After an article about state-owned Telenor’s treacherous conduct towards the employees of Telenor Myanmar and about nepotism in the Labour Party, I received a corrective from an old Labour Party grandee from Western Norway whom I have not heard from for many years.
There may be reason to reproduce his remarks here, because they tell us what actually happened in the Labour Party when Gro Harlem Brundtland staged a ‘coup d’état’ and became party leader in 1981. And they tell us something about the forces driving the current Labour Party leadership. He writes:
‘It is not the Labour Party that is the common denominator in what you bring to light, but the Labour Party leadership(s) of recent decades, beginning with Gro Harlem Brundtland. Under and after her, there has been “scorched earth” in the party and the trade union movement. Everyone who could read and write has been swept out, and in came relatives, friends and, not least, incompetent women.
This was reinforced by a wave of “neoliberal market economics” and “neo-functionalist integration theory” with regard to Europe and “the end of history” globally. All thought was replaced by slogans, an organisation of hand-picked “functionaries” and careerists. Everyone who could read and write and think for themselves had to go into internal exile – at best. We have seen nothing comparable since the Cultural Revolution in China.
This was a “party coup” and a coup d’état. It was carried out by people with poor “value-based foundations” and great ambitions on their own behalf. Some of the first to bear the brunt of this were the party’s “historic figures”, from Jens Chr. Hauge to Thorbjørn Berntsen, in the form of “dirt packages” of enormous proportions.
Unfortunately, this is the case not only in Norway. On the contrary, it characterises European and North American politics, especially social democracy and the Democrats in the United States. Much of it comes from the Socialist International, which has spread this “culture” throughout the West since 1990.
You will never get this documented, but be aware of it. A new party philosophy (“New Labour”) was concocted, and the parties were modernised. They were abolished as membership organisations. Membership fees were replaced by state party funding. Whatever ambitions existed for a “social democratic renaissance” after the fall of the Soviet Union were fiercely opposed. The Socialist International in reality abolished its own member parties and replaced them with “top-down” branches of the European Parliament.
The European Parliament was and remains an important institution and source of funding. It demands: “wokification”, “Europeanisation”, etc. Formally, it has little power, but in reality it is a well-disciplined battle formation that shapes and disciplines thought and debate in large parts of Europe.
This is poorly understood in Norway outside the Labour Party leadership, but the European Parliament is the Comintern of our time. Note also a major “Trotskyist undercurrent” in “postmodernism”, neo-functionalism and the fantasy of the end of history, etc. It is a guiding force for the social democratic parties in Europe and Norway, and in the Democratic Party in the United States.
The Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty are revolutionary programmes. They are not intended to abolish class society and introduce the affluent society through the “market mechanism”. They are intended to abolish the European state system. That is the core of globalisation policy. It is not the bourgeoisie that is to disappear. They themselves have become part of it. It is Europe’s historic ethnography and demography that are to be changed through massive immigration of a new working class from the south.
This is also about control through flows of money from Norway. They have gradually become enormous. The international appetite has grown along with the accounts of Norges Bank. (Note the central bank governor’s “revelation” in Arendal this summer. He is washing his hands before the coming catastrophe.)
The entire Labour Party, let alone the rest of political life in Norway, is not to blame for all this. You must not criminalise political activity. On the contrary! It is more important now than ever to mobilise people and expertise. Democracy, the rule of law and the country’s economy are at stake.
I believe that a large, vital, culturally rich DnA can still produce capable politicians and give us outstanding leaders. I would think – but feel free to criticise me – that this could be a prerequisite for this to turn out well. There are still members of DnA who are not involved in this “culture”. They could very probably be in the majority, but the “functionaries” have taken over.
The threat does not come from revolutionaries in cold attics, but from the gilded corridors of power.’
Thus writes the ageing Labour Party grandee from his cave at the head of a fjord beneath a glacier in Western Norway, far from Youngstorget, frowned upon and cast out from the party he once believed in and was part of.
It is probably the account of what has happened to Labour that comes closest to reality and is furthest from entering the public domain. It is a story about connections that, in these times, when everything old is being overturned, it is important to be aware of.
Fragments have been known before, popularised, among other things, through the NRK series ‘Makta’. Such accounts merely scratch at the personal caricatures and the anecdotal surface, without bringing the fundamental and essential connections to light. The real connections that govern the Labour Party today have their origins in the Socialist International, the ‘New Labour’–philosophy and the European Parliament – ‘the new Comintern’.
For us here in Norway, this is important contemporary history that provides necessary context and a supplementary explanation for the growing gap between the Frogner elite and the Labour Party grassroots, and which at the same time can explain the many obvious paradoxes in the policies pursued by the Labour Party over the past 3–4 decades, as well as the moral decay within the party, cf. the Epstein involvement.
The old party grandee’s account explains the total and unconditional capitulation to the EU, the party leadership’s downgrading of the nation-state and national Norwegian interests in favour of globalisation policy and the export of jobs and industry to China and other low-cost countries.
It lays bare that the destructive non-Western immigration policy is primarily about influencing voter demographics. It is about importing a new working class from the south. It is about securing the positions of a party elite in a movement that the welfare state has, in fact, rendered superfluous.
It explains the disarmament and dismantling of the national defence in favour of the policy of international engagement and the large flows of money in aid policy that contribute to influence and personal benefits for the chosen members of the party elite.
It explains the scaremongering associated with the extreme climate policy and the destructive energy policy, as well as the corrosive identity politics that ride Norway and Europe like a nightmare.
It explains the paradox surrounding the EU’s willingness to allow the proxy war in Ukraine to continue and escalate, while the defences of Western Europe are down for the count. The war against Russia is expedient for consolidating an EU that is showing clear signs of disintegration.
And it explains the Trotskyist currents that we now see coming to the surface in the Democratic Party in the United States. It has the same ideological origin and its roots in the Socialist International and the ‘New Labour’ movement.
And it explains how Jens, Jonas and Espen use the flows of money from Norway, hydropower, oil and gas to gain a seat at Ursula’s table in Brussels, despite the fact that the people, in both 1972 and 1994, told them to stay at home.
Nothing is accidental. The pieces of the puzzle are beginning to fall into place. Gro was the beginning of much that later went seriously wrong, but she was right about one thing: She said that ‘Everything is connected to everything’, an insight she had probably taken from Lenin.
There may be reason to commit to memory the warning from the ageing Labour Party grandee there at the head of the fjord beneath the glacier:
‘The threat does not come from revolutionaries in cold attics, but from the gilded corridors of power.’
There is nothing wrong with the Labour Party grassroots. They have intuitively understood that something is wrong, and have already fled to the Progress Party. It is an unscrupulous party elite that has allowed itself to be seduced by hubris – extreme arrogance– and that uses the Norwegian flows of money to build international careers and personal fortunes. The threats come from the gilded corridors of power.
After Stoltenberg relinquished the position of chairman of the Munich Security Conference, everyone understands what is now on the cards: Jens will once again be launched as the Labour Party’s saviour, just as he was, as the returning son, during the last parliamentary election. He will be Labour’s candidate for prime minister in the 2029 parliamentary election.
Jonas will move to a suitable international fallback position, possibly as Secretary General of the Council of Europe. The position will become vacant again in 2029, and by then Jagland’s embarrassing exit will long since have been forgotten. The links between the Council of Europe and the European Parliament are close. The position comes with a palace with servants and a private chauffeur, a substantial tax-free salary and access to countless red carpets.
It should be an easy match. The flows of money from Norway provide influence. The working languages are English and French, and Jonas speaks both. Thorbjørn spoke neither English nor French. Whether Nemesis finally catches up with Jens, as Epstein caught up with Thorbjørn, remains to be seen.
Time will tell. Everything is connected to everything. The only thing that can save the Labour Party is for the threat from the gilded corridors of power to be neutralised.
