Our Swedish correspondent LN, after pondering some of the recent statements by his country’s putative leaders, sends along the following essay on Sweden’s history and current political culture.
Update: I inadvertently excluded seven paragraphs of LN’s material; I have now added them to make his essay complete. Sorry, LN!
Trosa is a small town of 4,200 inhabitants some sixty kilometres south of Stockholm. This idyllic spot — which, with the islands and skerries of the archipelago just outside, in the old days before the era of automobiles was sometimes called the End of the World (Världens ände) — recently received a visit from a Swedish so-called minister.
One of the true oikophobes of Sweden, of which there are thirteen to the dozen, came to town to visit The Enterprising Week. It was the Swedish Minister of Economics, and also leader of the Center Party, Maud Olofsson.
It was not long before the frogs started to jump from her mouth. In a seminar covered by a small local paper, Östra Sörmlands Posten, Nov 2007, she established among other things that:
“Actually it was not we Swedes that built Sweden. It was foreigners, people from the outside who did it.”1
Of course Sweden has received influences from outside, just as any country has received influences from Sweden and Swedish thought and ideas. Swedish emigrants have contributed to the development in other countries, just as individuals and groups of immigrants have contributed to the development of Sweden. Since 1271 German merchants belonging to the Hansa up until 1669 had a very big influence on trade, and in the Cities around the Baltic Sea and during the 17th century approximately 3,000 French-speaking people from the southern part of what is today Belgium, the Vallones, people who were capable and skillful in mining, were invited to Sweden and had great importance for improving the manufacture of iron.
Maud Olofsson’s statement is, however, appalling and scorns every farmer, fishermen, lumberjack, mining worker, factory foreman, industrial worker, mill hand, maid, crofter, farmhand, tradesman, merchant, banker, businessman, and all the thousands of others who toiled often day and night in order to supply themselves and their families, and with their laborious mostly manual work contributed to building what we today call Sweden.
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It also scorns every one of those women and men who were forced to sacrifice their lives during wartime.
It scorns thinkers, inventors, industrialists and companies: people such as Karl Staaf, Arvid Lindman, Viktor Rydberg, Per Albin Hansson, Torgny Segerstedt, Harry Martinsson, Tage Erlander; Carl von Linné, Christopher Polhem, John Ericsson, Alfred Nobel, Gustaf Dalén, L M Ericsson, and Nils Alwall; companies such as ASEA, Alfa-Laval, Volvo, Scania-Vabis, SKF, AGA -Gasackumulator, Tetra Pack, and SAAB.
Maud Olofsson’s now notorious statement has stirred up anger and even fury all around Sweden. Of course much more so in the blogosphere than in any of the usual PC media.
Some readers might recall Jan Milld, who under suspicion of holocaust denial was scrutinized by Gates of Vienna only three months ago. He has written in detail on his blog about Ms Maud Olofsson and her statement, as has Richard Jomshof of the Sweden Democrats in their paper SD-Kuriren.
The aim of Maud Olofsson’s statement actually never was to say something essential about historical facts. The statement was not meant to be considered as an assertion about reality — true or not true is of course irrelevant for someone who is correct in orthodoxy.
No, it was about imposing a certain attitude, or to remind us about an already imposed attitude. Maud Olofsson determined and marked a position of political correctness: we Swedes shall experience ourselves as insignificant — we shall have no faith in thinking we have any value of our own.
Such a reduction is namely necessary in order to promote the big project — the changing of Sweden to one MULTICULTURAL COUNTRY.
Only if we fully realize how totally without value we are, and always have been, can those in power be assured that we deny ourselves the opportunity of considering the ongoing disintegration in all its aspects of our society.
If someone in the audience of the seminar in Trosa had put a critical question to Maud Olofsson during the question time, those concerned would have directly revealed untrustworthiness and a questionable set of values. Those concerned would have broken off from the PC-communion of self-evident consensus. A genuine democrat does not ask questions.
Maud Olofsson’s statement is one in a series of many coming from representatives of a the history-less but nasty elite in power. The leader of the Social Democratic Party, Mona Sahlin, a.k.a. ‘Måna Muslim’, is already notorious for her depreciatory statements.
But Mr. Fredrique Reinfeldt, who had just become Prime Minister of Sweden in 2006, perhaps carries off the first prize for oikophobic statements. In front of political refugees and ‘newly-created’ Swedes in the Södertälje suburb Ronna, he argued that
“What is truly Swedish is barbaric — the rest of development has come from abroad.”2
1. | Det var faktiskt inte vi svenskar som byggde Sverige. Det var människor som kom utifrån. | |
2. | Ursvenskt är bara barbariet. Resten av utvecklingen har kommit utifrån. |
thanks, ln, for the update.
It’s so sad. This self-hatred appears to be global. I mean “global” in the sense of western culture.
Thanks, too, for using oikophobic statements.
I can’t remember who he credits for this word, but Dr Mark Dooley used it in referring to the self-hatred of the left in Ireland, who want to do away with Irish culture in order to make the new immigrants feel at home.
We need to spread oikophobic far and wide — you just did your part! I’m going to send your post to him. It’ll warm his IRISH heart.
Are they just saying these things to make immigrants feel welcome? Or do they they actually despise Swedes so?
And even if they are just doing the former, at what point can say too much has been given the immigrants?
You take away jobs from Swedes in the form of affirmative action (there is affirmative action right?), you take away neighbourhoods in the formation of ghettos, and then you take their pride by saying it was really foreigners that made Sweden good? And then you conflate past foreigners with the present ones, handing that pride stolen from the Swedes to the new immigrants, as if someone who just immigrated has contributed anything to Sweden! Starts looking pretty absurd.
Maud Olofsson is definitely an oikophobe but above all else she is uneducated and has no knowledge of history whatsoever. In 2003 she took part in the Swedish referendum on the Euro – surprisingly enough on the NO side. (With friends like these…)
Her party had invited a British speaker who had been involved in the British No to the Euro campaign. One of their campaign films had contained a few seconds of a British comedian shouting “one reich, one Führer, one Euro”. Ms Olofsson had been warned abot this but did not take any heed. And when she was attacked by the journalists her memorable line of defence was:
“But we all know that Hitler did some pretty silly things.”
Luckily the Swedish voters understood that the whole question about the Euro was something that our politicians did not understand, and therefore their statements and gaffes were totally unimportant.
The perception that existence exists invalidates normal psychology – it makes it possible to despair. For thi reason some people take flight into a total fantasy and mindless pageant of the world: Multiculturalism.
I think it is a form of decadent sensuality, “Look at the vibrant diversity, it titillates my senses with its fragrant foreignness.” Seeing as though in a godless universe the only thing that can confer meaning is other people. And the more people the better. Perhaps that is the underlying psychological reason?
Dymphna, I believe that it was Roger Scruton who coined the term oikophobe.
I believe the Marxists of Europe, together with their useful idiots, are, totally unbeknownst to themselves, blocking themselves into the proverbial paper bag from which there will be NO escape. They are literally placing themselves between a rock and a hard place. Given Islam’s un-reformable aspiration, to be El supreme, numero uno, we all know that should they ever get into a position of potential domination, they will not share that position with any other group, especially a bunch of self-righteous, sanctimonious, godless atheists. So, just where do these Marxist clowns think that they will be able to draw the necessary foot soldiers from when push comes to shove; remember, the idea is to get the Islamic invaders to destroy the Western Capitalist system. Now after that piece of absolute betrayal, just how many of those people of the West will be favorably inclined to assist the Liberals, the social engineers, our moral superiors, in the fight for their own survival. Given that our future would already be marked out for us by then, as slaves and serfs, not many I suspect, at least not many with any enthusiasm. There again, given the Marxist tendency for slaughter on a grand scale, maybe in their infinite wisdom, they plan on just nuking everywhere where there are large numbers of muslims. Then again, given the liberals capacity to create screw ups out of an endless cycle of incompetence, maybe they’re just hoping for the best. Of course this all presupposes that Western civilization sits still for all this. Already, there is an awful lot of anger out there, I know, I’m one of them. When civil strife bursts out into outright civil war, just how forgiving are those forces of reaction going to be to the architects of this disaster, not very I think, not if they’re smart anyway, for someone who has betrayed you so thoroughly, should get no second chances.
“Widespread and vigorous miscegenation (race mixing)… is the best answer… Teachers are the most effective anti-racist campaigners in the country, this means more than education in other religions, it means a form of political education. Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them… have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants. And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress… I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain natural beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off”! – Andrew Marr. Talk about conceit; the man’s totalitarian credentials are laid out in plain view. For those that do not know, Andrew Marr is one of the senior journalists, news controllers at the BBC Thanks to the site I am an Englishman for finding this gem of Marxist/postmodernist hubris. Note the sense of entitlement to his position of authority; remember too, this man earns probably 5 to 7 times or more what they average person does, so he is immune to the consequences of his dictates, he can live in the safe part of town, well, for now he can, when the proverbial hits the fan it may be another matter, then again, after years spent sanctimoniously bashing Uncle Sam, he’ll probably run to the only safe place he can find, principles be damned, he’ll run right to the United States, after all, his money is as good as anyone else’s right.
What was that C.S. Lewis said about the tyranny of the self-righteous again? Oh Yeah, the worst tyranny of all.
Dear old Maud Oloffson is cut from the same cloth, just from the less intellectual end of it by the sound of things.
As we Cassandras sit here shouting our lungs out to a non existent audience of the dangers rapidly approaching, these clowns in authority believe in their own inevitable virtue, to be supreme. The only inevitability I see is that old worn aphorism Pride goeth before a fall. And I see one brutal fall ahead. Though I also see a very forlorn and chastened Islam cast into the wastelands, the pariah of humanity, scorned and reviled, as will be their just due. But it is going to be messy.
I believe that it was Theodore Dalrymple who said it best, that the purpose of political correctness was to make the people complicit in the lie that is the design of the prevailing order, and in so doing to divorce the people from their own values and morality. When viewed in these terms it is apparent how sick and depraved Marxism is, a philosophy that can only be sustained by deceit and subterfuge. An idea so corrupt that it must hide in the shadows, and speak through lies. The tragedy is that we have let these monsters into positions of power over us. May God help us.
Will the Swedes do anything about their destruction at the hands of their “representatives”?
JA Richard–
Thanks for thr origin of oikophobe. I was too lazy to go back to Dr. Dooley’s post and see whom he credited for it. His main concern was that the word should get legs…it is much better than the awkward and psychologically minded “Self-hatred.”
I think the elites of the West — the elected, plus the self-apppointed academics and journalists — have poked out their organs of sight in order to maintain their belief that *they* are safe. Hiding in their gated communities, never having to deal with the unwashed except to see them out the window, doing the landscaping, they are convinced they are safe…just as Stalin’s cohorts thought they were safe. Until he started throwing them overboard one by one.
Islamic aggression in the past had always been bloody and swift. THe technology has changed and Islam has always been adept at taking Western technology and using it for their own warfare purposes.
Now they overwhelm by numbers, and the numbers are there because the EU elites want them there — knowing that this will never harm *them.*
When does Sleeping Beauty wake up? Hard to say…I guess we have to wait for the jihad to behead her and then the palace will come to life…too little life and too late to lower the drawbridge.
Me? I’m planning to learn Arabic.
As it so happens, regarding Reality, Perception and Orwellian double speak, I just now happened to drop in over at the People Cube hoping to find an update and wouldn’t you know, Red Square, synergistically has just posted a parallel point:
How To Add Spin To Objective Reality With Optical Illusions
Great minds think a like. No I’m not in any way in cahoots with the folks over there. It really is just all happenstance!