The Ideology of Failure by Stephen Pax Leonard

Author:Stephen Pax Leonard [Leonard, Stephen Pax]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: immigration, islam, valet 2018, Alternativ för Sverige, Sverigedemokraterna, invandring
ISBN: 9781912079285
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2018-09-10T22:00:00+00:00

VI. Swedish Air Waves

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

— Hannah Arendt

The afternoon radio play has a Soviet feel to it with talk of the Folkehemmet (‘the people’s home’), a name given to the extremely generous, paternalist Swedish welfare state. The play is a twelve-part memoir with subtle undertones of communitarian associations and the conflicting imperatives of authoritarian liberalism: surveillance is the condition of trust, the State with its executive managerialism is the predominant category of political economy. The words are spoken slowly, articulated with great clarity and precision.

In Sweden, there is the sense that radio is creating an explicit ‘national imaginary’ (Hadlow 2004; Mrázak 2002; Bolton 1999) based on a prescribed repertoire of speech codes and cultural-political grammar. It aims to give ‘stories of other worlds’ (Abu-Lughod 1995: 191), carefully selected worlds where minorities are always discriminated against in some way or another. This is an ideological process concerned with social relations of power, and in the case of Sweden the State is portrayed as coming to the rescue of victims of these power relations. There is almost a fetishisation of minorities, or anybody who in some way may have been the victim of one form of social injustice or another. A sort of caritas FM; this characteristic maximises the role of radio as the locus of anti-racist linguistic hegemony.

There is no ideological balance of power on the nation’s airwaves. Sweden is in fact what one might call the Gramscian end-game. Gramsci (1971) spoke of how the State would fall into the hands of the Leftists once it captured the commanding organs of culture and media. All that happened long ago in Sweden. Sweden does not have the ‘talk radio’ culture that America has. Nothing like it. The only outlet for conservative thinkers is the policed Internet. There is the Gramscian discourse, and there is the spiral of silence and self-censorship, previously discussed in the ‘The Groupthink Trap’ essay.

The Swedes are a microcosm for their quasi-totalitarian Government and its all embracing system of prescriptive thinking. If one criticises the system, one criticises the Swede. The two have become synonymous, coterminous. The individual struggles to differentiate himself from the governing system; the individual and the collective act as one. A quasi-totalitarian State such as this defies Kant’s (1993: 30) moral philosophy, which states that moral beings can think for themselves and act on the basis of their independent judgements. And in a society where the historic religion is gradually becoming irrelevant, the State has usurped many of the previous functions of the Church. In Sweden at least, it is there to care for one from the cradle to the grave; it tells one what to think, when to feel guilty, how to express oneself etc., and perhaps most importantly it tells one that there are subjects that can only be discussed if one pursues a certain coded, accommodationist stance.

The radio gives voice and texture to news events, and is of course a public body with an instilled authority.

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