Thursday, August 7, 2025

Polaris of Enlightenment

Sweden Rock continues to impress

The Nordic region's largest music festival, Sweden Rock, was held this year in Norje, Sölvesborg. Naturally, The Nordic Times culture reporter Mikael Rasmussen was on site to experience the battling stage performances, dramaturgy, and poetic presence that could have been lifted straight from a fairytale world.

Published 24 June 2025
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5 minute read

More of everything sums up this year’s edition of Sweden Rock Festival. Lots of media, tons of photographers, huge crowds, merch, partner companies, Viking and medieval demonstrations of strength in the form of lifting logs in a way that would have been right at home at any Viking market. The audience was treated to high-octane stage art, dramaturgy, and poetic presence drawn from the worlds of film and theater.

Above all, this year’s festival delivered fantastic performances. One of the strongest in terms of musical quality, showmanship, songs, vocals, and overall balance was the band that I saw, heard, and lyrically contemplated at Palladium in Stockholm in 1995. Back then, they were promoting their album Helpyourselfish with its characteristic compositions… Now, 30 years later, better than ever, the Danish band D-A-D, with band members Jesper Binzer on vocals and guitar, his brother Jacob Binzer on guitar and vocals, the ever-charismatic Stig Pedersen on bass and vocals, and Laust Sonne on drums, serve up cool songs such as Sleeping My Day Away, Bad Craziness, Rim Of Hell and more. With a new art CD release in the form of Speed Of Darkness, they are maintaining their brand with good self-esteem and confidence. The rock icons hold it all together with the common thread of recognizability from their successful sound, their unique vocals, beautiful stage clothes, stage presence, charisma, and tight, fat drum and bass lines, to which the audience responded with raised hands and singing along in unison to the famous rock songs.

“Aim to be the best in the world”

Artist Razz also had a chat with guitarist Oskar Lindroos and bassist Jonathan Thyberg from the band Bloodstain, a band that aims to be the biggest in the world. At first, they described their goal as reaching the biggest stage, Festival Stage, at Sweden Rock, but after a while they realized that they had already achieved that goal.

Yeah, we might as well aim to be the best in the world, said Oskar and Jonathan.

They also shared that the band name Bloodstain came about when one of the band members’ fingers started bleeding from playing the strings too hard, and it became so meaningful and symbolic that everyone in the band felt a blood bond.

They describe how the songs are created together in the rehearsal room and how the choice of metal was also made in a truly democratic spirit. All the members of the band have different backgrounds and there is a strong foundation of blues, rock, and metal that contains many of its scales. When asked if harmonica fits into their sound, the answer is obvious.

Hell yes, said Oskar with a twinkle in his eye.

Time flies and the interview with Oskar and Jonathan is over before we know it. Jessica Lindroos, one of the band’s co-managers, enters our interview room and we realize that it’s time to wrap up, hoping to see and hear more from Bloodstains in the future.

A glorious mix of bands

Many visitors praise the Sweden Rock management for managing to put together a festival with so many incredible bands to enjoy, be charmed by, sometimes be frightened by, and repeatedly be completely enthralled by. One of the many great rock bands was definitely The Mercury Riots with their captivating artistry and song catalog. King Diamond was a fascinating experience with his characteristic wonderful falsetto vocals and dynamic theatrical and dramatic performance. A liberating Swedish act that affected the entire Pistonhead tent was Knogjärn with its stage language, light and color play, lyrics, and music that is impossible to resist, which can inspire any coward to start daring to take control of their situation.

Yes, it is definitely memorable to have had the privilege of experiencing these highly skilled bands, some of whom are in their 70s and 80s, such as the Scorpions, who are celebrating their 60th anniversary. These are memories for life that reach all the senses and touch the heartstrings, gilding and adding a golden edge to the lives of all who appreciate these experiences. It was particularly impressive when the band Meshuggah delivered an unparalleled light show in the middle of the night. Soen treated the audience to a musical fire show with a poetic and tasteful performance. Slipknot conjured up all kinds of creatures and had the audience almost speaking, or rather singing, in tongues based on call and response. The bombastic hard rock storytellers of the Swedish hard rock band Sabaton closed the entire festival session – a piece of theatrical drama with props including a tank, Carolingian costumes, gas masks, flamethrowers, and a crescendo of fireworks that made it feel like the entire Sweden Rockauditorium was celebrating New Year’s Eve.

Many bands at the festival also expressed their gratitude and thoughts to all those who worked at the festival site, including Cruzified Barbara, whose singer Mia Karlsson expressed her sympathy for all the children affected in Gaza.

Impressive organization

In the lead-up to Sweden Rock, many column inches were written, including about SVT’s documentary on Sweden Rock and its general, Ingolf Persson, who has shown skepticism toward many journalists – and even toward the memoir book about Sweden Rock and its journey up to the 30-year anniversary released in 2023. Ingolf views it primarily as a fairytale book and holds a distinctly different view of Sweden Rock’s soul than the one presented there

Many campers arrive in style, declaring that camping is half the fun. Visit Blekinge has also described using Sweden Rock as a tool to attract new residents. The festival has been described by some media as pompous and maximal. One person even said, “actually kind of rock’n’roll”…

It’s safe to say that the festival brings together many different people, target groups, and age ranges — and can best be summed up with joy, love, interest, and above all, gratitude. When all is said and done, we got to see and hear as many as 93 bands across five stages with a mixed repertoire – an impressive feat of organization considering the incredible logistics of artist and band transitions, coordinating and accrediting journalists, photographers, audience hosts, security personnel, guards, stage workers, electricians, and more

As the festival neared its end, most realized they had been bitten by the dangerous animals and bands that had graced Sweden Rock — from the viper Huggorm to Scorpions, whose nerve toxins sometimes manifested as ear-shattering, cheeky, and visibly paralyzing death spasms. We’re already looking forward to getting stung again at Sweden Rock Festival 2026.

 

Mikael Rasmussen alias Artist Razz

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A poem about the children in Gaza while the world watches

The genocide in Gaza

The children cry from hunger and dream of peace – but the world remains silent. Swedish artist and poet Malin Sellergren depicts the unbearable reality of children in this poem.

Published 5 August 2025
2 minute read

Daily terror, daily pain,
children cry in Gaza’s rain.
Six thousand trucks with food denied,
they starve while waiting on the side.

The bombs fall hard, the homes are gone,
on the cold ground they sleep until dawn.
At night they scream from endless fear,
by day they cry with hunger near.

When will this torment find its end?
When will the broken hearts still find mend?
No bread to eat, no life to live,
a mother’s boy had love to give.

He thought, I made it, almost there!
but bullets struck and stilled his air.
So many tried for food that day,
the soldiers came and shot their way.

And in the streets, so many fall,
just children, innocent through all.
For they were born in Palestine,
their lives erased, erased in line.

The world’s afraid, its leaders weak,
they whisper low, but dare not speak.
Sanctions stall, while time runs thin,
should we boycott oranges… or tangerines?

Yet weapons flow from west to east,
while crumbs are dropped, a guilty feast.
Millions starve, their hope is small,
the world looks on, and does not call.

No one dares to say “Enough!”
Israel’s hand is far too tough.
And those who speak are smeared with hate,
their voices drowned, their words too late.

Meanwhile children pay the price,
their lives are bartered, sacrificed.
Leaders claim this land their own,
they crush the seeds the kids have sown.

But still, among the ash and flame,
the children whisper freedom’s name.
Though caught in Gaza on the street
some of their hearts still beat.

 

Malin Sellergren, PoeticArtstories

Artists flee Spotify after Ek’s defense investment

The future of AI

Published 30 July 2025
– By Editorial Staff
1 minute read

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s investment in the German defense company Helsing is now prompting several international artists to leave the music streaming service in protest. The Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is the latest name to remove their music from the platform.

Daniel Ek, who is also chairman of the board at Helsing, led an investment of €600 million earlier this year in the German company that specializes in AI-driven autonomous combat solutions. The technology is used for drones and underwater surveillance systems, among other applications.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard announced the decision on Instagram with the words “Fuck Spotify”, explaining that their latest demo recordings will only be available on Bandcamp.

“Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests millions in Al military drone technology. We just removed our music from the platform”, the band wrote.

The California-based band Xiu Xiu and San Francisco group Deerhoof have made the same choice. Deerhoof expressed their position clearly: “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech”.

The protest reflects the music industry’s long-standing ambivalence toward Spotify’s dominant position and impact on artists.

Hard rock legend Ozzy Osbourne dead at 76

Published 22 July 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Osbourne during a performance at BlizzCon 2009.
1 minute read

British metal icon Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76, just weeks after his farewell concert with Black Sabbath in Birmingham, England. “It is with indescribable sorrow that we must announce that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love,” the family announced according to Sky News.

Osbourne rose to fame as the frontman of Black Sabbath during the 1970s and became one of the founders of the heavy metal genre. The band was formed in Birmingham in 1969 and revolutionized music with dark lyrics and heavy guitar riffs. Classic songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” and “War Pigs” defined an entire genre.

After leaving Black Sabbath in 1979 due to drug and alcohol problems, Osbourne built a successful solo career with albums like “Blizzard of Ozz” (1980). During the 2000s, he reached new audiences through MTV’s reality series “The Osbournes.”

Osbourne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease as early as 2003, something he first made public in 2020. On July 5, he performed his final concert at Villa Park in Birmingham together with Black Sabbath.

You have no idea how I feel – thank you from the bottom of my heart, he told the audience then.

Osbourne is survived by his wife Sharon and five children.

The miracle in the land of the Savior

The new multipolar world order

In just a few years, El Salvador defeated the brutal gang crime that had plagued the country for decades. President Nayib Bukele has been accused of being “undemocratic” by his globalist opponents, but among Salvadorans themselves he has achieved near-heroic status and is now spearheading a Bitcoin revolution.

Published 19 July 2025
– By Editorial Staff
9 minute read

El Salvador, literally “the Savior” or in other words “the land of the Savior”, formally became an independent country in 1842. The liberation of the Latin American country came after a civil war in the relatively newly formed country of the Central American Federation, which in 1823 had freed itself from the Mexican Empire, a Mexico that just two years earlier, in 1821, had proclaimed its independence from the Spanish crown.


The article was originally published in The Nordic Times on February 2, 2025.


Despite its name, the tiny nation would have to wait patiently for its salvation. El Salvador would come to be dominated by corrupt forces and has been known more than any other in modern times as part of Central America’s so-called “banana republics”, not only because of the presence of US-based corporate giants where the country went so far as to adopt the US dollar as its own currency, but also because El Salvador has long been known as a particular den of brutal and literally devil-worshipping criminal gangs, such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, which still have a strong presence even in the organized crime world.

Before that, the country was mainly associated with the protracted civil war that raged there for 13 long years between 1979 and 1992 in one of the many Cold War proxy conflicts between pro-American and pro-Soviet forces in the country.

Two years after the outbreak of the Salvadoran civil war, Nayib Bukele was born in 1981 in the capital, San Salvador. His father, Armando Bukele Kattán, was a prominent Palestinian businessman and Muslim leader who arranged for his first-born son to study law at the Central American University in El Salvador. Nayib never completed his degree, however, and instead went into business. According to him, this experience would allow him to develop two skills that he later described as crucial to his political career – communicating and leading with clarity.

Bukeles’ political career began in earnest in 2012 when he was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small municipality outside the capital San Salvador. His successes there – including economic reforms and social programs – led him to become mayor of the capital San Salvador in 2015. During this time, he distinguished himself as a simultaneously pragmatic, outspoken and visionary leader.

Despite the enormous risks involved in challenging the political establishment, which was completely infested by the tentacles of gang crime, Bukele came to increasingly openly criticize them for destroying the country and for betraying their voters.

Bukele meets the people.

In 2017, Bukele was expelled from his then-party, the FMLN, following internal conflicts, and founded his own party, Nuevas Ideas, which would become the platform for his daring campaign to run for president on a message of renewal and modernization. Despite difficult obstacles put in his way by political opponents, Bukele eventually won the 2019 elections by a historic margin, becoming the first president since 1992 not to belong to the two dominant parties, the socialist-oriented FMLN or the more bourgeois-conservative ARENA.

“They can kill anybody”

However, the difficulties were not over despite the electoral victory of the Salvadoran president, with his opponents sparing no means to stop him. They still controlled the Supreme Court and 90% of the legislature.

– I had to veto everything, and they override my vetoes. And they enact, they approved over 70 laws that I veto, Bukele explains in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.

The only solution Bukele saw was to also win a majority in the country’s Congress, which he would also succeed in doing. Today, only the electoral court, controlled by the liberal opposition, tried unsuccessfully to have the president impeached and jailed, which Bukele himself believes failed only because of the establishment’s fear of a large-scale popular revolt if he were to be removed from office.

Bukele tells Carlson that his first priority was to fulfill his election promise to tackle organized crime once and for all.

– You can’t do anything unless you have peace. And once you achieve peace, then you can struggle for the other things, like infrastructure, wealth, well being, quality of life. So we had to start with peace. And in the case of El Salvador, we were literally the murder capital of the world, says Bukele.

Bukele salutes the Salvadoran army.

One of the first things he did was to double the number of soldiers in the country’s army, equip them with modern equipment and then systematically deploy them to fight organized crime with a determination that had previously been lacking. The gangs, understandably, did not appreciate this and tried to fight back including a murder wave that killed 87 people in the small country in just three days.

– They can kill anybody. And if the state goes after them, the state has no intention of killing or harming anybody but the gang members. So you have 70,000 objectives, which were the 70,000 gang members, but they have 6 million possible targets (the population of the country). So it was almost an impossible task, said the president.

El Salvador’s new high-security prison CECOT, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or “terrorist prison” in English, houses the most serious gang members with a capacity for 40,000 prisoners. Life in the prison is extremely strict, with the only leisure time consisting of simple exercise and services by priests.

Even independent analysts point out that El Salvador is a very different country today than it was when Mr. Bukeles took office and that, according to the country’s official statistics, it has become the least crime-ridden of the American continents, including Canada and the United States.

– We’re safer than any other country in the western hemisphere. If I would have said that five years ago, they would say that I was crazy, right?

Mr. Bukele himself stresses that his government has not had access to any magic recipes, but that it has been able to solve the problem of gang crime because it had the political will and determination to actually do it.

– There’s always going to be crime, people breaking laws, but violent crime, people murdering and raping each other, is a voluntary decision that a government makes. Why would a government choose to have that? he asks.

Massive popular support

Politically, Bukeles’ El Salvador has also broken the mold on covid policy, with the government choosing to encourage healthy eating and exercise, rather than forcing the controversial covid vaccines on the population with covid passes. It was also one of the few countries to offer the drug hydroxychloroquine as an alternative treatment for COVID-19, something that Bukele pointed out was used by most world leaders themselves.

The focus of Bukele’s policies has been to push for economic reforms and, as part of this, he has made El Salvador the first country in the world to accept Bitcoin as legal tender meaning that it will be accepted as valid payment for all forms of debt and transactions. Enthusiasts of the new crypto-economy are now gathering in El Salvador, which many believe could become a new “tiger economy” in the Americas.

In the Western media, Bukele has been portrayed as something of a “dictator” who has rejected “human rights” in the context of mass arrests of suspected gang members and periods of prolonged military surveillance of specific areas of the country. Both domestic and international critics have accused the president of trying to centralize power, create a police state and undermine so-called democratic institutions and principles.

When he was re-elected in 2024 in a spectacular landslide with 84.6% of the vote, he responded to these criticisms in his much-publicized acceptance speech to the population by putting their rights before those of organized criminals.

– We are the safest country in the American continent. And what did they tell us? “You’re violating human rights”. Whose human rights? The rights of honest people? No. Perhaps we have prioritized the rights of the honest people over the criminals’ rights. That is all we have done, and that’s what you say is a human rights violation, Bukele declared.

Bukele with his wife Gabriela Roberta Rodríguez de Bukele. Photo: Casa Presidencial El Salvador

In an ironic response to similar epithets directed at him, he has referred to himself on Twitter/X as the “World’s coolest dictator”. The President has also become known for his extensive use of social media, particularly X, which he uses to communicate directly with the people, and sometimes to consult with the public on his decision-making.

This digital presence has made him very popular also among younger generations, who often see him as a modern leader of a very different type than the political establishment that ruled the country in the past.

The warning to the West

Bukele expresses personal criticism of the soft approach to criminals in the West, of which he considers El Salvador to be a part, pointing out that they are often seen as individuals with rights that need to be protected even if they are violent killers and organized gang members. This attitude, according to Bukele, ultimately leads to a point where civilization itself begins to crumble.

– So western civilization reached the peak. We can all agree that we’re in the decline. So that is happening because we’re not maintaining, we’re not giving the correct maintenance to the civilization, he says, explaining that we are no longer striving to do things as well and grandly as possible.

– Democracy works, but if you don’t maintain it, it will fall like the wall. So what we have right now is a huge erosion of Western civilization, Bukele concludes.

He points out that governments today seem mostly interested in appeasing individual constituencies to get their votes – for example, by giving them large sums of money or other generous promises, and that they no longer seem to care about what is good for the nation as a whole.

– You cannot go on. I mean, it’s like obvious. It’s like somebody eats too much, right? I mean, you can be a little fat, right? It’s fine. But then if somebody’s morbidly fat, somebody will come and say, okay, you mean you have to stop, right? Because, you know, your heart would. Your heart can’t take it anymore.

 

One focus for the outspoken president, now that the gangs have been defeated, is to attract investors and tourists to the country rather than being a haven for murderers and violent criminals. “There is enough money when no one steals is one of many similar quotes that sum up Bukele’s vision for the country’s future and have made him so popular with his own people.

Bukele often posts pictures showing how the country’s military and police fight organized crime. Photo: Nayib Bukele/FB

Many also argue that the success is an expression of the rise of a new generation of national populist leaders in a near-global revolt against the globalist “rainbow empire” characterized by gender ideology, demographic upheaval, coddling of violent criminals, and a huge gap between the political establishment and the population at large.

The Salvadoran president has also not been shy about explicitly criticizing influential globalists such as George Soros and others who he says have pushed for these kinds of developments in the West, and still have too much power over politics in many countries.

In his victory speech to the people in 2024, Bukele also articulated the importance for small nations to be alert to the actors of global politics, with El Salvador being just one example of many nations that have suffered in the wake of various factions of globalist-oriented actors and great powers.

– The civil war in El Salvador, which officially left over 85,000 Salvadorans dead, and displaced over 1 million people, was sponsored by two separate powers. There was a conflict between the West and the Soviet Union, and they wanted to fight, but not on their own soil. They didn’t want to provide the cannon fodder. So they decided to fight in other places around the world, and one of those places that they chose to fight was here in El Salvador. They tricked us. They told us to kill each other and we did as they said.

Bukele concluded by adding his view that there are now powerful players on the global stage who fear the example El Salvador has already shown.

We will continue to do the impossible, and El Salvador will continue to set an example for the world.

 

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