Olof Palme

Olof Palme
Born	Sven Olof Joachim Palme 30 January 1927 Stockholm, Sweden
Died	28 February 1986 (Age 59) Stockholm, Sweden
Cause of death	Olof Palme/Assassination
Nationality	Swedish
Alma mater	Sigtunaskolan, Stockholm University, Kenyon College
Children	• Joakim • Mårten • Mattias
Spouse	Lisbet Palme
Victim of	assassination
Interest of	Sven Aspling
Party	Swedish Social Democratic Party
Subpage	•Olof Palme/Assassination
Leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969, and two-term Prime Minister, until his assassination in 1986.  Prime Minister of Sweden  In office 14 October 1969 - 8 October 1976 Preceded by Tage Erlander Succeeded by Thorbjörn Fälldin  Prime Minister of Sweden  In office 8 October 1982 - 28 February 1986  Swedish Social Democratic Party/Leader In office 14 October 1969 - 28 February 1986  President of the Nordic Council In office 1979 Preceded by Olof Palme Succeeded by Olof Palme  Sweden/Minister/Education  In office 1 January 1968 - 14 October 1969  Sweden/Minister/Communications In office 25 November 1965 - 29 September 1967 Dates unknown

Olof Palme led the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 to his assassination in 1986. While being a part of the Swedish deep state, he also was the target of a multiyear covert US campaign using submarines false flag (The secret war against Sweden). The assassination is still unresolved, thanks to a decidedly problematic police investigation.

Full article: Olof Palme/Assassination

Early life

Olof Palme came from an upper-middle-class, conservative and at the same time tolerant and cosmopolitan family. His parents were Gunnar Palme (1886-1934), managing director of the Insurance Company Thule, and the Baltic-German Elisabeth von Knieriem (1890-1972), who was born in the Russian province of Livonia but came in 1915 as a refugee to Sweden. Her paternal grandmother Hanna von Born was of Finnish-Swedish nobility. As a four-year-old, Palme spoke French with his nanny, German with his mother, and Swedish with his siblings.

Olof Palme first attended private school in Stockholm. Later he transferred to the elite boarding school of Sigtuna. He did his military service as a lieutenant of cavalry.

Through his mother's relationships, he began to write – unpaid – for the country's largest conservative newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, until he received a scholarship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation for Kenyon College in Ohio, USA. Palme wrote his senior honour thesis on the United Auto Workers union, led at the time by Walter Reuther. On weekends he visited factories and got acquainted with the trade union movement. 1947/48 he received a Bachelor of Arts with a thesis on the concept of freedom in Friedrich August von Hayek's The Road to Servitude, and followed it up with a few months off, during which he hitchhiked around 34 US states. According to his later self-assessment, the experience of the USA gave him a strong feeling for the social inequality prevailing there. In the autumn of 1948, Palme began studying law at the University of Stockholm and joined the Social Democratic Student Association there, in 1952/53 he was /chairman of the Swedish Student Body. He graduated with a Bachelor of Laws.

From 1949 to 1952 he was married to the Czech Jelena Rennerová in a fictitious marriage. On June 9, 1956, Palme married the psychologist Lisbeth Beck-Friis; they had three sons: Joachim, Marten and Mattias.

Early political career

Palme was a member of the Social Democratic Student Club in Stockholm (SSK). In 1952, Palme became chairman of the Swedish National Union of Students, a position he held for a year. In 1953 he was recruited to become Bureau secretary at the military Defence Staff in the government of prime minister Tage Erlander, becoming Erlander's personal secretary and adviser. In the summer of 1955, was promoted to lieutenant in the cavalry reserve. In 1954, Palme advanced in the government office, becoming secretary of the Council of State, until 1961.

In 1957 he was elected as a Member of Parliament representing Jönköping County in the directly-elected First Chamber (Första kammaren) of Sweden's Riksdag. In the early 1960s Palme became a member of the Agency for International Assistance (NIB) and was in charge of inquiries into assistance to the developing countries and educational aid.

Palme was elected to parliament in 1957. In 1963, he became a member of the Cabinet - as Minister without Portfolio in the Cabinet Office, and retained his duties as a close political adviser to Prime Minister Tage Erlander. In 1965, he became Minister of Transport and Communications. In 1967 he became Minister of Education and, the following year, he was the target of strong criticism from left-wing students protesting against the government's plans for university reform. When party leader Tage Erlander stepped down in 1969, Olof Palme was elected as the new leader by the Social Democratic party congress and succeeded Erlander as Prime Minister.

Policies

As leader of a new generation of Swedish Social Democrats, Olof Palme was often described as a "revolutionary reformist". Domestically, his socialist views — especially the Social Democrat drive to expand Labour Union influence over business — engendered a great deal of hostility from more conservatively inclined Swedes.

Olof Palme carried out major reforms in the Swedish constitution such as orchestrating a switch from bicameralism to unicameralism in 1969 and in 1975 replacing the 166-year-old Instrument of Government (at the time the oldest political constitution in the world after that of the United States) with a new one officially establishing parliamentary democracy rather than de jure monarchic autocracy, abolishing the Privy Council of Sweden and stripping King Carl XVI Gustav of most powers held even by ceremonial monarchs in Denmark, Norway and the United Kingdom.

Olof Palme was a firm believer in nuclear power as a necessary form of energy, at least for a transitional period to curb the use of fossil fuel. His intervention in Sweden's 1980 referendum on the future of nuclear power is often pinpointed by opponents of nuclear power as saving it. Nuclear power remains one of the most important sources of energy in Sweden, much attributed to Palme's actions.

On 21 February 1968, Palme (then Minister of Education) participated in a protest in Stockholm against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War together with the North Vietnamese Ambassador to the Soviet Union Nguyen Tho Chan. The protest was organised by the Swedish Committee for Vietnam and Palme and Nguyen were both invited as speakers. As a result of this, the U.S. recalled its Ambassador from Sweden and Palme was fiercely criticised by the opposition for his participation in the protest.

On 23 December 1972, Palme (then Prime Minister) made a speech on Swedish national radio where he compared the ongoing US bombings of Hanoi to historical atrocities, namely the bombing of Guernica, the massacres of Oradour-sur-Glane, Babi Yar, Katyn massacre, Lidice, the Sharpeville massacre and the Treblinka extermination camp. The US government called the comparison a "gross insult" and once again decided to freeze its diplomatic relations with Sweden (this time the freeze lasted for over a year).

Despite such associations, and contrary to stated Social Democratic Party policy, Sweden in fact secretly maintained extensive military co-operation with NATO over a long period, and was even under the protection of a US military security guarantee.

In response to Palme's remarks in a meeting with the US ambassador to Sweden ahead of the Socialist International Meeting in Helsingør in January 1976, Kissinger asked the US ambassador to "(...) convey my personal appreciation to Palme for his frank presentation (...).

Palme hatred

Born into the upper class and with upper class manners and speech, but belonging to the Social Democrats and at at times with declared left-radical policies, Palme was seen both as a class traitor and outright Soviet traitor by some, he was hated more than any other left-wing politician, a phenomenon noted and given the name the Palme hatred. The haters were a mixture of disparate right-wing elements: outright Nazis and neoliberals. The old order establishment alongside nationalist revolutionaries. Economists side by side with naval officers. Conservatives and right-wing extremists, businessmen, the bourgeoisie, the CIA and the police. In several right-wing circles the assassination was welcomed with joy.

Assassination

Full article: Olof Palme/Assassination

An alleged SADF Military Intelligence report, dated 15 October 1985, concluded that Palme "should be seen as an enemy of the State." He was assassinated in February 1986.

Olof Palme was assassinated in Sweden on 28 February 1986 whilst walking home from a cinema with his wife. A decidedly problematic Official Narrative of the assassination suggests that it was the work of a "lone nut". Evidence is gradually emerging that his assassination was a deep event, including a document from October 1985 before his assassination that stated that "should be seen as an enemy of the State." A Dutch documentary had a Belgian investigator saying the murder was the work of Operation Gladio.

Suspect named

After spending the first two years on goose chases, the police in 1988 chose to finger Christer Pettersson, an alcoholic petty criminal as the killer, and managed to convict him, but it was overturned on appeal. Other suspects are mooted from time to time, including Stig Engström, an advertising consultant named as the "lone nut" suspect in the murder case by authorities on 10 June 2020, 34 years after the assassination.

Palme, the documentary

The 2012 film Palme

Palme is a Swedish documentary film premiered in Sweden on 14 September 2012 and written by Maud Nycander and Kristina Lindström. The film is a biographical portrait of the former prime minister Olof Palme, and covers his life from childhood to the role as a leading figure of Swedish politics. On general release in 2012, it has been shown as a 103-minute long feature film, and as a 175-minute long TV-movie in three parts on SVT at Christmas and New Year. On Friday evening, February 28, 1986 Olof Palme was shot dead in the street. The day after, news reached out to the people that the country's prime minister was dead, and the whole country found itself suddenly shocked. The film follows Palme's life from his youth until he is assassinated. It contains material from Palme's family that has never been shown in public, private snapshots and family movies.

External links

• Olof Palme Archives - Olof Palme Memorial Fund - Olof Palme International Center
• The Swedish Submarine Scare and the Palme Assassination: Lessons from the 1980s in Media Manipulation in Liberal Democracies - (see The Reagan Method)

 

A Olof Palme victim on Wikispooks

Title	Description
Olof Palme	Leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969, and two-term Prime Minister, until his assassination in 1986.

 

Appointments by Olof Palme

Appointee	Job	Appointed	End
Bernt Carlsson	Special Emissary to the Middle East and Africa	1983	1985
Kjell-Olof Feldt	Sweden/Minister/Finance	1 January 1983	16 February 1990

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1965	2 April 1965	4 April 1965	Italy Villa d'Este	The 14th Bilderberg meeting, held in Italy
Bilderberg/1973	11 May 1973	13 May 1973	Sweden Saltsjöbaden	The meeting at which the 1973 oil crisis appears to have been planned.
Bilderberg/1984	11 May 1984	13 May 1984	Sweden Saltsjöbaden	The 32nd Bilderberg, held in Sweden
Geijer Affair			Sweden	Swedish 1970s prostitution/VIPaedophile exposure with possible intelligence blackmail ties.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Afterword to "Who Really Killed Chris Hani?"	Book	29 February 2024	Christopher Nicholson	Courts have decided that freedom of expression trumps all other rights as without it nobody, including the courts, would ever hear of breaches of other rights. So those who have attempted to suppress this book have prevented the world from discovering and prosecuting the criminals, who perpetrated the foul murders. In law we would describe them as accessories after the fact of these killings.
Document:Olof Palme - The Man Who Played With Fire	book review	2020	Simon Matthews	Bernt Carlsson, a colleague of Olof Palme’s and UN Commissioner for Namibia 1987-1988, died in the Lockerbie bombing on 21 December 1988. Carlsson's presence on Pan Am Flight 103 has been cited as the reason it was bombed.
Document:Olof Palme — South African Spies Likely Murdered Sweden Prime Minister	Article	12 March 2018	Ludwig De Braeckeleer	Top Secret Apartheid Intelligence Report says that Olof Palme must “now be seen as an enemy of the State”
Document:PanAm-Rätsel LOCKERBIE: Es war Südafrika!…so wie bei Olof Palme	Article	6 October 1996	Kurt Seinitz	"It would have been easy for South African secret service agents, who had infiltrated Sweden's anti-apartheid movement, to exchange Carlsson's tape recorder in a hotel room against one containing the bomb. And then placing it inside one of those 'ubiquitous' Samsonite suitcases, so beloved by the peripatetic Bernt Carlsson."
Document:Reinstatement in HM Diplomatic Service	Letter	6 January 1997	Patrick Haseldine	A plea for reinstatement in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office by "Thatcher's Whitehall Critic"
Document:Who Really Killed Chris Hani?	Book	29 February 2024	Christopher Nicholson	"Apart from Chris Hani’s murder, we deal with five others, spread over three decades: Patrice Lumumba in September 1961; Dag Hammarskjöld on 18 September 1961; Olof Palme on 28 February 1986; Bernt Carlsson on 21 December 1988; and Anton Lubowski on 12 September 1989."

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