Reply to comment

The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town
are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it
Cop-enhagen, which seems far more appropriate. The international media
has been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so. Of course much
of the media is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, so other
things, such as the reason the protests are happening in the first
place, can get lost.

Inside the Bella Center lots of stuff is going on. Namely the US,
Australia and others leading the way in making sure nothing meaningful
takes place there, while many other delegates and activists within try
to make the best of it, or at least make the effort to thoroughly
expose the bankruptcy of the position taken by the rich countries. The
center itself is divided into floors where the big decisions are being
made, and then the rest of the place for the little people, the
delegates from unimportant countries like Tuvalu, representatives of
small NGOs and other riffraff. Many of the folks involved with the
process inside are dividing their time between the meetings and events
outside in the streets and at the alternative conference going on
elsewhere in town.

Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture in the heart of the
city is understated but exudes the wealth of a place that was once the
capital of a fairly sizeable empire. Of course, though the Danish
empire brought some riches home to Copenhagen, the wealth of modern
Denmark is far greater, that being the product not so much of empire
but of the Danish labor movement and Danish social democracy. It is
this check on Danish capitalism that has allowed this wealth to be so
impressively distributed, bringing Denmark a quality of life that is
the envy of most anyone who knows about it.

Of course, as in any society there are different forces at work in
Denmark. Most Danes would identify much more with those peasants who
rebelled in the 17th century and helped pave the way for modern
Denmark, not with the soldiers who massacred them, but those soldiers
were also Danes. Most Danes would prefer to remember the heroic stories
of resistance during the occupation of Denmark in the 1940's, but there
were also many enthusiastic collaborators.

At so many points in history there are pivotal moments when things can
go different ways, and something pushes events in a certain direction.
The direction of social democracy has been the ascendant one in Denmark
for quite some time, but this was able to happen for a variety of
reasons – the strength and purpose of the Danish labor movement, the
fear on the part of the rich of the spectre of communism, the moral
bankruptcy of the leaders of society who collaborated with the Nazis
after the war, and so on.

If people know anything about this most southerly of the Scandinavian
countries they know it's full of windmills. Germany actually has lots
more windmills than Denmark, but many of them are made in Denmark
anyway, at the Vespas factories in Jutland (where they recently laid
off thousands of workers).

There's a reason Denmark has been a pioneer in windmill technology, and
it is, to a large extent, the Danish environmental movement. In the
early 70's the Danish government was thinking about building their
first nuclear reactor, following the example of Sweden, which has one
right across the water, upwind. People inspired by ideas of communal
living and experiential learning formed a community centered around a
Free School near the little village of Ulfborg and began making plans
to build the world's largest windmill. Over the course of three years,
working with scientists, artisans and large numbers of hippies, they
built the world's largest windmill. They refused to patent any of their
ground-breaking technology, making it all available for anybody to use.
Their windmill, still standing and providing power to the community 35
years later, is the prototype for the big windmills you'll see
scattered around Denmark and the world.

This windmill provided more than just energy – it and the movement that
built it provided political capital. Those in parliament arguing for a
nuclear reactor lost the fight, and Denmark became a nation of
windmills.

For the past decade or so, however, Denmark has been run by a coalition
led by the neoliberal, xenophobic Vestre party. They have been
privatizing hospitals and passing some of the most restrictive
immigration legislation in the world. They have had troops in both
Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have been forcibly deporting refugees
back to these war-torn countries. Fueled by the changes to Danish
society wrought by EU membership, this conservative coalition keeps
winning elections. Along with a love of capitalism and a fear of
foreigners, these people also can't stand hippies or punks or other
dissenting elements, and they are on a quest to “normalize” the
900-person intentional community in the heart of Copenhagen known as
Christiania. To that end they conducted a police raid early one morning
in 2007 and destroyed a house they deemed to have been illegally
constructed. (I got my first taste of Danish tear gas there a couple
hours later.)

Shortly before this home demolition in Christiania, hundreds of Danish
police had landed on the five-story squatted social center known as
Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”) by helicopter early one morning. They
fumigated the place with tear gas, arrested those inside, jailed them
for several months, and proceeded to follow the new government policy
of destruction of the house. Masked construction workers from Poland
did the dirty work, since Danish unions forbid their members from doing
work that requires police protection.

Over the course of the next 1-1/2 years, however, the government was
forced to backtrack on their plan to civilize Denmark. The movement to
support Ungdomshuset grew dramatically, involving a number of fairly
significant riots and probably more importantly a weekly drill of
marches every Thursday for a year and a half, involving many hundreds
and often thousands every week. Eventually the chief of police and the
mayor of Copenhagen had to admit that their policies had been a mistake
and they gave the movement what it was demanding, a new house, bought
and paid for by the city. (Leftwing foundations had offered to buy a
new building for the movement but these offers were refused on
principle – the line was that the government destroyed Ungdomshuset and
they should replace it with something comparable.)

In the course of the riots and demonstrations around Ungdomshuset the
police preemptively arrested hundreds of people on a few occasions.
They weren't technically allowed to do this, but they came up with
excuses. One eyewitness told me that the police started arresting
people, claiming some of them were throwing rocks at them, although the
rock-throwing had clearly started only after the police began arresting
the assembled crowd.

A new law was passed in preparation for the climate summit which makes
this kind of mass preemptive arrest perfectly legal – all the police
need to do is arbitrarily determine that an area is designated as a
“riot zone” and then they can arrest whoever they want. Any non-Danes
arrested can be held for 40 days (including people who were born in
Denmark but are not citizens, a reality for many here that may seem
surprising to those in the US reading this). It went into effect a week
before last Thursday, and since then the Danish police have carried out
mass preemptive arrests that dwarf anything they've done before. They
don't even need to pretend they had any justification for what is
essentially collective punishment.

Those of you from the US reading this should be familiar with
preemptive mass arrests. If you haven't had your head in the sand for
the past few decades then you know this happens regularly at
demonstrations throughout our great democracy. But it's new for
Denmark, and it is a serious step in the direction of the
Americanization, you could say, of the country. Being an American, I
can say first-hand that emulating US policies in terms of law
enforcement or in terms of the privatization and outsourcing of
industry is all a very bad idea, at least as far as the vast majority
of people are concerned – but the interests of a privileged minority
are what moves people like the Danish Prime Minister, not the interests
of society as a whole.

The policies and concerns of the new Danish government were represented
eloquently by the kettling and mass arrest of a small march that was en
route to commit acts of civil disobedience at the docks run by the
Maersk corporation. Maersk is one of the world's richest men and runs
one of the world's biggest shipping companies (look for his name, it's
everywhere). Blockading docks is illegal, of course, and under the
normal legal procedures in a democratic society people committing such
acts would be told to stop and after a certain amount of time arrested,
fined, brought to trial or whatever. Yesterday, however, as with the
day before, hundreds of people were preemptively arrested, including
many who had no intention of committing any illegal acts, such as one
reporter for the Times of London.

I narrowly avoided being arrested two days ago. Of those arrested the
overwhelming majority had nothing to do with the rock-throwing incident
at the stock exchange that apparently set off the police action. The
overwhelming majority didn't even know anything had happened at the
stock exchange. All they knew was they were suddenly, randomly being
arrested while taking part in a permitted march organized in part by
the very mainstream Social Democratic Party. This was a family march
involving tens of thousands of people with no civil disobedience or
other illegal acts planned as part of it.

The new law may allow for mass preemptive arrests, but international
treaties which Denmark has signed called the Geneva Conventions outline
certain guidelines for the treatment of detainees which were clearly
violated by the Danish police. People were handcuffed in uncomfortable
positions for many hours on the frozen pavement, not allowed to move,
not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants,
adding to the danger posed by the freezing temperatures. Elderly people
were arrested along with teenagers. Anne Feeney's husband Juli, a
66-year-old Swede who had been slowly walking beside a carriage, was
handcuffed and made to sit on the frozen ground. Among the marchers
from Tvind, the Free School movement with whom I was walking, those
arrested include headmasters and teachers from throughout Europe and
Africa. Every one of the Norwegians I had just been hanging out with
the day before from Trondheim were arrested.

I participated in a march that was very quickly thrown together
involving several hundred people, starting near the Valby train station
and going to the prison to which most detainees had been brought. The
police surrounded (escorted?) us and seemed to be thinking about
arresting all of us, but apparently ultimately thought better of it.
Instead they informed us as we were marching towards the prison that
most of those detained had just been released, and that we were welcome
to march to the prison but no further.

Outside the prison – a temporary prison that used to be a brewery -- I
heard more stories of how the Anarchist Black Cross representatives who
had been attempting to provide soup and solace to people as they were
being released were told to leave the premises. When they attempted to
set up at the train station a kilometer away they were again told to
leave. So as most people left the prison there wasn't even anyone to
meet them and tell them where to find the train station. Most detainees
were at no point given any food by the police. After six hours some had
been given water.

Tonight after Naomi Klein, Lisa Fithian and others from Climate Justice
Action held a meeting at the Big Tent in Christiania hundreds of police
and dozens of police vehicles were involved in more or less laying
siege to Christiania, which was defended, as in the past, by hundreds
of masked, black-clad young people making burning barricades and
throwing large numbers of bottles at the police, who then fired lots of
tear gas. Tonight the police reportedly used a water cannon to
extinguish the main burning barricade and arrested 200. Most of this
happened while Anne Feeney and I were playing a concert in the Opera
House, not far from the main entrance.

The future is not written. There was nothing inevitable about Denmark
building a nuclear reactor, and because of the environmental movement
it built windmills instead. Equally, there is nothing inevitable about
Denmark becoming a neoliberal police state. The years ahead in Denmark
-- and more broadly in the rest of Europe, run increasingly by
pro-business and xenophobic governments – will determine in which
direction things will go. And perhaps the next few days will be a
particularly important moment in that process.

David Rovics
www.davidrovics.com
davidrovics.guestbooks.cc
www.soundclick.com/davidrovics
songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/davidrovics
www.facebook.com/davidrovics
twitter.com/drovics