You Are a Genocidal Maniac

“Now it’s time to take responsibility, and you should carry it with your life! You are a genocidal maniac along with all the other parliamentary fools. You chose, and now your reckoning is coming” - someone said to me recently on a public platform (FB group).

This is not the first threat I’ve received, and it certainly won’t be the last either. I know that many other MPs have also received threats. The situation has become so severe that the Prime Minister now requires police protection wherever he goes.

In Iceland, people throw skyr, eggs, and scatter glitter. In the United States, they shoot with rifles.

Let’s be absolutely clear: just because someone throws glitter does not mean that the same person is capable of firing a rifle. While both can be classified as acts of violence, there is a vast difference in their severity. You cannot equate throwing skyr with shooting a rifle.

It’s worth taking a brief moment to consider where such violence comes from, because only by understanding the “why” can we prevent violence in the future. The reason for the threat at the top of this article was related to vaccines following Covid, as an example.

It is very understandable that people have strong feelings about Covid and the vaccines because the risk involved was simply a matter of life and death. But what does it take for those feelings to lead someone to make death threats?

There is no easy or simple answer to that, otherwise it probably wouldn’t be a problem. In this case, the reason seems to be that Icelandic MPs are somehow being held responsible for unspecified harm caused by the vaccines. Regardless of the real reason, people should stop and seriously reflect on their emotions if they start driving them to violent reactions.

What happens next? It’s hard to predict the future, so perhaps the question should be, what needs to be done next? The fact is that the problem is political, and everyone in the political arena shares responsibility for the situation we are facing, and the only way to tackle the problem is through sincere dialogue.

Whether it will be possible to achieve a sincere discussion about all the problems we have been dealing with is the challenge—because the reality is that the debate has been weaponized, and it will be very difficult to get some politicians to sheathe their swords because their voter base depends on those swords.

But we have to start somewhere. Let’s try starting by stopping the name-calling, if not refraining from calling people idiots and fools, at least by not calling them genocidal maniacs. Because the difference between throwing skyr and shooting a rifle matters.