Book publisher Kristoffer Lind from the publishing house Lind & Co has slammed the Swedish government for only giving financial support through the Culture Council to books that promote social justice values and diversity above quality literature.
Mr. Lind argued that the Culture Council, headed by Green Party Minister of Culture Alice Bah Kuhnke, was using the grant system to promote politically correct literature in Sweden, Göteborgs Posten reports.
“If you have a reputable African female writer, you can get support for anything. But for a white American, it does not matter if he won the Nobel Prize, it’s hard to get support,” Lind said.
Director General of the Culture Council Staffan Forssell defended the organisation’s funding priority for certain issues saying they did not reflect the opinions of the management but were part of a broader consensus.
The criticism of Ms. Bah Kuhnke is not the first time the minister has been heavily criticised for her politically correct views.
Last year, the minister was slammed by many when she suggested that returning Islamic State fighters should be welcomed back and helped in order to reintegrate them into Swedish society.
More recently, many were raising questions over the appointment of Pakistan-born Qaisar Mahmood to the head of the Swedish National Heritage Board given Mahmood’s comments stating that he knew nothing about Swedish cultural heritage.
Politically correct attitudes were also blamed for a report in which researchers at Uppsala University revealed that clothing found in a Viking burial had contained the word “Allah” written in Kufic script.
A short time after the discovery was a presented, Stephennie Mulder, an expert on Medieval Islam at the University of Texas at Austin, took to Twitter to reveal that Kufic script had not even been invented at the time the clothing had been buried.
In August of last year, an even more troubling report stated that certain Iron Age archaeological finds in Sweden were being thrown in the garbage or being recycled as scrap metal.