Sorry about the sudden halt of this train of endless rants. Had stuff to do. Now I’m back.
…
Danes are thieves. Not in the sense that Danes nick more apples in supermarkets or swindle more billions than any other society with a concept of private property. No, Danes are more devious than that.
Danes steal achievements. No Nobel Prize too small, no Oscar too big – if the Danes like it and they think that it could constitute some sort of victory for Danishness, they just take it right out of your hands and dance around the town square cheering and celebrating, complimenting each other for a job well done and this being the final proof of the Danish Model’s supremacy on the battlefield of Utopias.
Take Viggo Mortensen. Or Scarlett Johansson. Or Connie Nielsen. Or Lars Ulrich. All of them great stars and highly and deservedly respected artists – and in some way or another born with Danish blood in their veins, the poor sods. And each and every one of them has been dragged through the whirlwind of greedy arms, stripping them of every available chunk of achievement every time they set foot on these desolate shores.
“How has being a Dane/having Danish ancestors/the fact that you’ve once seen a picture of Hans Christian Andersen helped you in your career?!” is the first and last question that every internationally applauded individual has to answer whenever the press is present. As if the years and years of refining their respective skills, the numerous disappointments and the astronomical levels of bravery that leads to the respect of your peers and the cheers of the punters had anything at all to do with the fact that a certain amount of the artists genomic variations derives from their pale and somewhat bloated ancestors of the Baltic Sea Region.
But the decayed sense of what’s yours and mine doesn’t stop at looting innocent artists, scientists and industrialists of the fruits of their labour in broad daylight. The Danes take any available opportunity to pluck any produce that hangs in the gardens of whole populations.
This spring served an example so grotesque that it made me doubt if I would ever be able to call myself a Dane again without the flames of shame burning in my cheeks.
As you may have noticed, there’s a bit of debate going on in Denmark at the moment. For some reason Danish people seem to be uninterested in discussing anything other than people who are not Danish. What do they wear? What do they eat? Where do they live? What TV shows do they watch? But most important of all: how do we make them stop all that and do what we do?
One of the more persistent perceptions has been that people who can’t show a pedigree containing at least three generations of pure Viking are unreliable and lazy. And the high number of people with mysterious origins in the unemployment statistics was seen as both the proof of the fact and the very reason that these exotic and morally degenerate tribes lived in total isolation from everyday life. ‘Parallel societies’ the phenomenon was christened. ‘Lack of integration’ was how it was understood.
The fact was, that it was practically impossible to get a job interview if the name on the application had just the slightest outlandish twist. It was a common known fact among immigrants and their children that if you sent two identical job applications for the same job, ‘Gudrun’ would get the interview. Gürcin wouldn’t.
But the Danes kept insisting that it was ‘the foreigners’ who refused to ‘integrate’. Until this spring.
Along came a survey from The Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs (yes, we actually do have a Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs…). It showed that the struggle to get a chance to contribute to society slowly but surely was beginning to pay off. After 15-20 years of humiliation, immigrants no longer have to send out 300-400 applications to get a job.
And what happened? The report from the ministry was celebrated in newspapers, TV and at the local værtshus to the resounding cheer of “Look at that! Foreigners work as much as Danes do! That must mean Danes are the best in the world at integrating people. Actually it just proves what we’ve always known: the Danish society is the best in the world and we should never change anything about how we do things because we are simply divine!!”
So to sum things up: If you’re visiting Denmark for the first time any time soon and you think that walking around in the streets is safe – think again. Your watch and wallet may be out of danger, but if you’ve done any sort of good in your life; if you’ve made any impact for the better of the world, however feeble and insignificant it might be – check your pockets regularly during your stay.
15 Comments
I love you, I love this post. Thank God there are Danes who can see this twisted complacency for what it is.
Yay, you’ve posted again! A few of us were worried you’d been sent for deprogramming or something, Peter.
(Note to other readers: be sure and mouse over the links–brilliant!)
Brilliant stuff. Love it. What I find strange is that Danes will often only steal if the goods are deemed worthy in foreign countries.
Karen Blixen [Isak Dinesen] couldn’t publish her way out of a paper bag in Denmark upon her return from Ahhfreeka, as Meryl Streep pronounced it in Out of Ahhfreeka.
But hey… once she was published in the UK and US and people actually bought the books… WHAM! She’s Danish! She’s Worthy of Being Danish! She’s Ours! We love her and we’ve always loved her. She owes it all to us.
The list of rejected Danes welcomed back into the fold after proving themselves is long.
Aqua, for one. Crappy pop-light band conquers world. They’re Ours!
Etc. Etc.
I always enjoy reading ur blog. I totally agree and can relate to how difficult it is for us foreigners in Dk to land even a job interview..whew!
A long period of wait and expectation has paid off… Peter Andreas has posted again!!!
I think that this complacency is paired with the notion that it is rather socially unacceptable in Denmark to express candid criticism of one’s peers, and a relunctance to admit one’s own shortcomings. Danes, there is nothing humiliating in admitting that we are not perfect. Nobody is.
Interestingly enough, Danes are rather modest among themselves. It is an oddity that this modesty comes with such arrogance towards other ethnic groups (this includes the English, the French, the Germans, and so forth).
On the most uneducated end of the spectrum, I’ve actually met Danes who believed that modern democracy was a Danish invention and that Christianity had been spread through the Viking conquests. This is of course ludicrous, but it fits in well with the general Danish propensity to claim others’ achievements for themselves… as a group.
Is this a form of over-compensation for the individual’s modesty? If you don’t feel very big yourself, at least you want to feel part of a “great” community…
Does this relunctance to apologize and admit culpability (e.g. of discrimination) come from the law of Jante? (If others aren’t any better than me, then I don’t have to lower myself by acknowledging my flaws.)
BTW, Danes, the combination isn’t charming. :-/
Its good to see you back. How I wish more people could be like you.
what a bliss to read this post from you.
thank god that at least one Dane in Denmark got it right about foreigners. I still don’t understand why Danes think ALL foreigners are the dark-skinned lazy sods who have tons of small children tailing behind them chanting loudly in Arabic.
There are us, the expatriates who happen to be unfortunate enough to receive the prejudice.
@canadian in DK.
Have you read this?
http://onlyindenmark.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/how-the-danes-taught-british-people-to-speak/
I know it’s probably a single loony, but how dare he claims that it was the Dane who taught British people how to speak
Absolutely brilliant!!! I was just thinking about Caroline Wozniacki and how proud Danes and the Danish media are of their own superstar tennis goddess…but she’s all Polish. Doesn’t matter. If I become a famous painter then maybe I’ll get merit citizenship and become an honorary Dane. As my friend Frederik states “your paintings will be made in Denmark thus making them Danish”.
@Jonathan: Yes, nobody dares to call her a “second-generation immigrant.” How convenient.
@TheWriter: It’s hard to tell who wrote this since there is no serious source. However, for those who are interested, the English language is known for incorporating many, many borrowings from other languages. The French language has influenced it greatly after the Norman conquest (yes, the Norman spoke an oïl language, still very close to modern French, and **not** a Scandinavian language). The mother language of English is actually “Old English.” The Old Norse (Viking) influences are simply borrowings, much like the French borrowings. All these languages are Indo-European languages, which are all related at some level.
Jonathan, whereas Caroline Wozniackis parents are from Poland and moved to Denmark, Caroline herself was born in Odense and grew up in Denmark.
I’d say that makes her pretty Danish.
Yes Heylel, I realize that. But the think I thought of earlier was the fact that some Danes have trouble thinking of certain people as not being Danish if they are not ethnic Danes or visibly Danish looking. I agree that she’s Danish as she was born here and raised here. But some people regard other children of immigrants still as guests.
You are so good at this it leaves me speechless.
What a relief.
I still don’t believe you are Danish and want to know what happened to you as a child to knock it out of you.
Were your parents avant-garde? WHAT were they putting in your sutteflaske?
Actually, red wine was put in my sutteflaske by mistake when I was about 6 months old. Luckily, it was watered down considerably.
My parents weren’t avant-garde as such when I grew up (and they are not at all avant-garde enough today, if you ask me), but my mum taught me that ‘if you want to be a lamp-post, you’ll have to get used to dogs peeing on you’. And they named me after a bloke who was expelled from Denmark on Christmas Eve, 1799 for telling ‘the truth’ about the peerage.
I’m just giving in to my fate.
P.
When I read the first assertive, I thought you would make a funny comparision between the current and the former Vikings…
It´s sad to me, as a danish´s descendant, to read such an impression about danish people. It is an enormous contrast to the memory I have of my danish grand-father and also of my father, both men of good deeds that sought to integrate into a multiracial society, as it is in Brazil, where I was born and continue to live.
Perhaps I might be discriminated in contemporary Denmark, because I don´t have a blond hair and blue eyes - my mother is japanese (a strange chimera, I know: Samurai-Viking-”lazy” Brazilian). But I can´t understand how could danish say that other people are lazy, if a danish citizen works only 37 hours a week and don´t have to worry about retirement, healthcare or education. I believe that this easiness can lead the future generations to laziness. I really hope that danish people won´t be as “lazy” as the “others” in the future, because our world is becoming an open arena for full market competition - and only the fittest will accomplish some “welfare state”.
I hope that Denmark will never have the same problems of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that made so many danish to emigrate (leaving a proud viking heritage in Hollywood and a not-so-proud inheritance in the Amazon rainforest) but if danes need Brazilian house again, they will be welcome - if work hard enough, of course.
(Brazilian statistics: tax rate about 57%, there is no functional public healthcare system, good education must be paid, and there is not a good retirement public scheme - this is REAL work hard to live. Everything must be paid, despite taxes!)