With rather wide-ranging censorship and a selective, partisan media that are prepared to overlook such extraordinary events, we are rapidly creating a toxic atmosphere of paranoia, fear and anxiety for free speech supporters. These are very sinister developments indeed when such actions are taken using clandestine methods. We know that Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union and current European refuge for Islamist militants operates in the same fashion if it gets a chance. In 2016 for instance, it was proposed that a new EU authority should control all Schengen national borders.67 Germany and France wanted to push this through as quickly as possible without debate. It is a familiar situation. The EU uses a crisis to consolidate its power, reducing the influence and sovereignty of nation-states, and tries to introduce the most significant reforms at a time when they are least likely to be noticed.
Sensitive topics cannot be discussed because they have been made taboo by the media, and in Sweden by the consensus-based society that has been established following decades of Social Democrats’ welfare politics. In the case of Sweden, ‘revolution’ may seem like a hyperbolic description since there is no civil or military uprising. But a revolution it is because it is bringing about the biggest demographic and cultural change the country has ever known. However, it is being done by stealth, as immigration has been rendered a taboo topic. The efforts to silence debate such as restrictions on freedom of speech; the blatant harassment and violence shown to journalists who tell the truth; the abuse of mass surveillance to track down critics of immigration policy; the rewriting of legislation to remove any references to ‘race’; the demonisation of the only political party that dares give the facts on mass immigration can only be described as ‘extremist’.
The politicians and journalists work together to hide the facts, and thus the politicians’ ultra-liberal propaganda is unencumbered. Not questioning this, the generous Swede believes he has given prosperity to the ‘refugee’, even when the refugee is not a refugee: a kind of institutional Christianity in a country that is no longer Church-going for the most part, and where Christenings are increasingly being replaced by secular namngivningsceremonier (‘name giving ceremonies’). Record numbers of Swedes have been leaving the Church in recent years, and certain members of the Muslim community now want the empty churches to be turned into mosques.68
According to the Swedish Integration Board (2005), two-thirds of Swedes question whether expansionist Islam is compatible with Western society, but this issue is simply not open for public discussion. Anybody who mentions something beyond the so-called ‘Overton Window’ (a range of ideas considered currently politically acceptable) will be marked out as a fascist.69 It is in fact striking how the same survey across Europe has produced the same result; but mainstream parties refuse to respond to public opinion. Something has to give, and indeed it already has. Anti-Establishment parties are on the rise throughout Europe, but Brussels still will not listen. Swedish politicians talk all the time of integration, but few, one suspects, really want it. Integration must surely mean integration into a shared culture, but there is little evidence of that taking place in Sweden. If the newcomers were being integrated, they would be taught for instance that religion belongs in the private sphere. Instead, it seems that Swedish politicians would prefer to create separate, conflicting communities, and just hope somehow that they will not bother them.
And according to various studies such as the UN Human Development Index (2013), Sweden was until very recently considered more or less the closest thing to what one might call the ‘perfect’ society. Its citizens enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, with Sweden ranked first in the world in terms of human development: Swedes benefited from a very supportive welfare system, excellent education standards and very minimal crime and corruption. Sweden was a safe, secure place: an essential notion for the Swedish identity bound up in the word trygghet which is the slogan for every political party. The political objective has to be to maximise trygghet, (‘feeling of security’); i.e. control every aspect of people’s lives, and then they will be ‘secure’.
Sweden was considered the ultimate multi-party functional democracy, the fetish of the Western modern world. But as the ‘December agreement’ shows, coalition politics in Sweden can be anti-democratic.70 To prevent SD from voting down the Government’s budget and triggering a constitutional crisis and possibly an election, the Governing coalition entered into an agreement in December 2014, just three months after the election with the Alliance (the opposition block excluding SD). The agreement stated that the minority coalition government is to be given free reign to govern without any opposition. It was a desperate attempt to prevent SD from having any political influence, and was meant to run for eight years, but lasted for just under one year before the Christian Democrats decided to leave it. This is the state of democracy in Sweden. This is effectively Sweden enacting Mussolini’s Acerbo Law where a party in fascist Italy that received the largest number of votes was guaranteed a two-thirds majority.71
It will not happen, but if SD were to hypothetically win outright the forthcoming General Election in 2018, then it is not unreasonable to assume that the entire democratic process would be unravelled in Sweden. Emergency legislation might be passed and the party would be blocked from forming a Government, perhaps on the grounds that they represent a threat to liberal democracy. In 2004 in Belgium, it looked as if the anti-immigration party, Vlaams Blok, could win outright. Indeed in that year, they became the largest single party in the Flemish Parliament election. The party was accused of falling foul of a 1981 anti-racism law, funding to the party was cut off and the party was effectively closed down.72 A party supported by one in four of the Flemish electorate was shut down. This is the state of democracy in continental Europe. It is reasonable to assume something similar would happen in Sweden.
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Sweden was in fact an extremely homogeneous society up until at least the mid-1970s when a decision was taken to make it a ‘multicultural society’. From the 1990s onwards, Sweden started to take in refugees from the Balkans. Over the last ten years, Sweden has accepted refugees primarily from war zones in the Middle East and North Africa: Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. For years, Sweden has taken in ‘refugees’ from peaceful, but autocratic Eritrea. These are young men who do not want to serve in the army. More recently, Sweden has taken in disproportionate numbers of asylum seekers, in some years accepting more refugees per capita than any other country in the world. The numbers are extraordinary: nearly 100,000 refugees came to Sweden (many from Syria) in 2014 for a population of just 9.6 million people, and in 2015, the figure was as high as 160,000.
If the UK were to receive a proportionate number of refugees to Sweden, that would mean we would see over 650,000 refugees from war zones coming to its shores every year. Or to put it another way, the UK would require every year a new city the size of Leeds to house the newcomers. Cracks are beginning to appear and in just one year, Sweden had according to the UN 2015 Human Development Report fallen out of the top ten countries ranked in terms of human development.73
Sweden received more unaccompanied minor asylum seekers than any other country in 2015. Over 35,000 child migrants came to Sweden in 2015: three times as many as went to Germany. Seventy per cent of them came from Afghanistan, i.e. not a war-zone. The cost of caring for children is much higher than for adults. Children who are not placed in foster homes are hosted in asylum centres that cost the State SEK 1900 (US$ 225) a day per child. That is more than what a business traveller would spend to stay at the Sheraton Hotel, Stockholm.74 Sweden spent US$2.5 billion in 2016 housing children from Afghanistan, and its overall spending on refugees in 2016 surpassed its entire defence budget.75 Sweden has lost touch with reality. To spend such disproportionate amounts of money on dependents from another country surely implies that there is a much broader agenda here.
Sweden is rapidly becoming a completely ‘other’ country — unrecognisable to Swede
s of the previous generation. Outsiders have never looked so out-of-place as crowds of miserable looking Arab men, wrapped in scarves, stand and shiver on the snowy streets in the winter months. Women covered head to toe in the beetle black burqa walk the aisles of the secular supermarket with active piety. It is the ‘mother of incompatibility’. Sweden’s response to the ISIS Caliphate was to open her doors to cultures whose values are diametrically opposed to her own in every sense. It has done so without a thought for the potentially baleful consequences. As we have seen, Sweden prides herself on human rights, fairness, tolerance, democracy and gender equality — values which are continuously evoked by politicians across the political spectrum and which the average Swede wishes to identify with. Few would dispute that Swedes should blindly follow the UN Convention on Refugees and Asylum — legislation written in an entirely different era and in a context of a Europe with border controls — and that an infinite amount of asylum seekers should have a non-negotiable, subsidised existence the moment they arrive. It is extremely unlikely that the same 144 nations would sign up to this legislation today, knowing that it is openly abused by hundreds of thousands of people. It is clear that the right of asylum needs to be rethought. Granting asylum to somebody who has made it to a nation’s shores just ensures that dozens behind him will drown trying to live out the same fantasy.
There is nothing to stop an Eritrean man pretending he is homosexual, and claiming asylum in Sweden on the grounds of ‘fearing persecution’. In an oversensitised world, it is rather easy to be afflicted by the ‘fear of persecution’. Certainly, any conservative academic in a Humanities department might surely be vulnerable to persecution as a multiculturalist defines it. In a world of open borders and mass mobility, such transnational legislation as the UN Convention on Refugees and Asylum and the European Convention on Human Rights could end up ‘sinking’ countries, unless they withdraw from such legislation or replace it with something more practical for the twenty-first century.
Feminism is ingrained in the language of Swedish morality, but the idea that a woman could be equal to a man in many of these conservative Muslim societies whence the refugees come is in no way realistic. These patriarchal communities remain entangled in the Gordian knot of misogyny. The feminists have run up against what they erroneously perceive to be a white patriarchy, but have no problems with the incoming migrant patriarchy. All of these values mentioned above define Sweden today, but are quite incompatible with Islamic religious doctrine, irrespective of how ‘radical’ the Muslim refugee is. The fact of the matter is that the way of life of the average Swede is in some way blasphemous or injurious to many of the incoming migrants. Instead of integration, tolerance and peace, one should expect tension, violence and potentially war. The latter outcome, the worst-case scenario, must of course be avoided at all costs and is very unlikely: pacifist Swedes are much more likely to give in to Islam than to form any kind of defensive testudo.
One cannot reconcile feminism with mass immigration from the Middle East and North Africa. If these new migrants become the ethnic majority, then the feminist project will be finished. It will be totally decimated. The ferocious feminists who try to ruin their ideological opposition under the false pretence of being the protectors of women will be disenfranchised. If they were real protectors of women, they might have something to say about female genital mutilation practiced in many of the asylum seekers’ countries.
Ironically, female opponents to the militant, virago feminists are frequently attacked in the most demeaning and sexist ways. Some of these ultra-feminists would no doubt happily criminalise the practice of women staying at home with their young children. And men are not considered legitimate discussants for issues that affect women. Through character assassination, men are sometimes excluded from any debate on women. In fact, all the opponents are excluded, leaving just a tired monologue. These techniques are used time and time again because their users know they work.
Many feminist writers refused to condemn Boko Haram when they kidnapped hundreds of Nigerian girls because they were concerned it might be perceived as imperialist, Islamophobic or against cultural relativism. Feminists seem more eager to smear the critics of jihadism as ‘Islamophobes’ than to stand up for women’s most basic rights. When it comes to deploring brutal repression, the Left cannot be so selective. Otherwise, they will just look like they are bereft of any moral compass. Feminism was a legitimate movement that wanted to achieve equal rights for men and women. That has been achieved in Sweden, and most other Western countries. This ideology has been written into legal codes, leading to new understandings of sexuality and family. It is now a power struggle of women over men (straight white men at least).
The naïve response to the issue of the potential demise of feminism in the light of Muslim majority countries in Europe is of course that the new migrants — the collective victimhood — will have Swedish values (even if they have insisted previously that Sweden does not stand for anything), but that is unrealistic. It is more likely that they will grow up in segregated communities which will not share any of the values the multiculturalists are anxious to promote. One cannot compare Somalis who grew up in ‘closed’ Islamist societies ruled by Al-Shabab and shari’ah law to the better educated European Bosnians who came to Sweden in the 1990s and who practiced a moderate form of Islam. The idea that the Somalis and Afghans coming to Sweden are going to preserve Western values and culture is more likely putting hope before experience.
Swedish politicians alongside EU bureaucrats claim that refugees are needed because Sweden is an ageing society (and thus contradict their claim that they are refugees, when it is clear many are migrants), and in order to continue the generous welfare benefit system, more immigrant workers will be required. However, this is a thoroughly flawed argument. The idea that Sweden needs constantly more young people to look after an ageing population is the logic of a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi demography is a policy which tries to increase profits for a small group of people at the top of the pyramid by adding more and more people to the bottom of the pyramid. Everything seems fine, but when population growth stalls, the economy goes into decline, high debt crushes consumption and the people at the top take their profits leaving those at the bottom potentially without work and in debt. The whole model is dependent on constant population growth which ultimately can only end in environmental degradation, and thus be a cost to an economy that does not properly account for externalities. As we have seen, the politicians that advocate these policies call themselves ‘green’, but one would never know it.
Our models and economic philosophies are based on constant expansion. The ultimate result would be that our economies end up like Japan’s: at the end of the road; 125 million people living on a cluster of small islands. With nowhere to grow, the bubble of the late 1980s burst and the economy just slowly declined for the next thirty years. It plays into the fallacy of believing that perpetual, exponential growth should be an economic and demographic objective in a world with finite resources. If immigrants were needed, it would surely be more sensible to operate an immigration policy based on common sense (as the Australians do) where people are allowed in when certain skills are required, to fulfil gaps in the job market.
However, Sweden apparently only wishes to welcome the least qualified, and yet at the same time appeals to a self-image as the utopia of modernity. The wave of refugees that came in 2015 and 2016 will become an unsustainable burden on the Swedish taxpayer for years and years because many do not (or are unable to) work. The already over-taxed Swedes will soon have to pay even more taxes to support hundreds of thousands of migrants. The problems of integration have not even begun to be tackled. The Yazidis who came to Sweden were asked why they came to Sweden, and they responded that ‘they could not live with Muslims’.76 Little do they realise that Sweden has a significant Muslim population, and that their fate once again will be to live amongst Muslims.
The idea that refugees wil
l fund an ageing population is just naïve, and not backed up by a single fact. Refugees wish to come to Sweden (as opposed to say its neighbour, Finland) in such overwhelming numbers in order to benefit from its extremely generous social security system and because their extended families are already there and can vouch for its unconditional generosity.77 Most Swedish politicians (the SD party excluded) refuse to recognise this obvious truth even when the refugees articulate it themselves. According to Swedish Government statistics, over seventy per cent of those that arrived in 2015 are young, healthy men, men who have travelled right across Europe searching for the best deal. Ninety per cent of unaccompanied minors who came to Sweden in the same year were male.
Politicians like Reinfeldt (the previous Prime Minister of Sweden) have waged cultural and demographic terrorism against their own people, and yet Swedes continue to vote for these policies (for the time being at least). The extent of ideologisation in Sweden is truly apparent when Swedes say, ‘We are not allowed to vote SD’, a comment which one often hears. Sweden appears at times to be run more on a basis of an NGO than a democratic nation-state. One cannot build a country on pity. The mainstream media needs to report what it perceives to be racism less obsessively, and to focus more on the real news stories such as the rape epidemic that has afflicted Sweden since the migration crisis.78
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