Martin Lund, American Renaissance, February 9, 2018

When Swedes go to the polls in September 2018, it will be one of the most important elections ever in a Scandinavian country. The Swedes will have to decide whether they will continue to be replaced by foreigners. In 2017 alone, Sweden let in around 74,000 people from the Third World — the equivalent of the United States letting in 2.5 million. The polls now show that the restrictionist party, the Sweden Democrats, will get anything from 15 to 23 percent of the vote. Occasionally, someone from a mainstream party says something unenthusiastic about immigration, but only one party is willing to take real action to stop it.

At the last election, in 2014, the Sweden Democrats got 12.9 percent of the vote. Because Sweden has proportional representation, this was enough to keep both of the two traditional blocs on the Left and Right from passing the 50-percent threshold — 175 seats in parliament — needed to get a majority. The center-left and left parties won 159 seats, the center-right 141 seats, and the Sweden Democrats 49 seats. On paper, this meant the Sweden Democrats could have joined a coalition with either side and pushed it past the threshold of 175.

The center-left formed a minority government without the Sweden Democrats, but faced a crisis in December 2014 when the center-right and the Sweden Democrats announced they would vote against the budget for the next year. The budget must pass with a majority vote, and ordinarily this level of opposition would have led to new elections. However, the mainstream parties feared yet more gains by the Sweden Democrats in a snap election, so the two largest mainstream parties from both the Right and the Left entered into the infamous December Agreement.

This was a pact wherein all major parties on the center-right agreed to abstain from a vote on the budget, which would then pass with the majority of votes cast. This was a transparent right-left alliance to bypass the democratic process and deprive the Sweden Democrats of influence. The December Agreement is meant to last until at least 2022. This means that the Sweden Democrats could increase their number of seats to as much as 30 percent but still be unable to vote down a budget — and force elections — if the center-right parties continue to abstain rather than vote against the budget. Swedish media find this kind of anti-democratic bullying perfectly acceptable if that is what it takes to keep “racists” from exercising power.

There is another serious obstacle in the electoral process. Most democracies take the secret ballot for granted. Not Sweden. They do not use a single ballot paper that lists all the parties. Instead, the voter has to take a ballot for the party he supports before going behind the curtain. Anyone who picks up the ballot for the Sweden Democrats must do so in public, and this scares some people from voting for the “forbidden” party. This procedure is so outrageous that even Danish mainstream media and professors have criticized it. There is no chance that the system will be reformed in time for the September elections.

What is at stake, of course, is the fate of what was once one of the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world — a country once considered even by many Americans to be a showcase of what can be achieved with leftist social engineering. Consider just one statistic: Sweden now has the highest rate of sexual assault in Europe, with 6,720 rapes reported in 2016. Neighboring Denmark, with a population 56 percent the size of Sweden’s, reported only 791 rapes. This means the rape rate is nearly five times higher in Sweden than in Denmark. Sweden’s preliminary figures for 2017 show an 8 percent increase in rape to 7,320.

The Swedish government does not report the race or ethnicity of criminals. In fact, in January 2017, Migration Minister Morgan Johansson announced explicitly that the government would not reveal the ancestry of criminals. It was therefore necessary for a private citizen — whose name remains confidential — to collect data from all the courts in Sweden. He revealed that 84 percent of all forcible rapes are committed by men from the Third-World, and that those most likely to commit rapes are Algerians, Afghans, Tunisians, Moroccans, and Palestinians — all from predominantly Muslim countries. Ninety percent of all gang rapes are committed by foreigners.

The problem of immigrant crime has become so serious that even Danish Broadcasting recently aired an interview with a journalist who calmly described activities of criminal gangs that have reduced parts of Sweden to a virtual state of anarchy. Gangs almost exclusively made up of first-, second- or third-generation Third World immigrants use hand grenades and other explosives. If the police step up enforcement, criminals may retaliate by blowing up police cars or even attacking police stations. The journalist told Danish Broadcasting (minute 33) that he thought immigrant crime could be the number-one issue in the September elections.

In February, a police officer, Peter Springare, wrote on Facebook about his work in the city of Orebro, 100 miles West of Stockholm: “I’m so fucking tired. What I will write here below is not politically correct. But I don’t give a shit. . . . I will soon retire after 47 years . . . .”

Officer Springare then listed the crimes in a typical week: “rape, rape, aggravated rape, assault rape [outdoor rape with violence], extortion, extortion, assault in a courtroom, threats, violence against the police, threats against the police, drug crime, felony drug crime, attempted murder, rape again, blackmail again and assault.”

Then he listed the names of the suspects: “Ali Mohamad, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again, Christoffer — What, is it true? Yes, a Swedish name popped up related to drugs — Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again.”

Almost instantly, Peter Springare was reported for having committed a hate crime, though the charges were later dropped. A Facebook support group sprang up and quickly gained 200,000 members.

How did Sweden come to this pass? There is no single answer to this question, but the Swedish way of consensus in politics and a strong belief among the elites that all people share their post-national values are probably part of the answer.

Between 1980 and 2016, Sweden admitted approximately two million people from the Third World. Since there are perhaps only 7.5 million ethnic Swedes, this means that at least 20 percent of the population is non-Western. Among people age 44 and younger, 37 percent have a foreign background. Some of them are from Western countries and cause few problems, but the vast majority are not.

It is hard to learn what nationalities are living in Sweden because the national Statistical Bureau considers a second-generation ethnic foreign to be “Swedish” even if only one parent was born in Sweden. However, here are figures for residents born abroad or born of parents who were both born abroad:

Syria: 149,418

Iraq: 135,129

Iran: 70,637

Somalia: 63,853

Bosnia (Muslims): 58,181

Turkey: 47,060

Eritrea: 35,152

Afghanistan: 34,754

Lebanon: 26,906

The opacity of Swedish statistics has prompted private groups to try to fathom the true racial/ethnic composition of the country. Here is an example of a blog that tries to fill in the blanks left by the government. Recently, Pew Research estimated that with a moderate rate of Muslim immigration, Sweden will be 20.5 percent Muslim by 2050. If immigration remains high, the figure will be 30.6 percent.

For decades, the Swedish mainstream media and politicians have claimed immigration was doing Sweden a twofold favor: First, by accepting a large number of so-called refugees, Sweden could take pride in being a “major humanitarian power,” as former prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt put it. Columnist Lena Mellin from the Swedish paper Aftonbladet agreed, writing that “it feels great and a little bit awesome” to be so virtuous. Second, high levels of immigration have supplemented the Swedish labor market, which suffers from an ageing native Swedish population.

The first claim is typical liberal puffery. The second claim is misleading, given the quality of immigrants. Swedish results in the international PISA tests are falling. The latest results, from 2016, suggest some improvement, but show that the gap between high and low achievers is widening. Swedish statistics cannot be analyzed to show the extent to which immigration is widening this gap, but statistics from Denmark — which has accepted immigrants from many of the same countries — track the performance of immigrants. The second generation is improving very little compared to the first generation; in 2015, it did not improve at all.

These results portend Sweden’s transformation from a prosperous country to a poor one, or at least one with much greater inequality. We are seeing a shift from a homogenous population to one with minority groups comparable in levels of achievement to American blacks.

Sweden has traditionally had an extensive welfare state. The origins of the welfare state date back to a 1928 speech in which Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson talked about making a Folkhem, a People’s Home. The idea caught on, and the Social Democratic Party held power continuously from 1932 to 1976, even winning an impressive 50.1 percent of the vote in 1968 — a remarkable feat in a multiparty system.

The Swedish welfare state is eroding, largely due to the fact that the people in the “people’s home” are no longer the same. Taxes are still high, but public services such as free health care, free elderly care, and pensions are subjects to serious cuts due to the burden imposed by immigrants. The Swedish economist Jan Tullberg has estimated the costs of immigration in 2014 at a staggering 250 billion Swedish kr. (31 billion US dollars), if the costs to Swedes of jobs lost to immigrants are included. This figure dates from before the massive influx after Angela Merkel let in more than a million so-called refugees, 163,000 of whom came to Sweden.

The Swedish government claimed that 2014 costs of immigrants were only between 45 and 60 billion Swedish kronor (5.6 to 7.5 billion US dollars), but even this figure is a lot for a country with 10 million inhabitants. Even if we accept the lowest figure, it is $560 for every man, woman, and child, or $2,240 for every family of four.

Immigrant children are wrecking the Swedish school system. A teacher in the Angered suburb of Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city, writes of teaching in an area that is now run by criminal gangs:

I have been hit with a knife, been threatened, beaten, and had my car vandalized. I have had students forced into marriage, maltreated, and who have sold sex for cigarettes. Students have been robbed, even in the low and middle grades. I have worked at schools with bullet holes in the walls. . . . We are talking about a clan that executes people on football fields. They keep it clean. Somalis remove the body. Later the police arrive and say everything is Ok.

On New Year’s Eve in Kristianstad, there was chaos when “young people” set fires and then threw stones and fire crackers at passersby and the authorities.

In many neighborhoods, there are more immigrants on the streets than ethnic Swedes. Scholars call these ghettos Utanförskap, which means something like “Outsideness.” This implies a failure of integration and assimilation of non-whites, for which Swedes are somehow to blame.

Sweden, like all Western European countries, has a hate speech law, called Hets Mot Folkgrupp “agitating against a people,” which can apply to an ethnic group or a sexual minority. In 2015, there were reportedly 37,000 victims of “hate crimes,” most of which could not have occurred when Sweden was still a homogeneous country. In 2015, an 18-year-old was convicted for using a swastika and a Hitler mustache as his Skype profile picture. It is thus forbidden to behave stupidly.

The far right in Sweden is considerably stronger than in Denmark or Norway. The number of outright neo-Nazis in Denmark or Norway is in the hundreds, but in Sweden, there are thousands. They are visible, most notably, on the website Nordfront.

There are probably two reasons why Sweden has a stronger extreme right. Unlike Denmark and Norway, Sweden wasn’t occupied by Nazi Germany. Also, Sweden has had by far the most extreme immigration policy, and this has probably pushed more people towards the extremes of the political spectrum.

Antifa are strong in Sweden, however, and are at least honest in admitting they are prepared to use violence. Police Chief Erik Nord of Gothenburg has noted that when neo-Nazis and nationalists apply for permits to hold demonstrations, violence is likely to come from far-left counterdemonstrators, which is to say, Antifa.

Sweden has been on the wrong track for a long time, but there are signs that the tide is turning. The cost of immigration in a country that prides itself on its welfare state are now so high that ordinary Swedes are questioning immigration. One serious problem is that it is very hard to get quantitative data. It takes persistence and ingenuity to get information on immigrants, whether it is rates of crime, poverty, welfare use, disease, education, employment, or anything else. Unlike the United States, which has long been a multi-racial society, where data for racial groups were recorded separately, Sweden has had no reason to make distinctions within its population. This makes the truth very hard to discover — and results in the wildly divergent estimates of the costs of immigration mentioned above.

Another problem is that Swedes are law abiding, polite, and very collectivist. They hesitate to say anything controversial. Let us consider the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. Iceland has very few foreigners and therefore does not have the problems of the other Nordic countries. The Danes are the most outspoken, followed by Norwegians. This may be due to the close genetic kinship between Danes and Norwegians, stemming back to the period of 1397 to 1814, when the two nations were part the state of Denmark-Norway. Finns and Swedes are much more conformist and have a harder time repudiating their morally corrupt elites.

Nevertheless, Swedes are beginning to speak out. The journalist Jens Ganman who worked for Swedish radio and television — both are relentlessly globalist/egalitarian — listed “12 Predictions” on his Facebook profile on January 17, 2018. He thinks that soon there will be calls for the repatriation of immigrants, and that even the “liberal” Social Democrats will support this. More radically, he anticipates that Swedes could even rise up and assassinate their leaders, and that ordinary people will arm themselves and form vigilante groups. Remarkably, so far, he has not been crucified in the press.

One must ask why the modern history of Sweden is so fraught with nonsense? Why was it a Swede, Gunnar Myrdal, who set American race relations on a catastrophic course with his 1944 book, An American Dilemma? Why was Sweden such an ardent supporter of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa — even to the point of supporting armed struggle? Why has Sweden been in the forefront of so many feminist excesses?

Until the 17th century, Sweden was subject to the Danish state of Denmark-Norway, but in 1658, Sweden conquered the richest lands then held by Denmark, and established itself as the major power in Scandinavia. It had generally poor soil, however, and 1.5 million Swedes emigrated to the United States. It was in the last decades of the 19th century that Sweden industrialized, pulling well ahead of Denmark and Norway and becoming one of the richest nations in the world.

This success may have turned the Swedish elites arrogant, and convinced them they were entitled to tell others how to run their countries. At the same time, the upheavals of 1968, “the Students Revolt” as it is called in Scandinavia, radicalized young people considerably more in Sweden than in Denmark and Norway. In a typical radical gesture, in 1985, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme attended an ANC gala, where he pledged yet more aid for the fight against apartheid.

Ironically, up until 1976, Sweden was carrying out the most extensive sterilization program in history, even compared to Nazi Germany. Some 63,000 people were involuntarily sterilized from 1934 to 1976. Perhaps Swedish elites are atoning for the past.

Sweden is certainly in dire straits, but the capitulation is strictly mental. In the 17th century, Swedes were the most feared soldiers in Europe. If Swedes rekindle even a small part of their willingness to fight, the newcomers will not stand a chance against such an intelligent and organized people. Even a badly run country like Greece could seal its borders in 24 hours if the will were there. It will be much easier for us Scandinavians. In the short run, the Swedish people will go through a terrible ordeal, but I am optimistic that they will take back their country.