A closer look at Icelandic and other fires

the fire at Thingvellir

Thingvellir the next morning

Now I do have to apologize for a misunderstanding I created about the fire on Thingvellir in the last post.
Althingi, the traditional Icelandic Parliament was not a house, it was a yearly meeting-place, a kind of open-air Parliament, in operation for about a thousand years.
What burned down was a house, or better a group of connected buildings, built in 1870 to commemorate this traditional Parliament as some kind of a museum. Nowadays these buildings had been used as a hotel.

Now, coincidences do happen and so do fires, even here in Iceland although they are very rare.
But what gave me a strange feeling about the whole thing is the date of the fire.
There are 365 days in a year and then two fires happen at closely the very same place and on the very same date 39 years apart. The first one kills a Prime Minister and his family, and the second one destroys a symbolic building.

Now Icelanders don´t do conspiracy theories, even less so than Americans.
Like most Europeans most Icelanders believe that conspiracy theories are some kind of paranoid bunk.
The exception is 9/11, of course.
9/11 has woken up quite a few Icelanders, just like quite a few other Europeans, that conspiracies do happen. It seems more and more that the only people who do not know, that 9/11 was an inside job, are the mainline journalists.

The death of the former Prime Minister and his family on July 10, 1970 was ruled an unfortunate, tragic accident.
Both TV channels mentioned the fact, that Bjarni Benediktsson died of a fire on the same day 39 years ago on nearly the same spot.
In the next breath, however, – the fire was still burning – the media, not the fire-department, already declared it´s probably cause: the isolation material in the walls which might have been greasy in the kitchen, and from there the fire behind the walls spread over the buildings.
Actually,the first eye-witness accounts were rather contradictory.
Some talked about a kitchen-fire, others said the employees noticed a bit of smoke, when they were in the kitchen and were then looking all over the house to find the cause, when it all of a sudden changed into a blazing inferno.

The fire-department told the Icelandic public the next morning, that ordinary people were not to come close to the ruins of the buildings. (Now where did I hear this before?)

Since Icelanders do not normally do conspiracy theories, everybody was very surprised and shocked, when the wide-spread phone-snooping, that had started during Bjarni Benediktssons government, was revealed. They even had wire-tapped Halldor Laxness, the most famous Icelander and Nobel laureate for literature.
And since Icelanders do not do conspiracies against their own people, especially not in 1970, when things were still far more traditional, it could well be that, the Prime Minister didn´t like the things he was told to do. In his second job, when he was not in government, he was also the chief editor of Morgunblaðið, the largest newspaper in the country. Maybe he was contemplating to tip somebody off, who knows.

And then, there were the British and the Americans playing their games about territorial waters.
Sure Iceland is very dependent on fishing waters. It´s important they don´t get overfished. But you would be very naive to believe that tiny Iceland would unilaterally expand it´s territorial waters without being prodded to do so by the Americans, who sitting in a large and that time by many Icelanders still very much hated air-base in Keflavik.

For America to enlarge it´s own territorial area was a matter of national security. Sending the Icelanders to go first would just make it look better.
But somehow the move was opposed to British interests.

When US- and Belgium capitalists had a conflict of interest on which one of them was to exploit the resources of Ruanda, the Americans payed and armed thugs, who blew the plane of the Ruandan and Burundi presidents out of the air, which then let to the massacres against the Ruandan Tootsie minority.

Blowing up small countries’ leading politicians, when they somehow get in the way of big “players” interests, is according to John Perkins, the former “economic hitman” the usual procedure. After the “economic”, the real hitmen show up, Perkins calls them “the jackals”.
(B.t.w. Perkins has been in Iceland recently to inform us, even on a talk-show on national TV, that indeed there are all indications that Iceland had been hit by some of his former colleagues – the economic hitmen, not “the jackels”, I mean.)

In 1970, the year of the Prime Ministers´death, a novel was published in the UK, written by Desmond Bagley titeled “Running Blind”.
The spy-novel, playing in Iceland was wholly a work of fiction. But the author is rather interesting.
His biography sounds rather like one you would find in someone who had been in “her majesty´s service”: born in England,moved to Africa, having held a number of jobs in Nairobi,Rhodesia, South-Africa, then he becomes a journalist, starts to write his first novel and moves to the channel island Guernsey.
Bagley´s hero, Alan Stewart, is an ex-spy, who has retired to a remote Scottish island and visits Iceland every summer, having an Icelandic girl-friend. Stewart is blackmailed by his former spy-master to do one more “easy” job, this time in Iceland. And of course, things go wrong.

Different from Flemmings “James Bond”, Desmond Bagley´s “Alan Stewart” is not a hero who loves his job.
Both Bagley and his possible alter-ego Stewart hate the “spy-business” and everything connected with it, with such a fierce vengeance so it might very well come from an all too close proximity to it.
Desmond Bagley describes the Icelanders of the 1970s as honest, hard-working, educated but down to earth, a close-knit society with it´s own culture, where people care about their relatives, neighbours and friends.

But Bagley didn´t describe just Icelanders here. Actually he describes so many decent people all over the world, then and now, the little people who often, like in Bagley´s novel, get into the cross-fire, when the “big players” play their dirty little games, be they overt or covert, economic or military war-fare, military coups, dictatorships popped up by death-squads.
Today it would be “color-revolutions”, false-flag terrorist attacks, or payed thugs who, like recently in Iran or in the Uighur-province of China, burn down buses, shops and infrastructure creating lots of chaos to destabilize a country.

In 1970 the stakes were high here in Iceland, today they might be even higher, as a legal challenge by Iceland of the Ice-save responsibility and the European banking regulations, could bring down quite a large house of cards.

And now I´m gonna speculate and “do conspiracy theory”.(It´s just a theory, I´ve only got a suspicious mind, but no proof whatsoever, and probably never will):

What, if someone indeed has been sending a warning with this fire on the ancient place of the Icelandic Parliament. If they were telling those to whom it might concern, that,
“yes indeed, we offed your prime minister those 39 years ago. And we can do it again anytime we choose to. And while we are at it, we might just torch the whole country. And there is nothing you can do about it, except comply. For we are big and you are small, we are strong and you are weak. There are no rules valid for us, none we have to obey. We stand above the law of God and men.“

And if “her Majesty” would indeed send some “James Bond” or other, he would insist on coming first class, sipping champagne on the “Queen Victoria”.
And those to whom it might concern, they probably will understand the message, while everybody else will close their eyes and ears safely, because we don´t “do conspiracy theories” over here. It doesn´t actually keep us safe, but it does keep us from becoming scared.

And now to a totally unrelated subject:

Iceland has got a very active Palestine Solidarity movement. And when the massacres in Gaza happened this winter, many Icelanders took time off, from demonstrating against their own government to demonstrate in front of the American Embassy in solidarity with the people of Gaza.They did so like hundreds of thousands all over the world. Some Icelanders cried, when they saw the pictures of burned people and dead children under the ruins of their homes.
We still feel for the people of Palestine, especially the people of Gaza. We haven´t forgotten their suffering, and we admire their courage:

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