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We're Living in an Increasingly Dangerous World

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COUNTRY OF SWEDEN™ (Rixstep) — This is written by Lars Joel Eriksson for Skånska Dagbladet, one of Sweden's major news outlets (albeit not in the 'top five'). What's remarkable about this piece is not only that it's spot-on, but that it's written in a climate where truth is an oddity that's often frowned on and prohibited.

We in the world around have all along known the truth in many of the areas Lars touches on, but those areas are forbidden by a Swedish media who are always eager to be compliant with the sitting government, and forbidden by a sitting government who are always eager to be compliant with NATO, the EU, and good old Uncle Sam, always lurking behind in the shadows.

Things didn't used to be like this in Sweden. Sweden was a remarkable country for so many reasons - for its beautiful people, for its open 'curious' society, for its summers with midnight sun, and yes, for its courage to stand up to superpowers on both sides and speak truth to them.

Sweden was the living proof that the Cold War was a sham and a shadow game. Come the end of the Cold War, and the brief ascendancy of US-informer Carl Bildt, and things changed. Radically. Today Sweden is a mess in a hand-basket, and its only hope is people like Lars Eriksson and a media who encourage others to stand up and think.

We're Living in an Increasingly Dangerous World

Lars Joel Eriksson, Skånska Dagbladet

Normally my sympathies would be with Democrat presidential candidates, the reason being that they're more concerned with welfare issues than the Republicans. But there are also things that normally can swing things to the Republican side.

Republican presidents have been less inclined to instigate wars than Democrat presidents.

For that reason, I think the Republican starting field for this year's presidential elections was more optimistic than for the Democrats, where Hillary Clinton, right from the start, was the likely winner.

At the end of the 1990s, there was cause to feel optimistic about our world's future. The collapse of Soviet communism made the countries of Eastern Europe democratic. After the chaos and raw plundering of Russia, the country got a strong and goal-oriented president in the form of Vladimir Putin, who pushed hard for economic growth and peaceful coexistence. But of this brighter future there is little that remains. President George W Bush occupied both Afghanistan and Iraq without having thought through how to end those wars peacefully. Many believed Barack Obama would be a President of peace, but instead the situation in the world has deteriorated during his years in power. For four of those years, the United States has in addition had an uncomfortably warmongering Secretary of State in the form of Hillary Clinton, who has a grave responsibility for the continued chaos in Iraq, the collapse of Libya, the civil war in Syria, and the refugee crisis that followed in its wake. To make matters even worse, there are overwhelming signs that the United State contributed to the rise of IS.

Not only Donald Trump, but also John Kasich and Ted Cruz were very critical of Obama's and Clinton's dangerous foreign policy. Now all hope of a more peaceful development seems lost now that Donald Trump, after all his bungling, won the nomination of his party. Instead it looks like it's going to be Hillary Clinton, known both for her choleric temper - she makes Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi, as a former colleague of mine expressed it - and for being what Americans like to call 'trigger happy'.

We are on the brink of major disaster. Recently there was an attempt at a military coup d'etat in Turkey against the democratically elected president. Thankfully the plotters failed. Otherwise we'd have had a civil war in that country, in the proximity of Europe, and with 75 million inhabitants, which would have resulted in another gigantic refugee crisis.

To that we can add the attempts of the US and the EU to destabilise Russia after the coup d'etat in Ukraine when the democratically elected president was forced to flee. This is playing with fire, a nearly bizarre policy orchestrated by Washington where one, in addition, has spent the past several months getting ready for nuclear war on Russian borders, and demonstrated complete deafness, for close to twenty years, when Russia kept warning about further escalation. A Russia that cannot hold together - the country has more than 140 million inhabitants - is also a threat of a further gigantic refugee crisis.

To, in this situation, get a warmongering President in the form of Hillary Clinton, someone who in addition seems to lack all semblance of self-insight, is an extremely frightening perspective. No wonder that the military industrial complex of the United States gives her such massive support.