Bridging The Gap - A Project Evolving
Bridging The Gap of Norway and Russia
Soviet Philosophy as a Generator for Closer Norwegian-Russian Academic Cooperation
1.0 Introduction
1.1 The Product
Througout the Middle Ages and up to our days Norway and Russia have been divided not only by a physical border, but also a border in terms of cultural orientation. Since Norway fell under the religious jurisdiction of Rome in 1030, our two countries have belonged to separate parts of the divided Christianity of a Western and Eastern Roman Empire, both claiming to represent the original Rome. With the Russian revolutions in 1917 this historical, cultural and religious difference also become ideologically-political.
The intention of this project is to explore and take advantage of the new possibilities related to the dissolution and opening of the Soviet empire in 1991 and new information technology, to bridge the historical, cultural, religious and ideologically-political gap between Russia and Norway. The democratization-process of the former Soviet Union in the eighties leading to the final fall of central Soviet power with the independence-declaration of Russia in 1991, has made formerly secretive information of internal Soviet affairs much more accessible to Western researchers.
The fall of Soviet central power may in this regard be interpreted first and foremost as an end of a protectionistic ideological regime, meaning not only that Soviet thought and culture is exposed to external influence in a larger degree, but that a formerly purely Soviet product, developed under a protectionistic regime, finally is offered for the global ”market” of ideas and political concepts. This situation obviously is clearer from the standpoint of the provider, than from the standpoint of the buyer, who, not having the proper knowledge of the new product, simply is not aware of the fact that it is to become a necessity. No one were in need of televisions before it entered the market, or cellular-phones or personal computers with internet-connection, but as soon as people has learned the new products to know and started appreciate the wast new possibilities they represent, they get addicted, and can hardly imagine a life without them.
There is a product developed in the former Soviet Union protected by the Iron curtain which have the same effect on those who have been made aware of it, and therefore has the potential to become as widespread and common as the cellular phone. The product, however, is not a physical invention, but an idea, which in fact is related and is basic to all physical inventions. The intellectual property right of the product do not belong to one single person, neither a limited group, but to a collective Soviet enterprise of historical dimensions, including thousands of researchers. The magnitude of the product may be its most problematic feature, because the world market simply is not used to a product of its size, and therefore have a serious problem only getting the grip of it.
That is why the high quality and sound Soviet product is in need of some concretization, where a suitable aspect of it is isolated and explained, to make it possible for the world market to relate to it, obtain it, and thereby be prepared for the rest of it.
1.2 The Painful Fact
The Soviet philosophical enterprise since second world war took place outside the range of western academies. Not only was the access obscured by the fact that it was developed in another language than the traditional international standard English, the Soviet official language Russian. More important was the fact that Soviet philosophy was developed on the basis of philosophical principles which were rejected by influential Western philosophers. One influential book made a great contribution to this philosophical Iron curtain of the Western world and the Soviet Union, the two-volume ”The Open Society and Its Enemies” by Karl Popper, published in the critical year of 1945. Poppers idea of a struggle of liberal democracy with a totalitarian ghost from Plato to Marx became instrumental in the socalled ”Cold War” of western democracies with the Soviet Union throughout the post war decades. Thanks to the studies in the history of science presented by the American jew Thomas Kuhn in his influential book ”The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962, the basic and problematic principle for Poppers rejection of marxist historicism was put under pressure. At that time a refugee from the Soviet occupation of Hungary, the talented matemathician and philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, had found himself a safe harbour as an associate under professor Popper at the London School of Economics, and was certainly eager to make use of the challenge presented empirically by Kuhn to open and connect Western philosophy of science to the contemporary Soviet development. One of the contributors for the conference held at Bedford college, London from 11 to 17 July 1965, John Watkins, reports:
”A few weeks ago I was asked to reply to Professor Kuhn this afternoon. Feyerabend and Lakatos were to have given the other papers; but the first could not come and the second found that, in arranging this colloquium, he had brought into existence a many-headed monster attending to whose multiplying demands would keep him busy approximately twenty-four hours a day.” (”Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”, ed. Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, 1970, p. 25)
The exile-Hungarian Lakatos and his associate Paul Feyerabend simply did avoid taking part in the physical meetings of the conference, and had their papers only printed in the anthology from the conference, published five years later. Feyerabend points out the ”painful fact” in his contribution ”Consolations for the Specialist”, with the following historical survey:
”When speking of ”discoveries” I do not mean to say that the ideas mentioned are entirely new, or that they now appear in a new form. Quite the contrary. Some of these ideas are as old as the hills. The idea that knwoledge kan be advanced by a struggle of alternative views and that it depends on proliferation was first put forth by the Presocratics (this has been emphasized by Popper himself), and it was developed into a general philosophy by Mill (especially in On Liberty). The idea that a struggle of alternatives is decisive for science, too, was introduced by Mach (Erkenntnis und Irrtum) and Boltzmann (see his Popularwissenschaftliche Vorlesungen), mainly under the impact of Darwinism. The need for tenacity was emphasized by those dialectical materialists who objected to extreme ”idealsitic” flights of fancy. Ant the synthesis, finally, is the very essence of dialectical materialism in the form in which it appears in the writings of Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Little of this is known to the ”analytic” or ”empiricist” philosophers of today who are still very much under the influence of the Vienna Circle. Considering this narrow, though quite ”modern” context we may therefore speak of genuine though quite belated, ”discoveries”. (”Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”, ed. Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, 1970, p. 211)
This failed seminar in London in July 1965, where leading figures in western academy in the crucial field of theory of science showed not capable of meeting face to face to talk freely on the matters, but ended up presenting their points in printed text on safe distance from each-other, as usual, is in my view not to be regarded as an isolated event due to accidental circumstances, but rather symptomathical to a deep, and yet unsolved crisis in western academies, related to the challenge from the outside world. Academies are institutions of power, which prepare candidates for service of the funder, which traditionally is the state, governed by a king, on ”a mission from God”. As the only academic discipline theory, sociology and philosophy of science deals exactly with these question of the wider historical, cultural and political context of science, and is therefore the field of research where a growing cleavage of academies with the general society is felt and recognised most clearly. This cleavage was emphasized and revealed in influtential books to come from Paul Feyerabend, like his scandalous ”Against Method” from 1975, from which he earned a reputation as a rebel who had finally turned his back on serious science within western academic frames, and became a central source of inspiration for the influential movement of socalled ”post modernism”, claiming scientific relativism and disbelief in the possibility of reason.
1.3 Soviet Philosophy
Despite some influence from the western postmodern development, Soviet academies in general, and Soviet philosophy in special, did in large escape this pitfall of postmodern relativism and irrationality. Only the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the loosening of the strain of the ”Cold war” has made it possible today to overcome the gap of western and Soviet academies and philosophy, and finally carry out the obvious intention of Imre Lakatos in 1965, which was postponed due to the current circumstances back then, throwing western academies into the general confusion of ”postmodernism”. My dissertation for the masterdegree of Russian language and culture, sucessfully defended at the University of Oslo in 1999, represent one of the few and very first openings in western academies towards the postwar Soviet philosophical development on its own terms. By making the Soviet reception of the western criticism of logical empiricist positivism, related to the Popper-Kuhn debate, Lakatos and Feyeranbend, an object of interest, I was able to study the Soviet development of the period avoiding the traditional western sovietological, which in fact represent a postmodernist relativist approach. There have been carried out western socioantropolocial studies in this aspect of the Soviet development, but these suffer from an inability to read the Soviet thoughts of the period as equal, and in some extent superiour, to the contemporary western thought. In this regard there is a serious imbalance considering the wast amount of Soviet studies in western contemporary thought, which, surprisingly enough to westerners, are charachterized by a much more open and understanding attitude towards the philosophical and scientific products of a culture by the official Soviet ideology deemed to be corrupt and unjust.
My survey of the postwar Soviet philosophical development in the form of a master-thesis presented at the University of Oslo in the autumn of 1999 made it clear that while western academies was influenced by Poppers rejection of marxism, Soviet philosophers of science went in the opposite direction and started applying marxism-leninism to the challenges of modern science. One important precondition for this development, interestingly, was the race for the nuclear bomb, which effectively put a limit to the autocratic tendencies of Stalins reign, since Soviet physicists had to be provided authonomy from ideological dictates to be able to carry out the necessary research. This pressure reopened a space in Soviet society for marxism-leninism as a philosophical approach to reality, putting at stake central philosophical questions like the relation of mind and reality, and the interconnection of history of thought, dialectics and logics, as a research-programme stressed by Lenin. This varied and broad Soviet philosophical development, related to the founding of the Soviet journal of philosophy Voprosy filosofii in 1948, the influential Moscow Methodological Circle established in 1952 for young, devoted, philosophically minded studies of Natural sciences and the first all- Soviet conference on the Unity of Natural Sciences and Philosophy in Moscow in 1958, gathering the leading Soviet Natural Scientists and philosophers face to face, constitute the diametrical opposite development of the one described of the contemporary western academies, and therefore have appeared as nothing but an exotic, impenetrable phenomenon to western researchers on Soviet affairs, suffering from an insufficient philosophical background and defenselessness against postmodern relativism.
In a western context the main challenge therefore is merely to reach out to researchers, political decisionmakers and the general public with updated information of the very existence of this vital, but hard to grasp and invisible aspect of the Soviet development, to provoke the necessary interest for this Soviet philosophical ”product” which there in fact is a great hunger, need and market, for. One clear sign of this demand is the surprising international success of the philosophy-novel for youngsters by the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder "Sophie`s world” from the year of the Soviet dissolution 1991, which have sold millions of copies world-wide and made the author a multimillion fortune, governed by The Sophie Foundation situated in the Norwegian capital Oslo. No one have been able to explain in detail the great public interest in this book, presenting in an easy way the main ideas of leading western philosophers throughout the ages, but regarding the strain which have been put on philosophical thought in western societies in realtion to the Cold war battle with the Soviet Union, the success of the book gets more understandable, and there is a reason to believe that the market on which Gaarders stumbled is not at all fed by his early model, but hungry as ever for the real, advanced Soviet philosophical product.
2.0 Concretizations
2.1 The Soviet Philosopher Evald Ilenkov
To accentuate these new insights and possibilites it is necessary to concretizise the wast Soviet philosophical enterprise with some representative of it which have the possibility to reach out to a wider public, of the necessary commitment to the enterprise combined with the necessary indenpendent stand in relation to it, not to be fully identified with a Soviet system which belongs to history. A supreme candidate for such a concretization, a true ambassador of the philosophical Soviet Union, is the outstanding and remarkable Soviet philosopher Evald Ilenkov. Born in 1924 in Smolensk, Ilenkov grew up with his family in Moscow from four years age, fought at the front in the two last years of the Second world war, and made after the war a philosophical career from pioneering the study of the dialectic method applied by Karl Marx in his works. This shift from the study of the very content of the writings of the classic to their ”way of doing it”, a research-field established and labeled in Soviet science as ”methodology”, was charachteristic for the period, and Evald Ilenkov was one of the main intiatiors and leaders of the shift, which cought momentum with the open critique of stalinism by Khruschev at the 20th party congress in 1956. With his personal qualities, deep engagement, civic stand, wast erudition and humane and democratic independent approach, Ilenkov remains one of the true stars of the Soviet philosophical enterprise, who represented something greater that what was accepted by the limits and circumstances of his time, which may have led to him comitting suicide on the brink of change in Soviet society in 1979.
Evald Ilenkov is one of the few Soviet philosophers who already have earned a certain reputation in the West, despite the general negative attitude to the Soviet political project which he as a communist was an integrate part of. The American scholar David Bakhurst is one of those who have made it their job to familiarize a western audience with the thoughts of Ilenkov. Such isolated enterprises of presenting individual representatives of the vast Soviet scientific and philosophical thought for a generally hostile audience of the Cold war context, however, means creating a strained ”hero-myth” of the selected Soviet, to distance him or her from the general Soviet setting they represent, to compete with wellknown Soviet dissenters like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Without the due respect for the whole Soviet philosophical and scientific enterprise of which Ilenkov and other Soviet thinkers answer, such a familiarization is thererfore doomed to fail, and shows up counterproductive, because it draws a wrong picture of the selected representatives. That is probably why Evald Ilenkov after all is to be regarded almost as non-existent as his many Soviet colleguas in a western context, his works are not to be found in the many bookshelfes of the professional philosophers througout western academies, and his name is absent in western philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias of philosophy. He remains only a matter of ”particular interest” of professor Bakhurst and a few other western specialists in Soviet thought, but no one who is considered of any interest or relevance to the general western audience, which made Jostein Gaarder a mulitmillionaire by running down the book-stores for his book.
I`m convinced that Evald Ilenkov in the not to far future will be regarded one of the leading philosophers not only of the Soviet Union, but of modern philosophical thought as such. Ilenkov`s philosophical work surpasses the one of the western star Paul Feyerabend with the advantage that he do not tip into wild relativism and moral cynicism, while carrying out the same challenge against all kinds of frozen structures and bureaucratic stupidity. One of his essays, published in Moscow in 1976, is scrutinizing the need to be associated with philosophical reflection in young age as a precondition to develop the ability to think independently and rationally, to be able to make independent and wise decisions, not act as a blind slave of the established rules, and face confusion and despair in the confrontation with new facts and situations, for which there are no established rules, but where the rules have to be invented. The essay like the rest of his philosophical works in fact outlines and represent a philosophical pedagogical programme of great ambitions and vast proportions, universal and applicable to all countries of the world, to secure a peaceful transition to a truly globalixed and democratic world. I have translated the whole essay to Norwegian, which constitutes a text of about 80 A4-pages. The yet unpublished translation exerts a growing pressure on Norwegian publishers, who shows incapable of grasping what kind of treasure they are being offered, rejecting it with the explanation that they do not believe that it corresponds with any Norwegian ”market”, non-regarding the success of Jostein Gaarder, which is regarded merely a mysterious ”accident”.
2.2 Soviet and Russian Philosophy As a Key to Historical Sensitivity
Charachteristic to Soviet thought and culture, influenced by marxism-leninism, which sharply divides it from contemporary Western thought, cought by a strichter and sceptical logical empiricism with a strong tendency of solipsism, is its historical sensitivity. While the Western mind tends to exclude all non-verifiable empirical facts and is a victim of historical amnesia, the Soviet mind sees itself in a historical evolution, stretching centuries back and striving centuries ahead, expressed by an interesting Soviet science fiction literature, of authors like I. Jefremov. The Soviet openess and sensitivity to history follows logically from the events of 1917, which constituted a historical break with the tsarist Christian ideology, striving for eternal and divine authority. The last remnants of this authoritarian ideology was removed from Soviet society with the critique of the reign of Stalin at the 20th partycongress in 1956 and with the democratization-process leading to the final dissolution of Soviet stalinist central power in 1991.
Western societies, on the other hand, are in quite another degree still under the spell of a royal religious oriented ideology, in which the idea of historical progress is marginalised as a subject for those who are particularly interested, mainly the professional historians. In contemporary royal Norway history therefore is regarded a less important subject to be taught in school, and is replaced with subjects which are regarded more relevant for service in the royal Norwegian state apparatus or business. While certain commentators have raised concern about this gradual weakening of the historical consciousness in the Norwegian school, they have problem themselves explaining why historical insight and sensitivity is important, while displaying a rather problematic understanding of modern history heavily influenced by the main ideas of Karl Popper, of an eternal fight of liberal democracy with a range of totalitarian enemies, mixing German fascism with Soviet socialism and Arabic islamism. The leader of the Norwegian Conservative party Erna Solberg recently wrote a comment in one of the leading dailies, where she claimed that Norwegian young people ready for army-service today, may have a hard time to imagine Holocoust, while not ”having any memory of the Soviet Union and the Iron curtain”. I wrote a comment for the paper where I pointed out the scandal if she is right about young Norwegianers not having any memory of recent history, and her wild attempt of new creative history-writing by hiddenly associating the Soviet Union with the Holocoust. I got no answer.
I have personal experience of how association with modern Soviet thought may help people avoiding the unpleasant and dangerous pitfall of insufficient historical consciousness and historical amnesia, which in fact constitutes one of the main widespread problems today of the western civilization. Absence of a general historical sense, means loosing track of ones own personal history, the crucial ability for a man og woman in a modern information-society to see their lifes from a perspective outsides themselves, to be able to contextualise themselves with the rest of the world, and in this way get a notion of consistency and meaning in their lifes. Persons deprived of a sound historical consciousness, left alone in a fragmented world of no principles, no inner consistency, no direction and no personal safety, are doomed to get unsatisfied, depressed and egoistic, with only their stricht personal interest of any value to pursue. Under such chaotic social circumstances families are being torn apart, young people get nervous about creating their own families, and avoid running the risk of committing themselves to other persons. The only persons gaining from such a general social situation of confusion, anxiousness and unrest, is the royal family at top, which is presented in the medias as the happy and harmonic family everyone are longing for. Under a regime of royal ideology the royal family and their inner circle are the only persons to have the privilege of feeling personally secure and live lifes which are contextualised and meaningful, which in a modern information-society, where this notion is what everybody needs and are striving for, means that monarchy reaches its peak of popularity, because everyone want to have a part of the attractive existential wholeness the royalities represent. To meet this demand the Norwegian princess Märtha Louise has made herself a profitable business from writing and telling fairytails for kids, and has attracted to her and got married to one of the most pretentious young Norwegian writers Ari Behn, who obviously is as much in love with the royal splendid ideology as with the princess and himself. The crown prince Håkon has no reason to strive as his sister, but has created a fairytale on his own by marrying a simple Norwegian girl Mette Marit from the south coast of Norway, who is being established in Norwegian medias as the new queen to come. Thanks to the royal ideology these persons are infallible, because whatever they do it is interpreted in the royal scheme and meet applause from their servants, striving for their holiness.
Thanks to the survival of Christian royal ideology and its intensification from the general insecurity of the modern information society, Norwegian society has created for itself a perfect solipsistical ideological pillow to sleep on while the incomes from the oil- and gas-industry is meant to pay the bill. The problem of this royal pillow is that a rapidly growing part of the population are being estranged from the royal structures in public and private sector, which are getting more and more sensitive to any kind of dissent, which reminds of the fundamental social insecurity which the whole Christian royal ideology is based on. As soon as someone are revealed as a dissenter and a ”not normal” person and kicked out in unemployment to be provided by the royal state, the person have a hard time being reaccepted by someone else in the royal system making employments. This disturbing development of tragic consequenses for a rapidly growing number of persons is hidden away in the royal medias, which in accordance with the empiricist basic attitude only report of historically low unemployment-rates, thanks to the policy of transfering the unemployed to ”measures” and further on to an existence as invalidized, the number of which constitutes the real unemployment-range and counts hundred of thousands, but is a number and a theme not to be talked about, not to be regarded a ”dissenter”.
Nothing of these observations are available to the ordinary Norwegian person who throughout the postwar period has been deprived of a basic historical consciousness actively advocated and consolidated in the Soviet Union at the same time. The only reason why all of this is clear to me, is that I have obtained the knowledge necessary of the realities at the other side of the Iron curtain, that I have associated myself with Soviet thought.
2.3 Our Common Anchestors?
The Christian royal ideology of todays Norway limits the historical perspective to the Christianization of Norway in the 11th century. The earlier history is obscured. Applying a Soviet historicist perspective means transgressing this historical limits, and start paying renewed interest to the pre-Christian Norwegian history. One of the main sources for knowledge beyond the Christian era in Norway is the ”Sagas” by Snorre Sturlason at Iceland in the 13th century. In the opening text of thsi great literary work devoted to the early history of the anchestors of the Norwegian and Icelandic kings, Snorre presents concrete and fascinating information about our history stretching back to the centuries before the birth of Christ which may be accurate, but which has yet not been fully empirically verified, and constitutes a controversy amongst Norwegian specialists. The famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who successfully proved that primitive people were able to cross the oceans separating the continents, but was never fully accepted by his western colleguas, but regarded a charlatan, devoted the last years of his life to prove the accuracy of the information provided by Snorre. According to Snorre the ancient Norwegian primitive religion of worshipping a god called Odin stems from an highly historical Odin, who orginally lived in the north-east area of the Azov sea. The name Tanais mentioned by Snorre is still a village in the area, nearby the town of Taganrog, and the geographical descriptions by Snorre of the area is stunningly correct, for a man basing his story on oral traditions passed from generation to generation, before he depicted them in text.
From reasons explained above history and archeology are highly politicized and weakly developed academic disciplines in Norwegian academies, and the preliminary explorations carried out by Thor Heyerdahl and his associates, revealing many more evidences for the accuracy of the information provided by Snorre, has met strong resistance from state-authorized Norwegian specialists, who are responsible not so much to the historical truth, as to the current ideological regime, which places the royal family is in the centre of attention. The facts provided by Snorre Sturlason and verified by Heyerdahl is simply rejected by attacking both as ”not serious”, the first a joker, and the second a naive believer. Such resistance from service-men in the Royal Norwegian academic structures shows how much which is at stake, and how decisive the reproduction of the historical past is to our cultural selfunderstanding. There is obviously a deep-felt anxiousness that this new, enlargened and compelling perspective on the Norwegian history, in which we orginally, according to Snorre, moved from Azov and inhabited Scandinavia to escape the expanding Roman empire, will undermine the legitimazy of the current Norwegian royal Christian political regime, making people open their eyes to the real fairtytales of history, and not the artificial ones of the Norwegian royal family and its state apparatus.
The controversial early history provided by Snorre Sturlason has a direct effect on our relation to Russia. In the official royal Christian perspective the historical contact is limited to Olav the saint who spent some time in Novgorod before starting the process of Christianizing Norway, to be killed in a battle with the reluctant farmers. There is also a history of cultural exchange of a newer date in the north, related to the fisheries, and of Scandinavian wikings serving as the first kings of Kievian Rus. The perspective of us stemming from a people originally known as "aser" living for centuries in currently Russian areas north-east of the Azov-sea, is a history implying a far greater degree of historical integration, where it get possible to talk about and seek common historical anchestors.
In my view, and I believe this to be the central motivation also to Thor Heyerdahl, such historical links between peoples, all kinds of historical examples like these, are of utmost importance to remind all of humankind of our common roots, that we in fact all are immigrants in the territories were we live, after having been moving and mixing around throughout the ages. Such historical facts ought not to be obscured and hidden as they are today, but brought into daylight, to effectively prevent any form of national chauvinism and rasism, leading to suppression and war. Chauvinism and war are, unfortunately, the main legacy of the remnants of the Roman empire, living on in the monarchies of the world, of which Norway is one, Britain another, with the USA back under its protection or vice versa from the dangers constituted by islamists, filling the former role of the Soviet Union as the necessary enemy-image.
2.4 Internet, The Western Information-Deadlock and The Terror
A necessary precondition for peaceful and democratic processes is freedom of speech and a free exchange of information. While traditional channels of mass-information are capital-intensive, require expensive printing- and broadcasting equipment, the internet represent a much more cost-effective channel. The former printing house and broadcasting is being replaced with a personal computer and a telephone-line, which is accessible for people even with a modest income. Internet as an alternative mass-media-channel in this way constitutes a rapidly growing challenge to the traditional media-controle of the power-structures of society.
In my pathbreaking and risky enterprise of opening up a space in Norwegian society for the formerly tabooed postwar Soviet philosophical development as described above, I have made extensive use of internet, with the addition the lasty years of the possibility to send short text-messages by cell-phones, socalled SMS-messages. Beginning with articles printed in left wing medias, the leading Klassekampen (The Class Struggle) of the Norwegian maoist revisionists, and the marginalised Friheten (The Freedom) of the remains of the original Norwegian Communist Party, I was challenged by a young maoist revisionist on the internet-blog of Klassekampen, Klassekampen-forum back in February 98, and engaged my self in direct debate with him and others at their blog. Since then I`ve distributed thousands of smaller and longer texts through the internet, constituting ”bombs” and ”mines” of information, challenging its readers to respond in some way or another, to ”protect” themselves and the general prejudices of the Cold war. This activity may be compared to the practice of distributing ”samizdats” in the former Soviet Union, when material stopped by the censorship was distributed in the form av hand-typed copies, by use of ink-paper. In the Soviet Union access to copy-machines were restricted, and in Moscow in 98-99 I was shown a photo-copy of Karl Poppers ”Objective Knowledge” by the dissenting philosopher Natalja Kuznecova, which she made with great personal risk back in the former Soviet Union. What obscures such a comparative perspective of contemporary Norwegian and former Soviet society in terms of centralistic controle of the distribution of information, is the fact that western societies have not carried out the same protectionistic policy on the ”market of ideas”, least not in open and fully consciously, like the Soviet leadership. The traditional censorship in western societies is not a matter of ideology, but of ”market”, the idea of the professional information providers, the publishers, editors, the journalists and the writers, of what kind of products the market of information-consumers are interested in. While the Soviet censorhip had in mind the abstract concept of ”building communism”, the Western censorship has in mind an abstract ”ordinary” man or woman, mainly interested in ordinary daily matters of his or her life, and not to be ”disturbed” by new and hard-to-grasp facts and opinions. That is why most material is filtered out by the professional information providers, never to reach the public, which is presented with a version of reality which is meant to fit the already established informational schemes, and not challenge any basic dogmas. Unlike the Soviet Union this stricht censorship is not conceived by those carrying it out like any form of political censorship, but only a professional duty according to skills obtained through the royal higher learning institutes and personal experience, to make the information ”eat-able” to the public. Like in the former Soviet Union, however, this censorship-service is carried out in some accordance with the popular sentiment, making the censors convinced that they are working in the interest of the general public, to rule out a few ”peace-disturbators”, madmen.
During the Cold war with the Soviet Union the western market-oriented censorship showed and for sure was far more liberal than the Soviet ideological protectionist regime. Since the only serious hindrance was in the imagined market-potential of the product, there was no need for the same restrictive policy in relation to photo-copying. There was no forbidden books like in the Soviet Union, hidden away in the special chambers of the state libraries, only accessible for those with the necessary authorisation, but all books available from the market-regulation were freely accessible for all, and widely photo-copied from the 60ties, while this new technology started appearing. While the possibility of photo-copying unauthorized material according to the Soviet censorship-regime was regarded a political problem, in the western countries, however, it constituted a growing market problem, because it meant loosing growing market-shares of people aquiring the necessary texts besides the traditional regulated channels. That`s why, in the late seventies, there was imposed in Norway, like in other western coutries, a new regime to secure the information-providers for the Norwegian information-market compensation for the ”use” of their products through photo-copying-technology, as in the librarian sector, for the lending of books. To maintain the market-oriented system it was necessary in this way, because of the technological development, to widen the traditional concept of a book or an article as the main product, to also include all kinds of reproductions and public use of, like lending from libraries.
Today, in light of the internet-revolution, it is easy to see in retrospect that this whole new system constitutes nothing but a preparation and adaption to the new possibilities represented by the internet, which finally is burying the traditional printed information-product, and replaces it with a floating digital entity, which have the possibility of instantly being reproduced in millions of ”copies”, given the right place and time. The internet, originally developed by western nuclear physists to ease international resarch-projects and the US armed forces to withstand a feared Soviet nuclear attack, in this way undermines finally the very basic principle of Western censorship, the concept of the ”copy” for sale on a market, and makes necessary a radical rethinking of the whole Western system of information-distribution, similar to the rethinking of the Soviet ideologically protectionist system of information-distribution known under the Gorbachev-slogans of ”Glasnost”- Openess, and ”Perestroika” - Restructuring, which finally led to the fall of Soviet central power in 1991.
Writing this very lines at the five-year-day since the shocking events known simply as 9.11, which kicked of the socalled ”war on terror”, in which also Norway takes active part, and having felt the blast from the bomb removing an apartment bloc in south-east Moscow killing 99 and wounding 150 September 8. 1999 while drinking evening-tea in a bloc nearby, and having myself and my information-activity been presented in Norwegian medias, anonymized, as a ”terrorist”-phenomenon, I do conceive the whole concept of ”terror” in a context of this current crisis of the traditional western system of market-based information-controle and censorship. The main problem of this system, which get evident today, is that it functions as a cultural Procrustean bed. Unlike other markets, the abstract notion of the typical western information-consumer is not being constantly challenged and tested by empirical market-surveys, where randomly selected ordinary men and women are presented with a range of alternatives to tell their preferences. To save the traditional system, the western information market must be protected from this kind of ”dangerous and destructive market liberalism”, which is said to constitute a threat against national languages and charachteristics. In this way the standard concept of the information-consumer, which corresponds with out general notion of who we are, is effectively being frozen and not to be challenged, by servicemen and women eager to escape the charge of being an enemy of a nationally protected information-market and a despiseful ”market-liberalist”, willing to sacrifice literary artistic quality to ”dirty literature” and pure profit. As a result, everyone are expected to fit to the standard concept of the information-consumer, and to display interests beyond and in conflict with this A4-standard, it being a general intellectual curiosity, is regarded a sign of weakness and may cause the individual problem in relation of employment and general acceptance in society. The natural outcome of such an informational deadlock is ”terror”, as a result of accumulated humiliations, estrangement of non-acceptable dissenting groups and stricht market-based censorship, where individuals droven to a state of despair commits outright crimes, only to attract the general attention at last to the censored information, create the necessary puzzle in peoples minds, which help them break out of the deadlock, and become active subjects in relation to a blind and solipsistic market-oriented societal structure.
The military ”war on terror”, therefore, is doomed to fail, because it is not adressing the structural problem of an western market-based information-deadlock causing the terror, but commiting the fundamental mistake of mixing the problem with the accidential poor persons being trapped by the maelstrom, and carrying out their ”terrorist-acts” before being finally drowned by circumstances outside of their personal controle. The ”war on terror” in this way only means speeding up the maelstrom, by seeking out all of them already in such a desperate situation that they are willing to commit terrorist-acts, and have them jailed, tortured and in some occesions directly executed instead of blowing themselves up to bring friends and foes with them. The whole western military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq therefore is doomed to escalate into outright war with the desperate victims of the situation, which is happening these days in the southern Afghanistan, meaning that not only the oppressed and persecuted arab patriots are dragged into the maelstrom, but also a growing number of young military servants of western countries, like in the two former world wars, and all the other technologized wars of the 20. century, with millions of causalities.
3. Suggestions
Soviet Philosophy as a Generator for Closer Norwegian-Russian Academic Cooperation
1.0 Introduction
1.1 The Product
Througout the Middle Ages and up to our days Norway and Russia have been divided not only by a physical border, but also a border in terms of cultural orientation. Since Norway fell under the religious jurisdiction of Rome in 1030, our two countries have belonged to separate parts of the divided Christianity of a Western and Eastern Roman Empire, both claiming to represent the original Rome. With the Russian revolutions in 1917 this historical, cultural and religious difference also become ideologically-political.
The intention of this project is to explore and take advantage of the new possibilities related to the dissolution and opening of the Soviet empire in 1991 and new information technology, to bridge the historical, cultural, religious and ideologically-political gap between Russia and Norway. The democratization-process of the former Soviet Union in the eighties leading to the final fall of central Soviet power with the independence-declaration of Russia in 1991, has made formerly secretive information of internal Soviet affairs much more accessible to Western researchers.
The fall of Soviet central power may in this regard be interpreted first and foremost as an end of a protectionistic ideological regime, meaning not only that Soviet thought and culture is exposed to external influence in a larger degree, but that a formerly purely Soviet product, developed under a protectionistic regime, finally is offered for the global ”market” of ideas and political concepts. This situation obviously is clearer from the standpoint of the provider, than from the standpoint of the buyer, who, not having the proper knowledge of the new product, simply is not aware of the fact that it is to become a necessity. No one were in need of televisions before it entered the market, or cellular-phones or personal computers with internet-connection, but as soon as people has learned the new products to know and started appreciate the wast new possibilities they represent, they get addicted, and can hardly imagine a life without them.
There is a product developed in the former Soviet Union protected by the Iron curtain which have the same effect on those who have been made aware of it, and therefore has the potential to become as widespread and common as the cellular phone. The product, however, is not a physical invention, but an idea, which in fact is related and is basic to all physical inventions. The intellectual property right of the product do not belong to one single person, neither a limited group, but to a collective Soviet enterprise of historical dimensions, including thousands of researchers. The magnitude of the product may be its most problematic feature, because the world market simply is not used to a product of its size, and therefore have a serious problem only getting the grip of it.
That is why the high quality and sound Soviet product is in need of some concretization, where a suitable aspect of it is isolated and explained, to make it possible for the world market to relate to it, obtain it, and thereby be prepared for the rest of it.
1.2 The Painful Fact
The Soviet philosophical enterprise since second world war took place outside the range of western academies. Not only was the access obscured by the fact that it was developed in another language than the traditional international standard English, the Soviet official language Russian. More important was the fact that Soviet philosophy was developed on the basis of philosophical principles which were rejected by influential Western philosophers. One influential book made a great contribution to this philosophical Iron curtain of the Western world and the Soviet Union, the two-volume ”The Open Society and Its Enemies” by Karl Popper, published in the critical year of 1945. Poppers idea of a struggle of liberal democracy with a totalitarian ghost from Plato to Marx became instrumental in the socalled ”Cold War” of western democracies with the Soviet Union throughout the post war decades. Thanks to the studies in the history of science presented by the American jew Thomas Kuhn in his influential book ”The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962, the basic and problematic principle for Poppers rejection of marxist historicism was put under pressure. At that time a refugee from the Soviet occupation of Hungary, the talented matemathician and philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, had found himself a safe harbour as an associate under professor Popper at the London School of Economics, and was certainly eager to make use of the challenge presented empirically by Kuhn to open and connect Western philosophy of science to the contemporary Soviet development. One of the contributors for the conference held at Bedford college, London from 11 to 17 July 1965, John Watkins, reports:
”A few weeks ago I was asked to reply to Professor Kuhn this afternoon. Feyerabend and Lakatos were to have given the other papers; but the first could not come and the second found that, in arranging this colloquium, he had brought into existence a many-headed monster attending to whose multiplying demands would keep him busy approximately twenty-four hours a day.” (”Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”, ed. Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, 1970, p. 25)
The exile-Hungarian Lakatos and his associate Paul Feyerabend simply did avoid taking part in the physical meetings of the conference, and had their papers only printed in the anthology from the conference, published five years later. Feyerabend points out the ”painful fact” in his contribution ”Consolations for the Specialist”, with the following historical survey:
”When speking of ”discoveries” I do not mean to say that the ideas mentioned are entirely new, or that they now appear in a new form. Quite the contrary. Some of these ideas are as old as the hills. The idea that knwoledge kan be advanced by a struggle of alternative views and that it depends on proliferation was first put forth by the Presocratics (this has been emphasized by Popper himself), and it was developed into a general philosophy by Mill (especially in On Liberty). The idea that a struggle of alternatives is decisive for science, too, was introduced by Mach (Erkenntnis und Irrtum) and Boltzmann (see his Popularwissenschaftliche Vorlesungen), mainly under the impact of Darwinism. The need for tenacity was emphasized by those dialectical materialists who objected to extreme ”idealsitic” flights of fancy. Ant the synthesis, finally, is the very essence of dialectical materialism in the form in which it appears in the writings of Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Little of this is known to the ”analytic” or ”empiricist” philosophers of today who are still very much under the influence of the Vienna Circle. Considering this narrow, though quite ”modern” context we may therefore speak of genuine though quite belated, ”discoveries”. (”Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge”, ed. Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, 1970, p. 211)
This failed seminar in London in July 1965, where leading figures in western academy in the crucial field of theory of science showed not capable of meeting face to face to talk freely on the matters, but ended up presenting their points in printed text on safe distance from each-other, as usual, is in my view not to be regarded as an isolated event due to accidental circumstances, but rather symptomathical to a deep, and yet unsolved crisis in western academies, related to the challenge from the outside world. Academies are institutions of power, which prepare candidates for service of the funder, which traditionally is the state, governed by a king, on ”a mission from God”. As the only academic discipline theory, sociology and philosophy of science deals exactly with these question of the wider historical, cultural and political context of science, and is therefore the field of research where a growing cleavage of academies with the general society is felt and recognised most clearly. This cleavage was emphasized and revealed in influtential books to come from Paul Feyerabend, like his scandalous ”Against Method” from 1975, from which he earned a reputation as a rebel who had finally turned his back on serious science within western academic frames, and became a central source of inspiration for the influential movement of socalled ”post modernism”, claiming scientific relativism and disbelief in the possibility of reason.
1.3 Soviet Philosophy
Despite some influence from the western postmodern development, Soviet academies in general, and Soviet philosophy in special, did in large escape this pitfall of postmodern relativism and irrationality. Only the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the loosening of the strain of the ”Cold war” has made it possible today to overcome the gap of western and Soviet academies and philosophy, and finally carry out the obvious intention of Imre Lakatos in 1965, which was postponed due to the current circumstances back then, throwing western academies into the general confusion of ”postmodernism”. My dissertation for the masterdegree of Russian language and culture, sucessfully defended at the University of Oslo in 1999, represent one of the few and very first openings in western academies towards the postwar Soviet philosophical development on its own terms. By making the Soviet reception of the western criticism of logical empiricist positivism, related to the Popper-Kuhn debate, Lakatos and Feyeranbend, an object of interest, I was able to study the Soviet development of the period avoiding the traditional western sovietological, which in fact represent a postmodernist relativist approach. There have been carried out western socioantropolocial studies in this aspect of the Soviet development, but these suffer from an inability to read the Soviet thoughts of the period as equal, and in some extent superiour, to the contemporary western thought. In this regard there is a serious imbalance considering the wast amount of Soviet studies in western contemporary thought, which, surprisingly enough to westerners, are charachterized by a much more open and understanding attitude towards the philosophical and scientific products of a culture by the official Soviet ideology deemed to be corrupt and unjust.
My survey of the postwar Soviet philosophical development in the form of a master-thesis presented at the University of Oslo in the autumn of 1999 made it clear that while western academies was influenced by Poppers rejection of marxism, Soviet philosophers of science went in the opposite direction and started applying marxism-leninism to the challenges of modern science. One important precondition for this development, interestingly, was the race for the nuclear bomb, which effectively put a limit to the autocratic tendencies of Stalins reign, since Soviet physicists had to be provided authonomy from ideological dictates to be able to carry out the necessary research. This pressure reopened a space in Soviet society for marxism-leninism as a philosophical approach to reality, putting at stake central philosophical questions like the relation of mind and reality, and the interconnection of history of thought, dialectics and logics, as a research-programme stressed by Lenin. This varied and broad Soviet philosophical development, related to the founding of the Soviet journal of philosophy Voprosy filosofii in 1948, the influential Moscow Methodological Circle established in 1952 for young, devoted, philosophically minded studies of Natural sciences and the first all- Soviet conference on the Unity of Natural Sciences and Philosophy in Moscow in 1958, gathering the leading Soviet Natural Scientists and philosophers face to face, constitute the diametrical opposite development of the one described of the contemporary western academies, and therefore have appeared as nothing but an exotic, impenetrable phenomenon to western researchers on Soviet affairs, suffering from an insufficient philosophical background and defenselessness against postmodern relativism.
In a western context the main challenge therefore is merely to reach out to researchers, political decisionmakers and the general public with updated information of the very existence of this vital, but hard to grasp and invisible aspect of the Soviet development, to provoke the necessary interest for this Soviet philosophical ”product” which there in fact is a great hunger, need and market, for. One clear sign of this demand is the surprising international success of the philosophy-novel for youngsters by the Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder "Sophie`s world” from the year of the Soviet dissolution 1991, which have sold millions of copies world-wide and made the author a multimillion fortune, governed by The Sophie Foundation situated in the Norwegian capital Oslo. No one have been able to explain in detail the great public interest in this book, presenting in an easy way the main ideas of leading western philosophers throughout the ages, but regarding the strain which have been put on philosophical thought in western societies in realtion to the Cold war battle with the Soviet Union, the success of the book gets more understandable, and there is a reason to believe that the market on which Gaarders stumbled is not at all fed by his early model, but hungry as ever for the real, advanced Soviet philosophical product.
2.0 Concretizations
2.1 The Soviet Philosopher Evald Ilenkov
To accentuate these new insights and possibilites it is necessary to concretizise the wast Soviet philosophical enterprise with some representative of it which have the possibility to reach out to a wider public, of the necessary commitment to the enterprise combined with the necessary indenpendent stand in relation to it, not to be fully identified with a Soviet system which belongs to history. A supreme candidate for such a concretization, a true ambassador of the philosophical Soviet Union, is the outstanding and remarkable Soviet philosopher Evald Ilenkov. Born in 1924 in Smolensk, Ilenkov grew up with his family in Moscow from four years age, fought at the front in the two last years of the Second world war, and made after the war a philosophical career from pioneering the study of the dialectic method applied by Karl Marx in his works. This shift from the study of the very content of the writings of the classic to their ”way of doing it”, a research-field established and labeled in Soviet science as ”methodology”, was charachteristic for the period, and Evald Ilenkov was one of the main intiatiors and leaders of the shift, which cought momentum with the open critique of stalinism by Khruschev at the 20th party congress in 1956. With his personal qualities, deep engagement, civic stand, wast erudition and humane and democratic independent approach, Ilenkov remains one of the true stars of the Soviet philosophical enterprise, who represented something greater that what was accepted by the limits and circumstances of his time, which may have led to him comitting suicide on the brink of change in Soviet society in 1979.
Evald Ilenkov is one of the few Soviet philosophers who already have earned a certain reputation in the West, despite the general negative attitude to the Soviet political project which he as a communist was an integrate part of. The American scholar David Bakhurst is one of those who have made it their job to familiarize a western audience with the thoughts of Ilenkov. Such isolated enterprises of presenting individual representatives of the vast Soviet scientific and philosophical thought for a generally hostile audience of the Cold war context, however, means creating a strained ”hero-myth” of the selected Soviet, to distance him or her from the general Soviet setting they represent, to compete with wellknown Soviet dissenters like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Without the due respect for the whole Soviet philosophical and scientific enterprise of which Ilenkov and other Soviet thinkers answer, such a familiarization is thererfore doomed to fail, and shows up counterproductive, because it draws a wrong picture of the selected representatives. That is probably why Evald Ilenkov after all is to be regarded almost as non-existent as his many Soviet colleguas in a western context, his works are not to be found in the many bookshelfes of the professional philosophers througout western academies, and his name is absent in western philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias of philosophy. He remains only a matter of ”particular interest” of professor Bakhurst and a few other western specialists in Soviet thought, but no one who is considered of any interest or relevance to the general western audience, which made Jostein Gaarder a mulitmillionaire by running down the book-stores for his book.
I`m convinced that Evald Ilenkov in the not to far future will be regarded one of the leading philosophers not only of the Soviet Union, but of modern philosophical thought as such. Ilenkov`s philosophical work surpasses the one of the western star Paul Feyerabend with the advantage that he do not tip into wild relativism and moral cynicism, while carrying out the same challenge against all kinds of frozen structures and bureaucratic stupidity. One of his essays, published in Moscow in 1976, is scrutinizing the need to be associated with philosophical reflection in young age as a precondition to develop the ability to think independently and rationally, to be able to make independent and wise decisions, not act as a blind slave of the established rules, and face confusion and despair in the confrontation with new facts and situations, for which there are no established rules, but where the rules have to be invented. The essay like the rest of his philosophical works in fact outlines and represent a philosophical pedagogical programme of great ambitions and vast proportions, universal and applicable to all countries of the world, to secure a peaceful transition to a truly globalixed and democratic world. I have translated the whole essay to Norwegian, which constitutes a text of about 80 A4-pages. The yet unpublished translation exerts a growing pressure on Norwegian publishers, who shows incapable of grasping what kind of treasure they are being offered, rejecting it with the explanation that they do not believe that it corresponds with any Norwegian ”market”, non-regarding the success of Jostein Gaarder, which is regarded merely a mysterious ”accident”.
2.2 Soviet and Russian Philosophy As a Key to Historical Sensitivity
Charachteristic to Soviet thought and culture, influenced by marxism-leninism, which sharply divides it from contemporary Western thought, cought by a strichter and sceptical logical empiricism with a strong tendency of solipsism, is its historical sensitivity. While the Western mind tends to exclude all non-verifiable empirical facts and is a victim of historical amnesia, the Soviet mind sees itself in a historical evolution, stretching centuries back and striving centuries ahead, expressed by an interesting Soviet science fiction literature, of authors like I. Jefremov. The Soviet openess and sensitivity to history follows logically from the events of 1917, which constituted a historical break with the tsarist Christian ideology, striving for eternal and divine authority. The last remnants of this authoritarian ideology was removed from Soviet society with the critique of the reign of Stalin at the 20th partycongress in 1956 and with the democratization-process leading to the final dissolution of Soviet stalinist central power in 1991.
Western societies, on the other hand, are in quite another degree still under the spell of a royal religious oriented ideology, in which the idea of historical progress is marginalised as a subject for those who are particularly interested, mainly the professional historians. In contemporary royal Norway history therefore is regarded a less important subject to be taught in school, and is replaced with subjects which are regarded more relevant for service in the royal Norwegian state apparatus or business. While certain commentators have raised concern about this gradual weakening of the historical consciousness in the Norwegian school, they have problem themselves explaining why historical insight and sensitivity is important, while displaying a rather problematic understanding of modern history heavily influenced by the main ideas of Karl Popper, of an eternal fight of liberal democracy with a range of totalitarian enemies, mixing German fascism with Soviet socialism and Arabic islamism. The leader of the Norwegian Conservative party Erna Solberg recently wrote a comment in one of the leading dailies, where she claimed that Norwegian young people ready for army-service today, may have a hard time to imagine Holocoust, while not ”having any memory of the Soviet Union and the Iron curtain”. I wrote a comment for the paper where I pointed out the scandal if she is right about young Norwegianers not having any memory of recent history, and her wild attempt of new creative history-writing by hiddenly associating the Soviet Union with the Holocoust. I got no answer.
I have personal experience of how association with modern Soviet thought may help people avoiding the unpleasant and dangerous pitfall of insufficient historical consciousness and historical amnesia, which in fact constitutes one of the main widespread problems today of the western civilization. Absence of a general historical sense, means loosing track of ones own personal history, the crucial ability for a man og woman in a modern information-society to see their lifes from a perspective outsides themselves, to be able to contextualise themselves with the rest of the world, and in this way get a notion of consistency and meaning in their lifes. Persons deprived of a sound historical consciousness, left alone in a fragmented world of no principles, no inner consistency, no direction and no personal safety, are doomed to get unsatisfied, depressed and egoistic, with only their stricht personal interest of any value to pursue. Under such chaotic social circumstances families are being torn apart, young people get nervous about creating their own families, and avoid running the risk of committing themselves to other persons. The only persons gaining from such a general social situation of confusion, anxiousness and unrest, is the royal family at top, which is presented in the medias as the happy and harmonic family everyone are longing for. Under a regime of royal ideology the royal family and their inner circle are the only persons to have the privilege of feeling personally secure and live lifes which are contextualised and meaningful, which in a modern information-society, where this notion is what everybody needs and are striving for, means that monarchy reaches its peak of popularity, because everyone want to have a part of the attractive existential wholeness the royalities represent. To meet this demand the Norwegian princess Märtha Louise has made herself a profitable business from writing and telling fairytails for kids, and has attracted to her and got married to one of the most pretentious young Norwegian writers Ari Behn, who obviously is as much in love with the royal splendid ideology as with the princess and himself. The crown prince Håkon has no reason to strive as his sister, but has created a fairytale on his own by marrying a simple Norwegian girl Mette Marit from the south coast of Norway, who is being established in Norwegian medias as the new queen to come. Thanks to the royal ideology these persons are infallible, because whatever they do it is interpreted in the royal scheme and meet applause from their servants, striving for their holiness.
Thanks to the survival of Christian royal ideology and its intensification from the general insecurity of the modern information society, Norwegian society has created for itself a perfect solipsistical ideological pillow to sleep on while the incomes from the oil- and gas-industry is meant to pay the bill. The problem of this royal pillow is that a rapidly growing part of the population are being estranged from the royal structures in public and private sector, which are getting more and more sensitive to any kind of dissent, which reminds of the fundamental social insecurity which the whole Christian royal ideology is based on. As soon as someone are revealed as a dissenter and a ”not normal” person and kicked out in unemployment to be provided by the royal state, the person have a hard time being reaccepted by someone else in the royal system making employments. This disturbing development of tragic consequenses for a rapidly growing number of persons is hidden away in the royal medias, which in accordance with the empiricist basic attitude only report of historically low unemployment-rates, thanks to the policy of transfering the unemployed to ”measures” and further on to an existence as invalidized, the number of which constitutes the real unemployment-range and counts hundred of thousands, but is a number and a theme not to be talked about, not to be regarded a ”dissenter”.
Nothing of these observations are available to the ordinary Norwegian person who throughout the postwar period has been deprived of a basic historical consciousness actively advocated and consolidated in the Soviet Union at the same time. The only reason why all of this is clear to me, is that I have obtained the knowledge necessary of the realities at the other side of the Iron curtain, that I have associated myself with Soviet thought.
2.3 Our Common Anchestors?
The Christian royal ideology of todays Norway limits the historical perspective to the Christianization of Norway in the 11th century. The earlier history is obscured. Applying a Soviet historicist perspective means transgressing this historical limits, and start paying renewed interest to the pre-Christian Norwegian history. One of the main sources for knowledge beyond the Christian era in Norway is the ”Sagas” by Snorre Sturlason at Iceland in the 13th century. In the opening text of thsi great literary work devoted to the early history of the anchestors of the Norwegian and Icelandic kings, Snorre presents concrete and fascinating information about our history stretching back to the centuries before the birth of Christ which may be accurate, but which has yet not been fully empirically verified, and constitutes a controversy amongst Norwegian specialists. The famous Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who successfully proved that primitive people were able to cross the oceans separating the continents, but was never fully accepted by his western colleguas, but regarded a charlatan, devoted the last years of his life to prove the accuracy of the information provided by Snorre. According to Snorre the ancient Norwegian primitive religion of worshipping a god called Odin stems from an highly historical Odin, who orginally lived in the north-east area of the Azov sea. The name Tanais mentioned by Snorre is still a village in the area, nearby the town of Taganrog, and the geographical descriptions by Snorre of the area is stunningly correct, for a man basing his story on oral traditions passed from generation to generation, before he depicted them in text.
From reasons explained above history and archeology are highly politicized and weakly developed academic disciplines in Norwegian academies, and the preliminary explorations carried out by Thor Heyerdahl and his associates, revealing many more evidences for the accuracy of the information provided by Snorre, has met strong resistance from state-authorized Norwegian specialists, who are responsible not so much to the historical truth, as to the current ideological regime, which places the royal family is in the centre of attention. The facts provided by Snorre Sturlason and verified by Heyerdahl is simply rejected by attacking both as ”not serious”, the first a joker, and the second a naive believer. Such resistance from service-men in the Royal Norwegian academic structures shows how much which is at stake, and how decisive the reproduction of the historical past is to our cultural selfunderstanding. There is obviously a deep-felt anxiousness that this new, enlargened and compelling perspective on the Norwegian history, in which we orginally, according to Snorre, moved from Azov and inhabited Scandinavia to escape the expanding Roman empire, will undermine the legitimazy of the current Norwegian royal Christian political regime, making people open their eyes to the real fairtytales of history, and not the artificial ones of the Norwegian royal family and its state apparatus.
The controversial early history provided by Snorre Sturlason has a direct effect on our relation to Russia. In the official royal Christian perspective the historical contact is limited to Olav the saint who spent some time in Novgorod before starting the process of Christianizing Norway, to be killed in a battle with the reluctant farmers. There is also a history of cultural exchange of a newer date in the north, related to the fisheries, and of Scandinavian wikings serving as the first kings of Kievian Rus. The perspective of us stemming from a people originally known as "aser" living for centuries in currently Russian areas north-east of the Azov-sea, is a history implying a far greater degree of historical integration, where it get possible to talk about and seek common historical anchestors.
In my view, and I believe this to be the central motivation also to Thor Heyerdahl, such historical links between peoples, all kinds of historical examples like these, are of utmost importance to remind all of humankind of our common roots, that we in fact all are immigrants in the territories were we live, after having been moving and mixing around throughout the ages. Such historical facts ought not to be obscured and hidden as they are today, but brought into daylight, to effectively prevent any form of national chauvinism and rasism, leading to suppression and war. Chauvinism and war are, unfortunately, the main legacy of the remnants of the Roman empire, living on in the monarchies of the world, of which Norway is one, Britain another, with the USA back under its protection or vice versa from the dangers constituted by islamists, filling the former role of the Soviet Union as the necessary enemy-image.
2.4 Internet, The Western Information-Deadlock and The Terror
A necessary precondition for peaceful and democratic processes is freedom of speech and a free exchange of information. While traditional channels of mass-information are capital-intensive, require expensive printing- and broadcasting equipment, the internet represent a much more cost-effective channel. The former printing house and broadcasting is being replaced with a personal computer and a telephone-line, which is accessible for people even with a modest income. Internet as an alternative mass-media-channel in this way constitutes a rapidly growing challenge to the traditional media-controle of the power-structures of society.
In my pathbreaking and risky enterprise of opening up a space in Norwegian society for the formerly tabooed postwar Soviet philosophical development as described above, I have made extensive use of internet, with the addition the lasty years of the possibility to send short text-messages by cell-phones, socalled SMS-messages. Beginning with articles printed in left wing medias, the leading Klassekampen (The Class Struggle) of the Norwegian maoist revisionists, and the marginalised Friheten (The Freedom) of the remains of the original Norwegian Communist Party, I was challenged by a young maoist revisionist on the internet-blog of Klassekampen, Klassekampen-forum back in February 98, and engaged my self in direct debate with him and others at their blog. Since then I`ve distributed thousands of smaller and longer texts through the internet, constituting ”bombs” and ”mines” of information, challenging its readers to respond in some way or another, to ”protect” themselves and the general prejudices of the Cold war. This activity may be compared to the practice of distributing ”samizdats” in the former Soviet Union, when material stopped by the censorship was distributed in the form av hand-typed copies, by use of ink-paper. In the Soviet Union access to copy-machines were restricted, and in Moscow in 98-99 I was shown a photo-copy of Karl Poppers ”Objective Knowledge” by the dissenting philosopher Natalja Kuznecova, which she made with great personal risk back in the former Soviet Union. What obscures such a comparative perspective of contemporary Norwegian and former Soviet society in terms of centralistic controle of the distribution of information, is the fact that western societies have not carried out the same protectionistic policy on the ”market of ideas”, least not in open and fully consciously, like the Soviet leadership. The traditional censorship in western societies is not a matter of ideology, but of ”market”, the idea of the professional information providers, the publishers, editors, the journalists and the writers, of what kind of products the market of information-consumers are interested in. While the Soviet censorhip had in mind the abstract concept of ”building communism”, the Western censorship has in mind an abstract ”ordinary” man or woman, mainly interested in ordinary daily matters of his or her life, and not to be ”disturbed” by new and hard-to-grasp facts and opinions. That is why most material is filtered out by the professional information providers, never to reach the public, which is presented with a version of reality which is meant to fit the already established informational schemes, and not challenge any basic dogmas. Unlike the Soviet Union this stricht censorship is not conceived by those carrying it out like any form of political censorship, but only a professional duty according to skills obtained through the royal higher learning institutes and personal experience, to make the information ”eat-able” to the public. Like in the former Soviet Union, however, this censorship-service is carried out in some accordance with the popular sentiment, making the censors convinced that they are working in the interest of the general public, to rule out a few ”peace-disturbators”, madmen.
During the Cold war with the Soviet Union the western market-oriented censorship showed and for sure was far more liberal than the Soviet ideological protectionist regime. Since the only serious hindrance was in the imagined market-potential of the product, there was no need for the same restrictive policy in relation to photo-copying. There was no forbidden books like in the Soviet Union, hidden away in the special chambers of the state libraries, only accessible for those with the necessary authorisation, but all books available from the market-regulation were freely accessible for all, and widely photo-copied from the 60ties, while this new technology started appearing. While the possibility of photo-copying unauthorized material according to the Soviet censorship-regime was regarded a political problem, in the western countries, however, it constituted a growing market problem, because it meant loosing growing market-shares of people aquiring the necessary texts besides the traditional regulated channels. That`s why, in the late seventies, there was imposed in Norway, like in other western coutries, a new regime to secure the information-providers for the Norwegian information-market compensation for the ”use” of their products through photo-copying-technology, as in the librarian sector, for the lending of books. To maintain the market-oriented system it was necessary in this way, because of the technological development, to widen the traditional concept of a book or an article as the main product, to also include all kinds of reproductions and public use of, like lending from libraries.
Today, in light of the internet-revolution, it is easy to see in retrospect that this whole new system constitutes nothing but a preparation and adaption to the new possibilities represented by the internet, which finally is burying the traditional printed information-product, and replaces it with a floating digital entity, which have the possibility of instantly being reproduced in millions of ”copies”, given the right place and time. The internet, originally developed by western nuclear physists to ease international resarch-projects and the US armed forces to withstand a feared Soviet nuclear attack, in this way undermines finally the very basic principle of Western censorship, the concept of the ”copy” for sale on a market, and makes necessary a radical rethinking of the whole Western system of information-distribution, similar to the rethinking of the Soviet ideologically protectionist system of information-distribution known under the Gorbachev-slogans of ”Glasnost”- Openess, and ”Perestroika” - Restructuring, which finally led to the fall of Soviet central power in 1991.
Writing this very lines at the five-year-day since the shocking events known simply as 9.11, which kicked of the socalled ”war on terror”, in which also Norway takes active part, and having felt the blast from the bomb removing an apartment bloc in south-east Moscow killing 99 and wounding 150 September 8. 1999 while drinking evening-tea in a bloc nearby, and having myself and my information-activity been presented in Norwegian medias, anonymized, as a ”terrorist”-phenomenon, I do conceive the whole concept of ”terror” in a context of this current crisis of the traditional western system of market-based information-controle and censorship. The main problem of this system, which get evident today, is that it functions as a cultural Procrustean bed. Unlike other markets, the abstract notion of the typical western information-consumer is not being constantly challenged and tested by empirical market-surveys, where randomly selected ordinary men and women are presented with a range of alternatives to tell their preferences. To save the traditional system, the western information market must be protected from this kind of ”dangerous and destructive market liberalism”, which is said to constitute a threat against national languages and charachteristics. In this way the standard concept of the information-consumer, which corresponds with out general notion of who we are, is effectively being frozen and not to be challenged, by servicemen and women eager to escape the charge of being an enemy of a nationally protected information-market and a despiseful ”market-liberalist”, willing to sacrifice literary artistic quality to ”dirty literature” and pure profit. As a result, everyone are expected to fit to the standard concept of the information-consumer, and to display interests beyond and in conflict with this A4-standard, it being a general intellectual curiosity, is regarded a sign of weakness and may cause the individual problem in relation of employment and general acceptance in society. The natural outcome of such an informational deadlock is ”terror”, as a result of accumulated humiliations, estrangement of non-acceptable dissenting groups and stricht market-based censorship, where individuals droven to a state of despair commits outright crimes, only to attract the general attention at last to the censored information, create the necessary puzzle in peoples minds, which help them break out of the deadlock, and become active subjects in relation to a blind and solipsistic market-oriented societal structure.
The military ”war on terror”, therefore, is doomed to fail, because it is not adressing the structural problem of an western market-based information-deadlock causing the terror, but commiting the fundamental mistake of mixing the problem with the accidential poor persons being trapped by the maelstrom, and carrying out their ”terrorist-acts” before being finally drowned by circumstances outside of their personal controle. The ”war on terror” in this way only means speeding up the maelstrom, by seeking out all of them already in such a desperate situation that they are willing to commit terrorist-acts, and have them jailed, tortured and in some occesions directly executed instead of blowing themselves up to bring friends and foes with them. The whole western military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq therefore is doomed to escalate into outright war with the desperate victims of the situation, which is happening these days in the southern Afghanistan, meaning that not only the oppressed and persecuted arab patriots are dragged into the maelstrom, but also a growing number of young military servants of western countries, like in the two former world wars, and all the other technologized wars of the 20. century, with millions of causalities.
3. Suggestions
posted by Sigurd Lydersen at
4:50 AM
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