Mythology and counter-mythology

Wilhelm Agrell is a Swedish professor specializing in national security issues. Interestingly, he used to work for the Swedish military during the 1970's. “Den stora lögnen” (The Big Lie) is Agrell's 1991 exposé of Swedish foreign policy.

The author argues that Sweden's “neutrality” during World War II and the Cold War was a sham. During the war, Sweden adapted to and even collaborated with whichever side was strongest at the moment. During the Cold War, Sweden – despite its much vaunted and much flaunted non-aligned status – was a secret ally of the United States and NATO. This explains the American anger at Swedish criticism of the Vietnam War, a criticism probably seen as hypocritical, given that the Swedish military was dependent on U.S. war material. It also explains why the Soviet Union habitually carried out secret submarine operations in Swedish territorial waters. The Soviets saw Sweden as a hostile nation. (The conspiracy theory that the submarine activity was really a NATO false flag operation is also compatible with Sweden's status as a military ally of the West.)

It's also interesting to note when Sweden was subservient to the Soviet Union. The first time was during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Sweden seized the gold reserves of the Soviet-occupied Baltic republics (the reserves were deposited in Swedish banks) and handed them over to the Soviet Union. It's safe to assume that Swedish compliance with Soviet wishes was really a way to appease Hitler, who was Stalin's “ally” at the time. The second time was during the brief era of good feelings between the Soviet Union and the United States following World War II. At Soviet requests, Sweden extradited Baltic refugees who had fought for Hitler during the war. Conservatives and Cold War liberals have long used this as a terrible example of Swedish appeasement with Communism, but a more reasonable analysis is that Sweden simply adapted to the Allies as a whole, including the Western allies.

While Agrell's analysis is true “as far as it goes”, it also has a grave weakness. During the 1970's and 1980's, Swedish foreign policy wasn't simply “pro-American”, but in fact highly contradictory. The Social Democratic governments of Prime Minister Olof Palme criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam, and supported the ANC and the PLO. Palme was a member of the group around Soviet official Georgy Arbatov, which promoted détente and called for a zone free of nuclear arms in Scandinavia, in effect an anti-NATO position. The Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors sold or smuggled arms to pretty much everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain, including smuggling of ammunition to East Germany, a Soviet satellite.

Clearly, Swedish non-neutrality was a pretty colorful affair!

Yet, Agrell says little or nothing about this. The author is right, of course, that Swedish “non-alignment” was an official lie, a kind of political mythology. But there is also a counter-mythology which says that Sweden was simply a patsy of the White House. Agrell's book feeds this counter-mythology, which still exists. In its right-wing form, it argues that Sweden might as well join NATO since it was never neutral anyway. In its left-wing form, it argues that Social Democracy was “imperialist” (or even “fascist” in the crackpot 1970's version of this myth), as if there wasn't any difference between Palme and, say, Kissinger or Reagan.

Agrell has exposed the big lie, but in this book (only available in trustworthy Swedish) he inadvertently feeds a number of more petty ones…