#Olof Palme

[joyxsadness]

Frozen mashup and yeah Olof Palme is Olaf. That’s who I think of when I hear “Olaf” or “Olof” as it use to be where I come from. It pronounce the same anyway ☃️

[fernsehn]

Unfortunately that horribly sensationalist Jan Stocklassa "The Man Who Played With Fire" Olof Palme doc is actually extremely interesting. Such a bummer that its highly interesting content is presented in such an unserious manner. But still: I knew N O T H I N G about the Olof Palme murder (shame on me) and now I can't stop thinking/be upset about it/draw parallels to present day politics. And to see that the consequences of it reach right into today's sweden is absolutely horrifying.

[crownjewel123]

I have a conspiracy theory that Olof Palme’s assassination was linked to his support of South African’s in apartheid and his support for the PLO to be added to the UN despite Israel’s chagrin.

(He was the first to give both the ACN& PLO and vote to join the UN meetings)

He is an incredibly interesting man. If anyone has any informative books on him I could read please share. (i will learn another language to read them if i must)

[movie--posters]

[lucidora]

OLE DAMMEGÅRD ~ "Worlds Most Complex Murder Mystery - The Olof Palme Cas...

[motionpicturelover]

"Jag är nyfiken – en film i gult" (1968) - Vilgot Sjöman

Films I've watched in 2023 (41/119)

I wrote a bit more about it for "February Film Favourites" earlier this year.

[signeficunt]

considering making a sideblog about dead politicians

[intellectures]

Leicht neben die Norm gesetzt

Im Übersetzerzentrum der Leipziger Buchmesse wurden wenige Stunden vor der Vergabe des Preises der Leipziger Buchmesse die fünf nominierten Titel in der Kategorie Übersetzung vorgestellt. Dabei sprachen die fünf Übersetzer:innen über besondere Aspekte ihrer Übersetzungsarbeit. Continue reading Leicht neben die Norm gesetzt

[elvislefilm]

Thinking about how they found traces of coke in the swedish parliament bathrooms

[freyjaofthenorth]

reminder that

[yourboyveggies]

I’m looking in to Olof Palme and his life and turn ute he went to Cuba and meet and tackt whit Fidel Castro. Him being the first democratically elected leader to do so.

I fund a trans lation lf Fidels spech

It’s honesty extremly interedting . With his relationship with Cuba , and North Vietnam and fears of criticism against South Africa and the US ( as well as the USSR) it’s no wonder he was assassinated

[sistabossenn]

[movie--posters]

[zvaigzdelasas]

The IB affair (Swedish: IB-affären) was the exposure of illegal surveillance operations by the IB secret Swedish intelligence agency within the Swedish Armed Forces. The two main purposes of the agency were to handle liaison with foreign intelligence agencies and to gather information about communists and other individuals who were perceived to be a threat to the nation.[...]

The story was immediately picked up by many leading Swedish dailies.[3] Their revelations were that: •There was a secret intelligence agency in Sweden called IB, without official status. Its director Birger Elmér was reporting directly to select key persons at cabinet level, most likely defence minister Sven Andersson and Prime Minister Olof Palme. •The Riksdag was unaware of its activities. People with far-left views had been monitored and registered. •IB agents had infiltrated Swedish left-wing organisations and sometimes tried to induce them into criminal acts. •There were Swedish spies operating abroad. IB spies had broken into the Egyptian and Algerian embassies in Stockholm. •The IB co-operated extensively with the Central Intelligence Agency and Shin Bet, in contrast to the official Swedish foreign policy of neutrality.[...]

In the following issues of Folket i Bild/Kulturfront the two uncovered further activities of IB and interviewed a man who had infiltrated the Swedish movement supporting the FNL, Vietnamese National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam - at this time the FNL support network was a backbone of the radical opinion - and among other things, visited Palestinian guerilla camps in Jordan. The man worked for IB and had composed reports that, it was surmised, IB later passed on to the Israeli security services which resulted in the camps being bombed. [...]Swedish authorities claimed they were unable to locate him to stand trial. In 2009, he released an autobiography of his years in IB[...] He also confirmed that he had been transferred from IB to the Mossad, an Israeli intelligence agency, immediately prior to his exposure.[...]

The magazine had information from a previous employee of IB, Håkan Isacson, who claimed that IB had broken into the offices of two political organizations: the FNL Groups, a pro-North Vietnamese organization, and the Communist Party of Sweden, a Maoist political party. This concerned a Jordanian citizen and a stateless citizen. A wiretap was installed in the latter case. After this uncovering, the defense minister did admit that IB engaged in espionage outside of Sweden and infiltrated organizations within Sweden, including wiretaps. Evidence was put forth in 1974 that IB had built up a large network of agents in Finland, which included the Finnish foreign minister Väinö Leskinen. This network's main mission was to gather information regarding the Soviet Union.[...]

In November 1973, Prime Minister Olof Palme denied any link between IB and the Social Democrats. However, according to the memoir of ex-security service chief P.G. Vinge, Birger Elmér had regular contact with Palme and made his reports regularly to the Social Democratic Party secretary, Sven Andersson.[...]

Jan Guillou, Peter Bratt, Håkan Isacson and the photographer Ove Holmqvist were arrested 22 October 1973[2] by the Swedish Security Service on suspicion of espionage. On 4 January 1974 each was sentenced to 1 year in prison. Bratt and Guillou were both convicted of espionage; Isacson was convicted of espionage and accessory to espionage. After an appeal, Guillou's sentence was commuted to 10 months. The Swedish Supreme Court would not consider the case.[4][...]

In 2002 an extensive public report, named Rikets säkerhet och den personliga integriteten (Security of the Realm and personal integrity), was published on the operations of IB. This report clarified the details of the case, but it did not have any legal impact. To date, no member of IB has ever been indicted, nor has any politician or government official, despite the revelation of widespread extra-constitutional and criminal activity.

[aaknopf]

A multi-generational saga courses across the pages of Ædnan, by Sámi-Swedish author Linnea Axelsson, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel. The verse epic follows an Indigenous Sámi family who have herded reindeer for generations, as the forces of colonialism and modern development of their ancestral lands threaten their culture and livelihood. The story is told by a small chorus of characters from the 1910s through the current day, and we become especially close to Lise, who left her Sámi family, following her brother Jon-Henrik, to be educated at a residential school for “Nomad” children. This excerpt from Chapter XII takes place in the early 1970s, along the Great Lule River Valley, where the state-owned Vattenfall company was developing hydroelectric resources, and Lise is graduating into a world unimaginable to her parents.

. .

The river climbed silently up the hills

as soon as Vattenfall whistled it came creeping:

–

Streamed backwards up its deep channel and drowned the earth

When the great Suorva Dam for the third time was to be regulated

–

Entreaty

shone from Mama’s eyes

–

She explained clearly to the Swedes 

that the fishing will suffer if the water rises

–

There was probably no one who understood what she was saying

– –

After the social studies lesson I went with the others to sit on the gymnasium floor

–

Almost all of Malmberget’s students had been dismissed from class

– To participate in the miners’ strike meeting

 –

Someone had heard that Olof Palme was coming

that he would travel all the way up here 

–

To the mining company’s and Vattenfall’s world the one that he himself had helped build

–

It is what he is guarding

It is all that he can see

–

The mine boss’s voice

flowed wildly above the crowded hall which was hot with bodies

–

His voice was so robust his conviction so intense

–

I glanced at Anne who was sitting beside me leaning against the wall bars

and she smiled back at me

–

Soon we would be leaving school too 

–

And could start working join the union

–

You took the job you wanted that’s all there was to it 

– 

Switchboard cleaner or cook

with the old folks at the Pioneer or the children in day care

– –

I spend the weekend up at Mama and Papa’s 

–

I stand with Jon-Henrik

 –

Watching the river flow murky across the slope

–

That brushy slope

where he and I used to go it’s underwater now

 –

How are our tracks ever to be heard Among the Swedes’ roads and power stations

–

It’s Jon-Henrik who says this he had also been drawn down to the dam

–

To work for Vattenfall as soon as school was done

 –

I’m surprised when he says

That he’d preferred to have taken up with the reindeer

–

Been elected into the Sámi community

And learned to guide that wandering gray soft ocean across the world of the fells

–

Just as the lot of us were once taught at the Nomad School that this is what the Sámi do

that this is how we all live

–

He laughs and says:

–

Who knows what the spring flood will bring with it

this drowned  earth may yet be fertile

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Ædnan by Linnea Axelsson.

Check out The Rumpus for a conversation between Linnea Axelsson and Susan Devan Harness about Axelsson's Sámi heritage and the decision to write Ædnan in verse. 

Click here to read Linnea Axelsson's op-ed piece for LitHub on Scandinavia’s hidden history of Indigenous oppression.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[motionpicturelover]

"Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult" (1967) - Vilgot Sjöman

("I Am Curious - Yellow")

"February Film Favourites" Day 10/28

One of two "I Am Curious" films: "I Am Curious: Yellow" and "I Am Curious: Blue", a play on the colours of the Swedish flag, blue and yellow 🇸🇪.

With this film the focus from the media, etc. has mainly been on the nudity and sexual themes - making it sound like some sort of soft core film - but it's a film that largely focuses on the changes happening in Swedish society in the late 60s. It deals with conscientious objection, strikes, the class society, socialism, and, yes, the sexual liberation/revolution happening at the time.

A large part of the film is taken up by unscripted interviews with people on the street, people working in Sweden's largest union (LO), and others, including Olof Palme - at the time the Minister for Communications (Transport) - who would go on to become Prime Minister of Sweden.