Stalwart Sweden - Taschenbuch

JOACHIM JOESTBN STALWART SWEDEN DOUBLEDAY, DORAN AND COMPANY, INC. Garden City, New York STALWART SWEDEN CHAPTER I The Medal Has Two Sides WHAT will Sweden do This question, long of secondary interest, may soon be come one of paramount importance. On the answer may well depend the success or failure of at least one phase of the concerted assault on Hitlers For tress Europe the counterinvasion of Norway. Only the king and the government in Stockholm can provide the answer, or even anticipate it on a better basis than conjecture. All others, in trying to foretell what Sweden will do if and when the Allies land in Norway, are faced with the problem of the jumping cat. In such a situation it would seem to be a dictate of ele mentary prudence not to take anything for granted and to prepare for all possible contingencies. There is, however, a widespread tendency in America to dismiss such caution and to count on Sweden as a sure ally to-be in the coming struggle. While events may justify this optimism, they may also bring bitter disappointments. For a sound approach to the question of what Sweden 2 STALWART SWEDEN may be expected to do in a given situation, we must care fully study what she has been doing up to the present. What has her role been in the first four years of the war The American public in general is little informed on this point. This kck of knowledge is due pardy to the traditional Cinderella role in world politics of the northern countries, but in even greater part to the misinformation deliberately spread here by Swedish propagandists. There is a Swedish myth in America, just as there used to be a Finnish myth whose shabby remains still linger in many peoples minds. In allrespects but diplomatic protocol Finland today is our enemy. She is formally at war with our two principal allies Britain and Russia she is fighting alongside our mortal enemy her ports shelter the submarines, and her air fields serve as bases for the bombers that sink American ships in the Arctic. Yet all this notwithstanding, numbers of people here still are prepared to excuse and cover almost anything Finland does on the grounds that she is a democratic country who quite accidentally happens to fight her private war at the sides of the fascist aggressors. The people who continue blandly to credit this danger ous nonsense usually are also the stanchest believers in the Swedish myth. This myth has sprung from various sources. Its roots reach back to the early thirties, when roving reporters and social tourists discovered Scandinavia, which had been, for centuries, almost ignored by the world. The foreign visitors, searching the globe for a place where people lived peacefully and prosperously in an at THE MEDAL HAS TWO SIDES 3 mosphere of social progress and international co-operation, found Scandinavia, and, in particular, Sweden, came very close to their dreams. They were enchanted by what they saw and heard, and they eagerly rushed their findings into print. That was the era of Sweden The Middle Way, and similar eulogies. Overnight a little-known and neglected country rose to the rank of a world sensation. Here, be tween latitudes 55 and 69 North, was Utopia. The glowing picture which the enthusiastic Utopia seekers drew of Sweden and her neighbors in the North at the time was, on the whole, justified, though many of the books were written in a spirit of uncritical admiration foreverything Swedish. As the years went by, however, the picture almost im perceptibly changed the light lost much of its luster, the shade expanded and grew more opaque. But the Middle-Way enthusiasts never even noticed the transformation. The lengthening shadow that fell over the Swedish pic ture was Hitlers. The tourists and the fiction writers did not notice it, but the statesmen and political observers did or at least some of them did. They began to wonder how Utopia would stand up in the great test to come...