Save the whale, Fuck the man!

For those of you who do not know then I work in the tourism industry. I have received many a letter regarding almost everything in a negative form. Last year, 2006, Icelandic officials made the blunt move to go back to hunting whales. Now as you can imagine – the reaction wasn’t pretty from anyone – except the owners of the few whaling vessels here in Iceland.

Now, one of those who responded where activists, Greenpeace – you know “Save the Wale – Fuck the man” kind of people. I got a few letters regarding some people who had decided that they would never visit our country because of the official decision, as if the small tourism company I work in had anything to do with that. I decided to answer them, and I did – I got into a lot of trouble for it because it’s not in the company’s “policy” or whatever they’d like to call it. But the following reply was sent to many Greenpeace activists, and I only received one answer.


Dear Mr. Mrs. (Put name here),

I was at great dismay that we, a localized tourist company in Iceland, received an email regarding this particular issue. I do realize that some people think of our act as unjustifiable, and I partly agree – but if you decide to ignore Iceland as a potential attraction because of that alone I sincerely hope that you have sufficient arguments to back it up, which seem to be lacking in every declaration I get in my inbox.

Now to be honest I would’ve thought that most people that are concerned with animals should be decently conscious of it’s society, I mean – deciding to have animals as a priority target of redemption must mean that you assume the humans are “fine as it is”. Taking note that we are living in the times that we do – I would’ve imagined people to be both open-minded and have respect to the decisions of others without shunning their country or heritage because they don’t share the same opinion as the government that reigns in the given country, like ours – and probably yours too.

I find it very harsh that people can think this is justifiable. It shows great disrespect to a whole nation as individuals (now in all disregard to our whaling) – and doesn’t show any will of understanding the circumstances we are in. Now I disapprove the invasion into Iraq and Afghanistan by the US government, and later with the support of the UK and many other countries, I find it unforgivable that they assume that it has to enforce their own ideals into other countries because they think that it’s right, just because they want to appear as if it works for them. That, however, does not stop me from visiting the US or UK which I have done numerous times. I do not put any connection from a country’s nature – it’s inhabitants – and it’s government. Those are all different and shall remain so for times to come. Sometimes I suspect many people respect life of a single whale more than the life of a human being. At least they seem to be more likely to cause vandalism – protest and ridicule than those who oppose warfare or plain murder.

As a country - we have one of the lowest murder rates in the world, along with Japan (ironically for this subject, as both Japan and Iceland are targets of Greenpeace for whaling), and we do not have an army. Our police-officers are not allowed to carry firearms except for the special-force team, which is rarely used. Those examples should be enough to show that we respect human life a bit more than the next avarege-joe country, yet somehow that’s not even considered when people blatantly declare that we should be ashamed for killing whales – if you feel that it’s wrong – then you should be able to argue that the killing of all wild-life animals is wrong, and I don’t see that happening.

Remember that the power of decision here in Iceland lies in the hands of few people, like in many other countries – I, for instance, totally agree that whaling is unjustifiable for us because we lose alot more than we could possibly gain from it. And that’s a fact. We get very bad publicity in other countries and many tourists decide not to visit Iceland for that reason alone, or at least say they won’t, which we could never confirm one way or the other. However, to be so narrow-minded that you let our whaling influence whether you could visit Iceland or not is simply beyond my grasp of understanding.

I understand your opinion though – and I respect it as well – but it appears ours are not the same. I don’t wipe out the option of coming to your country, experience it’s nature and society because of a decision that wasn’t even made by you as an individual. About 95% (remember that 48,7% of all statistics are made up on the spot) of Iceland’s population didn’t have a call for that decision and most of them, like myself, don’t even see why or how we made it.

You have to realise that we recently stopped our 60 year “co-operation” with the US air-force where we were rarely on the receiving-end of any favours – this has probably caused a minor inferiority-complex in our government offices and may be just the reason we made this ill-thought decision. Some people could define this situation as "Standing up to the Big Brother", because he just left. But that’s completely theoretical. You can assume that this mindset within our government is most likely a temporary one and will phase out soon.

Please reconsider your stance against our people – instead of the whales and our government.

Best regards,
Molested