pastery

The outcome of yesterday’s elections in Sweden shocked me. Never would I have thought 6%(!) of the Swedish population allowed to vote would support an extreme right wing party standing for everything modern Sweden has not stand for nor ever should stand for. Sweden will continue to stand for openness, compassion, fairness and freedom. I never thought I would see the day when Sweden had a party with Nazi tendencies to straight out Nazi opinions would get even close to the parliament.

It is a frightening and important wakeup call…

It is a wakeup call not only to Sweden, but to us all. We have to start to realize that even in a country as Sweden where very few real problems exists such parties still can find significant support. The election results in themselves requires a lot of analysis and the party might not make the parliament still and what the actual effect will be when all the remote votes have been counted. The difference to provide the reigning parties sole majority is only around 7,000 votes.

Yet… The support is there. That is what is frightening.

Even more frightening is that 20-60%(!) of the youths in the Swedish schools support this party. To me that is the most scary me the most. There is an entire generation believing those types opinions are acceptable or even sustainable. World War II should have taught us that more than anything.

This is what puzzles me. Yet it doesn’t surprise me.

We have let this happen.

Now it is time to take the power of our society back from these forces.

Wait a minute…

However, doesn’t this feel like the ultimate déjà vu?

Yep. World War II and the Nazi Germany.

World War II should have forever frightened us from this path. Yet we still haven’t learnt much from. Denial and passivity seem like constantly present deceases for human kind. It is convenient and easier to blame and point fingers at others, but will never be sustainable. Ever. Let us not ever forget the hatred and resulting events in Germany during the 30s and 40s. They should never be repeated.

The war on terror has – from both sides – meant that the war has moved from the “battlefields” into all of our backyards. It is close to us. it is there as a haunted house. Not really seen. Yet frighteningly close. The same can be said about the drug cartels in for instance Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

It is amongst us. The bad elements hide in the comfort of our houses as it becomes so much harder to exterminate them.

The absolute majority has nothing to do with these wars nor want to have anything to do with them. Yet in so many ways we are passive in questioning why and putting pressure on the few that gain from this.

Sweden will most likely never become Hitler’s Germany. Yet the elections show that even inside a very stable and trouble-free environment, these seeds can grow if you do not take care of them early on. It really doesn’t matter if they make the parliament when everything is said and done on Wednesday. It is really like fighting off weeds. Squash the root and it cannot gain grounds. Cutting weeds off will in many cases just make the situation worse. Bombs and violence doesn’t really solve the main issue which is too many cases is simply lack of education, poverty and disrespect of ethnicity, religion, culture etc.

Make sure the grounds are not there and the seed cannot set root.

Do remember!

Hitler actions the September 1st 1939 didn’t come out of the blue. He provoked the entire world during the 30?s. Yet we remained passive and denied it. The complete irony here is that the Versaille peace in so many ways provided the seed for World War II. It was doomed to happen. If the alliance in World War I wouldn’t have unproportionally punished Germany economically, the chaotic Germany would never had become as bad as it did. This was the ultimate foundation for Hitler to create a supporter base. He also did the universally known trick to point finger at who’s to blame – the Jews.

The “winners” of World War I created the ground for the worse seed of modern history to grow. Shouldn’t we have learned from that?

The situation in Germany during the 1930?s was colored by a huge unemployment, economical crisis (recession, astronomical inflation) and political instability. The perfect foundation for a “devil in saviour clothes” coming in and telling people who to blame for it.

Wait a minute! This sounds familiar.

We see this today in many of the troubled areas around the world, and maybe in particular in the war on terror. It is astonishing we do not realize this more often. External and outsiders creating chaos, shutting down the aid and even creating the violence. Too often this is driven by greed.

Shouldn’t we have learnt our lesson?

But then again when the war and chaos is far away it feels like a movie or a computer game. You conveniently shut off the TV and the war is gone. (Or at least you think it is.) You are back in the living room. It’s peaceful. Unfortunately for the people living there, the war is very much present. (In all honestly there are issues closer to us, but hey most people do not even see those either.)

The important part is…

The main lesson from 9/11 and the cascade of events afterwards both violent and political should have been that if we shy away from the real issues, these issues will sneak up on us. They will sneak up on us with terrible consequences. We can not passively look away from suffering and poverty around the world. We have to be active and proactive to make sure that openness, compassion and freedom does exist on all levels, and that it is a collective global front against anyone trying to change this – any foreign and domestic threats. We have to learn to live as a world society, where everyone is equal. Terror and extremism should be fought, but by eliminating the grounds in which they can live and seed hatred, mistrust and disbelief.

It is really like fighting off weeds. Squash the root and you can keep it away…

Bombs, violence or terror will not solve anything here. It just creates more grounds for these seeds to grow, and grow stronger. You will then create a downward spiral. It takes a lot of political courage to attack the real problem and the solution will be multi-facetted. Most likely violence play a very little part in all of this.

I wish we could learn from history once. A close person to me once said: “It seems to be the curse of human kind to make the same mistakes as our predecessors” A bit cynical maybe, but what have we done to prove him wrong?

World War II is a monument of our shortcomings here, and we are yet to learn anything from it. The elections in Sweden are a sad proof thereof. They shouldn’t have nearly the support they have if we would only have learnt our lesson.

Do we really wanna relive the same nightmare as World War II in a different scenario, different actors but still with the same type of roots?

It is time to make a choice and standup against it.

A dear person said to me on the Swedish elections: “Do we really want to let a small fraction of our society dictate how we live?”

No.

Let us make sure they don’t. We should use this as our grounds to seed hope, compassion and freedom. We should use it to build a united front.

Do not let the devil disguise himself in the savior clothes.