Hey there, back from Amsterdam. Besides attending the European political bureau meeting of the Fourth International over one weekend, I walked around and sat around much of Amsterdam reading and watching people around me get excited by the world soccer cup. I myself can not really get anything positive out of these constant, but controlled “wars” that make chauvinist and nationalist feelings come out everywhere. So I usually just wish that “my countries” are kicked out as early as possible. With neither Denmark nor Norway being in it to start with this time, “my countries” are Germany and Sweden (the latter of which apparently has been kicked out now). Whenever they’re out, the enthusiasts pick some other country to support, quite independently of where they come from themselves, but the feeling of being in the middle of a war usually vanishes quite fast.
This year the feelings are running especially high in Germany where social problems are about to climax. With the population drugged on soccer, the government is taking the opportunity to parse laws on increasing the sales tax (a tax that generally hurts those with little money), while at the same time cutting even more in the spending for the unemployed. The newest idea of theirs is to cut the amount they’re willing to pay for rent and the amount the unemployed is allowed to own. But who cares if Germany might end up as the world soccer champion? As an East German said at the camp ground that I stayed at in Amsterdam: “You saw that old English guy over there? Yesterday [when it was Germany vs. Poland], he fevered for us! I told him: ‘respect, man, respect!’” I don’t know if that meant that he had settled all hard feelings between the British and the Germans following WWII, but according to this soccer fan it was absolutely a deed of diplomatic proportions.
Author: johanneswilm
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On the World Soccer Cup
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Update : The video below has been replaced by a better edited version in which one actually can read the subtitles. (Sep 16, 2007)
By coincidence I am visiting my parents right now, when the Danish minority has its annual meeting (in Danish: “Årsmøde”). It lasted for three days, and I was back in Oslo the last day, so I decided to take my sister and shoot a little video of one of the celebrations in a tiny little village called “Ascheffel” (just far enough away for me not to run into old teachers from kindergarten, etc.). The resulting video has many flaws, amongst which are:
– The sound is not very good + you need to know both German AND Danish to make sense of it all. But then again, it’s subtitled!
– There are quite a few references which don’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t been there. (though look at the very bottom of this article)
Now I am putting the video up now nevertheless, because I know I will not have much time at a pc in the near future due to me travelling to Copenhagen tomorrow, then to Oslo from there and on Tuesday I’ll be in Amsterdam for a week, before going back to Oslo. (and yes, I’m staying in my tent both in Amsterdam and Oslo). Anyways, for anyone who doesn’t mind all these problems and is interested in a tiny documentary about the Danish minority in Germany from a critical perspective… enjoy the download!
Update: The anthropology sites Kansatieteilijän desktopilta (Finnish), sblog, Antropologi.info and Savageminds.org have linked the video.
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To anyone who thinks…
that I can not greet royals in a more traditional way, I present the following picture I found when visiting my grandmother today:
In German: “The children greeted the Danish queen with the Danish flag.” (Grätsch, Wochenschau, 1 April, 1992) I am on the far left and it says “Denmark” on my forehead I actually remember a few things from that day…
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The End?
So this is it, once again. Well, wait, I haven’t really been updating you for the past two and a half weeks. This is what has happened in the ever exciting life of Johannes Wilm:
Room 0815 — fearful of what is to come next?) During the weekend of the Revolutionary party (RV) national convention (for which I had programmed the system that allows for proposals to be tracked, ordered, printed out, handled by committees, etc.), one of my informants from Douglas, AZ showed up. ow he had announced his visit some weeks ago, but I really couldn’t believe that anyone from Douglas would really show up i Oslo just like that. I had known Jeff in Douglas during my first visit mostly as the boyfriend of January, but still I had had a few conversations with him back then, and especially since then both during my second visit and otherwise over MSN messenger and email have we had quite a few conversations. To give you kind of a idea how different we are, consider the following: he is 20 years old, he is a conservative, he is a christian, this was his first time leaving the Americas, he is a musician playing metal (?? actually I’m not sure what it is) ad he voted for George W. Bush at his reelection (although he now says that he can’t support him).Well, this guy suddenly showed up at the Oslo train station from where he called my cell phone. Now what was I to do? I concluded that shock therapy probably would be the most appropriate, so after picking him up, the first thing I did was to drag him through the national convention of RV (they had called me cause the Internet had stopped working), before we went to my room to drop of his stuff. A few hours earlier they had had a spokesperson from the Palestinian government (and member of Hamas) and he spoke in English, but unfortunately we were too late for that and what he got to see was really nothing more than a few old Norwegians speaking in Norwegian.
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Is there a future for the Red Electoral Alliance (RV) in Norway?
That is the theme of the just published issue of Kontur Debatt that I spent most of last night to prepare — download it at kontur.tv.
In Norway, just like in Denmark there is one reformist socialist party and one revolutionary socialist party (in addition to the social democratic parties of course). While in Denmark the Red Green Alliance (Enhedslisten) has been sitting in the national parliament for many years, the Norwegian sister party does not seem to have been going anywhere for a long time. Partially this is simply due to different election laws, which favor small, urban parties in Denmark, while they do not in Norway. also the reformist socialist party in Denmark is quite a bit more hopeless than the Norwegian counterpart (for example, the Dansih Socialist People’s Party (SF) was FOR the very neo-liberal and pro-war EU constitution. But another part of it is the general direction the two revolutionary parties have: while the Danish party has left all references to the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, the quasi-Maoist fraction in the Norwegian sister party is still going strong.
Now the Norwegain revolutionary party will have its national convention this weekend, and many have been hopeful that the will be able to remove themselves entirely from the ideological left-overs of Stalinism. Unfortunately, rumors have it that the ex/quasi-Maoist fraction (AKP is officially organized as a party within the party) have managed ot accumulate at least 50 of the 120 delegates for the convention. In this issue of Kontur Debatt we will try to give to those party members who are not affiliated with AKP. -
Marxist anthropology
Antroplogi.info just published an interview in Norwegian, after earlier critisizing me for being “too engaged” in the way I conducted my study of Douglas, AZ. It seems that there were a few things I had to clarify: contrary to popular believe, I do in fact not believe that i hold the one and only key to the truth about what Douglasites should be doing, nor what goals they shoudl strive for. That does not mean that I do not have an opinion or that I believe that all options have equally much going for them. All it means is that I do not set myself apart from the “field” the way some intellectuals tend to do. But I believe the interview makes that pretty clear.
Right now I’m interested in the reactions the proclamation of “Marxist anthropology” as being a sort of study with the goal of undertstanding some local phenomenon better in order to be able to change things on a bigger scale will stir up. I know there are quite a few radicals studying anthropology here in Norway, but as far as I can get, most of those still follow the liberal model of anthropology (the one in which you are not allowed to say that A is better than B nor that you prefer A over B, but you have to tell about A, B and the totally outlandish alternatives C through Z). Let us see if we get a response from one of them.
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Guantanamo activists facing court case
Tomorrow morning at 9am the trial against us six activists who walked out onto a major inner Oslo road wearing Guantanamo costumes in connection with the visit of US Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s visit June 7th 2005. That day was the the 100th anniversary of Norway, and we happened to walk out onto Karl Johann’s Street just before the king drove by.
The reason why we were dressed up as Guantanamo prisoners was of course not to protest the king, but to protest the fact that the Norwegian government at the time welcomed invited a person such as Rumsfeld to celebrate the day here in Norway. Also, they had filled the Oslo harbor with war ships from all over the world (including a major hangarship the US) and had lined up soldiers on both sides of Karl Johann’s street the day when Norway celebrated 100 years of independence from Sweden — while the seccession bck then had been exceptionally peaceful.
<%image(20060503-militparade.jpg|379|284|A disturbance for the system? (picture: NRK))%>
What many people do not know is that several of us spent some of the other days on a similar street theatre as we had planned to do on the 7th as well.Up until then, everything had worked out fine. Now we’re facing a potential fine of 10,000NOK (ca 1600USD) + costs of the courtcase.
None of think we’re guilty, as we never really were a danger to the king. But this case is about so much more.The rather hefty fine is probably meant to deter others who might get similar ideas, and therefore I believe it is politically motivated.
See also:
http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article1055066.ece¦ http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/innenriks/article403556.ece ¦ http://www.spisderike.net/artikkel/3088/We were finally fined 9000kreach for the incident. See the Norwegian article in Klassekampen below
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Ever been graded?
Sure you have! We all get graded all the time. Kindergarden, pre-school, middle school, high school, college, university, various certificates for having learned to swim, ride your bike or drive a car — grading has become one of societies great sports. More than that, especially in societies with a low degree criticism of the structure of society (and here I’m amongst others thinking of the country I currently reside in), it has become an entire ideology of itself: grading is seen as being a scientific activity done according to natural laws and any grade is dependent, and only dependent upon that which is being graded — subjective factors in grading do simply not exist. So if you get some grade from a school in some dinky place in northern Norway, that grade is directly comparable to another student might receive from a school in central Oslo. And more than that: according to this ideology, it is perfectly possible to accumulate grades across subject! So one can somehow say “student A with a certificate from a high school i central Oslo, who got A in math and B in French is a better student than this student B with a certificate from a high school in Tromsø, who got B in English and C in geography”. And people believe that is possible not only for high school, but also for college and university!
And once the grade has been handed out, one can then use it to objectively classify all students and either hand out salaries that correspond to the grades in case they take a job or in order to filter out the best if they choose to go on and take further studies.
Although I have always been highly critical of the first part, up until recently I had believed that at least the second part was one close to that way (although that does of course not make much sense given that the grade is not very objective to begin with).
But then I was called in to a meeting with the Central Admission Committee for bachelor studies of the University of Oslo in which I am one of two student representatives. The meeting was to decide upon the fate of a little more than 100 applicants for “selffinancing bachelor students”…
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Weather modifying dreams…
My good friend and inventor Michael Fallwell is at it again. Previously he came up with a home-built revolutionary new telescope design, which is much cheaper than the existing designs because it leaves out all the unnecessary parts and the lenses can be grinded using parts of any old washing machine you can find on the road. Then he came up with a glider powered windmill that might soon make oil obsolete as there is much less electronical cruft involved compared with the static windmills as we know them today.
A spray turbine boat enhancing the weather This time, Mike takes care of another of our current global problems: climate change. Mike’s rainenhancer works in the following way: you have a fleet of ships moving around the coast, pumping all the seawater they can up about 10m into the atmosphere (in 100m wides stripes around 200m apart). Then some of that water will get stuck there and form clouds which will then move up 100–1000km inland before they rain out — “like a little storm system,” as Mike says.
Just like most socialists, Mike believes that change in the structure of society is closely connected to changes in technology. But while most socialists in some way or another are politicians and believe the necessary technology to permit for a restructuralization are present already and all that needs to be done is to organize for a social revolution that will leave society with a different (socialist) structure which will be able to take full advantage of the inventions that have been made already.
Mike with another one of his inventions — a glider powered windmill Not so with Mike — as an inventor he sees the main driving force of human history to be the inventory spirit of mankind. If one wants changes, one needs to invent new ways of doing things — social changes will follow as reactions.
Unrealistic? Well, maybe. But how can we know if we don’t even try? I wish Mike all the luck he needs for getting it to work, but as a socialist I can’t quite see how society will change without any human intervention at all. But maybe technological inventionism is what people focus on if social change seem impossible to start with…
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Millinkevich once more
You might remember my previous item on the matter, and our protest from the Left Alliance against Millinkevich, the pro-Western, pro-privatization candidate in Belarus. Last weekend, Millinkevich came to Oslo as a guest of the Norwegian Helsingfors Commitee. As noone else had, we ended up being the ones protesting him. And by the way, yesterday, I gave up all my positions in the Left Alliance. I decided upon that mainly for three reasons:
1. the youth has to take over (although several of them are older than me or have been in student politics for a longer time)
2. the student parliament is mainly limited towards having the powers of a student council at a high school. Now although it was pretty soon clear to me that those were it’s formal powers, it took quite a long time for me to udneerstand that most other MPs also wanted it to remain that way and that they enjoyed having phony debates about things they couldn’t do anything about — without even getting the press involved to build up public pressure
3. I might, believe it or not, actually finish my career as a student this summer!
…well and then there are more interesting things/activities out there. So don’t expect me to stop being active quite yet!
Update (04/30/06): The last session of the student parliament this year was actually on Thursday after I had written the entry, so technically speaking, I had one last meeting to attend to. And at that meeting, the student parliament called for a boycott of all the main occupation states: Israel, USA, China, Marocco, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Great Britain, Pakistan, India and Indonesia. I really don’t think it can get very much more radical… If you know Norwegian, you can read the entire text below.
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