According to Western legal theory, "it is the individual who is the beneficiary of human rights which are to be asserted against the government" (1) but within the fomer Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) society as a whole was always seen as the sole beneficiary of human rights. By contrast, the best Western legal tradition holds that certain essential and foundational rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as those rights to equality before the law, to freedom of expression, and to social, cultural and economic rights, and the right to education (not necessarily 'schooling') that are derived from the three foundational rights, come before government. Moreover, in this tradition, "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" solely "to secure these rights". So said American political philosopher and polymath Thomas Jefferson. This understanding of individual rights and the proper purpose of government was largely absent in totalitarian communist Russia and its East European colonies. In short, there were no negative rights in the Soviet Gulag, known as the Soviet Union. And that was what principally distinguished the West from the Communist East
In respect of family, social and educational rights, Sweden is not a Western Liberal Democracy - it is a communist one. Lotta Edholm, of the misnamed Swedish 'Liberal' Party (Folk Partiet/Liberalene) in Stockholm, has found an excuse to remove even more family rights (the few that remain, that is) amongst the 5% of families whose mothers do not go to work in the Rheinfelt Soviet. She, along with some of her "Liberal" colleagues in the ruling 'Conservative'-'Centre' coalition government now want to make it effectively illegal for a parent to be at home with their children of school age during working hours. They want it to be a crime and for the Swedish SS (Social Services) to intervene as they have already done by kidnapping thousands of children from ordinary family homes and putting them into forced foster care, as they have already done to homeschooler Domenic Johansson. The reason? Something horrible has happened to one family in such a situation. The solution? Ban family gatherings during office hours!
The Swedish political class has gone completely insane. It is hell-bent on destroying the family and does not care that it is two-faced and hypocritical. It applies one standard to the family (an impossible one) and a totally different one to children at school. What if something terrible happens to a child at school, like bullying that leads to suicide? It has happened, many times. Applying the liberal socio-fascists' solution, school ought to be made illegal too! But that's not the point. You see, Sweden is a neo-Soviet state, at least when it comes to family politics, as one Swedish writer, Johan Himmelstrand, has pointed out in his article, Is Sweden a Soviet State in Respect of Family Politics? - Är Sverige en familjepolitisk sovjet state?.
The answer is: Yes it is, and it's getting worse. It is becoming more and more totalitarian as the last human freedoms are taken away by a power-hungry cabal in Stockholm.
How are these liberal fascists defending their Soviet Gulag mentality? Well, would you be surprised if I told you, they are doing so by appealing to Soviet concepts of liberty and human rights - in other words, state's rights and not human or natural rights?
Let me put it bluntly - when it comes to family and social politics, there are no human rights in Sweden. There are no negative rights here, just as there weren't in communist East Europe and just as there aren't in communist China.
Pat Feranga, in his article yesterday, The Dark Side of Government Schooling in Sweden, puts it this way:
"Swedish educationists want to be sure that children have the right to go to school, but not the reciprocal right to decline and learn in other types of settings, such as at home and in their communities. A strange “right” this is — the right to be forced to attend school under threat of fines, the right to lose your children to social services, and the right to only follow instructions from government agencies about what you can and can’t do for your children’s education".
You can't have proper human rights without having negative rights too. If a child has the right to attend school, it must simultaneously have the right not to attend state school providing it is having an adequate education somewhere else. You'd have thought that was common sense - and it is, if you think like a Western Liberal Democrat. The only people this doesn't make sense to is those indoctrinated with the Swedish version of Soviet propaganda.
And that is the mental condition of nearly all mainstream Swedish politicians, and it is what these politicians want taught in schools, and since it wants everyone taught these Marxist values it wants to force everyone into schools and to arrest parents who keep their children at home to teach them by some other educational method.
And believe it or not, there is more than one method. The Swedish Government says there is only one but then they are all closet communists, including the 'liberals' with their leader, ex-soldier Major Jan Björklund, who want only one state-run system in order to control the people. Pat Farenga continues:
"If there is one correct way to educate all children, why are there so many different pedagogies? If education is only the result of instruction performed by professionals in schools, why do countries with lots of educational options, such as Finland and Denmark, flourish? There is a large research base that supports informal learning and other models besides government schooling: How does Sweden justify ignoring a human’s innate ability to learn on his or her own, as we’ve done for centuries before compulsory schooling became the norm (around 1850), as well as all the research that supports intrinsic motivation, autodidactic behavior, and learning by doing as deep sources for educational excellence? What about the Pippi Longstockings—those children who do not respond to control and prediction in classroom settings but nonetheless succeed in life? Getting parents involved in their children's education is vital according to every piece of research I have read, so why must parents stop at a certain point? Why must education be either/or (school/homeschool) and not both/and?" (Ibid.).
The answer is simple. The Marxist Government doesn't want people to learn in different ways because then it can't brainwash them into swallowing its gurgledom propaganda. The Swedish system is communism in disguise, pretending to be liberal democracy, when it is anything but. In truth, it's a madhouse of communism and anarchism combined.
To be understood, the Swedish Utopia has to be seen for what it really is - a camoflaged Soviet Paradise with a large dollop of liberal anarchy. Unfortunately for the Marxists at the top, the whitewash is beginning to flake off, and now its coming off in ever larger clumps. The mainstream politicians are themselves products of the Marxist propaganda machine (having learned it at state schools) and can't even think any other way, which is why we can have a Conservative-Liberal government under Rheinfelt that's actually Marxist.
Sweden, like Britain and the United States (which are also infected by the same Marxist virus, though not as badly yet), needs a new political class of libertarians that are forced to recognise fundamental human rights - the natural rights of the individual and of the family. And the only way they will ever do that is for Sweden to get a new Constitution guarding the people against the doctrinaire totalitarian rightists and leftists. The way we're going, we'll have another communist nightmare here, and elsewhere, within a generation if we don't.
There is a hubris in the Stockholm 'Parliament', what British libertarian politician and leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage, calls an "overweaning arrogance and ambition which believes that it can dispense with eternal laws" (3), whether you call them divine or natural laws, it doesn't really matter, because they're obvious to anyone not isolated in their ivory towers. The natural rights of families and of individuals are being ignored in the cause of the political class and at the expense of their people.
Every week I am coming into contact with more and more people who have been abused by this Red system pretending to be pink, orange and blue. They are the victims of this élitist political class. If Sweden were a body and the government its head, then it may be said, if I may borrow Farage again, that the "body's limbs and reflexes have surrendered their power to react autonomously and must now refer to a distant, conscious brain for prior permission to flinch from a flame. The head has made sure that it is exceptionally comfortable. It regards flinching as rebellion. It wants the limbs bound" (Ibid.).
Our natural rights and freedoms to homeschool and safeguard the family from unwarranted government intrusion have been infringed by power-crazed idiots spouting gibberish. The politicians in the 'Liberal' Party have not only demonstrated that they are not liberal (they are social fascists) but prove from the nonsense they talk that they haven't a clue about education in the modern world. Quite clearly someone with a Marxist agenda has done their thinking for them and all they are doing is spouting the propaganda they have learned at school.
The Swedish Utopia, which is just the latest brand of imperialistic social engineering, a system imposed by political idealists with their heads in the clouds, will eventually fall apart and if the politicians knew any history, they would know that this is inevitable. It is ironic that all the so-called 'peoples' democracies' have almost nothing to do with the people themselves but about the self-imposed dictatorial class above them that rule them. We have the illusion of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but because it is set in a Marxist matrix where individual and family rights are but a mirage in the desert of lost freedom, there in reality is no government of the people in Sweden. How do we know this? Because when you actually take government away from the people - when local government isn't simply rubber-stamping the crazy rules invented by autocrats in Stockholm, what you end up with is dependent children and thus delay the moment when they dare to reclaim their own lives. For we do not own our lives in the Swedish Utopia - the government does. And what have we seen? That government is terrible at managing health, parenting, education and other individual responsibilities.
"The maintenance of huge, top-heavy bureaucratic states is no longer sustainable in the modern world. Social mobility has rarely been less. Skills are no longer nurtured in the young because success is defined not by achievement or status within a community but by material possessions. Aspiration and originality are not encouraged in education. Even those pupils who aim for excellence are reined in because exams are all about replicating standard views and demonstrating that you correspond to a specific, very low and so universally attainable government-ordained standard - not that you have thought" (Ibid.).
Education is at the lowest level in recorded history - at least the peasant, albeit illiterate, had his songs, stories, skills and specialised knowledge. Where has all that gone today?
And what about our politicians: "They live in gated communities and associate only with their own kind" (Ibid.). What they are trying to impose on us (and then penalise us for not doing it), the Swedish people - who by nature are egalitarian and generous - would do so naturally. Believe it or not, most parents are responsible for their children and love their children a lot more than the state ever could or would. Parents want their children educated and are far more motivated to do it than state-trained teachers, and don't want or need to be paid.
Education in Sweden still needs to be radically reformed. Not only must teacher-training be rethought or abolished (heads, parents and school administrators are well able to select talented, committed teachers from almost any background, and not just 'career' teachers, indoctrinated with the latest Marxist psychobabble theory), but selectivity in education must be introduced as a matter of urgency, especially as the Free Schools have all but been abolished now and everyone is learning the same thing everywhere. Indeed, it was a characteristic of education in the Soviet Union that you could move through several time zones and from a European school (like Moscow) to an Asian one (like Petropavlovsk) and know that on the same day there would be an identical class reading from the same page of the same book. Everything was a bland uniformity.
Sweden needs its own perestroika or 'openness'. The current régime claims to want 'more openness' but like the last one it's still stuck fast on the same old cracked Marxist monorail going around in the same old circle that will eventually collapse. Oiling it better isn't what's needed - it needs a totally new system. Sweden needs its own Gorbatchov to set peoples' minds free. It will come - it has to come - because Sweden is not a happy country.
"In their cowardice, our politicians, in league with their mutually dependent banks, have sustained their positions only by spending our children's money. They have bought allies by increasing the power and size of the state until it has proved unsustainable" (ibid.).
The current educational system, with its latest reforms, is the last attempt by a disconnected élite, to breathe life into the corpse of Marxist Utopianism. What we need here is sweeping reform along the line of the the 6 Central Theses delineated on my website. We have to begin by empowering the people democratically and decentralising the state by enshrining individual and family human rights. That mythical entitity called the 'state' must dethrone itself voluntarily, devolve powers, and be made to serve the people once again, not the élite with their unworkable and crazy utopian ideas at the top. We don't want another Soviet Union here in any form. We need freedom.
Footnotes
(2) Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by General Assembly Resolution #217 A (III) of 10 December 1948
(3) Nigel Farage, Flying Free (Biteback Publishing, London: 2001).
