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ge, the Germans had carried advancement to the Swedes. With one Francophile interlude in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German influence dominated Swedish life until the Second “World War. Gustav, although he was glad of German tutelage, resented German suzerainty. He disliked the economic stranglehold which the Hanseatic merchants had acquired, and he broke their power once and for all. He did so with a conscious desire mbt discount to establish a nation-state. He was a nationalist ahead of his time. As a nationalistic despot, Gustav was always open to innovations that would extend his power, and it was in that spirit that he introduced the Reformation to Sweden. He was perhaps the first monarch to grasp properly the political implications of mbt walking shoes Luther’s doctrine. He saw, more clearly and rationally than Henry VIII, the uses to which a national Church could be put. If Henry knew only that he had to break out of the domination of Rome, Gustav from the beginning had the aim of better controlling his subjects. Gustav’s purpose in accepting the Reformation was to make civil servants of the clergy. He and his successors became truly their own Popes. The Swedish Church was made identical with mbt the State, a situation comparable only with the Russian, the Byzantine and the Mohammedan worlds. The Swedish Reformation subjected the priesthood to the State. This, of course, happened elsewhere, but with the important rider that the nature of the Reformer’s doctrine weakened the sacerdotal power. In Sweden, the clergy increased the hold on the population that they had exerted since the Middle Ages. Sweden, then, became that unique phenomenon, a priest-ridden Protestant society. What Gustav did, almost alone among his contemporaries, was to nationalize the Church without undermining the dominion of priest over parishioner. The theology of the Reformation was anathema to him, since it implied the rise The Historical Background 21 of individual responsibility and the weakening of the clergy. What he strove for was the politics of <a href="http://www.christian-louboutin-2012.com/christian-louboutin-sandals-c-2.html"><strong>christian louboutin sandals</strong></a> the new movement, without its religion. For the awakening of the religious spirit, the emotional core of the Reformation, Sweden had to wait until the nineteenth century. It then became confused with the rise of Social Democracy, which has inherited its evangelical content. Gustav Vasa used the Church deliberately to foster the concept of Swedish nationality; 400 years later, a Socialist Minister of Finance, Mr Gunnar Strang, confessed to identical aims. When Catholic immigrants came to Sweden after the last war, a bishop approached the government for fiscal concessions mbt shoes online in church building. Mr Strang refused, saying that, although he himself was no believer, he preferred the new arrivals to turn Protestant, ‘So that they would become good Swedes’. Gustav’s successors completed the work of incorporating the Church into the State by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Church was deprived of its economic independence, all property (including churches) and income being transferred to the Crown. The clergy obediently turned into ordained bureaucrats. Ruled directly mbt discount by lay officials and royal secretaries, the Church became a government department. Since the Middle Ages, the Church had kept population records, and its parochial system, built on the ‘cell’ pattern, was admirably adapted to civil administration. The State simply took this apparatus into its own service and, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, had acquired, ready made, by deed of transfer, the kind of centralized administrative machinery that Napoleon had to build for himself two centuries later. The Church issued permits to move and organized conscription, doing all the work of petty officialdom in keeping a check on the citizen, aided by ingrained subservience to the clergy. Only in 1970 was mbt uk the last of the major bureaucratic functions, the keeping of population 22 The New Totalitarians registers, mbt clearance removed from <a href="http://www.christian-louboutin-2012.com/christian-louboutin-wedges-sandals-c-33.html"><strong>christian shoes</strong></a> the Church: it was then transferred directly to computers. It is one of the striking aspects of Swedish history that there has been no religious strife, no visible desire to keep the old faith. The Reformation triumphed easily and bloodlessly. In the century of religious passion, the Swedes are distinguished by the meekness and alacrity with which they changed creed. Political unity and personal convenience seemed of more importance than conviction. In various forms, this attitude has persisted through the years. There have been very few fights over principle; men have seen the greatest virtue in submission and acquiescence. Today, a Swede will most often show the same reluctance to suffer for an idea as his sixteenth-century predecessor. The absence of persecution need not necessarily imply toleration; it may equally well suggest that force is redundant where submission is willing and conviction weak. This seems to have been the case in Sweden. Rulers have long understood that their subjects will not stand more than a certain rate of change. An official of the Social Democratic party said in 1969 that reforms had to observe a speed limit to avoid opposition; the kings and chancellors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries acted on exactly the same principle. The Reformation was carried through in Sweden over about a century, at a comfortable pace, but with the final goal always in Cheap mbt shoes sight;’ One people, with one Lord and one King’, to quote a Swedish bishop of the time. If any Swedes were anxious for the martyr’s crown, their rulers were unwilling to oblige. The Swedes had discerned, before most Europeans, that martyrdom only perpetuates the ideas it is designed to suppress, and that opposition is best disarmed quietly. The eradication of the Catholic faith from Sweden was accomplished without dungeon, stake or block. Sweden had been severed from Rome for over sixty years before, in 1595, Catholics were prohibited from publicly The Historical Background 23 holding services, but not, immediately, from worshipping privately. In 1617 the old Faith was finally banned, but a Swede could still turn Catholic without risking life or liberty; exile was the sole and inexorable punishment. One of the first to feel this was Queen Christina, the great-granddaughter of Gustav Vasa. In 1654, during the twenty-third year of her reign, she adopted Catholicism, and was forced to abdicate and leave Sweden immediately, never to return. In few other countries did the Reformation triumph, or Catholicism disappear mbt chapa , so swiftly, completely and effortlessly. By the end of the seventeenth century not a single Catholic remained in Sweden. Occasionally, a Swede would convert, usually as a result of contacts made abroad, and deportation would invariably follow. It was not only Rome that had been the enemy; Geneva was equally so. Calvinism, mbt shoes and Protestant dissent of all kinds were suppressed by law as well. The rigours of Swedish religious legislation were maintained until the last half of the cheap mbt shoes nineteenth century. In 1848, Baptists were forced by religious persecution to emigrate to America. The last deportations for turning Catholic were carried out in 1858. In i860, the laws against apostasy were finally repealed. In 1870, the Free Churches were legalized. Until 1970, when adopting a religion was made voluntary, all Swedes were automatically born into the State Church, whatever the convictions of their parents. Permitted since 1860, withdrawal was only converted from a privilege into a right in 1952. Before that, anybody wanting to leave the State Church had to submit to a personal examination by the clergy, who had the power, periodically used, mbt sale to refuse the application. These examinations continued until the late 1940s. The continuous supremacy enjoyed by the Church from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century gave it an unchallenged hold on the population. Its educational monopoly upheld cultural isolation and a monolithic structre of intellectual life. A few pundits prescribed the lines of thought 24 The New Totalitarians by a kind of informal ukase, and the rest obeyed implicitly. It was a Protestant, and more humane, version of the Inquisition. Isolation, ignorance and hierarchical tastes made the Swedes easy to control, and identity of Church and State presented politicians with the benefits. Although the religious background has now grown faint, the legacy of the Church remains in political submissiveness and intellectual servitude. If the various reorganizing <a href="http://www.casualphorum.com/viewtopic.php?p=1818106#1818106"><strong>The story is with this Cheap Nike Shox | Flash Designers</strong></a> governments of Sweden, from the Liberals of the nineteenth century to the Social Democrats of the 1960s, have been able to execute rapid and often uncomfortable changes virtually unopposed, it is because conformity has been made a cardinal virtue, and dissent a mortal sin. Ecclesiastical hold over the population was never disturbed until a workable political substitute was available. However scornful of Christianity, the rulers of Sweden tolerated the Church as a means of controlling the population. And the clergy, being civil servants, still enjoy, by virtue of their bureaucratic status, a respect that they could never assure for their cloth. Men may abjure Christ, but they cannot bring themselves to drive out the priests. Sweden is one of the rare countries in which men are often anti-religious, but rarely anti-clerical. When Gustav Vasa was reorganizing the country, he had no time for foreign affairs, adopting a policy of isolation. That, in his opinion, was the future of Sweden. But his sons thought otherwise. They started expanding eastwards, mbt chapa and periodically for the next 250 years, Sweden battled with Russia and Poland for the mastery mbt stockists of the Baltic. Until well into the eighteenth century, Sweden belonged to Eastern Europe. Today, Stockholm remains unmistakably an Eastern European city. Possessing Finland before the twelfth century, Sweden had a common frontier with Russia, and early mbt footwear began to feel the expansion of the Muscovite State, as it drove towards the The Historical Background 25 sea. Until well into the fifteenth century, the pressure was contained with ease. But in 1478, Tsar Ivan III captured Novgorod and attacked Finland. With great difficulty, the Swedes managed to fend him off. Russia was gathering strength, the balance of power along the Swedish border was dissolving and the arrival of the tsars at the sea was only a matter of time. At the end of the 1550s, the Russians acquired their first foothold on the Baltic by the capture of Narva on the Estonian coast. That was the situation facing Erik XIV, Gustav’s eldest son, when he succeeded to the throne in 1560, discount mbt trainers and started the Swedish drive to the east. His first aim was to mbt sale blockade Narva and obtain a stranglehold on Russian trade with the West. Unfortunately, this antagonized Lubeck, a Hanseatic city with considerable Russian interests, and Denmark, then a rival for control of the Baltic States. The Danes, allied with Liibeck, attacked Sweden, and there followed the Great Northern War. Lasting from 1563 until 1570, its only visible result was to consolidate the Danish grip on the outlet of the Baltic to the open sea. Erik had started off to encircle Russia, but had ended by being bottled up more securely by the Danes. In the meantime, Erik’s half-brother, Duke John,* had developed ambitions on the Swedish crown. To enlist the support of Poland, John married Catherine Yagellonica, the sister of the Polish king. John crossed to Finland to raise a rebellion, but was captured by Erik before he could do so, and removed to Sweden, where he was thrown into prison. John, having been forgiven and freed, deposed Erik in 1568, and, in turn, imprisoned him. The king was supposed to have gone mad, but whether this was really the case, or whether a charge of insanity had simply been trumped up in order to * Although in most systems of nobility ‘Duke’ was a territorial title, in the Swedish royal house it was a personal one, conferred on the younger sons of the king.