Swedish History TV Series Faces Backlash for Using Black Actors

A new Swedish program on the country’s history is being scrutinized due to portrayals by actors of different ethnicities.

The History of Sweden will be broadcast this fall on Sweden’s tax-funded state TV channel Sveriges Television AB (SVT) after nearly three years of production, described by The Nordic Times as the network’s biggest ever historical venture.

Criticism has followed the arc of the project, however, due to Black and Middle Eastern actors front and center in previews. Some claim that their appearance is part of revisionist history and not following proper science or history, and some view it as a major slight towards white Europeans of Nordic descent.

SVT (state TV in Sweden) just produced a high-budget series called the History Of Sweden.

This is their depiction of the first Swedes: pic.twitter.com/nkjFlAYjuE

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 7, 2023

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As production has continued and publicity for the program has ramped up, more individuals have expressed antipathy toward the depictions shown in pre-released images. One of them is Jeff Ahl, a former member of Swedish Parliament.

“History falsification in full swing,” Ahl wrote in May on X, formerly Twitter. “The cultural Marxist poison must be purged from our ‘universities,’ which have turned into propaganda institutions, rather than serious institutions of learning.”

Others on X have declared it “state-sanctioned erasure of history,” adding that it is not Sweden’s past, but could be its future.

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