In the war on anti-American stereotypes everyone has a part to play. Some, like Bruce Bawer in today's Dagbladet, take straight aim at popular anti-American myths, hoping to change people's minds with good, honest arguments. Others prefer to use satire to expose the hypocrisy and ignorance of their enemies. I've sometimes played with satire, (this one keeps fooling people), but after reading Haakon Børde's article on nrk.no I realize that I have much to learn. Børde is a master of the art, and I bow before him.

The key to good satire, in my view, is to mix the believable with the ridiculous so that readers are unable to tell where the first ends and the second begins. You must begin by making the readers think you're on their side. Børde does this well by opening with one of those broad, incoherent complaints about America you hear almost anywhere:

The US concerns everyone. We watch their movies, listen to their music, drink Cola, buy American war planes, say dot instead of punktum when we give away our mail address. And we've given George W. Bush permission to count us in with the coalition of the willing in Iraq. We build fences around our docks because the Americans demand it.

Notice the clever jump from vague fear of cultural imperialism to political disagreement with the Bush administration. You don't need to show a logical relationship between the two, and in fact attempting to do so will give the satire away too soon, for no real anti-American would think that clearly about their fears. You must build the illusion that you're on the same side as your anti-American readers before you can gradually and carefully distort that picture. Børde shows us the right way to do it, and this opening paragraph will appear to readers not as the insanse mess it is, but as something they can read their own particular anti-American gripes into. French movie fans will read "we watch their movies" and skim the rest, linguistic protectionists will read "say dot instead of punktum" and no more. Everyone is happy, and will read the rest of the article with their critical senses on standby. A clever use of vagueness to confuse your readers.

Between plausible expressions of anti-American views Børde then inserts distortions that are small enough to slip beneath the radars of his readers, but which quietly add up to a feeling that something isn't quite right. The power of these distortions is retrospective: When outright ridiculous claims later on tip you off to the satire, you reread the earlier parts and discover obvious mistakes that slipped by you the first time. They force you to question your own ability to tell fact from fiction: If I could be fooled by this, perhaps I'm wrong about my other beliefs as well?

Here, too, Børde does an admirable job. Consider this gem:

We raise the flag on all public flag poles on July 4, because it is the national day of the United States, but not July 14, which is France's, or October 3, which is Germany's.

Shocking! And nonsense, if you think about it. The reason Norway has a national flag day on July 4 is because it is the Queen's birthday. But as if with the hands of a magician, Børde moves on from this remark so quickly that the objection barely has time to form in the reader's mind before his attention is pointed elsewhere:

Soon we'll probably introduce the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, though without the "Stars and Stripes" actually recieving the 51th star which shows that we are a member of the union.

What was it he said, the documentarist Michael Moore - that every sixth child in the US goes hungry to bed. He could have added that child mortality is lower on Cuba than in the US, and the number of doctors per capita is larger. Castro boasts that Cuba has the cleanest and best educated prostitutes in the world!

This is all unrelated nonsense, of course, but like the anti-Americans he parodies, Børde jumps deftly from claim to claim so that the reader is too distracted to consider any one of them at length. The flag day claim, the bogus statistic vaguely attributed to Michael Moore, a deceptive comparison with Cuba, all in the space of five sentences. All these claims fall apart on inspection, and this kind of writing is designed to prevent that. Even the prostitute quote is untrue, it was falsely attributed to Castro by none other than George W. Bush. Falsehood by falsehood, Børde sets his readers up for a real fall when they discover the joke.

Børde continues with an incoherent rant against American foreign policy. He manages to cover every chapter of the anti-Bush litany, with references to Halliburton, Christian conservatives, weapons of mass destruction, Ariel Sharon and Texas. Even hard core anti-Americans rarely cover this much ground with so few words - impressive. And as we near the end, Børde pulls his claims steadily towards the ridiculous:

When Iraq, that is, Saddam Hussein, began to price Iraqi oil in euro instead of dollars, the fate of the regime was sealed, according to the British journalist John Chapman in The Guardian. If the rest of OPEC had followed suit, the abandonment of the dollar could have ruined the American economy. Saddam had to be stopped - "The Axis of Evil" was invented. ..

It was understandable that the US mobilized its divisions and fighter planes to attack Afghanistan a few weeks after September 11. Very understandable, that is, if it was true as the intelligence reports said. .. It has since become apparent that it isn't always wise to trust all American and British intelligence reports, but okay ..

Ariel Sharon probably doesn't have connections to Osama bin Laden either, however his country does have weapons of mass destruction. .. But Israel does not have oil - so an American attack on Israel is therefore unlikely. ..

To attack the Jewish state would be antisemitism. .. But when the Arabs too are semites, doesn't that make it antisemitic to bomb and invade and occupy an Arab country? It is perhaps especially antisemitic when you consider that anthropologically speaking the purest semites today live on the Arab peninsula. The Jews, on the other hand, have become more mixed with other races, I read in my 1960 encyclopedia.

At this point the satire is obvious. The theory that Bush invades countries for abandoning the dollar, the speculation that bin Laden may have been innocent, the redefinition of antisemitism, the mysterious reference to the racial purity of the Arabs vs the diluted blood of Jews - at this point surely even the most gullible of readers will realize that they've been had. No genuine anti-American would write an article for Norway's public broadcaster with so many ignorant and disturbing variations of anti-American myths.

The reader, used to swallowing a wide selection of claims about America is here forced to question their own worldview: If the path from their presumably sane views to Haakon Børde's satire is so easy to follow that they only got the joke when he began talking about the racial impurity of the Jews, then how well can they trust their own views? Perhaps the mistake isn't just in the foreign policy of George W. Bush, but in their own arrogant ignorance, (hinted at by Børde: "I read in my 1960 encyclopedia").

Either that, or we're in such a mess over here that NRK's readers won't even get the joke. "Yeah", they'll think, "that's so true: Arabs are semites too, and that means the Iraq war was just a continuation of the Holocaust. And how can we know that bin Laden was behind 9/11 anyway? Everybody knows that the CIA is controlled by Big Oil. And anyway: Halliburton! Halliburton!" Entirely possible. But at least somebody at NRK is trying to expose such views with satire, and that is a good sign.

For this is satire. Right?

Dagbladet and Dagens Næringsliv picked up Lars Ruben Hirsch's story today about the plagiarized article in Aftenposten. Unlike Lars Ruben, Dagbladet's Jan Thoresen was able to get a response from Aftenposten - a rather deceptive apology. Take a look at this:

Foreign news chief Per Kristian Haugen apologizes that they've been unable to respond to the criticism because they were on vacation. And he admits that the article could have been better credited.

- As a rule sources should be credited. This has partly been done here, but it could have been done more thoroughly, he says to Dagbladet.no.

When he was made aware of the criticism in the weblog, he contacted the journalist.

- He has pointed to several sources for his article. Some of these sources may also have been Newsweek's sources, he says.

The sources were a column in O Globo on Latin American challenges. He has furthermore used Folha do Sao Paulo, Jornal do Brasil, as well as the magazines Veja, Istoé and Carta.

- It must be legitimate to point at these common issues. But the article could have credited sources more clearly, Haugen says.

I wish he hadn't said that. See, here's what should have happened: Blogger discovers plagiarism. Newspaper is notified of plagiarism. Newspaper slaps reporter on the wrist and flags him as someone who will require extra monitoring in the future. Case closed, for now.

But Aftenposten just had to deny it. Very well, then. "Some of these sources may also have been Newsweek's sources". Eh. When I wrote about this earlier I did a sentence by sentence comparison of the two articles, to check that Lars Ruben was right. Which he was. I marked sections where Halvorsen said the same thing as Johnson but with more/fewer/different words in green, and all sections where he said the same thing in nearly the same way and with equivalent Norwegian words in yellow. I've now updated that comparison and placed it on a separate page. First the quotes side by side, then in the context of the full articles: Arne Halvorsen vs Scott Johnson

This isn't an exciting or necessary read - this whole thing is just embarassing - (and I haven't translated anything - for that see Lars Ruben's blog), but browsing the comparison will give you an idea of just how derivative Halvorsen's article is of Johnson's. I've been more forgiving than I was the first time, and changed a few sections from yellow to green, but the conclusion remains that apart from four paragraphs at the end nearly all the content of Halvorsen's article is taken from Newsweek.

There were clearly other sources than Newsweek here. The quote from Mark Weibrot is longer in Halvorsen's version, so he has looked it up somewhere. Same with the lynching story. But this is not what an article that summarizes the content of several other articles looks like. This is not something a writer with integrity would publish as his own thoughts.

Aftenposten needs to come clean here, not because this one case is so horrible, but because they're sending a bad signal to their reporters by ignoring it. "We have never experienced such a detailed scrutiny before", Per Kristian Haugen says to Dagbladet. Yes, and your reporters know that. Now they also know you'll come to their defense if they're caught stealing.

Johan Galtung is "a rare plant in Norway's intellectual garden" (Thomas Hylland Eriksen), "our international peace researcher" (NRK), "controversial, loved and hated ... an honorary doctor of seven universities, and honorary professor of four" (NRK), "Earth's foremost researcher on peace .. honorary professor of about 30 universities" (spiritweb.dk), "not only our quickest but our best non-fiction writer" (Dagbladet), winner of the 2000 Brage Prize for best non-fiction book (Brageprisen), "beloved and debated" (Cappelen), "a consultant to several UN agencies" (Democracy Now), "regarded as the father of peace studies" (University of Melbourne), "a modern alchemist who transmutes old ideas into new ones" (Danish Association for International Co-operation).

He's also the person who feared that the US would nuke Afghanistan after 9/11, who believes that the Bali attack in 2002 which killed nearly 200 Australians should be seen in light of the number of Australian pedophiles who come there, - and he's the author of this crazy opinion piece in Dagbladet.

The formerly pro-American people of Norway, Galtung believes, are now undergoing the same mental transition he observed in his Communist friends in the years after World War 2. Phase 0: Blind faith in the Soviet Union and anger against anyone who questions it. Phase 1: Making excuses. “You have to consider what they've been through”. Phase 2: Soviet dissenters are probably traitors. Phase 3: One person alone, Stalin, was to blame. Nothing wrong with the system itself. Phase 4: There's something fundamentally wrong here. Phase 5: The whole structure of Soviet society and empire is rotten. Phase 6: The idea itself of a Russian empire and dictatorship of the proletariat is pathological. Phase 7/trap: Excessive, fanatical anti-communism.

Many Norwegians, Galtung claims, are still in phase 0 in their relationswhip with the United States:

The simplistic rejection of all doubt about the US is therefore strong. The current “Norwegian” Minister of Offense, head of a department which since 1999 has attacked three countries, one every other year, as part of the American struggle to strengthen and expand its empire, is one example.

Most Norwegians, however, sense that there's something wrong about America, and are in phase 3: Place all blame on one person, George W. Bush. But “the empire is not something Bush invented”. Galtung shrugs off “naive attempts” to see today's Bush criticism as a continuation of a century-long tradition, the theory of Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud in Frykten for Amerika (The Fear of America, reviewed here), but his own fear of America spans the centuries as well:

Others, including American Democrats, have killed far more than the 11-13 000 (?) victims so far in Iraq, ever since the English landed there in 1607 and 1620.

To place such historic evil on the shoulders of one man is thus both unfair and counterproductive. Like Stalin, we must conclude, Bush represents the American empire at its worst, but an election victory for “Bush light, John Kerry” won't change anything. The fall of Stalin was followed by interventions in East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The “dreadful number of American interventions to protect their economic empire with any excuse, the deaths, the suffering, the dictatorships, and the trampling across foreign cultures” transcends political party lines. America's evil, like that of the Soviet Union, is the evil of an idea. Galtung never specifies which idea he's thinking of, and he insists that he's no more an anti-American than the powers that fought the Nazis were anti-German, but when you see the history of America since the 17th century as one long variation on the theme of American empire, what's left to admire?

In his only actual example of imperial thinking in the US, Galtung abuses the esteemed Ralph Peters:

A Pentagon planner a few years ago said it clearly: “The de facto role of the United States Armed Forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.”

Galtung doesn't say who this Pentagon planner is, or what context he said it in, leaving readers to think that Pentagon have made plans for an aggressive foreign policy intended to preserve America's economic and cultural interests. But if you read what Ralph Peters wrote in the US Army War College Quarterly in 1997, in the article Constant Conflict, you find not a Pentagon plan of aggression, but a pessimistic prediction of the likely role the US will play in the near future. By its economic success and cultural power, which other countries will find difficult to emulate quick enough to please citizens reared on Hollywood glamour, the US will cause disillusionment and anger to be directed at itself.

Noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population, are enraged. Their cultures are under assault; their cherished values have proven dysfunctional, and the successful move on without them. The laid-off blue-collar worker in America and the Taliban militiaman in Afghanistan are brothers in suffering. ..

For many such Americans, the world has collapsed, even as the media tease them with images of an ever-richer, brighter, fun world from which they are excluded. These discarded citizens sense that their government is no longer about them, but only about the privileged. Some seek the solace of explicit religion. Most remain law-abiding, hard-working citizens. Some do not.

The foreign twin is the Islamic, or sub-Saharan African, or Mexican university graduate who faces a teetering government, joblessness, exclusion from the profits of the corruption distorting his society, marriage in poverty or the impossibility of marriage, and a deluge of information telling him (exaggeratedly and dishonestly) how well the West lives.

We're heading for a future of constant, low-level conflict:

The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves. And we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves. States will struggle for advantage or revenge as their societies boil. Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the "lesser" conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.

Galtung's quote placed in italics. Did he bother to check the context? The quote is floating around on left-wing/anti-war websites as an example of America's evil intentions. None of them, apparently, could be bothered to read the article they were referring to. Doing this becomes even harder, of course, when you don't quote Pentagon analyst Ralph Peters' article from 1997, but “a Pentagon planner”. Dishonest, sloppy or apathic, pick your choice. (Whichever it is, Galtung is a repeat offender - he's used it before. See also Professor Bunyip.)

Up until this point in the article, Galtung has presented no more than a respectable amount of paranoia, nothing that shocks Norwegian Dagbladet readers, who are used to moronic and ignorant claims about the evils of America. But then there's this, an almost Ann Coulter-like piece of hysteria:

Norwegian ministers of state, foreign policy and “defense”, who with good conscience have let themselves be led by the exploiters, murderers and torturists of America, ought to be put under surveillance as useful idiots of the American empire. Placing them on trial for “betraying the peoples of the world” ought to be in order. An apology would help, or at minimum some self criticism. How could I let myself be fooled by the US? What was my fault of intellect or conscience, when I could see the splinter in the eye of the Maoists, but not the wooden beam in my own eye? ..

This self criticism won't happen. But when the people of the world and the people of America, through violence, non-violence, economic boycott etc. finally breaks the back of American imperialism, I'm sure the Norwegian elites will feel relieved.

Here's a question for those of my readers who might have held some respect for Galtung's work as a “professor of peace”: Now that you've read his call to place Norway's pro-American politicians under surveillance and brought to trial, and his comparison of the Maoist “splinter” with the pro-American “wooden beam”, in which of Galtung's eight phases do you currently find yourself in relation to Galtung himself? Denial, apologism, concern, disillusionment? Just curious.

Eager to keep his distance from those crazy people who really, really hate America, Norway's Noam Chomsky ends by warning that “a late conversion from imperialism to concern for human rights must not take the form of blind anti-Americanism or antisemitism.” Right. We'll keep that in mind.

Lars Ruben Hirsch reports that Aftenposten's Latin America correspondent Arne Halvorsen has plagiarized an article from Newsweek:

On July 8, Aftenposten, Norway's most influential newspaper, published an article by correspondent Arne Halvorsen. The article seemed strangely familiar. Just a few days earlier I had read an article in Newsweek on the same theme. Come to think about it, it even used the same catchphrase, "Latin America's lost decade". I decided to take a closer look at the two articles. It turned out that Halvorsen's article is mainly a translation and rewrite of the article from Newsweek, but some phrases are not even rewritten but just translated almost word by word (see bullet 11 below).

Halvorsen's article was published as an Opinion, which in Aftenposten is supposed to be an independent analysis. None of the articles contained a reference to any third source, nor did the article in Aftenposten contain a reference to the article in Newsweek. In an email July 12, I told editorial manager Klaus Børringbo at Aftenposten about the issue and asked him to comment, but I did not receive an answer. July 15 I sent another email with a detailed point-for-point comparison of the articles.

Norwegian readers can compare Halvorsen's article with Scott Johnson's themselves, and for the rest of you Lars Ruben has translated a long list of examples.

I've taken a close look at the articles - plagiarism is a serious accusation. Out of 16 paragraphs in Halvorsen's article, 6 are almost fully stolen from Newsweek, 1 fully borrows an argument but uses different words, 3 contain individual stolen sentences, and 2 sum up the theme of the original article. Only 4 paragraphs at the end, which explain basic Brazilian and Argentinian politics, are Halvorsen's own. Scott Johnson's article is much longer, but one third of the content (almost the entire first third) has found its way into Halvorsen's article.

Arne Halvorsen has rewritten a third of Newsweek's article, using Newsweek's quotes, Newsweek's trains of thought, and Newsweek's examples, adding only a few supplementary facts. The words are largely Newsweek's, translated into Norwegian. Only the order of presentation is different. I believe I'm on safe ground when I agree with Lars Ruben: this is plagiarism.

Lars Ruben wrote about this on July 16, and still (apparently) hasn't received a reply from Aftenposten. That's a bad sign. I've looked at other recent articles by Halvorsen and run some quick checks on Google News without finding anything suspicious. Until proven otherwise, I'll assume this is a singular occurence. Silence from Aftenposten won't increase my confidence, though.

Erik Nord is a researcher and health economist who has worked for the Norwegian health authorities for 20 years, and has been one of the most vocal opponents of the anti-smoking law that came in effect last month. That's not saying much. Despite the harshness of the law, the unpopularity of Health Minister Dagfinn Høybråten, (who the media chose instead to nail for his connection to an anti-gay congregation), and the scientific flaws in anti-smoking propaganda, there haven't been many candidates for the job of speaking up for smokers' rights, for pragmatism and scientific honesty. Nord is one of very few.

In Kruttrøyk & fredspipe (Gunsmoke and Peace Pipe), Nord attacks what he sees as the main problem with the government's war on tobacco: its lack of compassion and pragmatism towards smokers.

Nord is not a regular smoker himself, and is glad that smokers no longer feel entitled to smoke anywhere they like, as they did only decades ago. But the wheel has turned. Smokers have learned to show us non-smokers consideration. Now it is time for us to return the favor, to show empathy with the smokers. Empathy with smokers? With smelly, cancer-spewing nicotine addicts? The campaign against smoking has been so successful that the idea is abhorrent. Smokers are selfish, inconsiderate and weak, not regular people deserving of empathy. But consider the lonely and elderly who spend hours every day with other pub or cafe regulars. How will the smoking ban affect their daily life? Did anyone bother to check? These people are real, but they're not very visible, and they're easy to overlook. Nord goes out looking for them, and finds what from his leftist point of view strikes him as a class conflict: Well off middle class people making laws that affect sections of society they're unaware of, and don't care about, in ways they didn't bother to investigate.

Or consider your average occasional smoker who enjoys a cigarette after dinner. A small joy, to be sure, but life is made out of small joys, many of which are no larger than that. But this has been left out of the equation. It is, of course, unlikely that these joys would outweigh the damage the government confidently attributes to passive smoking, but to not even consider it, to not even mention it as a negative side effect of a smoking ban, reveals a disturbing arrogance and a lack of empathy with the faceless masses this law affects.

Nord also objects to the scientific basis for the smoking ban. When I looked into this last month I found that there are many flaws and weaknesses in research on passive smoking: The level of passive smoking employees in pubs are exposed to may not necessarily be dangerous. But this is a gray area of science. The correlation with lung cancer and heart disease is too small to rule out confounding factors, but it is consistent, and is certainly an indication worth doing further research on.

Erik Nord chooses a safer, but just as effective, line of attack. Norway's health authorities assert not only that high levels of passive smoking are unacceptably dangerous, but that small levels of exposure are as well. So don't bother looking for alternatives to zero tolerance – there is no safe limit. Nord looks into this, and discovers that the scientific basis for this assertion is .. nonexistent. Reports refer to other reports, which refer to other reports, and at the end of the chain there are only assumptions: “A linear exposure-response relationship is assumed”, meaning that if x amount of smoke increases cancer risk by y, x/10 increases risk by y/10. Not only is it unscientific to make assumptions like this – it is deceptive to use such results without explaining how they were derived, which the health authorities appears to have done here. Either that or they didn't bother to check, in which case they're not qualified for their job. Nord recounts his attempts to force the health authorities to acknowledge this error, only to be met with silence and diversions.

How is this relevant? Passive smoking at pre-ban levels may be dangerous. It's not proven, all we have is a weak correlation, but people who believe in the precautionary principle will say that we can't take that chance. Others will say, as some supporters of this ban replied when I wrote about this in June, that even if passive smoking is harmless, it's annoying, and they'll be glad to be rid of the smell. So let's just ban it, right? But if small levels of exposure are harmless, then perhaps we don't need to ban all smoking, perhaps we could find a solution that just reduces exposure to a low levels.

This is where people with a sensible concern about passive smoking and a desire not to be annoyed should take a different path from those dishonest activists who use the fight against passive smoking to achieve their real goal: Not a world where people are safe from other people's smoke, but a world where people don't smoke at all. Activists won't settle for anything less than total absence. The rest of us are more flexible. We're more than happy with good enough.

Improved ventilation systems could achieve this, and so can separate smoking rooms. This would be safe, and it wouldn't be annoying to non-smokers. Erik Nord asks us to be creative, to think about solutions that respect the interests of smokers, while achieving all the stated objectives of our new smoking ban. This isn't difficult. All it requires is concern for the well-being of smokers.

But the health authorities didn't bother to investigate ventilation systems and smoking rooms. They didn't look for creative solutions. They went straight to zero tolerance, the one option that would cause the most inconvenience for smokers.

That zero tolerance is about more than protecting people from passive smoking becomes clear when you look at the way the government has reacted to Erik Nord's search for a way to bypass the smoking ban. After scrutinizing the text of the law, he discovered that if you form a club with restricted membership, and give this club a room of their own in the back of the pub, the law can not prevent club members from smoking in that room. So you can create smoking clubs for people who are against the ban, give them an unserviced room of their own, and let them go in there for a smoke when they want to.

When Nord went public with this discovery, the Ministry of Health first denied (falsely) that this hole existed, and when that didn't work attempted (illegally) to redefine the terms used by the law, to cover the hole, something only Stortinget is authorized to do. They still insist that it would be illegal to do this.

Why do this? Why refuse to allow even the tiniest opportunity for a small number of smokers, under great inconvenience, and without harming anyone but themselves, to enjoy their habit? Because the true goal of the health authorities in Norway is the total end of smoking, and for such a total end only a total ban will do the job. To reach their goal, they're prepared to abuse science and overrun hundreds of thousands of people. They don't care about anything but their vision of a tobacco free future, and if you don't happen to share that vision, that's your problem.

This is not the behavior of decent, sensible people, it's the behavior of authoritarians and puritans. This is not compassion with the plights of waitresses, it's an imposition by force of a narrow set of personal values on an entire society. Even people who dislike the smell of smoke, like I do, or who worry about its unproven second hand effects, (which I no longer do), should be concerned about this.

Kruttrøyk & fredspipe is not a great book, but it's a necessary one. It is not a comprehensive and coherent attack on the anti-smoking law, a history of how it was made, or a full evaluation of the effects it will have on regular smokers. It's a little of all three, fragmented and mixed together in a book-long rant. Never enough to close any issues, but always enough to convince you that there's something there worth investigating. There are so many threads here that deserve to be followed up, but won't be, because no news organization with the power to force a reply out of government officials give a damn about the well-being of smokers. There is still some territory left to take, but the war on smoking is over, and the puritans won.