**THE BLUE BOOK ANSWERS FOR ITSELF**
There is a blue book that stands on display in community halls and folk high schools and gymnastics halls all over the country.
And the special thing about this blue book is that no one uses it alone.
You stand up, you find the number, and then three hundred people sing the same thing at the same time, and somewhere between the second and third verse you stop being random people in a room.
That is actually the whole point of the book. Because it was not made to preserve songs.
It was made to shape a People.
In that book there is now a song called Ramadan in Copenhagen. Further along in the same book stands Freedom is the Best Gold.
I'll let you pause at that.
Right there.
Just a moment. Enjoy it.
While I leave you in peace with it.
One last time.
Ok. Did you catch it?
Otherwise take it just one very very last time,
And then take a good firm grip of my hand.
And follow along.
When the man behind the first song recently explained that one of the most feminist things a woman can do is put on a niqab, because then she can see us while we cannot see her, a question arose about whether the song still belonged among the others. And it is actually not the answer to that question that is interesting for all of us. That is. Us who sing in it.
It is the answer the association chose to give.
They did not say that the song is beautiful. They did not say that it is true. They said that one must be careful about rejecting art on the basis of the artist's views.
Then they mentioned as an example that Harald Bergstedt's songs also stand in the book despite his openly horrific and repulsive Nazi views.
Read that sentence again, and notice what has just happened.
From where we were 13-14 lines ago.
To defend the man they have placed him. They have not compared his statement to an unpopular opinion or a clumsy formulation or a provocation in a podcast. They have - of their own free will - pulled it into the company where one finds the views Denmark once had to defend itself against with weapons.
They think it does not matter.
Perhaps they are even right about that. We will find out in a moment.
But they have put it there themselves, without anyone asking them to, and that is the most revealing sentence that has fallen in this whole case.
There is just this difference here, which the defence does not seem to have thought through, and it is decisive.
What is it then, Thomas!?
Well. Bergstedt's Nazism is dead. It lost. It was defeated militarily, legally and morally, and so thoroughly that not so much as a claim was left to rise on again - and since then we have kept vigilant watch over that demon in these parts. It has no movement, no momentum, no laws, no countries, and the very few young people who still find their way into it do so under open revulsion from everyone else in the room.
Therefore - and ONLY therefore - can one sing The Sun is So Red, Mother, without anyone fearing anything at all.
One sings on the ruins of an order that has fallen, and that is the whole explanation. For if Nazism were alive, had laws and countries and young men behind it, then even a song that merely reminded of it would trigger tumult in the hall before the second verse.
Hold on to that picture.
The order that lies beneath the niqab has not fallen. It grows. It is enforced today, in this year, in countries where women do not choose anything at all, and where the price for letting the hair come out under the headscarf is collection in a van, a cell, a paragraph no one knows. There is no ruin to sing on. There is only an apparatus that is still running, and this is not a view from a lost time, it is a view from a world where it has succeeded.
Ask our Iranian friends - women and men - who have sought refuge here. From that order.
So no, it is not the same situation. Bergstedt is sung because he lost. The other is sung while his cause is still ongoing.
And then there is freedom, which one always brings out at the end. I do that often myself. So let us just do it.
The chairman reminds us that we live in a country with freedom of speech, and that he is free to express himself. He is. No one has suggested otherwise. No one has demanded him prosecuted, forbidden or silenced.
But the Folk High School Songbook is not an utterance, it is a selection - and a selection is by definition everything one has chosen away from. There are hundreds of thousands of Danish songs, and there is room for a few hundred, and every single place is a decision about what we want in each other's mouths when we stand up and sing together.
To discuss that decision is not censorship. It is the only way a songbook can come into being at all.
But look at the song itself.
Because that is where it all finally gathers.
There is not a single word in it about what Ramadan is. Not a single word about duty, about law, about submission, about what happens to the one who does not fast, the one who falls away, the one who no longer believes like the others.
On the other hand there is all sorts of things with dates and candles and evening red and hands finding each other and so on. That is precisely the sort of thing one would write if one wanted a whole people to sing "yes" to something before it had understood what it was saying yes to.
The song is in that way not untrue. It is just silent in all the places where it hurts, and its omissions leave a void so large that one can hear all the way through it, all the way out to the streets in Tehran where women, men and children were slaughtered in January by that order - and where the fast five weeks later began over the corpses, while the internet was shut down so no one should see or hear about it.
Some nice people at nice culture editorial offices around the country with nice glasses, flat shoes and nice views believed they had found our new Muslim Grundtvig - and therefore all of us others accepted and put him in the book.
Also because it was nice to be able to. To be them.
That was then.
He has now himself told us what that order looks like from within - and it is all sorts of super cool stuff with niqabs and rules about not being allowed to be seen, so one must be a woman like a ninja and such modern something. From there follows the rest.
What surprises me is that it is now the same people who were wrong about the man who answer by explaining why all this does not matter. We just brush it away. It does not mean anything.
So Mr. It Will Be Fine has the floor again.
Let me suggest a solution.
We let it stay there.
We do not need to tear the page out.
We just need to stop singing it as if we do not know what stands beneath it.
Ok? Is everyone with me from here?
Or should I cut it out in wet cardboard for you?
....
Happy weekend, friends.
☀❤️
