Eivind Berge, the Norwegian Men’s Rights blogger who was arrested after making repeated death threats against police on his blog, has been released from jail. The country’s Supreme Court has ruled that his comments – in which, among other things, he talked about how killing police was on his “bucket list” – are not illegal. His property will be returned to him and he is evidently entitled to compensation for his time in jail.
As far as I can figure it from the Google-translated articles I’ve read, the Supreme Court has ruled that statements on the internet are not “public” and therefore his threats don’t count as “incitement” under the law. Here’s what one article says:
Supreme Court’s Appeals Committee believes statements Berge has made on his blog are not covered by the Freedom of the definition in the Penal Code. incitement to violence and murder of police officers are therefore not presented publicly in the legal sense and therefore is not criminal, says the Supreme Court.
Apparently the issue was a fairly narrow legal one. According to the same article, the law under which he was prosecuted (written long before the birth of the Internet) “operates with a public safety and publishing concept that … do not take account of electronic publishing on the Internet.” The majority on the Supreme Court, the article goes on to say, felt that “the indictment includes actions that are clearly worthy of punishment,” but that existing law does not allow punishment for statements made on the Internet.
If anyone here knows Norwegian, let me know if this is correct. Here and here are several more articles in Norwegian, translated by Google. Here’s an article in English, written before the Supreme Court rendered its judgment, that spells out the issues a little more clearly.
On his blog, Berge celebrates his victory in the courts:
My blog is legal after all. The police had no lawful basis for pursuing criminal charges against me. This means the case has collapsed for the prosecution and I will be entitled to compensation for the three weeks I spent in prison. I was arrested and jailed for speech which the Supreme Court has ruled is legal, so obviously the entire prosecution was utterly baseless.
He considers his release a giant victory for Men’s Rights:
Being a political prisoner provided a welcome boost to my activism. … The entire process has been tremendously empowering for the Men’s Rights Movement. This spectacular prosecution of an MRA sparked debate and demonstrated to the horror of the feminist establishment that there are more antifeminists out there than they knew. I am not some kind of extremist easily dismissed, even though some of my writings may appear somewhat ungenteel. While my kind of violent rhetoric is legal, it is no longer needed. We are strong enough to fight feminism in more elegant and subtle ways now.
I will highlight some of Berge’s “ungenteel” opinions in future posts.
See here and here for previous posts of mine on Berge, which include many examples of his “violent rhetoric.”
Someone tell Antz about this new development, stat! It’ll make his day
Communism is a political belief, but anti-communist political beliefs are incitement to violence and don’t count as political beliefs. You’re free to propose any policy, as long as it’s one of the handful of policies that aren’t considered incitement to violence.
To Berge, rape is not a victimless crime (although his definition of rape is narrow). He considers rape of women and affirmative action against men to be symmetrical crimes that cancel each other out. Berge also believes that men can have sex with men whenever they want, so that the presumably male-on-male rape that you describe wouldn’t be canceling anything out. As for female-on-male rape, Berge considers a woman forcing a man to have sex to be a blessing for the man, but you describe a “bleeding bum,” and Berge would consider a woman anally raping a man to be a non-sexual assault.
Robert could totally be a Berge sock! That would be our most high-profile sock yet!
Me again. I ought to have better clarified what I meant about people who “called themselves Communists” – I was specifically thinking of those individuals in the West who openly professed to admire the USSR during its existence. There were a few of them. I’m not talking about what McCarthy said was happening, which no serious historian endorses these days anyway!
But, we’re off topic here – thanks Wetherby for getting back on it. I wonder, just how much of the ‘admirable’ Mr Berge’s views Robert does disagree with?
It sounds to me like he’s inciting murder. And those fantasies about killing cops are quite disturbing. He could very well be the next guy to go on a murder rampage.
Ruby, I doubt Eivind Berge will go one a rampage. Lots of libertarians say, for example, that “taxation is theft,” which according to their principles they could retaliate against with deadly force, but very few of them run amok.
Sorry if I missed a previous comment clarifying the subject, but I do understand Norwegian, and can confirm that David’s understanding is correct – most of the judges found the statements to be punishable but do not find the justification in the law that would be required to prosecute, as per the Norwegian Constitution and Human Right’s. I only read http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10067455, if you need understandings of the other articles, just let me know
Yeah, somehow I doubt this means an end to his violent rhetoric.
Wetherby: I’d say that Berge is a rape evangelist, not apologist. He isn’t justifying the rape that happens/exists, he argues that rape needs to be encouraged, increased, and made an overt act of intentional policy.
[redacted] either doesn’t know about it, cares not that he does it, or agrees with it. I can’t really see any other way to look at that, and come up with the adjective, “admirable” when talking about what Berge calls activism.
I don’t know why I said that last night.
I blame the jasmine rice bliss.
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because I heard somewhere years ago that everybody claimed Bonnie shot a downed cop “to make sure,” but there wasn’t much evidence for it and it got blown up in the popular media.
I cannot understand why you’d have ANY sympathy for rapists and what happens to them behind bars. Quite a few women I’ve spoken with think that the penalty for rape should be rape itself as opposed to execution. But hey, everyone’s entitled to my opinion! 😛
Dude, why are you so convinced rapists should be allowed to keep raping people behind bars?
RAPISTS ARE THE ONES RAPING BEHIND BARS.
RAPE IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE PUNISHMENT (see cruel and unusual)
YOU ARE AN ASSFACE.
This reminds me of a cartoon I saw where in the left frame there was a protester shouting “the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment!”. In the second from was a gravestone with the caption below saying “So is being a victim!”.
Yeah… how deep and profound.
It’s good that you love humanity so much that you really care about victims.
What happens to rapists behind bars? Who’s going to rape them, the embodied cosmic force of poetic justice?
If you only rape other rapists, do you deserve do be behind bars and/or to be raped?
Ah… the misanthrope things prison is a place where karma comes to call.
In the real world we know that rapists rape. Even if, assuming, arguendo, that rapists on the outside were going to be raped, on the inside, that means you are in favor of rape.
Which is evil. It’s also nonsensical.
BUBBA! 😛
Most of the prisoners who rape other inmates are not serving time for rape on the outside. In fact, sex offenders(especially child molesters) are the lowest caste in prison hierarchies around the world.
It’s no biggie. I hope I didn’t sound too much like a smart ass by saying that. I was just interested in the topic of Bonnie and Clyde, but I don’t know much about them except for what they did here in Joplin. And the only reason I knew about this is that I’ve been trying to come up with free or cheap things to do that have air conditioning, and the local museum has some relics from them.
Most of the prisoners who rape other inmates are not serving time for rape on the outside. In fact, sex offenders(especially child molesters) are the lowest caste in prison hierarchies around the world.
Ok, even if we accept this, for sake of argument, as true…. now you have a whole lot of new rapists.
Who is going to rape them?
And why should it be OK for those people who are now rapists to keep on raping people?
All rapists must rape EACH OTHER! Problem solved! Everyone gets what they deserve! *sarcasm*
The Spearhead sees this as a major victory against David, proving that he is the real aggressor here:
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2012/08/03/eivind-berge-out-of-jail/
Eivind Berge is there in the comments section as well.
I’ve never heard people who actually deal with corrections who refer to sex offenders as an aggregate being a lesser caste, only people there for raping or killing children. And I’ve never seen any evidence beyond *that* that it’s actually true that those criminals are a lesser caste…
Also, prisons hierarchies around the world, huh? You really don’t know how Corrections work if you think the Meriken model is in common use outside of the USA and Britain…