Born in 1970 and growing up in Northern Europe seems to be an excellent foundation for a harmonic life as a child. Nothing was destroyed here during the big continental war in the 1940s, the war that was called “The last war,” in a tone of adjuration. At least not in my country, Sweden. All was fine. But…
Watch the map, and notice that we were not living far away from the red area of the USSR with its nukes pointing to every corner of the free Europe and America on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Thirty minutes after Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had pushed the button, me, my family and everyone else in my surroundings would be burned to ashes and blown away by the heat wave – if we were lucky. If not, we would have to succumb during a nuclear winter. An ordinary winter here in Sweden is bad enough.
There was no danger of any American or British democratic nuke falling down over us, at least not one launched at us deliberately (although our Swedish newspapers told us that Ronald Reagan was mad). As history has told us, the only reason why anything like a nuclear war would had happen then was caused by someone failing at his work at the defense alert system. We were lucky because when this failure was almost going to happen, the human factor actually went human, and the disaster never happened.
I became an adult during the same time as the communist USSR went into history mode, and we thought all wars would be something of the past. We expected that the guns would be recycled for tools sent to farmers in poor Africa. With defense budgets being cut, and thanks to the international cooperation that would appear when the parts of the world were peacefully joined together, we would soon have money to cure all forms of cancer and the new thing called AIDS. Happy days were coming, and the cold war was over. Peace 4-ever.
Something went wrong down the road.
I am not sure I am joking when I describe the European Union as the new USSR. Anyway, I use to be informed that by phrasing the topic in this fashion, I am hand-in-hand with the right wing extremists. Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean that, sir. So if you meet a skinhead – with a swastika tattooed on his ugly forehead – that scream out loud “Cancer is bad,” you would reply that “We must accept that kind of illness!”…? Of course not. And the EU is a malign force.
USSR 2.0 “EU-edition” or not, the power structures have changed in Europe for the worse, and although we may debate about pros and cons of national sovereignty, we can notice a disturbing lack of individual freedom in all aspects, except used as fillers in political speeches. This is mostly caused by the EU. The EU has been obeying the White House since at least 2001. For that reason, the minds and voices of the voters and taxpayers are less influential than ever, because what EU does must be in line with what the American deep state wants.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the politicians’ influence on the voters are morbidly strong. It should be the other way around, for heaven’s sake!
Without anyone active in the anti-war movement, our politicians in Europe have been able to maneuver us to a situation where the old Cold War is back in place again. Why? Because the EU tells us that THEY are the anti-war movement. An anti-war movement that wants its own army. The tanks in Paris already have the EU-stars logo!
We may have voted for more employment, cleaner energy, tax cuttings, better schools and hospitals. But every time the politicians convinced us that this is what they are going to deliver to us, they have at the same time – or instead – fulfilled the agenda of the stupid and the evil, often behind our backs, and sometimes with a vocabulary that have fooled us to believe they were right when they did this malpractice. May I use the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as such example?
Now in 2018, my Swedish politicians are trying their very best to warn me and the other voters/tax payers that Russia wants to invade Sweden (as Russia has done in Ukraine, and how those still red bastards have provoked war with Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania like a new Hitler…). The best way to protect the Swedish interest would be to join NATO, they say and demand. That would also be the best answer to Putin’s meddling with the Swedish politics, says the repeated mantra from our national talking heads.
To show that we are ruled by our own evil and stupids, we have the great example of our politicians disarming our army, air force and navy to the extent that we can’t defend ourselves anymore. That was planned and a bipartisan project of both the left, center and right. The only level of combative force that was wanted was to assist UN on “peace-making” operations. For several years, the politicians never understood the new situation with the expansion of NATO and the change of power balance in Europe, until they realised that we need to get our defense ability back.
However, we can’t do it for now, due to several reasons. That is why they want to buy an expensive insurance from NATO. And on top of that, they also accept the presence of NATO and its military organs operating inside Sweden.
Until now people have not understood what it means that the Swedish government – in those days, the socialist government before the liberal-conservative government, followed by the past 4 years of socialist-green government coalition (despite any will of the people) secretly accepted NATO’s wish to operate in Sweden, both in peacetime and in wartime.
This is a crime against our old and good policy of neutrality in armed conflicts. In fact, this is now described as a “former policy” of my country since 2016. We, the Swedes, have unknowingly voted on this when we asked our politicians for more employment, cleaner energy, tax cuttings, better schools and hospitals, etc. But instead, we got NATO in our garden! (As a funny thing, the welfare states that people votes for, is eroding fast; ha ha, charade you are…)
The evil and the stupids have, by this contract with NATO, made my country a sitting target of “Russian aggression,” as it is called now when the Russian military exercise the scenario of Sweden being the geographical platform for the American and British armed forces situated here before a conflict between the Baltic countries and Russia.
Sweden has no interest in a war between Russia and NATO. It is bad enough that our government has promised the Estonian government to assist that country if they ever are attacked by Russia – a promise dated back in the days of the drunken Boris Yeltsin (and we expected that every other ruski should be similarly drunk, while their beautiful and smart ladies came over here for serial marriages).
It is sad that our stupid and evil politicians have no memories of the French and British promise to Poland that was honoured by turning the latter country into a communistic dictatorship under the USSSR after millions and millions of Europeans were killed in 1939-1945…!
Whatever politicians speak and act, the promises and actions will have consequences. So don’t do it, for heaven’s sake!
I don’t fear the full attack with nukes like I did when I was a school boy. But I do fear the “small” geographical limited warfare, like the ones the neo-cons in USA and EU triggered in Ukraine (assisted by the former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt). A limited war would be bad enough. It would ruin my country, and the crisis would be too complicated for the evil and the stupids inside my government and their hangers-on to cope with.
If they could create the crisis in Ukraine – and Mr. Carl Bildt does know everything about how it happened, although he may play innocent by now – then, it could be created here as well.
If you ask me why it could happen, I could say “Why not?”
A war in Scandinavia could be a good investment for the military industrial complex in America and Europe. It would also be a crisis that could give our Luxembourgish version of the constant drunken Boris Yeltsin – yes, of course I am talking about Jean-Claude Junker and his “balance problems” – his goal of a real European Army.
Peter H Svensson is a former candidate to the Swedish parliament of the liberal-conservative Moderate Party of Sweden at the elections of 1988 and 1991, and since then has not been associated to any political party. Membership of “Libertarians in Sweden” in 2014. Became truly anti-war minded after Nine Eleven, and from recent years being outspoken about this view.
