Christian Burch – Turbulent Private Life

– Some emotional impressions remain. You can’t get rid of them, he says NRK Profile Christian Porsche (78).

He just told the former foreign journalist that he was seconds away from a suicide bomber who blew himself up and all passengers on a local bus. The scene he met Porsche that day in Jerusalem 12 years ago was burned into his memory and for a long time he had been sleeping his night.

– I was close, and reached the site before the heat of the burning corpses subsided. I saw a brain had exploded from a skull and it was stuck on the second floor on a wall outside the bus. What’s sitting there, that is. Professionalism doesn’t protect you much in moments like these.

new book

In recent years, NRK Nestor has been working on memoirs in which he will tell about this and other daysDramatic experiences of 36 years as a foreign journalist. From his clerical desk at the top of Oslo, he tried to get an overview and overview of developments in his own field, international security policy. He believes Western policy has failed because it does not fully understand the motives of people in other countries, such as why Putin might start a war in Ukraine or the 24-year-old Palestinian who blew up the bus in Jerusalem.

The positions I discuss are explained by the politicians who exercised power, and then corrected and interpreted by political scientists. But I sat in the middle of it and saw things in a completely different light, says Burch.

Paragon gone to hell

The 78-year-old has a lot on his mind in 405 pages that will be published in March next year. It deals with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Balkan War, the Cold War, and globalization. Among other things, it will explain why democracies around the world are faltering now, and why economics is doing the same.

“There were a number of aha experiences when I looked back,” Burch says.

The so-called neo-capitalism that has dominated since the beginning of the 1980s was presented with a set of intentions, visions, and ideals that all went to hell. To a large extent, this led to politics losing its grip, allowing financial capitalism to run its own course. It has created a situation where democracy is being challenged, as we have seen in the USA, Turkey and Poland.

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– People in democracies have taken democracy for granted, and the result is that completely extremist forces have used democracy to gain positions of power, and then abused it and closed democracy behind them, he says.

– Decreased confidence in democracy as a form of government. We saw that especially in the overwhelming support for Trump. He’s a fraud and a manipulator, but that doesn’t matter because it was kind of fun, says Burch, who believes politicians’ use of market advisors was destructive.

– This has led to the similarity of politics in part with the marketing of diapers, cars and trips to the South, and this weakens confidence in democracy.

own experiences

Now the 78-year-old sits in a suit, bursting with energy and saying it gives him a lot to interpret international politics eight years after retiring from NRK. And although he covers dark stories and sometimes bleak analyzes in his forthcoming book, it was also rewarding to remember NATO summits and personal encounters with the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Benjamin Netanyahu.

– I’ve looked through a number of episodes over the nearly 400 years I’ve been working as a foreign journalist, he sums up with a chuckle.

Christian Borch has written several books on international politics. But what’s new in the upcoming book, which will be his twentieth, is that he weaves in his own experiences – and that’s one of them His first wife died of cancer at the age of 42.

“I led a relatively turbulent private life and used it quite a bit as a backdrop,” Burch says.

After growing up privilegedly in Holmenkollen in Oslo, not far from where he now lives, he modeled Tankers in international traffic as a kid on deck barely 17 years old And he sailed for a year. He liked to write letters home about his experiences, and since then he has kept talking.

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The experience was so powerful that I discovered I wanted to do the same thing for the rest of my life. The journalist says it has become an obsession.

However, he believed he was prompting to write more autobiography.

– The editor encouraged me to use myself in the book, because I experienced a lot. But I have a feeling it’s a bit silly and showy to present things around the person as a focus, so I’ve tried to balance that out.

in the controversial Christmas calendar

As a light counterbalance to the book’s heavy political themes, he also agreed to star in NRK’s ​​popular and controversial “24 Star Christmas Calendar” series.

– Yes, it means that I did not dare to look at it myself, says Porsche, who for the first time left his eyes in the interview.

– My eldest daughter made remarks that could be interpreted as somewhat sarcastic, while my youngest daughter was completely delighted, adds the 78-year-old.

For a few weeks in May, Burch and the other participants, wrapped in a tent to block out the sun, were trying to create the Christmas spirit in the program’s bizarre challenges. The 79-year-old didn’t know who 20 of the 24 “celebrities” were in the production before, nor does presenter Marcus Niebe. But he admits that it was very interesting to get to know them all.

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It’s fun having to use other sides of yourself and not take yourself too seriously. It is a kind of mental health. And I think it’s very interesting to be involved in large professional television productions. So there were twelve cameras working here, he smiles.

On TV on Christmas Eve

He will celebrate Christmas with his two daughters, their families and his partner Josephine Scanza (59) Her two sons and her mother. They may even be inspired by the tasks in the “24 Star Christmas Calendar” while celebrating.

– I have a faint feeling that my youngest daughter will say that we should have a ring dance and that my father should be the principal dancer. The game of “cat, mouse and goblin” reminds us of “rock-paper-scissors,” and we might as well take it, Burch laughs.

Other than that, he looks forward to peace with his loved ones, something he believes a lot of people have become more interested in lately – which is also the subject of the upcoming book. Because despite the war in Ukraine, economic hardship and bleak analyses, Porsche is looking to the future.

It looks miserable, but it isn’t. Each wave at some point meets its own counter wave. I think it works. We see differences in social work patterns post-Covid and the war. He says that people are more interested in reuse, close objects, and their inner lives than in outer space cynicism.

– If you believe in original sin, then you can believe that God sent Covid and Putin to the world to educate people. I can almost believe it.