Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.04.2018, Page 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.