Archive: https://archive.is/2025.03.25-034656/https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2025/03/25/sweden-rebuilds-its-total-defense-model-in-which-every-inhabitant-must-be-prepared_6739488_4.html

It was 6 pm on Thursday, March 20. Twenty-five people had signed up for the course entitled “Sköt dig själv” (“Take care of yourself”), offered free of charge online by the women’s organization Lotta. The two instructors in their thirties started by advising on how to recognize an emergency situation – the number to call, the radio frequency to listen to. Then, for more than two hours, they detailed the food and equipment to be stored at home, before encouraging people to cultivate a piece of garden or balcony, to increase the country’s food self-sufficiency, 50% dependent on imports.

Civil defense organizations offer courses like this one every week in Sweden. Although the possibility of armed conflict is rarely mentioned, it is on everyone’s mind. “Sweden is not at war. But it’s not at peace either,” summed up conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson on January 12. None of the kingdom’s 10 million inhabitants can ignore this. In November 2024, they all received in the post a new edition of the booklet “In case of crisis or war,” distributed by the Civil Protection Agency, reminding them that they must stock at home enough to eat, drink, heat and look after themselves for one week, without any outside help.

Printed three times during the Cold War, the brochure had already been sent to 4.9 million households in 2018, following Sweden’s decision in 2015 to resurrect its “total defense.” Developed after the Second World War to cope with a “total war,” this model, combining military and civil defense, was based on the principle that the army would not be enough to protect the country: Its population still had to hold out.

  • RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️
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    8 days ago

    I’m imagining a minefield made up of cans of surströmming. I wouldn’t put it past them to break the Geneva Chemical Weapons convention like that.

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        Reminds me of a news story I read several years ago, a Swedish family had a summer home in norway, and decades ago they had stashed a can of Surströmming in the roof beams and forgot about it.

        Well, it had swelled so much that when they found it they could not get it out the waynit got in, they had to hire a contracting firm to lift the roof off of the house and get it out.

        Then they opened the can and tasted the fish…

        • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
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          5 days ago

          Then they opened the can and tasted the fish…

          Epic. I don’t know if Surströmming can actually spoil.

          Some years ago, surströmming was actually used to scare away the voles around the king’s library in Stockholm.