Reykjavík Grapevine


Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.04.2018, Blaðsíða 18

Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.04.2018, Blaðsíða 18
18 The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 06 — 2018 Birgitta Jónsdóttir is an Icelander with international name recognition. Perhaps best known to the rest of the world for creating the Pirate Party in Iceland, her history with Iceland- ers actually stretches back decades before that. She has used her talent and boundless energy to create proj- ects ranging from poetry, activism, media reform and politics. Her u n c o m p r o m i s - ing approach to everything she does draws s u p p o r t e r s and detrac- tors of equal passion. Earlier this month, she announced she was leaving the Pirate Party. This should have surprised no one. Not only because Birgitta announced her intention not to run again when her term was finished - albeit the term in ques- tion finished earlier, with the collapse of the government - but also because that’s Birgitta’s way: as she put it herself: “I am a start-up person. I get crazy ideas, I get totally preoccupied with it, and I get it done. And then I just move." The Pirates went “from a movement to a political party” But this wasn’t the only reason she left the Pirates. “I felt I was just sort of the Cassan- dra there, and people weren't ready to listen to what I had to say, and that's fine,” she tells us. “You don't push your ideas when they're not welcome. I felt in a sense that I didn't really fit in there, either. I don't know if I fit in anywhere, to be honest. But I felt that my course as trying to do the things I originally intended to do, in parlia- ment, had run its course. That journey was over. Primarily because there were very many signs that we would not be getting the new constitution, ever.” Her decision to leave had more to do with just her place within the party, though; the party itself, she feels, has changed. “One of the reasons why I left the Pirate Party is it was increasingly feel- ing like a political party, and increas- ingly less a movement,” Birgitta says. “It's nobody's fault, really, it just sort of happened. I tried to warn about it, and take certain steps, but it didn't work. Maybe some day people will say ‘you were right’. Some people are saying it now. A lot of the people who estab- lished the party have left. And there's not really been a lot of discussion about it because there's just been so much drama behind the curtain. There was a deliberate decision to hide all drama because that's not part of the political culture. So a lot of people think there's been no drama, but that's not the case. There's been massive drama, and a lot of people that were the glue are gone. We have new people now, and maybe they'll do tremendous things, but my criticism is this is not a movement; this is a party. I didn't want to create a party.“ Learning the ropes Birgitta emphasises that she never meant to get involved with establish- ment politics. Rather, she felt obliged to run in order to help the Civic Move- ment, a party she helped create from prominent people in the 2008-2009 protests, due to a large gender imbalance. “I acciden- tally got into parliament,” she explains. “I had no intention when I was creat- ing the party to run. That was not my objec- tive. We couldn't find women to run, apart from Margrét [Tryg- gvadóttir]. We had very little time, and were created shortly before the elec- tions, so I felt I cannot be creat- ing a force for a new Iceland with one woman against five men. It just really felt Old Iceland. A few weeks before elections, I ran as the leader in my constituency, and we were so busy. We had no money. We had people living in the streets collecting signatures for us. It was a difficult but amazing time. In the end, we got 7.2% of the vote, and suddenly we were in parliament. A bunch of protesters!” Birgitta was not entirely a stranger to parliamentary politics at the time— she had briefly worked as a webmaster for the Left-Greens—but admittedly did not know much about the inner workings of Parliament. She quickly learned that, like high school, being new to Parliament means the cool kids don’t talk to you by default; you have to gain their friendship somehow. “So I'm in parliament, for the tiniest party, and we didn't know anything,” she says. “Nothing. And the other parties certainly used that against us. They were certainly not telling us things, which was really disgusting. The people within that structure were not at ease with us. They felt that we didn't belong there. You can see that in how [Minister of Finance and Indepen- dence Party chair] Bjarni Benediktsson has talked about my political movements as like ‘unwelcome houseguests’". The Civic Move- ment, which later changed its name to The Move- ment, would end up retreating from Parliament once Birgitta had moved on. In 2012, she helped form the Pirate Party, and again won a seat. As before, the Pirates were the new kids, largely shunned by the more estab- lished parliamen- tarians. A big part of this, admittedly, is their refusal to align with either left or right, terms the party feels are outdated. This has drawn criticism that the party cannot be trusted. “Which is completely bollocks,” Birgitta tells us. “It's a cop-out. We shouldn't be putting these things in the category of left or right. When you put environmentalism into "that's just the lefties that need to think about that" that's very bad. This is something that impacts all of us. I think the only workable difference left and right is if you want to privatise everything or not, or if you want to tweak taxes. Very old-fashioned stuff. We were trying to bring in new ways of dealing with stuff.” Underlining this point is the fact that “we have the most left wing party with the conservatives in government. And they gave the conservatives the Finance Ministry. That tells you every- thing. How can you possibly trust a left wing party that paves the way for some of the most corrupt people in Iceland to be in power?” Nonetheless, Birgitta saw an oppor- tunity to change things for the better. “To be honest, I knew very little about how things worked when I got in, and I've learned so much since then, which I intend to share,” she says. “You'll remember before the crash that you had people educating them- selves on fractional banking and these abstract concepts they'd never heard of before. At this time, social media was exploding. So in many ways, Face- book, before it put its tentacle in all of us, was a brilliant platform for a lot of countries to organise quickly and get to know a lot of stuff. Iceland got atten- tion from around the world for having the most open and civically-involved constitution process. So I believed that if you could do that, then you would have changed the rules of the game permanently. That's why the citizen engagement parts of the new consti- tution were so important, and many of us were lobbying for a constitution written by and for the people, and we specifically talked about the possibility for calling for referendums, transpar- ency and so forth.” It was during this time in Parliament, in both the Civic Movement and the Pirates, that Birgitta began to come to the conclusion that the system is hope- lessly rigged. This would necessitate new approaches. The brighter moments This is not to say Birgitta views her time in Parliament as a waste of time. On the contrary, there are a number of moments she recounts positively. The common thread in all these is that she had used her access to parliamentar- ians to introduce them to more radi- cal people and the ideas they had to share. “I guess the biggest pivotal turn- ing point for me, in politics and as an individual, apart from having chil- dren, of course, was when I was asked to speak on December 1, 2009, at an event for the Digital Free- dom Society,” she says. “At this event were two relatively unknown guys from an organisation that most people didn't know about but Icelanders did: Wikileaks. They were pushing an idea that co-founder of EFF and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow had talked about a year earlier, which was to make Iceland "a Swit- zerland of bits", a digital safe haven. That one way for Iceland to rise out of our reputation that the "outvasion Vikings" had given us—this unbridled capitalism, this casino cocaine party that was going on—was for Iceland to give something back. The idea was to collect all the best laws in the world in order to create transparency. I was the only parliamentarian speaking there because I was the only geek in parlia- ment at the time. After it, I basically said to Julian Assange, ‘let's do this, I'd like to work on this with you guys’. What they had at that time was more knowledge on how to protect data from being removed by powerful people, and we started sourcing laws on trans- parency and privacy protection, and started taking a holistic approach to a field in law.” This led to her creating the Icelan- dic Modern Media Initiative or IMMI. Knowing that, as a parliamentarian for the opposition, she had little chance of getting laws passed, she focused instead on parliamentary propos- als—a sort of statement of intent for government action without outlining precisely how to put the intent into action—that got Parliament on board with such concepts as protections for whistleblowers, freedom of informa- tion, and removal of data retention, amongst other fundamental demo- cratic principles. This proposal saw the likes of Julian Assange and noted tech activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg speaking directly with members of Iceland’s Parliament, at Birgitta’s behest. They also put IMMI on blast around the world (“If there's one thing Julian Assange is good at, more than anything, it's to create hype,” Birgitta notes). Ultimately, the campaign was a success. “I managed to get this unanimously passed in parliament, which was a miracle,” she says. “You don't often get things passed in the opposition unless it's something that one of the minis- tries are already working on.” Nonetheless, problems in Parlia- ment remained. Birgitta would soon begin exploring other options. “DREAM BIG - JUST DON’T DREAM ONLY ABOUT MATERIAL THINGS. THEY CAN ALL GO IN A FIRE TOMORROW. IT’S THE RELATIONSHIPS YOU CREATE THAT ARE IMPORTANT IN LIFE.” “HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY TRUST A LEFT WING PARTY THAT PAVES THE WAY FOR SOME OF THE MOST CORRUPT PEOPLE IN ICELAND TO BE IN POWER?” Birgitta’s Milestones A brief overview of everything Birgitta Jónsdóttir has been involved with is nearly impos- sible, but we’ve compiled some highlights here: 1989: Publishes her first book of poetry 1996: Organises Ice- land’s first live broadcast on the Internet; wins best personal web page of the year 1996. Early 2000s: Becomes more prominent in activism: Iraq war, Free Tibet and Sav- ing Iceland. 2002: Publishes the World Healing Book & the Book of Hope global anthologies. 2009: Forms the Civic Movement in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, gets elected to Parliament for the first time. 2010: Begins working with Wikileaks. 2011: Kicks off the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative 2012: Forms the Pirate Party, gets re- elected the following year, joins Chris Hedges and Chomsky in a lawsuit against NDAA/Obama and wins first round. 2013: Portrayed in The Fifth Estate, a film about Wikileaks. 2016: Selected as one of the most influen- tial politicians in the world by Der Spiegel magazine.

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