“You’ve just GOT to see this!!” she wrote.

It was a 20-minute TV-programme on NRK (the Norwegian broadcasting corporation). I’ve since found it on Youtube with English subtitles: Jens Stoltenberg grilled by journalist on Norwegian television”. And yes, I think everybody should see the NATO Secretary General being grilled.

Watching a solitary young journalist taking on and humbling one of the most powerful men in the West stunned me! Not only stunned; I held my breath, and after it was all over, I more or less broke down. Two days later, the journalist had to rescue his family out of Beirut, where he is stationed as NRK’s man in the Middle East. Bombs were falling all over the place.

I had written just a couple of days earlier that there are no “real journalists” in Norway’s corporate media. I was wrong. There is at least one! He is very, very brave, braver than anybody outside Norway can imagine.

You see, Norwegians love Stoltenberg; and are proud of him. There are no longer any political parties with representatives in the national assembly who speak out against NATO, against our so-called “defence” arrangements. NONE. People do not denounce, in public, our forcing Ukraine to fight till the last Ukrainian, do not, in public, dare deny that Ukraine is a democracy. Believe me, Professor Glenn Diesen is a brave exception.

Listening to Julian Assange at the PACE hearing on Julian Assange’s detention (starts after about 15 minutes into the stream) makes it chillingly clear why truth is hiding like a battered dog in Norway as elsewhere in the West.

The Ukraine war might be an enjoyable game of chess for the top-gun boys (male and female) in Washington and London. For Russia’s neighbours, however, one of which is Norway, “war” with Russia would be the end of the world. Please note: we have never had any quarrel with our powerful neighbour; on the contrary: we still weep for the Russian prisoners who died on Norwegian soil as slaves of the Nazi occupier. We still thank our neighbour for driving the Nazis out of Northern Norway and then retiring to their own borders. Never, ever, has Russia threatened Norway!

Sweden and Russia, yes, have had disagreements since the middle ages, intermittently fighting for domination of what is now Finland and the Baltic states. I won’t go into it because it’s a long story. At any rate, issues were settled between Russia and Sweden by Peter the Great and between Russia and Finland in 1948. The Baltic states, alas, were another matter.

So we’re back to the “Cold War” – a war that, by the way, was hellishly hot, for instance in Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Central and later South America, in case you don’t know. I actually suspect that you might not know, either because you are young or because you, like me until recently, have trusted the corporate media, in which case I once again recommend The Jakarta Method and any one of William Blum’s books.

But I am procrastinating. (There is a Norwegian expression that roughly translates as “a cat slinking around a bowl of hot porridge”.) For months I have been asking myself to what extent all this US-generated mess – Gaza, Ukraine, and the prospective war on China, etc. – is due to arms trade. I have found no figures, or rather, no figures that I am able to make sense of. SIPRI is an excellent source, but it does not tell me who, precisely, is profiting from the arms trade. Is Jens Stoltenberg? Nancy Pelosi? (I have actually read somewhere that she profits in a big way) Joe Biden? Kamala Harris… ? I have asked – and still do not know the answer – how much of US GDP stems from arms production and how much of the US annual budget is spent on the military industry. How much is spent on “defence”, which by the way is a very elastic concept, “Defence”, that is, or rather “offence”. (Does “defence” include multiple secret services? The Pentagon bureaucracy? Mr Blinken’s commuting to the Middle East? In short: To what extent does the military industry govern Norwegian foreign policy, directly or indirectly. To what extent does global military industry run the world?

I cannot answer those questions due to insufficient insight into finance, business and weaponry. But there are those who can:

Shadow World, inside the global arms trade is a 2016 feature documentary. How the film team managed to coax the sources into revealing so much is beyond me. Of course, the film pre-dates Julian Assange’s incarceration at Belmarsh. Nobody would have dared make or contribute to such a film today.

The writer of the book on which it is based, Andrew Feinstein, has just published a new book, Monstrous Anger of the Guns, How the Global Arms Trade is Ruining the World and What We Can Do About It. It appears that Andrew Feinstein knows a good bit about finance and business and, not least, about the global arms trade.