FOLLOW-UP: Some Loose Thoughts on the "Swedeaboo" Myth
FOLLOW-UP: Some Loose Thoughts on the "Swedeaboo" Myth
The Cult of Anders Tegnell and its Consequences
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Let's go back to the summer of 1518, in the countryside of the Holy Roman Empire, to a land called Alsace. It's a warm July mid-morning, and in one street in Strasbourg, a young woman by the name of Frau Troffea steps into the street and began to dance erratically, with seemingly no end in sight. Dozens would follow her lead. By August, it would be hundreds - with some of these clearly disturbed hoofers beginning to collapse from strokes, heart attacks, and exhaustion.
In September, the first attempted treatment was to pray atop a mountain shrine for God's absolution. Nobody could identify a cause - dubstep had obviously not been invented yet, for starters - with local doctors declaring the only treatment was to tell the afflicted to simply dance it off. Guild halls were converted to accommodate this prescription, musicians were hired, and helping hands were employed to keep dancers upright throughout the midnight oscillation marathons.
This “plan” was a complete and utter disaster and was quickly course-corrected with bans on dancing and music, and various religious rituals prescribed instead. Again, this was the early 1500s Holy Roman Empire, which was so horrific that there was a “Great Peasants' Revolt” just six years later.
Historical analysis suggests fungi poisoning, or the extreme stress of the current living conditions, to be the root cause. The specific number of deaths cause is up for debate, as well - some accounts claimed 15 were dying daily. While the medical world of the early 1500s was incredibly limited in their technology and knowledge. They certainly didn't have a library of research over what might cause this affliction & even centuries later, the cause is still unclear.
Now in the modern age of 2024, the Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell demanded the people of Sweden simply dance through the pain caused by COVID-19. A colossal betrayal of over 10 million people, as their High Priest demands the mass infection of their families - and children - with a brand new deadly and disabling pathogen, that already had medical literature warning that preventing infections was paramount.
In Sweden’s “post-pandemic” November 2023 Emilia Brangefält, a young athlete, would die by suicide after an extensive bout with health complications caused by the COVID-19 infection(s) that Anders Tegnell insisted was harmless to her as well as other young Swedes. Long COVID suicidal thoughts and suicides have gone largely ignored, tragically. According to a report from December 2022, 14 percent of Sweden's adults are suffering from Long COVID. A July 2023 paper says 16.5% of young Swedish adults are suffering from Long COVID. This number will only grow worse through continued waves of population-wide reinfections.
Yet Stateside, for people that have never visited Sweden, can't speak a word of Swedish, and don't know a thing about Swedish politics, daily life, or culture, suddenly held up Sweden's lack of a pandemic response as the example we should follow thousands of miles across the world, in a nation of 333+ million people that are not members of the European Union, and are a very different population than Sweden for a number of different contributing factors.
All to worship the alleged wisdom of some boomer crank who abandoned science for a social media conspiracy theorist embarrassment. You'll notice that a lot of these “Swedeaboos” fail to mention Anders Tegnell, and much less will risk mentioning Ivor "FatEmperor" Cummins, Tegnell's closest colleague - an Irish quack turned anti-vax Youtuber that claims public health mandates are the modern Nazi Holocaust.
Quite frankly, this is a scandal of modern democracy. Allowing any government's response to a population-wide disaster to be in any way influenced by a chronically incorrect and abusive anti-vax social media quack, instead of the work of leading doctors and scientific researchers, is an outright betrayal of the public. The future history books are going to look at this aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic response with absolute scorn and disgust, wondering how so many could fall for such unserious, unprofessional, and unscientific delusions. Was it because they were too afraid to face the reality of the many (still unfolding) harms that SARS-CoV-2 posed? That they were so crippled by fear that they embraced simple fantasy, regardless of the tangible, physical cost of putting on a charade of “normalcy?”
Is there a future where humanity stops making these fatal mistakes, especially with a global Internet that has been flooded with unscientific disinformation?
As adults, we're supposed to use our developed minds to analyze complex, scientific and technical problems (such as a global pandemic), with a certain degree of humility, open-minded curiosity, basic empathy, and scrutiny against simple-sounding fictional narratives. Instead, we now have no shortage of dishonesty, irresponsibility, and outright cowardice in a delusion of trying to "pretend" COVID-19 away. Shrugging at a growing mountain of needless death, disability, and chronic health issues that will haunt us for decades to come.
Countless Swedes were needlessly killed and disabled because of this unscientific "herd immunity" crusade championed by Anders Tegnell and his favorite anti-vax quack, that claimed on October 2020 that there would be no further waves of COVID-19 due to infection acquired "herd immunity." Education was constantly disrupted due to widespread illness in an unvaccinated population. The sheer amount of dishonesty required to misrepresent Tegnell's irresponsible mismanagement and "post-pandemic" pageantry grift as a "success" would almost be impressive, if it didn’t result in a massive swath of Swedish children who face many decades of chronic illness and serious health complications in their future.
However, this anti-intellectual poison is already starting to influence how we'll react to future pandemics - in the United Kingdom, the head of the UK Health Security Agency, Jenny Harries has declared: "We'll behave more like Sweden when the next pandemic hits." As in, we'll drown our unvaccinated children face-first in whatever new pathogen emerges on our shores - even if it's something similar to what plagued Alsace in the 1500s? Have we bothered to even ask our children if they’ve consented to this newfound abandonment of public health, volunteering their young bodies to be violated any and all future diseases?
As the slow burning blaze of climate collapse unfolds, future pandemics are a potential side effect to be prepared for - and across the US & UK, the leading philosophy in many political circles is to follow Sweden's failures instead of learning from our own and focus on preventing harmful and needless viral infections that cause pointless death and disability - especially in children who have decades of life ahead of them. In Canada, support for mandatory pediatric vaccination is already in freefall, an utter disaster in the making.
If we wind up dooming our children's futures because us adults chose to be irresponsible, addicted to upholding an intoxicating, delusional fantasy over a scientific understanding of our physical world and the many ways in can harm us, then the odds that human civilization survives through our future climate calamity to 2125 comes into question.
Because as of now? The Cult of the Swedeaboo is looking at public health like a drunk driver behind the wheel of the Titanic, after they’ve intentionally smashed into the iceberg. Getting the children into the lifeboats now would simply be living in fear.