The Nordic Link

Winning by Stepping Outside Social Media

2026-04-14T17:00:00.001-04:00

"Facts have a hard time winning our collective attention which explains why Munchausen-Trump has been such an effective communicator. His constant lying may in part reflect a rotting prefrontal cortex, but could as well result from a lifelong habit."

Love and Revolution - A New Novel Suite

2026-02-25T19:58:00.006-05:00

Love and Revolution is an introspective and deeply personal exploration of love and the meaning of life. The emotional, philosophical, and ideological challenges at the heart of Johan’s journey—in a turbulent time of war, balance of terror, and socio-political upheavals—should resonate with readers drawn to character-driven, reflective narratives.

A Kind of Madness, Book 1

Johan’s relationship with Cecilia was built on a shared political faith with its roots in the student rebellion of 1968 and the protest movement against the Vietnam War. But he loses his faith and without it, they were just two people living together in an equally dull and modern working-class suburb.

He resumes his studies while working night-shifts at a big Stockholm newspaper. Cecilia starts dreaming of starting a family and having a child, but Johan falls in love with another woman who however rejects his feelings, sending him out on a long wandering through his personal Purgatory.

Then his father dies, deepening his crisis. He leaves Cecilia and moves in with his mother to support her. He drops out of politics and tries to focus on his studies, but his mind flutters. This is also the year when he turns 30, a number that scares him. A third of his life has passed. What is he going to do with the remaining two thirds? He is stuck.

Coming Soon: Love and Revolution, Part One

2026-01-14T12:23:00.001-05:00

“My eyes being set on her to whom my mind
Was altogether subject and in prison:”

(Dante, Commedia, Purgatory, Canto XVIII)

Johan’s relationship with Cecilia was built on a shared political faith with its roots in the student rebellion of 1968 and the protest movement against the Vietnam War. But he loses his faith and without it, they were just two people living together in an equally dull and modern working-class suburb.

He resumes his studies while working night-shifts at a big Stockholm newspaper. Cecilia starts dreaming of starting a family and having a child, but Johan falls in love with another woman who rejects his feelings, sending him out on a long wandering through his personal Purgatory.

Then his father dies, deepening his crisis. He leaves Cecilia and moves in with his mother to support her. He drops out of politics and tries to focus on his studies, but his mind flutters. This is also the year when he turns 30, a number that scares him. A third of his life has passed. What is he going to do with the remaining two thirds? He is stuck.

Love and Revolution follows a young man during the mid-1980s as he searches for true love and a meaningful life.

The first volume of Love and Revolution will be published on Substack, as an ebook, in paperback, and in hardcover. The ensuing volumes will follow over the coming months. The books will also be available on Amazon.com or your local Amazon site.

Winter Sale at Sandberg Features - Enjoy!

2025-12-17T11:52:00.003-05:00

A Coffee Break Is Better Than Confucius -- My 1985 Interview With Professor Guo Kexin

2025-06-15T13:01:00.004-04:00

The other day I read an interview with Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the telecom and electronics giant Huawei. What this great entrepreneur said about creating good conditions for science and research brought me back to 1985, when I interviewed Professor Guo Kexin (1923-2006), a member of the Chinese Academy of Science in Shenyang, a city in northeastern China. The interview with Ren Zhengfei ran on the front page of People’s Daily (June 10, 2025), the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

Click here to continue to read on my Nordic Link substack!

Reflections on the 1970s Hippie Trail

2025-02-16T09:35:00.000-05:00

Last September, I published my book A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974). Six months later, Rick Steves released On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer (2025). These are two of the latest in a growing crop of travel books and memoirs from the Hippie Trail, which attracted hundreds of thousands young travelers until it was closed by the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Like millions of others (Rick Steves has 1.2 million followers on Facebook) I am a huge fan of his European guidebooks and PBS specials. His books are down-to-earth, and well researched—very useful when planning a trip or finding yourself looking for a way to avoid the long lines to the Louvre or the Uffizi Galleries. He is also a man who doesn’t hesitate to call-out evil when he sees it, whether through a television special on the history of fascism in Europe or calling out Donald Trump as the fascist he is.

Rick’s new book is beautiful and a delightful read. He tells the story of the journey his and his friend Gene Openshaw did along parts of the old Silk Road that in modern times became known as the Hippie Trail. Having been bitten by the “travel bug” backpacking around Europe in 1973, they met up in Frankfurt in July 1978 and set out for Istanbul. Although not hippies, the two 23-year-olds wanted to see India and Nepal, which in those days were popular destinations for hippies and young adventurers.

My book starts out four years earlier, in September 1974, when my then-girlfriend Elisabeth and I boarded one of two blue Scania buses set for India. We were 20 and had worked in a slaughterhouse over the summer to make money for the trip. The deal was that the buses would take us to New Delhi, park there for five weeks and then take us back to Sweden. We slept on the buses, which had been refurbished for the purpose. There were a couple of fellow travelers who talked of smoking pot on a rooftop in Nepal, but we were heading for southern India, maybe even Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon).

Our two books have similarities, reflecting the fact that our journeys from Istanbul to Srinagar in Kashmir and New Delhi overlapped, but they are still very different. Rick Steves built his book around his lightly edited 60,000-word journal, plus photos that he and Gene took. His story is charming, naïve and has a strong sense of presence. Unlike me, he was an extrovert who didn’t hesitate to ask a farmer if he could try out his ox-driven thresher or ask a female farm worker to carry her heavy load for a bit. It’s all there in the diary and the photos. We see him engaging with people he meets. He and Gene also took many photos of themselves documenting their 55-day-long journey. There was also something romantic about his approach, which was very different from mine.

“The Khyber Pass! I had dreamed of crossing this romantically wild and historically dangerous cultural divide for years. It was very high on my life's checklist of things to do in the top five for sure. I'd read all about its illustrious history as the gateway to India.” (p 82)

When reading his story and hearing him talk about it at his book launch in New York earlier this month, I got the sense that this was not only a trip in the now, but something that would change his life, which it did, once he had returned home. He became a travel writer.

Being a Swede, I was an introvert at home, but an extrovert on the road. I was an atheist, politically radical, and always on the lookout for inequality and poverty. I too was naïve, but also open-minded. Although we traveled somewhat cocooned in our bus to and from India, we had many opportunities to meet and engage with local people, mostly young men who spoke some English. During our five-week train travel through central and southern India, we had nowhere to “hide,” so we had to engage. Like Rick, I wrote a diary of sorts, but my entries were sporadic and not enough for a book. Hence, I had to build the book on my 100-day-long journey by digging into memories, going over my over 1,300 photos (regretting that I only posed for two!), and doing a lot of research. I read everything I could find, from Hans Christian Andersen, Robert Byron, and William Dalrymple—to Marco Polo, Rory Stewart, and Michael Wood.

The result is two very different stories. The strength of Rick Steves’ book is that he invites you to be with him during his journey, to share his perspective as a 23-year-old kid on the adventure of a lifetime, but his framing sometimes limits his story. When he visits “some old, ruined minarets in the distance” (p 82) in Afghanistan, he is not aware that they were part of the Musalla Complex, one of the great wonders of Timurid architecture, which sadly had been blown up by British colonialists in a reckless attempt to stop the Russian empire from advancing in the “Great Game.” I was aware of that from Jan Myrdal’s Afghanistan books and could now add context by quoting Robert Byron’s 1937 book The Road to Oxiana. In this way I could go beyond the perspective of a 20-year-old while still offering my personal take through diary entries, letters home, and photos.

Finally, my trip didn’t change me, but his did. I came back as radical as when I left, as young and dogmatic, reading Marx and Mao, protesting U.S. and Soviet imperialism. He on the other hand started a business that changed many people’s lives. He was an American and an entrepreneur. I on the other hand, was a young Swedish rebel, dreaming of a revolution that never came.

The Boy Who Wouldn't Die - On the Book "I'm Adding Sunshine to My Paint"

2024-12-17T07:30:00.000-05:00

Five years old, Harald Sandberg (1912-1983) came down with a double-sided pneumonia. Three doctors in Söderhamn, a city in northern Sweden, said that there was nothing they could do. (This was in the time when the Spanish flue killed tens of millions of people around the world.)

Harald survived, but the disease damaged his heart, and he was told that he was unlikely to see his tenth birthday. He looked forward to that day with trepidation, but it was his father who died on that day, 39 years old.

Early on, Harald wanted to become an artist, but a doctor said that his heart was too week for him to continue school and suggested that he should become a hairdresser. Which he did, and a successful one at that, but he never gave up on his dream.

“I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint” tells the story of the first four decades of Harald Sandberg’s life, from his birth on August 13, 1912, to the end of 1955, when he had accomplished his childhood’s dream of becoming an artist – a painter. He had had his first solo exhibits in Stockholm as well as a very successful exhibit in Paris. By then he had also brought three children into the world together with his wife Constance.

“I’m Adding Sunshine to My Paint” includes a diary that Harald wrote in 1946 during a critical phase of his struggle to become an artist. It also contains two interviews made during the last two years of his life, as well as over 100 photos and illustrations.

The book was written by his son Hans Sandberg.

Over the coming months, I will post excerpts from the book - both texts and pictures - here and on my substack for the book.

Scan the QR code below to find my book on Amazon.

Hitler, Trump and the "Revolution Against Reason"

2024-11-01T13:36:00.001-04:00

The historian Christopher R. Browning (at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) has a revealing and terrifying essay in New York Review of Books about Hitler’s quick ascend to power in the first half of 1933. In a review of three books about the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler, Browning brings forward many similarities to to today’s world, in particular the U.S. Many things that looks like Trumpian weirdness and anomalies echoes of the 1930s.

Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days starts with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30. Fritzsche notes that there “was no such thing as majority opinion” in fragmented Germany and that the “political system had checkmated itself.” … He continues, “In order to smash the Weimar Republic the men in the room needed the Nazis, and to lever themselves into power, the Nazis needed the men in the room.”

And as we see Trump’s fanatics prepare for a second January 6, we should remember that the “Nazis had no intention of competing in a free and fair election.”

Fritzsche makes the telling argument that violence not only silenced Nazi opponents but was also essential to building support. The ongoing violence, choreographed as public rituals of humiliation that portrayed Nazi opponents as weak and ridiculous, turned entertained spectators into accomplices by virtue of their “voyeuristic pleasure.” The “wave of denunciation” that swept over Germany broadened the ranks of complicity further.

And as the Germans watched the violence, they changed.

Fritzsche asks how such a “sea change,” in which “more and more Germans” accepted the “necessity of compliance” as well as the Nazi standard of “normality,” was possible. Coercion “played an undeniable role,” he concedes, but ultimately he concludes that “the great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life,” and that “to make Germany great was to narrate a great awakening.”

Browning quotes Benjamin Carter Hett’s book The Death of Democracy:

“in many ways, our time more closely resembles the 1930s than it does the 1990s,” as the Nazis “were fundamentally a protest reaction against globalization.”

To build the German MAGA movement, truth has to be overcome and replaced by the submission to the Great Leader, the Fuhrer.

The lost war, revolution, unjust peace settlement, economic chaos, and “huge social and technological change” were so intolerable that they led to a rejection of reality by many Germans. And they supported Hitler because he gave “voice to this flight from reality as could no other German politician of his time.” This “hostility to reality translated into contempt for politics” that in turn destroyed the “minimal common ground” that democracy needs to function.

Like Donald Trump, Hitler lied all the time, while revealing his plans to an audience that had stopped reflecting. Truth didn’t matter.

For Hitler his message “had to be simple” and “emotional,” not intellectual. And while he was personally close to no one, he had “a remarkable intuition for the thoughts, hopes, fears, and needs of other people.” Among other traits of Hitler, Hett includes insecurity, intolerance of criticism, bombastic claims about his own achievements, and scorn for intellectuals and experts. Thus without ever mentioning Donald Trump and MAGA, Hett clearly intends to draw parallels between Hitler and the Nazis on the one hand and the current American situation on the other.

And if you are surprised that so many billionaires, powerful and conservative joined forces with a right-wing “national socialist,” you are following in the path of Germany’s conservatives.

Like Ryback and Fritzsche, Hett places ultimate responsibility for Hitler’s ascent on German conservatives, who disdained democracy:
The crisis and the deadlock of 1932 and early 1933, to which Hitler appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half the population from political representation…. To this end, a succession of conservative politicians…courted the Nazis as the only way to retain power on terms congenial to them. Hitler’s regime was the result.

A Swede on the Hippie Trail 1974 - Watch the Video Promo!

2024-10-06T09:27:00.000-04:00

I've also launched a Substack where I post excerpts from the book. Click here to check it out and subscribe!

On This Day, 50 Years Ago, I and 40 Swedes Stepped Onto Two Buses Heading for India

2024-09-03T03:00:00.018-04:00

50 years ago -- September 3, 1974 -- I and 40 other young and naïve Swedes entered two old Scania buses who were to take us from Stockholm to New Delhi in six weeks. We were not hippies, just ordinary people, but we did travel on what was once called the Silk Road, and in the 1960s became known as the "Hippie Trail." I was 20, an atheist and politically radical, so I was definitively not looking to find a Guru or spiritual enlightenment in India. And I had no desire to end up on a rooftop in Kathmandu, smoking pot. I was interested in the world, and this was an opportunity that had opened, and didn't cost much, since we slept on the buses. You can read more about my 3 1/2-month journey in my new book - A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974) which is now globally available on Amazon.

Find the book on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/author/hans_sandberg

Heading Home From India and Left Behind on Mount Damavand

2024-09-02T04:00:00.004-04:00

After five weeks crisscrossing southern India, we met up in New Delhi, and the long road back to Sweden could start. We drove through Pakistan, through the Khyber Pass, and to Iran via Kabul, Kandahar and Herat. As we crossed Mount Damavand, Iran’s and Asia’s largest volcano, I was left behind in my long johns in the middle of the night. Read about it in “A Swede on the Hippie Trail.”

Sunset in Pakistan.

Towards the Khyber Pass.

Near Jalalabad.

The Darunta Dam on the Kabul River.

Afghanistan. Near Qalat in Zabur province.

Kids in eastern Turkey.

I don't have any photos from my adventure

on Mount Damavand, but here is one

from eastern Turkey.

Kerala as a Prism of India

2024-09-01T04:00:00.028-04:00

After Hyderabad in Telangana, Hassan, Mysuru (Mysore), and Bengaluru (Bangalore) in Karnataka, Chennai (Madras) and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, we arrived in Cochin (Kochi) on the Malabar Coast in the state of Kerala. The first humans to settle Kerala followed the coastline according to the British historian Michael Wood.

”A Swede on the Hippie Trail" -- an ebook, paperback and hard cover. Find it on Amazon.

A Ticket to South India

2024-08-31T04:00:00.020-04:00

On October 16, we visited the Office of the Divisional Commercial Superintendent in India Railway’s Baroda House to buy train tickets for our journey through central and southern India. This building was once the residence of the Maharaja of Baroda. The walls of the office were covered with shelves stacked with binders and piles of papers behind a paper-filled desk sat an official in a white shirt. He looked over the “Letter of Identification” we had received from the Swedish Embassy, which attested that we were “bona fide students.” He then took out a form and began to fill it out on his typewriter.

The result was a Student Concession Voucher that allowed us to travel to the cities we had specified.

New Delhi - Jhansi-Sanchi - Bhopal - Khandwa-Jalgaon (by bus) - Aurangabad - Hyderabad - Bangalore City - Madras Central/ Egmere - Madurai - Rameshwaram - Madras Egmere/ Central - New Delhi.

Read the story of my journey in my new book on Amazon.

After a Week in Srinagar, the Buses Were Parked in New Delhi. We Were on Our Own...

2024-08-30T04:00:00.055-04:00

After a week in Srinagar, Kashmir, our buses continued to New Delhi, where they were parked. We now had five weeks to travel on our own. I and my girlfriend decided to explore central and southern India.

”A Swede on the Hippie Trail" -- soon available as an ebook, paperback and hard cover on Amazon.

Dal Lake, Srinagar.

Srinagar, Kashmir.

New Delhi.

Stone cutters at the Red Fort, Delhi.

Jama Mashid, Delhi.

Nomads, Kabul, and the Khyber Pass

2024-08-29T04:00:00.059-04:00

We drove south-east from #Herat, stopping to visit a camp of #Kochi nomads, who exuded pride and independence. I approached one tent, where a man sat next to his two children. I asked using sign language if I could take a photo. He nodded, reached back and took out his rifle which he placed on his shoulder. After #Kabul, we headed for the #KhyberPass, but were not allowed to cross at night. To dangerous!

Kochi nomad. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

Kochi children. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

Dromedary and a Kochi tent. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

A typical black goat hair tent. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

Proud Kochi nomad. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

Kabul 1974. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

The Khyber Pass. Copyright: Hans Sandberg

Read more in ”A Swede on the Hippie Trail.”

Find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Herat - Love At First Sight

2024-08-28T04:00:00.008-04:00

We immediately fell in love with Herat in western Afghanistan. It was truly an oasis after having driven through the arid desert. Read more in A Swede on the Hippie Trail (1974) which in a couple of days will be available on Amazon.com as a richly illustrated ebook, paperback, as well as a hard cover book.

Copyright: Hans Sandberg

In Iran, Most People Were Friendly, but We Did Get Stoned In Golestan….

2024-08-26T04:00:00.002-04:00

From Istanbul we drove east for a long time, passing Mount Ararat before entering Iran, which then was ruled by the Shah and his secret police. Most people were nice and friendly, but we did get stoned in Golestan….

Copyright: Hans Sandberg

You can read about it in “A Swede on the Hippie Trail,” which will be available as an ebook, paperback and hard cover on Amazon on September 3rd.

In a Thessaloniki Market, the Butchers Warned Us About the Turks...

2024-08-24T04:00:00.006-04:00

Having crossed the Alps, we found ourselves in Yugoslavia and then in Greece, where the butchers in Thessaloniki warned us that the Turks would cut our heads off, which fortunately did not happen. Like H.C. Andersen – who visited Istanbul a century before us – we found the Turks friendly and generous. Read more in ”A Swede on the Hippie Trail” which will be available on Amazon.com on September 3.

Read more in ”A Swede on the Hippie Trail” which will be available on Amazon.com on September 3.

The Way We Traveled to India in 1974

2024-08-22T04:00:00.025-04:00

We traveled privately with little money and without political or social power. We were not spies, emissaries, traders, scientists, explorers, diplomats, or luxury tourists. We traveled on two old buses to and from India, and while in India, we rode train and local buses.

Each mode of traveling has its pros and cons, whether you walk to India like Thomas Coryat in the 16th century, or travel with caravans like John Mildenhall in the 17th century, or cycle, hitchhike, drive, take a bus, train, plane, or boat. Of course, walking or cycling from Stockholm to New Delhi was possible, but it would have taken a long time and been risky in more ways than one.

The book will be published on Amazon as an ebook, paperback, and an elegant hard cover book.

A Swede on the Hippie Trail - 50 Years Ago

2024-08-20T04:00:00.010-04:00

In two weeks, My illustrated book “A Swede on the Hippie Trail” will be published – 50 years after I and 40 other young Swedes stepped onto two old buses that were to take us overland to India.

The book will be published on Amazon as an ebook, paperback, and an elegant hard cover book.

What Happens to Trust in the Age of AI?

2024-06-06T13:55:00.008-04:00

I attended an interesting seminar at the residence of the Swedish Consul General in New York (Camilla Mellander) this past Tuesday. It was part of the consulate’s Transformative Talks series, and the topic of the night was The Future of Trust in the Age of AI.

Kimberly Springer, curator at Columbia University moderated a discussion with Swedish panelists Martin Gelin (journalist and author) and Martin Adolfsson (artist and photographer) – both based in New York. The discussion was lively and there were many questions from the audience reflecting both a curiosity and a healthy skepsis about the impact of the explosive growth of AI in the aftermath of the 2022 launch of ChatGPT 4.0 based on Large Language Models (LLMs).

What happens to trust when we seem to be surrounded by an ever-growing stream of manipulated stories and enhanced or fake images? What and who can we trust? Is more regulation the answer, or even feasible? Is media education the answer? Will the emerging AI-world self-regulate in the interest of the common good? Big questions, which nobody knows the answer to today. But it's not only a matter of what the AI-researchers and companies do.

The deeper question is how we as human beings react in this new environment. Will we cynically take a huge step back and seek comfort in tribalism and conspiracy theories? Will we find a way to navigate a world where confusion grows despite the explosion of facts and theories?

I put together a couple of links to articles that provide a background to those and other questions.

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds - New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. By Elizabeth Kolbert

Don’t Believe What They’re Telling You About Misinformation. By Minvar Singh

The Fake Fake-News Problem and the Truth About Misinformation. By Minvar Singh

Thoughts on “The Enigma of Reason”. By Arthur Juliani

The cerebral mystique. By Arthur Jasanoff

Will A.I. Be a Creator or a Destroyer of Worlds? By Thomas B. Edsall

1968 - The Year When We Were Born Again

2024-02-19T22:05:00.090-05:00

Stockholm in August 1968. A protest against Soviet's invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Photo: Hans Sandberg

The year 1968 took us by storm, especially if you were a teenager. We had been awaken to the world's unfairness and now change was in the air. We followed the news about the Vietnam War, the May Revolt in Paris, Black protest movements in the USA, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia. And we took to the streets to protest.

We were born-again even though we didn't believe in God. I had lost my childhood faith when I was eight years old. I cursed God and hid under my pillow, but nothing happened. That's how easy it was to see through the supernatural, but it was different with the Jesus, the human. I remember saying prayers, singing psalms in the morning and thanking God for the food at lunch time in elementary school.

We had an illustrated blue textbook in second or third grade that told of the twelve-year-old Jesus who debated the learned at the temple and how he as an adult fed the poor when the fishermen came in with their catch. Maybe most of all, I remember how he cast out the merchants from the temple.

The step from Jesus to Marx was not as long as one might think. This maybe even harder to understand here in the USA, where religious sects and churches had grown through competition with other beliefs or interpretations. Christianity was the largest faith in this diverse religious marketplace, but it came to be dominated by a branch that drew narrow circles around the groups that were to be included in the “brotherly love." It was a Christianity that took part in, or closed its eyes to, the genocide of the native population, to the slavery, the oppression of women, racism and lynchings, exploitation, and imperialist wars. It’s true that there were other branches who fought against slavery and for equality, both before and after Martin Luther King Jr., but the loudest branch was the one that today takes Trump as its savior.

We who were awakened in the years around 1968 actually had a lot in common with the early Christian church and later popular awakenings. The Christian socialist and theologian David Bentley Hart recently raised the question of whether the first Christians were not in fact communists. They sold their property and shared their wealth so that everybody had what they needed. The rest was owned collectively. They loathed private property, which to many modern believers are more important than the Golden Rule.

“The great John Chrysostom frequently issued pronouncements on wealth and poverty that make Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin sound like timid conservatives. According to him, there is but one human estate, belonging to all, and those who keep any more of it for themselves than barest necessity dictates are brigands and apostates from the true Christian enterprise of charity.”

(Are Christians Supposed to Be Communists?, David Bentley Hart, New York Times, November 4, 2017)

Marx may not have been as radical as Chrysostom, but he shared the first Christians' dream of an equal society. He borrowed words from the New Testament when he in 1875 wrote that the society of the future would “inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that we let our hair grow long and walked in Jesus sandals. The world I grew up in had taken shape after the second World War and its moral foundation had cracked in the shadow of the Vietnam war and 1968. This raised questions that the old generation and society could not answer, fundamental questions that were particularly challenging for us youths.

Mark Lilla, an American author and professor, wrote about the process in a personal essay in 2005. He had grown up as a Catholic in Detroit during the 1960s and turned atheist at thirteen only to discover the Bible after having attended a Christian rock concert. He found faith after a night reading the New Testament and soon found himself among a group of born-again Christians.

“This group was my substitute family throughout high school in the early 70's. I spent most nights with them, at prayer meetings, or guitar practice, or just sitting around on the shag carpeting of their living rooms, Bibles open on our laps. Ours was a rolling theological seminar devoted to interpreting the biblical message, and an open psychotherapy session where we helped each other adjust to being born again.”

(Getting Religion, Mark Lilla, New York Times, Sunday Magazine, September 18, 2005)

He described how the Bible became his only path at age fourteen.

“Then I discovered the strange new world of the Bible. That discovery might have led me to other books, but there was no one to guide me onto that path. So the Bible became my only portal into the realm of ideas — ideas about morality, justice, cosmology, psychology, eschatology, mortality. The Bible posed all the important questions, questions that were vaguely forming in my adolescent mind, but that now took on shape and contour. And, of course, it answered those questions.” (ibid)

For us young revolutionaries The Capital was our Bible and Mao’s Little Red Book our Small Catechism. We too sat around in circles with the books that explained everything in our laps. Lilla wrote that “all teenagers are dogmatists; a teenager with a Bible is simply a more intense teenager” and related how he would wander around in his school with a Bible at the ready, looking for sin and spiritual degeneracy, thinking that he did his victims a favor. I used to walk around with Mao’s Little Red Book at the ready, looking for bourgeois ideas.

Over time our passions ossified around Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism. It became our canon and Beijing became our Jerusalem, just as Mecca, Paris, Washington, and Moscow had been to earlier generations.

It was relatively easy to keep the faith when Mao was alive. He was like a living God who hadn’t hesitated to send a flood against the party he had founded, but ten years into the Cultural Revolution, we began to receive conflicting signals from the Middle Kingdom and Mao’s meeting with Nixon was followed by the Theory of the Three Worlds, which replaced the revolutionary class struggle with an international alliance against the two superpowers. Reactionaries and brutal dictators were now seen as allied in the struggle against the Soviet social imperialism. And when Deng Xiaoping had established himself as China’s leader a year after Mao’s death, the course shifted even more radically. China’s peasants were allowed to sell their surplus on free markets and foreign companies were welcomed to Special Economic Zones.

And as if that was not enough, Vietnam invaded Kampuchea at the end of 1978 and installed a puppet regime which led China to invade Vietnam in February 1979. Deng said that China wanted to “teach Vietnam a lesson.”

We didn’t immediately understand it, but it was the beginning of the end of Maoism. At first, we tried to patch-up our broken faith, but every time we thought we had the pieces right, the puzzle fell apart again. Everything was now open to debate. We had preached that wars were caused by capitalism and imperialism, but how could you then explain what was happening in IndoChina? And if Mao’s Cultural Revolution had not been able to prevent the corruption of socialism — was there any guarantee at all? We were convinced that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a democracy for the people and a temporary dictatorship over the former oppressors, but had not the people been oppressed during the Cultural Revolution?

To a seventeen-year-old it was easy to live for the revolution. It felt meaningful to attend meetings, sell magazines, and lead study circles. The tiredness you felt when you came home from a long work session was not the tiredness of a wage slave, but the proud tiredness of a fighter. What others took as unselfish sacrifices was for the believer a pleasant duty. But when doubt set in, the many meetings and heavy tasks began to feel like sacrifices, colliding with other interests.

“…the spell that transformed costs into benefits will be broken and the more usual kind of cost accounting will reassert itself. … As a result, the citizen will feel that he has vastly and unnecessarily overextended himself into the public domain and that a ruthless cutting down is in order.”

(Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements, 1982, p 126)

We had however invested so much in the revolutionary struggle that our first reaction was to persist and push harder than ever. And if a comrade slacked, the rest of us would step in. We read and debated even more in search of the correct analysis of the situation and the right path forward. We spent almost all our time at meetings and campaigns, why we didn’t see much of our families, friends or partners.

A decennium had passed since 1968, and the revolution we had dreamt of never came. The cultural revolutions and protest movements of the 1960s had been followed by a reaction that gave us Reagan and Thatcher.

Instead of saving the world, it was now about investing in yourself.

We tried to hold on to our faith as long as possible, but in the end you could not escape reality.

Some switched side and became conservative, many became social democrats, while others tried to deal with their disappointment. Yet others came to wrestle with understanding what had happened.

Posters in Stockholm. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1969.

We Swam in the Caspian Sea Before Getting Stoned in Golestan (1974)

2024-02-18T14:59:00.012-05:00

On September 29, 1974, I wrote in my diary that we had passed by a village whose mud houses had domed roofs. We had left Mashhad in northeastern Iran, a large city that was once an oasis on the Silk Road, and later became a major destination for Shia pilgrims. I remember an old man in turban waving angrily at me when I took photos from across the street of the Imam Reza shrine. A young guy offered to guide us through a museum within the shrine, but he rushed us through the rooms and didn’t seem to know much about the objects. The only thing he knew was that everything was worth millions of dollars…

The Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, Iran.
Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

Before we knew it, we were at the exit, and he showed us that he expected a tip for his service. I don’t remember if we gave him anything, but maybe we did to get rid of him.

The road from Mashhad to Herat in Afghanistan went southeast through a desert plain with mountains on both sides. The landscape was mostly sand-colored, except for where the land had been plowed making it dark brown. The only vegetation consisted of low bushes and tufts of grass.

Between Iran and Afghanistan. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

For some reason I didn’t write anything about the time when we were stoned by local kids in a Turkmen town. It must have been the previous day. We had driven north from Tehran, across Mount Damavand, and once we had descended from the mountain, we were met by a green and lush riviera on the southern shore of the Caspian Sea. After a break for swimming, we continued east towards Gorgan, capital of the Golestan province. Our drivers drove into a small town, hoping to find a restaurant. They parked the buses on the main street, and we left the buses to take a look at the town but were soon surrounded by a dozen young boys who soon began to grope the women, who in their eyes were indecent as they did not wear the burka. Several boys stuck their hands between the girls' legs. The situation quickly escalated, so the girls retreated into the buses, while a couple of us men formed a chain to hold back the rough kids. The buses slowly began to move. Once all the girls were safe on board, we ran after the buses and jumped in through the open front doors. We could hear rocks falling all around us and some hit the buses, but none of us were hit.

It was a nasty experience, and we were shocked to have been treated with such hostility. The only explanation I could come up with at the time was that the British colonialists once had staged a massacre in the area, which Jan Myrdal had written somewhere. But that was a long time ago, and it was more likely that the aggression reflected cultural intolerance and Islamic fundamentalism. Recently, I learned that the area at the south-eastern corner of the Caspian Sea has been subject to a long series of invasions, including one by Alexander the Great (ca 330 BCE.) If we had continued north, we could have visited the remains of the Great Wall of Gorgan – 195 km of fortifications – which protected the Iranian Parthian Empire from attacks by the nomads to the north at about the same time as the Chinese built the Great Wall of China for similar reasons. (For those who want to delve into the long and dramatic history of the nomads, I recommend Kenneth W. Harl's fascinating lecture series The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes published by The Teaching Company/The Great Courses in 2014).

We arrived at the Islam Kalah border station on a paved road through a flat, dry, and desolate desert landscape. We first stopped at the Iranian side and continued a short distance through no-man's land until we entered the Afghan side where the soldiers walked at their own pace, wearing uniforms that had not seen an iron for many years. I re-read Myrdal's Afghanistan book where he describes his and Gun Kessle's visit to Islam Kalah in the summer of 1958. They had slept in their Citroën CV2 on the Iranian side, and were happy when they entered Afghanistan, where the customs chief offered tea and introduced his brothers to the long-distance guests. We didn't get any tea, but we there were 41 of us in the two buses, so it was perhaps a bit too much to ask for. I interpreted the Afghans' behavior as bold and proud. They didn’t bow to worldly authorities in the same way as in Iran, I thought, influenced by my Swedish prophet.

When customs were completed, we set off in the direction of Herat, which for millennia has been located in the strategic and fertile valley of the river Hari Rud. This location has been both Herat's fortune and curse. Over and over, the city has been invaded, looted, pillaged, and the population slaughtered. The city was always rebuilt, but its bloody history continues to this day. Herat was called Artacoana and was the capital of Ariana, when Alexander passed by in search of the satrap Bessus of Bactria, who was fleeing after having murdered the Persian ruler Darius the Third.

The Citadel in Herat. First built under Alexander the Great,
the fortress was destroyed many times. The current building
was built in 1305. Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

A Thousand Year Old Thoughts About Love

2024-02-18T12:33:00.003-05:00

Abū Muḥammad ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd ibn Ḥazm al-Andalusī -- better known as Ibn Hazm -- lived in Andalusia, Spain, between 994 and 1064 (except for a period of exile in Mallorca after 1040.)

He wrote a book about love in 1022 under the suggestive title The Ring of the Dove. I don't know if he had read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but I sense an echo of the latter's reflections about friendship in the learned Arab's text.

Here is a part that captivated me.

”The noblest sort of Love is that which exists between persons who love each other in God either because of an identical zeal for the righteous work upon which they are engaged, or as the result of a harmony in sectarian belief and principles, or by virtue of a common possession of some noble knowledge. Next to this is the love, which springs from kinship; then the love of familiarity and the sharing of identical aims; the love of comradeship and acquaintance; the love, which is rooted in a benevolent regard for one's fellow; the love that results from coveting the loved one's worldly elevation; the love that is based upon a shared secret which both must conceal; love for the sake of getting enjoyment and satisfying desire; and passionate love, that has no other cause but that union of souls to which we have referred above.
All these varieties of Love come to an end when their causes disappear, and increase or diminish with them; they are intensified according to the degree of their proximity, and grow languid as their causes draw further and further away. The only exception is the Love of true passion, which has the mastery of the soul: this is the love, which passes not away save with death.”
(The Ring of the Dove, Ibn Hazm)

Note to the illustration: Manuscript to The Ring of the Dove can be found in the Leiden University Library.

Tea, Hashish, and an Arabic License Plate

2024-02-15T10:03:00.004-05:00

Leaving Afghanistan.
Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

2014

I’m searching for the name of the border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. I remember that our buses rolled into a dusty customs station and parked at some distance from the administrative building. I don’t think there were any other vehicles there. After googling for a while, I find Torkham, which in 2014 looks like a very different place than when we arrived in 1974. The once sleepy customs station is now full of armed soldiers. Google shows images of long queues of trucks and cars, as well as many people waiting. No camels or goats, but burning or burnt-out trucks, explosions, dead soldiers. I also find news reports of wars and attacks, most recently a Taliban attack on a NATO convoy near Torkham, which occurred on June 19, 2014. It destroyed 37 trucks carrying fuel and supplies.

We arrived late in the afternoon on October 4, 2014, and were told that we could not continue the same day. We had to wait until the morning since it was too dangerous to cross the Khyber Pass at night. There were bandits and robbers, and one of the villages along the way was called the "Den of Thieves".

Elisabeth and I were dead tired and fell asleep early in our bus. When we woke up the next morning, we were told by the others that the customs chief had invited everybody to a party in the customs building where they danced and were served hashish and tea.

The next morning, one guy traveling with the other bus was caught while trying to steal an Arabic script license plate from a wreck behind the customs house. We were told that he normally should go to jail in Kabul, but the customs officer was a friendly man and let us move on once every one of us had apologized for our fellow traveler's behavior.

"I see that you are nice people and will let it pass, but be careful in the future," the customs officer said.

We all shook hands with him and two other officials. Then they walked us out and waved us off.

Later that day we begin the descent along a road that twists and turns through hairpin bends and tunnels. Behind us we see the silhouettes of the mighty mountains in the moonlight. The landscape is becoming more and more green. We are approaching Pakistan and are met by cultivated fields and long stretches where the road is lined with trees.

In Pakistan we are met by water and a green landscape.

Photo: Hans Sandberg, 1974.

Footnote: There are about 40 languages in Afghanistan, with Dari and Pashto as the most common. Both are written in Arabic script.

(Translated from my October 4, 2014 post on Sandbergs hörna)