In remembrance of a morning 22 years ago
Posted by: Jenny Penny in History, Sweden, Swedish politics
22 years ago, I woke up to the sound of my mother crying. I could hear the radio was on, but it didn’t seem to be that usual Saturday morning chatter. The whole atmosphere was strange.
I was six years old, laying in bed, terrified, because I know something was terribly wrong. if I got up, I would have to face that frightening unknown, so I kept laying there, despite my desperate need to go to the bathroom, and I wet the bed.
That is how I remember the day that Sweden woke up to the news that prime minister Olof Palme had been assassinated. That, and the front page of our local newspaper, which had a black and white photo of Palme, framed by four red roses. Maybe there were words too, but I only remember the picture and the roses.
Some people say that Sweden changed forever on that day. I don’t know, I was only six when it happened. Most, if not all, of my perceptions of Olof Palme are created after his murder, when hearing his often brilliant speeches replayed, hearing him brought up in debates and memorials, reading about the failed murder investigation. I do see what they mean though: a new sense of vulnerability, that something that we only had read about happening elsewhere suddenly happened to us, that our way of life - that the prime minister can go to a movie theater on a Friday evening without needing caravans of police escort - was threatened (feelings which once again awoke in 2003 when foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death while shopping in a department store).
But it is too easy to assign to a single event, however huge its societal impact, the power to change everything. Contra-factual history writing may be a worthwhile intellectual exercise and the subject of some great authorship, but to say “if Olof Palme hadn’t been murdered, x never would have happened”, is to simplify too much. I’m not at all sure, as some people like to think, that we as a country would have more solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised, or a more brave and outspoken foreign policy, had Palme not been murdered 22 years ago. I wish that would have been the case. But political ideas should be based on reality and visions, not nostalgia for times long gone. Thinking about what might have been clouds the issues facing us today. In the ten years that I have been allowed to vote, I don’t recall that I have ever voted for the social democratic party. Not because I don’t agree with the ideology, but because of the abandonment and distortion of that ideology. I don’t know if I would have voted for Olof Palme, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is now, what we can do now to create a better world. Asking what would have been if only, isn’t a way to create change, if it is indeed change that we want.
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