Denmark

nation state

Denmark  link Powerbase Sourcewatch Wikiquote
Capital city	Copenhagen
Location	Europe,Nordics,Northern Europe
Type	nation state
Member of the EU, NATO.

Denmark is a nation state in Scandinavia, Europe. It is cited as an example of a low corruption, high social welfare government.

Deep State

Full article: Denmark/Deep state

File:Denmark Deep state.png

The Danish deep state is not well documented here. Danes have attended the Bilderberg.

Policies

Down syndrome

In 2014, 98% of Down syndrome pregnancies were aborted in Denmark.

Immigration

Denmark is one of the sole EU countries where the mainstream liberal or left party is also anti-immigration.

Watch on YouTube

Why is Denmark taking a hard line on migrants and refugees?, 5 August 2022, Al Jazeera

In 2015 plans were announced for advertisements in foreign newspapers, telling immigrants not to travel to Denmark.

Cashless society?

In 2015 the Danish government has a stated goal of “eradicating cash” by 2030.

Covid 19

On 24 July 2020 the Danish newspaper Berlingske revealed that PM Mette Fredriksen had not told the truth on 11th March when she claimed that the decision to immediately lock down Denmark was based on "the authorities' recommendation". The paper revealed that the two top advisers to the government only seven hours before Fredriksen's speech had advised against closing schools and kindergartens. ‘Based on health scientific reasons, we cannot recommend such an initiative in the current situation,’ wrote the director of the Danish National Board of Health, Søren Brostrøm, after he had discussed the matter with Kåre Mølbak, director at the Statens Serum Institut.

Emails deleted "by mistake"

The Ministry of Health prevented the public from getting the whole truth about the possible consequences, as all e-mails in the national research institute Statens Serum Institut in the period during the spring closure were deleted "by mistake". Although as much as half of all emails may have been "lost", the public was told that all e-mails would be available for a forthcoming official investigation of the lockdown.

Culling 17 million mink

• Denmark will cull all its mink, as many as 17 million, after a form of coronavirus that can spread to humans was found on mink farms. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the mutated virus posed a "risk to the effectiveness" of a future Covid-19 vaccine, and would effectively close down the 500 million euro industry.

Medical trials on orphans

Over the course of two decades from the 1960s, 311 orphans were subjected to torturous experiments funded by the CIA, to see if they could induce psychotic reactions. The children were placed in a chair, got electrodes put on their arms, legs, and chest around the heart and having to listen to loud, shrill noises, which attempted to incite a psychological response. The experiments were officially meant to reveal psychopathic traits and map out the link between schizophrenia and heredity.

The examinations took place at the Municipal Hospital in Copenhagen. The idea to experiment on the vulnerable children came from American psychologist Zarnoff A. Mednick, who was then a professor at the University of Michigan. The research project was co-financed by the US health service. It also received funding from the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA front organization set up to research brainwashing and MKULTRA, indicating that there were more to the experiments.

Danish psychiatrist Fini Schulsinger dedicated his doctoral dissertation to the experiments in 1977, titling it, "Studies to shed light on the connection between heredity and environment in psychiatry."

2003 Iraq invasion

Denmark participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In 2014, a number of anonymous officials told in the book Mørkelygten (The Dark Lantern) by journalist Jesper Tynell that they believed that the legal basis presented to the Folketing and the public was politically commissioned. In the book, an official states: "It was said, 'Don't come and say it can't be done.' So marked was the desire. ( ... ) It was quite clear that this was the wish of the highest place in the government. We should not come and say that it could not be done. And it is clear that with that in mind, there was no doubt about what the outcome should be."

The title of the book is taken from officialese jargon, where the use of "the dark lantern" means that you illuminate something in such a way that it actually becomes more obscure. The method involves dazzling and blinding for example parliament, the press and the public with figures, facts and assessments that pretend to shed light on everything, but which actually obscures what one would like to hide. The ambiguity of "the dark lantern" also consists in the fact that outwardly one says something with great conviction, while inwardly one knows well that it is not so. With the help of the officials, Tynell reviewed a number of political cases, showing how bureucrats often tamper with statistics and with the law in order to be able to support that the minister's policy proposals are both factually justified and legal, although this is sometimes not the case or at least is highly questionable.

Civil servants must obey illegal orders

When it is doubtful whether an order is illegal, civil servants still have a duty to obey it and can be punished if they do not. Even if a qualified legal judgment leads to weighty reasons for considering the order illegal, civil servants still have no duty to fail to carry it out. In this situation, they must make their superior aware of the problem, but they still have no right to refuse if the superior insists. Chief Justice Jens Peter Christensen, wrote that in cases where the order cannot be said to be clearly illegal, but where, however,"it can be argued in a valid and weighty way that there is illegality, it has been the common opinion in theory that the consideration to the superior's right to decide is more important than the requirement for administration according to the rule of law", such that the civil servant has both the right and the duty to comply with the order.

A 2015 survey showed that 80% of civil servants would obey an order they thought were illegal.

Parliamentary governance more or less out of order

In the 2014 book Mørkelygten (The Dark Lantern) by Jesper Tynell, with case studies from the Danish civil service, he concluded that:

The influential Danish jurist and legal philosopher Alf Ross paved the way for a quite elitist Danish understanding of what representative democracy is. But the practices the officials report do not even live up to Alf Ross' definition of democracy. In the book Why Democracy? Alf Ross characterized the population as characterized by" ignorance, fickleness and shortsightedness" and assumed that the people will therefore often "err in judging what serves their good " (Ross 1967:220). In his defence of representative democracy in opposition to direct democracy, he writes thus: "The task of the people, therefore, is not in principle to legislate, but to elect an elite of trustees and leaders whose task it must be, better than the people themselves will be able to do so immediately, with prudence and equal consideration to safeguard the interests of all and lead the people towards the goals that best correspond to its true interests and constant will.¨ (Ross 1967:220)
While Alf Ross apparently believes that it is the members of the Folketing who should constitute such an elite that makes decisions on behalf of the people, according to the cases in this book, it is rather an elite of ministers and top officials who in practice act outside the elected representatives and voters. And while Alf Ross has an idea that an elite will "look after everyone's interests" and what he describes as the "true interests" of the population, several of the cases in the book point to the fact that the actual elite most of all looks after the incumbent government's power - political interests, which it would have difficulty to justify if it put the cards on the table in front of the public and the Parliament. Thus, several cases suggest that the elite uses its powers of instruction not only to put the parliamentary chain of governance more or less out of order, but also to override the real professional assessments of officials. This top management, then, does not even necessarily lead to factually well-founded solutions to the problems facing society. Not even if the civil service spends quite a lot of resources and a lot of time to present it this way to the Parliament and the public.