The plaque above the door at 51B reads: ‘The Resistance group HOLGER DANSKE was formed here during the occupation 1940-1945’.
We’re on our way home through Christianshavn, and for the fun of it, I take some photos of the street to compare it with an old painting we have of this exact location. We are on one of the most curiously-named streets in Copenhagen, ‘Overgaden Neden Vandet’, literally ‘Upper Street Below Water’. In fact the only street with a more curious name is on the other side of the canal, ‘Overgaden Oven Vandet’ – ‘Upper Street Over Water’.
If you find yourself in Copenhagen you may well end up here in Christianshavn, and if you pass by house number 51B, keep an eye out for the plaque above the door. Holger Danske is the name of a character from Danish mythology, and the young patriots who met here in 1943 named their resistance group after this figure.
We’re walking back from a lunch with an old acquaintance who’s over from London. He wanted something traditionally Danish and Cafe Petersborg was our suggestion. My friend was back in his fatherland, so Cafe Petersborg’s traditional smørrebrød, beer and snaps seemed appropriate.
Born and brought up in south-east England to an English mother and a Danish father, there’s clearly still a sense of belonging to Denmark, tenuous as it may be. Of course, a feeling of national identity lives within us all, even, in my very English friend’s case, after an entire lifetime spent in and around London. We first met more than 40 years ago over here, and maintained contact on and off ever since. So it’s been fun to meet up again, for auld lang syne.
After our farewells, we’re walking back over Christianshavn. When my wife and I first met I used to invite her to a restaurant which lies on one of the side canals. Until today, I’d no idea that the main resistance group, against foreign occupation, was established just around the corner from a once favourite restaurant.
Resistance to foreign occupation is a natural response. Denmark witnessed its large southern neighbour not only invade but help itself to the national resources of the nation. Resources shipped out to support the empire, or in this case, ‘The Reich’ as it was known.
Armed resistance is one way to confront a foreign power that has annexed and occupied your country. Interestingly though, one of the other resistance groups ‘The Ring’ was involved in an information campaign. Politically neutral, it distributed information not carried by the mainstream press during the occupation. It liaised with other groups and its ultimate goal was, of course, national liberation.
According to Professor Alf Baird, we Scots have had a non-violent route to liberation since the 2015 general election. I posted a quote of his in an audiogram last week. In it he said that he was ‘flabbergasted’ that the 56 didn’t choose to withdraw from the Treaty of Union back then.
Former SNP MP Angus MacNeil responded to the audiogram by stating that you have to tell the voters first, if you want a mandate. Logical enough, but since when has a vote for SNP not been about independence? For crying out loud, it’s the reason the party exists! Well, it was, until the coronation of Nicola Sturgeon as successor to Alex Salmond.
If memory serves correct, it was Sturgeon who, quite arbitrarily, decided #GE2015 was not about independence. Now why would any SNP leader do this, when all the polls were suggesting an SNP landslide?
In his blog, ‘The Unserious Separatists of Scotland’ freelance writer Phil Mac Giolla Bháin writes about, “the internal contradictions of the mindset at the heart of the SNP. They don’t believe in abstentionism. However, [Kenny] MacAskill states that the SNP are “… an insurgency and we have to act like an insurgency”…”
Like Angus MacNeil, Kenny is no longer an MP. Like Angus, he remained at Westminster, and like Ireland’s Redmondites they achieved nothing, for all their sincere attempts to ‘poke Westminster in the eye’. They lost their seats for the same reason the Irish Parliamentary Party lost its seats in 1918. We will never achieve anything at Westminster.
Phil goes on to write, that you don’t establish any legitimacy as an insurgency, “by first agreeing to a very public degradation ceremony whereby fealty is pledged to the Saxe Coburg crime family. If they [the SNP] publicly accept the legitimacy of the Westminster Parliament, then they must ipso facto abide by the rulings that emanate from there. Hence the Section 30 conundrum… insurgency could become a reality if elected politicians were willing to sacrifice their paycheque and perks. The chaps in Whitehall would then know that they were dealing with serious people in Scotland, and that would be a game-changer.”
This all got me thinking of the first-ever interview I did with the late, and deeply mourned, Iain Lawson. The subject of the 56 SNP MPs came up. “All the years I was on the party’s NEC, which was over a decade,” he said, “the party’s policy was if we got a majority of seats in the Westminster Parliament, that was a mandate to begin the independence negotiations. And it remained that way all the time. It only changed after Gordon Wilson ended being leader and Alex Salmond took over. At that point they decided they would go the referendum route…”
What’s puzzling, though, is the notion that one route excludes the other. Surely what had been party policy for decades did not suddenly become illegitimate, merely because another, parallel strategy, had been adopted? When circumstances change to your advantage, you react accordingly. But then again, the chance of five years on the green benches on a salary beyond the dreams of most normal people, was perhaps too much temptation to put in the way of our erstwhile liberators?
Why was not one of the 56 aware of the Westminster Privileges Committee’s second report from October 1999? Professor Baird explains:
“The Privileges Committee report confirms that the UK parliament primarily exists only so long as Scotland’s representatives turn up there. In other words, Scotland has been de jure independent since the first of three majorities of SNP MPs were elected in 2015, as many in Scotland believed.“
Of its 350 members, Holger Danske lost 64, in active operations or executed. In all, about 200 resistance people died in the Danish liberation struggle.
Annexation and occupation are not normal. No nation on earth willingly submits to aggressive colonisation, oppression, and theft of its resources. Even the smallest nations fight back against seemingly overpowering bullies.
A few streets from 51B and Holger Danske, we walk past the Icelandic Embassy. The eyes of my Reykjavik-born wife light up. Despite having spent only the first 12 years of her life in Iceland, she identifies with the nation of her birth, her motherland. There was some kind of reception going on, behind the large glass doors of the ground floor foyer. It all looked very festive. “I’d really like to have an Icelandic passport and citizenship because in my heart, that’s what I am,” she says. “Go for it,” I tell her. “Well, I could get one, but I’d first have to live in Iceland for three years.” Even tiny Iceland demands that incomers show some kind of commitment to the nation, before being granted citizenship rights. Compare that to the free-for-all franchise used at Indyref 2014.
I can’t help thinking that if the SNP didn’t have such an allergic reaction to experts on post-colonial theory, we’d be in a very different place right now. How SNP MPs can be so ill-informed on the treaty, on its conditions, and on the many breaches by our so-called equal partner, is perplexing. Even SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has been caught asserting that we Scots fall under English parliamentary sovereignty. That level of glaikitness should be an instant sackable offence. And as for our Lord Advocate’s understanding of constitutional law, well, we’d better not go there.
Barring a miracle, the SNP are heading into the dustbin of history. Another nationalist movement, subverted, corrupted and effectively neutered. After a dismal decade of unused mandates, broken promises, and delinquent behaviour it defies logic that anyone still votes for them, never mind views them as the vehicle to independence. They took us all for a ride and filled their pockets in the process. Other resistance groups are available. It is our good fortune, that a peaceful route still remains open to us.
peteryoung.dk 