Syrians knew that if they could get to Sweden, they would receive the permanent right to stay. These kinds of policy statements from Löfven and Merkel aggravated the migration crisis further, and gave even more impetus to the people-smuggling migration machine. Indeed, such a policy turned a refugee crisis into a migration crisis which has become a clash of civilisations crisis. This is in part the explanation for why hundreds of thousands of people were headed to Sweden. In the autumn of 2015, every Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan had the magical word ‘Sweden’ on his lips.
And at the same time, suburbs of the major Swedish cities where the new arrivals are headed have become pressure cookers of discontent — hermetic communities, sometimes operating under their own laws. We are creating an ethos of cultural and linguistic apartheid where cultural loyalty comes way before State loyalty, religious identity before nation. If there is a relationship between the Islamic ghetto and the local political order it is an antagonistic one. The censorious edicts of the imams and mullahs are being increasingly accepted.
The Foreign Policy article ‘From the Welfare State to the Caliphate’ (February, 2015) describes how Swedish refugees from Chechnya, Syria and Iraq have become Al-Qaeda leaders, and that there are now Swedish jihadi brides, most of whom were Somali refugees in Sweden. All of these people benefited for years from Swedish benefits paid for by the ethnic Swedish taxpayer, who after the Danes are subject to the highest rate of taxation in the world (top rate: 60 per cent). Swedish imams (one of whom claimed to be a member of ISIS) who have called for the death of infidels have insisted on television that the money they receive from Swedish tax payers is ‘Allah’s money’. Other imams in Germany have called repeatedly in so-called ‘sermons’ for the Islamification of Europe, declaring modern Europe, ‘the ungrateful daughter of Islamic Civilisation’. Alongside a whole bank of interviews, these ‘sermons’ from screaming, hate-filled imams are televised and available on the Internet.90 In 2011, a Somali imam living in Sweden said live on Sweden P2’s Somali radio programme that all converts from Islam should be killed.91 The Chancellor of Justice refused to consider this to be hate-speech even if it was an unambiguous incitement to violence, and the imam was allowed to continue calling for the death of infidels.92 Two years later a Swedish woman was imprisoned for two years for making a defamatory comment on Facebook about eight migrants who gang-raped a woman in 2011.
The Swedish Government’s response to this extremely alarming situation has been not only to ignore hate-speech from the imams invited to their country, but also to increase (not reduce as the politics of common sense would surely dictate) in 2015 the number of refugees from the places where the Swedish jihadists headed, i.e. Syria and Iraq. This news was spread amongst the many billions active on social media within seconds, and then Syrian TV channels aired in several countries in the Middle East started to tell people to leave Syria and go to Sweden. From a Swedish perspective at least, common sense seemed to have just evaporated under the summer’s evening sun.
And so, the migration crisis got under way: over a million people were on the move in the summer of 2015, spurred on by the idiotic, impeachable Merkel and Löfven, who encouraged asylum seekers to come to Germany and Sweden. Naturally, the Swedish media only aired one side of this crisis. Sweden is facing a media blackout as described by Arnstberg & Sandelin (2013), a Swedish journalist and retired researcher who were brave enough to tell the truth about Swedish immigration statistics, but whose book has been completely ignored by the Swedish media. But the Swedish people really have a right to know the facts. The costs of the refugee policy are borne by the taxpayer, and thus one might assume they have a right to know the truth about Sweden and its refugee policy. Arnstberg & Sandelin provide all the data, and it will not be repeated here, but Swedes should really know that an extraordinary 60 per cent of welfare benefits in Sweden are paid to immigrants.93
In the UK, there was in the summer of 2015 much debate as to whether such recipients were refugees or migrants. As far as Sweden is concerned at least, this is a migration crisis, and not a refugee crisis. The real refugees are the poor, suffering women and children in Turkey, Lebanon etc. who have fled war to the neighbouring country. Article 1 of the Geneva Convention as amended by the 1967 protocol defines a refugee as follows:
A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
Refugees are people who flee against their will because of fear for their lives. According to figures available at Migrationsverket, since 1980, only one in ten of the people coming from the parts of the Middle East are ‘refugees’ in accordance with this definition. The next generation of ethnic Swedes, perhaps the last generation, will look back at Sweden’s immigration policy with incredulity. They will quite reasonably want to know what motivated this collective psychosis, and how one managed to lose all connection with reality.
Sweden responded to the very significant increase in street begging with the normal platitude about how the Roma have been mistreated for centuries, i.e. they are the victims and thus ideologically protected. But, the plight of the Roma should not be an issue for Sweden. However, Swedes being the masters of expiation, like to eke out victims to fill up its pantheon of losers. The difficulty with these responses is that it does not in any way address the problem. It is a blanket, ideological response, but never a political solution. By taking this standpoint, Sweden is turning a blind eye to the human trafficking that it is promoting by its policy of allowing this to flourish. Most Swedes feel uncomfortable seeing so many beggars in what is meant to be a utopia. The solution is simple: stop giving money to the beggars, and they will go elsewhere.
Even in the totalitarian Soviet Union, people still had a grip on reality. However, talking to ethnic Swedes, it is clear that the proselytising of the mainstream media has been extremely effective, as they appear to have bought wholeheartedly into this radical, anti-racist ideology. This comfortable world of welfare support where every other employee appears to be sjukskriven (‘on sick leave’) and where humanitarian supremacy reigns to the benefit of the salus of humanity, is about to be shattered, and the lunacy of thirty years of immigration policy will be revealed.
It is not as if the Syrians happened to be in Sweden when the war broke out, and thus sought asylum. These are people who have been told of a mysterious land in northern Europe that is prepared to offer them asylum and the rights that that entails; they just have to get there. Such a policy has fuelled the industry of people smuggling with groups asking for large sums of money to ensure safe passage to Sweden. Sweden’s fanciful policy is leading to the kind of crime that the so-called ‘humanitarian superpower’ was meant to be stamping out. Sweden should not turn a blind eye to this hypocrisy. It has encouraged very significant numbers of people with fake ID and fabricated asylum stories to be trafficked to Sweden. Cui bono? If they end up living in a separate, parallel Swedish society where there are few opportunities for them, one really wonders who is the winner.
It is demeaning for the immigrants who have abandoned their native country to be used as economic pawns in a gigantic game of globalisation, and it is unnerving for the hosts because it imposes brutal modifications on their societies. It should be obvious that the solution to these terrible conflicts and wars in North Africa and the Middle East is not major population shifts. That will never address the problem. And with further crises and perhaps warfare over finite natural resources, some countries might be left with a stark choice: police the borders or collapse.
The Swedish morality play has veered far from its script: the liberal as a protagonist has tried
to rescue the victim (the refugee or the beggar), but the victim has taken advantage of the liberal’s naïvety and constant urge for ‘goodness’. There will be an unexpected, but fatal twist in the play: the do-gooder will end up the victim, but there will be nobody to look after him. A disturbing dénouement; he might even be an ‘infidel’ in a country that was once his own. His insistence on pronouncing the multiculturalist sceptics as ‘racists’ (even if Islam is not a race) will have left him powerless and alone in a society whose vision he should have been questioning, and not ‘accommodating’. A morality play might even become a tragedy.
The over-politically correct will no doubt consider this an Islamophobic perspective on the problem of migration, but we are concerned here with belief systems (not people). Let us also not forget that -phobia means ‘irrational fear’. There is nothing ‘irrational’ about the fear of radical Islam; it is presented in the atrocities of terrorism all over the world, every week of the year. And there is a difference between being anti-Islam and counter-jihad, just as there is between prejudice and postjudice. It is not a question of resorting to prejudices to articulate views on radical Islam, but it is about drawing rational conclusions from postjudices. If we wish to preserve what is good about our societies, then we should all be counter-jihadists.
Islam is fundamentally different from Christianity, for it works on the logic of totality; it is an authoritarian religion in the sense that it dictates right down to the finer details how one should live one’s life. Given that Swedish cultural values are diametrically opposed to those held by the majority of the migrants, and given the disdain that radical Muslims have for the secular Western life (though that does not stop them coming to the West, which in itself is proof that they have no intention of integrating), it is surely in everybody’s interest for the radically minded to stay in the parts of the world where Islam is the dominant religion, i.e. principally North Africa, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Central Asia and other parts of Asia such as Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This was presumably the thinking behind some of Trump’s electoral announcements, and indeed his actions after his election.
If one deems such a critique to be Islamophobic, then one is effectively self-imposing the values of shari’ah law which is what communities in the West are actively doing. Shari’ah law does not tolerate any criticism of Islam. This might be blasphemy, and the critic might be subject to a fatwa. Our own Western societies do not tolerate criticism of Islam either, which is why after an Islamist terror attack, world leaders rush to tell us how ‘peaceful’ this religion is. Their clownish powerlessness has become frankly embarrassing, and their words have the ring of insults. We must come to terms with the lie of liberal modernity. It is surely time to consider what kind of society defines its own citizens as oppressors when the truth is quite the opposite.
The logical corollary of the policies being pursued is that the domination of the ethnic Swede has to end, and that the future society is for the marginalised and victimised. It is no wonder that so many are rushing to claim victimhood. Victimhood confers identity, but it also fosters moral dependence and leads to the creation of a society divided along lines of moral conflict as people compete for status of victims. This is bordering on a form of totalitarian thinking, as any opposition is considered intolerant, uncompassionate, even ‘extreme’, and thus illegitimate. They are employing doublespeak, as ‘tolerance’ according to the Left means accepting everything I tell you about racism, bigotry etc., and disrespecting everything else. This is an attempt at creating a polarising hegemonic mindset based on soft narratives that evoke sentimentality and false values. This well-intentioned totalitarianism is no less dangerous than the violence of communist doublespeak, but is arguably more effective at deceiving the masses because it is couched in cuddly terms.
The difference between this ideological censorship and that of the fascist totalitarian system is that the enemy is the ‘in-group’ (the ethnic Swedes in the case of Sweden) and not the ‘out-group’. This is therefore a perverse, nihilistic ideology based on liberal censoriousness. It is nihilistic because it is based on denial. Liberal censoriousness has meant that we have lost the freedom to discuss things, unless it concerns the liberal triumvirate of ‘pieties’, the shibboleths of virtue: tolerance, equality and diversity, which nowadays seem far more prominent than the theological virtues of love, faith, hope and charity. One is expected to respect these new pieties absolutely.
These three terms operate as a priori categories of understanding, and would typically make up what Nietzsche called the ‘slave morality’: the response of the weak to their domination by the self-affirming strong. But, this time it is the strong (in an economic sense) that are adhering to the values of the ‘slave morality’. It is the ‘strong’ that embody the impoverished loss of spirit. Guilt and self-loathing is not being instilled in the ‘strong’ by the priesthood, as Nietzsche would presuppose, but by the political elite and the media in a secular society like Sweden. The hegemony of these values represents a threat to the West because they promote mediocrity and gloss over individual achievement.
As we have seen, the defenders of liberty are styled as fascists while the fanatics are portrayed as victims, as in the Swedish response to Charlie Hebdo. Those who revolt against barbarism are themselves accused of barbarism. Sweden is setting itself up for a form of social internal combustion. A form of internal combustion that was entirely unnecessary and avoidable.
It is known that radicalisation is happening in the mosques, the faith schools and the prisons — places which are completely alien to most of us, and yet the legislation introduced to address it (the Prevent Duty under The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 legislation in Britain, for instance) is focusing on the universities. It is easy to be tolerant of something that does not infringe on you and that you cannot see. The problem of radicalisation is brewing away, but we are totally unaware of it until it is too late. In preventing radicalisation, the mosques seem like an obvious place to start, but the Government has its hands tied because the mosques are not public institutions. Instead, it is public institutions like our universities that are monitored and subject to further freedom infringements every time there is a terrorist incident.
By striving to be a leader in humanitarian issues, Sweden has created a troubled, parallel society of plural monoculturalism and internalised divisions. Its political leaders are so infested with anti-Western ideology, they have become morally blind. There are Muslim communities in Sweden where women are little more than serfs in sprawling clans that control their movements, tell them who to marry, and whose actions are governed by shari’ah law. This is the reality of the ‘multicultural dream’ in some Muslim communities in Sweden and elsewhere in Western Europe: rape, honour killings, jihadism and a medieval system of law. As shown in a CNN documentary (February, 2013), there are now shari’ah patrols modelled on Saudi Arabia’s muttawa in parts of East London where young British women are told to cover up and wear the hijab, homosexuals are harassed and passers-by are stopped and told ‘it is a Muslim area’ and therefore alcohol is banned.94 The same happens in Oslo, Copenhagen and Brussels where Muslims are now the largest religious group; and in parts of Spain (Lleida), shari’ah patrols have tried to ban pet dogs, even poisoning some of them.
The dynamics of group difference will always exist. One society comprising largely illiberal Muslims who divide the world up into believers and non-believers, and another, a ‘liberal’, secular society that has lost its faith and put its trust in a utopian, post-Christian multiculturalist paradise. The former will not tolerate the latter, and thus, assuming the status quo remains, European liberalism might perhaps be usurped in countries like Sweden by a European Islamic ideology, just as in Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (2015). The liberals who defined themselves in terms of tolerance (but are not really tolerant as the mere suggestion that immigration should have some limits will be met with the most intolerant of respon
ses) risk becoming in the most extreme outcome yes-men to a highly intolerant society based on shari’ah law. The secular ideology and its followers with their intemperate dislike of opposition seem thus to be headed down a rather self-destructive path.
As with certain other European countries with large Muslim populations, Sweden has become an increasingly balkanised country. The Swedes who vote for the most pro-immigration parties live in areas where there are no refugees, and thus sometimes struggle to grasp the ‘invisible’ problem that segregated communities create. Many live in Södermalm, one of the most expensive areas of Stockholm where the cool hipsters like the idea of helping ‘refugees’, perhaps because they never see them. They assume that the social problems have just been whipped up by right-wing ideologues, or at least that is what they have been conditioned to think.
Swedes are increasingly living in a climate of fear and repression, but also in one of sheltered institutional ignorance. If the rapes are mentioned at all, they are committed by Swedes. It is not permitted to give the ethnicity of the rapist. This is doubly pernicious: if, say, the assailant is from North Africa or the Middle East, his identity is protected, and the ethnic Swede is seen as the criminal. Such a policy can only be insulting to its own people, and chimes with the spirit of self-loathing and cultural nihilism propagated by the liberal politicians. There are countless examples of such incidents. Two years ago, an ethnic Swedish woman was gang-raped on a ferry between Stockholm and Turku in Finland. The rapists were called Swedes, but were in fact six Eritreans and one Iraqi.95 In a perverse turn of events, the rapist is sometimes even seen to be the victim, not the girl that has been raped. We have forgotten that signs of weakness show the opponent that one is vulnerable, and that one’s system can be manipulated. Some judges in Sweden seem to be rather deluded, often sentencing Somali rapists (or ‘newly arrived Swedes’ to use the multiculuralist’s language) to fifty hours or so in a detention centre and allowing them to stay in the country.
The Ideology of Failure Page 17
