Berlingske has spent recent weeks calling ordinary people far-right radicals. Or far-right extremists.
Not for violence. Not for race theories. Not for sick dreams of abolishing democracy. But for believing that a people has a right to its own country - for worrying about the largest demographic transformation in Western Europe's history - and for discussing solutions to it. Solutions that - admittedly - feel foreign to our self-understanding.
But they do for one reason. And one reason alone.
No Western society has ever faced this problem before. So let's get the proportions straight before I write the rest.
What has happened in Western Europe over the last 50 years has no precedent in human history. That a continent's populations voluntarily - without war, without conquest, without being asked - opens immigration from foreign faiths, cultures, customs and traditions to an extent that demographically and permanently transforms their own countries within a few generations.
It has never happened before.
NO civilization has done it. Not China, not Japan, not the Muslim world, not Africa - and not our own ancestors at any point throughout all of Danish history as far back as we can see.
The position "a people has a right to its country, its culture and its continuity" is, by contrast, not new. It is shared by virtually every person who has ever lived, in all civilizations. One peasant in 1400s France. One merchant in Ming dynasty China. One craftsman in Cairo 1850.
And it is shared by the majority of present-day humanity - from Japan to Morocco, from Israel to India - where the thought of the opposite would be met with disbelief.
60% of the French say it openly, here and now, despite the fact that labels for doing so sit just as loose on Berlingske's sister publications in France.
But what rings even louder in my ears is that until two generations ago, it was the position held by every social democrat, smallholder and folk high school teacher here at home, in Denmark.
Or just take one Danish worker in 1950 - your own great-grandfather. Try explaining to him that his view on who should live in Denmark is "far-right radical" - and that the neutral center position is that his great-grandchildren should accept becoming a minority in his own country. The country an unbroken chain of his ancestors cultivated, defended and died for - and which he himself believed he was passing on.
It's not 99% of humanity that shares his position.
It's closer to 99.9%.
What remains is the calculation that won't let go of me.
A small, culturally and identity-confused upper class, in a small corner of the world, in a 50-year parenthesis - with access to one-way mass communication of near-hypnotic power - has appointed itself "the normal" - and the rest of humanity, living and dead, as "extremists".
You're naturally free to do that. We've been given language to fight over it.
But "radical" means outlying - a position few stand on, far from the center. And the word doesn't retain its force when it hits the majority of your own readers, their parents and virtually all their ancestors.
So my question is really just this, which I hope someone can help me with.
If one position is shared by 99.9% of humanity throughout history and the majority of the world today - and another is shared solely by a narrow elite across two generations, with an experiment no society has tried before - which one is the outlier position?
And who gave them the mandate to judge everyone else?
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