The Portable Conscience Speaks: Scandinavian Journalism’s Bold Take on Recent Events
It used to be a joke among Swedes of self-deprecating ability – one dating from the time when Dag Hammarskjöld was President of the United Nations – that the most obvious trait of the representative Stockholm bureaucrat or university professor when abroad was his “portable conscience.”
Swedish liberalism, like Swedish blondness, was more liberal than any other kind, supremely and immaculately liberal. As such this liberalism entitled the enlightened Swedish ambassador, while at large in the benighted world, to act as a redeeming Superego to others whether anyone wanted him in that role or not. The Swedes, and swiftly enough their Scandinavian brethren, the Norwegians and Danes, pioneered professional righteousness during the 1960s, finding in the bloody contest between the two Vietnams the perfect opportunity to hone the art of multiplying excuses on behalf of any savage willing to fly the banner of socialism. A consequence today is that even more than elsewhere, with but a few exceptions, Scandinavian journalists are virtually in the employ of the state, and the state itself is the monopoly-instrument of the Leftwing elites.
Consider two recent editorials, one by Rikard Westerberg that appeared on 2 December in the dominant Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (“News of the Day”), on the “Climategate” scandal, and the other by Terje Svabø that appeared on 1 December in Aftenposten (“The Evening News” – the Norwegian counterpart of DN) on the national referendum by which a significant majority of Swiss voters decided to ban the construction of minarets within the borders of their republic. Both editorialists are exemplary in demonstrating how an ideologically committed writer must strain rhetoric in order to keep truth from contaminating doctrine. (Westerberg’s full article is here and Svabø’s is here.)
Westerberg broaches his topic with a whopping understatement: “As the Climate Conference in Copenhagen nears, the debate about global warming has taken a sharp turn. Two weeks ago a hacker illegally acquired over a thousand emails and documents from renowned climate researchers at East Anglia University in Great Britain.” Like United States senator Barbara Boxer, Westerberg characterizes as “illegal” the retrieval of information illegally withheld by the researchers themselves in defiance of a British freedom-of-information subpoena – the better to shift blame away from the fraudsters, whose dishonesty stands nakedly revealed. In a follow-up sentence, Westerberg requires a contortion of prose: “Parts of this private correspondence can definitely be interpreted to mean [definitivt kan tolkas] that the researchers do not want to tolerate colleagues who position themselves as skeptics of global warming or who do not believe that it is driven by human activity.” The Swedish modal verb att kunna, “to be able,” like the English verb can, meshes oddly, when used as an equivocation, with the adverb definitely. Those who have kept abreast of the story know that internal communications at East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit were anything but ambiguous in their tendencies and intentions.
According to Westerberg, while the East Anglia scientists “can hardly be said to have entered into a worldwide conspiracy to conceal [att dölja] uncomfortable climatological facts,” it is the case that “their jargon concerning researchers with a more skeptical position [than theirs] has damaged the trustworthiness of [all] climate research.” But for Westerberg, the real disaster consists in the consequence that, “the scandal has provided grist for the mill of the skeptical minority.” Like “illegal,” the writer uses the term “minority” in a skewed way, which might well be factually inaccurate. Westerberg notes that the disclosures put the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory in such bad light that, “last Sunday the chair of the United Nations Climate Panel [IPCC], Rajenda Pachauri, publicly defended the Panel’s method.” Of course, the IPCC’s method was to use the CRU’s data without questioning it. One wonders what the defense might be.
Westerberg introduces further bi-valences that would be entirely avoidable simply through the employment of clear prose. One concludes therefore that the murky prose appears out of calculation: “At the center of the debate stands the question whether global warming has ceased.” In fact, the essential question concerns whether the much-ballyhooed warming trend ever existed at all. Admittedly, “measured from the exceptionally warm year 1998, the global temperature has not noticeably increased,” writes Westerberg; “on the other hand the last decade has been the warmest since measurement began in the 1880s,” from which he concludes that, “therefore both the believing majority and the non-believing minority can be said to be right.” One remarks the awkwardness of the passive construction – a typical fallback when writers wish to dissimulate causality or responsibility.
The problems of passive verbalism and downright odd usage get worse: “For the last ten years the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose while at the same time temperature increase failed to appear [temperaturökningen uteblivit]. It might naturally be a temporary phenomenon or something dependent on the ocean currents. But the type of questions asked must be allowed to be problematized and discussed.” A noticeable disappointment inhabits that failure to appear of the “temperature increase.” Perhaps, in Westerberg’s wishful thinking, a “temporary phenomenon” has delayed the necessary – the ordained – manifestation of the warming trend.
Lest anyone guess that, respecting the last sentence, I have translated badly, here is the same sentence in its original:“Men den typen av frågeställningar måste tillåtas problematiseras och diskuteras.” The unit of the sentence defined by its last five words – four non-agential verbs in a row – almost defies accurate recasting in English. The term “frågeställningar” is a prize, an abstruse item from Neo-Kantian methodological discourse. In normal Swedish, the simple word fråga, or “question,” would suffice. But in that case a reader might respond, “Yes, indeed, perhaps the climate researchers have been asking the wrong questions.”
Svabø’s problems resemble Westerberg’s. Something simple has happened that offends political correctness and that therefore requires deflection, which the writer will proffer as explanation. In sum: Swiss voters, in a national referendum, decided that they did not want the aggressive architecture of the minaret raising itself everywhere over Swiss towns and cities and they banned further construction of such monuments. Svabø’s effort to misrepresent the elegant simplicity of the Swiss people’s judgment begins with the drama of his first sentence: “A mantle of shame has settled over Switzerland.” Svabø writes that the “no” vote on more minarets is “unworthy of Swiss tradition” and that “the nation’s reputation has been put at risk.” That insofar as Switzerland has a political tradition known to people beyond its national frontiers it is one of stubborn independence – this is knowledge that seems to have escaped Svabø, for whom the only imaginable tradition is the non-tradition of modern liberal doctrine. One might add that whatever Swiss tradition might be minarets have never been part of it.
Svabø continues: “The issue was in reality not the four towers in connection with their mosques, but the relation of Switzerland and the Swiss to Islam and to Muslims. It was nothing less than a referendum on the willingness to allow free speech and free exercise of religion and on the relation to the minority.” Like all Leftwing pontificators, Svabø lacks any understanding of concepts such as “free speech” and “free exercise of religion.” He does inadvertently get it right, however, in the two foregoing sentences, in the descriptive although not in the evaluative sense. The Swiss referendum indeed concerned the relation of the autochthonous majority to its invited new minority population from the Muslim world.
The majority of Swiss voters made the plausible interpretation that minarets are an imperious architecture, whose purpose is to dominate skylines and impose the obnoxious ululations of the muezzin on everyone, not only Muslims. It is true that church-bells ring in public too; and that Switzerland is a country famous for its bells, but to hear the prayers and sermons one must first enter the church. Worship in a Christian context remains in this way a matter of privacy and volition.
To explain the remarkable clairvoyance of the voting majority, Svabø must conjure a demon; and to conjure a demon he must seize on a label. His label is “Rightwing populist parties.” (“Høyrepopulistiske partier”) Svabø writes: “In nation after nation in Europe we see growing Rightwing populist parties with an anti-foreigner profile.” Thus, “In Austria the Rightwing populist Heinz-Christian Strache stands in the pulpit holding high the Cross and warning against the Islamic advance.” Svabø nevertheless cannot avoid certain disturbing facts, such as the fact that “active participation of over fifty-three per cent of voters is unusual in this nation [Switzerland], where the referendum process is used frequently.” In Svabø’s analysis the larger-than-normal participation “demonstrates that the turnout was mobilized.” To this one says: Of course – mobilized by an accurate perception of Islamic militancy and intransigency.
For example, quite as Svabø remarks, many Europeans have noticed that Muslim immigration creates what amount to colonies (“parallel societies”) of culturally inassimilable people in the midst of towns and cities. Hence the following half-true sequence: “Districts of such cities live their own lives with their own justice, banking arrangements, shops and clubs… The women rarely leave the district boundaries, and the young people feel hatred towards the [larger] society that lacks the will to include them.” Svabø blinkers his eyes to the explanations why, as he puts it, “the women rarely leave the district boundaries” and “the young people feel hatred.” Islamic society is the actual wife-and-daughter-jailing patriarchy that Western liberals never stop denouncing; and Muslim preachers deliberately instill contempt for everything outside Islam.
Svabø repeatedly invokes “fear of Islam” (“fyrkt af Islam”), but the majority of Swiss voting in the referendum has simply made a rational, evidence-based assessment of the religious interlopers in their country. Svabø refers to unnamed “members of the Federal Government and leaders of most parties in Switzerland” who “are now deeply concerned about how constitutionally to undertake the change in law.” Svabø adds that, “The election will be remembered not least because of the Rightwing-populist poster of a woman in a burqa in front of a Swiss flag pierced by rocket-like minarets.”
Svabø approaches his conclusion with that keystone device of professional obfuscators, the rhetorical question: “So, what now, Switzerland?” The real answer is, now Swiss people will go about their daily lives without having to listen fives times a day to the call for prayer. As Svabø sees it, however, “the first order of the day is clearly a major fire-fighting effort in collaboration with the Islamic world, the United Nations and neighboring countries in Europe.” He quotes a line from a fellow-traveler among Austrian journalists, in whose charming figure the wisdom of the referendum represents “direct democracy’s ugly face.”
It sounds like editorial discourse in the New York Times or spoken commentary, in the required monotone delivery, on NPR.Naturligtvis, or “naturally,” as one says in Swedish… Like the Volvo, the “portable conscience” has been a hot-selling export item for decades. Nowadays, every liberal drives one.
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