These events are strangely
beautiful, partly like a brilliantly choreographed modern dance
performance with the city as it’s stage, partly like a medieval
battle. Many of those who don’t wish to be involved leave the scene in
a hurry, many others find some high ground and watch the melee unfold,
and quite a few more try to keep on with whatever they were doing
before the riot started and hope it ends soon.
For
months before the event tension had been building, as is standard
before these big convergences. As if following a script, the German
authorities raided leftwing social centers throughout the country
looking for people they described ominously as “terrorists.” (What a
useful word for anybody you don’t like.) These raids were reported
throughout the European press, of course. The idea is to scare people
off from coming to the protests. As usual, it worked, and the crowds
were probably less than half what they would be if so many people had
not been afraid to go.
Police were stopping people
driving suspicious-looking vehicles, looking for gas masks, fireworks,
or other things they didn’t want at the G8 protests. Of course,
anybody coming in a day early driving a normal-looking rental car like
me had no problems and could have brought anything into Rostock, but if
you were trying to bring some banned item in with a home-made
“pull-me-over” car, or a big bus full of anarchists, you had problems.
But
all the efforts of the police were in vain, since one of the most
effective weapons people use in these confrontations are readily
available in unlimited quantities in every European city –
cobblestones. The streets of Rostock were littered with broken
cobblestones that young people had been smashing on the street and
breaking into fist-sized pieces to throw at the cops.
The
most impressive part are the modern equivalent of the archers, those
firing flares, lighting up the sky, arcing far over the heads of the
crowd and landing in the packed lines of riot police. Many times the
police retreated, many times they charged, and many times they tripped
over each other in the narrow streets, where their numbers simply
couldn’t be accommodated. By the end of the day there were hundreds
injured, dozens with broken bones, including quite a few police.
The
day began with my friend Lisa dropping me off at the main train
station, where one of the two opening rallies was to take place. She
forgot her cell phone in the hotel room and it took her hours to drive
back to it. For the whole day it seems the police had shut down most
of the roads leading into the city. Sometimes roads leading out were
also closed, but mostly it was easy to get out but hard to get in.
For
days leading up to June 2nd, mostly youthful alternative-looking sorts
of folks were streaming out of the main train station, coming from all
over, then heading purposefully from the train station to the main
Convergence Center or one of the three camps within twenty kilometers
of Rostock, surrounding the small resort town of Helingendam, where the
G8 meetings are taking place as I write. On Saturday morning the crowd
kept doubling in size every ten minutes or so until by 11 am there were
tens of thousands of people, and the same thing was taking place at
another site in town for the other opening rally.
The
crowd was a multigenerational collection of people with very diverse
views, but united in the idea that this world could be a very different
place. There were representatives of the massive German anti-nuclear
movement, there were those calling for the G8 nations to end their wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to do something about global warming.
There were quite a few Turkish communists, there were Danish union
members, Dutch squatters, and many, many others with no particular
political affiliation or ideology. Just people who know that things
are not as they should be, this world is not quite the world we want,
and these G8 leaders need to be held to account for the world they
have, in so many ways, created for us.
They are
essentially asking the question that is as old as what we dare call
“civilization.” Whose world is this? Is it for the corporate elite
and their pseudo-democratic governments to rule in the interest of
profit, or is the world’s wealth for us all to share more equally? Is
our world a place where we can allow any nation’s army to bomb cities
in another nation? And when all this death and destruction is all
about oil and control, what then? What is the appropriate response
when our air is being poisoned by coal-burning power plants, our food
and soil poisoned by pesticides, our water poisoned by nuclear waste,
and we’re all dying of cancer? Is this how things should be? If not,
how can we change the situation?
One of the speakers
was from the MST, the landless peasants movement in Brazil. They have
answered the question of whose world is this by seizing the land that
the rich call their property and they are forming collective farms.
They have chosen to eat and fight rather than to starve and die. The
questions are immediate, the stakes high, and in Brazil, as with many
other countries, much blood has been spilled over these questions.
In
modern Europe there have been historic compromises between the haves
and the have-nots, and most people live in relative comfort. The
struggles rarely result in people getting killed these days. But as in
the rest of the world, all over Europe the historic struggle goes on,
continually trying to answer the question in one form or another, is
the world here for the private gain of the few or for the public good
of the many?
One of the things that’s always so
striking about these mass convergences such as this week of action
going on right now in and around Rostock is how few of the people I
know in various activist networks around Europe are actually there.
There were tens of thousands of people present at the big rally last
Saturday, but they clearly represent a small fraction of the European
left. Throughout my tour of Europe leading up to the G8 protests I
asked people if they were planning to go. There were always one or
two, sometimes a few, who were. But most said no, they couldn’t get
off work, or they had to take care of their kids, or they were
concerned about getting arrested, or they were on probation from the
last arrest, or they were too broke to afford the train ticket.
Yet
here we were on June 2nd, with the big public space in front of the
train station thronged with tens of thousands of people. Behind the
stage for everyone to see were two large banners, proclaiming in German
and in English, “another world is possible.” I sang, a German hiphop
artist performed, and then there were several speakers from around the
world, including the woman from MST.
It was a long and
peaceful march to the site of what was supposed to be the main rally,
which turned into a smaller rally than the opening ones, as many people
left, others stayed and fought, and a few tried to pay attention to
what was happening on the stage, which kept on starting and then
stopping again depending on what was happening around it.
June
2nd was the main rally against the G8, but the actual G8 meetings are
happening now, with smaller groups (many thousands) based at their
various camps engaging in road blockades and many other different types
of actions to try and prevent the meetings from happening, or at least
to disrupt them.
Already the G8 meeting organizers have
cut their meetings down from three days to 1-1/2 days. They presumably
have their reasons why they’re doing this, but everyone knows the real
reason – fear of us, fear of humiliation, fear that the world will see
them naked, humbled by a few thousand citizens determined to let them
know that their elitist, corporate version of “democracy” is not ours.
My
“G8 Warm-Up Tour” began with a flight to Copenhagen at the end of
April. As soon as I dropped off my stuff in Norrebro I took a walk to
the place that’s now being called “Ground 69.” 69 Jagtvej was the
address of what was Copenhagen’s oldest leftwing social center. Built
by the union movement in 1897 and called Folkets Hus – the People’s
House – it eventually fell into disrepair and was squatted by leftwing
youth in 1982 and called Ungdomshuset – the Youth House. Since then
and until last March it was a thriving center that included a bar, an
infoshop, several performance spaces including a ballroom with a stage
and a great sound system, a kitchen where thousands of meals were
cooked, practice rooms for local bands, and rooms for all kinds of
other industrious and creative activities.
A whole
generation of youth had grown up in and around Ungdomshuset. Many of
them had kids who also grew up with the Youth House being a center of
their daily lives, as their parents from the 1980’s generation mostly
moved on to other things. In March the anti-terror police landed with
helicopters on the roof of Ungdomshuset, filled the building with tear
gas, arrested it’s defenders, and destroyed the building within a
week. They had to use masked construction workers imported from Poland
to destroy the building, since none of the Danish unions would work
under police protection, out of principle.
In the taxi
on the way from the airport, and walking down the main street in
Norrebro to 69 Jagtvej, the evidence of the battle for Ungdomshuset --
for the right of the youth to have their house, and more broadly, the
rights of people other than yuppies to exist in the quickly-gentrifying
Norrebro neighborhood – was everywhere. There were thousands of
posters carpeting the city advertising upcoming demonstrations.
Ubiquitous graffiti saying things like, “I still feel like rioting.”
Official-looking
signs saying “Jagtvej” had replaced many street signs that used to
indicate that you were on another street. But now, evocative of the
end of the film, Spartacus, we are all Jagtvej now. The two numbers
that everyone in Denmark knows as synonymous with Ungomshuset, “69,”
had replaced many addresses. My taxi driver was complaining about how
much harder it is now to find the addresses of his customers since last
March.
He was also complaining about the riots. Like
many Danes, he was sympathetic with the struggle of the Youth House up
until the several nights of rioting that followed the police occupation
of the building.
But many others were either involved
with, supportive of, or at least not particularly bothered by the
riots, which were seen by many as a sensible or at least understandable
reaction to the events that led up to them. This was also evident as
soon as I got into the city. Many varieties of Ungdomshuset t-shirts
and hoodies were everywhere, worn by many really young kids who had
probably never seen Ungdomshuset when it existed. Many youth had made
home-made patches saying just “69” or “Ungdomshuset Blir” –
Ungdomshuset Stays – also the title of a song that became a national
hit last fall. The scenes on TV of the riots – and they were
well-publicized on national television – had caught the imagination of
many young people, who identified viscerally with the young men and
women battling with the police.
For several days,
several neighborhoods in Copenhagen were characterized by burning
barricades made largely of bicycle tires -- as with anywhere, you burn
what’s available, and in
Copenhagen you can’t walk down the
sidewalk without tripping over hundreds of old bicycles on each block.
Broken glass, broken cobblestones, tear gas and sirens were the order
of the day. To a very large extent, the youth of Denmark were on the
side of those throwing the stones, not the ones firing the tear gas,
whether or not they were entirely clear on the origins of the conflict.
It
was a shock to see how narrow the new dirt lot was, where Ungdomshuset
had stood. The building was a lot taller than it was wide, I realized
upon visiting Ground 69. But what really brought back the memories of
that place where I have played shows to so many great audiences was
when we were outside the prison where fifteen of Ungdomshuset’s
defenders were being held, close to three months after the destruction
of the building.
It was there that I came into contact
once again with the microphone that had been used for all of my shows
there, and for many other shows as well. The mike smelled like someone
who had not brushed his teeth in years, it was the worst-smelling
microphone I’ve ever encountered. I suddenly could see the clouds of
smoke, behind which sat or stood a hundred black-clad youth, listening
attentively, or singing or shouting along with me, facial piercings
reflecting the lights.
Every Thursday since the
beginning of March, different groups were taking turns organizing
protests and marches with sound trucks through the city. Many people
from the early days of Ungdomshuset have come out of the woodwork,
along with many young kids who had never seen the place other than in a
photograph.
I was in town for several rallies.
On
my first real day of gigs, May Day, I sang in the morning in the nearby
town of Roskilde for members of the red-green coalition, Enhedslisten,
who have a number of people in the parliament and are the
extraparliamentary left’s biggest ally in parliament. In the afternoon
I sang at the communist-sponsored May Day stage in a big park near
Norrebro. In the evening I was hanging out by a park with anarchist
youth and others there to party for May Day, who had put lots of
burning rubbish in the street, something which has recently once again
become a Copenhagen tradition, particularly since March. Police stayed
a hundred feet away. This time nobody threw anything at them, and they
didn’t try to clear the street.
One rally and march was
on the 69th day since the raid of Ungdomshuset. Many hundreds of us
were marching behind a very loud sound truck, and for the first time I
was able to appreciate techno. It reminded me at the time of hearing
the call to prayer coming from the mosques inside Israel. A very
different social milieu, to be sure, but in both cases there was a kind
of loud statement of existence, this affirming cry of “we’re here.”
People from Christiania had come and added to this, bringing with them
dozens of little home-made instruments consisting of tin cans and latex
formed in such a way that when you blew into them lightly they would
screech with twice the volume of a good bugle.
The more
conservative end of the establishment is often characterizing the
growing Danish youth movement as a bunch of self-centered brats, and
with that in mind, one scene on this particular march was noteable.
There was a police “escort,” as always, on both ends of the march. At
one point they were suddenly agitated. Not speaking Danish, I didn’t
know what they were yelling about, but it was suddenly clear as an
ambulance was making it’s way down Norrebrogade. But as soon as the
march saw the ambulance coming, with no need for any prompting, the
street suddenly cleared of people and the ambulance sped through
unimpeded.
It was a few days later that I got my first taste of Danish tear gas.
The
conservative government in power in Denmark has decided to “normalize”
Christiania. For decades there was a sort of détente between the
Danish government and this 900-person commune in the middle of the
city, two blocks from the Christianshavn metro stop. But since Anders
Fogh Rasmussen came to power this is all changing. He has sent Danish
troops to assist the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan (though
they are now leaving Iraq). He and his rightwing political allies in
the racist “Danish People’s Party” have turned Denmark into one of the
least friendly nations in Europe for immigrants and refugees. And,
among his other crimes against the people, he has embarked on a project
to “normalize” Christiania.
Christiania is a magical
place, and is one of Denmark’s biggest tourist attractions. In 1970 it
was an old military barracks, no longer being used as such, and the
counter-culture decided to take it over and create a community on these
several hundred acres of land. They cleaned up the land and the water
beside it, fixed up the buildings that were there, and built many more
funky, artistic dwellings. They decorated the land with artwork, built
cafes, restaurants, music clubs, and a very successful bicycle-making
workshop, among other things. They provided office space for activist
groups and a large building was given over to be used exclusively by
people from Greenland. (Still a colony of Denmark, much of Greenland’s
population has suffered at the hands of their Danish colonizers and
suffer from alcoholism and other problems.)
The
continuing existence of Christiania has been an inspiration for people
around Europe and much of the rest of the world. It is essentially a
small town with no cars, no police, no landlords, no rent, generally
bustling with tourists and residents. Until Fogh’s police went in
several years ago and busted the open hashish and marijuana market, it
was the only place in Europe outside of the Netherlands where hash and
pot could be bought openly on the street, in a safe environment. With
no police force, hard drugs were kept out of Christiania by mutual
agreement between the residents and the people running their stalls on
what is still known as Pusher Street.
The people of
Christiania resoundingly answered the question of to whom the city
belonged by taking land that was not being used and declaring that it
belonged to the people. The buildings had long ago been built and paid
for, why should anyone “own” them? Why pay rent or mortgages for
them? Who needs police or other such services? They pay directly to
the utility companies for their electricity and water. Rather than
being a burden in any way to Danish society or taxpayers, they are a
top tourist destination.
But the government apparently
can no longer stand this kind of example being set. They say they want
to create a park and “low-income housing.” What the residents of
Christiania already have is a beautiful park for any visitors who care
to come, and free housing – but so close to the center of the city, on
property that could presumably be sold for hundreds of millions of
dollars, and Copenhagen’s real estate developers are salivating in the
back rooms behind the Prime Minister.
So on the morning
of May 14th, after claiming that “normalization” negotiations with the
commune had broken down (they hadn’t), police arrived unannounced with
a bulldozer and proceeded to destroy one of 52 houses which the
government wants to destroy, for one reason or another. They’re not up
to code, they’re built in the wrong place, or whatever.
As
the house was being destroyed, supporters of Christiania – including
many also involved with the struggle for Ungdomshuset – started sending
text messages to each other, and within a couple hours there were
hundreds of people there. By afternoon there were hundreds more, and
still more by evening. I got there by around 4 pm, about seven hours
after the house had been destroyed.
I was walking from
the metro station towards Christiania and I saw a couple of women from
Ungdomshuset that I recognized. I had heard that the main road that
runs alongside Christiania was completely blocked off by the police,
and it had occurred to many of us that looking “normal” could be a good
strategy for getting through the police lines. These women, however,
had multicolored dreadlocks and facial piercings. I asked them about
that. “We’re under cover!” They said. “We’re not wearing black!”
And it was true. I hadn’t noticed.
The police were
still blocking off the road, but there was one smaller road that went
into a residential neighborhood, and they were letting people in
there. From that road you could get into Christiania. As soon as I
stepped foot into Christiania I found myself running with a crowd of
people away from a cloud of tear gas. Groups of mostly young people
had made barricades to keep the police out, and set them alight if the
police were trying to come in that way. The crowds would then stand
back and throw rocks and bottles at the police, who would fire tear gas
back. It went on like that all night. On the roofs of the buildings
many people were watching the show, and trying to be helpful, making
noises when police were coming from around the corner.
This
was not the preferred response of many in the Christiania community,
who are coming from a more nonviolent, hippie orientation. The
spokeswoman of Christiania duly distanced herself from the
rock-throwing. In response many youth that I talked to complained that
the hippies just weren’t responding. But if they had waited a few more
hours they would have seen how people at Christiania were responding.
Overnight several dozen people built a new, very artistic house on the site where the house had just been demolished.
A
few days later there was what you could call an anarchist-hippie unity
march. I stood on the sound truck, which was a more improvised version
of the ones used by the Ungdomshuset supporters, a more colorful
Christiania version, pulled by a tractor, one of the few motorized
vehicles driving on the narrow dirt roads of Christiania. It was
raining, but not too hard. Behind the crowd of several hundred people
was one of the main entrances to Christiania. On top of an arch that
you pass through to get in or out it said, in English, “You are now
entering the EU.”
Despite the fact that the house had
been destroyed, Christiania felt more like Christiania than it had in
years. Since the hash market was busted by the police, gangs of cops
had been roaming around Christiania nightly, randomly searching the
bags of anybody they wanted to. This kind of behavior is very unusual
for police in Denmark anywhere outside of Christiania, but ironically,
it had become one of the least safe places to smoke weed anywhere in
Europe. That week was different. Thanks to the burning barricades it
had once again become a liberated zone, and people were taking the
occasion to roll and smoke lots of big spliffs. The sound man and I
were feeling good by the time we got to the government building
downtown.
There we were met by the other half of the
march, the weekly Ungdomshuset march that the Christiania march was
timed to coincide with. The rainbow flags and the black flags
intermingled, punk rock, hiphop and acoustic music once again on the
same stage, completely surrounded by hundreds of riot cops, who stood
around looking mean but didn’t do anything.
The new
movement for Ungdomshuset was well in evidence, with many very young
kids there along with the more typical teenagers and folks in their
20’s. As with marches every Thursday, there were older folks with
vests that said (in Danish), Parents Against Police Brutality. They
were keeping an eye on the cops at these marches, but not trying to
play the unpopular role of “peacekeepers,” just watching out for the
cops, and everybody liked them.
One of the people who
performed was a woman named Nia, a great singer, sister of a great
singer named Billie, daughter of a pair of legendary Danish rock stars,
Annisette and Thomas Koppel of the band Savage Rose, generally
identified by the 1960’s, but still going strong today. Thomas died
unexpectedly of a heart attack not long ago, at the age of 60, and he
is sorely missed by many. Only days before he died he finished a CD of
instrumental music, which rose to #1 in the Danish charts
posthumously. He also wrote something called Message From The
Grassroots, a sort of “where do we go from here” piece, around which
many older and younger Danish activists formed a group of the same
name, and their banners and sweatshirts were well-represented at the
rally. (Annisette was also at the rally, but didn’t sing that day.)
The
weekend before the house demolition in Christiania I was in Sweden. I
had played at a three-week-long film and music festival in solidarity
with the Palestinian struggle in Malmo, just over the bridge from
Copenhagen, and my next stop in Sweden was further north, in
Gothenberg. I was singing at a rally against NATO. It was the second
anti-NATO rally I had sung at in Sweden, which seems particularly odd
since Sweden is not a member of NATO.
But there in the
harbor of the lovely, canal-filled city of Gothenberg were dozens of
warships from the US, Britain, Spain and elsewhere. Sweden, like most
places, is a land of contradictions. It is by far the most welcoming
place in Europe for Iraqi refugees, while at the same time it sells
large amounts of high-tech weaponry to the US to bomb Iraq with. In
fact, I understand that per capita, Sweden is the biggest arms exporter
in the world. Officially “neutral,” whatever that means, it is a
member of the European Union and has hosted many NATO events.
The
anti-NATO rally was the biggest in Gothenberg in a long time, with
thousands of people there by the harbor across from the warships.
After the European summit in 2001 during which a protester was shot in
the stomach by the police with live ammunition, the police were trying
to be friendly, but of course they were there to protect the warships
from us, posted every few feet along the harbor.
Here
we had another very privileged European country with a large chunk of
the population concerned and asking basic questions. Why are we
hosting a meeting of an organization that is busily making war with
half the Muslim world? Why are we exporting so many arms to nations at
war when we claim ourselves to be “neutral”?
Unlike
some other countries in Europe, Swedes these days don’t do a whole lot
of rioting. The same can be said of Norway, which was the next stop on
my G8 Warm-Up Tour.
I had gigs in Oslo and in
Trondheim. Trondheim is a city of 150,000 or so, seven hours on the
train due north of Oslo, but not even halfway to the northern tip of
Norway, which is well into the Arctic Circle.
Around
both cities could be found posters and graffiti in solidarity with the
struggle at Ungdomshuset. Along with them can often be seen “Blitz
Blir” – Blitz Stays. Blitz is Oslo’s answer to Ungdomshuset, another
leftwing punk rock social center that has been in downtown Oslo since
the 80’s.
You’ll also find posters saying (in
Norwegian), “Norway out of NATO, NATO out of the world.” Not long
before I got to Oslo, NATO had a meeting there, and it was met by a
small but festive protest which the authorities and the media were
referring to as “violent.” It certainly was no riot by Rostock
standards, but there was a bit of fence-shaking and a lot of tear gas.
Because
of this, my friend Stein was once again in the news. Since the heyday
of the Norwegian squatters movement in the 1980’s, if anything exciting
happens in Oslo, Stein gets the blame for it. He doesn’t seek the
publicity, but if there’s a protest and he’s saying something into the
bullhorn along with many others, more often than not it’s his picture
that’s in the paper and his words on the television news broadcasts.
Walking with him from the train station to his house and back, about a
20-minute walk altogether, he was greeted by at least a dozen people,
some of whom he knew, and harassed by one cop who he didn’t know.
It
was about a year before the NATO meeting when Stein and many other
people were playing support roles for 23 young men from Afghanistan who
were doing a very public hunger strike while camping on the grounds of
a large church in the center of Oslo. The Afghans were asking the
people of Norway a simple question. Is Norway a country where people
like them shall be deported back to war zones from which they had fled
for their lives, or a country that shall give them safe haven?
For
26 days they ate nothing, wasting away in front of the eyes of the
masses of passing shoppers, commuters and tourists. I was in Oslo for
a week or so during that time, spending a good bit of it hanging around
the churchyard. Every day at 5 pm there would be a cultural event for
the Afghans, their supporters, and the passersby. While I was around
there were performances by musicians from all over Asia, Norway and, at
least in my case, the US. I first met the Afghans by playing for them,
and realized in the process to my delight that most of them were quite
fluent in English.
It was an eventful week while I was
there. The most memorable occasion was when the police came at dawn
one morning to destroy the tents and arrest the hunger-strikers. I was
there with several dozen other supporters, including many from Blitz,
surrounding the Afghans and trying to prevent them from being removed.
As usual, the television crews spent much of their time following Stein
with their cameras to see what he might do or say next. If they tried
to talk to him he’d tell them that the Afghans have a spokesperson and
he’d point to Zahir, a tall, thin, intelligent man of all of 23 who was
working day and night in the position his comrades had chosen for him.
When
the hunger-strikers ultimately were taken away by the police and then
released, they all came back and stayed in the churchyard with no tents.
It
was a heartwarming moment when soon thereafter the Norwegian Red Cross
came and erected their own tents for the Afghans, and also hooked them
up with running water. The Norwegian parliament then finally said
they’d reconsider each case. After 26 days of not eating this was the
best offer that had been made, and the Afghans decided to end their
hunger strike. Since then, however, Norway has deported many more
people to the war zone that is Afghanistan today, occupied by Norwegian
troops along with many other NATO soldiers.
After
riding in the train through the snow-capped mountains and small
villages dotting the landscape here and there from Oslo to Trondheim, I
was met at the train station by activists from the UFFA anarchist
social center and taken to a protest downtown.
Not only
was it roughly the anniversary of the hunger strike in downtown Oslo,
but it was also the one-year anniversary of the killing of a young
immigrant from Nigeria by a Trondheim cop. It was a classic story,
repeated ad nauseum in the US. It was almost identical to a story I
had heard just weeks before in Sonoma County, California. The young
man from Nigeria had low blood pressure and had gone too long without
eating. In front of the social welfare office he was feeling
delusional and apparently acting out. If he were a white Norwegian, of
course, the cop probably would have recognized the situation for what
it was and sought medical help for him. Being black, however, he
instead strangled him to death.
Over a thousand people
there in downtown Trondheim, and over a thousand at the same time in
Oslo, wanted to let the authorities know that this kind of racism is
not OK in Norway.
There also at the rally were many of
the Afghans I had met in Oslo a year earlier. They had chosen that day
to embark on a long march from Trondheim to Oslo to highlight their
plight and that of other asylum-seekers who are daily being deported
back to war zones like Afghanistan. I sang for them as they began
their walk. As I write this, they are about three-fourths of the way
to Oslo. Many people were concerned about how they’d do in the very
sparsely-populated, snow-covered mountainous regions that they had to
walk through to get to Oslo, but they assured everyone that they had
had lots of experience walking through snowy mountain ranges escaping
their homeland and getting to Europe. They all made it through those
mountains just fine.
That night after the rally in
Trondheim I was to play at UFFA’s annual three-day music festival.
Before the festival I was talking with one of the organizers,
Bjorn-Hugo, about the differences between the activist scene in Norway
as opposed to other European countries. “It’s hard to be very militant
when they keep giving you what you ask for,” he explained. For
example, when the old UFFA center burned down by accident, the
anarchists demanded that the government give them another building.
The government did. It’s a bit further from the center of town, but it
has a bigger backyard than the last one, and everybody’s happy with it.
But
the folks at UFFA still have a lot to be mad about. Although the
society is prosperous and nobody’s going hungry, Norway is an oil-rich
nation that encourages fossil fuel dependency and global warming. It’s
a big arms exporter. It’s troops are occupying Afghanistan. And a
member of the Trondheim police force strangled an African immigrant to
death last year, to name a few concerns.
It’s summer,
and in Scandinavia in general, and northern Norway in particular, the
sun never really sets. It always feels eerily like it’s about 5 pm.
Long shadows, a dusky light, but never dark. For maybe a half hour at
about 2 am it almost got dark, but then it started getting lighter
again. When the festival was over, at 4 am, several dozen fairly
intoxicated anarchists – they had been drinking a northern Norwegian
specialty called Kolshk, a mix of moonshine and coffee – marched
towards the social welfare office where the Nigerian was killed. It
was only a few blocks from UFFA.
Along with the march,
in a shopping cart, they brought with them a toy wooden police wagon,
about a meter tall and a meter wide, big enough for a child to sit in
and pretend to drive. “It’s Trondheim. We don’t burn real police cars
here,” someone explained. They wheeled the toy police wagon up to the
social office, doused it with moonshine and set it on fire.
In
the early dawn light, beneath the cloudy sky, the bright red fire and
black smoke was beautiful, and far more dramatic than I had imagined
burning a toy police car might be. A couple of real police cars
circled us but didn’t do anything provocative like get out of their
cars or anything… The fire department responded with impressive speed,
looking like they had just gotten out of bed and thrown their gear on,
and were not happy to be awoken so early for no good reason. They
dutifully put out the fire, turning the black smoke white, leaving a
smouldering toy police wagon still sitting in the shopping cart.
Without
missing a beat, folks bid the social office adieu and wheeled the cart
back to UFFA. Some of them climbed onto the roof and planted the
partly-burned, still-smouldering toy police wagon on top of the chimney
for all passersby to see. I suspect the partly-blackened police car
atop UFFA will be staying there for quite some time.
“From
dreaming comes knowledge.” Armand was quoting an ancient Arab writer.
I was in the Netherlands, starting the Holland leg of my tour. Armand
and I were backstage at the ACU club in downtown Utrecht, smoking big
spliffs.
“What kind of weed do you recommend I get at
the coffeeshop down the street?” I asked. He looked at me
skeptically. “I don’t touch the stuff from the coffeeshops. I only
smoke outdoor organic.”
The Netherlands is now the only
country in Europe where you can buy pot and hash over the counter in
coffeeshops (since the Danish police put an end to Pusher Street in
Christiania). It hasn’t always been that way in Holland, though, and
Armand remembers those days well. When he was a young man in the late
1950’s he first smoked cannabis with some folks from the Carribean he
met at the harbor in Belgium, and he’s been a proponent ever since.
In
the 60’s Armand became a household name in Holland and Belgium (the
Dutch-speaking world, you could say). As in Denmark, the US, and much
of the world, it was a time when leftwing hippies like Armand could
become rock stars, and he did. He had many hits, and was known as the
Dutch Bob Dylan. Stylistically there is certainly a resemblance,
though his lyrics, from what I’m told (they’re almost all in Dutch),
focus largely on cannabis, with peace and love and other nice ideas
thrown in for good measure.
At age 61, with a full mane
of long, bright red, dyed hair, and very multicolored clothing, he can
enthrall an audience for hours. He used to pack stadiums. Now he
packs smaller venues, though with significantly larger audiences than
I’d normally get most places, so doing several gigs in Holland with him
was a pleasure for various reasons.
Armand and I were
first playing at a G8 informational event, encouraging folks to go to
the protests, talking about what was going to be happening there,
before the music started. The fear tactics of the German authorities
seemed to be crossing borders, since just the week before a hundred
bicyclists were mass-arrested for having an unpermitted Critical Mass
bike ride there in Utrecht. The general consensus was that the Dutch
authorities were looking for names of people who might be going to the
G8 protests in nearby Germany, to pass their information on to the
German authorities, since mass-arrests of bicyclists is not the norm in
this otherwise very bicycle-friendly nation.
That night
I slept in a large squatted building only a couple hundred meters from
City Hall, in the center of downtown Utrecht. There had been a big
fire in the building fifteen years ago and the building was abandoned.
Taking advantage of Dutch laws which say that buildings left abandoned
for a certain amount of time can legally be squatted, it was squatted
and fixed up at least to the point where people could safely live in it.
As
in cities throughout Europe, real estate prices have gone through the
roof, and abandoned buildings these days are rare, so there are always
palpable tensions between the scruffy squatters and their yuppie
neighbors who otherwise populate the downtown areas. Is living in the
city you grew up in a right or a privilege? You’ll find very different
answers depending on who you ask.
The same tensions can
be found between those favoring more industrial development and
highways and those favoring more forests, farms, bicycles and villages.
Writings 
The riots in Rostock, Germany began around 3 pm last Saturday. In European riots outside of G8 meetings and such, generally all sides refrain from using lethal weapons. (If anybody breaks with this tradition – such as Genoa in 2000 or Gothenberg in 2001 – it is always the police.) The riots on Saturday were part of a long series of such confrontations around Germany, around Europe, around the world. 
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