Fred og Rettferdighet (FOR, engl. Peace and Justice) is a newly founded organisation in Norway, aspiring to become a registered party ahead of the next general election in 2025.

Dear comrades, champions of peace!

As is widely recognized, the current world situation has many similarities to the situation just ahead of the World War. The problem is that the governing politicians and mainstream media outlets in Norway as in much of the West, are making comparisons with the wrong world war. The current situation is not similar to 1939. Russia of Vladimir Putin is not reminiscent of Hitler’s Third Reich. And nor is Ukraine and NATO, despite the current Ukrainian regime’s vile celebration some of the worst local Nazi collaborators as national heroes.

Analogies being made to compare with WWII are part of the war propaganda, on both sides, that make for a situation very similar to that just ahead of WWI. The propaganda on the NATO/Ukrainian regime side, rightly points to Russia as an authoritarian nationalist and imperialist threat, just as the German propagandists could rightly portray the Russia of Nicholas II in a similar way. The problem is that just as the German propagandists ignored Germany’s own imperialist atrocities and agenda while rallying the population against the Russian threat, so do the NATO propagandists today. The destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria, through illegal Western wars of aggression, is as much part of the reason for the current war in Ukraine, as Germany’s imperialist ambitions, topped with the genocide in Namibia, was part of the reason why the Balkan crisis in 1914 erupted into world war.

Drawing on the correct historical analogies, is a matter of life or death. As much as in 1939, there was no alternative to military struggle to stop the expansion of the genocidal regimes of the Anti-Comintern Pact, the world that started in 1914, and by which long term effects also lead to the war that started in 1937/39, should and could have been avoided by general strike action of the organized international labour movement. The failure to do so can to a large degree be attributed to the effectiveness of the war propaganda on both sides, effectively making use of parts of the truth to demonization of the opposite party, while ignoring the truths that show that our side harbours equally imperialist and illegitimate ambitions. To avoid making a similar mistake, we must always be insisting on including the wider picture as part of our analysis. Therefore, we must always dismiss the term “whataboutism”, widely used to try to limit the scope of analysis to what suits the current needs of our propagandists.

Failure to challenge such concepts and artificial analytical limitations, have unfortunately plagued the parliamentary Left in Norway, which has for that reason fallen prey to NATO propaganda, just as the parliamentary left fell prey to their propagandists in Germany as well as in France and Britain on the eve of WWI. Both the Norwegian parties that have affiliation with the European Left, the Socialist Left Party and the Red Party, have ended up with supporting Norwegian arms shipments to Ukraine. For the Socialist Left party, this is the third time the party has fallen prey to NATO propaganda, having previously also supported the illegal NATO wars on Yugoslavia in 1999 and Libya in 2011. For the Red Party, having made it across the 4 percent threshold for gaining parliamentary seats for the first time in 2021, this was also the first time fell the party chose to support NATO action. As in much of Europe, the Norwegian Green Party has also abandoned its former peace stand in favour of a current hardline pro-NATO position. For these reasons, those of us who want to continue the political tradition of the anti-militaristic labour movement from before WWI, and other peace activists, have decided we need to set up a new political party ahead of the 2025 general election.

We build on the political tradition of the anti-NATO movement lead by Finn Gustavsen, that lead to the establishment of the Socialist Left Party. We are an independent Norwegian organization, operating within the Norwegian political context, but our name – Peace and Justice, and our choice of deep purple as our political colour, is based on inspiration from Jeremy Corbyn and his Peace and Justice Movement in Great Britain.