Sweden’s Totalitarian Face By Fjordman
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/print/
On April 4 2014, in Malmö District Court in Sweden, the provocative artist Dan Park was sentenced to three months in jail for hate speech (“hets mot folkgrupp”) for his works of art. The prosecutor even wanted the artist examined for mental illness, similar to the way Communist dictatorships have treated dissidents. The court did not support this suggestion, however. Park and his defense lawyer have indicated that they will appeal the verdict.
Ingrid Carlqvist, the editor of the newspaper Dispatch International, commented that the verdict essentially amounts to a ban on satire in Sweden, at least if the satire involves ideologically protected immigrant groups.
At the same time, and with a heavy heart, Carlqvist announced her own decision to leave her native Sweden. The repressive and totalitarian atmosphere in the country has simply become intolerable, especially if you happen to be a critic of Islamization, Multiculturalism or mass immigration. You then run a real risk of physical attacks. The level of political violence as well as street crime is only rivaled by the level of ideological censorship and repression. In combination, this has created a society plagued by levels of tension that are growing increasingly dangerous.
Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city. It is set to become the first Scandinavian town with a Muslim majority population. In recent years, it has achieved a certain notoriety for its crime problems.
The wave of robberies the city has witnessed is part of a “war against Swedes.” This was the explanation given by young robbers with immigrant background for why they are robbing native Swedes. The sociologist Petra Åkesson interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explained, laughingly, that “We rob every single day, as much as we want to, whenever we want to.”
Yet suggesting that the ongoing rise in violent crime might have something to do with mass immigration of alien and aggressive cultures is quite literally banned by law. In March 2007 during a rally supported by SSU (the Social Democratic Youth League) a man carried a sign reading, “While Swedish girls are being gang raped by immigrant gangs the SSU is fighting racism.” He was promptly arrested and later sentenced to a fine. His crime? He had “expressed disrespect for a group of people with reference to their national or ethnic background.” The local court rejected the man’s free speech argument because even free speech has its limits, and he had clearly acted in too provocative a manner.
So-called “Islamophobia” is treated as a serious offense. In August 2013, Swedish prosecutors charged a 22-year-old non-Muslim Swedish man for honking his car horn outside the Fittja mosque near Stockholm, citing his intention to disturb the Muslim congregation there during prayers.
Expressing disrespect for ethnic Swedes, whites and European culture seems to be just fine, though. That’s not merely allowed under Multiculturalism, but virtually encouraged. Sweden’s allegedly conservative Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has stated that the original Swedish culture was merely barbarism; everything good was imported from abroad. He said this in 2006 following a visit to the town of Södertälje, near Stockholm.
A police station in Södertälje was in September 2005 hit by shots from an automatic weapon, following a direct confrontation between aggressive immigrant youths and the local police. The trouble started after a Swedish girl was called a “whore” and reacted negatively to the epithet.
If a leading politician had said that African, Asian or Islamic culture was “merely barbarism,” there would have been a huge public outcry and calls for his immediate resignation due to “racism.” His career might have been over. Yet disrespecting and mocking the traditions of the majority population is apparently no problem.
This phenomenon seems to exist in all Western countries with a white majority population, and only there. Only Europeans are expected to denigrate their own culture and meekly give their country away to outsiders. Multiculturalism is in essence an anti-European ideology. Under the seductive and highly misleading slogans of “diversity” and “tolerance,” it entails unilaterally dissolving European nations and their distinct identities.
Mona Sahlin has held various posts in Social Democratic cabinets, among others as Minister of Democracy, Integration and Gender Equality. In 2007 Sahlin was elected leader of the Social Democratic Party, which has been Sweden’s largest party for generations and often its dominant political force. She stepped down as party leader after losing the 2010 elections, when she was the left-wing candidate for Prime Minister.
The radical organization Expo is – unfortunately – very powerful in Sweden today. It was founded in the mid-1990s by the now-late Marxist activist Stieg Larsson. He ironically went on to sell tens of millions of books of crime fiction after his death.
In 2011, after having been a serious candidate for Prime Minister only a few months earlier, Sahlin joined the board of the organization Expo. The journalist and dissident writer Ingrid Carlqvist has documented how Expo came to have a powerful unofficial influence over the Swedish public debate on immigration, or the total lack of such. Sweden is partially paralyzed by a climate of fear. You risk being fired from your job and socially demonized by the left-leaning press if you say anything remotely critical of mass immigration. As a matter of fact, you risk being fired without saying anything at all in public. It can be enough merely to give a small donation as a private citizen to democratic dissident websites such as Avpixlat.
Expo has contributed negatively to this totalitarian climate. Some of its harshest critics have even compared it to Stasi, the secret police in the Communist dictatorship of East Germany (DDR). The few who dare speak up against mass immigration in Sweden risk being physically attacked as well. Expo has been accused of having too close a relationship with violent left-wing organizations.
In 2007 the leading Expo member Charles Westin was the editor of a book about alleged right-wing extremists. In addition to contributions by radical left-wing academics such as Mattias Gardell, it contained a chapter written by the extremely violent left-wing organization Anti-Fascist Action (AFA).
AFA have for years staged very violent attacks on people who dare to question mass immigration or oppose Islamization. Some of their victims have been attacked with axes even in their private homes. AFA often post videos on the Internet where they brag about such attacks. They have done this with near-impunity for many years. The political Establishment looks the other way.
Among AFA’s many targets have been members of a perfectly democratic and legitimate political party, the Sweden Democrats. These attacks have continued even after they earned representation in the Swedish Parliament in 2010. Expo’s board member and spokesman Daniel Poohl, who is not democratically elected himself, has publicly stated that it’s “not undemocratic” to deny the Sweden Democrats access to political influence.
In early 2011 Mona Sahlin went directly from being the national leader of the very powerful Swedish Social Democratic Party to sitting on the board of Expo together with Charles Westin. That a leading politician sits on the board with a person who has cooperated openly with groups beating up members of a legal opposition party might have raised a few eyebrows elsewhere, but not in Sweden.
Bruce Bawer, the author of bestselling books such as While Europe Slept, has previously warned that “Though two–thirds of Swedes question whether Islam is compatible with Western society, this issue is simply not open for public discussion. To quote Jonathan Friedman, a New Yorker who teaches social anthropology at the University of Lund, ‘no debate about immigration policies is possible’ because Sweden’s ‘political class,’ which controls public debate, simply avoids the topic.”
Dissidents from the Sweden Democrats have been the targets of violent events that recall China’s Cultural Revolution. Protests have been staged by the youth divisions of other parties.
The British historian Roland Huntford warned in his 1971 book The New Totalitarians that Sweden has perfected the methods of suppressing individual dissent while maintaining the outward workings of a democratic system. He feared that similar methods might be adopted elsewhere in the Western world.
That time — the early 1970s — was just before the wave of non-European immigration hit Scandinavia. Huntford’s book therefore does not deal directly with this issue. But he does pinpoint the serious repression of dissent in Sweden and its dangerous lack of intellectual defenses. Perhaps that is the nation’s most damaging flaw. He also noted the extensive Socialist indoctrination, the all-intrusive bureaucracy and the fact that after generations of Social Democratic dominance, the country seems to view itself as an ideological state. It is not hard to see how these factors could become very toxic when combined with mass immigration.
It’s just a 40 minute drive by car across the Øresund Bridge from the troubled town of Malmö in southern Sweden to Denmark’s capital city Copenhagen. Sweden shares a land border with Finland in the north plus a longer sea border across the Baltic Sea. Norway and Sweden share a 1,630-kilometer long land border which happens to be one of the least protected national borders in the world.
Sweden is now becoming so repressive, and the problems related to rampant mass immigration so big, that the country could represent a future security threat to neighboring nations.
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