For decades it was embarrassing to be Danish.
If you said there existed a Danish culture - something particular, something worth preserving - then you must be one of those who voted for the Danish People's Party. Or worse.
You were the one sitting with the Dannebrog at the summer house, afraid of the foreign. The one who listened to Morten Korch, old patriotic songs and believed Denmark was something special.
And it was funny. Really funny.
Danish culture was put on display as something with meatballs and painted picket fences. Folk songs and folk dancing. Something rather pathetic, which only people without refinement and without the fine educations took seriously.
Over the years an inevitable shift occurred.
Suddenly being Danish didn't exist at all. Everything that had existed was constructed. What had been inherited was stolen. What had been built was built at others' expense.
SAS spent multi-millions making advertisements that said it out loud -
"What is truly Scandinavian? Absolutely nothing."
Everything we were was either borrowed, stolen or appropriated.
And we should be ashamed, of being us.
And the left nodded.
"Yes, that's how it was."
In the same period there were large groups of second and third generation immigrants, from distant faiths and cultures, who absolutely did not wish to be Danes - which they clearly expressed, by calling those they thought must be "fucking Danes" with the sort of shouts that can only be said with that kind of love when you really mean it.
For a while they burned parts of Copenhagen down, to clearly demonstrate how non-Danish they were.
Now we stand somewhere else.
Now EVERYONE suddenly wants to be Danish.
It's actually almost a human right - regardless that one's lineage for 57 generations is from a place 4,000 kilometres from here, that one's faith, culture, orientation and life concerns what goes on there - and that one hasn't held back when it came to telling us what a shithole country we live in here.
And everyone is completely up in arms, particularly on the left - the same left that quite recently didn't acknowledge that Danes existed, or that a country has the right to its own borders - that anyone questions this. And why on earth anyone at all doesn't have the right, in 15 seconds, to call themselves Danish.
I mean hello?
What?
Can you make up your minds?
Regardless. It's actually the same logic.
Back when Danish identity was being put on display as ridiculous or nothing - everyone could therefore be allowed to disparage it.
Now it's suddenly something - and therefore everyone wants a share of it.
The identity hasn't changed.
The convenience has.
...
Notice by the way how this thing with national identity works - and how deep it runs.
Greenland.
An American president said out loud that the world's largest island belonged best to the USA, if they were to continue providing security for a demilitarised, de-industrialised and energy-dependent Europe.
And then something happened in the national soul in 3 split seconds.
Words that hadn't been in the mouth of most people for decades - if not their entire lives - suddenly appeared everywhere.
The Realm community. Our realm. Our territory. Our people.
Suddenly we had a "we" again.
It was actually in a way touching.
But it was also illuminating.
Because in that same week perfectly ordinary, sensible people stood side by side with the country's leading communists - people who for decades have worked systematically to level and tear down precisely that country we were now to defend - and demanded rearmament. As quickly as possible. Direct confrontation if necessary.
Against our closest ally and the world's undisputed greatest superpower and war machine.
For the Realm community's sake.
That people who five minutes ago didn't exist.
That territory which five minutes ago was arbitrary lines drawn on a piece of paper by colonialist patriarchal oppressive and racist forces.
That identity which five minutes ago was meatballs and painted picket fences.
That we would now die for.
🤓🤷🏼♂️
Welcome back to Reality.
