Interview: Birgitta Jonsdottir (Part One)

Last week I had the chance to interview Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She is an Icelandic parliamentarian, a member of the political anti-party called The Movement, and a former spokesperson for Wikileaks. She came to Toronto at the invitation of Samara and talked about her work for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a push to make Iceland  a haven for freedom of information.

I intended to ask Birgitta about Wikileaks and other such topical issues, but we got to talking about more abstract questions. Here's part one:

Q:  I was struck by your remark, at the beginning of your talk, when you mentioned that you were inspired to enter politics after reading Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. Was that because of her general thesis, or was it because you had specific worries that Iceland was going to get “shock-doctrined” in the wake of the economic crisis?

A.  I had been on the forefront of fighting against the aluminum business in Iceland -- Alcoa and these other companies. Alcoa got to build a massive facility and was getting energy from the Iceland government four times cheaper than it was in Brazil. So I was concerned where Iceland was heading long before the economic collapse; I was concerned, and it was so annoying to be in the role of Cassandra.

I’d been reading books, including The Shock Doctrine, and I was very concerned when I heard the IMF was coming to Iceland. And I was concerned how the regulations were being chipped away when the banks were privatized…in 2007 we were ranked the most developed nation in the world. Where are we now? Third largest collapse in the world. 

It draws this incredible parallel, even if not as extreme, with what happened in Argentina. We have a complicated situation in Iceland with political extremism: the neo-conism from before the collapse, and the new extremism saying the only solution is to join the EU.  I am a member of the foreign affairs committee that has oversight over the application to the EU. I say we should tighten up our garden before trying to join another garden. 

Because we are such a young democracy, and so few in number, when I look at former colonies in Africa, the parallels between their independence and ours is striking. There was a guy who contacted me many years ago: I git this email in 1997 or so, and at the time I had one of the only personal web pages from Iceland.

There’s a strong belief in Iceland about the “hidden people” – these mythical creatures who live in the hills amongst the rocks. I talked about them on my website, and this guy contacts me and asks if I believe in them, and I say yes, and he sends me this remarkable letter. And he says he has been appointed to be the “spear” to lobby for American corporations to enter Iceland.

I couldn’t tell if this guy was real, but it turns out he had a high ranking authority in the California government, and he says that he had been visited by hidden persons, and they gave him a message saying he should stop doing what he was doing, and he was worried we would be exploited if American corporations discovered how vulnerable we are.

We are very vulnerable, we need help from the international community. Members of the environmental activist community were the first to see this in 2005, when we organized the first protests against the aluminum industry. That’s the first time I was classified as an environmental terrorist; the worst thing we did was to padlock some machinery, and someone climbed up a crane.

But we pushed the barriers a bit. Which is basically what WikiLeaks does; they are an activist organization that pushes the barriers of the norm, and others feel empowered to go further, in sort of an evolutionary process.

Q: As a parliamentarian, you clearly feel you can make a difference by working within the system. Is that because you think Iceland is small enough and has a flexible enough political culture that working within the system can make a difference?

A: Well, I wanted do an experiment which is why we founded this party that was defined as neither left nor right. We made a checklist of things we needed to achieve. If it is foreseeable that we can’t achieve these goals, we have to dissolve the party. We have max eight years. One of the things on the checklist is to sever the ties between then corporate and the political.

Q: Meaning, no corporate donations to political parties?

A: To have a severe limit to it, no large corporate donations. Some of them obviously try to go around it...

We, for example, would never accept large corporate donations. We are actually having difficulties raising money because we don’t want to have any members – nobody could be a member of The Movement. It makes it hard though, to organize volunteers. People wanted to pay to become members of the Movement, so we are looking into ways to solve that. So our idea is that if you want to be a member, you can also be a member of any other party as well. Because we don’t want to define ourselves as a party.

I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference, but the reason why we haven’t become like the others, and it has been successful, is that we have two fundamentally different aspects. First, you cannot run for us if you have been a politician, because we want to build a bridge between power and the people.

Second: We are very horizontal (inspired by Horizontalism, a book from Argentina). So we rotate leadership roles, only because you have to have an appointed party group chairman. If we have to do leadership stuff we throw dice… the key is, we don’t take it seriously, so we don’t become like them. We take the pledge to be the annoying fly in the tent, and don’t let anyone feel comfortable around us. We have a jar we have to pay money into if we sound like a politician.

The same with the media. The media hates us, because they love to have the leader of the party for interviews, and they are used to the same structure of power. … It is so critical to understand that there is nothing worthy to sacrifice for power.  So as long as we can keep those things integrated…

I was trying to figure out, everything’s still fucked up, what can the people ask for? They don’t want another government because it’s just the same parties. We have got little attention so people haven’t understood what we are about yet. Many voted for us as part of a protest, because they don’t trust the system.

What I realized is the system is the problem. We have this whole breed of people, most countries have been taken over by this breed called bureaucratic lawyers. They control everything; they work directly with lobbyists. Some of the law that has come up since the financial collapse was written by people from the banking sector. The ministries are filled with people who have got their job not because they are qualified, but because they have the right connections. Meanwhile you have qualified bureaucrats that never get any authority within the civil service.

I used to think I lived in a democracy, and I never thought that it would be so blatantly obvious to me that the system is basically controlled by lawyers. (laughs). And I thought, that’s no good.

The problem is that systems tend to defend their mistakes – as the US is doing right now with WikiLeaks. They look to every possible way to say they didn’t make a mistake. And so we need to do like the Argentinians did, and protest the model of the system. I’ve talked to people from all over the world and there is the same level of distrust in the system, and that we don’t have the tools to change it.

That’s why I think it is important in Iceland, the development of national referendums. If people can call for a referendum, with passion, that they should have the right to have a referendum on issues that are important to the entire nation, then being an active citizen becomes more of the norm, and people will have to educate themselves about the issues.