Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Tag: journalists

Wilful ignorance

26.09.2024 /

In Norway, we don’t hear much about the recent catastrophic floods in West and Central Africa. The first time I heard of them was when I accessed the New York Times about ten days ago.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as it were, surveys show that Norwegian attitudes and values are changing, and not for the better, if you ask me. Now why is that, I ask you.

What are Norwegians told about the world? Well, for one thing, we are not told much about the floods in Africa, about the plight of those whose homes have been devastated, whose livestock has drowned. Yet a Duckduckgo search for “floods +Africa” will yield an avalanche of horrifying reports.

  • Do the Norwegian news outlets not check news from abroad?
  • Do the Norwegian media not care about drowning Africans?
  • Have the Norwegian media been instructed to downplay the catastrophe?
  • Are Norwegian outlets determined to stimulate “optimism”, so that people here will be sufficiently carefree to consume mindlessly.
  • No doubt, the Norwegian media are very aware of the fact that Norway, as an oil producing nation, is contributing to climate change in a big way. Has somebody whispered to them: We don’t want climate activists swarming all over the place, do we?
  • Are Norwegian journalists lousy?
  • Have Norwegian journalists been bribed?

I do not know. I really do not know. Maybe a combination of all of the above.

Having determined that Norwegian media are useless about climate change, I move on to the geopolitical scene. It is true that the Norwegian media dutifully report every day the number of Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese who have been murdered by Israeli assassins over the past 24 hours (I ask myself: When Israel has killed off all the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese – will Israelis be happy?)

But the Norwegian media do not appear to have noticed Israel’s great big, black shadow, the USA, our (in)famous “ally” and “protector”, without which Israel could not have killed a fly. Not a word of criticism will you hear or see against big brother.

What about our so-called “Pension Fund“. Does it invest in genocidal Israel?

What about the Norwegian arms industry? Say, “Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace” – which produces NASAMS, among other instruments of death. We hear virtually nothing about the company, which most Norwegians proudly associate with the invention of Krag-Jørgensen rifles. This is how they present themselves in Wikipedia: Hard-working labourers. But are they making loads of money these days? Are they making more money now because of Ukraine … and Gaza… and Lebanon … Is Jens Stoltenberg a shareholder of Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace? Are his children? What about our prime minister?

Why aren’t our news media answering any of these questions? Why aren’t they at least asking these questions?

Why did they not tell us the truth about Ukraine? What exactly does “news media” mean? His Master’s voice?

We need real journalists!

***

Addendum of 28 September:

It has come to my attention that the Norwegian quarterly Ny Tid has indeed raised some of the questions I pose above. The article Oljefondet inn i kapitalismens mørke written by Øyvind Andresen for the quarterly’s 1 September edition informs us that our so-called “Pension Fund” has invested 13.6 billion USD in 50 companies that profit directly from the occupation of the West bank. Of that amount, Israeli banks that have helped fund illegal settlements have received 5 billion USD. Øyvind Adresen’s source is Don’t buy into the Occupation, which I cannot access now, as the website turns black when I open it.

The “Pension Fund” also invests heavily in companies that sell arms to Israel (p. 14, table 3 of the linked report). The companies in which the Pension Fund has invested so heavily, according to the report (and the SIPRI arms transfer database) are principally: Boeing, General Dynamics, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Rolls-Royce.

Shame Shame Shame!!!

Alternative warfare – Christmas proposition

25.12.2014 /

UNESCO has published a list of killed journalists. This year there were 60 of them. Sixty killed journalists! That’s a lot of dead journalists. Many were killed in 2013, too. And not only in Syria! Just take a look at UNESCO’s list:

Unesco condems killing of journalists

Being dead may, however, be better than being tortured in a prison. I can’t tell you, because I’ve never been tortured, but I don’t think I could bear it. What I do know is that for every dead journalist there are probably many more rotting in sinister jails. It’s a marvel that there are any of them left.

I depend on those people! So do you. So do we all. Without intrepidly investigative journalists, we would still be back in the middle ages, ignorant, rebellious perhaps, but impotent. We would sign infinite petitions to our kings and the Virgin Mary, asking for their protection against barons that would, without a doubt, exploit us till we could take no more and wouuld lie down in some corner to wait for the next life. That’s the way things still are in much of Central America, where they’ve been killing judges and journalists for decades.

Thinking about the perpetrators – the moron killers we hear of from the Middle East and Mexico, for instance – I find myself wishing that somebody would go and whip them out of their beds and hang them up in the nearest tree. If there is no tree or lamp post at hand, at least they should be given public whippings.

But what can I do? I am opposed to capital punishment, opposed to torture. So I have to rethink, to calm down and try to examine the consequences of hanging hundreds of depraved morons from trees and lamp posts.

To begin with, we know from morally primitive societies (I shall refrain from giving examples of what I consider morally primitive societies), that if you kill one of them, there will be hell to pay, collective retribution against your entire tribe. You and a lot people you care for will be wiped out, one way or another. They can take your water, or your electricity or your hospitals or your livelihood or they can simply shoot you.

What if, you might say, we wipe them out first? Well, I admit that reading about the journalists this morning, that was approximately what I thought. The problem is that they have access to as many and as lethal firearms as we do. Maybe not the same firearms, maybe not as “superior”, as it were, but somehow, we keep seeing again and again that the outcome of wars is not as foreseeable as the weather. Thanks, not least, to journalists, this should now have become eminently clear.

Moreover, as a colleague of mine pointed out today, people in Mexico, Guatemala or IS are not likely to be genetically more prone to depravity than the rest of us. To every story there is, implicitly if not explicitly, a prologue.

For reasons I need not go into, I have seen a lot of newborn babies in my life. I have seen many small children, many adolescents, and many adults. Need I add that when something went seriously wrong somewhere along that line, what happened was almost always preceded by a series of unfortunate circumstances. An unhealthy society is countless series of unfortunate circumstances.

So my Christmas proposition is to capture them (and having done so, to resist at all costs the temptation to spit at them, bruise them, or tell them to fuck their mothers, and of course, to refrain from any of the infamous methods applied by the US authorities at Guantanamo), feed them, and proceed to question them. They will be incarcerated in conditions that satisfy the terms of international law. Next, they will be educated, brainwashed, if you will. They will be subjected to education in accordance with their respective religions. If they are Catholic, they will be taught by Catholics, if they are Moslems, they will be taught by Moslems, if they are atheist, they will be taught by atheists. The consequences of their past acts will be made clear to them – consequences for their families, their communities, their countries and, finally, the world. They will be taught by social scientists and psychologists. Modern educational principles will be applied, i.e. student participation will be stimulated. They will be recalcitrant, sullen, nasty, deceitful etc., even more so than high school students, but they will be adults who take pride in being able to justify themselves, so something will penetrate in spite of their emotional resistance.

Some, many, will have been so brutalised that nothing will move them. Many will be so traumatised that reintegration will be unlikely. If released, many will return where they came from, hardened. At any rate, they will all have to serve long sentences for war crimes, or in the case of the Mexican butchers, for gang murders.

On the other hand, many others will come around, will regret their acts, will want to help put a stop to continued violence and the devastation of their respective regions. They in turn will educate others.

I put it to you, that such an approach would cause bewilderment and chaoes in the “enemy camp”. It should be clear now, that perpetual shoot-outs will not permanently solve any of the underlying long-term issues that caused the current debacles.

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