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Thaddeus Russell visits #DECONSTRUCTIVECRITICISM to discuss how prostitutes, drunkards and renegades built modern civilization, if work ethic is something good or bad, and if Eleanor Roosevelt was a mass murderer or not.
These last few weeks of beginning of February – Swedish media has not been fretting over the young men getting shot in the streets of Sweden, opting to instead focus on violence against women – in Spain.
Nor have they said anything about the wave of robberies of young ethnic swedes by gangs of predominantly immigrant Swedes or children thereof, since that would be racist. According to the prevailing logic, or rather lack thereof, racism can only come from the majority population towards the minority and never the other way around and that his how robbing a fellow human being and peeing in his mouth makes the urinator into “the oppressed” and his victim into “the oppressor”. Regardless of how confusing it must be for both oppressor and oppressed that the act of urination into someone else’s involuntarily open mouth has suddenly become a symptom of the aggressor’s oppression. I’m sure that type of reasoning takes the fun out of the humiliation and torture for the young sadist perpetrators but I fail to see how it benefits the victim? He would probably object to the conclusion of this type of intersectional analysis if his mouth wasn’t filled to the brink with lukewarm piss.
Noone has barely mentioned the fact that Stockholm now has a net out-migration, more people are moving out of the capital than into it, something you would think an important problem for a capital city. But no one has had time for such bad omens since both sides of the social-democratic political scale instead spend their time accusing the other of being liberal. The left accuses the right of being liberal fascists while the right hurl accusations against the left for being liberal socialists. Neither is true of course. Here in Sweden there are just two big groups of collectivists but this is what happens when you change the meaning of words. A few decades after you start doing that the confusion is complete and all encompassing.
Instead of battling this or a myriad of other problems they have instead decided to focus on a commercial for Scandinavian Airlines.
The commercial has triggered the right by claiming that everything great in Sweden came from some place else, or “Elsewhere” as the commercial states. “What is truly Scandinavian?” asks the commercial the viewer and then adds “Absolutely nothing!”. “Everything is copied!” it concludes as if copying things couldn’t be an original trait for a culture. As far as anyone knows the swedes may have invented copying others?
Not that it matters. For if it is one thing that a true swede can’t stand to hear is that Swedish Meatballs came from “Elsewhere”.
Ridiculous I know but also ironic considering that the same people now laughing at the right for not wanting to admit influences from the outside world in the development of Swedish culture are the same people that would never admit that gang rapes with streaks of torture or peeing victims of robbery in the mouth and then uploading it to the internet could have anything to do with outside influences or, to put it plainly, ethnic violence. As per usual the chattering classes are focused solely on what is said and not what is actually happening. Which is why it keeps getting worse.
Thaddeus Russell
Thaddeus Russell has been a professor of history, American Studies, and philosophy at Columbia University, Barnard College, The New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College, Occidental College, and Willamette University. He is also the author of A Renegade History of the United States and the host of the Unregistered podcast. Nowadays he manages his own university for those who love to learn.
And although I don’t agree with him regarding his theories on work ethic, America’s contribution in World War 2, or how to relate to fringe phenomena I have been aggressively curious about his upbringing as a socialist in the United States of America and I do agree that the rogues, drunkards, and outcasts of humanity has both been neglected in traditional history and that their contribution has been undervalued. I just think that embracing the fringe normalizes them and makes them – to be quite frank – boring.
I was also very interested to hear his view about labor history in the United States. Because that is what Thaddeus Russells dissertation was about.
Our lack of consensus is exactly what makes this a fantastic conversation. And now – Thaddeus Russell – Enjoy!