From little fascist Denmark: another ordinary day in the news

Many people I speak with around the world, friends or casual acquaintances, have expressed what might best be described as feelings of cognitive dissonance when I have attempted to explain how bad things are in today’s Denmark. It just doesn’t match the fairy-tale picture of a modern, progressive, peace-loving, little country which most people have acquired throughout the previous decades. This problem has been particularly acute when I’ve had to explain what currents underlay the rather complex affair of Mohammed’s caricatures, a year or so ago.

True enough, it isn’t easy to explain the transformation of a whole society with all the necessary nuances and without boring everyone to death. So here are small four vignettes, extracted from the news I heard on the radio today, four items which illustrate perfectly well that true fascism is in place when the fascist ideology of a gang of elected rulers match the fascist longings of their population.

I. In order to make its masters in Washington happy, the land of Denmark has been trying hard to play along on the "war on terror" bandwagon. For lack of any serious home-grown terror, a case of two young people who were sentenced for playing with intended "terrorist activities" in Bosnia and who had contact with four young people (of Muslim descent, of course) in this country has been magnified up to the unravelling of the big terrorist threat, followed by mediatic cravings for righteous punishment. Quite unusually in the light of this country’s previous traditions in matters of law and justice, the court suit has been marked by a strong reliance on character descriptions and ideological intents, rather than on the sober presentation of straightforward hard evidence. Yet, ruling against the state prosecutor’s deepest wishes, the judges’ recommendation was that one of the defendants be released for lack of evidence, and that two of the others be released while they await judgment for some minor offences.

Unbelievably, the 10-man strong jury came today with the verdict of guilty for all four defendants - but, even more unusually: the judges, who do have the last word in such cases, immediately overruled the brain-washed jury and ruled that the three defendants should be released anyway! For one simple reason: the lack of evidence. Are judges and judicial institutions in Denmark - as the case is in Italy or in Spain - to become the last defenders of human rights against politically and culturally motivated mob lynching?

2. The US has just granted the right of asylum to those Iraqis who have worked as interpreters or translators for their occupation forces, as they can be expected to end on top of the liquidation lists as soon as the US throws in the towel in Iraq. Denmark - who, let it be recalled, was the only European country besides Britain to declaredly participate in the invasion and who has ever since stubbornly maintained a military contingent in the shadow of the British troops - Denmark has nonetheless officially stated and re-stated today that there was no question of granting such asylum to their translators, in spite of the fact that language officers back from duty in Iraq have pleaded for their employees’ safety. The preposterous spin laid out by the government: "Those people have nothing to fear, because we won’t be leaving Iraq before there is peace and democracy there". Roight.

The truth of the matter is that all government decisions in Denmark are subject to acquiescence (a.) by Washington, for external affairs; and (b.) for internal matters, by the far-right xenophobic Danish People’s Party (DF) which ensures that the minority government remains in power. The way one got around the problems Austria had in relation to the European Union was to give DF de facto decisional power without having the party actually sit in the government. DF’s racist policies are quite unambiguous: no more ’rabs, niggers, Muslims, Poles and other fur’ners in Denmark, and get rid of those that are already there if you can, even if they’ve been your slaves and will get murdered for just that. The two parties in government seem only too happy to comply.

As a result, we find ourselves today in an even more absurd situation, with the anti-war parliamentary opposition demanding that the government, instead, comply with the US’s own humanitarian standards. Roight, 2.

3. One of the most assertive undertakings of the xenophobic and (accordingly) ultra-nationalistic extreme-right in power since 2001 has been to ensure what they claim to be the revival of Denmark’s cultural achievements - both true and alleged - of which a large number, so far, have succeeded in remaining quite obscure from the viewpoint of the world’s great civilizations. One telling example: most people have heard (of) Norway’s Grieg or Finland’s Sibelius, but how many symphonic bells does the name of Carl Nielsen, Denmark’s "greatest" composer, and as such a rather bland and insignificant one, ring?

The current minister of Sports, who also has Cultural Affairs under his enlightened Olympic wings, has thus decreed, a couple of years ago, that canonical listings of twelve great works by great Danish artists in a variety of fields, such as music, painting, novels, films etc. - works which all Danes should revere in order to claim to be true Danes - should be drawn up by their respective committees. This caused intense and heated debate, especially when the minister of Sports made public statements interfering with the commissions’ work, but, rather characteristically, the issues discussed usually tended to center on which works should or should not have the unsurpassable honour of being canonised, rather than the utter stupidity of the whole enterprise (and here, intelligently and provocatively as usual, director Lars von Trier publicly stated that he refused to have any of his films listed in the film Canon).

At any rate, the stupid enterprise of canonisation has proved such a mediatic and populistic success that the same stupid idea has been extended to other fields, such as... the teaching of history. Today, the manically fundamentalist minister of Education has decreed that the date of 9/11 (September 11th, that is, and yes, 2001, not 1973) will be part of the Canon, set in stone, of the world-shattering historical events all Danish children will have to learn about in the future. No one has said anything about what will be appearing in print in the school books (and it isn’t hard to guess either), but yes, I might add, 9/11 will hopefully be remembered as the date Denmark made its allegiances clear and transparent and unequivocally started slipping on the imperial slope of moral decrepitude.

4. It should be no secret to anyone that large numbers of Europeans, Latin Americans and probably people from all over the world have come to find that visiting the US, either on business or as a tourist, is not worth the hassle one must endure in order to be given access to the "Land of the Free". Not to mention the risks if one happens to get caught in the random meshes of "anti-terrorist" bureaucracy, in the holy and blind name of (Orwellian) Security. As a friend of ours used to put it, "Who wants to be treated as a criminal just for the privilege of giving them your money?"

I now learn that this has actually become something of a concern to US tourist organizations whose members have seen plummeting revenues due to the dwindling numbers of visitors from foreign countries. But they need not fear, for one should be able to count on the help of one’s truly brain-washed allies. With this latest piece of news came the information that the numbers of Danes travelling to the US as tourists has actually risen to unprecedented figures. It’s not just that Danes, thanks partly to their participation in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq while having their currency pegged to the euro rather than to a weakening dollar, have so much money in their hands that they don’t know what to do with it and travel more than ever before. It would seem that they actually like it.

I’ll close this bout of patriotic ranting by leaving open the question as to whether the Danish minister of Education has learned about the canonical and mediatic worth of September 11th, 2001, by managing to bypass those US immigration procedures other menial humans like us would have to endure.