Our racist hockey song

I can´t say I liked this book. Sure, “Du gamla, du friska” by Eva Danielsson and Märta Ramsten does contain interesting facts about the Swedish national anthem “Du gamla, du fria” and its surprisingly complex history. The problem is that the book is written by two globalist left-liberals who quite simply hate the anthem, nationalism and the nation-state. This makes for some bizarre reading.

Thus, the authors (who are – surprise – ethnologists) spend considerable time debunking various far right myths about the anthem, for instance the claim that it originally had four verses, and that two of them have been intentionally suppressed for being too patriotic. However, they then end up peddling their own propaganda, claiming that the anthem has never been banned in Swedish schools “by the government”. But the bad-thinkers quoted in the book do *not* claim that the government banned the anthem – they make the *correct* observation that the anthem has been banned at certain public schools by principals (cuz racist). 

The mainstream media reported several such cases during the 1990s, giving the names and the locations of the schools and the names of the principals. Perhaps this was all fake news? In liberal-globalist newspapers, to boot? Somehow, I find that very hard to believe! Eventually, the authors are forced to admit that principals do indeed have the jurisdiction to ban the anthem in school, essentially conceding the point of the nefarious dark racist forces (actually, ordinary Swedes).

Another absurdity: the authors constantly attack the Sweden Democrats for thinking that all national anthems except the Swedish one has been officially adopted by law in their respective countries, when the SD motion proposing such a move says “many”, not “all”. Once again, the author team then concedes that many anthems around the world indeed *have* been officially codified by law! So what on earth is the prob then? The low quality of the polemics in this work suggests that we are dealing with some kind of hot button topic here! Of course, if “Du gamla, du fria” (the two-verse version) would finally be adopted by law, we could perhaps sack the school boards who ban it in “their” school districts…

By all means, buy this book if you can read Swedish and know next to nothing about the National Anthem of Sweden, but take the political stuff of these two ethnology majors with a large grain of salt.