In April, a video entitled ‘Iceland forgives mortgage debt of its population’ went viral. The 30-second clip, a Spanish-language news broadcast by the Latin American TV network teleSUR with English subtitles, reported that the mortgage relief was ‘a response to citizens’ demands’. Within 24 hours of being uploaded, the report had been watched tens of thousands of times (videos on teleSUR’s English-language YouTube channel often struggle for double digit viewing figures). Activists on Twitter and Facebook hailed Iceland as an example to the world, reposting as they went.
The teleSUR video was not the first story characterising Iceland as David standing up to the Goliath of international finance to go global since the 2008 crash. Last year, an article claiming that ‘this little-known member of the European Union’ had defied the ‘FMI’ and recovered ‘their sovereign rights’ appeared on the popular liberal US blog Daily Kos. The piece was ‘liked’ more than 1200 times on Facebook and reposted on countless blogs. Like the teleSUR video, the Daily Kos article tells an uplifting story of the population of a small country asserting their collective rights and refusing to kowtow to the demands of bankers and profiteers. If only the stories were true. full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/06/25/peter-geoghegan/icelandic-myths/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
