This sorry Swedish story attracted fleeting global attention.

A school in Sweden confiscated a boy’s party invitations being handed out to his friends as two classmates were not invited:

"Two people in class had not been invited, and that is not allowed. The ones who were not invited felt sad and left out," the school principal, who was not named, told the paper.

Let’s assume that the two who were not invited had in some way or the other upset the party-host.

The boy hosting the party decides not to invite them. Cause – meet Effect!

The idea that behaviour has consequences is life’s one core rule. Our world depends on it.

Society ideally should be organised so that Good Behaviour has Good Consequences; Bad Behaviour has Bad Consequences.

And if those basic principles are not taught and learned at school, when are they taught and learned?

What if the very distinction between Good and Bad is seen as … discrimination? 

Thus to the Mandela Birthday Party in London. And the revolting spectacle of Annie Lennox on stage twittering on about HIV/AIDS, when Mandela has done so little about the utterly awful policies of President Mbeki in this area which have led to the deaths of countless South Africans.   

Then on to the African Union gathering, where ‘President’ Mugabe is welcomed as if nothing untoward had happened in his country’s ‘election’. Again, Mandela has done nothing to make a difference.

On the day France takes over the EU Presidency let us recall the infamous words of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1961:

The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.

We see now that J-PS was 100% wrong.

Those African Marxist liberators, so generously supported by Sweden, did killing enough. But they remained unfree, locked in a profound Marxist/Swedish moral syndrome of Total Irresponsibility.

Unable to accept criticism, unable to set their standards high, ultimately loyal (like Mandela) not to their people but only to their own political movements.

Nor are we former colonialists free either, since we carry on sending ‘assistance’ to these villains, patronisingly subsidising and extending their countries’ moral and actual impoverishment.

In Africa thanks to generations of the best Euro-Swedish non-judgmental educational thinking and development policies, Bad Behaviour has Quite Good consequences.

Result?

Disaster. Of course.

But it’s no-one’s fault. Except maybe ours.

Update: I learn that many schools in the UK and not only in Sweden have these ‘all or no-one’ policies for parties. Including the school where my daughter goes(!). They have a variation – it is OK within one class for girls to invite only girls to a party, and boys only boys. Hmm.

Not clear to me what exactly the ‘policy’ means. It is not (I think) in any contract one signs with the school. In practice it is little more than an impertinent device to give teachers an easier life, and maybe these days they need one.

Yet it is deeply perverse. Imagine if the teachers at a school were told that if they host a party at home they had to invite all their teacher colleagues. They would say ‘Get Lost! It’s my house and I’ll invite whom I like.’

Parents and children are not extended a similar freedom and the accompanying responsibility?