A week in Iceland
I’ve spent almost a week in Iceland now – in Reykjavík only, having not had time to go up north – and will return to Finland tomorrow morning. The first thing that happened when I landed was that a group of people invaded the Central Bank, demanding that one of the three directors of the bank – former prime minister and turkmenbashi-ite monarch type of a person (he wrote psalms and had the state TV play them, and such) – would stop doing his job and just leave (which says something about a person’s ability to do their job, non?).
When I got into town the crowd had surrendered – after having made a deal with the cops that they would stand down first, which they surprisingly did.
At a bar the first night everyone spoke of tear gas and pepper spray, their experience with such during the siege of the police headquarters in Reykjavík a week earlier. The siege was made to protest the arrest of a protester who’d pulled a Bónus-flag (Bónus is a chain of cheap food-stores, owned by corporate assholes who used the libertarian principles enacted by politicians to get filthy rich) up on the parliament building. (Although, apparently, according to the powers that sort of be, he was being arrested for an earlier protest, not the flag-protest which made him famous).
Surprise, surprise – the succeeded. The young man was set free, two hours after the siege started, and a mysterious donor paid his fine (said by the young man’s mother, to have been a high ranking official).
Radical ideas are commonplace these days, it seems – suggestions of anything from looting to beating are heard from the most unexpected people.
Although it seems to be dying down a little. Christmas is coming, we’re still in the bumper zone (meaning that unemployment is still not critical (less than in Finland, for instance) and people are still in the houses they can’t afford). I don’t know why or how – but people are saying that come february, the shit will properly hit the fan.
So last saturday, fewer people showed up at the weekly demo (1.500 instead of up to 10.000), and for once the parliament house was not covered in eggs and melons afterwards.
Also, I’m pretty sure that when people start realizing how much Iceland is being governed by the libertarian think-tank, the IMF – and how little the government is willing to turn back from it’s own libertarian ideals (both parties – the independence and the social-democrats – are rampant) – people will get angry. They’re being told that we’re no longer libertarians, while nothing has been done to regulate or socialize the system.
Spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning.
It’s mad.
I don’t know how gullable people are in this country. Right now. They’ve been very gullable in the past. But I’m not sure their innocence still persists.
People are hoping a board of foreign experts will investigate, while not understanding that laws haven’t been broken – laws were made to accommodate this nonsense – and just because experts are foreign, doesn’t mean they’re not the same kind of assholes as our domestic assholes. I mean to say – the IMF is a group of foreign experts. Which doesn’t mean they’re good news.
We need to redefine crime, if we want to investigate – otherwise it’s just talk that’ll lead to vindication of said assholes. And to redefine crime, we might need to redefine punishment.
We need to investigate the causes – we need to do it publicly – the results and the inquiry should be made public while it is happening (as much as is possible) – and it needs to be done by independent parties, and I’d personally go for a mix of foreign and domestic independies – but the keyword is independent, not foreign. Purely foreign experts tend to overlook some of Iceland’s functionalities, which due to size has strings of cliques running in all directions – and let us not forget, that a panel of foreign experts has repeatedly given Iceland a stamp of being nearly corruption free (while political parties don’t need to give up any of their financial afiliations, the head of the central bank was PM for 13 years, the current PM just had his wife hired as the organizer of the largest arts festival in the country etc. etc. etc. etc.)