Racism in Denmark, a Global View

But who pays for it?

I make no distinction regarding refugees of any ethnic background: Arab, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Aboriginal, etc. We pay a much higher price by not caring for all peoples in need wherever they are in our world. We, in the “West,” have a moral responsibility at the very least, an economic, self-serving responsibility at worst, and a spiritual responsibility at best.

Moral, because it is often directly due to “Western” exploitation and covert governmental influences in the “3rd World” that has resulted in these region’s intense suffering.

A self-serving economic responsibility, because if “Western countries” do not help these refugees now, it will result in a far greater cost later on. These refugees are added to the rolls of those who cannot participate in paying international debts. Refugees acquire tax-paying skills for the countries that embrace them (in spite of the short term cost of initially caring for them). Also, when innocent refugees are forced back to their chaotic lands, they will likely foster such hate for the western world that terrorists will have no problem recruiting them, at an unimaginable cost to the Western World.

We have a spiritual responsibility because a basic tenet for any culture’s survival, as many historians and anthropologists agree, is proportional to its compassion. If this sounds far-fetched, then you’re short sighted. All great cultures in human history crumbled, economically and otherwise, when those cultures embarked upon cruel treatment to its less fortunate neighbours. When cultures become more involved with short-term economic gains and less involved with non-dogmatic “spirituality” they always fail. Why is that? It has never been the GDP or what you have in the bank that has glued a particular culture together. If such things are a culture’s glue, it leads to national stressors that lead to instability that lead to wars that lead to self-destruction. It has always been a culture’s spiritual base that has led to that culture’s long-term survival. Just read the three documents to the U.S. Charters of Freedom (Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and The Constitution), much of which actually was derived from the contemporaneously recently written-down Iroquois League of Nations Constitution of the Five-Nation Confederacy dating back to 1390 AD, when they did not have a written language!!! These documents are full of compassion and spirituality. Like with Mahatma Ghandi’s India, South Africa, on the brink of collapse, survived only because of Mandela’s spiritual compassion. This argument is incredibly simple but so hard to digest for many. The early Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and many Native American cultures were founded on compassionate spirituality, and crumbled when their spirituality was replaced by cruelty and supply & demand economics. Some might argue that many of these cultures collapsed when their inherent spirituality waned, leaving them weak, cruel and vulnerable to even more cruel cultures.

Well, our world is no longer made up of all these isolated cultures anymore. What happens in the remotest region of Africa, Arabia or China affects the whole world almost instantly, like AIDS, SARS, pollution, terrorism… everything. We can’t afford not to be spiritual and compassionate in our world anymore. That’s like sticking our collective heads in the sand and arguing pointless economics as all hell breaks loose everywhere. America, until very recently, has truly shown the world how compassionately opening its doors to the refugees of the world has only made it a much more productive, beautiful and successful nation.

So there’s your answer to your question: “Who pays for it?”

©2003, Danish American NewMedia Enterprise & Bent Lorentzen. All rights reserved. Please refer to author's website at http://www.denmark.gq.nu and email address dane [at] kabelnettet.dk for further information.

The Lessons of Child Abuse Apply to Global Policy

I’ve received a lot of email response to my article on the racism in Denmark. One letter I received was a very reasonable rejoinder that argued against some of the issues I raised. He is a Latin American who lived some months in Denmark several years ago and fondly remembers the kindness of the Danish people. In that letter, he referred, among other cites, to an article by Per Henrik Hansen of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama. http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1274

I asked him to allow me to publish his articulate letter and my answer to him (below), to which he was genuinely impressed. He prefers I not publish his letter. We have now become friends.

***

Yes, I am familiar with Per Hansen’s work, and the works of many others that logically foreshadow the collapse of Denmark’s economy if we continue with the present course of the cradle-to-grave Danish idealism of the 1960´s, which actually evolved out of a philosophy from the 1890’s that kept being waylaid due to the two world wars. If you really read my article on racism in Denmark you’d see that it has nothing to do with promoting irrational socialism. I believe in a system where one benefits from her or his initiatives and constructive contributions to society through commerce and creativity. I am not an economist though I’ve certainly studied it. I am however highly educated as a biologist and anthropologist, have academic experience with many disciplines, been an educator for many years, and then went on to work with newspapers and magazines as a writer but mostly as a researcher and editor. What articles like Per Hansen’s and some of the others you cite lack is a historical perspective that looks at the failures and successes of the past, especially in context to the whole of human history and psychology. Simply put, the articles you cite fail to look at this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective.

What disturbed me most about Per Hansen’s article was his barrage of statistics. As an editor and journalist, one learns very quickly that all statistical data can be used to the advantage of whatever point of view one already has determined the article should embody. In my article, I used the statistic that though violent crimes in the US has gone down 20% in the past decade (as of 1991), the media reporting of such crimes increased 800%. What should be obvious about my use of that statistic is that media technology, i.e., the Internet and 24-hour televised media stations like BBC, MSNBC, CNN, et al, also exponentially exploded in that same time frame. So my worthy statistic is just as skewed. Another point that bothers me tremendously with Per Hansen is his comparison of American and Scandinavian education. That’s comparing apples with oranges. American public grade and high school education is relatively atrocious, as anyone living in New York City will tell you. As an example, my dad graduated from a teaching seminarium, not a university. His education was mistakenly supposed to be limited compared to the broader, liberal arts education American universities provide. And my mother only had a 9th grade Danish education. But my father only needed a few college courses to get his American graduate degree, and I remember an Icelandic woman who had graduated from a Danish gymnasium who, when matriculated and tested, immediately received a two-year college degree in California. The education system from the bottom up in Denmark is much more vigorous, and one of the reasons for so few university educated people in Denmark is because of the relatively very high requirement standards for simply entering a university or even for entering a gymnasium (high school). Education in Denmark is far more fluid and dynamic with trade schools and apprenticeships, echoes of the ancient trades guilds of Europe. For Per Hansen not to have grasped that major difference is just poor journalism and instantly discredits the rest of his argument.

Your argument comparing Danish and US public healthcare spending and lifespan is skewed. Actually, in spite of Denmark’s social welfare system, America spends one third more money per person through its public healthcare. Again, statistics are very dangerous to use in the support of any argument. They generally have very little to do with truth and more to do with its shock and persuasion value. http://www.globalaging.org/health/world/denmarkjulie.htm


Still, my article has nothing to do with any of that. Plato said the ideal form of government was a benevolent dictatorship, as the general population in a democracy is too easily swayed by political mendacity. I don’t quite agree but his argument has a ring of truth to it. My article’s real purpose is to provoke a wake-up call to a frightening trend, a percolating trend that history has shown as being suicidal. In Plato’s time, cultural suicide was limited to perhaps a city-state. In today’s world, it is planetary annihilation, simply put. Plato also referred to the world’s perhaps most successful society, one that flourished for thousands of years in the Mesopotamia Valley long before the emergence of the hierarchical governments of democracies, god-king monarchies and dictatorships. Anthropologists in the past few decades have begun to find evidence of its egalitarian remnants there and elsewhere. Well, rather than bore you with tedious facts, perhaps you could go to
http://www.howardri.org/Let67.html and
http://www.aquinas.edu/homepages/brookdan/CWCtext/chap2/ch2a.html and
http://www.orgonelab.org/saharasia.htm


So, when one truly wants to understand how we are to survive in a world that has never refrained from using any weapon it has seen fit to invent, we must dig deep into our past to see what system of coexistence ever really succeeded. To argue facts inherent to a flawed system simply furthers the descent into that flawed system, and the world can’t afford to descend much further. Another reason not to be persuaded by statistics. We are at a crossroads in planetary society where we truly must drop a collective insanity that has persisted for millennia and been at the root of unchecked violence, from the personal level of a rapist, burglar, and murderer to the international level of war. We are no longer dealing with swords that have a four-foot reach, bullets that have a thousand foot reach or even missiles that have a reach of thousands of miles. We’re dealing with a reality where we have weapons that can decimate all of life many times over and from many vectors. Sure, during the Cold War, there was a lot of well-founded hysteria around that very thing. After all, America chose to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs on the argument that it saved hundreds of thousands of lives in a land invasion on Japan. But with regard to that 11:59 clock of the Cold War, or M.A.D., what everyone in the “West” forgot due to propaganda and sheer stupidity is that those in the Kremlin were just as anxious to live the next day as those in the White House.

That’s all changed now. Authors and researchers, Tom Clancy and John le Carre, have said that what frightens them the most about today’s world is the proliferation of these previously well-guarded weapons of mass-destruction in the hands of psychopaths who hold no special instinct for self-preservation. We can no longer afford to simply argue politics and economics. We absolutely cannot afford to not understand what is at the root of this insanity that has led us to where we are with today’s terrorism. Terrorists do not have an economy or land to protect. We must address the fundamental issue of violence at all levels, and the answer lies far back in the past if we’re smart enough to look there. But most of us aren’t. Our leaders, those who we vest our power, wealth, and resources to, are educated politicians and economists who have no experience with the multidisciplinary fields that provide that insight. We perpetuate violence by constantly reacting to it. To declare war on terrorism furthers terrorisms fatal spiral. To in any way discriminate against anyone anywhere fuels terrorism, fuels the collective insanity. To mismanage statistics to point fingers at “foreigners” as the cause of a particular society’s violence and economic troubles is totally insane in today’s world. In any world.

Try to imagine how you would feel, as a person of color, if your car broke down in the deep American south of 1962 and you asked for help from a local. And that local with his buddies gathered around you and yelled, “Go back where you came from, nigger,” and proceeded to kick the hell out of you. You just needed help. Not your fault the car broke down. Not your fault you aren’t a local redneck. But you’ve managed to find yourself in an impossible situation, and you just needed help, and instead you get brutalized. An average person surviving such an ordeal could easily be talked into joining a violent group led by a maniac seeking to right a wrong. It is imperative that we as a world completely rethink our entire strategy of dealing with violence and get totally away from the hierarchical structure that gave it all its birth.

Egalitarian, non-hierarchical societies have been the most successful ever to flourish on Earth. Some of these societies purportedly existed seamlessly for thousands of years, and they were not primitive cave dwellers. They were actually very technologically advanced societies that had running water, sewage systems, agriculture and trade. Yes, such societies caved in quite quickly to later cultures that had adopted a political agenda with a military and hierarchical structure. So we must learn from that mistake.

The idealism of a more egalitarian society for Denmark that fermented in the Copenhagen of the 1890’s was a step in the right direction. That’s why I come down so hard on my beloved Denmark for its racism. I actually became aware of this racism quite by accident, because it really has been latent for quite some time. For you to have lived in Denmark for eight months is not enough time to understand how insidious it is. The sheen of idealism strikes all who first walk into Denmark and talk with a caring social worker. It is only in the more recent Danish administration that it has come out of the closet, so to speak. Years ago at a soccer game I overheard two Danes talking about how “those damn refugees are sucking away at our pension money,” and actually found myself thinking about my own retirement. For… a… moment. And then I was in shock. How could I have entertained the notion for even a moment? And I began experimenting, innocently asking people I knew and loved, how they felt about the issue. Again I was shocked. Outwardly, until recently, Danes project idealistic empathy for all peoples. Inwardly, I have never felt such a stinkpot of racism, not since I grew up in the racism of the 1960’s United States. But now the racism is out in the open in beautiful Denmark, many using the statistics you’ve quoted to scare moderate Danes into agreeing with the implementing of racist laws. One of my best friends is a Jewish woman born to Danish parents while hiding in Sweden from the Gestapo during World War Two. She has told me that in the past decade, because of her dark hair and a slightly darker complexion than the archetypal Norse, she is daily subjected to subtle but very hurtful forms of racism when walking down Copenhagen streets, at the supermarket checkout line, or trying to share a seat on the bus.

Osama bin Ladin and his cronies have all tasted the terrible suffering of racism, from Egypt, Sudan and elsewhere. They were horribly tortured while incarcerated for their Islamic beliefs. And most of their followers come from terrible circumstance. That said, do we allow the horrific acts of a serial murderer who lacks a conscience to continue unchecked simply because a doctor can prove in court that the psychopath has a genetic predisposition triggered into life by unfair environmental circumstance? Of course not. But what we have learned about that terrible and very real analogy is that we don’t go around beating our kids half to death when in a bad mood and that if parents can’t control themselves, society has a responsibility to protect and care for these children.

We cannot afford to not learn at the global level from that simple lesson in human psychology. It’s clearly not some philosophical ideal espoused from some cerebral tower. It is a matter of surviving a harsh reality we’ve allowed the world to ferment for thousands of years. Those folk working in the Twin Towers on Sept. 11 had no clue how dangerous the world was. Few in America did. It is The Law of Cause and Effect. Its ramifications will not be solved by any of the strategies proposed yet by anyone at Pennsylvania Avenue, Downing Street, the EU, etc. Mandela, Ghandi and others had the right idea but no one seems to take them seriously at the international level. It will take nearly a miracle of love. And that’s what egalitarian cultures were about. Love of life. And we get there by how we are with each other in our daily lives, from the janitor in the apartment complex to the president of the United States. We get there by caring for the homeless woman down the alley and by caring for the plight of a whole people.

This morning, as I watched World News, I was startled and pleased to listen to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s speech regarding re-evaluating the Security Council’s purpose. He stated very clearly that the world must totally rethink its strategy on dealing with global violence and quickly address the issues of weak and suffering peoples wherever they are.

And then I saw again President Bush’s address to the nation, where he made a despondent plea for USD 87 billion (more than USD 1000 per US citizen) to rebuild the Iraq he destroyed to establish his take on democracy there and wipe out that mess of terrorism he is responsible for having brought into Iraq. That statement is a can of worms I’d have no problem defending; there is a clear and present reason why it was the oil interests in Iraq that merited American troop presence and not the Baghdad UN building.

Think about that for a moment. Those who freak out about spending money to care for the starving, sick and oppressed seem to have no qualm squandering unimaginably huge sums of money on agendas that destroy those very lives and cultures.

I decided to publicly criticize the current Danish government’s prejudicial lawmaking and policies with a lot of fear initially. It leaves me open to personal attack because it’s such a volatile issue on so many fronts. But I can’t with good conscience -- with this monster we’ve created in the world -- ignore my gift of writing and learning to not bring about awareness in some small way. I’ve spent too much time writing mediocre stuff. You are right when you wrote that my provocative critique is perhaps more aimed at American policy, because that’s where we find most of the world’s power and responsibility. Though hurt deeply by Denmark’s waxing racism, I am using what’s happening in Denmark also as a paradigm to describe in the microcosm what’s happening at the global level.

©2003, Danish American Newmedia Enterprise & Bent Lorentzen. All rights reserved. Please refer to author's website at http://www.denmark.gq.nu and email address dane [at] kabelnettet.dk for further information.

Dear Mr. Lorentzen,
First of all allow me to congratulate you for your articles, they are amazing I liked them so much because it's so much like I think too.

I must say I found it hard to believe about the racism in Denmark because I was once there and everybody was so helpful and nice to me (I am a mexican, went there in Sept.1994 when I was 22 y.o.) of course the short time that I was there makes me no expert but my visit to Copenhage holds a very special beautiful place in my memory.

I too have learned a thing of two about glogbality lately. I went to University for International Affairs Studies, to, in my mind, be able to undesrtand better the world I was in.

Later in life I married an american citizen and moved to the US. Suddenly I was living in that place where everybody wants to go and also after the attacks of 9/11 it was no more like I always viewed it from home in Mexico something that hapened to those people over there from those other people over there. Suddenly it was my home and my family that was beign attacked , my mom and rest of my family who stil live in Mexico were worried and so were their friends and so on. But I knew it wasn't every muslim who did this so I prayed that the spiral of hate wouldn't go deeper and there's one conclusion I drawed, that is very much like what you said in your article:

No one of us knows where we are going to be next, we must be very careful not to send any hatred out there because we don't know where it is going to reach us or our family or friends. In this world there's no place far away.

Thank you very much for your time on reading this

Yes Delina,

Thanks for your comments. In 1994, racism in Denmark was in the closet. And actually, the majority of the Danish population is not racist at all but very kind-hearted. But as in the rest of the world, the majority is easily swayed by fears generated by those in power who might have ulterior motives.

I recently saw a Larry King episode where a comparison was drawn between fears of Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism. When the person being interviewed was asked what form of Christianity most resembles a Muslim terrorist organization, he was stymied. Until the answer hammered home: the closest Christian correspondence to an Islamic terrorist organization is the Ku Klux Klan or the White Aryans. Not the Christian Right or so many other Bible Belt movements that often come to mind.

The very word "Muslim" incites so much fear in so many people because of so much propaganda from officials who have ulterior motives. The American government has launched a pre-emptive War on Terrorism, which in effect dissolves many Constitutionally guaranteed rights to a certain class of people and channels valuable resources away from reducing suffering in the world to corporate billionaires who thrive on the perpetuation of violence in the world.

©2003, Danish American Newmedia Enterprise & Bent Lorentzen. All rights reserved. Please refer to author's website at http://www.denmark.gq.nu and email address dane [at] kabelnettet.dk for further information.

DIY:
You seem very troubled to let us know who you are. And it is quite apparent you scarcely read anything of this series of articles I labored so hard to write. This is typical of the unfortunate ignorance that ferments racism and jumping to hasty conclusions. As I clearly wrote, one of my dearest friends in life is Jewish, her entire family is Jewish and travels many times each year to Israel despite fearing suicide terrorists. Prominent in my home is a Jewish Menorah on an altar before the Mitzvah facing the east toward Israel, and once a week we perform a candle ceremony to honor Judaism’s potent traditions. Years ago, during a turbulent period in my life, I sought refuge from a Rabbi who guided me out of a self-destructive episode. Later, this Rabbi invited me to a morning Telfillin ritual as the only Gentile present. Out of this relationship grew a series of articles I wrote on the deep values inherent to the Jewish tradition. One of my favorite esoteric readings is the Kabala.

As a child I grew up in Protestant Denmark, went to Catholic schools in Canada and the US for 12 years, and was a Buddhist monk for fifteen years who fell in love with Hinduism’s exceptional wisdom. My closest local acquaintances are an Iraqi who runs a Copenhagen vegetable market and an Iranian who cuts my hair. From our countless conversations I learned -- outside the realm of academia -- of Islam’s essential splendour. I have often experienced the bliss of Islamic Sahaja in dance, as Kabir often wrote of.

In America, one of my cherished acquaintances is a 72-year old Cherokee Shaman in North Carolina, USA, who taught me an exquisite fire ceremony to reduce suffering and to celebrate life’s mystical beauty. While studying anthropology in California, my Navajo professor was so taken by my desire to understand his tradition that I was invited, again as the only non-indigenous, to a Dineh Blessingway Ceremonial. My most beloved ally in life is a female spiritual master who teaches that ALL religions, when followed with a pure heart, lead to exactly the same truth.

I am proud of those in my Christian family who helped Jews escape Nazi-occupied Denmark. In fact, in this very set of articles you call anti-Jewish, I describe my girlfriend’s family’s flight to Sweden. Many of my articles on the plight of the anti-Jewish phenomenon have appeared in Israeli publications. So you see, DIY and all of you who read DIY's obtuse reaction, how easy it is to prejudge and be racist due to ignorance.

Again, remember Newton's Third Law. We reap what we sow. Action reaction. By condemning one person's faith we are doomed to our own condemnation. And that will hurt..


©2003, Danish American Newmedia Enterprise & Bent Lorentzen. All rights reserved. Please refer to author's website at http://www.denmark.gq.nu and email address dane [at] kabelnettet.dk for further information.

Thanks for some very true depictions of Danish situation regarding racism, specially articles of Bent Lorentzen. If any one needs more material to read on the subject, please go to http://www.bashy.dk, or contact me on bashy [at] get2net.dk.There is a lot of stuff available to prove that there are forces in Denmark who are not concerned how Denmark is viewed abroad.Their agenda is simple: An Anglo-Saxon,Christian and free from all other influences - Denmark.
This is the time to speak up and show such people that Denmark has an other side. A democratic, humanist and loving way of living.

Bashy Quraishy
President
European Network Agaist Racism - Belgium

In 2003 when I wrote an article on racism in Denmark that sparked a flurry of commentaries, the world was a much different place than it is now. An open debate on critical world issues of faith and culture was unlikely to degrade into violence and loss of life. A recent poll in Egypt suggests Denmark to be its number two enemy after Israel. That's very distressing. The issue of racism in Denmark has much more to do with a minority's fears of losing certain Danish cultural values than of a bias against the cultural values of other regions. It is perhaps an immature response within a world that quickly is technologically evolving such that cultural and national boundaries grow less pronounced. Such responses are endemic to almost all local regions in the world, and an open civil debate over these differences is what brings about empathy... an understanding where before there was fear. Violent responses to cultural/religious misunderstandings or disagreements only entrenches the perceived differences of the clashing societies, and it is this clash that then is manipulated and exploited by those who have a political and capital agenda – to wit, the US Bush Administration, the Danish Fogh Administration, the British Blair Administration... and equally, those who sponsor and propagate any form of international terror. Bush's delusional War on Terror is nothing less than an attempt by that administration and those in other democracies, to undermine the philosophical roots of those democracies. And those who wage terror are only playing into that game. What is unique in Denmark is its democracy and freedom of expression. The recent controversy over the Muhammad drawings has sparked a good and open debate in Denmark, that freedom of expression engenders a responsibility to be aware and sensitive to the inherent values in other cultures. There are many places in the world where I would be unable to express a view contrary to a political policy without serious consequences. It is this fundamental value that now is at stake in this politically motivated illusion called The War on Terror.