Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

Well. Not really. A comic strip cannot be president. Yet. *glances around insidiously*.

Having done a lot of political ranting lately, I’m going to keep this short and focused:  If you’re American, read this.

If you’re not: Super Tuesday is around the corner (February 5.). It’s the day when most US states select their presidential candidates. [If you’re Icelandic, compare to prófkjör.] The current situation is that if Hillary Clinton becomes the candidate for the Democrats, then the Republicans have enough firepower to lay waste to her campaign. Which means Ron Paul might be the next George Bush (only slightly smarter and a lot more malicious). Obama has a chance, because shit just hasn’t stuck to him so far. So prod your American friends.

(Btw, if you’re a technophile and are interested in American politics, I recommend the book Interface by Neal Stephenson and Frederick George)

Regarding Karl Ágúst vs Ólína in Kastljósið this evening:

“At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.” - Eric Idle

Nuff said.

Or maybe not. The liberal elements of Icelandic society have taken the issue of the coup d’état in Reykjavík city hall last week and made them into a rather big issue. Meanwhile, I have had conversations with the representatives of retentive element and found a common theme. Apparently:

• It is not justifiable for the public to voice its opinion as a group, except once every four years by way of anonymous elections where an enumerated list of options is presented.
• The people who have been selected by popular (if unfair) election to run the various parts of our community should be left to their own devices, regardless of what these are. This entails that protests that disrupt their routine workdays are not acceptable, because their goals - regardless of content - are more important than the opinion of those who are affected by those goals.
• It doesn’t matter who our leader is, nor how he ascended.

I maintain that anybody who believes this kind of nonsense deserves to live in the kind of society that we’ve spent the last thousand years trying to break free of.

“The struggle for freedom of thought is as old as European politics and it underlies who all of us are today. It exists in relation to a long-standing struggle against various forms of control of thought each characteristic of the political and economic moment in which they temporarily triumphed. Whether it is the control of education and publication by the universal catholic church, the control of printing and censorship of learning by state power or the control of knowledge and culture by owners, capitalistically motivated and ideologically inclined–we have been struggling against power for the freedom of thought for a millenium.” - Eben Moglen, Die Gedanken sind Frei

One fairly recent example that I frequently quote, in my discussion of what amounts to personal freedoms, is the situation in Cochabamba, Bolivia, back in 2000, where people protested that the city’s water source, recently privatized by demand of the World Bank and sold to the Bechtel Corporation. Bechtel doubled the rates people were forced to pay for their water - up to nearly a quarter of the typical household income. Thousands protested - fifty thousand participated in an impromptu referendum. Nine hundred thousand live in Cochabamba, making the protesting portion of the city fractionally larger than protested at Reykjavík City hall last week, but not by far, even when accepting some of the conservative estimates offered by members of the Independence Party (although I refute the most conservative estimate I heard, that it had been 20 very loud people protesting at city hall). Does this make the protesters in Cochabamba wrong? By golly, no. It doesn’t matter how many protest. It doesn’t matter how loud they are, or how disproportionate they are to the population. What matters - the only thing that matters - is that there are people who are discontent for reasons that can be fixed.

I recently read Immanuel Kant’s What is Enlightenment?. It was a good read, and in general terms I rather agree with it. Kant says: “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes), nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.”

He also says: “[…] [F]reedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters. But on all sides I hear: “Do not argue!” The officer says, “Do not argue, drill!” The tax man says, “Do not argue, pay!” The pastor says, “Do not argue, believe!” (Only one ruler in the World says, “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!”) ”

Very important, this. Laziness and cowardice are considered vices when applied in personal lives. But when applied by the majority of people in regard to their own political opinions, this is considered, by the ruling class, beneficial. Preferable even. When I suggested to one of the retentive elements that this laziness and cowardice be systematically eradicated by way of education - enlightenment - he retorted that most people would never be employed to such interest towards their environments.

I offer Switzerland to the contrary - a country where the system is such that everybody participates actively in the making of decisions that directly affect them. Indeed:

“This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.” - I. Kant, ibid.

When the concept of democracy rose to dominance in Europe, the ruling class was prodded to a large extent off their seats. However, new people sat down in them and took different titles. The rest was business as usual, because eliminating hereditary power and putting the power into the hands of what people imagined to be their peers was, for many, enough. A hierarchy is a hierarchy regardless. The next step towards true democracy is to use the greater freedom we have to enlighten people - to tell the apathetic masses that this is not how things are done. And perhaps, one day, we’ll get closer to some kind of ideal.

On Monday, just as I was coming down off my cloud after a very successful Fab Lab Workshop, the Independence party staged a coup d’état in Reykjavík.

I use the term coup in a fairly open-ended sense: The act was, strictly speaking, legal. It was just wrong on so many other levels.

Iceland’s national and municipal governments are compound governments formed by many parties. For example, currently the Social Democratic Party and the Independence Party have an allegience for the national government, sharing the ministries between them. On parliament these parties are counteracted by the Leftist Green Party, the Liberal Party and the Progressive Party.

Reykjavík city council, after the last elections on the 27. May 2006, had the following structure: The Progressive Party (B), 4056 votes, 6.1%, 1 seat. The Independence Party (D), 27823 votes, 42,1%, 7 seats. The Liberal Party, 6527 votes, 9,9%, 1 seat. The Social Democratic Party, 17750 votes, 26,9%, 4 seats. The Leftist Green Party, 8739 votes, 13,2%, 2 seats.

First after the elections the Independence Party, having a majority vote, joined The Progressive Party in creating a 8 man majority on the council. Vilhjálmur Þ. Vilhjálmsson became Mayor.

In mid 2007, following a major scandal relating to financing of Reykjavík Energy Invest (a company wholly owned at the time by the Reykjavík Power Company, which in turn is owned by Reykjavík city council) and the proposed sale of the public company to private investors running the company Geysir Green Energy, Björn Ingi Hrafnsson, the Progressive Party’s front man in the city council, made a deal with the Liberal, Social Democratic and Leftist Green parties on taking over the city and opposing the sale of Reykjavík Energy Invest (REI) to private investors - most of whom are front people in the Independence Party.

Thus we enter the day of the Lakeside Quartet, as the four parties were called, wherein Dagur B. Eggertsson became the fourth mayor of Reykjavík in four years.

At some point prior to this Ólafur F. Magnússon, the front man for the Liberal Party, was admitted to the University Hospital of Iceland’s mental ward for undisclosed reasons. Now, at the beginning of 2008, he was released and his first act after taking his seat (releasing his deputy), was to deal with the Independence Party. The deal involved that Ólafur would become mayor.

Today, Ólafur F. Magnússon was instated as the fifth mayor of Reykjavík since 2003. Several hundred people protested at Reykjavík City Hall and were removed (and some restrained) by police. Several thousand lodged an official protest. Opinion polls show that less than 25% of people in Reykjavík support the current administration, and thereof almost all voted for the Independance party in the last election. No surprise there.

Björn Ingi Hrafnsson resigned from politics today, and Margrét Sverrisdóttir, Ólafur’s deputy on the council, has become extremely popular, being described as some as “a party of her own”. Interestingly, neither Ólafur nor Margrét are members of the Liberal Party - both resigned from the party last year.

I don’t write reviews. If I did, my review of the movie Cloverfield, which premiers in US cinemas today and in Iceland on the 25th of January, would be something like this:

(WARNING I WILL NOT SAY THIS TWICE: THERE ARE SPOILERS BELOW)

After a lengthy intro intended to introduce the characters, build up interpersonal relationships to as plausable a level as possible through a handheld camera, we vaguely come to realize that there are six main characters. One quickly gets killed when the Brooklyn bridge collapses, and the rest die painful and miserable deaths, including the real hero of the movie - not the whiny bastard who decided to jeopardize the lifes of his friends to save the girl he loved, but rather his best friend, who not only went along against his better judgement, but dilligently attempted to document the entire catastrophic attempt at heroics.

The movie was quite good. I liked it. It made me laugh nervously on occasion, and I felt a very strong urge to piss my pants (although, frankly, that urge was introduced by the fact that I neglected to go to the toilet before the movie began, and there was no break).

At least one person left the cinema to go lie down on a couch outside due to motion sickness, and frankly I can’t blame him. The handheld cam was a stylisticly good idea, but a terrible move as far as cinematics were concerned. At row three, where I was sitting, I heard a few complaints of nausea after the movie ended and people were streaming out, and I myself had to close my eyes a few times just to get my bearings during the runtime of the movie.

This appears to be the latest trend in cinematics. Nauseotron. Transformers had a similar, although far less severe, effect. I’m not sure if I like where this is going - as a descendant of a caveman, the entire idea of an hour’s worth of adrenaline-maximizing explosions is quite appealing; but as a self styled intellectual and a big fan of good old fashioned storytelling, the idea of sitting for an hour and a half through an ever intensifying feeling of seasickness whilst gleaming just slightly more in way of plot development than if I had been watching a David Lynch film just doesn’t hit the home run.

Plot. Plot. Plot. I love a good plot. Cloverfield had a lot of plot elements. It had structure. But essentially it was just layer upon layer of texture. There was so much texture you could literally taste it. The plot was obscured by the texture.

China Miéville’s books have far more texture than Cloverfield. And in them the texture does not obscure the extremely complex plots (except, perhaps, in Iron Council, where he lost me for about a hundred pages.). Why aren’t they made into movies? I could play Lemuel Pigeon or Krüach Aum. Perhaps even Ori. I’d make a darned poor Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin though, because although I share several of his basic tendencies, I’m just not fat enough, and I’m not very attracted to Khepri. Sorry. Perhaps I have hidden speciesist tendencies.

There, I managed to veer so far off topic nobody knows what I’m talking about any more. And that is why I don’t write reviews. Three stars out of five with a bonus halo for having made Simmi squeal like a little girl.

Special thanks to Ásgeir and Birita for inviting me along to the screening.

I don’t do enough blogging these days. Take it to mean that I’m actually busy with other things (such as working, organizing the Fab workshop, writing Kokompe kode, going for long walks, abusing free coffee shop Wifi, playing hangman at the Icelandic Geosurvey until two in the morning, baking, dancing, knitting, etc.)

Another thing I haven’t done for a while is bitch about something annoying but trivial. After having heard a lot of such bitching yesterday from all over the spectrum, I decided to contribute a bit today.

http://visir.is/article/20080114/FRETTIR05/80114008

This is an article in an Icelandic newspaper. It speaks of the Messenger mission that’s doing a flyby of Mercury soon. The article states that Mercury is the only planet besides Earth with a magnetic field that suggests the planet’s core is made of iron. This, of course, is absolute bullshit.

Within our solar system the following planets have magnetospheres: Mercury, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Additionally, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede also has a magnetosphere. From Wikipedia:

Jupiter has a very large and powerful magnetosphere. In fact, if one could see Jupiter’s magnetic field from Earth, it would appear five times as large as the full moon in the sky despite being so much farther away

Score one for the stupidity of Icelandic media moguls. Just to emphasize that I didn’t misinterpret the sentence in Icelandic, here is a counter to the alternative reading, which would claim that only Earth and Mercury have metal cores:

The magnetic field is generated by eddy currents in Jupiter’s metallic hydrogen core.

Thank you again Wikipedia.

Now just to drop in a few scientific tidbits to clear up the discussion, while it is true that both Mercury and Ganymede have magnetic fields, neither of them has a field strong enough to trap plasma. As a result the magnetic field of Mercury does not affect the tendency of Earth’s magnetic field to generate magnetic storms and substorms, wherein magnetized plasma distorts the field in the wake of the solar wind.  It’s a fascinating subject. Honestly.

Next weekend - on the 19th and 20th of January - the first meeting and Workshop of the Icelandic Fab Lab network will be held in Reykjavík. Among guests is professor Neil Gershenfeld of MIT.

It will be a semi-closed event, due to organizational issues and the small time frame we have. The guest list has already been made and invites sent, but if you think you really ought to be one of the people there, e-mail me and let me know and I’ll see what we can do. (spm2, at nospam.hi.is)

The schedule is:

Saturday 19/01/2008:

19:30   Dinner meeting.

Sunday 20/01/08:

10:00    Workshop starts

Quick overview
Goals, timeline
Finance, organization

12:30    Lunch
13:00    Second session

Lab deployment
FAB Academy
Wrap-up discussions

14:30    Workshop ends

There’s a lot of graffiti in Reykjavík’s city center these days. I decided to send an e-mail to Reykjavík city council’s department of environmental issues. Here it is (Icelandic):

  Ekki þarf að ganga langt um miðborg Reykjavíkur í dag til þess að rekast á ótal dæmi um veggjakrot. Magn veggjakrots hefur aukist töluvert á undanförnu og vel þess virði að spyrja sig hvort ekki sé tímabært að gera eitthvað í málinu.

Kannski er réttara að byrja á því að spyrja sig hvers vegna það er mikilvægt að gera eitthvað í málinu. Jú, þetta er ljótt og skapar mjög ófagra ímynd fyrir miðborgina, en það er meira.

Rannsóknir sálfræðingsins Phillip Zimbardo á stýriþáttum atferlis benda mjög sterklega til þess að hægt sé að hafa áhrif á tíðni stærri glæpa með því að útiloka minni glæpi. Svo vitnað sé í grein eftir Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (sem nú er bók):

“In a famous experiment conducted twenty-seven years ago by the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a car was parked on a street in Palo Alto, where it sat untouched for a week. At the same time, Zimbardo had an identical car parked in a roughly comparable neighborhood in the Bronx, only in this case the license plates were removed and the hood was propped open. Within a day, it was stripped. Then, in a final twist, Zimbardo smashed one of the Palo Alto car’s windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, that car, too, was destroyed. Zimbardo’s point was that disorder invites even more disorder-that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. The broken window was the tipping point.” [Gladwell 1996]

Hér er um sama fyrirbærið að ræða. Afskiptaleysi húseiganda og stjórnvalda í Reykjavík gagnvart þeim minniháttar glæpum sem veggjakrot og rúðubrot eru hefur skapað umhverfi þar sem minniháttar glæpir þrífast og erum við að verða komin að faraldspunktinum.

Því vil ég leggja til vil borgaryfirvöld að gripið verði til aðgerða, og þau hús í miðborginni sem eru til óprýðis verði máluð upp á nýtt og brotnar rúður lagaðar. Tímaramminn til að framkvæma svonalagað er stuttur, því ef þetta er gert í áföngum er ekki öruggt að þetta eigi eftir að bera árangur. Hugsanlega er best að niðurgreiða málninguna fyrir húseigendur, en það má spyrja sig hvort það sé nægileg hvatning að þeirra hálfu til þess að taka þátt í hreinsunaraðgerðum. En hvernig sem það verður þá er mjög líklegt að fjárfesting í nokkur hundruð lítra af málningu eigi eftir að skila sér margfallt til baka í minni rekstrarkostnaði hjá lögreglu (að þurfa að sinna ýmsum smáglæpum), umhverfishreinsun (t.d. brotnar flöskur o.þ.h.) og almennt glaðlyndari íbúum (sem leiðir til ómælanlegra áhrifa í hagkerfinu).

Hopefully it will spur the right kind of response. Generally I think it is far better to nudge the variables than to use reactionary means like Reykjavík’s police has been doing for months, when they decided to deploy swat officers in the city center during weekends to make sure people don’t urinate on the streets or break bottles. Expensive, authoritarian, and extreme overkill.

Herbert linked me to this text by Siggi Pönk. It is both slightly supportive of my ill-informed claim from the post before last, and supportive of Miriam’s response. The truth is flexible. But at least it’s not Z_36.

Anyway, it’s a fairly good read although it emphasizes a bit much on recent events, jumping over several large protests (such as Ómarsganga) and only mentioning the only riot in Icelandic history in passing. It also neglects Gúttóslagurinn, although I suppose that wasn’t strictly an anarchist exercise.

I think it would be interesting to do what Herbert and I talked about once, back in the day. We talked about doing proper historical research on protests, rallies and formal complaints throughout Icelandic history, measured against their relative success rates. It would be very informative.

Herbert: Get cracking.

I went to see The Golden Compass on Saturday with Alli and Simmi. Good flick, really entertaining, and Dakota Blue Richards really pulled off her role with flying colors that, well, most of the other lead actors mostly weren’t there to follow up on.

However, the mathematician in me awoke to one facet of the movie. The eponymous compass (pictured) shows 36 symbols on its face, and there are three hands that select the parameters of the question, and one hand that returns the “truth”. Okay. So this is a function f: Z₃₆ × Z₃₆ × Z₃₆ -> Z₃₆. Which basically means there are only 46656 questions in existence, and only 36 different answers.

Granting leeway for contextual interpretation, we understand these 46656 questions are indeed innumerable - but it also means that every conceivable question can be reduced to one of 46656 proto-questions, or that there are indeed 46656 different sets, and each question belongs to at least one of these sets and no question belongs to any set outside of these. Further, there is a many-to-one relation mapping each of these 46656 sets to members of set consisting of 36 elements, giving us a reduction factor of approximately the cubic root.I really wish life were that simple.

But ignoring that kind of thing… it was a good movie. I look forward to the sequel. I wouldn’t mind reading the novels either… but the book Interface by Stephen Bury (a.k.a. Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George) entered the top of my stack today when I accidentally ambled in to Nexus with Alli. Whoops.

I got e-mailed an Icelandic translation of the talk Miriam Rose did at the Reykjavík Academy on the 20th of November. Miriam was one of the people who protested the Kárahnjúkar dam project up until the last minute, and she managed to get arrested, stored in solitary confinement for 8 days and almost deported from Iceland for no more than disobeying the Police - something most people simply get slapped on the wrist or at most fined for around here.

Miriam is a member of the Saving Iceland movement. I’d like to say that although I very much agree with their cause and support it wholeheartedly, I firmly disagree with a lot of their methodology, especially with regards to acts of sabotage. (In fact, a friend of mine calls it a “terrorist organization”, which I find stupid - there’s no such thing as terrorist organizations. It’s not like a group of people sits down one day and decides to become terrorists just for kicks. Rather, it’s people fighting for a cause, and such people sometimes resort to violence. This aspect is, as a rule, ignored in western media.) I maintain that destruction, being the opposite of creation, is always the wrong way to do things, and therein it is imperative that we do not break laws in the name of justice - as is pointed out in the speech, law and justice are too different concepts altogether - but rather be subversive and find ways to give the wrongdoers a taste of their own medicine. The system the tyrants have concocted makes this difficult, but beating people at their own game is always the sweetest of all victories.

Now, with that caveat out of the way… well. Miriam’s speech is extremely good. (The Icelandic translation by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl is almost flawless too, although his translation of “spin doctor” was lax..)

Miriam graciously allowed me (and everybody else) to republish the talk, saying that there is a recording and she’s going to try and get it for me. I’ll post a link when it becomes available.

Here it is:

---

For those of you who don´t already know me, my name is Miriam Rose, and I am an activist and environmental scientist from the UK. I have been asked to speak today on my experience of the basic values of Icelandic society, based on an interview I did on Kastljos in October, after I was threatened with deportation from Iceland for my part in actions against the heavy industry policy of your government. The letter of requested deportation which I received explained that I may be expelled from Iceland for a minimum of three years as my behavior constitutes a ‘threat to the fundamental values of society’.

In the interview I noted how telling I thought this choice of words, and raised the question: What are the fundamental values of Icelandic society? It seems that free speech, equal rights and the right to protest are not amongst them, so what does this sentence say? To me it revealed a very simple truth about the nature of the decision. I had questioned the right of market and economic values to dominate society and nature, through the policy of heavy industrialisation. In this accusation it was made painfully clear that these are the ‘fundamental values’ of today’s Icelandic society even at the expense of human freedoms, and those who question such values are not welcome here. I will go on to explore this hypothesis tonight.

Iceland is a country with a proud history and belief in strong democracy and human rights. It is certainly perceived from the outside as a country with a representative and refined democratic system, and peaceful and humanist values. But what are these basic values we are so proud of maintaining in such a developed society? There are two essential building blocks of commonly percieved fundamental values of society- the fundamental human rights and the basic democratic values. I will go on to examine some of these values in detail, in relation to their applications in modern Icelandic society.

Developed democracies claim to value above all the basic human rights; free speech, equal rights, freedom of movement etc. Rights that were defined by hundreds of years of social struggle against repressive regimes, for equality and freedom, and are now enshrined into UN conventions and government constitutions to put our minds at rest.

So let us start with equal rights, perhaps the most fundamental of these values, assumed by all and part of our everyday rhetoric on the advantages of western democracy. But how are our equal rights monitored and enforced? Well, if we feel we have been treated unequally our first stop is the law courts, designed to check the application of such rights and deliver justice. It is well known that our ability to be represented in the courts requires and depends on money; good lawyers, payment of court fees, time off work etc. So this system is fundamentally flawed and unequal.

Secondly it is the duty of governments and companies to practice and ensure equal rights in their policies and actions. But will they really do this at the expense of enormous profit margins? Big corporations and state economies operate by using cheap labour and products from countries with dubious human rights to give their customers cheap ‘value-added’ goods. Value in this sense means only the size of the dent in the purse, not the rights of those whose slave labour creates it.

To confuse the matter of equal rights further, the use of human rights terminology must also be monitored, as its original purpose is misused and mistreated in the court room. The European Court of Human Rights has in several cases awarded corporations the human rights of individuals. The idea is that by acting against a corporation, you are acting against its shareholders and their fundamental human rights. (ie by blockading a MacDonalds truck you restrict the freedom of movement of its shareholders). Even these conventions now serve to protect the rights of big business and capital growth, and do not represent the voiceless majority as they were intended.

In Iceland there is considerable evidence of terrible mistreatment of foreign workers at Karahnjukar dams. Illegal workers brought by construction company Impregilo had almost no rights in Icelandic society, and reports of deaths at the work site are accused of being grossly underestimated. They received no justice or equality here. The Icelandic state ignored this ill-treatment in favour of the profits promised by powerful companies like ALCOA, (and perhaps also in fear of speaking against corporations with such highflying connections).

Personally I have experienced considerable inequality in my treatment here. This summer i was sent directly to prison after being notified of a fine for disobeying the police. In contrast to the norm I was given no time to pay the amount and no right to appeal in the courts, and was sent immediately to prison where I was kept in isolation for 8 days, as there was not space in the womens prison for me. While inside I was told by the prison guards that this was very unusual as most women are pardoned a few times before being imprisoned in Iceland, hence the small number of female prisoners. They were quite surprised that a woman convicted of her first and non-violent crime would be treated this way. It seems that this unfair treatment was intentionally harsh as a warning to other protesters that they were not wanted by the state.

Let us move on to free speech. Unlike the controlled media of dictatorships and communist regimes, we pride ourselves on the free and unbiased press of the Western world. But how impartial is it really? Icelandic media is controlled by a few private groups and a small state run element, which accepts private finance. What are their interests? Can company owned and sponsored media really criticise its own, or associated companies, or report fairly on their economic abuses? In whose interest was it that lies about the payment of Saving Iceland activists were published by RÚV and never revoked despite complaints made through all the official channels?

I will use the pertinent form of questioning taken by tribal rights activists in India, whom I have worked with and ask:
Free speech for whom? At what cost?

Thirdly, and in strong relation to my experience, what of freedom of assembly or the right to demonstrate? When our ability to express ourselves through the democratic system or the free media fails, this is an essential human right to test our democracy and the existence of our perceived fundamental human rights and values. On this subject i will read from an essay by booker prize winning Indian author Arundhati Roy:

“The only way to make democracy real is to begin a process of constant questioning, permanent provocation, and continuous public conversation between citizens and the State. That conversation is quite different from the conversation between political parties. (Representing the views of rival political parties is what the mass media thinks of as ‘balanced’ reporting.)

It is important to remember that our freedoms such as they are, were never given to us by any government, they have been wrested from them by us. If we do not use them, if we do not test them from time to time, they atrophy. If we do not guard them constantly, they will be taken away from us. If we do not demand more and more, we will be left with less and less.” (Roy, 2005)

In several instances the Icelandic State has shown its intolerance to the right of freedom of assembly, and to methods of civil disobedience as a form of protest. (Despite huge admiration for the use of these methods in defining our civil rights and freedoms). In 2002 any person suspected of being a member of the Falun Gong (a strictly pacifist human rights movement), were arrested or denied entry into Iceland at the request of a corrupt and internationally frowned upon government. (China.)

As a personal anecdote, I often use an example from my treatment here last summer. After being arrested and taken to Eskifjorður police station after a protest action, I found myself very thirsty while held in one of the small hot cells. When I knocked on the door to ask for a glass of water (my constitutional right) I was told, “You lost your rights when you broke the law!” and denied the water. This incident highlights to me the mentality of absolute lack of acceptance of the validity of this form of protest, and the lack of respect of human rights by those who´s job it is to protect them. (The police.)

We suffer from an obsession with the ’sacred’ nature of the law, which denies us the right to challenge laws, ask who they are there to protect, and allow society to change and grow as it has historically by the use of these methods.

Having examined some of the main human rights let us now turn to the fundamental values and building blocks of democracy, the pride of Iceland´s history as the first truly democratic nation. Democracy is based on; participation (of people in the system), representation (of the people by politicians) and accountability (of decisions taken to the people). By examining these elements I will present the idea that real democracy has been replaced by an ‘illusion of democracy’, manufactured by PR experts and spin-doctors who now hold such an important place in the workings of our governments. In fact many western governments (including Iceland) rely on this illusion to maintain a fairly silent and disinterested population, who don’t question a so-called democratic system which benefits big business and capital growth at the expense of all else (the environment, civil liberties etc).The use of rhetoric has confused the ‘free-market’ with the freedom of the people, suggesting that an open economic environment means an open society, and disguising the loss of civil liberties and democracy that march hand in hand with such unchecked and unquestioned capital growth.

First let us examine participation. In this the democratic systems we use are fundamentally flawed. In the 2003 Icelandic elections 33.7% voted Independence party, 31% voted for the Alliance (social democrats), and 17% voted Progressive. In the following coalition, not only did just 34% vote for the winning party, but a party with only 17% support achieved huge shared power in government. This was the coalition who went on to repeatedly deny requests for an open vote on Kárahnjukarvirkjun.

Secondly we may examine representation and accountability. Once elected it seems that ministers have a clean bill to do what they (and their interest groups) want without any accountability to, or representation of the people who put them there. In 2003 Prime Minister David Oddsson and Foreign Secretary Halldor Ásgrimsson, allied Iceland to the war in Iraq without the consultation of the people or even the government. This decision was vastly against public opinion. It was not representative and against the parliamentary rules and the constitution, which state that such issues must go through the foreign affairs commitee (which it did not). The Penal Code states that anyone who challenges the fairness of the Icelandic state as defined in the constitution is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Were they tried on this crime? No. Representation and accountability failed here as in so many cases.

Again, when the legal system and democracy has failed to hold the government accountable, protest is the only avenue for justice. In 2006 fifteen thousand people marched in towns and cities around Iceland in protest of the drowning of Kárahnjukar, to no effect. It is no wonder that people feel powerless with these methods of protest, and turn to direct action and civil disobedience to challenge decisions made in their name.

Some would even say that corporations have more power than people and even politicians in Iceland. Since we have seen the connection between money and power, it is clear that enormous monopolies like ALCOA, Baugur group, RioTinto and the KolKrabbin hold much. And how are they held accountable? DECODE, the owner of almost all Icelandic human DNA are selling off their information to other companies at 60,000 Kr a piece, with no public permission. Meanwhile ALCOA receives energy for many times less than the Icelandic public, an amount so small that Landsvirkjun will not even disclose it.

Again we ask: Representation for whom? At what cost? Democracy for whom? At what cost?

Modern Western democracies (such as Iceland and the UK) rely on a silent and disillusioned population, allowing the passing of controversial policies without check, as we are fooled by the rhetoric of democracy and freedom. Unlike under a harsh dictatorship or tough communism, we are too wealthy and content to question the system that creates our wealth.

On the issue of authority and acceptance, I always find the famous psychological test by Stanley Milgram very interesting. In this experiment a member of the public is asked to participate in a contrived experiment in which they must read out a list of questions to
a second participant (actually an actor) sitting in the next room. When the answerer gets the questions wrong, they must give them an electric shock, the dose of which will increase with each wrong answer until it reaches a red (very dangerous) zone on the machine. The participant can hear the screams of the answerer getting louder and more horrific with each dose. In most experiments the participant complied to a very worrying level of electric dosage and did not question the authority of the white-coated, clipboard holding scientist directing the test. Milgram concluded that the perceived authority of the scientist removed the personal values of the participant to some extent.

He went on to examine how compliance changed with variations to certain aspects of the experiment. He found that compliance dropped dramatically when: a) the scientist did not wear a labcoat or hold a clipboard, b) A third party actor playing another member of the public entered and questioned the validity of the experiment. When related to democracy and societal values, the first instance shows the importance of perceived legitimacy in authority figures, and the need for the PR man to ensure the image keeps the people silent and satisfied. The second element I find most interesting as it shows the huge destabilising force of the dissenting public voice to the illusion of democracy. It only takes one other voice of concern to unmask the powers that be and lead to rejection of the system and re-establishment of personal values. No wonder governments try so hard to quash protest against their contentious policies.

Finally, when asking Icelanders what they consider the basic values of their society, the issue of Independence came up time and time again. It seems that if liberty is the fundamental value of the USA, Independence is that of Iceland. Icelanders are respected worldwide for their rejection of a national army, of the EU, of the globalisation of fishing rights. There is a real, and admirable feeling of the need to be self sufficient as an island state here, even at the cost of expensive fat-cat friendships in Europe and beyond.

Despite this, there is great willingness of the Icelandic nation to accept neo-colonisation of the economy by very few Aluminium corporations, who rip off energy at a fraction of the public cost, burdening the taxpayer and creating economic reliance on so few foreign companies. (ALCOA admitted in a meeting in Brazil that they are paying less than half for Icelandic power, as they will pay for big dam electricity there.) Yet, when foreign activists join Icelanders in opposing this sellout they are shunned and told, ‘it is not your business’.

So it seems that the freemarket, the economy and Iceland’s role in corporate globalisation are the key values of today’s Icelandic society. So we ask once more: Globalisation for whom? At what cost?

Does globalisation mean international free movement of people?
No, not in the case of the Falun Gong, or saving iceland activists repeatedly threatened with deportation.

Does it mean equal respect for all human lives?
Not in the case of the secretive treatment of workers at Karahnjukarvirkjun.

Does it mean meaningful international treatise on climate change, racial discrimination or nuclear weapons?
No, again it doesn’t. Geir H. Harde is even currently trying to weedle his way out of Iceland’s already excessive Kyoto allowances.

And, if these are the values of Iceland, are they really the values of the Icelandic people? Or just those of the powerful few at the head of the decision making process? And if they are not the people’s values, how will the people object to them? How will they regain and redefine the real fundamental values of society? That is the question which faces Iceland and most states today. In a climate where the market God has become almost unquestioned as the basis of our life and values, we must decide whether it is really ok to take the blue pill and settle into the cushioned comfort of the illusion, or gulp the red pill, open our eyes, and set ourselves to unmasking the powers that we must once again wrest our values from.

References:

Roy, Arundhati, 2005. ‘An ordinary persons guide to empire’. Penguin Books, India.

Miriam Rose is also co-author of:

Aluminium Tyrants (The Ecologist)
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/1021

Relevant stories:

The Directorate of Immigration Refuse to Deport Miriam Rose
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/1022

London Protest Against Iceland’s Deportation of Environmental Activists
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/998

Stop Iceland’s Persecution of Environmental Activists - London Demo 2 October
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/988

UK Greens Urge Icelandic Government to Stop Persecution of SI Activists
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/985

UK Greens Back British Environmental Activist Imprisoned in Iceland
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/917

‘Surprise, surprise!’
http://www.savingiceland.org/node/144

---

(Copied from SavingIceland.org, with permission)