Kurt Lundgren R.I.P.

Kurt Lundgren was a well-known Swedish writer, editor, and blogger who died on Thursday at the age of 64.

He wrote in Swedish, so I am familiar with his work only through the references of others. Steen, Fjordman, Conservative Swede, LN, and Reinhard often referred to him. He was widely respected, and his blog was considered by many to be the most significant in Sweden.

With the help of Google and our Swedish correspondent LN, I have translated an obituary from a local paper, Barometern Oskarshamns-Tidningen:

As Kurt Lundgren’s colleague for many years, I had great respect for his sharp pen, broad knowledge, and body of work.

When Kurt Lundgren came to Kalmar as a journalist for Östran in the 1970s, he became the area’s main reviewer of various social issues, often to the dread and discomfort of the local rulers. Whenever he sniffed out an injustice, it went hot into his columns. Another recent forum was as chief editor for Ölandsbladet and the opinion-making endeavors he put his name to there were characterized as free and independent, but always with a strong sense of his own landscape with its people and interests.

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Kurt Lundgren coupled academic and historical work with great local knowledge of both modern society and the past that he so often leaned against. Source research was a specialty, but when he cut loose in his intensive blogging recently, he became increasingly effective in the current issues he raised. His distrust and heckling of modern society was considerable.

The limited readership that Ölandsbladet offered him opened the way to a wider audience, and thus he became a more widely-read and popular opinion-maker.

A little over a year ago I received an email from Mr. Lundgren expressing his opinion about certain sections of the Swedish political class. Since the observations he offered then can do no damage now either to his reputation or his estate, I reproduce them below:

SSU, the youth party of the Swedish social democrats, is a bunch of real nuts; they are subsidised by the state and the money is paid in relation to the number of members. They pretended to have over 38,000 members to get more money from the state; the fraud was exposed, and now they have 4,000 members. No one was ever charged.

Their former chairman Anna Sjodin was arrested when she was drunk and fighting in a pub. She is a big lady with muscles, so beware; she has now been fired and condemned for the pub-brawl during which she was screaming like this to the Lebanese waiter: “People like you will we not have in our country!”

One of her drunken fellows was running around and asking: “Do you know whom you are arresting? We are in the same political party as the minister of justice!”

In their program you can read the following:

Kärnfamiljen som norm ska krossas.

“The nuclear family, the normal family, should be smashed.”

I think Pol Pot said that, too.

From this small, extreme, left-wing organisation the social democratic government is recruiting almost all of its ministers.

Will they stop families from having more than five books each in their homes? I think they will do, sooner or later.

Now they also want to stop all selling of petrol to save the climate. They say, we are all in the same boat. But, as our great writer Vilhelm Moberg said:

When politicians say to us that we are all sitting in the same boat, be very careful, because it means that you are going to be forced to row that boat.

Requiescat in pace, Kurt Lundgren.