The Central American Republic of Nicaragua was in the 1980s portrayed as one of the greatest communist threats in the western hemisphere. Once the political right won presidential elections in 1990s, the ideological education so many had received for a decade suddenly didn't seem to have mattered. That is until now, in May 2008 little more than a year after the Sandinistas regained the presidency with a promise of national reconciliation, when transport workers take to the streets, shut down all public transport built barricades on major highways and demand for the government to go back to politics of price control and subsidization. Now running on its 9th consecutive day with all talks between drivers and government not anywhere close to a positive the solution, the immediate future of Nicaragua is uncertain.



Transport workers in León at the exit to Managua, trying to stopp trafic at least semi-permanently



The strike started on May 5th. The first day only busses between major cities stopped while city busses and taxis in Managua as well as busses between minor destinations continued to operate. Since then all transportation has been shut-down with the exception of occasional pirate taxis. In the city of León drivers have set up camp at the exit of the highway to Managua, and most afternoons they block each lane for ten minutes at a time to stop most traffic, although only past Tuesday did it end up with violent confrontations between police and demonstrators.

The demand brought forth by the transport cooperatives are frozen petrol prices at the equivalent of 2.88 USD/gallon or 0.49 Euro/L for public transport, as they claim is the case for those operating in Managua already. Currently prices run around 5.18 USD/gallon or 0.88 Euro/L. The money that is to be used on this is the money that the government allegedly has access to through an oil deal with Venezuela which lets the country buy oil at market price, but with only 50% having to be paid within 90 days and the remainder in 23 years with an extremely low 2% interest rate. The government on the other hand claims that there isn't sufficient funding available for such heavy subsidization and that part of the available funds are to be used for other projects, such as anti-hunger measures, micro-credits for small shop owners and road infrastructure measures.


Workers presenting wounds inflicted upon them by the police

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Hey everybody. It's not like I'm not experiencing anything. I've been studying in London, went to Belfast and interviewed representatives of opposing but leftist/socialist parties, I went all across the States from Portland, OR to Miami, FL, stopping by in Berkley/Oakland, CA, Douglas/Tucson, AZ and NOLA (all by land) while meeting tons of people. And I've started fieldwork here in Nicaragua where I meet and talk to everything from open source software students (explaining to them all about LAMP) to hardline Sandinistas involved in land occupations, backpackers of all types and intellectual elites.


Johannes -- thinking

I started writing a number of texts, but I just can't get myself to finish anything to be published. Maybe I'll do sometime in the future, but don't count on it. I don't really think I'm obligated to tell anyone why, but it's just how it happens to be. If nothing else, it was getting boring having a constant deadline waiting for me just around the corner.

If you really want to know what I'm doing, it's probably best to send me an email or contact me on Facebook (email: j.wilm (a) gold.ac.uk), and I'm sure I'll tell you something or other, depending on who you are.

PS: If you are from Denmark/Norway (or feel close to those countries), check out the national campaign websites for these countries to get their soldiers home from Afghanistan that I've created recently: Norway & Denmark.

A few months ago I took an Austrian girl on a tour of the old German Democratic Republic (GDR). Part of the point was to show that the view of East German history differed quite a bit depending on where one was. Now unfortunately we did not meet all that many people with a positive view of the previous regime, and so i, who usually count myself as quite opposed to Stalinism, had to step in and try to show some of the positive points of the GDR as well.

One of these is without question that Western Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), has media that is at least as false and brainwashing as that of the GDR, and by following both one could therefore escape most of the propaganda.


Buy a youthfil shirt to show you support the GDR -- well if it hadn't collapsed some 19 years ago.


But now a report on some states in East and Western Germany by the research community "SUP-State" (the SUP was the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party of East Germany) at the Free University of Berlin (FUB) shows that views amongst students in East Germany on the GDR are more positive than what they had expected. It appears that the selection of informants the Austrian girl and I had made was skewed.

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No, it's not that I don't have a life and that I only write about and am concerned with issues relating to the usually very far away Danish minority in Germany and its mother country. While I have not been blogging for several months, I moved to Hackney in north eastern London with Petra (false name), who I met in Oaxaca (see posts from about a year ago) and I started MPhil/PhD studies at Goldsmiths College -- quite a radicalizing change from the University of Oslo. In October, the print edition of the Norwegian Dagbladet also had a piece on me coordinating activists from Norway and Germany to come to a demonstration for the youth house Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, while I was situated in Århus. I wrote notes in online communities such as Facebook.com and Underskog.no -- one of my Norwegian comments on the current political situation in Denmark in Norwegian was translated to Danish by Espen Stegger Ledaal -- and I supplied Katie, with whom I had been traveling in Central America, with enough data on the Danish welfare state model for a group presentation as part of her social woks master degree, that her professor said she was very lucky to have "a significant other" from Denmark... So yeah, I sure have been active, although I stopped writing here for a while.

It is actually quite easy to record patterns of behavior of those around me here, but they are anarchists and so a bit paranoid of having their stories published all over the Internet. Also there were some events in the last few months that were so close to me that I would be afraid of putting them out for everyone to see. So you will have to wait until I go somewhere else -- like Nicaragua some time this spring/summer.

Nevertheless, every now and then I find the time to scan through the Danish minority paper Flensborg Avis.


The physical border line between Denmark and Germany consists of no more than symbolical markers in 2007. Nevertheless, maintaining "Danish culture" is still important to some.

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The last year has really been quite a rush for me. Actually the last few ones have been. When I dropped by my parents last sumemr some time and just shot this mini-docu, it was in-between a million other things and I had to leave to Oslo the day after. I had never expected that it would take me so much time and that it would be stretched out over so long to finally get it fixed to where it is viewable. But finally this week, before going to London on Wednesday, I had some time at my parents' computers, where it has been sitting for all that time. So if you have not seen it yet or did not understand much of it due to subtitle problems, now is he time.




And go and check out the original post for the discussion!

It all started in the middle of the Afghanistan campaign: The same group of Afghan refugees that had hunger striked in front of Oslo Domkirke last summer now arranged a 650km march from Trondheim back to Oslo. The point was to get media coverage in order to stop Norway from deporting people to their war-torn country. I had just arrived a day or two earlier from the G8 summit in Heiligendamm when they arrived in Oslo. A few hundred supporters showed up when the 45 young men who had done the walk arrived at the outskirts of Oslo and walked the last kilometer or so with together them. The final destination was the parliament building and the secret plan was to erect a tent during the speeches there, which would then stay in place, giving shelter to the camping Afghans. They would then stay until the police/government would take any concrete action.


Austria -- for real, this is what it looks like there!

This is the story on how I left from Oslo and that campaign and traveled 2000km to visit a girl I had only seen a few hours in Panama half a year ago...

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Some have asked for me to tell a bit more about what Rostock really was like. In some of the international media the G8 protests were completely ignored, and in for example the Norwegian media, the stone throwing on Saturday the 2nd were big time news with, as far as I understand, live pictures of riots being beamed to living rooms across the country. Also in Germany, stations such as N-TV showed the same two burned out cars from all angles at various stages of burning, making it look like there had been a whole line of cars that had been whole line of burned out cars. On top of that you had the number of 433 hurt police officers (status Sunday, 3rd). Sounds like civil war, huh?
Well, on the ground it was not quite like that. For anyone reading this only to find action, I can tell you now already that I was never arrested nor hit by a water cannon. I was neither anywhere close to stones being thrown and I did I do anything that in itself, forgetting the special circumstances, would have been very exciting. Well, maybe. If sleeping on a street counts.


The blockade consisted mostly of young people.

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"This is what winners look like!" activists shouting and celebrating after 48h of blockades



On the 6-8th of June 2007, Germany hosted the annual G8 meeting in Heiligendamm. For many of the academic-intellectual organizations that came into life with the advent of the globalization-from-below movement around Seattle 1999 or who are older but have redefined themselves as being part of the movement, this was planned to be just another meeting space. Almost all the Norwegians who came down (I was on a bus with around 50 and we arrived in Rostock, the closest bigger city, on the morning of the 2nd) were here for a big demonstration some days before the meeting started, and those few who stayed for the time of the actual summit were to participate in an "anti-summit" in Rostock during the summit. Now there have been loads such summits over the last few years, and they have a few things in common: all the main speakers speak within some post-Marxist framework, preferably the speakers argue for applying some kind of wonder tax which would magically transform this world back to the early eighties, and no-one ever has any real proposal on what to do to exert power. Even in times when countries go to war with over 90% of their population being against it, there is somehow this strange notion in these conferences that everything will be good if only one speaks and demonstrates. A perfect example thereof is Mr. Peter Wahl of the coordinating group of German Attac, who tried to convince everybody to just sit down in front of the first line of policemen.


However, in Germany things were somewhat different. 10,000 activists ended up blocking all entrance ways to the conference center physically for hours on end and made all transport in and out of the center at times impossible at other times very dangerous. The fence around the whole thing that cost around 15 million USD and security was supposed to be on top; 16400 police from all over the country and an unknown amount of the army had coordinated for months and months in order to keep demonstrators at least 200m away from the fence. Some politicians had even talked about using the special anti terror unit GSG9 and equip police with rubber bullets in order to keep them away from the fence.

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April 26th to 27th 2007, Oslo hosted the annual informal NATO summit which was accompanied with a series of protests. I will try to give you an overview of the events surrounding these days from the perspective of an Oslo activist. This is the second part.

One factor in the special way the Norwegian left is handled is the huge amount of media attention it gets -- and that is of the positive kind. I believe it is fair to say that the vast majority of the non-parliamentary left, or those who are active in parliaments but do not believe much in parliaments' abilities to fundamentally change society, there is _one_ common strategy on how to change government policy:

Make your case known in the media -> your proposal gains popular support -> politicians react to opinion polls and more parties are willing to adopt a stance closer to your's -> the government implements a law or a policy that encompasses what you wanted.



Blitz and Attac: although style and methods differ, goal and strategy are in reality the same.

Generally the entire anti-capitalist left agrees on most issues. In this case it would be for Norway to pull out of NATO, for NATO to be shut down, and for all NATO (Norwegian and from other countries) soldiers to be pulled out of Afghanistan as fast as possible. So there is not really a difference in the amount of radicalism amongst us. However, some groups have to consider other groups outside the anti-capitalist left and they therefore moderate what they can ask for. One example is the left of the Socialist Left Party which, although itself through and through anti-capitalist, has to consider the right in the party, which is social liberal and does not understand much of the ideas of the anti-capitalist left. Other major considerations are how radical ideas one wants to gain support for can be, whether one should prioritize a long-term perspective of changing society fundamentally or a short-term perspective of changing one tiny bit of society, and what kind of measures to gain media attention are productive.

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April 26th to 27th 2007, Oslo hosted the annual informal NATO summit which was accompanied with a series of protests. I will try to give you an overview of the events surrounding these days from the perspective of an Oslo activist. This is the first part.


The protests around the NATO summit would end with confrontations between protestors and demonstrators. (Photo: spisderike.net)

Friday April 20th, I was on my way to Bergen for the national council meeting of Pedagogstudentene to represent the University of Oslo, when my phone rang as I was passing through security control. "This is XX from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs [...] We were wondering if you were showing up on the meeting on Monday?" What were they talking about? Why would I, just a simple student without any offices be asked to show up at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? "It's a meeting on the NATO summit later on next week, we sent you an invitation..." OK, I got it. This must have had something to do with my previous involvement with Blindern Fred. Since I started coordinating the group fall 2004, never more than about 4-5 activists at any given time had been involved with the group at any given time. It was tiny. But we had quite a few successes in setting the agenda by getting media attention on various issues. When I had left for the Americas, the group had pretty much dissolved. Only one older employee of the meteorological faculty, Rolf Solvang, continued running the organization in his less activist style, by for example arranging a debate on "Norwegian media's role in war" (Wednesday this week).
But now Blindern Fred somehow was considered an organization that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs needed to talk to before they could hold a NATO summit. Nice!

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