Sunday, July 31, 2011

Welcome to the New Norway

Note: This article will likely appear published in Norwegian elsewhere, when it comes up, I will provide a link for the Norwegian, nonetheless this is the original version.


Welcome to the New Norway

“We have a good country to live in” is what a Norwegian interviewee told me exactly a week after the deadly attacks of which we all have heard, and I kept wondering to which extent normality had returned to Norway, how far had they embodied the words of Prime Minister Stoltenberg, delivering on themselves the promise of more freedom and more democracy.

My initial reaction was one of curiosity and then of surprise as I spoke to more and more Norwegians and found out that in fact nothing had changed and that life went on, business as usual. Regardless of their walk of life – a public servant, a film maker, a student of political science, a hotel chef and a party goer – there seemed to be a consensus among them that Norway was such a good country to live in and looking at the facts, there is no doubt that they’re correct.  

I kept wondering however, what could be so wrong with Norway that would bring up such headlines as last week’s – but then I found out that what happened in Norway was after all, the heinous act of one man – Anders Behring Breivik. With great dignity the Norwegians had managed to go on with daily life while newspapers and political commentators in Norway and elsewhere had a different take on this; we hear from them to no end the words “alarm”, “crisis” and “catastrophe”.

I decided to act with caution, kept myself from asking uncomfortable questions and began to dig elsewhere. Nothing of what I found was news to me and yet I remembered well the reactions of the street in France and the Netherlands when the multicultural order was challenged by violent events in the course of the 2000’s – The anxiety of the Dutch and the French was nowhere to be found among the Norwegians.

This is very admirable but I cannot help looking at it with some suspicion. Perhaps Norwegians are dismissing the issue too quickly and have focused on the acts of the perpetrator without some conscious self-examination about whether there might be more to it than just Breivik the man.  Behind this all there’s also a society where this has happened and speaking only against the incitement and hatred engendered by the people behind this all is righteous but not entirely a fair assessment.

The political parties and movements out of which extremist violence might have risen have not fallen from the moon, they have been in fact created by means of legitimate democratic processes and people have voted them in – not aliens or mass murderers but rather European citizens of flesh and bone, people beset by the anxiety caused by the dawn of the “new Europe” and who felt that they were not being represented by traditional parties, that they were not being heard and that someone had to do something about this.

There is a need now for an open confrontation with them about many key social and political issues, not only because the future of Europe depends on that but also because the consequences of believing that the social and political order is perfect and, thus must remain unchallenged are not only potentially dangerous but the writing on the wall in Oslo and Utøya as of last week. The confrontation with the uncomfortable is not just a matter of more or less political openness; it has become now a condition for the future.

The multicultural society that came under attack last week is a noble idea even in a country as small and historically homogeneous as Norway, but, the belief that multiculturalism is a policy that is to be dealt with by official channels and government bodies rather than peoples, is potentially dangerous.

Multiculturalism – in so far as it deals with something as unstable as culture and at the same time as concrete as peoples – is not a matter of policy but rather demands a change of heart, an attitude, acts of compassion or love, and ultimately an open negotiation about what is going to be acceptable or not, with both the host and the guest being upfront about their viewpoints, not being deluded by supposed friendships in between peoples that were never such – not even between Norway and its neighbors.

Multiculturalism demands a change of heart as much as policies and on the other hand, terrorism needs to be tackled with a little bit more than love – it also demands serious political decisions to be made. In both cases, policy without social change or the other way around achieves nothing but a temporary truce that can be breached anytime.

More freedom and more democracy cannot mean more of the same freedom and democracy. People must settle down in this new situation that has irreparably shifted things in the political and social landscape. Pretending that by keeping quiet because “we have a good country to live in” they will move on is nothing but an irresponsible delusion.

Going backwards to restore former glories of Europe as the conservatives want or prolonging the status quo of the present – that is, the present that was before last week – as the liberals want, are both dead options now. The new Norway has arrived without a working permit and is going to stay regardless of whether refugee status is granted or not.

What happened in Oslo and Utøya is not only an attack on multiculturalism or a political party – that would be the equivalent of assuming that 9/11 was an attack on the bank whose offices were in this or that floor of the towers – but rather an attack on the whole of Norway’s citizenry and must be understood as such without allowing for one moment on anyone to capitalize political gains on the basis of the crimes committed.

There’s no collective responsibility or collective guilt here, but the time has come for making ourselves responsible for the things that happen in our midst and this means nothing but the possibility to ask difficult questions not only to the perpetrators of this unprecedented act of evil, but also to ourselves, to the political system, to the structural conditions that gave to such ideas the power to act.

The new Norway is already the future of Norway and unless we let go of the moral comfort and speak out the truth about where our fears and hopes on ourselves and the others lie, we will not be able to stop the past from clashing against the future and becoming once again the writing on the wall of what we are avoiding to address.   

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Norway – A Room of One’s Own (Uncertainty)

Norway – A Room of One’s Own (Uncertainty)

Until last Friday whoever would have asked “what might possibly be wrong in Norway?” would have been met with puzzling looks on the part of the experts, for what we are dealing with here is a senior member in the ivy-league of nations and not just one another infamous country in the ever so media-popular Middle East or elsewhere in war and famine savaged lands. Norway – idyllic northern playground of socialism, wealth and tranquility – what might possibly be wrong with Norway? Nothing really. However today after the Oslo blast and the deadly massacre in the island of Utøya both the question and the answer have changed and so far we do not know the answer but the question unmistakably is “what went wrong in Norway?” As it is often the case with a tragedy of this nature, our minds are still somewhat wandering in the dark and we have begun to look for an explanation.

Apparently there’s nothing wrong with Norway as far as we can see from the ever so dignified and human reaction on the part of the Norwegian government to the catastrophic events and the concomitant promise that terrorism will be met only with more freedom and more democracy. We all wanted to know how this tragedy fell upon the peaceful Norwegians and quickly enough, saving us time for popular wisdom and conjectures, the media of the world began doing the job for us. The obvious first plausible explanation was of course a terrorist attack against the West carried out by Islamic extremists and then the relationship of Norway to the Arab world was brought under fire by the critics. When we found out that the perpetrator was an ethnic Norwegian – Anders Behring Breivik – the situation changed dramatically and then – to the relief of many people – we were speaking of an attack by a right-wing extremist.

Even though so little information was available, the media of the world sat in front of their computers and began fishing out information about this man. First a file emerged from user comments of Mr. Breivik in the Norwegian web; file that without further ado, was Google-translated from Norwegian into English and posted online by a journalist who probably hadn’t had enough time to read the fifty pages of the manuscript and that he curiously labeled “The Political Writings of Anders Behring Breivik”, probably bringing political theory and writing to an all-times low level of discredit. The situation was further aggrandized when another manuscript emerged from the internet – a hefty book of over one thousand five hundred pages apparently written by Mr. Breivik in English and titled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence”. The content found in both manuscripts rang alarms all the world the world – except in Norway where the reception on both fronts remained more or less cool overall – and then journalists and experts all over the world took to the task of digging deeper into the meaning behind what we read.

In these writings Mr. Breivik quite speaks out his mind and goes to great pains to detail his views: He hates Islam and multiculturalism, condemns the entire political and educational system of Norway and Europe as a Marxist attempt to destroy European culture and lays out in different ways his project to restore Europe to former glory by a mixture of violent and less violent methods which include not only ideological indoctrination by means of youth movements and newspapers but also the extermination of Islamists and Marxists alike. The details are no doubt chilly but of no less concern is the ways in which mainstream media dealt with the subject: Journalists turned to experts in international affairs – a very misleading term as it explicitly makes out of the world a single continuum of facts that we receive from the news as “truth and world” – which they cited verbatim, commenting on the content on the manuscripts (one from a Google-translated version and the other from a copy just fresh out of the internet) as they read it for the first time and raised voices of outrage at this new situation in which the legitimate institutions of democracy and right are assaulted by extremist forces.

Given the nature of Mr. Breivik’s writings, it is surprising that none of the experts consulted were experts on Norwegian history or politics, European right-wing movements or neo-Fascism. At best the experts were able to establish the obvious – some connections to other right-wing movements (EDL in the UK, PVV in the Netherlands and the home-grown FrP in Norway) and then drifted onto even unlikelier connections that link Israel and also some scholars with dubious credentials directly with the attacks and then lastly the sources of Mr. Breivik’s ideology were highlighted and brought under fire to the avail of no one. Conclusions were gathered before they had even read the entire manuscript and whatever we had wanted to believe, we began to believe. It is not only that mass media fails to distinguish between fact and truth but that fact-free assumptions have taken the central stage of information.

There are two crucial aspects of the particular Norwegian case that have been completely overlooked and that I wish to address only in passing: Firstly, investigative analysis is of little use unless we address the fact that this kind of literature is not unique to Mr. Breivik and that in fact has been widespread in Europe at least, for a long time now; insofar as the act is inseparable from the book and that there are many of these books out there, we’re speaking only of one symptom and not of a unique or isolated phenomenon. It is also necessary to mention at this point that Mr. Breivik, just like the “liberal right-wing” movements in the past decade or Nazism, have not fallen from the moon into a peaceful conflict-free zone, but rather, they have emerged out of specific structural conditions already existent in our societies.

The ideological content portrayed in the book is not only restricted to a few dubious scholars but is deeply entrenched within the intellectual traditions of Europe – the apocalyptic mood, restorations of law and order, religious enmities, cultural superiority – and in the same books and schools of thought that we read in classes of philosophy and law. These cultural moods have prevailed in the European scene all the way back to Hegel’s pupils and were part and parcel of the struggle between German liberalism and conservatism in which conservatism was politically and intellectually suppressed, what ultimately led to imperial disintegration all over Europe and that ended in two world wars so that the older notions of left and right may be considered defunct already then in between Bismarck and Hitler. What we call today liberalism in Europe does not differentiate between right and left in practical matters (such as the economy) and does not come from continental Europe.

Already in the end of the 19th century, though no one remembers them now, the Leipzig School of Sociology had adopted this worldview based on a particular reading of Hegel and then in opposition, the Marburg School of Philosophy developed the intellectual platform for the coming century based on the critical reason of Kant and it is through them that Hegel’s critics, Kierkegaard and Marx, entered the intellectual scene and were instrumental in shaping directly or indirectly the spiritual life of the Western world and the role models for politics and philosophy. However, these ideologies still survived, they can be thoroughly seen at work in Carl Schmitt and they never entirely disappeared officially until the 1960’s when the new European university rose out of a revolution with Marxist outlook. Suppression of the past – which is what took place all over Europe – is a helpless tactic and the forces at work do not disappear from the social and political scenario even if the references are deleted from the textbooks – Germany and Austria come to mind immediately.

Secondly, Norway is also a very idiosyncratic nation similar to no one. The independence of Norway came very late and the idea of the nation is rather belated by both European and American standards; the constitution of Norway drew heavily on elements from similar British, French and American experiments, a new monarchy was shipped in from elsewhere in the 20th century after independence from Danish rule and the idea of national identity and the re-making of national history were quietly negotiated; leaving the country at the mercy of little autonomy in an international context. The passion for equality that apparently characterizes the Nordic countries – just like tolerance is admittedly a trait of the Dutch, arguable concept in both cases – played a role here because the Norwegian aristocracy disappeared in medieval times and the construction of the new modern state was for the most part the work of a small group of politicians, bureaucrats, artists and academics.

It was this tiny minority what formed the Norwegian elites and from then on began a series of tensions between the center elites based in Oslo and the periphery embodied in the peasants’ movement of the 1880’s. The official state in Oslo was met with a certain measure of resentment over dependence on the part of the periphery, conflict which was solved through politics rather than policies and negotiation over participative politics. What constitutes elites in Norway was constantly challenged and changed in the course of the 20th century but what did not change was the certain measure of discomfort about this central state that though a minority; has always not only ruled but also been seen with suspicion and resentment by many people.

National unity has been important especially after the discovery of oil but nevertheless its terms have been as unstable as the terms of national identity and autonomy, being a small country in the periphery of the European Union and other major economic blocks; for this reason intervention of the official state in private affairs is unparalleled to most other nations so that during the late 1990’s it was said in international economic contexts that Norway was the last Soviet state: Freedom of speech is rather limited outside the scope of established political consensus and economic growth is defined by politics by a much larger extent than by entrepreneurs. 

The two points outlined above are essentially important to bear in mind when analyzing the Breivik case because we must place ourselves against the background of this tragedy, how they are interrelated, why and what we can conclude from them: The ideological premises behind Breivik’s heinous deeds have not been taken seriously by the Norwegian and the European populace because having achieved the status of being the most perfect, peaceful and egalitarian nation on earth, Norwegians are not open to self-criticism on their society or politics and it is usually the case that criticism of the country abroad is ignored at home or quickly dismissed – something that fluctuates between smug and pride; attitude that is replicated by the minority political system itself so that dissenting political opinions are not socially acceptable, what becomes a grave accusation in such a small and socially homogeneous land. It is not only Breivik and its possible accomplices, intellectual friendships and supporters but Norway as a whole and Europe that need to scrutinize themselves and ask how it is possible that structural conditions were ripe for these movements, ideologies, suppressions of opinion and acts of horror, ultimately.

The history of Norway is by no means free of blame. There has been widespread Anti-Semitism and occasional outbursts of xenophobia, the participation of Norwegians in Nazi totalitarianism, the Norwegianization of the Sami peoples of northern Norway and the official state policy of demonizing dissenting opinions. As we know from this horrible life-example, the problems of the past are not going away when we build a wall around them and perhaps it is the time to deal with the past and the present without euphemisms and without mythical figures of demonization and ostracism. The government has earned much praise in saying that they will respond to terrorism with more democracy and more freedom, however nobody knows specifically what it means other than maintaining the status quo of pre-22/7 politics at the benefit of the minority political system.

Some have said not without sound arguments that this is the end of the extreme right wing parties as we know them and that Geert Wilders and company have been ultimately defeated because it is their spread of hate ideology what has somewhat made this possible. Without addressing the nature of the demands made by Mr. Breivik and his kind of people in manuscripts, protests and ultimately acts of violence, nothing could be further from the truth. Even at the risk of not liking or being comfortable with what some segments of society want to say, they must be heard instead of silenced and their questions must be addressed with more than ideology: An open confrontation with the past and the present has become a condition for the future.

Multiculturalism is a noble idea but the cracks are now evident, more so in Norway than for example in the Netherlands and Britain that truly have a history of multiculturalism. It is not because there is anything wrong with it but because multiculturalism has been understood in Europe as policy-making and never as a change of heart, as an act of love, and ultimately as a personal negotiation between the members of different fragile communities to agree on what is acceptable or not – in this point both the host authorities and the guests are to stand on trial for their misgivings. On the other hand Norway responds to terrorism apparently with nothing but love and this is just so wrong because both multiculturalism and terrorism must be addressed with a change of personal attitudes as much as with sound policies. More democracy and more freedom it seems to appeal only to the continuation of the same, that great as it might have been, Norway has to realize, it is already a long by-gone past. Yes. Everything that Norway was before last week, it is already in the past. What Norway is going to become, we don’t know but it is clear that it cannot stay the same. Policies are not enough to protect people from being discriminated or isolated behind thick invisible walls.

We are living in times of great uncertainty and anxiety, product of the breakdown of the traditional sense of community and many people attempt in vain to seek an already lost security under the wings of a culture understood as identity – in this sense the Muslim communities and disenfranchised Europeans are looking for the same things – and this loss doesn’t have to do with being losers or winners in globalization or local societies than it has to do with a nostalgia over having lost a sense of belonging and membership that provides identity and values. Identity in the modern world is not something stable or fixed and furthermore, both the cultural conservative project of restoring the past and the left or socialist or cultural Marxist project of maintaining untouched the fragile structure of the present, these projects are doomed to fail and this is why I asserted the paradigm is dead; in reality, beyond the realm of ideology, both are subject to the same anxieties and unsettling feelings of insecurity.  The true potential of Europe is its vision for the future and the ability to re-make political history for every generation and not a fixed potential for either conservatism or liberalism – that’s dead letter. Resorting to pessimism is also to no avail, for both the modern world and Western civilization cannot survive without Europe, unless we understand our civilization and the modern world as economic and social structures free of values.

The countless losses of lives in Oslo and Utøya are not an attack on specific political ideas or platforms and understanding them as such is allowing for parties and ideologies to capitalize gains on the horrible deaths of young people – these deaths were heinous acts committed against humanity and as such we must responded to it on the basis of our humanity, not as an abstract institution but as a community of people different as much as diverse. When it is said that “We’re all Norway” not so much as much it achieved as it could be by saying “I am a Jew and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a Muslim and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a Christian and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a liberal and I stand behind Norway”, “I am a conservative and I stand behind Norway”. There is no such a thing as collective responsibility here and each man must be held accountable for his own deeds to the same way that only he, beset by inner turmoil over his own identity can stand up against terror by demanding not only accountability of the criminal(s) but also the political openness that could prevent this from happening.

Yes, it is very difficult to live with so much uncertainty, but nobody said that freedom is an easy thing – Western philosophy and theology know this very well – and it comes with a price. There’s always the easy solution to keep silent, to capitalize on tragedies for ideological and political gain, to act as if nothing happened in order to move on. I can only conclude by telling the people of Norway that a little more than freedom and democracy is needed in order to move on. The future of Norway will not begin until we all accept that it is not only Breivik but our whole political institutions that need to be asked difficult questions; the future of Norway will not begin until the moment when we realize that the past as we know it – political institutions, ideological enfranchisements and social structures – is no more.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Either/Or – The Business of Academic Thinking

Note: This article was originally written for another website where I hope it will still appear in a shortened and substantially different form.

Either/Or – The Business of Academic Thinking

“A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity” –Søren Kierkegaard


‘Humanity’ – that endless rant we hear time and again through the loud speakers of radio, TV, social media and casual conversations. There is no single day that goes without someone advocating a bit of humanity; it doesn’t matter which country you choose, which armed conflict, which sectarian division, we hear it over and over, no less in the felicitous notion of ‘crimes against humanity’  whose definition is limited by strict practical-legal boundaries. According to the dictionary definition, ‘humanity’ (hyoo-man-i-tee) has been defined as 1) all human beings collectively; the human race; mankind 2) the quality or condition of being human; human nature 3) the quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence. Throughout history, nevertheless, humanity has been understood in manifold ways and the concept itself, on which we rely today, abstract as it is, arose sometime between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; it constitutes by no means a given fact, part and parcel of the history of mankind. Truth being said, ‘values’ such as goodness, kindness, good judgment and ‘humanity’ itself are not inborn qualities in any human being or group, unless we are understanding humanity as the uninterrupted continuum of Western education – the kind of education whose aim is not to teach, but to develop such values in people.

This is how humanity has been long associated with the ‘study’ of what academics have termed and perhaps not without irony, ‘the humanities’: a household name for the otherwise ‘useless’ and rather loose assemblage of various disciplines and fields of knowledge that are thought of as ‘unscientific’ and lacking the precision of ‘exact’ and ever more reputable sciences such mathematics and physics, as if, the study of mathematics and physics wouldn’t constitute in itself a human or humanistic enterprise to be more precise, but a wholly practical endeavor pursued in order to dominate the natural world – not without the inherent melancholy in that this has been so far, the greatest broken promise of the modern world. If we put asides the currents of historical definitions ‘humanities’ as the study of ‘humanity’ and ‘human values’ can be tracked back to the classics of Greece and Rome – not only the Platonic academy and its sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, but also the Sophists schools, the Orphic cults, the Homeric bards that preceded and also everything that followed uninterrupted until the late Middle Ages. At least in from the Platonic academy onwards, the study of humanity, it figures, also included the study of science.

This ‘classical’ education, considered a means of intellectual training in the broadest possible terms, covered at once the study of philosophy, history, material culture, logic and foreign languages – what they called in the Roman Empire ‘liberalia studia’ available to both boys and girls offspring of free men and extensively discussed by Seneca The Younger. The subjects included in this study would become the standard liberal arts of Roman and medieval times and comprised the basic curriculum of ‘education for the sake of education’ in late Classical and Hellenistic Greece. Pagan writer Martianus Minneus Felix Capella defined the liberal arts in the 5th century AD as: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy; they were then split in the medieval University into the Trivium – grammar, logic, rhetoric – and the Quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music, astrology and astronomy – establishing the importance of the full spectrum of the liberal arts as the foundation of civilized and educated citizenry, all of the above rooted from times immemorial down to our own times in the teachings of Plato and his master Socrates.

It wouldn’t be compelling to reconsider lengthily the nature of this education if it weren’t for a telling passage in Plato’s Republic that discusses the nature of this education that stands for the very foundation of what we consider civilized and educated and indirectly, liberal, inquisitive and open. In the Republic (379a) Plato speaks for the first time of ‘the speech of the Gods’ or better said ‘theology’, that for being the earliest historical use of that notion known to date, comes not entirely devoid of surprises: ‘but this very thing – the patterns or norms of theology, what would they be?’ Then this is followed by an all-encompassing discussion about the role and nature of education, pointing out that for the sake of the youth, poets should adhere to strict norms and that heresies of the likes of Hesiod, Homer, Heraclitus and the Sophists will not be tolerated – ‘The true quality of God we must always surely attribute to him whether we compose in epic, melic or tragic verse’ – because they are a threat to the founders of the state, who must know and enforce the patterns on which the poets must compose their fables, for it has become clear that the rulers of the city are graceful In the eyes of the deity and therefore, the true quality of God being only that which coincides exactly with the interests of the city.

In another earlier passage (377b-c) the political impact of this ‘theology’ is more evidently manifest: ‘Shall we, then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they grow up?’ The answer to this question is univocal and by no means supported in the classical virtues of argumentation, persuasion and discussion – ‘By no manner of means will we allow it. We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our story makers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject. And the stories on the accepted list we will induce nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls by these stories rather than their bodies by their hands. But most of the stories they now well we must reject.’ In what follows, they go on to discuss what kind of stories might be deemed acceptable or not.

Hannah Arendt is truly illuminating on the import of Plato’s ‘theology’ (‘What is authority?’ in ‘The Portable Hannah Arendt’, Penguin 2000 pp. 494) when she argues that Plato was the first to become aware of the enormous and strictly political potential in stories, tales and alas mythologies. The fact that it was him who coined the term ‘theology’ in this educational-political context referred to the founding of cities in the Republic is very suggestive because this new theological god is neither a living god nor the god of the philosophers or a pagan deity; it is a political devise according to which cities may be founded and the rules of behavior for the majority laid down. Moreover this ‘theology’ teaches how to enforce these standards absolutely even at the risk of committing injustice – for example the death penalty – with the argument (615a) that ‘for all the wrongs that they had ever done to anyone and all whom they had severally wronged they had paid the penalty in turn tenfold for each’ – meaning ultimately that even those who caused injustice either because of law or war would receive their punishment during their lifetime (615b-c) and that this was beyond the scope and consequence of the law – the state comes first. Socrates, who was ultimately wronged under the same policy tried to reverse this awful state of affairs by claiming that ‘It is better to suffer wrong than do to wrong’ (Gorgias, 469b-c) and then he went to prove it rationally but he failed and thus dealt a deadly blow on moral philosophy from the moment of its very birth.

This is the background against which the liberal arts and the different versions of Western education were engendered – as means for the free or educated classes to enforce their interests on the great majority. The definition and scope of what later became theology as the discipline of reasoned discourse about God and not merely mythologies was not rooted in these passages but in another set of passages in the Republic (506d-511e) that deal with the proper method to distinguish between false mysteries and divine truth – of course falling under the rubric of false mysteries anything that could contradict in anyway the founding principles of the city. The great political import of Plato’s ‘theology’ was nonetheless never forgotten and accordingly, Christian theology did not for one moment forget its Platonic background as it is evident in St. Augustine’s versions of hell and purgatory and the speculations of both Origen and Clement of Alexandria after suffering. These political principles in the education of the ruling elites remained more or less unchallenged through history and are still prevalent today. Its tools however, the so-called ‘humanities’ have come under fire for a long time now since the Age of Reason and the rise of ‘scientific history’ in the 19th century, time from which they have fallen prey to disrepute and harsh criticism because of their unscientific claims that they themselves have tried to revert by adopting ‘scientific methodologies’ – this applies for each and every field of knowledge, theology included.

In this spirit of reason and truth, the social sciences rose to life in the course of the 19th century with a therapeutic task in mind – to cure the unscientific nature of the humanities applying to them the same rigorous treatment until them only afforded to the always so respectable exact sciences; this process gave birth to an unexpected flow of new disciplines that wouldn’t have been successful in finding a hall of fame in the grandeur of academic discourse, hadn’t they appealed to the scientific flair demanded by the reasonable men of their times – sociology, linguistics, anthropology, ethnology, etc.  This felicitous momentum coincided with the last grandiose vernissage of European culture: An assortment of civil and international wars and Imperialism and Colonialism in their climax, planted the seeds of the bloodiest totalitarian movements that grew happily into mythical trees in the nicest palatial gardens as the European greedy attempts to monopolize the natural resources of the entire earth went on unmolested.  The spectacular demise of the humanities for the sake of ‘true knowledge’ sheltered upon the wings of Plato’s selfsame theology paved a self-defeating way to pursue progress in lieu of ‘mere knowledge’. In this age of progress – that among other achievements burnt dozens of libraries in the course of imperial and civil wars – nothing more disgraceful than having the epitaph of philosopher over one’s grave, that, in case he was lucky enough to have one.

One must be always a scientist, because science does something after all, no? It serves as means to an end, it has a purpose. The ‘humanities’ that deal with ‘humanity’ are totally unnecessary since what we need is people who can do things, who can build things and above all – who can add a peg or two more to the endless chain of accumulation of capital. Humanity, that humanity embodied by the liberal arts has become nowadays nothing but a form of education available only to the few privileged who need not worry about pursuing ‘careers’ that will bring bread home. I should correct myself – this has been the situation always ever since the days of the Platonic Academy, however this has significantly deteriorated overtime on the basis of the transformation of man ‘homo sapiens’ into the ‘animal laborans’ – heritage of the Industrial Revolution – who is entirely dependent on the produce of his labor; people who are not engaged in labor are no longer considered a functional part of society and consequently, such as pre-historical man, must survive on labor alone. There’s no space for work (e.g. works of art of literature) or action (of the political and social kind); one is ultimately condemned to labor so that even a college professor and an artist or a politician must see their activity not in the light of a vocation but only as a job, raw labor that cashes a pay check and then home.  ‘Creative minds’ cannot flee this structure, that is why there are (in the spirit of the functional division of labor) chairs in universities, artists-in-residence, fellowships, stipends, state galleries, art communities and studios. Everything wants to make sure than there is no distinction whatsoever between works and jobs. Nothing can be left at the fringes of society – indeed a Platonic dream.


What kind of individuals are those riddled with questions and doubts? What happens with their ill spirits that leads them to seek no (functionally tiered) glory, pleasure and gratification other than knowledge? How can one dare pursue anything for its own sake? Everything must have a reason, a wherefore, a destination, an aim and most ultimately, a compensation – even truth. Popular wisdom can put it best in ‘everything happens in the world because of a reason’. Nothing is haphazard. The human condition of the animal laborans has been severed from the humanities and not without a reason – the animal laborans is by no means homo sapiens. Since it is clear that being human is not a profession then there’s clearly no argument in favor of the humanities unless they constitute the political education of the wealthy; however since it is not possible to be a professional human, it is possible to be a humanities professional – a liberal arts professor in one of our prestigious universities. The great majority of this academic job holders wind up as members of an ‘intelligentsia’ and erect themselves into cults from within academic halls packed with initiates and converts. 

We learnt much about the modern university – e.g. the modern Platonic academy, from Icelandic philosopher Páll Skúlason (‘The Nature and Purpose of Academic Thought’, 2006 http://vefir.hi.is/pall/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=34&Itemid=8) who claims that because the university is a place of academic or theoretical thinking, it is not political, religious or commercial. It seems that according to him the only interest of the university is to understand and explain; even further, he makes an ‘useful’ distinction between problems of reflection and problems of life – there is no place in the university for problems of life.  He is not saying anything outrageous but merely stating out the obvious. According to Skúlason (former rector of the University of Iceland) scholarly detachment is a moral virtue that it can turn to the vice of indifference once the scholar ceases to think of himself as part of society and of his scholarship possessing social context. Northrop Frye in his essay ‘The Knowledge of Good and Evil’ (in ‘The Morality of Scholarship’, ed. Max Black, Cornell University Press, 1967 pp. 9-10) points critically to one particularly important case: ‘Psychology is a science, and must be studied with detachment, but it is not a matter of indifference whether it is used for a healing art, or for motivational research designed to force people to buy what they neither want nor need, or for propaganda in a police state’. The limits of this detachment have never been less clear because it is a seriously complicated matter to define such limits when firstly, scholarship derives its method from scientific formal logic and not from human pursuits, and secondly, when there exists such overriding contradiction between training for the job market and educating for understanding in the total absence of ‘problems of life’. I am highly skeptical over the meaning of humanity found in this kind of academic study and the obvious relatedness of the humanities to educate civilized citizenry.

Scandalous as it is, this has not been always the case – for Lessing, a German dramatist of the Enlightenment, humanity meant experiencing the world in anger and laughter, experiencing the artifacts and works that complement our life on earth only in regard to their effect in the world – relating study and the activity of either reading or producing art and works of literature to the most obvious problems of life. The new trend has little to do with the death of God, for it was not the old crowd of unbelievers and heretics who declared him dead but rather the professors of theology in the academic chairs, and their disappointment is more a disappointment with the broken promises of the modern world than it is a disappointment with religion per se – still a dominating force in public discourse everywhere. This disappointment however is neither novel nor solvable – already in an Assyrian tablet from 2800 BC unearthed in Iraq, we read the following inscription: ‘The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a tablet, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching’. This pessimism translated into apathy and powerlessness is rooted not only in man’s inability to make himself at home in the world but also in the technological possibilities afforded by the previous century that dealt a deadly blow on the human imagination because we have become unable to imagine or describe all what we are now able to do. Instead of relating to the actual life problems of the day, fleeing into the comfortable zone of academic detachment seems the most feasible option for these young men and women that enter the world educated for everything but citizenship.

During her last public appearance before her death (Bicentennial Address, 1975) Hannah Arendt ran ahead of the times and left us with a cunning warning for our current situation: ‘We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut off the past. At such moments of history when the writing on the wall becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day life with its unchanging pressing demands”. People are no longer able to move in the world of thinking and therefore are also impaired in the world of the real – social and political, and feel the pressing need to flee the world of human affairs because they have been indoctrinated in two suspect versions of truth – 1) That truth is correctness of fact in the style of ‘if this is correct or accurate, then it must be true’ 2) That truth is the result found at the end of a thought process; both of them promoted by reckless elitist Platonism in politics, by the life cycle of the animal laborans and by infinite economic disparity.

Education no matter what its content is should not be the measures of measures to learn how to act in the world but rather the provider of critical tools for people to decide what these measures are. Necessary measures in any case if we look at 2011 with paucity of mind and assess the recent political and historical developments that might radically transform the social texture of our world: The Arab uprisings spreading to every corner of the Middle East, the scandalous corruption of the media and the world superpowers exposed to the public, the communication possibilities enabled by the internet and the powerlessness of traditional armies to combat in the highly decentralized warfare of our times. Regardless of what young men and women want to do with their lives – either academic or not, education must be entirely independent of preparation for the job market, worthwhile mentioning at this point that a great percentage of the people enrolled today in graduate schools in business programs will probably never find a job after graduation. To achieve this, it is to no avail to keep building new universities or providing endless funding for scholarships; it is those institutions that have perpetuated for centuries the model that must be combatted. The model of the Western university must be challenged from bottom to top.

Greek and Western philosophy in the traditional sense and theological politics is of no help here, for like Eric Voegelin pointed out (in ‘The New Science of Politics’, c. II, ‘Representation & Truth’ in ‘Modernity without Restraint’, University of Missouri Press 1999, pp. 139) in relation to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, ‘Aristotle had no illusions on this point. To be sure, like Plato, he attempted a paradigmatic construction of a social order that would express the truth of the σπουδαιος (the morally perfect man) in Politics VII-VIII; but he also asserted with firm regret that in none of the Hellenic poleis of his time could there be found a hundred men who were able to form the ruling nucleus of such a society: any attempt at realizing it would be utterly futile’. The self-defeating project of classical philosophy as a foundation for politics, education and morality has found a home in the modern political arena where political officers of the Western countries say for example that the Middle East cannot be changed, without adding of course that this has to do with the fact that such political education as that demanded by Plato and Aristotle on the free men of the cities is the exact equivalent of today’s ivy league – an ivory tower where only the elites are educated to dominate the majority through despotism of power, capital and information; in this spirit there is too little these philosophers can help us with, as we are facing almost entire generations of disenfranchised youth willing to subvert the order of truth and politics raging over the entire earth.

The possibility of leaving the realm of academic and scientific thinking – barely qualified as thought – is not only instrumental but elementary in halting the oceans of frustration that have fueled terrorism and channel them through truly legitimate and transparent political processes – hardly the case in the Middle East today for example – that the people themselves have been unable to realize because of the clearly apolitical and narrowly defined scope of the education they have received if at all, to what the Platonists of our times – international think tanks, NGO’s and political officers – reply condescendingly arguing that they’re not ready for change, that we have to wait, that it’s not time yet, while they continue unmolested abusing us and them by depriving us not only from education but from the whole specter of rights.  Many of these disenfranchised youths are led by another true successful multinational – global terror – to express their frustration appealing to supposed ancient traditions and ‘classical’ interpretations of religion that are nothing but the other side of the strictly modern opposition between radical universals. This global terror is no less part of the despotism of capital, power and terror that the respectable leadership promote and no one better than philosopher Agnes Heller to have put this in words in an interview with Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita (09.07.05): ‘The people behind global terror are themselves global capitalists, just like Hitler was supported by German industrialists and financiers. Anti-capitalism merely serves as a slogan to direct massive resentment against the rich and to wage a racist or religious war. Many of them are frustrated intellectuals – young people who want to be remarkable in a very unremarkable world, with big ambitions but little talent, or whose careers were hindered for other reasons’. Whoever thinks that this should not be addressed, must be too deluded to understand the gravity of the rupture in the social texture of the world today cause by the political nature of education.

I propose to begin with adopting a yet fresher definition of truth that I have drawn from British philosopher and theologian Philip Goodchild: Let us make a proposal for truth as a power and as its own power instead of correctness or fact or the result of investigation – truth as an attitude and a principle. This truth does not engage in particular projects or agendas; it defies no opponents and never exercises violence. Unlike the critical reason of philosophy (indifferent to problems of life obviously) it does not aim to undermine other truths or to master the future or representations. It is the force of itself because its orientation is precisely a mode of orientation. It is a knowledge before knowledge (and not thereafter); it expresses actual problems so that one might begin to think, it demands investment in experience and adapts imagination to experience rather than to concept. Its true power is nothing but awareness. In the old sense, authority had been since times immemorial (by both Plato and the Biblical prophets) the guarantor of truth, today however, we do not have to ask the question of what authority is but rather like Arendt did, of what authority was! We can no longer fall upon old experiences common to all and the gravity of the demands of peoples all over the world express this faithfully. The old canons of state, capital, media and government must be replaced by new ones and this is nothing but a very slow process, however it must begin at the beginning – not with yet another re-enacting of perfunctorily established institutions such as the university and the government. Truth is a public power, and that is what we the people, must rely on, for anybody who comes today from the position of defunct authority to offer us a truth he has, kind as he might be, he’s no less deceived than we might have been once. 

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Breivik Files


Norwegian Translator: 
English Translator: 

Index

Introduction & Files September 2009 Part I

Files September 2009 Part II

Files October 2009

Files November 2009

Files December 2009 Part I

Files December 2009 Part II

Files 2010


Notes from Norway by 

Final remarks by 

Final remarks

There is not much one can add at this point, the text should speak for itself. This long text that extends well into 50 pages was not necessarily easy translate; I translate large sections manually, and used a different variety of tools, some CAT software and a previous version done by Ole, the Norwegian translator. Translating such a vast amount of text in a record time doesn't come without some challenges. I cannot claim that the translation is perfect, neither that it is perfectly loyal to Norwegian; my intention above all was to produce a text that would be easily readable to English speakers and I believe I've succeeded. Over time these texts will lead to many questions that in turn will question the translation and I might be able to amend serious mistakes. Not only the length of the text was overwhelming but also the nature and content even independently of the context. I did my best not to omit anything and to leave it just as it is. It might seem incredible but this was there floating free in the Internet for some years. The purpose of this translation was to provide the world at large that doesn't speak Norwegian an authentic glimpse into the writing and thinking of the Norway shooter, since I saw that media relied extensively on Google translate, what seemed to me rather preposterous. Along the way Ole appeared and volunteered a previous translation to work from which I corrected substantially but that saved me a lot of time, so that in a way this was team work. Any questions about the translation, I might be available via Twitter.

Notes from the Norwegian Translator

Notes by 

The text below consists of the recently publicly identified norwegian mass murderer Anders  Behring Breivik’s posts on the Norwegian website document.no.

The posts were made available on document.no’s website in the early morning hours of July 23rd 2011.

The text has been translated via Google Translate, and has thereafter  been roughly formatted with changes in separation of the posts and accentuation  of the date headings in bold and read. Red  ink has been used to mark changes made to correct errors in the the auto translation.

The automatic translation is not bad, but induces numerous errors in syntax and incorrectly translated or missed complex words. This has been addressed to the degree necessary to understand the meaning of the text for English speaking readers. The sentences have beenhandled with as much care as possible, as to not alter the contained information. I have tried, as far as the limited time available has allowed, to proofread thoroughly and take care not to inflict changes to the meaning of words and sentences. These corrections  are marked in red, where applied, in the text below.

The original Norwegian text is supplied as a separate file. Comparisons of the texts can thus be made at any time by someone proficient in both the English and Norwegian languages, if  one should for some reason find this necessary. For such purposes, a re-run through Google translate should also provide the erroneous raw translation I have used as the skeleton for this translation.

The views and opinions expressed by the now-murderer who authored this text are, of course, since they are taken out of the debate threads in which they were posted, not in their original setting, and are not more than isolated expressions. Most are posts regarding islam and multiculturalism, and topics related to this, expressed in a discussion forum environment with other persons holding both similar and opposite views.  

The website document.no is at present still up and running, and contains the threads from which this text is extracted. Anyone interested in delving deeper into this matter, may of course provided he or she understands Norwegian, explore these threads in depth.

Nevertheless, this text gives an eerie insight into thoughts and opinions of obviously significant importance to this disturbed man, who for reasons not understandable to any sane man or woman, turned mass murderer yesterday.

Working through this document, translating it over the past 20 hours, has been a sickening, disturbing experience.

It is my humble hope analyzing this information and connecting this with whatever other useful data that may be at hand or can be dug up  can help to cast light onto the as of now incomprehensible acts performed by ABB may have come to happen. If such an understanding can be obtained, that may possibly assist in creating some kind of understanding of how to prevent something like this from ever happening again. That will, I think, be neccesary to achieve the healing the wounds this  monstrous character has inflicted on our beloved country, Norway. If so, it will surely have been worth the effort.

It is not illogical to think that the issues he speaks of in his post have been a main factor in this man’s  incomprehensible evolution, ending with him performing unspeakable acts of terror, inflicting meaningless deaths, damage and grievance to a great number of people, and great damage to our country and society  as a whole.

It has been less than 9 months since this man’s last post.

Breivik Files: 2010

Translated by  

Breivik Files 2010

2010-01-02 14:20:13

There are political forces in Oslo who want to mass-build subsidized/low cost "Islam-blocks" in Oslo West for "better integration". As far as I know, it is only the Progress Party / Conservatives who oppose this at the moment, so it can actually become a reality over the next decade.

If this ever becomes the case, many from Oslo West will move to Bærum (and most will eventually follow).

Hm, but where do you move when this policy reaches Bærum?


2010-01-19 11:25:11

Very good article:) It helps pushing the debate to a new level.


2010-01-22 02:53:39

I'm tempted to get in touch with the owners and explain to them the possibility of success through restructuring my leadership. This will involve firing all remaining cultural Marxists and start with the culturally conservative coverage as the first major newspaper in Norway (critical of multiculturalism/Islamization). It is realistic to believe that the circulation will then have the potential to reach up to 120-200k.


It surprises me that there are no more "culturally conservative entrepreneurs" in the Kingdom of Norway?

Do you think the owners will have a positive attitude to such proposal?

I will not be a good option, though, as I have absolutely zero knowledge of editorial processes. I think however, Hans Rustad should be responsible for the editorial and invite them to consider his concept. I think the timing for this is perfect right now!

There are 15 cultural Marxist politically correct papers already in Norway and not a single one culturally conservative. The first culturally conservative (not politically correct) publication will be GUARANTEED success.

2010-01-24 10:45:19

The problem with the Progress Party (FrP) is that they have become too entrenched in reaching out for multiculturalism and the demands of humanistic and suicidal ideas. In many ways they have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

 Genuine resistance has been reduced to listening to the PR agency and do 2-3 tactical statements before each election, to ensure the votes of the core.

The vast majority of new faces in the Progress Party are now politically correct career politicians and not in any way idealists who are willing to take risks and work for idealistic goals.

The comic part is that even though they have thrown almost all principles on the garbage dump and reduced cultural struggle to "reducing the flow of asylum seekers with a couple of thousands" are still being branded in public, ridiculed, harassed and isolated by the humanist-Marxists.

Parliamentary Representatives from the Progress Party should at least read document.no every single day and involve themselves a bit as it is their duty to be the people's voice. Unfortunately, very few of them at all know what document.no is at all, and fewer than 5% of them know what taqiyya and naskh is.

For example when a combined force chose to ignore the Swedish and French intifada before the last election for strategic reasons, which later cost FrP maybe 5%;  Siv should have instructed all of her people to call the ARK and other newsrooms and force them to cover this news.

I have great respect for how the Marxist-humanist networks in Norway are able to use their power optimally through "force multiplication" and cooperation.

They are insanely hard-working, skilled in consolidation and most of the right has a lot to learn from them.

2010-01-25 05:20:24

Public Enemy, Carl Christian

What you manage to come up with here is nothing but very nasty control techniques.

You claim that all Norwegians who do not follow the  nation’s “moth-(murder)-er” Gro Harlem Brundtland‘s definition, is racist:

"Anyone who at a given time holds a Norwegian passport is a full Norwegian" ... Which means that even the Somali (with a Norwegian passport) who chews qat all day, beats his wife and sends half the social benefits he receives to al-Shabaab should be viewed as a full worthy Norwegian citizen.

If anyone in this country DARES to look at this Somali as anything other than a full-Norwegian they are racists and need to be branded publically. And you say that everyone who disagrees with their extreme cultural Marxist world view - the utopian, global citizen- definition are racists?

In that case, I think you have labeled 95% of the world population as just this but this plays just a minor role for you?

You are only committed to paralyzing all debate in society, to silence all those who are not of the same opinion as you, to exercise social control in line with the conservative Muslims in Greenland? Once a person takes off his "ideological hijab" you are there immediately as the troll you are.

Sorry, but it does not work anymore. More people will be increasingly immune to your rule techniques due to their massive inflation rhetoric.

I think the majority of Norwegians demand full cultural assimilation (European culture) to count others as full Norwegians. Hans in his analysis is thus correct. A Norwegian passport is irrelevant in this context. Get over it ...!

    :-)

2010-02-02 13:35:11

I completely agree that Obama is a brilliant rhetoric and communicator, one of the best we've seen over the past 30 years.

But firstly, we can not and should not compare the cultural struggle in the U.S. with that in Europe. The rhetoric must and should be different. The average "right-wing party" -voter Republican in the U.S. is a "libertarian" (anti-socialist but pro multiculti) while the average conservative in Europe is much more anti-multiculti but bases his arguments on cultural resistance against Islamization.

The so-called anti-multiculti in the U.S. base their rhetoric on ethnocentrism alone which thus differs greatly from Europeans. This is the main reason that we must separate the American and European cultural struggle. I usually stay away from American issues as a result.

Regardless of whether we are in the U.S. or Europe, it is essential for you to inquire the following:

When did multiculturalism cease to be an ideology designed to deconstruct European culture, traditions, identity and nation-states? If you support a leader who propagates multiculti (the ideology that as of this writing systematically deconstructs Western civilization), can one not then just as well stick to the class struggle or  MSM?

And if one then thinks that multiculturalism’s wonderful doctrines are the main cause of the ongoing Islamization of Europe and the U.S., should one not criticize multiculturalism’s leader No. 1, the one Jesus Christ Obama for his fundamental principles?

Failing to criticize him, has one not then accepted the multiculturalist wonderful premises?

2010-02-16 19:25:24

According to two surveys 13% of young British Muslims between 15 and 25 support Al Qaeda ideology. UK is representative for Norway, so I would guess that at least 15-20% of Norwegian Muslims support murder of gays. There is certainly not fewer who support the killing of gays than support Al Qaeda.

2010-02-17 10:56:52

Problem is that it often does not help if 80% of Muslims are "moderates", ie they ignore the Quran. "It takes very few people to overthrow a plane."

What percentage is the Taliban of Pakistan's population? 1%, 3%, 5%? And how much chaos is there today?

In every society where Islam exists there will be a certain percentage of the Muslims who actually follow the traditional interpretations of the Koran.

And then we have the relationship between conservative Muslims and so-called "moderate Muslims".

There are moderate Nazis, too, that don’t support extermination of Roma and Jews. But they're still Nazis and will only sit and watch as the conservative Nazis strike (if it ever happens). Should we accept the moderate Nazis as long as they distance themselves from the extermination of Roma and Jews?

Now things have unfortunately already gone wrong with Marxists who have already thoroughly infiltrated culture, media and educational organizations. These individuals are tolerated and are even allowed to work as professors and lecturers at colleges/universities and are thus able to spread their propaganda.

For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differently. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies. Not all Muslims, Nazis and Marxists are conservative, most are moderate. But does it matter? A moderate Nazi might, after having experienced fraud, choose to be conservative. A moderate Muslim can, after being refused to enter a club, be conservative, etc.

It is obvious that the moderate supporters of hate-ideologies, at a later date may choose conservatism.

    Islam (ism) has historically led to 300 million deaths
    Communism has historically led to 100 million deaths
    Nazism has historically led to 6-20 million deaths

    ALL hate ideologies should be treated equally.

2010-06-15 11:11:55

Very good and very important article. Great work, Hans!

2010-09-01 08:19:15

Lasse Moer,

Japan and South Korea are much clearer examples of countries that consistently and outright dismissed multiculturalism. This they confirmed in the 70 -, 80 -, 90’s and this they confirm to this very day.

The UN has for years been trying to push them to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees but the number has ended in a tiny fraction of the original claim. Europe has never chosen to run psychological and economic warfare against them for this reason (as they do to European nations/individuals who espouse the same arguments and principles)

Multiculturalists become very embarrassed if you mention Japan and South Korea as these nations prove quite obviously that mass immigration is only a result of specific Marxist doctrines and is very rarely economically or culturally beneficial. Japan/South Korea has a border and border guards. If one lacks a visa one is denied passage ... (Europe presumably had  this scheme prior 1950-1960)

The interesting question is the, why are not Japanese and South Koreans demonized as the Nazis and fascists? The answer, we know ...

2010-09-21 23:20:25

The main axes are the economy and culture.

They were right-wing culturally but economically leftist (not as extreme as the planned economy but still strongly socialist). So it is equally wrong to call them right wing as the left extreme. They were both: P

The left of course likes to tag them as right wing, as well as anti-socialists refer to them as the left extreme.

The third axis: authoritarian vs liberal is inappropriate to use as the main marker.

2010-10-29 14:08:40

Thanks for the great effort until now, Hans and Document.no
You are doing an incredibly important job and are considered today to be one of very few ideological alternative voices. And you ARE noticed from the country's parliamentary representatives and journalists. I would even argue that Document has become a political force in Norway, as we all know that the country's elites secretly read Document weekly! :-) You continue to do Norway a great service! :-)

I wish however to make some constructive criticism when it comes to Document’s organizational and financial plans. Please do not take it personally:)

Considering Document’s modest economy and that there are in any case 50 talented writers in Norway who had willingly helped more actively, I think it would be a very bad idea to focus 90% of Documents assets on a permanent reporter position. Today there are a plethora of essays and articles that requested to be distributed without financial compensation so why spend all the funds in a reporter position? I'm pretty sure that, under the circumstances, very costly position is liquidated in the course of a two-year period when I expect that you will eventually get to the same conclusion.

It would be a pity if you ignored the suggestions and decided to squander all the money on a potentially "politically correct" person with a background in the Marxist boot camp: Volda University College or any other journalist (Marxist) camps, etc.

What you, however, should focus economically on, is to develop "Concept Document" socially and organizationally, primarily through the development of this blog to a solution more like a social networking for example, that is linked to similar organizations in other countries (similar to a beginning of a cultural Euro-version of a Tea Party movement).

Alternatively, should you publish a monthly magazine that is distributed through Narvesen. I have already presented a detailed strategy for how this can be done. I collected all the offers from suppliers, I even contacted Narvesen and then submitted this to you, Hans. Full distribution through Narvesen (2000 copies monthly magazine), can be produced for less than NO. 35 000 per month, an investment GUARANTEED to provide "break-even" and could potentially result in TWICE the revenue! I do not understand why someone from Document have not wanted to consider my proposal?

You have, at present, access to a fleet of some of the brightest talents in most industries that would be willing to work for free. This talent is now unused. So why use up 90% of Document’s agents on a reporter position?

I have worked with project development for 14 years with several projects related to web solutions, have the financial education + two other Bachelor's degrees, earned my first million as an entrepreneur at the age of 24 and have many friends who are today  successful entrepreneurs in most industries. Several of my friends are experts on the development of social networking sites (one of them runs Deiligst.no, Norway's probably the most profitable online communities despite the frayed moral concept).

The point of the illustration is that you have access to very valuable skills, free, that you now refuse you to use.

I hope you will be willing to receive help to a much greater extent than you do today and instead use the modest funds for more essential costs, as outlined above.

Anyway, get on! I support you 100% no matter what you ultimately choose ;-)