Norwegian martyrs-six dark stories about Norway.
Norway is a small country in this world. A sparsely populated land with a short history as an independent nation.
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. The first story deals with the longest classic non-violent civil disobedience action in post-war Norway. The 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.
Sorry.
Sorry? After the man had been imprisoned without rights or a fair trial since 1971 : The steadfast labourer who had endured 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.
May he rest in Peace. A Norwegian resistance man. A martyr.
The pictures 6 and 7 (artist comments 20th Aug-00; this is my catalogue-essay for the exhibition in 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.
Juklerød and these two psychiatrists are the same age, born and brought up in Norway, but with two 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.
It is said that we are all equal in the eyes of God, but what a distance is built up before this Final Meeting.

2. The pictures 8 and 9 are also a dichotomy between two Norwegian extremes, exemplified by
two solid authentic faces.
Picture No.8 is a portrait of the closest one is able to come in regards to Norwegian nobility and aristocracy. The man, who is now retired and has transferred the estate to one of his sons, was the heir by right of birth and later owner, of one of the country's largest estates.
The man in Picture No.9 is a rebel on a small farm deep within the Finnskog region. He is an ardent orthodox Communist, elected to the municipal council for many years in his district, watched over and blacklisted in the Norwegian variant of MacCarthyism which exploded as a case in the media with the Lund Commission last year.
3. Pictures 10 and 14 are portraits of the same man. A heavily alcoholised tramp in Oslo, who in likeness with many thousands of others, was injured physically and especially mentally from being seamen on board the Norwegian Merchant Navy's fleet during World War 11. This was without doubt, the greatest war effort contributed by Norway (amongst others, Norwegian ships were instrumental in keeping the Murmansk convoys in operation and thereby the two-front war that broke the back of the Wehrmacht).
These seamen, if they survived German mines, fighter planes, submarines and destroyers, went ashore to a post-war Norway that did not recognise their effort and refused them the respect, help and reward that they deserved. Many perished, also after the war had ended.
4. Picture No.11 is a portrait of an old woman of immigrant origin. Her predecessors fled from hunger further East (Finland) to the great forests of Eastern Norway several centuries ago. They supported themselves on meagre plots of land; the husks of a few acres of forest and grew a little grain, some potatoes in the thin ash-filled soil. When the land no longer yielded a crop, they repeated the process.
At a point in time, timber became Norway's greatest export item besides fishing and the farmers who owned forest and the Church saw the makeshift farmers as "pests". A bounty was introduced on these. By delivering a pair of cut-off cars to the higher authority's representative one could be paid a bounty "prize".
The woman in the picture is partially paralyzed by a brain hemorrhage. She has lost the ability to talk, but she remembered ... she remembered.
5.Picture No.12 is a portrait of a woman from the ethnical minority group of "tater" (gypsies) who were a nomadic race in Norway. They had their own culture, language and traditions. They were great craftsmen who sold their services to the permanent Norwegian residents. Hate and contempt for the gypsies became a part of Norwegian culture over a few centuries. It ended in genocide.
"Most are retards and cause the school a lot of trouble. They inherit their parents' low intelligence. They belong to an inferior race of people who are always recruiting from the pits of Society. On an intellectual scale, the Norwegian wanderers are in a class with Negroes, Red Indians and Mexicans. Socially and psychologically, they are in a class with hardened criminals."
This is an excerpt from a scientific periodical, written by a medic in war-time Norway. The medical &Iite, especially within psychiatry were influenced to the extreme by German theories on race hygiene.
Hate towards "the wanderers" (a term also used for gypsies was so strong in the countryside that the Labour Party representative, Ole 0. Ihler, in Sør-Odal e.g., made a proposal to the municipal council to quite simply shoot gypsies). The motion was defeated with 15 votes against 8 votes for.
Den Norske Omstreifermisjon (The Norwegian Wanderer Mission) was established in 1897 and it is documented that their work also included torture, child kidnapping, and being a party to causing violent bodily injury. Once again, the big villain in this drama is psychiatry which has a hair-raising statistic which includes forced intervention (amongst others, lobotomy) and forced treatment of gypsies, because they were gypsies.
The Norwegian Health Authorities carried out a program for forced sterilization that you would have to look at Hitler-Germany to find a parallel. The gypsies were quite simply eradicated in Norway.
The discussion on the genocide of the Norwegian gypsies raises questions on materialism. Did this give and does it give psychiatry's and Darwinism's development the testimonial that materialistic thinking in the last instance does not have room for humanism and humane treatment? Does materialism reduce the human viewpoint to being mechanical? If so, can such a materialism be defended in an age of gene technology?
6. The last of these "dark stories" deals with the Jews fate in Norway with the German invasion. Picture no. 13 is a voice for the Jewish population where almost every one was collected by the Norwegian state police, handed over to the German occupation forces and sent further to their final destiny in the German extermination camps. Only a handful of the Norwegian Jews survived the war. This is in contrast to for instance, the Danish Jews who were protected by the Danish authorities and the Danish people.
Epilogue.
I am sitting in a room and looking out across probably, one of the world's purest and most beautiful landscapes-the Lofotfjell mountains in Northern Norway. Each day, I go skiing in the mountains (there is two meters of snow here still). There is cod from the Lofot fishing catch everywhere, hanging up to become dried cod.
In this idyll, I bear a dulled, dark view of the future with me. The wind carries a scent of downfall and I fear for the day when we no longer defend out humanity and sink down into inhumanity.
May, 1997 By Reinhardt Søbye