As the controversy around the party's posters on the Oslo Metro has blown up over the past few days, I translated three articles from various news sources about the developing situation yesterday:
Now, NRK reports, along with the host of Debatten Fredrik Solvang on his own Instagram account, that Peace & Justice will disclose the ever-mysterious source of their funding, for their strikingly large campaign for such a small party, on Debatten on NRK1 @ 9:15 PM CET. The party will further be explaining their stances on the War in Ukraine and Norway's role in it as part of the program.
I'm not going to translate Solvang's reel or the attached video in the NRK article, because there's a lot of "Russian propaganda????? Foreign influence????? Just look at the Romanian election!!!!!" type talk that just gives me a fucking migraine; but at the end of the day, by hosting Peace & Justice, NRK/Debatten is taking the oh-so-"edgy" narrative of "OK, but what if — get this — people can be opposed to sending weapons to Ukraine without being Russian assets?", which to me seems like it might be kind of a big deal?
We won't know how this will go until the show runs — whether tonight's episode of Debatten will be a part of a transition in Norwegian bourgeois media to favor withdrawing support for Ukraine, or whether having Peace & Justice on Debatten is really just a formality to again try to grab a hold of the narrative and push it back towards the status quo.
We also won't know how Peace & Justice itself will handle this opportunity, but in any case the Oslo Metro posters controversy reminds me of a previous "scandal" I've translated for the news comm, namely the Red Youth fake parking tickets controversy about three months ago. Like the ongoing Peace & Justice posters controversy, the Red Youth controversy three months ago involved that organization doing something potentially illegal, and keeping their lips sealed about it until they could reveal their big idea on Debatten.
Pretty much from the moment the Peace & Justice posters scandal broke out, I was thinking this may have been their strategy, going on Debatten to reveal the information they've been so conspicuously keeping secret for the past few days.
And yeah, if my sleep-deprived Swiss cheese brain could figure out that this was the party's endgame almost immediately, then surely actual news organizations would've realized it as well, right? Now average Joes filming themselves vandalizing the ads and posting their acts on social media, thereby giving the ads way more exposure than they would've had otherwise — that doesn't necessarily warrant much thought, I don't think, 'cause that's just standard viral marketing based on the premise that average people are not always the brightest and will do anything for likes. But actual news organizations? They have agendas and short and long term interests to balance, right?
With regard to those average Joes, though, I'm wondering if that's why the party originally planned for the campaign to last as long as a week, because they didn't have confidence that their virality would be so huge and immediate.
It is very amusing in any case that so many people keep thinking that the party is basically vandalizing and DDoSing itself for attention — no, I really just think they just know how to use what they have to their advantage. People I guess can't stand to think that the party is winning because it's so despised.
My own thoughts on Peace & Justice is that they seem like yahoos, I appreciate that they're critical of Norway's support for Ukraine but I don't really like how they're pitching this idea to the people of Norway as a matter of "look how we could spend the money we save on Ukraine on ourselves" — that to me seems like a bit of a selfish and "miserly" framing of it. But I guess things will go as they go and I don't have much power to change it. Shôganai.
