Most parents know the nightmare that can run on the inside during the years when your son - or daughter - begins moving through the city at night.
The first couple of years my son Oliver went out, because there was a school party, or because he was just meeting friends on a Friday or Saturday, seven of his friends were - without any preceding argument, but simply for walking down the street - beaten down.
SEVEN!
Beaten, robbed, assaulted. One of them so violently that he woke up after having been unconscious.
We live in Frederiksberg.
The end with the villas.
When I asked about it, many of the boys just perceived it as - "that's just how it is!?" - Meaning. Their reality. What is normal and expected.
I often lay in a half-awake state waiting for him to roll in, quite worn out late at night, if not early morning - and I didn't breathe properly until I heard the door go.
I can describe several of those nights. Where the thoughts wandered. What time it was. How many they were. Where they were in the city. I can describe everything, except the one thing that would explain why it kept happening - because that thing had been made unspeakable.
I know it. Every parent both in that neighbourhood - but also the rest of the city - and presumably in Denmark - knows it. But we have been given a language where we lose the right to say it aloud the second we try.
Unfortunately, language and words can do worse things than shut a father's mouth. It can, for example, put handcuffs on a dying boy.
Because there is now a boy lying on the pavement in Southampton.
He is eighteen, he studies accounting in his first year, and he has just been stabbed five times. With a knife.
On the recording you can hear him say that he can't breathe, that he has been stabbed, and you can hear an officer reply that he doesn't think he has, "mate". While he's saying this, handcuffs are being put on. Not on the man with the knife.
No. On the boy who is bleeding out.
Because when the police arrived at the scene, the man with the knife pointed at the boy and said the magic word 'racist' - and the officers acted on that word, and not on the boy lying in front of them...
Try to see if you can understand that picture.
A boy lies down and says he has been stabbed.
A man stands upright and says the boy is a racist.
The officers chose to believe the man. They believed the word and not the body on the ground asking to be heard, and they did it with a calm that is worse to watch than rage.
Later the court established that there was not a single true word in it.
The accusation of racism was fabricated, constructed by the man with the knife to make his victim into the guilty one. But by that point it no longer mattered, because the word had already done its work. The boy lay in handcuffs, and he died there, because a murderer knew exactly which word would make the law turn against the wrong person.
He stabbed him down, and then he used the language to ensure the boy stayed down.
The boy was called Henry Nowak. He was white, and the role was fixed before anyone opened their mouth. The man who killed him was Sikh, a minority, and the moment he seized the word racist and made himself into the victim, it worked immediately. Because that word only shoots one way.
Had the white boy invoked protection through the word "racism", no one would have listened for two seconds. But used as it was here, it turned the entire reality upside down - not because it was true, but because it came from the right mouth and pointed at the right face.
And here it stops being about Southampton. But is also about what happens here. What happens in every other European large or smaller city. Because a word can only kill in that way if someone has first emptied it completely of content, and poured something else into it.
Racism was once a description of something you could point to and verify. Today it has become a sentence you pronounce over another human being and have executed on the spot - BEFORE a single piece of evidence is presented, and before anyone manages to stop a bleeding out.
This emptying and replacement of the word's meaning has not happened by itself. Politicians did it, the media did it, educational institutions did it, companies' HR departments did - everyone did it - decade after decade, word by word, until Language can no longer be used to find out who is bleeding, and who is lying.
The suicidal empathic woke brain virus that has created inflammation between the ears of large parts of Europe's population - built the weapon that the murderer picked up. And none of them deserve a milder word than what they have done to our language.
So let us not wrap it up.
The man who stabbed the young boy down, killed him and lied, did it intentionally, and he is convicted of it.
The officers who readily believed the lie and put handcuffs around a dying person's wrist, acted reprehensibly, regardless of what lived in their hearts - because it was their hands that closed the handcuffs, so no one could believe of them that they wouldn't stand on the victim's - that is, the minority's - side, who had allegedly just been subjected to racism.
And those who through decades have poisoned the language we orient ourselves with in reality, walk free, while a boy lies dead.
But someone must be held accountable. And it is not only the man with the knife, but every single person who saw Henry Nowak bleed out and chose the word over him.
Because they are the reason why we for decades have not had a language where we could clearly say what we feared for our young, and where that fear came from, without the sentence itself being made into the crime.
In the Nowak case, one word weighed heavier than five knife wounds.
Let us take the language back. Let us over the coming years lead it home to the Western world and its tradition, and without fear or concern meet anyone who would invert our reality and cripple us on the tongue with full force back.
❤️🔥🪽
