[Archived] Norway

[philipl]

Glenn Beck descends to the lowest level of scum with these comments

[vizcaya]

Glenn Beck descends to the lowest level of scum with these comments

The scumbag whose name shall not be mentioned said something similar himself, referring to the members of the Labour Youth Party as "Stoltenberg Jugend".

Anyway, absolutely appalling comments, makes me sick.

[herbergeehh]

Nothing new from G.B., he's absolute scum, and lives in a world not too far off Norway's most hated.. His favourite hobbies are comparing things to nazi-Germany and fighting multiculturalism.

an earlier reply I still find amusing... you'd have to see Glenn Beck's TV performances first though.

Jon Stewart

But Glenn Beck cannot undo what the people of Oslo and about every other Norwegian city did tonight.

'He took some of our best roses, but he can't stop spring'

[dave birch]

Not much I can add, there's a feeling of emptiness, of frustration that things like this happen.

My good lady wife passed this on to me.

It's not in the harshness of the happenings in Norway, but it may give some hope for personal resolution that can be required at times like these.

"Who is Forgiveness For?

By Prakriti Tandon

July 21, 2011

By Prakriti Tandon -

The Story

Some 21 months ago, my mother was the victim of an armed robbery. Barely a month into our MAPP year, two unassuming gunmen posed as University students looking for housing and manipulated their way into the office that my parents have presided over for nearly 4 decades. They pulled out guns and blunt-force objects from beneath their jackets, bound my mother’s hands and feet with duct tape, and demanded to know “where the money was.”

My parents had for years kept a reserve of cash in the office for contractors who generally lived hand-to-mouth and needed advances not just to start jobs, but immediate cash payments upon completion of a task. My trusting parents used something of an honor code in their place of work, leaving these funds in each worker’s folder for them to access when they came to the office. There had been petty thefts and burglaries over the years, but the system worked better than not, and despite my mother’s wariness and occasional protests, my father’s compassion for his workers won out, and the system continued.

Bound hands

Alas, a day would come when their trust would be abused in the most grotesque way. As the first armed assailant, the shorter and stockier of the two, ripped more duct tape from the roll to wrap around my mother’s head and mouth, she inquired in her mild and steady voice, “Why are you doing this, son? What do you want?” The perpetrator responded to her maternal sobriquet with an epithet. “Shut up bitch!” he shouted, and struck my gentle mother in the face with the long blunt weapon he wielded.

The FBI agent handling the case still smiles when he hears how my mother called the lead perpetrator “son,” as only a mild and compassionate mother could. By now, after several phone conversations and face-to-face meetings with my mother, countless hours spent studying the details of the case, and years of face-to-face encounters with the most unsavory specimens of our humanity, he has a finely tuned radar for good and evil. His smile, a delicate Duchenne fusion of admiration and bewildered awe, conveys his recognition of my mother as the very best of humanity in the face of the very worst.

What the Story Teaches

Hold in the light

Revisiting this experience tempts me to tears every time, not just because it is my beloved mother I must envision in this distressing scenario, but also because of the utter perversity of one human being responding so violently to the diametrically opposed compassion of another.

For my mother, revisiting this trauma reminds her (in her words) “to hold them in the light.” Translation: forgive their transgressions and seek not their demise, but their upliftment. From whence does this transcendence come? How is my mother able not just to allay her anger and to practice forgiveness, but actually to desire the elevation of her aggressors?

My mother came upon one piece of writing in particular in the aftermath of her trauma that she reverted to time and again to help her navigate the path of healing. Let it be known, she should have earned an honorary MAPP degree for her unquenchable thirst for all of our reading materials. She drank up every book I brought home, and still desired more. My one-time college professor mother and self-professed literary fiend just couldn’t get enough (while I perhaps had more than I could chew), and it was while poring over one of her favorites, Sonia Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness, that she came upon an excerpt on forgiveness.

Learning to Forgive

In this section, entitled “Learning to Forgive,” Lyubomirsky emphasizes that forgiveness is “something that you do for yourself and not for the person that has wronged you.” I marvel at the counter-intuitive nature of this statement; don’t we generally think of forgiveness as an altruistic act?

It was in watching my mother navigate this ordeal that I understood that the true benefit of forgiveness lies in the more selfish act of allowing it into our lives. During these difficult months, my mother faced a potential punishment that was even weightier than any the perpetrators might receive. She risked life imprisonment from her own anger, her own “unforgiveness,” as Worthington and Scherer label the stress reaction that most victims of an interpersonal transgression experience immediately following the transgression.

Nelson Mandela

Lyubomirsky relays a story to underscore this point: former President Bill Clinton asked Nelson Mandela how he was able to bring himself to forgive his jailers, and Mandela responded, “When I walked out of the gate I knew that if I continued to hate these people I was still in prison.” Forgiveness seems to be a necessity, not a choice, if one is to move forward in life free, weightless, resilient. Indeed, Worthington and Scherer find that “Forgiveness can be used as an emotion-focused coping strategy to reduce a stressful reaction to a transgression.”

Other studies indicate the same, a positive correlation between forgiveness and resilience. Doctoral researcher Broyles finds a statistically significant, though low, correlation between forgiveness and resilience.

A Resilient Tree

So what might we do to bolster the relationship between forgiveness and resilience? How might we maximize the utility of forgiveness as a tool toward springing back to flourishing after an adverse event?

Stephen Post talks at length about reaching out to help others as a solid avenue toward flourishing, and I can just imagine the benefits to victims who seek to forgive not just to enhance their own flourishing, but also to embrace the elevation of their own aggressors. But that’s a study for another day (readers: please feel free to be inspired and conduct a study on this! Study participants 1 and 2: My mother and Nelson Mandela).

As the trial date approaches and my mother prepares to face her aggressors once more, she is a paragon of forgiveness and the consequent resilience. No doubt she’ll have a copy of The How of Happiness on-hand to steady her course should she feel her anger rise up or her resolve weaken.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

References

Broyles, L.C. (2005). Resilience: Its relationship to forgiveness in older adults. Doctoral Dissertation. Retrieved from gradworks.umi.com. (3177245).

Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin Books.

Post, S. and Neimark, J. (2007). Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life by the Simple Act of Giving. New York: Broadway Books.

Worthington, E. and Scherer, M. (2004). Forgiveness is an emotion-focused coping strategy that can reduce health risks and promote health resilience: Theory, review, and hypotheses. Psychology & Health, 19, 385-405.

I

This article first appeared on Positive Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here.

Prakriti ("Paki") Tandon, MAPP '10 has several years experience in the Media/Television space. Most recently, she was an anchor and producer at CNBC-TV18 in New Delhi, India. Paki is now working on several projects for the media space, and hopes to fuse her passion for positive psychology with her talents and skills on camera."

Like I said, it's not in the scope of horror of Oslo, but may give something to hold onto and a sense of forgiveness may help in the healing process.

The bit that stands out for me is this:

"former President Bill Clinton asked Nelson Mandela how he was able to bring himself to forgive his jailers, and Mandela responded, “When I walked out of the gate I knew that if I continued to hate these people I was still in prison.” "

I trust that our Norwegian friends take this as it is given; in the hope that you find a resolution to your grief and a return to normality.

db

[john.leigh]

very eloquent piece from Gamst in the LET

http://www.lancashiretelegraph.co.uk/sport/football/blackburn_rovers/news/9159855.Blackburn_Rovers_star_calls_on_team_to_honour_Norwegian_victims/

A sad time for a proud nation. The least that we can do as a club is honour the victims of this pointless waste of life. I'm sure the players, club and fans around the world will all unite with you in paying respect to your fellow countrymen. I for one do.

[Miker]

Surely the idea must be to stop the creating of those home-bred psychopaths and demented individuals by making sure we live in the best, most tolerant society possible?

Yes, this is exactly correct. I am really concerned at hearing people saying we should be ignoring what this guy is saying, blaming video games and calling him insane/crazy/demented etc.

This guys was fully aware of what he was doing. He was doing it to send a message and he was doing it to protect the values he holds so dear that he would kill and die for them. I'm not saying this in defence of him, I don't care for him, his values or his actions one bit, but to turn our backs on this and say "he was just a nut, it was an isolated incident" is just plain dangerous and wrong.

The anti-Muslim and right-wing views he holds and the values he proudly fights for are not uncommon, and in fact they are in the majority, but obviously with varying degrees of seriousness and extremism. These are views of people in countries all over the world, people are dying every day from internal conflicts within nations over ethnic and cultural purity or rights. The fact that this has happened in Norway, one of the more peaceful and tolerant countries of the world, is a shock and a tragedy, but it simply shows the extent of this problem on a global scale.

I hope this issue prompts open and intelligent discussion, but I fear it will make things even harder than they already are, in a discussion fraught with friction and anger. The problem with many debates, especially now with the Internet acting as a forum, is it's too easy for people with significantly radical or intolerant views to be quickly dismissed, abused and vilified thereby antagonising the situation and the person. This is partly to blame for people like this mass murderer, who has resorted to extreme methods to get his message across, as it was likely dismissed elsewhere. The problem with getting dismissed by a large number of people, is they look for other, like-minded individuals, so that they can perpetuate and strengthen their values and ideas. Once you get a lot of like-minded individuals in one place massaging each other's egos, you get an incite to rebellion and terrorism, and occasionally revolution.

Now I'll stop there, as I've vaguely alluded to a number of concepts in history, politics, philosophy and sociology, and if I keep going the scope of my post will get too large. However, I would like to make a call on here (and everywhere else) to show greater tolerance to people, especially the ones with largely different views on life than you. Don't ignore them, don't disregard them, don't vilify them and certainly don't accept them, but keep engaging them in discussion, keep looking for a solution to your differing world views. You'll likely never reach one, but as long as you're keeping them engaged, you're pacifying them and that's extremely important.

My thoughts and deepest condolences go out to the deceased, their families and friends, and the people of Norway. An unnecessary waste of life and a horrible tragedy.

[philipl]

Roger Cohen in the New York Times I think gets it spot on:

European Christendom in this context is a mirror image of the idealized caliphate of Osama bin Laden. It is a dream-world cause through which to enlist the masses in apocalyptical warfare against an “infidel” enemy supposedly threatening the territory, morals and culture of an imagined community of devout believers.

This particular Christian Europe — the Continent is overwhelmingly secular for reasons that have nothing to do with a growing Muslim presence — is just as fantastical as a restored 7th-century dominion of the caliph. Bin Laden inveighed against “crusaders.” Breivik attended a 2002 meeting to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. This is the stuff of video games — except that it kills real teenagers of all faiths.

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at “multiculturalist” liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda’s anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

[jim mk2]

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at "multiculturalist" liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda's anti-infidel poison:.

Alf, are you reading ?

[thenodrog]

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at multiculturalist liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaedas anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

Oh so those bombers are OK now then Gunner?

It all just validates the 'equal and opposite reactions' theory imo.

[SuperCat]

Oh so those bombers are OK now then Gunner?

It all just validates the 'equal and opposite reactions' theory imo.

"those bombers" are definately not OK in 99% of peoples eyes, neither is this lunatic.

Unfortunately there is always that 1% of nutters that carry out these terrible acts.

Now I'll stop there, as I've vaguely alluded to a number of concepts in history, politics, philosophy and sociology, and if I keep going the scope of my post will get too large. However, I would like to make a call on here (and everywhere else) to show greater tolerance to people, especially the ones with largely different views on life than you. Don't ignore them, don't disregard them, don't vilify them and certainly don't accept them, but keep engaging them in discussion, keep looking for a solution to your differing world views. You'll likely never reach one, but as long as you're keeping them engaged, you're pacifying them and that's extremely important.

Great post my friend.

[philipl]

Oh so those bombers are OK now then Gunner?

It all just validates the 'equal and opposite reactions' theory imo.

Are you really this stupid?

[Miker]

Oh so those bombers are OK now then Gunner?

They're both exactly the same. Terrorists with different ideologies bred in the same environment.

I think the point is that there was a lot of discrimination laid towards Muslims due to the suicide bombers, but we see that it's not just Islam that creates this sort of people.

Both were driven to their acts by having a set of values they were so passionate about that they were willing to die or kill for them just to send a message.

Personally, I believe intellectual thought and reasoning fails once a person can't exercise even a small degree of doubt about their views.

[Paul]

Yes, this is exactly correct. I am really concerned at hearing people saying we should be ignoring what this guy is saying, blaming video games and calling him insane/crazy/demented etc............................

Excellent post Miker. Sadly it will be misunderstood or ignored or both by those who need to take on board the message.

[Miker]

Excellent post Miker. Sadly it will be misunderstood or ignored or both by those who need to take on board the message.

Thanks guys. When posting on something like this it's difficult to assess how people will interpret or react to it, but it's good to know it's getting a positive response.

[thenodrog]

Are you really this stupid?

You made the direct comparision not me remember.

btw yesterdays news suggested that unless Norway can pin a crime against humanity charge against him to replace a multiple murder charge this evil bugger can be out of prison in 12 years.

If he was incarcerated in a graveyard that would solve any issues I'd suggest. No doubt someone will be along soon to decry this but I don't envy them their task.

[RoyRover]

My deepest sympathies go out to the victims, their families and the people of Norway for this horrific event. Pure evil.

A friend of my Dad's is home in Belfast at the minute, with his family. He lives and works in Oslo. His children would have been on Utøya had they not been in Belfast. My mum was down in Dublin on Tuesday meeting up with a friend of hers who has been on holiday in Ireland. Her son who is with them, got a text from his best friend, who was on the island, saying that he was safe but his girlfriend had been killed. Truely awful.

[rog of the rovers]

Always though Morrisey was an idiot.

Over rated Manc talks rubbish....

[Miker]

btw yesterdays news suggested that unless Norway can pin a crime against humanity charge against him to replace a multiple murder charge this evil bugger can be out of prison in 12 years.

Is it Norway that has the best prison conditions in the world? Either Norway or Sweden I'm pretty sure.

Yes it is Norway

http://www.christianpost.com/news/anders-behring-breivik-likely-to-serve-time-in-luxurious-prison-53044/

[philipl]

Norway also has the most effective prison system in the world if measured by rate of re-offending.

That is surely what matters in assessing any criminal justice system.

As for the monster who embarked on the mass slaughter, I understand there are provisions under Norwegian law for him to be given rolling 5 year incremental sentences every five years over and above whatever initial tariff he is given.

The greater worry for me is that the prosecution do not bungle the trial in such a way that there is any chance for any individuals or group to sympathise when Breivik tries to mount his political prisoner defence.

[thenodrog]

Norway also has the most effective prison system in the world if measured by rate of re-offending.

That is surely what matters in assessing any criminal justice system.

As for the monster who embarked on the mass slaughter, I understand there are provisions under Norwegian law for him to be given rolling 5 year incremental sentences every five years over and above whatever initial tariff he is given.

The greater worry for me is that the prosecution do not bungle the trial in such a way that there is any chance for any individuals or group to sympathise when Breivik tries to mount his political prisoner defence.

Ryan, Bird and Anderson at least solved that issue by saving their last round for themselves. As with OBL there is no future issue incarceration to be discussed with them. A similar end to Breivik would be the best solution for any civilised society to prevent him 're-offending'.

[Miker]

Ryan, Bird and Anderson at least solved that issue by saving their last round for themselves. As with OBL there is no future issue incarceration to be discussed with them. A similar end to Breivik would be the best solution for any civilised society to prevent him 're-offending'.

I think the problem with killing him is that there is always that chance he'll become a martyr for someone.

Reason I brought up the prison issue is because I can't imagine he'd be too worried about spending a large part of his life, or indeed, even the rest of his life in there. Kinda sickening that he'll have a better lifestyle than a large number of people living in third world countries.

I can't fault Norway's approach to the prison system though, as it has been a massive success for them so far.

[Commondore]

I think the problem with killing him is that there is always that chance he'll become a martyr for someone.

Reason I brought up the prison issue is because I can't imagine he'd be too worried about spending a large part of his life, or indeed, even the rest of his life in there. Kinda sickening that he'll have a better lifestyle than a large number of people living in third world countries.

I can't fault Norway's approach to the prison system though, as it has been a massive success for them so far.

Define "better"... Few things are worse than being robbed of your freedom and your dignity. Also, isn't the problem with people in prison living a "better" life than some people in the third world about the state of the world rather than Norwegian prison conditions?

[MeanGreenMachine]

He will be warm, fed and watered. Thats more than some people in England, never mind the third world.

[Miker]

Define "better"... Few things are worse than being robbed of your freedom and your dignity. Also, isn't the problem with people in prison living a "better" life than some people in the third world about the state of the world rather than Norwegian prison conditions?

Not faulting Norway's prison system or saying there's a problem with it. Just saying it's a sickening thought that scum like him have a place to sleep, eat and even do recreational activities, while there's people being born into poverty and into living conditions that are simply horrendous.

It does say a lot about the state of the world.

[alexanders]

If he survives in prison that is. There have been an interview with a prisoner talking about the rank system inside the prison. Lowest rank is pedophiles. This guy comes lower than that.