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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