"The Swedes the first people in history to commit collective suicide"
Published March 9, 2023 at 7:47 p.m
CULTURE. Hungarian Ponthus Zsolt Várkonyi spent seven years as an immigrant in Sweden in the 70s and 80s, but then moved back home. In this essay, he analyzes the Swedish national character from a Hungarian perspective and tries to explain how phenomena such as mass immigration and the scrapping of Swedish neutrality could have arisen.

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Swedish politicians and the mass media have for several years directed sharp criticism at Hungary, the Hungarian politicians, Hungarian society and the Hungarian people in general. They have not spared the most pejorative - and insulting - descriptions, such as "undemocratic", "dictatorial", "autocratic", "patriarchal", "misogynist", "homophobic", "Nazi", "racist" and "anti-Semitic" .

Hungary is an unfree society with an unfree and one-sided media, it has been claimed. An accusation that seems absurd when you consider that, according to accessible figures, over ninety percent of the Swedish journalistic corps consists of left-liberal writers and that in Sweden there is no government-critical TV, radio or press in the real sense. This compared to Hungary, where the proportion is roughly 50-50.

What happened? Why do Swedish politicians and journalists deal with Hungary on a daily basis? As the author of this article is a Hungarian who lived in Sweden 40 years ago, and is still a proud Swedish citizen, I will try to give a balanced analysis of how the different people's souls relate to each other and why.

My father has told me that during the 30s he learned at school that Sweden had been a poor agricultural country with famine, high unemployment and mass emigration around the turn of the century. My Swedish girlfriend's father at the time told me that they had been so poor during the 40s that they had to supplement the wheat flour with birch flour. That today's Sweden is undoubtedly one of the most successful and richest countries in the world has been achieved in part due to a fortunate position on the world map, through which the country was able to stay out of - and make a lot of money from - two world wars. But it also partly depends on own performance through the wise, hard and diligent work of the Swedish people, as well as the wise and historic settlement between Swedish workers and employers in the 1930s.

The Swedish psyche must therefore be understood in this context, and with regard to the climate and geography, in a country where there are miles between houses and between people, both physically and psychologically. Sweden is characterized by enormous distances, sparsely populated areas, cold, meter-deep snow and darkness for half the year. Consequently, the Swede is lonely, isolated, afraid to make contact - but on the other hand straightforward and honest, diligent, considerate and tactful. Historically, Sweden was homogenous when it came to ethnicity and religion, so the Swede has always felt a deep solidarity with his fellow human beings, even strangers, when they were like him. "Blonde and blue-eyed" and members of the Swedish Church. If one was freezing or starving to death deep in the forest and a stranger appeared, he represented a sure rescue and not a threat. So the Swedish soul was imbued with solidarity: