The Multicultural Paradise of Sweden

People who call themselves socialists, and who mostly do not know what that  means, often hold up the luminous example of Sweden to tout the success of the policies they do not understand. In the multicultural paradise of Sweden people from different cultures live together in harmony in an overly generous welfare state. Or so they believe. What could possibly go wrong?

Andy Ngo recently traveled to Sweden and found… you guessed it… a nation divided into separate but unequal neighborhoods… the one containing Swedish nationals, the others containing the Muslim refugees that the nation so graciously welcomed. In truth, on a per capita basis, Sweden opened its arms to more refugees than did Germany.

Ngo explains:

... the country that admitted the most migrants per capita was Sweden. In one year alone, the northern European nation of 10 million added nearly 2 percent to its population. Most of those arrivals were young men. Tens of thousands more have continued to arrive since then.

How is that working out? Have all of these refugees produced a crime wave, to say nothing of a rape culture?

Ngo explains:

In recent years, the Nordic state known for scoring among the highest among all nations in quality-of-life indexes has also gained a reputation for gang shootings, grenade attacks, and sexual crimes.

Days before I was due to arrive in Sweden last summer, the country was rocked by mass car burnings across its west coast. Authorities faulted “youth gangs” for the fires, a euphemism for criminal young men of migrant backgrounds. My first visit was to Rosengård, Seved, and Nydala, immigrant neighborhoods in the southern city of Malmö and among the 23 “especially vulnerable” areas across Sweden. At times, ambulances and fire trucks will enter only with police protection. Desperate police have appealed to imams and clan leaders for help when they cannot contain the violence.

As for education, the children of these families cannot pass their way out of middle school. Please explain how much they are going to be contributing to Swedish society:

In Rosengård, youths gathered during school hours in streets and parks around the public housing that lined the neighborhood. In fact, fewer than half of ninth-graders here pass enough classes to enroll in high school.

So, Sweden is not an egalitarian utopia. It has produced a parallel society, one that is segregated from most of Sweden… but that threatens to encroach on it:

The on-the-ground reality I witnessed in some parts of Sweden stood in stark contrast to the egalitarian utopia I had been sold by American progressives. How did Sweden, on the whole a prosperous and peaceful nation, also develop parallel, segregated societies afflicted by criminality and violence? The starkest reminder of this reality are the numerous grenade explosions and gun murders that have become a regular occurrence across some sections of society. In fact, Sweden’s homicide rate is now above the Western European average.

So, the wages of multiculturalism are evident in Sweden:

Sweden’s institutionalization of multiculturalism began in 1975, when a parliament led by Social Democrat Olof Palme rejected assimilation in favor of policies that encouraged minorities to keep their separate identities. “Of course, if you say these things [critically] in Sweden, you’ll be ferociously attacked by social workers and the dominating left-wing academia for being inhumane,” Adamson says.

Of course, everyday Swedes see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. They do not even know what is going on:

For the remainder of my trip, ethnic Swedes I spoke with responded with incredulity when I told them about what I saw in some neighborhoods in their own cities. They didn’t believe that within a short metro ride they could find communities practicing sex segregation, religious fundamentalism, and the imposition of extreme modesty culture on young children. They conceded, however, that they hadn’t spent much time in those areas. Most of those I spoke with had never even visited them — and have no reason to. Parallel societies are exactly that: They exist side by side and rarely meet.