In this article, I will explain how Sweden went from being arguably the best and safest country the world had ever seen to becoming a nation on a slippery slope and a cautionary example.
I will also explain it so clearly that even a Green Party supporter can understand it.
You do not need to be a rocket scientist or a genius to understand what is happening in Sweden. What we are witnessing is the logical consequence of decades of wishful thinking, virtue signaling, and denial of reality by politicians, journalists, celebrities, and academics who have eagerly competed to ridicule, smear, and ostracize anyone who has tried, even in the slightest, to raise concerns or warn about what would happen if we continued to bury our heads in the sand.
Brinkemo, Bali, Rojas, Lamotte, Ganman, Janouch, Åkesson, Westerholm, Teodorescu… The list goes on of those who have been mocked and branded as racists by self-proclaimed apostles of virtue and reality-denying gatekeepers.
But let’s start from the beginning:
In Sweden, we have been spared from war for more than 200 years. Because we remained outside both World Wars during the 20th century, our infrastructure and industry remained intact, and the demand for raw materials during Europe’s reconstruction in the 1950s and 1960s helped make Sweden one of the world’s wealthiest industrial nations. In addition, workers from several European countries came here.
We succeeded in building a welfare state with a social safety net that impressed the rest of the world.
The downside of having lived in such a ”protected environment” is that you risk taking for granted what others can only dream of, while becoming both complacent and self-righteous in the process. This is why people sometimes say that we have been ”spoiled by peace.” Combined with the belief that we were ”the best in the class,” we came to think that we could both export and import a utopia in which everyone really wanted to be like us—or at least embrace our admirable values.
In Article 34 of the UN Refugee Convention, Assimilation and Naturalization, we can read:
”The host country shall make every effort to allocate the necessary resources for assimilation and naturalization so that the migrant group can become part of the host country’s culture and labor market as quickly as possible.”¹
In Sweden, we have done precisely the opposite for decades. In other words, we have imposed virtually no requirements while providing extensive welfare benefits.
Over the past 20 years, Sweden has received more than two million immigrants—more than any other country in Europe on a per capita basis. The vast majority have come from Africa and the Middle East. Despite claims of tighter immigration policies, Sweden still receives around 100,000 immigrants each year.
Let us, however, be clear about one thing. There is no reason to believe that most immigrants do not want to contribute and make an honest living. At the same time, it cannot be ignored that many come from countries with little or no experience of either democracy or equality. Whereas Sweden has a consensus-oriented culture built on compromise and dialogue, many countries in the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa) are characterized by cultures in which machismo and blood feuds are more prevalent.
It is only natural that friction will arise when people from such backgrounds encounter a country where these practices are considered unacceptable and where democracy and gender equality are regarded as self-evident. Every country has its own cultural values and places different importance on various cultural traditions. For example, in Sweden, honor-based violence, female genital mutilation, and child marriage are considered unacceptable, whereas in some countries these practices have been traditions for centuries and are regarded as normal.
It is naïve to believe that people will leave such traditions behind simply because they cross a national border.
However, if we are to understand the failed integration policy and the divisions in today’s Sweden, we must begin in the mid-1970s—more specifically, on February 27, 1975.
On that date, the Swedish Parliament decided to replace the policy of assimilation with multiculturalism and formulated it as follows:
”Immigrant and minority policy should be characterized by an effort to create equality between immigrants and Swedes.”²
So far, so good. But then, for some reason, they wrote the following:
”Immigrants and minorities should be given the opportunity to choose to what extent they wish to adopt a Swedish cultural identity or preserve and develop their original identity.”³
Today, this almost appears to be a blueprint for creating social exclusion and segregation. It is one thing what religion, food, clothing, or music people prefer—that is, of course, a private matter—but how is a newly arrived immigrant supposed to become part of a society if the country’s leaders signal that it is acceptable to hold on to the laws and customs of one’s former country, even when they conflict with those of the new one?
It is precisely this kind of message that leads to parallel legal systems and social exclusion. ”Integration explicitly became a matter of free choice for the immigrant,” as the perceptive Nils Littorin put it:
”Harmful cultural practices, such as honor oppression and child marriage, were not challenged. On the contrary, generous subsidies to ethnic, strongly patriarchal, and religious organizations, along with mother-tongue instruction, contributed to separating immigrant groups from the traditionally homogeneous Swedish society. In addition, financial incentives for settling in ethnic enclaves (the EBO Act) laid the foundation for the emergence of parallel societies.”⁴
Swedish politicians thus abandoned the previous focus on assimilation—that immigrants should adapt to Swedish society, rather than the other way around. Instead, politicians from both the left and the right engaged in self-flagellating absurdities such as, ”Everything genuinely Swedish is barbaric. Everything else has come from abroad,” and ”What do we have? Midsummer celebrations and other silly things.”⁵
As if that were not bad enough, for decades the government has poured billions in subsidies into various study associations, religious organizations, and schools—some more or less extremist—without any meaningful oversight of how the money has been used.⁶ In addition, dictatorships have also provided millions in funding to mosques. At the same time, all criticism of clan rule and extremist religious practices has been pathologized and labeled as Islamophobia and racism, thereby demonizing any objections.
The result of this policy is that the state has paved the way for clan rule, honor-based violence, extremism, gang crime, shootings, bombings, extortion, and humiliation robberies. Furthermore, clan-based criminality, extremism, and gang crime have spread throughout society via schools, politics, public authorities, businesses, the personal assistance sector, and the legal system.
In other words, we have both legislated for and financed our own downfall.
A record that is difficult to surpass when it comes to national masochism.
Or, as terrorism researcher Magnus Ranstorp put it:
”We hold the international record for naivety.”⁷
Because we have placed virtually no demands on those who have immigrated, they have had little incentive to adopt the Swedish language, Swedish values, or Swedish norms. Instead, we have largely viewed them as victims upon whom it would be inhumane to place any demands. This has resulted in what Mustafa Panshiri has described as ”the racism of low expectations.”
For a long time, we have instead cultivated the myth that everyone who comes here is ”fleeing for their lives.” Most of those who have immigrated to Sweden have not fled from war. The vast majority have fled poor, corrupt, and more or less brutal societies. It is understandable that people want to escape such circumstances, but that does not necessarily mean that they were fleeing for their lives.
The majority of those who have come to Sweden over the past ten years have been young, strong men. Filled with raging hormones and without a patriarch or father figure to keep them in check, they have been welcomed into a society that has regarded them as helpless ”children” and considered it lacking in empathy to place demands on them or put its foot down when they behaved badly.
This low-arousal approach, which Swedish psychologists teach and educators and public authorities apply in schools and residential care homes (HVB homes), has, in combination with a dysfunctional curriculum, contributed to a significant erosion of respect for authority in Sweden. It is in this context that we must understand why Sweden has more disorder in its schools than any other country in Europe and why respect for teachers, social workers, and police officers is alarmingly low.
It is also here that we must look for part of the explanation as to why children and young people are increasingly running amok and ”converting” to hedonism. Every day, they fill their earbuds and screens with misogynistic, violence-glorifying rap music in which ”guys” spew contempt for society while jumping around in videos waving bundles of cash and weapons.
As criminal investigator and YouTuber Luay Mohageb puts it:
”Swedish youth culture has been completely marinated in gangsterism, materialistic worship, and an obsession with money, where pro-criminal values have become the norm and the gangster mentality the guiding principle.”⁸
It is interesting to note that many of those making the sharpest and most perceptive analyses of today’s Sweden have immigrant backgrounds: Omar Makram, Mustafa Panshiri, Luai Ahmed, Victor de Almeida, and Navid Modiri are just a few of several insightful voices.
A large proportion of those who become criminals grow up with a single mother struggling under the burden of having borne many children and having been taught that her place is in the kitchen. The absence of a father figure is a well-known risk factor for boys becoming involved in crime. This applies both to ethnic Swedish boys and to those with foreign backgrounds.
If we add to this that Sweden has Europe’s weakest border controls, Europe’s lowest police density, and has been governed by uninformed and timid politicians who have refused to conduct consequence analyses, it becomes clear why Sweden has mixed a cocktail that is not only toxic but also explosive.
It no longer works to bury our heads in the sand and pretend everything is relative. The laughter has caught in the throats of the stand-up comedians and podcast celebrities who, through their self-indulgent chatter and relentless virtue signaling, have earned millions mocking everyone who tried to warn what would happen if the Swedish welfare state was carelessly turned upside down and the values and norms that sustained it were thrown away.
For years, Public Service and the mainstream media have gladly and uncritically given airtime and space to the childish ramblings of foie gras socialists, environmental Marxists, and ”open hearts” liberals with more or less closed minds. They have been enthusiastically encouraged by celebrated researchers who, with the stubbornness of fools, have rambled on about ”socioeconomic causes” and insisted that what we really need is more youth recreation centers.
At the same time, the false and dangerous notion of systematic racism and the idea that Sweden is a deeply racist society have been cultivated. This has been said about the country that has received the most refugees per capita in Europe, donates millions through fundraising galas and billions in foreign aid, and consistently ranks among the least racist countries in the world in international surveys.⁹
Yet Sweden overwhelmingly tops the European league tables for shootings, bombings, and rapes. And God knows how many Swedish youths have been traumatized after being subjected to humiliation robberies, or how many elderly people have had their lives ruined after being robbed of their life savings. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of girls who are subjected to honor-based violence.
Let us face the truth:
If Sweden were a patient, the diagnosis would be self-harm.
Sleeping Beauty’s slumber is over, and the awakening is not a pleasant one. In the future, dissertations will be written about how Sweden went from being a model nation to a cautionary example. Scholars will earn doctorates studying how a country managed to emasculate itself through extreme altruism, extreme naivety, timid and ingratiating politicians and journalists, among others, who, in their eagerness to signal the ”correct” values, dismantled the very foundation upon which society had rested.
Not everything, however, is doom and gloom. Most people are fundamentally quite decent. Moreover, ”alternative” media outlets such as Kvartal, Fokus, Axess, Bulletin, Nyheter Idag, and The Epoch Times, among others, have been refreshing injections of vitality. Journalists such as Paulina Neuding, Thomas Gür, Widar Andersson, and Ivar Arpi, among others, are doing what they can to awaken people from their mental stupor. The same is true of organizations such as Doku, led by the highly capable Sofie Löwenmark.
What the ”new” Sweden will do to people’s nervous systems, as well as how it will affect tourism, new business investment, and the brain drain, remains to be seen.
In the book Enemies of Society, the British historian Paul Johnson writes:
”The essence of civilization is the orderly pursuit of truth, the rational perception of reality in all its aspects, and the adaptation of human behavior to its laws. So long as we follow the path of reason, we shall not stray far from the enlightened circle of civilization. Its enemies are always those who, whatever their motives, deny, distort, diminish, exaggerate, or poison the truth, and who corrupt the processes of reason. In every age civilization has its enemies, although they constantly change their appearance and their weapons. The great defensive art is to detect and expose them before the damage they cause becomes life-threatening. Hell, wrote Thomas Hobbes, is truth discovered too late. Survival is a lie discovered in time.”¹⁰
Michael Delavante, When a country falls apart
Sources:
- The Refugee Convention 1951, https://www.unhcr.org/4ca34be29.pdf
- Prop. 1975:26. Regeringens proposition om riktlinjer för invandrar- och minoritetspolitiken m. m. https://lagen.nu/prop/1975:26
- Prop. 1975:26. Regeringens proposition om riktlinjer för invandrar- och minoritetspolitiken m. m. https://lagen.nu/prop/1975:26
- Gästskribent Nils Littorin: Multikultur är fascismens spegelbild, Nils Littorin, detgodasamhallet.com, 19 December, 2019
- Reinfeldt: Det ursvenska är blott barbari, DN, 15 November 2006. Skogkär: Med mångkultur kom hederskultur och tystnadskultur, Mats Skogkär, bulletin.nu, 19 August, 2021.
- Ibn Rushd är bara toppen på isberget, Malin Lernfelt, timbro.se, 10 May, 2021.
Radikala islamister i mångmiljonaffärer med svenska kommuner, svt.se, 27 August 2020.
- Terrorforskare: ”Sverige har internationellt rekord i naivitet”, Henrik Sjögren, fokus.se, 2023-02-10
- Gangsterkulturen kan göra barn till mördare, Luay Muhageb, Expressen, 20 September, 2023
9. Least Racist Countries 2023, worldpopulationreview.com. Also see: Which countries are the most racist? Survey says UK amongst least racist countries, Beryl Naz hassan, Evening Standard, 27 April, 2023
- Paul Johnson, ”Enemies of Society,” Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977, (page 85)
