“Guernica, Oradour, Babij Jar, Katyń, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka” Palme’s 1972 Christmas speech criticizing the US bombing of Hanoi, Vietnam.
1975-2025 Democracy 50
Sweden’s democracy turned 50 last year in 2025: 1975 – 2025. It was Prime Minister Olof Palme who introduced modern democracy in Sweden in 1975. It is the 1973 Regeringsformen, the Swedish constitution of government that was introduced on January 1, 1975 and which had strong protection for the new democracy. Today, the new democracy is under attack.
On February 28, 1986, Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated.
Before 1975 there was a dictatorship in Sweden,
even though the society was undergoing reforms for democratization, which in the 1960s introduced elementary school and high school and removed the vagrancy law that had been a defense for estate society. It was a fight for democracy when many Swedes sacrificed everything. In 1974, it was still the king’s laws, the king’s government, the government sat in the king’s cabinet, and the king had the highest political power in Sweden. There were political elections with suffrage for both women and men since the 1920s but the elected government with ministers was only advisory to the king. The king had the highest political power.
There were still political prisoners in the 1950s in Sweden, for example at Skeppsholmen prison. The Swedish police could torture, murder republicans, the king’s enemies still during the beginning of the 20th century. Police murders could be carried out in places in Stockholm that had that purpose for several hundred years. But during the 20th century, it was not for the sake of the king, not for the king’s will, but the motive was instead that the Police carried out the deed to defend the corrupt authority society, the Swedish Junkerväld (noble rule), a remnant from the feudal era, which enjoyed the corruption; the military, the judiciary, authorities, the defense industry, etc. Historically, corruption was a kind of institution within the military and police when there was no pension system like today, but there were fees to be paid to older colleagues to get a position. Commanders and officers could get leave to go to work in other countries’ colonies for killing and looting such as in the Congo or Persia.
The Swedish criminal code is from 1961 and therefore lacks several categories of state organized crime because in a dictatorship the regime cannot commit crime.
Our king today is Sweden’s first democratic king.
Swedish police officers who served in the German SS during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany were wanted by the Nuremberg trials in 1947. But Swedish authorities blocked handover to the allies in Germany so that these Swedish police officers would not be able to tell about the higher-ranking Swedish people who had been in Nazi Germany where Jews were murdered.
Palme’s munitions inspector Carl-Fredrik Algernon, who was conducting an investigation against the munitions company Bofors for smuggling, died on 15 January 1987 when he fell onto the tracks in front of the subway. According to witnesses, the hand fell backwards and appeared to have been pushed. But already after two months, the prosecutor dropped the investigation and declared it an accident.
The murder of Olof Palme is very reminiscent of the death of Swedish UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld on September 18, 1961, who died on a flight to Africa to mediate peace in the Congo crisis. Mines and security services. When it happened, the Swedish people were told that it was just an accident. Hammarskjöld’s bodyguards had gunshot wounds, but it was explained away that it was ammunition that exploded in the fire. But ballistics experts such as Major C. F. Westell have strongly contradicted this theory, basing their conclusions on actual experiments. Westell explained that munitions detonated in fire cannot penetrate the human body or even penetrate containers. Björn Egge, a Norwegian major general who was one of the first UN officers to see Hammarskjöld’s body, claimed in a 2005 interview that Hammarskjöld had a hole in his forehead that was later removed from the autopsy photographs. But maybe it wasn’t a gunshot wound? The documents on Dag Hammarskjöld’s death are today, among other locations, at the Swedish government agency Riksarkivet, but are still classified more than 60 years after Hammarskjöld’s death.
Preliminary investigation leader Krister Petersson in the police’s Palme investigation closed the preliminary investigation into the Palme murder on June 10, 2020, with the justification that they concluded that the murder was committed by the “Skandia man” Stig Engström, who died in 2000. “On December 18, 2025, Chief Prosecutor Lennart Guné decided that the evidence was not sufficient to single out Engström as the perpetrator. However, the preliminary investigation remained closed“.
The main lead with the most evidence for Palme’s murder is the so-called SÄPO trail, that is, the Swedish security police who denied Palme bodyguards on the night of the murder. SÄPO is also part of other tracks with far-right police and military. SÄPO themselves say that they have already been investigated in the Palme murder.
But the Swedish Deputy Attorney General Kerstin Skarp says that the SÄPO trail has never been investigated.
New technology such as AI, Artificial Intelligence has been tried to use to come up with new new evidence but only points to certain theories about Swedish elite soldiers – but no proof. An AI can only examine the data that is available. Since the SÄPO track has never been investigated, there is no data for AI to test that includes the SÄPO track. So not surprised if an AI failed to come up with any new evidence.