The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  Once again, in this domain, Sweden has managed to engineer an image of the ultimate free, open country, an image that is at odds with the truth. We know for instance from Edward Snowden that Sweden is a key partner to the US in mass Internet surveillance, and the Swedish FRA law (broadly in line with the proposed ‘snooper charter’ in the UK, and far beyond the scope of surveillance sanctioned by the European Commission) permits rather broad snooping.108 The Swedish state keeps a record of everything said in telephone conversations, surfed on the web or written on the Internet. The entire population is tapped all the time, and no courts are involved. By law, every telephone and Internet operator in Sweden has to have a cable linked to the Government’s server. Every single piece of communication is examined using 250,000 search criteria.109 Technological and digital registration means that we have little choice but to hand over control and surveillance to potentially a small number of people who may at some point in the future and for a variety of reasons abuse the control they have over the data. Once again, transparency is particularly poor in Sweden. The Stasi could only have dreamt of this kind of surveillance.

  From the Snowden leaks, it can be ascertained that Sweden spied on Russian leaders, and shared the data with the US. Leaked documents show that Sweden is a key NSA collaborator because 80 per cent of Russia’s Internet traffic passes through Sweden.110 Once again the traditional image of Sweden as a politically neutral, pacifist country was shattered. Wikileaks from 2011 show that Sweden adopted the new controversial wiretapping law because they were under pressure from the NSA. The whole Snowden case shows how truth-telling has been problematised in contemporary ‘democratic politics’. It might be perceived to be ‘unpatriotic’ to reveal the truth that the NSA spies systematically on its citizens all of the time, and to demonstrate that various Government and NSA officials lied under oath when talking about these revelations.

  Sweden had a bilateral agreement with the NSA long before the FRA law was introduced, and Snowden reported that the NSA gave Sweden access to XKeyscore, the most comprehensive system that allows the monitoring and wire-tapping of millions of people worldwide.111 XKeyscore is a gigantic electronic trawler that can search in real time through tapped fibre optic networks, satellite links and enormous electronic databases. So, for instance, it could give lists of people in Sweden that visit a certain anti-immigration forum. In Sweden and elsewhere, there appears to be a collective indifference to the growth of the surveillance state. People feel with a sense of holistic resignation and disempowerment that it is just completely beyond their control. In a ‘securitised’ world, individual liberty is crushed, and we are left feeling helpless because the threat is felt to be existential. Through the ‘grammar of security’, the threat is felt to be immediate and ubiquitous. In Sweden, the threat can be real. People who have been critical of immigration policy have had Swedish journalists knock on their door, threatening to ‘expose them’. ISPs must be passing on data to journalists (perhaps via the Government). There can be no other explanation.

  Electorally speaking, Sweden does not feel like the open democracy par excellence that people believe it to be either. At the polling booth in Sweden, the voter is invited to take a slip for the party that he wishes to vote for. If the voter wishes his voting intentions to be private, he would have to take several slips of paper to disguise who he intends to vote for. One might infer that voting is done in this manner to deter people voting for SD, the anti-mass immigration party.

  Totalitarianism can come about in various different ways, but one way Sweden attempts to control its people is by the media telling them what to think. This is at least the view of the editor of the major Danish newspaper, Berlingske, Anne Knudsen. This kind of control is not new. Sweden has for centuries rather obsessively collected large amounts of data on its people. From 1686 onwards, laws regulating parish registers came into effect. The State collected comprehensive demographic data on population structure, mortality, fertility, health, marriage, occupation, illegitimacy, migration etc. The primary purpose of this was for the clergy who were State employees to control the Christian and moral belief of their parishioners (specifically to collect information on people’s knowledge of the catechism), and to keep track of the population (Sogner, 2016: 443). Sweden boasts amongst the most comprehensive historic demographic records in the world, and is therefore of much interest to academic demographers. This obsessive control took a controversial turn during the 1930s when the State started to sterilise young women that it thought might pose a threat to society because of mental illness, feeble-mindedness or social problems. These policies lasted for forty years and were arguably an extreme attempt at ‘controlling’ the future behaviour of Swedish citizens. This is apparent when one looks at the census in 1970 where there was an enormous amount of information collected on almost every Swedish citizen. However, these reproduction policies which the Swedish media loves to discuss were not connected with ideological goals of the State, and thus comparisons to Nazi Germany are largely unjust. Nowadays, with ID numbers and mass electronic surveillance, control has become so effortless few would ever question it. This is a country where one cannot even order a bathtub without an ID number.

  VII. Societies at Risk

  This multicultural approach, saying that we simply live side by side and live happily with each other has failed. Utterly failed.

  — Angela Merkel

  Can a human society where inherited forms are under constant attack survive in the absence of tradition and conservative forces? We will discover here that our explicit attempt to create a so-called ‘multicultural’ society is based on perverse thinking. In the case of Sweden, we are importing outsiderhood and dependents, breaking up organic communities and replacing them with a generation of individuals whose roots rather obviously belong elsewhere. Intercultural fluidity exists and the aesthetics of modernity can be challenged, but the idea that we are all somehow ‘citizens of the world’ evokes a fake universality. It might give some hope to confused transnationals, but is ultimately a meaningless objective that tries to conjure up a false, Panglossian worldview where ‘everything is the best in the best of all possible worlds’. The idea that we should all be these rootless, globalised citizens of a utopian, multicultural world where we have forgotten there are limits to growth has been coupled with the notion of a ‘progressive’ society, the sine qua non of modernity.

  The contemporary cultural imperative in the West is to be ‘progressive’, but there is zero critical thinking as to what ‘progress’ really should mean in our overpopulated, panem et circenses consumerist-obsessed societies where materialism is coupled with intellectual regress. The consumer good is the summum bonum in the world where the transcendent in any of its permutations (cultural, religious or otherwise) is frequently ridiculed. In such a society, one sometimes finds even a contempt for learning. Kalb (2008: 4) describes ‘progress’ as ‘in effect, movement to the Left’, and at a meta-level, that is of course correct. But, meta-politics aside, one might question whether it is progress if modern, secular society erases any moral teleology, and is reduced to little more than hyper-consumerism. Is it progress if we live in a world where children grow up knowing nothing about their cultural heritage? Is it progress if Christian holidays become nothing more than consumerist orgies where any public display of Christian iconography is considered multiculturally insensitive? Well, it certainly is for those that cheer these kinds of secularist practices which chime so conspicuously with the totalitarianism of Nazism and Communism. In Nazi Germany, ideologues saw religion as an enemy of the totalitarian state. It was the same in 1980s Ceaușescu Romania where massive apartment blocks were built in front of churches in order to conceal them from view.112 In liberal democracies, multiculturalist secularists see religion as an enemy of ‘progressive liberalism’.

  In the long term, this will surely unravel somehow. The liberal centre will not hold; even some liberals now recognise that the ideology that was once based on r
ationality is no longer rational. When one looks at developments on American campuses, few rational people could claim that they are the outcomes of a liberal consciousness. Identity liberalism has had its day, and left a deep scar on our public institutions. It is time for a post-identity liberalism to return to its rational roots. One cannot organise a society along the lines of consumerism and political correctness without it looking eventually like little more than a self-parody. These are not ‘real’ connections. At some point, any such society will surely implode and people will be left looking for a more transcendental dimension. Now that we live in a continent where a Catholic priest is beheaded during a Church service in a sleepy French town or where a Belgian priest is stabbed by an asylum seeker whom he is trying to help, the secularisation multiculturalist project pursued by the liberals might perhaps be reassessed.113

  What some perceive as ‘progress’ may be nothing more than ongoing decline. Taking people away from their roots and placing them in some kind of egalitarian cultural soup might not result in ‘progress’, but might be a formula for disaster for the regressive liberals that spearhead these changes. It collapses the bonds which tie people together, destabilises the moral consensus and risks turning a country into a schizophrenic army of conflicting personalities. In the name of cultural relativism, Norway abolished in 2012 the State-sponsored Church of Norway ending a 1,000 year tradition. The nation no longer has an official religion.114 This radical change was framed in terms of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’, but it has nothing to do with either. Those who practice other religions are free to practice in Norway. Norway wants to escape from religion, but it has just sleepwalked into another religion of rational, consumerist scientism. The new religion is based on political correctness, feminism and egalitarianism. Practicing an ancient religion might even be considered by some to be politically incorrect, unless it is Islam of course. When it comes to the treatment of Islam in the West, it seems that cultural relativism even trumps equal rights for women.

  One wonders how far we might go with this rather extreme cultural relativism and equality demagoguery. At Palaiseau, 17th December 2008, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that the challenge of the twenty-first century was interracial marriage (métissage ‘miscegenation’).115 Ten years later, President Macron spoke in very similar terms in Brussels. If white ethnic French did not submit to it, Sarkozy promised that the State would take measures to force it upon them. This is still the thinking of some of our leaders today who nurture a strange fantasy of a multiculturalist utopia, apparently in the name of equality and diversity, the a priori apodictic cultural truths. Certain politicians speak of these notions as if they have become entirely incontestable. But, following the rapid increase in the popularity of the alternative Right, their claims are being dismantled bit by bit, sometimes (as in the case of Sarkozy) by the same people that promoted such thinking. They have perhaps paused to remember the lessons of Soviet Communism — manufactured utopias are self-destructive and end in failure.

  Some of our leaders demonstrate a hatred for the West and the whole superstructure that has put them in the privileged position that they occupy. If we wish to preserve our culture, these people would need to be voted out of office, for otherwise the guardians of our civilisation risk disappearing. Echoing Sarkozy, Frans Timmermans, a Dutch diplomat and Vice-President of the European Commission, made recently a disquieting speech saying that ‘Europe must face diversity or face war’.116 He urged all members of the EU parliament to increase efforts to ‘erase single, monocultural nation-states’. It is no wonder that Iceland and the Faroes lost interest in joining (or rejoining) the EU. One does not want to give up a culture established over centuries, just so it can be replaced with an incoherent muddle. One does not want to be ‘erased’ for having a sense of national identity, and one certainly does not want to be told to do so by an overpaid, unelected good-for-nothing bureaucrat. Very soon, such speeches, which are online and available for the world to see, will backfire and destroy the careers of these individuals. The sentiment is changing very fast, and they risk looking like vacuous demagogues of diversity who are promoting ideas which are self-destructive, and ultimately serve an abstract concept and nothing more.

  Peter Sutherland, the late UN special representative for migration, non-executive Chairman of Goldman Sachs and Bilderberg Group member said in 2012 that the EU should ‘do its best to undermine the homogeneity of its member states’.117 In a separate discussion, he said that sovereignty must end. Three years later, this globalist with diplomatic immunity appealed for unlimited immigration into Europe from Africa. With Heads of State, European Commissioners and billionaires such as George Soros talking like this, it is not surprising that there is conspiratorial talk of a globalist destabilisation programme whereby globalists step in to run great trading blocs once the complete chaos that they have engineered ensues. One might think of this as the economic version of the migration crisis. It is certainly the case that destabilisation programmes have been discussed before. We know from General Wesley Clark that the US had planned a mass destabilisation programme after 9/11 with the plan to invade seven countries in the Middle East.118

  If there is no conspiracy, then multiculturalist liberals have seriously misunderstood the multicultural project. The people coming to Western Europe from the Middle East and North Africa are considerably less liberal than the people here already. The result will not be the liberal, atheistic paradise they crave. They are peddling a new consciousness, but it is a false one. It might be an illiberal theocratic society based on shari’ah law juxtaposed to a Western, secular society. Islam as it is spelled out in the Qur’an (and not necessarily as it is practiced by the millions of moderate Muslims) is illiberalism as a religion and is based on a contrary civilisation.

  It represents a different way of being human, for it is total and absolute; it is absolutism as enforced uniformity and these pressures can lead to demagoguery, as we have seen with Gaddafi, Hussein, Assad etc. The West has drifted into secularism to such an extent that it could not even begin to understand the metaphysical objectivism which is so absolute in Islam. Muslims must surrender to the slavery of God — a concept that is complete anathema for people living in the West, even Christians. If one cuts off the matrix of relations embodied in history which define who we are but which are external to us, then one cuts off an individual’s vitality, and leaves him ‘etherised upon a table’.119 If one were to run around a town in Nietzschean fashion in the West shouting ‘God is dead’, people would just ignore you, shrug their shoulders and think you were mad. They might even laugh. This is the extent to which we have lost our theological foundation. If one did this in parts of the Middle East, one would have insulted the prophet, and might face the death penalty under shari’ah law. This is the extent of the culture clash we are busy orchestrating.

  One must remember that a community is more than just wages and consumer goods. How can one have a Gemeinschaft (‘community’) if people have nothing gemein (‘in common’)? To have a big welfare state such as Sweden, one needs a proportionate sense of commonality, not a pre-existing national commonality based on some kind of Herderian romantic Volksgeist, but one based more simply on an agreement on and sharing of the procedures, precepts and institutions that make up the country. A nation’s culture is its proverbial glue binding together these institutions and its citizens. It implies a sense of shared process. One would have thought this was rather obvious, and yet reductive liberalism wants to undo this collective identity, erase our common habits and loyalties, remove our badges of membership, dismantle our meanings and beliefs, which have been inherited from generation to generation. The modern liberal instruction is that we must question orthodoxy (in all its guises) — the default position of mankind. The Christian West must constantly question its roots and belief systems, but Islam forbids investigation into the origins of the Qur’an. Just imagine the hullabaloo that would have ensued had The Life of Brian been a
bout Muhammed, and not Christ. John Cleese would have been hanging from a mature English Oak tree.

  Multiculturalism and the political correctness that guides it amounts to an oxymoronically sounding ‘dictatorship of virtue’ (Bernstein, 1995). It emerged from the laudable impulses of the American civil rights movement, but has become quasi-dictatorial in nature as it attempts to demonise any opposition and seeks complete and absolute ideological control over people in the West. Bernstein shows how multiculturalism is a code-word for an expanded concept of moral and cultural relativism, and that this relativism has become the orthodoxy of our age. It acts as a form of totalitarian thinking because nobody wants to appear to be against it, and ‘hiding behind the innocuous, unobjectionable and entirely praiseworthy goal of eliminating prejudice from the human heart lies a certain ideology, a control of language’ (1995: 36). Bernstein called multiculturalism ‘nobility perverted’ (1995: 11): it appears as something noble, but its effect is alienating and self-condemning unless one is a minority. Courage and ‘nobility’ will be required to transgress this dictatorship of virtue. Bernstein’s description could be no more fitting than in a place like Sweden where virtue as meant here is put on a pedestal.

  Despite all the rhetoric, the objective of eliminating all prejudice by creating multi-ethnic societies might seem praiseworthy, but it is in fact, one suspects, a rather shallow ideal. It is largely unrealistic and might even be the stuff of fairy-tales. It is not valid in any way as a policy for a Government that sees itself as something more than Blue Peter, something more than naïve, blind liberalism which many Swedish politicians seem to stand for.