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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:
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:
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.
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.
22/08: Ethnicity based on economics
Last year (the article should soon be online at http://www.duo.uio.no ) I pointed out that the various changes in border perception both at the Mexican/US and Danish/German border all have their economic underpinnings. National identity and ideology on either side are changing closely related to economic factors -- even though national ideologies usually hold that their particular national ideology has not changed (or currently resembles a state that it was at before it somehow was changed towards the worse). Also, it is usually held that national allegiance lies above any economic factors.
I ended my article with predicting...
I ended my article with predicting...
Ha! Finally I got my neighboor to speak again - at least a few sentences. The occasion this time was that I had forgotten a frozen pizza outside of our door in the hall way. "Is this yours?," she asked - thereby breaking several weeks of silence. "Ehm... yes" - I had actually been looking for it for several minutes. She gave me the "you are freaking weird"-look while handing me the pizza. But of course that was not all cause the next thing was that she was about to enter the bathroom: "If you need to shower, just remove those," I said while pointing at the five wet pink all-body suits that were hanging in the shower. Apparently that was no weirder than leaving a frozen pizza in the hall way, so she just said: "In fact, I do have to shower." And after another few words exchanges she moved into the shower, putting away those pink suits.
Johannes Wilm on his knees
Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?
Johannes Wilm on his knees
Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?
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