Politically
incorrect journeys (12): Sweden
This is a travel blog about Malmö,
Scandinavia and the failure of multiracialism throughout northern Europe.
Fredrik Reinfeldt, ex-leader of the world’s humanitarian superpower
It took me some time to appreciate the importance of this history—the zeal for eugenics, and the war that Sweden did not fight—to what is happening there now. Many Swedes had overt sympathy for Hitler, and the country made quite a lot of money out of selling iron ore and machinery to the Wehrmacht through Narvik port in Norway, a trade so important that it was targeted by an unsuccessful Allied campaign. Unlike the occupied Norwegians, relatively few Swedes joined the resistance. (Denmark did not distinguish itself either—it was occupied in two hours flat at a cost of sixteen lives, which must be some sort of record, and its government remained pretty much in place for three years). This experience has left Sweden with something approaching a proxy version of the German guilt complex. It is why Raoul Wallenberg, the single wartime figure the nation can look on with pride, has become a Swedish Martin Luther King, commemorated with memorial monuments all over the country and constantly referenced in political discourse. Still, many Swedes remain uncomfortably conscious of how many more victims of Nazi persecution could have been saved had Sweden used its influence and resources as a free nation outside Nazi control.
For these
sins, Sweden’s utopian immigration policy is an unspoken gesture of penance.
Because Swedes stood by while an enormously powerful racial supremacy cult went
berserk in the 1940s, and many of them indeed felt its lure, they feel a
special moral obligation today to disown and oppose all kinds of nationalism
through what is essentially a slow process of self-sacrifice—deliberately
allowing Swedish identity to be watered down by uncontrolled immigration.
Something similar is happening in every major European country, of course, but
in Sweden this self-effacement has been elevated to a national mission. A lot
of Swedes appear to genuinely want their country to stop being Swedish, just as
many Germans want to de-Germanise Germany. Given the scale of the immigrant
influx and the birth-rate differentials—ethnic Swedish women have an average of
1.66 children—they won’t have that long to wait. It is estimated that ethnic
Swedes will be a minority in their major cities by 2050 if they go on like
this.
As said,
this disaster is slowly unfolding all over Europe. But while Sweden actively
foments the mental sickness that is consuming it, other European peoples are
held back somewhat by the saner hands of remembered historical experience. Not
Sweden, though. Almost uniquely in Europe, it has virtually no citizens who
have personal experience of war, apart from a few thousand volunteers who
fought the Russians in Finland. In over a century, Swedes have never had to
make life-or-death decisions or defend themselves or felt the need to really
understand the threats posed by the world around them. The neutrality—the
guilty want of actual blood-and-sweat engagement with armed enemies—has been
the crucible for the culturing of the utopianism that now dominates Swedish
society.
Paradoxically,
the other main ingredient is the ancestral memory of Sweden’s glory days as a
military power. In the early seventeenth century, the Swedish military under
Gustav II Adolf was perhaps the most formidable force in the world. Like the
Germans and the French, but less catastrophically, its armies advanced deep
into Russia. For a few decades Sweden was a great power, able to project force
and influence pan-European destiny, something that no other Scandinavian nation
had achieved since the Viking times, and few other European powers of similarly
small population have ever achieved. Sweden was briefly Number One, and it has
never been forgotten. The impulse to recapture that glory was channeled into
other endeavours, such as the perfection of social democracy and creation of
the model welfare state. Now, Sweden is trying to become a “humanitär stormakt”—a humanitarian great
power, a goal explicitly laid down by former Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik
Reinfeldt.
***
What Sweden
is today has been a long time in the making. The Social Democrats, who ruled
without interruption from 1932 to 1976, presided over the modernization of
Sweden and its growth into a welfare state and beacon of social equality. Then
Sweden was the folkhem (folk-home), a
political concept premised on the now unfashionable notion that Swedes were one
big family and that Sweden was their homeland. As late as 1965, Prime Minister
Tage Erlander, commented, against a background of race riots in the USA that,
“we Swedes live in such an immeasurably fortunate situation. The population of
our land is homogenous, not just where race is concerned, but also in many
other respects.” (He would, of course, have been vilified as a racist and
forced to resign if he had said this today.)
And how did
it reach this blessed state? Sweden today is not affluent today because it is
socialist; it is socialist because it is affluent. Because it can easily afford
the very considerable cost of trying to build an egalitarian paradise where
every public building with a staircase also has a hundred-thousand-kronor lift
for wheelchairs, where classes of schoolkids can be taken on indoctrination
pilgrimages to Auschwitz, and where large numbers of immigrants can be given
free lodgings, healthcare, dole, child allowances and other benefits for years
on end, some of them even if they don’t actually live in Sweden. It became
affluent for two simple reasons: its ideal population-resource balance, and the
practical, hardworking Lutheran traditions of, as Erlander noted, a basically
homogenous people with no internal divisions.
Since the
end of the Social Democrats’ long reign, in 1976, it’s been pretty much
downhill economically, albeit at a gentle pace, with the gradual closure of
whole industries and long-term recession. Sweden, of course, was not alone in
finding the world a harsher place in the 1980s. But it only has itself to blame
for its reckless demographic engineering programme, which dates from this time.
From the
first, it was based on hoovering up refugees from distant, and often very
distant, places with which Sweden had no particular connection. The first
arrivals were from Chile and elsewhere in Latin America, a small minority which
was smoothly integrated and of which little is heard today. They were followed
in the early 1990s by a much larger wave of refugees from the former
Yugoslavia, when Prime Minster Carl Bildt overturned the “Lucia decision,” the
one serious political attempt in recent Swedish history to put the brakes on
immigration. Then the lunacy set in. Between 2006 and 2014, a period of
broad-based coalition government, the Reinfeldt administration smashed the
gates down and allowed immigrants in in their hundreds of thousands. If Sweden
had the population of Britain, its intake, proportionately, would be up to 10
million people.
Yet it would
wrong to portray this as a country in crisis. The localized riots that happened
at Rosengård (Malmö) and Husby (Stockholm) captured global headlines, but,
frightening as their frequency is, the country is simply too rich and too
comfortable for large-scale unrest. Rioters can always be bought off with
generous “investments in the community,” even though these often just
incentivise further rioting. And Sweden differs from nearly all other western
countries swamped by immigration in one key respect: there is no pressure on
space. It is huge, mineral-rich, and highly developed. In material terms, it
wants for nothing. But it has a falling birthrate, as do Norway and Denmark.
Unlike, say, Belgium, it could theoretically absorb another million or even ten
million immigrants without overstretching itself. The same, of course, is true
of Finland, another very wealthy country with lots of space relative to
population. But the Finns have sensibly chosen to stay Finnish and keep their
homeland to themselves. This of course is the birthright of every normal people
which has legitimately occupied the same patch of land for generations and
fashioned a nation out of it. By contrast, an alarming number of Swedes see
their country as a kind of European Canada, circa 1870—an almost empty
territory belonging to nobody, just waiting to be developed by industrious
immigrants.
As said,
Sweden is not in crisis. Rather, it is a country sleepwalking into disharmony
and segregation, alienation and insecurity. It is becoming a place where almost
everything is less good than it used to be, where nobody really feels at home
and patriotism is dead. Community cohesion and public services, especially
housing, are under assault on all fronts. Immigrants who are difficult to
house, employ and integrate now have a strong presence in all the big cities
and in pockets around the country like Hälsingfors, Eskilstuna and Södertälje.
In two kommuner, Botkyrka near
Stockholm and Haparanda in the far north, people of “foreign background” were already
in the majority in 2007, according to official statistics. The number of
immigrants from Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East has nearly
doubled since 2006. Some 70,000 people sought asylum in Sweden in the first ten
months of 2014 alone, seven times as many as in Norway—and that figure does
not, of course, include regular economic migrants.
Only in
recent years have the Swedish people begun to wise up the long-term
implications of all this, as the entry of the Sweden Democrats into Parliament
testified. This is why the Swedish establishment, after getting over its
initial shock, has not moderated but stepped up its campaign to abolish
traditional Sweden and create a new mixed-race society. While ever-increasing
numbers of refugees are accepted and dumped on ill-prepared and unwelcoming
local authorities, the very words “race” and “racial” are allegedly being
purged from state legislation. It is now almost as if Swedes themselves are new
arrivals in their own country. To ensure they know their place, former
Folkpartiet leader Bengt Westerberg wants to see £50 million allocated to
schools to combat “everyday racism,” with 20,000 teachers, or three per school,
to receive special training in “human rights.” The experiment must be made to
work, whatever the cost.
***
But in
Malmö, the test-tube, integration is failing. One fact alone highlighted this:
the inability of so many first-generation immigrants to speak basic Swedish,
even after a decade or more of residence. I would guess that half of all
Malmö’s working-age immigrants do not have any real interaction with Swedes
outside the workplace, and only the most superficial exchanges within it. The
fact that many Muslims do not drink, and keep their daughters under religious
wraps in the day and in the home in the evening, adds to the barriers.
Housebound wives of immigrants brought over under Sweden’s unquestioning anhöriginvandring (family-reunification
migration) regime have particular difficulty with the language and cultural
adaptation. I did not see much voluntary mixing between the immigrant and
indigenous populations in Malmö, especially out of school uniform. The various
communities seemed to lead largely separate existences. Riots and car-burnings
are still regular events.
Just how
desperate Malmö city authorities are about this situation was clear from a sign
in the window of the local citizen’s centre: “Every year, the city offers
rewards of 30,000 kronor (3,000 pounds) for good initiatives for increasing
diversity and integration.” Can there be anywhere else in Europe that actually bribes citizens to embrace
multiracialism?
Despite the
ideological zeal of its elite, on the ground Sweden actually lags the European
pioneers of multiracialism like Britain and France, which have been importing
large numbers of foreigners for at least two decades longer. As a result,
Britons and French are used to living in multiracial cities. But many Swedes do
not really accept even second-generation immigrants as true fellow citizens.
The term “ethnic Swede” is still commonly used in public to discriminate
between native and “new” Swedes, a distinction that has become controversial in
Britain. And there are still Swedes who take pride in explicitly racial
identity, something which in Britain, rightly or wrongly, attracts mockery or
hostility now.
In Britain
and France, the universality of the English and French languages and the old
colonial links with migrant countries of origin have made the whole integration
process relatively smoother and deeper than it is anywhere in Scandinavia.
Sweden by contrast, like some guilt-wracked Marxist aristocrat trying to give
his mansion away, has simply opened its doors to a huge range of countries it
knows almost nothing about, patronisingly expecting its supposedly superior
social model to be automatically internalized by all comers. “Can’t speak
Swedish? No matter, the kommun will
lay on an interpreter. Can’t find work? Don’t worry, here’s dole, for as long
as you like. No home? No problem, we’ll house you rent-free. Can’t fit in?
Hostile to Jews and prone to rioting? You’ll grow out of it.” It is hardly
surprising some immigrants end up despising their new homeland.
What has
actually happened in Malmö is population replacement, with an exodus of ethnic
Swedes into the country. On one of my last days in the city, I peeped into a
kindergarten while walking around the redeveloped Västerhamn port area. These
days, looking through kindergarten window anywhere in any European city is like
staring into a demographic crystal ball. I could see from a glance that only
half the kids were Nordic.
I tried but
was unable to get historic demographic data relating to the city. One helpful
woman schooled here in the 1960s guessed that the total foreign population was
between 2,000 and 3,000 when she was a child—mainly Yugoslavs and other East
Europeans, who were later joined by Latin Americans in the 1970s before the
tidal wave began. If that crude estimate is even close to accurate, Malmö has
gone from being nearly 100% ethnic Swedish to 50% in 50 years.
Here are
some statistics I did get. Between 2006 and 2013, just 1,305 out of a total
increase of some 27,000 people in the 0-44 year age range in Malmö had parents
who were both ethnic Swedes, according to Sweden’s Central Statistics Bureau.
That’s one in twenty. The same agency estimates that by 2022, almost two-thirds
of the city’s inhabitants will be people of foreign or part-foreign origin. The
“foreign background” population as a percentage of total population is growing
at little under 10 percentage points each decade. One percent a year.
If this pace
is sustained, Malmö will be effectively be a foreign enclave on Swedish soil
within two decades—a crime-ridden grab-bag of minorities with little in common
except Islam and a heavy reliance on the restaurant business. Kebabville. And
if the Malmö experiment is repeated across the country, it will be the end of
Sweden within fifty years.
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