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.
I love this. If you’re going to treat sex and, um, alpha-ness(?) as commodities, then there ought to at least be a free market.
What you’ve got isn’t selling? You can improve your product, lower your price (um, not quite sure what that means here, but maybe “consider women other than skinny submissive 20-year-olds”), or step up your advertising. Or you can take down your shingle and quit.
What you can’t do is curse the market and rant about how it ought to just give you money because you tried so hard. You can’t flip out at people for not being your customers. And you definitely can’t steal from people and claim you only did it because they wouldn’t buy from you.
Vaginas are money? Fine. Keep your goddamn hands off my money.
(I know this little rant is ridden with terrible implications, but that’s inevitable when you’re working in the “sex as transaction” model.)
Yeah, his physical appearance has nothing to do with him not getting as much sex as he wants.
Here are two other photos of him I found:
http://www.ba.no/nyheter/article6139884.ece
http://g.api.no/obscura/pub/978x1200r/04402/1341588907000_BA56325_4402582978x1200r.jpg
Like most MRAs, he needs everyone else (well, men) to feel the same way he does – for example, the notion that no man would refuse sex with a woman – so that he can feel he isn’t responsible for his actions. He needs them to want the same things so that he can feel he is entitled to those things.
And in so doing, he strips himself of the basic humanity of wanting something. It’s no longer a personal, individual trait, but a categorical huMan thing. He’s too scared to speak for himself. So he has to convince people – and himself – that he’s speaking for everyone.
You do not speak for me, MRAs. You speak only for yourselves, whether you want to or not, whether you’re human enough to own yourselves or not.
(Longish-time reader, first time commenting. Hi!)
I actually saw this happen. I went to a flower shop to pick up a bouquet a friend had ordered, and the whole place reeked of cigarettes. The owner was shrieking at somebody about how unreasonable she was being for wanting something the owner didn’t have in stock. She closed down about a month later.
@Quackers, Eivind actually disagrees with Breivik on some salient points:
In other words, unlike the apologists who empathized with Breivik’s cause and decried his methods, Eivind approves of mass murder even if it wasn’t for quite the right reasons.
Yeah, it was time for the authorities to take him in.
Hi Alantas. Welcome. 🙂
@NWO we are not ridiculing men for saying “I wouldn’t fuck her” because we think they really would fuck us. We say it because we don’t give a shit. It is not causing any of us pain to know that men out there don’t want to have sex with us.
I suppose you can’t wrap your head around that, because in your head, a woman not wanting to have sex with you is the worst possible punishment ever.
@ Alex
Can you read the first article you linked to? I’m just curious what the press in Norway are saying about him.
@NWO:
So basically you’re saying that Man’s truth is still in accordance with the ancient Greek tradition of having sex with boys? And with the Spartan tradition of leaving weak babies to die? And with Alexander the Great’s CONQUER EVERYTHING? And with Gengis Khan’s CONQUER AND HAVE SEX WITH EVERYTHING? And with the geocentric views of the church? And with the idea of spontaneous generation, or flies being born from rotting meat? And with the ignorance of the existance of germs? And with the idea that alcohol is perfectly fine? And with the idea that alcohol is an abomination that should be banned? And that alcohol is perfectly fine? And that smoking is harmful? And that doctors smoke since it’s so healthy? And with the idea that black people are sub-human and should be slaves? And with the idea that black people are sub-human even if they shouldn’t be slaves? And with the idea that fat women are the ideals of beauty? And with the idea that skinny women are the ideals of beauty? And with the idea that only women photoshopped to remove their thighs and lengthen their necks and enlarge their breasts are the ideals of beauty? And so on and so on?
History is rife with mistakes that humankind has moved past, and there is still so much in modern times that should be changed. Women’s truth has followed the herd of men, because women weren’t granted the ability to form their own opinion. Man’s truth has changed so much that your (NWO) own morals would be completely unrecognizable to men of the past, just as much as our morals our unrecognizable to you. Women as well as men still fight to hold on to the traditions they’ve grown up with, and women as well as men fight to correct those parts of tradition that are proven faulty. Your solipsistic notions of who’s fighting what battle is irrelevant; positive change will continue to happen throughout the rest of human history, and you and your ilk are on the losing side.
NWO, you’re out in fine form today I see.
This whole “women follow the herd thing” — who exactly is leading the herd then? You’ve got only a couple of options here, either cultural shifts just happen, men lead them, or women do…in none of those cases do you get to claim that women just do what is popular.
So if your ex shows up really late, and drunk, wanting to talk, and you relent and let her in, and end up deciding it’s probably safer if she spend the night, is it sweet or neutral when you wake up with her on top of you?
How about when your landlady says you can pay rent in sex, or be homeless? Sweet or neutral?
Both those happened to men I know, neither considers it either sweet or neutral.
Re: Vagina Monologues — didn’t we already go over how no one here supports including that rape one? I’d have sworn I’d mentioned that all I really know of the monologues is that that one gets a lot of criticism.
And debtor’s prisons are unconstitutional under most state’s constitutions btw. But your problem isn’t debtor’s prisons is it? No, it’s more like how you think divorce should never be legal.
@Argenti:
Asking NWO to recognize that we don’t support something he says we do is like watching a streaming video with a bad internet connection. You get a long period of silence followed by having to sit through the whole thing from the beginning.
“And so on and so on?”
Pretty sure they do believe that women are hysterical because wombs wander if not “engaged with” often enough. I have a song for this, one that will royally upset NWO. (Everyone else, please give it at least 3 lines before going ARGH as it is actually parody)
http://youtu.be/q-PX2Z4r-e4
NWO, what happened to going out and getting a job as a housekeeper? Go do something that makes you happy.
kirbywarp:
Welp, botched that blockquote.
This whole “women follow the herd thing” — who exactly is leading the herd then?
Men, but not white Christian men, so they don’t count. Oh, they may look white, but every man in a position of power is secretly black, Arab, and/or Jewish. Except for Rupert Murdoch.
This is the first time I’ve seen someone argue that only women are capable of learning and changing, and this is proof that men are superior. Points for creativity.
@nwoslave
“The only one’s fighting this “progressive” truth are men. Man’s truth hasn’t changed. Women’s truth has followed the herd. That’s why MRAs are bad, they refuse to alter the truth to follow the herd.”
Yes, all men everywhere throughout history have believed the same thing. No men have ever had disagreement or conflicts based over opposing concepts of truth. Only women take part in culture. In fact, I never even left this comment because, being a man, I am physiologically incapable of disagreeing with you.
Also, I like how you admit that men took part in Pederasty in ancient Greece, but you blame the mothers of their victims for it. Not the men who actually did it. It wasn’t their fault somehow, it was all the women’s fault all the time. It was their fault that they didn’t… murder all the pederasts I guess. I can’t even follow your fucking logic anymore. The point is that you claim that “men’s truth never changes” when the one example you gave of “women’s truth” changing is something that men were responsible for that you are now against. Your argument isn’t even coherent.
…no man is able to proposition a woman?
Even in the strange reality inside your head, you cannot honestly believe that no man in the history of the world has told a woman he’d like to have sex with her. But, hey, if this is somehow in doubt, I can offer you definitive real-world examples of men telling women they’d like to have sex with them. For an easy example, my boyfriend told me precisely that earlier today! It was a pretty normal thing!
Sometimes, when a person says, “I’d like to have sex with you” to someone, that person says, “I’d like to have sex with you, too!” And then, quite frequently, they go have sex. Sometimes, that person says, “Sorry, but I’m not interested,” and then they don’t have sex. None of these activities are gendered. Both men and women are eminently capable of expressing desire, both men and women are eminently capable of returning that desire, and both men and women are eminently capable of saying “no.”
Context matters, dude. If my boyfriend, whom I want to fuck, tells me, “I would never fuck you,” I would be sad and hurt. (Also, y’know, kind of confused at this point.) If some complete stranger in whom I have no interest tells me, “I would never fuck you,” I think, “…that’s nice?” It is not particularly effective to insult people by saying, “OH YEAH WELL I WON’T GIVE YOU THINGS YOU DON’T WANT.” It is downright sad to attempt to insult them by saying you’ll withhold things they not only don’t want but which you have solid reason to expect they would actively refuse if they were offered. Would you be deeply insulted if a man you’d never met told you that you weren’t invited to his birthday party? How about if he stomped around yelling about how he had a cake entirely made of human feces and you didn’t get to eat ANY of it? Because, see, “oh no, I don’t get to eat feces” is pretty much how most of us feel about “oh no, the misogynist troll doesn’t want to have probably-rapey sex with me.”
And, see, this is why you appear to hate men more than any of us ever could. I think men are PEOPLE, not interchangeable automatons. If my partner left me, I would be extremely sad! I would not go, “Oh well, anyone with a penis will do!” because that is terrible. Most men, like most women, do not want to fuck absolutely anything that moves. They want to fuck specific people whom they love/like/lust for. I cannot honestly believe I am explaining this like it is a thing that needs explaining.
@VoIP:
I also kinda smoothed over how different places in the world are in different situations at the same time… not a lot of room for subtlety in a rant for NWO.
But yeah, point very much taken. Description of evolution as a ladder suffers the same problem, thinking that everything is strictly better or worse than everything else (and that somehow white men always seem to be at the top of said ladder).
You can describe specific issues in the narrative of progress… and that’s sort of what I had in mind in my rant. But yeah. Trying to say that culture as a whole travels up a single ladder is pretty problematic.
“I cannot honestly believe I am explaining this like it is a thing that needs explaining.”
Scroll back up to the puppy, NWO causes that reaction a lot.
“Because, see, “oh no, I don’t get to eat feces” is pretty much how most of us feel about “oh no, the misogynist troll doesn’t want to have probably-rapey sex with me.” ”
Honestly, I might prefer the cake. Disgusting as the idea is, it’s probably less likely to lead to a. physical injury and b. long-term psychological trauma.
Also if I changed my mind in the middle of eating the cake I would be able to leave.
Puppy therapy is the best kind of therapy.
(I think I am able to write a long reply to NWO today in large part because I just finished watching “The Artist,” and Uggie the dog helps tremendously at inoculating one against the WTFness.)
@Cassandra
That’s a hard choice. I don’t know if I could eat the cake.
I’m sure that, in the back of NWO’s mind, those women are just bitter and spiteful. Sure, they can have sex with 20 different guys, but she’ll never be truly satisfied. Not until she settles down with a single man and finds her calling as dishwasher. Hmm…
You know, I think NWO’s little story actually has a kernel of truth. I’m pretty sure that anyone who was brave enough to announce hir intentions for sex to a big crowd would get at least a couple takers just through probability. And those couple takers would probably be sex-positive and a joy to be around.
You know, I’m actually rather tempted to try this and see what happens… It’s not like I’d go to a bar to drink anyway.
Yeah, the analogy would probably be better if the cake were made of, like, feces, razorblades, explosives, gonorrhea, and bees. And you were allergic to bees.
And the bees were special killer bees that carried enough radiation to give you cancer.