Yesterday I had the privilege of exchanging a few words with a political scientist whom I greatly admire, and whom I have often mentioned here in the past, Professor Glenn Diesen. He has written a number of books, most recently:
- Europe as the Western Peninsula of Greater Eurasia: Geoeconomic Regions in a Multipolar World. Rowman & Littlefield. 2021.
- Great Power Politics in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Geoeconomics of Technological Sovereignty. Bloomsbury. 2021.
- Russian Conservatism: Managing Change Under Permanent Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield. 2021.
- Russophobia: Propaganda in International Politics. Springer. 2022.
- The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War with Russia. Clarity Press. 2023.
- The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order. Clarity Press. 2024.
In The Think Tank Racket he explored the sinister part played by fake NGOs, think tanks, media outlets and the like (financed, as it now turns out, not least by USAID) with the explicit aim of promoting a “rules-based order” (our rules, stupid). Some of these fake institutions also receive generous funding from the Norwegian government.
Such artificial institutions are working hard, as we speak, to implement regime change operations and, if required, civil wars wherever the financial and strategic interests of the US elite are not sufficiently heeded. In Ukraine they have worked hard – very hard indeed – to suppress dissent against the Zelensky regime, which now appears to have been a dictatorship.
They also work hard to ensure that citizens in “Western” countries are prepared for and able to support certain regime change operations in non-Western countries.
The manufacture of consent has been particularly successful here in Norway, where confidence in the system has not yet been eroded by the dramatic fall in living standards that has plagued other European countries, and where people are ludicrously proud of Jens Stoltenberg. That he is a neoliberal warmonger has somehow not been brought home on them. Almost all Norwegians are now warmongers. Hearing little old ladies speak, you’d think they were raring to go fight the Russians.
With great clarity and, I would add, humility, Glenn Diesen has above all analysed the tortuous demise of the unipolar system and the unfortunate reluctance of the EU and my own country to understand the need for a new “security architecture”, as he calls it.
Unfortunately empires don’t collapse over night nor do they go quietly. They go crashing through the landscape, smashing everything and everybody on their way out.
I had never previously met Glenn Diesen whose work I have followed studiously for nearly three years. What I was very glad I could thank him for yesterday, is his remarkable courage and stamina! The malevolent and absurdly unscientific persecution he has been subjected to in the Norwegian press, day in and day out, reminds me of fascism, quite simply. You see, in this country, if you don’t like US expansionism and the methods used by the US to retain its hegemony, you’re worse than an infidel.
They don’t burn infidels, it is true, yet, but they smear you, ruin your reputation, finish you off one way or another. They? Who are they? Why, the NGOs that defend “justice” and “democracy” of course! They are trying to light a pyre under Glenn Diesen and others who seriously challenge business as usual. That they devote so much venom on him, is merely an indication, you might say, of how very impressive his work is. It is also an indicatori of Norway’s groveling suberviance to USA.
Well, it turns out that Glenn Diesen has had enough. True, there are other Norwegians who know that the USA is anything but committed to “democracy”, “justice”, and “freedom”. But they dare not speak. That’s how bad it is. So Glenn Diesen is leaving the country. The police have warned him he is not safe here. He has applied for citizenship elsewhere. A scientific refugee FROM Norway. This is not the first time science is targeted, and it surely won’t be the last.
But the smell of burning science is definitely foul.