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Iceland Says No to Anglo-Dutch Usury

The revolutionary "mass strike" phenomenon which was manifest in the vote for LaRouche candidate Kesha Rogers in the United States on March 2, 2010, was also heard in Iceland, on March 6, when an overwhelming 93% of the voters said no to the bailout of the Anglo-Dutch creditors of Icesave. Despite threats from the British Empire that Iceland would be made "an international pariah" if the country refused to pay back some $5.5 billion to the British and Dutch governments over the failure of the bank Icesave, only 1.6% of the Icelanders voted in favor of the payment.

After the private bank Landsbankski and its online bank Icesave failed in October 2008, those two governments decided to bail out in full the creditors in their countries, and then demanded full reimbursement from the Icelandic government, although the deposits were never guaranteed in full.

The Iceland parliament then hastily approved that usurious deal by a one-vote margin in December 2009, although the sum amounts to fully 40% of Iceland's GDP. However, upon receiving a petition signed by 60,000 citizens, almost a quarter of the population, President Grimsson refused to sign the bill into law, and called for a referendum, which was held on March 6. He explained at the time: "It is the cornerstone of the constitutional structure of the Republic of Iceland that the people are the supreme judge of the validity of the law."

The governments of Great Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden, all of which are monarchies, strongly criticized Grimsson's decision, demanding that Iceland "live up to its responsibilities", and surrender sovereignty, or not receive a cent from the international community, and be blocked out of the EU.

The British government, above all, tried everything to block the referendum, fearing and rightly so that it would establish a precedent. In fact, the British and Dutch governments had rushed through a unilateral decision to pay off their depositors in 2008, and then demanded that the Icelanders come up with the money to reimburse them, despite the fact that those Icelandic banks really only acted as subsidiaries of British banks. Gordon Brown's government even treated Iceland as a terrorist state, invoking anti-terrorist laws to confiscate Icesave's deposits in Britain!

Popular resistance in Iceland to the British pressure proved to be very strong, and Gordon Brown became the most popular foreign target. Hundreds of families posted family photos on a homepage asking: "Am I the terrorist, Mr. Brown?". A widely circulated cartoon showed Gordon Brown as a British school boy bully, attempting to show off to two school girls, by threatening with a chain saw a terrified schoolboy, who looks like former Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde. Brown is saying: "Look girls! This is how you handle a terrorist who has lost your lunch box."

Throughout the European Union, and in many other countries as well, the forces called upon to join the mass strike movement, fully supported and were heartened by the courage of the Icelandic citizens.

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