The Democratic Party has made a hard-left turn in recent years, to a point where Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are hailed as the future of the party. When confronting them with the disasters of democratic socialism in Venezuela and other hellholes, they always say that wasn’t real socialism. Look to Sweden instead.
Okay, let’s do that. Recently, the Swedish newspaper Samtiden published a documentary about the suppressed history of the Social Democratic Party of Sweden, called One People, One Party. The film is narrated in Swedish but subtitled in English for an international audience, and the content is disturbing.
The Violent Beginnings
In the early days, the party had a rhetoric which was far closer to Antifa or other far-left organizations. At the second party congress, one of their leading ideologists, Hinke Bergegren, said to the audience:
“Why be so afraid of revolution and violence, when we still must use violence as weapon to enforce our demands? As for me, I consider small murders altogether eminent, and such acts terrorizing to those ruling society. We shall inject the venom of hatred, to mature us of any violence whatsoever.”
Racial Biology and Eugenics
During the progressive era the Social Democrats were smitten by racial ideology and the idea of creating not only social, but also genetic equality. They wanted to protect the country’s gene pool from the “lower races” and eradicate social inequality on the genetic level through eugenics, forced sterilization and euthanasia.
Prominent Social Democrats and Nobel Prize winners Gunnar and Alva Myrdal wrote in 1934 in defense of forced sterilization:
“From any standpoint it can hardly be defended that children be allowed to be born and raised by feeble-minded parents.”
Sweden sterilized more people per capita than any country in the world, including National Socialist Germany, and the forced eugenics program was not abolished until the late 1970s.
In fact, Sweden was a pioneer in racial eugenics and direct inspiration for Germany’s own focus on this endeavor. Hans Friedrich Karl Günther, Nazi Germany’s leading “race expert,” said about the governmental educational book Swedish Race Knowledge:
“The new title constitutes the most important eugenic examination of a European people ever published…Sweden has twice now created an example for other people.”
National Socialism
Many Swedish Social Democrats were enthusiastic about the new lodestar on the socialist sky: Adolf Hitler. However, many Swedish newspapers published critical articles about the new regime in Germany, and when Hitler got wind of this he complained to the Social Democratic Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson.
He responded to this in 1933 by jailing two newspaper editors on grounds that they had violated the Freedom of the Press Act.
In 1939 the Social Democrats changed the law so that the Swedish government could confiscate “problematic” journalistic material without a court order to prevent “hate speech” against the Nazi regime. During World War II, the Social Democrats started mass censorship of the press to prevent articles critical of the German regime from being published.
They also allowed German forces to travel through Sweden during their invasion and occupation of Norway. At the same time, the Norwegian King Haakon and his family tried to seek asylum in Sweden, but were rejected by the Social Democrats on grounds that it would be a breach of their neutrality.
Why “Far Right”?
The documentary makes it clear that although the Swedish Social Democrats and the German National Socialists were not formally allies, they were certainly brothers in spirit and ideology.
Bernie Sanders: Democratic Socialist
Why are the National Socialists (Nazis) regarded as “far right” today when their ideas were mirrored in a milder form in Swedish Social Democrats? The fact is that no-one, apart from Stalin’s propaganda machinery, regarded them as “far right” at the time. It was only later when they lost the war, that the socialist academics scrambled to throw them over on the right, and the conservatives were so gullible that they simply accepted this bold lie.
The Swedish Suicide
We can now with greater understanding appreciate why Sweden is currently in the process of committing cultural and ethnic suicide. The Social Democrats know that they were closely allied with the Nazis, and they feel terrible about it and want to atone for their sins.
The irony is that in their desire to make up for their dark past, they believe that collectively sentencing the Swedish people to extinction somehow will balance their moral budget.
However, two wrongs do not make a right. Instead, they should re-examine their past and identify and throw out the bad ideas while retaining and cultivating their good ones. National honor is benevolent and necessary for a culture to prosper, but chauvinism is malevolent.
What the Swedish Social Democrats have done and are still doing is something socialists all over the world have a habit of doing: blaming and punishing innocent others for their sins. If they want to make the world a better place, socialists should start by taking responsibility for their own heritage.
