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I Friday (10/30) Jan Myrdal passed away, 93 years old. In TT’s first longer article on his death, he is called one of the “most controversial authors in the country.” Otherwise, the description is completely uncritical, with strong words of praise. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but at least you can and should speak honestly about them.
Despite Myrdal’s merits as a writer, he is almost an embodiment of the concept of being on the wrong side of history.
Under 60 and In the 1970s he made numerous reporting trips to Cambodia. He was and remained a staunch supporter of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party that took power in the country in 1975 and ruled with a dictatorial iron fist.
In 2014, Head of State Khieu Samphan was sentenced by a UN court to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes against humanity. Myrdal regarded him and Pol Pot as friends, and he spent a great deal of time smoothing over their misdeeds. He stated in a 2011 text that, to the extent that abuses were now being committed, his friends in the regime did not know them.
In the 1970 book “Albanian Challenge”, Myrdal praised the country’s socialist dictator, Enver Hoxha. He has also managed to defend such disparate figures as Stalin and Mao, French denier Robert Faurisson, and convicted Moroccan-Swedish anti-Semite Ahmed Rami.
Myrdal also defended the Iranian regime’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie, as a way for Muslims in Europe to wage “a conscious ideological struggle for their human dignity.” Therefore, he supported almost everyone who attacked the liberal and capitalist West, no matter what they stood for.
The people in the innermost rooms of society, Mattias Gardell, Roy Andersson and Maj Sjöwall, among others, have received happy awards in their name and Lenin’s. It worked, because the despots Myrdal liked were anti-Western socialists and theocrats. If, instead, he had dedicated his tribute texts to SS sympathizers, he would have been rightly expelled from Swedish cultural life.
So let’s go Remind us of the ideas that Myrdal fought tirelessly for and the consequences they had in practice. When some people speak lyrically of his greatness, they also remember the abomination in his act. Otherwise, their mistakes will be repeated and others, in the same spirit, will continue to apologize for the murder and oppression.
