Fredrik Reinfeldt: Down With the Nation State!

Fredrik Reinfeldt is a former prime minister of Sweden. He is also the former leader of Moderaterna, the Moderate Party. In the article below, all instances of the word “Moderate” refer to the party. It is considered a “center-right” party, despite being all but indistinguishable from the Social Democrats in its policies. Thus there is no major alternative to big-state globalist socialism in Sweden except for the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), who will never be allowed to form a government.

I remember when Mr. Reinfeldt became prime minister back in 2006, “moderate” conservative journalists in the USA — think of them as the RINOphiles of the media establishment — celebrated, because the Moderates weren’t officially described as socialists, and were considered to be on the right. When you read the piece below, you’ll understand what a hoot that idea was.

Many thanks to LN for translating this article from Fria Tider:

Reinfeldt: It’s wrong to put one’s own country first

Former Prime Minister and Moderate Leader Fredrik Reinfeldt was invited to this year’s Moderate Party Conference to give a hostile speech. He warned of Donald Trump’s nationalist “world power order”.

During the Moderates’ ongoing party conference in Västerås, the former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt was invited to speak.

Reinfeldt, who in recent years became a multimillionaire outside of politics, continued in the same vein as the infamous “open your hearts” speech from 2014, which paved the way for the great wave of asylum-seeking in 2015.

In his speech at the Party Conference, he focused on the American election next year, about which he will write a new book.

Reinfeldt warned of Donald Trump’s nationalism and the new “world order” that the US president is said to stand for. The world should be globalist, believes the former Moderate leader.

According to Reinfeldt, Donald Trump has done what communists and other opponents for decades have been trying to do.

“He has dismantled US rule over the world. Instead, we see the establishment of a new world power regime. And that is something we should react against; after all, a world power order is all about the conditions for human life where we are. That’s why this election matters,” Fredrik Reinfeldt said during the conference.

“Will it continue for four more years with a dismantling of the world order that — not least — this party has struggled to maintain?” he continued his speculations.

Reinfeldt argued that the “global answers” are needed because so-called climate policy cannot be resolved through nationalism.

“It is therefore necessary that world trade not be about putting one’s country first and by ordering protectionism in the flow of trade. Just remember what it challenges.”

According to Fredrik Reinfeldt, the world becomes wealthy when trade is open and free, not through trade carried out with the help of “threats”.

The former top politician claimed that Donald Trump’s views on trade prevailed 250 years ago. He then referred to the Scottish economist and the “father of liberalism” Adam Smith while the M[oderate] crowd applauded his speech.

“He [Trump] is trying to teach us that in our time the answer is one-eyed nationalism, to put one’s own country first. And it has spread all over the world; he is not alone in this approach. Just remember what it challenges.”

“If it is about one-eyed nationalism and putting the nation first, then the idea that arose after the Second World War is being challenged: that the most important and finest in the world are not nations but people, individuals,” Fredrik Reinfeldt continued, pointing out that the “wise” decision of individuals is the most important thing that exists on earth.

Reinfeldt also explained that it is wrong to say that the individual is not worth more than the nation, the “people” it would be part of. Such national views should be combated, the former prime minister believes. The idea of a national collective people is a “lousy and bad idea”. It is even dangerous, he explained during the speech.

“It makes us think that we belong to a people that is some kind of being through which we, by collective affiliation, acquire worth,” said Fredrik Reinfeldt, while he seemed to burst with contempt for nationalism.

The former Moderate leader also stated that it is dangerous for the US to withdraw as the world’s policeman and no longer want to “defend” the so-called universal world. Then other power players will take over, he said, referring to countries such as Russia and China.

According to Reinfeldt, Donald Trump’s USA challenges “everything” that the Moderates stand for, and that’s what his new book will be about, he concluded to an applauding audience.

20 thoughts on “Fredrik Reinfeldt: Down With the Nation State!

  1. The idea of a national collective people is a “lousy and bad idea” He is anf Mr Trump is not. Are Scandinavian swallowing blue pill on a regular basis.

    Is he and his politicians moderate? Do they deal with their own native people moderately? Do they import jihadis moderately? Or does his country oppress his own native people extremely, send them out of their houses and apartments to be occupied by colonizers? Do invaders of Europe behave moderately? Do women in Britain drink moderately? Do feminists act moderately?

    Can he make Saudi Arabia Wahhabism, and Shiite Iran and Hizbullah behave moderately?

    Where are these people living to have so superficial ideas and get a grandstand and applaud.

    He implies that because WW2 ‘s mottoes were fascism, nationalism, patriotism, therefore we can avoid future slaughters by burying these slogans. And don’t interfere in any courses that are taking shape under our very noses: Shariah creeping, mosques mushrooming everywhere, poisonous madrassas, rampant deadly anti-semitism and anti-Christianity.

    Is rplacing Christmas with Holiday Season moderate modernity? What abou halal meat imposed on us . . . is that a moderate idea? Teaching/ converting American kids, districts, building, schools, curricula clothes, beaches, swimming pools into the new religion moderate acts?

    What about Brexit? Since June 2016 the Zombie little britain is trying to extricate itself from the tyrant the Ten Headed monster, who started to speak in strange languages :

    ” And the dragon stood on the sand of the seashore. Then I saw a beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads, and on his horns were ten diadems, and on his heads were blasphemous names. ”

    They never stopped telling us that Genesis is just a fancy myth. then the rest of the Book is too. Now I say Revelation is turning out to be true so is the rest of the Book.

    And what about the attitudes after discovery penicillin and antibiotics: “Now we don’t need God. Science can heal us. But science killed Marie Curie because she was versed but also inherently ignorant. Radiation had been killing her red cells.

    Why does not he teach the world to use oil, plastic moderately?

    Did the Book mention something “about the residents who poison the Earth.

    We poison and cause extinction of organisms and later ourselves by our own “clever brains”.

    Where is he living? In Sweden that explains it.

    • What came before the nation state was empires. Rebellions were ruthlessly crushed, only the central culture had any real showing in society.

      People wonder why the European powers allowed the Ottomans to treat their European subjects the way they did once Western culture had become strong enough to do stop it. The answer lies in preserving the concept of the empire. Help to crush the Ottomans and you’re opening yourself up for your own subject people in India, Africa to demand independence.

      It’s quite amazing that the same people critical of the nation state demanded the Albanians be given their own ethno-state in Kosovo. The same people critical of Uighurs being forced to comply with Chinese communist doctrine have no problems with countries like Sweden kidnapping the children of Christians and similar who believe in traditional society.

  2. How strange. Last time i heard about Reinfeldt , he was being chased by a couple of strong men in white uniforms, carrying solid leather-straps and a funny-looking jacket…

  3. He also received criticism for not having provided the financial prerequisites during his eight years in power.[73] AktuelltFokus published an article criticizing Reinfeldt, after leaving politics, for receiving monthly payments of 156 000 SEK[74] from Swedish tax money while his own corporate declared a profit of 22 million SEK in 2016.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Reinfeldt

  4. Mr. Reinfeldt reminds me of the comedian years ago who would be hired by industry and professional groups to speak at their events. He would start out addressing issues of interest to the attendees and then gradually slip in complete gibberish. He was hilarious. This malevolent moon calf, not so much.

    The politicians of the post-war world were like spastics afflicted with uncontrollable muscle contractions initiated by normal desires for the ordinary activities of life. In a normal person, lifting a drinking glass to one’s lips is a smooth, controlled movement not a movement where the full force of one’s bicep is employed so as to smash the glass into your mouth. For these demented souls the recognition of a slight problem requires the most massive, idiotic reaction. All revolutionaries are similarly afflicted.

    The notion of human society as an immensely complex arrangements held together by human relationships and filaments, ropes, and cables of conscious and unconscious ideas, memories, and desires is foreign to these magicians. In their minds, entire nations can be turned upside down and primitives, hostiles, parasites, and utter strangers from other countries can be imported without limit and critical relationships can be discarded or eviscerated utterly without risk of catastrophe.

    The Bible wisely observes that many are the ways of men but the will of the Lord will prevail. But this caution is ignored by those with perfumed, pampered sensibilities who exemplify Alexander Pope’s famous observation that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. The Enlightenment opened the door not to wisdom but to degeneracy. The seeming upward path of the Western world in 1900 was deceptive as then we stood on the threshold of utter madness. We proved to be no more rational than the sick souls who wish to mutilate their bodies or even amputate body parts.

    I’ll post a more pessimistic assessment when I get around to it.

    • Love your last sentence, Colonel! I disagree about the Enlightenment; it was a necessary stage in our cultural evolution, enabling the advances in the sciences which have created the prosperity, comfort and long lives most of us enjoy.

      Years ago, on this site, I related the distress caused to my late mother (who was illegitimate) by my late father’s (strict Methodist- and hypocritical-) family; this is a milder form of the honour killings which accompany religious fundamentalism. God, if he exists, gave us brains to think for ourselves; not to be the robots which Islam demands. There is no virtue in being good if we have no choice.

      • Thank you kindly.

        The advances in science were wonders and that’s a fact. It’s counterintuitive in my mind that those same discoveries fueled the thinking of weak minds that in ALL things clever people can unlock the secrets of life. Notions of scientific socialism and eugenics are symptoms of that urge to take science too far. Think of the sorcerer’s apprentice in that wonderful Walt Disney cartoon.

        As that choice Yiddish expression goes, “Send a fool to close the window and he’ll close them all over town.” Or, stated another way, if eating one hamburger is good, eating 25 hamburgers must be fantastic. But not a sorcerer in sight to keep things under control.

        Perhaps, too, the notion grew that if science was good, then non-science was evil. The troglodytes stood in the way of studying anatomy did they not. The Church burned people at the stake for unauthorized Bible translations. And witches and Catholics got burned at the stake. QED. Murder, superstition, and obscurantism as far as the eye can see.

        Human society is part mystery and along came science with its absolute clarity. Hark! An equation.

        It grew to monstrous proportions, this certainty of rectitude and of the rottenness of what the ancestors had wrought.

        A tertiary effect is the intellectual pathology that proceeds from the abundance made possible by science. It’s essentially a belief in magic and is as destructive as intellectual pride. Not enough of the finer things in life? Just open the tax and regulation spigots another notch and it’s a party time!

        The end result is vast numbers of people living with a heavy load of self delusion. As I said, it’s counterintuitive. Immense intellectual achievement led to utter irrationality.

        That’s my argument.

        • You completely ignored the fact that the Roman Catholic church genocided Christians who refused to bow to the pope. There were the Waldenses, the Huguenots and the St. Bartholomews Day Massacre, and tthe Inquisition. Your church also burned Protestants at the stake. You [ad hominem insult redacted] for not mentioning those facts. I realize that this statement might be banned from this comment section because of the Roman Catholic majority on Gates of Vienna.

          • It is not the duty of Westerners wishing to arrive at a healthy assessment of what is clearly an amazing civilization to first catalog its every last defect or abuse and then don sackloth and ashes in a state of paralysis and surrender. Those who wish to tear it down and discard it in toto, however, revel in such a catalog to the exclusion of everything praiseworthy.

            I’m Catholic?

        • I’ve two points to make Colonel.

          One is I think you should compose a post at your own sites around this gem:

          “In a normal person, lifting a drinking glass to one’s lips is a smooth, controlled movement not a movement where the full force of one’s bicep is employed so as to smash the glass into your mouth. For these demented souls the recognition of a slight problem requires the most massive, idiotic reaction. ”

          In that regard “Never let a crisis go to waste (when you have a soviet-style media in your hip pocket to make a blemish look like a crisis, a power-mad politician would be certifiably mad to not exploit it) go to waste” comes to mind.

          The secondpoint may at first glance appear to be a disagreement with your assessment of the downside of the Enlightment (and it’s even better offspring, the Age of Reason). Rather my comment to follow is a recognition that there is no free lunch along the lines of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. And it has a great deal to do with human nature, both its good and bad sides.

          Norman Mailer, for whom I do not have a great deal of respect, once penned an observation that holds a personal accomplishment meaning to me and which also provides a less pessimistic view than you have of the Enlightenment. Mailer, that broken clock, once wrote “the more a man may create the more his may be certain that the devil will inhabit a portion of his creation.”

          God (even an atheist can allow that term to pertain to reality as a stand-in for a being the atheist doesn’t believe exists) allows man to over-extend his self-adoration. The more man achieves the more he thinks he’s God. And woe to all those that god thinks of as inferior. The enlightenment freed the minds of mankind to advance, but it also provided the opportunity for resentful second-rates to hijack the creations of better men, and allowed these second raters to despoil the memory of all those who made their rise to power possible.

          I see this as the second law of thermodynamics at work. No advance did not have within it a way to keep the rogues from gaining control of it for their nefarious ends. The problem is not due to the Enlightenment per se, but within the fallen nature of mankind itself. That is what laws in an ordered society are allegedly made for. Laws are intended to keep the primitive impulses in check more or less. But even there, the rogues find ways to subvert it.

          What is that line from Shakespeare? Let me paraphrase: The problem is not found in the stars, but in ourselves.

          • Thanks for your appreciative comment in your first point. The idea of measured response is certainly basic to conservative thinking. The complete absence of some kind of central control of how reality is dealt with is one of the defining problems of our age. Providing safe spaces and hysteria over pronouns are examples of how pathetic, lunatic ideas float easily into the main stream. And there they are.

            I’m a bit weary of blogging so I can’t say I feel ambitious about substantive pieces.

            I quite agree with your point that the more man achieves the more he thinks he’s God. I also agree that the problem was not with the Enlightenment itself but rather the distorted sense of our ability to solve human problems by virtue of our demonstrated capability to invent a toaster.

            And great quote from Mailer.

    • “The notion of human society as an immensely complex arrangements held together by human relationships and filaments, ropes, and cables of conscious and unconscious ideas, memories, and desires is foreign to these magicians.”

      Isn’t that something to be delighted at?

      If a person cannot understand what is meant there then they have no right to vote or hold office because voting and holding office (professors, ministers/ politicians, etc. ) these decide the fate of man.

      Those fools of EU have experimented with native lives whenre angels never thought of meddling.

      EU is a scheme interwoven by Satan, How do we know?

      We know From the diabolical fruits it bears.

      • It is, indeed. As Isaac Bashevis Singer obverved, the world crawls with wickedness but it is also full of wonders. Not the exact quote.

        As one gent at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting said, he tried to have an attitude of gratitude. People who build and create are marvellous and the urge to tear everything down to the foundation makes for something ugly.

        Amen to your thoughts on the E.U. The real curse of the 20th century was totalitarianism but the E.U. sold itself as the solution to “nationalism.” Hence, it started off based on a blatent lie. And it adopted an unwieldy, undemocratic structure that gave power to an unelected minority and a vast untouchable bureaucracy. It was all about unaccountable centralization, the precisely wrong direction for man if we are to live lives free of psychopaths.

        • Gosh Colonel, I set off an interesting train of thoughts there, from you and others.
          If “immense intellecual achievement led to utter irrationality” as you suggest (and I’m only partly agreeing), I don’t know what the solution is, but it cannot be a return to the greater irrationality (imho) of religious dogma, except perhaps on an individual and private basis.

          • Religious dogma is not always irrational, but may provide a path to true enlightenment. More on this later.

  5. From Samhällsnytt

    picture:
    https://samnytt.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/reinfeldt-stamma-2019.jpg

    Reinfeldt made an appearance at the M-meeting on October 19, 2019.

    One of the keynote speakers at the Moderates party meeting, which last Friday in Västerås, was the former moderator and prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. Some of the recent deal with the “Reinfeldt era” globalist policy that has been widely talked about did not appear, either with Reinfeldt himself or the audience, who applauded his former leader’s anti-nationalist profiled speech.
    https://www.facebook.com/moderaterna/videos/385087639036584/
    Reinfeldt devoted much of the scene to attacking nationalism as an idea and to selling his new book, where he goes against the US President Donald Trump and his “nationalist world power order”.

    In the speech, the former M leader categorically dismissed the idea as “lousy” that there is something that can be called a people and that can experience community in a national identity. A leader who puts his own country and people primarily thought Reinfeldt is “extreme and dangerous”.

    “It makes us believe that we belong to a people who are some kind of being where we, through collective affiliation, get a value,” Reinfeldt said.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    The Reinfeldt family wants to influence the election
    in the United States.

    On Wednesday, Albert Bonnier’s Publishers announced that former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt will write a book about the upcoming US presidential election. Reinfeldt calls the election “the most important democratic decision of our time”.

    He is writing the book with his son Gustaf and it is scheduled to go on sale in August next year. According to the publisher of the book , Fredrik Reinfeldt has “knowledge and contacts that give him a special ability to observe and analyze what many consider an election of fate for the United States”.

    In the book, the former prime minister and leader of the Mmoderate party will review Donald Trump’s time in power. Together, father and son will also discuss “the upcoming decision between next year’s main candidates”.

    Trump “dismantles world order”.

    Fredrik Reinfeldt, who have said that he left politics in 2014, now wants to influence the American election he calls “the most important democratic decision of our time”.

    In the press release, Fredrik Reinfeldt also seeks to point a boot at the incumbent president, who he thinks is “dismantling our existing world order”.

    – This particular election is the most important democratic decision of our time. Will the American people continue to support Trump and the dismantling of our existing world order, or will they choose another, democratic, path, Fredrik Reinfeldt wonders.

    Partyleader Lööf cheers.
    When Gustaf Reinfeldt announced to his followers on Instagram that he is writing a book with his father about the upcoming US presidential election, Center leader Annie Lööf expressed her appreciation in a comment

  6. When I hear this fool and friend of David Cameron, I think of the awful photo I came across of the deaf child Ebba Akerlund dismembered by a Muslim in a truck in Stockholm.
    She was an individual, and her nation should have cared for her, but you wanted to show how caring you were towards hateful people. Now Ebba is dead. Her family are heartbroken and you are a criminal accessory.
    KBO Baron.

  7. He said this “Sweden belongs to immigrants, not Swedes”
    The other part of this issue, is that many Swedes believe this, as they keep on voting parties that go along with this.

    In a global point, it means then that no other country, is sacrosanct.
    Well there are exceptions, like Saudi.

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