I'm fully aware that Sweden and Denmark are different countries (I lived in Denmark for 3 years), but this reminded me of the reel of Swedes playing every time I visit IKEA, where they talk about how corruption is absolutely unthinkable in Swedish society.

And there's also this tidbit from the article:

> Other Scandinavian nations also reeled upon watching The Black Swan. After the series premiered in Sweden, a criminologist at Lund University warned: “There’s a lot of evidence that it’s probably even worse here.”

For all its excellent marketing, of course Denmark has issues much like any other country.

It's still a great country, just take the marketing with a hint of salt - a self certain smugness / hubris can easily make you blind to real problems.

The director also made Kim Jong Il’s Comedy Club[1], an absolutely insane documentary on North Korea.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1546653/

>All of Scandinavia, he believes, has persuaded itself that crime exists only in violent, poor abscesses on the edges of their societies. “The Danes totally subscribe to this idea that Denmark has no corruption, and to the idea of Denmark as the end of the road,” Brügger said, referring to the political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s notion that “getting to Denmark” is the goal of every modern democracy.

First, this is an assertion about “All of Scandinavia”, and there is some contradiction about crime exists but is small, and Denmark has “no corruption”. But this is basic over-generalization, between low and none, and a exposé that provides anecdotes but doesn’t challenge statistics.

Still people will claim (rhetorically) “none” when the real answer is not zero. And is that really incorrect? To be correct is to quantify and provide your reasoning. That’s something that public discourse is yet to embrace.

Its just people. People are the same everywhere, and are fundamentally unpredictable systems. How large groups behave does depends to a certain extent on context: by compared to others and your socio-economic situation. How they publicly expressed their values are entirely different from their behavior. This is to the dread of incumbent governments and pollsters.

If you starve a wealthy man for 2 weeks he will be ready to cannibalize. If you create a metric upon which you place a lot of economic-value, soooner or later it will get gamed and corrupted. If you remove checks and balances humans being unpredictable will turn on each other.

One can choose to ignore this fact, but at the cost of endless grief to oneself and those around.

Great documentary! The story that chocked me most was the social democrat local politician that helped criminals launder money and evade taxes in his spare time… How low can you sink?

In the third world, corruption is very open from the clerk in a local revenue office to the top ministers/secretaries. There is a price for every service.

In the West, it is hard to see low-level corruption (bribes for services) in offices. However, corruption takes form in the shape of collusion; and this collusion is pretty much legal. Revolving door, consultants, lobbyists, conflicts of interests, setting up NGOs to grab money from the govt, offering sinecure jobs like advisors, directors, etc for friends and family--these are some strategies to do unethical yet legal stuff in the West.

Will that change Denmark‘s position in the Corruption Perception Index?

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2024

I always thought the lower the more realistic

Same filmmaker exposed US, UK, Apartheid collaboration and involvement in the spread of HIV in Africa, and the assassination of the SecGen of the UN, Dags Hammerskjold

Black Swan was a big deal, but this article massively overstates the average Dane's faith in the system. The welfare state is certainly not reverred as a religion, and the current state of it is always a hot discussion topic with pulls in either direction.

Unlike what this article suggests, tax fraud is also relatively common (one would have to be rather daft to assume that a country with such absurdly high taxation did not have tax evasion as a key pastime - although probably not as aggressively as in places like the US), and while heavily frowned upon certainly not seen as the highest form of crime as this article suggests. Well, maybe if you ask the tax agency and the political parties pushing for ever more welfare, both of which push heavily for a cashless society where all financial transactions are fully trackable by them, but I think most would place tax evasion quite far down on the list of significant crimes.

I would instead say that the average Dane is carefree about these issues, not because they are trusting or believe their system is worth religious following, but because the issues experienced there feels quite minor compared to what seems to happen elsewhere in the world. When your concept of a significant natural disaster is a flooded basement, you tend to not worry that much about what happens locally.

Besides the description of the scandal for non-Danish audiences, this was also an interesting reflection on the deception inherent in the production of any kind of documentary work, even when it's portrayed as straight CCTV footage.

> All documentaries are artificial: their footage has been carefully threshed and sieved with an eye to telling a story or pushing an argument. The Black Swan, though, relies on the unblinking, real-time gaze of hidden CCTV cameras, so we lull ourselves into thinking that we’re seeing the full picture, the full truth. No such thing. Instead, we get evasion upon evasion: Smajic’s charade for her clients, Malm cheating the taxman, TV2 withholding their work from the police, Brügger keeping details from his audience. Smajic’s final bluff merely confirms what Brügger seems to have believed throughout his career: everywhere, there are conspiracies and lies that he must expose, even if he has to participate in the dissembling himself.

> ...Smajic believes she’s a victim of journalistic deceit. The Black Swan was meant to be about her life, she said, with the hidden camera footage being used only sparingly to corroborate her stories. She’d been offered no security during the filming, she said. When TV2 screened the first three episodes for her approval, they were really just raw, unedited clips, she maintained, and in any case, she’d been strongly medicated after a surgery and couldn’t assess them with a clear mind. (“Amira watched the edited episodes, they just needed finalising,” TV2’s Nørgaard told me. “During the four hours she spent with the editorial team that day, she appeared unaffected and seemed coherent, as we also documented in the series.”) Smajic hadn’t been running any other office at the time, she said to me, and in any case, “they hadn’t bought the rights to every single moment in my life”.

I cannae creids there would be something rotten in the state of Denmark

Did it really shatter their self image, or it just made every Dane realize that the tabu their society created against speaking badly on the absurdity high taxation they face is actually felt by everyone that is a net contributor of their system?

The middle class citizen in most of Europe is now paying more than 50% of their earnings to the state. I don’t believe a single one actually believes this is anything fair and many surely think it’s oppressive and a form of slavery.

There are only 3 kinds of people that defend these outrageously high taxes:

- the ones that are a net negative to the system

- populist politicians

- people that are indoctrinated to virtue signal about the theme, but that don’t actually believe in it (the ones in the video)

We are really living in the Dictatorship of the Majority.

I did not except the biker gang bandidos in Denmark is led by one Abrar raja. I don't know, as an Indian it just feels weird to hear a Pakistani name in that setting.

Crtl-F "who turns 53 in June" to skip a rather lengthy description of the series (or scroll to the large red "B")

> Nothing I learned from Smajic solved the central mystery of The Black Swan: why did she choose to capsize her life by participating at all?

I recall that Herve Falciani only leaked his trove of tax data when a police investigation was closing in on him. Maybe something similar here: a looming indictment?

Why can’t I find this series anywhere? Even for, you know, download?

How can we view in the usa?

That seems a bit overblown. I doubt that most wasn't aware that things like this is going on. Perhaps the scale and the number of people involved is a little more than most would have expected. The worst bit, for me and most of the people I debated the documentary with is how people can be so unapologetic about doing irreparable environmental damage. There's currently a another case where a company have blatantly mismanaged handling of polluted soil, in the name of profit. The fact that these people don't give a shit, and the people working of them just hit a wall if they're trying to alert local government is the most choking, not that there's corruption.

Also this type of corruption isn't seen by Danes in our day to day life, so they don't really register on our corruption perception. I still struggle to view it as corruption and not just straight up criminal activity or deliberate environmental damage.

Haven't seen this film, but here are some observations I think we should keep in mind in general when it comes to journalism.

There is a famous saying, that in one version goes like this:

I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how. [1]

Mutatis mutandis, something very similar can be said about filmmaking: it is of less importance exactly what someone says and of great importance who cuts and edit it.

Light or lack of light, missing context - this can be the exact questions asked that triggered the answer[2] or what the person said to qualify their statements [3]. There is music, sound effects, camera perspectives and so on and so on.

One can also lead the viewer towards a conclusion without spelling it out [4].

There is a reason militaries advice soldier that in case of capture we should say as little as absolutely possible outside of what one is legally required to say: name, rank, service number, and date of birth. Anything and everything can and probably will be abused.

This is true not only for opponents in a war but as probably everyone knows also with police in most of the world, and HN is keenly aware of this.

I'd argue that we should be equally aware when it comes to journalism: as much as I respect many journalists, they are not a homogeneous group of perfectly ethical people striving for perfect objectivity. They have personal agendas: fame, income, people and cases they sympathize with and people and cases theywant to hurt.

We should be aware of this when reading, watching or listening - but of course even more when answering questions.

Any competent defense attorney can tell

[1]: Supposedly said by Stalin in reference to a vote in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but exactly who said is is less important than the general idea.

[2]: can be as simple as this classic: asking the person "hypothetically, if you wanted to ... how would you have done it?"

[3]: Simple example: "Q: Have you cheated on your taxes? A: yes, <here the director cuts>, back in 1956 when I was 18 ..."

[4]: This is an actual example: Our public broadcaster in Norway mentioning that they had tried to investigate the economic transactions of some people, saying they couldn't do it and it was very confusing and ending that segment with a merry go round.

What they didn't mention was that Norwegian police had already investigated the same people over three years, several months secretly and had not only been unable to prove the crimes suggested, but gone as far as stating they found it proven that the accused were innocent.

Did you really make it as a rapper? Do you have a Spotify or Soundcloud or wat?

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I wonder if this will impact Denmark's spot at the top of the corruption perceptions index. Last years rankings still has them at first, but it's hard to say when the data was collected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

One nice thing about being on the spectrum is that you can spot morally sketchy situations more clearly—or at least more clearly than most normies. I once walked out of a pitch meeting where we were trying to land a client that completely clashed with a solid, well-paying client we already had. I couldn’t believe no one else saw the huge conflict of interest. No one batted an eyelash.

> One out of every two Danes has seen the documentary.

Why not simpler English -- "half of the country has watched it"

Also pendatic aside -- i think "every two danes" is a stretch -- i am sure we can find many instances of "two danes" where both has watched it. Or neither. Some are being born as we speak (write).