Norwegian Men’s Rights Activist blogger Eivind Berge, known for his violent rhetoric and rape apologia, has been arrested for death threats against police.
Not too surprising, given that he once announced on his blog that “[k]illing at least one cop is on my bucket list.”
Here are some Google-translated details from a news account here:
The right-wing extremist and anti-feminist blogger Eivind Berge has been arrested for having encouraged and glorified the killing of policemen. The police have found both ammunition and textbooks in use of explosives at Berge.
The police regard the threats as an invitation to others to kill police officers, but also feared that he would commit the acts themselves shortly.
He was evidently arrested on Wednesday. According to this story — at least as far as I can tell from the obviously crude Google translation — he made a specific threat to kill a police officer this Saturday:
Berge also writes about how he was planning to attack a policeman with a knife on a Saturday evening:
“Then I used the trial to come forward as a good example for men, and I considered it to be worth 21 years in prison for premeditated murder.”
According to this account, Berge is being held for two weeks. He claims innocence.
Berge, as readers of this blog may well already know, is a fan of right-wing terrorist and mass murderer Anders Brevik. On his blog, he’s also argued (among other things) that “Rape is Equality.”
He’s glorified the murder of police on his blog numerous times.
Some examples, taken from the second news account:
“… attack on the police is something 100% in harmony with everything I stand for.”
“I maintain that police murder is both ethically and tactically correct.”
Some other examples, direct from his blog (each paragraph is from a separate post; click on the quote for the source):
I viscerally despise cops and wish them the worst. Killing at least one cop is on my bucket list.
If ever a victim of psychiatry, here is what I would do. I would first attempt to kill the cops or whoever tried to apprehend me. Failing that, I would feign docility in order to get out as soon as possible and then kill a representative of the industry as revenge. … killing cops is also very much a men’s issue. Every pig killed is also a blow against feminism, so men should be doubly elated whenever an officer goes down in the line of encroaching on our cognitive liberty.
This was his reaction to a news story about a police officer being killed:
Good news for men is rare in this hateful feminist utopia that is Norway, but today is a joyous day! Today I feel schadenfreude in my heart along with all the hate that feminism and resultant mate deprivation have instilled in me. One blue thug less on the streets.
From another post on the same subject:
The swine Olav Kildal died while trying to enforce our lack of cognitive liberty. This was a defensive, much deserved killing that cheered me up.
Here he threatens a female prosecutor:
To feminist prosecutor Anne Cathrine Aga I have the following message: The Men’s Movement is watching you, bitch, and we are seething with hatred against you personally and the police state you represent. Actions have consequences. Trials are still (mostly) public and they sink into our collective minds, where they form the basis of future activism. Hate breeds hate — that is a fact of life too smugly ignored by feminists. …
2011 is the year Norwegian men as a group emerged out of the blogosphere and into the battlefield. This in turn has led to a breakthrough for MRAs such as my good self in the public discourse, probably for the simple reason that the powers that be now realize ignoring us has deadly consequences. Men are angry now, and we have proven that we are deathly serious about resisting feminism. So the feminist prosecutors referred to above ought to wipe that smug look off their faces before it is too late. Clearly seventy-seven body bags wasn’t enough, but I am fairly confident that you will be sorry one day.
Aside from the explicit threats of violence, the violent and threatening rhetoric here is not unlike much of the rhetoric we see regularly on A Voice for Men and other MRA sites. AVFM founder Paul Elam, for example, told one feminist that:
I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. … We are coming for you.
The blogger Emma the Emo, Berge’s girlfriend, has posted comments here in the past defending him. The news account quotes someone identified as Nataliya Kochergova, described as his girlfriend; I assume this is “Emma,” because what she told the media is similar to what she posted here. She of course denies that he planned any real violence. According to the article, she said:
There are not really threats. He has never had plans to kill someone, he has said several times in his blog. When for example, he says that “the police killings are an effective way to prevent stupid laws,” it’s a factual description and not a threat. Even those who love the police agree with it.
Berge, for his part, has stated publicly that if he had not met Emma, he probably would have killed by now:
At the time I wrote my last blog post, I believed I would probably become Norway’s first modern violent activist in peacetime. Celibacy enforced by a feminist regime had driven me to the point where I saw no other option. I would target the pigs who enforce feminist law, knowing I could realistically at least kill one of them before I would be captured or killed myself. Thus revenge would be assured and if I lived, my reputation as a violent criminal would make me attractive to some women. But then in the nick of time this blog attracted a lovely girl commenting as “Emma.”
This is why I take violent rhetoric from MRAs very seriously.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, MRAs glorify MRA “martyr” Thomas Ball, who killed himself on the steps of a New Hampshire courthouse last year in hopes that his death would inspire MRAs to literally burn down courthouses and police stations.
Ball’s manifesto is still up on A Voice for Men in its “activism” section, including these passages:
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. … This is too important to be using that touchy- feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers
AVFM tastefully omitted Ball’s specific instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails, but left this in:
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
For many more examples of violent threatening rhetoric from MRAs, I urge you to go through some of my posts here and here.
… Why does Eurosabra’s icon keep mutating? Is that normal?
PERMANENT REVOLUTION
You think pick-up artists are bad with the whole aestheticization of power thing, but you third-wavers are kink-positive, so there.
@Ithiliana
“But there’s a SHITLOAD of sociological research on how cultural attitudes (INCLUDING PREJUDICE) are handed on through the generations,”
A clear example is the fascist, hateful use of “Straight white cis males.” Just another example of the hateful feminist power structure endemic is the west. What’s the difference between Nazism which claimed Jews are the problem and feminism which claims straight white cis males are the problem? Nothing at all. Feminism began as a hate movement and it’s the prevailing ideological power structure in the west.
VoIPHuh. I wasn’t familiar with his work, and then I looked it up on Wikipedia, and then…huh. I see he makes broad claims that are not dependent on any one particular culture’s values or norms. That’s…not good. Wikipedia says he relies on Marshall, and don’t we know now that Marshall just made a whole lot of his stuff up?
I don’t know that we can say Marshall, “made a whole lot of his stuff up,”, though (as with Mead) there are some questions of methodology.
The biggest problem with Grossman; in the culture he’s trying to describe (the Armies of the West) is that the way in which he uses Marshall is to take a stat (only 15 percent of troops in a firefight were firing) and then extrapolating (without explaining) that the 15 percent in firefight A are the same 15 percent in firefight B.
It’s not supportable. It’s not supportable on the evidence; unless his claims of normativity on the part of people are false.
Because either the US Army managed to improve its shoot-rate (which is his claim, that positive reinforcement training with more realistic targets led to shoot rates significantly higher; by the time of Vietnam, and even higher by the 1980s, rising to as much as 90 percent), or it didn’t.
The evidence, from firefights, is that the relative shoot-rate didn’t change much. Why do I say this? Because the relative casualty rates don’t change enough. The problem is that the US hasn’t fought force on force engagements much in the 40 years since Vietnam.
Where there has been such combat i.e. well trained troops (harder to dig out, because it’s more isolated), the US hasn’t inflicted, infantry to infantry, outstandingly differential casualty rates.
So that implies that Marshall’s fundamental claim (troops shoot when they are feeling directly threatened/are immediately aware of a threat to a comrade) still seems to hold.
It’s not, I think, Grossman’s thesis that people are fundamentally unwilling to kill, it’s that they don’t want to be killed. Firing, during a firefight, gets one shot at. If your side seems to be winning, why stick your head up? If you are getting your ass handed to you, keeping your head down is smart.
It’s when the fight is in question/you(or your friends) are at risk (which risk can be countered), that people are willing to court death.
That, at least, was my takeaway from the book, when all was said and done.
Which was, for all that he has some interesting theories, nothing really new; and the ending (a paean to the need to censor video games and movies [against violence, not sex, but still censorship]) failed to convince me that the thesis supported the conclusion.
But he’s made a minor career out of it, mostly because he has, COL. in front of his name.
@Scapemind; LOLWUT?
Can we add something like, “Before stonewall, lesbians didn’t exist” to the Book ‘o Larnin’? Cuz this was priceless:
That’s just dishonest, MollyRen. You must know he was talking about gay men not lesbians. Rename it the Book o’ Straw Larnin’. Why attribute that funny list of factoids to NWOslave when you’re writing the jokes yourself?
Scrapemind: While Molly mahy have misunderstood NWO, that’s not a great crime… he’s often unintelligible.
And the reason for the Book o’ Larnin, is that those are things he’s said. Some of them (say Spanish and Russian using the same alphabet) are direct quotations.
I mean, if you want to limit “gay” to just “men”, go ahead. But that doesn’t mean lesbians don’t *exist*, and the fact that they exist makes his statement that “When being gay wasn’t considered acceptable, women didn’t accept it” kinda silly.
Kink is consensual. Both people know what they’re getting into. Power exchanges are negotiated.
Pick-up artists don’t ask “hi, I’d like to emotionally manipulate you for sex, what do you say?” They play power games without consent.
Apart from anything else, I’m not sure that everyone here is actually third wave. I’m pretty sure we have a few people who’re more second wave.
In addition to that, are you under the impression that feminist kinksters advocate just walking up to random people and involving them in kink scenes without their consent? Like you just slap a pair of handcuffs on anyone you find attractive and you’re good to go? Because I’m afraid that’s not how it works.
“What’s the difference between Nazism which claimed Jews are the problem and feminism which claims straight white cis males are the problem? Nothing at all.”
NWO this question ought to be simple enough — where are the ovens?
Fascist really doesn’t mean “generic bad thing” either btw. (And going for Nazis as a rhetorical device? You just Godwin’ed)
‘Sfunny because in the Commonwealth my kink is legal and your thwacky thwack isn’t. Eh, Community Standards are right, ‘cept when they ain’t.
I think if PUA could ditch the essentialism of gender and just be a kink, it would be less problematic.
The other thing about non-consensual PUA power games is that they’re weak sauce, depending totally on someone’s indoctrination as a people-pleaser. Double binds like “Prove you’re an adventurous girl, leave with me now…” have no real power, except to PUAs stroking the fetish/talisman. Most of the old stuff of that genre has faded away.
It might make you feel better to pretend the people you and your fellow PUAs lie to on a regular basis are secretly in on it, and it’ll just good fun for all involved, but come the fuck on. You’re not fooling anybody but yourself.
Mens rights has nothing to do with violence but of course an MRA like this is a psycho but people will tag whim with the rest of the mens rights movement. However when radical feminists come out and say how they want to throw little boys into closed windows or exterminate men off the planet in the same way the Nazis did to people everyone still takes their side.
Manboobz, you are just a pile of trash but you don’t surprise me. You’re a poor, sad white man who is too afraid to defend himself from obvious injustices and who constantly tries to defend feminism and women as if it’ll get you somewhere with them. It won’t. They hate you just as much as any other (white) man.
Who? This guy isn’t MRA. Isn’t manboobz feminists?
It looks like suffragettes set fire to a lot of things:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=9&ix=h9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=“tom+martin”+lse+gender#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=suffragettes+set+fire&oq=suffragettes+set+fire&gs_l=serp.3..0i30j0i5i30.3833.70331.0.72822.36.23.0.0.0.6.544.2461.13j4j3j5-1.23.0…0.0.SixfWroE-v8&
Mind you, they were only lady fires, so presumably that’s okay to manboobzers.
Martin: Are you seriously equivocating property damage with death?
Of course! Also, hard chairs are misandry!
Tom, you’re the star of a movie: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/13281965/tom-martin-on-chairs-and-whores
never heard of him…. an MRA you say…. i c.
@Wave theory: trying to distinguish different feminist theories by ‘waves’ is not a bad start, but like every other heuristic, it vastly oversimplifies.
I’m not sure the difference between second and third wave feminisms is only focused on sex positive feminism–there are also some major issues race and class and intersectionality.
The “Sex Wars” (http://sitemaker.umich.edu/lesbian.history/the_sex_wars) were part of the conflicts in feminism during the 1970s, but so were critiques by womanists/feminists of color (http://noteasybeingred.tumblr.com/post/206038114/alice-walkers-definition-of-a-womanist-from-in).
Also, conflicts between liberal, radical, and separatist feminists too place at more or less the same time–and there was lots of overlaps.
And there are some discussions already about possible/existing Fourth Wave (http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/23/fourth-wave-part-one/).
Wow, we’re honored by a visit from TOM AKA: SoreButt MARTIN?
WOOT!
*puts on new troll stomping boots in honor of the occasion*