Daybreak in San Diego- gorgeous red sky reflecting off still water. Drinking coffee leaning over the hotel room balcony--using the chill outside to wake up, so jetlagged I can't see straight. Trying to remember everything I'm supposed to remember for the conference today. Head's not working yet, but it's always like this. Head usually comes back online in time to be there when I need it. Fingers crossed.
Feels strange to be in San Diego again, under circumstances so different than last time.
The hotel is just across the channel from the fleet base. Yesterday morning I opened the curtains to see a missile cruiser square in my vision, huge, dark grey under the pre-dawn sky, powering out towards the Pacific. I'd forgotten we were at war.
Denmark's gone into the full media press... non-stop reports from the frontline, cops firing teargas, kids throwing bricks, the whole lot. Wish I wasn't stuck on conference calls with the Americans so I could pay more attention.
Full disclaimer here- I have not had time to do any first-hand reporting, and everything that follows in this piece is speculation based on second or third hand information with no independent confirmation. But this is what I've heard.
The story begins with the Ungdomshuset, "the Youth House," a building that was taken over by revolutionary squatters in the 1960s, and which has been a crash pad, haven from the world, and center of counterculture resistance in Denmark ever since. Today's residents are less hippie than the previous generation but still very bright red, tinged now perhaps with stripes of black... punks, crunchies, anarchists, and people the Danes charmingly refer to as "the autonomics." Ungdomshuset is Copenhagen's Smolny, if you will.
Last year a group of developers funded by Faderhuset "the Father's House," an extremist Danish Christian group, tried to buy Ungdomshuset from the Copenhagen Amt's government, which nominally owns the property (in Denmark, an Amt is like a county or municipality). Faderhuset made it clear that their intent was to destroy the building and rebuild a Christian youth center on the plot. Nobly, the Copenhagen Amt refused, pointing to Ungdomhuset's standing as a protected cultural landmark.
A few months later a different group of developers appeared, and offered to buy Ungdomshuset from the Amt. The Amt agreed, apparently not realizing that the second batch of developers was also financed by Faderhuset, this time sub rosa. Very quickly, the new owners of the building signed ownership over to Faderhuset, and the extremists demanded that the current residents get out to make way for demolition. There’s been stalemate for the past few months--lawyers in league with the punks claim that the sale took place under false pretenses, the government says property law is property law, and the punks have to go. Other interested parties have offered to buy the building from Faderhuset for substantially more than what the building is worth, just to protect its status. But it’s not about money—it’s ideology at stake here. The religious extremists want the place wiped out, and have demanded the authorities move in with force. The police, for a while, were reluctant to start cracking heads.
Tonight it all broke. The cops went in, the kids are throwing stones and starting fires, police responded with teargas, and now it feels like the Seattle riots out there.
This is no intifada. If this is what it looks like (and once again I have not been able to confirm any of this independently), it’s a simple case of religious extremists with money buying people out on ideological grounds--possibly with government collusion. There was never any question that the lefty extremist edge of the Ungdomhuset cadre would respond with stones when words had so clearly failed them.
Danes are unused to seeing people in the streets at night, but this is a manufactured confrontation.