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July 12, 2023 - August 15, 2024
In other words, the two polar opposites of Swedish society lived cheek by jowl with one another right here in these two low-income housing districts – the immigrants and asylum seekers on one side, the right-wing working class on the other.
‘City planners have a great deal to answer for,’ I thought to myself as I picked the leaves out of my hat. Then I thought again: perhaps the isolating nature of the urban layout here in Rosengård was intentional. Perhaps someone wanted to fragment these communities and keep them apart.
THE AWKWARD TRUTH for Sweden’s multiculturalists is that immigrants and asylum seekers do appear to be responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in the country, particularly violent crime, and particularly rape. In Fishing in Utopia Andrew Brown writes:
The Scandinavian welfare-state model was not designed with non-Western immigrants in mind.
By effectively shunting newly arrived immigrants off to places like Rosengård, where they are given just enough money to live on but face often insurmountable obstacles to progressing further in society,1 the system creates convenient ghettoes for their ongoing ‘clientification’
The country has also taken in around 30,000 asylum seekers each year, compared with 3,000–5,000 in Denmark, a figure which is striking enough in absolute terms, but which makes Sweden the third highest destination for asylum seekers in the world in per capita terms
‘And I think it was 43 per cent of Swedes that said “Yes, I don’t like to be together with people who are different from me.” When I first saw that, I thought, well that’s not bad, less than half. But then I saw the responses from the other countries and the difference was immense. In the other Nordic countries it was about 10 per cent, even Spain was only 22 per cent.
In other words, the prevailing Social Democratic doctrine that immigration is a good thing, the right thing, has become a kind of self-fulfilling socio-political prophecy.
Actually, I did feel a bit of a fascist for asking my next question, but did he not think that, with more than a third of Sweden’s population either born overseas or from foreign parents, might it at least be the time to consider stopping further immigration?
the more you debate with extreme parties like them, the more legitimate, and larger, they become.’
Absolut Sweden: A Journey in a Wealth of Silence
the Øresund Bridge as a ‘mental Berlin Wall’,
It is economic suicide not to integrate immigrants and not to invite people from elsewhere to come and work here.
‘a form of government that includes control of everything under one authority, and allows no opposition,’
They called it Folkhemmet (the ‘People’s Home’). It was the most generous, progressive and extensive welfare state in the world. Folkhemmet ensured its citizens never went hungry or homeless, that they were cared for when they were sick, and provided for when they grew old.
The New Totalitarians of the country as a socialist dystopia
‘Modern Sweden has fulfilled Huxley’s specifications for the new totalitarianism,’ he wrote. ‘A centralised administration rules people who love their servitude.’
Enzensberger was referring to the extraordinary levels of conformity and consensus he had observed during a general election, but also the fact that the Swedish Social Democrats had enjoyed a virtually unchallenged stranglehold on power for most of the twentieth century.
(still to this day it is inordinately difficult and costly for Swedish companies to sack anyone);
writes veteran Swedish journalist Ulf Nilson in his book What Happened to Sweden?
It was also decided that the formal Swedish mode of address, ni (their equivalent of the French vous) was undemocratic and should cease to be used
the concern being that they contribute to negative gender stereotyping. The idea is that everyone should be referred to as hen, regardless of their gender – one Stockholm kindergarten recently made hen the mandatory pronoun.
No figure epitomised this self-righteous, finger-wagging approach more than the Social Democratic prime minister of the seventies and eighties, Olof Palme.
They had inherited a poor, patriarchal, and formal society, and turned it into a rich, feminist, and fiercely egalitarian one.’
Under Palme, Sweden’s welfare system expanded exponentially in the fields of health care, childcare, housing, care for the elderly and much more, and taxes rose to cover the costs and redistribute Sweden’s fast-growing wealth.
The shock to this peaceful nation of having its prime minister gunned down in the street is hard to overestimate, indeed Palme’s murder still resonates among an entire generation of Scandinavians. As historian Tony Griffiths writes: ‘Sweden suffered a collective nervous breakdown.’
Henrik Berggren has written a highly acclaimed biography of Palme.
there is a creeping totalitarianism which is defined as conforming, to do like others. Nobody really questions the kind of society we have, that’s what I dislike so much about Sweden. Indoctrination is what you would call it.’
‘Swedes are not interested in history,’ Daun told me. ‘Swedes look at their country as modern.’
the most diligent of worker bees, happy to toil for the good of the hive. But what made the Swedes such perfect subjects for benign totalitarianism?
Trade unions were modern. Collectivism was modern. Neutrality was modern. Economic and gender equality were modern. Universal suffrage was modern. Divorce was modern. The welfare state was modern. Eventually multiculturalism and mass immigration were deemed modern.
The Swedes had been selling iron to the Germans since the fourteenth century and clearly saw no reason to stop.
‘an extension of Germany’s war industry’ up until at least 1943.
I bring up the Second World War here not to rub the Swedes’ noses in it (okay, perhaps just a bit), but because their post-war economic and social miracle would not have been possible without the devastation and subsequent rebuilding of much of the rest of Europe. Sweden’s neutrality left it unscathed, placing it in a prime position to exploit Europe’s rapid, Marshall Plan-fuelled growth.
‘After the war, the agreement that they would go for growth, retain a national consensus and, tacitly, bury the past, worked very well. But it’s left a kind of scar . . . And in order to achieve that success it gave up division: so there’s agreement, or apparent agreement, on everything.’
‘huge commitment to peace and neutrality while at the same time fostering a huge arms industry’,
One of my more outlandish theories was that the Swedes’ ostentatious political correctness, in particular with regard to their openness to immigration and multiculturalism, was a manifestation of this repressed guilt: they realised they had let us all down, and were now trying to make up for it. Surprisingly, for once he agreed with me.
‘Because prosperity in general in moral people does tend to create a sense of guilt.
Particularly if, for instance, you were one of the sixty thousand Swedish women – mostly working-class – who were forcibly sterilised or coerced into being sterilised between 1935 and 1976
during the country’s unfortunate eugenics misadventure.
‘We have the good fortune to belong to a race that is so far relatively unspoiled, a race that is the bearer of very high and very good qualities,’ adding that it was about time they protected said superior race.
The two regimes shared the same goal: the purification of a race of tall, blond, blue-eyed people.
Ulf Nilson in his book What Happened to Sweden?
The Swedish state was, she writes, ‘a repressive machinery where individual rights were potentially sacrificed to powerful social norms’.
(as the saying goes, ‘Swedish people are born free but taxed to death’).
concedes that the Swedish state still has extraordinary influence over the lives of its citizens, but argues that it exercises its powers with transparency and compassion: ‘Yes you are transferring an enormous amount of power to the state, but it depends how the state uses that power.
argue that the real aim of the Swedish government was to liberate its citizens from each other, to set them free and allow them to become fully autonomous, independent entities in charge of their
‘hyper individualists’ – more so even than the Americans – and that they are ‘devoted to the pursuit of personal autonomy’.
The Swedish system’s logic is that it is dangerous to be dependent on other people, to be beholden to other people. Even to your family.’
“Well, it depends on my family.” “Ah, so if you have rich parents then they have to pay for you. But what if you have parents who don’t agree with what you want to study? It sounds like you are pretty dependent on your parents.” This is not the kind of problem we have. We can study anything we want to. It’s a small example, but its telling.’
