The Epstein case
The Winter Olympics came in the count’s time. After all the gold medals, the world has again started to ask why Norwegians are so good. Do we still have the answer?
Table of Contents
It actually started earlier OL. Right after the Epstein documents. After Norwegians had for days whipped the Norwegian people’s soul back to the 1990s and well, because four Norwegians and a crown princess had ended up in the Epstein trap, there was only one conclusion to draw among those who always draw it the fastest:
There is something rotten in the Kingdom of Norway.
That has always been the case in a nation raised on fermented food, shipping and municipal councillors, but now it was about the political corruption that arose in the lag between social democratic hegemony, oil wealth and some people in Norway who got too high on themselves and thought they were going to save the world. There is no longer anyone who has spoken together in Youngstorget, they have spoken in New York, in Strasbourg, in the Middle East, on Epstein’s island in the Caribbean. They have started to like oysters for starters, expensive apartments at Frogner and lunches with Bill Gates in Paris.
– One of the worst moments of his presidency
No one in the government may be deeply shaken, least of all the former foreign minister and good friend of the crown prince couple. But now both reputation and royalty are at stake, and it is necessary to act quickly to prevent the last vestige of honor and the entire Nobel Prize from being swept away, someone has obviously thought. This is how a nation with a self-image like a blue whale and a memory like a goldfish thinks.
But no sooner had investigations been set up and an investigation opened, than we received unexpected praise from those we still like to get attention from. Norway, Great Britain and other European countries were highlighted in the American media as examples of how a modern democracy and a liberal rule of law should work. It spread to social media. Norway, for example, had immediately arrested its former prime minister, fired a top diplomat and the queen was about to abdicate, one could read.
Eh, not exactly, Norwegians had to protest out of shame against what had been lost in the translation to the web. But we liked the message. It matched the self-image. Here there is no difference between high and low, here we clean up and crack down hard on corruption, criminal networks and sexual abuse. We may make mistakes, but we correct them. Don’t we?
The seriousness of the matter remainsand it is far from everything that has come to light. We are only at the beginning of seeing the outcome worldwide, not least in the USA. Yesterday, the former British prince, Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten, was arrested, allegedly on suspicion of sharing sensitive information with Epstein. Seen through American eyes, in a country where the president and his Ministry of Justice are trying as best they can to cover up and distort a historic scandal at the top of society, and where at least a thousand victims have fought for decades to be heard and believed, the British and Norwegian reaction appears exemplary open and effective. The list is not long.
But then they caught sight at Klæbo out there. When Johannes Høsflot Klæbo cleaved up the slopes in Cortina as if he were Usain Bolt on flat ground, the audience was enthralled. They wanted more. In a divided world with a new order, where size alone is power, one small Norway became a symbol of the opposite. How could a superpower with 350 million inhabitants be crushed so emphatically by a nation with as many inhabitants as Minnesota?
Trump: Announces new global tariffs
Even alpinist Atle Lie McGrath’s disappointment at riding out, when he threw away his skis and poles and headed for the woods, was embraced as a sign of the times: That’s how I feel now, people wrote.
Newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times wrote almost daily about the Norwegian wonder, NBC made a major report, where they painted an idyllic picture of play and fun, explained the concept of grassroots sports, the ban on topping the team and filtering out too early, about how parents could participate in their children’s lives due to a regulated working life and a lot of free time. All illustrated with laughing happy children in snow and sunshine. In a parenthesis, it was mentioned that Norway can afford to spend billions on sports, but the headline was nevertheless:
We could have had it that way too.
The Norwegian way of being even gets credit for melting ICE. After the brutal ravages of the immigration police in Minnesota, the rest of the United States has gained new respect for a state in the Midwest that people on both coasts often make fun of, partly because it is dominated by staunch Scandinavian descendants who take pride in being “Minnesota Nice”. The population still managed to stand up to ICE without riots and violence on their part, if you ignore some snowballs.
Power without responsibility is dangerous
American politicians and journalists have also made a pilgrimage there in search of cracking the code for how the US can move forward without violent conflicts. The stories they bring back are the same as about Norwegian sports; about a culture of service and a local environment that stands up for each other, includes everyone and takes social responsibility.
The pursuit of the good life is not without conflict, or classless, least of all. There is a whole battalion in social media that has devoted itself to the question of why the Olympics hold circuit championships for white privileged athletes, and it makes indignant Norwegians claim that they skied to school every day, built ski jumps in the forest and pedaled up mountains without a lift. Norwegians sometimes sound like their great-grandparents. An increasingly large part of the population is not born with skis on their feet, and this is not only due to immigration, but climate change, urban life and countless more tempting offers. But they still kick football at Løkka. The Norwegian model is not made just for Johannes Høsflot Klæbo to fly up a hill. It should also give Antonio Nusa the chance to score against Italy.
But is it good? People laughed at Gro already during the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994 when she declared: It is typically Norwegian to be good! They suspected even then that Norwegians are no better than others off the ski track. And that despite the fact that Norwegian diplomats had created peace in the Middle East the year before.
