What’s Wrong with Sweden?
By Bruce Bawer
“When no opposing views are heard, people do not believe
there are any even if they themselves dissent.”
Europe is slowly committing suicide, but Sweden is plainly determined to do itself in faster than the rest. Earlier this month, on a visit to Lagos, Nigeria, Sweden’s Minister of Finance, a fellow named Anders Borg, made one of those staggeringcomments, drenched with contempt for one’s own nation and culture, of the sort in which Swedish officials excel. Paying tribute to the beauty of Nigerian women’s colorful attire, Borg couldn’t just leave it at that; he felt compelled to use the occasion to complain that his own countrywomen too often wear dull, black outfits. Speaking with a reporter for Expressen, he expressed the hope and expectation that in ten years’ time his own country, and Europe generally, will look far more like Africa. It’ll be more multicultural, he explained, and thus better.
But is Nigeria more multicultural than Sweden? Yes, if you’re referring to the fact that it has over 250 native ethnic and linguistic groups with a wide range of cultures, from Fula to Hausa to Yoruba. But if you’re talking about multiculturalism as an ideology that compels public servants to view the establishment of greater and greater ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity as an undivided virtue, regardless of all objective evidence to the contrary, Nigeria has nothing on Sweden. While only a tiny minority of Nigeria’s population is of foreign origin, over 25% of Sweden’s inhabitants have a foreign background. And people like Borg are determined to drive that number steadily higher, by hook or by crook – on the insane grounds that a nation like Sweden should look to a nation like Nigeria as a model for its own future development.
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In socialist countries, after all, the state doesn’t exist to serve the people; the people exist to be shaped into unquestioning servants of the state – servants who accept that the state is them and that they are the state. In such countries, it’s taken for granted that there’s no need to place any limit on state power or to provide mechanisms to protect citizens from that power, because, by definition, as Sjunnesson puts it, “the state always is good.” We may mock the European Union for banning jugs or bowls of olive oil on restaurant tables, but this is what socialism does: the powers that be need to have their fingers in every pie, need to minimize the number of situations under which freedom may actually be experienced, need to accustom citizens to a society in which their lives are increasingly regulated. They need, in short, to create a country in which the land and the system are, in the minds of the general public, one – a country, that is, in which the people simply cannot imagine the nation itself without the socialist state.
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