The book, They hanged dogs (2012) is the first on the Niels Oxen trilogy and the only one I have so far read from Jensen. As I do not like to tell the plot of any book, let us just say that it is an action thriller with a kind of Danish Rambo fighting the evil commandos and all evidence always disappears. There is also a one-legged girl, but as Niels is impotent, Jensen avoids writing the unavoidable sex parts, which so often embarrass a writer of his first book. I expect that later on in the trilogy Niels recovers from this problem.
The book is quite good in a way. As it is an action story, we do not care of small problems, like how a Russian ex-commando got a key to the escape car before Niels shot three tires and the poor spetsnaz crashed into a tree, or how come an underground corridor closed by a mighty steel door happened to be much wider than the door so that Niels could blow up a hole next to the door. You would not build it that way, would you? If the book were a detective story of the Sherlock Holmes type, a reader would ask such questions, but action is like in American movies and no questions are asked.
But many of those action books give some new and interesting, often alarming, information, like of some dirty dealings of the CIA or other big players. Jensen’s book has quite little anything of this type. He does tell that in Middle Ages Denmark had some kind of division of power between the king, nobles and clergy, but so it was in most places. Kings become absolute monarchs a bit later. These shifts of the system depend on external factors, like the level of weapon technology. In Middle Ages a knight with a horse and armor was the basis of the army. Consequently, nobles – who were the knights – had some power and king was not an absolute ruler, but later the army had cannons and muskets and more trained soldiers than nobles could provide, so the king become the sole ruler. Still a bit later artillery and weapons become better and a mass attack with artillery preparation could beat a professionally trained army, the time of Napoleon. This period ended in the American civil war: magazine rifles and later machine guns made mass attacks too costly. The social order followed these changes, form a weak king to absolute monarchy to democracy. Today the army again has evolved towards professionalism. A change of this type shifted the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire with an emperor. It may happen again, we will see.
Jensen needs a conspiracy theory for his action story and makes the claim that medieval Danish parliament Danish Danehof (1250-1413) did not disappear but has been governing Denmark in secrecy ever since, even by using the similar Masonic methods as Licio Gelli’s P2 lodge in 1980s in Italy: arranging bongo pongos and secretly videoing sex acts of important people, naturally to be able to backmail them.
Nobody doubts that there is something wrong in Denmark. Hamlet said it already and nothing has changed. Denmark was conquered only once, by Hitler – as the Danish did not see it possible to fight unified Germany. In the previous century they had fought Germans (but not Germany) over Schleswig Holstein, first successfully, then losing it. Danmark did not participate in the WWI, but got area after the war by a plebiscite, then lost all to Hitler, and later gained independence again. But in early times Denmark once was the leading Northern country, during the Kalmar union, before Gustav Vasa. They lost Southern Sweden, and later Norway, but in general they managed rather well. There was no revolution, there was no change of power. It is very possible that the old nobles in Denmark still have some power. One cannot fully discard Jensen’s claim: Danehof may rule Denmark in some sense.
But the time Jensen gives for the last Danehof, starting from 1859, agrees rather well with the founding of the Grand Lodge of Danish Freemasonry in November 1858. There were Freemasons in Denmark since 1743, so Jensen does not clearly imply Masons, but of course Masonic methods of the book’s Danehof point to them. They kill demented Masons beforfe they can spill out the secrets, they have infiltrated everywhere and help their members to get important positions. Jensen does not say, but maybe the members of Danehof write reports focusing on news in their workplaces. Anyway, it does look like the Masons of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in Protocol 15, which are under secret control and provide the main intelligence and influence tool for the Elders, and yes, these Masons are killed in a covered way. Protocol 15 does remind of the P2 lodge, especially as both included the police forces. Do I think that Denmark is governed by Freemasons? I do not think they have a P2-type lodge there because P2 in Italy was needed in order to stop Communists from taking power in Italy. It was a part of Gladio, the resistance network against Communists. There was no such external threat in Denmark. Thus, the methods could be much softer. It is even possible that Danish Freemasons mainly focused on cover activities, like charity and social networking. I think most Freemasons do nothing worse than that, and what is so bad in social networking – not that I personally would ever network with anybody, but that is a defect.
The case of Licio Gelli’s P2 is quite worth investigating. Gelli, the Puppet Master, was a liaison officer between the Italian government and Nazi Germany during the war. After the was he was involved in the rat lines which helped Nazi criminals to escape to South America and later to be employed in espionage by the USA and the UK. Vatican was a main enabler of these rat lines. This piece of history has always puzzled me, because it is still not so clear. First rat lines were organized by Bishop Alois Hudal and it is not known if he was acting alone or supported by Vatican. He smuggled to South American several famous Nazis: Franz Stangl (the commander of Treblinka), Gustav Wagner (the commander of Sobibor), Adolf Eichmann (the person responsible of the transport of Jews), Alois Brunner (also transported Jews), Walter Rauff (responsible for mobile gassing vans, a British spy during the war and later employed by Mossad), and so on.
These people would surely have been sentenced to death if caught after the war. Assuming that my calculations of the Jewish death toll are correct (and I think they are), there were no actual death camps, though 2.5 million Jews died. If so, Hudal’s motives may not seem so sinister. Later Vatican was quite clearly involved in the rat lines, but so were the USA and the UK. Some of the ex-Nazis ended up supporitng Israel, like Walter Rauff, who worked for Mossad, and Klaus Barbie, who in 1965 was selling weapons to Israel. (See E. R. Carmin Das Schwarze Reich around p. 448, there are notes in the end of the book.) It is also interesting to mention that Richard Gehlen in his memories tells how he predicted the exact day of Israel’s attack in 1967 (easy, the USA provided the surveillance of Egypt to Israel) and that he had sent to Egypt ex-Nazis, who fully well knew what weapons Israel had, but did not tell it to Egypt, so they worked in Israel’s favor. So, there may be something strange behind all this.
Consider what happened after the war. In the end of the war many Nazis tried to convince the Western Allied that there will be a confrontation between the West and the Communists, as later there was, the Cold War. But West did not agree to a peace with Germany so that they could stop the Soviets. Indeed, Western Allies stopped their advance and gave Soviets time to reach Berlin. Obviously, it had been agreed that the bosh sides should meet in Berlin, which implied that Eastern Europe would fall under Soviet influence and be behind the iron curtain. This had to be agreed, yet, immediately after the war Western Allies helped Nazis to escape through the rat lines and they were asked to build a resistance network in Eastern Europe, as they did. This whole resistance network was very soon uncovered by Soviets. The result was that the Soviet Union wiped out all resistance that these remaining Nazi cells might have presented. Communism was safe from a counter revolution. The West had divided the world into two blocks. When Soviets tried to expand to new countries, like Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, the West resisted them, but the West did not try to overthrow the Communists in their area. Was this the agreement? For the Elders and the West the existence of a confined enemy was quite good. On could create small wars, there was the arms race and the space race, which meant large loans. There was even the extra bonus that the Catholic Church was tricked into supporting Nazi criminals, which appeared that they supported Nazi criminals because these Nazis gave them gold robbed from Jews. This does not seem to Christian, and serves the goal of destroying the moral basis of Christianity.
One should carefully investigate those issues. While they have been investigated and one conspiracy (the rightist one) has been found and it did exist, there may be behind it another conspiracy, not a rightist one, nor a leftist one.
But I have to return to Jensen’s book. I could say something of his choice of the hero. Niels Oxen suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), so it is said. Because of this be cannot handle complicated social relations (though in the book later he seems to handle them fine), so he moves to live in a forest. After the Vietnam War there were American soldiers with PTSD, who moved to the Rocky Mountains to live as mountain men. They could not manage in the normal life, they were line John Rambo. But that probably meant that they were easily irritated and turned violent. Oxen is never violent. He simply has nightmares. Everybody gets nightmares from the war, I guess. Most get nightmares even from the conscript service thought there was no war. Several years later you may dream that some officer is shouting at you because you lost your rifle in the forest. Such nightmares happen, that is the core of army teaching, stress. In a real war there is much more stress. Thus, Oxen has nightmares, flashbacks and such things. I do not understand why Jensen did not tie these flashbacks or nightmares into the action. Now they are just glued on the text, they do not change the course of events. He could for instance have used a flashback of a mass grave when Oxen and his one-legged girlfriend are caught by wood chopping bad guys in the way that dreaming this mass grave, Oxen made one of his uncontrolled violent actions and overpowered the leader of the bad guys by a insane and foolhardy knife attack. But no, Jensen does not use such tricks to tie parts of the text better together.
So, we have the nightmares, flashbacks and inability to handle complicated social relations. The last defect Oxen shares with Larson’s heroine Lisbeth Salander, who was described as autistic, suffering from the Asperger Syndrome. I could not diagnose the Asperger Syndrome in Salander, and as Oxen is not violent, I would not diagnose PTSD in him, but these mental states have something interesting in common. It is already old news that autism may be related to abnormalities is cerebellum. Later research has confirmed it, and Asperger people also often have abnormalities in cerebellum. Suggestively PTSD also is tied to defects in cerebellum. While PTSD is an acquired disorder, there are real changes in cerebellum. They are not caused by the psychological stress caused by fearful experiences (like the flashbacks and nightmares), but by physical stress of getting too many hits in the head (e.g. by explosions and blasts). Hits in the head work in the same way as knockouts in a boxer. Ex-boxers (over 40 years) often have a damaged cerebellum and it cause many problems, including the inability to handle complicated social relations. There are very few people, who have been born without cerebellum. They have the expected coordination problems (clumsiness, uncertain walking, inability to drive a bicycle), but also social problems of the type Lisbeth Salander, Niels Oxen, Asperger people and PTSD people have.
This gave me one idea: the role of cerebellum and why it took so long for humans to develop from the stone age level to where we are now, or more precisely: why there was practically no development of culture in the stone ages for a so long time. I read a book by Steven Mithew, The Prehistory of the Mind, where he tries to argue that the human mind actually developed only in the last 30,000 years and before that the mind was different: divided into compartments. His argument is obviously false, as we have Australian Aborigines and African Pygmis and Khoikhois and their minds are largely like ours. (Not quite, as Aboriges have superior route finding abilities.) Mithew is naturally wrong also in the sense that the conscious mind is much older than 30,000 years. All mammals have rather similar mind. You can easily see that dogs are conscious, they have feelings just as we, they have personalities, free well and everything we have. Only they do not think very deeply. The mind itself was there already when the neocortex was developed.
But one can work a better argument from Mithew’s observations. We have cerebellum, which contains 3.5 times as many neurons as the neocortex. That is, some 80% of neurons that we use for thinking are in the cerebellum and 20% in the neocortex. There still are other parts in the brain, like the middle brain, so the cerebellum has over 50% of all neurons in the brain. But scientists do not know what they are for. It is known that the cerebellum does not initiate anything, it just helps you to do the things better. Thus, you can learn to drive a bike using the neocortex (and that is what we do when we learn it), but driving a bike with the guidance of the neocortex you usually always fall. Only when the control is taken over by the cerebellum, you can drive a bike well. The same is with social communication. You can do it and learn it by using the neocortex, as some of us always have to do, but it is very tiresome and in a short time other people notice that something is not quite as it should be. Only by cerebellum you can do it as it is to be done, well, naturally, fast.
From this one can conclude that Let us say that the neocortex is for learning new things, while the cerebellum is the real brain that does these learned things well, and unconsciously. It is the goal of Zen Buddhism: to learn to shoot an arrow so that you do not think of it: make it automatic, then it is excellent. Neocortex can never be as fast as cerebellum. But it takes time and exercise before the cerebellum learns anything new. Let us assume that in the stone age the ideal of teaching was that young people learn the correct method (or shooting arrows or making stone tools) and the level they were to reach is that the skill is automatic. Then they would not invent anything new, ever.
It is still so today, though the modern society appreciates invention of new things. However, usually these new things are invented by young people, who learn the way. As they have not yet learned it well enough, it is not in the cerebellum, it is under the conscious control of the neocortex and this is why it can be improved by new inventions. I say it is still so today, even in research. Just try as over 40-years old to do something new, from a new field, I do not mean “new” in the field that you know as your pockets. I mean, change the field in research and write a research paper e.g. form supergravity assuming you used to work on something totally different. You will see that people from that new field will not like your effort. They would like it if you were 20 years. Then they would consider it normal: he has to learn, he can even be inventive, but over 40 years he should not be learning that way: he should excel the field, stay in his field and make more of those excellent “new” results. This is exactly the same as in the stone ages, only some of our professions produce something what looks like inventions.
Excellence in any field may look like geniality, it is so perfect, so fast, not depending on conscious thinking but coming from somewhere, like from angels. But that is cerebellum at work. Real creativity is neocortex. It is conscious, it is clumsy, it is trial and error.
It is easy to see how a lone hero, like Niels Oxen or Lisbeth Salander, might benefit from the abuse of the learning brain, neocortex, to tasks intended for the real adult brain, cerebellum. Neocortex does everything slower and worse, but it is more original. Thus, the hero manages in new surprising situations. Furthermore, in the case of Salander, a person on autism-spectrum, we can add the rare possibility of abusing the cerebellum to what it is not intended for, and not only abusing neocortex for thinking (instead of learning). As neocortex does the thinking and cerebellum is not used, one can put the cerebellum to do such amazing things as photographic memory, fast calculation, drawing and so on. We know that this is abuse of the brain, as no hunter-gatherers use their brain that way. But for a lone hero a photographic memory (a particularly lousy type of memory, which does not associate) can be quite nice, at least in a book. So, all this is really of abuse of parts of the brain. I remember a singularly stupid statement, often attributed to Einstein, that people use only 10% of their brain (for thinking). If 80% of neurons are in cerebellum, there is only 20% of neurons in neocortex for thinking and using all this power to thinking of theoretical physics is certainly idiotic and leads to serious problems by ignoring all other tasks of the brain.
More than this did not come to my mind from Jensen’s book, but maybe I will later read the other two volumes of the trilogy.