The road to hell is paved with petrodollars

Also published at Gates of Vienna

Most people learn from an early age that money doesn’t grow on trees. And nowhere is that more true when it comes to paying for cultural enrichment, which is a lesson that Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg learned the hard way the other day when she had to inform the Norwegian Parliament that the estimated costs of processing the enormous influx of so-called “asylum seekers” would reach a staggering US $6 billion over the next five years.

And to add to Mrs Solberg’s woes, this is occurring at a time when Norwegian oil revenues have taken a severe blow, resulting in tens of thousands of Norwegians losing their lavishly-paid jobs in the Norwegian oil industry. More and more young Norwegians have been joining the ranks of the unemployed, and have to rely on social handouts from the government to get by.

What could possibly be better then than to spend billions of dollars on hordes of people from the Third World — mostly Muslims — who are borderline illiterates, who have no intention of contributing to society and who are only looking for a rich and gullible sugar-daddy nation in the West that they and their extended clan can scrounge off?

Well, according to the Left, nothing could be better, because they are literally walking on sunshine these days. They are enthusiastically encouraging Norwegians to join in what has colloquially been dubbed a “working bee” by the MSM, to ensure that the influx of future welfare recipients is dealt with as proficiently and smoothly as possible. The prospects of importing hundreds if not thousands of hard-core terrorists who could destabilize the country and cause serious mayhem doesn’t seem to faze them in the slightest. In fact, they are much more concerned that the police in Norway are now carrying firearms at all times, a safety measure that was introduced late last year due to the increased threat level, and a direct consequence of by the Left’s aggressive pursuit of a multicultural society.

Hardly a day goes by when there isn’t a frenzied reference in the MSM by a left-wing diehard about the outrageousness of an armed police force and the possibility that a member of the police could actually shoot and harm a violent criminal who took it upon himself to go berserk on a crowded street with a samurai sword, a box cutter or some other exotic type of bowel-slicer. But then again, these are the people that were outraged over suggestions that Anders Behring Breivik should have been taken out by a sniper’s bullet when he went on his mad killing spree on Utøya Island in 2011, so what else can you really expect?

“Cultural enrichment” is, of course, a term coined to mock the multiculturalists’ outrageous claim that importing hordes of people with diametrically opposing views and values is a smart and decent thing to do. And no, we’re not talking about importing people who think that capitalism is superior to Norwegian social democracy, or people who prefer football over cross-country skiing, but rather individuals from “exciting” cultures where it’s considered completely acceptable to stone women to death and hang gays from mobile cranes. To kill people who decide to leave Islam or who have the temerity to offend the prophet Muhammad’s honour.

If you look at it from a completely rational point of view, you’ll find that today’s cultural enrichment is just as beneficial as the Black Death was in 14th century Europe. The reality is that this enrichment is slowly destroying our culture and our way of life, and just like the Black Death it is spreading like a malignant cancer, which the decision-makers are doing their utmost to ignore.

The whole Western world was in an uproar when ISIS blew up relics from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization in Palmyra earlier this year, but when Norwegian and European leaders destroy a living and highly vibrant civilization, and do it just as effectively as the powerful explosives used by ISIS, no one even bats an eyelid. The political classes in the west are more interested in preserving memories of a long since extinguished civilization than trying to save the one that is under attack at the moment. And, sadly, the cultural enrichment has picked up some serious momentum in the last few months and it has now shifted into high gear. People all over the European Union have begun in earnest to discover what the term “cultural enrichment” really means.

That is also the case in Norway, where a kindergarten recently had to close down due the sudden arrival of a reception centre for asylum seekers next door. The straw that finally broke the camel’s back for the parents of the children was a bloody fistfight between two of the residents staying at the reception centre just outside the perimeter of the kindergarten. This was an incident that was witnessed by several of the children. Prior to that there had been incidents of asylum seekers wandering onto the grounds of the kindergarten during operating hours. So what did the local council do upon learning about this? Well, they decided to close down the kindergarten, of course! The children just had to toughen up and deal with it. After all, they can always find new friends at a new kindergarten; and besides, what’s the big deal if the parents have to spend another hour or so each day dropping off and picking up their children from kindy?

These might sound like cruel arguments, but apparently they made perfect sense for the members of the local council.

Likewise parents are becoming increasingly worried about sending their children off on organized school trips to various campsites around the country, something which is an established Norwegian tradition and something that hundreds of thousands of Norwegian kids have done in the past and have fond memories of. A recent newspaper article highlighted some parents’ reluctance to send their children to a camp after they learned that twenty asylum seekers were living in buildings on the campgrounds. As one parent put it, they are worried because they have absolutely no idea about who these people really are, what their mental state is like and what they may be capable of doing when the kids arrive. And the concerned parents have a very strong case, to put it mildly. Why should they feel at ease when the authorities themselves have absolutely zero idea about the real identities of the “asylum seekers”? Figures show that 90% of asylum seekers who apply for political asylum in Norway do not have any identification papers. For all we know the camp could be the new home of senior members of ISIS or Al Qaida. It is also worth pointing out that the two newspaper articles describing the aforementioned cases were written in such a way that the reader might question the motives of the parents, and not the authorities.

The increased pace of cultural enrichment in Norway these days has also prompted the political Left to intensify its mass-intimidation campaigns, in which leftists actively go after those who dare to speak out against the official policies, with the intention of silencing and shaming them. The more obvious it becomes that the policies of the Left are failing, the more important it becomes to keep the situation under tight “control”, that is, to make sure that the critics keep their opinions to themselves and don’t rock the boat. Long-time readers of GoV should be very familiar with the methods employed by the Norwegian inquisitors, their tenacity and the unbridled pleasure they take in destroying the reputations of decent people whose only crime is to have opposing political views.

One of those unlucky individuals who ended up in the crosshairs of the political left recently is Hege Storhaug, a long-time critic of Islam and a vocal opponent of the Norwegian authorities’ head-in-the sand approach when it comes to dealing with multiculturalism and Islam. She is one of the co-founders of the Norwegian think tank Human Rights Service, and is thus frequently in the media discussing reports written by HRS, talking about surveys commissioned by the organization, or just commenting on issues dealing with multiculturalism and Islam. In this capacity, she has stepped on quite a few toes, and the MSM have finally decided that it is payback time.

It came in the form of an extremely vile hit piece published in Itromso a few weeks ago, where the author of the editorial even went so far as to compare HRS and Hege Storhaug with Norwegian wartime collaborators, Jew haters and Nazis during WW2 in German-occupied Norway.

The piece ended with a cryptic remark about the fact that many Norwegian wartime collaborators were shot at the end of the war for their treason.

This prompted Kjetil Rolness, a Norwegian sociologist and a social commentator to pen an op-ed entitled “The hatred directed at Hege Storhaug” in which he described in great detail the venomous vitriol that is constantly being hurled at her by members of the political Left, the cowardly guilt-by-association tactics that they use, and the fact that no one can refute the facts and figures that are presented by Storhaug and HRS in the reports that they publish. Rolness also correctly pointed out that this hatred will make ordinary people afraid of talking positively about Storhaug, and make them think twice about liking any of her articles posted on social media. The Left has in essence succeeded in making her name synonymous with the bogeyman, which of course was the ultimate goal and the sole motive behind the intimidation campaign. Rolness’ op-ed was published a few days after the hit piece appeared in iTromso, and it has generated massive ripples in the MSM and on social media in Norway. It is still being hotly debated today, with the usual “racist”, “Islamophobe” and “hater” epithets thrown in for free by Rolness’ and Storhaug’s detractors.

It is also worth mentioning that until recently HRS have received yearly state subsidies from the authorities that have allowed them to keep the organization afloat (pretty much every Norwegian organization receives some type of subsidies, and this is governed by law). HRS’s subsidies, however, look set to be revoked after massive political pressure from powerful forces on the left. One Norwegian politician from the Socialist Left, Audun Lysbakken, actually broke protocol a few years ago and ordered the subsidies of the think tank cut in half.

This prompted the leadership of HRS to contact the well-known FrP politician (Progress Party) Carl I Hagen, whose party at the time held the power of balance in the Oslo City Council. Hagen consequently made it a condition that HRS subsidies be reinstated in full in return for continued FrP support for the annual Council budgets in the capital.

However, after the recent local elections in Norway, where FrP lost support in the city of Oslo, and the left made considerable gains, proposals have yet again surfaced to revoke HRS’s financial support, which of course is crystal-clear proof that the official subsidies in Norway are political in nature. It clearly shows that any organization that dares to oppose the official line on certain issues stand to lose its funding at any moment.

This is a good reason to scrap the entire system and abolish state subsidies altogether which, would guarantee the independence of these organizations and kill any questions of political meddling. Nevertheless, that is irrelevant in this particular context.

Another person who has involuntarily ended up in the media recently is Hanne Tolg, a Norwegian British-based writer for the Norwegian conservative website Document.no. This website and its founder Hans Rustad became famous after the 22/7 attacks due to the fact that Breivik had posted a couple of dozen non-violent and completely ordinary comments in their discussion section. For this Document.no was absolutely trashed in the MSM in the months following the attacks. The fact that ABB had also written dozens of comments in the MSM was quickly swept under the rug, because there is no reason to “get caught up in details”. Anyway, the reason why Hanne Tolg ended up in the MSM was that she was literally pressured to resign from her job in Wales after someone requested information about her employer and justified this by referring to the Freedom of Information Act, and used Tolg’s name as the reason.

This subsequently led to suspicion and additional investigation by her employer, who soon discovered that she had been writing articles for Document.no. The articles that Tolg had penned were average, ordinary conservative articles of the type you would expect to find in a run-of-the-mill conservative British or American magazine. However, this had no bearing on her case, nor did the fact that she had never encouraged violence, illegality, etc. The thing that became the focus of attention was that Document.no “had been ABB’s favourite website and one where he had posted several comments”. This is apparently what kick-started the official investigation by her employer, a local fire station in a small town in rural Wales where she had been working in admin for thirteen years. What followed was a process that can only be described as a protracted witch-hunt that lasted for several months and that eventually drained her of her strength, and which finally made her cave in and resign.

The fact that everything was written in Norwegian obviously complicated the process, as her British employers were forced to rely on Google translate and Tolg’s own translations and clarifications. In the end Tolg was never told about who requested the information about her employer and used her name as the reason why, and she still does not know who that person is. It is not unreasonable to suspect, however, that that individual is a Norwegian, given the language of the articles in question and the fact that Document.no is a Norwegian website. It could even be a prominent person working in the Norwegian MSM or in the Norwegian academia, but we will probably never find out. One thing for sure, though, is that there have been several cases in Norway where people who disagree political with others have contacted the person’s employer over things that he/she has said or written with the intention of causing difficulties for the target.

Admittedly Hanne Tolg wasn’t “forced” from her job by a Norwegian employer, but the list of Norwegians who have lost their jobs for daring to state their political views has grown fairly long, and more names will be added to it now that the official estimates of “refugees” arriving in Norway by the end of 2016 have been raised to 60,000.

This is a far cry from the 8,000 Syrians that the Norwegian government so generously pledged to accept a few months ago, before the local elections and after a massive media campaign orchestrated by the Left urging the government to do so. There are still many people in Norway who dare to oppose the official policies of the Left, and there are still many who are unafraid to write under their real names. It would not at all be that surprising if some of these were made an example out of, for example by terminating them from their jobs and making them unpalatable for any future employers. After all, we’re talking about “nice cosy Norway” here.