The silent icelandic revolution the media don't tell you about

http://www.aljunnah.com/2011/02/the-other-revolution-of-iceland/

by chmike • 15 years ago

11 13 15 years ago

fleitz• 15 years ago

Is this in regards to the Icesave bill? http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2011/02/16/iceland-parliamen...

It looks like something much different is happening than what is described in the article. I'm highly skeptical of the claims in this article. It seems light on facts and heavy on opinion.

thefreshteapot• 15 years ago

* it has taken a long time to get to this stage.

* the first version "the people" rejected, imagine that in UK.

* they ultimately have to pay (not by choice)

* notice how they plan on forcing the banks to pay for it (yes most owned by the government) not by taxing their people who have already suffered.

phamilton• 15 years ago

This feels hardly readable. Anyone else having a lot of difficulty with the English here?

samuel1604• 15 years ago

Yeah I didn't understand much the article as well...

wyclif• 15 years ago

It's barely readable. The author should have had a native English-speaker translate this for him.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

Has anybody killed anybody or threatened to kill anybody?

No?

Yeah, I wouldn't count on the media paying much attention.

henrikschroder• 15 years ago

What a fantastic example of author bias.

Just because a large amount of the population takes to the streets, and just because the government resigns, it's not a revolution. A revolution means that the people are trying to change the form of government, which is absolutely not what happened. An overwhelming majority of the Icelandic are perfectly happy with their current form of a liberal, western, parliamentary republic.

The result of the protests was that the government resigned, held a re-election, and put the icesave bill to a referendum. There's absolutely nothing revolutionary about this, this is exactly how our liberal democracies are supposed to work.

But if you're from a region where there aren't any liberal democracies, I can understand why a reporter would write this funnily biased piece, drawing parallells between the actual protests and revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the protests in Iceland.

dazzawazza• 15 years ago

Given the stress that the Icelandic people were put under it is a credit to them and their democracy that there wasn't more violence.

The media in the UK covered the 'revolution' closely because of the many ties between the two countries. I can imagine most people in the middle east know little or nothing about Iceland so why would the media cover ten thousand people standing peacefully in the cold outside a parliament building making reasonable demands.

chmike• 15 years ago

We may not have the same information source. The governement resigned and a new government was elected. Althouh the new gouvernement was more social oriented, they wanted to continue the same model. Then the people went on the street to protest and the new government resigned.

The revolution here is that a new constitution is rewritten by a group of citizen elected for this purpose. This is a refactoring of a country's fundamental society rules.

Maybe your bias comes from your assumptions of what a revolution is usually referred as in the media.

The revolution of the Arabian countries is to get the dictators stop their dictatorship. The Icelandic revolution is to get bankers stop to control the country and drive it to its financial collapse by their greed and selfishness.

US and European citizen should follow closely how this revolution and new society turns out because it may open a path to a truly new and better world (not the one of Bush) and avoid the world to collapse financially because of speculation bubbles on food, energy, etc.

mahmud2• 15 years ago

Why are we citing an article on a militant Jihadi website? I'm sorry, but since when is HN an outlet for crackpot militant religious groups?

P.S. Whoever pens that site doesn't quite grok Islam. Says "there are no copyrights in Islam" in all footers. Without copyright, or at least attribution, there wouldn't be Islam today (i.e. the Sunnah is all citations that would collapse if unattributed.)

fwdbureau• 15 years ago

Not sure why you've been downvoted here, you make a valid remark. I'm pretty sure the flag on this site's logo is the flag of the jihad. Since that wave of 'revolutions' in the middle east has started, a lot of disinformation has been spreading, and some wolves seem to be hiding behind the cute flock of sheep. It wouldn't hurt to care of where we're picking our news from, and take everything with a pinch of salt

mahmud2• 15 years ago

You need not quote revolution: it's real. And Jihadis have NOTHING to do with the Arab Spring. They would rather kill strangers in strange lands, instead of actually rising up against their own despots.

Saudi Arabia funds them, and you heard what the fuckwit Mufti said about the Egyptian uprising: he said Mubarak is the rightful rules of the soil and Muslims must obey him.

Muslim people have woken up to the lies of the Islamists.

gardarh• 15 years ago

As an Icelander I must say this article is terribly poorly written. I don't really understand what this silent revolution is about. Generally speaking, if a "revolution" isn't discussed by any media outlet and cannot be found on Google (in a country where government censorship essentially does not exist) I'd say that it isn't just silent, it simply doesn't exist.

There was never a referendum on whether banks should be recapitalized or not, they simply were recapitalized. However there was a referendum on the Icesave deal (about terms of repayments of deposits of UK/Dutch depositors into an Icelandic bank) after the president was petitioned not to agree with the parliament decision to do so. The president formally has power to do this but no president acted on it until the incumbent one in 2004 (50 years after Iceland became a sovereign state) and again in 2010 regarding the Icesave deal. This deal is actually quite different from what the Irish government is currently doing by saving its bank system, the old Icelandic banks did go into bankruptcy in 2008 have since been restarted as new institutions partly owned by the government and partly by the old bankrupt estates. The deal is about sovereign political responsibility and having a national referendum about it is quite paradoxical in my view since the end result is basically asking: Do you want to pay a great deal of money or not?

Of course the matter is more complicated than that. And is subject to lengthy spin-filled bullshit ridden politics.

About the constituent assembly: It was supposed to have already started but due to legal issues in the elections it hasn't started yet and is in a bit of a limbo. The matter of this assembly is, of course, quite political as well.

Finally, the exaggerated comments on "capitalism" and "communism" in the article are very exaggerated. Iceland has conventionally been a nordic welfare state with a strong healthcare system, public school system, etc. The atmosphere before 2008 was leaning towards the right but shifted a bit to the left after the big bank collapse. It feels to me it's shifting back to the right now as people realize that huge tax hikes aren't that great either.

Bottom line: this article is terrible, poorly written and not very informative. I don't really understand how it got any attention on HN.

The silent icelandic revolution the media don't tell you about

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