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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.
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?
Much of the refugee migration was out of Iraq, Syria destruction so off the back of US war mongering and lingering cold war stuff. We shouldn't forget these root causes when we champion the next intervention.
Soo... We are going to ignore everything that happened after WWII? The cold war was just 'stuff'? And then you're going to talk about root causes?
What do you think is the cause of the 'US war mongering'?
I imagine it's strategic foreign policy driven by national interest, access to resources etc. Basically having geopolitical influence in a region.
But individual instances of the mongering are more contingent and serve more localised benefits such as the military industrial complex, profiteers.
The actual instances of intervention are often due to power politics of some form and the consequences down the road ultimately reveal that the various strategic rationalisations are just a facade and the only reason that remains is that the US seeks to be ruthless and brutish to peoples all over the world, to show that is maximus brutish/ruthless and sustain itself as a hegemony, with the most likely aim to turn regions into shitholes, to reduce their potential for power, or ideally set them up as useful clients and to hell with whoever gets murdered locally as a result.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of civilians are killed in indiscriminate bombing and millions flee. In Syria a client state of a relatively weak rival power remains, the region is broadly thrown into turmoil, raising potential stochastic damage down the track. Next, do the same with Iran...
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