(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
On a windswept island off Tromsø, tents are set up on newly mowed fields. Some Indians from Mexico tag on a caravan. A same joiker in the distance. This year's artist program at the Karlsøy festival is full of non-celebrities. The criticism of society must be beyond Troms. The Afghan Refugee Committee, the Palestine Committee, the Lesbian and Gay Liberation National Association and representatives from the Christiania environment in Copenhagen have all found their way to Karlsøy. Now the counterculture will be celebrated.
Johan Galtung is invited to Karlsøy to talk about international solidarity. Those present will hear the professor of peace research talk about predictions and conspiracies. Galtung predicts US downfall in 2025. If John McCain is elected president, the United States goes down in 2020. Barack Obama is not the solution either.
- Nobama, says Galtung, to laughter from the assembly.
No, Obama belongs to the same wool, according to Galtung. Not everyone gets the dramatic predictions. Some are staggeringly drunk, nodding in agreement.
- Åssen can the USA operate as they do? Why is no one standing up and saying that enough is enough? asks one.
- I am most afraid of those natural disasters. What do you think about it? asks another.
A few weeks later, the same questions are raised further south in Norway – during the Protest Festival in Kristiansand. This week, the festival has gathered bishops and whores, ministers and anarchists from all over Norway in protest against powerlessness and indifference. Retrospectively, one asks whether the struggle of the sixty-eight years ago was in vain. In light of the anniversary of the 40 uprising, the thread "what are we going to form a common front towards now?"
Peace mother Cindy
The program features debates on everything from the Norwegian greed culture to religious fanaticism. At the same time, many are gathering for the events on US warfare and machinery in Iraq and Afghanistan. The themes have broad coverage in the program. September 11th raises the views of who is really behind the attack and why.
One of the highlights is American Cindy Sheehan. On a typical day in early August 2005, she was watching television at home in California. George W. Bush was on screen with a press conference about the war in Iraq. The president called the war "good," and the case was dignified and correct. It was a war every American had to stand behind. Sheehan listened, as upset as when she met Bush in June 2004 with a group of survivors who called for the war to be stopped. The son Casey sacrificed his life in the war that same spring. He turned 24 years old.
- Bush spoke as if there was agreement that the war was wanted and necessary. As if no one could think otherwise. But I meant something else, I had a voice, and I should use it, Sheehan says to Ny Tid after receiving Erik Bye's memorial prize during the festival's official opening.
Peace activist Sheehan became known as the "Peace mom" when she gave the peace movement a face by camping outside Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch at Crawford, Texas on August 6, 2005. Three days earlier, she had sat there, by the side of a camping chair. . In the main house, the president prepared for a five-week vacation and refused to come out. At the same time, the swarm of press people grew. So did the tent camp of supporters around her.
- Bush never came out and it's good, she says today. It had probably weakened the protest base.
- Stick your finger in the ground
Now she wants him sued and has obtained the more than 10.000 signatures needed to run as an independent candidate in the San Francisco congressional election against the Democrats' Speaker of the House, number two in the succession to the presidency, Nancy Pelosi.
– Bush changes the explanation and motive for continuing the war every time his previous explanation falls apart and is to be brought before the Supreme Court. Nancy Pelosi has not contributed to that. Therefore, I oppose her.
Festival coordinator Svein-Egil Haugen and his wife Grete have lived on Karlsøya since 1972. They were among the first to move into one of the back-to-nature collectives. Strongly inspired by the 1968 uprising in the United States, the collectives were a rebellion against the lifestyles of the rest of society. The notion that the world could be made a better place stood strong. With a life in harmony with nature and the soul, utopia was possible. The counterculture took root on Karlsøy.
They wanted to get more like-minded people to the island and Svein-Egil wrote an article in Gateavisa in 1972: «Buy a farm, stick your finger in the ground and sow a carrot seed in the hole afterwards. We see you. Maybe until the summer. "
This is how the dream of Karlsøy became known in the countercultural environment in Norway. Several came and became part of the community. Hippie life on Karlsøy lasted for four years. Then most traveled south again. Peace and harmony were not enough. It was difficult to run organic farming on an island 60 degrees north. The hippies were left with unpaid bills and marital breakdown.
The Haugen couple now run a farm with goats. Svein-Egil is deputy mayor of the Socialist Left Party (SV) and responsible for ICT in Karlsøy municipality. He is afraid the Karlsøy festival is going in the wrong direction. There has been too much work. Too few workers and too little money. Next year, he thinks it will be a summer camp to celebrate the counterculture instead.
- We have become far too big. I'm afraid we're going for a bang and it could come this year, he says.
Svein-Egil himself has put out 110.000 kroner and borrowed 100.000 for the festival. With a thousand paying guests, the festival goes to zero. Now there are mostly only volunteers and speakers on the island. The ferries should soon be full of counterculture.
Root youth
To Kristiansand, the counterculture has come across the Atlantic. When the American filmmaker Donna Musil dived into the lives of children of American soldiers, she found longing, loneliness and fear to show emotion. After growing up with military discipline under his father's command at various military bases around the world, they had to adapt to ordinary, small communities in the United States as adults. Some of these children had the strength to stand up for their own identity. Musil is himself one of them, and participated in the Protest Festival with the multi-award winning documentary Brats: Our journey home. In advance, she had a conversation with award winner Cindy Sheehan about why someone chooses soldier life. According to Musil's investigations, the family life of these soldiers has often gone awry. According to the documentary filmmaker, their children have plastered the wounds with alcohol and crime, extravagant behavior and hatred. Today, 15 million Americans are children of soldiers, or "brats," as Musil calls them.
- The computer age has lobotomized the whole society, says the artist Kohinoor. She has other perspectives on the results of alienation, but the message complements Musils; fear breeds fear. People need roots, belonging, the feeling of being at home a place. Otherwise, a violent target can easily become a substitute.
- Everywhere today one encounters computers that will solve all kinds of tasks. There are machines everywhere. Young people use cards and buttons instead of talking to adults. One must ask why there is such a high suicide profile in the West. That's not the case in Africa. It's worse to be lonely than to starve.
Mari Kohinoor Nordberg got a lot of media attention after her boyfriend was beaten down in Sofienbergparken in Oslo and then left injured by the ambulance personnel who came to the place. "I'm gonna use my name!", She strikes funky from the stage. At the same time, she calls for the fighting spirit of the old 68s, who are reportedly in power in the press and school system today.
- There are many exciting debates going on, but where are the 68s when you need them? At least I experience little support from the authorities when I come forward with an opinion. Where are the so-called SV journalists? she asks.
A greater understanding of the dormancy of the 68-spirit can be found in the book Real Sixty-Eight. Author and professor Tor Egil Førland participated this week at the Protest Festival with views on who they were, where they came from and where they ended up. As he writes, 1968, according to Polish solidarity activist and editor Adam Michnik, is a way of thinking.
- The 68 uprising occurred in the universities. By the time the long march through the corridors, which was their slogan at the time, was at the end of the road, they had reached the top of the ivory towers. But they never got out of there. They came from the universities, and flooded the bookstores and then the media. Today, it is the descendants of Anders Lange who win, while the heirs of the 68s write non-fiction, says Førland.
On overgrown Paths
- No, is not he Jan Bojer? Are you back on overgrown trails? says Guri Hansen.
She is leaning over the fence on the other side of the road in front of the old collective house. Jan Bojer Vindheim walks in tall grass. He came to Karlsøy in 1972 and started one of the collectives there.
- We wrote a little. Printed and stapled Aquarius. Then we went out into the field and raised hay on hoists, says Vindheim.
The work with the magazine Vannbæreren kept the residents of the collective together. It gave life on Karlsøy meaning. The magazine was sent south to the hippies in Slottsparken in Oslo. The aquifer became one of the most important voices for the counterculture in Norway in the 70s.
He now lives in Trondheim and works as a newspaper courier. He also sits on the city council for the Green Party. Vindheim stands on the old plot on Karlsøy. The collective house is burnt down. A hippie is back to utopia.
It's Friday and the solar eclipse is upon us. Heavy clouds make the experience less dramatic. Outside the festival office, seven people hold hands and form a semicircle.
– Come on! We make a ring for peace, says Marion Karlsen.
While the sun disappears behind the moon, the semicircle stands still on the grass. No one comes, and there is no ring. But it is peaceful. Peace is broken later in the day as the ferries dock. The countercultural are in a party mood. Boxes of beer are carried towards the campsite. The celebration seems to go to zero this year as well.
