There’s freedom. Then, there’s Sweden Freedom.
With Swedish Freedom, the government forms a psychological operations agency to protect the free forming of correct opinions, by policing potentially incorrect opinions that native Swedes could form, which could be a threat to Swedish values.
And they appoint a guy to run it, whose most recent qualification is running an investigation of the right-wing opposition party for potential wrong thinkings.
When a country becomes as diverse as Sweden has become, it is inevitable that they set up these Orwellian systems to prevent the people from questioning diversity. This is the only way you can hold together something which would naturally break apart.
The Swedish government is creating a new agency intended to monitor and counter psychological operations (psyops) directed against the country — not only from other countries, but from within Sweden as well.
The new Psychological Defence Authority will be tasked with safeguarding “the free forming of opinion” in Sweden against psyops, and will be offering people a “different image” of the country than the one that the “opponent” wants to convey, according to a report by Samhällsnytt.
The Authority’s creation is the result of an investigation that was first announced in 2018 by Sweden’s current Left-wing Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven, of the Social Democrats. Anders Danielsson, the former head of Sweden’s Migration Board, was appointed to lead the investigation. It concluded that there is a need for “supporting, strengthening, and coordinating society’s overall resilience in terms of psychological defence” against psyops carried out by adversaries both foreign and domestic. It falls under the jurisdiction of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB).
Samhällsnytt has obtained some internal e-mails that were sent by MSB officials in January 2019 which show that the Authority will be empowered to restrict freedom of the press and opinion by increasing the state’s power over them. It will also work closely with the country’s intelligence agencies.
The Authority’s task will be to “identify, analyze, and confront undue information influence and other misleading information directed at Sweden or Swedish interests.” One of the ways it will accomplish this is by “assisting media companies in identifying, analysing, and responding to undue information impact.”
The Authority’s mission will be “to safeguard an open and democratic society, free education, and the freedom and independence of Sweden,” according to Danielsson. “[Sweden’s] values are being subject to undue influence from foreign powers in order to create divisions. This can lead to a loss of confidence in democracy and lower voter turnout.” He named cyberattacks and efforts to influence Swedish politicians, institutions, companies, journalists, and researchers as the sort of psyops that the Authority will be combating. This could come in the form of the spreading of “rumours and other forms of misleading information.”
Toward this end, the investigation proposed that the Authority include a national centre for psychological defence that would work to counter such influence on information in Sweden. The government hopes to have it in place by 2022.
Claiming that dissenting political opinions are “psychological operations” was the final end of what we’d been seeing for the last five years. They told us that any political opinion differing from that of the political establishment was the result of “Russian meddling.” We recently saw that complaints about a Swedish advertisement that showed Swedes as being replaced by blacks were attributed to Russia by the Swedish media. They claimed that it must be Russians, because complaining about this was against Swedish values, meaning that it couldn’t have been Swedes.
Of course, the comments were not from Russians, they were from Swedes, but it fit the media narrative to dehumanize them as Russians. In the longer run, however, it would be possible for these people who are accused of being Russians to simply stand up and say “no, actually, I’m a Swedish national with no connection to Russia and I disagree with this.” As such, it is necessary to begin identifying domestic dissent as “meddling,” or as state, “psychological operations.”
We are going to see this same thing across the Western world. I said this was going to happen when Hillary Clinton went up and gave a speech in August of 2016 saying that Alex Jones, Pepe the Frog and Breitbart News were a part of a Russian conspiracy. I knew that those things were not part of a Russian conspiracy, and that labeling them as such would eventually lead to any political opposition being put in the same category as foreign psychological operations. Much more importantly that simply beating the drums of war against Russia, all of this “Russian meddler” nonsense was designed to equate all forms of political opposition to foreign meddling.
There is no room for anyone to disagree with the establishment, because the establishment narrative is so fragile, so a Soviet-style “enemies of the state” narrative is necessary. This conflicts directly with all of their nonsense about “democracy,” so it is necessary to create this round-about and convoluted mechanism of identifying enemies of the state by equating them to nonexistent foreign agents. Now the process is finished, so we can just talk about “domestic psy-ops.”
We can expect this sort of narrative to be rolled out soon in the US and the rest of the West. Although to be honest, with the coronavirus madness, and the labeling of “coronavirus disinformation” as illegal speech, I would not be surprised if this became unnecessary. Everyone who has an interesting opinion in opposition to the state is already labeled a coronavirus disinformer, and we will likely all be further silenced on those grounds.