It’s not racist to talk about the crisis of integration – it’s essential.
The news from Sweden is alarming. Prime minister Ulf Kristersson is considering changing the law itself to allow greater ‘military involvement’ in crime-fighting. It follows a disturbing spike in street mayhem. In September alone, 11 people were killed in gang violence. On one day – Wednesday 27 September – two men were shot dead in Stockholm and a 25-year-old woman was killed in a bomb attack in Storvreta, 50 miles north of Stockholm. She was a schoolteacher. It’s thought she was a neighbour of the intended target. Young teachers dying in blasts? We’re a long way from when the Guardian would publish gushing pieces about how ‘a visit to Sweden is like time-travel to the future’.
Indeed, even the Guardian, whose writers have long looked at Sweden as a social-democratic heaven in contrast to the gammon hell that is the UK, is now forced to admit that Sweden is being ‘rocked by [a] wave of violence’. September was the worst month for shooting deaths in Sweden since records began in 2016, it reports. It quotes Kristersson’s sad, salutary words: ‘Sweden has never seen anything like it. No country in Europe has seen anything like it.’ So Sweden is still a unique country, then – but for the wrong reasons this time.
It is difficult to overstate how serious Sweden’s disarray has become. Kristersson says it is ‘terrorist-like’. On 30 August the country was rocked by four explosions in the space of one hour. In 2022 there were 90 bombings and 101 attempted bombings. This year, up to 15 August, there had been 109 bombings. Is anyone else wondering why there are any bombings in this once peaceful, happy land? There were 391 shootings in 2022, 62 of them fatal, a rise from 45 fatal shootings in 2021. Guns are everywhere. Social services in the small city of Örebro say guns are now so easy to come by that most of the ‘at-risk’ youths they work with could probably get hold of one in a day.
There are now so many grenade attacks in Sweden that it’s the only country outside of Mexico that keeps a record of them. Things have got so crazy in recent years that even the BBC, which is not always upfront in its reporting on the problems afflicting ‘nice’ EU nations, sounded agog in 2019: ‘Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?’ Alongside the gang violence, there are Islamist uprisings. There were days-long Muslim riots in April last year in response to a right-winger’s burning of a Koran. Sweden’s chief of police said he’d ‘never seen such violent riots’.
Are we allowed to talk about Sweden yet? Now that the Swedish army is being asked to help cops with a surge in gangland killings, can we ask if perhaps there is something rotten in the state of Sweden? For years the complacent technocracies of America and Europe said Sweden was fine. Only Trumpists and troublemakers would say otherwise. Now, following the PM’s announcement that he’s asking the army to use everything from its knowledge on ‘explosives’ to ‘helicopter logistics’ to help tackle an epidemic of gang crime, maybe these people will be roused from their Scandi-naïveté.
The news from Sweden is alarming. Prime minister Ulf Kristersson is considering changing the law itself to allow greater ‘military involvement’ in crime-fighting. It follows a disturbing spike in street mayhem. In September alone, 11 people were killed in gang violence. On one day – Wednesday 27 September – two men were shot dead in Stockholm and a 25-year-old woman was killed in a bomb attack in Storvreta, 50 miles north of Stockholm. She was a schoolteacher. It’s thought she was a neighbour of the intended target. Young teachers dying in blasts? We’re a long way from when the Guardian would publish gushing pieces about how ‘a visit to Sweden is like time-travel to the future’.
Indeed, even the Guardian, whose writers have long looked at Sweden as a social-democratic heaven in contrast to the gammon hell that is the UK, is now forced to admit that Sweden is being ‘rocked by [a] wave of violence’. September was the worst month for shooting deaths in Sweden since records began in 2016, it reports. It quotes Kristersson’s sad, salutary words: ‘Sweden has never seen anything like it. No country in Europe has seen anything like it.’ So Sweden is still a unique country, then – but for the wrong reasons this time.
It is difficult to overstate how serious Sweden’s disarray has become. Kristersson says it is ‘terrorist-like’. On 30 August the country was rocked by four explosions in the space of one hour. In 2022 there were 90 bombings and 101 attempted bombings. This year, up to 15 August, there had been 109 bombings. Is anyone else wondering why there are any bombings in this once peaceful, happy land? There were 391 shootings in 2022, 62 of them fatal, a rise from 45 fatal shootings in 2021. Guns are everywhere. Social services in the small city of Örebro say guns are now so easy to come by that most of the ‘at-risk’ youths they work with could probably get hold of one in a day.
There are now so many grenade attacks in Sweden that it’s the only country outside of Mexico that keeps a record of them. Things have got so crazy in recent years that even the BBC, which is not always upfront in its reporting on the problems afflicting ‘nice’ EU nations, sounded agog in 2019: ‘Sweden’s 100 explosions this year: What’s going on?’ Alongside the gang violence, there are Islamist uprisings. There were days-long Muslim riots in April last year in response to a right-winger’s burning of a Koran. Sweden’s chief of police said he’d ‘never seen such violent riots’.
Source: Spiked
