Chapter 1: Speculations PastSweden as a small sensible nation; Sweden's good behaviour this century; 19th and 20th century as Sweden's best two centuries since Scandinavian settlements; Distortions of Viking history by the Christian churches; Common Nordic heritage amongst the maritime peoples on the shores of the North Eastern Atlantic; The future for The Ancient Mariners.
Sweden. Not too big. Not too small. Just the right size.After allowing the Norwegians to secede peacefully and create a new country on their Atlantic seaboard at the beginning of the century, the remaining eight million Swedes continued their virtuoso display of war avoidance diplomacy - a skill they had acquired during the early years of the nineteenth century when Napoleonís troops were establishing their military bases along the estuaries of the many rivers running out of Central Europe into the southern seaboard of the Baltic Lakes.
By the time the governments of the European colonizing companies embarked upon The Great Folly of employing their young men as cannon fodder in 1914, Little Sweden was well rehearsed in the art of non-alignment. It knew all there was to know about weaving and bobbing and keeping your head down, and had learned how to avoid slaughtering its youngest, strongest, best and brightest men.
It had become a small sensible nation that remembered its imperial pretensions of bygone days and understood that nothing awaits warring empires, be they hailed as victors of the war or winners of the peace, except their exhaustion, their division and their subsequent brief but glorious Golden Age.
And so during the twentieth century, Sweden has kept its young men as out of the firing line as any small strategically situated nation can reasonably hope to do; it has done its bit to persuade more belligerent governments to take a more sensible view of the world; it has avoided throwing the public purse into disarray by getting too far in hock to either the pirates without the gates or the clerks within; and it has used the coercive powers of the state discreetly to create wealth shrewdly, spread it around fairly, and support the weak generously.
All in all, it is about as good a two hundred year record as any since the end of the eighth century when they took upon themselves the task of spreading their skills at boat construction and stock breeding out into the Atlantic across the North Sea and brought the peaceful arts of navigation and sheep husbandry, and the subtle skills of community, justice and mythology to the peoples of Northumbria, Mercia, Scotland and Ireland.
The Vikings we read about in our venerable histories are not the wise and noble men who lived and loved, traveled and traded in these Northern waters in the ninth and tenth centuries but the warped creations of the withered minds of the priests whose religion of guilt and sacrifice and dusty tomes these Vikings so despised with so much good cause.
How sad a sight is the scholarship of our day that can no longer distinguish the real history told in song and embedded in memory from the feeble distortions engraved by dishonourable apologies for men upon the dry and shriveled backs of sheep long since discarded by the real men of the age as they lived for the day, provided for their families and celebrated their pride in kinship and their wonder at the world created to challenge them!
All hail, ye Norwegians, Danes and Swedes! How noble a heritage ye pass on in the world! We English, Scots and Irish owe much more to you, our forefathers, than the captors of our minds and scribblers of our histories would care for us to know, lest we should rise up as one people and push their landed interests back over the Eurohills from whence they came a thousand years ago to silence our songs, burn our boats and uproot us from our gardens. We, the Ancient Mariners, guardians of the past and masters of our craft, salute ye!
But life moves on. A new generation is coming of age. The old empires are crumbling. New empires of the mind are arising, thrusting their ideas upon the decaying structures of a dying age. New pirates seek to wrest these worthless artifacts of a lifeless civilization from out of the grasping claws of the old pirates. The little looters are looted by the bigger looters. The moocher seeks out ever more victims to drain them of their liberty by fear and guilt.
Once more, Oh Ancient Mariners, you must set yourselves proudly at the helm, your eyes fixed on the stars, your hair flowing out behind you in the wind as your vessel gathers speed, its bow thrusting through the cold blue waters. Not for you their mean and miserable lives bent under their self-inflicted burden of guilt and despair.
But wither? What is to determine your course? And where are you to find the driving force for your endeavours? From the muscles of your bodies? Or the more enlightened analytical and creative muscles of your minds: muscles that can harness the mighty power of the natural world and magnify it to provide man with the muscle power of a million slaves? Will ye be little men destroyed by your foolish belief in a Great Spirit or will ye once again be Great Men honouring and harnessing the abundance and great generosity of a myriad of Natureís little spirits?
So let us talk no more of such great things, but turn our minds instead to some little thing, for there is no greater task than the application of the general principle in the particular life of some real day to day world.
Let us talk of that ancient Athenian idea of democracy, ignoring for the moment our more recent ideas of monarchies and republics, but focusing our attentions instead upon votes and parties, parliaments and elections. Not the direct elections of a minersí strike nor the participatory democracy of an English jury. But this modern thing that the schoolmen of our day would have us know as Representative Democracy. A thing for which our practical men of action, for it is so they would be known, have invented the practical ideas of voters, parliamentary members and election strategists.
Let us talk of that great intellectual edifice underpinning the twentieth century corporate state: The General Election in which mass propaganda is applied to mass voters to legitimize their mass disempowerment.