“The terrible becomes commonplace.”
That’s what Olof Palme said when he was elected leader of the Social Democrats in October 1969 – the same month I was born.
Today the observation seems almost macabrely timeless.
Seventeen years later I, like many other Swedes, became part of the collective memory that forever binds us to a place in time. I was sitting on the bus on the way home from a school trip to the Alps and my girlfriend was crying on the way to Munich. Then I remember the funeral, an indifferently cold March day, as the white coffin traveled through Stockholm while all the church bells in the city rang. We stood along the procession route for a whole day, I remember people throwing flowers on the street and serious men with heavy red flags. The rest of the day is completely gray.
But today, forty years later, the memory is also about the lack of a solution to this national tragedy. Or rather: it is the missing solution become The national tragedy. This year, Hans-Gunnar Axberger masterfully summed up the events in his book “The Murder of the Prime Minister,” in which the fundamentally deplorable drama was illustrated with such seasoned objectivity that it took on an undertone of folk theater. The sheriff who had to turn back on the way to Vasaloppet, sound and sound, the men in black musk masks hunting, the world’s best Carlsson, frying steak and serving cutty sark.
Policeman Potato with the walkie-talkie? Addict mustache with the revolver? Advertising consultant Rundnätt with hand left pocket?
And today? Today everything has become contemporary true crime or the clever Cluedo, but without valid identification of the perpetrator in the last room. Policeman Potato with the walkie-talkie? Addict mustache with the revolver? Advertising consultant Rundnätt with hand left pocket? What, well, neither does he!?
But the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme is not a party game. It’s a story worth taking very seriously, about the descent into the oil pit of a decaying public house where the bottom never seems to be reached. The more you move in the mud, the stranger shapes appear. Through the twists and turns of failed murder investigations over the years, this story has revealed unexpected aspects of the world’s most modern and rational country, where seemingly ordinary Swedes are preoccupied with the most unspeakable things. Bomber with Bible quotes. Private detective with party book. Gun fetishists in the villa city.
“They couldn’t explain the case, but maybe they explained it to us”
The story of the murder at Olof Palme has brought to light the truth about ourselves and continues to bring it to light. Not who we want to be, not who we think we are, but who we are Is. If we think we are further investigating the Palm murder, we are further investigating ourselves.
This is the lasting, perhaps still only valid, takeaway from the Swedish Winter Murder of 1986. In his major essay on the Palm Murder in the book Kartritarna, Per Olov Enquist believes that what is most significant about an event may not be what happened, but how we treat the event in our dreams and myths. What matters, says Enquist, is perhaps not who committed the murder, but what the hunt for the murderer tells us about ourselves. “The statements we created gave a picture of our dreams and our fears, they explained nothing else because the case is unsolvable,” he writes. “They couldn’t explain the case, but maybe they explained it to us.”
Palme’s murder and the failed and chaotic attempts to find a murderer and an explanation thus forced an attempt at introspection, a kind of collective psychoanalysis, which hopefully continues. Sooner or later we have to deal with self-perception.
That’s what I would do in that case say the time has come. In his apocalyptic commemorative text in DN from March 2, 1986, Olof Lagercrantz wrote about the violent political rhetoric of his time: “The hatred against Palme was part of the larger hatred from which the Third World War – general murder – will one day emerge.”
Maybe Lagercrantz will soon be told the truth. As the world continues to move toward universal murder, the search for a single Swedish perpetrator is more like a security-enhancing ritual. We will probably continue to find both new and old suspects, each of whom in their own way corresponds to the requirements of the time and therefore “cannot get around”.
But the murdered prime minister himself, Olof Palme? Is it possible to bypass it?
Personally, I have always thought that Palme’s finest speech was the one he gave just three years before his assassination
There was Remembrance days in recent years when it felt easy and natural to remember how Sweden and social democracy should return to Olof Palme’s memory and to the basis of his political vision, which was not really a vision but just a practical arrangement around the dignity of every human being.
Personally, I have always thought that Palme’s finest speech was the one he gave just three years before his assassination. There Palme talks about the “course of life” and about the fact that all people are confronted with the same basic problems throughout their lives: finding playmates in the schoolyard, finding a place in professional life, a home and a family, watching one’s children and grandchildren grow up and, in the face of the frailty of old age, securing one’s livelihood and dignity.
“Society does not exist to realize a single idea, freed from these conditions of life,” Palme said. “Society with its institutions exists so that people can realize their life plans and live their lives here and now. Then they do not endanger anyone’s future.”
Today, the most ruthless actors in the culture war are questioning not only human rights, but also the right to medicines and the fight against cancer
That was too the framework of the great history of social democracy, which has always been so provocative for utopians and dogmatists of all camps and which is about people who rose up and achieved dignity. A story that shaped so much of the 20th century because it made people say: Now I understand my place in this context.
Today, this seemingly self-evident political idea appears to be as broken as the murder investigation surrounding the man who formulated it. The kind of moral grammar that Olof Palme took for granted in his time no longer exists. Even human value is no longer an agreed construct.
Today, the worst wild minds of the culture war are questioning not only human rights, but also the right to medicine and the fight against cancer. In Sweden, the deputy prime minister talks about appeasing the Swedish people from the “pack,” and the party leader who apparently drunkenly shouted songs about palm murder in 2009 now leads Sweden’s second-largest party and claims the prime minister’s post. 4 out of 10 Swedish men support him.
Yes, the terrible is becoming commonplace, as Olof Palme stated in his speech in 1969
The mechanisms of hate speech work, large parts of the world are ruled by narcissistic fools and nihilistic oligarchs. World War III is already here, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week as his country entered the fifth year of its heroic defensive war against the worst tyrant of our time.
Yes, the terrible is becoming commonplace, as Olof Palme stated in his speech in 1969. But he also emphasized that society is a movement of individual people and that the catastrophe is therefore not inevitable. “There is a growing realization that the crucial problems of the present are social and political in nature and therefore need to be solved using social and political methods. Therefore, development can only be steered in the right direction by the people themselves,” he said.
It’s about this idea because the historical memory around Olof Palme should be built. The questions of common destiny, from the climate crisis to the crisis of democracy, will ultimately not be about the realization of some paradisiacal utopia, but rather about a concrete everyday life, the focus of which are the problems and joys of individual people – and about the political priorities that make up this everyday life.
“We are condemned to be here on earth,” Palme once said in a television interview. “We have to make life as humane as possible. That is the basis of my political philosophy.”
Read more texts by Björn Wiman. Also, subscribe to the Wiman & Beckman newsletter, where he and Åsa Beckman select favorite articles and give cultural tips every Monday.
