Norway

Five years ago, Trump wanted to buy Greenland, got Danish PM Mette Fredriksen’s response that it was ‘absurd’ and then cancelled his visit and scolded her to the point where all the trousers in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were shaking. Shortly afterwards – as a plaster on his wounds? – negotiations about American bases in Denmark began. The US now has 3 bases in Denmark, access to 12 base areas in Norway, 17 bases in Sweden and 15 in Finland – all under US jurisdiction. And now the sight is on Canada and Greenland – “we need it for economic, national security’ as Trump stated and did not rule out the use of military means and economic sanctions to get it. Everything is related to everything else. That is, if you want to see it. Finland and Sweden rushed down the NATO mouse hole because, in the governments’ absurd...

After the NATO Summit in Vilnius, a US-Nordic Summit took place in Helsinki on July 13, 2023. Here is, first, what I would suggest the US, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland take up: • How to back out of NATO’s conflict with Russia, stop the war in Russia and move – with the use of UN peace-keeping and -mediation – towards a viable, sustainable solution to Ukraine’s security problem that all parties can live with – although perhaps not be happy with. • How to re-create the Arctic as a de-militarised, low-tension region and cooperate to the benefit of all parties and the fragile environment. • How to secure that none of the Nordic countries shall have any US bases (except the one in Thule, Greenland, which by the way was not invited) – so to not provoke Russia unnecessarily.Given the Nordic countries’ historically comparatively peaceful policies, how can the...

Nobel Peace Prize Watch, Oslo Honourable Prime Ministers of the five Nordic countries Magdalena Anderson, Sweden Mette Frederiksen, Denmark Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland Sanna Marin, Finland Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway A  NORDIC  INITIATIVE FOR  PEACE IN  UKRAINE  AND  LASTING  WORLD  PEACE The war in Ukraine once again shows that the world is like a city with brutal gangs constantly roaming the streets, looting and fighting with loads of heavy weapons. No one will ever feel safe in such a city. The same applies at the international level. No amount of weaponry can make us safe. No country will be safe until also neighbouring countries can feel safe. The present international system is broken, to avoid future wars we need deep reforms. Once again, now in Ukraine, we have seen that arms cannot prevent war. We should not, in the present state of shock, expand or prolong the militarist traditions that guarantee eternal...

The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize honoured press freedom and – no surprise – was welcomed by the world press. As I listened to the announcement, on October 8, an old story from the Cold War kept coming back to me: A Soviet official had been travelling in the US for a couple of weeks. As he left, he remarked to his hosts, in puzzled bewilderment “How can it be that you have such perfect control, even with a completely free press?” He was right. Society makes one huge exception from democracy and press freedom: national security. The Military-Industrial Complex is in control, thoroughly disciplined media see it as a sacred duty to keep their own nation strong and united behind the flag and the forces. Nations are governed by fear that any doubt or deviation from military orthodoxy would harm national security. As a result, in 2021 the Nobel awarders...

Imagine that the Nobel Prize in Literature is given to a book publisher or papermaker and the official motivation is that publishers or papermakers are preconditions for the writer writing and being read. Roughly, this is how the Nobel Peace Committee, reasons – unreasonably. Here’s how it legitimates that its 2021 prize goes to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov way outside the letter and spirit of Alfred Nobel’s will: “Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press, it will be difficult to successfully promote fraternity between nations, disarmament and a better world order to succeed in our time. This year’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize is therefore firmly anchored in the provisions of Alfred Nobel’s will.” See? – “without papermakers and publishers, it will be difficult to successfully write good literature and be read…” I believe my readers easily grasp just how far-fetched this argument is in the...

US Marines participating in the Cold Response 2016 exercise (Torbjørn Kjosvold/Norwegian Armed Forces) USS “Stoltenberg” – Norway, now the newest US aircraft carrier Some years back Norwegian foreign minister Thorvald Stoltenberg took wise steps to reduce confrontation with Russia through a Barents Council for civilian cooperation. This was in prolongation of a long Labour tradition initiated by the legendary prime minister Einar Gerhardsen, who started a policy of low tension with the neighbouring Soviet Union: No foreign bases, restraint with military exercises in the North, no nuclear weapons in Norway or our waters. Last week Stoltenberg´s son, Jens Stoltenberg, now leader of NATO, dishonoured a high-level meeting for civilian corporation in the Arctic Council in Reykjavik by NATO holding a large navy manoeuvre in that part of the Atlantic. Many countries participated in the tension-building provocation, that has become standard Norwegian policy in later years. And – unbelievably – the...

Intro Below please find a letter I wrote more than 3 months ago to the Nordic bank, Nordea – present in roughtly 20 countries around the world. Since then, I have been waiting for an answer, but none has arrived. I believe it should have been possible for Chairman of the Nordea board, Mr Thorbjörn Magnusson, to have responded by now. As this is not the case and I have no reason to expect an answer will arrive from him, I hereby make the matter be known to a wider circle of people. Should anybody in the Swedish/Nordic press be willing to take it up, it would be good. But I also do not expect that given the political correctness practised, not the least around the issue of Iran and the primary and secondary sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran and on everybody else, Europe in particular. PS...

• Johan Galtung takes a swim and speaks about Norway, Sweden, American occupation, relations to Russia and the risk of getting killed – in the media and for real. Interview with John Y. Jones, October 2017

Jondal, Hardangerakademiet, Norway, August 1, 2016 The Hardanger Academy is focused on the three UN concerns, peace-development-environment. This year’s symposium was brilliantly opened by Vandana Shiva, a gift to the world from India. She encompassed all three themes with deep insights; holistic and very dialectic in her approach, with forces and counter-forces in all her proposed solutions; with her optimistic activism and engagement. The media missed a golden opportunity to tell the Norwegian public. She was imported for a week from India, and met with dedicated counterparts and groups in Norway. They are not very visible in public space either; but the Hardanger Academy will try to change that. What is in public space in Norway? A mirror image of US public space. If the US media say that Russian hacking was behind the enormous WikiLeaks revelations from the Democratic National Committee computer, so do the Norwegian media. If US...

Lund, December 10, 2015 On the day of the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony at Oslo City Hall To whom it may concern, including the media We know – and Alfred Nobel knew – how devastating war and arms races are, and how little security we get for all the money we spend on military forces. The campaign to reclaim the Nobel Peace Prize is first and foremost a campaign to revive the idea that global peace requires global cooperation on disarmament and replacing the law of force with the force of law. Every day more and more of us see, from the Middle East warfare, from the refugee crisis, and many other chilling reminders, the mandatory urgency of a change in world politics. Alfred Nobel decided to give one fifth of his fortune for a prize to promote disarmament and resolution of all conflicts through negotiations and legal means,...

Norway, on top of the UN indicator of good life for years, is now hit by two different crises; one for the less developed aspect and one for the more developed. Yet the citizens are protected by a massive oil slick, the biggest sovereign fund in the world, the Government Pension Fund for an aging population when oil dries out. For only 5 million inhabitants, $178,000/capita, and growing. First crisis: Third World monoculture—oil/gas–hit by the world markets; from over $ 100 per barrel to under 50 recently. A crisis of over-supply and also of under-demand, less than expected: toxic fossil fuels do the same to the lungs of Planet Earth as smoking to the lungs of humans. Green alternatives strong in Germany, China, coming in USA. A generation was needed for the smoking truth to penetrate, but smoking survived in the Third World – for some time. We will get...

Mohandas Gandhi invented the nonviolent approach to basic social change, Satyagraha, in South Africa in the early 20th century; Nelson Mandela presided over the birth of a one person-one vote democracy at the end of the century. Both were lawyers, trained in English Common Law; good in the sense of a keen consciousness of what is right and wrong, bad in the sense of a court process identifying who is in the wrong rather than solving underlying conflicts, and wrong in the sense of punishing the wrong-doer; violence rather than cooperation. Both built on the positive side of law – the indelible rights of the people for whom they were fighting by comparing empirical facts with normative rights; immigrant Indians in the case of Gandhi, original inhabitants in South Africa, the Blacks, in the case of Mandela. Gandhi (1869-1948) did not live to see equality between Indians and whites in...