Yesterday, we participated in the anti-racist demonstration in Oslo organized by Handala forening. Thanks for inviting us! Below you can find our speech:
Hello, we are Knus Krigsmaskinen!
On April 2nd we squatted the abandoned military barrack in Avgrunnsdalen, Hurummarka to defend the forest from being turned into an explosives factory for Chemring Nobel.
Chemring, the Norwegian ministry of defense, and the Norwegian state are enforcing this plan by subjecting the local population to an audacious sham democratic process. The locals know this, and together with them, our resistance shines like a bright fire in a dark night.
Already today, Chemring produces explosives on the Hurum peninsula in their factory in Sætre. The explosives manufactured there are used in the american produced Hellfire-missiles, which are widely used in israel’s genocide on Palestinians. Chemring Nobel and Nammo also secured themselves a twelve year agreement with German Diehl Defence last year, who is itself is in close cooperation with the israeli weapons industry.
Needless to say, imperial wars, settler colonialism and genocide are inherently racist. The plunder and devastation of land and resources can only be justified through a white supremacist logic that decides who plunders and who is plundered. This logic is sustained through a deeply engrained nationalism. As a prime example of upholding this racism, Norway supplies the US, NATO and German military with essential components for their imperial endeavors under the nationalist rhethoric of self-defense.
Through this nationalism, Norway’s complicity in the genocide on Palestinians is directly linked to its own internal colonization of Sápmi.
For the land is being scarred and the waters poisoned to extract resources including wood, metals, and electricity, to host paying tourists, to process digital information in data centers, and to force Norwegian culture and a “modern” lifestyle as they call it, into dominance – and not least: to satisfy the material and energy demands for an ever increasing war machinery.
Racism in Norway also takes the shape of politicians who call reindeer herding a threat to “progress” and demand that reindeer districts have less power over their territories. It takes the shape of killed reindeer, harassment during military exercises, and a structural exclusion of the Sámi parliament from decision making power.
Pretenses of a progressive national identity exist only in nationalism’s paradigm of erasure. Last Sunday’s display of Norwegian national pride, which entails countless Norwegian flags placed also on traditional Sámi territories, AT THE SAME TIME as norway and norwegians continue to colonize Sámi lands and people, shamingly proves this point. So does calling Sápmi Norway or calling Riehpovuotna Repparfjord. These names should mean places, inlets and mountains – and kin. Norway continues to be a settler colonial state and many of the worst perpetrators sit on company boards or in parliaments. For example, the company Nussir ASA blasts a tunnel into the mountain Nussir to get at copper, gold, and silver, and dumps the tailings into the inlet Riehpovuotna, poisoning and filling it again – as they done before in the 1970s. The owner of Nussir ASA is the Canadian Blue Moon Metals inc., who also runs a mine on indigenous territories in the so-called US. One of Blue Moon Metals main investors is Hartree Partners LP, with offices no fifteen hundred metres from here on Fjordaleen 16, only naming some targets. Of course, there are many more.
The EU critical raw materials act has spurred on a whole host of mining projects in Sápmi in the name of a green transition that does not in fact transition away from anything but instead only means more production and consumption, industry and land grabs. Their so-called progress is nothing but a tool on the belt of capitalist civilization and in the hands of the likes of Nussir ASA, LKAB, Talga AB, Anglo American Services.
We now lived in Avgrunnsdalen for almost two months and established an AFS, an actively defended zone, or aktivt forsvart sone in Norwegian. We will stay until the factory will no longer be built. Each day we spend in Avgrunnsdalen, our hearts are with those who’ve lost their lives, their loved ones, or their lands while facing the unimaginable horrors of imperial and colonial aggression.
We also stand in solidarity with the flotilla activists being intercepted by israeli forces earlier this week, and with the 47activists are going to court in Vestre Finnmark Tingrett in Hámmárfeasta on the 2nd of June for resisting against the Nussir mine in Riehpovuotna. At this very moment, racism in Norway takes the shape of compliance with genocide against Palestinians, as well as the active colonization of Sápmi. Genocide and colonialism are at this very moment profited from and produced, among other places, in Hurumlandet, and it must be stopped there and now. Let’s stand side by side in the fight.
Freedom for every colony, solidarity means attack!
Join us in Avgrunnsdalen. Join our midsommer camp! All infos on our website.
Knus Krigsmaskinen!
