Opinion of Olof Palme

[President Johnson]

Strong FF.

[buritobr]

Strong FF

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Strong FF

[Antonio the Sixth]

Strong FF

[Vice President Christian Man]

Strong FF

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!

[buritobr]

I think he was the last real social democrat in Europe. The leaders of European social democrat parties who came after him can be better described as progressive liberals.

[Vosem]

Very very strongly HP, to the point that historically my elaborations on this point were my most-infracted opinion for most of my time on the forum. A leader taking virtually every opposite position would have been exemplary.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

One of the greats.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I think he was the last real social democrat in Europe. The leaders of European social democrat parties who came after him can be better described as progressive liberals.

There's a case to be made for Jospin, and maybe even for Blair's first few years in office, but broadly speaking you're right. He was certainly the last to believe in social democracy's ability to fundamentally overcome capitalism.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

A leader taking virtually every opposite position would have been exemplary.

Good to know you support both apartheid south africa and the warsaw pact crushing internal dissent, rare to get that kind of clarity these days.

[Antonio the Sixth]

A leader taking virtually every opposite position would have been exemplary.

Good to know you support both apartheid south africa and the warsaw pact crushing internal dissent, rare to get that kind of clarity these days.

Vosem's anime villain arc is becoming genuinely embarrassing. I never expected to have to use the ignore button for him, but there's a limit to everything.

[Storr]

1) Inarguable FF. I wonder what he'd have thought about how the Cold War ended, how the West handled the the Soviet Union's collapse and subsequent fallout, the rise of the European Union (with Sweden as a member), and Russia's descent back into totalitarianism.

2) A youtube video below about Palme's assassination I came across a few months ago. You can definitely tell it's from an American's perspective, for example the narrator emphasizes that Palme was walking around in public without security "like a normal citizen" in a surprised foreboding tone, but I still found the video insightful.  It feels impossible for the killer of a "modern", highly developed nation's leader to go undiscovered and unpunished. Yet here we are, nearly 40 years later.

3) One of the early suspects, Victor Gunnarsson, a far right "activist" was granted political asylum in the US and ended up settling in North Carolina in a neighboring county to the one where I grew up. Weirdly enough, he ended up being murdered in 1993. His death had nothing to do with Palme or Sweden either. Basically it was a love triangle "gone bad". Gunnarson had been dating a woman for a few months and was killed by the woman's former police officer ex-fiance. Here's an old Forensic Files episode about the case:

[ingemann]

Olof Palme have always for me just been about his murder, as a citizens in a neighboring country who was only a small child when Palme died and who grew up in a Social Democratic family, he was more a martyr or secular saint than a politician.

But it does raise the question; as a prime minister and more important social democrat, what was so good about him? He worsen the relationship with USA which in hindsight and what we know about USSR was a terrible idea, was the first social democrat in forty years who lost. He threw journalists in prison, and he gave into hostage takers.

[Clarko95 📚💰📈]

Olof Palme have always for me just been about his murder, as a citizens in a neighboring country who was only a small child when Palme died and who grew up in a Social Democratic family, he was more a martyr or secular saint than a politician.

But it does raise the question; as a prime minister and more important social democrat, what was so good about him? He worsen the relationship with USA which in hindsight and what we know about USSR was a terrible idea, was the first social democrat in forty years who lost. He threw journalists in prison, and he gave into hostage takers.

The martyr mythologizing thing is really true. He had a lot of good takes on foreign policy, and his first seven years were progressive on expanding the welfare state, but he was also the one who presided over the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and his last four years were rather mediocre.

Like you said, he came within an inch of losing the 1973 election, then actually lost the 1976 and 1979 elections and really only won in 1982 because of the global recession that year which harmed Swedish heavy industry. His tenure from 1982 to 1986 was unremarkable, and actually made a number of decisions (such as the deregulation of the Swedish banking system in 1985 and the use of devaluations to paper over internal imbalances) that would lead to the early-1990s recession, which led to Carl Bildt winning in 1991 and taking a chainsaw to the Swedish welfare state, which included things like the privatization of the school system.

I always found the lionization of him to be very strange, much like Americans beatify Kennedy because he got shot. He presided over many progressive economic accomplishments in the 1969 - 1976 period, but these were not exactly the result of new ideas, but rather simply carrying the momentum of the 1960s onwards.

Erlander did far more to actually build up the Swedish Model and expand it, Palme merely put the icing on the cake.

[H. Ross Peron]

Very very strongly HP, to the point that historically my elaborations on this point were my most-infracted opinion for most of my time on the forum. A leader taking virtually every opposite position would have been exemplary.

I see you've decided on being Atlas Richard Hanania.