Amerika

The idea behind liberal democracy: gain moral right by accepting everyone, and gain strength through being a melting pot that is ideologically motivated yet build on a solid foundation of capitalism.

The reality: diversity destroys nations, a lack of culture empowers rapacious commerce, proletarian mass revolt denies unpopular truths so commits ecocide, capitalism isn’t stable, wars have gotten worse not better, and people are psychologically afflicted with depression, misery and anomie because their lives are pointless servitude to simultaneously lofty goals and mundane self-consumptive reality.

Hamsun pointed out that society was neurotic, and that its values decayed as cities and international trade came about, and that such a society empowers idiots who glibly lie to make money yet are blind to complete solutions, but are so drugged on their own egos they resist any attempts to assert reality over “whatever you wanna believe is true, man.”

Knut Hamsun, the Nobel prize-winning Norwegian author who fell from grace for supporting the Nazi occupation of Norway, is to be put on a commemorative coin by his homeland’s central bank.

The coin is the first to celebrate Hamsun, a Norwegian national hero until his sympathy for the Nazi party emerged. “NORWEGIANS! Throw down your rifles and go home again,” he wrote in a newspaper article after the Nazis arrived in Norway in 1940. “The Germans are fighting for us all, and will crush the English tyranny over us and over all neutrals.” His post-war trial for treason was ended after two psychiatrists ruled he was suffering from “permanently impaired mental faculties”, but he was sentenced to the loss of his property, put under psychiatric observation, and died in 1952 in poverty.

Hamsun is best known for his novel Hunger, which is seen as one of the first genuinely modern Norwegian novels, telling of a starving young writer driven to extremes of euphoria and despair, and for the classic works Mysteries, Pan, Victoria and Growth of the Soil.

The Guardian

Regardless of his politics or personal, he’s an awesome writer, one of those brave and bright minds who can literally invent themselves because they have a clear grasp of reality outside of themselves.

• Sult/Hunger (1890)
• Pan (1894)
• Markens Gröde/Growth of the Soil (1917)

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