The Ideology of Failure

by Stephen Pax Leonard

  Radio dramas feature invariably an immigrant who is always cast as the ‘victim’, bullied at school, denied opportunities etc. One programme recently centred on an Iraqi refugee to Sweden called Fatima. She was encouraged to think about whether she had had any unpleasant experiences as a child that she had never overcome. She spoke of how one day her father made her have her haircut like a boy. Swedish radio was quick to describe this as an ‘assault’, and devoted a whole programme to what they perceived to be a human rights issue. It is a familiar theme. If the theme is not the hard-done-by ‘refugee’, the focus is on the Swedes themselves. The intention is often to play on the alleged Swedish complicity in the atrocities committed in the earlier part of the twentieth century during the Second World War, and to portray the ethnic Swede as somehow the arrogant, racist colonial master. The implication being always that we must make amends, even if the fabricated image is of course far from the truth.

  Artists, playwrights and authors with foreign background are often interviewed on P1 and asked to talk about the ‘racism’ they experienced. The assumption is that Sweden must be racist, and that the immigrant must somehow feel like a victim. Plays are chosen for their anti-racist agenda, and the Swede is presented as the guilty party. The implication is that to cleanse this image, Sweden must play the humanitarian superpower, be the conscience of the world (even if it is per capita the world’s third largest arms exporter).97 It is a peculiar variety of nihilistic propaganda which leaves one struggling to come up with historical precedents. It is not possible to eliminate all inequalities among human beings. The Swedish media is failing its own people by focusing somewhat exclusively on such overly politicised themes.

  In July 2015, there was a programme on P1 on child abuse. As always, it is obvious from the reporting that it is the ‘ethnic Swede’ that is guilty. And yet when the reports are followed up with individuals, often related to the assailant, it is evident in fact that the offender is not a Swede, as he invariably does not speak Swedish. It is very disconcerting to see programmes aimed at Swedish men in this manner, especially as so many of these effete, androgynous men do not seem capable of speaking up for themselves. National radio is clearly being run by a group of radical, left-wing feminists. Man-hating is a theme in these Swedish radio plays. There is a temptation to portray men as misanthropic pre-rapists, but only if they are white ethnic Swedes. One is left wondering whether these editors really understand the purpose of journalism, or whether they are just blindly following a culturally nihilistic Government agenda. Along with the judiciary, they just seem to want to make a career out of obsessing over ‘equality’ and other such shallow thinking best reserved for demure housewives.

  It is State feminism and anti-racism devoid of common sense.98 Men are often portrayed as potential enemies. Women are the ‘victims’ and thus they are by definition right, as he or she who has achieved victim status is never in the wrong. In a fraudulent manner, Swedish politicians explain away the sudden increase in rape by claiming that men are having trouble dealing with gender equality or the ‘feminist revolution’. But, femininity is also being demonised, in Sweden at least. If women do not describe themselves as ‘feminists’, then they are not considered real women. If men do not describe themselves as feminists, they are considered sexist. Both men and women are deviant if they do not behave within the constraints of the State ideological norm. There is no established alternative voice in Swedish media. There is no space for the non-feminist, and the anti-feminist might be guilty of hate-speech. By only giving voice to the feminist, the media wants us to believe that the non-feminist simply does not exist, and so selection of radio themes serves the same objectives as political correctness.

  There is a very different kind of journalism in Sweden as compared to the UK. Swedes do not seem particularly interested in making headlines. If rapes in the UK had increased astronomically, newspapers would report it and it would be all over the front pages. That is because the print media in the UK at least works as a ‘checks and balances’ mechanism. Journalists in the UK would crave this kind of factual information because it could mean they could expose something or somebody. This element of shock exposure seems to me to be very important to journalism in the UK, but is curiously absent in Sweden. One can only assume it is because Swedish editors would not accept these articles because they have been told such sensitive topics are unacceptable. Journalists who are keen to advance their careers know that they have to tow the line. This goes against, no doubt, many of the perceptions that people have of Sweden and its media, but it is true. Like so many other aspects of Swedish society, the media’s principal focus is ‘control’.

  The irony is that Sweden was in 1766 the first country in the world to abolish censorship and guarantee the freedom of the Press. Sweden has gone from being a freedom advocate to a subtle, pseudo-totalitarian state; this sounds like an oxymoron, but in this case it would appear not to be.99 It is important to understand that there is no freedom of the press in Sweden; unlike in neighbouring Finland, the newspapers have been partially subsidised by the Government since 1971.100 According to the former Swedish Minister for Culture and Sports, Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth, newspapers that criticise immigration policy or multiculturalism will be threatened with subsidy removal.101 For the more indoctrinated journalists, there is little risk that the subsidy will be in fact removed for many of them perceive criticism of immigration policy to be a form of ‘hate-speech’. And thus, we have a situation where the Government reports the ‘facts’, and the newspapers reproduce it. When one reads newspapers in Sweden, one is not reading the news, but State propaganda. In 2013, the Government made it possible for police to access IP addresses in order to identify when ‘online hate-crimes’ occurred, and granted the Swedish Media Council SEK 1 million for initiatives to combat online xenophobia, sexism and similar forms of intolerance.102

  In such a context where editors of Swedish newspapers are not only accountable for all content published on the newspaper’s website, but also for all the archived material put online by their predecessors, it is not surprising that voices of dissent are few and far between.103 As with the multi-party political system, the Swedish media looks extremely democratic and diverse with its seventy-eight daily newspapers (2007 statistics), but they are subsidised to say more or less the same thing.104 It is a ‘smoke and mirrors’ democracy with allusions to free speech. It says quite a lot about a country when the leading newspaper with the widest circulation (Aftonbladet) is controlled by the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, and when politicians debate whether private individuals should be able to own satellite dishes.105 The news reporting on television is so biased that high-profile news presenters have resigned. The key positions in the media are filled by the Social Democratic party. It is extraordinary to think this can happen in a Western democracy which is billed as one of the most ‘free and open’ states in the world.

  It is a similar story with Swedish radio. There was no commercial radio at all until 1993, and then it was only reluctantly allowed after many years of debate.106 Today, 35 per cent of the content is from commercial radio, but news items are produced centrally. Thus, there are no originally produced news items, and few alternatives to the feminist, multiculturalist State propaganda. When it comes to the media in Sweden, change is cosmetic (and not real). As mentioned previously, where Swedish media is concerned, there is a disturbing silence regarding the big topics. If one constantly cuts out the voice of opposition, one risks creating a very volatile and explosive situation. We are moving towards a state of psychological warfare, and in Sweden this is happening at a time when society is in great flux.

  It is not really totalitarianism, not of the Soviet type with the secret police and samizdat publishing. There are few dissidents amongst the intelligentsia. There are of course no gulags; nobody is being put up against the wall and being shot. One language and one norm are needed for that kind of totalitarianism. Instead, it is more akin to a kind of rational
totalitarianism. Whatever one chooses to call it, all ideologies have to some degree totalitarian elements or at least mechanisms for enforcing their legitimacy. The template that successive Swedish Social Democrat Governments have been trying to create is one of a social, humanistic utopia. Governments in centralised Sweden have had the power to implement policies and operationalise control mechanisms over the Swedes. Other Governments could only have dreamt of having this kind of power and control where for decades the same party could continue to implement its Folkehemmet policies.

  It might be an understatement to say that totalitarianism has an intolerance for autonomy and freedom. Totalitarianism is a state of mind that at its extreme attempts to destroy private opinion and transcend the human condition. The current status quo in parts of the West is that the private opinion, if it does not adhere to the liberal, multiculturalist outlook, has been silenced (but not destroyed). If people think they want to say something which might not adhere to the supposed liberal consensus or something that is considered politically incorrect, they look around before saying it. The PC police are in your heads.

  In an environment of an ideologised public consciousness, nobody wants to be caught apparently swearing allegiance to a heretical philosophy. A significant freedom is being erased. The last time we lived in this kind of context must have been in a totalitarian society. This time around, the dissidents are not marginalised intellectuals (as in the Soviet Union), but those who paradoxically enough speak up for the cultural heritage and traditions of the country, be it Sweden or Britain. They are in a sense, curiously enough, what one might call anti-dissidents as they are dissenting against the State-supported undermining of their own indigenous culture. Their opposition is against an anti-culture; it is perhaps the national Governments and the EU that are the dissidents as they are embracing a muddled ideology of multiculturalism which is misrepresented as egalitarian. Ideological struggles were pushed ‘underground’ in the Soviet Union, but in multiculturalist Europe, they appear on the Internet, the modern platform for political dissent where opponents to the mass liberal consciousness are monitored in microscopic detail by the State, using the latest search tools.

  Totalitarianism is a form of State-sanctioned authoritarianism that historically speaking, Nazism aside, has gone hand-in-hand with Leftist thinking. A totalitarian regime is informed first and foremost by an ideology, and this ideology penetrates all aspects of social life, curtailing individual freedom and stifling creativity. Totalitarianism ‘liquidates its internal enemies’ (Revel, 1985: 4). The objective is for the Government to control the thoughts and actions of its citizens. Totalitarianism is now reasserting itself in new forms: surveillance is total and privacy is being decimated. The little bit of privacy left is even in some cases being monetised. Much of this extraordinarily banal content now appears as reality TV. Every human act is now fodder for social media in the endless public display of the Self. The GPS on our phones track our whereabouts, and all digital communication is passed through centralised servers and kept in storage banks (alongside one’s DNA if one has committed a crime).

  Some companies in America are now using facial recognition software and biometric technologies which will be able to detect and identify anybody. Indeed, such software showed that some of the ‘child refugees’ from Syria were in fact nearly forty years old. Whole cities in America, such as Baltimore, are being spied on by the police day and night. The police have adopted a surveillance system used in Iraq, whereby they fly Cessna aeroplanes over cities with wide-angle 200 megapixel cameras capturing an area of thirty square miles that continuously transmit real-time images to analysts on the ground. Everything is recorded, every movement, and all images can be played back and fast-forwarded. These surveillance aeroplanes were flying for over six months before people realised what was going on. No public disclosure of the programme had ever been made.107

  Mass surveillance is emerging in a context of the polarising, totalitarian language of Leftist institutions. Such language is increasingly unchallenged, and has filtered through most of the strata of our society. As in any totalitarian regime, language in the West is manipulated and employed as a form of Orwellian doublespeak where words used as slogans have come to mean the opposite of their defined meaning. There has been rather thorough semantic recoding. The meaning of words has become sufficiently destabilised, and the truth is becoming blurred. Thus, ‘tolerance’ means privilege status for the ideologically protected.

  ‘Democracy’ is considered something beyond reproach, but when used as a slogan by the multiculturalist it seldom refers to the democratic process. Instead, it is more likely to refer to the ‘democratic rights’ of minorities which Drummond (2014: 178) describes as ‘sacred’ in a multicultural society. Following the failure of two previous totalitarian regimes, people have been led to believe that ‘democracy’ is unquestionably the best model of government in every sense. To even question the supposed infallibility of democracy as a model is semi-scandalous. And so using the word deceptively to refer to the ‘rights’ of the ‘persecuted’, one creates a statement whose falsification would be socially quite unacceptable.

  The idea that democracy is always the best form of government irrespective of the country’s political history has become a truism, even if only half the population vote, and the winner in the American version is often determined by which candidate has the most money to spend. It is as if 51 per cent of the electorate vote for one party, then that party is able to do what it likes and we should support it nonetheless in the name of ‘democracy’. Individuals should have certain inalienable rights akin to the American Bill of Rights that are off-limits for an incoming government. Many countries such as Sweden and Germany where individual freedoms are being undermined by the State would benefit greatly from such legislation.

  Unlike in many parliamentary elections, democracy becomes the champion in national referendums, because here voters know that their vote can actually make a difference. Switzerland is a model for democracy, not Sweden. And of course, the Brexit referendum with a 72 per cent turnout was democracy working at its very best. People went out to vote because they knew the result could actually lead to change, unlike with a General Election. Transforming the demographic and ethnic make-up of a nation and pursuing utopian, federalist fantasies without public or parliamentary debate is democracy at its worst.

  The totalitarian multiculturalists, the pioneers of cultural entropy and repudiation, believe they are right by definition. This form of totalitarianism is being led by the antagonistic post-modern Left (more so than what one may call the traditional Left), and by, in particular, academics, bureaucrats and journalists, some of whom refuse to accept the inherent values of the West: the very people whose role in society is surely to promote and ensure an open and fair intellectual discussion. Herein lies a paradox: the enemies of freedom are disguised as the guardians of tolerance and openness. And the so-called victims are often ‘quite proud of their intolerant traditions’ (Drummond, 2014: 178).

  Unlike Russia, Sweden is not an authoritarian State. There is no monopoly on political power, and its leader is by no stretch of the imagination a demagogue. Instead of a charismatic leader, Sweden has an insipid trade unionist who is inclined to feel sorry for himself. Neither is there any demagogic control of the psychology of the masses for which there is normally required some kind of appeal to a religious basis (Le Bon, 1982: 36). Huntford (1971) describes the situation in Sweden as ‘benign totalitarianism’. He showed how the Swedes sacrificed personal liberty in order to have a ‘benevolent’ modern welfare state. Undoubtedly, this has been the case. These observations ring true in the context of the discussion about home-schooling in Sweden. Home-schooling has been effectively banned (except in very few exceptional cases). Those that want their children to be home-schooled have left the country because the fines are so onerous. With cases like this and others, it seems that Sweden does not want the individual to think for himself, especially not
in an educational context. For a country that loves to talk about human rights, it is ironic that when it comes to freedom, certain fundamental rights appear to be denied to Swedes. People who like to rule over others have understood for a long time that if one can create dependence on the system that one is trying to build, the job of ruling becomes a lot easier. And the Swedes are certainly dependent on their system, many quite happily so as it is so generous.

  Whilst much of what Huntford writes about in his book still stands, the current totalitarianism is of a different kind because it embraces what the State calls multiculturalism (as has been observed, it is not very multi-). Given that we live in an age of Islamist terrorism, one might not wish to call it ‘benign’. Huntford concludes (1971: 285): ‘To judge solely by its mass media, Sweden appears to be run by a tolerant dictatorship. Press, radio and TV show remarkable similarity, as if guided by some Ministry of Propaganda’. And so it is the case that totalitarianism of this kind can exist without tyranny and charismatic leaders. It is an attempt to govern ‘in the name of the truth’. Sweden wishes to imprison its members in regimes of truth. In the twenty-first century, the regime operates in a context of technological and media control where ‘acoustic and audiovisual media have a particular media for exercising political power’ (Zakharine, 2010: 158).

  No totalitarian state of the twentieth century had anything like the kind of power that modern communication technology enables where digital surveillance systems can tap into every conceivable mode of communication and collect endless amounts of mass metadata on every citizen. With such extraordinary capabilities, the Internet could soon become a force of oppressive control in a post-Orwellian world instead of a force for democratisation. It would seem the conditions for a new totalitarianism are already in fact in place. Our lives have been technologised and the five companies that monitor our every movement are all Californian companies that endorse the globalist liberal-left agenda. What is more, there is now one principal source of knowledge: Google, an omnipresent, omniscient (one might say) company embedded in the social justice warrior ideology. This alone should be cause for alarm.