Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Tag: Norway

May 17

23.05.2024 /

This year, waking up on 17 May brought to mind a Cat Stevens song:

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird

I had to look up the text, and saw then, that it is essentially a hymn of gratitude. No matter. The song is beautiful, and the sunlit morning was as pristine as the first morning, no doubt about it. I happened to be in Lillehammer where you can still see snow on distant mountain tops towering over green slopes and the lake down below. May 17 is Norway’s national holiday.

The day is celebrated year after year as earnestly as Christmas. No military parades, but parades of children. Dressed in their finest, waving little flags, they march proudly preceded by their school’s band. In all of Norway, children from all schools march, flanked by their teachers. In the capital, the parade lasts for hours as wave after wave of schools make their way through the centre, up the boulevard to the palace, where the king and his family stand on a palace balcony, smiling and waving (must be quite an ordeal).

Normally, May 17 tends to be cold, often even wet, but this year, the day was spectacularly warm and beautiful. Though I generally go off to the woods on such occasions, I made an exception this year, the last before we cede military control of our country to the USA. I dressed up and watched and listened.

This is the one day of the year when people can wear their beautiful and exorbitantly expensive national costumes. There was a time, not very long ago, when it made sense to own a national costume. Back then, many women did their own embroidery, and some were even able to sew the entire costume. At any rate, the costumes were so durable that they were reused, generation after generation for all major events: Christmas, christenings, weddings, funerals…

Now, they are only used on May 17. And what a sight they are. The town Lillehammer was populated by billowing skirts sprinkled with delicately embroidered flowers, broaches with trembling golden birch leaves, silver belts, richly embroidered linen shirts and intricately shaped tight-fitting brocade bodices. Lillehammer could have been a Rivendell film set (Lord of the Rings).

Norwegians are certainly patriotic, no doubt about it, yet they are surrendering military control of their country to a foreign power. Norwegians are basically peaceable, yet, they have chosen a “protector” that is the most dangerous out-of-control war machine on earth (cf. conversation between Glenn Greenwald and Jeffrey Sachs).

It is terribly sad.

Break

17.04.2024 /

I’ll be taking a break now for a while. I have to devote some time elsewhere, in my own language, which is Norwegian.

Besides, as far as I’m concerned, there’s not much more to be said about the Ukraine war and the lies we so relentlessly are being spoon-fed by the mainstream press. There is not much more to be said, either, about the genocide being committed by Israel, the USA and the EU who are, moreover, virtually begging Iran to start world war III …, no, I’d better say no more.

It’s all so psychopathic that if I say anything else, I’ll be guilty of “hate crime”, and I would rather not go to jail.

I will however take the liberty of quoting Australia’s former Prime Minister Paul Keating. He was referring (in 2023) to NATO and to my country’s former Prime Minister:

Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States.

Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen. In February he was drawing parallels between Russia’s assault on Ukraine and China saying, ‘we should not make the same mistake with China.’ That is, that China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed.

Stoltenberg, in his jaundiced view, overlooks the fact that China represents twenty per cent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world. And has no record of attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do.

http://www.paulkeating.net.au/persistent/catalogue_files/products/20230709nato.pdf

As for the suppression and criminalisation of anti-Zionism in the USA and EU, it is better dealt with in the affected countries. (Norway has fortunately taken a different tack on that score at least.) In the USA, I think the most powerful voice against the suppression of dissident views, including not least anti-zionism, is Glenn Greenwald’s. I very warmly recommend Glenn Greenwald’s channel on Rumble.

My greater worries now, however, concern recent dramatic developments in my own country (no doubt with pressure from the “supreme fool”, the “accident waiting to happen” mentioned by Paul Keating): what to my mind is the virtual handover of Norway’s sovereignty to the USA. You will find very little information about this online. The press dares hardly whisper. Agreements have been signed according to which Norway gives the US the right to establish military bases in Norway’s 12 main military stations – bases in which the US will have exclusive right of access. There are those who maintain that the US armed forces will be able to carry on in Norway as though they were at home. It is reputed, for instance, that if any US citizen or members of his or her family commits a criminal act in Norway, he or she will not be prosecuted here; If a Norwegian citizen inadvertently trespasses on US security zones (in Norway!), for instance during the transportation of troops, the US forces may open fire on him/her.

Norwegian authorities will not have the right to inspect these bases, and nothing guarantees that nuclear weapons will not be stored there. We have long followed US orders in the matter of foreign policy, we are now finally a US puppet, virtually an occupied state, but nobody is rushing to defend us against the USA.

So I shall have to write elsewhere for a while, and in Norwegian.

The Left or…

27.09.2023 /

I have mentioned several times, on these pages, a remarkable book written by what must be a remarkable man:

“LESS IS MORE'” by Jason Hickel.

No book that I ever read had a more profound effect on me. Reading it, I realised I had been wrong on a number of issues. By the way, discovering that you have been mistaken can actually be extremely liberating – unless you are being publicly humiliated; it gives you a new start, so to speak, and Jason Hickel has no intention of humiliating his reader. He puts the facts to us very gently.

Mind you, I have read, or at least leafed through, quite a large number of books and essays on climate change, ecology, the third world, social injustice, neocolonialism, etc., etc., etc. Believe me, this one was different.

The odd thing was that nobody I knew in Norway had ever heard of Jason Hickel or his book. I stumbled across it entirely by coincidence. I lent it left, right and centre and oddly, most of the people who have actually read it have been taken in by it. Not that they agreed blindly with all the conclusions, but they found the reasoning extremely thought-provoking and important.

Yes, I live in Norway, a country I thought was unhappy about the plight of the planet and the creatures living on it. I thought that informed intellectuals, at least, would know enough to grieve about the disproportionate price paid for the changing climate by people in Europe’s neighbouring continent, Africa. I wrote to three left-leaning political parties (including MDG – the Greens) saying that the issues raised in the book are so important that they merit a serious national discussion. I received barely disguised snorts in return. The paper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) has one – 1 – somewhat supercilious review of the book, end of story.

That paper, Klassekampen, which claims to be venstresidens avis (“the political Left’s paper”) is certainly as good or better than any other Norwegian paper. It’s a good read, no doubt, even entertaining. But it is not interested in discussing the global economic system that has been crippling African countries ever since their independence. I have not seen a word about the debt crisis that the currently rising price of the US dollar is aggravating for 3rd world countries. No in-depth analyses do I find, historical or otherwise, of the relationship between the global south and countries such as, yes, Norway. Why does Norway’s UN vote never go to the Palestinians, for example? And of course, there was merely a brief article more or less dismissing Seymour Hersh’s detailed claim that the US and Norway were responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. On whose side are you, Klassekampen? Is the new Labour Party paying your bills, by any chance?

I have a couple of ageing British friends who have not come to terms with the end of “Empire”. They call me a “Lefty”, meaning a “f__ing Marxist”. I may indeed have been a “Lefty” in the past, but I no longer know what the term means.

So no, I am no longer a “Lefty”.

“Universal human rights” is what I might be willing to die for, I think (as opposed to my British friends) if the opportunity to do so were offered to me. I would also, in theory at least, be willing to die for the principles of the Bandung Conference in 1955. But such matters are of no interest to the “Left” these days, it seems.

All of a sudden, I discover – again, purely by coincidence – that Jason Hickel is in Norway this year, as an 2023 honorary professor at Oslo University. Unfortunately I was unable to attend his lecture on 13 September, as I was staying in a village in southern Europe, where most people cannot afford to protect themselves against the mortal heat of summer nor the ghastly cold of winter.

I think the “Left” has lost its way, not only in the USA, but also in much of Europe. I think Norway has lost its way in what I consider a western geopolitical debacle.

I am sorry. I am deeply sorry.

This is not the time to make babies

03.09.2023 /

The Norwegian bellicose foreign minister Huitfelt has just been exposed in what appears to be a case of serious corruption. Her husband made some strikingly lucrative investments after she became a Cabinet member. I have seen no proof that decisions she has made as a foreign minister has contributed to their joint wealth. Yet, there is no doubting that her decisions as a foreign minister contributed to an abrupt hike in the value of stock in the arms industry, in which he invested. We all assume that, at the very least, his investments were based on information that was not immediately available to the general public, information she certainly possessed.

You should see her puckered cocker spaniel face as she denies he received the information from her, denies having the slightest idea, even, that he had invested a big lump of their money in stock that would prove extremely valuable just a few days later. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe this sort of thing is called insider trading.

When Bill Clinton earnestly looked into the eyes of the US-American public and stated, enunciating slowly and very clearly, that he had never had sex with … etc., I thought he looked like a playful, slightly abashed dog, never mind what kind of dog. When our blond foreign minister is caught being bad, she definitely looks like a cocker spaniel. I hasten to add that cocker spaniels are anything but as angelic as they look. They can be very, very (and joyfully) naughty. Moreover, they can be very strong.

So what do we do about it? Well, the Norwegian papers are pondering whether she is telling the truth. The truth!!! Since when do politicians tell the truth? I add, for the record, that Foreign Minister Huitfeldt famously expressed, a couple of years ago, her confidence that the British authorities were adhering, and would continue to so, to international Human-rights treaties in their ongoing persecution of Julian Assange, something the British authorities notoriously failed to do, then as now, as Huitfeldt well knew. So much for “the truth.

“Should she be dismissed?”, a few of our dailies ask timorously. “No,” she replies earnestly. “I want to repair my mistake.” A heading reads: “I am deeply sorry that I made a mistake”, with sub-headings to the tune of “- that I did not check the rules.” Rules? In this country, every child older than 5 years knows that insider trading is against the rules, is bad, is evil, is the stuff that Hell is made of. (We were, after all, a deeply religious country until fairly recently.) But she, poor dear, was not aware of “the rules”!

Anybody who reads the international news, knows there is corruption everywhere. Corruption is the stuff the “accelerating ecological breakdown” is made of. But Norway has come a long way by marketing itself as a country that is almost devoid of corruption, that is “peaceful”, that is benign in every sense.

Huitfeldt and her husband were caught, if not not prosecuted. My question now is: What about our prime minister? Regardless of what political views Norwegians have, he is generally regarded as an earnest and relatively devout Christian, a “good man”. But he is also said to be enormously rich. What do we know about the source of his wealth? And what about his friend and political comrade, the warlord Jens Stoltenberg? Has he invested in the “industrial military complex”? For the record, some of that military industrial complex sits right here in Norway

We have just had a period of deluge here in Norway. Tens of thousands of people have lost their homes, many of them permanently. In June, we had a drought that nearly halved the grain harvest. The August deluge ruined much of what was left. France and Spain have seen their harvests crippled by drought year after year. Will Europe be able to even feed itself in coming years? We are in for a long run of droughts and deluges, unprepared as we are to replace Russian gas, and unprepared to meet, not to mention prevent, the climate disasters that have been forecast for decades. The only thing we are prepared for is war. War is always the solution of choice when the powers-that-be have made a mess of thing: War to divert attention from real and, in this case, existential threat.

The Norwegian foreign minister may be suffering some humiliating moments, but she will be fine in the long run, and wealthy, as opposed to those of us who work for median or less wages. I must remind you that median income is “the amount of income that divides a population into two equal groups, half having an income above that amount, and half having an income below that amount” (source: Wikipedia” as at 1/9/2023.) I should add that in Norway, the income of 60% of the population is less than the “average”.

What do you do when you see that you will not be able to pay the rent at the end of the month? I, for one, have not been in that situation for very many years, but I remember. So I know that what you do is to eat cheap and unhealthy food, freeze in winter, have your teeth and those of your children pulled rather than pay regular visits to the dentist, and when your bronchitis makes you too miserable, you splurge on a baby elephant.

We all divert attention away from real – “existential” – threats. The powers-that-be do so by tricking us into hating “the enemy”. As individuals, we trick ourselves into purchasing what we definitely cannot afford.

Let me tell you a secret. When I was as desperately poor as I hope none of my readers will ever be, I almost took a bank loan – in those days, bank loans were thrown at you – to buy a glass piano. Would you believe it? A glass piano! I wasn’t even a half-decent pianist, but an instrument of glass would surely have been the most beautiful object imaginable. Or so I thought, because I had limited recourse to beauty.

Fortunately, I took to my senses. After all, I knew I would someday become an academic of sorts, if not a good pianist, and would be able to lead a “normal” life.

And now, as an academic, I have learnt that foreign affairs are just as business affairs. Please take note, because this is important:

If you are a businessman, your job is to beat your competitors, preferably to take over their customers and suppliers.

  • If you are a nation, your business is to beat competing nations, take over their trade and trading partners.

If you are a businessman you should prevent your employees from unioniising You do so either by firing them or by offering attractive conditions, wages etc.

  • If you are a nation, you should prevent your population from revolting. You do so either by subjecting it to police terror or by providing decent living conditions.

What I’m saying is that neither business nor foreign affairs are based on lofty ideals.

In short, this is definitely not the time to bring babies into the world.

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