Norwegian martyrs-(six dark stories about Norway)
1. Arnold JUKLERØD:
In this period, (whether one reckons from the 400-year union with Denmark or from the union later with Sweden which
ended in 1905) the country has contracted historical "festering abscesses" that are possibly as characteristic of Norway
as the present day's projection of the nation as the World's peacemakers and as a showcase for the Utopian Welfare
State populated with good-natured sports idiots.
There is a certain power in the defining of "reality".
The understanding of reality that at all times is advisory, always lies 20-30 years behind a more objective and balanced
historical comprehension.
Seen in this light, there are many historians who are of the opinion that "modern times is always and continuously incorrect".
The historical "truth" is matured, corrected and cleansed for manipulation and lies through the stories of its own atonement
victims, scapegoats and martyrs.
Just as the Third Reich is characterised with its force of will and ability for industrial genocide and the Soviet empire of
NKVD, the general allegations and the millions who disappeared in GULAG, all nations, peoples and movements have
committed crimes against Humanity. Crimes that continue to haunt a people right up to the time when an attempt to
stutter remorse, admittance of guilt, shame...... and redress, then dignity is given to the victims or their descendants.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin, believed that Truth was not something that you could see directly, but that it only
existed in veiled fragments, individual stories......
I use the basis of such a perspective in my work by highlighting the meaningful and universal facets of the individual person's
fate, struggle and pain.
I do not believe that three persons are "more" than one person. The individual's naked face surrounded by the dark eternal
cosmos is the highest step on the "ladder" towards recognition and God.
Something indefinable triggers the execution of human mathematics and a reduction of the Human Being to systematized raw
materials, even if only in the form of soap (thousands of gassed Jews were in fact "refined" down to soap in the
German extermination camps).
It triggers the door open for fascism.
The stories of the nation's victims are therefore a gift from God as a source of soul-searching, mental and moral balance.
1.
pictures 1-5 are portraits of Arnold Juklerød, born 1925 on a small farm in Drangedal. As fate would have it, he
became one of the bravest opponents to the powerful quasi-science which is the alliance between medicinal psychiatry
and the pharmaceutical industry.
Juklerød was a pacifist and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector at Havnås Camp, together with among others,
Galtung. An odd coincidence in a way, as both men had been engaged in and developed non-violent fighting methods.
Galtung as a theoretician (who today, is an international sage within peace research) and Juklerød as a practician.
The case of Juklerød's fight against psychiatry and Norwegian authorities is as if Ibsen might have written a new version of
"En Folkefiende" ("An Enemy of the People") after having read Orwell's "1984", Huxley's "Brave New World" and
seen everything directed by John Cleese.
Juklerød's total life history from when he was forcibly incarcerated in Gaustad Hospital at an age of 47 years, could have
been taken from a manifestation for the reigning party in Norwegian government since World War 11 ended, he is the
archetype for the popular basis on which the Norwegian Labour Party's power is anchored : the tough, responsible,
hard-working and quietspoken proletarian with both childhood ideals and belief in authority intact. A tall, well-built
man with muscles and callused hands who (could have) been used on the Labour Party's election poster "Together we
shall build the country".
Juklerød was involuntarily committed to an institution for the first time in 1971. The background is that he, three years
previously, against his own vote, was elected to lead a parents' action against the closing down of a local primary
school. At this time, a massive de-centralising campaign was carried out, amongst others in the education system in
Norway. This happened often with bitter resistance locally when parents took opposing action against their children
being uprooted by the authorities from a safe, well-arranged neighbourhood environment with only short distances
between home and school.
The parents' group that Juklerød led, discovered by degrees that in their case, the school bureaucrats had overstepped the
powers entrusted in them by the country's Parliament. This is a serious affair in a parliamentary democracy where the
bureaucrats' job, without exception, is to carry out political resolutions.
In his capacity as the group's leader, Juklerød tried to make people in general and school authorities aware of this fact. (A
situation that could precipitate serious consequences for the bureaucrats responsible).
Being the average, uneducated man that he was, he also wrote articles and letters to the editor of the local newspaper where
he used pictures and concepts from his Christian childhood ideals. Christianity being the state religion in Norway. (It
is otherwise surprising the degree in which Norwegian reductionistic and materialistic-based psychiatry regards solid
religious belief as a marked indication of mental illness).
Juklerød was forcibly committed because the psychiatrists meant that he suffered from "noncorrectable delusions about
Norwegian authorities". They gave him the rare (and ridiculous) Kraepelin-diagnosis "Paranoia querulantis".
(Kraepelin, 1856-1929, was a social-Darwinism believer, whose theories and form for diagnosis was essential to the Nazi
ideology with its speculative biological orientation and pseudo-scientific theorising that the majority of mental
disturbances were regarded as inherited, degenerative illnesses or defects. As with so many other intellectuals in pre-
Hitler Germany, he perceived the solution to the social and mental hygiene problems in "the strong man". "A ruler
with unlimited powers to intervene in our lives will lead to the reduction of mental illness in the course of a few
decades!" Unfortunately for Kraepelin, he did not live to see his dream fulfilled, he died in 1929, 4 years before the
take-over of power).
Just before he died in 1996, Juklerød received an official letter from the Department of Education that agreed on all counts
that his version of the old school case from 1971 was correct.
forced medication (chemical lobotomy), sat in isolation for years and had not been allowed to leave the most morbid
section for men at the hospital (a room in "The Norwegian House" that could have been a model for Dante's Inferno).
The other crossbeam in the psychiatrists' diagnosis that kept Juklerød imprisoned under the most debilitating and degrading
conditions was that he was mentally dangerous. He had also worsened in the decades that the hospital had housed him for "treatment".
The deterioration (far beyond the limits of credibility; stretching to the ridiculous) was according to the doctors' opinions due
to his having developed the symptom-free illness (Sic!).
This farce was naturally just a disguised prestige battle where the doctors' professional credibility was on the line and thereby
the psychiatrist's legitimacy as a pillar and renovator of the social system.
Juklerød was a non-typical "patient" within intensive psychiatry. First, he was not "sick " when he
was admitted. Second, he had an indomitable spirit and a physical constitution that made him
resistant to the "treatment". Third, he was non-violent, but most important ... he was led into a
new world whose existence and character he would never have been able to imagine before that
time. He witnessed how the patients were degraded, humbled and destroyed by a system that
supported itself on a speculative theoretical foundation that few would call scientific.
I visited Juklerød sporadically in the last three years of his life. His rich perspective, calm and
thoughtfulness made it natural for a person to trust him.
I asked him once how he had survived all these years and he looked me straight in the eye : "It is a
call. It is a task that I have been given because I am capable of bearing the load."
Madness? Only to the ears of a psychiatrist.
Juklerød's fight became more and more visible in the media. Television crews arrived from The Great
Big World Out There (among others, from Japan). Parliamentarians from the Norwegian
government joined the association Juklerøds Venner (Juklerød's Friends) as did a large group of
intellectuals and artists.
Juklerød made copies of anti-psychiatric articles etc. and stuck them up
on the stairs of the Welfare building in the hospital area. The hospital's Board of
Administration tore them down. They felt that they had been spited, injured ... and they were
"worried for the other patients".
This battle went in waves to and fro for years.
The hospital tried to white-wash itself by "buying itself free" when they offered to sign his release
with an apartment and a job to follow, but Juklerød demanded that an official declaration be
made that the diagnosis was wrong.
This was not possible for the hospital. The loss of prestige would be too great. In addition, this
snowball" could develop into a mighty uncontrollable avalanche ...
The battle continued. On one side, the hospital maintained that Juklerød was "dangerously ill
mentally" and in increasing "deterioration", and on the other side, they did everything they could
to rid themselves of him even though the hospital was bound by law to care for precisely those
mentally ill persons who are a danger for themselves or others".
Juklerød occupied a cornice for a long time by the great stairway in the Velferdbygget (Welfare
building). He lived there with one bed-sitter, coffee percolator, mobile telephone (a gift from one
of the country's leading newspapers) archive cupboard and tobacco for rolling his
cigarettes.He became a type of alternative professional authority for the other patients at the
hospital. They came to him with their problems and he helped them as well as he could.
Amongst others, he managed to stop the practice that the hospital had of administering new
medicines to these helpless patients before the Norwegian State Committee for Control of
Medicines had given their authorization.
Gradually, he built up so much trust with the patients that certain doctors threatened their patients to
stop seeing Juklerød.
The hospital's Board of Administration decided to evict him from the Welfare building and hired two
police guards, who in their spare time earned a good sum of money by hindering Juklerød from
using the toilet etc. in the Welfare building.
Juklerød now lived in a tent on the lawn outside the entrance to the Welfare building.
One cold Winter's day, (this is Norway), the hospital's administrative director decided that the time
was come and pulled the plug on the electricity that was connected to a heater in the tent. While
this took place, a Danish television crew was present and with fascination, filmed the treatment
that mentally dangerous persons in need of care, receive in Norway.
It was a scandal and the Minister of Health, at the time, realised how bad it all appeared and Juklerød
was given a small caravan with electricity and telephone located right outside the Welfare
building.
This is where he stayed the last years of his life before he died as a result of the persecution,
mistreatment and the struggles he had experienced. The letter from the Department of Education
was his last encouragement.
Tokyo-97, and only portraits of Arnold Juklerød are accompanying this website-text) are
portraits of two Norwegian psychiatrists. Neither of them had any connection
with the Juklerød case.
These portraits are unclaimed commissions (even if neither try to caricature nor "build in" elements
that I do not see in the person, my portraits are often rejected by persons in the upper echelons of
Society).
I include these here as an illustration of Life, which, as a "pedagogical fate" develops the individual person.
diametrically opposite lives.
One in the grips of "the force of the Powers-that-Be" and the other two, well paid as the "The Powers-
that-Be" master and servant.