02 March 2024

Sweden is "hopelessly unprepared for war"

Excerpts from an opinion piece at The Guardian:
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 came as a rude awakening for Sweden. Across the country people suddenly realised that national security vulnerabilities were everywhere. The entire public transit rail network in Stockholm, for example, is operated by MTR, a Hong Kong-based company with ties to the Chinese Communist party.

In the event of Stockholm being attacked by foreign forces, most of the detail about critical infrastructure and tunnels running under the city centre – home to the Swedish parliament, the prime minister’s residence, the state department, the royal castle – could be shared with enemies...

The problem isn’t necessarily the privatisations per se, but the reckless way in which they were executed, often without due diligence or background checks. Officials often just chose to do deals with the private contractors that submitted the cheapest bids. The globalisation optimism of the 1990s, when Russia and China were expected gradually to open up and eventually ally with western liberal democracies, paving the way for peace ever after, was so firmly rooted in Swedish politics that local officials until very recently were offering deals on critical infrastructure to investors with ties to adversarial governments...

There’s a Swedish expression for this attitude: fredsskadad, “peace damaged” – the idea that Sweden’s two centuries of peace have left its citizenry ill-prepared for a crueller reality. Swedes have long taken their safety for granted, while government officials recklessly sold off public assets and critical infrastructure to foreign powers...

The government has also cut funding for the free press, for civil society organisations and independent research institutes, which might further undermine citizens’ ability to educate themselves about potential threats. It is little comfort to think that, as bad as things are, many Swedes will have nothing to fear – because they will be unaware that they should be worried.

11 comments:

  1. "The government has also cut funding for the free press, for civil society organisations and independent research institutes, which might further undermine citizens’ ability to educate themselves about potential threats."

    This is a strange sentence. A government-funded press is not free. A government-funded research institute is not independent.

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    1. I agree, and I remember being momentarily discombobulated as I was copypasting that part of the text.

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    2. Publicly funded research may not be “free” but it is more transparent and open to public scrutiny than privately funded research. It’s also less likely to be hidden or distorted. After all look at, say, the results of research funded by tobacco and petroleum industries.
      Publicly funded research has its problems but private industries can’t be trusted to fund their own research any more than they can be trusted to regulate themselves.

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    3. There are countries where the elections are funded by the government - that is, each candidate is given a preset sum of money to conduct their campaign. This keeps big business, billionaires and other oversized interests out of at least that portion of the political process.

      You might argue that such a process is not "free", and maybe it isn't completely, but it sure beats the hell out of the mess we have here.

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    4. A government-funded press is not free.

      Depends. Public media can have in their charter that they're independent and if the government actually keeps its hands out of the public media, that press can be very free. Even more free than the commercial press that depends on the whims of its advertisers.

      I don't know how Swedish public media are organized, but if you have a BBC-like model then it's gonna be pretty independent. In fact, most European public media are pretty freaking independent.

      Unless you're making the non-argument that government-funded stuff isn't free. Which is such a boring cliche I'm not even going to counter it.

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  2. Ha. John Farrier's words are true.

    Here in New Zealand the last Labour government (not sure what the equivalent American version is), under the leadership of the charismatic but split tongued Ardern until she just upped and quit, not only bolstered the 'free' press by offering millions of dollars to them as long as they stayed within the lanes preset, but also spouted repeatedly how they were the only source of truth.

    Déjà vu for 1984 ... luckily that political party got a trouncing in the last election and has now lost all creditability.

    Even their bed mates the Green Party, took a hammering, if post election, when their rising star, a pretty faced Iranian refugee with copious amounts of eye liner who had become a NZ citizen as a child and later a lawyer, was eventually arrested for shop lifting .... not $20 worth of basic food but tens of thousands of dollars worth of high end fashion wear ... and the Green party leaders tried to keep it quiet.

    You think the American presidential race is full of ... well, just the two clowns .... but over here in these South Pacific islands the political arena has truly been a circus of late.

    ----

    'Unprepared for War ?'
    Here in New Zealand we get a vast array of our food from China, the so far 'happy uncle' from up north a bit.
    And things like taking the cheapest bid for train locomotives from China to save a couple of hundred thousand dollars, but laying off hundreds of engineers in our own railway workshops, the very guys that build locomotives ... and then those Chinese locomotives breaking down and having defective brakes.

    So far we haven't had our roads built by the Chinese mega funders, but looking at the state of them and our most recent government's promise to fix them, the solution may well come from that to date happy yellow uncle

    And we export the root stock of our Kiwi fruit and other plants, mainly to eastern countries, so they can grow their own produce as good as ours.
    We live export sheep and cattle to middle eastern and eastern countries, so again, they can benefit from our pastoral expertise and, lol, not need the livestock we grow on our fertile and verdant islands.

    Seriously, I may not be the brainiest bloke around, and I certainly don't have the ability to waffle on using some clever words like a fair few politicians do, but I am pretty sure I could do a better job of protecting our interests.

    Discombibulated .... like discombobulated but for babies.

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  3. Perhaps the US should be the world's policeman. That would free up some funds for Sweden's social programs. /s

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  4. Good thing that thanks to Sweden's admission to NATO, NATO now controls most of the Baltic Sea. Sweden's Gotland is the controlling island.

    This makes us all safer.

    At some point we may have to change the name NATO to include the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas. And once Ukraine and Georgia join (in the very distant future), NATO will also control the Black Sea.

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  5. If Russia was smart, they'd join NATO.

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  6. With apologies to John Lennon, imagine all countries "hopelessly unprepared for war."

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  7. It took me a while to understand how much we in the US are responsible for the current mess in Europe. We would not be having this discussion (and Sweden would still be neutral) had we pursued a different foreign policy path, especially from the early 90s to the present. I can't think of a time when Americans were more poorly informed--and more dangerously so. I highly recommend tuning in to a few John Mearsheimer interviews. A place to begin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emD1cN2xEz4

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