Jan Myrdal
Jan Myrdal (19 July 1927 – 30 October 2020[1]) was a Swedish author known for his strident Maoist, anti-imperialist and contrarian views and heterodox and highly subjective style of autobiography.
[7] His last book A Second Reprieve (2019), drew criticism for its graphic depiction of his own and his past wives' sexual and adulterous relationships, although it also garnered praise as a work of unflinching introspection.
He initially had little success as a journalist and an author, which he attributed in part to his political views and to the influence of his parents, both of whom were leading figures within Sweden's ruling Social Democratic party.
As his heterodox Marxist-Leninist and anti-colonial ideas drew him to Maoist-style Communism, he became a stalwart defender of Mao Zedong's Chinese government and, later, of the Cultural Revolution.
His 1963 book Report from a Chinese Village achieved some international success when released in English in 1965, offering a then very rare socio-political study of life in rural China, albeit from a clear pro-Maoist perspective.
A signature work was Confessions of a Disloyal European, published in original English in 1968 though in large part based on the merger of two previous Swedish books.
John Leonard of the New York Times described it as an "extraordinary" book and "a particularly disturbing combination of fiction, reportage and allegory",[11] while Kirkus Reviews offered a more mixed opinion of what was termed a "curious document of social guilt".
[12] In 1972, Myrdal co-founded Folket i Bild/Kulturfront (FiB/K), a political-cultural monthly "for freedom of speech and of the press; for a people's culture and anti-imperialism"..[13] He remained involved with the magazine for much of his life, and continued to pen a regular column in it until 2019.
FiB/K garnered major attention when it broke the IB affair in 1973, damaging the ruling Social Democratic Party by calling Swedish neutrality into question.
He had come to espouse the view that the Soviet Union had evolved into an even more menacing imperialist threat than the United States, urging Sweden to spend on national defense.
Although the I novels cemented Myrdal's position as a major figure in Swedish literature and intellectual life, his political influence waned from the late 1970s on.
After ending his involvement with the Moscow-backed Communist movement in the mid-1950s, Myrdal never again joined a political party, preferring to position himself as an independent thinker and writer.
[13] In addition, he exerted influence of a more indirect nature as the intellectual lodestar of the KFML, a Maoist group that gained a very active student following in the late 1960s and 1970s.
In keeping with this dim view of China's new leadership, he condemned the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and described the Beijing government as "a military regime of the fascist type".
In 1997, however, Myrdal publicly revised this opinion, saying he had come to the conclusion that although the protests had merit, the government crackdown had ultimately become necessary in order to prevent China from collapsing into internal conflict.
Therefore, he said, "[t]he question can not be whether it was moral or immoral to shed blood on the square of Heavenly Peace in the summer of 1989, but whether it was necessary or not in order to prevent a Bosnia in billion-size proportion and a possible Pacific war.
Perhaps even more than the Tiananmen Square controversy, Myrdal's position in Swedish public life suffered from his defense of Pol Pot's regime in Democratic Kampuchea.
Although he argued that national wars of liberation and peasant rebellions were intrinsically brutal affairs, in which many Cambodians had undoubtedly perished, he dismissed depictions of the regime's purges as a genocide and continued to refer to senior Khmer Rouge leaders as friends and political allies until his death.
In his view, the left needed to protect and preserve "bourgeois liberties" acquired through past class struggles, and use whatever margin of freedom existed to pursue its cause.
For example, despite being a lifelong atheist, Myrdal argued that Marxists could – indeed, should – make common cause with conservative religious movements whenever they expressed genuine popular or class aspirations.
In 1989, Myrdal publicly distanced himself from Swedish intellectuals who condemned Khomeini's death sentence against the author Salman Rushdie for blasphemy in The Satanic Verses.
Myrdal argued that although Rushdie should enjoy freedom of speech and belief, Khomeini's fatwa was formally a correct expression of Islam in the Iranian context and the pro-Rushdie campaigns served anti-Muslim and imperialist interests.
Myrdal was virtually alone among leftists in joining Christian conservatives to protest the new laws, arguing that legislators needed to respect social reality and children had a right to a legally recognized biological mother and father.
To Myrdal, Afghans would not find peace unless "ISAF soldiers, including the Swedish ones, are brought home in body bags and buried with military honors (and stirring speeches by cabinet ministers!
He caused a stir among his own supporters by writing that the electoral successes of the far-right Front National in France was based on her ability to attract working class voters by attacking neoliberalism.
A voracious reader, a bibliophile, and an unusually prolific and eclectic writer, Myrdal published books and articles on a very broad range of topics, in addition to novels and plays.
In Myrdal's writing, the line dividing art, literature, and politics is generally fluid, if at all existent; he will often dive into far-ranging historical and cultural exposés, circling back hundreds of years to contextualize a contemporary issue or personal experience.
Having dropped out of gymnasium to concentrate on his writing, he was briefly employed as a journalist at a local newspaper and struggled to find a publisher for early novel drafts.
His interests strayed far beyond contemporary politics, and, over the decades, he published on such diverse topics as 19th Century French caricature, Afghanistan, Balzac, wartime propaganda posters, wine, Meccano, sex, death, and Strindberg.
Indeed, Strindberg's intellectual eclecticism, ceaseless feuding, and strident politics appears to have served as a model for Myrdal's own literary and public persona.
