An abbreviated version of the speech below was given in connection with the award ceremony. This is the unabridged speech.
Dear friends, dear laureates, dear former laureates!
Today is the 25th day of the Month of Fog, year 234. This is according to the French Republican Calendar, and we will be awarding the Robespierre Prize – or, as it is also called, Jan Myrdal’s small prize. The prize will go in the year 234, or 2025 if you like, to an activist and writer who works in the refractory spirit of Myrdal and Robespierre: Andi Olluri!
The justification is as follows:
“The young activist and student Andi Olluri has already at the age of 20 established himself as a sharp media and system critic when it comes to the power over our thoughts. In the spirit of Jan Myrdal, he has systematically gone to the newspaper files and with stunning empirical evidence and logic demonstrated the stupidity, hypocrisy and double standards that regularly govern our public conversation in both Sweden and the rest of the Western world when conflicts in the wake of the ravages of colonialism are presented and discussed before all the people and where the very laws of thought represent the thoughts of the rulers in a one-eyed world.”
Jan Myrdal sometimes spoke of “on our side” and referred to the left that does not consist of constant turncoats. Who does not see a job at Timbro as the best career choice. He did not mean a left where everyone agreed on everything, far from it, but the left that has actively chosen not to adapt to the prevailing political climate. The left that knows fascism by its gait.
Jan Myrdal writes:
“We are shaped by and bound by our time, but we are not necessarily condemned to participate in its great public lies!”
Andi, you belong on our side. And that is where you are now. And you are most welcome! If I understand you correctly, you may have shown more interest in Bakunin than in Marx, preferred Emma Goldman to Rosa Luxemburg, found Britta Gröndahl more interesting than Hilding Hagberg. Maybe that irritates someone, but it doesn’t matter.
Your book from 2023 was called Beyond Ukraine – Swedish ideology and propaganda in the new cold war. Göran Therborn, who received the Lenin Award here at the theatre in Varberg in 2019, yes, or in the year 227, writes in the book’s foreword that: “…the main theme is the bottomless self-flattery, hypocrisy and crude ruthlessness of the Western powers and their Swedish servants and ideologists. It is borne of a burning moral commitment, each of us has a moral responsibility for our stance on the world’s oppression, conflicts and wars.”
It’s easy to agree. Your texts really burn, you don’t let anyone get away with it, you’re not afraid of crushing formulations laced with vitriol and if anyone should doubt what you write, the sources are in extensive footnotes. In addition, you choose words with great care and a measure of irony. As a reader, I sometimes have to stop and think, understand your thoughts, it’s stimulating even if it’s probably mostly due to my own squareness. We recognize a Myrdalesque language. The assertive, the substantiated, the polemically straightforward. But it is not a copy of Myrdal’s style that we see in you, your style stands in its own right and is, I dare say, unique in today’s debate.
Your texts constitute a kind of investigative journalism. You find connections, holy and unholy alliances, the adaptability and spinelessness of politicians and the media. The empty sacks of experts, filled more with crap than facts. In your texts, the authorities are stripped naked and made to stand with shame. You point out in an article about NATO that it is not the rapid and poorly anchored accession process that is the big problem. It would not have mattered if it had taken four years to become a member, the problem is NATO, the military group you call an offensive alliance. You show what is not really allowed to be said or at least is never said in the media. Namely, that our rulers, eagerly cheered on by knaves, the media and so-called experts, have simply decided to agree. The will of the people is against it, but for the sake of appearance, a little appropriate bickering about the process itself is offered.
In another article you rob Magnus Ranstorp of his honour and conclude with: “A common feature of Ranstorp’s analyses is that he claims things that have no basis in facts, and that he would not get away with even in the Israeli or American media. Here in Sweden, however, he is allowed to continue.” This is very concrete political and activist gonzo journalism, completely in the spirit of Hunter S Thompson. A part of the journalistic craft that is essentially non-existent in Sweden.
It is clear that you are also joining another important tradition: that of almost constant reading and almost constant writing. If you don’t do one, you have to do the other. It is important to make the best possible use of the time that is given. Myrdal sees the time that is given as Balzac’s magic skin, it is constantly shrinking. You can observe Robespierre. The unassuming lawyer, with well-kept but simple clothes, constantly at work, reading, writing, arguing, out of the necessity that the revolution demanded of him. But that obviously does not mean that writing is an expression of an ascetic life. To treat oneself to wine, women and song, to leave the learned chamber sometimes, to go out and about. Myrdal knew that. Robespierre probably never understood it.
Reading demanding texts, long texts – and writing these texts – are acts of resistance. Largely political acts of resistance. Against linguistic degradation. How do the politicians who themselves demand language tests from others and are neglecting school libraries express themselves? Polarized and stupid! As if the space under the hat parking lot were completely deserted, empty.
In October Poems, Lars Forssell has Lenin exclaim:
“I must use words
when I speak to you.
You must learn words”
The difficult words, in complicated contexts, become urgent in a social climate like the current one. The media simplify, as if they were vassals of power, bound by oaths of allegiance. On our side, it is important to break through the simplifications. Your hammer-like prose is needed in the debate.
The worst thing about being a writer is that there are editors. Most often ignorant, square-headed and generally incomprehensible to the greatness of texts. Pure idiots, simply. Who have difficulty understanding that texts cannot be shortened, that the words chosen are the only possible ones. When I asked you to shorten your text, the one now in Myrdaliana 2025, you did so in good humour and with understanding that sometimes you must shorten. I was a little worried, it must be said, about your response to my request. Peter Himmelstrand, who not only wrote popular song texts but was also a language curator at Expressen, used to say: “A text that is longer than twenty lines is too long.” Sometimes it is actually true. But most of the time it is not. Something to think about sometimes during your many years to come in the service of refractory journalism, where compressed rhetoric also has an important place.
Congratulations on the prize!