Politically incorrect journeys (8): Sweden
This is a travel blog about Malmö,
Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe.
With so
many immigrants from violent, lawless countries, it is not surprising that
Malmö has become notorious throughout Scandinavia for crime. Perhaps the
biggest change in daily life has been the loss of trygghet (security), which lies at the heart of what it is to be
Swedish. Sweden without trygghet is
not Swedish.
Trygghet rests on trust. Yet I had never seen
so many locksmiths in any city, anywhere, nor such huge locksmiths. A locksmith
store near my flat was the size of a small supermarket—but it was selling only
security devices. Every public-facing door had a sign on the inside saying, Lock up after you. The depth of Malmö’s
burglary crisis was clear from a single headline in the local press that
autumn: “Today 16 Skåne families were
victims of break-ins; Skåne is the worst affected län.” Every day brought a fresh batch of crime reports in the local
press.
Of more
concern for Malmö is its gang problem. Between 2002 and 2008, gang-related
murders in Sweden nearly doubled (compared to a seven-year period in the 1990s)
to 71, according to Sydsvenskan, and
of these, eighteen happened in Skåne and eight in Malmö alone, which makes it
the murder capital of Sweden on a per-capita basis. The December 4 Metro reported that there were about one
hundred shooting incidents in 2013 in the city—mostly at cars and other
objects, but including a couple of teenagers shot in the leg, a 25-year-old hit
at a car wash, a 31-year-old man severely injured by three shots in Bergsgatan,
close to where I was.
But it
is rape that has really ravaged the city’s reputation. Sweden now has the worst
per-capita rape statistics in Europe. Here is an example of the kind of attack
that was unthinkable before 1975, near Tensta, Stockholm. It is taken from one
of Sweden’s many alternative news websites, Fria
Tider:
“The rape took place on 19 June [last year]
in a garden cottage. The men gang-raped the girl while one of them –
unidentified – pointed a gun into her face and threatened to kill her if she
did not stop screaming. After raping her, the man pressed the gun into her
abdomen, causing injury and heavy bleeding. Then two of them took the girl in a
car to a basement room in Rinkeby, where they gang-raped her again. .. After
escaping, she seemed as terrified as “hunted prey,” read the judgement at the
sentencing of the rapists, who were all young men of 21 or under, and of Middle
Eastern background.”
And
here is another, from the same source and likewise ignored by the major
tabloids, that happened a few months later:
“It all began when a Somali stole a woman’s
bicycle. When she followed him to get it back, he trapped her in a courtyard.
‘Now you will die, you fucking cunt!’ the Somali cried and began attacking her.
He kicked and beat his victim about the head with a bottle, and raped her in
different ways. The woman suffered serious injuries. The plaintiff felt the
fear of death, and many times asked him to stop, at one point on her knees with
hands clasped, for the sake of her children. While she was lying on the broken
glass, he forcibly attempted anal intercourse. So read the judgment. Ibrahim
Ahmed Dahir, who claimed he does not remember anything of the event, was handed
six years in prison for aggravated rape and ordered to pay 164,000 kronor in
damages to the woman. He was also found guilty of shoplifting, attempted
robbery, vandalism, threats against officialdom, violent resistance, breaches
of knife-bearing legislation and drug charges, all crimes committed on other
occasions. He is a citizen of Sweden and therefore cannot be deported back to
Somalia.”
Sweden
no longer publishes statistics on immigrant crime. The most recent official
data on rape dates from the late 1980s, when just over half of reported attacks
were found to involve immigrants or their offspring. You need to look at
Sweden’s neighbour, slightly less PC Norway, to get an idea of how bad the
problem has become now. “Here, 100
percent of all attack-rapes (rapes where the attacker and the victim did not
know each other beforehand) in the last five years in Oslo were committed by
immigrants from non-Western countries,” reports Nicolai Sennels, on
10News.dk. “In Stavanger, 90 percent of
rapes are committed by immigrants.”
And
Sweden now also suffers race-hate attacks. Just before my stay, Erik Björkman,
22, died some days after being beaten repeatedly in the head in an Uppsala
street, by unknown assailants, evidently for being Swedish. Before he died he
wrote on Facebook: “I was molested
because I have a typical Swedish appearance. The only thing I heard was
somebody shouting ‘damned Swede’.” When he had called the police, he told
the online news service Dispatch
International, “I talked to an
uncommonly honest woman with whom I spoke for a long time. She admitted that
this was clearly a hate crime, but that our legislation is so bad” that
such attacks were usually classified as molestation only, which made it easier
for the police to simply drop them.
Which
in this case they did. Of Sweden’s mainstream media, only an Uppsala local
paper bothered to report this. Meanwhile, in 2010 alone, Skåne police said 79
hate crimes against Jews had been reported, mostly in Malmö, including an arson
attack, vandalism and grave desecration.
***
What
did ordinary Swedes in Malmö think about what was happening to their city? I
had always found Swedes difficult to talk to, even on the banalest of
subjects—not so much because of Swedish reserve, but rather the nature of
everyday life there, which discourages casual social contact. Sweden’s
population is tiny relative to its huge land area, and the climate does not
encourage dalliance. You just don’t often bump into interesting people and have
those quirky encounters that, among other things, make for good travel-writing.
Cafés and restaurants can be as quiet as crypts, bars are not that common and
boozing is subject to controls. Life is lived mostly in the home, and people
don’t chew the cud with strangers. Now that immigrants had taken over so many high
street businesses, opportunities to chat with ethnic Swedes had further
dwindled. You were left with the public-handling representatives of official or
voluntary organizations—who did not really want to talk about Swedish people’s
views on immigration. It is, I soon found, a sensitive subject. Answers tended
to be short, vague and evasive: “It’s the
way of the world, isn’t it?” or “People
are always moving into the cities.”
One
afternoon, I went to one of Malmö’s big churches, in a heavily enriched downtown
area. It was empty but for a warden and a very frail lady in a white coat
slumped in a wheelchair, who listened stoney-faced to our chat or snoozed. As
there was nobody to overhear us, and the warden had a local accent and was old
enough to remember Malmö as it used to be, I again raised the forbidden topic.
I told him that when I had first come to Sweden in the 1980s, foreigners were
thin on the ground, and they were effectively banned from all but the lowliest
levels of the job market. I know this is hard to believe, but it’s true; I was
one of those affected. The really astounding thing is that the main opposition
to employment of foreigners in those days came not from the “right” but from
the unions—the foundation blocks of Swedish leftism.
“What
do older people think about the fact that half the population of this city is
now of foreign origin?”
He
hummed and haa-ed a bit.
“I
don’t fret about it.”
“If
every city in Sweden was like Malmö, would you like that?”
I did
not catch the mumbled answer. I rephrased it.
“If
every city in Sweden was like Malmö, would the Swedes be happy?”
“Not
all of them,” he said, finally, with emphasis.
I
blundered on, but he was not comfortable talking about this anymore. Just as I
was about to change tack, the little old lady suddenly roused herself, gave me
a sharp look, and asked,
“So
what do you think? Do you think Malmö
has changed for the better?”
Wrongfooted,
I fumbled: “I’m not Swedish. I cannot be the judge of that.”
She
made no response, and I found myself staring once more at the top of her
slumping head. Later, I wondered, why on earth did I duck the question? After
all my blather, I didn’t have the courage to say in public what I really
thought, which is that Sweden’s utopian mass immigration experiment is a
tragic, colossal mistake from which the country will never recover unless it
changes course now. But I had censored myself. How on earth could I expect
others to speak openly when I had difficulty doing so myself?
***
In
fact, I found the harshest critics of immigration to be other immigrants. “I
really felt the pressure when other guys started opening restaurants in this
neighbourhood,” a Greek chef resident in Malmö for forty years told me. “But
people have read about Sweden, they learn about their entitlements and they
come here for the social benefits—free flat, free schooling, free healthcare…
Immigrants were all good guys in the beginning, all really hardworking. But now
there are scams. You get Africans presenting fake medical bills to the Swedish
medical insurance system, getting refunds for treatment they never received.”
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