Had anyone asked me, say, ten years past, my likelihood of answering how I would describe Jan Myrdal's (now very recent, and having occurred almost unexpected) passing I would unlikely have found myself replying in the nostalgic, or even the most tedious, shambolic exercise of mourning. For decades he was a divisive figure of Joker-esque proportions, the first troll if you like (and if you've never heard of Socrates, or any of his more likely followers), a contrarian of majesty comparable to his parents or brother-in-law in their own respective careers, or even the Internet, was an issue for less divisive, though seldom as prolific, authors to consider. And in this sovereignty, if not always consistent, was his greatness. (And yes, I will return to Connery, the fitting antagonist to pass the same weekend, shortly. Image below, considering this, is very deliberate.)
Always, without apology, without overt irony, the villain. The Devil of Folkhemmet.
Born to a womb and penile rapture - as he might have put it - then not yet in their prime, he might have been destined for greatness. But in his youth, Jan - Ian as he might have been known had he followed his instincts to stay and become an American, non-hyphenated - to purchase the great liberal struggles, as we may know them, for the First Amendment and a Marxist feminism in recognition of economic rights and labour and in opposition to the second and particularly third wave denounced by his follower, last millennium's inhabitant Björn Afzelius. Above all he possessed a desire for the contrarian, the provocateur without a cause (or rather as one who didn't need an explicit cause) for truth in all its forms. He became a man of the left, as his background may both suggest and disconcert, but certainly one his father would have, and did, disown as such, and ultimately a man who could only stick to - and sometimes alter - his own convictions. Like his detractor Per Ahlmark, who he preceded by one decade and outlived into another, he had issues with ever recognising this fact, but in his always-opposition nature and refusal to actually hold the reins he so dastardly endorsed, from time to time, in their most excruciating and destructive endeavours, and stubborn to foolhardy maintenance of the Enlightenment and revolutionary principles so contemporaneously discarded by "his" left (including, in many cases, his followers).
His private life, so often intertwined with the public, the political, almost deliberately so, was no less publicised or, lacking a more precise phrase, discouraged. He grew quickly into a man but always remained the steadfast, stubborn boy at Central Station, eloping from school and family - with which he would break, still quite young, forever - into cohabitation and first marriage, the bourgeois institution with which he never managed to break. In one of the latter, equally entertaining and miserable, articles about his personal situation, he meekly and self-debasingly remarked that no woman would ever express interest at a 91-year old at Tinder, a fact he may have found misproven had he ever put it to the test. Jan remained a icon with the young and "revolutionary" bourgeoisie long after his heyday, and crowned his aging, if not ailing, career with successive, increasingly Hefner-like marriages with followers following the death of his impossibly long-lasting wife, Gun. Many came to lament, as they never outrightly condemned him, their fates, but the magnetic quality he must have possessed, yet never imbuing it with those qualities that mark a cult leader; the sarcastic, insulting, even self-abasing always taking heyday over the charismatic. Even as he praised the Cambodian known as Saloth Sar long after his death, one was left with little imagination of what would have been Jan's fate, had he joined that fateful struggle and bothered, as he always did, with speaking his mind. This watching from the barricades - and in the Cambodian excursion, very much near the genocide - of a new society forming well beyond the barricades and gates of his own cluttered-to-comfortable home, was typical and a focal point of admonishing critique; yet he never relented, preferring to speak his mind to a room, and develop his theory form the perspective and strategy of the strictly long term.
Consistantly annoying, in constant review of the past. Leaving him into a legacy of public ownership is a library of Gladstonian proportions. How many - even of his contemporaries - have even beheld as many volumes, let alone fondled them?
Expelled from the PEN Society in the late 1980s after defending the crushing of the Tiananmen uprising, a tone characteristically taken by near-octogenarian autocrats in the Eastern Bloc (who he generally resented, or brushed off) and adding to the humiliation - if not his own - by defending the clerical death sentence against Rushdie as ecclesiastically (if not morally) upright, he both saluted the coming tide of left-wing neurotic self-abasement over the higher and less surrepticious tide of challenges to the Enlightenment, and particularly what fellow detractor Christopher Hitchens christened "fascism with an Islamic face". He never joined that train, or even came to praise it as fellow post-colonial scholars merrily did, but certainly angered - rightly - his fellows on the broader New Left and the Enlightenment-Americanophiles of liberal strands alike. His was, ultimately and strangely for a man of the progressive, ofttimes regressive (such as on the issue of Rushdie, and his Scandinavian descendents) left, a defender of the rights of small nations, of the sovereignty principle, of the plurality and difference in social and cultural customs, on whom he spent substantial chronological, intellectual and physical resources, which a non-imperialist world order would endure and toil under. While there would be little certainty for the principles of individual autonomy and free speech, above all, which he lauded in such an order, he was nevertheless vindicated again and again, and in the end - having alienated nearly everyone not of near-masochistically held views - refused to die. If the Sweden of the age of Folkhemmet and bureaucratic, intrusive, rights-denouncing (still a prevalent feature of our illiberal constitution; the one he denounced as well for cementing and centralising power with its elimination of the liberal elements inherent in its 1809 predecessor) state had indeed been a Soviet Union, as many of his detractors thought and as he might have implied in the lesser sense, he might have been a martyr of Solzhenitsyn's proportions. Whether his Churchill-like or Poirot-esque arrogance and consistently annoying relativism, and focus on the subjective and personalised, almost "yellow"-y autobiographical would have befitted such a character, or indeed made it more endearing, and branded a soul of courage and actual accomplishment, is a fact minted for the everlasting question of unconsummated opportunity.
Solidarity is not the concern for the other, but concern for those things that are common.
Jan Myrdal, 1927-2020, however he would describe himself
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