Politically incorrect journeys (9): 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

Employment agency

Eventually, I did get an ordinary Swede to open up, in a private environment where he did not have to worry about being overheard. He was a young gardener, doing one of string of short-term jobs he had done since leaving school.

“Without a good education, all you can do here is work like this, treeplanting, retail, call centre jobs. Youth unemployment in Malmö is awful. Of my friends, two out of twenty have jobs. And still we let them in. They do all the manual jobs we used to do. But you don’t actually need money when you’re in Sweden if you’re an immigrant ... they give you everything for free.”

Bitterly he talked, about how easy it was to exploit the welfare system, how immigrant votes in Rosengård had been bought with cash, how the government intended to flood the country with thousands of Syrian refugees. “It’s insane!” He said he had once been asked by a man to help arrange a paper marriage to get somebody residence papers. Why didn’t he report it?

“What do you think? The police would question him, and he would deny it. Do you believe our police would seriously investigate it?”

This, I realized, was my first ever cynical, pissed-off Swede. They hadn’t really existed in the 1980s, as I remembered it—in landsfadren Palme’s halcyon days of affluence for all, easy-going equality and well-meaning idealism. We, the British, had cynicism. And the Swedes had lugn, that unflappable persistence personified by Björn Borg at Wimbledon.

“And if you tell people that you have voted for the Sweden Democrats,” he went on, “they will call you racist. And so everybody..”–he said no more, but made a zipping motion, moving his hand across his mouth. “Everybody thinks the same about this, but nobody dares say anything. Swedes, you know, do not like to be judged.

“Sorry, I don’t read much. I don’t understand this mång- mång- stuff (multi- multi- stuff—he couldn’t remember the word “multicultural,” mångfaldig). I just know it has gone too far. Do you have the same problem in your country?”

“Yes. Pretty much.”

I asked him if he had thought of emigrating, trying his luck elsewhere.

“Oh yes, many times. To America or Canada. But I wouldn’t go unless there was something already fixed up in advance. If I went would they give me social security as soon as I got there? Like they do here?”

“I doubt it.”

“Ah, well.”

***

“Racist is the worst thing you can be called here. Swedes are simply afraid to criticise immigration.”

“Why don’t they just vote SD then, and keep quiet about it?”

“If it came to be known that you voted for the Sweden Democrats, you would risk being ostracized or sent to Coventry in your workplace. The immigation issue divides families now.”

In Landet som försvann, Julia Caesar reproduces some Facebook posts that give an idea of the personal cost of voting for the Sweden Democrats. They were originally recorded in the well-known Affes Statistik-blogg after the party entered parliament in 2010:

“One half million people voted for the Sweden Democrats in the parliamentary election—are you one of them? Defriend me. We will never meet again.”

“If you voted for the Sweden Democrats, you can defriend me and go and cut your wrists and stick your head up your backside ... Welcome to 2010 and not 1925, you damned racist whores.” (The word “damned” here, jävla, could probably be translated with something stronger.)

“If any of my ‘friends’ here on Facebook are, contrary to expectation, among the approximately 450,000 Swedes who voted for the Sweden Democrats, then I ask you cordially but firmly to get lost and go to hell.”

Wailed a Twitter commentator quoted by SVT, “I am ASHAMED of being Swedish, shit country!” The frothing hate of the tolerant goes all the way up to the so-called elite. “So this is where we have arrived,” mused a well-known Expressen writer on election night. “I want to kill somebody.”

I was talking about these things with Ingrid Carlqvist, a veteran journalist who runs the Dispatch International news website with the Danish writer Lars Hedegaard. Because of her views, she is a persona non grata in Sweden’s mainstream media, but also one of the country’s best-known journalists. My meeting with her, in a downtown bakery café, was the only formally arranged interview I had during this stay. Her English was superb. And she wasn’t bothered about being overheard in public.

“When I was first called a racist, it was shocking, but now I’m used to it, I am confident of my views.

“The political system does not know how to categorise SD. They are using the smear approach, but people basically know that they are not real racists, and when you use words like Nazi and Fascist in connection with them you are kind of stuck when it comes to describing the real extremists.”

“Do most Swedes approve of the government’s immigration policy?”

“Of course not. But Swedes don’t protest. They don’t go out on the streets and throw stones and set things on fire. Plus, we have the most repressive government in Europe now when it comes to criticism of immigration.” Instead, she said, there had been white flight out of Malmö, “to places with a low immigrant population, like Vellinge.

“Although Malmö is by far the most multiracial city in Sweden, many other smaller towns like Eskilstuna have major problems with immigration… After those riots in Rosengård, the government simply threw money at the problem, giving the rioters a motive for behaving badly again. That’s the only response Sweden has to these problems—throw more money at them. Swedes can’t understand why they happen, because they assume that immigrants will automatically adopt our ‘superior’ way of life. But of course they won’t, because their way of life is so very different from ours. Some of the immigrants, they just laugh at us, they despise us, for constantly giving them money.”

“And yet a majority of people go on voting for more of it. Why do you think so many Swedes feel this need to open their country up like this?”

“One reason is this. In the seventeenth century we had a great empire. People somehow want to recreate this kind of power. But not through bad things like war but through .. how do you say it, mänsklighet?”

“Humanitarianism, magnanimity, human kindness ..”

“It’s something inside us. We Swedes are driven to be number one, the best at everything. Just try googling ‘Sweden is the world’s best’ in Swedish. We pride ourselves on leading the world in garbage-sorting. Now contrast that, I mean the Swedish Lutheran tradition of hard work and taking personal initiative with the fatalism of Islam. The Insha’Allah (God willing) mentality—that justifies idleness and unemployment. ... Do you realize that there are almost no Swedes today who know what war is? What will happen if we get involved in another major war? Do you think our Muslims will be loyal to Sweden?”

“Is it true,” I asked, “that Jews are leaving Malmö?”

“Yes. There has been harassment and a few physical incidents. And when it emerged that the aggression was not from the ‘Nazis’ but from the Muslims, the papers did not report that fact. A street near the main synagogue, Föreningsgata, is locally nicknamed Hatets gata.”

That’s Hate Street, or Hategate: Expressen (far-left tabloid) writer Micke Ölander did a story on it in 2011, and, sure enough, somehow failed to mention who was doing the hating in the 37 cases mentioned. Instead, he discreetly noted near the bottom of the piece that a “dialogue forum” had been created for representatives of the Jewish, Muslims, Roma and Somali communities.

Carlqvist was meeting me while on her way to Copenhagen, where she spends half her time, though “I’d rather be in Skåne.” Her partner in running Dispatch International, Lars Hedegaard, has been forced to use a safe house since an attempt on his life in February 2013, when a gunman posing as a parcel delivery man tried to shoot him.

“Yes, I miss Skåne,” she said. “When I was a child, my parents would spontaneously talk to people on the bus, to my embarrassment. But now nobody does that any more. It’s not indifference. It’s fear. Because now people do not feel safe anymore.” I thought of my last bus ride.

Taken from the free downloadable book Kebabville & Zone