While Israel is converting Gaza to rubble, killing thousands and driving millions away from their homes, while at the same time preventing emergency aid to get to these people, there is no scarcity on condemnations from Western governments.

Not all Western governments, it should be said, as the USA, for instance, seemingly enjoys seeing how the area is being cleaned and prepared for Trump’s dreamed-up beach paradise to be created, while putting everybody in prison who disagree.

But all normal governments regularly tell Israel that they are not happy with what they see.

And then – nothing.

The trade between Israel and other countries continue, all other collaborations, including such as the participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, which, as an example, Russia was thrown out of when they began a similar operation towards Ukraine.

I have before mentioned how Danes in general prefer to do nothing at all, apart from sitting in their sofas, watching it all on TV, and expecting someone else to fix it.

But now, at least, a group of 210 Danish writers have sent an open letter to the Danish government, asking for some action, like the end of selling military equipment to Israel and in general put a real pressure on the Israeli government.

This is described in an article on DR.dk (in Danish): https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/kultur/210-danske-forfattere-kritiserer-statsministeren-det-er-ubegribeligt-danmark-ser

It is not clear why only writers have signed that letter, but probably it was found to have a certain weight when the Danish intelligentsia joined forces around such a thing.

Also unclear: what the Danish government will do about it. The foreign minister did already, earlier on the same day, go to the press with a criticism of Israel and their behavior towards the people in Gaza. But that is exactly the kind of non-action, the writers are protesting against, since nothing further is done, typically. Only words said to the press, nothing required from the Israeli government.

I know that many Danes do not agree. They believe that Israel is better than “Arabia”, or whatever they prefer to call the non-Israelian parts of the Middle East, and they have long had a similar set of thoughts as Donald Trump, rather wanting to see the back than the face of people from there, having convinced themselves that all crimes and all misery are a result of people from the Middle East moving to Denmark.

It has been easy for the press to tell the story of the attack by Hamas on Israel, which apparently started this whole modern holocaust that is taking place now, in such a way that many Danes spontaneously would answer “but they have a right to defend themselves” when confronted with the magnitude of Israel’s violence.

But, at least 210 writers are thinking otherwise. As nothing in this protest could be a surprise to the Danish government, it is unlikely that they will change their minds about anything, but there could be a (very) small chance that some of the other Danes would change their minds, which the politicians would then perhaps consider reacting upon.

So far, the prime minister has refused to express an opinion about the letter.

Whenever something big happens, Danes tend to just lean back and watch. Preferably on the TV or the mobile phone, so that they can zap around a bit. Someone else will then fix the problem, they think.

And usually this is how it goes. Someone else will fix whatever it was. A crime wave will be taken care of by the police, and an immigration crisis by the immigration authorities.

During the last few years, however, a lot of big crises have been piling up, making even some Danes begin to worry if they will be taken care about. And some politicians, who may or may not be afraid of not being reelected the next time, are now showing stronger signs of being in panic than ever before.

There is, of course, the war in Ukraine. It has displayed clearly that all what Danes from their sofas said about Russians being bad was true. Now it is expected that we will be attacked next, or at least, indirectly be hit by the next attacks, wherever they may take place.

It is significant that nobody seems to believe that it is going to end – we all know, that we are moving toward a large-scale war.

But many years of leaning back and watching didn’t prepare us well for such a situation, so now we panic. “Buy, buy, buy!”, as the Danish prime minister said recently, when being asked what the new military strategy would be. She wants us to get as many weapons as possible, from anyone who has some to sell.

We were just done with panicking about COVID-19, which was a leaned back panic, in that most people were indeed doing nothing or stopping to do things as a result of that panic. Staying home, not going to the office to work, having food sent by courier instead of picking it up yourself in the supermarket cannot be said to be the most active kind of panic.

But it was just a start, as it should turn out. Most Danes are still in that same kind of “soft panic”, doing nothing, but the politicians, as mentioned are running faster now to try to prevent a disaster, they know will come.

Today, Denmark finally, after a long debate, decided to allow for the USA to have a military presence in Denmark – complete with bases and their own justice system, being exempt from following Danish law even when being in Denmark. Almost all of the Danish parliament agreed that it would be good to have the American soldiers in Denmark, because – “buy, buy, buy!”. More military could possibly prevent the expected attack by Russia.

And that is a somewhat radical decision, considering that the USA is the party that has threatened Denmark with using military power to conquer Greenland and include it in the USA.

How much of a panic are you in, if you fear one enemy so much that you invite another one in to protect you against the first one?

Of course, the USA is an allied. The most important one. The politicians can quickly agree on that, and the threats to attack us are then simply ignored in that discussion.

All because of the panic, appearing after years of doing nothing.

We also, suddenly, need nuclear power plants. Because, what if we can’t have enough of energy from other sources, now that the Russian gas has been shut off? The fact that Denmark now a lot of the time produce more electricity than needed, from windmills and solar panels, seems to be forgotten. The enormous additional potential for energy production or reduction of consumption from more solar panels, windmills, solar heating, geothermal energy, and many other sources, have been forgotten. And the detail that the uranium for the nuclear power plants would most likely need to come from Russia has also been forgotten – and that problem about the nuclear waste: we have no place to put it.

Panic.

Maybe it is not so strange, then, that other areas, such as cyberattacks and the lack of sufficient food production, and polluted groundwater, and many other important things, are being pushed aside: after all, you can’t be expected to panic about everything simultaneously. Those real-world problems must wait, while we implement idiotic decisions on the basis of imagined problems.

And most Danes, those who are not politicians, still just sit in the sofa, watching and waiting for someone to fix the problems.

Postscript:

There will, of course, be some Danes who will see opportunities in all of this. Such as the possibility to deliver materials and consumables to the American bases, or build different things, or provide various services, just like some Danes did during the WWII, under the German occupation of Denmark. Some people earned a lot of money on that in those days, and some will, today, eye a similar path forward.

In the German days, all the money came from the Danish national bank, where the Germans simply took them. I wouldn’t expect the USA to send soldiers and start protecting Denmark for free – in the light of what Donald Trump did to Ukraine (suddenly demanding much more money in return than Ukraine had ever got from the USA, plus half of all the country’s produced values, forever into the future – and all that in the middle of Ukraine’s fight for survival, where they were asking for support – and still, at the same time, supporting Russia’s takeover of parts of Ukraine, effectively capitulating to Russia on behalf of Ukraine), it will be likely that Denmark is going to pay a high price for whatever the USA decides to do to protect the country.

So, in a way, the collaborators of today, delivering goods and services to the upcoming American bases in Denmark, would also be getting their money, indirectly, from the Danish national bank.

For a while, this will work, as it did during the German times. When people are more afraid of the alternative than they are upset about what happens now, they tend to accept it – for now. And then, perhaps one day in the future, some kind of settlement will happen.

All of it will be judged by the future, though. When looking back, history has always been shaped for a purpose, and this will happen here as well.

We might some day blame the politicians who let the enemy in, and the collaborators who benefited from it, like after the WWII, or we might consider all of them as the heroes who saved us from a potential disaster.

All of it, of course, depending on whether the USA actually wants to do it. Donald Trump has expressed his dislike of the USA’s protection of Europe, so it may never happen. It could also be that the USA turns out not to be an enemy after all – maybe they will even not invade Greenland, and maybe they will decide to support us and not Russia, should the latter decide to invade us. In these times with the American’s erratic politics, we cannot know.

The future will tell, somehow.

During a number of years, there have been several initiatives across the European Union to develop alternatives to the American software and services that dominate the use of computers – which means, dominates almost everything we do.

Almost every single company, organization, or individual in Europa, like in the rest of the world, is dependent on the USA big tech companies: through the computer operating system, Windows, or though mobile phones – or several apps and cloud services that we cannot live and function without anymore.

It should be possible to skip Microsoft Office, as there are alternatives on the market, such as LibreOffice (which is open-source, community based, originally developed in Europe, but, actually, also effectively from the USA1). However, most users will then run it on Windows or macOS, which both are American operating systems.

There is, of course, Linux. For a number of good and bad reasons, it never really hit it for individual users, even though a large part of the Internet servers and devices are using Linux as their operating system. Linux is open-source and not specifically American, even though it is interesting to see how Microsoft has been trying to get an ownership of that world as well, like they once tried to make their own alternative to the Internet (called MSN, Microsoft Network). Microsoft’s approaches have been many, but one was to buy GitHub, where much of the open-source development takes place. GitHub is a kind of mix between a social media and community, and a source code repository. GitHub uses Git, a repository management software developed specially for the development of Linux, even though GitHub doesn’t own Git, and Git can be used without GitHub. It just leans heavily on the open-source movement, in name and function.

Almost every programmer uses GitHub, and the system is free to use for open-source projects, making Microsoft a significant player in that market. Also, Microsoft has launched many open-source projects themselves, and put parts of their existing code into the open source2.

Microsoft has also embedded many open-source products into their own products and services, this way making use of the free development to build bigger systems of services than they would otherwise be able to, and, at the same time, claim that they support the open-source community.

Many other products than Microsoft Office exist as open-source versions or alternatives, and you could, if you really wanted, put together a fully operating platform for a company that didn’t include any commercial software. But the IT departments are being targeted by Microsoft’s marketing and nursing to skip the alternatives and use Microsoft’s software instead, and it works! You can find many IT managers and employees who will tell you, proudly, that “we are a Microsoft house”.

Now, the IT world isn’t revolving around Microsoft alone. Several other companies take part, and they are almost all American.

A very important, and dangerous, development has taken place over some years: the cloud revolution. It is about not doing all the computing on your own computers, back in your own offices, but instead using computers that you have rented from someone on the Internet. For instance, Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. You may rent the computers completely, using all ends of them yourself, or you may rent some “computing resources”, which will then be provided by the vendors out of their pool of computers.

This is how almost everything is done today. Very few companies, and, indeed, very few individuals, would be able to get through a day if the access to these cloud services would disappear.

Cloud services are not just such things that IT managers care about. Substack, for instance, is run as a cloud service. If the company Substack would lose the access to this, there would be no Substack. If you, as a Substack user, would lose your access, then, of course, you couldn’t use Substack either. And virtually all social media systems and most software products are today entangled in cloud services, even if there is a locally installed part of it. You often need to at least log in to a cloud service in order to use your locally installed software, and often, there will be an ongoing communication between the local software and the cloud software.

Mobile phones are not individual devices anymore, only connected to a telephone central, as they were before the smartphone idea took over. They are effectively computer terminals that use cloud services.

It should be clear, that if any of all this stops working – perhaps just for some people, or the people in a country, or a continent – there would be serious problems getting through a working day, or even the day of an individual person.

Very much rely on the functionality of software and services: payments, communication, sales, subscriptions and information, help and assistance (911, for instance), electricity and other supplies and facilities, defense, security and surveillance, and many of the mechanical devices, we wouldn’t even suspect to have a connection anywhere, such as modern cars or heating systems.

If the ones controlling such software and services would decide to switch these off, the world as we know it would, literally, be switched off.

That is why Europeans are getting worried.

Almost all software and services are controlled by American companies, directly under the influence of the American government, while much of the hardware, the software runs on, is made by and often controlled by Chinese companies.

It is very easy to switch off Europe.

With changing political trends in the USA, it actually has happened already, that otherwise trusted services became unavailable to individuals or organizations, even though the lawyers of the big tech companies do their best to deny it. For instance, Karim Khan, a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, lost access to his emails after order by Donald Trump, because of the arrest order on Benjamin Netanyahu, which isn’t accepted by the USA. Microsoft claims that they didn’t block the emails, but that remains an open question as the emails apparently were blocked, so someone did it. A view on this at Politico: https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Whatever has happened or not, the very possibility for such things to happen are making people think: “we can’t make ourselves that dependent on other people’s good will”.

And it means that, for instance, Denmark is now examining how the dependency on these American services can be reduced, at a government level. Companies are not there yet, as the IT managers still see great advantages for themselves and their departments by using the American software, but public administration has from time to time thrown out Microsoft and run with Linux, often going back some years later, when a new political team was elected.

My guess is that we are looking at a pile of explosives here, that will blow up as soon as a spark ignites it. The slightest sign that the USA and its big tech dominating companies will abuse their position in the world to damage European countries, and we will see a massive move away from the American products and services.

Until then, there will be initiatives now and then, isolated to individual city administrations or national government offices, but nobody will dare to be a front-runner and throw it out completely – until it suddenly will happen, as a result of a bad move by the USA.

At that time, it will not even be a matter of doing it without too much trouble, or without losing functionality or even data. It will be something that will be done, even if it means several steps back, from where we will then have to redo the development of similar products and services.

It will be ugly, as we have got ourselves into deep water with the digitalization process that has been running for several years now, where almost everything is in the cloud, using American software and services. But it will happen, unless things start moving into a better direction in the USA.

We would all prefer to not talk about them – to just look the other way, as we always do here in Sweden.

Hackers.

They are getting more and more insisting, making our digitalized world dysfunctional and counterproductive. Instead of paying easily with “Swish”, a concept that connects a bank account to a phone number through a simple app, to arrange for payments in seconds, we now regularly have to use other means – every time Swish is under attack, which is often.

Of course, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and all the credit cards will do theirs, so I doubt that many people seriously run out of options for paying, but still, it costs some extra trouble and confusion to first try Swish and then find out it doesn’t work today, and then what to do…

And what if I would now check the TV news on the national TV station SVT? On their website, as I always do it. Well, I have for several days now been met with a message that it doesn’t work. They have technical problems. At times such level of problems that they can’t even tell that they have them.

They are both, Swish and SVT, being hit regularly and hard by hacker attacks, the so-called DDOS or “distributed denial of services”, where thousands or millions of computers around the globe all try to get access to the site simultaneously (for instance initiated through viruses), which the web servers cannot handle. And then things stop working.

These two are not alone. Many public authorities and private companies experience it regularly, but often so that it is mostly an annoyance or a disturbance of public services, more than an attempt to steal data or lay down a company.

They are attacks on all of us normal people who are just trying to live our digitalized lives in peace.

And peace is the word.

We are, actually, at war. Or so do they see it in Russia. Our Scandinavian authorities are convinced that it is now mostly Russia who are behind such attacks, as part of their attempt to break down our society and its stability.

There are also physical attacks, for instance recently on a long line of mobile antennas on the Swedish east coast. Also suspected to have been arranged by Russia “through proxy”, which is a new expression we will learn going forward: when someone makes another do the bad stuff instead of doing it themselves. Apparently, Russia hires professional criminals, who will do anything for money, and this way they can sabotage things in Sweden without actually sending any Russian agents to us. Not that those are missing, though, as there regularly are revelations of spies, but they don’t need to be here for our society to be destroyed – many people who are already in Sweden are more than happy to do such things.

So, this all is the official line of the story.

I am not saying that it is wrong – I don’t know if it is – but what I want to stress is that it is a dangerous path to enter. When our government calls everything that doesn’t work for “a deliberate attack commissioned by an enemy state”, the door has been opened for the suppression of free speech and free movement, and for putting people in prison for presumed treason, perhaps setting aside all the normal legal protection mechanism that should ensure us all a fair trial, etc.

All the same happens all over Europe, btw., but Swedish media tends to tell about Sweden only, as if we are special. Danish media similarly tells about Denmark. But somehow, the news slipped through recently, that there were something like 60 major hacker attacked across Europe each day1.

It is always difficult to know the details because, first of all, not many know them so that they can tell – hacking does take place in the hidden, most often, and the visible results, such as websites not working, are then just the tip of the iceberg. So, a journalist trying to count a day’s events will most likely only see that tip. A senior security officer in some high-level agency will perhaps know about more attacks, but there are then additional attacks that are not known yet, and perhaps never will get known to anyone else than those who arranged them.

It can be difficult, as well, to know who did the attacks. Currently, journalists enjoy asking military experts for advice on such things, and these are notoriously skeptical against Russia, so they will point that way as the first thing, no matter if they know anything or not. Politicians do the same, currently. It is politically correct to accuse Russia.

Of course, maybe it is Russia most of the time, but I doubt that all the other hackers in the world have gone on vacation. There are hackers everywhere, and some groups of them have occasionally been the scape-goats, while the rest have not been mentioned during that time. My guess is that the truth is bigger: there are many more attacks than being reported, and many more hackers from many more places, commissioned by many more parties, than the news media typically want to deal with.

It is much easier to blame just one at a time.

We have made ourselves very vulnerable, as almost everything is digital now. In Denmark, even the distribution of letters is set to end by the end of this year. The politicians believe that letters are old-fashioned, together with money, but more about that below:

Electronic tickets are now the norm. It was long ago, the decision to stop accepting cash payment in the buses of Copenhagen, Denmark. Malmö, Sweden, followed a bit after. Various electronic ways of paying for the ticket has then been tried out, but the end effect is that it is now something you do with your mobile phone.

The national trains and various other transportation means are using similar (or the same) systems, where a ticket most often can be shown on your mobile screen as a QR code, and the controller then uses their mobile phone to read that code and check that the ticket is valid.

If you lose your phone or run out of battery, you have no ticket. The rules state that it is your problem, and you will be fined.

Cash payments have almost vanished from almost all other areas as well, and it is now a rare event to see someone pay with cash in a supermarket. So far, it is still possible, though, but almost nobody ever does it.

The national bank of Denmark recently withdrew the largest Danish banknote, the 1000 kr (Danish kroner) note, as it was considered unnecessary today – only criminals use them, was the rationale.

There has been implemented rules in Denmark about how much cash you are allowed to pay in one go. I think it was 20,000 kr until recently and it has now been reduced to half of that. Paying a larger amount by cash is now a criminal act and can lead to prison or fines.

All information from public authorities is now sent electronically, and the Scandinavian countries have arranged for all citizens (in a way different for each country) to have an electronic mailbox. Any message from the tax office, for instance, or from any other authority, will as a basic rule be sent to that mailbox, and each citizen is obliged to check what is there.

It is mandatory to have a bank account, and as a result, banks are obliged to provide one for you, given a few conditions: you have no bank account in that country already, and you do live in the country. They can charge a fee for creating the account plus a yearly fee for maintaining it, but they cannot refuse to create it. However, if you live abroad or already have an account, they can refuse, and they do. It has become increasingly difficult to live, work, and act across the borders, also within the Scandinavian area. We used to consider us almost one country, but this is getting further away from reality all the time now.

Also, buying an insurance has become a very national thing, with most insurance companies rejecting customers from other countries.

The restrictions by banks and insurance companies are a bit peculiar, considering that these companies have merged across the borders, in the beginning (some years ago) with the argument that they could then provide services across the borders, but now the service offerings of that kind are actually fewer and more restricted than ever before.

Which is another result of the increasing digitalization: There are more possibilities now for tracking money across borders, which puts the financial companies under pressure to both document more and also prevent criminal activities. And more things are considered criminal today than before, with money laundry a top scorer, but also the support of organizations that are considered related to terrorist activities, and any scheme that could be seen as an attempt to avoid paying taxes.

It is, by now, impossible to live a life off grid in Sweden or Denmark. And it is impossible to just divide your time freely between the two countries, as it will lead to complex tax problems and problems with transferring money to where you need them.

And that is a somewhat unexpected side effect of the digitalization: instead of freeing us from being at a particular place, as we can now always get our mail electronically and do our work from wherever we are, we actually find ourselves tied more than ever to a certain location. All the former, hard-gained freedoms to travel, speak, arrange savings, be ourselves and decide ourselves what parts of our lives to share with others, have basically been lost.

The funny thing is that it has sneaked in under the cover of making everything easier. And things have become easier, if you are a conformist. But for anyone attempting to act as an individualist, everything has become more difficult.

And then, all the digitalization has opened our society for the world to hack and destroy.

The ones having a benefit out of all this, are, in fact, not us, the citizens, but rather the big providers of the electronic services – yes, you guessed it, mostly the big American companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.

These companies thrive on everything being digital, and they do not care about individual freedom. Or hacking.

So, we now have a society where we are all bound to use the services that increasingly do not work because of cyber attacks.

What is then the natural reaction? To re-introduce cash payments, and abandon the requirement to have a bank acoount and an electronic mailbox, and to re-instate the almost completely dismantled snail-mail system?

No, we must digitalize more! That’s the mantra. But at the same time, say the wise Swedish politicians, we need to make sure to have some cash at home, just in case of a war is coming that would ruin the electronic means of payment.

Aha? There are no bank affiliates anymore – all closed. Any bank office that may be left has no cash. If you enter one of them in order to cash in some money to your account, you’ll be met with great suspicion. There are ATMs, a few of them left, often restricted to let you take out 100 € or similar in one go. Anything more will be met with suspicion.

And nobody has thought of what to do if the electronic mailboxes do not work, or the systems for automatic payments. Or anything else, actually.

Maybe that’s why Russia, or whoever, finds it both easy and rewarding to attack us electronically.

Instead of protecting ourselves against such attacks by having a more diverse society with several parallel means of payment and message distribution, we do what? We buy more bombs and guns and other military stuff. Because we, by tradition, cannot grasp that war today is electronic. We are already at war, and the bombs and guns will not help us.

What we need is to get that lost freedom back, through which we would be much less prone to get hurt by any electronic attack.

Danes are happy, as we know from the yearly happiness reports, always placing Denmark as one of the top countries.

Happiness is in that context mostly something about economy, but I could add another dimension to it: they tend to trust others. In some countries, that would make them “happy idiots”, but in Denmark, the concept normally works. Most shops will happily replace a product if you are not happy with it, no matter the legal details, so Danes will often just buy something, check it out, and then bring it back if they don’t like it. Hence, they trust that this is possible, and the rare occasions where it isn’t will get talked about, and the shop will gain a bad reputation.

When people from abroad notice how much trust Danes put in a shop, even such one they have never heard about, and when they know that Danes are relatively wealthy and willing to pay more for a good brand, they may come up with ideas to abuse this situation.

Like this one, mentioned today on the Danish national TV-station DR: The Mareno Aarhus online shop.

Read about it in the article (in Danish) at the TV-stations website.

The short version of the story is that a Dane wanted to equip their new apartment with lighting, found a website that offered half price on some interesting lamps. It was, apparently, a shop that had been selling lamps from a physical address in Denmark’s second-largest city, Aarhus, for 20 years, and the website even claimed that the lamps had been designed in Aarhus.

The shop had a profile of sustainability, craftsmanship, and durability.

This way, pushing all the right buttons to inspire a quality-aware and brand-aware Dane to buy.

It then turned out that the lamps didn’t work well and didn’t display a quality that could reasonably correspond to the price. Also, the shop turned out to not exist at all, and the lamps being from China, and even dangerous to use, as they are highly flamable.

In fact, the website and its photos were AI-generated – all fake.

This kind of article shows by itself another aspect of the trusting nature of Danes – being spawned by a TV-program where journalists are experts, telling the truth about something that most Danes wouldn’t find out on their own. These experts can find things on the Internet, for instance, and they can call a company to ask questions about a product. Danes, often being watchers rather than doers, watch such TV-programs and tell each other afterward what they have learned. A good topic to talk about during the lunch break at work or when the neighbor offers a cup of coffee.

It is typical for Danes that they immediately believe that a presumably known brand with high prices, now on sale, represents better quality products than a lesser known brand that always has such lower prices.

Brands are used all over the world to justify higher prices, so Danes are not unique in this respect, but perhaps they are a bit naive in not checking out things before buying. They jump right into it, feeling good for a moment that they were able to find such a good offering on something that normally costs more. And only when they then get the product by mail, and it obviously is cheap crap, not worthy of any esteemed brand name, they may start wondering.

Actually, it is typical that they just eat the loss and forget about it, throwing the product in the garbage bin. But a few will occasionally complain about things in such a way that TV or newspapers will show an interest in it. How this comes to happen is often a bit mysterious, but my guess is that Facebook is the source of many such stories in the media – someone tells about it, others “like” it, and a journalist, hungry for something juicy to tell about, sees this and takes it to their editor as a suggested new story (or they just run with it on their own, as freelancers).

Certain is it, though, that most people can tell similar stories when they see this on TV, because the neighbor or a cousin knows someone who also bought the same cheap crap from the same shop. Probably, many people will buy this and get disappointed, before someone decides to complain publicly about it.

Part of the naivety comes from the fact that the loss of, in this case, 500 kroner x 2, isn’t significant for a typical Dane. They get good salaries from their jobs, being able to pay the mortgage or rent for living, for food, entertainment, and various luxury items on a regular basis.

I guess, this is calculated in by the scammers. They set a price that fits the sweet spot for Danes, economically, where it is sufficiently expensive to plausibly look like a good brand, and yet, cheap enough for the loss to not be big enough for a typical Dane to want to bother too much with complaining, seeking a refund, etc.

Danes trust shops, journalists, and virtually any other organizations and people, and are open and listening, willing to take in any explanation being given without doing their own fact-checking.

That helps make the Danish society “hyggeligt” (that special Danish word for being pleasant, cozy, nice) and mostly free of conflicts. But it is also an open invitation to scammers from all-over the world to try making a profit on it. Because, as most Danes would think, “Danes would never do such a thing”.

As a side note:

The idea of something “being designed here – manufactured in China” is widespread all over the Western world. We “know”, all of us, that Chinese design is bad, but “our own” design is good, and then the Chinese are simply good at producing things at a low cost, making it more affordable for us to buy.

We have this dualist approach to accepting that everything now comes from China. But we can’t really accept it, deep within. So people want to believe that something they consider buying is better than that.

Actually, there are many great brands that are purely Chinese. I can mention such a Xiaomi or Enya, that sell different products (electronics and musical instruments) but designed and products to high standards.

Yet, many of us can’t believe in it, having grown up with the idea that good design is from the West, always.

Situations like the lamp scam surely do not help to change that idea, and somehow we have a selective memory, forgetting how many products made locally that were actually quite bad.

I keep wondering when we will grow up to understand what reality we live in today: where very few things are manufactured locally, and where “Danish design” or similar is merely a matter of having picked a model from a catalog of available goods from a Chinese factory and sending them a file with a logo to put on the goods.

I bet you live somewhere in the world – most people do :)

I also bet that you hear a lot of news and get a lot of cultural input from some parts of the world, but much less from others.

There are some cultural centers that seem to run off with all the attention. And some political power hubs, where all the big things are happening – from where war and peace is decided upon, life and death for most of us, and the world economy controlled.

And then there are some spots on Earth that seem to just be there, without having much influence, not much significance. They are not centers for anything. You have heard of these spots, and you may know something about them, but they’re not likely to be on your mind very often unless you live there.

Scandinavia is such a spot. It is actually more than one, as it consists of several separate countries, but they also share something common: the relative peace and quiet, relative easy life for most people, and relative lack of significance for most people in the world who do not live here.

Each Scandinavian country tends to feel insignificant as well. Most of what is happening here is a reaction to something that happens in the world, while only a few things are truly invented here, be it technology or societal ideas. As a reaction, there are some strong national elements in the ways people of Scandinavia see the world around them – they often become overly interested in sports results for “their” teams within several sports, and they pay an unreasonable attention to locally produced movies.

A Scandinavian newspaper will have something about the USA, about Russia, and about China somewhere on the front page. At times, news from these centers will almost fill out the front page, but even then, there will be at least one or two teasers in the corner for something local, like the birthday of Denmark’s oldest, or the decision of a mayor in a small town to aim for re-election.

A Scandinavian will live with this mix of big world news and small local news, often unbalanced, paying much more attention to the local stuff than the international news.

Big news here is when someone local is appointed to a big job in the UN or similar, or gets a top job in a big, international company. Then we all feel that we can do that, or at least some of us, even though we don’t have such high positions locally. But we are also skilled and capable of doing big things, we then think, for a moment offering somewhat of a countering of the feeling of being insignificant.

Where is this place, Scandinavia?

Historically, you can find evidence that it should consist of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, sometimes paying attention to the associated areas and countries like Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, and various other places, and sometimes including Finland as well.

The “Scandinavian peninsula” is often used as a kind of frame for Scandinavia, but only Norway and Sweden are today placed on that peninsula, so it’s a bad way of describing it. In fact, borders have moved many times in history, and the connection between people have been strengthened by national ties, or weakened, and the feeling of being interconnected as one Scandinavia next to being nationals of a single country has varied, also in regard to geography. Personally, I include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in my definition of Scandinavia, because that’s what many people there want, and that’s how they think.

All of this to be found at the top of Europe. Up here, you’ll also find Russia, perhaps including Belarus, depending on how you measure it, but they do not today see themselves as part of the same region. The United Kingdom and Ireland plus various island countries in that area somehow are in the North, which is easy to get confirmed by looking at a map, but not included in the Scandinavian North. Politically, demographically, perhaps, and according to self-image, these all make up a separate northern area.

We are very close, in several ways, to the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland. Somewhat to the North, but also more continental.

So, this is where we are, and a bit about how we are thinking, and how people are thinking about us.

And why am I writing all this about Scandinavia?

Because I have been thinking about the situation where almost everything that takes place in the world is based on somewhere else, if not being a very local phenomenon, but then nobody else in the world cares.

There isn’t much activity in the news or social media that equals Scandinavian topics with those from the cultural centers. In fact, even many others of those places in the world that are not centers often get much more attention than Scandinavia. Also by the Scandinavians.

I am myself more of an internationalist, not being more interested in local details than those of other countries, but then again, I am not less interested in the local details either. Still, I have a hard time getting into a good mix of information from all the world, including the part I live in.

So, I thought that I would start writing something, now and then, about what is and what happens in Scandinavia, while trying not to always relate it to some major world events or let it be subordinate to news from everywhere else. At the same time, trying not to get caught by national feelings, trying to avoid a tendency to promote whatever exists here over everything else.

I don’t know how many people in the world would be interested in reading about things that happen in Scandinavia, and I am even a bit uncertain about how many Scandinavians would be that – because, some of those tend to be interested in local stuff written in their local language by locals, so to speak, ruling out the rest of the world as something to be taken care of by others. And other Scandinavians are as internationally minded as me, or even more, and may not want to read about Scandinavia.

But here we go: from now on, an occasional text from this corner of the world may appear, and I’ll find out who may be interested. At least, if nobody will be, I will find the search for topics and their details interesting, so it can be a nice supplement to all the other things I’m writing.