This morning, I ran about 5 Km through one of, if not the, most fantastic cities in the world, Madrid. I ran down Calle Legasce threw the beautiful Barrios de Salamanca and it’s magnificent houses on to Puerta de Alcala. I then continued in to the wonderful Retiro, a park situated right in the city center, only kilometers away from Puerta del Sol, which supposedly is the center of the Iberian Peninsula (although slightly miss calculated). While running, I was thinking of my brother and the fantastic time we spent here studying Spanish an autumn at Eurocentro on Gran Via. In many ways, this was the most important months of my life, because it fundamentally changed it forever. I actually think my life really started her some 30 years at the age of 21. My brother, then 17, and I took our girlfriends Maribel and Mari-Carmen to the park on weekends and we went there with our fantastic friends Ragnhild Tilly and Sophie Torun Olsson who’s hospitality where crucial to how we experienced Madrid back then. This was a time only a few years after Franco’s regime had stepped down. I remember walking threw the park with my first real camera, a Minolta a got from my father, and I remember pictures I took of buildings, fountains, the lake and people… Almost everything looks exactly the same… We lived with a very old “viuda” (a widow), who took care of us like princes… literary, as she actually thought we where… and today, having a breakfast at café Mallorca on calle Serano (you must go!), just a few blocks away from her apartment, I saw an old crooked lady who could just as well had been her… It made me think about history and that I heard that Mona Salin the other day had said that we Swedes lack connection to our history in comparison to other Europeans. History repeats itself, for god and for bad. Lovers and tourists has walked the parks of major cities since they where built and the will continue to do so, until they are removed. But history is not true, not to it self and it is not consistent. Mona Sahlin is wrong. People in other countries have no stronger relationship to their history then Swedes do. People all over the world face the same problems. We forget and we cannot relate to time. The old get old so quickly… the young think they will be young forever, the old forget the importance of innocence and energy and the young do not understand the value of experience. The new generations takes over… again and again and again… making the same mistakes but also continually maturing and improving. Things where definitely not better before. Much more important then history, is culture. Culture is true and it is constant. Buildings, statues, books and paintings remain as they really where. History is changed over time… I often wonder, even about my own history, of how my youth really was… how close to the “truths” my memories are? How selective, unconsciously, my mind has chosen to remember things… in one way or the other… History needs to be written down 50 years after it occurred, it needs to mature in order to, hopefully, be as accurate as possible, but for most of the time it is corrupt and manipulated. With the increased speed of information processing one would think that it would go faster, but the increase of information exceeds the speed of processing and like wine and people things improves with maturity (until the tipping point ☺ ). If you are not a socialist as young you do not have a heart and if you are not conservative when you are older you do not have a brain. Socialists know all this. That is why they have burnt and destroyed books and cultural artifacts where ever they have been in power. That is why they dominate journalism, it is why they change the name of parties from Communists to Vänstern keeping the same people… or why they ad “democratic” to socialism… this is why they “own” beautiful words like feminism and solidarity… it is why they lie and mystify, indoctrinate and brainwash: They know that they can rewrite history, that people will forget and that is why they, at what ever cost, must dominate the cultural scene. Because it is right there, in the heart of culture, where our presence is documented and the future can be vaguely foreseen. They might have hidden the mass graves where we will not find them, but at least their bombastic, horrific architecture and their depressing, suburbs and statues over their elitist leaders will remain… It is sad that they in so many places have brought them down, they should have stood there and had the doves shit on them until eternity, with no care or maintenance as a beautiful remembrance of socialisms fatal failure. Mona Sahlin, Swedes have culture, we know our culture and we are rightfully proud of it and I think that it is vital that we insure that the values and traditions of out cultural traditions remain. We should cherish it and bring it to surface. We should educate immigrants to the soul of our for fathers, to the legacy that has created the embracing nature of the Swedes, making it possible for them to find refuge in our wonderful country.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 19:36:16 +0000
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