One Man Destruction
Oslo and Norway are in deep mourning, so are the rest of us in the Nordic region and in the world for that matter. As our foreign minister Carl Bildt (and for once I agree with him) said: “At this time we are all Norwegians”.
And this is because of one man, a loner, who has got it all wrong, but who has had a plan for a long time, to kill off as many as possible of those other Norwegians that are soft on immigration and on “other cultures” (as if Norway and the Nordic countries ever had just one culture). We are not only sad and in mourning, but also angry but not hateful. We however strongly resent what Anders Behring Breivik has done. The over 90 persons, most young, who were killed by his hand on Friday, 22 July in central Oslo and at Utøya, the island and the conference and holiday resort of the Social Democrats for many years 38 kilometres northwest of Oslo, an incredible achievement in cruelty, will not come back. I personally see him behind bars for many years to come; he should get life imprisonment in fact.
There are four reasons why the occurrence of last Friday simply won’t go away and could not be regarded as the exception confirming the rule: everything is peaceful in the Nordic hemisphere and all are basically decent, peace loving people. No, not at all; first of all he, Anders Behring Breivik, is one in our midst. He is born and bred here, and he is really one of us. He really looks like many of us and many of his generation are also quite tall, healthy, and athletic. Secondly he was and is a loner. It is just a fact that in our societies it is not at all uncommon that (especially men) are very lonely, partly out of choice, or sometimes not. This is a sore point, a very sensitive issue. Stockholm, for example, has the highest number of one roomed flats per capita in the world. And yet you could share your life with others, like with your mother, and she would still not know what you are up to. The Nordic hemisphere is an odd environment, where it still is being said that “alone is strong” and “a good man gets along on his own”. Such rubbish! Such views are not contested in our society and that is tragic. This is also not where we are coming from. We used to have strong communities, hierarchical and with built-in discriminatory practices against women, that is true, but we used to have strong communities that cared. At best such local communities were also tied to the church, which played a vital role in all the different phases of life, from birth until death (från vaggan till graven).
Thirdly, there is this notion that our region is mono-culture (“on Midsummer Eve you eat fresh potatoes and herring and drink brandy”, as one Swede but recent immigrant expressed it recently) and that is also not true. Political parties like Danish People’s Party and Fremskrittspartiet in Norway, and also the Swedish Democrats, like to feed on people’s prejudices in this respect; as if there is a particular culture that could be deemed exactly Swedish, Norwegian etc. we are also ourselves to blame to quite some extent and I vividly remember the Winter Olymics in Lillehammer, Norway in 1994, where the opening ceremonies were saturated with “Norwegian Culture”, as if Norway was, really, a mono-culture state. Seeing what I saw, I thought to myself: “but all things we also have and do in Sweden, why call them Norwegian?” We must do away with the mono-culture syndrome sooner than later. There are certain ground rules in a country that calls itself democratic, but those rules should just be there to facilitate a flourishing of different cultural expressions; if not, culture becomes a problem, becomes oppressive.
The fourth point is about virtual reality via internet. It is a technical tool, that could enhance communication tremendously, and so it does. But there are also drawbacks, and any system could lend itself to abuses, but remember it is always the human being that decides what technique is used for. If x number of men spend time on internet for the sake of pornography, internet is not to be blamed, but the human being wasting his time and downgrading his life thereby. So the ugly thing in connection with people like Anders Behring Breivik, and make no mistake about it, as there are numerous others like him in the Nordic hemisphere, his loner mentality feeds into the virtual reality of internet and instead of becoming a means of communication, this virtual reality magnifies that very loneliness of that person. If we cannot overcome the kind of loneliness we are talking about we are in trouble. Surely we can learn from how people connect socially in other parts of the world, where sociality is still a prime mode of being (think Africa, you know me!).
So, due to the fact that people from other continents are coming our way, we are sitting with the stranger in our midst. It has always been like that and this is going to be so increasingly, thank God. We better get used to the fact that we also in the Nordic region will increasingly welcome those from the south; we need each other. If we are a sound culture we would naturally welcome the stranger in our midst. We need the other in order to become what we are. We should even thrive by the fact that we look different. My first memory of a black person was a very happy one. Perhaps it was also partly because of my brother who had introduced me to jazz on our radio at 9h00, Monday evenings and I knew that some of the best people in jazz were black people. So one Sunday afternoon, outside the school building in south west Sweden where we lived, a small car came on the narrow gravel road and hesitantly turned down the hill; at the back was a black man and he waved at me. I was so happy, and he made my day and I must have been eight years old.
We must not lose hope. We are sitting with a problem in our midst, but there are ways and means to sort them out. This time, though, we are not going to do it on our own, but together with all mankind.
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