Non-virus interlude: Mayhem in the streets, Danish style

What’s going on here? 

Photo: Ekstra Bladet.

In the US, when you see a photo like this, you might think it’s from another BLM protest, an Antifa attack, or a white supremacist rally that got out of hand, and wonder when the country will ever recover. Not here. This is a brawl between soccer fans (DK) of the arch-rival clubs FCK (Copenhagen) and Brøndby before a big match on Sunday. Denmark has the luxury of being able to go amuck about less serious things than structural racism and the capitalist patriarchy.

Terror in Tivoli

Saturday evening, the police got a report of a man with a gun in Tivoli Gardens (DK) in central Copenhagen. Several police cars with cops in riot gear descended on the world’s oldest amusement park and pacified the guy without incident. “It turned out it was a toy pistol,” said shift captain Henrik Svejstrup. “Maybe not exactly the place to do it.” The man was charged with threatening behavior.

We can attack statues too

In my own neighborhood of Frederiksberg, a statue drama of Lilliputian dimensions (DK) is unfolding. In 2006, a small plaza opposite the main shopping mall in the area was renamed Empress Dagmar’s Plaza. David Munis Zepernick, a councilman from the Social Liberal Party, wants it renamed and the statue torn down. Dagmar (1847-1928), a Danish princess who married Emperor Alexander III of Russia and became known as Empress Maria Feodorovna, had no connection to Frederiksberg, explains Munis Zepernick. She was commemorated there only because of base commercial interests of Russian companies and Danish firms with export business in Russia.

Like honoring Hitler’s mistress

Say what? Yes, Munis Zepernick asserts that the comparison is apt because Alexander III was one of the worst tyrants and antisemites in history. The councilman has a convenient solution that would also address the “uniform masculine white dominance and almost total lack of presence of female historical figures in the city space”: Rename the spot “Queen Margrethe’s Plaza” after both Margrethe I (1353-1412) and Margrethe II, Denmark’s current monarch.

Defending Dagmar

Nicolaj Bøgh, Chair of the Frederiksberg’s Culture and Leisure Committee and member of the Conservative Party, takes a dim view of “hopping onto the stupefying contemporary identity politics wave and attempting to edit the past.” Destroying Dagmar’s statue because you don’t like her husband seems absurd and has little to do with the cause of equality, says Bøgh.

Frederiksberg has long had close relations with the royal family, he adds. Dagmar’s brother, King George of Greece, and his family are commemorated in the names of nearby streets. Dagmar passed the last years of her tumultuous life in Denmark after her son, Emperor Nicholas II, abdicated and was executed by the revolutionary government in 1918.