Det er en rasende interessant analyse af Sverige. Man skal et lille kvarter ind, så kommer analysen af den ytringsfrihed, der reelt ikke findes i Sverige. Derefter analysen af venstrefløjen og liberalisternes barokke tro på, at hvis man øger indvandringen, vil færre stemme på Sverigedemokraterne. Og jeg jeg skal love for, de øger den. Små 10.000 kom søgte asyl sidste uge, men SD øger alligevel. 1328 om dagen (!)

Nyhederne fra Sverige er af en sådan karakter nu, at man bare resignerer. De er alvorlige, og danske og norske politikere burde vågne op og interessere sig for dem. Sverige afskaffer først velfærdsstaten, så nationen. Antallet asylsøgere stiger også voldsomt til Danmark og Norge, og ingen af regeringerne vil helhjertet gøre noget ved det. Det er en sort tid.

Hening Mankell: Terminally crude and adolescent

Theodore Dalrymple skriver om den afdøde kriminalforfatter og venstreaktivist: “On the paradox of good writers with bad ideas.”

In one of his novels, apparently, Mankell returned to the subject of China and the Chinese: “The extraordinary global success of Wallander [his main character] did not . . . diminish [Mankell’s] engagement in causes. . . . He wrote one novel in which a Chinese man massacres an entire family in a remote Swedish village as revenge for the treatment meted out by their ancestors in the US in the 19th century.” What cause exactly, one might ask, is being promoted or supported here? The killing of Swedish villagers? Awareness of the Yellow Peril?

The righteousness of vengeance exacted upon the descendants of those who have wronged one’s distant ancestors? Mankell’s philosophy remained terminally crude and adolescent. According to the obituarist: “For the most part his books stayed closely aligned to the conventions of the 20th-century Swedish progressive aesthetic: chiefly that the rich are always morally repulsive; that Christianity is wicked, but the common decency of ordinary people is to be trusted; and that conventional respectability must always conceal and corrupt the real nature beneath, like a plaster beneath which the ulcer is silently growing.”

This is all an ideology, of course, rather than an aesthetic; but for anybody beyond the age of 18 or so to be surprised that outward respectability may hide a multitude of sins, and to conclude from this that respectability, therefore, is itself to be utterly rejected as a notion, is a sign either of having had no experience, or of failing to learn from it, and of being prey to an immature utopianism about human possibilities. It is not altogether surprising to learn that Mankell had difficulty with personal relationships, though whether his difficulties arose from his views or his views from his difficulties, I cannot say.

The passage quoted continues: “There is [in his novels] often some more open and honest society abroad—in the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö [two other Swedish crime novelists] this was eastern Europe under Soviet rule—and the books are also marked by a profound sexual pessimism.” Having spent some time in Mozambique, Mankell returned to Sweden, where “he saw that Sweden had become a much more racist country than it had seemed in the 60s, when there were hardly any immigrants from outside Scandinavia there.”

How about that for political-correctness-tinted spectacles and willful disregard of obvious realities? And still I think his books may well have been good.

Jeg har heller ikke læst Mankell eller kriminalromaner overhovedet siden 1970’erne. Da læste jeg kommunistiske Sjöwall og Wahlöö fordi de var oppe i tiden, og jeg havde en raptus med Georges Simenon og læste rub og stub. Ingen an beskylde ham for at være politisk korrekt, og jeg ser da også efterpå at det alligevel vidner om min daværende litterære sans.

Jeg har set filmatiseringer af Mankell med gode svenske skuespillere. Det er politiske og politisk korrekte historier, hvor det usandsynlige forekommer: Onde skåninge der myrder en god marokkaner, hvilket næppe er forekommet i historisk tid.

Siden da har jeg syntes, at livet i sig selv var så spændende, at jeg ikke følte mig fristet af kriminalromaner, og da slet ikke de missionerende svenske, der partout vil gøre den uretfærdige verden retfærdig. “Rättvisa” er blandt top fem plusord i Sverige, som man ved. Desuden synes jeg, man skal læse verdenslitteraturen, når den nu er der. Ingen når alligevel at læse den hele.