Northern Delusions, Nord Stream Edition

Contrast the virtual media blackout on Hersh's piece with the full-blown gaslighting in legacy media: no country for anti-war protests

Judged by the age-old adage, that ‘actions speak louder than words’, there’s a lot going on in Norway.

Earlier this week, I asked my co-workers about Hersh’s article. One even said he’d seen it, but his reply was really quite telling: he was really saddened that it hadn’t been the Danes, Swedes, or Poles. Nuff' said, I daresay.

So much for my circles, but what about legacy media?

This is my dog, a Border Collie, assuming the position of Norwegian media and society with respect to Hersh’s piece on the Nord Stream bombings.

Crickets in State Media, Except for U.S. Gov’t Agit-Prop

State broadcaster NRK has not yet found anything on Seymour Hersh’s piece to discredit it with, hence, there’s no reporting so far. There’s no opening in terms of independent thought either, as evidenced by a piece that appeared on 15 Feb. 2023 claiming that Russia! Russia! Russia! is abducting Ukrainian from the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts.

The information in the NRK piece comes from ‘Conflict Observatory’, which is, according to their own website, a ‘central hub to capture, analyze, and make widely available evidence of Russia-perpetrated war crimes and other atrocities in Ukraine’.

If you’re asking yourself, ‘huhum, what is this organisation?’, here’s a bit of information I gleaned from their ‘about us’ site: Conflict Observatory emerged out of a collaboration with Esri, Alcis, and Quiet Professionals LLC, and with research, analysis, and documentation provided by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, and PlanetScape Ai.

As an aside, it will probably not surprise you to learn that Esri, Alcis, and Quiet Professionals LLC is a partner of the U.S. gov’t, via the State Dept., which ‘aims to build on open-source effort to track war crimes in Ukraine’, according to Federal News Network. So, basically, a bunch of people with laptops and tablets scanning (social) media.

In other words, they’re a U.S. gov’t contractor, i.e., hardly an independent party. Moreover, according to their own website, Esri, Alcis, and Quiet Professionals LLC also list their ‘core competencies' as follows:

Operational Mission Support, Cloud Managed Services, C3I - Geospatial Services, Intelligence Support, DevSecOps, AI/ML and Information Technology Support.

It is hardly surprising then, I’d say, that Norwegian state broadcaster NRK ‘partners’ (shills) for U.S. gov’t contractors. It’s par for the course, if the Norwegian gov’t is in cahoots with the U.S. on the Nord Stream operation.

What about other media?

Both Dagens Nyheter (approx. FT) and Aftenposten, Norway’s NYT equivalent, did not mention anything other than calling out Hersh’s piece pure fiction.

There was but one Norwegian outlet that ran with the story: iNyheter, which reproduced Hersh’s piece quite extensively. At the end of last year, iNyheter took over the largest quasi-independent online magazine, Resett. They leaned slightly to the right-of centre and can be considered ‘national-conservative’. Resett’s former managing director is now fulfilling that same function at iNyheter.

Before it went bankrupt, while ‘even’ Resett ran several Russophobe pieces, it was still a place for relevant contributions that, ever so timidly, contradicted the prevailing NATO narrative among its readers, esp. in their comments section.

No Country for Political Change

In contrast to a certain amount of dissent among the conservative base, unfortunately nothing can be expected from the Progress Party (FRP), which was the junior partner in the gov’t of Erna Solberg (in office 2013-21). Chairwoman Sylvi Listhaug, who as a potential Norwegian opposition leader, has replaced Siv Jensen as party leader in May 2021. Ms. Listhaug’s main accomplishment in government—she served as Minister for Migration and Integration (in office 2015-18), among others—oversaw the reduction of the number of asylum seekers from 30,000 to 2,000. No need to build a wall, I suppose.

After taking over the Progress Party last year, though, the FPR has become a faction devoid of any content, conviction, and contours—in less than a year. Quite an accomplishment.

Last year, though, Listhaug opened a party conference with the Bandera chant ‘Slava Ukraina’, which is the functional equivalent of ‘Sieg Heil’. The Progress Party has therefore reintroduced a motion in parliament to declare the Holodomor as ‘genocide’. (A motion to the same effect was rejected years ago, as was one concerning the Armenians under the Turks.) In other words, the Progress Part won’t do anything.

That really leaves only the far-left Reds (Rødt) as the only party critical of NATO and the war. As far as they are from me, personally, they are the only party that opposes the continued delivery of weapons to Ukraine, Norwegian participation in the war, and membership in NATO. However, it is unlikely that its leader, one Bjørnar Moxnes, will become the Norwegian peace candidate who manages to mobilise the masses beyond his party’s narrow base (and that’s disputed internally) to resist the war.

A Brief Comment on Norwegian Mentality

As far as I know, the two factors that produce a pronounced America-friendliness coupled with no criticism of the U.S. are: first, the many connections due to a strong out-migration to the U.S. over the last 150 years; and, secondly, the ‘trauma’ of being victimised in 1940 because they did not belong to an alliance.

As an Austrian by birth and citizenship, I do see that point: the Norwegians were a bit less ‘victimised’ (Quisling, anyone) that Austrians in 1938, but, then again, these are differences of degree, and not of kind. For background, please refer to this piece.

Traditionally, Norwegians (like Scandinavians in general) have this basic trust in their institutions. I personally, I find this extremely misplaced, as I’ve detailed in a four-part series on the gov’t’s Corona Committee Report, presented last year in April:

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; and Part 4.

Lo and behold, also iNyheter wrote about this pathological compulsion to conform at any cost, which in this report is portrayed as being even higher in Norway than in woke Sweden. As this is a long piece already, I shall translate that piece tomorrow.

Stay frosty.