DEBATE • Zara Larsson’s latest political comments on social media have stirred strong reactions and sparked a broader reckoning with the activism, morality, and ideological certainties of our time. The pop artist’s statements can serve as a springboard for a polemical critique of socialism, migration policy, feminism—and a deeper moral decay in Western societies, as Nietzsche describes in his work ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’.
Also sprach Zarathustra, best known in the form of a symphonic tone poem composed by Richard Strauss—which Stanley Kubrick, among others, used as the opening to his film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’—is, as mentioned above, originally a text by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
The book is an essay in moral philosophy based on Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, a Persian prophet and poet who lived around 1500 BC. An early religion considered a precursor to monotheistic movements like Judaism and Christianity. The book addresses the decline of morality and introduces concepts like “God is dead” and “the Übermensch,” ideas which are unfortunately often misunderstood and mistakenly linked to totalitarian regimes such as Nazism.
Zara Larsson — the diametric opposite of a philosophical heavyweight
Zara Larsson, a Swedish pop artist, is the diametric opposite of the aforementioned intellectual giants, for the most part totally ignorant of the state of things yet still given space on all kinds of media platforms.
Her latest comments regarding the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis by an ICE agent have made big headlines, as she seems to hate the US migration police, who, entirely legitimately and in accordance with democratically adopted policies, hunt down illegal immigrants on behalf of the US government.
Loves criminals and socialism
In the same post, Zara claims to love, among others, criminals, LGBTQ people, immigrants, abortions, and socialism. I wonder if she’s trying to “troll” us older conservative men into indignantly protesting against her provocations, or if she’s simply a foolish and reality-detached leftist activist? I lean toward the latter.
One might ask what kind of socialism Zara actually loves — the kind of the former Soviet Union, where millions were imprisoned in Siberian Gulag camps. Does she love Stalin’s agricultural policy, which caused famine in Ukraine with 7 million dead? Maybe it’s the socialist leader Pol Pot in Cambodia she loves, who wiped out a third of his country’s population. Or perhaps she loves Venezuela’s successive presidents, Chavez and Maduro, who completely ruined one of Latin America’s richest countries. Who knows?
Difference between loving abortions and loving abortion rights
She also loves abortions, which is something entirely different from loving the right to abortion. For most women, abortion is a difficult and heavy decision, not something one loves to do. If the abortion is performed late, it can also be, not just psychologically but also physically traumatic, both for the one undergoing it and the one carrying it out.
Maybe Zara also loves abortions that happen so late that the child could be saved with incubator treatment, but which in fact are still ended by hospital staff because abortion law is written that way in some places. Abortion lovers of this sort are also not uncommon within radical feminism.
Perhaps Zara would most of all love to be a volunteer executioner in the maternity ward and finish off aborted fetuses that don’t die quickly enough on their own. Naturally with the best intentions and in the spirit of her love for abortions.
Loves immigrants — but lives far from them
Apparently immigrants are also close to Zara’s heart—these “culture enrichers” who only flee from war and bombs to find refuge in the distant little land of Sweden, after having passed over all nearby and safe countries that could have offered shelter.
She herself lives in a large attic apartment in central Stockholm, far from the marginalized neighborhoods inhabited by the immigrants she loves. If her love is so strong, why doesn’t she move to Husby or Rinkeby, where she’d be surrounded by those she holds so dear?
Criminals should stick to the silver screen
I must admit that, like Zara, I also love criminals, BUT ON FILM! The Godfather, Parts I & II, Tarantino’s and Guy Ritchie’s gangster films, as well as old black-and-white noir movies, are extremely entertaining. But meeting criminals in real life is anything but delightful.
They are often unreliable and mentally disturbed people who can suddenly have unprovoked outbursts that turn into acts of violence. Maybe Zara dreams of hanging out with the suburb’s criminal gangs and trying out various firearms and participating in the thrilling ventures of gang wars.
Since she also loves “slutty women” perhaps she could be passed around as a trophy among mob bosses and their henchmen. There are, in fact, some women who seem to love criminal psychopaths, given the hundreds of fan letters murderers receive in our prisons.
Anecdotal arguments about the ICE shooting
That the fatal shooting in Minneapolis was unfortunate and perhaps unnecessary does not mean the hunt for illegal immigrants in the US should immediately cease. There is a reason why borders between countries exist, and free and uncontrolled immigration has shown to create major problems with crime and cultural clashes.
READ ALSO: Singer Zara Larsson hates the police – still asked for their help when threatened
The ICE agent who fired the fatal shots could perhaps have avoided being run over by jumping away from the accelerating car as quickly as he instead drew his pistol and fired three shots into the vehicle. He could have been “the fastest gunslinger in the wild west” if he had lived in the 1800s.
“Entitled Karens”
Women who refuse to obey police orders during interventions for traffic offenses are often called “entitled Karens,” which the deceased woman and her partner absolutely fulfilled, believing they stood above the law and had the right to hinder and protest the ICE agents’ mission.
Many of the incidents resulting in police violence with injury or deadly outcomes could have easily been avoided by simply following police instructions—something that, according to the laws decided upon democratically, people are required to do.
And therein lies perhaps the problem: that vulgar feminism ultimately leads to the moral decay Nietzsche describes in his ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’—thus spoke Zarathustra—where women’s biological programming, primarily concerned with the survival of children, in many aspects is not fully compatible with modern civilization, which has been largely created by men.
When women’s inherited empathy results in societal utopian dreams of equality and the dismantling of the largely masculine world order, many men yield in their need for affirmation from the other sex and call themselves feminists.
Sir John Glubb historically described in his book ‘Faith of Empires’ how civilizations arise and then fall, largely due to moral decay and the dissolution of norms, where decadence and doomsday prophecies are rampant.
Forty years later (2017), author Michael Hopf phrased the phenomenon in his often-quoted classical aphorism in his book ‘Those Who Remain’: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men and weak men create hard times”. When weak men hand over decision-making to power-hungry women who view men as enemies, it often leads to polarization and naïve foolishness.
READ ALSO: Zara Larsson and the Moral Breakdown of Feminism
If Zara Larsson has “trolled” me and Samnytt’s columnist Jonas Andersson, who has previously written excellently about Zara’s remarks, as well as now President Trump, then congratulations on this prank that’s made us upset over her, in that case intentional, provocation and made us fall into her cunning trap.
However, I think that she and many other, above all young, women genuinely mean what they say and do—a point further demonstrated by the pop duo Rebecca & Fiona, one of whom naively wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the hammer and sickle during their performance at Pride festival, which actually prompts a question about whether Orwell’s dystopian future motto “ignorance is bliss” truly applies to a large part of humanity.
To conclude, yet another quote from George Orwell’s ‘1984’: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and noser-out of unorthodoxy”.