Our Swedish correspondent Svenne Tvaerskaegg sends this report on the increasing political repression in Sweden that is taking place in the run-up to September’s elections.

Sweden — it’s now or never

By Svenne Tvaerskaegg

Sweden, once a model society of hard-working and peaceable Scandinavians with one of the highest standards of living in the world, is entering into a state of dissolution.

Decades of mass immigration from some of the most backward and violent countries in the world are slowly and irrevocably transforming the model society into its opposite. At first the problems were relatively small, and although they inexorably grew over the years, they tended to be concentrated in the ever-growing immigrant ghettos that sprang up around Sweden’s towns and cities. Most Swedes could continue to live their lives as before, largely unaffected by the increasing crime and chaos festering in the isolated suburbs of their clean and peaceful cities.

Swedish media helped to keep the population in their dreamlike state of peace, prosperity and security, while in the background a destructive policy was wreaking ever-increasing damage to the fabric of their society. With an almost religious fervor the media promoted the official government ideology of multiculturalism and its manifold benefits. Mass immigration was good for Sweden; it was culturally enriching; it vitalized the economy; it made life more worth living.

For a long time the propaganda barrage worked, but this is rapidly changing. The sheer scale of what has happened is becoming impossible to ignore, as the ghettos become more unmanageable and crime spills out into the rest of the country. Gang rapes, gang warfare, hand grenade explosions, shootings, riots and attacks against police stations, things just about unknown once are now becoming daily occurrences.

This year is an election year in Sweden, and the September election is going to be the most important election in Sweden’s history. Concern about immigration, multiculturalism, social disintegration and rapidly escalating crime will play a central role.

As the country gears up for the election campaign, Swedish media are in crisis. Confidence in mainstream media has been plummeting for years as the gap between what people see and what the media say increases, and public trust in state-run radio and television as well as the daily press is now at an all time low.[1] Their failure to accurately report what is happening in their country has lead to the rise of a strong and increasingly influential alternative media as more and more Swedes turn to online publications such as Samhällsnytt[2] Fria Tider[3] Nyheteridag[4] and other dissident news sources for their information.

Mainstream media are now in a very difficult situation. They are rapidly losing their credibility as well as their monopoly on information, and need to find a way to manage the unwelcome intrusion of reality into their propaganda bubble while neutralizing those who accurately report it. They seem to have found a way by reading the works of George Orwell: if propaganda no longer matches reality, then reality and those who report it must be suppressed by force. It seems they have never heard Abraham Lincoln’s wise words about trying to fool all of the people all of the time — or maybe they think they have found a way to do what Lincoln said couldn’t be done.

In their attempt to bring about Lincoln’s proposed impossibility, they have a willing and powerful ally in the Swedish government. Sweden has invested a great amount of money and effort in promoting an international image of Sweden as a ‘humanitarian superpower’, an image that is now in tatters as the world watches in amazement at what is happening inside the country.

In an effort to stop the flow of unfavorable information from leaking out of Sweden and further damaging their image, the government has proposed a change in the law which would make spreading negative information about Sweden a crime of treason. The main opposition party, the Moderates, announced over the weekend that they will support the proposal, which makes it just about certain it will become law.[5] The dissident media are understandably worried about the chilling effect this law will have on critics of government policy and how it may well result in alternative media journalists’ being jailed. The proposed law is considered to be going too far, even by some mainstream journalists, and an online petition against it has been started, but with such powerful political support it is hard to see how it can be stopped.[6]

The new treason law is not likely to come into force before September, but the government is deploying other weapons to silence critics in time for the coming election campaigns. A state-funded authority is being set up to counter what it calls “fake news”. This authority will consist of the public broadcasting company SVT and Sweden’s major mainstream newspapers.[7] The object of their anti-“fake news” campaign will not of course be themselves, who are the largest manufacturers of fake news in Sweden; it will be their competitors in the alternative media who they are desperate to neutralize.

The government has also financed a group of online investigators whose job is to monitor social media and discussion groups and hunt down posters of what they call “hate speech” then report them to the police.[8] Examination of the groups’ activities indicate that stopping “hate speech” may not be their main purpose, since they find so little of it, despite the resources they deploy. It seems their real purpose is intimidation.

They have already reported many hundreds of people, but after police investigation this has resulted in fewer than ten prosecutions. People will know they are being watched, and become wary of posting immigration and multiculture critical comments on social media, however innocuous, since the threshold for being reported to and investigated by the police is very low. Even YouTube is eagerly helping the authorities crack down on critical opposition. Dissident YouTube accounts have been demonetized and have even been completely deleted ,thereby marginalizing and eliminating important opposition voices.

Unless there is a radical change very soon in the direction the country is taking, Sweden may cease to exist as a coherent cultural and political entity. The changes which have occurred in Sweden since the decision to become multicultural in 1975 have been so radical that a continuation of them after the September election means turning back will no longer be possible.

Advocates of the current post-modernist agenda and social conservatives both know this, and that the future of the country is at stake. The Swedish Security Police, Säpo, have warned about the polarization of Swedish society and how public discourse is becoming more bitter and hate-filled. They expect and have prepared for unprecedented levels of violence during the election campaign.[9]

Notes:

1. www.resume.se/nyheter/artiklar/2017/04/06/fortroendet-for-public-service-rasar 2. samnytt.se 3. www.friatider.se 4. nyheteridag.se 5. samnytt.se/moderaterna-rostar-ja-till-lofvens-censurlag 6. www.stoppagrundlagsandringen.com/namninsamling 7. samnytt.se/myndighet-ger-mediekoncerner-uppdrag-och-miljoner-for-att-paverka-utgangen-av-riksdagsvalet 8. www.friatider.se/staten-finansierar-obskyr-siktspolis-som-jagar-invandringskritik-p-n-tet 9. www.di.se/nyheter/sapo-storre-hotrisk-infor-riksdagsvalet



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