| From: [email protected] (Ahrvid Engholm)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: Sweden Day
Date: 25 May 1994 16:39:35 GMT
Organization: Stacken Computer Club, Stockholm, Sweden
June 6th is a holiday, nowadays. (It didn't use to be.) In Stockholm
the main national day celebration is on Skansen (the open air museum
and zoo). People will go there dressed in folk dresses and listen to
for instance choires singing folksongs. The king will be there, and
hand out Swedish flags to groups and organizations that seems worthy.
The busses in the city will also fly Swedish flags.
There will probably be hundreds or thousands of events around the
country, where people gather to listen to traditional music, hear
speeches etc.
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| % From: Mats Bjorkman <[email protected]>
% Subject: Re: Flags
% To: Multiple recipients of list SWEDE-L <[email protected]>
On Fri, 27 May 1994, Jennifer Klenz wrote:
> I have a question. My Swedish friend told me that people have been
> rather restrained with flag waving of late because the white supremacist
> type groups in Sweden have been using the flag as "their" symbol. He
> said that when he saw the Olympic hockey finals it was nice to see
> people waving the flag again and so it seemed it had relegitimized
> the flag as something for Swedes to be proud to show.
>
> Is what he said true?
>
Let me add a Swedish perspective to this. Nationalist feelings and use
of national symbols such as our flag was in steady decline from the
end of WWII (I guess the outcome of the war made many people feel that
nationalism was bad, especially in a country so closely related to
Germany as Sweden) until it reached a bottom in the sixties and
seventies, when the strong socialist/communist movements made
nationalist expressions something very suspicious.
Thus, at the time when the skin heads (neo-nazis) picked up the use of
our national symbols, hardly noone else were using them. Starting in
the eighties, people have become more inclined to express positive
feelings for Sweden and the Swedish national symbols.
The problem is of course how to interpret the use of our national
symbols today. I can see two groups of people who care, namely those
Swedes who are trying to reclaim our national symbols from the
extremists by using our symbols the way they should be used, and those
Swedes who still think our national symbols are signs of
fascism/nazism, and consequently fight the use of them.
My feeling is that it is mainly younger people that are trying to
revive the proper use of the national symbols, while those least
inclined to do so are people in their 40s and 50s. A good example of
this is the school (somewhere in the Stockholm area) where the
students wanted to sing our national anthem on graduation day, but it
was banned because the school board thought singing the national
anthem was an expression of racism.
//Mats
--
Mats Bjorkman Email: [email protected]
Dept. of Computer Science Phone: +1 602 621-8119
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721
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