Another thing I was thinking about in connection with my trip to bergen is the extreme focus all other regions in Norway put on Oslo – at the same time as they really don’t like it at all.
They were all very certain that in Oslo you can get killed by just walking out on the street and living for them was apparently all about moving back out into the middle of nowhere where they were born after finishing their education in the nearest town with a population just large enough to provide for a college.
The most amazing thing about these misconceptions of Oslo is that Norway is incredibly Oslo-focused.
For example we were to play this game of demonstrators against police as a “get to know oneanother”-game. So the demonstrators were to keep a little tobacco-case away from the policemen, and they were to try to lift us of it, while we were screaming slogan at them. Now for the game, they called it “Blitz’ers against pigs” – and “Blitz” is an anarchist house here in Oslo, about 5 min walk way away from here. Now of course I know about it, and I have been there many times, but for some of those others, Blitz is 30-40 driving hours away from where they live. Nevertheless, all of them knew exactly what Blitz is. Another example was a teacher who came to talk about the organization and she mentioned that she was teaching at one certain school in Oslo, which I didn’t even quite know where to place. Afterwards, during group work, the girls in my group from somewhere in the middle of nowhere talked about her – and of course they knew exactly how one could go to the school, starting from the inner city.
So it’s this weird mix – we in Oslo serve sort of as a stage that people follow from several thousands of miles away from here – at the same time as they are all very anti-Oslo, and everything about Oslo is just really really negative for them.
What a weird country! Now I could go of on the consequences of centralizaiotn of how that is conencted with the capitalist production of the homogenized sitizen, but that will have to wait for another time.