Jorge Capelán and Stephen Sefton, 28 de mayo 2015

On a previous entry we went hard on Jonas Sjöstedt, the Swedish Left Party's Secretary General who has openly stated he prefers the US over Venezuela. Since then he's been criticized in an open letter, signed by a number of friends of Latin America, as well as by an editorial in the Flamman weekly – an outlet close to the party. However, we feel the need to get back to the subject since there are a number of disturbing aspects that add even more suspicion as to the integrity of the Swedish party's current leadership.

First, a short recap: On April, 23rd, Sjösted appeared on a Public Service TV show saying that he preferred the US over Venezuela. He said that he was “pretty worried about Venezuela's democratic development” which he called “authoritarian”. He also criticized Venezuela's alleged failure “to ensure enough goods in the shelves and a good economic development”.

In our blog we pointed at  Sjöstedt's self-confirmed close friendship with late US ambassador in Benghazi, Chris Stevens, a man who was involved in the training of the terrorist forces that carried out the bloodbath in Libya during the NATO-led war that resulted in the ousting – and murder – of Colonel Gaddaffi. The fact is that Sjöstedt himself wrote in his blog that he had met Stevens during a trip to Tel Aviv many years ago, and that they had been friends until his death by the end of 2013.

This is very serious and should be a matter for discussion within Swedish Left Party, especially taking into account the lengths to which the leadership of the former Left-Communist Party went in order to investigate the contacts of its representatives with Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War and the self-criticism it engaged in as a result.

For the Left Party, which since the collapse of the Soviet Union decided to drop the C-word from its name, the relation with Communist Parties and more or less official contacts with governments behind the “Iron Curtain” became a motive of self-criticism, public outrage and shame. It  is thus highly contradictory that 20 years later, the intimate relation of its leaders with US-American officials engaged in criminal war of aggression should be treated as a matter of hardly any concern.

Well, in the light of all that, here we offer another revelation that should also raise some eyebrows:

According to WikiLeaks diplomatic cable #09STOCKHOLM691, in November 2009, Hans Linde, the Left Party's spokesperson on foreign policy reported on his organization's international policy to the US-Embassy's Political Officer.

According to the Embassy's interpretation of Linde's words, the Party's members were “keenly aware of global issues” (meaning too opposed to the Empire's various wars) and this “limited” the Party “in its ability to compromise with the SDP” (Social Democrats) in an eventual government. Also according to the Embassy, Linde complained that the grassroots of his party were too friendly towards immigrants and aired his (or his fellow party leaders' ?) concerns that “further liberalization of Sweden's generous immigration laws threatens the current high level of Swedish workers' rights and benefits”.

Although WikiLeaks cables have been public for some years now, only a neo-nazi web magazine, “Fria Tider”, wrote about it in an article in April, 2012.

Linde confirmed the meeting with the Embassy for the magazine, as well as the agenda, but denied that he had said what stood in the cable. Linde deserves the benefit of the doubt, taking into account that such diplomatic cables often contain disinformation, however...

Call Linde naive, but isn't it highly problematic for the foreign policy spokesperson of a party that formally opposes NATO's wars in Afghanistan and Irak to make a report to the US-Embassy? Diplomats talk to everybody and everybody talks to diplomats but: going to the Embassy for a formal meeting? How come no open debate on this took place in the Party? After all, the Swedish Left Party is formally opposed to US imperialism.

What if such a cable on a meeting between Linde and, say, Venezuela's ambassador would have been made public? What if the cable had involved a meeting between Linde and the Russian embassy? What would the media's reaction have been like?

How credible is a party that calls itself “Left” with: a) A secretary general that is intimate friend of a US ambassador that gets killed by the same terrorists he once trained and b) A foreign policy spokesperson that reports to the US-Embassy on his party's policy?

Given the extremely serious threats of armed conflict currently threatening world peace, the contradictions of a minority party in Sweden may seem somewhat trivial. But it is also true that this kind of co-option is very much a technique of the NATO country "soft power" subversion currently destabilizing Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil.

In Latin America, the techniques of "soft power" aim at overthrowing anti-imperialist governments. In Europe, that kind of subversion aims at defending the governments of US allies by undermining and weakening the political opposition. Only by confronting this kind of collaboration with covert NATO country subversion can we defend all our peoples against it.