Sweden is the country where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between satire and reality. Public service is a reliable force behind this Orwellian development, and one production that takes the podium is the documentary Aldrig mer kebab (Never Again Kebab), which you can stream via SVT Play. For 48 minutes, you get to follow former radio host Gurgin Bakircioglu on his way from a normal life to an existence where he tries to live in accordance with the Paris Agreement. The film was released in March 2023, but has gained new traction on social media – thanks to its marketing being mistaken for humor.
To be honest, I was still unsure after watching the show. Is it a documentary, mockumentary or satire?
But it is not Sacha Baron Cohen, Svenska nyheter or Freudian Slip Productions who are behind the post. It’s SVT Dokumentär (SVT Documentary, “SVT” being “Sveriges Television”, the Swedish public service television company).
On Facebook, the tax-funded SVT advertises the program in the following way:
Journalist Gurgin resigns from Sveriges Radio, leaves his apartment and moves into a mobile home with his dog Ronja, all to reduce his climate impact. But the parents don’t understand Gurgin’s new minimalist lifestyle. He, who used to run a kebab restaurant, is now trying to get his dad to become a vegan. His mother dreams of grandchildren while Gurgin thinks about sterilizing himself. Lots of conflict and desperation but also lots of love and humor. Stream Aldrig mer kebab on SVT Play >> https://bit.ly/3UHYXqv
Let’s, for the sake of good order, find out what it is that SVT Documentary is selling.
SVT thus spends an unknown amount of the taxpayers’ forced donation of nine billion SEK (821 million dollars) to produce a “documentary” about: 1) a public service employee who is 2) a journalist with 3) an immigrant background and sometimes with 4) a keffiyeh around his neck, who 5) lives with his dog, is 6) vegan and 7) tries to get others to become vegan, and who chooses a 8) “minimalist living” and 9) wants to be sterilized to 10) reduce his climate impact.
Seriously?
Yes. Apparently.
A documentary – or a huge pointing stick?
Behind the film stands Hogir Hirori, the Kurdish-Swedish film director who in 2021 received both the prestigious Swedish award Guldpalmen and a director’s award for the documentary Sabaya, which purported to show how enslaved Yazidi women were freed from the terrorist sect IS. But the documentary turned out to consist of staged scenes, and Hirori had also filmed women against their will.
Ooops. Hate it when that happens. Hirori was criticized and the BBC, for example, chose to depublish an interview with him after the revelation. But apparently there is no problem to 11) get continued trust from the public service despite having cheated, if you 12) are identity politically “correct” and 13) represent “the desired” opinions.
Thus, the internationally disgraced Hirori has been able to follow and document all of Gurgin’s activities for five years (!), at the taxpayers’ expense.
So this is what we are forced to finance: a public service that, with the help of its own (also a known cheater), tries to push its climate alarmist and doom-smelling ideology down our throats. Once again. Because Aldrig mer kebab isn’t a documentary either – it’s one big pointing stick. A climate alarmist version of Ingmar Bergman’s Hets, where Gurgin’s self-confident statements hits the viewer like professor Caligula’s pointing stick.
“Making the Paris Agreement a reality”
We are told that “we must change our habits” and this “for the sake of the climate”, because the earth is dying. The role model Gurgin declares that his goal is to “make the Paris Agreement a reality” in today’s society, which he describes as a “dirty system”. That his contribution to the Paris Agreement consists in leaving his apartment to instead drive around (!) in a 26-year-old (!!) and diesel-powered (!!!) motor home from Eura Mobil, we don’t need to dwell on.
— In 2017, I had enough. Thought this was absolutely disastrous to keep going to a job and “Well, howdy, howdy! What about the cottage in the countryside then? It’s newly painted red now, isn’t it?” Sit and listen to people’s boring anecdotes and be another bored person who makes money, spends money, makes money, spends money and then goes to bed and dies…
That’s not how the radio host wants it. No, he wants to “work less and live more” – so he resigns. The first year he intends to live on his saved money, then he will make a living by podcasting about dogs…
Another provocation
Perhaps someone at SVT could have informed both Comrade Gurgin and Comrade Hirori that the above probably feels like a a big slap in the face for most Swedes. Most of us actually don’t have much choice but to “make money, spend money, make money, spend money” as we live paycheck to paycheck yet dream of traveling to that dingy red cottage in the countryside that Gurgi apparently despises.
Resign from a permanent position? In addition, in a workplace that the majority of journalists can only dream of? (Sveriges Radio, SR, is the Swedish public service radio company.) Leave an apartment in Stockholm? No. You just don’t do that. A good job, a steady income and a home of your own are what most Swedes have at the top of their wish list and what many Swedes never achieve, despite their struggle.
“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche..?”
Instead of working, Gurgin chooses to save the world by taking his old fossil-fueled motor home to drive to a climate demonstration in Berlin, and on to an animal rights demonstration in Brussels. “It’s going to be totally awsome,” he explains, because now he can finally do what he really wants, things that “mean more.”
You shake your head and feel the secondary shame wash over you like luke warm diesel from an overheated motor home on the Autobahn.
Gurgin drives his diesel-powered motor home to the EU Parliament in Brussels to demonstrate for veganism and animal rights together with the dog Ronja. Illustration: Screenshot SVT.
Generation Ego
Gurgin says he wants to “live the future”. But of course the reason he makes these changes in his life is because he can. He has the means and opportunity to ignore everything and everyone and just be the full-blooded egocentric world savior wannabe he appears to be. If there is something that the documentary succeeds in showing, it is that Gurgin has never had to fight for his existence, never had to prioritize anyone other than himself.
Hirori and SVT therefore fail miserably. The documentary (?) which is supposed to motivate the viewer to make drastic changes for the climate, really only succeeds in one thing: portraying Gurgin as a narcissistic besserwisser. A perfect representative of Generation Ego.
The rest of the Bakircioglu family, Gurgin’s father, mother and sister, seem to agree with me on that.
— This is what happens when you give your children freedom, Gurgin’s father exclaims when the family sees a TV segment where the son propagates that people should refrain from having children. If it would mean that humanity dies out, it’s positive for the climate…
Sterilization for the climate
Gurgin himself wants to be sterilized, and the viewer can accompany him to the doctor’s consultation before the procedure. The conversation between the patient and the doctor becomes a farce within a farce, when Gurgin is asked to explain why he wants to have the procedure done (the quotes are transcribed, he actually expresses himself like this):
— No, but… Thoughts that have slowly grown, from voluntary child freedom to… Until I have understood that it has such an incredible, like, impact on the climate. And I care about climate. And I don’t want to deal with… What shall I say… T-shirt activism. But I want that when you commit to something, you do it for real. And children and people come with such incredible emissions.
— I’ve become a vegan and a minimalist and stopped buying and don’t fly airplanes. So why would I have a child when it’s absolutely like.. Twenty times worse than the second most environmentally friendly everyday decision in one’s life? Eeehm… Fifty-eight like tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. There are tons of studies on how we kind of… Aaah, I’ve read an inordinate amount about this.
The doctor’s answer? “Yes, it seems so…”
The face of a doctor who listens to a patient who wants to sterilize himself “for the climate”. Illustration: Screenshot SVT.
“Viruses or Parasites”
Somewhere in the mania of sectarian mentality and firm belief in the right path to salvation, Gurgin loses sight of an important detail: If everyone were to do as he did and abandon work and responsibility to “live their dream”, society would collapse. Then the public service would not get a single tax penny to spend, no one would be able to fix Gurgin’s crumbling mobile home, no one would be able to sterilize him.
“If any other species had behaved as we do, we would have called them viruses or parasites”, Gurgin says in the documentary’s introduction, as if to emphasize how wretched we humans are.
I believe there is some truth in what Gurgin says. If any other category had behaved as Gurgin does, they would have been called “parasites”. But now they are called “public service” instead. However, the principle is the same: Public service spreads something that is harmful to humans, and it does so by getting it’s nourishment from the same body it wants to destroy.
For Swedish taxpayers, it is therefore worse to suffer from SVT’s indoctrination, than from something that could have been cured by a course of Ivermectin. And many would certainly have preferred to spend their money on a good kebab, instead of being forced to finance the idol portrait of yet another vegan climate alarmist without grounding in reality, who wants to educate the rest of us and make us feel guilty and ashamed that we too do not abandon our families, our income and the cottages in the countryside. “For the sake of the climate!”
Whether or not Gurgin Bakircioglu is “living the future” today is unclear. Satire is nevertheless dead and buried.
