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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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How Peaceful Sweden Became Europe’s Gun-Murder Capital

This link is probably paywalled for most, so some of the salient points:

"Turf wars for control of the drug trade, driven by an influx of guns, personal vendettas and a pool of available youths, many from marginalized migrant communities, have resulted in a gun-homicide rate approximately 2½ times the European average, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.

With 62 people shot dead last year, up from 45 in 2021, Sweden’s overall homicide rate is about one-sixth of the U.S.’s. But in a European context, it is extraordinary. Stockholm’s gun-murder rate was roughly 30 times higher per capita than London’s.

Perpetrators are becoming younger, and are also resorting to increasingly violent tactics such as throwing hand grenades and placing bombs, injuring a growing number of bystanders, including children.

Because most shootings in Sweden take place among individuals from migrant backgrounds, they have fueled a surge of right-wing populism. In the 2022 election, the Sweden Democrats, a party that has roots in Nazism and blames Sweden’s liberal migration policies for the violence, gained more than 20% of the votes to become the country’s second-largest. Today it rejects Nazism and white nationalism on its platform.

The new center-right government has promised to tighten migration policies, double sentences for offenses committed in “gang environments,” widen the use of electronic surveillance and expel more criminals who aren’t Swedish citizens.

“Compared internationally, we have had a much laxer criminal law. And we have now lost control over the situation,” said Daniel Bergström, an adviser to the Swedish minister of justice.

Experts, however, say there is no simple explanation for the violence.

Nikoi Djane, a former gang member turned criminologist, said authorities had failed to help refugees integrate into society, instead segregating them from society in housing estates with few job opportunities or treatment for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The perpetrators have a responsibility, but they are also victims of their circumstances,” Djane said.

Manne Gerell, an associate professor at Malmö University with expertise in organized crime, said the problem was caused by poor integration and exacerbated by years of insufficient response from authorities, police and politicians.

Today, an estimated 75% to 80% of deadly shootings remain unsolved, and the low risk of getting caught has prompted a growing number of youths to kill for bounties issued by gang leaders, said Salihu, the crime expert.

It might also be helpful to look at this article in conjunction with this Free Press article on violence in Sweden: Two Bombings in One Night? That’s Normal Now in Sweden.

At least on its face, this situation has a clear cause (migration from non-Western countries) and a simple solution (stop accepting migrants and remove many of the migrants that are already in Sweden), but to even state these facts gets you labeled a "right-wing populist" (nice of WSJ to omit the customary "far right populist").

I do see where the Left is coming from here. Most migrants aren't committing violence, and it does seem cruel to kick out people who have been living somewhere for years or even decades. But I also think a given community has the right to maintain the integrity of its society and culture. That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.

That's also why I'm more okay with something closer to open borders in the USA: Our culture is already so hollowed out that migrants moving here are probably adding, not subtracting, from whatever "culture" there is in the US.

I knew this was coming. I have read too many “conservative” commentators who decry mass immigration to European countries but celebrate it in America (“because we’re a different sort of country, built on ideas”) to expect anything else. People are perfectly capable of looking at Syrian gang members shooting each other in a Stockholm mall (shouting in Arabic the whole time) and recognizing Those men are not Swedes. They will never be Swedes. Nothing short of a magic spell could turn them into Swedes. And yet when asked to apply the same logic to that same sort of men in America, an impenetrable mental block descends and makes it impossible for even the same commentators to reach the same conclusion.

America is not a special country that exists outside of history. It is not mysteriously immune from the realities of human biology and heredity. “American” is not a magical category that is infinitely capacious and malleable in a way that no other extant ethnicity or nationality is. It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading. Syrians are no more capable of becoming Americans than they are of becoming Swedes.

There are tens of millions of Americans who can directly trace their descent to families who lived in this country 400 years ago. I am one of them! Those people were settlers and invaders who displaced the indigenous population that had previously occupied that land; that is also true of nearly every human population group on earth. The Europeans who showed up to displace the Iroquois and the Cree did not become Iroquois and Cree. They were a new people, capitalizing on the weakness and decline of the existing population. The exact same is true of the Syrians moving into Sweden.

Unlike the Iroquois, though, Swedes have the actual power and numbers to easily repel this invasion by force of arms at any moment. The Swedish military could locate and forcibly deport or eliminate nearly every Syrian in the country within a month if they desired to. If you believe it would be cruel to do so, that’s fine; I don’t even necessarily disagree! But the fact that they choose not to do so in no way means that the country is benefiting from the presence of those people. The same is largely true of the United States - only the scale of the problem is different.

It was, in fact, founded as an ethnostate, exactly the same way that Sweden was. The men who founded the country said so at the time, and the history of the demography of the country supports that reading.

Where was this?

Don't post low-effort jeers like this.