The Panic Age

It is very un-Danish to panic – Danes mostly just watch and wait

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

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.

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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.