Jan Oberg
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Without being a NATO member, Sweden enters into an extremely far-reaching agreement with the United States, which completely undermines the country’s ability to conduct an independent security policy. Decisions are made without debate and behind the backs of the Swedish people. The official threat perception is fake: Russia will not attack the island of Gotland, but Russian missiles will now quite naturally be aimed at Sweden and be the first to be fired – if! Sweden might as well shut down the Ministry of Defence and let the Pentagon and State do the rest.
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Sweden has just signed a so-called defence agreement with the US. It gives the US access to no less than 17 military bases all over Sweden – and it does not exclude nuclear weapons on Swedish soil.
It is now absolutely certain to be dragged immediately into a US war – the country that has fought more wars and killed more people than any other country since 1945 and is currently the main culprit in Israel’s genocide.
This happens with the standard argument that it will make Sweden safer and that the country can get earlier and faster “help” from the US, e.g. in case someone tries to occupy Sweden – no, not even that but an isolated attack on the island of Gotland, according to the country’s defence minister.
And the (mis)leading militaristic mainstream media don’t ask a single critical question.
Here are a couple of examples of how public service Sveriges Television (SVT) treats these issues – about the defence agreement; why the agreement does not exclude nuclear weapons in Sweden; what does the defence agreement mean; the agreement has no limitations – and of course SVT uses a regiment commander to tell us how good this is; and here the bases (17 !!), which the US gets access to.
No one who could raise critical questions about this has SVT’s interest. SVT behaves as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon and the Swedish government, not as a critical problematiser or the classic fourth estate.
Can it get any dumber? Of course, it can – as long as the Swedish people continue to give a damn about their security and blindly believe the media and politicians.
History will judge harshly those who, in panic over Russia’s – primarily NATO-provoked – attack on Ukraine, abandoned the basic principles of Sweden’s security and its sovereignty and showed more solidarity with the US than with the security of the Swedish people. Without any broader investigation or impact assessment, that is.
And how do we know this?
We know this because no comprehensive, competent and serious analysis, investigation, commission report or public discussion was ever conducted before the then Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and her government headlong and thoughtlessly submitted the application for Swedish NATO membership.
She did so with the most irrational populist and ignorant argument – that we Swedes may disagree on many things, but we agree that we love Sweden and that it is worth defending – and it shall be defended in NATO.
That’s how you talk in a kakistocracy, not in an enlightened democracy.
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What is going on now is not even a natural part of a possible future Swedish NATO membership. For example, Denmark has never supported the US in this extreme way. Denmark has a number of restrictions on its NATO membership:
+ No foreign troops on Danish territory
+ No advance storage of weapons on Danish territory.
+ No nuclear weapons on Danish territory.
+ No participation in NATO’s nuclear planning group.
This has been the case for NATO country Denmark since 1949. This is misrepresented in the Swedish government’s declaration on these issues. And indeed, Denmark may change these reservations.
But in about a year, Sweden has gone much further without being a NATO member than Denmark did in 74 years!
There are no publicly available risk assessments – or pro and contra membership and cooperation of this type with the US – that the Swedish people have ever been asked to consider.
Today’s policy completely violates a long-established democratic principle that the Swedish people should receive full information, take a position on political choices on the basis of documents that have been sent out for consultation, have the opportunity for debate and understand the meaning of future decisions so that security policy can be said to be anchored in the “people’s home”.
The way in which the Andersson government then and the Kristersson government now persevere in total contempt for classical democracy and Swedish security policy thinking, thereby indisputably jeopardising the future security of the people, is worthy of a dictatorship.
Treason in peacetime?
Thank you for keeping your eyes on the ball, Jan.
I myself have reached the point, where I cannot watch American or NATO soldiers - or IDF child butchers for that matter - without wishing that they will all be killed, in the most horrible ways, in real life as well as in the movies . This is not a wish I am proud of, on the contrary, but the powerlessness and the utter disgust I feel for our political leaders has grown to a level where my emotions are beginning to cloud my judgment.
I know rationally that the only way forward is to agitate for peaceful coexistence, but I understand clearly how human beings closer to the killing zones might want to take lethal action. I personally know nobody who has been killed or maimed in these wars between the West and the Rest, but the fact that these killings are being done in my name, as a Danish citizen and a member of NATO against my will, makes my blood boil.
So again, thank you for focusing on what is real and important. We have to stop these wars, before people all over the world begin to long for the kind of revenge that I have begun to long for in my most depressed moments.
Keep up the good work, it helps keep me sane to know that I am not alone in feeling disgusted. Cheers from Denmark!
As someone who has always looked with great admiration and hope at Scandinavian countries as models for other countries to follow and as sources of hope for the future of mankind, I feel extremely sad at the latest developments regarding Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Do people ever bother to think where this global militarisation will lead?
The rightwing Israelis and their US supporters always argued that maximum, overwhelming strength was the guarantor of peace and, therefore, the best policy to follow. We have seen how decades of militarisation with tens of billions of US dollars worth of arms, turning Israel into a garrison state, exploded in rage on 7th October, followed by the worst example of genocide and ethnic cleansing since the Second World War right in front of our eyes.
It is a wrong assumption to think that, when faced with overwhelming force, weaker people will always put up with their state of subjugation and all will be well. In the current dangerous world, we do not need more US conventional and nuclear weapons, but serious efforts made for establishing peace and reconciliation. The current course of militarisation led by a hegemonic United States with an unmatched record of wars, destruction and mayhem in recent decades can only have one outcome, and it is not universal peace.