Chapter 3

Crime & Punishment

They are currently running a series of TV adverts which would not have been out of place in the Third Reich. They show a man with a bandit mask sneaking around a dustbin looking suspicious.  From beneath his long, dirty raincoat he pulls a tatty polythene bag from which he takes a glass bottle.  He places it in the glass-recycling bin.  Very responsible, but what is the point of the advert I wondered as I watched it the first time?  The advert continues with the bandit peering surreptitiously around to make sure no one is watching.  He then takes an empty aluminium drink can from his bag, which he drops into the “unsorted” bin.  At this point a blue flashing light appears from inside the bin and a policeman comes along and drags him off to be punished for his criminal activities.  In a second avert it is a boy scout that comes along and accuses him of being an “environmental sneak” and more or less threatens to report him to the authorities for his socially deviant behaviour.  I had always thought of sneaks as being goody, goody boy scout, gauerleiter types who have nothing better to do than promulgate a fascist system of justice.  Whilst the Nazis and the Red Guards both favoured this system of summary justice, it hardly rates as the manifestation of an advanced Western Democracy.

I am sure that many people in both Nazi Germany and Red China honestly believed that it was not only a necessary evil, but that it was actually desirable to expose individual deviants in the wider interests of their fellow countrymen.  And the children may even have believed that denouncing their parents to be sent to concentration camps was essential to rid society of aberrant behaviour and a sacrifice worth making in order to make the world a better place.  In Norway it seems, as in other totalitarian States, if you are convinced of the rightness of your own political view, it is acceptable to be a fanatic.  It is even all right to issue the Western equivalent of fatwahs against transgressors in other countries.  The irony being, of course, that Norway has been at the front of international activities in support of Salman Rushdie.  Of course, in countries like that, there are always dissidents, but somehow the Norwegians are so convinced of their liberalism that they don’t realise what is happening to them.  Of course, any dissident in such a liberal society must be deranged and their views are politically incorrect.  Perhaps it is something to do with the parable of the frog.  It is said that if you drop a frog into hot water it will immediately hop out.  If however, you put it in a pan of cold water, which you then gradually heat up, it will not realise how hot it has become until it is too late to do anything about it and will simply boil to death.  I’m not quite sure what would constitute death to the Norwegians.  Perhaps it is when the tax burden reaches 100% of the GNP (today it is a mere 60%), or perhaps when they need permits to buy alcohol (oh, they already do in some areas?) or when they cannot open a bank account, borrow a library book, buy a car, have a telephone etc. without a personal identity number burned into their foreheads (today you can keep the number on an identity card, but you still need it).

 The strange thing is that they are so aware of this kind of creeping injustice in other countries and are such staunch advocates of civil rights, but just not in their own country.  It reminds me of a story I heard about a Sunday School class.  With their widespread “Christianity” I am not altogether surprised that they have fallen for the same deception.  The teacher tells the story of the sinful woman who goes to the temple to pray and prostrates herself before the altar, begging God to forgive her sin and to hear her prayers, worthless though she is.  A couple a Pharisees come up to pray at the altar saying:

“Oh God hear our prayers.  We thank you that you will listen to us because we are holy and not sinners like that woman.”

Jesus tells his disciples that it is the woman with her contrite spirit who will be heard and not the self-righteous Pharisees.

The Sunday School teacher then says to her class:

“Now children, you see how important it is to have a pure heart and the right attitude toward God. Now it is time to pray.  Oh God thank you for all your blessings to us, thank you for the lesson we have learned today and thank you most of all that we are not like those judgmental Pharisees…”

It is also quite extraordinary how values have become distorted in an attempt to raise people’s awareness of current issues.  In order to impress upon people the seriousness of drink driving, the penalties verge on capital punishment.  A first offence is punishable by a fine of one month’s gross salary with disqualification for a year.  Repeat offences result in confiscation of your car, three months in jail, two years disqualification and eventually insurance premiums so punitive that you simply could not afford to ever run a car again.  In Muslim societies they cut off thieves’ right hands, not to prevent them stealing which they can of course do with either hand.  No, it is so that they cannot eat with others, the left hand, which is used for bum-wiping being not unreasonably considered unclean.  That means that theft in Islamic societies is effectively punished by social ostracism, a practice which is rightly condemned by all liberal societies and exponents of civil liberties.  In Norway, living in the countryside of which there is plenty requires access to a car, certainly if you expect any kind of social life.  The removal of that privilege effectively ostracises the Norwegian, but do we hear a word about it, even a hint of protest.  Of course not, because the Goebels propaganda machine has so intimidated the masses that they all assume it must be fair.  Perhaps it is because of the terrible car accidents attributable to drink-driving you might wonder.  If it were not for the fact that there are only a total of 250 road accident fatalities a year in Norway (traffic density hardly being a major concern here) and that most of those are caused by collisions with elks, you would be right.

I thought perhaps I should check the drink-driving penalties, which I had assumed were a little exaggerated by the man in the pub who told me.  They were of course wildly inaccurate.  Drink-driving is discouraged because it is dangerous and can cause harm, physical injury and even death.  In fact, last year there were around 50,000 cases of speeding, injury to other road users, driving without a licence and other anti-social driving activities.  As a result a grand total of 384 people were given custodial sentences.  In the same period about 8000 were caught drink-driving of whom 2291 ended up in jail.  In other words, they don’t give a damn whether you have a driving licence, drive dangerously or kill people, just so long as you are sober when you do it!

But drink-driving is not the only social crime; parking within 5 meters of a junction, even in a residential cul-de-sac is punishable by execution by firing squad…or maybe that was just a nightmare.  Yes it was just a nightmare.  I awoke to discover that the actual penalty for parking 2 inches too close to a junction is no more than a fine of £100, about the same as for rape.  Well, I guess old habits die hard.

This might seem like something of an exaggeration and it is…a bit.  Of a total of 180,000 crimes successfully prosecuted in Norway last year, about 170,000 resulted in fines.  This figure includes serious crimes such as rape, murder, child abuse, violence against the person, violence against civil servants (for which they have a separate category – not surprising really) and burglary as well as less serious ones, misdemeanours, such as drink-driving and parking on an expired meter.  The average fine for all these horrendous crimes was a little over £300!

Perhaps it is all part of the Viking tradition that virtually exonerates violent crimes against the person, but when it comes to their current PC obsession, then God help you.  Only last week a man was convicted of shooting his neighbour – five times.  (Despite the five shots he still somehow failed to fatally wound him.  It has to be said that at least the Americans know how to do a good shooting.)  He was harangued by the judge for quite a while and given a pretty stiff sentence – 40 hours community service.  It was his first offence.  The moral of the story being: if you want to shoot somebody you don’t like, its quite alright.  Just don’t make a habit of it.

This might seem to demonstrate how compassionate the Norwegians are and how understanding of man’s inherent sinful nature.  But then I heard about another court case the same week.  A director of Norsk Hydro, a major chemicals company, was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.  I listened attentively to the item, wondering what on earth he could have done to warrant such an incredible prison term.  It had to be something on a par with genocide,

Not drink driving, tax evasion, smuggling?

No, it was for accidentally spilling poison chemicals in a river with the inevitable fatal consequences.  There were in fact several hundred deaths as a result of the poison spillage not to mention the expected deformed babies.  I wondered why they hadn’t shot him, but then the article continued and I realised that the fatalities to which they referred were not amongst the Norwegian citizenry, but the minority population known as fish!  Five years for killing a few fish, which is anyway one of the major industries of Norway.  “Ah, but he did not have a licence”

Quite how they can accept this distortion of values is beyond me.  It means that about a quarter of the prison population are there for nothing more serious than fishing without a licence or driving with excess alcohol in their blood, not I hasten to add for having caused harm to anyone else whilst so driving, just that they had been guilty of a technicality.  It seems slightly more likely that someone with no driving licence, such as a joyriding adolescent showing off to his mates is something more of a hazard to society.  Meanwhile, most muggers, rapists and murderers walk the streets with impunity.

Of course it is easy to be cynical about the way in which society chooses to make an example of one or two cases “pour encourager les autres”, but the real test of success or failure is the overall reduction in that particular crime.  In the past 20 years despite ever more stringent punishment, the level of accidents involving drink driving offences has remained more or less constant at around 6000-7000 cases per year.  Meanwhile accidents resulting from non-drink-driving offences, in exactly the same period, more than doubled from 84,000 to 166,000 of which almost none resulted in custodial sentences.  What was that one about banging your head against a brick wall?  Oh, I remember – it hurts less if you stop.

As a further example of their interminable meddling in other peoples’ affairs they now think it is acceptable to extend the bounds of their jurisdiction across the world for particularly unpleasant crimes.  We are not talking about crimes against humanity, mass murderers, genocide, but sex crimes.  Now whilst I might occasionally feel like banging up these sick perverts for life, I do not necessarily subscribe to the principle of extra-territorial jurisdiction.  Nor do I believe that sex with 15 year olds necessarily constitutes a criminal activity.  Indeed there are absurd, if exceptional, examples today of 30 year old mothers in jail, their babies having been taken away by the authorities because the father was under age at the time of conception.  The fact that for millennia, societies have not only permitted, but even encouraged teenagers to marry cuts little ice with some people.  The problem with this as with so much of this sanctimonious posturing is that they just don’t know where to stop.  Yes, we can all go along with measures aimed to discourage paedophilia, but what if it was extended to other areas which we find distasteful but which are rather less serious than other crimes we accept or even condone.  Are the Norwegians going to start persecuting drink drivers in Thailand?  It’s only a matter of time.  Should we prosecute purchasers of Nike trainers for being accessories to child slave labour?  They can hardly claim ignorance.

No sooner did I write this than I read in Aftenposten, that they advocate prosecution of Norwegian businessmen who indulge in corruption overseas.  How the hell else do they think they get those contracts which keep them all in their cushy lifestyles back home?  Who do these sanctimonious, lying, cheating politicians think they are to pontificate about business ethics?  With all their “concessions” to the farmers who put them in power it is about as reasonable as Clinton moralising on “family values”.

So are they whiter than white and is Norway a nation of moral integrity?  I think not.  Would you be surprised to learn that the four Scandinavian countries rate number 1,2,3 and 4 in the world league of most criminal offences per capita?  In Finland nearly 15% of the population have criminal records, in Sweden 13%, Denmark 10% and Norway 9%.  This is compared with the highly criminal (so we are told) former Soviet Union States such as Georgia (0.2%) and Ukraine (1.2%)!  But then, bearing in mind that in Norway it is a criminal offence for a barman to serve you another beer before the glass from which you are currently drinking is completely empty, it is not such a great surprise.  They are so obsessed with trying to control people that they naively believe they can make everybody good by criminalising anything which might be considered even vaguely anti-social.  In Sweden they say that if something is not explicitly permitted, then it is forbidden.  I wonder whether there are any references to breathing in the Swedish Constitution?

But of course once you are in prison they are quite nice to you, or so I am told.  At least I assume there are no thumbscrews or arbitrary torture, but I have no desire or intention of researching that point further.  What I have heard though is that they like to make sure their prisoners are kept in touch with the outside world in order to avoid becoming institutionalised.  So much so that they take them on outings.  Whilst being shown round the new Oslo airport recently, one of them said he had to obey nature’s call and headed off downstairs to the Gents’.  After an hour or so someone noticed he had not returned and went to look for him.  It was at this point they realised that not only were the toilets downstairs, so was the platform for the high speed rail link!  And that is the last we heard of him.

© Jeremy Harrison 1997-2008; all text and images copyright of the author.

Contact: jeremy@nomadintent.com