This article by Max Lundqvist, director, playwright, and writer about the arts, has been rejected by all the major established newspapers in Sweden, but NewsVoice believes it to be an important piece, which we hope will spark debate about the limits of freedom of expression and the role of culture in an increasingly narrow climate of opinion.
The article is based on Uppsala City Theatre’s (Uppsala Stadsteater’s) decision to cancel the performance of ”German Autumn” after one of the performers made a statement about the war in Ukraine in an entirely different context. It was an emotive speech favoring peace, with a logic that does not fit into the current debate climate. Max Lundqvist asks how narrow the corridor of opinion needs to become before it turns into pure dictatorship.
Max Lundqvist has been the artistic director of Chaos Theatre (Teater Kaos) in Stockholm since 1991. His latest theatre production, ”In One Act,” asks a fundamental existential question: Who are we if we casually sell out our physical and spiritual integrity?
The Editorial Team, NewsVoice
A frightening example of an increasingly narrow corridor of opinion is the one that recently unfolded recently at Uppsala City Theatre, where extremists succeeded in intimidating the theatre’s management to shut down the production of ”German Autumn”, a dramatisation of Stig Dagerman’s documentary novel about the ravages of post-war Germany.
By Max Lundqvist, theatre director. Translation: Jonathan Gilthorpe
The background to this story is a speech given by one of the actors, Richard Turpin, at the annual meeting of the Swedish-Russian Friendship Association. Turpin delivered the speech as a private individual with no connection to Uppsala City Theatre apart from the fact that Turpin was a member of the cast of ”German Autumn.”
The Swedish evening newspaper Expressen wrote an inflammatory article about his speech, and other media outlets followed suit—all to discredit Turpin for his views on the war in Ukraine. In reality, his speech was a passionate plea for peace.
Uppsala City Theatre took the position that the drive against Turpin had become so threatening that the management felt they could not guarantee the safety of either the performers or the audience. The communications manager at the theatre told the Swedish newspaper SvD:
”People have contacted us in various ways, by e-mail, by phone. Many have been upset and sad, and others have had a harder tone. There has also been a heated discussion on social media. On two occasions, most recently on Saturday, someone left a bag of feces addressed to Richard Turpin outside the theatre’s stage door.”
The closure of German Autumn is a relatively small loss for the performing arts but a gigantic defeat for democracy. Thus, the extremists have gained the upper hand.
Globalism
So who are these extremists? Do they realize whose agenda they are fuelling?
The extremism spreading in society and taking on such a visible face in Uppsala is about steering politics towards Globalism, or as it was originally called, the New World Order (NWO).
It is pointless to focus on the left-right axis of Swedish politics when we have an ongoing global power shift. Power is moving further and further away from you and me, from parliament and government to NGOs, where unelected people rule together with big finance.
Examples of globalist organizations are the World Economic Forum, the UN, the WHO, the EU, the banking families, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, where Swedish politician and former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt is active.
The extremists say that Turpin can think whatever he wants, but he must be dismissed immediately from his job at Uppsala City Theatre and never work again. Similarly, in 2021, the extremists said that COVID-19 vaccines were voluntary, but if you did not take the experimental injection, you should not expect to take part in society on the same terms as those who did.
A system of totalitarian thought is being implemented, and many people have been fooled into believing that it is about democracy and that it is compatible with freedom of expression and human rights. It is not.
The Information War
There is a war of political propaganda going on, both in the mainstream media and on social media platforms.
Until October 2022, the Swedish Public Health Agency employed an expert in psychological warfare, Christer Janson, as Press Officer. Janson trained in both the military and at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), which is responsible for helping Sweden prepare for major accidents, crises, and the consequences of war. In the newspaper Dagens Media, Janson has expressed his satisfaction with how the Swedish press acted during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was quoted as saying: “Together, we have changed society without coercion,” a quote with several interpretations.
On social media, online trolls and shills act with a single purpose: to subjugate critics of the propaganda narrative. They are easily recognizable by their short one-liners and their deployment of ’laugh out loud’ smiley faces, with which they attack the factual arguments posed by critics and the opposition.
On the Uppsala City Theatre’s Facebook page, numerous online trolls actively responded to the theatre manager’s post about Turpin’s speech. If you haven’t met such trolls before, you can be easily made to feel threatened, even scared and insecure. That’s the point of psychological warfare.
As in many other countries, people working in the cultural arts sector in Sweden were also subject to precision lobbying before the introduction of vaccine passports in 2021. Extremists wanted to normalize the intended raid on human rights. On Facebook, there was a group called ”Open the Salons”. Here, understandably worried, unemployed workers within the performing arts were targeted and, in many cases, captured by the lobbyist extremists. They were told that their jobs would return – that the theatres would reopen – as long as they accepted vaccine passports.
The Council of Europe, whose resolution 7.3.1 stated that vaccine passports violate human rights, was silenced when the agenda was laid out. We have seen a similar culture of silence from politicians and the media regarding the origin of COVID-19. We should be afraid of bats, cows, and birds, not bioweapons generated by gain-of-function research in secret biolabs.
War is a political tool for globalists
The war in Ukraine could have ended after just a few months when a peace treaty negotiated under the leadership of the then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet was accepted by both President Putin and President Zelensky.
That agreement was torn following US intervention, with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson as its messenger and NATO as its enforcer.
Turpin said in his speech:
”Did Putin know that the defense of the Lugansk and Donetsk People’s Republics would decisively change the balance of power throughout the world? I do not think so. Now he knows it. Now, the whole world knows it, including Washington, Paris, Brussels, and London. That’s why Boris Johnson is openly telling us that a Russian victory in Ukraine means the end of Western hegemony. Now it is no longer a secret. With the West, it is not possible to live in peace.”
In response, I ask the following questions:
- The extremists say that we must support the war in Ukraine, but to what end?
- Why are the extremists abandoning 200 years of Swedish neutrality to fuel NATO’s war-mongering and the ongoing armament for the next war?
- Why are the extremists handing Sweden over to the US through the Defence Cooperation Agreement (DCA), which, according to Colonel Douglas MacGregor, is very similar to the agreements that Germany and Japan were forced to sign after their defeat in World War II?
- Was it perhaps the post-war agreement that prevented Germany from protesting when the US blew up the Russian Nordstream gas pipeline and created an energy crisis in Germany and the rest of Europe?
Whatever the answers are to these riddles:
- Why does Sweden want to participate in the US war against Russia in Ukraine instead of working for peace?
- Why does Sweden want to become a subservient state to the US voluntarily, as Germany and Japan have?
The digital control society
At the heart of the ongoing ’fourth industrial revolution’ is the digitalization process, where Sweden is a world leader. Globalists want to concentrate power in ’one hand.’ In the plans for their coming world dictatorship, the foundation is a digital and global behavioral ID. It will contain everything about you. Everything you do will be recorded. Every move, every purchase, everything related to your health and medical status. The digital behavioral ID passport can also be linked to the proposed central bank digital currency (CBDC).
With digital ID passports (behavioral passports), the powers that be will know and track everything about you, but you will now know anything about the powers that be, which is the essence of a dictatorship. If ‘they’ are unhappy with you, your ability to purchase items may be switched off instantly, and your assets may be eliminated through a negative interest rate. Vaccine passports have been promoted as a means to stop the spread of infection, but they do not. In fact, they have been created to establish the digital platform for this behavioral ID. Despite Sweden’s easy stance on lockdowns – the vaccine passport database was a prominent feature of the government’s COVID-19 response.
Back to Uppsala City Theatre: What is left to defend culture when politically motivated vaccine passports are seen as a means of liberation and a bag of feces is enough to silence a performance?
What is a man without his integrity?
By Max Lundqvist, theatre director, playwright, and writer about the arts
The online magazine Parabol (focusing on culture in society) has a regular column on cancel culture. In the June issue, the incident at Uppsala City Theatre is discussed.
Related
- NewsVoice: What Putin Must Have Known and What He Could Not Have Known – A Speech by Richard Turpin
- NewsVoice: The Speech on Palestine that got Yanis Varoufakis Banned from Germany
- NewsVoice: Carl Bildt: Total Surveillance Doesn’t Harm Freedom of Speech, Because it is Covert
- Parabol: Månadens Cancel: Uppsala Stadsteater
- ETC: Nina Björk: Frihet för den som hyllar Putin