Nordic activists had to weather attacks both from internal enemies (big business and aristocrats) and also literal Nazis. I bring this point up deliberately, because one of the other cynical rejoinders to community-focused activism is that you can’t counter fascism with co-ops and neighborhood associations. To the contrary, if you compare the Danish citizen response to Nazi occupation to that of other countries with less robust care networks, the difference is striking.

Not only was Danish resistance successful in keeping a significantly higher percentage of its country’s Jewish population safe, but neighborhood-based sabotage campaigns actively slowed down Nazi repression in meaningful ways, in spite of betrayal and cowardice on the part of Danish elites. The Danes, far more than many of their occupied counterparts, were a constant bee in the Third Reich’s bonnet. Not, it should be noted, because they hated fascism more than citizens of other countries, but because when the fascists rolled in, they didn’t have to build neighborly connections from scratch.