F O L K E T  I  B I L D / K U L T U R F R O N T  4/97
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97-04-20

Dear colleagues and friends!

Returning from France Gun Kessle and I have received and read copies of your letter March 26 to the Swedish and International P.E.N. concerning the campaign against Gun Kessle and me. I have also read the reply from the Swedish P.E.N. March 30.
Your letter to the Swedish P.E.N. truly warmed our hearts. It also raises serious questions of principle concerning both the Swedish P.E.N. and the International P.E.N.
There are those intellectuals that live and write for grants, scholarships, official honours, good criticism in the official reptile press and membership of this or that academy. Of course I find them despicable. They dress the economic and military needs of their masters in ideology. The whores of reason, as I put it in "Confessions of a disloyal European".
Against them it is necessary that we as conscious writers who do not accept and follow the political line now established by Washington behave responsibly. We do that by discussing the present day reality openly and seriously with arguments and counter-arguments as long as we can.
The ethnical, religious and cultural conflicts are increasing. But they do not develop on their own. They serve the interests of the imperialists. Today the most reactionary circles in Washington by using them try to dismember not only China but also India, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and other countries. Many Western intellectuals are being used as tools in this.
He who has witnessed a real communal riot knows that it is too late to argue when throats are being slit. It is today that we must understand how to write in order to increase mutual understanding and respect between religions and cultures; to defuse the conflicts. Thus we must strive to overcome the attempts to organize ideological crusades. This Gun Kessle and I try to do. It is for this we are once more under attack.
If your letter made us glad the letter from Terry Carlbom, the international secretary of the Swedish P.E.N. was sad reading. He did not lie but neither did he state the truth. His letter gives a distorted description; he hides the deep conflict in the Swedish P.E.N. His letter becomes an expression of the present malaise of the organization.
It is true that the Board of the Swedish P.E.N. decided - by a hung vote - not to recommend the Annual meeting to exclude Gun Kessle and Jan Myrdal for their words. But the statement that the Swedish P.E.N. would stand up for our "individual rights" if they were threatened is unfortunately open to serious doubt. That would depend on the general political situation and on which group at that time dominated the organization.
During later years Swedish P.E.N. has been active abroad but has not proved able to stand up for rights under threat in Sweden. When during the war in Afghanistan the Soviet Consul General in Gothenburg wanted the police to intervene against the well known Swedish artist Torsten Jurell when he presented Bresjnev as a war-criminal Thomas von Vegesack - then chairman of Swedish P.E.N. - declared that this was not a matter for Swedish P.E.N. The Soviet Union was strong. P.E.N. was politically correct.
That was also the first time Thomas von Vegesack wanted to exclude me - I had refused to accept the formulation "Peace is more important than anything else". Pointing to Indochina and Afghanistan I stated that independence could be more important to the people than peace.
Now when the Swedish freedom of the Press Act is under threat from forces in the European Union it has not been possible to get a majority for a clear and unequivocal statement from Swedish P.E.N. that the organization will defend the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act.
The reason is that a small group among the c. 500 members of Swedish P.E.N. behave as a self appointed leading core. They appear in public as "Swedish P.E.N." without being elected and without any mandate. (They even act as if they had the same power as the Stasi or the KGB and confidently telephone the Foreign Office in the name of P.E.N. to "investigate" Myrdal.)
Important to remember is that in those media where the gate-keepers belong to this self appointed leading core - daily papers like Dagens Nyheter and Expressen and the cultural and news service of the Swedish state radio - there has been no discussion allowed about what Gun Kessle and I really have said. Dagens Nyheter - from whose editorial office the campaign first was organized - has absolutely refused to print any of the articles that discussed the issues. The readers of Dagens Nyheter are as uninformed of what I really have said as were the readers of Pravda in 1965 when I was branded in Moscow as an enemy because I had visited Turkmenistan and written honestly about the national oppression in the then Soviet Central Asia.
But - to be fair - the conservative Svenska Dagbladet, the Labour Aftonbladet and the market oriented Finanstidningen are not as Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, they have printed such articles. Sweden is not quite "gleichgeschaltet", to use the German expression.
The present conflict is not an internal matter for Sweden. The individuals politically most active and personally most dishonest in the defamatory campaign against us in Sweden have been people like Per Wästberg, former chairman of International P.E.N. and Thomas von Vegesack, present vice chairman of International P.E.N. Also the present chairman of International P.E.N. - without having read what I have written!!! - was inspired to give an interview for the Swedish state radio in which he stated that if Myrdal was "a man of honour" he would leave P.E.N. before being thrown out. That I was not asked to reply to this outrageous statement (in itself a breach of the agreement between the state and the broadcasting corporation) goes without saying.
But there are some still more surprising developments. I have been a member of Swedish P.E.N. several decades. I held the keynote speech: "The Loyal Image" (on how ideologically the literature of the colonial and imperialist powers have described the Third World;) in the International P.E.N. meeting in Stockholm 1973. But now 1997 Thomas von Vegesack, vice chairman of International P.E.N. and Per Wästberg, former chairman of International P.E.N. on March 7 1997 - after the decision of the Board not to recommend our exclusion - demanded that the Annual meeting opens a discussion "whether the statements of Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle during the years are in accordance with the PEN Charter. The question of our continued membership in the Club will depend on the stand the Club as a whole takes on this decisive question."
Gun Kessle and I have told the Board that our printed words 1943 to 1997 are publicly available. There are in the National library some 80 volumes and here in our house some 100 volumes of collected articles; there is also a new bibliography just being printed. If the Annual meeting so decides an extraordinary PEN-commission to check this material for un-PEN ideas is free to inspect them. Though we find the very demand for this inspection strange; it bodes ill for the freedom of thought. In fact, I have not heard of anything like it since the US and Soviet witch hunts of the fifties!
I thus suspect that this campaign is organized in the same way that I remember such campaigns being organized against other writers - now passed away - by the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom forty years ago. If so then the International P.E.N. needs cleansing!

All the best from Gun Kessle and Jan Myrdal

F O L K E T  I  B I L D / K U L T U R F R O N T  4/97
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