Episode 80: Why Dag Hammarskjöld Still Matters

July 29, 2025 was Dag's 120th birthday. He wouldn't still be with us now even if he hadn't been murdered in 1961. But it's important for those of us in the younger generations to keep his life and legacy alive. Does Dag still matter? Absolutely. In a time of vitriol, madness, and bombast, Dag reminds us that we could have it so much better. 

Case I mentioned: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_v._Ginzburg

My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available next summer. 

Need more? You can visit the website at: https://consaracytheories.com/ or my own site at: https://saracausey.com/. Don't forget to check out the blog at: https://consaracytheories.com/blog. 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Dag Hammarskjold, plane crash, JFK assassination, deep politics, intellectual legacy, personal side, justice, conspiracy theories, biographies, UN Secretary General, disarmament, peace, introverts in politics, supremacy culture, legacy.

Action Items

Learn more about Dag Hammarskjold's life, legacy, and the ideals he stood for.

Consider the importance of having more introverts and highly sensitive people involved in politics to bring about positive change.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know well you're in the right place? Here is your host, Sara Causey. 

hello,

hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I want to explore why Dag Hammarskjöld still matters. Obviously, this topic is very near and dear to me, more so than I ever imagined it would be last year. On July 29 I released a bonus episode asking who was Dag Hammarskjöld. And in the write up for that, I mentioned that, as with JFK, discussions of dag often turned to the mysterious circumstances of his death in this plane crash that happened on September 18, 1961 I've talked before about Ravi Somaiya’s book, the golden thread, Mads Bruger’s documentary, cold case, hammer sold so often. The dialog around DAG is about the bizarre circumstances of his death. And I want to be very clear in saying that it's not my position that we should just forget about it, nor is that my position with the murder of JFK, nothing's going to bring these people back. It's all water under the bridge. The perpetrators themselves are probably dead by now. So what's the point? Let it go. Move on. I'm not saying that at all. I absolutely believe that the perpetrators should be identified, called out, and if anybody involved in the plot is still alive, then they should be prosecuted. There should be whatever form of justice a person can get all these decades later. I don't claim to have all the answers to that. But I just want to be emphatic that my point is not forget about the murders, let it go focus on the good things. My point is really that people can become reduced down to the worst day or the worst night of their life through no fault of their own. That's like you have this entire cottage industry of people that are dedicated really not to anything that pertains to JFK is life or his policies or what he was trying to accomplish, but people that are almost like morbid curiosity seekers that are obsessed with his death. And again, to be clear, JFK, murder is something that's a frequent topic of conversation on this podcast, so I'm not saying that we should stop talking about it. I think there has to be a balanced discussion between who someone was in their life. What were their goals? What did they accomplish? What were they trying to accomplish? What ideals did they stand for as well as, hey, this person was murdered. This person actually had a platform. They had a voice. They had ways of being able to affect change and potentially bring about peace. And that's why they were murdered. They were a threat to the system, the same system that Peter Dale Scott, very wisely identified as being deep politics. When you have somebody like dag or like JFK, that's a threat to that system. If it looks like they're going to succeed, they're going to really change the world, or change the Western world in some significant way. Nope, that's not going to be allowed to happen. Whenever I recorded the episode last year, I had read Charlie Simon's book about dag as well as Bo Beskow’s wonderful book, strictly personal, and you can tell the difference, especially for me, knowing dag as I do now, you can absolutely feel the difference in texts like that, because we have, I want to be thoughtful in how I say this, but at the same time, I don't, because this is a nighttime broadcast, and I can really say whatever I want to. I think, as it pertains to DAG, you have one cadre of biographies or books that are cold, clinical and academic, and they really want to make dag sound that way too. They home in on dag as an intellectual. And believe me, he was, Dag was, and as far as I'm concerned, still is brilliantly smart, well read, multilingual. There were people at the UN that would talk about how when you're still on step one, DAGs already on Step five, his mind is like Quicksilver. And he just he was, he was already playing like seven. D chess when you were sitting there with checkers, that's just not all there was to him. In the same way that the night that he was murdered is not the only thing that's significant about his life and his times, I would argue that his intellectualism is not the only thing that's significant about him, either. So you have this cadre of books that are all about Jag, the cold intellectual. Look at how much he accomplished as the UN Secretary General, and he was part of the Swedish Academy, and he spoke multiple languages, and look at how brilliant he was. And I feel like, in my opinion, which could be wrong, I feel like sometimes writers that are of that flavor have the belief that if dag were in a flesh suit right now, he would be one of them. He would love to sit and have intellectual sparring matches with them. And, you know, he would never like, let's say, crack open a beer and sit around a campfire and want to tell ghost stories like, Oh no, not the great Dagh Hammer-hjold!

And I sit back and I'm like, Y'all don't know him at all.

So one of the refreshing things about Bo's book strictly personal, is that you do get to see that side of dag to a degree. I think, I think even Bo's biography is still somewhat closed off in comparison to what I've tried to do. And that's not me trying to be a bragger by any means. It's not me bragging on me. It's just me trying to say like I've done the best that I possibly can, to attempt to be a good conduit for DAGs energy and to let him finish up some unfinished business. But at least in Bo’s book, you do get to see that side of him. You get to see that side of him coloring with his goddaughter Maria, and playing around in a canoe and trying to fish, not well, but trying to fish, and roaming around with, you know, nothing but a pair of shorts and sandals on, and it's like, yeah. Like, that's dag too. It's not just the cold intellectual. It's also someone who loved being out in nature, loved to play in the dirt, loved to be goofy and silly at times. But, you know, the cadre of academics that I think have, in my opinion, safeguarded his legacy, not to really safeguard it, but just to guard it. I don't think that they want to see that side of him. They want, as I said, I think that they really want to believe that if dag were in a flesh suit here and now, then he would be hanging out in ivory towers, and he would be an intellectual. He wouldn't be hanging out with anyone unsavory, like some farmer from the Midwest who had the nerve to write his biography. Oh, heavens no.

Just a reminder, you can find Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld on amazon.com the link is available in the summary for this episode. And now back to the show.

Then we have another cadre of people who are fascinated by DAGs murder, and this is a lot like what we see in the cottage industries that have sprung up around the murder of JFK. Some people really do care about the life and legacy of JFK, and it's not that they're trying to cash in on his memory or they're trying to cash in on people who love a good conspiracy theory or a good murder mystery, they really care about the whole ball of wax, and they see a distinct line between what JFK was doing and trying to accomplish and the reason why he was murdered. And I think that the same thing is true with DAG. You have people that they want justice. They want the perpetrators to be named. They want some answers around this mysterious plane crash where we're all told, very similar to JFK, Jr, you know, I have have started getting into some of the weird circumstances around his death on this podcast, and that seems to be part of the Pop Pop playbook, if need be, take some out. Take someone out via plane crash, and it looks like, Oops, a daisy. They just misread the altimeter. The pilot didn't know what they were doing, and it was just a shit happens accident, and oh, my goodness me, couldn't have been prevented. Or maybe it could, you know, in JFK juniors case, it's like it could have been prevented, because he's portrayed as a himbo, someone who was attractive but not at all bright, didn't know what he was doing in that airplane, killed himself, his wife and his sister in law. In DAGs case, it's like, well, the pilot was experienced. He just had an accident. He just misread the altimeter. Didn't realize he was flying too low in a forest, and everybody went Bye, bye. It's like, Yeah, except no, except it was a murder. And I'm not the kind of author who I think, because for me, I'm not out here trying to get academic. Street cred. I'm not out here like, well, I want someone from the Ivy Leagues to sanction my work. I'm trying to do publish or perish. I'm trying to get University tenure. I couldn't care less about any of that. I have never held myself out to be an intellectual. I've never held myself out to be an academic. I have three college degrees, and I have, in fact, presented work at the Ivy League level. I have done that. I'm an award winning author and poet. I'm a playwright now too, which is absurd to me. I'm like, how did that happen? I'm illustrating some of my own books. I'm also like, how did that happen? It's just crazy. So my point is, I wouldn't say that I'm a slouch in the intelligence department, but I have never held myself out to be an intellectual or an academic, so I don't care about any of that. I don't give a toss about it. I personally believe the preponderance of evidence says that dag was murdered, that it was a hit and that he was taken out. I don't think it was an oops, a daisy, the pilot misread the altimeter. I also don't get into these fact magazine type of conspiracies that dag had lost his marbles. He was basically schizophrenic at the end of his death, or at the end of his life, I should say, and that caused his death. He took a boom, a boom stick on board the plane and killed everybody and went nuts. You know, you can you read things like that, and it's not a wonder, you know, you go back and look at the case with Barry Goldwater, it's not a wonder why he sued and won, by the way. You know, it takes something in the United States for a case to go in that direction, it really does, because the courts historically have put the First Amendment in a place of reverence, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and rightfully so. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The point that I'm making is for somebody to win, a politician in particular. Okay, let's think back to the 1990s primary colors. I was asking one of my publishing attorneys about this just the other day. I was like, how did they do that? Because we all knew it was Bill and Hillary. And then even when the movie version of primary colors was made, we all knew that it was Bill and Hillary. It was like, I remember a parody of primary colors on SNL where Steve Forbes had written his own book, and he was calling himself t torbs, and he was calling Lamar Alexander. Lamar Alexander, too. It was funny, because that's how it wasn't primary colors. Like we all know that this is about Bill and Hillary, and so my attorney was like, that's because of the First Amendment. Like the courts have really made the first amendment a priority. And when you are talking about satire, you're talking about fiction, and you're talking about those things for political figures, not only public figures in general, who have kind of given up a certain right to privacy, but politicians, in particular, in a lot of respects, they're fair game. They can be lampooned, and they certainly can be criticized. So to have a politician say, I have been besmirched to the point of libel, and I'm coming after you in the courts, and then to win. That's really saying something. And I'll drop a link to the to the case information if you want to check it out. If you're kind of a law nerd like I can be sometimes, you know, it's interesting reading, but I don't get into those kind of conspiracies either. I absolutely believe, personally, that dag was murdered, but I don't think that it was some kind of crazy murder suicide, where he went off the rails. I think this is another way to smear him. It's another way to keep the conversation on anything other than why he mattered, and that's why I'm on the air today. So this episode will drop on Wednesday the 30th, so the previous day, Tuesday, July, 29 2025, that would be DAGs 120th birthday. Obviously he would not still be here. Even if he had not been murdered and cut down in his 50s, he wouldn't still be here now. But we lost him way too soon, way too soon, and especially as his biographer, I just sit back and I think about all the plans that he had, and it reminds me, in a way, of my friend Ron. Had a friend. This was back, you know, in my late 20s, early 30s, we were co workers, and in a way, we were misfits. And I called him affectionately, my go to misanthrope, because he was an introvert and he was not a people person in the sense that he just didn't like most people. If you've ever heard any interviews with Hugh Grant, he was like that. Hugh Grant will be like, I don't like this. I don't like that. I don't like slow walkers. I don't like people that carry water bottles. I don't like backpacks. There's a whole list of things that that Peeves him about other people. That's how my friend Ron was, and I thought it was hilarious. It was delightful to be around somebody that wasn't full of fake positivity, fake gratitude, all of that. And Ron had a lot of plans for what he intended to do after he retired. He got sick with cancer, and it was so fleeting, so ephemeral, the time between his diagnosis and his passing felt like a breath or a whisper. It's just unreal, and it made an impression on me, and I thought, I am not going to sort of back load my life. In other words, I'm not going to have this list of things that I'm going to wait forever and ever to accomplish. I'm I'm going to live. I'm going to do what I feel that I came on this earth to do, and not just say, well, maybe after 65 I'll do all of this. Because what if you don't make it, there's always the possibility that you won't. Dag had some real plans. He had his farm house in the south of Sweden, which was down the street from the best golf he loved to write. He loved to translate. And, you know, like he had this, this window, this particular window picked out at the farmhouse where he intended to set up his writing desk and, like have his typewriter and his sheets of paper and his tea or his coffee, and to be able to look out at nature while he was typing and translating. And, you know, he just never got there. He had that farmhouse, but he never lived there full time. He had some real goals and some real ideas for what the next chapter of his life was going to look like once he was finished at the Secretariat, there's always the possibility that he might have been the FDR of the UN he might have been nominated for a third term. Dag being the way that he was being so duty bound, he might have agreed to do it if he were not chosen for a third term. However, I absolutely believe that he would have moved home to Sweden and he would have started that encore career in writing and translating. He intended to write his own memoir, and never got the opportunity to do it, which is one of the reasons why I'm so very committed to doing what I do for him and with him. If people say, well, that's just crazy, you know, you've, you've watched the ghost and Mrs. Muir too many times. Okay, that's your opinion, man. Like I said, I'm not out here chasing academic street cred. I really don't care if somebody sees me as an eccentric and strange artist. Well, I am. It's like how Dali said, the only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad.

I leave that open to your interpretation.

Why does Dag Hammarskjöld still matter sitting here thinking about him on what would have been his 100 and 20th birthday? What's still important here? Why should we still come back to this? Why should anybody care? Why would I write a book like decoding the unicorn, and I'm currently writing another book called simply DAG, that's even more intimate. That's even more like giving dag the opportunity to have that memoir that he didn't. I mentioned Peter Dale Scott and how he talks about the system of deep politics. If you think that that system has gone away, I would cordially invite you to reconsider your opinion. There was a quote that I read a little while back that stuck with me, and I think it always will. It was written by a member of the silent generation, and I think that there are some overlaps sometimes between that silent generation and Gen X, because Gen X so often gets forgotten about. It's all about the boomers, the millennials and the Gen Zers. And it's like those of us who were born between 1965 and 1980 somehow don't exist, or our opinion is not valid. I saw some rage bait the other day. I didn't click on it. I was a good girl. I'm like, I am not going to feed this machine, because rage is all the outrage pun intended. Pun not intended. Some jackwagon on medium had written an article saying that Gen X is basically like the silent generation, and they should all just shut up. And I thought, who's being vocal anyway? Like we're so often forgotten about, like, I didn't click on it. I'm like, I'm just not going to go there, because I'm not going to feed the machine. I'm not going to feed the algorithm. I'm so very tired of rage bait. But this person, the interesting person, not the rage bait person, this person from the silent generation, had said, like, you have dad getting murdered in September of 1961 then you have Bobby Kennedy getting murdered in 68 and he said, I was an adult when both of those events happened, and it just ruined it for. Me. I thought anybody who gets close to making peace, anybody who gets close to really making a difference, is going to be killed. There's not going to be any hope. There's not going to be any change. That's the end of it. And I can relate to that sentiment. You know, in the last episode that I recorded, Monica, we sack, we got into that a little bit. And Obama came along with hope and change. The Audacity of Hope. What a fucking fantastic book title. Man that's That's brilliant, The Audacity of Hope. And then he just goes and does a bush Cheney part two. What hope? What change? It's just Bush Cheney in different clothing. Dag Hammarskjöld still matters for a plethora of reasons, especially to me. I think in the broader sense, his legacy is still important because of the ideals that he stood for and because of the practical things too, disarmament, a world free from war and the fear of war, a world where people didn't automatically assume that you had to hit the war button, a world where we didn't have perma wars, a place where people could go and hash out their differences peacefully By talking, not by dropping bombs, but by talking the idea that a person can be quiet and gentle and still be effective, that you don't have to be bombastic and braggadocious and loud and extroverted and crass in order to get your point across. You

I feel like we could have it so much better, you know, and I make that argument in decoding the unicorn, we could have it so much better. I really feel that more introverts and HSPs should get involved in politics. They don't, and I understand why I Yeah, but I feel like if we continue to leave the town square to the extroverts and the loud, bombastic types, we're just going to continue to get what we've always gotten. Dag still matters, because he's a shining example of what what can be? What can happen when someone who really cares, someone who takes their duty seriously, an introvert, an HSP, somebody that's not flashy, somebody that doesn't manipulate and try to force things to happen their own way by yelling, shouting, using racial epithets or bigoted language. Dag was denouncing supremacy culture before we ever even had the term. He was very clear in saying that the era of white Europe running the whole world is over. The era of any culture, any race, any group of people, any ethnicity, saying I am superior. We set the code. We set the bar. It's over. It's done with nobody should have made been making that claim anyway. If you believe that people are equal in the eyes of God or creator, you cannot say I'm better than you. I'm I'm superior. My people good, your people bad. It doesn't work that way. We can have it so much better now I don't know politics as usual today. I don't know what's going to happen over the course of this administration, and it doesn't even matter, really, it's sort of like a revolving door. God, what was it Voltaire said, history is a catalog of crime, something like that. The older I get, the more I believe that to be true. At the risk of sounding cynical, especially sitting here extolling dag the way that I have, oh, history is a catalog of crime. Yeah, pretty much is the White House is just a revolving door. You have the White House, corporate America and Wall Street and all of these little piglets are suckling on the same sow, on and on it goes. But yet, this is not a sour and dour message, because it's really saying we could have it so much better. And I would certainly encourage you, whether you pick up my book or not, is beside the point. Please learn more about DAG, his life, his legacy, the things that he stood for. He was, and still is a wonderful, amazing person, and he doesn't deserve to be forgotten. He doesn't deserve to be thrown on the ash heap of history, nor does he deserve to be exploited because of the crazy circumstances around his death. Yes, we identify the perpetrators, we bring them to justice, but we don't turn the whole thing into a carnival act. Dag deserves better than that, and so do we.

Stay a little bit crazy, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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