Graph of the day – Some unpleasant facts for Swedish "peace activists"

We celebrate our National Day today, the 6^th of June. But not all of us think it is something to celebrate. There are those among us that want to destroy our country. These people are, as in other countries, left- and right-wing extremists who worship Putin. It may look strange that people with so diverse views admire the bare-chested little dictator. The common denominator for these groups is of course Putin’s deep contempt of human rights.

The left-wing extremists engage in “peace movements” in every country. Some of the these people and their activities are described in the part about Sweden here.

These people hate our co-operation with the NATO aiming at increasing our abilities to defend ourselves against Russia. The disinformation campaigns targeting this co-operation and our mildly increasing military expenditures have taken many forms. One form is the establishment of a network of organisations and political parties aiming at stopping our military exercises with NATO-countries and other countries such as Finland.

Russia has not been exposed to any military, or other, threat from other countries since the Soviet Union collapsed.

A common theme in the disinformation campaigns is that there is no need for Sweden to co-operate with NATO or increase its defence capacities. That is supposed to be pointless or even counterproductive. Pointless because Russia does not pose a threat to Sweden and counterproductive because increasing Swedish military exercises leads to “increased tensions”.

Pathetic arguments of course. Following the collapse of Soviet Union, most countries, and especially Sweden, decreased its military expenditures and the USA pulled back most of its troops and weapons from Europe. We, and most other countries, did not increase our military expenditures not even when Putin massively did so as shown in Figure 2 here.

On the contrary, the military expenditures occupied smaller and smaller shares in GDP and total government expenditures in most countries, including Sweden while the opposite occured in Russia.

Military expenditures in Russia and Sweden

Source: www.sipri.org

So, given the evidence above, the “peace activists” should ask: Why has Russia increased its military expenditures and capacity so massively since Putin became president?

Of course, they won’t ask that question. And if they would ask, they wouldn’t ask people in Georgia and Ukraine who have first-hand hard experiences of not living in a NATO country.