SUMMARY IN ENGLISH
CONTRA # 4 2005
Sven Grafström and Communism
In this issue we look at the achievements of Swedish diplomat Sven Grafström
during the ten years from 1945 until his early death in 1955. He was Swedish
ambassador to several countries in Latin America, delegate to the United
Nations and head of the UN supervisory commission on POWs in Korea in
1953. And he was a staunch anti-communist all the time.
The confessions of a taxman
Mikael Wolkander served as a Swedish taxman for 37 years. After his retirement
he is finally writing a book on the tax authorities, their methods and
inefficiencies. And the fact that taxmen are given pay raises only if
they increase the tax assessment of a sufficient number of people.
A new attack against freedom of speech,
by C G Holm
The courts in Sweden more often attack freedom of speech. The most recent
fad is ”hate crime” prosecutions against pastors and other
Christians for preaching against homosexual behaviour. The pastor Åke
Green was sentenced to one month in jail for a sermon he held in 2003,
but later he was freed by the appelate court. The case is pending in the
Supreme Court. As Contra noted in its comment on the Green case, the appelate
court’s decision was based only on the fact that he was a pastor
and that he made his comments in a sermon. Now the effect of that verdict
is a two month prison term against the lay Christian Leif Liljeström
for what is said on his site www.bibeltemplet.net. The district court
especially cites that it was not a sermon.
Lower confidence in media,
by Allan C. Brownfeld
As citizens of a democatic society our decisions (including decisions
in elections) are not better than the quality of the information the decisions
are based on. Media is here an unfortunate part in the decision-making
process. Often called the fourth arm of government media has a bad bias
and often are revealed with outright forgery like in the cases of Jayson
Blair and Stephen Glass.
The murder of Heydrich and the massacre at Lidice
The village Lidice was situated 20 kilometers west of Prague. It had
its origin in the 14th century. On June 10 1942 the village was exterminated
as a revenge for the murder of the Obergruppenführer Reinard Heydrich,
Reichsprotector of Bohemia-Moravia. The men of the village were shot,
while women and children were transported to concentration camps; a few
children were given to German families. After the war a new Lidice has
been constructed.
The New Leftists: ”Feministiskt Initiativ”
The new party ”Feministiskt Initiativ” is a far left organization, in spite of the fact that participators in the board of directors have claimed to have voted at other parties than the Social Democrats, The Greens and The Communists. After having said that she had voted for the Liberals some time, Susanne Linde had to admit that she had voted with the (reform) communists in the most recent elections. Some of the women were mebers in extremist feminist organizations already in 1991. They attacked the right-wing cabinet of Carl Bildt for being against the interest of women, but kept quiet when the same measures that Bildt took were upheld by the new Social Democratic government in 1994.
