Dark Watchfulness in U-Dopia
On a trip to Copenhagen, I was encouraged to visit the famous hippy enclave that is the self-styled independent country of Christiania. It is Denmark’s third biggest tourist draw after the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens. It occupies the old 35 acre Bådsmandsstræde barracks and is home to around a thousand people dedicated to living a free and alternative lifestyle. On a warm day I arrived at this dusty enclave quite ignorant of its history. My vague sense of entering a zone of liberty was somewhat dissipated by a sign declaring “No Photos” a curious reminder of my transit through Moscow airport during the authoritarian communist regime.
Behind the saggy racks of lace-edged clothing were cobbled together self-build houses adorned with familiar rainbows and bendy legged cartoon men with Mickey Mouse fingers holding howitzer sized joints.
The personable Mr Risenga Manghezi, giving a TED talk about the commune, mentioned how it all started as a magic fairy tale. That seemed an odd analogy since its conception in the early 70's was the breaking down of a solid fence with a battering ram. Once through this sturdy Narnia wardrobe, their promised land happened to be "abandoned", as alternative people like to say (not always correctly) of empty property they wish to inhabit.
As I walked the main street, a waft of marijuana and patchouli oil told me I wasn’t at an Oklahoma bake n’ buy. Jostling through the crowd I saw statuesque men in a slit balaclavas holding sentry beside what seemed like Punch and Judy shows. In my innocence I thought they were either "Performance Artists" or "Ushers" and not as it turned out, rather intimidating drug dealers, the curtains apparently opening to reveal the theatre of their weedy wares. This avenue I later discovered was called “Pusher Street”.
The road then moved around to an open air café stuffed full of stoned Urban Pastoralists (a fitting term used by the art critic Julian Stallabrass to describe a breed of well off people holidaying in edgy "alt" city zones and lifestyles, their escape from any persistent trouble assured). A historical parallel would have been the hypocritical Post French Revolutionary fashions amongst the landed classes for "Noble Peasanthood", a phoney delusion spawning shawls and milkmaid hats.
I’ve no doubt the Christiana residents have more practical concerns than to sit about stoned strumming shyte guitar riffs all day but equally Mr Manghezi’s exasperation that the on-site drugs, that universal token of hippy freedom, would soon spawn criminal incentives (that in their policing, strained the State’s tolerance over Christiana's alternative lifestyle and notions of property ownership) seemed rather naive.
I’ve no doubt the Christiana residents have more practical concerns than to sit about stoned strumming shyte guitar riffs all day but equally Mr Manghezi’s exasperation that the on-site drugs, that universal token of hippy freedom, would soon spawn criminal incentives (that in their policing, strained the State’s tolerance over Christiana's alternative lifestyle and notions of property ownership) seemed rather naive.
Manghazi went on to describe the constant battle between themselves and the Danish state, who recently sold Christiania to a foundation at below market rates which were nevertheless bound by Danish property laws whose operational costs and popularity has driven up rents and with it many original settlers from the area. This gentrification however hasn’t dissipated the tug of war between police and pushers. The police raid three times a day and it’s a cat and mouse operation, often involving drones. Apparently Christiania is used as a training ground by the police for other raids. Why bang up a pretend street for this task when there's one already built and haemorrhaging crime as regular as Yellowstone's Old Faithful. Maybe they rotate the officers to alleviate the boredom. As for the residents themselves, it is said they do not profit from this trade.
Only recently the undercurrent of criminality which makes up Christiania’s main thoroughfare, spilled over into a shooting that prompted the locals to dismantle the drug huts. In truth, the occupants did move the timber but the European press gave the impression that these peace loving hippies had simply decided to take a hammer to the structures without resistance. What was not photographed were the army of Copenhagen's police (that country beyond) conveniently borrowed to make sure these liberal folk were not beaten to a pulp by the dealers for destroying a lucrative narcotics trade. Needless to say within a few weeks the same structures returned.
It is this "state protected liberalism" that Christiania seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge with any clarity. Their demands over land subsidy have legitimacy when they see the nation bailing out failed banks, but then so do these grievances apply to society as a whole. It is the insistence that somehow “The Christiania Experiment” is something so special that Denmark should gift it as an independent state, a “Monaco-with-a-Toke” complete with a free plug-in police force and public amenities thrown in.
When Mr Manghazi talked of all the included and special characters in the commune, I do wonder about the millions of equally worthy people across the world unable to be entertained in their main hall by famous capitalist rock bands keen to bath in alt-cool, like actors scrabbling for disabled roles in art house movies to gain Oscars.
To conclude, one doesn’t expect Christiana to be the Venus Project but equally Christiania residents have consistently demanded to live by principles that cannot be achieved without being the recipients of external protection and social concessions, ironically from a state system they seem (right or wrong) to hold in distain. To the rest of the world it seems odd that a group would seek sanctuary from a government overseeing a nation recently voted the second happiest on the planet. And yet in fairness to Christiania, it is not fully acknowledged that the Scandinavian total welfare state may (to the liberally minded) be a Huxleyan dystopia. By this I mean that when the residents first broke into the barracks they were not so much seeking freedom but escaping from what they perceived as an oppressive collective, the "wrong type" of socialism. Perhaps then, liberalism is like the Oroboros snake that in extremis eats it's tale. The mouth may be Christiana and the tail Red-Neck American Preppers, the first clutching a joint, the latter an assault rifle. Their methods may be very different but their thirst for the un-bureaucratized life and the inherant contradictions flowing from that assertion, no less so.
It seems neither examples offer a stable and convincing model because the dilemma between personal freedom and then unconditionally demanding the state's protection can best be described by a large anarchy poster I saw on a house near my home. In large defiant letters it said “BREAK A LAW TODAY!”
I thought of throwing a brick through the window with a note attached that said “You really haven’t thought this through”!
ANDY PRICE MMXX
I thought of throwing a brick through the window with a note attached that said “You really haven’t thought this through”!
ANDY PRICE MMXX