City Museum after criticism: "Should have stood on us"

The noisy city: Youth riots and youth politics in postwar Stockholm. So is the book that historians Andrés Brink Pinto and Martin Ericsson wrote together. The Stockholm City Museum invited them together with authors of similar books for a panel discussion on youth riots through the ages.

But when Andrés Brink Pinto and Martin Ericsson found out that the director, playwright, writer and community debater Stina Oscarson was to lead the conversation, Ericsson wrote to the City Museum that they no longer wanted to be included, citing that Oscarson had previously interviewed representatives of racist and / or Nazi organizations : "In our capacity as researchers, we do not want to act as a kind of hostage or alibi for anyone who wants to propagate against xenophobic views."

The City Museum then chose to cancel Stina Oscarson, which was criticized by Oscarson himself in a comment in Svenska Dagbladet but also by former Assignment Review reporter Janne Josefsson in Dagens Nyheter. "A small complacent cultural left can dictate, brownstick and plague Stina Oscarson without any consequences," Josefsson writes among other things.

- A participant in a conversation obviously has the right to think what she or he wants about what I have done and said. I fully respect that. But that an institution such as the City Museum that asked me as a moderator precisely because of the competence I have in matters of democracy, that they then give in to the participants' opinions that they themselves do not support, I think that is very cowardly, says Stina Oscarson to The cultural news and continues:

- When the fear of touching other people's opinions goes so far that it is about the second and third points, that I have talked to people with "wrong" opinions, to me it is a sloping plane that is very dangerous.

Fredrik Linder, director of the City Museum, is now self-critical.

- I wish we had taken a different position. We should have stood with Stina Oscarson. If it was not possible to implement the program, we should probably have set it or found another form for it, he says, and believes that the museum as a public institution must work to guard a breadth of public conversation.

However, the researcher and author Martin Ericsson feels no regrets.

- We have spent three years writing this book, we would like to tell you about it, but then it should be done under good conditions. I don't understand why I would have any obligation to participate in a panel discussion that just Stina Oscarsson out of every ten million in Sweden happens to want to lead, he says.