Sweden is a beautiful country filled with beautiful people. And I don't just mean on the outside. There is a gentle, warm and friendly spirit amongst the Swedes. And they truly want to help one another in a philanthropic, egalitarian sort of way. I find that 'Swedish Way' very attractive and that is why I am very much pro-Sweden and pro-Swedes. When I think of Swedes I think of an elegant deer. It's the oppressive political system that I cannot stand, the good that it has done in the past notwithstanding.
I think that the 'Swedish Way' is why the dreams of Per Albin Hansson, the pre-war Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister, were realisable. Just as it took the discipline and hard work of the German temperament to make communism work economically in the late German Democratic Republic (though at the terrible price of losing their freedom), it has taken the very special temperament of the Swedish people to make Social Democracy work up until the early 1970's. I think that is why Conservatism has, until recently, worked well in my country of Great Britain, because of our peculiar temperament and desire for 'fair play'.
But things have changed for Germans, Swedes, and Britons. The East Germans threw off the yoke of communism along with the rest of Eastern Europe in the early 1990's (it left them numb rather than jubilant) but it yet remains for Swedes and Britons to throw off their particular yokes. At the time of writing (2011), the Arabs of North Africa and in many countries of the Middle East are throwing off the chains of dictatorship in a desperate bid for more freedom. Whether they will be successful or not remains to be seen. Dictators like Muammar al-Gadaffi are exacting a high cost in blood.
Sweden is rather special. Sweden isn't so much shackled to chains in a prison cell as she is asleep in a deep political narcosis. Instead of sending in troops, tanks and planes in the 'classical' way to quell disconent, the Swedish authorities simply ignores its opponents, or silences them with social workers and psychiatrists. Accusing someone of being a 'fascist' usually does the job and if that doesn't work, then setting them up as rapists (as they are trying to now do with Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange) or as bad parents (as they did with the Domenic Johansson family, seizing their son because he was being homeschooled...legally) usually does the trick. The Swedish government has been a smooth operator...so far. But now with the homeschooling business it has failed to make enough of a smokescreen to hide behind - the ugly truth is coming out for everyone to see. And it under-estimated the response of the homeschooling community which it assumed would volunatrily accept educational euthanasia. We didn't - we intend to live and fight until we have victory! It is, after all, a basic human right we are fighting for, not some obscure cause.
A homeschooler in this country recently wrote to me and shared these valuable insights:
"The Swedish people have been indoctrinated over the last 30- 70 years and it's very difficult for them to "see" where the oppression is. They are so indoctrinated that they defend the system that is oppressing them. They will even defend it with passion. It's like a really dysfunctional family where the children defend their parents out of loyalty. After all the state has taken care of all their needs - and if they had needs that the state couldn't take care of it was because the child/person was not fitting into the mold designed by the government. So it was the individual's fault if they couldn't feel happy with what they were offered, because the state was/is always right. That is the first step in oppressing a soul. Make them feel that they are wrong, like there is something wrong with this person.
"I can see that I have never really been assimilated by the Swedish society in the 22 years that I have lived here. It is something that Swedes just don't understand, how it feels to not be Swedish. They grow up with a certain subtle Swedish feeling/soul that they learn to love and that is after all genuine. So when someone from the outside comes clamping in on the fragile Swedish essence of being they can't take it...
"You know when I look at oppressed countries I wonder why the people don't do something. Rise and fight, but I understand that it is something that has to ripen from within. It's no good when an outside force comes with their army to help the 'helpless oppressed people'. It often creates an imbalance that takes ages to recover from.
"I keep thinking of Paolo Freire who said and taught so eloquently that it is of the utmost importance to free the oppressor as well as the oppressed. That's the tricky part in Sweden as the two are so tightly entwined. How do you help individuals to act as human beings again rather than as robots?"
How, then, does one awaken the Swedish Sleeping Beauty? And how do you prepare her for the Ugly Toad who, unlike the Handsome Prince of Truth, is not so much trying to wake her up but keep her asleep with a hypodermic syringe filled with lies about how the state is working in her best interests when we know that it just wishes to subdue and control her?
I am reminded of the Pakistani drug baron who built a hospital in Karachi to help those wanting to recover from the drug abuse that he and others like him caused in the first place! Here the state gives you all sorts of benefits and incentives to decorate your prison cell which it, itself, has put you in! Or to put it another way, using an illustration from Tolstoy:
"I (the state) sit on a man's (the people's) back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back" (Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence: 1886).
Reason and logic alone will not awaken a sleeping beauty. You cannot reason with someone who is asleep. You have to awaken him by other means until he is willing to negociate.
There are many apart from myself trying to do this - I choose to do it by making a lot of noise on the internet and elsewhere so that the myths of the Swedish Utopia can receive worldwide attention. Reason has got us nowhere so far because the government wouldn't even hear our case - they were "too busy". We have to awaken it by other means.
Part of the problem is the fact that the government has been so successful in insulating the truth about Sweden from the world with its heavily funded propaganda machine paid for by Swedish tax-payers that until the word sees what is going on, Swedes will continue to believe the illusion until someone from outside points it out to them. They may not listen to me or to the hundred or so voices from the homeschooling movement but they might listen to world opinion which has already been horrified by the Domenic Johansson case and reacted accordingly. Of course the government hopes that this will all blow over with time by continuing to ignore it, or hopes the world be distracted by other things like the crumbling economy and revolution in the Middle East. But I do assure them that what is now an irritant will become a major embarrassment as the oppressive state machinery rumbles into action as homeschoolers in Sweden declare the new Education Act to be null-and-void because it is in violation of EU Law which now (since the Treaty of Lisbon) takes automatic precedence. And, yes, we know that the government will try to 'pull strings' in Strasbourg, as it has already done with Domenic Johansson, but we intend to make a lot of noise there as well. The EU sloth also has to be awakened.
So, we will be making lots of noise in Sweden, in the EU, in the UN and in the world at large. Once the catalyst has been injected into the system, Swedes will (hopefully) take care of the rest themselves. It's going to be a painful experience for them - like Sleeping Beauty waking up to the Ugly Toad instead of to the Handsome Prince - but maybe her kiss, once she is awakened, will soften politicians' hearts, who knows, but if it doesn't, she has the alternative of booting them out of office.
"At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second" (Tolstoy)
