Sweden’s Cultural Revolution
unherd.com
unherd.com
I've seen enough politics in countries where I speak the language and understand some of the situation - articles like this are meaningless. As are articles praising or damning any aspect of Sweden. The bandwidth available for reporting is too limited to get a good idea of what is going on.
In the real world, everything is always complicated.
Also the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcom_Kyeyune
> While sometimes being labeled by media as a conservative due to his participation in Oikos, Kyeyune primarily describes himself as a marxist
He sounds like one of those people like Spiked/Living Marxism; their primary interest is in being controversial. Using "horseshoe theory" for clickbait.
He wrote another interesting article - “On ‘Strasserism’ and the Decay of the Left”:
https://www.thebellows.org/on-strasserism-and-the-decay-of-t...
I think the issue is that (much like with the National Front in the UK), Sweden previously had an issue with white supremacists (VAM for example), and that became the face of anti-immigrant sentiment. This then meant that legitimate concerns were forced to mix with that (and the extreme groups dominated the political opposition to mass immigration).
This has also meant that opposition to immigrants personally (e.g. for their religion, culture, race, or even just not speaking or being Swedish) has been mixed in with the strategic opposition (e.g. it makes no sense to accept another 5+ million immigrants when there are already 7-10 year long public housing queues, and rents and house prices are ballooning).
The latter is the biggest issue IMO, it's meant that no political party (aside from SD) dare really touch the issue. And instead they start supporting stupid things like tightening the bureaucracy on legal immigration (greatly affecting Swedes with foreign partners and foreign doctoral students). This is exactly what happened in the UK too (look up the "hostile environment" for legal immigration).
The other Scandinavian countries had a different experience, not surprisingly since they are very different in culture and policy.
All in all what the author describes is just unapologetical selfishness vs intentional virtue signalling. Most people are able to internalise the facts that
a) taking in refugees will cause problems and those problems will need to be dealt with
And
b) taking in refugees will save lives and it's important to do so as much as possible
But of course some people just want to be as radically left or right as possible and yell about it. The worst of us do not define the rest of us, but it seems to be simply irresistible to write article after article about the worst of us.
I've engaged in several conversations where someone starts out with statistics of crime and so on but wildly misrepresent those statistics, and when called out on and engaged in a discussion about the actual numbers in the studies they cite, the conversation has more than once ended on "So you want to let any trash into our school :) Allright if you ever have kids you'll understand :)))))" or something like that.
On the other side it tends to end with "If you talk about it you give a voice to racists so better to just not talk about it publicly?"
The reality either way is that if immigration is a problem, then we have a problem to solve. It's not going away, with how the world is looking right now, likely it will get worse. The impression I've been given growing up about why Scandinavia has succeeded has been that when there have been issues we dig our heels in and deal with them, find a way through. When the work put in goes down and the talking done goes up, nothing gets dealt with and the kind of people who get their power and following from "hate clicks" or "hate votes" flourish. The Internet is an unfortunate issue here as well- the media cycle is too fast to give justice to any sort of societal effort- before a decision can even be made about anything in politics there will be endless articles of how every conceivable outcome of the decision has already been failing before it has happened.
Covid is a good example, we have somehow already failed completely to contain it and succeded completely where others failed depending on who you ask and the verdicts started coming out just weeks into the pandemic from every corner of the world.
Honestly the theory I've been slowly growing over the last few years is that this is how society finally dies- media and everyone engaging in social media profiting increasingly on reporting failure until things simply cannot be allowed to succeed any more and our society just starts eating itself alive.
This goes with Brexit - the consequences are now felt in form of problems with food supply and labor
or the pandemic - vaccination works as has it done in the past
or magatards - a hollow phrase only supporting Trump just because, despite the fact that he was incompetent
What I didn't get from the article is if immigration increased the crime rate significantly because in Germany it did not. And mixing kids in school, that didn't have a real impact in my area at least, as the immigrants were widely spread and the kids I know from Syria in the school were pretty normal kids.