Turning Money into Rebellion: The Unlikely Story of Denmark's Revolutionary Bank Robbers

by Gabriel Kuhn (Editor, Translator, Contributor)

Blekingegade is a quiet Copenhagen street. It is also where, in May 1989, the police discovered an apartment that had served Denmark’s most notorious twentieth-century bank robbers as a hideaway for years. The Blekingegade Group members belonged to a communist organization and lived modest lives in the Danish capital. Over a period of almost two decades, they sent millions of dollars acquired in spectacular heists to Third World liberation movements, in particular the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In May 1991, seven of them were convicted and went to prison. The story of the Blekingegade Group is one of the most puzzling and captivating chapters from the European anti-imperialist milieu of the 1970s and ’80s. Turning Money into The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers is the first-ever account of the story in English, covering a fascinating journey from anti-war demonstrations in the late 1960s via travels to Middle Eastern capitals and African refugee camps to the group’s fateful last robbery that earned them a record haul and left a police officer dead. The book includes historical documents, illustrations, and an exclusive interview with Torkil Lauesen and Jan Weimann, two of the group’s longest-standing members. It is a compelling tale of turning radical theory into action and concerns analysis and strategy as much as morality and political practice. Perhaps most importantly, it revolves around the cardinal question of revolutionary What to do, and how to do it?

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics

231 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

Reviews

[chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A totally fascinating piece of European anti-imperialist history, one that I'd never even heard a glimmer about. Lots to chew on. The book comprises several different pieces of documentary history, and once you can get used to the vast array of abbreviated Danish leftist and communist and state three-letter agencies, it coheres remarkably well. The introduction is particularly worthwhile in framing the questions that this form of solidarity action poses for radicals in the global north today.

[Niki Chalusi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robbery for the Revolution—the Swedish title is much better than the English one! Reading this book was an inspiration. As someone born close to the millennium, it helped me understand the political environment that shaped the struggles of past generations.

If I had to compare it to something, I’d say it feels like the real-life version of Andor from Star Wars—but grittier, more urgent, and with stakes that aren’t fiction. Highly recommend!

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this here:

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revie...

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 2 out of 5]

The description completely misrepresents the content. This is not a book about bank robberies; it's a book about sheepish M-L communists who happened to commit bank robberies. Book is 10% generalized content about robberies and 90% third world liberation theory.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hagiographic account of a snap of telling moment of the “long 1970s” leftist moment in Europe, focused on a group of Danish post-Maoist bank robbers who stoles tens of millions of crowns between 1972 and 1988 to supply arms to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — the theory being that the working class of the Global North had becomes hopelessly anti-revolutionary and that the focus of true revolutionaries in the north had to be simply to appropriate resources from the North and funnel them to true revolutionaries in the Global South. Blekingegadebanden, as the group became known — named after the quiet Copenhagen street where the gang’s safehouse and arms cache was discovered — were a kind of Danish equivalent to the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany. In its tendency toward politically fragmenting in-fighting snd rejection of bourgeois convention the story is emblematic of the late days of western radical politics before the neoliberal triumph of the 1980s.

Edited by a journalist who has previously celebrated the social world of pirates and the Council Communists of Germany in 1918-1919, this volume presents the gangsters’ casuistries for their actions though historical documents they created in their youth to explain their ambitions as well as retrospective interviews made some 20 years after their eventual arrest in 1989, in which they remain politically unbowed albeit aware of their failure of their life project.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and thought provoking book about a group of Danish revolutionaries that I had never heard of. This group which broke with Maoism in the late 1960's, applied Lenin's ideas about labor aristocracy to the entire world, and determined that the working class in North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand were hopelessly bound to their respective ruling classes.

This led them to determine that revolutionary change would only come through materially supporting revolutionary struggles for national liberation in the Third World / Global South. So, for almost two decades, this group robbed banks and delivered the funds to such organizations as Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, FRELIMO, SWAPO, and others.

The book is divided into sections, of which an interview with two leading members of the group is perhaps my favorite. They are remarkably thoughtful looking back on their activities.

[Mikael Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

En mycket intressant genomgång av kanske den mest lyckade militanta gruppen i Nordeuropa efter andra världskriget. Här presenteras teroin, metoderna, anledningarna och resultaten tydligt och på ett sätt som gör det svårt att inte beundra M-KA för deras extrema skicklighet och disciplin när det kom till att genom rån forsla miljontals kronor till olika nationella befrielsegrupper i det globala syd.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific analysis!

[sorrowmancer · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must-read for first worlders interested in what we could do to aid the liberation of the third world. the conditions arent quite there today to emulate the brave danish few, but their analysis and their commitments, and their reflections on these, with hindsight, are invaluable. the book presents m-ka's activity as primarily political in nature, which it was, making it a necessary corrective to the popular representation of the k-ka/m-ka as "criminals." (journalists must pay for their crimes.)

the only thing i wish there was more of -- discussion of the campaigns against male chauvinism. they werent the only far left western world org who had these in the late 70s. i want to know why they happened! the consequences of the campaigns are described in detail, but the campaigns themselves are pretty glossed over! nobody's perfect, i guess.