this edito is from today's guardian:
Quote:
Denmark's new values
What was once a liberal country lurched to the far right while the world was not looking
Kiku Day
Wednesday February 15, 2006
The Guardian
Denmark has at last managed to catch the world's eye, after so many years of failing to get credit for being at the cutting edge of liberalism. But the inelegant handling of the controversy over the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad is the result of a country that has been moving in the direction of xenophobia and racism - especially towards its Muslim inhabitants.
The world needs to realise that the Denmark that helped Jews flee from Nazi deportation is long gone. A new Denmark has appeared, a Denmark of intolerance and a deep-seated belief in its cultural superiority.
We were a liberal and tolerant people until the 1990s, when we suddenly awoke to find that for the first time in our history we had a significant minority group living among us. Confronted with the terrifying novelty of being a multicultural country, Denmark took a step not merely to the right but to the far right. Now, politicians of most stripes have embraced ignorance.
The Social Democrats, formerly Denmark's largest party and the force behind its postwar social reforms, were forced to realise that the rhetoric of solidarity and social reforms no longer impressed voters in an increasingly prosperous economy. To win support mainstream politicians felt they needed to bully the same scapegoat blamed by the far right for the social problems arising in modern Danish society, in the form of the Muslim minority. The rhetoric of politicians and media hardened and became offensive. Where else could liberal politicians get away with saying that one of their party's main aims is to stop Turkey joining the EU?
The discussion has focused on freedom of expression, but that is not what Jyllands-Posten had in mind when it published the caricatures, nor is it the prime mission of the rightwing Danish government. Denmark has embarked on a self-declared crusade to tell others how to live. The prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is quoted as saying: "Freedom of speech should be used to provoke and criticise political or religious authoritarians."
The Danish establishment weighed in on its leader's side. The rightwing newspaper Weekendavisen - at one time Denmark's foremost intellectual journal - justified Rasmussen's initial reaction of indifference to complaints about the cartoons and his refusal to meet with 10 concerned ambassadors from Muslim countries as "a desire for an activist foreign policy which has clashed with the traditional diplomatic wish to smooth things over". An MEP, Mogens Camre, declared: "It is 2005 and there is no reason whatsoever to respect foolish superstition in any form."
Following the lead of the moderates, the founder of the ultra-rightwing Danish People's party, Pia Kjærsgaard, felt emboldened to say that in order to qualify for citizenship, immigrants must not only master the Danish language but be examined on their respect for Danish society and its values. The words "Danish values" are repeated reverentially, as if all Danes possess a single mindset opposed to that held by Muslims. Kjærsgaard tells her countrymen the issue is not one of cartoons, but concerns rather a titanic struggle of values between totalitarian, dogmatic Islamic regimes and the freedom and liberty beloved of western democracies. Meanwhile the 200,000 Muslims living in Denmark have been denied a permit to build a mosque in Copenhagen. There is not a single Muslim cemetery in the country.
It is now obvious that Flemming Rose, the culture editor at Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the cartoonists to satirise the prophet, exhibited a striking lack of judgment. His subsequent decision to salvage things by planning to publish anti-semitic and anti-Christian caricatures went beyond the bounds of the permissible in Jyllands-Posten's and Denmark's crusade for free speech. Chief editor Carsten Juste finally intervened and sent Rose on indefinite leave.
An indefinite holiday is not enough. As the former foreign minister and Venstre party leader Uffe Elleman-Jensen has suggested, we need editors who realise that just bad judgment can have important consequences. Both Juste and Rose need to step down.
And how have ordinary Danes reacted? The People's party reported that last week it had received almost 17 times as many applications for membership as normal. Is this the future for Denmark? These are the new "Danish values", and the world needs to be aware of the dangers of a country that went off on the wrong track while nobody noticed.
· Kiku Day is a Danish musician living in London
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source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...709754,00.html
this article poses some interesting questions about a context that has, curiously enough, dropped away in the conversations about this cartoon cartoon controversy.
i would be curious to hear what nancy makes of it (or someone else who is in situ)---for myself, my close-ish acquaintance with things danish starts and stops with kierkegaard, so....
but it does point to an important matter that was discussed at length in the general discussion thread on this, but which has not reappeared in this thread--which i took to be in part motivated in order to make this topic safe against for extreme rightwing views to be circulated. so it has gone.
the issue is the drift into neofascist discursive terrain that so many folk above, and in the other thread, simply undertook without seeming to be aware of it.
the problem is that this terrain is unmarked in the u.s.: it is an aspect of mainstream conservative ideology, this repellent discourse that redefines a national community along racial and religious lines on the basis of caricatures of the muslim Other.
i feel no need to go through the entire demonstration again--suffice it to say that the interpretations being run out of this controversy, and the views of islam that one sees elaborated as a function of it, are as much if not more a problem than are the actions in response to the cartoons that this thread is set up to complain about.
all the arguments presented in the general discussion thread about the basically racist character of much conservative "understanding" of islam obtains here as well--switching forums does not obviate the critiques
it is curious, the extent to which this thread has so far functioned as if the other one did not happen.
but this edito raises many of the same questions.