With an eye on Russia, Swedes are embracing the military

STOCKHOLM — Sweden is transforming its Home Guard military reserve from a Dad's Army into a fighting force that has become so attractive to young Swedes that it's having to turn away applicants.

The reason? Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and growing worry — reinforced by the country's leaders — that Sweden must prepare for war.

That's a huge change from recent years, when the Home Guard, a force of 23,000 soldiers who support the full-time military, fell out of favor after the Cold War ended. Thereafter the Home Guard became the domain of largely middle-aged citizens, many of whom didn’t take their duties terribly seriously.

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Swedish Rearmament is Accelerating

Wooden targets hide among the pine trees at the Gotland island army firing range, silhouettes depicting foreign invaders, their faces twisted with malice.

They bear no unit insignia, no flag patches. But the Swedish army recruits peppering the targets with machine-gun fire this fall knew exactly who the enemy was: Russia’s 76th Guards Air Assault Division.

With Russia’s foreign policy growing more assertive over the past decade under President Vladimir Putin, the Swedes are bulking up defenses on Gotland. Its army expects that in the opening moments of a Russian invasion, airborne soldiers from the 76th Guards, based across the Baltic Sea, would likely parachute onto Gotland. Both sides know that whoever controls the island controls naval traffic through the southern Baltic.

“We will never surrender,” said Daniel Martell, sergeant major of Sweden’s Gotland Regiment. “That’s the message we’re sending.”

The Cold War is back on in the frigid North.

Russia’s expansive military and political appetites are alarming countries along the former frontiers of the Soviet Union, from Finland to Romania. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has deployed four battle groups—nearly 5,000 troops—to Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In 2018, Norway hosted NATO’s largest military exercise since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Sweden’s response is especially dramatic, overturning decades of its own defense and foreign policy. While the country maintained a careful neutrality between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, this time around Stockholm is tightening ties with Washington. This fall, the Swedes rubbed that partnership in Moscow’s face by spotlighting joint U.S.-Swedish commando exercises previously kept secret.

“We no longer can rule out a military attack on Sweden,” said Karin Olofsdotter, Sweden’s ambassador in Washington. “It’s not likely in any way, but it can’t be ruled out.”

Last month, Sweden’s parliament authorized the biggest increase in military spending in 70 years, including a 50% expansion of the country’s armed forces, to 90,000 troops in 2025 from 60,000 today. In 2018, the army resurrected its Cold War-era Gotland Regiment, which had been deactivated in 2005, and now the troops regularly train to repel Russian invaders. The army plans to add another battalion, artillery units and logistical capabilities to its forces on the island.

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Fearing a resurgent and aggressive Russia, Sweden is rearming

...Like most European nations, Sweden cut its military spending sharply after the cold war ended, from about 2.5% of GDP in 1990 to barely 1% by 2010; equipment was scrapped and bases were closed down. The shipyard on Muskö was sold off to German engineering company Thyssen Krupp.

But the occupation and annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 “changed things completely”, Granholm said. “It showed that this is what Russia does to its smaller neighbours. Now it is proving a difficult and long-term task to rebuild the armed forces.”

Swedish defence company Saab bought out Thyssen Krupp in June 2014, after some arm-twisting that involved mass recruitment of Krupp’s staff and a dawn raid by the defence ministry on Krupp’s shipyards in Malmö, ostensibly to rescue military secrets.

A few months later, Stockholm was gripped with panic after an alleged Russian mini-submarine was spotted in its waters, reviving memories of a Soviet nuclear sub that ran aground in Karlskrona in 1981, sparking a decade of high-profile submarine scares.

The submarine hunt of 2014, details of which still remain unresolved, saw opinion polls swing towards Nato membership for Sweden and presaged the first of several boosts to defence spending. For the first time in more than two decades, the Swedish government embarked on a sustained expansion of the defence budget, pledging to increase spending from 43bn Swedish crowns (£3.5bn) in 2016 to 50bn in 2020.

Other recent moves to strengthen Sweden’s military preparedness include bringing back conscription, and a leaflet delivered to every household explaining what to do in case of a nuclear attack.

Read the rest here.

Sweden Isn't Socialist (mostly)

For years, I've heard American leftists say Sweden is proof that socialism works, that it doesn't have to turn out as badly as the Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela did.

But that's not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says in a new documentary and Stossel TV video.

"Sweden is not socialist -- because the government doesn't own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea," says Norberg.

"We did have a period in the 1970s and 1980s when we had something that resembled socialism: a big government that taxed and spent heavily. And that's the period in Swedish history when our economy was going south."

Per capita GDP fell. Sweden's growth fell behind other countries. Inflation increased.

Even socialistic Swedes complained about the high taxes.

Astrid Lindgren, author of the popular Pippi Longstocking children's books, discovered that she was losing money by being popular. She had to pay a tax of 102 percent on any new book she sold.

"She wrote this angry essay about a witch who was mean and vicious -- but not as vicious as the Swedish tax authorities," says Norberg.

Yet even those high taxes did not bring in enough money to fund Sweden's big welfare state.

"People couldn't get the pension that they thought they depended on for the future," recounts Norberg. "At that point the Swedish population just said, enough, we can't do this."

Sweden then reduced government's role.

They cut public spending, privatized the national rail network, abolished certain government monopolies, eliminated inheritance taxes and sold state-owned businesses like the maker of Absolut vodka.

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Swedish church leaders oppose support for persecuted Christians

Liberal Church leaders in Sweden have opposed an initiative aimed at showing support for persecuted Christians. After the murder of French priest Father Jacques Hamel by jihadists in July three Swedish priests started an initiative called Mitt kors (“My cross”) in which Swedish Christians took “selfies” with a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians. However, the initiative has been attacked by liberal church leaders apparently concerned that it might offend Muslims! The head of communications for the Church of Sweden even called it “seditious and un-Christian”. The Church of Sweden's attacks on the "My cross" initiative continued until one of the priests who had started it publicly left the Church of Sweden. In a newspaper article, Johanna Andersson, the priest who has resigned wrote:

"Church leadership has for several weeks been running a campaign against us who started the group 'My cross.' In this campaign, I have been discredited, called 'questionable', 'unclean', 'agitator', 'un-Christian' and attributed xenophobic hidden agendas."

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe

You just can't make this up.

Swedish group wants 'legal abortions' for men

Men should have the same right as women to decide not be parents, according to a controversial new proposal from the Liberal Party’s youth wing in western Sweden (LUF Väst).

Men who don’t want to become fathers should be permitted to have a “legal abortion” up to the 18th week of a woman’s pregnancy, say the young liberals.

The cut-off date coincides with the last week in which a woman can terminate a pregnancy in Sweden.

“This means a man would renounce the duties and rights of parenthood,” LUF Väst chairman Marcus Nilsen told The Local.

By signing up for a “legal abortion” then, a man would not have to pay maintenance for his child, but neither would he have any right to meet the child.

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

Goodbye Sweden

This is the last post on this blog. I am leaving Sweden for good shortly, and will no longer be following its descent from what was once the third most prosperous country in the world. Frankly, it’s just too damn depressing...

...Having said that, what Sweden is doing is something completely different. The once homogenous population has been forever altered by a rapid and massive addition of people from vastly different cultures and value-systems. 26,8% of the population is now foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent, and the national census bureau estimates that some 150 000 per year will arrive to the country of just 9,8 million residents.

There simply is no possible way to absorb and assimilate such volumes of people, period. Then you are merely creating ethnic enclaves, which due to incompatible language, culture and job skills become ghettos, which in turns brews crime, misery and extremism. Once the inflow has exceeded the capacity for absorbtion, further immigration only makes the problem worse.

Read the rest here.

World's First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, to Install Muslim Prayer Space

The Bishop of Stockholm has proposed a church in her diocese remove all signs of the cross and put down markings showing the direction to Mecca for the benefit of Muslim worshippers.

Eva Brunne, who was made the world’s first openly lesbian bishop by the church of Sweden in 2009, and has a young son with her wife and fellow lesbian priest Gunilla Linden, made the suggestion to make those of other faiths more welcome.

The church targeted is the Seamen’s mission church in Stockholm’s eastern dockyards. The Bishop held a meeting there this year and challenged the priest to explain what he’d do if a ship’s crew came into port who weren’t Christian but wanted to pray.

Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels“, the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths”.

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Amidst Russian provocations Sweden begins to grasp the perils of disarmament

Stockholm (AFP) - With an assertive Russia next door, Sweden has started to beef up its military after a decade of downsizing, but a credible deterrent may take years to achieve, analysts warn.

In one of Sweden's most dramatic steps since the end of the Cold War, it has brought back the option of using reservists to boost its military force, making no attempt to hide the fact that the main motivation behind the move is Russia.

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Non-interventionism is a fine foreign policy. But a neutral country that is unable or unwilling to defend itself is just a free lunch waiting for someone to start eating.

Sweden Hunts Foreign Submarine

In an echo from the Cold War, Swedish military forces are reported to be hunting for an unidentified submarine in their territorial waters. The Russians, everyone's first suspect, heatedly denied that any of their vessels are involved. On a side note, there also no Russian troops in Ukraine.

New Swedish Archbishop Prefers Allah

From here.
HT: MCJ

The Dhimmi Church of Sweden

...a controversy has arisen in Sweden over the inability of candidates for the office archbishop in the Swedish Church to affirm that Jesus Christ presented a truer picture of God than Mohammed.

One of the illustrious clerics who seemed all too willing to blur the distinctions between Christianity and Islam was the front-runner Antje Jackelén, who has since been elected to become the new archbishop. Our Swedish correspondent LN has translated several articles about the controversy, beginning with an overview of the theologian Eva Hamberg, who left the church rather than be a party to the encroachment of “Chrislam”.

Unfortunately, like so many other Scandinavian institutions — political parties, media outlets, and most private charitable organizations — the Swedish church is state-funded. This means that most non-state alternatives are competitively hobbled, and remain largely vestigial. Ms. Hamberg may thus find it hard to obtain a new, paying position in any non-PC Christian church in Sweden.

Read the rest here.

Sweden: Muslim Immigrants Engage in 5th Night of Rioting

The trigger was the shooting dead by police of an elderly man wielding a knife. But the riots convulsing Stockholm suburbs such as Husby and Rigby-Kista have been a long time in building.

As in France — which is periodically affected by similar outbreaks — many of the rioters are young and unemployed, members of an urban underclass that feels abandoned by the modern state.

More importantly, they are also mainly immigrants. The statistics explain the problem: although people born abroad or to immigrant parents make up only about 15% of the Swedish population, unemployment in immigrant neighbourhoods of Stockholm is much higher than that elsewhere in the city.

Read the rest here.

Ecuador Is Wrong

Ecuador's government has a great record of challenging the disastrous record of Western neo-liberalism, but its Foreign Secretary is wrong to describe the charges as "laughable" and "hilarious". Though its UK Embassy must be protected from any British Government attempt to attack its sovereignty, it is wrong to offer Assange political asylum. Assange should go to Sweden to face the allegations. That doesn't mean abandoning the struggle to hold Western governments to account, and to force them to be open about how they act in our name. But this is a struggle that has become tragically compromised by Assange.

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seeks asylum in Ecuador

WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in the Ecuador Embassy in London and has asked for political asylum, Ecuador's foreign minister said on Tuesday.

"Ecuador is studying and analyzing the request," Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters in the capital Quito.

The Ecuador Embassy issued the following statement:

    This afternoon Mr Julian Assange arrived at the Ecuadorian Embassy seeking political asylum from the Ecuadorian government.

    As a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration for Human Rights, with an obligation to review all applications for asylum, we have immediately passed his application on to the relevant department in Quito.

    While the department assesses Mr Assange's application, Mr Assange will remain at the embassy, under the protection of the Ecuadorian Government.

    The decision to consider Mr Assange's application for protective asylum should in no way be interpreted as the Government of Ecuador interfering in the judicial processes of either the United Kingdom or Sweden.

Read the rest here.

Good luck with that. The last time I checked "rape" was not classified as a political crime anywhere in the world. Nor is Sweden a country that is likely to prosecute someone on trumped up charges just to make the US happy. If anything Sweden has a more sober and fair legal system than ours. So I say pack him off to Sweden and let him have his day in court.

Church of Sweden Members Unlikely to "Believe in Jesus"

Only 15 percent of members of the Church of Sweden say they believe in Jesus, and an equal number claim to be atheists according to the results of a recent survey.

"It's not very high," Jonas Bromander, an analyst with the Church of Sweden who was responsible for the study, told The Local in reference to the figure.

"It's not really a problem; rather, it’s a byproduct of the secularisation in Swedish society which has taken place over many years."

More than 10,000 members of the Swedish Church participated in a comprehensive membership survey carried out over the past year and dubbed "Member 2010" (Medlem 2010).

According to the survey, 15 percent of church members they are atheists, while a quarter of Swedish Church members identify themselves as agnostic.

Read the rest here.

219 years ago today

The regicide of Gustav III of Sweden

Sweden: The latest royal headache

First it was a somewhat controversial royal wedding. Then the (IMO) overblown revelation that the King had lived a rather hedonistic lifestyle when he first came to the throne as a young man in the 1970's. Now we have reports that the Queen's father (H.M.'s family comes from Germany) had ties to the Nazi Party before and during the war, and that he made a great deal of money from a factory he "acquired" from Jews in the late 1930's. At that time German Jews had been banned from owning most forms of property and businesses and many were forced to sell their homes and livelihoods at rock bottom prices to often well connected non-Jews. Later the factory was of course part of the German war effort.

In fairness it is not clear how much the Queen knew about all of this. It has never been common in Germany for parents to discuss with their children their activities in support of Hitler's regime. Think of it as Germany's version of "don't ask don't tell." Even so recent statements by the the Queen are difficult to explain. It is probably too much to ask someone to spit on the grave of their parents. But it is not too much to come clean about their involvement in this sort of thing, especially when the evidence is presented. Nor is it unreasonable to expect an unequivocal condemnation.

Sweden is rocked by a royal scandal

H.M. Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden is alleged to have been a playboy in the 1970's.

Five months ago, the Swedish royal family was the toast of Europe. All eyes were trained on Stockholm as the glamorous Crown Princess Victoria wed her long-time boyfriend in a fairy-tale ceremony, and the world's press clamoured for a glimpse of the elegant Swedish royals and their regal guests.

Now the international media is again camped outside the gates of Stockholm's Drottningholm Palace – but this time for far less congratulatory reason.

Revelations last week that the King of Sweden once enjoyed romps in seedy nightclubs owned by shadowy underworld figures have eclipsed the sparkle of July's wedding. King Carl XVI Gustaf, the stern-looking, bespectacled monarch who is honorary chairman of the World Scout Foundation, has found himself thrust uncomfortably in the spotlight following the publication of an unflinching book, Carl XVI Gustaf – Den motvillige monarken (Carl XVI Gustaf – The reluctant monarch) which catalogues his past predilection for wild, alcohol-fuelled orgies and naked jacuzzi parties with models.

The book has caused uproar and dominated the country's media, leading to nationwide soul-searching about the 64-year-old King's role, reputation and right to privacy.

Read the rest here.

As someone of Swedish heritage (on my mother's side) I must say that I am shocked and deeply disappointed. In fairness to H.M. most of this does appear to be not just "old news" but very old news. As far as I can tell the King's playboy lifestyle ran its course and ended decades ago. Still it is disconcerting. And the Royal Court has not handled this well at all.

Parents appeal to European Court of Human Rights after Sweden seizes home-schooled child

STRASBOURG, France, June 28, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights Friday asking it to hear the case of a seven-year-old boy seized by Swedish authorities because his parents homeschool.

“Parents have the right and authority to make decisions regarding their children’s education without government interference,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska, who is based in Europe. “A government trying to create a cookie-cutter child in its own image should not be allowed to violate this basic and fundamental human right.

"The refusal of Swedish authorities to respect that right has left us no choice but to take this case to the European Court of Human Rights.”

Swedish authorities forcibly removed Dominic Johansson from his parents, Christer and Annie Johansson, in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant nor have they charged the Johanssons with any crime. The officials, say ADF lawyers, seized the child because they believe homeschooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise Dominic instead.

Read the rest here.