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Den där skarpögde britten Huntford...
Vill passa på och tacka alla som bidrar till den här tråden. Många intelligenta och läsvärda inlägg som håller mycket hög klass.
Kul att du (fasligt – inlägg #62956) nämner Roland Huntford. Av en slump så hittade jag en träffsäker artikel som han skrev 1974, men som likväl kunde ha skrivits 2019. Förutom invasionen av människor från tredje världen så har ingenting ändrats.
Sweden is becoming a totalitarian state
STOCKHOLM - My 11 years in Sweden have been a somewhat despiriting experience, for I have watched the development of what self-styled progressives from the four corners of the earth are pleased to see as a model for the future. If this is really the prospect before us, I see little reason for Joy.
A visiting journalist once described Sweden as "a totalitarian state masquerading as a democracy." It was a remarkable flash of prescience, based as It was on his first interviews with trade union bureaucrats.
It was also a nice piece of irony, since the man had been invited by
the Swedish government, which is increasingly preoccupied with its image abroad, and excessively keen on demonstrating that it really presides over the most democratic of all democracies. But this judgment at any rate expresses the reason for my discontent.
Sweden, as few will now need to be reminded, is the epitome of the welfare state; the model of affluence, where poverty is outlawed; the mecca of the social engineer. It is egalitarian, orderly, well run and most efficient.
But the price has been too heavy for my taste.
As the welfare state has been extended and private enterprise controlled, so have the government bureaucracy and the labor movement apparat consolidated their power.
If their history had been different,
the Swedes might be said to have sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. Two centuries ago, however, Voltaire remarked that the Swedes were the only people he knew who, supposedly possessed of all possible freedom, gladly abrogated all their rights to a strong ruler. Voltaire was talking about that royal despot, Charles XII, but his remarks apply equally well to the constitutionally elected Social Democratic government of today.
In the course of covering the news here, I have watched many parliamentary elections.
On several occasions the opposition non-socialist parties have been on the verge of winning power. But at the last moment they have ratted and made some murky deal with the government, as if mortally afraid of change. That is why the Social Democrats have remained in power for 42 years and, despite a present parliamentary deadlock, are securely in the saddle.
The official government propagandists, perturbed at the sight of a regime that has now outlived most overt dictatorships, try to explain away the situation by blaming the ineptitude of opposition politicians. This is spurious argumentation.
I have come to the conclusion that it is what the man-in-the-street wants. He is afraid of a change of government because it would mean change and the threat of insecurity. He has no interest in politics: he only want good administration and strong rulers.
Given this growing meekness of the ruled, the rulers have understandably advanced their position. The legislature, never very powerful in Sweden, has been reduced to a cipher.
The real power lies in the hands of the party bosses, the bureaucrats and the trade union leaders, who together form an impregnable ruling establishment.
I have watched the advance of corporative society that would have gladdened the heart of that disappointed Socialist. Benito Mussolini. The individual has been suppressed and corporative organizations have taken over. Most ominous of all, I have seen the evolution of a voluntary collective tyranny. Group-think has triumphed.
The collective has been elevated above all else. It is as if the average Swede has decided that liberty rocks the boat: that to forego it is a reasonable price to pay for social security.
There is an intolerance of independent thought. Deviation from the collective opinion, the consensus, is now regarded as among the worst of crimes. Any parliamentarian, for example, who ventures a private conviction that contradicts the national consensus will be publicly crucified by his political kith and kin.
Saddest of all, this "tyranny of the compact majority" - as the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen once put it - has been promoted by the media. There is no censorship in Sweden; it is superfluous, seeing that the media censor themselves by instinct.
One incident sticks in my mind. During the Vietnam War, when the Swedish consensus was rabidly anti-American, and it was decidedly not polite to deviate from that line, I was approached by the editor-in-chief of a chain of newspapers. Could I not arrange to have a piece published saying that all Swedes were not really anti-American and that there was a sizeable minority genuinely worried about the official line?
Although he believed it to be true, he dared not print the story because it would be breaking a taboo and would damage the reputation of his group. But he could quote what a foreign newspaper said with impunity. It is not perhaps an attitude familiar in the Western democracies, to which Sweden technically belongs, but it is well known to those familiar with Eastern Europe.
Indeed, a refugee from East Germany once rang me up to say that she had seen much, but never thought to witness a people voluntarily putting itself in chains. She was emigrating to America, for the sake of her children, whom she did not want to grow up in what she termed ”a creeping dictatorship”. 'The question I put to my self." she said, " is at what point does a democracy end and dictatorship begin''. I think Sweden it approaching this point " All this is terribly depressing, but all cannot be unrelievedly dark and hopeless, it might be argued. There must be some light among the shadows. True enough, but it is on the dangers end the threats to a way of life that one must concentrate when one is under siege.
In Sweden, the compensations are from God, not man. Thus, all the prosperity and orderliness derive from a happy accident: A country rich in natural resources with a population in proportion, and not too large. The real lesson to be learned is that of size. Perhaps a small country has something to be said for it.
Thus, argument about Sweden has been focused wrongly: it has concentrated on system where it ought to be devoted to the question of size.
There are other small countries, notably Switzerland, which is just as well run, but boasts less and whose neutrality, incidentally, is refreshingly honest, consistent and worthier of respect. So those who look to Sweden as a model for the world might do better to see it in relation to size rather than socialism versus the opposite.
As far as I am concerned, the Sweden experiment is too close to Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World for comfort. And there has been no comfort in the fact that the present prime minister, Olof Palme, has harried certain foreign correspondents when their reporting does not mirror the official line.
But Sweden has not been my whole parish. Finland, with which I have been concerned, has also been a source of gloom. While the Finns are wholly admirable, history has put them at the mercy of Russia. Their rulers have decided that appeasement is the path to take.
I have consequently watched how freedom of expression has been whittled away to avoid antagonising the Kremlin. Finland in many respects has taken on the semblance of a Soviet satellite, albeit with a constitutional Western form of government. The word "Finlandiza-tion," coined to designate this particular condition, is not an empty term. It, too, may have ominous connotations for the rest of Western Europe.
The real compensations have come from Norway and Denmark. There, the process and mentality of Western democracy still flourish. Both are traditionally Social Democratic strongholds, and bulwarks of the welfare state, but they lack the totalitarian trends of Sweden.
Both, to their credit, have recently deposed socialist governments in the interests of healthy politics and change. In both countries, people are willing to fight for their ideas, to criticize, and to respect the view of the individual. Both have avoided the spiritual aridity which will be my abiding memory of Sweden.
On the whole, my Scandinavian years have not induced particular optimism. There are trends which suggest that I may indeed have peeped into the future, that this is what the political bosses elsewhere are diligently trying to copy, and that what is in store for the West may indeed by a "totalitarian state masquerading as a democracy."
That, in a sentence, is the lesson I have learned.
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