Politically incorrect journeys (11): Sweden

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

Taken from the free downloadable book Kebabville & Zone: Click HERE

Christmas was in the air in Malmö too now. Crowds milled around a big illuminated fir tree that had been raised in Stortorget, and market stalls lined the main streets selling meatballs, ginger biscuits, glögg spiced wine and other traditional fare for the two holidays that dominate this month, Christmas and, before it, St. Lucia’s day on December 13th, when the girls wear crowns of candles. I had never seen Malmö looking so Swedish. 

I didn’t have much left to do and, with winter proper coming on, little wish to stay longer in Scandinavia. I gravitated towards the bookshops. Despite the impenetrable Bergman films and the gloomy, tormented plays of Strindberg and Ibsen, I have never found Scandinavia a place of furrowed brows or profound intellectual activity. As noted before, the political stuff was scanty and monotonously leftwing, and the history shelves were dominated by illustrated Hitler-iana, which sells just as well in peace-loving Sweden as in the actual combatant countries. The fiction top ten mostly comprised the same sadistic crime pulp that passes for light reading all over Europe now—Snow White Must Die, Abattoir Blues. But among the war stuff, I found one volume that tempted me into a quick browse. 

It was titled Fyra dagar i April (Four days in April). By Magnus Alkarp, archaeologist, musician and dramaturge, it was about the old Swedish Nazi party, the SSS, and the pro-Nazi rioting that took place in the summer in 1943 in Uppsala, which was allegedly aimed at dragging Sweden into the war on the side of Germany. I was less shocked that Sweden had its own Nazis—it still does, proper ones who wear the kit, hold miniscule rallies and do the salutes—than by the fact that people had actually rioted. When did you last hear of Swedes taking to the streets? 

The university town of Uppsala was probably the logical place for these events, since it has significant previous in the annals of Swedish state-sponsored racism. I mean here real racism, not the empty smear bandied about by “progressives” today. It was here, in this venerable old seat of Scandinavian learning, that the Swedish government in 1922 set up Statens Institut för Rasbiologi, the state “race-biology” institute, which presided over the world’s first modern racial studies program and was later involved in forced sterilisation, a program which affected 63,000 people in Sweden and continued until 1975. It is hard now to believe how staggeringly different attitudes to this sort of thing were just three generations ago. It is also interesting to note that this extremism, just like today’s diametrically opposed extremism of the utopian left, found its natural home in academia.

According to Maja Hagerman, a science writer with the leading daily Dagens Nyheter, the decision to found the institute was almost unanimous, with support from both the right and the then newly founded Social Democrats. Its mission, she writes, was to “teach the general public to spot the differences among peoples.” Campaigns spread the message that it was important to distinguish the foreigner—Lapps, Finns, Jews and gypsies—and study the differences in their faces and bodies. It was deemed to be of national importance, and reaching young girls was considered crucial. The programme was “a kind of sex education designed to get them to choose someone of the right kind to father their children. So that the next generation of Swedes would remain Swedish.” People were photographed and had to fill out forms about eye and hair colour and give intimate details about their pubic hair. Blond and blue-eyed Swedes could be categorised as “Grade A” people of the best stock, while others were seen as less valuable. “I have met many people who remember how they learned to categorize each other by race in school,” Hagerman writes. “Some were ‘investigated for race’ front of the whole class, and divided by the teacher into different types, something which happened in Jokkmokk in the 1950s and in Västerås 1970.” Jokkmokk, in the far north, is a Lapp area.

Many of the men who founded and ran this institution remained respected academics, some with international reputations. One of them was the chemist and Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius, a scientist of wide-ranging abilities who is better known as a father of global-warming science, being the first person to link atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with temperature. In addition to his involvement with Statens Institut för Rasbiologi, he had also been on the board of the Svenska Sällskapet för Rashygien (Swedish society for “race hygiene”), founded in 1909 by zoologist William Leche “to support research on how the Nordic race could be preserved and enhanced through various types of biological ‘processing.’” 

As for forced sterilisation, Karin Thunberg wrote movingly in Svenska Dagbladet in 2013 about how it had affected one woman from a Småland farming family. 

The victim was born in 1927. After six years of basic schooling, she was brought home to work on the farm most of the year. But her home life was troubled, with many quarrels, which triggered epileptic fits. At 17 she met a boy, “the first person she felt loved by” and became pregnant, Thunberg writes. This was the Swedish Bible Belt, in the 1940s, when children born out of wedlock were still deemed illegitimate. The parents were scandalised, and she was taken to a doctor for an abortion. He also made sure she could never have a child again—because of her epilepsy, they told her. When Thunberg reported this story, the woman was 86. 

She had married the father of her aborted child, and they moved to Stockholm, where she found fulfilment in work. The husband did not complain about the marriage being childless, perhaps because he felt responsible. For her, the scar remained, a constant, dark reminder of what had been done to her. Only in the 1990s, when people began talking about forced sterilisation, did she break her silence. She received 175,000 kronor—less than 20,000 pounds—in compensation for being forced to forego the joy of motherhood.




Taken from the free downloadable book Kebabville & Zone: Click HERE