In neighbouring Norway, politicians and academics (Professor Unni Wikan, Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, 2001 for example) have berated Norwegian girls raped by Muslims for being intolerant, implying that had Norwegian women dressed as Muslims, these assaults would never have happened. At this point, one might recall that in countries that follow the dictates of shari’ah law, men can commit rape with impunity because the victim’s testimony is inadmissible. If this kind of insulting thinking propagated by Norwegian academics becomes institutionalised — and there is a real risk of that — then one should expect the indigenous culture to continue to be undermined and marginalised, perhaps to the point of irrelevance. The social norms of the newcomers will take precedence, and perhaps parts of Western Europe will resemble the medieval governance structures of shari’ah. We live at a time in which Christ can be depicted in all kinds of defamatory poses, such as when the artist Andres Serrano put a crucifix in a jar of his own urine.96 However, laughing at Islam merits the fatwa. Islamic accommodationism would appear to be the norm in large parts of Western Europe.
Sweden decided that the best way to deal with returning jihadists who have raped and pillaged in Syria is to ensure that they are well integrated into a community by giving them a job, free housing and access to benefits. In addition, they promised to cancel their debts. These killers in the name of religion should be looked after, as they will no doubt be traumatised. Denmark has also decided rehabilitation is the best response.
Islamic accommodationism is writ particularly large in cities like Malmö, in southern Sweden, close to Denmark. This city is set to become the first Muslim city in Scandinavia, and will be the site of a new mega-mosque funded by Saudi Wahabi money, the ultra-conservative branch of Sunni Islam that wishes to spread shari’ah law across the world. The spread of shari’ah law is the macro-strategic goal of the Islamist movement, funded by Saudi Arabia. This is a fundamental part of the Islamist ideology; it compels its subjects to spread the practice of shari’ah. From the Saudi perspective (a Muslim country which has not accepted a single refugee), the ‘refugee crisis’ is effectively hijrah, ‘the moving into a place to take it for Islam’. The first hijrah was by Muhammed in 622 who took his followers from Mecca to Medina. Da’wah follows the hijrah. Da’wah refers to the process where every aspect of society is run in accordance with shari’ah law, and it runs in tandem with jihad. And, it is important to understand that da’wah is a part of Islamic creed. Da’wah propagates extreme isolation from Western society, and encourages the creation of parallel Muslim communities run in accordance with shari’ah law which can be used to undermine their adjacent Western communities. The concern is that this is happening now in parts of Western Europe.
The Grand Mosque of Copenhagen opened in 2014. It was funded by Ahlul Bayt Foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The organisation has called for the death of Israel, and is also vociferously opposed to the integration of Muslim immigrants into their host societies. Its centres in Asia and Africa have been used to radicalise local Muslim communities. The prayer room is so large it can host over 3,000 worshippers at a time. In Oxford, the new Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies is much more than any other academic department. It occupies a 3.25 acre site in the centre of Oxford, and includes a mosque with a striking dome and minaret. It took over eleven years to build, and cost more than £75 million. It was funded in part by the late King Fahd of Saudia Arabia.
It is this extreme naïvety that has characterised our universities and immigration policy for years, and particularly so in Sweden. Surely, any reasonable, half intelligent politician or university administrator could see what is really happening, as it is obvious to anybody who has not been subjected to the propaganda. It is clear for instance that the Swedish Muslim Housing Minister had an agenda when he said in October 2014 that the way to tackle ISIS recruitment was for European Governments to give money to the mosques.
Contrary to what the media with its multiculturalist agenda and the Establishment politicians wish us to believe, the problems in Sweden have little to do with ‘racism’. It is about the failure of juxtaposing two cultures with utterly alien value systems in a time of turmoil and Islamist terrorism. In response, all the multiculturalist liberals seem capable of is moaning about the ‘clash of civilisations rhetoric’. The Left has been conducting an experiment and has used the coercive power of the State to achieve its objectives, but things have gone very badly wrong in the Swedish social laboratory. The changes that have taken place in Swedish society are probably irreversible and will destroy any notion of the trygghet that Swedes seek. But worse than this is the fact that Sweden has created a repressive society where none of these important issues can be openly discussed.
If speech attacking a group is prohibited, that group has absolute power. A free society is contingent on the freedom of speech, and a tolerant society does not abandon the freedom to argue. The real problem is that we cannot talk about the problem. If one cannot tell the truth, one does not have one’s freedom.
VI. Swedish Air Waves
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
— Hannah Arendt
The afternoon radio play has a Soviet feel to it with talk of the Folkehemmet (‘the people’s home’), a name given to the extremely generous, paternalist Swedish welfare state. The play is a twelve-part memoir with subtle undertones of communitarian associations and the conflicting imperatives of authoritarian liberalism: surveillance is the condition of trust, the State with its executive managerialism is the predominant category of political economy. The words are spoken slowly, articulated with great clarity and precision.
In Sweden, there is the sense that radio is creating an explicit ‘national imaginary’ (Hadlow 2004; Mrázak 2002; Bolton 1999) based on a prescribed repertoire of speech codes and cultural-political grammar. It aims to give ‘stories of other worlds’ (Abu-Lughod 1995: 191), carefully selected worlds where minorities are always discriminated against in some way or another. This is an ideological process concerned with social relations of power, and in the case of Sweden the State is portrayed as coming to the rescue of victims of these power relations. There is almost a fetishisation of minorities, or anybody who in some way may have been the victim of one form of social injustice or another. A sort of caritas FM; this characteristic maximises the role of radio as the locus of anti-racist linguistic hegemony.
There is no ideological balance of power on the nation’s airwaves. Sweden is in fact what one might call the Gramscian end-game. Gramsci (1971) spoke of how the State would fall into the hands of the Leftists once it captured the commanding organs of culture and media. All that happened long ago in Sweden. Sweden does not have the ‘talk radio’ culture that America has. Nothing like it. The only outlet for conservative thinkers is the policed Internet. There is the Gramscian discourse, and there is the spiral of silence and self-censorship, previously discussed in the ‘The Groupthink Trap’ essay.
The Swedes are a microcosm for their quasi-totalitarian Government and its all embracing system of prescriptive thinking. If one criticises the system, one criticises the Swede. The two have become synonymous, coterminous. The individual struggles to differentiate himself from the governing system; the individual and the collective act as one. A quasi-totalitarian State such as this defies Kant’s (1993: 30) moral philosophy, which states that moral beings can think for themselves and act on the basis of their independent judgements. And in a society where the historic religion is gradually becoming irrelevant, the State has usurped many of the previous functions of the Church. In Sweden at least, it is there to care for one from the cradle to the grave; it tells one what to think, when to feel guilty, how to express oneself etc., and perhaps most importantly it tells one that there are subjects that can only be discussed if one pursues a certain coded, accommodationist stance.
The radio gives voice and texture to news
events, and is of course a public body with an instilled authority. McLuhan (1968: 340-45) speaks of radio as ‘the cradle of the collective environment of voices’. With its acoustic authority, radio can have a monopolistic effect in certain communities, and can be indicative of linguistic intimacy, consciousness and acoustic presence. The ‘intimacy’ of Swedish radio is torn apart by its explicit attempt to appeal synchronically to multi-norms, the cultural and linguistic apartheid that modern Sweden has become.
When it comes to the Swedish radio, there are no normative frames for speech communities. On any single day, one can be acoustically teleported to a Somali, Sámi or Arabic speaking community in contemporary Sweden. All these communities make up apparently the acoustic national imaginary, but of course they do not. Nobody is fluent in all of these minority languages. Instead, it divides the Swedish radio sphere, the acoustic Lebensraum into linguistic islands, a discography of strange voices, reinforcing the ethnic separateness that has come to characterise Sweden. The inclusiveness of radio sociality has been undermined by multiculturalist objectives.
The radio crackles into life. It is ‘Summer on P1’, a very popular Swedish radio programme, P1 being roughly equivalent to Radio 4 in the UK. In the summer months, the programme is broadcast every day. A lady with a soft voice and dulcet tones reads out the programme highlights for the forthcoming week. In one week in the summer of 2015, there were three documentaries on P1 with these titles: ‘Does God hate women?’; ‘Does God hate homosexuals?’; ‘What is Sweden’s homosexual geography?’ In the final programme, the objective is to understand why there are fewer homosexuals living in the countryside (‘Is it because farmers are homophobic…?’ is the subtitle). Permutations of these topics crop up time and time again. Three years later it was no different with programmes on sexual domination. There is an obsession with gay rights and feminism on Swedish radio: topics which should have marginal value at best at a time of economic crisis, war and burgeoning extremist movements.
Beyond the series on whether God is homophobic, in the summer of 2015 we were told there will be a series of discussion programmes on menstruation, transsexuality, unrestricted immigration and masturbation. What is more, we can look forward to programmes on discrimination against transsexuals with a focus on how difficult it is to live as a transsexual in Sweden. Despite being considered perhaps the most ‘liberal’ country in the world, ethnic Swedes are apparently transphobic.
Liberal groupthink and a sense of consensus are created on these radio programmes by choosing people that only represent radical views, quite unashamedly so. Here is a selection of guests in the month of July 2015: Hans Mosesson, who worked with the leftist theatre and musical group, Nationalteatern, Kristina Sandberg, the liberal author, Auschwitz survivor Hédi Fried and Liza Marklund, the multi-millionaire author who will make a special plea for immigration to be completely unrestricted. She would like to see the population of Sweden rise to 180 million (from 9.8 million today). A week later, a Swedish cartoonist is on the radio, discussing her orgasms. No objective listener could say that this is anything but far left-wing propaganda mixed up with idiotic outpourings blurted out by people with a twisted worldview. The topics chosen are peripheral, trivial, often perverse, and the conversations are one-sided and lack substance.
Does the Swedish media really represent the interests of so many? State media journalists present the image through a demoralising discourse that attacks spiritual values, implying that if one is a true intellectual, one must be an atheist, ready to scorn any higher authority and of course engage with this matrix of preoccupations about minorities. The epistemological assumption is that intellectuals have apparently a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge. Religious belief cannot be computed in any scientific fashion, and therefore cannot act as a catalyst to the moral high ground. The Swedish media portrays those who have faith and go to Church as akin to people believing in fairies, lacking in intellectual heft. The media couples intellectual activity with the boorish, profane pursuit of atheism. Religion (unless it is Islam, it would seem) should be trivialised. Christianity might even be considered fundamentalist since it appeals to authorities that are not recognised by the anti-traditionalist media (but once again Islam is an exception). Kalb (2008: 108) speaks of the ‘world’s turn away from transcendent realities and towards this-worldly constructivism’. That seems to be explicitly the case in Sweden.
If one is a Church-goer, one is not a ‘thinking type’ and perhaps somehow ‘deviant’, threatening the secular consensus model that imprisons Swedes intellectually. Swedish journalists and left-wing politicians work in concert to create this image. It is almost unheard of for a Swedish journalist to criticise anything that a politician from the secularist Miljöpartiet says, even if the party has shown that it has been infiltrated by Islamists. They share the utopian vision of a world free of borders, and populations enlightened by the abolition of cultural and national identities. They aspire to a Kindergarten view of the world.
Listeners to Swedish public radio are spoon-fed radical feminism and mass immigration rhetoric as this appears to be the rather flimsy intellectual foundation of the Swedish political elite. The radio wishes to continually present Sweden as structurally racist. In doing so, it is almost as if they see it as their job to shield Swedes from the truth of what is happening in their country. It is noticeable that they can only introduce the information in a way that intellectualises it. The information provided on national radio programmes is packaged in often very conceptual ways, sometimes quite abstract, but seldom factual. State media journalists gloss over the facts, and quickly move on to an intellectual discussion.
The journalists know that the average Swede is kind, generous and slightly naïve, and they wish to do everything to perpetuate this naïvety, so that they can continue to promote the multiculturalist agenda by stealth. They also understand that Swedes overwhelmingly comply. Few Swedes would for instance dare criticise immigration policy on the radio, and if there is any risk of doing so, one would have little chance of being invited to participate. Programming for Swedish radio follows an unequivocal liberal-left agenda.
Sweden needs desperately an alternative to State radio; free, private channels where people can call in and speak freely about all the big topics. The silence on the most important topics has meant that alternative media has become increasingly popular. But, one wonders if this will be possible for much longer. Will the next step be for the Government to close down websites that are critical of Sweden’s immigration policy? Many fear this is in fact imminent which is why so many (almost all of them) are no longer hosted on .se web addresses. They know they are being monitored by the Big Brother Society.
The content of Swedish State radio programmes and its agenda journalism shows just how ideological the media is, how bound up with the utopian vision they are. This notion of attempting to create a post-racial, post-gender universe is the fanatical iconoclasm of late modernity. Race and gender are part of who we are. Racism is always framed in terms of intolerance, but the media’s approach to the subject wishes to prohibit certain speech acts and modes of thinking. It aims to tackle what it perceives as intolerance by imposing its own intolerant, totalitarian system. One cannot beat the State, and in Sweden the media is the State.
A few more turns of the chrome dialing knob, and the radio springs to life with Kurdish folk songs. For five hours every day, Swedish Public Radio (P2) broadcasts live on air in Sweden in the following languages: Finnish, Meänkieli, Sámi, Romani, Albanian, Arabic, Assyrian/Aramaic, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, English, Farsi, Kurdish, and Somali. The equivalent in the UK would be to turn on Radio 3 and hear for a couple of hours every day nothing but Polish and Lithuanian. The Swedish acoustic universe is partitioned in a rather essentialist manner by the media into cultural reservoirs of semiotic proportional distribution. This is the State philosophy of egalitarianism, attempting to represent the nation as a linguistic pluralist whole with its internal diversity a
nd is tantamount to what Vidali-Spitulnik (2012: 250-67) calls in a Zambian context ‘culturalisation of ethnicity’. Sweden has institutionalised anti-fascism and this has led to a curious obsession with minorities. Hearing such a diversity of languages on private radio channels is something that one could only applaud, but of course this ethnolinguistic democracy in the name of the social imperative of ‘inclusion’ just results in practice in Swedes turning the radio off. When multilingualism is low, such a cultural codification of diversity cannot achieve its objectives. Swedish radio reproduces unthinkingly the notion that it is a language that emblematises people, and thus hypocritically conforms to the essentialism that they are meant to be distancing themselves from.
There is a tendency to select radio plays that invite a sense of self-loathing, and nurturing of some kind of collective guilt: productions for instance about the Swedish Rasbiologiinstitutt (an Institute established in the 1920s and supported by all the political parties with an objective of measuring the racial make-up of the Swedes), Nazi concentration camps to remind listeners of the horrors of racism and to speculate on whether Swedes were somehow complicit. It is not unknown for Swedish radio programmes to exaggerate wildly the scope of the Swedish slave trade on Guadeloupe before it was handed over to the French at the end of the Napoleonic wars. There is a desire to constantly judge past actions by our own repudiative values.
The Ideology of Failure Page 18
