By Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli
Doctor of Medicine in psychiatry, professor emeritus of epidemiology.
Founder, Swedish Professors and Doctors for Human Rights SWEDHR
(From the coming book Sweden’s Geopolitical Campaign, Libertarian Books Sweden, 2021. ISBN 978-91-88747-25-9)
PART I
Propaganda for war by proxy: Rebuttal to Martin Kragh’s flawed analysis in Swedish J Social Sciences 2020. Part 1: Introduction
It was year 1897 when a Swedish military officer of name Claes Grill launched the initiative to raise a monument on a Poltava field, in honour of Sweden’s Karolina fallen soldiers.[1] Idiosyncratic predictable, sooner the noble initiative evolved among chauvinist elites to be a memory to Sweden’s past empire in the Baltic area, a needles self-reminding of what they seldom forget to refer as to “the era of great power” (stormaktstiden). [2]
In the middle of a febrile monarchy-sponsored campaign to collect funds for that monument, an aristocratic general of name Oskar Magnus Björnstjerna, also Sweden’s first foreign minister, suddenly reminded to the academic public that, in fact, it was in Poltava, in Russian soil, where the defeat of the Swedish army by the Russians in 1709 marked the end of “Sweden’s era of great powers”. The idea of raising a monument to fallen Swedes in a Poltava graveyard would have been somehow embarrassing, was the underlying argument. [3] So, other initiatives instead should be taken to tackle the post-Poltava sentiment.
That same year of 1897 it was founded the Swedish Journal of Political Sciences.
And it was meanwhile general Björnstjerna, the count’s son who couldn’t bear that title because he wasn’t the eldest one, was never mind happy to have been elected a top member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences –the institution aimed “for the study and analyses of defence and national security issues”. [4] There he could further agitate his strategic project on Russia.
Noteworthy in this context, another member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences is nowadays the current chief-editor of the aforementioned Swedish Journal of Political Sciences: Magnus Jerneck – described also as “post retirement professor” at the Department of Political Science, Lund University.[5]
Well, after all, being that royal academy a “forum for military (army and air force) and defence issues”, [6] –from a hawkish, belligerent right-wing ideological perspective that is– it is not surprising to find among the publications of that public-funded institution a sheer defence of Martin Kragh.
Good old Martin is a political researcher who has been singled out as allegedly instrument in Sweden of “Integrity Initiative”. Being this outfit a spy, spooky, spurious organization financed among other by the British Intelligence apparatus and the UK Ministry of Defence. Needless to say, its target being all the same: to disinform about “archenemy” Russia.
Therefore, neither is a surprise that if any in Sweden who would dare to ask an investigation about Kragh, including established mainstream media journalists, it shall per default, pejoratively named “a-sort-of-communist”. That is what exactly it reads in a publication of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences– a piece devised to defending Kragh, for he really needs it.
Or shall I better say, ‘protecting’ Kragh. Although in these contexts the verb to use should perhaps be ‘covering’.
And neither it was a surprise when now Post retirement professor Magnus Jerneck, the editor of the Swedish Journal of Political Sciences –aka member of the said Academy of War Sciences– ignored a formal claim by this author to the right of rebutting in the same journal the false and libellous statements by Martin Kragh on Swedish Doctors for Human Rights.
To his falsehoods about SWEDHR statements, Kragh even added a detrimental description of our organization to the readers of Swedish Journal of Political Sciences. Precisely as the apparently per-default instruction of Integrity Initiative, he describes Swedhr as “a group of far-left activists”. Instead of referring as to what we are:
A non-governmental organization of Swedish professors and doctors, with roots in the Swedish peace movement of the 70’s, aiming to expose the human rights infringements and war crimes atrocities perpetrated by the powers which Kragh obeys to, and that are silenced by the Swedish institutions which help to finance the biased, ergo non-academic ‘research’ activities of Mr Kragh.
And I wonder if such a denial to a rebuttal from the part of that journal, which is published at Lund University, a public institution, would not be illegal. Besides of being, in my opinion as former scientific member of a Swedish ethical committee for research, academic unethical.
One may wonder where this widespread anti-Russian sentiment among Sweden elites is rooted. I mean, among those who are not doing it for the money or to preserve their positions of privilege.
What would be the cause of that seemingly deep animosity, that “phobia”, or whatever it has been called to describe the sentiment of Sweden’s elites and its hired researchers against Russians?
Could it be that simple that it is rooted in a revanchist feeling for the Poltava defeat of 1709? or in the memories of ancient Sweden-Russian wars that preceded the collapse of Sweden’ s “great powers time”?
Or is instead much ingrained in the Swedish aristocracy’s repulse of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, when leftist revolutionaries thrown the monarchist Duma’s provisional government and marked the ending of aristocracy privileges? Let’s not forget that Sweden is a monarchy. And monarchy and democracy is a terrible contradiction of terms. Monarchy not only represents, but it is actually based in a) the notion of by-birth privileges, that not all are born with the same rights, b) the principle that the public (the non-privileged by birth) has to pecuniary sustain those expensive privileges of the born in the right dynasty.
Ergo, the fact is that very many Swedes spend their life, all along, either themselves venerating or even worshiping the monarchic institution, or accepting without protest that obvious incongruency. Monarchy and Democracy is a contradiction of terms. By principle, monarchy is antidemocratic, and ‘democracies’ that venerates the inequality and the born privileges of the ‘royal houses’ are hence vassal institutions.
“Democratic” Sweden is in true a deep-rooted monarchy system, where the antidemocratic privileges of the royal house (not even of nobility origin) [7] are untouched.
To make things worse, the nobility of the current Swedish royal dynasty was invented by decree at the political decision-making corridors of Stockholm. As I have previously explained, [8] by the end of the 1700s, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte was a soldier of plebeian origin that became general in the popular ranks of Napoleon’s army, thanks to the French Revolution. However, due to his military misconduct as judged by his commander in chief, [9] Napoléon Bonaparte removed him, and evicted him ostracized to one ultimate distant point from Paris, within then French Empire. That resulted being Ponte Corvo, a tiny Italian village of population about 5,000. From there he was picked up by the Swedish envoys. Later in Sweden he was made noble by political decree.
Or if it has geopolitical-related causes (a further development on the historical/geopolitical Benardotte issue in my book of 2021, “Lo Paradojal de La Vida. Reflexiones dialécticas” [10]
Or if it is for real, or just the deployment of a propaganda thing to provoke a war mobilization in benefit of a Swedish industrial-military complex, in tight alliance with the UK and the US. That these peoples are frantic propagandists for a full NATO membership is no secret. Neither is a mystery that they appear equally ignorant about the military capability of the Russian armed forces, or even about what history praxis has defined as casus belli.
The Swedish elites replace the nostalgia of a bygone imperial time of prestige –a hard currency in Swedish idiosyncrasy– with a delusion of political and military might: Sweden is best, and all in the Baltic region should copy its model. As all the world should copy Sweden epidemiological strategy in the virus war.
Martin Kragh’s recent paper at the Swedish Journal of Political Sciences contains multiple academic, factual, and methodological flaws. [11] But, as in the exception that confirms the rule, the Uppsala University researcher is there nevertheless right in identifying SWEDHR as being first to expose his alleged secret association with the UK Intelligence organization “Integrity Initiative”. We continue here our denouncing endeavour.
Those in power who want war, need war, and even have an unmistaken past of promoting it for ends of conquer, colonizing, enslaving, and predating the soil, the gods and goods of other countries. Those will hardly admit, if ever, that all they want is war.
Neither war would be possible without a national sentiment of hostility, developed amidst the domestic masses against the nation-target. What those in power would do instead to create such public attitude and to “moral” legitimate the geopolitical move (in a combination of political, diplomatic and military efforts), is to contract scholars in the supermarket of pens to hire, aka the unscrupulous bazaar of journalists and researchers stripped of humanity, the disregarders of academic ethics. They are more conveniently to be found abroad.
(What do I mean with a sense of humanity? Nothing more than what is in the constitution of all the so-called civilized Western democracies: that all humans are born equal, all have the same rights, that all lives have the same value. And that homicide perpetrators shall go to jail.)
As an example, Nazi Germany never had an academic institution for racial research. It was instead established in Sweden, in Uppsala, under the name “State Institute for Racial Biology” (Statens institut för rasbiologi). [12]
Propaganda by proxy, we could say, of foreign powers using domestic assets to disinform their respective national publics. They have existed as long international conflicts have existed. They thus constitute the real oldest profession in this world.
Since Gutenberg’s invention of the printed word in 1440, those opinion doers have contributed with their apocalyptic written narratives to a massive holocaust which has amounted billions. A carnage of human beings coinciding with the dawn of modern times, with no parallel before in history. Since the British War of the Roses in 1455, continuing with the slaughter of indigenous population by the Spaniards in nowadays Latin-America 1579-1572, [13] and to the current Yemeni war.
Yes, the forgotten war in Yemen. Where the richest countries in the region put their might together behind the Saudi led, to bomb unabated the population of the poorest country of the same region.
And where the UK and Sweden support the attacking coalition with weaponry aimed to bomb and destroy unabatedly, to kill mothers and to orphan their children, to fumigate with tons of explosives the few plants left, to incinerate roofs and walls and to burn to death innocent domestic creatures. All life shall be scorched. All the oil shall be taken. All they want is profit.
And a war against Russia for the predating of Eurasian markets? And for a successfully completion of the ‘regime change’ program in the Middle East? That war which the local and transoceanic warmongers have wished since Hillary Clinton’s “Russia will pay a price”? [14]
Well, that warmongering which poor little angel eyes Martin Kragh wish to represent in Sweden, albeit the phony output of his non-research, that warmongering if it becomes war it will however not be waged against a defenceless country.
We would all perish in that war, except those who shall manage to activate the one-way ticket to the U.S. recommended by my former Swedish super right-wing patriots nationalists Russia haters relatives-in-law. They had those already in their pockets –just in case it would happen what they wished it shall happen: a revanche war against Russia.
I mean that we Swedish citizens shall be first mobilized to the front line, as it is in the strategic design of NATO. Swedes, Finns and Norwegians. That is what we are for in the plan.
Thereafter peace would be signed for the US and the UK’s sake, just prior the all-nuclear exchange would start against them. As it was in the Cuba crisis of 1962. But at that moment the people whose national security Kragh pretends to advocate for, they are already all death. Aa all their brothers, fathers, sisters, children and grandchildren. The old Wasa warship will be sank again, together with all Strandvägen, together will all Stockholm city. Together with all the rest of main towns, all the plants and rivers and fishes.
Does Kragh and his warmongering colleagues reflected on that when in December 2013 it was known that the FRA –the Swedish version of the NSA (in fact, working for the NSA)– has been a conspicuously an active part of Quantum, and hacked on Quatum’s behalf. [15]
A notable Swedish scholar then reminded where cyber spying provocations may eventually lead.
Professor Wilhelm Agrell, one most respected international-conflict researcher, argued that Sweden’s secret cyber warfare operations directed against Russia –a collaborative enterprise of Sweden with the US military which was exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, could be equated with an act of war. In the professor’s own words:
“Cyber warfare, if it is directed against vital infrastructure in another country, can certainly be tantamount to an armed attack.” [16]
And you don’t need to cyber-spy on their weaponry. Just check YouTube, like in this upload by the US-based site Military Update titled “Wanna Fight Russia? Meet this Russia’s New Nuclear Superweapons and Strategy”:
All those perils and risks of nuclear confrontation will of course not exclude the destiny of NATO’s Europe, including those countries devised to be its cannon fodder.
What Kragh and associates should instead do, it is starting to follow our sensible advise which we published in DN, synthetized:
Seek instead to solve eventual disputes with the Russians in the negotiation table.
And what those grievances would be about after all?
In sum, we, the Swedish professors and doctors for human rights (SWDHR)[17], are in the main only concerned with preserving peace, with trying to convince political actors to stay away from provoking war, or keeping the stupid stance of brushing aside propositions for maintaining peace.
What we ask the authorities of our country, is to cease interfering, or support other powers’ interfering in other countries internal whereabouts –by militarily invading them or other means– while in fact those interventions either hide an economic agenda for profit to their corporations and some politicians’ own pockets, or a geopolitical agenda devised to expand political territories and areas of influence. Like de Baltic project now emerging amidst the Swedish warmongers, their generals and their academic proxies.
What we ask Sweden’s governors is to return to the path of honour, to really care for the human rights for all. To really understand that the primary of human rights is the right to live.
Those after war are those after death. Those were who patched on their helms the skull and bones of the slayed.
Those are the Nazi and their proxies SS.
Those are who decent armies fought against. Like the one of Churchill, like the one of the Red Star. While others provided the Third Reich the gearwheels to keep the torque of their industrial killing machinery.
“Because Russia’s annexation of Crimea…”
The hawkish Swedish Minister of Defence, Peter Hultqvist, together with the top commander of the military, Micael Bydén, have been monotonously repeating since 2014 the mantra that we need to further intensify collaboration with NATO, more weapons, more soldiers, etc., “because Russia’s annexation of Crimea heightens tension in the Baltic”.
They say that in present time, but that was seven years, and after that no incident of that nature has ever happened. The reiteration of the reiteration voids their sentence of content. They don’t get it. Or they expect people to sign for NATO in exchange to be liberated of hearing the same wearisomely litany…
That sounds more and more like the voided repetitive litanies of those heard in prays devised by catholic priests to be repeated by the naïve indigenous folks, in a language they would never could understand (“ora pronobis”). But that was the point, that the alienated folks have to swallow the authorities’ cocktail prepared for them, which mixes the argumentum ad verecumdiam with the argument ad baculum.
As we wrote in DN 2015: “We believe that the US war in Iraq and the NATO operations in Afghanistan and Libya, which after a reinterpretation of UN resolutions resulted in more than a million dead, is a much worse violation of international law than Russia’s annexation of Crimea, real popular support and without death.” [18]
Has Martin Kragh, and/or his associates at the Swedish institutions financing his “research”, ever comment on that?
The real ‘democratic problem’ is not Martin Kragh’s flawed Russophobe research, but its echo chambre in Sweden orchestrated by Western Intel ops behind. It’s the risk for war.
All we want is peace.
References
[1] The name of the monument, who was finally placed in Stockholm, became “Åt Sveas fallna söner” [To Sweden’s fallen sons”]. Inaugurated in 1904. Source: Magnus Rodell, “Fallna svenskar och fortifikationer i vildmarken – om det ryska hotet och medielandskapet kring 1900”. Kungliga Bibliotek. Libris, 2008.
[2] The expression stormaktstiden may constitute the nostalgic root of the later construction “We are world’s moral superpower”, developed as fictitiously elongating our preserved historical memory of the “great power era”. In social-psychological terms this would be called a compensation mechanism: We can in any case still call us a superpower, a ‘moral superpower, that is. It is said it was Carl Bildt who came to the ‘moral superpower’ idea. Meaning the same Swedish stateman who just some years ago was still staring across the oceans of Stockholm at the Baltic countries with dreaming eyes.
[3] Magnus Rodell, op.cit.
[4] Aims as stated in the Academy’s website https://kkrva.se/historik/
[5] https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/lucat/user/34ae582d97e45d726ef0758687089b6b Retrieved 28 Oct 2020.
[6] Description in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Swedish_Academy_of_War_Sciences
[7] See chapter “From Jean Batiste Bernadotte to Carl Bildt. In the history of Sweden’s violations of its neutrality oaths”, in my book “Swedish VS. Assange. Human Rights Issues”, pages 32-39. https://libertarianbooks.wordpress.com/human-rights-issues-in-the-swedish-case-vs-assange/
[8] Id.
[9] Such as failing to order his troops to engage in the Battle of Jena and Auerstädt, or ultimately, when Bernardotte ordered retreat –in violation of Napoleon’s orders– during the battle of Wagram.
[10] M Ferrada de Noli, ”Lo Paradojal de La Vida. Reflexiones dialécticas”, Libertarian Books – Sweden, 2021. ISBN 978-91-88747-10-5
[11] Kragh, Martin, ” ’Martin Kragh är ett demokratiskt problem’. Hur Aftonbladet gav spridning åt en rysk påverkansoperation” . Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift · Årgång 122 · 2020 / 3
[12] M. Ferrada de Noli, Sweden’s “neutrality” at the servicof Nazi Germany. The Indicter, 29 Oct 2020. Apparently ending activities several years after the Third Reich had disappeared, it was then renamed “State Institute for Human Genetics” (Institutionen för medicinisk genetik), currently a department at the same Uppsala University.
[13] The victims toll of the Spanish killings in the countries ok now Latin-America amounts 242.200.014
[14] Said by Hillary Clinton in Paris, 2012. Also during the U.S. presidential campaign, 2016.
[15] Dagens PS, “SVT: Svenska FRA hackar datorer åt USA”, 11 December 2013.
[16] “Cyberkrigföring kan ju om, om den riktas mot vital infrastruktur i ett annat land, vara liktydigt med ett väpnat angrepp.”
See Expressen, 11 Dec 2013, Experter: FRA kan bryta mot lagen. https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/experter-fra-kan-bryta-mot-lagen/
[17] The NGO Swedish Professors and Doctors for Human Rights (SWDHR), was founded in Uppsala, September 2014. Its founding Board of Directors comprised professors Marita Blomberg Troyer, Marcello Ferrada de Noli and Anders Romelsjö, and doctors Alberto Gutierrez, Leif Elinder, Martin Melin, Armando Popa, and Luz Varela.
[18] “Sweden risks to be first target” (”Sveriges riskerar at bli försthandsmål”), Dagens Nyheter (DN), 2, Sept 2015.