By Bruce Bawer
June 26, 2018
The Swedish flag outside Stockholm City Hall.
I try to be careful about these things, so I won't give a thumbs-up – yet – to the new party Alternativ für Sverige. I want to know more about them. That said, the party leader, Gustav Kasselstrand, is saying all the right things. “What you read about Sweden on alternative news platforms is true,” he told an interviewer recently. “We are facing problems more severe than ever before in our history, where Swedes face a situation of being a minority within 20 years if nothing is done to stop the replacement of our people.” He added: “I would describe the problems in Sweden as some kind of low-intensive civil war (with gradually increasing intensity for each day).”
While I'm not yet sure what to make of Kasselstrand and his party, I do know what to make of the establishment they're taking on. It's a gang of liars. Case in point: recently the Council for the Promotion of Sweden Abroad – a joint effort by Sweden's Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, Ministry of Culture, the Swedish Institute, Business Sweden and Visit Sweden – distributed a manual, Sharing Sweden, which explains to Swedish entrepreneurs how to attract tourism, business development, investment, trade, “cultural and scientific exchange,” and the like. The thrust is to project a “strong image of Sweden abroad.” This, admits the Council, is not easy nowadays, because, and I quote, “Sweden has been affected in recent years by negative rumours and in some cases outright disinformation, particularly in the areas of migration and integration.”
“Negative rumours”? “Outright disinformation”? Translation: the horrifying truth about our national mess of an immigration and integration policy has gotten out, and if we want to attract vacationers, investors, etc., we've got to double down on the denial.
For a dose of the reality that the Council is out to quash, consider a report that came out of Malmö just the other day. The city, Sweden's third largest, with a population of over 300,000, has 800 cops. Violent crime by Muslim gangs has reached such high levels, however, that the police department says it would need an extra 7200 officers – an increase of 900% – to even hope to be able to handle the problem. Unfortunately, even if the government were willing to spend the money to hire that many new cops – and it isn't, because it's busy spending that dough on immigrant welfare payments, housing subsidies, and so on – there are no new cops to be found. Sweden's Muslim crime problem is so severe that police officers are retiring en masse, and the police academies are empty, because only a lunatic would want to enter upon a career as a cop in Sweden nowadays. Being a cop in Sweden used to mean gently reminding kids not to jaywalk. Now it means walking into the Valley of the Shadow of Death – unarmed. For while the crime picture has changed utterly, the philosophy of policing has not: Malmö's new “strategy” for combating Muslim gang violence calls on police to ask criminals politely to be nice. (I'm not kidding.)
It's not just Malmö. In January, a headline in Britain's ordinarily staid Sunday Times read: “Teens roam streets with rifles as crime swamps Sweden: The army may be called in to halt a gang surge in immigrant areas.” Another crime-fighting policy, instituted in “no-go” zones across Sweden three years ago, has already proved a colossal failure. The scale of violence continues to climb – and the intensity of that violence keeps getting steadily worse. Cops are scared. When two of them respond to a call, one of them has to check out the possible crime scene, tend to any victims, and look around for perpetrators – while the other guards the police car. There are now 61 “no-go” zones in Sweden; the number of especially dangerous ones is 23, up from 15 in 2015. The number, naturally, is constantly on the rise. Then there's this: on June 6, Sundsvall municipality, on the central Swedish coast, celebrated Sweden's National Day by inviting new Swedish citizens to the City Hall to hear Palestinians perform a violent revolutionary song in Arabic that included lines about firing guns and jihadist martyrdom. On Midsummer's Eve, June 23, which is a major festival in Sweden, TV4's morning news program featured a special cooking segment focusing on “traditional” foods – no, not herring, the dish usually associated with that holiday, but kebab, which was prepared by a woman in a hijab.
The truth about Sweden, then, is dire. But boy oh boy, is the PR glorious. Forbes, in a piece published the other day, chose to buy the PR wholesale – as do pretty much all of the “respectable” media, even now. In an article about Forbes's selections for “The World's Most Reputable Countries 2018,” Vicky Valet described Sweden – which grabbed the list's top spot – as exemplary of the increasing tendency of international businesses to be drawn to “beautiful landscapes, friendly citizens and ethical policies.” “Ethical policies” in this case meaning admission into the country of hordes of unvetted Muslims.
Valet praised Sweden's “decades of sustainability initiatives” – meaning, of course, environmental sustainability. Never mind that Sweden's migrant policies are fast rendering it socially, economically, and culturally unsustainable. (“Globally,” applauded Valet, “Sweden accounts for less than 0.2% of all greenhouse gas emissions.” She failed to note that Sweden has only about 0.1% of the world population.) Far from warning that Sweden's migrant policies have placed it is on an insanely self-destructive path, Valet celebrated them as good for its international image: “Sweden has...become synonymous with hospitality....[It] has a long history of embracing the displaced, most recently opening its borders to 163,000 refugees.” Compounding the absurdity, there's this: “Just as the Swedes have welcomed immigrants, they have also supported the LGBTQ community.” Valet doesn't seem to grasp that filling your country with dicey Muslims is scarcely a gay-friendly act.
To be sure, Valet did admit that Sweden “still has work to do.” What work? On gender equality! You see, “Swedish women make just 88 cents for every dollar banked by their male counterparts.” Some observers might suggest that the main problem facing Swedish women today isn't some illusory pay gap but the country's status as the rape capital of Europe – and the fact that, owing to a lack of police resources, a huge percentage of those rapes aren't even investigated. But Valet didn't even mention this pesky little detail. That would be bad for business.
Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” and "The Victims' Revolution." His novel "The Alhambra" has just been published.
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