Wednesday 5 August 2015



Politically incorrect journeys (4): Sweden


This is a travel blog about Malmö, Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe. 




Unfortunate juxtaposition: the heads appear to read "Women to take initiative in Malmö," left, and "More forced to sell sex in Skåne," at right. Look again and you see the Metro refers to immigrants.


The print media generally aroused in me an emotion towards Sweden that I had never felt before: contempt. Dave Spart is not a joke character in a satirical magazine in this country. In his Swedish incarnation, he is the chief editor of Expressen and Aftonbladet, two of the most fanatical and vicious tabloids I have ever read anywhere. Though mass immigration is not a taboo topic in Sweden, almost all criticism of it is censored, distorted or demonized in the mainstream print media. A daily barrage of hate and slander is directed at the Sweden Democrats (usually shortened to SD, for Sverigedemokraterna), the self-proclaimed ‘Sweden-friendly,’ anti-mass-immigration party with a young, fairly telegenic leadership that has been shaking up Sweden’s cosy coalition politics. Every morning I would read headlines like these: “SD are trying to delude the working class.” “SD are still racists!” “How far to the right will [SD leader] Jimmie Åkesson go?” Every single newspaper story I read about SD in a month in Sweden—and there were a lot, because its rise to double-digits in the polls has become a real worry for the establishment—was a hatchet job, often littered with Spart-like abuse originating in World War II. Around this time, local paper Länstidningen ran a cartoon of Åkesson as a giant cockroach, with a masked exterminator wearing a gas tank on which the other main parties’ logos featured. In such an environment, the party uses a box number main address on its website and its three top leaders are thought to need police protection. 

The threat of violence is very real. Referring to a scuffle incident involving party leaders and an iron rod, Swedish rapper Sebbe Staxx told the Metro on November 28, 2013, “If I had been there I would have taken the rod and put all three of them in a coma.” I read these lines and thought, this is nice little Sweden? A country where you can use the press as a platform for threatening GBH?

Indeed, violence against the “intolerant” is now seen by some Swedes as acceptable. It is “good violence.” There was TV documentary all about it on SVT in May 2014, with precisely that name, Det Goda Våldet. The “good violence” usually takes the form of physical assault or trashing of people’s homes. Even if you do not know Swedish, this uncharacteristic exposé is worth watching online, as the footage speaks for itself. It focuses on one particularly nasty organization, Revolutionära Fronten, using their own video diary of assaults with spray cans, axes and incendiary devices against conspicuously outnumbered “fascists” in the street or in their own homes. It goes without saying that the attackers are nearly all from the far left, mostly from affluent middle-class backgrounds, and that they generally hunt in packs. 

One victim was Daniel Spansk, a politician belonging to the small, nationalist Svenskarnas parti (Party of the Swedes), who was attacked by strangers on the way from a restaurant. “We had hardly got 200 meters from the restaurant before I received a leaping split kick between my shoulders and fell to the ground, I have no doubt that the mob belonged to Revolutionära Fronten, the same people who have paid lots of home visits to our members and posted videos of what they vandalized,” he told Dispatch International. While this is a fringe phenomenon, overshadowed by repeated rioting and violence within the immigrant community itself, political thuggery by gloating “antifascist” cowards in balaclavas is another gift from the world’s would-be model society that the world is better off without. In a normal country, in times of peace, the only time when thugs get your address and kick your door down in the middle of the night is when you have serious outstanding financial issues with the mob. In Sweden, it happens because of your voting preferences. It is a truly disquieting precedent, and, as we shall soon see, it is not the only form of citizen intimidation being pioneered in this strange country.

While scorning and stygmatising patriotism, the media contort themselves to present multiracialism as an unalloyed boon. The local papers, like City Malmö, were particularly crass in this regard. Every day, you would see transparently propagandist headlines, like “Enterprises that employ foreign-born people succeed more easily overseas,” or “Neglected school building finds new use as lodging for asylum seekers!” The real goal here was not to keep the public informed, the core mission of a paper, but to make the constant inflows of foreigners seem normal. Needless to say, media sensitivity about Malmö’s now international crime reputation is acute. After an Odense school cancelled an exchange trip with a local school, citing the Danish parents’ security fears, Vårt Malmö (Our Malmö), published by the city, ran a feature in which residents were asked if they felt safe in their areas. “Yes, I do,” said Darwin Celebre, the ethnic interviewee. “Yes, it’s safe, with lots of families with children,” said Eric. “I feel very safe,” said a third. Added Tove: “I feel really safe, very quiet streets.” In truth, I had some sympathy with this laughable piece of puffery. Danish schoolkids on a short visit are not likely to get hurt here. It isn’t that bad. Might hear a few police sirens, though.

The propaganda effort is greatly abetted by the police stonewalling on criminal ethnicity (though they do not censor personal names). A paper ran a story warning parents about a suspected rapist hanging around two local schools: “Three children were victims of rape in September and all three have said that the perpetrator was a man in his twenties. No suspects are currently under investigation.” That was all. Malmö has well over one hundred nationalities, but the children evidently had nothing to say about the attackers’ appearance or accent. You saw stories like this, with gaping holes, nearly every day. But all facts that make the open-door policy look bad are simply suppressed. “Political correctness” comes before public safety in Sweden. “Of course, certain people think that we should specify whether a crime has been committed by an immigrant or not,” said Lars Johansson, chief editor of Helsingborgs Dagblad (quoted by Julia Caesar). “As I see it, this is not relevant, but it is the will of the mob that we do this.” 

It almost goes without saying that in any dispute pitting immigrants against ethnic Swedes, Swedish newspapers side with the former. A minor but particularly emotive episode that generated a nationwide outcry concerned an elderly Red Cross charity shop worker, Barbro Feldt, who was secretly filmed on a smartphone telling a young Iraqi Kurd immigrant who came into her shop in Falun that she believed that ethnic Swedes should come first in job-creation measures. The Kurd posted video footage on Facebook, gloating at her “shameless, heartless” words. Aftonbladet then ran a headline accusing a Red Cross worker of offending an immigrant. Never mind that Feldt, a voluntary worker, had been set up and meanly betrayed, and that the Kurd was a convicted criminal whose upbringing had largely been financed by the Swedish taxpayer. Or, come to that, that Feldt was possibly right to want priority given to young native Swedes. The Red Cross sent in some head honchos to give Feldt a lecture on moral values, while the Kurd’s video was earmarked for internal training. The press denounced her as a xenophobe for wishing to prioritize her own people, and for making the distinction between “us” and “them,” to which an Ethopian-born Swedish Red Cross cadre professed to take particular exception. Feldt left—was evidently forced out of—the Red Cross and died soon after. There was, however, one glimmer of silver lining. When the story broke nationally, the Red Cross website crashed in a storm of online protest. Just for once, ordinary Swedes spoke back.

Books weren’t much better than the papers. In a leading bookstore, I could find only one volume that even touched on the issue of mass immigration, the most important change Sweden has faced in the last thousand years. It was called Partiet. En olycklig kärlekshistoria (The Party, an unhappy love story). It was by Eva Franchell, Aftonbladet leader-writer, and its theme was the decline of the Social Democrats, the party that presided over the golden era of nice, rich, homogenous Sweden, and, under Palme, began to destroy it. I skimmed it for twenty minutes or so. Towards the end, a single line stuck out: “It is 2012, and one in ten Swedes can think about voting for a racist party.” There, in one sneering line, you have the establishment stance on immigration in Sweden, in all its depth and subtlety. Yet if you go on one of the Swedish alternative news websites, you will find at least a dozen books on this subject, with titles like Jan Sjunnesson’s Sverige 2020: Från extremt experiment till normal nation (Sweden 2020: From extreme experiment to normal nation) and Julia Caesar’s Landet som försvann (The land that vanished), professionally written by respected commentators, and available only through specialist publishers who often charge their authors. Mainstream publishers in Sweden refuse to handle this kind of material. It was shocking to realize that the closest parallel to this situation in Europe that I could think of was samizdat press of the USSR.


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