FAGERVIK, Sweden -- Twenty years ago he was beaten up by baton-wielding police during a street protest against the Vietnam war. Today, Jan Myrdal remains a fiery communist and stands out as Sweden's most rebellious writer this century.
Many Western intellectuals may have second thoughts about what they said or did during the radical 1960s. But not the author of the 1963 classic social study 'Report from a Chinese Village.'
Myrdal rarely regrets anything.
The controversy around him stems from many things, including his defense of the chaotic Chinese Cultural Revolution and of toppled Cambodian leader Pol Pot, accused of mass murder. And his vision of Western-styled Communism in which everyone could afford to drink fine wines and eat Camembert. And the fact that he once questioned whether his Nobel-Prize winning mother and father were actually his parents.
A stubborn polemicist, Myrdal has his enemies.
He is not welcome in the Soviet Union for his writings about Soviet actions in Turkmenistan and Afhganistan.
But he also has his admirers. When Myrdal turned 60 in July, Culture Minister Bengt Goransson called to congratulate him. An endless stream of Swedish personalities brought presents to his door.
'Jan Myrdal is Sweden's best writer. Whenever he travels abroad it becomes silent in Sweden,' said Ivar Lo-Johansson, the country's veteran labor author. 'He is courageous and a realist, a moralist.'
Myrdal has won praise from the literary establishment for his childhood memoirs -- but caused a scandal for portraying his parents, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, as cold-hearted career minded people.
The black sheep of the family, he is one of three children of the Myrdals, who were two of Sweden's most globally oriented political radicals.
Between travels, the bespectacled Myrdal, who also sports a mustache, writes on a word processor in his house, fittingly painted red and overlooking island-dotted Lake Malaren in Fagervik village, 40 miles southwest of Stockholm.
Myrdal says his head sometimes still aches from being hit with a police baton Dec. 20, 1967 in that Stockholm anti-American protest.
'They really beat me up, you know,' muses Myrdal, who was arrested and fined for causing a public disturbance.
At the time, his mother was Swedish Cabinet minister for disarmament, a job that reflected her position as head of the Swedish delegation to the Geneva disarmament conference. She took part in the government meeting that denied the demonstrators permission to stage the protest, paving the way for the police crackdown.
His father, author of the 1944 classic 'An American Dilemma -- the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,' publicly condemned his son for joining the demonstration.
'He was insane,' Jan Myrdal says now. 'And six months earlier Alva had said we should stop seeing each other to avoid compromising her position. It became natural for me to break off relations (with them).'
Seven years later, in 1974, Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel Economics Prize. In 1982, the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on his mother.
That also was the year Jan Myrdal published 'Childhood,' the first volume of his memoirs of his early years. Myrdal, who himself has a son and a daughter, both with successful careers, wrote that he had such a loveless childhood he speculated Gunnar and Alva were not his real parents.
The fact that his mother was a child psychologist, he wrote, 'struck me as an expression of black and surrealistic humor.'
His parents, saying they had indeed loved their son, in vain sued newspapers for printing excerpts from the book.
Two years later, Myrdal published 'Another World,' the second part of his memoirs, describing his life as an 11-year-old in New York, where he spent a year while his father researched material for 'An American Dilemma.' He tells of waging a silent war against his parents and the school psychologist, who said he had 'pronounced autistic traits.'
Alva Myrdal died on Feb. 2, 1986, and her husband on May 17 this year, whereupon Jan Myrdal wrote an impressive obituary hailing his father's work.
Born in Stockholm on July 19, 1927, Myrdal spent his childhood as an avid reader and a dreaded street fighter in both Stockholm and New York.
At the age of 10, he read the works of Sweden's 19th century literary giant August Strindberg and at 15 he consumed works about the French Revolution and became a communist. He quit school and became a drifter.
'I chose to write,' says Myrdal, author of some 50 books. 'It meant I had to break with school and that kind of education. That I knew from reading Strindberg and others. One had to make oneself impossible from the start, tear down bridges.'
He did it so efficiently that the Social Democratic establishment, 'agreed that the best thing I could do for the Labor movement and the country was to disappear,' Myrdal said in his 1968 autobiographical work on his teenage and adult years, 'Confessions of a Disloyal European,' which he wrote in English.
In 1958, Myrdal left Sweden with his wife and travel companion-photographer Gun Kessle, for Afghanistan. Since then, they have spent some 20 years on dusty Asian roads, including four years in India and two years in China, writing and photographing.
'Asia changed all my perspectives. I had known something about Asia, of course ... But it was a European perspective,' he wrote in 'Confessions of a Disloyal European.'
In 1963, Myrdal got his international breakthrough with 'Report from a Chinese Village,' which was based on interviews with peasants in Liu Lin village in the northern Shanxi province.
A political pilgrim, Myrdal returned to Liu Lin four times - writing about life in the village before, during and after the Cultural Revolution in such books as 'Chinese Revolution Continued' and 'A Chinese Village 20 Years Later.'
Myrdal insists the 1949 Communist takeover in China was 'the greatest event this century,' But he is against current Chinese reform policies and warns that they may create a new ruling class that will suppress the rural masses.
He struck the same theme in his 1980 'India Waits,' an impassioned view on the world's largest, and poorest, democracy and a scathing criticism of its former British colonial masters. The book has been published in the United States and India, but not in Britain.
A restless, vigorous man, Myrdal gets up from the armchair, his thundering voice getting still louder, to lumber back and forth in front of a wall dominated by a curry-colored Indian tapestry.
Myrdal, who is writing a script for a joint Swedish-Mexican television project about Mexico's revolution, mused about the way the world has changed since his days of protest in the 1960s.
'The Mexican revolution cost a million dead. Did it succeed? No, Zapata's dream is still a dream. Did it fail? No. It was a giant leap forward.
'The great social upheavals are necessary. Political parties are temporary things, but the general direction prevails.'
Myrdal remains a supporter of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who was responsible for the death of many Cambodians before he was toppled by the Vietnamese in 1979.
'There was terror and counter-terror. I asked Pol Pot in Phnom Penh about the terror accusations. His answer was that they were grossly exaggerated. I think he is right there. It was not a million (who were killed).'
He is a man with serious views but one who also has a lighter side. Myrdal's hobbies include changing neck ties (he has over a hundred), playing with his Meccano construction set and toy steam engine, and drinking French wines.
In his imaginary communist society, advanced technology would be used to enhance the quality of life for people in Western countries.
'Technology would, for instance, make it possible to buy cheap handbound books. Reasonable socialism should take advantage of all possibilities for the good, changing life, and the good wines and the Camembert,' Myrdal smiled.
