Welcome to the blog of Johannes Wilm!

This is a campaign I started a little over a month ago. And yes, I happened to take the initiative, but the fact that the name wasn't very well chosen was something many people had been thinking about before. Basically, it's this Danish company that's taking over a piece of property that had belonged to the army previously and builds a Danish school on it for 70 million Euros, and everybody gets all excited about how great they are. The problem is just that the company doing it is the shipping giant MAERSK and it's named after their founder Arnold Peter Møller, who died in the 1960s. Now this guy and this company happen to have a history on earning their money on wars (selling arms to the Nazis and earning high profits on services to the Pentagon in connection with the Iraq war) and using union busting tactics against their workers.


The A.P.Møller-school of today might be the Gilberto-Soto-school of tomorrow.

Just in terms of numbers If they were to pay the same tax percentages for their oil exploration in Denmark to the Danish government as private companies have to pay to the Norwegian government, that would amount to 6 Billion Euros more in tax income from today until 2045. But the queen, and the Danish minister of education thank them so much for giving 70 million!

When I first wrote this, I wasn't aware of several points that appear in the final version. That is because the first ten people signing it had a say in the contents of it, and several of them added things I didn't have a clue of.


Arnold Peter Møller -- weapon producer for the Nazis -- is now being honored with a school named after him.

The reaction in the borderland has been like it would be anywhere in Soviet Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall: the newspaper Flensborg Avis refused to print it with the argument that the fond paying for the school had been "giving a lot of money to Southern Schleswig in the last couple of years". Other people employed by the Danish institutions either were told that they could not sign such a thing or they were afraid of signing it due to past reaction from the system. The text was allegedly also spread in the intranet of the teachers down there. One guy went as far as calling me six times on my Nicaraguan cell phone and some 20-30 people sent me hate mails of various kinds. A reporter from Flensborg Avis went on and on in Facebook forums, trying to find some or other problem with the text. Unfortunately for him, he just revealed thereby that his investigative skills weren't all that developed.

Still, despite some (unfortunately very uninformed) criticism I and we received so far, I am sure that in a few decades the call will come to fruition in some form or another. Here you can read it in four languages:

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Update: In the final count, the FSLN ended up with winning a grand total of 105 city governments. The liberals continue to claim it was fraudulent, but in the Supreme Election Commision (CSE) there were three Sandinistas and three representatives of the liberals. The liberals also ended up voting for accepting the results in Managua and León. One of them came out against Montealegre publicly, saying the former candidate for mayor had ulterior motives. The liberal party has expelled its three members of the CSE, claiming they had sold themsevles to the FSLN. Ortega mentioned in the victory speech, that the Carter Center and the OAS had told him after the elections in 1996, that they couldn't permit new elections in Nicaragua, although the elections were fraudulent. If that is true, it means that the Sandinistas were kept out of power for an additional ten years after winning the elections. That likely explains why Ortega decided not to let them monitor this time around.

Nicaragua once again is on the verge of chaos. Municipal elections were held on the 9th of October, and these were largely won by the Sandinistas (FSLN). In 91-94 out of 146 cases, the FSLN managed to win the majority. That is slightly more than last time, with a difference of around 4 counties. However, the elections were something somewhat extraordinary.

This video I took in León a week after the elections:

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This is really just to try it out, but a lot more should be coming henceforth. I'm running around Nicaragua with this really nifty camera/microphone combination, and although I have some 13h of footage, the editing situation has been pretty crummy and I have had to put the various bits and pieces of software together myself to get a working toolchain.


However, this ended up being used in Nicaraguan national TV by two stations. It's some footage I took the other day, when a political party, the Movimiento Renovador Sandinista and the students at the UNAN university clashed together here in Leon the other day. For the MRS, the militant Dora María Telléz had planned to speak at the university that day, and simultaneously the students decided to take over the university for the day in protest against the late payment of scholarships. The MRS recently lost its license to run in the upcoming local elections, and have therefore been calling the country a dictatorship. When students blocked the entrance on June 29th, they again expected for the president and his FSLN-party to be behind it all.


Confrontation between MRS and CUUN

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I recently went to Northern Ireland, to the city of Belfast. The Left has generally supported those pro-catholics, who are working for a united Ireland as a part of a national liberation struggle from London rule. I decided to interview representatives of progressive parties on either side on the issues that socialists should really care about -- social issues -- to see how different they really are in their day-to-day politics in these current times of peace. This is the last of three parts, in which I conclude after having interviewed Hugh Smyth from the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and Paul Maskey from the socialist Irish-republican Sinn Feinn party.

So there we go. I interviewed a representative of a progressive party on either side of the divide, and their answers were remarkably similar.

Local demands against profit rather than alliance with one EU-country or another can be seen in Belfast as well.

Let us review their answers once more:

 

PM: Paul Maskey (Sinn Fein)
HS: Hugh Smyth (HS)

housing:

HS: not opposed to rich apartments, but percentage needs to be affordable
PM: not against private houses, but more social housing

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I recently went to Northern Ireland, to the city of Belfast. The Left has generally supported those pro-catholics, who are working for a united Ireland as a part of a national liberation struggle from London rule. I decided to interview representatives of progressive parties on either side on the issues that socialists should really care about -- social issues -- to see how different they really are in their day-to-day politics in these current times of peace. This is the second of three parts, me interviewing Paul Maskey, member of the Northern Irish Assembly for Sinn Fein, in his office in Western Belfast. Part three with the conclusion will follow tomorrow.

Paul Maskey (Sinn Fein) claims to represent progressive republicanism.

Johannes Wilm

• Ehm, yeah, the first thing is I noticed when walking around
  there was quite a bit of graffiti against gentrification.

Paul Maskey

• ok

Johannes Wilm

• ehm, there are apparently apartment buildings that eh... are
  for the let's say those who have more money.

Paul Maskey

• mhm

Johannes Wilm

• Ehm... whereas others complain about lack of public
  housing.

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I recently went to Northern Ireland, to the city of Belfast. The Left has generally supported those pro-catholics, who are working for a united Ireland as a part of a national liberation struggle from London rule. I decided to interview representatives of progressive parties on either side on the issues that socialists should really care about -- social issues -- to see how different they really are in their day-to-day politics in these current times of peace. This is the first of three parts, me interviewing Hugh Smyth, founder and former leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and current member of the Belfast City Council, representing his small, but locally very present party, in his office in the Shankill Road in Western Belfast. Parts two and three will follow tomorrow and the day after

Hugh Smyth is standing outside his office in the Shankills Road.

Johannes Wilm

• Ok, here we go... ehm.. yeah...

Hugh Smyth (PUP)

• Who.. what are you enquiring?

...

Johannes Wilm

• I'm trying to look at...

Hugh Smyth (PUP)

• [door opens, interchange between office worker and HS]

Johannes Wilm

• And I'm trying to look at what kind of policies you have.
  That.. what you.. what kind of policies you support..

Hugh Smyth (PUP)

• right

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Update: Today, Saturday May 17th, the strike has ended after 12 days. Transport workers will get subsidies of 1.30 USD/gallon, but cargo transport will be excluded from that offer as they are "not regulated". Where the money for that suddenly comes from is unclear.


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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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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"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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