How Peace-Oriented Norway Learned to Stop Worrying and Love War

Prof. Glenn Diesen
Glenn's Substack

The deeper the belief in the righteousness of the cause, the easier it becomes to love the war that serves it.

Norway identifies itself as a model of a liberal and tolerant peace-oriented nation. Yet, a collective mindset has developed with intense distrust and loathing of anyone who deviates from the government’s official truth and war narratives.

Here is a social experiment to test the claim above. I am a professor of political science, but I am also a politician running for Parliament. My recently established political party is primarily an anti-war party, and we started a poster campaign on public transportation in Oslo. The core message was that we are for negotiations and against weapons for the war in Ukraine. This seemed like a reasonable position as Norway previously had (until 2022) a policy of not sending weapons to countries at war (as it escalates and can make us a participant), and our country used to advocate for diplomacy and negotiations as the path to peace.

Norway has abandoned these policies and unified under the new mantra that “weapons are the path to peace”, and we have boycotted basic diplomacy with Russia for more than three years at a time when hundreds of thousands of young men died in the trenches. Was our peace-oriented nation ready to at least consider the argument that we should return to our former policies of negotiating instead of fueling the war with more weapons to fight the world’s largest nuclear power?


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