A bouquet of Norwegian Chávez groupies

Here’s a quickie. Last August, and again in June of this year, Norwegian historian Bård Larsen published newspaper articles in which he noted that prominent left-wingers in his own country who had long cheered the Hugo Chávez (now Nicolás Maduro) regime in Venezuela were now finally – finally! – acknowledging the failure of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution.

At the same time, however, they weren’t quite willing to accept that they themselves had been fools and knaves, clinging with blind faith to an authoritarian ideology that from the very beginning had quite obviously contained the seeds of disaster. Some of them, indeed, had dropped their own past statements about chavismo down the memory hole.

Among these chavista “groupies,” as Larsen called them, is Audun Lysbakken, head of Norway’s Socialist Left Party, who’s on record as having called chavismo “an expansion and deepening of democracy.” Over the years he’s made other statements in praise of the Bolivarian Revolution, but they now appear to have been removed from his party’s website.

Lysbakken isn’t alone in his party, which has firmly supported chavismo from the beginning. After Chávez was re-elected in 2004, the Socialist Left’s national board – including such high-profile figures as Kristin Halvorsen, Øystein Djupedal, and Bård Vegar Solhjell – sent a letter of congratulations to Caracas that begin with the words “Dear comrades!”

Author Eirik Vold now presents himself as having foreseen Venezuela’s collapse. But it was only three years ago that the radical-left publisher Manifest issued Vold’s extremely pro-chavista book, Hugo Chávez: The Revenge. In it, Vold hailed Chávez as a “Christmas present for the left” and claimed that the dictator had a lot to teach Norwegian socialists.

Another sap: Benedicte Bull, a researcher at the University of Oslo. She now supports the Venezuelan opposition, but not long ago she was praising Chávez for working towards “a more egalitarian society and democratic government institutions” and condemning Norwegian critics of the caudillo for their supposed ignorance and lack of “nuance.”

Then there’s Peter M. Johansen of the national Communist daily Klassekampen, who had repeatedly depicted Chávez, and then Maduro, as waging a heroic struggle against what he described as a “cryptofascist oppisition directed from Washington.”

One Norwegian enthusiast for chavismo who has yet to jump ship is Dave Watson (no, the name doesn’t sound too Norwegian to us, either), who belongs to something called the Latin America Group in Bergen. In an article written in May, five months after the Venezuelan opposition scored a victory in last December’s parliamentary elections, Watson blamed the Bolivarian Republic’s economic disaster largely on the ruling party’s opponents, whom he accused of “undermining, destabilizing, and sabotaging” chavista efforts to bring about utopia.

Instead of criticizing Maduro for incarcerating opposition leaders such as Leopoldo López, moreover, Watson actually condemned the Venezuelan opposition for using its new majority to try to free these political prisoners. (Yes, you read that right.) Similarly, instead of recognizing that the country’s grocery shelves were empty because of the colossal failure of chavista economics, Watson suggested that the “mysterious disappearance” of staples from the stores was the product of a corporate conspiracy to bring down Maduro. All of which goes to show that some dreams – some self-delusions – never die.

Posted on July 29, 2016July 28, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Room 101 at the top: Reds in the Norwegian elite

We’ve been poking through Bård Larsen’s book The Idealists, which can be fairly described as a history of useful stoogery in modern Norway. It’s a country in which a high-profile involvement in Communist politics not only doesn’t hurt your ability to make it to the top in a variety of fields – in one instance after another, it often seems to have helped.

In some cases, indeed, people who have almost nothing but their Communist affiliations are handed top jobs. Aslak Sira Myhre‘s parents were prominent members of the Workers’ Communist Party (AKP), and he himself was head of a Communist party called Rødt Valgallianse (RV) before he was recruited in 2006 for the powerful and prestigious position of director of Litteraturhuset, Norway’s leading literary institution and debate venue.

In 2014, Myhre left that job for one that was even more high-profile: director of the Norwegian National Library. And no, he has no background whatsoever in library science or in any related profession.

A not terribly dissimilar case is that of Gerd Liv Valla, who was appointed Minister of Justice in 1997 by then Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland. During her student days at the University of Oslo, Valla had been active in the Kommunistisk Universitetslag (KU), a group whose politics, as Larsen reports, were to the left of AKP’s: KU supported the Kremlin line until the USSR underwent de-Stalinization, whereupon it switched its allegiance to Mao’s China; after Mao died and China moved beyond the Cultural Revolution, the KU aligned itself with Albania. That a woman with such a background should be put in charge of a democratic system of justice outraged many, but the furore was dismissed by the political class as right-wing nonsense. From 2001 to 2007, Valla was head of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the workers’ organization that is one of the most powerful institutions in Norway.

In one field of endeavor after another, some of the most high-profile people in today’s Norway are Communists. Sports? No sports figure has been more prominent over the past couple of decades than Egil “Drillo” Olsen, the colorful, outspoken coach of the Norwegian national soccer team. “I believe in the collective, I believe in solidarity, I believe in taking the side of the weakest people in the most important conflicts in the world,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Therefore I’m a Communist.”

Medicine? No doctor in Norway is more famous than Mads Gilbert, an anesthesiologist and politician (for Rødt, a Communist party) who’s been praised by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, named Man of the Year (in 2014) by the newspaper VG, been decorated (in 2013) by King Harald V, and won a long list of prizes. Why? For his “humanitarian work” in the Palestinian territories. Never mind his less-than-humanitarian support for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, about which he said that “the oppressed have a moral right to attack the U.S.”

(By the way, another much-heralded Communist M.D. and “humanitarian,” Hans Husum, also vigorously defended 9/11, as did prolific crime novelist and Rødt politician Gert Nygårdshaug, who after the terror attacks wrote an op-ed explaining his refusal to take part in a minute of silence outside the U.S. Embassy. In fact, Nygårdshaug was so delighted by 9/11 that he put up a plaque in his garden commemorating it.)

AndersXHegerXcopyX3_1171386394_1171386410 — Anders Heger

Publishing? Anders Heger, a columnist for the daily Dagsavisen who has also been head of Cappelen, one of Norway’s three major book publishers, since 1991, is a Communist who has expressed support for jihad; born with a silver spoon in his mouth in the richest part of Oslo, he’s rejected charges of hypocrisy, saying that despite his wealth “I have a right to be radical….One can’t turn one’s convictions into a question about private income.”

Then there’s a group called SOS Rasisme. For many years, it was one of the most high-profile organizations in Norway, collecting massive amounts of government support for pointing the finger at supposed racists. Although many of these “racists” were people whose only offense was failing to toe the socialist line, SOS Rasisme’s charges were invariably taken seriously, and the group was regarded throughout the Norwegian cultural establishment as a legitimate and respectable anti-racist voice.

Then, a few years ago, it was revealed that SOS Rasisme (a) had been systematically lying about membership numbers in order to rake in more taxpayer cash, and (b) was essentially a front for Tjen Folket, an extremely radical Maoist faction whose leader, Henrik Ormåsen, had declared Stalin the greatest man of the 20th century. In 2013, the group finally went bankrupt; last year, Ormåsen and seven other men were indicted for fraud.

More tomorrow.

Posted on June 30, 2016June 10, 2016 by usefulstooges 2

Red star over Norway – all over

We’ve been toting up the names of some of the high-profile Norwegian Labor Party politicians who were – or are likely to have been – KGB operatives. But not all of the Cold War-era useful stooges in the land of the fjords were secret spies. Nor were all of them members of the Labor Party, or even politicians. Many of them were cultural figures who belonged to more extreme parties – and who were proud to publicly identify themselves as friends and supporters of the USSR.

In 2011, historian Bård Larsen catalogued some of these eminentos in a book entitled Idealistene (The Idealists). What might be surprising to a non-Norwegian is that these people’s open embrace of Communism didn’t keep them from becoming influential, successful, in some cases even beloved. On the contrary, Larsen notes, apropos of the small Workers’ Communist Party (AKP), founded in 1973 and disbanded in 2007, that in all of Europe, scarely any extreme political group of its size has so many members who’ve had such successful public careers.

One of Larsen’s subjects, poet Inger Hagerup (1905-85), was a member not of AKP but of the Norwegian Communist Party (NKP), founded in 1923. Hagerup’s oeuvre consists largely of crudely polemical verse calling for a workers’ revolution. In one famous work, “Be Impatient!”, she wrote: “Dreams and utopias, say the wise men, / Those who are cold in heart. / Don’t listen to them any more!” Despite – or because? – of her devotion to Stalin and her penchant for pro-Kremlin propaganda, she’s considered a major Norwegian poet.

We consulted two standard anthologies of Norwegian verse and one history of Norwegian literature. Neither anthology mentions Hagerup’s Communism. One of them (Den store lyrikkboken) praises her “awareness of oppression and injustice in the world around her” – never mind that she was utterly indifferent to oppression and injustice in the USSR. The other anthology (Norske dikt i 1000 år) tactfully describes her as having been “involved on the political left,” identifies her poems as being marked by a “clear antifascist tendency,” and says that “Be Impatient!” is “mostly about the dream of a world free of violence and the use of power.” Only the literary history, Per Thomas Andersen’s Norsk Litteraturhistorie, acknowledges Hagerup’s party identification: “She was a communist, but unlike [fellow lefty poet Arnulf] Øverland she clung firmly to her Soviet-friendly attitude after the war.” Andersen makes no judgment, one way or another, about her party affiliation.

Mainstream journalism in Norway is riddled with Communists. Take Sigurd Allern. Born in 1946, he’s served over the years as head of the Socialist Youth League, editor-in-chief of the Communist daily Klassekampen, and leader of the AKP and another Communist party, Rød Valgallianse (RV). All of which, apparently, in the eyes of University of Oslo officials, made him the perfect candidate for the country’s first-ever position as Professor of Journalism – a job he accepted in 2003, and still holds to this day.

Another example: Hilde Haugsgjerd. She was active in AKP, head of RV, and editor of Red Youth’s journal Red Guard – so when Aftenposten, the nation’s purportedly conservative newspaper of record, was looking for an editor-in-chief in 2008, who was hired? Haugsgjerd, natch. Though she claims to have left radicalism behind, she says her time in AKP taught her to esteem reason and question authority – a rather bemusing thing to say about one’s membership in a gang of supremely irrational utopists under strict orders not to question anything.

Then there’s Helge Øgrim. A former leader of AKP and of Red Youth, he’s been editor-in-chief of Journalisten, the professional journal for Norwegian journalists, since 2007. (Even a confession of plagiarism didn’t bring him down.)

Needless to say, the idea that Communists – devoted by definition not to objective reporting but to ideological propaganda – should hold these kinds of positions in a democratic country is ridiculous. In Norway, however, questioning the appropriateness of such hires would be considered to be outrageously offensive.

More tomorrow.

Posted on June 29, 2016June 7, 2016 by usefulstooges 1

Putin’s Quisling

Tomorrow, October 7, Vladimir Putin celebrates his sixty-third birthday. To commemorate this occasion, we’re spending a few days here at Useful Stooges looking at Putin – and at a few of his benighted fans around the world. Today: a nutty but high-profile creep in Norway.

Ad for the TV series Occupied, showing a Russian flag flying over the Norwegian Royal Palace

In late August, Russia’s Foreign Ministry publicly condemned Occupied, a forthcoming Norwegian TV series, complaining that its premise – in the near future, Russia invades Norway and seizes its oil fields – brings to mind various anti-Soviet movies made in Hollywood during the Cold War. (One imagines they’re thinking of such fare as 1984’s Red Dawn, in which Soviet forces overrun the U.S.) The ten-part series, which was created by bestselling mystery novelist Jo Nesbø and will premiere in October on Norway’s TV2, had another critic: Bjørn Ditlef Nistad, who was identified by a Kremlin-controlled “news” website, Russia Beyond the Headlines, as a historian and an Associate Professor of the University of Oslo.

Nistad was paraphrased as saying that Occupied “is offensive to residents of Norway, liberated by the Soviet Union from German occupation in 1944.”

What? Norway liberated by the Soviet Union in 1944?

Yes, it’s true that on October 18, 1944, Red Army soldiers chased retreating Nazi forces out of Russia and into the remote, sparsely populated far northern tip of Norway, with which Russia, then as now, shares a 122-mile-long border. But to describe these troops as having liberated Norway is Orwellian. On the contrary, even though Stalin was nominally an ally, the leaders of the Norwegian government-in-exile in London were so concerned about the entry of his troops into their territory that they dispatched Norwegian soldiers to the region, partly to try to minimize the damage done by the scorched-earth policy that the Nazis were pursuing as they fled southward but also partly to ensure that Uncle Joe didn’t annex so much as a square centimeter of Norwegian soil.

When did the German occupation of Norway end? Ask any Norwegian. It ended on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, when the Nazis surrendered to the Allies. The date is still celebrated in Norway as Liberation Day. Soviet troops lingered in northern Norway until late September 1945, when they finally packed their bags and went home. Fortunately for Norway, Stalin had his hands full subduing and Communizing Eastern Europe and knew that any effort to turn his foot-in-the-door presence in Norway’s icy attic into a conquest of the entire country would be a difficult proposition and would be fiercely resisted both by Norwegians and by the Western Allies, who at that point were tacitly accepting his ongoing imprisonment of the people of Eastern Europe behind what Churchill had yet to call the Iron Curtain.

So how can a professor of history at Norway’s leading university present such a twisted version of the facts? Well, first of all, as it turns out, Nistad isn’t on the University of Oslo faculty. He got his Ph.D. in Russian history there in 2008, and stayed on as a temporary lecturer until 2010, but has not held an academic position since. He claims to have been unable to find a job. Why? Because, he says, of his “pro-Russian” views – by which he means his unqualified approval of absolutely everything Vladimir Putin does and says. Nistad supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; he endorses Putin’s oppression of gays. “I think Vladimir Putin is a good guy and a likeable politician who has saved Russia,” he told Dagbladet last year. He has even compared Putin to Churchill.

Because no Norwegian university will hire Nistad, he compares himself to a Soviet dissident. He’s tried to arrange financial backing from Russian oligarchs to pursue his “pro-Russia research.” There’s less freedom of speech in Norway today, he claims, than in Putin’s Russia.

Not that he’s been silenced. Far from it. Despite his inability to wangle a sinecure at the University of Oslo, he’s secured, in the words of writer John Færseth, “an important role in Norwegian debates about Ukraine, not least on NRK,” Norway’s government-run TV and radio network. Nistad, according to Færseth, is the “most important – or in any case the most obvious – defense player on the Russian team on the Norwegian scene today.” While most Norwegian commentators on the crisis in Ukraine, observed Færseth last November, are “in practice mouthpieces for Russian propaganda,” what sets Nistad apart is that his readiness to defend Putin and Putin’s former puppet in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, “has as times led him over into pure bloodlust, as when he wrote in July that the ‘coup makers’ in Kiev should be hanged.” Nistad has called pro-freedom Ukrainians fascists and neo-Nazis, and has written that killing a “few hundred” of them “would be a small price to pay” if it succeeded in establishing “that fascists would not be able to come to power through a coup in one of Europe’s most populous states.”

Here’s another way that Nistad stands out: he’s not one of those Putin fans who deny any similarity between the current regime in Moscow and the Soviets. On the contrary, as his fantasy version of the liberation of Norway might suggest, he was a fan of the USSR, too. In 2011, Norway’s newspaper of record, Aftenposten, ran an article by him headlined “Can We Learn from the Soviet Union?” His answer: da! The USSR, he maintained, was “one of the few reasonably successful multiethnic and partly multicultural societies that the world has known.” Its 200-odd ethnic groups “lived together in peace.” They had “a common dream: of building a socialistic society.” And this shared goal made them “good, honest, and hard-working citizens.” Although Gorbachev, in Nistad’s version of history, did a deplorable amount of damage to this paradise, Soviet values still survive among today’s Russians, thanks largely to Putin – who, he explains, has breathed new life into those values and made Russians proud again.

Bjørn Nistad: remember the name. If the scenario imagined in Nesbø’s TV series ever did come to pass, it’s not a bad bet that Nistad would be to Putin what Quisling was to Hitler: a devoted Norwegian acolyte, willing to run his puppet government and enforce his tyranny.

What a shame that, in the meantime, Norwegian students won’t be able to learn at the feet of this courageous truth-teller!

Posted on October 6, 2015October 4, 2015 by usefulstooges 3