What is going to be the spark that pits The West against islam in open conflict?
Something in Europe, for sure.
Mark Steyn writes about the demographic challenge ahead in his new book, however as Victor Davis Hanson has noted The West is lethal when they really go to war.
How will the USA act when say Denmark starts expelling all moslems?
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Death of Sweden??
One of the themes of this poor barely active blog is culture. Sweden seems to be commiting suicide
From Fjordman at Brusselsjournal
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2278
The Death of Sweden
From the desk of Fjordman on Tue, 2007-07-31 08:59
I still get questions as to why I, being Norwegian, write more about Sweden than I do about my own country. First of all: I do write about Norway sometimes. And second of all: If you look at capital cities alone, Oslo could quite possibly be the worst city in Scandinavia. However, in virtually all other respects, Sweden is worse. And yes, it is every bit as bad as I say it is.
The primary reason why I write so much about Sweden is because it is the most totalitarian country in the Western world, and should thus serve as a warning to others. The second reason is that Sweden, like my own country, now needs some "tough love." Too many Swedes still cling on to the myth of the "Swedish model" while their country is disintegrating underneath their feet. If Sweden the nation is to be saved – if it still can be saved, I'm not so sure – then Sweden the ideological beacon for mankind must be smashed, because vanity now blocks sanity.
According to news site The Local, a judge who hears migration appeals had his house vandalized by left-wing extremists. Threats were sprayed on the walls, red paint was poured over the steps and an axe was left outside his home. "When a judge in a Swedish court has his home vandalised in this way, it is of course very serious," said Ingvar Paulsson, head of the Gothenburg District Administrative Court . The group Antifascistisk Action (AFA) writes on its homepage that the attack was motivated by the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers. The Swedish Board of Migration has ruled that they should be deported if they cannot show that a threat exists against them personally.
It should be noted here that Sweden alone in 2006 accepted almost as many asylum applications from Iraqis as all other European countries did combined. Native Swedes, who live in a country that was one of the most ethnically homogeneous nations in the world only 30 years ago, will be a minority in their own country within a few decades, if current trends continue. Sweden is self-destructing at a pace that is probably unprecedented in history, but for the extreme Left, even this isn't fast enough.
AFA openly brag about numerous attacks against persons who get their full name and address published on their website. According to them, this is done in order to fight against capitalist exploitation and for a global, classless society. Their logic goes something like this: If you protest against Muslim immigration, you suffer from Islamophobia, which is almost the same as xenophobia, which is almost the same as racism. And racists are almost Fascists and Nazis, as we all know, and they shouldn't be allowed to voice their opinions in public. Hence, if you protest against being assaulted or raped by Muslims, you are evil and need to be silenced. If a native Swede is really lucky, he or she will thus first get mugged or battered by Muslims, and then beaten up a second time by his own extreme Leftists for objecting to being beaten the first time. The state does next to nothing to prevent either, of course. Native Swedes who object to a mass immigration that will render them a minority in their own country within a couple of generations have already been classified as "racists," and racists are for all practical purposes outside of the protection of the law.
According to some observers, Islamophobic hatred is on the rise in Europe. Let's have a look at what constitutes "racist hatred." The following is used as an official example of what is considered an Islamophobic hate crime in Sweden: A Muslim family in a Swedish neighborhood asks whether it is possible for them to get something else to eat other than sausages made out of pork. Linda then answers: "No, we live in Sweden." The family asks what she means by that. Linda repeats that "We live in Sweden, and you have to respect that." The man of the family says that "We respect you, why can't you respect us?" Linda then replies that "No, unfortunately not." She laughs and walks away.
Contrast this with an example from 2006, when Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz discontinued his preliminary investigation regarding anti-Semitism at the great mosque in Stockholm. He wrote that "the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs." Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and "Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers – celebrated as martyrs – are the most effective weapon." Lambertz thought that the "recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law." His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict.
This double standard is not just limited to Jews. Dahn Pettersson, a local politician, has been fined 18,000 kronor for writing that 95 percent of all heroin brought in comes via Albanians from Kosovo. "It is never ethnic groups that commit crimes. It is individuals or groups of individuals," prosecutor Mats Svensson told the court, which found Pettersson guilty of "Agitation Against a Minority Group." Svante Nycander, former editor of daily Dagens Nyheter, stated that "the ruling in Malmö District Court is damaging to freedom of expression. Many will take it as proof that the authorities are afraid of uncomfortable truths, and that lacking reasoned counter-arguments they punish those who speak plainly." In Sweden, saying that Muslim Albanians are behind much of the drug traffic in Europe (a fact) is a crime. Making derogatory statements about the native population, however, is just fine.
Bexhet Kelmeni is of Kosovar Albanian origin and lives in Malmö, the country's third largest city, which is set to become the first Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority in a few years. He thinks that it is important that it has now been established that Dahn Pettersson's assertions were criminal. "I am ashamed that there are such politicians," says Kelmeni, who claims that he has been in contact with hundreds of Albanians and all of them have taken offense. "He needs to learn more about the Albanian culture," Kelmeni says. What he doesn't say is that many of the remaining Swedes in Malmö – the natives have been evacuating, or rather fleeing, the city for years due to rampant violence and harassment – get daily lessons in Albanian culture.
Feriz and Pajtim, members of Gangsta Albanian Thug Unit in Malmö, explain how they mug people downtown. They target a lone victim. "We surround him and beat and kick him until he no longer fights back," Feriz says. They are always many more people than their victims. Isn't this cowardly? "I have heard that from many, but I disagree. The whole point is that they're not supposed to have a chance." They don't express any sympathy for their victims. "If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak," says Pajtim and shrugs. "Many of us took part in gangs which fought against the Serbs in Kosovo. We have violence in our blood." They blame the politicians for why they are mugging, stating that they are bored. If the state could provide them with something to do, maybe they would stop attacking people. But is the lack of leisure pursuits the only reason why they assault people? "No, it's good fun as well," says Feriz.
Criminal gangs of Albanians thus freely admit assaulting Swedes, but Swedes cannot suggest that there are criminal gangs of Albanians. That's just racist.
The wave of robberies the city of Malmö is experiencing is part of a "war against the Swedes." This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds. "When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes." This argument was repeated several times. "Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet. We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to." Swedish authorities have done virtually nothing to stop this.
Is there then no racism in Malmö? Yes, there are some nasty cases of Islamophobia. A bus driver was suspended for discrimination and hatred after he allegedly tried to stop a woman from boarding because she was wearing a burka. According to writer Mats Wahl, arson against schools costs more than 300 million kroner a year. An unofficial survey among 52 Swedish municipalities indicated that at least 114 such cases of arson were registered within the first half of 2006, but accurate numbers were hard to come by. At least 139 schools suffered attempted arson during 2002 alone. Björn Vinberg from the fire department in the Malmö area says it is degrading to put out fires again and again in the same immigrant areas, with school kids laughing at them and lighting a new one just afterwards. No doubt, this must be a protest against the institutionalized and pervasive Islamophobia in Swedish society.
In a country where the tax rate is above 60%, higher than in almost any other country on the planet save perhaps North Korea – which incidentally also has almost as much free speech as Sweden – the natives are attacked on a daily basis by immigrant gangs, yet the state seems unwilling to do anything to stop this. Although Muslims openly brag about targeting Jews and Christians, this doesn't constitute a hate crime. But is does constitute racism and a hate crime if Muslims are not presented with halal sausages at all times or allowed to wear a burka wherever they want to.
According to Professor Wilhelm Agrell, Sweden now has a security policy based on the assumption that territorial defense is no longer needed. Military resources are only deemed relevant as political markers in distant conflicts and their own territory has become nothing more than a training ground. Agrell concludes that "after years of existential angst and budgetary black holes, Sweden's military has finally taken down its flag, emptied its stores and fled the field." The few soldiers they do have are in places such as Afghanistan, not at home. Jan Karlsen from the Swedish Police Union warned in 2007 that the underfunded police force would not be able to keep up with organized crime and ethnic tensions for much longer. Meanwhile, police officers are protesting against a new uniform designed to make them appear less aggressive by replacing boots with shoes, making guns less visible and changing the shirts to a softer, gentler color.
In an article from June 2007 with the title "Summertime — rape time," Aftonbladet, the largest daily in Scandinavia, linked the spike in rapes during the summer to the warm weather. The official number of rape charges in Sweden has more than quadrupled during one generation, even more for girls under the age of 15. If this is due to the warm weather, I suppose the Scandinavian rape wave is caused by global warming? The fact that many of the suspects have a Muslim background, which is also proven by statistics from neighboring Norway, is purely coincidental, no doubt. The number of rapes in the Norwegian capital Oslo is now six times as high per capita as in New York.
According to journalist Karen Jespersen, Helle Klein, the political editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet from 2001 to 2007 and a former leading member of the Social Democratic Youth League, has stated that "If the debate is [about] that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don't want it." Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, yet not one party represented in parliament has been genuinely critical of the immigration policies, and there is virtually no real debate about Multiculturalism and Islam.
During a demonstration in Stockholm organized by Islamic and anti-racist organizations in 2006, Helle Klein stood in front of a banner which read "A Sweden for all — Stop the Nazi violence" holding a speech warning against Islamophobia in the media. "Sweden for all" sounds almost exactly like "Sweden for Allah" in Swedish. When leading members of the political and media elites associate Islamophobia with Nazism while remaining silent on the violence committed by Muslim gangs in their own country, they are indirectly providing verbal ammunition to extreme Leftists groups such as AntiFascistisk Aktion, who physically assault critics of mass immigration.
The Brotherhood, an organization of Christian Social Democrats, has friendly relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, just as Klein's Swedish Social Democratic Party had with the Fascist and Nazi regimes prior to WW2. Helle Klein has voiced sympathy for terrorist organization Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the MB, in her editorials, while warning against the threat to world peace posed by Israeli aggression and the Christian Zionist Right in the USA. Hamas is a Fascist organization openly calling for mass murder of Jews. The irony of warning against "Nazi violence" while showing sympathy for an organization that wants to finish what the Nazis started apparently doesn't strike Ms. Klein, who is now studying to become a priest in the Church of Sweden. Her great-grandfather was a rabbi.
The Church of Sweden has announced its willingness to allow gay couples to marry in church, but would like marriage laws to be renamed "cohabitation laws." How Klein intends to reconcile support for gay marriage with support for an Islamic terrorist organization that wants to kill gays beats me, but I'm sure she'll think of something.
The British author Paul Weston believes that Britain's national heart has ceased beating: "Our national soul is hovering indecisively above the operating table. The crash team have been called, but the politically inclined hospital switchboard have told them there is no problem, that everything is under control. The life support boys have heard otherwise, they are hurrying to get there, but other hospital staff members have switched the signage to the operating theatre and killed the lights. It is a big hospital, they only have minutes to get there, they are lost, confused, misinformed, and the clock is relentlessly ticking, and ticking, and ticking…"
I'm inclined to say the same thing about Sweden. The Swedish nation is currently on its deathbed. We can only hope there is life after death after all.
From Fjordman at Brusselsjournal
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2278
The Death of Sweden
From the desk of Fjordman on Tue, 2007-07-31 08:59
I still get questions as to why I, being Norwegian, write more about Sweden than I do about my own country. First of all: I do write about Norway sometimes. And second of all: If you look at capital cities alone, Oslo could quite possibly be the worst city in Scandinavia. However, in virtually all other respects, Sweden is worse. And yes, it is every bit as bad as I say it is.
The primary reason why I write so much about Sweden is because it is the most totalitarian country in the Western world, and should thus serve as a warning to others. The second reason is that Sweden, like my own country, now needs some "tough love." Too many Swedes still cling on to the myth of the "Swedish model" while their country is disintegrating underneath their feet. If Sweden the nation is to be saved – if it still can be saved, I'm not so sure – then Sweden the ideological beacon for mankind must be smashed, because vanity now blocks sanity.
According to news site The Local, a judge who hears migration appeals had his house vandalized by left-wing extremists. Threats were sprayed on the walls, red paint was poured over the steps and an axe was left outside his home. "When a judge in a Swedish court has his home vandalised in this way, it is of course very serious," said Ingvar Paulsson, head of the Gothenburg District Administrative Court . The group Antifascistisk Action (AFA) writes on its homepage that the attack was motivated by the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers. The Swedish Board of Migration has ruled that they should be deported if they cannot show that a threat exists against them personally.
It should be noted here that Sweden alone in 2006 accepted almost as many asylum applications from Iraqis as all other European countries did combined. Native Swedes, who live in a country that was one of the most ethnically homogeneous nations in the world only 30 years ago, will be a minority in their own country within a few decades, if current trends continue. Sweden is self-destructing at a pace that is probably unprecedented in history, but for the extreme Left, even this isn't fast enough.
AFA openly brag about numerous attacks against persons who get their full name and address published on their website. According to them, this is done in order to fight against capitalist exploitation and for a global, classless society. Their logic goes something like this: If you protest against Muslim immigration, you suffer from Islamophobia, which is almost the same as xenophobia, which is almost the same as racism. And racists are almost Fascists and Nazis, as we all know, and they shouldn't be allowed to voice their opinions in public. Hence, if you protest against being assaulted or raped by Muslims, you are evil and need to be silenced. If a native Swede is really lucky, he or she will thus first get mugged or battered by Muslims, and then beaten up a second time by his own extreme Leftists for objecting to being beaten the first time. The state does next to nothing to prevent either, of course. Native Swedes who object to a mass immigration that will render them a minority in their own country within a couple of generations have already been classified as "racists," and racists are for all practical purposes outside of the protection of the law.
According to some observers, Islamophobic hatred is on the rise in Europe. Let's have a look at what constitutes "racist hatred." The following is used as an official example of what is considered an Islamophobic hate crime in Sweden: A Muslim family in a Swedish neighborhood asks whether it is possible for them to get something else to eat other than sausages made out of pork. Linda then answers: "No, we live in Sweden." The family asks what she means by that. Linda repeats that "We live in Sweden, and you have to respect that." The man of the family says that "We respect you, why can't you respect us?" Linda then replies that "No, unfortunately not." She laughs and walks away.
Contrast this with an example from 2006, when Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz discontinued his preliminary investigation regarding anti-Semitism at the great mosque in Stockholm. He wrote that "the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs." Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and "Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers – celebrated as martyrs – are the most effective weapon." Lambertz thought that the "recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law." His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict.
This double standard is not just limited to Jews. Dahn Pettersson, a local politician, has been fined 18,000 kronor for writing that 95 percent of all heroin brought in comes via Albanians from Kosovo. "It is never ethnic groups that commit crimes. It is individuals or groups of individuals," prosecutor Mats Svensson told the court, which found Pettersson guilty of "Agitation Against a Minority Group." Svante Nycander, former editor of daily Dagens Nyheter, stated that "the ruling in Malmö District Court is damaging to freedom of expression. Many will take it as proof that the authorities are afraid of uncomfortable truths, and that lacking reasoned counter-arguments they punish those who speak plainly." In Sweden, saying that Muslim Albanians are behind much of the drug traffic in Europe (a fact) is a crime. Making derogatory statements about the native population, however, is just fine.
Bexhet Kelmeni is of Kosovar Albanian origin and lives in Malmö, the country's third largest city, which is set to become the first Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority in a few years. He thinks that it is important that it has now been established that Dahn Pettersson's assertions were criminal. "I am ashamed that there are such politicians," says Kelmeni, who claims that he has been in contact with hundreds of Albanians and all of them have taken offense. "He needs to learn more about the Albanian culture," Kelmeni says. What he doesn't say is that many of the remaining Swedes in Malmö – the natives have been evacuating, or rather fleeing, the city for years due to rampant violence and harassment – get daily lessons in Albanian culture.
Feriz and Pajtim, members of Gangsta Albanian Thug Unit in Malmö, explain how they mug people downtown. They target a lone victim. "We surround him and beat and kick him until he no longer fights back," Feriz says. They are always many more people than their victims. Isn't this cowardly? "I have heard that from many, but I disagree. The whole point is that they're not supposed to have a chance." They don't express any sympathy for their victims. "If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak," says Pajtim and shrugs. "Many of us took part in gangs which fought against the Serbs in Kosovo. We have violence in our blood." They blame the politicians for why they are mugging, stating that they are bored. If the state could provide them with something to do, maybe they would stop attacking people. But is the lack of leisure pursuits the only reason why they assault people? "No, it's good fun as well," says Feriz.
Criminal gangs of Albanians thus freely admit assaulting Swedes, but Swedes cannot suggest that there are criminal gangs of Albanians. That's just racist.
The wave of robberies the city of Malmö is experiencing is part of a "war against the Swedes." This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds. "When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes." This argument was repeated several times. "Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet. We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to." Swedish authorities have done virtually nothing to stop this.
Is there then no racism in Malmö? Yes, there are some nasty cases of Islamophobia. A bus driver was suspended for discrimination and hatred after he allegedly tried to stop a woman from boarding because she was wearing a burka. According to writer Mats Wahl, arson against schools costs more than 300 million kroner a year. An unofficial survey among 52 Swedish municipalities indicated that at least 114 such cases of arson were registered within the first half of 2006, but accurate numbers were hard to come by. At least 139 schools suffered attempted arson during 2002 alone. Björn Vinberg from the fire department in the Malmö area says it is degrading to put out fires again and again in the same immigrant areas, with school kids laughing at them and lighting a new one just afterwards. No doubt, this must be a protest against the institutionalized and pervasive Islamophobia in Swedish society.
In a country where the tax rate is above 60%, higher than in almost any other country on the planet save perhaps North Korea – which incidentally also has almost as much free speech as Sweden – the natives are attacked on a daily basis by immigrant gangs, yet the state seems unwilling to do anything to stop this. Although Muslims openly brag about targeting Jews and Christians, this doesn't constitute a hate crime. But is does constitute racism and a hate crime if Muslims are not presented with halal sausages at all times or allowed to wear a burka wherever they want to.
According to Professor Wilhelm Agrell, Sweden now has a security policy based on the assumption that territorial defense is no longer needed. Military resources are only deemed relevant as political markers in distant conflicts and their own territory has become nothing more than a training ground. Agrell concludes that "after years of existential angst and budgetary black holes, Sweden's military has finally taken down its flag, emptied its stores and fled the field." The few soldiers they do have are in places such as Afghanistan, not at home. Jan Karlsen from the Swedish Police Union warned in 2007 that the underfunded police force would not be able to keep up with organized crime and ethnic tensions for much longer. Meanwhile, police officers are protesting against a new uniform designed to make them appear less aggressive by replacing boots with shoes, making guns less visible and changing the shirts to a softer, gentler color.
In an article from June 2007 with the title "Summertime — rape time," Aftonbladet, the largest daily in Scandinavia, linked the spike in rapes during the summer to the warm weather. The official number of rape charges in Sweden has more than quadrupled during one generation, even more for girls under the age of 15. If this is due to the warm weather, I suppose the Scandinavian rape wave is caused by global warming? The fact that many of the suspects have a Muslim background, which is also proven by statistics from neighboring Norway, is purely coincidental, no doubt. The number of rapes in the Norwegian capital Oslo is now six times as high per capita as in New York.
According to journalist Karen Jespersen, Helle Klein, the political editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet from 2001 to 2007 and a former leading member of the Social Democratic Youth League, has stated that "If the debate is [about] that there are problems caused by refugees and immigrants, we don't want it." Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, yet not one party represented in parliament has been genuinely critical of the immigration policies, and there is virtually no real debate about Multiculturalism and Islam.
During a demonstration in Stockholm organized by Islamic and anti-racist organizations in 2006, Helle Klein stood in front of a banner which read "A Sweden for all — Stop the Nazi violence" holding a speech warning against Islamophobia in the media. "Sweden for all" sounds almost exactly like "Sweden for Allah" in Swedish. When leading members of the political and media elites associate Islamophobia with Nazism while remaining silent on the violence committed by Muslim gangs in their own country, they are indirectly providing verbal ammunition to extreme Leftists groups such as AntiFascistisk Aktion, who physically assault critics of mass immigration.
The Brotherhood, an organization of Christian Social Democrats, has friendly relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, just as Klein's Swedish Social Democratic Party had with the Fascist and Nazi regimes prior to WW2. Helle Klein has voiced sympathy for terrorist organization Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the MB, in her editorials, while warning against the threat to world peace posed by Israeli aggression and the Christian Zionist Right in the USA. Hamas is a Fascist organization openly calling for mass murder of Jews. The irony of warning against "Nazi violence" while showing sympathy for an organization that wants to finish what the Nazis started apparently doesn't strike Ms. Klein, who is now studying to become a priest in the Church of Sweden. Her great-grandfather was a rabbi.
The Church of Sweden has announced its willingness to allow gay couples to marry in church, but would like marriage laws to be renamed "cohabitation laws." How Klein intends to reconcile support for gay marriage with support for an Islamic terrorist organization that wants to kill gays beats me, but I'm sure she'll think of something.
The British author Paul Weston believes that Britain's national heart has ceased beating: "Our national soul is hovering indecisively above the operating table. The crash team have been called, but the politically inclined hospital switchboard have told them there is no problem, that everything is under control. The life support boys have heard otherwise, they are hurrying to get there, but other hospital staff members have switched the signage to the operating theatre and killed the lights. It is a big hospital, they only have minutes to get there, they are lost, confused, misinformed, and the clock is relentlessly ticking, and ticking, and ticking…"
I'm inclined to say the same thing about Sweden. The Swedish nation is currently on its deathbed. We can only hope there is life after death after all.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Mini lesson on why culture matters
From Michael Yon's latest. Read it all, especially the concrete bomb.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/birds-eye-view.htm
We live far better on base here in Baqubah than many people who are living downtown (though there are some very nice homes), and it’s not all about money. Not at all and not in the least. When Americans move into Iraqi buildings, the buildings start improving from the first day. And then, the buildings near the buildings start to improve. It’s not about the money, but the mindset. The Greatest Generation called it “the can-do mentality.” It’s a wealth measured not only in dollars, but also in knowledge. The burning curiosity that launched the Hubble, flows from that mentality, and so does the revenue stream of taxpayer dollars that funded it. Iraq is very rich in resources, but philosophically it is impoverished. The truest separation between cultures is in the collective dreams of their people.
When I listen to people in these civil administration meetings inventorying the obstacles, giving detailed and passionate speeches about why the things that need to happen cannot, often next comes the tired lament, “You can do these things because America is rich.” This seems like a chicken-egg argument, but it’s not. They will stare at you like a bird. Blinking. Blinking. As if waiting for an answer to a question that seems to forever loop back on itself. “But you are rich! You put a man on the moon!”
When a person holds an egg in hand, the question seems answered. And when a person holds a chicken, the question seems answered.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/birds-eye-view.htm
We live far better on base here in Baqubah than many people who are living downtown (though there are some very nice homes), and it’s not all about money. Not at all and not in the least. When Americans move into Iraqi buildings, the buildings start improving from the first day. And then, the buildings near the buildings start to improve. It’s not about the money, but the mindset. The Greatest Generation called it “the can-do mentality.” It’s a wealth measured not only in dollars, but also in knowledge. The burning curiosity that launched the Hubble, flows from that mentality, and so does the revenue stream of taxpayer dollars that funded it. Iraq is very rich in resources, but philosophically it is impoverished. The truest separation between cultures is in the collective dreams of their people.
When I listen to people in these civil administration meetings inventorying the obstacles, giving detailed and passionate speeches about why the things that need to happen cannot, often next comes the tired lament, “You can do these things because America is rich.” This seems like a chicken-egg argument, but it’s not. They will stare at you like a bird. Blinking. Blinking. As if waiting for an answer to a question that seems to forever loop back on itself. “But you are rich! You put a man on the moon!”
When a person holds an egg in hand, the question seems answered. And when a person holds a chicken, the question seems answered.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Haji's at the disco
From GatesofVienna
Yety another reason to kick moslems out of the West. Dissapointing, looks like some of the Westerners are fighting back literly.
All of the progress in the world today is from the West. Electricity, automobiles, cell phones.
The non west just jives us drama
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/07/youths-and-night-life.html
Monday, July 23, 2007
“Youths” and Night Life
by Baron Bodissey
Last night Kepiblanc reported on the methods nightclubs in Copenhagen use to handle the problem of Muslim “youths” and their tendency to react violently when they can’t have their way with Danish girls.Two commenters on the post then reported on the same problem as it occurs in other parts of Scandinavia.First, Vasarahammer has translated an excerpt from the interview of Sedu Koskinen, owner of several nightclubs in Helsinki. The entire interview is available in Finnish at Viisi Tähteä:
Sedu Koskinen spoke of a politically sensitive subject in the Haaga Studia Restonomia seminar, namely allowing entry of foreigners to a night club.“Today there is a problem with foreigners. One must raise this issue in some forum. I sometimes get tens of complaints that there have been too many foreigners in our place. Regular customers find that disturbing. Foreign men don’t necessarily respect others, especially women. They openly grab, fondle and behave badly. That is the reality.“And when the foreigners start making trouble, it is not that do I hit first or do you. At that point they have already hit, usually with a knife or a beer mug. And normally they come in groups. They make sure that the group is there and then they start hitting.“Finns normally don’t come in groups. When the foreigners visit a club, they don’t come in at once, but one by one. But they still constitute a gang. When a Finnish gang arrives, they all come at the same time and they will be noticed at once and their entry is refused. They cannot do that. Foreigners know how to deal with it. Obviously we are not talking about the French here. Are there any specific nationalities you need to look out for?“Yeah there are. Yugos, Albanians and Asians are a dangerous lot. And the Somalis have arrived as their own group. They have lived here so long that they know the system and speak Finnish. They are not outsiders any more. They are deep in the system. And I am not a racist. I have spent a lot of time abroad and always try to understand as far as possible, but the problems are a reality today. At some point they may get out of hand, as it has already happened in Sweden and Germany, for example.“However, the law requires that you cannot refuse entry based on race or nationality.“I know many clubs in Helsinki that forbid entry to foreigners. Even in the most popular clubs there are clear rules. You just don’t talk about them.”Vasarahammer adds this comment: “Frankly, I’m surprised that he has not been visited by the thought police yet.”Carpenter has his own report: “Well, we have similar bar problems in Sweden too. Here, a ‘discrimination industry’ has occurred.”- - - - - - - - - -Here’s his translation of excerpts from an article in Realtid.se published on May 29th:
Struggle against restaurant racism — A business idea?The law students have received much — overwhelmingly positive — publicity for their struggle against club-racism. After having sued about a dozen clubs for ethnic discrimination, their requirements for damage compensation amount to almost 1,000,000 kronor [around $140,000]. Now, they’re accused of having found a profitable business idea.[…]So far, they have received just over 100,000 kronor [around $14,000]. But they will possibly receive even more. According to the “law students” themselves their demands amount to one million, against thirteen clubs.[…]It all started three years ago, as a discrimination experiment by the law students. With hidden camera and microphone, they went around in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Their work resulted in reports against thirteen clubs.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/07/strangers-in-night.html
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Strangers in the Night
by Baron Bodissey
When I was in Copenhagen in April, the weather was unusually fine and warm, and downtown Copenhagen came alive in the evenings with a foretaste of summer nightlife. Kepiblanc, our Danish correspondent and frequent commenter here at Gates of Vienna, offered to give me an after-dark tour, so we took a stroll through the narrow streets of the old city.From time to time he pointed out groups of young Muslim men who were heading for the nightclubs. They were dressed fashionably, and appeared to be mainly Turks and South Asians. According to Kepiblanc they frequent the bars and discotheques in search of something hard to find in their own cultural milieu: available young women.Yesterday Kepiblanc sent me an email with more information on this topic:
Baron,As you probably remember from our joint evening walks in downtown Copenhagen, one can always spot a “dance hall” — or discotheque — by the crowd of Middle Eastern types hanging around outside, arguing with a doorman while harassing female bypassers.Of course, the Danish equivalent of CAIR, several Danish factions of the “do-good-industry”, and useful-idiot politicians accuse the doormen of “racism”, bigotry, and discrimination. Accordingly the “cultural enrichers” have started to sue doormen and bar owners — and with success in some cases.Now, what can a bar owner or a doorman do to protect his business, his customers and earn a little money? If he lets the “youths” inside one thing is a given: trouble. His business is founded on selling liquor, wine, and beer. But Muslims don’t buy anything. Instead they “engage” the Danish girls (Muslim girls are not allowed outside their homes) in a rather un-Danish way. The girls mostly refuse to dance with them, but since Muslims can’t fathom that, the girls need protection from Danish boys. Then the fighting starts. Suddenly fists and knives appear, and the evening is ruined. As is the discotheque.So, for the bar owner and the doorman it’s a lose-lose situation.Below is Kepiblanc’s translation of a story from yesterday evening on Danish TV2:
Discotheque: Muslims make trouble [Photo text: “Sorry fellas, I can’t let you in.”]The overwhelming majority of problems in the discotheques can be related to young, Muslim immigrants. So says one of the owners of Australian Bar in Copenhagen, Tommy Petersen, who has appeared several times in media stories for rejecting immigrants. Tommy Petersen underscores that it has nothing to do with racism and discrimination:“They are mostly unable to behave themselves because they don’t know, or will not respect, the norms and mores of the local nightlife,” he says.In June the discotheque rejected a young Danish-Turk due to his haircut, a so-called “army cut”, with reference to the dress code of the place. Likewise the discotheque in February rejected three foreigners. The doorman in question later had to pay a fine of DKR 1,000 [$180].Kepiblanc adds this editorial afterword:- - - - - - - - - -
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Several ways, actually.Some discotheques made an agreement with the cops: They maintain a photo gallery of the “usual suspects” which makes it legal to reject matching faces. Others have established themselves as members-only, but the Muslims somehow figured that one out, so now they’re whining and seething about “racism” once more.Fortunately, man’s best friend came into the play: by claiming an anti-drug policy some discotheques now place a “sniffer-dog” at the door. Poodles, bulldogs — whatever. It doesn’t matter: Muslims are afraid of being touched by dogs, so they leave the place without further ado.While the Danes just pat the tail-wagging doggie on the head and walk right in.I guess it’ll be a while until the Muslims’ lawyers figure out how to handle that one in court, but if they do, I have a suggestion:Refurbish all the discotheques. Use swine-leather upholstery on all furniture, bars and doorknobs.Keep the room clean.
Yety another reason to kick moslems out of the West. Dissapointing, looks like some of the Westerners are fighting back literly.
All of the progress in the world today is from the West. Electricity, automobiles, cell phones.
The non west just jives us drama
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/07/youths-and-night-life.html
Monday, July 23, 2007
“Youths” and Night Life
by Baron Bodissey
Last night Kepiblanc reported on the methods nightclubs in Copenhagen use to handle the problem of Muslim “youths” and their tendency to react violently when they can’t have their way with Danish girls.Two commenters on the post then reported on the same problem as it occurs in other parts of Scandinavia.First, Vasarahammer has translated an excerpt from the interview of Sedu Koskinen, owner of several nightclubs in Helsinki. The entire interview is available in Finnish at Viisi Tähteä:
Sedu Koskinen spoke of a politically sensitive subject in the Haaga Studia Restonomia seminar, namely allowing entry of foreigners to a night club.“Today there is a problem with foreigners. One must raise this issue in some forum. I sometimes get tens of complaints that there have been too many foreigners in our place. Regular customers find that disturbing. Foreign men don’t necessarily respect others, especially women. They openly grab, fondle and behave badly. That is the reality.“And when the foreigners start making trouble, it is not that do I hit first or do you. At that point they have already hit, usually with a knife or a beer mug. And normally they come in groups. They make sure that the group is there and then they start hitting.“Finns normally don’t come in groups. When the foreigners visit a club, they don’t come in at once, but one by one. But they still constitute a gang. When a Finnish gang arrives, they all come at the same time and they will be noticed at once and their entry is refused. They cannot do that. Foreigners know how to deal with it. Obviously we are not talking about the French here. Are there any specific nationalities you need to look out for?“Yeah there are. Yugos, Albanians and Asians are a dangerous lot. And the Somalis have arrived as their own group. They have lived here so long that they know the system and speak Finnish. They are not outsiders any more. They are deep in the system. And I am not a racist. I have spent a lot of time abroad and always try to understand as far as possible, but the problems are a reality today. At some point they may get out of hand, as it has already happened in Sweden and Germany, for example.“However, the law requires that you cannot refuse entry based on race or nationality.“I know many clubs in Helsinki that forbid entry to foreigners. Even in the most popular clubs there are clear rules. You just don’t talk about them.”Vasarahammer adds this comment: “Frankly, I’m surprised that he has not been visited by the thought police yet.”Carpenter has his own report: “Well, we have similar bar problems in Sweden too. Here, a ‘discrimination industry’ has occurred.”- - - - - - - - - -Here’s his translation of excerpts from an article in Realtid.se published on May 29th:
Struggle against restaurant racism — A business idea?The law students have received much — overwhelmingly positive — publicity for their struggle against club-racism. After having sued about a dozen clubs for ethnic discrimination, their requirements for damage compensation amount to almost 1,000,000 kronor [around $140,000]. Now, they’re accused of having found a profitable business idea.[…]So far, they have received just over 100,000 kronor [around $14,000]. But they will possibly receive even more. According to the “law students” themselves their demands amount to one million, against thirteen clubs.[…]It all started three years ago, as a discrimination experiment by the law students. With hidden camera and microphone, they went around in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Their work resulted in reports against thirteen clubs.
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/07/strangers-in-night.html
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Strangers in the Night
by Baron Bodissey
When I was in Copenhagen in April, the weather was unusually fine and warm, and downtown Copenhagen came alive in the evenings with a foretaste of summer nightlife. Kepiblanc, our Danish correspondent and frequent commenter here at Gates of Vienna, offered to give me an after-dark tour, so we took a stroll through the narrow streets of the old city.From time to time he pointed out groups of young Muslim men who were heading for the nightclubs. They were dressed fashionably, and appeared to be mainly Turks and South Asians. According to Kepiblanc they frequent the bars and discotheques in search of something hard to find in their own cultural milieu: available young women.Yesterday Kepiblanc sent me an email with more information on this topic:
Baron,As you probably remember from our joint evening walks in downtown Copenhagen, one can always spot a “dance hall” — or discotheque — by the crowd of Middle Eastern types hanging around outside, arguing with a doorman while harassing female bypassers.Of course, the Danish equivalent of CAIR, several Danish factions of the “do-good-industry”, and useful-idiot politicians accuse the doormen of “racism”, bigotry, and discrimination. Accordingly the “cultural enrichers” have started to sue doormen and bar owners — and with success in some cases.Now, what can a bar owner or a doorman do to protect his business, his customers and earn a little money? If he lets the “youths” inside one thing is a given: trouble. His business is founded on selling liquor, wine, and beer. But Muslims don’t buy anything. Instead they “engage” the Danish girls (Muslim girls are not allowed outside their homes) in a rather un-Danish way. The girls mostly refuse to dance with them, but since Muslims can’t fathom that, the girls need protection from Danish boys. Then the fighting starts. Suddenly fists and knives appear, and the evening is ruined. As is the discotheque.So, for the bar owner and the doorman it’s a lose-lose situation.Below is Kepiblanc’s translation of a story from yesterday evening on Danish TV2:
Discotheque: Muslims make trouble [Photo text: “Sorry fellas, I can’t let you in.”]The overwhelming majority of problems in the discotheques can be related to young, Muslim immigrants. So says one of the owners of Australian Bar in Copenhagen, Tommy Petersen, who has appeared several times in media stories for rejecting immigrants. Tommy Petersen underscores that it has nothing to do with racism and discrimination:“They are mostly unable to behave themselves because they don’t know, or will not respect, the norms and mores of the local nightlife,” he says.In June the discotheque rejected a young Danish-Turk due to his haircut, a so-called “army cut”, with reference to the dress code of the place. Likewise the discotheque in February rejected three foreigners. The doorman in question later had to pay a fine of DKR 1,000 [$180].Kepiblanc adds this editorial afterword:- - - - - - - - - -
But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Several ways, actually.Some discotheques made an agreement with the cops: They maintain a photo gallery of the “usual suspects” which makes it legal to reject matching faces. Others have established themselves as members-only, but the Muslims somehow figured that one out, so now they’re whining and seething about “racism” once more.Fortunately, man’s best friend came into the play: by claiming an anti-drug policy some discotheques now place a “sniffer-dog” at the door. Poodles, bulldogs — whatever. It doesn’t matter: Muslims are afraid of being touched by dogs, so they leave the place without further ado.While the Danes just pat the tail-wagging doggie on the head and walk right in.I guess it’ll be a while until the Muslims’ lawyers figure out how to handle that one in court, but if they do, I have a suggestion:Refurbish all the discotheques. Use swine-leather upholstery on all furniture, bars and doorknobs.Keep the room clean.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
How to get out of jail-American style
This is sooooo dissapointing.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290300,00.html
Alleged Child Rapist Goes Free Because Court Can't Find Interpreter
Sunday, July 22, 2007
E-MAIL STORY
PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
ROCKVILLE, Md. — Charges against a man accused of repeatedly raping and molesting a 7-year-old girl were dismissed last week because the court could not find an interpreter fluent in the suspect's native West African language.
Mahamu Kanneh, a Liberian native who received asylum in this country and attended high school and community college here, according to The Washington Post, was denied a speedy trial after three years awaiting a court-appointed interpreter who could speak the tribal language of Vai.
Click here to read The Washington Post article.
A court-ordered psychiatrist determined that Kanneh, despite his functional facility with English — he originally spoke with detectives in English, The Post reports, needed to have Vai spoken in order to understand the proceedings against him.
Loretta Knight, a clerk with the court system in Montgomery County, Md., said she had been unable to find an interpreter to stay on the case, even after an exhaustive search that included the Liberian Embassy and courts in 47 states.
Judge Katherine Savage called her decision to dismiss the charges one of the most difficult she's had to make in a long time, especially since she was aware of "the gravity of this case and the community's concern about offenses of this type."
Prosecutors can't refile the charges but are considering whether to appeal the judge's ruling for the dismissal.
FOX News spoke with a man who claimed to be Kanneh in a five-minute phone conversation on Sunday in English. He said the allegations against him were false and the dismissal of the charges was "a good thing." Asked if the accusations were true, he responded, "I said what I had to say" and hung up.
The Washington Post wrote in its article that in just one night reporters were independently able to identify three Vai translators available to assist in the case. It noted that the need for interpreters has risen starkly in Montgomery County, Md., with the court system spending $1 million in interpreters in 2006, or 10 times the amount it spent in 2000.
According to witnesses who originally reported the case to authorities, Kanneh allegedly repeatedly raped and sexually molested the girl, a relative. In a statement made by the girl to police, she said she had been told she'd be forced to stay in the apartment unless she had sex with Kanneh.
FOX News' James Rosen and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,290300,00.html
Alleged Child Rapist Goes Free Because Court Can't Find Interpreter
Sunday, July 22, 2007
E-MAIL STORY
PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION
ROCKVILLE, Md. — Charges against a man accused of repeatedly raping and molesting a 7-year-old girl were dismissed last week because the court could not find an interpreter fluent in the suspect's native West African language.
Mahamu Kanneh, a Liberian native who received asylum in this country and attended high school and community college here, according to The Washington Post, was denied a speedy trial after three years awaiting a court-appointed interpreter who could speak the tribal language of Vai.
Click here to read The Washington Post article.
A court-ordered psychiatrist determined that Kanneh, despite his functional facility with English — he originally spoke with detectives in English, The Post reports, needed to have Vai spoken in order to understand the proceedings against him.
Loretta Knight, a clerk with the court system in Montgomery County, Md., said she had been unable to find an interpreter to stay on the case, even after an exhaustive search that included the Liberian Embassy and courts in 47 states.
Judge Katherine Savage called her decision to dismiss the charges one of the most difficult she's had to make in a long time, especially since she was aware of "the gravity of this case and the community's concern about offenses of this type."
Prosecutors can't refile the charges but are considering whether to appeal the judge's ruling for the dismissal.
FOX News spoke with a man who claimed to be Kanneh in a five-minute phone conversation on Sunday in English. He said the allegations against him were false and the dismissal of the charges was "a good thing." Asked if the accusations were true, he responded, "I said what I had to say" and hung up.
The Washington Post wrote in its article that in just one night reporters were independently able to identify three Vai translators available to assist in the case. It noted that the need for interpreters has risen starkly in Montgomery County, Md., with the court system spending $1 million in interpreters in 2006, or 10 times the amount it spent in 2000.
According to witnesses who originally reported the case to authorities, Kanneh allegedly repeatedly raped and sexually molested the girl, a relative. In a statement made by the girl to police, she said she had been told she'd be forced to stay in the apartment unless she had sex with Kanneh.
FOX News' James Rosen and Serafin Gomez contributed to this report.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Why moslems lose wars
This follows the theme from Victor Davis Hanson's "Carnage and Culture"
Replace Arab with muslim though.
Gyped this from a post on NRO Corner today.
As Derb says " it you want to win wars fight Arabs/Muslims"
This is one of many examples.
http://www.meforum.org/article/441
DECEMBER 1999 • VOLUME VI: NUMBER 4
Why Arabs Lose Wars
by Norvell B. De AtkineMiddle East QuarterlyDecember 1999
Norvell De Atkine, a U.S. Army retired colonel with eight years residence in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut, is currently instructing U.S. Army personnel assigned to Middle Eastern areas. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own.
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.2 Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.3 The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.4 And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.
It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat. The following impressions derive from personal experience with Arab military establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché and security assistance officer, observer officer with the British-officer Trucial Oman Scouts (the security force in the emirates prior to the establishment of the United Arab Emirates), as well as some thirty year's study of the Middle East.
False Starts
Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it has often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking, and mythology. Thus, the U.S. army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that the country would be permanently disadvantaged in technology.5 Hitler dismissed the United States as a mongrel society6 and consequently underestimated the impact of America's entry into the war. As these examples suggest, when culture is considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces, it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the opposite: to view the potential enemy through the prism of one's own cultural norms. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated their own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees.7 Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.
It is particularly dangerous to make facile assumptions about abilities in warfare based on past performance, for societies evolve and so does the military subculture with it. The dismal French performance in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war led the German high command to an overly optimistic assessment prior to World War I.8 The tenacity and courage of French soldiers in World War I led everyone from Winston Churchill to the German high command vastly to overestimate the French army's fighting abilities.9 Israeli generals underestimated the Egyptian army of 1973 based on Egypt's hapless performance in the 1967 war.10
Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an individual's race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a mockery of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to individuals—as the military histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires illustrate. In both cases it was training, discipline, esprit, and élan which made the difference, not the individual soldiers' origin.11 The highly disciplined, effective Roman legions, for example, were recruited from throughout the Roman empire, and the elite Ottoman Janissaries (slave soldiers) were Christians forcibly recruited as boys from the Balkans.
The Role of Culture
These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare which he terms "face to face," Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection.12 Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political warfare13—what T. E. Lawrence termed "winning wars without battles."14 Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core entailed a masterful deception plan. It may well be that these seemingly permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety, indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships.15
Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that "certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991."16 These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level.
The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations"17 in no way lessens the vital point he made—that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications.
But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training? At present, it has hardly any role. Paul M. Belbutowski, a scholar and former member of the U.S. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own military education system: "Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level."18 And yet it is precisely "all that is vague and intangible" which defines low-intensity conflicts. The Vietnamese communists did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an understanding of the enemy's cultural mythology, history, attitude toward time, etc.—demanding a more substantial investment in time and money than a bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize.
Mindful of walking through a minefield of past errors and present cultural sensibilities, I offer some assessments of the role of culture in the military training of Arabic-speaking officers. I confine myself principally to training for two reasons. First, I observed much training but only one combat campaign (the Jordanian Army against the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1970). Secondly, armies fight as they train. Troops are conditioned by peacetime habits, policies, and procedures; they do not undergo a sudden metamorphosis that transforms civilians in uniform into warriors. General George Patton was fond of relating the story about Julius Caesar, who "In the winter time ... so trained his legions in all that became soldiers and so habituated them to the proper performance of their duties, that when in the spring he committed them to battle against the Gauls, it was not necessary to give them orders, for they knew what to do and how to do it."19
Information as Power
In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature. On one occasion, an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt at long last received the operators' manuals that had laboriously been translated into Arabic. The American trainers took the newly-minted manuals straight to the tank park and distributed them to the tank crews. Right behind them, the company commander, a graduate of the armor school at Fort Knox and specialized courses at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance school, collected the manuals from the crews. Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point in giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In point of fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent source of knowledge. Being the only person who can explain the fire control instrumentation or boresight artillery weapons brings prestige and attention. In military terms this means that very little cross-training is accomplished and that, for instance in a tank crew, the gunners, loaders, and drivers might be proficient in their jobs but are not prepared to fill in for a casualty. Not understanding one another's jobs also inhibits a smoothly functioning crew. At a higher level it means there is no depth in technical proficiency.
Education Problems
Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for foreign instructors; for example, his credibility is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the end, are students.
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to "sharing answers" in class—often in a rather overt manner or junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior's.
American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation—and learning becomes impossible.
Officers vs. Soldiers
Arab junior officers are well trained on the technical aspects of their weapons and tactical know-how, but not in leadership, a subject given little attention. For example, as General Sa‘d ash-Shazli, the Egyptian chief of staff, noted in his assessment of the army he inherited prior to the 1973 war, they were not trained to seize the initiative or volunteer original concepts or new ideas.20 Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly accentuated class system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a non-commissioned-officer development program.
Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans. When the winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert during a demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a contingent of soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the Americans; Egyptian soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as nothing more than a windbreak. The idea of taking care of one's men is found only among the most elite units in the Egyptian military. On a typical weekend, officers in units stationed outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and flagging down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in various degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries—less so in Jordan, even more so in
Iraq and Syria.
The young draftees who make up the bulk of the Egyptian army hate military service for good reason and will do almost anything, including self-mutilation, to avoid it. In Syria the wealthy buy exemptions or, failing that, are assigned to noncombatant organizations. As a young Syrian told me, his musical skills came from his assignment to a Syrian army band where he learned to play an instrument. In general, the militaries of the Fertile Crescent enforce discipline by fear; in countries where a tribal system still is in force, such as Saudi Arabia, the innate egalitarianism of the society mitigates against fear as the prime motivator, so a general lack of discipline pervades.21
The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men's sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military's effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf war when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands.
The military price for this is very high. Without the cohesion supplied by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat. This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not trust their officers. Once officers depart the training areas, training begins to fall apart as soldiers begin drifting off. An Egyptian officer once explained to me that the Egyptian army's catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from a lack of cohesion within units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in 1973. Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear and enmity toward their officers.
Decision-making and Responsibility
Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral communication. This leads to a highly centralized system, with authority hardly ever delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical decision on his own; instead, he prefers the safe course of being identified as industrious, intelligent, loyal—and compliant. Bringing attention to oneself as an innovator or someone prone to make unilateral decisions is a recipe for trouble. As in civilian life, conformism is the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that stands up gets hammered down. Orders and information flow from top to bottom; they are not to be reinterpreted, amended, or modified in any way.
U.S. trainers often experience frustration obtaining a decision from a counterpart, not realizing that the Arab officer lacks the authority to make the decision—a frustration amplified by the Arab's understandable reluctance to admit that he lacks that authority. This author has several times seen decisions that could have been made at the battalion level concerning such matters as class meeting times and locations requiring approval from the ministry of defense. All of which has led American trainers to develop a rule of thumb: a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army. Methods of instruction and subject matter are dictated from higher authorities. Unit commanders have very little to say about these affairs. The politicized nature of the Arab militaries means that political factors weigh heavily and frequently override military considerations. Officers with initiative and a predilection for unilateral action pose a threat to the regime. This can be seen not just at the level of national strategy but in every aspect of military operations and training. If Arab militaries became less politicized and more professional in preparation for the 1973 war with Israel,22 once the fighting ended, old habits returned. Now, an increasingly bureaucratized military establishment weighs in as well. A veteran of the Pentagon turf wars will feel like a kindergartner when he encounters the rivalries that exist in the Arab military headquarters.
Taking responsibility for a policy, operation, status, or training program rarely occurs. U.S. trainers can find it very frustrating when they repeatedly encounter Arab officers placing blame for unsuccessful operations or programs on the U.S. equipment or some other outside source. A high rate of non-operational U.S. equipment is blamed on a "lack of spare parts"—pointing a finger at an unresponsive U.S. supply system despite the fact that American trainers can document ample supplies arriving in country and disappearing in a malfunctioning supply system. (Such criticism was never caustic or personal and often so indirect and politely delivered that it wasn't until after a meeting that oblique references were understood.) This imperative works even at the most exalted levels. During the Kuwait war, Iraqi forces took over the town of Khafji in northeast Saudi Arabia after the Saudis had evacuated the place. General Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ground forces commander, requested a letter from General Norman Schwarzkopf, stating it was the U.S. general who ordered an evacuation from the Saudi town.23 And in his account of the Khafji battle, General Bin Sultan predictably blames the Americans for the Iraqi occupation of the town.24 In reality the problem was that the light Saudi forces in the area left the battlefield.25 The Saudis were in fact outgunned and outnumbered by the Iraqi unit approaching Khafji but Saudi pride required that foreigners be blamed.
As for equipment, a vast cultural gap exists between the U.S. and Arab maintenance and logistics systems. The Arab difficulties with U.S. equipment are not, as sometimes simplistically believed, a matter of "Arabs don't do maintenance," but something much deeper. The American concept of a weapons system does not convey easily. A weapons system brings with it specific maintenance and logistics procedures, policies, and even a philosophy, all of them based on U.S. culture, with its expectations of a certain educational level, sense of small unit responsibility, tool allocation, and doctrine. Tools that would be allocated to a U.S. battalion (a unit of some 600-800 personnel) would most likely be found at a much higher level—probably two or three echelons higher—in an Arab army. The expertise, initiative and, most importantly, the trust indicated by delegation of responsibility to a lower level are rare. The U.S. equipment and its maintenance are predicated on a concept of repair at the lowest level and therefore require delegation of authority. Without the needed tools, spare parts, or expertise available to keep equipment running, and loathe to report bad news to his superiors, the unit commander looks for scapegoats. All this explains why I many times heard in Egypt that U.S. weaponry is "too delicate."
I have observed many in-country U.S. survey teams: invariably, hosts make the case for acquiring the most modern of military hardware and do everything to avoid issues of maintenance, logistics, and training. They obfuscate and mislead to such an extent that U.S. teams, no matter how earnest their sense of mission, find it nearly impossible to help. More generally, Arab reluctance to be candid about training deficiencies makes it extremely difficult for foreign advisors properly to support instruction or assess training needs.
Combined Arms Operations
A lack of cooperation is most apparent in the failure of all Arab armies to succeed at combined arms operations. A regular Jordanian army infantry company, for example, is man-for-man as good as a comparable Israeli company; at battalion level, however, the coordination required for combined arms operations, with artillery, air, and logistics support, is simply absent. Indeed, the higher the echelon, the greater the disparity. This results from infrequent combined arms training; when it does take place, it is intended to impress visitors (which it does—the dog-and-pony show is usually done with uncommon gusto and theatrical talent) rather than provide real training.
This problem results from three main factors. First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects offensive operations.26 Exceptions to this pattern are limited to elite units (which throughout the Arab world have the same duty—to protect the regime, rather than the country). In a culture in which almost every sphere of human endeavor, including business and social relationships, is based on a family structure, this orientation is also present in the military, particularly in the stress of battle. Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver. The maneuver element must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers getting out front and leading, something that has not been a characteristic of Arab leadership.
Second, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the sectarian and tribal loyalties to maintain power. The ‘Alawi minority controls Syria, East Bankers control Jordan, Sunnis control Iraq, and Nejdis control Saudi Arabia. This has direct implications for the military, where sectarian considerations affect assignments and promotions. Some minorities (such the Circassians in Jordan or the Druze in Syria) tie their well-being to the ruling elite and perform critical protection roles; others (such as the Shi‘a of Iraq) are excluded from the officer corps. In any case, the assignment of officers based on sectarian considerations works against assignments based on merit.
The same lack of trust operates at the interstate level, where Arab armies exhibit very little trust of each other, and with good reason. The blatant lie Gamal Abdel Nasser told King Husayn in June 1967 to get him into the war against Israel—that the Egyptian air force was over Tel Aviv (when most of its planes had been destroyed)—was a classic example of deceit.27 Sadat's disingenuous approach to the Syrians to entice them to enter the war in October 1973 was another (he told them that the Egyptians were planning total war, a deception which included using a second set of operational plans intended only for Syrian eyes).28 With this sort of history, it is no wonder that there is very little cross or joint training among Arab armies and very few command exercises. During the 1967 war, for example, not a single Jordanian liaison officer was stationed in Egypt, nor were the Jordanians forthcoming with the Egyptian command.29
Third, Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority.30 They use competing organizations, duplicate agencies, and coercive structures dependent upon the ruler's whim. This makes building any form of personal power base difficult, if not impossible, and keeps the leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure in its careers or social position. The same applies within the military; a powerful chairman of the joint chiefs is inconceivable.
Joint commands are paper constructs that have little actual function. Leaders look at joint commands, joint exercises, combined arms, and integrated staffs very cautiously for all Arab armies are a double-edged sword. One edge points toward the external enemy and the other toward the capital. The land forces are at once a regime-maintenance force and threat at the same time. No Arab ruler will allow combined operations or training to become routine; the usual excuse is financial expense, but that is unconvincing given their frequent purchase of hardware whose maintenance costs they cannot afford. In fact, combined arms exercises and joint staffs create familiarity, soften rivalries, erase suspicions, and eliminate the fragmented, competing organizations that enable rulers to play off rivals against one another. This situation is most clearly seen in Saudi Arabia, where the land forces and aviation are under the minister of defense, Prince Sultan, while the National Guard is under Prince Abdullah, the deputy prime minister and crown prince. In Egypt, the Central Security Forces balance the army. In Iraq and Syria, the Republican Guard does the balancing.
Politicians actually create obstacles to maintain fragmentation. For example, obtaining aircraft from the air force for army airborne training, whether it is a joint exercise or a simple administrative request for support of training, must generally be coordinated by the heads of services at the ministry of defense; if a large number of aircraft are involved, this probably requires presidential approval. Military coups may be out of style, but the fear of them remains strong. Any large-scale exercise of land forces is a matter of concern to the government and is closely observed, particularly if live ammunition is being used. In Saudi Arabia a complex system of clearances required from area military commanders and provincial governors, all of whom have differing command channels to secure road convoy permission, obtaining ammunition, and conducting exercises, means that in order for a coup to work, it would require a massive amount of loyal conspirators. Arab regimes have learned how to be coup-proof.
Security and Paranoia
Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military. Information the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions, transfers, names of unit commanders, and unit designations) is top secret in Arabic-speaking countries. To be sure, this does make it more difficult for the enemy to construct an accurate order of battle, but it also feeds the divisive and compartmentalized nature of the military forces. The obsession with securitycan reach ludicrous lengths. Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that within two weeks of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war, his minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his immediate staff of the order. Should a war, Sadat wondered, be kept secret from the very people expected to fight it?31 One can expect to have an Arab counterpart or key contact to be changed without warning and with no explanation as to his sudden absence. This might well be simply a transfer a few doors down the way, but the vagueness of it all leaves foreigners with dire scenarios—scenarios that might be true. And it is best not to inquire too much; advisors or trainers who seem overly inquisitive may find their access to host military information or facilities limited.
The presumed close U.S.-Israel relationship, thought to be operative at all levels, aggravates and complicates this penchant for secrecy. Arabs believe that the most mundane details about them are somehow transmitted to the Mossad via a secret hotline.This explains why a U.S. advisor with Arab forces is likely to be asked early and often about his opinion of the "Palestine problem," then subjected to monologues on the presumed Jewish domination of the United
States.
Indifference to Safety
In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training safety. There are a number of explanations for this. Some would point to the inherent fatalism within Islam,32 and certainly anyone who has spent considerable time in Arab taxis would lend credence to that theory, but perhaps the reason is less religiously based and more a result of political culture. As any military veteran knows, the ethos of a unit is set at the top; or, as the old saying has it, units do those things well that the boss cares about. When the top political leadership displays a complete lack of concern for the welfare of its soldiers, such attitudes percolate down through the ranks. Exhibit A was the betrayal of Syrian troops fighting Israel in the Golan in 1967: having withdrawn its elite units, the Syrian government knowingly broadcast the falsehood that Israeli troops had captured the town of Kuneitra, which would have put them behind the largely conscript Syrian army still in position. The leadership took this step to pressure the great powers to impose a truce, though it led to a panic by the Syrian troops and the loss of the Golan Heights.33
Conclusion
It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to—the culture of their own armies in their own countries—defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors.
When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the Soviets reinforced their clients' cultural traits far more than, in more recent years, Americans were able to. Like the Arabs', the Soviets' military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia. The steps taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these fears, such as a rigidly centralized command structure, were readily understood by Arab political and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt an affinity for the Soviet officer class's contempt for ordinary soldiers and the Soviet military hierarchy's distrust of a well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.
Arab political culture is based on a high degree of social stratification, very much like that of the defunct Soviet Union and very much unlike the upwardly mobile, meritocratic, democratic United States. Arab officers do not see any value in sharing information among themselves, let alone with their men. In this they follow the example of their political leaders, who not only withhold information from their own allies, but routinely deceive them. Training in Arab armies reflects this: rather than prepare as much as possible for the multitude of improvised responsibilities that are thrown up in the chaos of battle, Arab soldiers, and their officers, are bound in the narrow functions assigned them by their hierarchy. That this renders them less effective on the battlefield, let alone places their lives at greater risk, is scarcely of concern, whereas, of course, these two issues are dominant in the American military culture, and are reflected in American military training.
Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab political culture, although the experience of other societies (including our own) suggests that the military can have a democratizing influence on the larger political culture, as officers bring the lessons of their training first into their professional environment, then into the larger society. It obviously makes a big difference, however, when the surrounding political culture is not only avowedly democratic (as are many Middle Eastern states), but functionally so. Until Arab politics begin to change at fundamental levels, Arab armies, whatever the courage or proficiency of individual officers and men, are unlikely to acquire the range of qualities which modern fighting forces require for success on the battlefield. For these qualities depend on inculcating respect, trust, and openness among the members of the armed forces at all levels, and this is the marching music of modern warfare that Arab armies, no matter how much they emulate the corresponding steps, do not want to hear.
1 Saeed M. Badeeb, The Saudi-Egyptian Conflict over North Yemen 1962-1970, (Boulder, Westview Press: 1986), pp. 33-42.2 R. D. McLaurin, The Battle of Zahle (Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md.: Human Engineering Laboratory, Sept. 1986), pp. 26-27.3 Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume II: The Iran-Iraq War, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 89-98; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 22-223, 233- 234.4 Kenneth M. Pollack, "The Influence of Arab Culture on Arab Military Effectiveness" (Ph.d. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996), pp. 259-261 (Egypt); pp. 533-536 (Saudi Arabia); pp. 350-355 (Iraq). Syrians did not see significant combat in the 1991 Gulf war but my conversations with U.S. personnel in liaison with them indicated a high degree of paranoia and distrust toward Americans and other Arabs.5 David Kahn, "United States Views of Germany and Japan," Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Before the Two World Wars, ed., Ernest R. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 476-503.6 Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970), p. 21.7 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 18.8 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 186-187. The German assessment from T. Dodson Stamps and Vincent J. Esposito, eds., A Short History of World War I (West Point, N.Y.: United States Military Academy, 1955), p. 8.9 William Manchester, Winston Spencer Churchilll: The Last Lion Alone, 1932-1940 (New York: Dell Publishing, 1988), p. 613; Ernest R. May "Conclusions," Knowing One's Enemies, pp. 513-514. Hitler thought otherwise, however.10 Avraham (Bren) Adan, On the Banks of the Suez (San Francisco: Presideo Press, 1980), pp. 73-86. "Thus the prevailing feeling of security, based on the assumption that the Arabs were incapable of mounting an overall war against us, distorted our view of the situation," Moshe Dayan stated."As for the fighting standard of the Arab soldiers, I can sum it up in one sentence: they did not run away." Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976), p. 510.11 John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 18.12 Ibid., p. 38713 John Walter Jandora, Militarism in Arab Society: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 128.14 T. E. Lawrence, The Evolution of a Revolt (Ft. Leavenworth Kans.: CSI, 1990), p. 21.( A reprint of article originally published in the British Army Quarterly and Defense Journal, Oct. 1920.)15 Author's observations buttressed by such scholarly works as Eli Shouby, "The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Psychology of the Arabs," Readings in Arab Middle Eastern Societies and Culture, ed. Abdullah M. Lutfiyya and Charles Churchill (The Hague: Mouton Co., 1970), pp. 688-703; Hisham Shirabi and Muktar Ani, "Impact of Class and Culture on Social Behavior: The Feudal-Bourgeois Family in Arab Society," Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies, ed. L. Carl Brown and Norman Itzkowitz (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1977), pp. 240-256; Sania Hamady, Temperament and Character of the Arabs (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), pp. 28-85; Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), pp. 20-85.16 Pollack, "The Influence of Arab Culture," p. 759.17 Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 21-49.18 Paul M. Belbutowski, "Strategic Implications of Cultures in Conflict," Parameters, Spring 1996, pp. 32-42.19 Carlo D'Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York: Harper-Collins, 1996), p. 383.20 Saad el-Shazly, The Crossing of the Suez (San Francisco: American Mideast Research, 1980), p. 47.21 Jordan may be an exception here; however, most observers agree that its effectiveness has declined in the past twenty years.22 Pollack, "The Influence of Arab Culture," pp. 256-257.23 H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn't Take A Hero (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), p. 494.24 Khaled bin Sultan, Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the War by the Joint Forces Commander (New York: Harper-Collins, 1995), pp. 368-69.25 Based on discussions with U.S. personnel in the area and familiar with the battle.26 Yesoshat Harkabi, "Basic Factors in the Arab Collapse During the Six Day War," Orbis, Fall 1967, pp. 678-679.27 James Lunt, Hussein of Jordan, Searching for a Just and Lasting Peace: A Political Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1989), p. 99.28 Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 197-99; Shazly, Crossing of the Suez, pp. 21, 37.29 Samir A. Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 161.30 James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 3rd Ed. (New York: Harper-Collins, 1990), p. 262.31 Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 235.32 Hamady, Temperament and Character of the Arabs, pp. 184-193; Patai, The Arab Mind, pp.147-150.33 Joseph Malone, "Syria and the Six-Day War," Current Affairs Bulletin, Jan. 26, 1968, p. 80.
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Replace Arab with muslim though.
Gyped this from a post on NRO Corner today.
As Derb says " it you want to win wars fight Arabs/Muslims"
This is one of many examples.
http://www.meforum.org/article/441
DECEMBER 1999 • VOLUME VI: NUMBER 4
Why Arabs Lose Wars
by Norvell B. De AtkineMiddle East QuarterlyDecember 1999
Norvell De Atkine, a U.S. Army retired colonel with eight years residence in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and a graduate degree in Arab studies from the American University of Beirut, is currently instructing U.S. Army personnel assigned to Middle Eastern areas. The opinions expressed here are strictly his own.
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.2 Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds.3 The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.4 And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.
It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat. The following impressions derive from personal experience with Arab military establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché and security assistance officer, observer officer with the British-officer Trucial Oman Scouts (the security force in the emirates prior to the establishment of the United Arab Emirates), as well as some thirty year's study of the Middle East.
False Starts
Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it has often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking, and mythology. Thus, the U.S. army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that the country would be permanently disadvantaged in technology.5 Hitler dismissed the United States as a mongrel society6 and consequently underestimated the impact of America's entry into the war. As these examples suggest, when culture is considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces, it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the opposite: to view the potential enemy through the prism of one's own cultural norms. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated their own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees.7 Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.
It is particularly dangerous to make facile assumptions about abilities in warfare based on past performance, for societies evolve and so does the military subculture with it. The dismal French performance in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war led the German high command to an overly optimistic assessment prior to World War I.8 The tenacity and courage of French soldiers in World War I led everyone from Winston Churchill to the German high command vastly to overestimate the French army's fighting abilities.9 Israeli generals underestimated the Egyptian army of 1973 based on Egypt's hapless performance in the 1967 war.10
Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an individual's race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a mockery of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to individuals—as the military histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires illustrate. In both cases it was training, discipline, esprit, and élan which made the difference, not the individual soldiers' origin.11 The highly disciplined, effective Roman legions, for example, were recruited from throughout the Roman empire, and the elite Ottoman Janissaries (slave soldiers) were Christians forcibly recruited as boys from the Balkans.
The Role of Culture
These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare which he terms "face to face," Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection.12 Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political warfare13—what T. E. Lawrence termed "winning wars without battles."14 Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core entailed a masterful deception plan. It may well be that these seemingly permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety, indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships.15
Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that "certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991."16 These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level.
The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations"17 in no way lessens the vital point he made—that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications.
But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training? At present, it has hardly any role. Paul M. Belbutowski, a scholar and former member of the U.S. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own military education system: "Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level."18 And yet it is precisely "all that is vague and intangible" which defines low-intensity conflicts. The Vietnamese communists did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an understanding of the enemy's cultural mythology, history, attitude toward time, etc.—demanding a more substantial investment in time and money than a bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize.
Mindful of walking through a minefield of past errors and present cultural sensibilities, I offer some assessments of the role of culture in the military training of Arabic-speaking officers. I confine myself principally to training for two reasons. First, I observed much training but only one combat campaign (the Jordanian Army against the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1970). Secondly, armies fight as they train. Troops are conditioned by peacetime habits, policies, and procedures; they do not undergo a sudden metamorphosis that transforms civilians in uniform into warriors. General George Patton was fond of relating the story about Julius Caesar, who "In the winter time ... so trained his legions in all that became soldiers and so habituated them to the proper performance of their duties, that when in the spring he committed them to battle against the Gauls, it was not necessary to give them orders, for they knew what to do and how to do it."19
Information as Power
In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature. On one occasion, an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt at long last received the operators' manuals that had laboriously been translated into Arabic. The American trainers took the newly-minted manuals straight to the tank park and distributed them to the tank crews. Right behind them, the company commander, a graduate of the armor school at Fort Knox and specialized courses at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance school, collected the manuals from the crews. Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point in giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In point of fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent source of knowledge. Being the only person who can explain the fire control instrumentation or boresight artillery weapons brings prestige and attention. In military terms this means that very little cross-training is accomplished and that, for instance in a tank crew, the gunners, loaders, and drivers might be proficient in their jobs but are not prepared to fill in for a casualty. Not understanding one another's jobs also inhibits a smoothly functioning crew. At a higher level it means there is no depth in technical proficiency.
Education Problems
Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for foreign instructors; for example, his credibility is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the end, are students.
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to "sharing answers" in class—often in a rather overt manner or junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior's.
American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation—and learning becomes impossible.
Officers vs. Soldiers
Arab junior officers are well trained on the technical aspects of their weapons and tactical know-how, but not in leadership, a subject given little attention. For example, as General Sa‘d ash-Shazli, the Egyptian chief of staff, noted in his assessment of the army he inherited prior to the 1973 war, they were not trained to seize the initiative or volunteer original concepts or new ideas.20 Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly accentuated class system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a non-commissioned-officer development program.
Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans. When the winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert during a demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a contingent of soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the Americans; Egyptian soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as nothing more than a windbreak. The idea of taking care of one's men is found only among the most elite units in the Egyptian military. On a typical weekend, officers in units stationed outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and flagging down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in various degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries—less so in Jordan, even more so in
Iraq and Syria.
The young draftees who make up the bulk of the Egyptian army hate military service for good reason and will do almost anything, including self-mutilation, to avoid it. In Syria the wealthy buy exemptions or, failing that, are assigned to noncombatant organizations. As a young Syrian told me, his musical skills came from his assignment to a Syrian army band where he learned to play an instrument. In general, the militaries of the Fertile Crescent enforce discipline by fear; in countries where a tribal system still is in force, such as Saudi Arabia, the innate egalitarianism of the society mitigates against fear as the prime motivator, so a general lack of discipline pervades.21
The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men's sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military's effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf war when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands.
The military price for this is very high. Without the cohesion supplied by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat. This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not trust their officers. Once officers depart the training areas, training begins to fall apart as soldiers begin drifting off. An Egyptian officer once explained to me that the Egyptian army's catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from a lack of cohesion within units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in 1973. Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear and enmity toward their officers.
Decision-making and Responsibility
Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral communication. This leads to a highly centralized system, with authority hardly ever delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical decision on his own; instead, he prefers the safe course of being identified as industrious, intelligent, loyal—and compliant. Bringing attention to oneself as an innovator or someone prone to make unilateral decisions is a recipe for trouble. As in civilian life, conformism is the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that stands up gets hammered down. Orders and information flow from top to bottom; they are not to be reinterpreted, amended, or modified in any way.
U.S. trainers often experience frustration obtaining a decision from a counterpart, not realizing that the Arab officer lacks the authority to make the decision—a frustration amplified by the Arab's understandable reluctance to admit that he lacks that authority. This author has several times seen decisions that could have been made at the battalion level concerning such matters as class meeting times and locations requiring approval from the ministry of defense. All of which has led American trainers to develop a rule of thumb: a sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army. Methods of instruction and subject matter are dictated from higher authorities. Unit commanders have very little to say about these affairs. The politicized nature of the Arab militaries means that political factors weigh heavily and frequently override military considerations. Officers with initiative and a predilection for unilateral action pose a threat to the regime. This can be seen not just at the level of national strategy but in every aspect of military operations and training. If Arab militaries became less politicized and more professional in preparation for the 1973 war with Israel,22 once the fighting ended, old habits returned. Now, an increasingly bureaucratized military establishment weighs in as well. A veteran of the Pentagon turf wars will feel like a kindergartner when he encounters the rivalries that exist in the Arab military headquarters.
Taking responsibility for a policy, operation, status, or training program rarely occurs. U.S. trainers can find it very frustrating when they repeatedly encounter Arab officers placing blame for unsuccessful operations or programs on the U.S. equipment or some other outside source. A high rate of non-operational U.S. equipment is blamed on a "lack of spare parts"—pointing a finger at an unresponsive U.S. supply system despite the fact that American trainers can document ample supplies arriving in country and disappearing in a malfunctioning supply system. (Such criticism was never caustic or personal and often so indirect and politely delivered that it wasn't until after a meeting that oblique references were understood.) This imperative works even at the most exalted levels. During the Kuwait war, Iraqi forces took over the town of Khafji in northeast Saudi Arabia after the Saudis had evacuated the place. General Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ground forces commander, requested a letter from General Norman Schwarzkopf, stating it was the U.S. general who ordered an evacuation from the Saudi town.23 And in his account of the Khafji battle, General Bin Sultan predictably blames the Americans for the Iraqi occupation of the town.24 In reality the problem was that the light Saudi forces in the area left the battlefield.25 The Saudis were in fact outgunned and outnumbered by the Iraqi unit approaching Khafji but Saudi pride required that foreigners be blamed.
As for equipment, a vast cultural gap exists between the U.S. and Arab maintenance and logistics systems. The Arab difficulties with U.S. equipment are not, as sometimes simplistically believed, a matter of "Arabs don't do maintenance," but something much deeper. The American concept of a weapons system does not convey easily. A weapons system brings with it specific maintenance and logistics procedures, policies, and even a philosophy, all of them based on U.S. culture, with its expectations of a certain educational level, sense of small unit responsibility, tool allocation, and doctrine. Tools that would be allocated to a U.S. battalion (a unit of some 600-800 personnel) would most likely be found at a much higher level—probably two or three echelons higher—in an Arab army. The expertise, initiative and, most importantly, the trust indicated by delegation of responsibility to a lower level are rare. The U.S. equipment and its maintenance are predicated on a concept of repair at the lowest level and therefore require delegation of authority. Without the needed tools, spare parts, or expertise available to keep equipment running, and loathe to report bad news to his superiors, the unit commander looks for scapegoats. All this explains why I many times heard in Egypt that U.S. weaponry is "too delicate."
I have observed many in-country U.S. survey teams: invariably, hosts make the case for acquiring the most modern of military hardware and do everything to avoid issues of maintenance, logistics, and training. They obfuscate and mislead to such an extent that U.S. teams, no matter how earnest their sense of mission, find it nearly impossible to help. More generally, Arab reluctance to be candid about training deficiencies makes it extremely difficult for foreign advisors properly to support instruction or assess training needs.
Combined Arms Operations
A lack of cooperation is most apparent in the failure of all Arab armies to succeed at combined arms operations. A regular Jordanian army infantry company, for example, is man-for-man as good as a comparable Israeli company; at battalion level, however, the coordination required for combined arms operations, with artillery, air, and logistics support, is simply absent. Indeed, the higher the echelon, the greater the disparity. This results from infrequent combined arms training; when it does take place, it is intended to impress visitors (which it does—the dog-and-pony show is usually done with uncommon gusto and theatrical talent) rather than provide real training.
This problem results from three main factors. First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects offensive operations.26 Exceptions to this pattern are limited to elite units (which throughout the Arab world have the same duty—to protect the regime, rather than the country). In a culture in which almost every sphere of human endeavor, including business and social relationships, is based on a family structure, this orientation is also present in the military, particularly in the stress of battle. Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver. The maneuver element must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers getting out front and leading, something that has not been a characteristic of Arab leadership.
Second, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the sectarian and tribal loyalties to maintain power. The ‘Alawi minority controls Syria, East Bankers control Jordan, Sunnis control Iraq, and Nejdis control Saudi Arabia. This has direct implications for the military, where sectarian considerations affect assignments and promotions. Some minorities (such the Circassians in Jordan or the Druze in Syria) tie their well-being to the ruling elite and perform critical protection roles; others (such as the Shi‘a of Iraq) are excluded from the officer corps. In any case, the assignment of officers based on sectarian considerations works against assignments based on merit.
The same lack of trust operates at the interstate level, where Arab armies exhibit very little trust of each other, and with good reason. The blatant lie Gamal Abdel Nasser told King Husayn in June 1967 to get him into the war against Israel—that the Egyptian air force was over Tel Aviv (when most of its planes had been destroyed)—was a classic example of deceit.27 Sadat's disingenuous approach to the Syrians to entice them to enter the war in October 1973 was another (he told them that the Egyptians were planning total war, a deception which included using a second set of operational plans intended only for Syrian eyes).28 With this sort of history, it is no wonder that there is very little cross or joint training among Arab armies and very few command exercises. During the 1967 war, for example, not a single Jordanian liaison officer was stationed in Egypt, nor were the Jordanians forthcoming with the Egyptian command.29
Third, Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority.30 They use competing organizations, duplicate agencies, and coercive structures dependent upon the ruler's whim. This makes building any form of personal power base difficult, if not impossible, and keeps the leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure in its careers or social position. The same applies within the military; a powerful chairman of the joint chiefs is inconceivable.
Joint commands are paper constructs that have little actual function. Leaders look at joint commands, joint exercises, combined arms, and integrated staffs very cautiously for all Arab armies are a double-edged sword. One edge points toward the external enemy and the other toward the capital. The land forces are at once a regime-maintenance force and threat at the same time. No Arab ruler will allow combined operations or training to become routine; the usual excuse is financial expense, but that is unconvincing given their frequent purchase of hardware whose maintenance costs they cannot afford. In fact, combined arms exercises and joint staffs create familiarity, soften rivalries, erase suspicions, and eliminate the fragmented, competing organizations that enable rulers to play off rivals against one another. This situation is most clearly seen in Saudi Arabia, where the land forces and aviation are under the minister of defense, Prince Sultan, while the National Guard is under Prince Abdullah, the deputy prime minister and crown prince. In Egypt, the Central Security Forces balance the army. In Iraq and Syria, the Republican Guard does the balancing.
Politicians actually create obstacles to maintain fragmentation. For example, obtaining aircraft from the air force for army airborne training, whether it is a joint exercise or a simple administrative request for support of training, must generally be coordinated by the heads of services at the ministry of defense; if a large number of aircraft are involved, this probably requires presidential approval. Military coups may be out of style, but the fear of them remains strong. Any large-scale exercise of land forces is a matter of concern to the government and is closely observed, particularly if live ammunition is being used. In Saudi Arabia a complex system of clearances required from area military commanders and provincial governors, all of whom have differing command channels to secure road convoy permission, obtaining ammunition, and conducting exercises, means that in order for a coup to work, it would require a massive amount of loyal conspirators. Arab regimes have learned how to be coup-proof.
Security and Paranoia
Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military. Information the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions, transfers, names of unit commanders, and unit designations) is top secret in Arabic-speaking countries. To be sure, this does make it more difficult for the enemy to construct an accurate order of battle, but it also feeds the divisive and compartmentalized nature of the military forces. The obsession with securitycan reach ludicrous lengths. Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that within two weeks of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war, his minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his immediate staff of the order. Should a war, Sadat wondered, be kept secret from the very people expected to fight it?31 One can expect to have an Arab counterpart or key contact to be changed without warning and with no explanation as to his sudden absence. This might well be simply a transfer a few doors down the way, but the vagueness of it all leaves foreigners with dire scenarios—scenarios that might be true. And it is best not to inquire too much; advisors or trainers who seem overly inquisitive may find their access to host military information or facilities limited.
The presumed close U.S.-Israel relationship, thought to be operative at all levels, aggravates and complicates this penchant for secrecy. Arabs believe that the most mundane details about them are somehow transmitted to the Mossad via a secret hotline.This explains why a U.S. advisor with Arab forces is likely to be asked early and often about his opinion of the "Palestine problem," then subjected to monologues on the presumed Jewish domination of the United
States.
Indifference to Safety
In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training safety. There are a number of explanations for this. Some would point to the inherent fatalism within Islam,32 and certainly anyone who has spent considerable time in Arab taxis would lend credence to that theory, but perhaps the reason is less religiously based and more a result of political culture. As any military veteran knows, the ethos of a unit is set at the top; or, as the old saying has it, units do those things well that the boss cares about. When the top political leadership displays a complete lack of concern for the welfare of its soldiers, such attitudes percolate down through the ranks. Exhibit A was the betrayal of Syrian troops fighting Israel in the Golan in 1967: having withdrawn its elite units, the Syrian government knowingly broadcast the falsehood that Israeli troops had captured the town of Kuneitra, which would have put them behind the largely conscript Syrian army still in position. The leadership took this step to pressure the great powers to impose a truce, though it led to a panic by the Syrian troops and the loss of the Golan Heights.33
Conclusion
It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to—the culture of their own armies in their own countries—defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors.
When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the Soviets reinforced their clients' cultural traits far more than, in more recent years, Americans were able to. Like the Arabs', the Soviets' military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia. The steps taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these fears, such as a rigidly centralized command structure, were readily understood by Arab political and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt an affinity for the Soviet officer class's contempt for ordinary soldiers and the Soviet military hierarchy's distrust of a well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.
Arab political culture is based on a high degree of social stratification, very much like that of the defunct Soviet Union and very much unlike the upwardly mobile, meritocratic, democratic United States. Arab officers do not see any value in sharing information among themselves, let alone with their men. In this they follow the example of their political leaders, who not only withhold information from their own allies, but routinely deceive them. Training in Arab armies reflects this: rather than prepare as much as possible for the multitude of improvised responsibilities that are thrown up in the chaos of battle, Arab soldiers, and their officers, are bound in the narrow functions assigned them by their hierarchy. That this renders them less effective on the battlefield, let alone places their lives at greater risk, is scarcely of concern, whereas, of course, these two issues are dominant in the American military culture, and are reflected in American military training.
Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab political culture, although the experience of other societies (including our own) suggests that the military can have a democratizing influence on the larger political culture, as officers bring the lessons of their training first into their professional environment, then into the larger society. It obviously makes a big difference, however, when the surrounding political culture is not only avowedly democratic (as are many Middle Eastern states), but functionally so. Until Arab politics begin to change at fundamental levels, Arab armies, whatever the courage or proficiency of individual officers and men, are unlikely to acquire the range of qualities which modern fighting forces require for success on the battlefield. For these qualities depend on inculcating respect, trust, and openness among the members of the armed forces at all levels, and this is the marching music of modern warfare that Arab armies, no matter how much they emulate the corresponding steps, do not want to hear.
1 Saeed M. Badeeb, The Saudi-Egyptian Conflict over North Yemen 1962-1970, (Boulder, Westview Press: 1986), pp. 33-42.2 R. D. McLaurin, The Battle of Zahle (Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md.: Human Engineering Laboratory, Sept. 1986), pp. 26-27.3 Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Volume II: The Iran-Iraq War, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 89-98; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 22-223, 233- 234.4 Kenneth M. Pollack, "The Influence of Arab Culture on Arab Military Effectiveness" (Ph.d. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996), pp. 259-261 (Egypt); pp. 533-536 (Saudi Arabia); pp. 350-355 (Iraq). Syrians did not see significant combat in the 1991 Gulf war but my conversations with U.S. personnel in liaison with them indicated a high degree of paranoia and distrust toward Americans and other Arabs.5 David Kahn, "United States Views of Germany and Japan," Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Before the Two World Wars, ed., Ernest R. May (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 476-503.6 Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany: Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970), p. 21.7 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), p. 18.8 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), pp. 186-187. The German assessment from T. Dodson Stamps and Vincent J. Esposito, eds., A Short History of World War I (West Point, N.Y.: United States Military Academy, 1955), p. 8.9 William Manchester, Winston Spencer Churchilll: The Last Lion Alone, 1932-1940 (New York: Dell Publishing, 1988), p. 613; Ernest R. May "Conclusions," Knowing One's Enemies, pp. 513-514. Hitler thought otherwise, however.10 Avraham (Bren) Adan, On the Banks of the Suez (San Francisco: Presideo Press, 1980), pp. 73-86. "Thus the prevailing feeling of security, based on the assumption that the Arabs were incapable of mounting an overall war against us, distorted our view of the situation," Moshe Dayan stated."As for the fighting standard of the Arab soldiers, I can sum it up in one sentence: they did not run away." Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1976), p. 510.11 John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 18.12 Ibid., p. 38713 John Walter Jandora, Militarism in Arab Society: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 128.14 T. E. Lawrence, The Evolution of a Revolt (Ft. Leavenworth Kans.: CSI, 1990), p. 21.( A reprint of article originally published in the British Army Quarterly and Defense Journal, Oct. 1920.)15 Author's observations buttressed by such scholarly works as Eli Shouby, "The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Psychology of the Arabs," Readings in Arab Middle Eastern Societies and Culture, ed. Abdullah M. Lutfiyya and Charles Churchill (The Hague: Mouton Co., 1970), pp. 688-703; Hisham Shirabi and Muktar Ani, "Impact of Class and Culture on Social Behavior: The Feudal-Bourgeois Family in Arab Society," Psychological Dimensions of Near Eastern Studies, ed. L. Carl Brown and Norman Itzkowitz (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1977), pp. 240-256; Sania Hamady, Temperament and Character of the Arabs (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), pp. 28-85; Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973), pp. 20-85.16 Pollack, "The Influence of Arab Culture," p. 759.17 Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations," Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 21-49.18 Paul M. Belbutowski, "Strategic Implications of Cultures in Conflict," Parameters, Spring 1996, pp. 32-42.19 Carlo D'Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York: Harper-Collins, 1996), p. 383.20 Saad el-Shazly, The Crossing of the Suez (San Francisco: American Mideast Research, 1980), p. 47.21 Jordan may be an exception here; however, most observers agree that its effectiveness has declined in the past twenty years.22 Pollack, "The Influence of Arab Culture," pp. 256-257.23 H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn't Take A Hero (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), p. 494.24 Khaled bin Sultan, Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the War by the Joint Forces Commander (New York: Harper-Collins, 1995), pp. 368-69.25 Based on discussions with U.S. personnel in the area and familiar with the battle.26 Yesoshat Harkabi, "Basic Factors in the Arab Collapse During the Six Day War," Orbis, Fall 1967, pp. 678-679.27 James Lunt, Hussein of Jordan, Searching for a Just and Lasting Peace: A Political Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1989), p. 99.28 Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 197-99; Shazly, Crossing of the Suez, pp. 21, 37.29 Samir A. Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 161.30 James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 3rd Ed. (New York: Harper-Collins, 1990), p. 262.31 Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 235.32 Hamady, Temperament and Character of the Arabs, pp. 184-193; Patai, The Arab Mind, pp.147-150.33 Joseph Malone, "Syria and the Six-Day War," Current Affairs Bulletin, Jan. 26, 1968, p. 80.
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Thursday, July 19, 2007
Dear Democrats, part I
Dear Democrats,
Please stop with this buffoonery with the war and let our guys win.
I know you want to take power in the USA, but forcing the US to loose this thing is really bad.
Pretty soon all you baby boomers who reveled in Vietnam will be dead and the USA will start winning again. (Why is it that boomers whose parents won WW2 revel in a loss in Vietnam??)
We pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and it will be Rwanda all over again. If you could keep your mouth shut for 2 years or so and supported victory AQI would roll up and go somewhere else, and we could hunt them down there and eradicate them.
Innocent and also guilty people will die alike. Think Dar fur x10.
You can't end war. You win or loose war.
reguards,
Please stop with this buffoonery with the war and let our guys win.
I know you want to take power in the USA, but forcing the US to loose this thing is really bad.
Pretty soon all you baby boomers who reveled in Vietnam will be dead and the USA will start winning again. (Why is it that boomers whose parents won WW2 revel in a loss in Vietnam??)
We pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and it will be Rwanda all over again. If you could keep your mouth shut for 2 years or so and supported victory AQI would roll up and go somewhere else, and we could hunt them down there and eradicate them.
Innocent and also guilty people will die alike. Think Dar fur x10.
You can't end war. You win or loose war.
reguards,
Bi-Partisanship
BiPartisanship is horse hockey, who really cares if congress gets along what we (me, anyway) want is for them to do the right thing. Not agreeing for agreeing sake
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Spit on freedom
"You grew up with freedom and can spit on freedon, because you don't know what it is to not have freedom, I haven't "
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
To a nitwit journalist on the Canadian Broadcast
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/07/13/video-cartoonishly-anti-american-canadian-interviews-ayaan-hirsi-ali/
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
To a nitwit journalist on the Canadian Broadcast
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/07/13/video-cartoonishly-anti-american-canadian-interviews-ayaan-hirsi-ali/
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Dating in Gaza/West Bank
Granted these haji's are pathetic. If they lived in a free society they could sort this out themselves. But they can't create a free society because their culture is assbackqard
Who marries their cousin for $4,000? see below
It is pathetic that almost 40 years after the USA landed on the moon, these goat fucks act this way.
Not even starting on 'honor killings' as if Abu has any honor, he just killed his daughter for being a lusty 19 year old girl.
HEY !!!!! goat humper, if your honor is dependent on someone else besides yourself, you got issues, buddy.
link
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3370049&page=1
Sex and the Single Palestinian
Racy Cell Phone Clips, Longing and Waiting, for Men of Ramallah Seeking Love
Men in the Muslim world sometimes struggle when traditional values clash with the modern world of sex and technology like cell phones.
By MATT GUTMANRAMALLAH, West Bank, July 12, 2007
The four men are huddled over a cell phone screen. Its faint color splashes over the stairwell of a dingy shopping center in Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital.
In the 30-second video, a man pressures a young woman to perform a sex act. She appears to be a conservative, veiled Muslim, but grudgingly complies. The men watching shift their feet anxiously — being caught watching the clip would bring immediate disgrace.
The men, all in their late 20s, all considered middle-class professionals, watch with eyes sprung open, and with apparent self-disgust. It's the closest thing to sex they've ever had.
In a place where tradition prohibits premarital sex, young, frustrated men are increasingly turning to outlets like cell phone pornography. Some unmarried men seek out Ramallah's few prostitutes, but the vast majority remain virgins, bursting with pent-up sexual energy, until their wedding night.
Cell phones are selling at a blistering rate. Ramallah is packed with cell phone shops, offering not only the newest Nokia models but accessories like leather holsters and shiny, new touch pads. And the Palestinian Telecommunications Co., the primary cell provider in the West Bank and Gaza, has grown to become the largest stock traded on the Palestinian Securities Exchange, according to the PSE Web site.
Suhaib, 28, is a researcher for the Palestinian Authority. "When I first watched it," he said after leading this reporter back into a cafe, "it made me desire more and more and more. I felt ashamed by it, and I only watched each video once."
Marriage Prospects
Some of the porn comes from Ramallah and East Jerusalem, typically forwarded from acquaintance to acquaintance. Some of the clips come from as far away as Kuwait.
Unlike his friends, Suhaib is getting married in January. He's lucky. He'll marry his cousin, who is 14 years old. The family connection, he says, worked to his benefit.
"Because she's my cousin, they gave us a good price of $4,000 for the dowry. That's considered an average dowry these days," he said.
That's not all he had to pay. Grooms traditionally foot the bill for the customary gold that becomes a mother's heirloom to her children, the wedding feast and all the other wedding expenses.
Grooms' families used to chip in, but these days few can afford to help. In Gaza most Palestinians live on less than $2 a day, and unemployment hovers near 40 percent. It's not much better in the West Bank.
While the Palestinian society is more open than many others in the Middle East, there is still much frustration these days and not only for economic reasons, says Bassem Ezbidi, a political scientist at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University. "The political stalemate with Israel and internal violence between Hamas and Fatah also contribute."
Cell phone use has skyrocketed over the last five years, he says. His students often walk around with high-tech phones they can barely afford.
"The unfortunate part is they use the phones not to communicate, but to surf porn and download useless ringtones. It's raised issues at the university," where cell phone chatter and the constant beeping of messages have become a campuswide scourge, he says.
Back in the shopping center, the four men are done watching the porn clip. They head back inside to what they call a couples bar. Here men and women sit in darkened corners, close, but never touching. Just being here unchaperoned pushes the boundaries of acceptable social behavior.
Virgin at 50?
Muhammed and Muna are to marry next month. Muhammad is a construction worker who makes about $700 per month. They are not wealthy. They wanted a cheap wedding, but tradition and their parents compelled them to do otherwise. It's taken a toll on Muna, who unlike many other women here, married for love.
She says she feels nauseated when at home. "I fainted the other day from the pressure. They want Muhammad to incur all the expenses and to invite the whole village to the wedding." That's at least 2,000 people, she says, all of whom must be fed.
On the one hand, Muna considers herself a modern woman. She works and doesn't feel the need for a traditional celebration to mark her marriage. On the other hand, she says feels unable to buck tradition and family.
In the past, says Palestinian behavioral psychologist Leila Atshan, people got married younger in unions traditionally arranged through their families.
"When people were just farmers, it was easier," she said. "They lived their lives around their extended family. They shared a house and everything else, but now there are concepts of privacy and concepts of modern life, cities, new demands on grooms."
And these days, most urban middle-class Palestinian males say they don't stand a chance of getting married. The Palestinian economy is a shambles, and they simply can't afford it.
'Nervous All the Time'
Shawki is a 30-year-old graduate student at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University. He makes $500 a month. It's enough for him to buy the snappy outfit he's wearing, but not enough to pay for a wedding, a dowry or even rent an apartment.
It's a midsummer Thursday night in Ramallah, a party night ahead of the Muslim Friday Sabbath. People feast and watch the fireworks. But for Shawki, the sound of celebration only heightens his frustration. He says it makes him more aggressive too.
"I'm nervous all the time. I begin hating people, even my friends," he said. "Of course I don't want to be a virgin, but I simply can't afford to marry."
Shawki's feelings are not uncommon, according to Atshan. "People get obsessed with whatever is prohibited, whether it is hunger for food or sexual deprivation."
She adds that Palestinian unemployment and an imploding economy "have caused a lot of communities to regress to being very conservative. Even social interaction
It's ironic that in a place where a couple holding hands in public is rated X, cell phone porn is on the rise.
Every week, says the graduate student Shawki, his phone announces new clips with a double beep. He says he watches them once, then deletes.
Suhaib, also a friend of Shawki's, is getting married in January, but it's hard for Shawki to feel happy.
"I promise you," he said. "The way things are going, I'm convinced I'll still [be] a virgin at 50."
Who marries their cousin for $4,000? see below
It is pathetic that almost 40 years after the USA landed on the moon, these goat fucks act this way.
Not even starting on 'honor killings' as if Abu has any honor, he just killed his daughter for being a lusty 19 year old girl.
HEY !!!!! goat humper, if your honor is dependent on someone else besides yourself, you got issues, buddy.
link
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=3370049&page=1
Sex and the Single Palestinian
Racy Cell Phone Clips, Longing and Waiting, for Men of Ramallah Seeking Love
Men in the Muslim world sometimes struggle when traditional values clash with the modern world of sex and technology like cell phones.
By MATT GUTMANRAMALLAH, West Bank, July 12, 2007
The four men are huddled over a cell phone screen. Its faint color splashes over the stairwell of a dingy shopping center in Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital.
In the 30-second video, a man pressures a young woman to perform a sex act. She appears to be a conservative, veiled Muslim, but grudgingly complies. The men watching shift their feet anxiously — being caught watching the clip would bring immediate disgrace.
The men, all in their late 20s, all considered middle-class professionals, watch with eyes sprung open, and with apparent self-disgust. It's the closest thing to sex they've ever had.
In a place where tradition prohibits premarital sex, young, frustrated men are increasingly turning to outlets like cell phone pornography. Some unmarried men seek out Ramallah's few prostitutes, but the vast majority remain virgins, bursting with pent-up sexual energy, until their wedding night.
Cell phones are selling at a blistering rate. Ramallah is packed with cell phone shops, offering not only the newest Nokia models but accessories like leather holsters and shiny, new touch pads. And the Palestinian Telecommunications Co., the primary cell provider in the West Bank and Gaza, has grown to become the largest stock traded on the Palestinian Securities Exchange, according to the PSE Web site.
Suhaib, 28, is a researcher for the Palestinian Authority. "When I first watched it," he said after leading this reporter back into a cafe, "it made me desire more and more and more. I felt ashamed by it, and I only watched each video once."
Marriage Prospects
Some of the porn comes from Ramallah and East Jerusalem, typically forwarded from acquaintance to acquaintance. Some of the clips come from as far away as Kuwait.
Unlike his friends, Suhaib is getting married in January. He's lucky. He'll marry his cousin, who is 14 years old. The family connection, he says, worked to his benefit.
"Because she's my cousin, they gave us a good price of $4,000 for the dowry. That's considered an average dowry these days," he said.
That's not all he had to pay. Grooms traditionally foot the bill for the customary gold that becomes a mother's heirloom to her children, the wedding feast and all the other wedding expenses.
Grooms' families used to chip in, but these days few can afford to help. In Gaza most Palestinians live on less than $2 a day, and unemployment hovers near 40 percent. It's not much better in the West Bank.
While the Palestinian society is more open than many others in the Middle East, there is still much frustration these days and not only for economic reasons, says Bassem Ezbidi, a political scientist at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University. "The political stalemate with Israel and internal violence between Hamas and Fatah also contribute."
Cell phone use has skyrocketed over the last five years, he says. His students often walk around with high-tech phones they can barely afford.
"The unfortunate part is they use the phones not to communicate, but to surf porn and download useless ringtones. It's raised issues at the university," where cell phone chatter and the constant beeping of messages have become a campuswide scourge, he says.
Back in the shopping center, the four men are done watching the porn clip. They head back inside to what they call a couples bar. Here men and women sit in darkened corners, close, but never touching. Just being here unchaperoned pushes the boundaries of acceptable social behavior.
Virgin at 50?
Muhammed and Muna are to marry next month. Muhammad is a construction worker who makes about $700 per month. They are not wealthy. They wanted a cheap wedding, but tradition and their parents compelled them to do otherwise. It's taken a toll on Muna, who unlike many other women here, married for love.
She says she feels nauseated when at home. "I fainted the other day from the pressure. They want Muhammad to incur all the expenses and to invite the whole village to the wedding." That's at least 2,000 people, she says, all of whom must be fed.
On the one hand, Muna considers herself a modern woman. She works and doesn't feel the need for a traditional celebration to mark her marriage. On the other hand, she says feels unable to buck tradition and family.
In the past, says Palestinian behavioral psychologist Leila Atshan, people got married younger in unions traditionally arranged through their families.
"When people were just farmers, it was easier," she said. "They lived their lives around their extended family. They shared a house and everything else, but now there are concepts of privacy and concepts of modern life, cities, new demands on grooms."
And these days, most urban middle-class Palestinian males say they don't stand a chance of getting married. The Palestinian economy is a shambles, and they simply can't afford it.
'Nervous All the Time'
Shawki is a 30-year-old graduate student at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University. He makes $500 a month. It's enough for him to buy the snappy outfit he's wearing, but not enough to pay for a wedding, a dowry or even rent an apartment.
It's a midsummer Thursday night in Ramallah, a party night ahead of the Muslim Friday Sabbath. People feast and watch the fireworks. But for Shawki, the sound of celebration only heightens his frustration. He says it makes him more aggressive too.
"I'm nervous all the time. I begin hating people, even my friends," he said. "Of course I don't want to be a virgin, but I simply can't afford to marry."
Shawki's feelings are not uncommon, according to Atshan. "People get obsessed with whatever is prohibited, whether it is hunger for food or sexual deprivation."
She adds that Palestinian unemployment and an imploding economy "have caused a lot of communities to regress to being very conservative. Even social interaction
It's ironic that in a place where a couple holding hands in public is rated X, cell phone porn is on the rise.
Every week, says the graduate student Shawki, his phone announces new clips with a double beep. He says he watches them once, then deletes.
Suhaib, also a friend of Shawki's, is getting married in January, but it's hard for Shawki to feel happy.
"I promise you," he said. "The way things are going, I'm convinced I'll still [be] a virgin at 50."
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Norwegian socialists
A couple of years ago I was in Bergen, Norway and took a tour bus one afternoon to get some local insight and see what to see.
Anyway, the tour guide proudly pointed out that in Norway 60% of the people worked for private enterprise and 40% worked for the Government**. Now that is goodness she exuded from her pores after telling us yanks that(and our wicked AngloSaxon capitalism).
[Me, I'm thinking so 60% of the blokes pay the wages of the other 40% (through taxes and government fees of course)]***
**no idea how the $ dollars from the 19 North Sea oil wells that Norway operates gets funneled through the coffers. I don't think oil pays for all the Govt. budget
***Now if I was in Sweden, I would have pointed out that per capita, the poorest state in in the USA Alabama or Mississippi has more disposable income than Sweden.
Anyway, the tour guide proudly pointed out that in Norway 60% of the people worked for private enterprise and 40% worked for the Government**. Now that is goodness she exuded from her pores after telling us yanks that(and our wicked AngloSaxon capitalism).
[Me, I'm thinking so 60% of the blokes pay the wages of the other 40% (through taxes and government fees of course)]***
**no idea how the $ dollars from the 19 North Sea oil wells that Norway operates gets funneled through the coffers. I don't think oil pays for all the Govt. budget
***Now if I was in Sweden, I would have pointed out that per capita, the poorest state in in the USA Alabama or Mississippi has more disposable income than Sweden.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Why President Bush is messing up!
The only way the USA should ever end a war is through Victory, nothing else. We do not toss away our sons and daughters lives and service to loose.
President Bush has not allowed our awesome US Military off the leash to persure and destroy our enemy's in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We should use all force available to eliminate islamo fascist in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also need to interdict Iran at every opportunity. Who will bet Iran will supply a nuke to enemies of Western Civilization?
Our Voice of America needs to be broadcasting all the facts. Truth is a myth. Granted all those leftists from Ivy League schools in the State Dept. and CIA are a hindrance, but we need a leader to punch through these roadblocks.
I recently finished a book about Somalia in 1993. A Somali stole a pair of sunglasses off the face of a US Marine. The Marine shot the Somali. Unfortunately the Marine was brought to trial. This is a mistake and whoever brought charges on the Marine endangered the lives of other Marines. Not shooting the Somali would have emboldened other Somali's to escalate aggression against our sons int the US Military.
To make the world safe we need to make sure those opposed to us know that we mean business and will use violence not dialog to get things done.
I love the Presidency of the US and President Bush is a good hearted man, but what is he thinking?
President Bush has not allowed our awesome US Military off the leash to persure and destroy our enemy's in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We should use all force available to eliminate islamo fascist in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also need to interdict Iran at every opportunity. Who will bet Iran will supply a nuke to enemies of Western Civilization?
Our Voice of America needs to be broadcasting all the facts. Truth is a myth. Granted all those leftists from Ivy League schools in the State Dept. and CIA are a hindrance, but we need a leader to punch through these roadblocks.
I recently finished a book about Somalia in 1993. A Somali stole a pair of sunglasses off the face of a US Marine. The Marine shot the Somali. Unfortunately the Marine was brought to trial. This is a mistake and whoever brought charges on the Marine endangered the lives of other Marines. Not shooting the Somali would have emboldened other Somali's to escalate aggression against our sons int the US Military.
To make the world safe we need to make sure those opposed to us know that we mean business and will use violence not dialog to get things done.
I love the Presidency of the US and President Bush is a good hearted man, but what is he thinking?
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Dating in Denmark
Gypping the from another site.
http://www.xmel.com/denmark_directory.html
I thought this was a good read and incite into Danish culture. Long though.
My Life in Denmark
I've lived in Denmark for six years now, and I like it very much. As an American, however, I am a perennial target for complaints about U.S. eating habits, George Bush's foreign policy, and the inappropriate behavior of characters on American sitcoms. Danes particularly enjoy delivering these lectures when I have a beer in my hand and am trying to relax.
Needless to say, I have my own issues with Danish culture, and in fine American fashion, I have figured out a way to make money off them. The articles below appeared first appeared in BT, Denmark's most widely circulated tabloid newspaper.
When I first came to Denmark
two years ago, people kept asking me what I thought about Danish men. It seemed like a weird question. Why didn't they ask what I thought about Danish weather (bad) or Danish food (bad), or, for that matter, Danish women and children? (very nice, in my experience).
I soon learned their interest in Danish men was a variation on the famous German saying: Man spricht uber das, was man nicht hat. (You talk about what you don't have.) There are NOT a lot of men in Denmark, although there is quite a bounty of tall, timid boys.
While the culture of egalitarianism has done some great things for Denmark - where else will you see tattooed musclemen pushing baby carriages? - it has led to a terrific siphoning off of testosterone. Danish men seem too timid to do anything that makes men men, such as taking risks, taking initiative, or enjoying the pure thrill of the chase. Don't return a Frenchman's calls, and he will become intrigued and pursue you until the end of the Earth. Don't return a Dane's phone call (singular) and he will forget the whole thing.
Either that, or worse, he will sit home and sulk about it. Last year, I briefly dated a good-looking triathlete, a guy with a hot job and a fancy car, the kind of guy that in New York would have arrogance preceding him into the room like a bad after shave. Three days after a single unreturned phone call, I got a tremulous email from him.
You haven't called I wonder if this is because you don't like me please , if I am bothering you, let me know.
For a girl used to American macho, this was about as expected like John Wayne asking for second coat of nail polish.
This is not to say that American men are perfect: they wear baseball caps everywhere but the shower, and their idea of child care often involves letting the child sit beside them while they watch basketball on TV.
But I've done a lot of travelling, and I must say that the relations between the sexes in Denmark are the strangest I've ever seen. The women do everything: they initiate, they seduce, they even get on top, and the men seem to expect it. "I want to be scored," a drunken colleague once confessed to me. Imagine John Wayne saying that.
I know that when you choose to live in a foreign country, as I have, you must learn to adapt to local culture. I have learned that expecting a door to be held open for me is an invitation to get hit in the face with a door. I have struggled home with large packages while male neighbors just cheerfully wave hello. Wearing high heels and a skirt, I have wrestled my bike out from a pile of collapsed junkers while hefty workmen smoked cigarettes against the bike rack.
But I don't know if ever get used to the timidity factor. Three months ago, my co-workers set me up on a blind date with a 36-year old man Danish man who had built a successful international company. We arranged to meet in a small cafe downtown, and since I was there a bit early, I got a cup of coffee and sat alone at a table near the door. Apart from the waiter and a group of elderly Swedes, I was the only one in the place.
My date arrived on time, and when I saw him coming through the door, I was pleased. He was a real looker, tall and athletic. He saw me, smiled, and went to the bar. Fair enough, I thought. He'll order himself a cup of coffee, and then come sit down.
And he did sit down. He sat down at the bar, and took to looking out the doorway.
He sat there. I sat there. He sat there, staring out the door.
Could he not see me? Did he think I was late? Was he waiting for somebody better to come along?
Or, as I now suspect, was he simply waiting for me to make the first move? Was he waiting for me to get up from the table where I was sitting, walk across the room (carrying my unfinished coffee), and introduce myself?
Sadly, I'll never know, because after the 15 minutes it took me to figure out what was required of me, Mr. Wonderful got up and left.
What do I think of Danish men? I have heard that they are wonderful, that they are warm, funny, thoughtful, and sexy. I hear that they are the prototype for men of the 21st century. I am looking forward to meeting one.
On my very first night in Copenhagen,
I went with an American girlfriend to a downtown discoteque. I'm a blonde, and she's an attractive blackwoman, so you could say we had something for every taste.
We sat at a table roughly the size of a pizza. Three men sat across from us, a distance of approximately 25 centimeters. For an hour. Without saying anything. I think Zulus or spacemen would have found some way to communicate with us, but this was apparently beyond the capability of three well-educated Danes.
Finally, fortified by gin and tonics, we spoke to them first, and they turned out to be nice guys. But that was a lucky night: Since moving here, I have been to many a discoteque where women shake their booty with their girfriends for hours while men watch with pretend disinterest from the sidelines, their eyes radiating invisible beams of desire: Please, miss, ask me to dance.
How do Danish men and women meet each other? I know it happens; the streets are full of Danish babies. But much like other reported miracles, such as Christ walking on water or an American president delivering a speech he wrote himself, it's something I've never seen with my own eyes.
For one thing, Danish people seem to think that talking to strangers is uncouth. Ask Danish men why they don't chat up women, and they say that women don't want to be approached. They'll make fun of you; they'll think you're desperate. They'll think you want something from them.
What men want of course, is the same thing that has produced a world population currently in excess of 6 billion. Most women want the same thing, although they'd probably like it to last longer than three minutes. Yet you see Danish men and women in parks in the summer, sitting alone on blankets, or in cafes in the winter surrounded by their buddies or girlfriends with their hair carefully gelled, lonely and horny but contemptous of anyone who dares to approach.
The icebreaker of course, is alcohol, and I have little doubt that if it vanished from the Earth tomorrow Danes would never reproduce. It didn't take me long to learn that in Danish parties and nightclubs, there was a window of time, roughly from 1am to 3am, where social intereaction was possible. Before 1am, Danish men weren't drunk enough to talk, and after 3, they were too drunk to talk.
Extreme drunkness seems to be the accepted way to meet that special someone, as explained to me in the days when I still was seeking a Danish boyfriend.
"What you do," a Danish girlfriend explained to me, "is you get trashed and go home with somebody. Then in the morning you decide if you want to be boyfriend and girlfriend."
This one-night stand culture is very difficult for foreigners to understand. One-night stands certainly take place in the US, but it is something unusual and embarassing, like making a lot of money in Denmark.
Here, drunken sex with a complete stranger seems to be the hopeful prelude to a serious relationship, possibly marriage. If children result from this, it is hard to imagine what their parents tell them about the night Mom and Dad first met. My grandparents once told me that they met outside a Depression-era dance hall, since my unemployed grandmother didn't have the 10 cents necessary to get in, but maybe I just didn't hear the whole story.
Which leads me back to dancing. Here is what I have learned: in Denmark, it is bad manners to ask a girl to dance, but it is good manners to get very drunk, make sure she is drunk too, and ask her to come back to your place. She will quite likely say yes, if only in a misguided audition for the role of girlfriend, leaving you both a little sad and bitter the next morning.
Long ago, before I ever thought of living here, a Danish woman told me that her country was a place with a lot of sex but not very much love. I wonder.
When Danish right-wing nutcasePia Kjaersgaard
went on one of her rants about how most foreigners in Denmark were criminals, my friends and I were furious. Here we were, foreigners, and we were clearly not getting our cut of the criminal millions being made on the streets of Copenhagen. All we did was go to work every day and pay Danish taxes. We figured we had better get started.
After considering a variety of profitable crimes, we decided on a male prostitution ring, with the idea that our workers could do internal projects on slow nights. But our male escorts would not provide sex: that was too easy to get in Denmark.
Instead, they would offer romance. Specially imported from Mediterranean countries, these Romeos would bring flowers, write poetry, and say things like "Your eyes are like the ocean." In short, they would do things that Danish men wouldn't consider even if it would give the local Copenhagen team an instant victory over the German national squad.
Foreign men play a curious role in the world of Danish romance, since they can sometimes make a Danish woman realize exactly what she is missing: those longing looks, those sweet words, that masculine worship that makes her feel so wonderfully female. A man in Madrid once told me that Danish girls on vacation were easy. Well, no wonder. Nobody's said anything nice to them in years.
Take a deep breath, everybody, but in the world outside of Denmark, florists are not just for buying a centerpiece for Aunt Bente's Sunday lunch. They are for sending roses to your wife or girlfriend, and in France, to your mistress too. In foreign lands, men buy women jewelry and furs to win their favors: they open doors and carry furniture. Some even earn a lot of money and pay all of the household expenses.
Sometimes Danish women capture these men alive and bring them back to Denmark, where the government punishes them by making them sit through infinate Danish courses and refusing to allow the couple to live in sublet apartments. I suspect that the new restrictions on marriage to foreigners are just Pia's sour grapes about ending up with a Danish husband.
Of course, there are already a large variety of foreign men available right here in Denmark. Many are tall, dark, and handsome, many are Muslim, and many are lovely people - one of my closest friends in Denmark now has a Pakistani boyfriend who treats her like a queen.
That said, one of the sad lessons of a multicultural society is that assholes come in every color. I'm ashamed to agree with Pia about anything, but there are, unfortunately, some "new Danes" who cannot understand the difference between an ordinary blonde girl on the street and the blond bimbo they saw soaping her plastic breasts on cable access TV late Friday night. Some of them see Danish girlfriends as temps until their future Mrs. Muslim right comes along. I've fallen for this one myself; it took me a while to figure out why the sweet Muslim surgeon I was dating would never introduce me to his friends, and always wanted to sit at the very back of cafes.
I have met these embarrassments-to-Allah; I have occasionally removed their hands from my inner thigh on the dance floor at the Copenhagen Jazzhouse. (In one particular case, I handled the situation New York fashion, firmly grasping the gentleman's hand and bending it back so far I almost broke his finger. He won't try that again.) Anyway, these jerks do more than cause bad karma between "new Danes" and standard Danes. They get in the way of truly nice immigrant guys getting laid.
Maybe, instead of importing romantic manpower, we could train Danish men to do better. Instead of those scuba courses they're so fond of, Danish guys could be sent on kissing courses to France, or seduction courses in Italy. Since I like a man who stands up for himself, even when confronted with lunatics carrying lethal weapsons, I might even suggest "misguided macho" courses in the USA.
In return, Danish men could provide exchange courses in the things they do well: housecleaning, meal preparation, child care. Forget Danish foreign aid - this is what would really win Denmark a place in the hearts of the world's women. And, darling Pia, it just might cut the immigration rate. Plenty of men will choose another destination when they find out that in Denmark, they must help do the dishes.
Americans can't be prissy, can they? After all, we invented Las Vegas.
So why am I so shocked at the debauchery of a Danish corporate Christmas party?
It's not the drinking that shocks me - God knows, Danish people do that all year - or even the sex. I think it's the proximity of work and sex. In a land with few limits, Americans draw a firm line between work and sex, based on the (rather prissy) notion that no one should have to put up with sexual come-ons or even sexual talk in order to keep a job, and that anyone who does should be compensated with a hefty legal settlement. All I can think about at a Danish Christmas party is how much an American lawyer could earn off the proceedings. One stalk of corporate mistletoe, I am sure, would generate more than enough business for him to redecorate his office with the high-priced furniture at Illums Bolighus and his wife with silver from George Jensen.
This American concept of sexual harassment has been difficult to explain to my Danish male co-workers, who like to tell saucy jokes in the office, and whose hands have occasionally ended up attached to my hair, shoulders, and bottom until I threaten to call an American lawyer. For them, I offer this easy-to-follow rule: Anything I might want to discuss with, say, male model Oliver Bjerrehus in a jacuzzi over two flutes of champagne, I do not want to discuss with you, married father of four, over six pages of computer printouts on letterhead. Anything I might want to do with Oliver by candlelight, I do not want to do with you by fluorescent light. It's that simple.
The overfamiliarity between co-workers is just one of the reasons Christmas partys are difficult for foreigners. The structure of the party, the long tables and the fixed seats, is a challenge in itself. At American parties, the format is loose and everybody mingles, which allows one to break free of a bore with a number of convenient excuses, such as Hey! Isn't that my plastic surgeon over there? I must say hi. At a Danish Christmas party, you sit at a seat assigned to you by luck of the draw or cruel party planners and are expected to chat for seven hours.
What do Danish people say to each other for seven hours at those tables? Of course, I know what two close friends say to each other, but what about people who have nothing in common but a copy machine? All of a sudden, those dull people from the back of the office, those people you've avoided all year, are your companions in fate for the evening. This is where snaps comes in. I feel confident that the tradition of heavy schnapps drinking at Christmas parties can be traced to a Viking forced to sit next to the dull guy from the back oars he'd been avoiding all year. Schnapps must be the only way to get through Hour 3 of hearing about a stranger's pets, office feuds or summer-house redecoration.
Snaps is also just the beginning of an enjoyable program of Danish food. Question: do foreigners like Danish food? Answer: Is there a fast food chain with "Golden Ds" serving "Dyrelaegen's Natmal" (pork paste and raw gelatin) to customers all over the world? Of course, the Christmas party has its own delicacies, most of which, taken off the table and reassembled like a puzzle, would form a large, live, and angry pig. Except, of course, for the parts which are herring. When you are a foreigner, Danish people thrill to making you try everything, the odder the better, and watching your reaction when you discover that there is an extra layer of pork paste underneath the bacon and mushrooms. If other foreigners are reading this, the secret is to take small bites of everything and smile a lot. When fellow partygoers are distracted, you can soak up the alcohol in your stomach with bread and butter.
After the almond has been found in the ris a la mande and the snaps topped off with wine and aquavit, the Viking drinking songs begin. Drinking songs seem to be the only modern remnant of Viking culture, except for the way Danish people behave in the bike lanes at rush hour, where they will use their bells with all the ferocity of an ax if you don't move into the right lane fast enough. At any rate, everyone but you will know all the words to these songs, and enjoy singing them enough not to notice you are sitting against the back wall looking confused. For foreigners, it is time to go to the loo and pretend to wash your hands for about an hour.
By the time you get back, the deejay will be playing. This is a mixed blessing, since from what I can tell, there is a paragraph in the Danish constitution that requires Danish deejays to play George Michael every five songs. But loud music means that you no longer have to pretend to talk to the people next to you, and, freed from your chair, you can shift around and talk to the people you actually like. A few courageous souls start the dancing, mostly women, along a few sad men in elf hats who don't realize that apart from a bow tie, no garment cuts your score potential more than an elf hat. Every once in a while the deejay plays an old Danish Eurovision song contest entry, and then it becomes easy to tell the locals from the foreigners again. The Danes are the ones on their feet in ecstatic remembrance, while the foreigners are sitting down looking bewildered, wondering when George Michael will come back.
By this point in the evening, those people who plan to score have chosen their target, and perhaps even their location. This, in particular, has always confused me - I mean, I've certainly dated people I've met in the office, but I've always dated, and slept with them, outside the office as opposed to within it. But Christmas party stories are always rife with tales about ping-pong tables, bathroom stalls and the boss's desk. Some people leave together, but even at home and in bed, I have to wonder how much fun this drunken sex can possibly be. How much sexual technique can these snaps-soaked middle managers have to offer? For the women, it must be about as erotic as having the statue of Bishop Absaolm fall on top of you.
The real challenge of the company Christmas party is the first day back at work afterwards, when you are required to take the middle managers' opinions on sales strategy and corporate downsizing seriously again. You'll get little help from the managers themselves, who will be avoiding your eyes, knowing perfectly well that you saw them dancing in their shorts and elf hat to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go just a few days before. Years ago, before my very first Christmas party, I was told that people would go wild at the party but then forget the whole thing the next day. That's what's supposed to happen. Somehow, nobody ever does.
As distressed as I am that I may never get a chance to date Crown Prince Frederik,
I'm happy that he has found love with Australian lawyer Mary Donaldson. She's seems to be a lovely women - although, Mary, it isn't really fair to go running back to your sunny homeland during the worst months of the Danish winter.
It seems that the only thing Mary still needs to work on is her command of Danish, and anecdotal reports indicate she is struggling. Every foreigner in Denmark sympathises with her. Danish, to a newcomer, can be overwhelming.
So let me offer a solution: I'll teach Mary Danish. Having been in Denmark for more than two years now, I speak it reasonably well, except when a policeman stops me on my bicycle, upon which time I speak only very complicated English. But most of the time, at work and at parties and while trying to get the immigration department to let me stay here and pay more even Danish taxes, I speak Danish.
Frederik loves Mary.
Of course, during that two years I've made some pretty big mistakes. Like, for example, the time when I was forced to quickly leave a sublet apartment, and told everybody that I was not thrown out (smidt ud) but thrown out the window (kastet ud.) Or like the time I went past the Fødevareministeriet (Agricultural Ministry) and, getting fødevarer confused with fodtøj, wondered why Denmark had such a big ministry for shoes.
But I'm sure I'll be a better teacher than the government-funded Danish-language schools I went through. Their programs were clearly designed for a 1963 type of immigrant: one made us repeat over and over, supposedly as a pronunciation drill, "Jeg arbejder på en fabrik i Vanløse." ("I work in a factory on the outskirts of town.") They also insist on lumping candidates from all countries in a single class, being politically unwilling to accept that someone from Sweden might learn Danish a little faster than someone from Korea. As each day's class enters its third hour, the Swedish girl is drawing pictures in her notebook, while the guy from Korea is lost and gradually losing the will to live.
So we'll work one-on-one. Written Danish won't be too hard; it's straightforward, and free of all the kaleidoscopic verb endings of Spanish and French, and the silly old-fashioned spellings of English.
Unfortunately, written Danish has absolutely nothing to do with spoken Danish. Danes, in a salute to Scandinavian minimalism, say only part of each word. Thus, what looks in your workbook like "Hvad hedder du?" ("What is your name?") is actually pronounced "Hv' hed' du?" Learning to understand spoken Danish is learning to guess which part of the spoken word is missing.
While you're trying to learn to understand spoken Danish, the best people to listen to are other foreigners. Other foreigners, in their ignorance, say entire Danish words. You'll be pleased to know that one of the first Danish speakers I could understand was your prospective father-in-law, Prince Henrik. Danes hate the way he speaks Danish, but that's because he says the entire word, every time. If you'd rather not practice on him, try the nice Pakistani lady at the kiosk. Not being Danish, she will speak a Danish you can understand.
I can also recommend watching hand puppets on television - since they have no real mouths, whomever is speaking for them needs to enunciate very well - as well as speeches by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is so desperate to cover his Jutland accent that he speaks very, very slowly. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister. Anything on TV in Danish with Danish-language subtitles for the deaf is also good. If all Danes came equipped with subtitles, life would be much easier for foreigners.
Anyway, you might as well take mumbling as an advantage and mumble yourself. It makes it a lot harder for people to tell if you are making mistakes. I find it a particularly effective way of hiding my problems with adjective endings, i.e. the correct “hver dag” or the incorrect “hvere dag.” (By the way, “hverdage” (week days) does not really mean “hver dag” (every day of the week), as I found out when I tried to go to a “Åben hverdage” supermarket on a Sunday). At any rate, you will often be surprised to find Danes themselves differing about spelling and other points of language: Danish may be formalised in books, but in daily use it is less so, perhaps because until recently no one has had the bother of teaching it to many foreigners.
Small disputes aside, the Danish language generally reflects the homogeny and harmony of Danish culture. That means no one ever says anything too definitively, for fear of having an unpopular opinion and being forced to back down.
For example, if something is good, you would say in English that you definitely and positively like it, but in Danish you will say that you kan lide it, directly translated as you can suffer it. This construction keeps Danes from being unfashionably enthusiastic about things, and thereby assuming their opinion is more valuable than others, as proscribed by the Jantelov.
Also keep in mind non-committal phrases like i mine øjne (in my eyes), kunne godt være (could well be), and the all-time favourite, blandt andre (among other things). Blandt andre should be added to the end of every list to make sure no one will ever be able to accuse you of leaving something off the list. For example, if you are making a list of the most attractive princes in Europe, you could say something like, "Prince William of England, Prince Felipe of Spain, and Prince Carl Philip of Sweden, blandt andre." This will help you at home.
But, in case the Queen would prefer to have someone else teach you Danish, let me just leave you with some tips. Watch the "o" and "ø" - for example, the "Mønster Bageri" near my home is trying to tell people that it is an excellent bakery, not that it is full of monsters. Be careful about words that sound similar: after hearing a safety announcement on the 2A bus, I once tried to explain to a deaf old lady that "en tyver" (a twenty-five cent piece, as opposed to "tyv," a thief) was stealing passengers' purses. And take special care when you use "dufte" (smell good) and "lugte" (smell bad) It's the same word - "smell" - in English, but people get real mad if you tell you can "lugte" the dinner they spent all day preparing.
Actually, there is a secret to learning Danish quickly, but it would horrify every Dane. That said, it assisted me enormously with grammar, vocabulary and comprehension. I might never have learned Danish without it. The terrible secret is: Learn German first. If you can speak English and German, functional Danish is only a few months of practice away.
To truly know a country, you must get to know its people.
Not just ordinary people, the butcher and the baker and the sulking lady at the sausage stand, but its famous people.
On this basis, I am integrating very badly. I simply cannot tell Danish celebrities apart. Of course, the Royal Family and their troubles are familiar to anyone who stands in line for groceries, but the others all blend together for me in a sea of teeth and hair.
It's confusing and isolating, being outside the local currents of fame. Magazines run in-depth profiles of Danish actresses disclosing their new, intimate secrets when I don't even know their old, intimate secrets. The Big Brother celebrity house looked exactly like any other Big Brother house to me. And out in public, I have often witnessed the Danish people around me are getting very, very excited by someone who looks to me like a well-dressed bus driver.
Not famous, just Danish.
I've tried to catch up. Recently, I did what thousands of Danes do every week - I bought one of the supermarket gossip magazines. (At least, I hear that thousands of Danes buy supermarket gossip magazines every week. I never see them reading them. In cafes and other places where people can see them, they always seem to be reading the very smallest print in the intellectual newspaper Information.)
Anyway, after flipping through the pictures and reading the rather short articles, I realized that apart from the Royal Family, the weekly magazines have three basic themes: pregnancies, premieres, and TV hosts. Sometimes they report on pregnant TV hosts attending premieres.
I didn't recognize the hosts, since there is so much terrible American TV available in Denmark that I rarely watch terrible Danish TV. But I did learn a lot of interesting things from the magazines. Did you know, for example, that Birgitte Nielsen has had pretty much the same hairstyle since Ronald Reagan was president? (She also seems have been wearing the same black mini-dress - perhaps she uses that detergent advertised to keep black from fading.)
Furthermore, if Denmark ever faces attack from the air, we will all be able to protect ourselves with a shield made from Princess Alexandra's fancy hats.
But the gossip magazines were no help with Danish celebrities who had been out of the public eye for awhile. Just the other day, my colleagues rushed to the window of our office building to see someone passing on the street outside. It turned out to be the former Danish foreign minister Uffe Elleman Jensen, who in person looks a lot like an elderly, balding man.
I think the main problem is that Danish celebrities are Danish - that is, they are modest, gentle, and eager to fit in. In New York, picking out a celebrity is easy. Someone like the rapper P.Diddy can be counted on to have a car the size of a small yacht, be wearing a canary-yellow business suit and at least a kilogram of jewelry, and be surrounded by an entourage of 60. If you were surrounded by an entourage of 60 in some small Danish towns, there would be no one left to admire you and your entourage.
It's the same thing with Danish sports stars. American athletes look like living cartoons, the football stars as wide and thick as refrigerators, the basketball stars as tall as trees. Danish handball and badminton players look like ordinary Danish guys, if in slightly better shape.
In fact, when I first arrived in Denmark, some guy-in-good-shape tried to impress me by telling me he had once played for FCK. He didn't look particularly impressive, I had no idea what an FCK was, and Americans don't care that much for soccer anyway - when the movie "Bend It Like Beckham" was released, the reviewers had to explain who Beckham was. Anyway, I failed to fall off my chair with excitement, and Mr. FCK went away with his ball intact and his ego bruised.
This is one of the great ironies of celebrities everywhere. They say they want to be treated just like ordinary people, but they are horrified if you do. If you ever want to hurt a celebrity's feelings, pretend not to recognize him.
Which does not mean that they will return the favor. Since I do some work in the dance world, I have met choreographer Alexander Kolpin on at least six occasions. He can never remember having met me before.
After the third or fourth time of staring into his handsome, empty eyes, I began to play a fun game. Each new time I'm introduced, I gave him a brand new name. "Hi, I'm Suzie," I'll say. "Hi, I'm Michelle," I'll say the next time.
He has never noticed the difference. I plan to work my way up to statements like, "Hi, I'm Lucifer, the prince of evil and darkness," and "Hi, I'm Marilyn Monroe," just to see at what point he notices that there is a person on the end of the hand he is shaking.
To be honest, I am getting pretty good at recognizing Danish movie stars, assisted by the fact that the same six or seven people star seem to star in every Danish movie. I'm also getting good at recognizing Danish music. By the time Aqua broke up, I knew them so well that I was able to jump up and turn off the radio within the first two bars of any of their songs.
Now rap is big in Denmark, and tall blond men wear "do-rags," designed to assist in the difficult maintenance of African hair. My friends tell me these men are very talented, but, frankly, I want to hear Danes rap in English about as much as you want to hear Jennifer Lopez struggle her way through the Danish national anthem.
Still, I was excited when I thought I had recognized one of the Danish rappers at a party. He was a handsome guy in his early 20s with blond dreadlocks, and the girls were wild about him. "Which record is his?" I whispered to one of them.
"He's not a musician," she told me. "He sells pants at Illums."
"We all love him," she added. "We make him bend down and get pants off the bottom shelf."
So perhaps celebrity is relative. You can be known worldwide, you can be known in Denmark, or you could be known in the pants department at Illums. You could be David Beckham and be able to walk down the streets of Kansas City unnoticed. No matter how many people know you, there will always be some people who don't know you.
After two years in Denmark, I can recognize both the Royal Family and the lady at the sausage stand, and that will have to do for now.
I must admit I envy Danesat vacation time.
They have so much of it, and it must be so much easier to travel when your country hasn't started any wars lately. But I have a lot of trouble understanding how they use it. They seem to be on an endless search for other Denmarks with better weather.
There is no Jantelov when it comes to comparing Denmark with other countries. I have seen Danish women furious when men in Italy and Spain flirt and flatter and generally act like Italian and Spanish men, instead of their wimpy Danish counterparts. If only men here respected women, like they do in Denmark.
Danes shake their heads at drunks sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City - If only they had social workers to help them, like we do in Denmark - and at veiled ladies in Africa. If only they could wear what's in the weekly ladies' magazines, like we do in Denmark.
In general, they feel a quiet shock and pity for anyone who can't eat fried fish balls and watch Danish reality television. Why can't everyone be tolerant and open-minded, like we are in Denmark?
So why leave Denmark at all? Well, there is the weather, although I have never understood why Danish people insist on traveling during the summer, in the only few weeks of the year when the weather in Denmark is any good. November in Copenhagen is dreadful, March is a misery, but in July, Copenhagen's Ørested Park is one of the prettiest places on the planet.
But good weather in Denmark is an exception, and no one ever seems to suggest Danish weather serve as a model for anywhere else. In fact, it makes Danish tourists easy to spot during the winter months: they are the ones standing in the airport parking lot in Tenerife with their faces up to the sun, trying to get the last drops of light before they board the plane.
This, I think accounts for the eternal popularity of Australia, which can be counted on to be sunny. It has other things in common with Denmark, too - lots of athletic, blond people, an endless supply of beer, and even its own Jantelov, in the form of a Tall Poppy Syndrome. (A friend of mine once tried to mail an important letter first class letter in Australia; "Only one class here, mate," the postal clerk told him.)
Most Danes have been to the United States too, and I always quiver a little when they start to tell their America stories. Did they have a good time? Or am I about to have to apologize for something?
Fortunately, most of the time they've enjoyed themselves and my fellow Americans have been pleasant. In fact, most Danes seem pleased by the willingness with which Americans will strike up conversations, say, in the line at the supermarket, although they always seem slightly hurt that these supermarket-line relationships turn out to be so short-term and superficial. ("And then checkout lady said, How are you today? But she didn't really care about me.")
I've actually enjoyed vacationing a lot more since I've come to Denmark, in part because I've learned Danish, a great a secret code language when traveling abroad. Incomprehensible to anyone but Norwegians and sharp-eared Swedes, it makes the communication of sensitive information easy and fun. "Do not buy that. That is clearly not an authentic ancient papyrus," you can tell your friend in at Egypt bazaar. Or, in a bar in Italy, "Buy him a drink if you insist, but that's all you're getting. The man is clearly gay."
Of course, this technique works a lot better in Texas or Tokyo than it does in London, and if you guess wrong about who speaks Danish you can easily get your block knocked off. Especially since, as an American, I am constitutionally required to speak very loud. But it's a good concept all the same.
Secret language or not, Danish will soon be heard in the campgrounds of South France, on the beaches of Thailand, and in the supermarkets of Mallorca, for the Danish summer vacation season has begun. Danes will be opening their hearts and minds to exotic cultures (while hanging out with any Swedes or Norwegians they may happen to meet) and secretly checking out foreign newspapers in the hope that the weather is really bad back home.
I must admit I envy Danesat vacation time.
They have so much of it, and it must be so much easier to travel when your country hasn't started any wars lately. But I have a lot of trouble understanding how they use it. They seem to be on an endless search for other Denmarks with better weather.
There is no Jantelov when it comes to comparing Denmark with other countries. I have seen Danish women furious when men in Italy and Spain flirt and flatter and generally act like Italian and Spanish men, instead of their wimpy Danish counterparts. If only men here respected women, like they do in Denmark.
Danes shake their heads at drunks sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City - If only they had social workers to help them, like we do in Denmark - and at veiled ladies in Africa. If only they could wear what's in the weekly ladies' magazines, like we do in Denmark.
In general, they feel a quiet shock and pity for anyone who can't eat fried fish balls and watch Danish reality television. Why can't everyone be tolerant and open-minded, like we are in Denmark?
So why leave Denmark at all? Well, there is the weather, although I have never understood why Danish people insist on traveling during the summer, in the only few weeks of the year when the weather in Denmark is any good. November in Copenhagen is dreadful, March is a misery, but in July, Copenhagen's Ørested Park is one of the prettiest places on the planet.
But good weather in Denmark is an exception, and no one ever seems to suggest Danish weather serve as a model for anywhere else. In fact, it makes Danish tourists easy to spot during the winter months: they are the ones standing in the airport parking lot in Tenerife with their faces up to the sun, trying to get the last drops of light before they board the plane.
This, I think accounts for the eternal popularity of Australia, which can be counted on to be sunny. It has other things in common with Denmark, too - lots of athletic, blond people, an endless supply of beer, and even its own Jantelov, in the form of a Tall Poppy Syndrome. (A friend of mine once tried to mail an important letter first class letter in Australia; "Only one class here, mate," the postal clerk told him.)
Most Danes have been to the United States too, and I always quiver a little when they start to tell their America stories. Did they have a good time? Or am I about to have to apologize for something?
Fortunately, most of the time they've enjoyed themselves and my fellow Americans have been pleasant. In fact, most Danes seem pleased by the willingness with which Americans will strike up conversations, say, in the line at the supermarket, although they always seem slightly hurt that these supermarket-line relationships turn out to be so short-term and superficial. ("And then checkout lady said, How are you today? But she didn't really care about me.")
I've actually enjoyed vacationing a lot more since I've come to Denmark, in part because I've learned Danish, a great a secret code language when traveling abroad. Incomprehensible to anyone but Norwegians and sharp-eared Swedes, it makes the communication of sensitive information easy and fun. "Do not buy that. That is clearly not an authentic ancient papyrus," you can tell your friend in at Egypt bazaar. Or, in a bar in Italy, "Buy him a drink if you insist, but that's all you're getting. The man is clearly gay."
Of course, this technique works a lot better in Texas or Tokyo than it does in London, and if you guess wrong about who speaks Danish you can easily get your block knocked off. Especially since, as an American, I am constitutionally required to speak very loud. But it's a good concept all the same.
Secret language or not, Danish will soon be heard in the campgrounds of South France, on the beaches of Thailand, and in the supermarkets of Mallorca, for the Danish summer vacation season has begun. Danes will be opening their hearts and minds to exotic cultures (while hanging out with any Swedes or Norwegians they may happen to meet) and secretly checking out foreign newspapers in the hope that the weather is really bad back home.
My Danish has improved, thanks to weekly private lessons in my apartment from my tutor, Eva Olsen. The official language of the 5 million residents of Denmark is Danish, and speaking, reading, and writing Danish is not enormously difficult. What's hard is understanding what the hell people are saying. Danes stay true to Scandinavian minimalism by pronouncing only a portion of each word. For example, "What is your name?" or "Hvad hedder du?" is pronounced "Ve' he' du'?"
For the first year, I understood no one but professionals paid to ennunciate - mostly TV newsreaders and hand puppets.
Denmark is a lovely country, but it is not very diverse. Almost all the men are named Christian, Mads, or Anders, which is why there are so many last names like Christiansen, Madsen, and Andersen. As a matter of fact, foreigners here joke that you can crash any party by saying, "I'm a friend of Christian and Mads." There is ALWAYS someone named Christian or Mads at the party.
The Danes are famous for their open-mindedness, but what they really mean is We are open to anyone who is exactly like us. I went to a job interview recently - the ad specifically said they were open to hiring foreigners - but when I turned up they rejected me because I spoke Danish with an accent. We are open to hiring all foreigners who speak Danish with no accent.
It is difficult for an American, from a relatively new and multi-cultural society,to understand the level of groupthink among people who have lived together in the same place for a thousand years. For example, there is a tacit agreement to dress for the time of year, not for the weather. If it is rainy and cold in July, Danish women will still wear tiny sundresses: to wear a sweater would be to imply that the Danish weather is lousy. (Danish weather IS lousy.)
Then there are the delicate politics of wearing a winter hat. There seems to be a certain date in the fall when one may start wearing a hat: I have no idea when it is, but I do know that wear a hat before that date is to withstand a hundred looks of silent disapproval. We are not wearing Our hats yet. Suddenly, though, Hat Day arrives, and five million hats sprout on the heads of five million Danes. Why aren't You wearing Your hat?
Danish men are very pleasant, and perfectly willing to do half of the housework, but these charming traits seem to be linked to a low testosterone level. Women do most of the calling for dates, and are even required to ask the men to dance at nightclubs. You'll often find a Danish disco full of women dancing alone, watched from the sidelines by lonely, passion-filled men, terrified behind stiff smiles as their eyes send out invisible out rays of desire: Please, Miss, ask me to dance.
Fortunately, there is a mitigating factor, and that is alcohol. Generally, you can count on Danish men at any given gathering to be moody and silent for the first couple of hours, or at least untll the first rounds of Tuborg kick in. At that time, around the third hour, they are become friendly and sweet, with a slight tendancy to tell their life stories to strangers. (I once thought that this life story business indicated a man's desire to date me; sadly, it indicates only a desire to tell me his life story.) By hours four, five, and six, they are sloppy drunk and interested only, as the Danish term goes, in "scorer damen."
If the women, who have also had plenty of beer by this time, are willing, new couples depart to whomever's apartment is closest. The next morning, they decide if they would like to see more of each other.
Suffice to say that if alcohol disappeared tomorrow, the Danes would never reproduce
I've seen Crown Prince Frederik only once, in the lobby of a theater during the peformance of a ballet. He was not very interested in the ballet, and was instead hanging out in the lobby eating licorice fish from a plastic bag.
There was a crowd in the lobby - it really wasn't a very good ballet - so I couldn't get too near, but did I walked past him about 50 times trying to get his attention. I got absolutely no reaction from Frederik, but the guy standing next to him did notice and was very flattered.
Anyway, Frederik is considering marrying a girl from Australia (whom, according to press reports, made the first move.) Royal watchers assumed at that Frederik would avoid having her visit Denmark while the weather was bad - ie in September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, July, or August - for fear this might diminish whatever interest she had in being Crown Princess.
But the gossips were wrong - he did bring her to Denmark, for several grey days around New Years' Eve. For "security reasons," however, she was not allowed to leave the palace. Perhaps the royal courtiers papered the interiors of the windows with sunny pictures; perhaps Frederik simply permitted himself a royal lie, such as "Wow, the weather's usually much better than this."
Questions and Answers about Living in Denmark
Of all the things I've posted on this website, nothing has brought in more comments than My Life in Denmark.
I get support from other foreigners in Denmark, and queries from people thinking of coming here. I get a few laughing Danish men who see themselves in Danish Men: Not John Wayne, and the occasional angry Danish man who tells me to get the hell out of his country if I don't like wimps.
Anyway, most of the questions were pretty standard, so I decided to put together a Q&A for Foreigners Coming to Denmark. I hope this answers the basic questions, even for people too lazy or shy to email me.
A blue "clip card", which can be used on Copenhagen's metro, buses, and trains, including the train from the airport. I recommend buying one as soon as you arrive.
What type of clothes should I bring?
The Danish weather can go from freezing to broiling and then back again within a few hours, so layers are your best bet. Bring lots of sweaters and at least one waterproof jacket. Most Danes own a whole set of "rain clothes," a sort of waterproof jogging outfit. For winter, you'll need warm scarves and a warm coat - a short one is more practical, since many people get around on their bikes all winter long. (Fur is entirely acceptable in Denmark).
Even for summer, plan on bringing a few sweaters and a solid jacket - leather is ideal. Danish summers are often rainy and cold.
You'll be doing a lot of walking, so bring comfortable shoes, waterproof it possible. Bright white tennis shoes will identify you as an American. Danish men and women tend to dress in subdued colors - brown, navy, grays - that match the colors of nature in Denmark.
For women, long skirts are more practical than short, even for summer, since skirts that are knee-length or shorter are too revealing when riding a bicycle. (I often wear bike shorts under my dress until I get where I'm going.) Danish women wear little makeup and simple hairstyles, so there's no reason to drag along a suitcase of fancy products. High heels are a nightmare on cobblestone streets, so if you must wear them, bring along a pair of flats to wear until you reach your destination.
You probably won't need much in the way of fancy clothes, unless you're a real nightlife aficionado. And unless you have a job in a bank (as I do), there is no reason to bring more than one business suit. Jeans - without rips or holes - can be worn almost everywhere.
You can always purchase the clothes you need when you arrive in Denmark, but prices are at least double and sometimes triple those elsewhere, once 25% sales tax is factored in.
What will I be able to bring home with me?
If you'd like to bring home gifts for family and friends, I recommend Danish housewares.
Mom or Granny will enjoy china from Royal Copenhagen (and you can get it half-price on the top floor of their Copenhagen headquarters), your newlywed sister might like a beautiful glass vase from Holmegaard, and even your buddies will like brushed-steel CD or wine accessories from Georg Jensen or his imitators. (See the Royal Shopping site for images).There are also beautiful textiles on sale in Denmark. You should be able to find something for everybody, if you have a general idea what they're looking for.
How will I make friends?
Denmark is a small country, and many people still hang out with the people they grew up with. That can make it hard for a foreigner to make friends: some Danes simply have all the friends they need, and really don't want any more. My Danish friends are almost all people who came from outside Copenhagen, so their childhood friends don't live nearby.
To make things even harder, Danes value privacy very highly - it's part of their general policy of tolerance. Neighbors, for example, may feel that by not greeting you or asking where you come from, they are respecting your privacy. If you smile and introduce yourself, most people will respond positively.
Get to know people in your work or study group. It's easier to do things in groups than one-on-one. Asking people over for a dinner of some of your native food is a great way to make friends, or bring some native sweets to your office on one of your national holidays. Invite a bunch of people out to hear some music from your part of the world. Danes love to see themselves as international, and they will be flattered that you think of them that way.
One quirk of Danes is that they love to make plans far in advance, and they are very good about sticking to those plans. You can invite a bunch of people for dinner on a Tuesday two months from now at 8pm, and although you may not see them in the meantime, they will all turn up, precisely on time.
When dining at someone else's house, bring a bottle of wine or some dessert. A fancy present isn't required.
One more tip: When you enter a room containing a group of people, it is your job to go around and shake everyone's hands, saying, "Hi, I'm so-and-so." Just keep going until you have shaken hands with everyone in the room, upon which time you can stop and talk to whomever seems interesting.
If you want to start a conversation with a Dane you don't know well, ask about the places he's travelled and his future vacation plans. Danes get six weeks of vacation per year, and they love to spend it in places with better weather.
How will I meet someone of the opposite sex?
Even Danes have trouble with this one. As I explain in Get Drunk and Find Your True Love, Danish men don't approach women in the way men do in the rest of the world, and consequently, Danish women don't get much flirting practice. The whole thing can be very awkward, and sometimes succeeds only because both parties are drunk.
Foreign men sometimes assume they are getting turned down because they are foreign, or because they are not white. Not true - Danish men get turned down just as much.
I'm probably not a good source of advice on this one, since I'm single myself.
Will I face racial prejudice?
If you are a non-white person from a western country, probably not - at least as soon as people hear you speaking English. You will then be considered exotic and fascinating, and may get some very interesting dates with blond Danes who are interested in expanding their horizons. There are a lot of multi-racial babies among the younger set in Denmark. Spanish-speakers are considered particularly desirable; Danes love Spain and Latin America.
But there is racial prejudice in Denmark, most of it directed against local Muslim immigrants, who can be of Turkish, Palestinian, Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghani or African origin. In the 1960s and 1970s, "guest workers" were invited to Denmark to help fill a labour shortage, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Denmark made the noble decision to accept refugees and people who were persecuted or tortured. Many of these people came from rural areas, had little education, and were very conservative and religious. Of the more recent immigrants, many have had trouble finding work in Denmark and trouble fitting into Danish society.
There are certainly individual success stories - immigrants and immigrants' children who make important contributions to Danish life - but generally, there has been an unwillingness to integrate on both sides. Danish employers have not been quick to offer the immigrants jobs, which makes it hard for them to show what they have to offer. On the other hand, some immigrants see the Danes as unclean and immoral, and make great efforts to keep their children from becoming "too Danish." It's a story with no heroes.
What this means to you as a foreigner is that if Danish people think you are a local Muslim, they may be unkind to you - until they find out that you are not, upon which time they will be very courteous.
Will I have problems because I am gay?
Being gay is no big thing in Denmark - in fact, the non-Danish gay people I know who have visited or lived here have been a bit disappointed, since the lack of prejudice means there's not much of a gay or lesbian community and not much solidarity.
The Danish world "kaereste" which means partner, can refer to either sex. In professional or social circumstances, feel free to refer to "my partner, so-and-so," but prepared for listeners to be neither shocked nor impressed.
How do I learn Danish?
If you are here for less than a year, it may not be worth it. Danish children begin English instruction when they are 10, and most Danes are very proud of their ability to speak English. You may find some elderly people or blue-collar workers who are less confident in English, but they will probably understand whatever it is you're saying.
That said, learning basic words like "Tak" for thank you (there is no Danish "please") and "Goddag" (Good Day) will be much appreciated. Saying hello is easy - it's just "Hej!!" (pronounced Hi!) Goodbye is "Hej Hej!" (Hi Hi!) So you've got that one mastered already.
If you plan to stay longer, the Danish government provides free Danish classes. I found these a bit slow, and preferred to work with a private tutor. I also drilled with "Danish in Three Months" (available on Amazon.com) although I did not, in fact, learn Danish in three months.
What will I eat in Denmark?
There are some terrific things to eat in Denmark:
Fresh, dark rye bread - called "rugbrod."
Buttery salmon, prepared many different ways, or eaten smoked on rugbrod. Herring, too, if you like it.
Wonderful local cheeses.
Fresh, tasty butter, and organic milk available in every supermarket.
Carlsberg and Tuborg beer - they also make special "Easter" and "Christmas" versions.
Danish pastries - fresh and much better than the plastic-wrapped version. The Danes call them "Wienerbrod" or Viennese bread.
Hyldeblomst juice, or elderflower juice. Great alone as an alternative to soda or alcohol, but also good mixed with champagne or vodka. Hyldebaer juice - elderberry juice - is also excellent, and has medical properties. Kids like both.
Summertime berries - Denmark grows the world's best strawberries, available only in June, as well as wonderful raspberries and blackberries. Local cherries and apples are also excellent, in season.
Danish bacon is, of course, world-famous - but Danes don't eat very much of it.
There is also plenty of dreadful food - hot dogs dyed bright red, fried fish balls and fried meatballs, fatty pork in a variety of disguises, overcooked cabbages and root vegetables, shots of "Gammel Dansk" breakfast alcohol, and waxy chocolate for dessert. Don't let anyone in Denmark tell you that your homeland's cuisine is uniquely unhealthy.
The selection of ethnic cuisine in Denmark is improving, but if you really love Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian or Japanese food, fill up on it before you leave home. The Danish version is rarely authentic - and watch out for Danish pizza!
A good steak is also hard to find, and expensive if you do find it. Hamburgers can be iffy. In general, Danes eat less beef than Americans, and more fish and pork.
Vegetarians will have a tough time in Denmark, since the vegetables just aren't very good. If you eat fish and dairy products, you should be able to get by. Tofu is not popular, and often available only in jars or in ethnic supermarkets. There are, however, shwarma shops all over the country where you can pick up hummus, babaganush, and felafel.
If you like peanut butter, you may want to tuck a big jar into your suitcase. The Danish version is not encouraging.
Will I be able to find work in Denmark?
As a student, I believe you are allowed a certain number of work hours - but don't quote me on that. If you're out of school, finding work will require tremendous commitment and aggressive tactics. The best thing you can do is to get a Danish company in your field to sponsor you before you leave home. To do so, they will have to prove that no Dane can do your job. Engineers, IT specialists and nurses are the most sought-after at the moment.
Some large, export-oriented Danish companies, like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, have English as their corporate language and are happy to employ qualified non-Danes. They are great companies to work for, with great benefits, and therefore receive a lot of applications from both inside and outside Denmark.
Working off-the-books in a restaurant or as a cleaning person is possible, although illegal and not always reliable.
If you are coming to Denmark to be with a boyfriend or girlfriend, getting married will not necessarily make things easier for you, work-wise. In fact, your partner will have to prove to the Danish government that he or she can support you before you can get a "fiancee visa" - and since you won't be eligible for government support, you should plan on living off your partner for at least a year or two before you know enough Danish to get a full-time job. Can your relationship survive that?
What should I never do?
Danes greatly admire people from Latin countries like Spain, France, Italy. They love their relaxed nature and high style, and go to night school to learn their languages. Danes enjoy visiting Southern European countries, and sometimes retire there.
That said, Latin-style behavior will cause problems for you in Denmark.
Being relaxed about appointments is a good example. If you have a 10am meeting at a Danish office, your colleagues will expect you to be there at 10:00.00. Arriving at 10:05 is bad manners, and at 10:10 you will find the meeting room door closed, with a lot of sour faces when you open it.
The same is true of social appointments. If dinner is at 8, you are expected to be there at 8. It is considered appropriate manners to circle the block until 8.00.00, upon which time you press the doorbell. Arriving after 8:10 is intolerably rude. Do not cancel social arrangements unless there is an emergency, or unless you are ill.
Do not lose your temper. If someone upsets you, by all means tell them so, but in cool, measured tones, without using any bad language, and don't wave your arms. I violated this rule myself, at my own expense. On day I tripped over a heavy iron refuse bin that some idiot had left in a hallway at my office. I was badly bruised, and I swore loudly. Several months later, the incident turned up in my annual employee evaluation. Apparently several of my colleagues had been disturbed by my loss of composure.
What is there to see and do in Copenhagen?
I'll leave the details to www.woco.dk, the official tourist site, but for a single day's visit I would recommend the following:
A stroll down Stroget, the central shopping street. If you've got energy to spare, climb the Rundturm, a 17th century tower. No stairs, just a long, spiral ramp, so feel free to bring the baby stroller.
An hourlong flat-boat harbour cruise. Cheap at EUR4/$5, and it includes a trip to the Little Mermaid. Bring your own food/beverages.
Lunch at Hovedtelegraphen, a rooftop cafe above the main post office. It's non-touristy, has a reasonably-priced menu of Danish food, and offers a great view of all the city's medieval spires.
Shopping at Illums Bolighus, a four-story Danish design museum where everything is for sale. Right next door is Royal Copenhagen, where you can get some great bargains at the top-floor outlet shop.
http://www.xmel.com/denmark_directory.html
I thought this was a good read and incite into Danish culture. Long though.
My Life in Denmark
I've lived in Denmark for six years now, and I like it very much. As an American, however, I am a perennial target for complaints about U.S. eating habits, George Bush's foreign policy, and the inappropriate behavior of characters on American sitcoms. Danes particularly enjoy delivering these lectures when I have a beer in my hand and am trying to relax.
Needless to say, I have my own issues with Danish culture, and in fine American fashion, I have figured out a way to make money off them. The articles below appeared first appeared in BT, Denmark's most widely circulated tabloid newspaper.
When I first came to Denmark
two years ago, people kept asking me what I thought about Danish men. It seemed like a weird question. Why didn't they ask what I thought about Danish weather (bad) or Danish food (bad), or, for that matter, Danish women and children? (very nice, in my experience).
I soon learned their interest in Danish men was a variation on the famous German saying: Man spricht uber das, was man nicht hat. (You talk about what you don't have.) There are NOT a lot of men in Denmark, although there is quite a bounty of tall, timid boys.
While the culture of egalitarianism has done some great things for Denmark - where else will you see tattooed musclemen pushing baby carriages? - it has led to a terrific siphoning off of testosterone. Danish men seem too timid to do anything that makes men men, such as taking risks, taking initiative, or enjoying the pure thrill of the chase. Don't return a Frenchman's calls, and he will become intrigued and pursue you until the end of the Earth. Don't return a Dane's phone call (singular) and he will forget the whole thing.
Either that, or worse, he will sit home and sulk about it. Last year, I briefly dated a good-looking triathlete, a guy with a hot job and a fancy car, the kind of guy that in New York would have arrogance preceding him into the room like a bad after shave. Three days after a single unreturned phone call, I got a tremulous email from him.
You haven't called I wonder if this is because you don't like me please , if I am bothering you, let me know.
For a girl used to American macho, this was about as expected like John Wayne asking for second coat of nail polish.
This is not to say that American men are perfect: they wear baseball caps everywhere but the shower, and their idea of child care often involves letting the child sit beside them while they watch basketball on TV.
But I've done a lot of travelling, and I must say that the relations between the sexes in Denmark are the strangest I've ever seen. The women do everything: they initiate, they seduce, they even get on top, and the men seem to expect it. "I want to be scored," a drunken colleague once confessed to me. Imagine John Wayne saying that.
I know that when you choose to live in a foreign country, as I have, you must learn to adapt to local culture. I have learned that expecting a door to be held open for me is an invitation to get hit in the face with a door. I have struggled home with large packages while male neighbors just cheerfully wave hello. Wearing high heels and a skirt, I have wrestled my bike out from a pile of collapsed junkers while hefty workmen smoked cigarettes against the bike rack.
But I don't know if ever get used to the timidity factor. Three months ago, my co-workers set me up on a blind date with a 36-year old man Danish man who had built a successful international company. We arranged to meet in a small cafe downtown, and since I was there a bit early, I got a cup of coffee and sat alone at a table near the door. Apart from the waiter and a group of elderly Swedes, I was the only one in the place.
My date arrived on time, and when I saw him coming through the door, I was pleased. He was a real looker, tall and athletic. He saw me, smiled, and went to the bar. Fair enough, I thought. He'll order himself a cup of coffee, and then come sit down.
And he did sit down. He sat down at the bar, and took to looking out the doorway.
He sat there. I sat there. He sat there, staring out the door.
Could he not see me? Did he think I was late? Was he waiting for somebody better to come along?
Or, as I now suspect, was he simply waiting for me to make the first move? Was he waiting for me to get up from the table where I was sitting, walk across the room (carrying my unfinished coffee), and introduce myself?
Sadly, I'll never know, because after the 15 minutes it took me to figure out what was required of me, Mr. Wonderful got up and left.
What do I think of Danish men? I have heard that they are wonderful, that they are warm, funny, thoughtful, and sexy. I hear that they are the prototype for men of the 21st century. I am looking forward to meeting one.
On my very first night in Copenhagen,
I went with an American girlfriend to a downtown discoteque. I'm a blonde, and she's an attractive blackwoman, so you could say we had something for every taste.
We sat at a table roughly the size of a pizza. Three men sat across from us, a distance of approximately 25 centimeters. For an hour. Without saying anything. I think Zulus or spacemen would have found some way to communicate with us, but this was apparently beyond the capability of three well-educated Danes.
Finally, fortified by gin and tonics, we spoke to them first, and they turned out to be nice guys. But that was a lucky night: Since moving here, I have been to many a discoteque where women shake their booty with their girfriends for hours while men watch with pretend disinterest from the sidelines, their eyes radiating invisible beams of desire: Please, miss, ask me to dance.
How do Danish men and women meet each other? I know it happens; the streets are full of Danish babies. But much like other reported miracles, such as Christ walking on water or an American president delivering a speech he wrote himself, it's something I've never seen with my own eyes.
For one thing, Danish people seem to think that talking to strangers is uncouth. Ask Danish men why they don't chat up women, and they say that women don't want to be approached. They'll make fun of you; they'll think you're desperate. They'll think you want something from them.
What men want of course, is the same thing that has produced a world population currently in excess of 6 billion. Most women want the same thing, although they'd probably like it to last longer than three minutes. Yet you see Danish men and women in parks in the summer, sitting alone on blankets, or in cafes in the winter surrounded by their buddies or girlfriends with their hair carefully gelled, lonely and horny but contemptous of anyone who dares to approach.
The icebreaker of course, is alcohol, and I have little doubt that if it vanished from the Earth tomorrow Danes would never reproduce. It didn't take me long to learn that in Danish parties and nightclubs, there was a window of time, roughly from 1am to 3am, where social intereaction was possible. Before 1am, Danish men weren't drunk enough to talk, and after 3, they were too drunk to talk.
Extreme drunkness seems to be the accepted way to meet that special someone, as explained to me in the days when I still was seeking a Danish boyfriend.
"What you do," a Danish girlfriend explained to me, "is you get trashed and go home with somebody. Then in the morning you decide if you want to be boyfriend and girlfriend."
This one-night stand culture is very difficult for foreigners to understand. One-night stands certainly take place in the US, but it is something unusual and embarassing, like making a lot of money in Denmark.
Here, drunken sex with a complete stranger seems to be the hopeful prelude to a serious relationship, possibly marriage. If children result from this, it is hard to imagine what their parents tell them about the night Mom and Dad first met. My grandparents once told me that they met outside a Depression-era dance hall, since my unemployed grandmother didn't have the 10 cents necessary to get in, but maybe I just didn't hear the whole story.
Which leads me back to dancing. Here is what I have learned: in Denmark, it is bad manners to ask a girl to dance, but it is good manners to get very drunk, make sure she is drunk too, and ask her to come back to your place. She will quite likely say yes, if only in a misguided audition for the role of girlfriend, leaving you both a little sad and bitter the next morning.
Long ago, before I ever thought of living here, a Danish woman told me that her country was a place with a lot of sex but not very much love. I wonder.
When Danish right-wing nutcasePia Kjaersgaard
went on one of her rants about how most foreigners in Denmark were criminals, my friends and I were furious. Here we were, foreigners, and we were clearly not getting our cut of the criminal millions being made on the streets of Copenhagen. All we did was go to work every day and pay Danish taxes. We figured we had better get started.
After considering a variety of profitable crimes, we decided on a male prostitution ring, with the idea that our workers could do internal projects on slow nights. But our male escorts would not provide sex: that was too easy to get in Denmark.
Instead, they would offer romance. Specially imported from Mediterranean countries, these Romeos would bring flowers, write poetry, and say things like "Your eyes are like the ocean." In short, they would do things that Danish men wouldn't consider even if it would give the local Copenhagen team an instant victory over the German national squad.
Foreign men play a curious role in the world of Danish romance, since they can sometimes make a Danish woman realize exactly what she is missing: those longing looks, those sweet words, that masculine worship that makes her feel so wonderfully female. A man in Madrid once told me that Danish girls on vacation were easy. Well, no wonder. Nobody's said anything nice to them in years.
Take a deep breath, everybody, but in the world outside of Denmark, florists are not just for buying a centerpiece for Aunt Bente's Sunday lunch. They are for sending roses to your wife or girlfriend, and in France, to your mistress too. In foreign lands, men buy women jewelry and furs to win their favors: they open doors and carry furniture. Some even earn a lot of money and pay all of the household expenses.
Sometimes Danish women capture these men alive and bring them back to Denmark, where the government punishes them by making them sit through infinate Danish courses and refusing to allow the couple to live in sublet apartments. I suspect that the new restrictions on marriage to foreigners are just Pia's sour grapes about ending up with a Danish husband.
Of course, there are already a large variety of foreign men available right here in Denmark. Many are tall, dark, and handsome, many are Muslim, and many are lovely people - one of my closest friends in Denmark now has a Pakistani boyfriend who treats her like a queen.
That said, one of the sad lessons of a multicultural society is that assholes come in every color. I'm ashamed to agree with Pia about anything, but there are, unfortunately, some "new Danes" who cannot understand the difference between an ordinary blonde girl on the street and the blond bimbo they saw soaping her plastic breasts on cable access TV late Friday night. Some of them see Danish girlfriends as temps until their future Mrs. Muslim right comes along. I've fallen for this one myself; it took me a while to figure out why the sweet Muslim surgeon I was dating would never introduce me to his friends, and always wanted to sit at the very back of cafes.
I have met these embarrassments-to-Allah; I have occasionally removed their hands from my inner thigh on the dance floor at the Copenhagen Jazzhouse. (In one particular case, I handled the situation New York fashion, firmly grasping the gentleman's hand and bending it back so far I almost broke his finger. He won't try that again.) Anyway, these jerks do more than cause bad karma between "new Danes" and standard Danes. They get in the way of truly nice immigrant guys getting laid.
Maybe, instead of importing romantic manpower, we could train Danish men to do better. Instead of those scuba courses they're so fond of, Danish guys could be sent on kissing courses to France, or seduction courses in Italy. Since I like a man who stands up for himself, even when confronted with lunatics carrying lethal weapsons, I might even suggest "misguided macho" courses in the USA.
In return, Danish men could provide exchange courses in the things they do well: housecleaning, meal preparation, child care. Forget Danish foreign aid - this is what would really win Denmark a place in the hearts of the world's women. And, darling Pia, it just might cut the immigration rate. Plenty of men will choose another destination when they find out that in Denmark, they must help do the dishes.
Americans can't be prissy, can they? After all, we invented Las Vegas.
So why am I so shocked at the debauchery of a Danish corporate Christmas party?
It's not the drinking that shocks me - God knows, Danish people do that all year - or even the sex. I think it's the proximity of work and sex. In a land with few limits, Americans draw a firm line between work and sex, based on the (rather prissy) notion that no one should have to put up with sexual come-ons or even sexual talk in order to keep a job, and that anyone who does should be compensated with a hefty legal settlement. All I can think about at a Danish Christmas party is how much an American lawyer could earn off the proceedings. One stalk of corporate mistletoe, I am sure, would generate more than enough business for him to redecorate his office with the high-priced furniture at Illums Bolighus and his wife with silver from George Jensen.
This American concept of sexual harassment has been difficult to explain to my Danish male co-workers, who like to tell saucy jokes in the office, and whose hands have occasionally ended up attached to my hair, shoulders, and bottom until I threaten to call an American lawyer. For them, I offer this easy-to-follow rule: Anything I might want to discuss with, say, male model Oliver Bjerrehus in a jacuzzi over two flutes of champagne, I do not want to discuss with you, married father of four, over six pages of computer printouts on letterhead. Anything I might want to do with Oliver by candlelight, I do not want to do with you by fluorescent light. It's that simple.
The overfamiliarity between co-workers is just one of the reasons Christmas partys are difficult for foreigners. The structure of the party, the long tables and the fixed seats, is a challenge in itself. At American parties, the format is loose and everybody mingles, which allows one to break free of a bore with a number of convenient excuses, such as Hey! Isn't that my plastic surgeon over there? I must say hi. At a Danish Christmas party, you sit at a seat assigned to you by luck of the draw or cruel party planners and are expected to chat for seven hours.
What do Danish people say to each other for seven hours at those tables? Of course, I know what two close friends say to each other, but what about people who have nothing in common but a copy machine? All of a sudden, those dull people from the back of the office, those people you've avoided all year, are your companions in fate for the evening. This is where snaps comes in. I feel confident that the tradition of heavy schnapps drinking at Christmas parties can be traced to a Viking forced to sit next to the dull guy from the back oars he'd been avoiding all year. Schnapps must be the only way to get through Hour 3 of hearing about a stranger's pets, office feuds or summer-house redecoration.
Snaps is also just the beginning of an enjoyable program of Danish food. Question: do foreigners like Danish food? Answer: Is there a fast food chain with "Golden Ds" serving "Dyrelaegen's Natmal" (pork paste and raw gelatin) to customers all over the world? Of course, the Christmas party has its own delicacies, most of which, taken off the table and reassembled like a puzzle, would form a large, live, and angry pig. Except, of course, for the parts which are herring. When you are a foreigner, Danish people thrill to making you try everything, the odder the better, and watching your reaction when you discover that there is an extra layer of pork paste underneath the bacon and mushrooms. If other foreigners are reading this, the secret is to take small bites of everything and smile a lot. When fellow partygoers are distracted, you can soak up the alcohol in your stomach with bread and butter.
After the almond has been found in the ris a la mande and the snaps topped off with wine and aquavit, the Viking drinking songs begin. Drinking songs seem to be the only modern remnant of Viking culture, except for the way Danish people behave in the bike lanes at rush hour, where they will use their bells with all the ferocity of an ax if you don't move into the right lane fast enough. At any rate, everyone but you will know all the words to these songs, and enjoy singing them enough not to notice you are sitting against the back wall looking confused. For foreigners, it is time to go to the loo and pretend to wash your hands for about an hour.
By the time you get back, the deejay will be playing. This is a mixed blessing, since from what I can tell, there is a paragraph in the Danish constitution that requires Danish deejays to play George Michael every five songs. But loud music means that you no longer have to pretend to talk to the people next to you, and, freed from your chair, you can shift around and talk to the people you actually like. A few courageous souls start the dancing, mostly women, along a few sad men in elf hats who don't realize that apart from a bow tie, no garment cuts your score potential more than an elf hat. Every once in a while the deejay plays an old Danish Eurovision song contest entry, and then it becomes easy to tell the locals from the foreigners again. The Danes are the ones on their feet in ecstatic remembrance, while the foreigners are sitting down looking bewildered, wondering when George Michael will come back.
By this point in the evening, those people who plan to score have chosen their target, and perhaps even their location. This, in particular, has always confused me - I mean, I've certainly dated people I've met in the office, but I've always dated, and slept with them, outside the office as opposed to within it. But Christmas party stories are always rife with tales about ping-pong tables, bathroom stalls and the boss's desk. Some people leave together, but even at home and in bed, I have to wonder how much fun this drunken sex can possibly be. How much sexual technique can these snaps-soaked middle managers have to offer? For the women, it must be about as erotic as having the statue of Bishop Absaolm fall on top of you.
The real challenge of the company Christmas party is the first day back at work afterwards, when you are required to take the middle managers' opinions on sales strategy and corporate downsizing seriously again. You'll get little help from the managers themselves, who will be avoiding your eyes, knowing perfectly well that you saw them dancing in their shorts and elf hat to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go just a few days before. Years ago, before my very first Christmas party, I was told that people would go wild at the party but then forget the whole thing the next day. That's what's supposed to happen. Somehow, nobody ever does.
As distressed as I am that I may never get a chance to date Crown Prince Frederik,
I'm happy that he has found love with Australian lawyer Mary Donaldson. She's seems to be a lovely women - although, Mary, it isn't really fair to go running back to your sunny homeland during the worst months of the Danish winter.
It seems that the only thing Mary still needs to work on is her command of Danish, and anecdotal reports indicate she is struggling. Every foreigner in Denmark sympathises with her. Danish, to a newcomer, can be overwhelming.
So let me offer a solution: I'll teach Mary Danish. Having been in Denmark for more than two years now, I speak it reasonably well, except when a policeman stops me on my bicycle, upon which time I speak only very complicated English. But most of the time, at work and at parties and while trying to get the immigration department to let me stay here and pay more even Danish taxes, I speak Danish.
Frederik loves Mary.
Of course, during that two years I've made some pretty big mistakes. Like, for example, the time when I was forced to quickly leave a sublet apartment, and told everybody that I was not thrown out (smidt ud) but thrown out the window (kastet ud.) Or like the time I went past the Fødevareministeriet (Agricultural Ministry) and, getting fødevarer confused with fodtøj, wondered why Denmark had such a big ministry for shoes.
But I'm sure I'll be a better teacher than the government-funded Danish-language schools I went through. Their programs were clearly designed for a 1963 type of immigrant: one made us repeat over and over, supposedly as a pronunciation drill, "Jeg arbejder på en fabrik i Vanløse." ("I work in a factory on the outskirts of town.") They also insist on lumping candidates from all countries in a single class, being politically unwilling to accept that someone from Sweden might learn Danish a little faster than someone from Korea. As each day's class enters its third hour, the Swedish girl is drawing pictures in her notebook, while the guy from Korea is lost and gradually losing the will to live.
So we'll work one-on-one. Written Danish won't be too hard; it's straightforward, and free of all the kaleidoscopic verb endings of Spanish and French, and the silly old-fashioned spellings of English.
Unfortunately, written Danish has absolutely nothing to do with spoken Danish. Danes, in a salute to Scandinavian minimalism, say only part of each word. Thus, what looks in your workbook like "Hvad hedder du?" ("What is your name?") is actually pronounced "Hv' hed' du?" Learning to understand spoken Danish is learning to guess which part of the spoken word is missing.
While you're trying to learn to understand spoken Danish, the best people to listen to are other foreigners. Other foreigners, in their ignorance, say entire Danish words. You'll be pleased to know that one of the first Danish speakers I could understand was your prospective father-in-law, Prince Henrik. Danes hate the way he speaks Danish, but that's because he says the entire word, every time. If you'd rather not practice on him, try the nice Pakistani lady at the kiosk. Not being Danish, she will speak a Danish you can understand.
I can also recommend watching hand puppets on television - since they have no real mouths, whomever is speaking for them needs to enunciate very well - as well as speeches by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is so desperate to cover his Jutland accent that he speaks very, very slowly. Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister. Anything on TV in Danish with Danish-language subtitles for the deaf is also good. If all Danes came equipped with subtitles, life would be much easier for foreigners.
Anyway, you might as well take mumbling as an advantage and mumble yourself. It makes it a lot harder for people to tell if you are making mistakes. I find it a particularly effective way of hiding my problems with adjective endings, i.e. the correct “hver dag” or the incorrect “hvere dag.” (By the way, “hverdage” (week days) does not really mean “hver dag” (every day of the week), as I found out when I tried to go to a “Åben hverdage” supermarket on a Sunday). At any rate, you will often be surprised to find Danes themselves differing about spelling and other points of language: Danish may be formalised in books, but in daily use it is less so, perhaps because until recently no one has had the bother of teaching it to many foreigners.
Small disputes aside, the Danish language generally reflects the homogeny and harmony of Danish culture. That means no one ever says anything too definitively, for fear of having an unpopular opinion and being forced to back down.
For example, if something is good, you would say in English that you definitely and positively like it, but in Danish you will say that you kan lide it, directly translated as you can suffer it. This construction keeps Danes from being unfashionably enthusiastic about things, and thereby assuming their opinion is more valuable than others, as proscribed by the Jantelov.
Also keep in mind non-committal phrases like i mine øjne (in my eyes), kunne godt være (could well be), and the all-time favourite, blandt andre (among other things). Blandt andre should be added to the end of every list to make sure no one will ever be able to accuse you of leaving something off the list. For example, if you are making a list of the most attractive princes in Europe, you could say something like, "Prince William of England, Prince Felipe of Spain, and Prince Carl Philip of Sweden, blandt andre." This will help you at home.
But, in case the Queen would prefer to have someone else teach you Danish, let me just leave you with some tips. Watch the "o" and "ø" - for example, the "Mønster Bageri" near my home is trying to tell people that it is an excellent bakery, not that it is full of monsters. Be careful about words that sound similar: after hearing a safety announcement on the 2A bus, I once tried to explain to a deaf old lady that "en tyver" (a twenty-five cent piece, as opposed to "tyv," a thief) was stealing passengers' purses. And take special care when you use "dufte" (smell good) and "lugte" (smell bad) It's the same word - "smell" - in English, but people get real mad if you tell you can "lugte" the dinner they spent all day preparing.
Actually, there is a secret to learning Danish quickly, but it would horrify every Dane. That said, it assisted me enormously with grammar, vocabulary and comprehension. I might never have learned Danish without it. The terrible secret is: Learn German first. If you can speak English and German, functional Danish is only a few months of practice away.
To truly know a country, you must get to know its people.
Not just ordinary people, the butcher and the baker and the sulking lady at the sausage stand, but its famous people.
On this basis, I am integrating very badly. I simply cannot tell Danish celebrities apart. Of course, the Royal Family and their troubles are familiar to anyone who stands in line for groceries, but the others all blend together for me in a sea of teeth and hair.
It's confusing and isolating, being outside the local currents of fame. Magazines run in-depth profiles of Danish actresses disclosing their new, intimate secrets when I don't even know their old, intimate secrets. The Big Brother celebrity house looked exactly like any other Big Brother house to me. And out in public, I have often witnessed the Danish people around me are getting very, very excited by someone who looks to me like a well-dressed bus driver.
Not famous, just Danish.
I've tried to catch up. Recently, I did what thousands of Danes do every week - I bought one of the supermarket gossip magazines. (At least, I hear that thousands of Danes buy supermarket gossip magazines every week. I never see them reading them. In cafes and other places where people can see them, they always seem to be reading the very smallest print in the intellectual newspaper Information.)
Anyway, after flipping through the pictures and reading the rather short articles, I realized that apart from the Royal Family, the weekly magazines have three basic themes: pregnancies, premieres, and TV hosts. Sometimes they report on pregnant TV hosts attending premieres.
I didn't recognize the hosts, since there is so much terrible American TV available in Denmark that I rarely watch terrible Danish TV. But I did learn a lot of interesting things from the magazines. Did you know, for example, that Birgitte Nielsen has had pretty much the same hairstyle since Ronald Reagan was president? (She also seems have been wearing the same black mini-dress - perhaps she uses that detergent advertised to keep black from fading.)
Furthermore, if Denmark ever faces attack from the air, we will all be able to protect ourselves with a shield made from Princess Alexandra's fancy hats.
But the gossip magazines were no help with Danish celebrities who had been out of the public eye for awhile. Just the other day, my colleagues rushed to the window of our office building to see someone passing on the street outside. It turned out to be the former Danish foreign minister Uffe Elleman Jensen, who in person looks a lot like an elderly, balding man.
I think the main problem is that Danish celebrities are Danish - that is, they are modest, gentle, and eager to fit in. In New York, picking out a celebrity is easy. Someone like the rapper P.Diddy can be counted on to have a car the size of a small yacht, be wearing a canary-yellow business suit and at least a kilogram of jewelry, and be surrounded by an entourage of 60. If you were surrounded by an entourage of 60 in some small Danish towns, there would be no one left to admire you and your entourage.
It's the same thing with Danish sports stars. American athletes look like living cartoons, the football stars as wide and thick as refrigerators, the basketball stars as tall as trees. Danish handball and badminton players look like ordinary Danish guys, if in slightly better shape.
In fact, when I first arrived in Denmark, some guy-in-good-shape tried to impress me by telling me he had once played for FCK. He didn't look particularly impressive, I had no idea what an FCK was, and Americans don't care that much for soccer anyway - when the movie "Bend It Like Beckham" was released, the reviewers had to explain who Beckham was. Anyway, I failed to fall off my chair with excitement, and Mr. FCK went away with his ball intact and his ego bruised.
This is one of the great ironies of celebrities everywhere. They say they want to be treated just like ordinary people, but they are horrified if you do. If you ever want to hurt a celebrity's feelings, pretend not to recognize him.
Which does not mean that they will return the favor. Since I do some work in the dance world, I have met choreographer Alexander Kolpin on at least six occasions. He can never remember having met me before.
After the third or fourth time of staring into his handsome, empty eyes, I began to play a fun game. Each new time I'm introduced, I gave him a brand new name. "Hi, I'm Suzie," I'll say. "Hi, I'm Michelle," I'll say the next time.
He has never noticed the difference. I plan to work my way up to statements like, "Hi, I'm Lucifer, the prince of evil and darkness," and "Hi, I'm Marilyn Monroe," just to see at what point he notices that there is a person on the end of the hand he is shaking.
To be honest, I am getting pretty good at recognizing Danish movie stars, assisted by the fact that the same six or seven people star seem to star in every Danish movie. I'm also getting good at recognizing Danish music. By the time Aqua broke up, I knew them so well that I was able to jump up and turn off the radio within the first two bars of any of their songs.
Now rap is big in Denmark, and tall blond men wear "do-rags," designed to assist in the difficult maintenance of African hair. My friends tell me these men are very talented, but, frankly, I want to hear Danes rap in English about as much as you want to hear Jennifer Lopez struggle her way through the Danish national anthem.
Still, I was excited when I thought I had recognized one of the Danish rappers at a party. He was a handsome guy in his early 20s with blond dreadlocks, and the girls were wild about him. "Which record is his?" I whispered to one of them.
"He's not a musician," she told me. "He sells pants at Illums."
"We all love him," she added. "We make him bend down and get pants off the bottom shelf."
So perhaps celebrity is relative. You can be known worldwide, you can be known in Denmark, or you could be known in the pants department at Illums. You could be David Beckham and be able to walk down the streets of Kansas City unnoticed. No matter how many people know you, there will always be some people who don't know you.
After two years in Denmark, I can recognize both the Royal Family and the lady at the sausage stand, and that will have to do for now.
I must admit I envy Danesat vacation time.
They have so much of it, and it must be so much easier to travel when your country hasn't started any wars lately. But I have a lot of trouble understanding how they use it. They seem to be on an endless search for other Denmarks with better weather.
There is no Jantelov when it comes to comparing Denmark with other countries. I have seen Danish women furious when men in Italy and Spain flirt and flatter and generally act like Italian and Spanish men, instead of their wimpy Danish counterparts. If only men here respected women, like they do in Denmark.
Danes shake their heads at drunks sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City - If only they had social workers to help them, like we do in Denmark - and at veiled ladies in Africa. If only they could wear what's in the weekly ladies' magazines, like we do in Denmark.
In general, they feel a quiet shock and pity for anyone who can't eat fried fish balls and watch Danish reality television. Why can't everyone be tolerant and open-minded, like we are in Denmark?
So why leave Denmark at all? Well, there is the weather, although I have never understood why Danish people insist on traveling during the summer, in the only few weeks of the year when the weather in Denmark is any good. November in Copenhagen is dreadful, March is a misery, but in July, Copenhagen's Ørested Park is one of the prettiest places on the planet.
But good weather in Denmark is an exception, and no one ever seems to suggest Danish weather serve as a model for anywhere else. In fact, it makes Danish tourists easy to spot during the winter months: they are the ones standing in the airport parking lot in Tenerife with their faces up to the sun, trying to get the last drops of light before they board the plane.
This, I think accounts for the eternal popularity of Australia, which can be counted on to be sunny. It has other things in common with Denmark, too - lots of athletic, blond people, an endless supply of beer, and even its own Jantelov, in the form of a Tall Poppy Syndrome. (A friend of mine once tried to mail an important letter first class letter in Australia; "Only one class here, mate," the postal clerk told him.)
Most Danes have been to the United States too, and I always quiver a little when they start to tell their America stories. Did they have a good time? Or am I about to have to apologize for something?
Fortunately, most of the time they've enjoyed themselves and my fellow Americans have been pleasant. In fact, most Danes seem pleased by the willingness with which Americans will strike up conversations, say, in the line at the supermarket, although they always seem slightly hurt that these supermarket-line relationships turn out to be so short-term and superficial. ("And then checkout lady said, How are you today? But she didn't really care about me.")
I've actually enjoyed vacationing a lot more since I've come to Denmark, in part because I've learned Danish, a great a secret code language when traveling abroad. Incomprehensible to anyone but Norwegians and sharp-eared Swedes, it makes the communication of sensitive information easy and fun. "Do not buy that. That is clearly not an authentic ancient papyrus," you can tell your friend in at Egypt bazaar. Or, in a bar in Italy, "Buy him a drink if you insist, but that's all you're getting. The man is clearly gay."
Of course, this technique works a lot better in Texas or Tokyo than it does in London, and if you guess wrong about who speaks Danish you can easily get your block knocked off. Especially since, as an American, I am constitutionally required to speak very loud. But it's a good concept all the same.
Secret language or not, Danish will soon be heard in the campgrounds of South France, on the beaches of Thailand, and in the supermarkets of Mallorca, for the Danish summer vacation season has begun. Danes will be opening their hearts and minds to exotic cultures (while hanging out with any Swedes or Norwegians they may happen to meet) and secretly checking out foreign newspapers in the hope that the weather is really bad back home.
I must admit I envy Danesat vacation time.
They have so much of it, and it must be so much easier to travel when your country hasn't started any wars lately. But I have a lot of trouble understanding how they use it. They seem to be on an endless search for other Denmarks with better weather.
There is no Jantelov when it comes to comparing Denmark with other countries. I have seen Danish women furious when men in Italy and Spain flirt and flatter and generally act like Italian and Spanish men, instead of their wimpy Danish counterparts. If only men here respected women, like they do in Denmark.
Danes shake their heads at drunks sleeping on the sidewalk in New York City - If only they had social workers to help them, like we do in Denmark - and at veiled ladies in Africa. If only they could wear what's in the weekly ladies' magazines, like we do in Denmark.
In general, they feel a quiet shock and pity for anyone who can't eat fried fish balls and watch Danish reality television. Why can't everyone be tolerant and open-minded, like we are in Denmark?
So why leave Denmark at all? Well, there is the weather, although I have never understood why Danish people insist on traveling during the summer, in the only few weeks of the year when the weather in Denmark is any good. November in Copenhagen is dreadful, March is a misery, but in July, Copenhagen's Ørested Park is one of the prettiest places on the planet.
But good weather in Denmark is an exception, and no one ever seems to suggest Danish weather serve as a model for anywhere else. In fact, it makes Danish tourists easy to spot during the winter months: they are the ones standing in the airport parking lot in Tenerife with their faces up to the sun, trying to get the last drops of light before they board the plane.
This, I think accounts for the eternal popularity of Australia, which can be counted on to be sunny. It has other things in common with Denmark, too - lots of athletic, blond people, an endless supply of beer, and even its own Jantelov, in the form of a Tall Poppy Syndrome. (A friend of mine once tried to mail an important letter first class letter in Australia; "Only one class here, mate," the postal clerk told him.)
Most Danes have been to the United States too, and I always quiver a little when they start to tell their America stories. Did they have a good time? Or am I about to have to apologize for something?
Fortunately, most of the time they've enjoyed themselves and my fellow Americans have been pleasant. In fact, most Danes seem pleased by the willingness with which Americans will strike up conversations, say, in the line at the supermarket, although they always seem slightly hurt that these supermarket-line relationships turn out to be so short-term and superficial. ("And then checkout lady said, How are you today? But she didn't really care about me.")
I've actually enjoyed vacationing a lot more since I've come to Denmark, in part because I've learned Danish, a great a secret code language when traveling abroad. Incomprehensible to anyone but Norwegians and sharp-eared Swedes, it makes the communication of sensitive information easy and fun. "Do not buy that. That is clearly not an authentic ancient papyrus," you can tell your friend in at Egypt bazaar. Or, in a bar in Italy, "Buy him a drink if you insist, but that's all you're getting. The man is clearly gay."
Of course, this technique works a lot better in Texas or Tokyo than it does in London, and if you guess wrong about who speaks Danish you can easily get your block knocked off. Especially since, as an American, I am constitutionally required to speak very loud. But it's a good concept all the same.
Secret language or not, Danish will soon be heard in the campgrounds of South France, on the beaches of Thailand, and in the supermarkets of Mallorca, for the Danish summer vacation season has begun. Danes will be opening their hearts and minds to exotic cultures (while hanging out with any Swedes or Norwegians they may happen to meet) and secretly checking out foreign newspapers in the hope that the weather is really bad back home.
My Danish has improved, thanks to weekly private lessons in my apartment from my tutor, Eva Olsen. The official language of the 5 million residents of Denmark is Danish, and speaking, reading, and writing Danish is not enormously difficult. What's hard is understanding what the hell people are saying. Danes stay true to Scandinavian minimalism by pronouncing only a portion of each word. For example, "What is your name?" or "Hvad hedder du?" is pronounced "Ve' he' du'?"
For the first year, I understood no one but professionals paid to ennunciate - mostly TV newsreaders and hand puppets.
Denmark is a lovely country, but it is not very diverse. Almost all the men are named Christian, Mads, or Anders, which is why there are so many last names like Christiansen, Madsen, and Andersen. As a matter of fact, foreigners here joke that you can crash any party by saying, "I'm a friend of Christian and Mads." There is ALWAYS someone named Christian or Mads at the party.
The Danes are famous for their open-mindedness, but what they really mean is We are open to anyone who is exactly like us. I went to a job interview recently - the ad specifically said they were open to hiring foreigners - but when I turned up they rejected me because I spoke Danish with an accent. We are open to hiring all foreigners who speak Danish with no accent.
It is difficult for an American, from a relatively new and multi-cultural society,to understand the level of groupthink among people who have lived together in the same place for a thousand years. For example, there is a tacit agreement to dress for the time of year, not for the weather. If it is rainy and cold in July, Danish women will still wear tiny sundresses: to wear a sweater would be to imply that the Danish weather is lousy. (Danish weather IS lousy.)
Then there are the delicate politics of wearing a winter hat. There seems to be a certain date in the fall when one may start wearing a hat: I have no idea when it is, but I do know that wear a hat before that date is to withstand a hundred looks of silent disapproval. We are not wearing Our hats yet. Suddenly, though, Hat Day arrives, and five million hats sprout on the heads of five million Danes. Why aren't You wearing Your hat?
Danish men are very pleasant, and perfectly willing to do half of the housework, but these charming traits seem to be linked to a low testosterone level. Women do most of the calling for dates, and are even required to ask the men to dance at nightclubs. You'll often find a Danish disco full of women dancing alone, watched from the sidelines by lonely, passion-filled men, terrified behind stiff smiles as their eyes send out invisible out rays of desire: Please, Miss, ask me to dance.
Fortunately, there is a mitigating factor, and that is alcohol. Generally, you can count on Danish men at any given gathering to be moody and silent for the first couple of hours, or at least untll the first rounds of Tuborg kick in. At that time, around the third hour, they are become friendly and sweet, with a slight tendancy to tell their life stories to strangers. (I once thought that this life story business indicated a man's desire to date me; sadly, it indicates only a desire to tell me his life story.) By hours four, five, and six, they are sloppy drunk and interested only, as the Danish term goes, in "scorer damen."
If the women, who have also had plenty of beer by this time, are willing, new couples depart to whomever's apartment is closest. The next morning, they decide if they would like to see more of each other.
Suffice to say that if alcohol disappeared tomorrow, the Danes would never reproduce
I've seen Crown Prince Frederik only once, in the lobby of a theater during the peformance of a ballet. He was not very interested in the ballet, and was instead hanging out in the lobby eating licorice fish from a plastic bag.
There was a crowd in the lobby - it really wasn't a very good ballet - so I couldn't get too near, but did I walked past him about 50 times trying to get his attention. I got absolutely no reaction from Frederik, but the guy standing next to him did notice and was very flattered.
Anyway, Frederik is considering marrying a girl from Australia (whom, according to press reports, made the first move.) Royal watchers assumed at that Frederik would avoid having her visit Denmark while the weather was bad - ie in September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, July, or August - for fear this might diminish whatever interest she had in being Crown Princess.
But the gossips were wrong - he did bring her to Denmark, for several grey days around New Years' Eve. For "security reasons," however, she was not allowed to leave the palace. Perhaps the royal courtiers papered the interiors of the windows with sunny pictures; perhaps Frederik simply permitted himself a royal lie, such as "Wow, the weather's usually much better than this."
Questions and Answers about Living in Denmark
Of all the things I've posted on this website, nothing has brought in more comments than My Life in Denmark.
I get support from other foreigners in Denmark, and queries from people thinking of coming here. I get a few laughing Danish men who see themselves in Danish Men: Not John Wayne, and the occasional angry Danish man who tells me to get the hell out of his country if I don't like wimps.
Anyway, most of the questions were pretty standard, so I decided to put together a Q&A for Foreigners Coming to Denmark. I hope this answers the basic questions, even for people too lazy or shy to email me.
A blue "clip card", which can be used on Copenhagen's metro, buses, and trains, including the train from the airport. I recommend buying one as soon as you arrive.
What type of clothes should I bring?
The Danish weather can go from freezing to broiling and then back again within a few hours, so layers are your best bet. Bring lots of sweaters and at least one waterproof jacket. Most Danes own a whole set of "rain clothes," a sort of waterproof jogging outfit. For winter, you'll need warm scarves and a warm coat - a short one is more practical, since many people get around on their bikes all winter long. (Fur is entirely acceptable in Denmark).
Even for summer, plan on bringing a few sweaters and a solid jacket - leather is ideal. Danish summers are often rainy and cold.
You'll be doing a lot of walking, so bring comfortable shoes, waterproof it possible. Bright white tennis shoes will identify you as an American. Danish men and women tend to dress in subdued colors - brown, navy, grays - that match the colors of nature in Denmark.
For women, long skirts are more practical than short, even for summer, since skirts that are knee-length or shorter are too revealing when riding a bicycle. (I often wear bike shorts under my dress until I get where I'm going.) Danish women wear little makeup and simple hairstyles, so there's no reason to drag along a suitcase of fancy products. High heels are a nightmare on cobblestone streets, so if you must wear them, bring along a pair of flats to wear until you reach your destination.
You probably won't need much in the way of fancy clothes, unless you're a real nightlife aficionado. And unless you have a job in a bank (as I do), there is no reason to bring more than one business suit. Jeans - without rips or holes - can be worn almost everywhere.
You can always purchase the clothes you need when you arrive in Denmark, but prices are at least double and sometimes triple those elsewhere, once 25% sales tax is factored in.
What will I be able to bring home with me?
If you'd like to bring home gifts for family and friends, I recommend Danish housewares.
Mom or Granny will enjoy china from Royal Copenhagen (and you can get it half-price on the top floor of their Copenhagen headquarters), your newlywed sister might like a beautiful glass vase from Holmegaard, and even your buddies will like brushed-steel CD or wine accessories from Georg Jensen or his imitators. (See the Royal Shopping site for images).There are also beautiful textiles on sale in Denmark. You should be able to find something for everybody, if you have a general idea what they're looking for.
How will I make friends?
Denmark is a small country, and many people still hang out with the people they grew up with. That can make it hard for a foreigner to make friends: some Danes simply have all the friends they need, and really don't want any more. My Danish friends are almost all people who came from outside Copenhagen, so their childhood friends don't live nearby.
To make things even harder, Danes value privacy very highly - it's part of their general policy of tolerance. Neighbors, for example, may feel that by not greeting you or asking where you come from, they are respecting your privacy. If you smile and introduce yourself, most people will respond positively.
Get to know people in your work or study group. It's easier to do things in groups than one-on-one. Asking people over for a dinner of some of your native food is a great way to make friends, or bring some native sweets to your office on one of your national holidays. Invite a bunch of people out to hear some music from your part of the world. Danes love to see themselves as international, and they will be flattered that you think of them that way.
One quirk of Danes is that they love to make plans far in advance, and they are very good about sticking to those plans. You can invite a bunch of people for dinner on a Tuesday two months from now at 8pm, and although you may not see them in the meantime, they will all turn up, precisely on time.
When dining at someone else's house, bring a bottle of wine or some dessert. A fancy present isn't required.
One more tip: When you enter a room containing a group of people, it is your job to go around and shake everyone's hands, saying, "Hi, I'm so-and-so." Just keep going until you have shaken hands with everyone in the room, upon which time you can stop and talk to whomever seems interesting.
If you want to start a conversation with a Dane you don't know well, ask about the places he's travelled and his future vacation plans. Danes get six weeks of vacation per year, and they love to spend it in places with better weather.
How will I meet someone of the opposite sex?
Even Danes have trouble with this one. As I explain in Get Drunk and Find Your True Love, Danish men don't approach women in the way men do in the rest of the world, and consequently, Danish women don't get much flirting practice. The whole thing can be very awkward, and sometimes succeeds only because both parties are drunk.
Foreign men sometimes assume they are getting turned down because they are foreign, or because they are not white. Not true - Danish men get turned down just as much.
I'm probably not a good source of advice on this one, since I'm single myself.
Will I face racial prejudice?
If you are a non-white person from a western country, probably not - at least as soon as people hear you speaking English. You will then be considered exotic and fascinating, and may get some very interesting dates with blond Danes who are interested in expanding their horizons. There are a lot of multi-racial babies among the younger set in Denmark. Spanish-speakers are considered particularly desirable; Danes love Spain and Latin America.
But there is racial prejudice in Denmark, most of it directed against local Muslim immigrants, who can be of Turkish, Palestinian, Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghani or African origin. In the 1960s and 1970s, "guest workers" were invited to Denmark to help fill a labour shortage, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Denmark made the noble decision to accept refugees and people who were persecuted or tortured. Many of these people came from rural areas, had little education, and were very conservative and religious. Of the more recent immigrants, many have had trouble finding work in Denmark and trouble fitting into Danish society.
There are certainly individual success stories - immigrants and immigrants' children who make important contributions to Danish life - but generally, there has been an unwillingness to integrate on both sides. Danish employers have not been quick to offer the immigrants jobs, which makes it hard for them to show what they have to offer. On the other hand, some immigrants see the Danes as unclean and immoral, and make great efforts to keep their children from becoming "too Danish." It's a story with no heroes.
What this means to you as a foreigner is that if Danish people think you are a local Muslim, they may be unkind to you - until they find out that you are not, upon which time they will be very courteous.
Will I have problems because I am gay?
Being gay is no big thing in Denmark - in fact, the non-Danish gay people I know who have visited or lived here have been a bit disappointed, since the lack of prejudice means there's not much of a gay or lesbian community and not much solidarity.
The Danish world "kaereste" which means partner, can refer to either sex. In professional or social circumstances, feel free to refer to "my partner, so-and-so," but prepared for listeners to be neither shocked nor impressed.
How do I learn Danish?
If you are here for less than a year, it may not be worth it. Danish children begin English instruction when they are 10, and most Danes are very proud of their ability to speak English. You may find some elderly people or blue-collar workers who are less confident in English, but they will probably understand whatever it is you're saying.
That said, learning basic words like "Tak" for thank you (there is no Danish "please") and "Goddag" (Good Day) will be much appreciated. Saying hello is easy - it's just "Hej!!" (pronounced Hi!) Goodbye is "Hej Hej!" (Hi Hi!) So you've got that one mastered already.
If you plan to stay longer, the Danish government provides free Danish classes. I found these a bit slow, and preferred to work with a private tutor. I also drilled with "Danish in Three Months" (available on Amazon.com) although I did not, in fact, learn Danish in three months.
What will I eat in Denmark?
There are some terrific things to eat in Denmark:
Fresh, dark rye bread - called "rugbrod."
Buttery salmon, prepared many different ways, or eaten smoked on rugbrod. Herring, too, if you like it.
Wonderful local cheeses.
Fresh, tasty butter, and organic milk available in every supermarket.
Carlsberg and Tuborg beer - they also make special "Easter" and "Christmas" versions.
Danish pastries - fresh and much better than the plastic-wrapped version. The Danes call them "Wienerbrod" or Viennese bread.
Hyldeblomst juice, or elderflower juice. Great alone as an alternative to soda or alcohol, but also good mixed with champagne or vodka. Hyldebaer juice - elderberry juice - is also excellent, and has medical properties. Kids like both.
Summertime berries - Denmark grows the world's best strawberries, available only in June, as well as wonderful raspberries and blackberries. Local cherries and apples are also excellent, in season.
Danish bacon is, of course, world-famous - but Danes don't eat very much of it.
There is also plenty of dreadful food - hot dogs dyed bright red, fried fish balls and fried meatballs, fatty pork in a variety of disguises, overcooked cabbages and root vegetables, shots of "Gammel Dansk" breakfast alcohol, and waxy chocolate for dessert. Don't let anyone in Denmark tell you that your homeland's cuisine is uniquely unhealthy.
The selection of ethnic cuisine in Denmark is improving, but if you really love Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Thai, Indian or Japanese food, fill up on it before you leave home. The Danish version is rarely authentic - and watch out for Danish pizza!
A good steak is also hard to find, and expensive if you do find it. Hamburgers can be iffy. In general, Danes eat less beef than Americans, and more fish and pork.
Vegetarians will have a tough time in Denmark, since the vegetables just aren't very good. If you eat fish and dairy products, you should be able to get by. Tofu is not popular, and often available only in jars or in ethnic supermarkets. There are, however, shwarma shops all over the country where you can pick up hummus, babaganush, and felafel.
If you like peanut butter, you may want to tuck a big jar into your suitcase. The Danish version is not encouraging.
Will I be able to find work in Denmark?
As a student, I believe you are allowed a certain number of work hours - but don't quote me on that. If you're out of school, finding work will require tremendous commitment and aggressive tactics. The best thing you can do is to get a Danish company in your field to sponsor you before you leave home. To do so, they will have to prove that no Dane can do your job. Engineers, IT specialists and nurses are the most sought-after at the moment.
Some large, export-oriented Danish companies, like Novo Nordisk and Lundbeck, have English as their corporate language and are happy to employ qualified non-Danes. They are great companies to work for, with great benefits, and therefore receive a lot of applications from both inside and outside Denmark.
Working off-the-books in a restaurant or as a cleaning person is possible, although illegal and not always reliable.
If you are coming to Denmark to be with a boyfriend or girlfriend, getting married will not necessarily make things easier for you, work-wise. In fact, your partner will have to prove to the Danish government that he or she can support you before you can get a "fiancee visa" - and since you won't be eligible for government support, you should plan on living off your partner for at least a year or two before you know enough Danish to get a full-time job. Can your relationship survive that?
What should I never do?
Danes greatly admire people from Latin countries like Spain, France, Italy. They love their relaxed nature and high style, and go to night school to learn their languages. Danes enjoy visiting Southern European countries, and sometimes retire there.
That said, Latin-style behavior will cause problems for you in Denmark.
Being relaxed about appointments is a good example. If you have a 10am meeting at a Danish office, your colleagues will expect you to be there at 10:00.00. Arriving at 10:05 is bad manners, and at 10:10 you will find the meeting room door closed, with a lot of sour faces when you open it.
The same is true of social appointments. If dinner is at 8, you are expected to be there at 8. It is considered appropriate manners to circle the block until 8.00.00, upon which time you press the doorbell. Arriving after 8:10 is intolerably rude. Do not cancel social arrangements unless there is an emergency, or unless you are ill.
Do not lose your temper. If someone upsets you, by all means tell them so, but in cool, measured tones, without using any bad language, and don't wave your arms. I violated this rule myself, at my own expense. On day I tripped over a heavy iron refuse bin that some idiot had left in a hallway at my office. I was badly bruised, and I swore loudly. Several months later, the incident turned up in my annual employee evaluation. Apparently several of my colleagues had been disturbed by my loss of composure.
What is there to see and do in Copenhagen?
I'll leave the details to www.woco.dk, the official tourist site, but for a single day's visit I would recommend the following:
A stroll down Stroget, the central shopping street. If you've got energy to spare, climb the Rundturm, a 17th century tower. No stairs, just a long, spiral ramp, so feel free to bring the baby stroller.
An hourlong flat-boat harbour cruise. Cheap at EUR4/$5, and it includes a trip to the Little Mermaid. Bring your own food/beverages.
Lunch at Hovedtelegraphen, a rooftop cafe above the main post office. It's non-touristy, has a reasonably-priced menu of Danish food, and offers a great view of all the city's medieval spires.
Shopping at Illums Bolighus, a four-story Danish design museum where everything is for sale. Right next door is Royal Copenhagen, where you can get some great bargains at the top-floor outlet shop.
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