From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 10:30:07 MDT
On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 11:59:56AM -0400, Michael Wiik wrote:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > No need to cry over spilt milk, the issue is what to do next time
> > something like this happens.
>
> I'm curious, what's the general attitude in Sweden today over its
> neutrality in WWII? Do the swedes consider themselves lucky, guilty, or
> something else?
Good question. I think the general attitude is a bit that we were
lucky: Sweden was militarily weak and would not have been able to
resist Germany, Russia or the western allies other than symbolically.
This feeling of luckiness is reinforced by the subtle "niceness
supremacism" that has spread throughout society: "We were neutral
because war is evil, our system goos and we are the most democratic,
equal and caring people on Earth. So there!" ;-) There are notably
few people that are ashamed of us not participating (the exceptions
might have been the Swedish volunteers in the Finnish Winter War
against Soviet; my grandfather actually participated).
It was probably the pragmatic right thing to do, and served Swedish
interests well, but it wasn't very brave. On the other hand, Swedish
opinion wasn't clearly on one side or the other, and there were both
swedish nazis, swedish communists and swedish nationalists that would
have resisted any intervention violently. So when in doubt, do nothing
(but of course, try to get favors from everybody else - which the
Swedish government did on all sides).
I think the shame element is only new emerging, but it is rather
diluted since the generations involved are by now quite old.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:03 MST