 Although Denmark is home to one of Europe's most successful anti-mass-immigration movements, politicians are often reluctant to address the effects of mass-immigration. Pictured: The chamber of Denmark's parliament in Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen. (Image source: News Oresund/Wikimedia Commons) |
Although Denmark is home to one of Europe's most successful anti-mass-immigration movements, the bleak facts concerning the effects of mass-immigration have not been taken seriously by the mainstream media, and politicians are often reluctant to address the matter.
How did this situation come about?
In 1983, the Danish Parliament enacted a new "foreigners' law", the "Memorandum on Migration policy." Preparatory work for the new law was performed by an official committee of public servants and Hans Gammeltoft-Hansen, chairman of the private (heavily subsidized) Danish Refugee Council. Going against the majority of the committee, which included the president of the Supreme Court, Gammeltoft-Hansen succeeded in promoting an alternative bill that opened Denmark's borders to anyone claiming asylum.
At that time, information on immigration was monopolized by the Danish Refugee Council and similar organizations, which -- in an apparent eagerness to seem welcoming and kind-hearted -- usually painted false rosy pictures of the results. With little to contradict those false rosy pictures, the Danish Refugee Council was quite successful at molding public opinion favorably toward migration.
The new act, however, soon proved catastrophic. Attempts at integrating the various "refugees" who flowed into the country kept failing. Three quarters of all refugees who arrived in the early 2000s, for example, remained jobless a full decade later.
In 1984, a refugee donation campaign launched by the Danish Refugee Council spurred a priest, Søren Krarup, to place two separate ads in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten -- for which he wrote a regular column -- against the endeavor. In spite of a tremendous smear campaign against "the black priest," his efforts attracted wide support.
In 1987, a private organization, the Danish Association (Den Danske Forening, DDF), was established:
"... to safeguard Danish culture, language and traditional lifestyle in a world increasingly threatened by chaos, overpopulation, violence and fanaticism... to warn against the dissolution of our cultural identity which is now under threat of being swamped by an enormous influx of immigrants from countries plagued by overpopulation... to prevent the disintegration of Denmark as the homeland of the Danish people."
As a result of these aims, the DDF was accused of "Nazism" and "racism" -- despite many of its key members being veterans of the Danish Resistance Movement of WW II.[1] In response, the DDF filed and won a slew of defamation suits against the media outlets that promoted the lies.
Already at the DDF's inaugural meeting on March 18, 1987, participants were attacked with "small grenades" and a "fair sized bomb." Others were physically obstructed from entering the premises. The chairman of DDF at the time -- the world-renowned pathologist Johannes Clemmesen -- complained to the justice minister about the events at the meeting, which had been barely mentioned in the press.
Police protection remained ineffective, however: DDF meeting sites, such as hotels and restaurants, were continually harassed. The organization then resorted to using community centers for its gatherings.
The DDF engaged in a three-pronged approach: conducting research on the immigration problem and other key issues, such as the workings and funding of the Danish Refugee Council, as well as its formal plan to manipulate public opinion; publishing the findings of the research in leaflets and the DDF periodical, Danskeren; and distributing the material in mailboxes, on public transportation and in letters to the editors in newspapers, and the like.
The advent of the internet provided a huge boost to their efforts. Spreading information could now be done online, through a proper website, which currently has about 3,000 visitors a day.
Although all such endeavors proved effective -- particularly as they circumvented the mainstream media, which was not friendly to any group opposing unfettered immigration -- the DDF acquired the higher ambition of affecting parliamentary policy and taking on issues of demography, culture, national defense, free speech, law, statistics and economics.
Gradually, many groups sympathetic to the same objectives as DDF, in at least questioning the results of unvetted mass-immigration, began to emerge, each dealing with a special issue. Among them are the Danish Culture Association, the Free Speech Society, Stop Islamization of Denmark and Generation Identitær, as well as alternative media outlets and blogs, including Den Korte Avis, Uriasposten, Snaphanen and 24Nyt.
The Danish People's Party, established in 1995 by politicians splitting off from the Progress Party, also adopted an immigration policy generally in accordance with that which the DDF had formulated in 1987. Since then, the party's popularity has soared. Today, it is not only the country's second-largest political party, but also holds the chairmanship of the parliament.
Denmark's Social Democratic Party, which traditionally attracted the "common people" -- those most burdened by the influx of immigrants -- was hit the hardest blow by the rise of the Danish People's Party.
In the 1980s, the Social Democrats had formed a committee to examine the results of immigration. The negative findings that emerged were rejected by the party's leaders, who instead released a pro-immigration report. It was due to the unrealistic immigration policy of the Social Democrats that many of its members ended up defecting to the Danish People's Party. This move, however, caused subsequent leaders of the Social Democrats to shift the party's stance on immigration "in a more restrictive direction." The good news is, as a result, that the Social Democrats' immigration policy today runs along basically the same lines as that of the Danish People's Party, still extremely skeptical about the desirability unvetted mass-immigration.
The bad news is that the Danish mainstream media and pro-immigration politicians do not tell voters the truth: that the presence of hundreds of thousands of unintegrated Muslims is endangering Danish society. Journalists have not been telling the truth out of denial; politicians possibly also for fear of losing immigrants' votes. As a result, the electorate does not realize how serious the situation has become.
Ole Hasselbalch is a professor of law at Aarhus University, Denmark, and author of "Opgøret med indvandringspolitikken: En personlig beretning."
[1] For example, Jens Toldstrup (key organizer of DD, resistance leader in Jutland during WW II, awarded i.a. with the US Medal of Freedom with Gold Palms); Herluf Rasmussen (DDF-leader of the Copenhagen District, among the leaders of the Communist sabotage organization BOPA); Sune Dalgård (DDF chairman and editor, the illegal press and military groups); Niels Ebbe Lundholt (organizer of DDF Middle Jutland, railway saboteur); Bjørn Palnæs (distribution of DDF information to members of Parliament and the press, the youngest Dane ending up in a Nazi concentration camp).
