Charles B (in the article he forwarded) and James F (in his remarks on the
reactionary bourgeois cultural icon Ingmar Bergman) highlight the strong
streak of right-wing reaction in Sweden.
I'd like to comment on some of the statements in the article from the
Internet Anti-Fascist/LA Times that Charles posted.
> A HATE CRIME THE SWEDES COULDN'T IGNORE: KILLING OF CLERK
>WHO PROTESTED NEO-NAZIS SEEN AS WARNING CALL THAT ANYBODY COULD BE TARGET
It wasn't a hate crime so much as a political crime against a left-wing
anti-fascist.
>STOCKHOLM--No one here took much notice of the hundreds of hate crimes
>against immigrants over the last few years that besmirched the image of
>Sweden as a bastion of tolerance and serenity.
Most people have tended to interpret them as emotional, psychological
aberrations -- hate crimes -- and not political crimes. As for Sweden's
*image* of tolerance and serenity, that's just what it has been, an image.
And one that's been polished and maintained by outsiders more than by
Swedes themselves -- the welfare paradise of the third way, a reformist
utopia has been needed as a copout from the revolutionary socialist
transformation of capitalist society. Hence the bleating by Havel in Prague
and others about the Swedish model -- a model that was already dead and
being buried when the Stalinist regime collapsed in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union and the lack of a revolutionary working-class leadership
allowed the workers states to be hijacked by capitalist restoration.
>Nor did many here rise up in anger over the execution-style slayings of two
>police officers who foiled a bank robbery by neo-Nazis in May, or the car
>bombing a month later that seriously wounded an investigative reporter who
>had been documenting this country's white supremacist movement.
"Rise up" gives the wrong impression. There is too much sympathy for the
police in Sweden as it is. Not on the left, but in public opinion. But the
bombing of the reporter made a lot of people very angry -- especially at
the off-handed attitude of the police in easing off protective measures in
relation to the threats against the reporter.
>But when a mild-mannered warehouse clerk was gunned down in his Stockholm
>apartment last month after protesting the election of an avowed neo-Nazi to
>the board of his trade union, Swedes got the message that any open-minded
>person could be an enemy or a victim of racist radicals.
Bjoern was not so much mild-mannered as likeable, radical and determined.
(I've got a picture of him carrying a banner I can send as an attachment
to anyone interested.) The message was not that "any open-minded person"
could be targeted but that any determined unionist who took a stand against
the Nazis could be targeted.
>"Bjoern wasn't an anti-Nazi crusader. He was just an average guy who did
>what any decent person would have done, which is to stand up and confront
>something that is wrong," said Anna-Clara Bratt, editor of the Arbetaren
>labor journal. "Almost 90% of Swedish workers are trade union members, so
>his murder served as a warning call that anyone could be next."
He wasn't an average guy, he was a syndicalist union organizer, a local
workers leader. The argument that he did something "any decent person would
have done" is neither here nor there -- actions of this kind are rarely
spontaneous expressions of moral fibre.
The high level of union organization is important here, though. But the
threat is not to ordinary union members -- yet. It's to organizers and
people who take the initiative to speak up for their fellow-workers.
And Arbetaren is not a labour journal. It's an anarcho-syndicalist paper
with a heavy cultural slant. The fact that "arbetaren" means "the worker"
is misleading.
>Before Soederberg's slaying, Bratt said, Swedes tended to avert their eyes
>from the ugly assaults and harassment of immigrants and refugees, who now
>make up as many as 1 million of Sweden's 8.9 million residents.
"Swedes" were just as divided in their response after the killing as before
it. There is a groundswell of support for immigrants and radicals among
ordinary people in Sweden that rarely makes the headlines, as Bob M can
testify and often has, as opposed to the louder and more visible
anti-immigrant, anti-radical lobby.
>Since 1995, there have been at least four slayings of foreigners attributed
>to neo-Nazis, and police have investigated hundreds of racially motivated
>attacks each year, said Margareta Lindroth, deputy director of Sweden's
>SAPO security forces.
The only interest the secret police have in this is to use the Nazi threat
as an excuse to home in on the socialist left under the cover of vague
"anti-democratic" charges. Of course, certain of the Social-Democrats want
the secret police to stop the Nazis targeting them, but hey, no pain, no
gain.
>Sociologists and historians attribute the recent surge in neo-Nazi violence
>to desperation among a small but powerful minority that has come to realize
>that it cannot penetrate the established political parties and win converts
>to its anti-immigrant and racist message.
That is, political desperation (a petty-bourgeois characteristic) using
methods of individual terrorism. The lack of party penetration is related
to the groundswell of popular anti-authoritarianism I mentioned. Since the
culture of a lot of party political life in Sweden is bureaucratic and
authoritarian, the whole picture is full of contradictions -- a bit like
the antics in England in relation to the election for a Mayor of London and
Ken Livingstone's candidacy for the Labour Party in which a huge popular
majority of Londoners wants the man as mayor, and a huge preponderance of
machine politicians led by Blair himself is trying to smash him using every
bureaucratic and authoritarian trick they can.
>Unlike in Austria, where the ultranationalist Freedom Party won the
>second-largest number of votes in parliamentary elections last month with
>toned-down rightist rhetoric, the vast majority of Swedes array themselves
>among parties firmly on the political left.
This is utter nonsense. "Left" from the perspective of Los Angeles perhaps,
but nowhere else. What Swedes want in general is a welfare state with
progressive health, retirement, education, housing and employment policies,
the way it was from 1950 to 1975-80. They're being screwed by all the
parliamentary parties including the ex-CP Left Party. Most of the parties
use "social caring" rhetoric, but none of them deliver on it.
>"Neo-Nazi activists today realize there is no way they can ever arouse the
>Swedish masses. The majority of Swedes will never get behind the national
>socialist banner of racial revolution," said political scientist Matthias
>Gardell, a University of Stockholm professor who has written extensively on
>Sweden's racist radicals.
This is unhistorical. The Swedish petty-bourgeoisie (including the
intermediate wage-earning officials, supervisors and specialist groups) is
just as likely as anywhere else to fall for radical Bonapartist solutions.
The thing is, that Sweden has a long tradition of unionism and collective,
social solutions to counter-balance the individualist rhetoric of fascism,
and more importantly the actual petty-bourgeoisie is very small, so the
lumpen-proletarian and (more predominantly) lumpen-bourgeois elements of
thuggery in the Nazi movement need a complete vacuum of working-class
leadership if they are to develop any mass base. The response of the
official working-class leadership (unions, so-called socialist parties,
etc) to the massacre of Bjoern Soederberg indicates that in this respect at
least there is no such vacuum -- yet.
>Like other analysts, he estimates the number of neo-Nazi activists at no
>more than a couple thousand, of which perhaps 50 are believed to be
>willing to carry out serious crimes. But their relatively small number and
>fragmentation make them all the more dangerous, he said, because being
>marginalized intensifies their "paranoid view of themselves as white
>warriors facing extermination."
A revolutionary socialist party with these numbers would have a much
greater impact on society than the Nazis (for "willing to carry out serious
crimes" substitute "willing to devote their lives completely to the
cause"). Paranoia is not a political position.
>The Internet allows Sweden's racists to form bonds with U.S. white
>supremacist groups, emboldening the Nordic extremists by giving them the
>sense of belonging to a broader community, Gardell said. Sweden also has
>become the international production and marketing center for racist music
>cassettes and CDs, whose sales on the Internet help finance the extremists'
>activities, he said.
Even the nationalists are internationalists these days. And note the
inter-imperialist tie-up and division of labour.
>But Gardell believes that Sweden's radicals made a tactical error in
>attacking Soederberg, because the 41-year-old clerk's slaying inspired the
>first broad anti-racist backlash. Tens of thousands took to the streets
>across Sweden late last month to demand a government crackdown on neo-
>Nazis. Some political parties have called for a ban on public activities
>by racists and nationalists and a formal prohibition against membership in
>organizations openly espousing fascism.
The masses demonstrated (very passively) to show their support for Bjoern
and to show a united union and political front against the Nazis. An
important aspect of the demonstrations was the fact that for the first time
all four strands of the union movement in Sweden -- the blue-collar LO
federation, the white-collar TCO federation, the academic/graduate SACO
federation and the anarcho-syndicalist SCO federation (to which Bjoern
belonged) -- collaborated in organizing a large-scale national protest
action.
The demand for a "government crackdown on neo-Nazis" is not what was put
forward except perhaps by a few individuals. The big mainstream union
guns, if they raised any demands at all, demanded a crackdown on
"anti-democratic" groups -- and we all know what that means, systematic
harassment and attacks on the revolutionary left.
>A recent poll by the SIFO Institute published in Dagens Nyheter, a
>prominent daily newspaper here, showed 69% of respondents backing a
>criminal ban on right-wing extremism--the first hint of majority support
>for free-speech restrictions in modern Sweden.
Another reflection of the popular groundswell I mentioned. What the
political establishment will transform this into is another matter.
>But most leftists and liberals, who have controlled the power structure for
>decades,
This ridiculous formulation is referring to Social-Democrats and centrist
bourgeois parties.
>argue that a ban would do little more than drive the extremists
>underground.
Big deal -- they're already underground. Occasionally they push their
snouts up into the air to test the temperature.
>"We already have laws against murder and bombing. We think the laws are
>sufficient; they just need to be practiced," said Ulla Hoffmann, a member
>of parliament from the Left Party. "What is at issue is free speech. If we
>start by forbidding Nazis to talk, the next ones silenced will be the
>Communists and other leftist parties."
She's half right. The state can always forbid anyone it wants to do
anything -- the problem is enforcing it. There's no automatic connection
between a ban on Nazism and a ban on Communism etc -- unless the ban is
formulated in vague terms like "anti-democratic aims" and fails to specify
right-wing extremism in concrete terms.
>What national leaders need to do to fight the neo-Nazi resurgence, Hoffmann
>said, is to guide the country through a long-overdue confrontation with its
>World War II role.
>
>Although Sweden ostensibly remained neutral during the war, officials have
>conceded over the last decade that the country supplied Germany's Third
>Reich with iron ore for its munitions factories and allowed Nazi troops to
>pass through Sweden en route to attacks on other countries.
True enough. And under cover of "neutrality", Sweden helped the imperialist
USA and NATO spy on the Soviet Union workers state. Sweden is an
imperialist state, let's never forget it.
>Hoffmann and Hannele Peltonen of the Syndikalisterna, a trade union
>umbrella that covers Soederberg's shop, tie the rise in right-wing
>extremism to a distorted self-image of Swedes as innocents
The problem is that Swedes in general have no idea as to why the country
became so prosperous after World War II or why it was able to set up a
fairly well-developed bourgeois welfare state. The ideological reflex of
this was a nationalist view that somehow Swedes were more enlightened,
liberal and efficient than everyone else (the conscience of the world
syndrome). The fact that Sweden enjoyed marginal benefits (like Titoist
Yugoslavia) by playing off the Great Powers against one another, that it
had undamaged industries (like the US) that had benefited from war
production, that the bourgeoisie was ready as in other imperialist
countries to make huge concessions just to survive in the face of the
powerful revolutionary upsurge coming out of the war -- these things are
hardly ever mentioned (with the exception of the industrial setup, which is
rarely dealt with in any sensible context).
>and to flagging
>financial support for schools and social services. The latter, they said,
>enhances the impression among nationalists and conservatives that
>immigrants represent competition for pieces of the shrinking public pie.
The dismantling of the welfare state is just as much a mystery to Swedes in
general as was its construction. The question of immigrant competition for
resources is not just a question of national distribution of a reduced
national budget and slashed employment opportunities, but also one of
international division of labour, international and national reserve armies
of the unemployed, and international solutions to the problems of an
imperialist world system.
>"There are a lot of right-wing people working inside police and military
>organizations," Peltonen said, suggesting that their sympathies for some of
>the neo-Nazi causes explain why existing laws prohibiting threats against
>ethnic groups or incitement of violence are seldom applied.
True enough. This should have been elaborated to reflect on the repressive
and reactionary nature of the bourgeois state.
>Syndikalisterna's offices in the town of Gavle, about 90 miles north of
>Stockholm, were bombed a week after the suspects in Soederberg's death were
>arrested, suggesting that a dangerous rear guard in the radical right
>remains at large and active, Peltonen said.
The bombing was done the night before the nationwide demonstrations in a
completely misjudged attempt to scare people off demonstrating.
In England the fascists in the East End of London were hounded into
insignificance by militant demos targeting their head offices and
aggressive marking. Anti-fascists do this to some extent in Sweden -- most
Nazi demos are outnumbered by counter-demonstrators and need the cops to
save their skins.
In general, however, the fascist threat is always alive under imperialism,
so there will be no let up till the system is changed. And it's a political
threat, not a psychological one, so socialists will have to take the lead
in opposing the growth of fascist currents, or no-one will.
Cheers,
Hugh
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