It's so incredible to watch this unfold. We're basically now openly talking about starting WW3, and most people in the west are just going along with it. Pretty much nobody is asking whether maybe we should stop the insanity instead.
I mean have you seen how bloodthirsty a lot of the westerners are? Until the bombs actually start falling on their cities they think they are some undefeatable force of good that can't be harmed.
I've never had any illusions regarding the bloodlust in the west, the utter lack of understanding of what an all out war with Russia would mean has shocked me though. It's especially wild that Europeans, who will be the first victims of the conflict, are the ones cheering this the most. At least with the US, you can see how they might think that the conflict to be contained to Europe.
According to Forskning.no, Norway is the number one country in Europe by percentage of population willing to "fight for their country". It might also be the only European country in the world top 10 depending on how you count Georgia. Norway stands behind only China, Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, and finally Vietnam, the number one country in the world by willingness to fight for its independence. The high percentage in VN is attributed to the Vietnam War, and likewise the high percentage in Norway is attributed to the resistance against Germany during the Second World War. We could also bring up the Swedish invasion of 1814 and the Swedish invasion that never happened during the 1905 crisis, but these are "ancient history" by comparison. Not really the stuff that inspires blockbuster movies and pop history books, you know.
The reason I bring this up is because Norwegians, it seems, think that every invasion has the same character as the German invasion, and that their own freedom amounts to simply the freedom to hoist the national flag up a backyard flagpole. Norwegians would never put any real thought into the material causes of war and invasion, nor any thought into how the capitalist class wages war on them every day. Norwegians in fact celebrate that the Blücher was sunk before it could ever reach the "heart of the nation" one moment, and then the next moment they welcome the Harry S. Truman to Oslo — the Hakenkreuz flag was dragged to the very bottom of that narrow fjord, while the ensign of the Nazis' greatest inspiration my countrymen let flutter high over the same waters 84 years later. Yesterday's "we are here to protect the Norwegian people from the existential threat of Judaeo-Bolshevism" became today's "we are here to protect the Norwegian people from the existential threat of Russian aggression" — and this sham was apparently accepted by most countrymen for the simple fact that the folding of Norway into vassalage to the Septic Reich took a more "presentable" form than the short-lived attempt to fold Norway into the German Reich. The number of Nazis granted key positions in NATO be damned, of course, Norway is after all the same country that refused to convict a Holocaust collaborator because he was simply too useful as an anti-communist asset.
Fuck, I'll never be able to look at that word the same way again
Can confirm, I got that pamphlet recently. I feel like being told to prepare for a nonspecific catastrophe does end up putting danger and catastrophe in people's minds, makes some sort of non-specific doom feel like a more real and immediately present possibility, but I also do of course acknowledge that being prepared for disasters is a very important thing. The Norwegian pamphlet does mention war but seems to focus more on other things like extreme weather.
Edit: Looking over it again, it mentions war a little more often than I remembered.
Handy, but I just recently watched Threads and know all I need about how to survive a nuclear war:
Don't.
Those bombs go off I'm skipping into the light, to that oneness with my fellow man we could not make the honest way.
I'm gonna do a silly pose against the wall for my forever shadow
The Norwegian pamphlet features an aerial photo of the extreme weather Hans, that was 7~9 August 2023. Specifically it's a cropped version of Nesbyen-12.png — a photo taken by Helitrans, free to use with credit, commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection (who also made the pamphlet). Nesbyen is located in Hallingdal district in Buskerud. It looks like a very nice and scenic place when it's not getting flooded to Hell.
But yeah, I was off in the Land of the Seven Council Fires when old Hans came to town, it was honestly crazy to see a picture from a neighbor back home, showing our street looking like it had turned into friggin Venice overnight. So in that moment I was thinking, "Yup, we're seeing the extreme weather of climate change here as well!" — And then a few months later, January 17th 2024, there was that crazy snow storm that just completely shut down half of Norway's transit infrastructure for half the day, and I thought again, "If people are going to end up commuting by gondola in the summer and by snow scooter in the winter, I don't think capitalism will survive for much longer, 'cause God Himself keeps calling general strikes, using precipitation as a divine picket line..."
Sounds like something from Monty Python https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C-M2hs3sXGo
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
