It was an important revelation that the journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt made in 1973. In the IB affair, they revealed an undisciplined espionage against Swedish political extremist movements, uncontrolled emergence, partly in collaboration directly with the Social Democratic Party instead of with the government.
Anna-Lena Lodenius recounts here the story 50 years later – but still in the way of the IB whistleblowers, with Guillou as the unhelpfully strongest narrator even though Lodenius put a lot of work into talking to others and studying documents.
The point of going through the IB affair 50 years later would be to look at it with contemporary eyes and subject the old interpretations to a disrespectful and critical examination. That’s certainly not what Lodenius is doing here.
At the center of the IB debate it said what was called, with a polemical term, “opinion registration”. This was banned in 1969, writes Lodenius, and she adopts the misleading world view of the seventies left.
The Personnel Control Proclamation introduced in 1969 certainly stated that no one should be placed on a police register based solely on political opinion or membership of a party. But it was also stated in the instruction that the police should assess which people might be prepared to go from word to action – and these potential revolutionaries should be monitored and registered. Oddly enough, later in the book Lodenius reproduces that instruction as well, but it is as if the different fact-findings in the book do not come into contact with each other.
So it was never meant to be to ban coverage of extreme political movements, as the seventies left often claimed, without regulating how it is done. In the same way as it is today, there is a debate about how today’s Säpo monitors violent right-wing extremists and Islamists.
I think that would have been an important thing for a contemporary book about IB to sort out, and Lodenius misses that.