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Mary had a little lamb
I used to love The Guardian. You could find discussions about just about anything there, views right left and centre, philosophical musings, analyses of books, films and even a magnificent series in which Andras Schiff presented each and every one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. It was a site that continued where school education left off,…
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This is not the time to make babies
The Norwegian bellicose foreign minister Huitfelt has just been exposed in what appears to be a case of serious corruption. Her husband made some strikingly lucrative investments after she became a Cabinet member. I have seen no proof that decisions she has made as a foreign minister has contributed to their joint wealth. Yet, there…
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John Mearsheimer
Mr. Mearsheimer, who is a prominent expert on international relations, cf. Britannica, has been relatively uncommunicative since 2022, after the war he had warned about ever since 2014, started. Maybe he did not want to tell us “I told you so”. Or was his case perhaps one of not being allowed to tell us? Like…
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Quoting Kissinger
To be an enemy of the United States is dangerous. To be a friend of the United States is fatal” Henry Kissinger Indeed. In the wake of the Ukraine debacle, many of us are beginning to understand the statement. Here in Europe, all states, including Ukraine, are seeing an unprecedented rise in the cost of…
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Five minutes of foreign policy
What’s going on in Niger? I wonder. My next thought is: How strange the press is! Today, I’ve checked AP, Reuters and Al Jazeera – these are the most common sources that feed local papers in the West about situations in places to which a news outlet may not be able to send its own…
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Rødt
Rødt is the name of a Norwegian left-wing political party. It is the only political party that still advocates leaving NATO. The party maintains that NATO is not a defence alliance, but an alliance of nations vindicating US global hegemony. The party avers that NATO not so much solves as creates problems. It is the…
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Defence of self or of hegemony
Have you heard of “perception management”? Simply put, it means persuasion on the basis not of facts but of lies (or suppression of facts). During the 1980s, Reagan decided to “kick the Vietnam syndrome“, a condition from which the US public was suffering, sick to the heart of the horror and shame of the Vietnam…
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Libya again
Why, you may be asking, am I writing about Libya when everybody else is writing about Iraq? And that brings me straight to the rather surreal aspect of this ignominious war, which some countries, not least my own, waged against a country that was, from the 1990s on, one where even you or I might…
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Look back in horror –Libya 2011
In 2011, NATO bombed Libya to Kingdom Come. Blasting a well-functioning country off the map was not – I repeat, NOT – in compliance with UN Security Council resolution 1973 (Incidentally, no less than five countries, including Germany, abstained from voting on that occasion). The said resolution authorised action to “protect” civilians. …. take all…
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Pipe me a Tune
For a year now I’ve been wondering why the Norwegian authorities are so rabid about the Ukraine war. I mean, their faces don’t turn scarlet when they talk about the de facto genocide of the Palestinian people, the torture going on in Egyptian prisons or the suppression of women in Saudi Arabia. But Russia, now,…