Danish Christians reckon there’s no room for yoof in Copenhagen. So the terror squad evicted the Ungdomshuset. Bloomberg reckons 80 members of the Danish resistance have been arrested; AP claims more than 250; Reuters at least 75; later amended by The Age (Reuters) to “about 190”:
“We made them an offer and I’m sorry that they did not accept it,” Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard told a news conference after hurrying back from a ski vacation in Norway.
“The police handled the situation very professionally,” she said.
When she’s not evicting squatters, on holidays, praising police terror squads, or ‘campaigning’ for ‘environmentalism’, ‘feminism’ and ‘socialism’, in her spare time, Bjerregaard is a gardener in her organically-managed manor; mostly growing apples.
Isn’t that nice.
See also : yeahpope on Ungdomhuset (Remercie le camarade s0metim3s)
Newsflash!
Mick Armstrong has issued the following statement on the eviction:
I wish I was one of the participants in The Bolshevik Revolution™ but in the meantime I am in Socialist Alternative.
The anarchist crazies involved in the ultra-violence are in no serious sense part of Danish society. Just like their black bloc mates in Australia they simply exploit squats such as the Ungdomshuset for their own purposes.
Right throughout the lead-up to the eviction they made clear their hostility to and contempt for private property. On the day they did all they could to disrupt the eviction and were hostile, abusive, threatening and ultra-sectarian towards police.
Denmark, fortunately, has not previously been blighted by the sort of black bloc anarchist activities which have had such a massive impact on demonstrations in Australia. These people are simply provocateurs that open up civil society to police repression. In Australia their ranks have been riddled by police agents and fascists… and they are even averse to waving red flags!
What gave them a certain critical mass at the Ungdomshuset was the presence of considerable numbers of anarchists from Outer Space. One of our members from Mars said he recognised at least 40 Martian anarchists. He knew at least 20 of them by name. There were also a considerable number of black bloc anarchists from outside Denmark. We know of people from Sweden, Germany and England. These people are like football hooligans who travel the world looking for violence, including a German who was hit on the head, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
(Thankfully, police officers from across the country are on their way to Copenhagen to help in the coming days, when more demonstrations are expected. Police are also monitoring border crossings with Sweden and Germany because Danish squatters have called for filthy fucking foreign squatters to help.)
On top of that there were also a considerable number of anarchists from New Guinea, and various islands of the Malay Archipelago.
Because of the behaviour of these provocateurs the media and the law and order brigade are having a field day.
The left should offer no comfort to these crazies. We should do whatever we can to isolate them. They are wreckers. If they grow in Europe it will simply make it harder to to build a revolutionary organisation that can participate in mass struggles, draw lessons from past victories and defeats and convince the working class that middle class students from the University of Melbourne know the way forward to socialism.
If the property is owned by the state and therefore owned by taxpayers, then I think a case can be made for taxpaying squatters to inhabit such property. However if it is private property, owned by either a company or an individual, occupied or not, then there is no right for anybody else to occupy such property – it’s otherwise known as theft.
Long live Mick Armstrong! I\’d follow him to the barricades (then stand still and repeat inane chants on a megaphone) any day!
Darrin: You\’re correct when you see there are no rights (or very little). It\’s more of a duty. Don\’t you think it\’s obscene that there are empty buildings while people remain homeless? Even if they squat as a choice (against renting, against waste) it\’s cool with me.
Lumpen, if you occupy a building that is privately owned, then you are stealing.
The building, located at Jagtvej 69, Nørrebrois, is owned by a tiny Christian fundamentalist sect called Faderhuset (‘Father’s House’), who want to demolish it and build a church in its place. Constructed in 1897, the building originally served as an organising base for the local labour movement. It was bought by the municipality of Copenhagen in 1978, and made available for use by young people — hence being dubbed Ungdomshuset (‘Youth House’) — in 1982. In 1999 the municipality placed it on the market, and it was eventually purchased by the sect very much in question in 2001. A series of legal and political battles over the ownership and use of the building have taken place since then, but in August last year the Danish courts declared the sect to be the rightful owners, and legally entitled to evict its current tenants. The original date for the eviction was given as being December 14, but did not take place until March 1, 2007.
In the Danish squats and Christiania, the freedom they entail means smokers can smoke tobacco inside regardless of the wishes of non-smokers.
The first thing you used to see in Christiania was a row of skunkweed and hash merchant stalls all with regulated fixed (high- sic) prices.
Whilst I am all for legalisation and economic liberalisation of drugs, I am against consumption, use, distribution and price fixing of these substances. If squat politics means increasing the chance of lung cancer for non smokers, then you can keep it.
Dont tell Princess Mary but my friend had a toke of weed with her husband the crown prince of Denmark when he was younger. They really should enlist his help if they want to save Christiania as he might have some power over parliament and have sympathy for the hippies considering the dolphin tattoo on his leg. Why dont you get in touch with them Andy and suggest it? If you are such an interweb activist?
Their palace is only a couple of streets away from the Christiania wetlands..
Wow! Something so ironic {I presume} it reads like total nonsense. That’s great!
“…I am all for legalisation and economic liberalisation of drugs, I am against consumption, use, distribution and price fixing of these substances.”
…eh? I mean, yeah, me too.
I mean, what?
Yep it is quite possible to believe in the legalisation of drugs and penalties for price fixing.
And at the same time to hope that most people will not to use drugs or have anything to do with their regulation or distribution.
It might seem impossible to you in your redeyed haze (I checked your blog young lady and you are in a bad way, ride your bike to odyssey house ^^) , but a lot of people probably have this point of view, once you tease it out. Probably not anywhere near a majority of people mind you.
OK, that sentence certainly makes slightly more sense. Yes.
Oh and thanks for your concern, pseudonymous slackbastard commenter. Here I was, thinking I was asking about economic liberalisation. Silly, drug addicted me. But they DO say the personal is political SO FYI: I was bashed by a 7 foot tall Irish bloke who looked like Gerry Adams at 5am in a bar in South Korea. Because I wasn\’t Irish enough. Or was it because I was TOO Irish? I forget, the reason being I was very drunk.
Just a second though… that was YOUR substance related hi-adventure, wasn\’t it? { http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=490#comment-1540 }
It was then and still is now a fascist hate crime. I hope you take my point, but if not 😉
{ http://www.houseoffun.com/store/m&c/art/mc-tee4.gif }
I must say, I do feel like I\’m tripping when I have to negotiate that psychedelic spam filter you set up, @ndy. I think I even had to type A C 1 D once. E also appears a lot.
Can\’t you do something about it?
On second thoughts, don\’t…
More importantly, after a third night of police terror, and a total of 643 arrests —
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2328814.ece
— the fucking cunts have started tearing Ungdomshuset down:
“Scabs wore face masks under their helmets to conceal their identities as a wrecking ball slammed into the Youth House, a graffiti-sprayed brick building in the Noerrebro district of the Danish capital…”
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/03/05/europe/EU-GEN-Denmark-Clashes.php
“We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accomodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget that we can also build these places and cities, here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts, and that world is growing in this minute.”
~ Buenaventura Durruti, to Pierre Van Passen, August 5, 1936
Why is the left eating itself up with these internal arguments over whether action is good or not?? Obviously it is important not to succumb to an act of violence for violence’s sake, or to be a thug who just smashes stuff up for the sake of it. But is that really what we have been seeing of late around the globe? We have seen so much activity in the last few years from the streets of Paris to the actions at Australian protests. Is this really just the action of a few “radical crazies”? Of course not, a few radical crazies would not be able to get a crowd dynamic to work in their favour unless the crowd was already very pissed off by what is being done to them. We have reached a crisis point in world history that may very well require global revolution to resolve. The left has been pushed further and further into a corner that leaves it with little option but to fight its way out. Why are we decrying those who are willing to make a stand and fight back against those who would like to see them all dead? Instead of arguing against those who are making a stand at the moment in the streets of Denmark and Norway we should be arguing that what is needed right now is a global Intifada. The signs are all pointing towards the fact that something like that is coming.
*Some* segments of ‘the left’ are hand-wringing over a bit of rock-throwing, but then they always do eh? And we’ve seen lots of ‘shit’ around the globe, for centuries, and barring an (unfortunately quite likely) massive collapse of the global ecology in the nxt few decades, we will continue to for some time to come. (Well, you and I will be dead, but y’know…) And loadsa people are pissed off, but then that’s nothing new either.
In terms of ‘the left’ (of which, incidentally, being an an-archist, I do not really consider myself to be a part), what *is* new is the fact that it’s operating in a global political context in which Communism is no longer capable of suffocating grassroots movements. That’s a *good* thing; tho’ many are still struggling to come to terms with the fact that much of their legacy — essentially, ‘Marxism’ — is politically bankrupt: — hence the popularisation of concepts such as ‘autonomy’…
“Why are we decrying those who are willing to make a stand and fight back against those who would like to see them all dead?”
Who’s “we”, paleface?
Up the punx!