A Lethal Tantrum

As you may recall, back in March we reported on a little tantrum thrown by the autonomer of Nørrebro, a district of Copenhagen. It seems the youths were a little bit upset and found it necessary to burn some cars and throw things at the police in order to express their displeasure.


“Autonomer” is the Danish term for a hodge-podge of anarchists, Trotskyites, radical Greens and all the other players we see in the anti-war and anti-globalist demonstrations that erupt periodically across the Western world. Here in the USA it would be International ANSWER filling the same role.

They are called autonomer because they reckon themselves to be autonomous, i.e. not part of the patriarchal capitalist warmongering fascistic country they happen to be living in. They are the true independent free-thinking progressive idealists of our time.

Which is very interesting, because they threw that incendiary tantrum back in March because they were finally evicted by the police from Ungdomshuset (the Youth House), a house in Nørrebro where they had been squatting for years. They didn’t own it, but since they had been living there so long, and since property is an outmoded concept of bourgeois capitalism, they considered it theirs.

And how do these youths support themselves? Why, they are recipients of government welfare benefits, of course!

Some “autonomy”.

Anyway, although Ungdomshuset is gone (it has since been torn down), it has not been forgotten, and from the point of view of the victims, the fascist crimes against the progressive youth of Copenhagen still require an accounting.

Mikkel Høgh, who blogs in English, had this report last week on the latest from the autonomer:

I just saw the critically acclaimed Danish move ‘Drabet’ (Drab is the term for voluntary manslaughter in Danish) by Per Fly, one of our best filmmakers here in Denmark, and it is one of those films that makes you think. The film revolves around the killing of a Danish police officer by a group of left-wing “activists”… The film contains a scene where one of the characters tries to relativise the killing of the policeman to Iraqi children struck with cancer due to American usage of depleted uranium weapons and other similar stories. And it is just such a callous thing to say — or even think. It is just wrong on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin. Just today, I read that the young “activists” from the late “Ungdomshuset” that was torn down earlier this year are contemplating real terrorism. In an article I found on Politiken, one of them says the following:

People are fed up with militant action that does not work. It would be more effective with assault, firebombings or kidnappings. It could be a police officer, Ritt Bjerregaard or Ruth Evensen.

And their apologist lawyer states:

The young people do not feel that they are being listened to. They are becoming desperate and that is dangerous.

[…]

I distance myself from violence when ever I am asked. But I will not preach non-violence to the young people. That is not my job.

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I distance myself from violence when ever I am asked.

Does that mean you stay close to violence whenever no one asks you about it? Do you think there’s anything wrong with it? Or are such judgments irrelevant and antiquated to a free-thinking modern progressive like yourself?

That is not my job.

No, it isn’t. If a Danish lawyer is anything like an American lawyer, your job is to make large quantities of money while paying little or no attention to ethical behavior or the truth.

Nor is it the job of the schools, the government, the media or any other organized entity of modern society.

“Preaching” — a.k.a. moral education — is a no-no. It has been ruled off the turf. Different strokes for different folks, whatever floats your boat, etc., etc. Who are we to judge?

And so we have Danish punks publishing a call to murder in a major organ of the press, and no one bats an eye.

At the same time, a politician in Sweden has been convicted of ethnic agitation for speaking the plain truth.

If only I could make like General Cornwallis at Yorktown, and summon up the band to play “The World Turned Upside Down”.