On 2 February less than a handful of Norwegian dailies briefly reported the signing of an agreement between the USA and the Norwegian government, according to which Norway grants the USA 8 new military bases, in addition to the four granted in 2021. All the dailies used the same wording, including the non-word “omforent”, which no normal person outside law-enforcement circles would ever use. (The word merely means “agreed upon” – nothing wrong about that. What is wrong is that the word is never used by journalists. So these dailies are citing their government source verbatim.)

Indeed, since 2 February, there has been no public debate about this dramatic turn of events in any news medium. No anti-war protests. Nothing. The “left” – whatever is left of it – has been silent. The national assembly will obediently ratify the agreement.

Yet, according to the deal, the USA will store weapons and equipment in locations to which Norwegian inspectors have no right of access. Norwegian authorities will not be apprised of what is stored there, i.e. will not be informed if the USA stores nuclear weapons on Norwegian soil. The USA may attack Russia from Norway, if they find it serves their interests.

Norway has, de facto, handed itself over to the USA (not even NATO).

The idiots – pardon my French – who have been bamboozled into this hare-brained, treasonous agreement will have imagined that they are gratefully accepting US protection against the big bad bear on the other side of our northernmost border (with whom we have, by the way, until now had amicable relations. That will of course change: In future Russia will, for all practical purposes, no longer be bordering little old Norway, but the USA.)

The Norwegian public has heard, day in and day out, relentlessly and from all channels, that Russia wishes to engulf us, that all arguments to the contrary are Putin’s talking points, and that everything Biden and the New York Times say is God’s solemn truth. The ground has been carefully prepared in advance and resistance to the agreement is inconceivable because my compatriots are — alas — sleep-walking.

It is true that Norway’s long North Atlantic coastline is attractive to players in the current geopolitical contest, including our neighbour Russia.

It is also true that an arrest warrant was issued the other day against one of my favourite authors, the Russian Boris Akunin, who emigrated from Russia in 2014 and who calls Putin a Caligula. Apparently Akunin has urged Ukrainians to bomb Russian cities. If he returns to Russia, he will probably be put behind bars for years. Obviously, I strongly disapprove of keeping dissidents behind bars!! And Akunin is certainly not the only one.

On the other hand, what is our “protector” other than the most trigger-happy country in the world;
a country that specialises in murderous regime changes;
a country whose raison d’être is to wage disastrous wars;
a country that leaves a trail of failed states wherever it turns its attention;
a country that is blissfully indifferent to the plight of a greater part of its own population.

Using Europe as its now (already) enfeebled hostage, the USA wishes to see Russia reduced to the palaeolithic condition in which the country found itself under the rule of the US puppet Yeltsin.

How many vicious Latin American (e.g. Pinochet), African (e.g. Mobuto), East Asian (e.g. Suharto) and Middle Eastern (e.g. the Shah) dictators must the USA support? How many failed states must it create, and how many torture victims and corpses must it leave in its wake before my confounded compatriots understand the nature of US foreign policy since WWII? CIA-supported coups and/or military interventions and/or paralysing economic sanctions have targeted and sometimes utterly destroyed countries such as Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, Ghana, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, Niger, North Korea, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, Syria, Vietnam, Yemen. How many more countries must suffer the deadly attention of the CIA and US enforced sanctions before my disoriented compatriots as well as Five-Eye citizens realise what “rule of Law” actually means? Most recently:

• The USA probably forced the non-confidence vote against Pakistan’s Imran Khan in 2022, and happily sees him imprisoned after Khan “leaked” the cypher exposing the source of his ouster. (Of course the USA denies any wrongdoing, as always.)
• The USA is still making a determined effort to prevent developing countries from developing (via its instruments: the IMF, WTO and the World Bank).
• The USA is leading a propaganda campaign that has strangled all Western mainstream media, thus ensuring that bewildered citizens have no idea of what is going on.
• The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found there are plausible grounds to suspect Israel is committing a genocide that the USA is actively supporting.
• The USA has vowed to support Ukraine with “all it takes”. We see that the outcome so far is a dramatic depletion of the Ukrainian male population and a 23 % reduction in Ukrainian territory.

My stunned compatriots have definitely forgotten about Laos and Cambodia. They have possibly not even learnt in school why North Korea became what it is? Even the RAND Corporation points out that “operations… such as those in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere—were disappointments or outright failures”. I put to you that failures on that scale are simply indefensible.

I fear that when my discombobulated compatriots belatedly discover that the USA cares not a hoot for “international Law”, for “freedom”, or for “democracy”, it will be too late.