Friday, March 16, 2007

Still here

The smoke clears and only a ruin remain. The Youth House is gone.

We, a bunch of us, stare at it with running eyes. But our tears are of defiance and rage. It is said that the ruin in front of us was just a house, and that is true. Even though it represented ideas and ideals it was merely a building, a material expression of something that the material can never express. What is inside us isn’t a place but a state of mind. It’s true. That evasive place of freedom is everywhere, in all true warriors’ heart and core.

Hundreds were arrested and jailed. How many will probably never be quite clear. I’ll certainly not trust the police to tell us the correct number. Many were arrested. Quite a few of them only passing by, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was among those not caught this time. But I have been arrested before, and I know how a cell looks like and feels like, both because I’ve seen the small cell from the inside and because I walk through the bigger prison of society every day.

I know what my friends and fellow warriors feel. I would, even if I hadn’t heard their cries of pain and desolation.

They threw everything at us, and we’re still here.

«We made a mistake», Information Officer Fleming Steen Munch in the Copenhagen police stated today, to Danish TV2.

They fired Ferret 40 teargas grenades at us, a brand that even the manufacturer, Defense Technologies describes as lethal, «if fired directly at people».

Our pal Fleming doesn’t mean it, of course. Police forces all over the world have a long history of coming up with insincere apologies after street battles. It’s one of their methods of softening the blow when facing a public at least partly seeing through their propaganda. Even a text-TV message on Norwegian television, in a rare show of honesty co-revealed, confirmed that the uniformed thugs attacked peaceful protests. Everybody knows what’s going on in the world, even the most thickheaded average citizen and watchdog. They know deep down. They have eyes and they can see. They have minds and they are able to think… even though they are not exercising that ability very much. They know what freedom of expression means, at least in a muddled part of their brains and core.

Workers are afraid. The religious zealots «legally» owning the ruin have a hard time finding people willing to work there, to build their house dedicated to intolerance and insanity.

Very good. The servants of tyranny should be afraid. They should look under their beds a dark night. The new, shiny house will in all probability be raised, under heavy guard from the thugs in armor. Experience tells us that. Their masters, in their smugness think they have won… again, but they haven’t, not really. This is merely one more battle of the thousands that have been, of the thousands to come.

They fired death at us, and hammered us with their clubs and viciousness and glee, and took us away in chains. We’re still here.

We’ll always be here.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Smoke

Radio Baghdad from Copenhagen today:


I’m coughing constantly. I have been coughing all day. We were given word quite early that «something was up». The behavior of the Copenhagen police has gone from bad to worse lately. The people ruling these bullies, those sending them on their missions have turned ever more aggressive both in language and use of power the last year, even more so than during the last twenty years.

So, when the bullies, also the «anti-terror police» charged Ungdomshuset (the Youth House) in Copenhagen none of us was surprised. We’re just wondering why they waited so long.

They threw out the people living there, using water cannons and a helicopter, and all the equipment the bullies of tyranny generally has at hand.

I don’t have much time. I’m sitting on an Internet cafĂ©, scribbling something. There are rumors that the bullies will close down places like this soon. The situation has exploded all over the city in such a short span of time. Traffic and streets have been closed. Street fights are happening everywhere. The train connections in and out of Copenhagen have been stopped. The police are holding Ungdomshuset, but they are besieged by an enraged gathering.

There is smoke everywhere, and I’m coughing, but I’m laughing, as well. I’m enjoying myself, not because Ungdomshuset has been cleaned, but because so many refuse to take it anymore, refuse to accept that society’s cleaners act the way they do. They have been getting away with so much. Hopefully they’re gonna get it this time. I shout at them and stand against them, like so many others. The clueless ordinary people we’re passing on the street look terrified at us and at their surroundings. One of them shouts that World War 3 has begun.

I fervently hope he’s correct.


Radio Baghdad from Copenhagen tonight:


Smoke and teargas are lingering in the air. There are fires everywhere. Garbage and ruined, burning cars and buildings with broken windows surround us wherever we look. We fight the police using our meager tools, but we fight and we keep fighting. Did they expect this, this much resistance? I think they expected a bit and planned for it, and even wanted it, wanted to teach us a lesson, but even though they will retain the upper hand, of course, with their superior numbers and armaments, and a corrupt society behind them, they have clearly overreached themselves today, tonight. We shout our triumph from the rooftops.

It’s a war zone. Even the established media says so. Princess Street, The Square and large parts of the city. Copenhagen is on Fire.

I keep coughing, and my eyes are flooded in tears, but they are tears of rage. The Square is filled with people, and we will continue to fight through the night, the weekend and beyond. People are coming to aid us from near and far, and I welcome them, welcome them all. This isn’t just about the house, this city or any, isolated incident. This is about us, and all people standing up for themselves against tyranny, the tyranny that is virtually everywhere today.

I hide out in a dark apartment, writing this. I will go back out soon. Don’t expect to hear from me again for a while.

Hopefully this will be yet another beginning of countless beginnings, to change the world. We can hope and do our best, for this to be the start of the one, true war: that against oppression and tyranny, especially the oppression and tyranny cloaked in benevolence and illusion. The tyrants and their watchdogs say people living in the western democracies are lucky and shouldn’t complain, shouldn’t go to so-called extremes like we do tonight.

They would say that, of course.

That is their pitch, their propaganda. They say protesters are violent merely because they are defending themselves. They say protesters are misguided or terrorists or whatever term is the current derogatory buzzword. I don’t believe it, believe them. And neither does anybody else gathered here tonight. Neither do millions of others in various countries seeing through their lies and conceit. This is an ongoing war, not constrained to a single nation or even a single string of events, but something happening everywhere, and I am very happy, extremely pleased to be a part of it.