Monday, August 26, 2013

A Swedish patriot on love of country

Stefan Torssell is a Swede who has written a defence of patriotic love. I'm a little reliant on Google translate in what follows (and it's an abridged version of his column), but the gist of his argument is clear enough.
It is he who loves who is happy...

And then comes the question: can someone love their country? I believe they can and actually remember the moment when my love grew...I went on the folk high school excursion. We lay in the grass and talked.

All around me were red cottages along a country road. Large arable fields spread out. Sweden was a beautiful country with good values...The language, culture and traditions created a national community that made us develop into a good society.

Just as insights about oneself are a prerequisite for being able to love another human being, a love of country presupposes that you know your country's places, fauna, traditions and culture. I grew up in my language, in my country, in my nature and our traditions.

It is essential for me to be able to love my country. But it is not enough. Love of Sweden contains love in two ways: it is a feeling, and it is an active choice.

It may seem pathetic to write about the love of a country. Some may perceive it as pompous in our time when the denial of their own national culture has become a competition. My experience of Sweden recalls the love of a person. They want to stay in that person's proximity, giving up a part of himself and is sympathetically tuned to that person.

There are those who do not love Sweden. One member of the cultural Left who often persecutes the Sweden Democrats (the patriotic party) is Martin Aagard. I heard him on the radio a while ago. He explained that he did not feel anything for his native Sweden.

I think the idea is not foreign to the cultural left that one can hate their own nation, or at least feel indifference. From that state can be born a destructiveness. It is not just the Left that can have this negativity to their own country. Even right circles I believe can make such choices.

Increasingly now I hear people express themselves negatively about Sweden, not only Mona Sahlin and Reinfeldt. Sweden has no culture. Swedish culture is borrowing from other more developed cultures. Swedish culture is barbarism.

The Swedish Democrats expressing kindness to Sweden is described as xenophobic. Many are forced to be cautious. They try to adapt to the zeitgeist to malign everything that is Swedish. They are to be regretted.

I've written about this before in terms of love, but it bears repeating. Faithfulness and truth are necessary in a relationship. The worst thing we can do to ourselves is to lie to someone we care about. Anyone who wants to lose a friend or a loved one should lie immediately to the man. The lie starts a mental process of decomposition and soon the friendship or love lost.

The powerful want EU countries to grow together into a federation with a single currency and a uniform law of free movement of capital. Multiculturalism has a purpose. It breaks down a country's uniqueness and national institutions.

That the Sweden Democrats are disliked by people with power and influence, I interpret as a sign that they are lying to us and about us. 

But there is another question. Can even the love of a country end? I think so.

The Sweden I discovered long ago is no more. Fragmentation in the nation is extensive. Much happens that is detestable. I have a strong feeling that many want to destroy Sweden in order to get something else.

My country feels strange when terrorists with Swedish citizenship are captured in an Arab country or when Swedes who committed a gang rape are reported to have spoken an incomprehensible language. I do not regard them as Swedes and I doubt very strongly that they do themselves.

Obviously, it is not the negative consequences of multiculturalism the establishment want. They want Sweden to become something else. What is happening now they consider a passing phase. Because they just want to discuss what is good with multiculturalism and only with those who think alike. I and the majority of the population have never been asked.

They are ruining Sweden. The whole project seems to now move toward a tragedy. We'll see which side wins. We who are sympathetic to Sweden or those who want to impose multiculturalism?

The good news from Sweden is that the Sweden Democrats are strong enough to have won 20 seats in the parliament. Below is a photo of the leader of the Sweden Democrats, Jimmie Ã…kesson, at a community event in his hometown.



I particularly liked Torssell's analogy between the love of a person and the love of a country:
My experience of Sweden recalls the love of a person. They want to stay in that person's proximity, giving up a part of himself and is sympathetically tuned to that person.

7 comments:

  1. The patriotic love of country, culture and traditions is normal and entirely human. And countries and families must be made up of a single ethnicity and culture. Those who hate their country are those who are alienated from the country and traditions by virtue of being aliens themselves.

    Who are the aliens? There are those who are entirely alien and come from different cultures and traditions and those who are partially alien coming from mixed race or mixed ethnic families and those whose families are dysfunctional.

    Most people who are derived from alien cultures, races and traditions can almost never wholly love the host culture. There will always be a sense of at last partial alienation and incomplete integration.

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  2. Couldn't help but notice the apparent advanced age of that crowd. Love of country is for old folks?

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  3. They're trying to geNOcide ethnic Swedes as they are all White people.


    This necessitates denying them national identity and racial interests- any such notion is just called - racism- or heresy, same idea.


    Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians, White Countries for Everyone?

    NO MORE.

    Hold them accountable.

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  4. J, I noticed that too. I could only find data on the average age of voters for the Swedish parties from 2006 and the Sweden Democrats scored relatively well amongst young voters. Their average age was 44 years compared to 50 years for the Social Democrats (and the average age of voters was 47).

    In other words, the Sweden Democrat voters were a little younger than the average.

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  5. Finland eagerly gets ahead of the game in importing Syrians.

    Finland has informed the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR that it is prepared for an emergency intake of Syrian refugees as part of its refugee quota. However the UN agency has not so far indicated that it needs Finland's help to resettle civilians fleeing the country’s civil conflict.

    Mass immigration plus forced integration is white genocide.

    Rule by traitors is the death of the nation.

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  6. Wow, that was a beautifully written piece. Good for him. He's very eloquent and I felt a sadness as I read it because I feel very much the same about the American South, what we like to call Dixie. For some of us (not many, but we do exist), when the country split in 1861 between North and South, it only split because there had already been a huge divide. The South was agricultural and conservative, the North was industrial and liberal. Even for quite a while after the war, Southern culture persisted. Terms such as 'Southern hospitality' are still used today.
    When the North won the war and forcibly brought the South back, they began to systematically destroy Southern culture. Books, movies, songs, jokes: the huge majority of them, even if written by those in the South, tend to make fun of or spread malicious myths about us. Now when the South is spoken of, the first thing that comes to mind is the redneck: beer-bellied, scraggly beard, riding around in a beat-up truck, living in a junky trailer, cussing, and shooting his gun off just to make a racket. While there are remnants of our culture, such as men holding the doors for ladies, or addressing those older than oneself as "sir" and "ma'am", largely we've been overrun by Yankees, Hispanics, and blacks. There is no culture anymore, just a conglomeration of people who are crude, rude, selfish, sloppy in dress and speech, waving around a Confederate flag not because they care about Southern heritage but because they identify as 'rebels' against anything and everything that they don't like.
    And it saddens me deeply. I can't say that I wish we were back in the 19th century, but I wish that we had carried the culture of the South with us into the 21st. I wish we had won the war. I wish that liberals, with their grand ideas of centralization and tolerance, didn't exist. To me, the South is my country. The Union, which was a forced union as soon as the first shots were fired on the South, isn't a bit unified in any way, shape, or form. And, as the South becomes ever more Northernised, the connection which I feel to it will lessen until it is nonexistant. Such is the way of the world.

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  7. Sweden is a bit more differently crazy and intense in their troubles compared to their Scandinavian/Nordic neighbors (e.g. Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland), but I hope they do alright.

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