Re: what you said HERE :
http://www.thelocal.se/29752/20101021/
Brother / Sister asian 369,
You are most probably right:
“Swedish leaders see unity on Afghanistan” BUT Swedish Nation DO NOT see unity on Afghanistan.”
They haven’t asked us – not yet.
That’s democracy for you: we choose our leaders (our bishops too) so that we can follow THEM, wherever they may lead us – to Valhalla or even to the other place.
Brother/ Sister asian123,
Moving into the territory of incontrovertible fact:
My family name Hamelberg is German, not Swedish. I have equal parts of German and English in my immediate ancestry.
My mother, who is buried in Hendon Cemetery in London, true, did visit us in Stockholm, approximately 24 years ago.
Permit me to address what I think are the implications in your question. I intuit that you ask because as an Asian (possibly from the Caste System which also exists in parts of Africa,) you are probably worried ha ha ha – or trying to figure out an answer to the question “Who is a Swede?” – and if you are from the relevant part of Asia, or even from ( another aspiring Englishman) Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s Trinidad and Tobago, your deeper concern could well be, “Are they ( the Swedes) all Brahmins?” or “How do they fit in or into the Caste System’s hierarchy?”
http://groups.google.com/group/usaafricadialogue/browse_thread/thread/a97f2fee91c909ea
My advice to you is: Don’t worry! My Swedish better half throughout this life, is partly of Walloon extraction and her father, proud of his roots, wrote a book about it: Vallonerna (The Walloons)
More about them:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADFA_svSE393&q=The+Walloons
If you were born in Calcutta, I wouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you, just as Eric Blair though born in India – unlike the great Gandhiji, will forevermore remain British .
In yesterday’s BBC interview, Sir Salman Rushdie had interesting things to say about the fact that he was born in Bombay. Check it out.
One last thing about being Swedish, the rest of today, I’ll be digging deep into Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson’s “The Everyday Torah” , since according to Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s introduction, he teaches among other things, that ”equality is not to be equated with identicality”.
Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks much more than Asian born Baron Bhikhu Parekh , has given many positive insights into the kinds of questions that are revolving in the minds of Sverige Demokrater and all those who oppose them, questions such as after the failure of multiculturalism, what do we do next? He takes up some of these matters in his inimitable style, in the following books:
“Dignity of Difference” – How to avoid the clash of civilisations “(2002)
“To Heal a Fractured World – The Ethics of Responsibility “(2005)
“The Home We Build Together – Recreating Society” (2007)
“Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-first Century” (2009)
If you’re not in too much of a hurry, you could listen to him talk about the dignity of difference, here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrQ75meskWI
Hopefully we will get back to the question of saving lives in Afghanistan - the Malmö shootings and the possibility of life in dignity