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Sweden Wrestles with Its Own Future
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The days are short here in Stockholm, which is so far north that winter daylight is limited to about four hours a day. But the city is buzzing with visitors, media and activities, as the Nobel Prizes were given Wednesday. While the Nobels recognize lifetime achievements in medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, economics and peace, and Sweden is a paragon among progressive, social democracies, there is another side to Sweden and the Nobels that warrants a closer look.
Alfred Nobel made a fortune as an inventor, principally for his discovery of dynamite. He died in 1896, leaving most of his fortune to endow the Nobel Prizes. Nobel lived in a time when European rivalries and wars were the norm. He believed the destructive power of his inventions could promote peace. He wrote to his lifelong friend, peace activist Bertha von Suttner, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize almost a decade after his death, "Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your Congresses; on the day when two army corps will be able to annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops."
If only. Now countries can destroy each other many times over, but instead of recoiling in horror, they just continue buying ever more destructive weapons, ironically making Sweden one of the world leaders, per capita, in weapons exports. Nobel turned Swedish munitions into a stable, multinational enterprise. In 1894, he acquired the weapons company Bofors, now a subsidiary of the weapons maker BAE Systems. While the world's eyes are on the Nobel Prize winners, several Swedes are facing prison time for taking direct action against Bofors.
Cattis Laska is a member of the anti-war groups Ofog and Avrusta, Swedish for "mischief" and "disarm." She told me about their protests against the Swedish weapons industry: "We went into two weapon factories the same night. Two went into Saab Bofors Dynamics (while General Motors bought Saab's auto division, Saab in Sweden makes weapons) ... and they disarmed about 20 (grenade launchers) -- to prevent them from being used in wars. They did it by using a hammer. There's very much details in those launchers, so they have to be perfect. So it's enough just to scrape inside to disable them. And then, me and another person went into the BAE Systems Bofors factory, where we disabled some parts for howitzers going to India. We also used hammers." Like the Plowshares activists in the United States, they follow the biblical prescription from Isaiah 2:4, turning "swords into plowshares."
Annika Spalde also participated in the actions: "We sell weapons to countries at war and to countries who seriously violate human rights, and still these sales just grow bigger and bigger, so we feel that we, as ordinary citizens, have a responsibility to act then and to physically try to stop these weapons from being shipped off." Spalde is awaiting trial. Laska has been sentenced to three months in prison.
Traditional Swedish politics also are in flux. Brian Palmer is an American, a former Harvard lecturer, who has emigrated to Sweden and has become a Swedish citizen. Palmer has penned a biography of Sweden's 43-year-old prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt. Palmer credits Reinfeldt with leading the shift away from the progressive social policies for which Sweden has become world famous. He said Reinfeldt, in 1993, "wrote a book, 'The Sleeping People,' where he said that the welfare state should only prevent starvation, nothing beyond that. After being elected ... one of his first major visits abroad was to George Bush in the White House."
Reinfeldt and his Moderate Party hired Karl Rove as a political consultant to help with the election coming in 2010. Palmer went on: "We have a real kind of silent war on the labor movement. We have a rather dramatic change in the tax system, abolishing the inheritance tax and most property taxes, cutbacks in social-welfare institutions." This week, a new coalition of center-left political parties formed to challenge this rightward drift.
The U.S. electorate has thoroughly rebuked the Bush administration, handing Barack Obama and the Democrats a mandate for change on issues of war and health care, among others. One of the world's leading laboratories for innovative social policies, Sweden is now wrestling with its own future. Those seeking change in the U.S. would be wise to watch Sweden, beyond Nobel week.
27 Comments so far
Show AllLet's see now, individuals are prosecuted and jailed by governments for trespassing, and destroying hunks of sophisticated metal and plastic used to destroy thousands of people, their cities, and cultures, while nobody is prosecuted and jailed for unwisely, often illegally, using such hunks of sophisticated metal and plastic to intentionally kill other people and destroy their cultures. From where did the cruel 'morality' arise that 'things', particularly killing machines, are more sacred than lives? This all reminds me of the protesters in the US who a generation ago went to the silos where the land-based ballistic missiles were deployed and hammered on the bunker doors. They were arrested for tresspassing and doing damage to some of the 'dumbest' and most equal-opportunity destructive machines ever invented while nobody questioned the existence, or the morality of the missiles. We, in our goody-two-shoes holier-than-thou city-on-a-hill jesus-saves christian culture value bits of feeling-less and soul-less metal and plastic more than flesh and culture. Irony must surely be dead for us not to hear it scream; or we have become deaf to its twang.
good post
Sioux Rose
TIREBITER: The bits of metal are a tribute to Mars, god of war, the deity that receives the greatest measure of largesse from leaders here in America, as noted by a bizarre and obscene military budget, added to the Homeland security shenanigans that have the uniformed spying on peace groups (enemy to war, hardly terrorists!), added to the INVESTMENT In weapons manufacture, design & tragic deployment.
It has to do with an assymetric worship of masculine traits, and a false depiction of God as a male human being endowed with super-MAN like qualities. It has to do with a lack of empathy as programmed into societies where competition is highlighted, and hierarchy by class or caste is the norm.
The full folly is in plain view, that those who resist weapons are punished, while those who use them get medals. The only way to analyze the data is to recognize the true nature of the thing worshiped, the god of war is the entity worshipped by far too many nations... of course their patriarchal religious roots/programming has MUCH to do with this. And it is anti-life, hence the need for a strategy to counterbalance what's obvious. Enter: preservation of the fetus, which also works conveniently to limit women, since when pregnant, they are dependent on others for financial help while the baby depends on them. Until there is respect, indeed REVERENCE for the twin forces that together make life, we will see folly continue.
Father doesn't (usually) know best...
As long as we as individuals ask "what's in it for me," exploitation of every kind will be the rule rather than the exception. Additionally, the motives of self-interest will be disguised behind clever spin and propaganda. Evil has a ready answer to every objection, and all seem plausible. It will require that we get in touch with our hearts again to understand the real motives behind the words. This goes beyond male or female, mars or Venus, and right to core of human nature.
A commentary by Guy Finley on the 'murder' at Wal-mart touches on this:
http://www.guyfinley.com/Wisdom_Tree/Audio_Clips/Listen/3354/?q=wal-mart
Sioux Rose
I read CD every day where possible because it's a rich font of learnning. I did not know that Sweden is where certain weapons originated, or that the Nobel prize money emerges from weapons! Talk about a cosmic catch-22. Well, if you're gonna profit from violence, one way to pay off karma is to allot the profits to those who would prefer to promote peace. Divine irony... whoa!
Up north in Canada they're on the verge of throwing neo-con Prime Minister Stephen Harper out of office.
Canada’s governor general, Michaelle Jean, granted Stephen Harper’s request to suspend parliament for six weeks delaying a confidence vote.
Neo-conservatism is being exposed as the mental illness it is.
I urge Swedes to fight the neo-conservative cancer with all your energy.
It will destroy your beautiful country.
From where did the cruel 'morality' arise that 'things', particularly killing machines, are more sacred than lives?
From that same dark bird who flies upon the wings of greed and fear.
If the Swedes are stupid enough to go down the same path we did with the assistance of the Karl Rove brigade, then they can be branded even dumber than Americans, as the Swedes will have the hindsight of history.
www.wunderman-comics.com
Must you be so condescending ......?
Yeah? And what do you have to offer?
Since the Reinfeld gang came to office I've been convinced they were getting advice from Rove . The candidates cosmetic and rhetoric populist makeover, the arrogence and disregard for public criticism, selling off pubic assets, trashing the govenment as fast as possible. How did it happen?
First the social-democrats' shining light, Anna Linde was stabbed to death in a department store by a serbian youth with a fishing knife. Then the tsunami that hit thailand left thousands of swedes on christmas holliday stranded. The swedes are so used to a government that regularly performs miracles that when they couldn't instantly transport their citzens out of harms way there was a public outcry. "Why had they let us down?" Factor in that every sixteen years or so there accumulates enough youthful voters that forget how the "moderates" screwed everything up the last time they conned their way into power to tip the ballance along with the greedy and the truly dim to swing the election.
But now it seems the swedes are tired of it. Hopefully by the time this crew is booted out there will be a few things still nailed down. So of course the swedish version of the neo-cons calls up Karl Rove. I knew something was up when he visited Stockholm this summer. It was more than him just dodging a supoina although that certainly was part of it.
Beware sweden. Karl Rove (like all republicans) hates sweden with a passion that knows no bounds.
p.s. Just for the record the days in Stockholm this time of year are about six hours long, not four. It just seems darker while the the right wing nuts are in the driver seat.
"The U.S. electorate has thoroughly rebuked the Bush administration, handing Barack Obama and the Democrats a mandate for change on issues of war and health care, among others."
Again the myth. Obama won 52% to 48%. A solid victory, BUT hardly a Reagan or Johnson like tidal wave, AND it occured after Obama spent the entire general election running to the right.
deepblue
Hold on. Not so. The data given on the RealPolitics.com website
has Obama/Biden winning by a margin of 7.2 not 4 as you would
like to have it. They have Obama at 52.9 and McCain at 45.7.
Not a huge landslide, it is true, but according to another website
FiveThirtyEight.com Obama won by more that 9.1 million votes
which it is stated there as the 6th largest victory margin of all time
and the Largest ever by a non-incumbent. Don't be in such a hurry
to dismiss the magnitude of the Obama/Biden victory.
I also would disagree with your assertion that "Obama spent the entire
general election running to the right." Did he back off on national
health care? NO. Did he relax his condemnation of the Bush administraion
and the War in Iraq? No.
Did your need to dis Obama compell you to distort the facts?
Many of the people who voted for Obama seem to have done so as a repudiation of Bush - and so McCain - rather than as a real embracement of Obama. Which is to say, the vote was as much a reflection of how deeply people revile neocon policy as it was approval of Obama. (This is something that doesn't seem to have penetrated Obama's natural arrogance.)
Obama was never for national health care, which would be a single-payer system.
Obama is for national health insurance company care.
Condemnation of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq? (Is that two separate subjects?)
Let's see, Obama voted to "revise" (= gut) FISA, which included granting retroactive immunity to all players in the illegal government wire-tapping program, (although he claimed to oppose the immunity clause and promised to vote against it).
He was one of the most ardent backers of the Wall Street Giveaway.
He has repeatedly voted for no-strings-attached war funding.
He's only talking about removing combat troops from Iraq.
He's surrounded himself with Iraq war hawks. (Need I even mention the name Gates?)
He wants to expand the war in Afghanistan - and talked of unilateral strikes inside Pakistan. (Has he yet condemned that little attack inside Syria?)
(I'm not even a political junky.)
Umm, "dis Obama"? Is that a typo or some sort of slang? (One of those annoying internet/texting abbreviations, perhaps?) "Dis" certainly isn't in my dictionary, except as a prefix.
Sioux Rose
PHOTONS: I think you nailed it.
Thanks.
The handle should be photon's feather - a name I'd already established elsewhere -
but despite the fancy upgrades, this site doesn't allow punctuation marks in user names.
deepblue
To photons feather:
dis is a word.
I heard it used and looked it up on the Mirriam-Webster dictionary on my computer.
Yes, it is a slang word.
variant diss
transitive verb
1. slang: to treat with disrespect or contempt: INSULT.
2. slang: to find fault with: CRITICIZE.
I think that for you to characterize Barack Obama as naturally arrogant
is an indicator of your own arrogance itself and is unjustifiable.
The way you take my own brief pro-Obama comment and blow it up into
a tirade against the man I think also reflects your rather acrimonious
and spiteful temperament. Grow up - this is the Common Dreams website.
Think before you bash.
Evidence for Obama's arrogance:
No details on change: Just trust me.
No response to liberals' concerns about his advisors, choices for his cabinet: Just trust me.
Voting to gut FISA, despite promising his concerned supporters that he would vote against a bill that offered retroactive immunity: no excuses, no apologies.
Voting - even pushing for - the Wall Street Giveaway, despite the clamor from his supporters and his constituents.
That European (campaign) tour. Essays could be written on that.
His entering the campaign in the first place, after he'd promised, following his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, 2004, to serve out his term as senator (if elected). When queried: No response.
A tirade? You need to get that dictionary out again. To your puerile attack on another commenter, all I did was to offer another interpretation of the numbers - and offer my reasons for my interpretation. I then offered facts that Obama has not done as you claimed. Are you suggesting that your comments are off-limits, even when they are in error?
'Acrimonious' is truly an exaggeration. Where 'spiteful' comes from, (besides your imagination), is anyone's guess.
You take it upon yourself to reprimand me for 'bashing' someone, when I did little more than state a few facts (and logical conclusions) that contradicted your claim - and then you follow it up with an unquestionable personal attack. For someone who launched two personal attacks in two comments to criticize someone else's online behavior is utterly ludicrous. Perhaps you need to give some consideration to your own temperament - and take your own advice. [You know nothing of me or my temperament.]
The query about the word 'dis' was perfectly straightforward, and was not a major part of my comment, which is why it was appended at the bottom. Why you decided to make a major issue of it is beyond me. It isn't, as I said, in my dictionary, so I thought perhaps it was one of those texting abbreviations that I find so annoying and have never learned.
It is obvious that you had no substantive reply to my comment. (Is this the reason you elevated a minor query? Because it was the only part of my comment to which you could offer a factual reply?)
yeah, New Zealand, another country with a fairly strong social safety net, national health care and reasonably good labor and human rights politics, just sent a dumbass, middle-brow, "pro-business", rightwinger to their PMs office. He managed to convince lots of people that NZ needed a more "dynamic market" (read unregulated ponzi scheme, debt-based, ratfuck free-for-all at the taxpayer's expense). This after Wall Street just pulled the world economy over a cliff.
Proving, I guess, that people don't just look a gift horse in the mouth; they are perfectly willing to shoot the gift horse in the mouth, if seduced with the right combination of lies, false promises and fairy tales of riches beyond all imagining. Nevermind that there is a reason why the riches are beyond all imagining.
Stupidity is the world's only infinite resource...
If you read Jean Chretien's (ex-prime-minister of Canada) book "Straight from the Heart" he basically says the same thing - putting a business whizz in government is a bad idea, probably because the profit motive, as we've seen from Walter Reed Hospital to whole national economies, does not work towards the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It simply funnels money into two or three pockets with no trickle down. Businesspeople also think the rest of the world should be like them (moneytraders, hedge fund managers, CEOs, even liars, crooks, thiefs) and that there is something inherently wrong with people like musicians, artists, housewifes who don't know how to get that first million and are forced to survive on government redistribution programs. These people call them "handouts", perhaps not realizing that it is our money to begin with, not theirs, or government's.
“Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.”
---John Kenneth Galbraith
BV Conway--Loved the Galbraith quote.
Poet
Most excellent article. As admirable as Sweden's non-totalitarian Socialist welfare state has been, it is useful to remember that it has been largely capitalized by an arms industry second only to the US. Sweden still has much to teach us the US though as well as lessons of its own to learn.
"Reinfeldt and his Moderate Party hired Karl Rove as a political consultant to help with the election coming in 2010. Palmer went on: "We have a real kind of silent war on the labor movement. We have a rather dramatic change in the tax system, abolishing the inheritance tax and most property taxes, cutbacks in social-welfare institutions." This week, a new coalition of center-left political parties formed to challenge this rightward drift."
It will be interesting to see if Swedes buy the politics of fear and greed (isn't that all Karl Rove knows?) rather than hope. I hope the opposition points out the failed administration Rove helped facilitate in Washington.
As Shakespear had Julius Ceaser say in his play by the same name, "the fault dear Brutas is not in our stars but in ourselves".
No ideology can, of and by itself, bring about a perfect state as long as the people who populate that state are flawed. This time calls for dialog and the give and take of honest negoitiation. That's change we (and they, the Swedes)can believe in. Karl Rove is not.
Poet
Pass the Turkey Pray for War
The business of war is booming
brave buttered futures are looming
The market's self corrective hand
knows war's bread is spread hand to hand
to the greed is God and God is good gangsters who own the land
the plutocrat pushers our mushroom masters of small change
as might gangs up on right
and negative equity rains down on the needy
while the gobble up creed and the gusher of plunder
collapses the umbrella of red ink
a subsidiary of nuclear Inc.
who play Christmas Carols
for pre-emptive peace and good will and joy to the world
So say grace and pass the turkey...
The business of war is booming
brave buttered futures are looming
for....
greed is good... fraud is better... and war is best
to grease our master's hands
those of the meltdown plutocrats and their puppets
like goofy cartoon dogs and demoted planets
but mostly.... demented dogma
like market rule
while the hand dives into the public purse
for a billion grand
hush... that's the market corrective hand!
Did we say grace?
Pass the turkey and pray for war.
Well, each country has its bright side and dark side. Too bad the dark side has screwed this nation up big time. Sweden sure had better watch out and go on the offensive lest they be the next victim of rightwing lunacy.
Stand aside and watch it SLIDE!
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
Hello, kick in the A-s!
Opt OUT!
SHUT OFF the Indoctrination SET!
Screw you Arnold!
(The Turd-ulator)
You know where you can stick that cigar!
BUSH/CHENEY
The FAUX Media
GM & the Small Three
Mr. Terminator Genes (Mono-saint-co)
My seeds are holier than thou!
&
Emperor Ratschild
Want you to buy in, again.
Keep the wheel spinning while the Delusion:
Falls apart around you.
Sink or SWIM?
CORPIRATE GREED has ENSLAVED U.S.
DECLARE INDEPENDENCE!
It is a DEAD SYSTEM.
END THE CORPIRATE MONO CULTURE!
Join the Micro-Democracy Revolution.
Rely on your family, friends and neighbors.
Invest in your family's survival.
Become efficient, self reliant and self sufficient!
Shit can the toys and buy some tools.
Grab a handful of Magic Beans, a Golden Goose, a Tent and climb to the top of a Mountain.
GO LOCAL
GO GREEN
GO ORGANIC
Canada, NZ, Oz (forget Rudd), Denmark, now Sweden...
It is indeed disturbing to see so many countries turning to a neoliberalism and arrogant foreign policy, just as the USA is showing, for all the world to see, just what a failure it is!
Or do they know? Do Europeans know of all the things USAns suffer through - healthcare, low working class wages, higher education only at the cost of ruinous debt, opression of dissent - things thay would never put up with themselves.
Can any European out there answer this?
---USAn---
I think we must remember that the upper classes might believe it's been a resounding success for them--I mean, look what they've gained.