HOPE > TRUTH?

Us at Grapevine HQ keep a close eye on the internet, with a special focus on Iceland-related articles. We feel it is our duty to sort of keep track of what people are writing and saying about us. Y’know?
So we read lots of articles and newsstories pertaining to Iceland, and we post some of them on our Facebook and tweet some of them on our Twitter dot com and whatnot (you should befriend us on Facebook—facebook.com/ReykjavikGrapevine—and Twitter—@rvkgrapevine—btw).

A lot of them are nice to read. Some are really horrid BS. In this day and age of one-click-publishing and blog journalism and whatnot, many seem to feel content by just, you know, making stuff up if it sounds good.

We sometimes tweet back corrections or leave comments if articles or opinion pieces are super offensive to our truth-loving sensibilities. But we have been hesitant with some of them. Because while they might be grossly inaccurate or make-believe, they seem to be inspiring some sort of hope or even direct action in remote places. Places like Spain and Portugal, for instance, where they have been holding massive demonstrations that are apparently ‘Inspired by Iceland’ and its purported refusal to bail out its bankers.

So we have been turning a blind eye to such articles. “Maybe if it’s repeated enough, it’ll become true,” we’ve thought. And we still sort of hope that.

But a couple of days ago Naomi Klein, an author we have a great respect for, tweeted a link to some blog post with the accompanying message: ““#Iceland is proving that it is possible to resist the Shock Doctrine, and refuse to pay for the bankers’ crisis”.

And we just sort of were shocked. While the linked-to blog post might be true in some awesome alternate reality, it reads like a grouping of sick lies from where we’re sitting. We continually feel subject to the ‘Shock Doctrine’, and we certainly feel like we are paying for the bankers’ crisis every single day.

And, we thought, if people keep maintaining this nonsense, this might mean we might eventually start believing everything is all awesome and great here. And it is not! It isn’t! We are not dying of famine or anything, and we certainly aren’t being tortured by fascists, so we should be thankful, but we are still very much subsidising the luxurious lifestyles of the banksters that near-bankrupted Iceland with their criminal actions—none of which have admitted any responsibility for anything, and none of which have been brought to justice—and we are still being forced to privatise and sell off our resources and sacrifice some of Iceland’s pristine nature in their name.

If it is repeated enough, we might start believing it. If it is repeated enough, we might stop fighting back.

So we posted a rebuttal to that article. It’s on our website, it’s called ‘A Deconstruction of “Iceland’s On-going Revolution”’ by Anna Andersen, and you should seek it out and read it.

Sorry, people of Portugal and Spain and the rest of the world that read it. Hopefully your revolutionary vigour will remain, and you will accomplish some great and positive change to the way everything is being run.

Hopefully, we will, too. Eventually.