I Have a Drone

There is a hangman living in the White House.

We live in the “epoch of execution,” writes Joar Tiberg (Aftonbladet Kultur, 16 Nov 2012).

Criticism against the unmanned killing machines is strong, but this never affects Obama. The U.S. sends political prisoners to detention and torture the world over—Guantanamo, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria—but the dirty handling of people is never associated with the country’s president. The U.S. spies on everyone, but a name like Snowden nonetheless is never attached to Obama himself.

We think all of this is detritus from Bush. We think that Obama really wanted something else. We see a black Democrat with a simple background. When he talks, he sounds pleasantly intellectual; so inverse is our anti-racism and our admiration for the educated class traveler.

When Bush visited Gothenburg in 2001, hardly any top politicians would allow themselves to be photographed with the man, even though he had not yet begun his horrific “war on terror.” It is different with Obama. When the day of the state visit on September 4 finally arrives, Fredrik Reinfeldt will be smiling with almost his entire mouth. Even the liberal press has revived. “Advantage Alliance!” writes the Dagens Nyheter; Obama’s visit could help the government in the upcoming election. Never mind what Obama has on his conscience. Drones, mass surveillance, multibillions to the junta in Egypt … Like water off a duck’s back.

Happiest of all is Carl Bildt who regards the state visit as a triumph of his own efforts. Which of course he may.

Bildt was America’s man in Europe even before he became minister for foreign affairs. His career began where it ought to have ended—with that he went to the United States with secret Swedish information about Russian submarines. As a lobbyist in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, with strong connections to Donald Rumsfeld, his mission was to persuade a skeptical Europe of the necessity of invading Iraq.

There are no barriers to Sweden’s cooperation with the United States. As Lisa Röstlund and Leo Lagercrantz revealed, Bildt has, in secret, created a kind of shadow foreign office, a semi-private political security organization, situated in Nacka, outside Stockholm. The Institute for Security and Development Policy manages relations between the U.S. and sensitive nations like North Korea. There, the old Palme investigator, Walter Kegö, holds an important position, in cooperation with Americans from the extreme right wing.

Of course, anyone who wants Sweden to join NATO is also happy about Obama’s visit.

NATO propaganda has never been so potent, despite the fact that threats to Sweden are glaringly absent. It is understandable that NATO lobbyists are troubled; hence the desperate attempts to breathe life into the now defunct Russo-phobia. It’s not quite working. Even the staunchest Russian proponent, Stefan Hedlund, is forced to conclude that Putin does not pose any threat to Sweden. The Committee on Defense came to a similar conclusion recently. Yet they crank on, and hope to gain impetus from Obama’s visit.

Membership or not, Sweden is closer to the U.S. than many other NATO countries. Sweden has been transformed into a vassal state. We are so tuned into Western liberalism’s perverted war on terror that we don’t even care that Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has personally sent secret service agents to The Guardian to force journalists to erase their hard drives—which tragically enough they also did. The Stasi lives in symbiosis with McCarthy but we just shrug our shoulders. Example: This text has been conveyed via the surveillance tool, Gmail. Not even publishing houses understand the importance of their disclosures.

When Obama visited Germany he was met by protests against mass surveillance, even at the level of government, but here in Sweden no objections are roused—against monitoring or drones or torture or anything. So Obama probably knew what he was doing when he spun his atlas globe and let his finger land on Stockholm as the host for his next European visit.