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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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How about some culture war? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/30/how-gang-violence-took-hold-of-sweden-in-five-charts

While I imagine the Guardian is persona non grata around here, this seems to me to be pretty stunning. Sweden, long the darling of the left, is now “… in the grip of a rise in gang violence and shootings that has taken citizens and leaders by surprise. In the words of the prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, this year: “Sweden has never before seen anything like this. No other country in Europe is seeing anything like this.””

I’m leery of rephrasing the article excessively, but it does note that gun crime and narcotics have been rising since 2013, and that the gun murder rate in the capital of Stockholm is now 30 times that of London.

The fairly standard claim (this is the Guardian, after all) is that this has to do with poverty, not migration.

“Socioeconomic factors are what mostly constitute the risks of ending up in crime,” not ethnicity, says Felipe Estrada Dörner, a professor of criminology at Stockholm University whose research centres on juvenile delinquency and segregation. “This is a classic and well known pattern, in Sweden and internationally.”

Estrada Dörner says accelerating this trend and reversing other aspects of socioeconomic decline should be prioritised. “In order to slow down the supply of new recruits to gangs, inequality must be reduced. Harsher punishments, which the government invests a lot of resources in now, will not overcome those problems.”

So… Is the solution, now that mass migration has been accomplished, to make sure that they have just as much money as the original Swedes? Given the Swedish welfare state was already extremely generous, which drove all the immigration, is that feasible?

How long are normies and Conservatives going to continue to accept this tripe? At what point is accepting the reality of the situation going to stop being "Far Right" or "Dissident Right" and just be "the right?" I would say someone like Hlynka represents the absolute boundary of a Conservative who should know better by virtue of intelligence and exposure to arguments that thoroughly destruct the narrative embodied in this report, but remains indelibly committed to prevailing grand narratives of liberalism and Judeo-Christian civilization.

A European identity is inevitable, it's only a question of when it goes from being a "far right" to just "right" wing position. There have already been recent election victories around stopping mass immigration and demographic change in Europe, so when can we stop calling sensible people who oppose demographic replacement of European people in their homelands "far right?"

How long are normies and Conservatives going to continue to accept this tripe?

What's your evidence that Conservatives accept this tripe in any meaningful sense at all? Opposition to mass immigration is a mainstream Right idea at the population level; the idea that such opposition is evidence of being "far right" is Blue propaganda and always has been.

Opposition to mass immigration is a mainstream Right idea at the population level; the idea that such opposition is evidence of being "far right" is Blue propaganda and always has been.

Conservatives frame their opposition to mass immigration within the exact same dialectic of this report! It's not about race, it's about jobs and wealth inequality and welfare and rule of law, 'they have to come legally!'. Conservatives are playing the exact same game as the writers of this report and the journalists reporting on it. It's no wonder their arguments have completely failed to prevent mass immigration and demographic change.

So just to be clear, your question is ‘when will conservatives switch from saying that non western immigrants are not a good fit for cultural reasons, to saying that brown people do not belong in Europe because they are not white?’

Because swedens current ruling party is the Sweden democrats. Geert wilders is about to become PM of the Netherlands. AFD is the most popular party in Germany, and FN is basically the mainstream Conservative Party in France at this point.

Sweden's current "ruling party", to the extent it has one, is the Moderate party. The Sweden Democrats agreed to provide support to the Moderates and their allies to form the government in exchange for tougher immigration policies, but there is still a cordon sanitaire against the SDs - they have no portfolios in the Swedish Cabinet despite being the second-largest party in parliament and having more seats than the Moderates. Similar dynamics play out in most European parliamentary systems; it's very much an open question as to whether Dutch center-right types will simply let the Netherlands be rudderless rather than support Wilders becoming PM.

That's fair, I overstated my case. But it seems like the statement "the fastest growing section of the European right is opposed to immigration from nonwestern countries, although they do not use racial terminology" is not only defensible but trivially true, and also an answer to SS's main question.

I suspect that at least some of these right wing parties avoid the use of racial terminology because of European hate speech laws, not political correctness.