The Portable Conscience Speaks: Scandinavian Journalism’s Bold Take on Recent Events

It used to be a joke among Swedes of self-deprecating ability – one dating from the time when Dag Hammarskjöld was President of the United Nations – that the most obvious trait of the representative Stockholm bureaucrat or university professor when abroad was his “portable conscience.”

Swedish liberalism, like Swedish blondness, was more liberal than any other kind, supremely and immaculately liberal. As such this liberalism entitled the enlightened Swedish ambassador, while at large in the benighted world, to act as a redeeming Superego to others whether anyone wanted him in that role or not. The Swedes, and swiftly enough their Scandinavian brethren, the Norwegians and Danes, pioneered professional righteousness during the 1960s, finding in the bloody contest between the two Vietnams the perfect opportunity to hone the art of multiplying excuses on behalf of any savage willing to fly the banner of socialism. A consequence today is that even more than elsewhere, with but a few exceptions, Scandinavian journalists are virtually in the employ of the state, and the state itself is the monopoly-instrument of the Leftwing elites.

Consider two recent editorials, one by Rikard Westerberg that appeared on 2 December in the dominant Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (“News of the Day”), on the “Climategate” scandal, and the other by Terje Svabø that appeared on 1 December in Aftenposten (“The Evening News” – the Norwegian counterpart of DN) on the national referendum by which a significant majority of Swiss voters decided to ban the construction of minarets within the borders of their republic. Both editorialists are exemplary in demonstrating how an ideologically committed writer must strain rhetoric in order to keep truth from contaminating doctrine. (Westerberg’s full article is here and Svabø’s is here.)

Westerberg broaches his topic with a whopping understatement: “As the Climate Conference in Copenhagen nears, the debate about global warming has taken a sharp turn. Two weeks ago a hacker illegally acquired over a thousand emails and documents from renowned climate researchers at East Anglia University in Great Britain.” Like United States senator Barbara Boxer, Westerberg characterizes as “illegal” the retrieval of information illegally withheld by the researchers themselves in defiance of a British freedom-of-information subpoena – the better to shift blame away from the fraudsters, whose dishonesty stands nakedly revealed. In a follow-up sentence, Westerberg requires a contortion of prose: “Parts of this private correspondence can definitely be interpreted to mean [definitivt kan tolkas] that the researchers do not want to tolerate colleagues who position themselves as skeptics of global warming or who do not believe that it is driven by human activity.” The Swedish modal verb att kunna, “to be able,” like the English verb can, meshes oddly, when used as an equivocation, with the adverb definitely. Those who have kept abreast of the story know that internal communications at East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were anything but ambiguous in their tendencies and intentions.

According to Westerberg, while the East Anglia scientists “can hardly be said to have entered into a worldwide conspiracy to conceal [att dölja] uncomfortable climatological facts,” it is the case that “their jargon concerning researchers with a more skeptical position [than theirs] has damaged the trustworthiness of [all] climate research.” But for Westerberg, the real disaster consists in the consequence that, “the scandal has provided grist for the mill of the skeptical minority.” Like “illegal,” the writer uses the term “minority” in a skewed way, which might well be factually inaccurate. Westerberg notes that the disclosures put the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory in such bad light that, “last Sunday the chair of the United Nations Climate Panel [IPCC], Rajenda Pachauri, publicly defended the Panel’s method.” Of course, the IPCC’s method was to use the CRU’s data without questioning it. One wonders what the defense might be.

Westerberg introduces further bi-valences that would be entirely avoidable simply through the employment of clear prose. One concludes therefore that the murky prose appears out of calculation: “At the center of the debate stands the question whether global warming has ceased.” In fact, the essential question concerns whether the much-ballyhooed warming trend ever existed at all. Admittedly, “measured from the exceptionally warm year 1998, the global temperature has not noticeably increased,” writes Westerberg; “on the other hand the last decade has been the warmest since measurement began in the 1880s,” from which he concludes that, “therefore both the believing majority and the non-believing minority can be said to be right.” One remarks the awkwardness of the passive construction – a typical fallback when writers wish to dissimulate causality or responsibility.

The problems of passive verbalism and downright odd usage get worse: “For the last ten years the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose while at the same time temperature increase failed to appear [temperaturökningen uteblivit]. It might naturally be a temporary phenomenon or something dependent on the ocean currents. But the type of questions asked must be allowed to be problematized and discussed.” A noticeable disappointment inhabits that failure to appear of the “temperature increase.” Perhaps, in Westerberg’s wishful thinking, a “temporary phenomenon” has delayed the necessary – the ordained – manifestation of the warming trend.

Lest anyone guess that, respecting the last sentence, I have translated badly, here is the same sentence in its original: “Men den typen av frågeställningar måste tillåtas problematiseras och diskuteras.” The unit of the sentence defined by its last five words – four non-agential verbs in a row – almost defies accurate recasting in English. The term frågeställningar” is a prize, an abstruse item from Neo-Kantian methodological discourse. In normal Swedish, the simple word fråga, or “question,” would suffice. But in that case a reader might respond, “Yes, indeed, perhaps the climate researchers have been asking the wrong questions.”

Svabø’s problems resemble Westerberg’s. Something simple has happened that offends political correctness and that therefore requires deflection, which the writer will proffer as explanation. In sum: Swiss voters, in a national referendum, decided that they did not want the aggressive architecture of the minaret raising itself everywhere over Swiss towns and cities and they banned further construction of such monuments. Svabø’s effort to misrepresent the elegant simplicity of the Swiss people’s judgment begins with the drama of his first sentence: “A mantle of shame has settled over Switzerland.” Svabø writes that the “no” vote on more minarets is “unworthy of Swiss tradition” and that “the nation’s reputation has been put at risk.” That insofar as Switzerland has a political tradition known to people beyond its national frontiers it is one of stubborn independence – this is knowledge that seems to have escaped Svabø, for whom the only imaginable tradition is the non-tradition of modern liberal doctrine. One might add that whatever Swiss tradition might be minarets have never been part of it.

Svabø continues: “The issue was in reality not the four towers in connection with their mosques, but the relation of Switzerland and the Swiss to Islam and to Muslims. It was nothing less than a referendum on the willingness to allow free speech and free exercise of religion and on the relation to the minority.” Like all Leftwing pontificators, Svabø lacks any understanding of concepts such as “free speech” and “free exercise of religion.” He does inadvertently get it right, however, in the two foregoing sentences, in the descriptive although not in the evaluative sense. The Swiss referendum indeed concerned the relation of the autochthonous majority to its invited new minority population from the Muslim world.

The majority of Swiss voters made the plausible interpretation that minarets are an imperious architecture, whose purpose is to dominate skylines and impose the obnoxious ululations of the muezzin on everyone, not only Muslims. It is true that church-bells ring in public too; and that Switzerland is a country famous for its bells, but to hear the prayers and sermons one must first enter the church. Worship in a Christian context remains in this way a matter of privacy and volition.

To explain the remarkable clairvoyance of the voting majority, Svabø must conjure a demon; and to conjure a demon he must seize on a label. His label is “Rightwing populist parties.” (“Høyrepopulistiske partier”) Svabø writes: “In nation after nation in Europe we see growing Rightwing populist parties with an anti-foreigner profile.” Thus, “In Austria the Rightwing populist Heinz-Christian Strache stands in the pulpit holding high the Cross and warning against the Islamic advance.” Svabø nevertheless cannot avoid certain disturbing facts, such as the fact that “active participation of over fifty-three per cent of voters is unusual in this nation [Switzerland], where the referendum process is used frequently.” In Svabø’s analysis the larger-than-normal participation “demonstrates that the turnout was mobilized.” To this one says: Of course – mobilized by an accurate perception of Islamic militancy and intransigency.

For example, quite as Svabø remarks, many Europeans have noticed that Muslim immigration creates what amount to colonies (“parallel societies”) of culturally inassimilable people in the midst of towns and cities. Hence the following half-true sequence: “Districts of such cities live their own lives with their own justice, banking arrangements, shops and clubs… The women rarely leave the district boundaries, and the young people feel hatred towards the [larger] society that lacks the will to include them.” Svabø blinkers his eyes to the explanations why, as he puts it, “the women rarely leave the district boundaries” and “the young people feel hatred.” Islamic society is the actual wife-and-daughter-jailing patriarchy that Western liberals never stop denouncing; and Muslim preachers deliberately instill contempt for everything outside Islam.

Svabø repeatedly invokes “fear of Islam” (“fyrkt af Islam”), but the majority of Swiss voting in the referendum has simply made a rational, evidence-based assessment of the religious interlopers in their country. Svabø refers to unnamed “members of the Federal Government and leaders of most parties in Switzerland” who “are now deeply concerned about how constitutionally to undertake the change in law.” Svabø adds that, “The election will be remembered not least because of the Rightwing-populist poster of a woman in a burqa in front of a Swiss flag pierced by rocket-like minarets.”

Svabø approaches his conclusion with that keystone device of professional obfuscators, the rhetorical question: “So, what now, Switzerland?” The real answer is, now Swiss people will go about their daily lives without having to listen fives times a day to the call for prayer. As Svabø sees it, however, “the first order of the day is clearly a major fire-fighting effort in collaboration with the Islamic world, the United Nations and neighboring countries in Europe.” He quotes a line from a fellow-traveler among Austrian journalists, in whose charming figure the wisdom of the referendum represents “direct democracy’s ugly face.”

It sounds like editorial discourse in the New York Times or spoken commentary, in the required monotone delivery, on NPR. Naturligtvis, or “naturally,” as one says in SwedishLike the Volvo, the “portable conscience” has been a hot-selling export item for decades. Nowadays, every liberal drives one.

 

 

 

KA to T.F. Bertonneau

I appreciate your response.  I have always maintained that in theory at least, complete and global multiculturalism and political correctness will be detrimental to diversity and promote homogeneity.  Human individual and group success has depended on an efficient balance between heterogeneity and homogeneity, which is why radical socialism is as much a failure as anarchic libertarianism.  As with all nature, balance is essential.  Unfortunately, it is difficult to identify the exact causes of these policies, because ideological positions often occur as a response to one’s environment.  Multiculturalism was more of a response to the failure of assimilation than a product of the Reformation.  This response occurred within the context of postwar revulsion towards genocide, de-colonization, civil rights movements, etc.

failure of assimilation

Multiculturalism was more of a response to the failure of assimilation ...

This is an interesting comment. The only demographic that has adapted well to Western civilization (and are hence able to assimilate easily) is certain Asian populations, notably the Japanese and Chinese. But when we think of multiculturalism as enforced by politicians and their leftist supporters, we usually do not think of these Asian groups, at least primarily.

Warming and immigration

In spite of all this there is a part of me that wants to attribute immigration (whether Muslim in Europe or Mexican in the US) to the short term interests of politicians who know that indigenous demographics (i.e., population decline) cannot possibly maintain a tax base sufficient to support the welfare state. Thus, from a practical standpoint these politicians see the influx of foreign workers as simply a new source of tax revenue

Obviously this cannot account for many other liberal actions, actions which, far from strengthening the state, actually act to further the state's demise. It is understood, however, that the notion of the sovereign state is not part of the liberal vocabulary, and this certainly explains much.

As far as "global warming" goes, note that the idea has, for a while, undergone a terminological shift, now typically spoken of as "climate change." This semantic shift is meant to be unobserved, but since the man-made warming aspect is more and more viewed by most as unsupportable (and by many as simply an outright fraud) what else can they do? Besides, no one can argue against the fact of "climate change," although its man-made aspect remains questionable. But, to advocates, this is only a minor point, and one to be glossed over in any case.

Comment from Thomas F. Bertonneau

I thank Kapitein Andre for his comment.  My point in the article is less about Sweden and Norway than it is about liberal intolerance and the international homogeneity of the politically correct worldview, which, however, crystallized among Swedish liberals quite early.  The political atmosphere became politically correct in Sweden before it did in Great Britain, say, or Germany. All that notwithstanding, Kapitein Andre makes a point that is worth following up: namely that the aggressive political correctness of the Swedish elites, including the journalists, is connected with Sweden’s imperial past.

 

Few people outside Sweden know that at one time a Swedish empire not only dominated the Baltic, but claimed large swaths of Northern Germany and Poland, and that this empire even had overseas possessions, transiently, in North America and (believe it or not) Africa.  The drivers of Swedish imperialism were the successive Gustavian royal princes of the Vasa (or Wasa) Dynasty and their cause was Protestantism.  Whatever the merits of Luther’s original protest, his movement, when it reached Stockholm, swiftly became an ideology.  Whereas the Swedes had ceased being heathens only by long centuries of Catholic missionary preaching, they ceased being Catholics by brutal domestic campaigns until swiftly there were no more Catholics in Sweden.  The Thirty Years War, in which Sweden, despite its small population, became a major player, exhibits all the classic traits of an ideological conflict, by which fanatics attempt to export and impose their homespun doctrine.

 

The American political theorist Paul Gottfried derives political correctness – and such doctrines as multiculturalism and diversity – from Protestant Christianity, of which, on his interpretation, they are degenerate transformations.  In this way, the outrage of an editorialist at Dagens Nyheter on behalf of climate fraudsters or the outrage of an editorialist at Aftenposten on behalf of Swiss Muslim immigrants deprived of their minarets fit in a history.

 

Here is an etymological parting-gift to the Kapitein to which I myself attribute no significance: The word wasa refers to a sheaf of intertwined wheat stalks, which was the royal emblem of the Gustavians; wasa is related to the Latin fasces, which refers to a similar ceremonial device.

@ Thomas Bertonneau

The rootcause of Swedish political correctness doesn't go so far back in history.
Sweden has a secret loaded past during WWII during which they actively cooperated with and profited from the nazis.
The reason for the Swedish economic wonder years after WWII was the enormous profit they made during the war.
Switzerland was the financial profiteer and Sweden was the commercial/industrial profiteer. I knew personally people who were involved in it and it is safe to say that the whole Swedish economy thrived on it for many years.
After the war there was a collective desire to "forgive and forget" with the active cooperation of the "powers that be" in the US who participated in the profiteering by selling goods to "Sweden", mainly in transit via Swedish ports.
Since the whole country was involved and informed because the whole population worked, traded, farmed for German customers, there was a complete silence after the war and an unspoken desire "to be holier than thou". The social democrats and the unions saw in this collective guilt complex a marvellous opportunity to "guide and protect the innocent".
When I talked about it in the sixties and seventies with Swedish "captains of industry" they still couldn't speak freely about it, a little bit like Swiss bankers about Jewish assets, but in Sweden it was a whole country and not a couple of hundred bankers.

RE: Portable Conscience

Mr Bertonneau,

 

Whilst others attribute these pathologies of the national character to virtuous intentions, I differ.  Sweden, like many former empires, is asserting itself by appealing to liberal and egalitarian ideals through multilateral channels, and is exercising power politically.  Of course, Sweden has neither the economic base nor the military strength to be a regional power in Europe much less a middle power in the world.  If Swedes think that they have merely talked their way to political influence, they are sorely mistaken.  The true great and middle powers prefer deferring to mediocrity than to one of their rivals.