Society's Child
Three explosions in one night would be front page news in any first-world city. But when Stockholm reverberated to multiple blasts in one night last week, national broadcaster SVT's nightly broadcast was silent, relegating the news to its web coverage instead. One of the targets, a Syrian Orthodox church, had already been bombed twice in the past year.
But in Sweden, explosions no longer make the news. In 2018 there were 162 bombings reported to police, and 93 reported in the first five months of this year, 30 more than during the same period in 2018. The level of attacks is "extreme in a country that is not at war," Crime Commissioner Gunnar Appelgren told SVT last year.
The use of hand grenades is a purely Swedish phenomenon too, with no other country in Europe reporting their use on such a level, a police manager told Swedish Radio in 2016, a year after attacks first spiked.
The grenades used almost exclusively originate in the former Yugoslavia, and are sold in Sweden for around $100 per piece. But while only three hand grenades were thrown in Kosovo between 2013 and 2014, more than 20 have been used in Sweden every year since 2015.
More broadly, homicide has risen in Sweden, with more than 300 shootings reported last year, causing 45 deaths. Though homicide rates had been in decline since 2002, they again began trending upwards in 2015, as did rapes and sexual assaults, which more than tripled in the last four years.
Of course, 2015 was also the year in which Sweden flung open its doors to more than 160,000 asylum seekers, more per capita than any other European country. The right have blamed these newcomers for the rising rates of homicide and sexual violence, and Denmark's former Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Swedish television last year that he often uses "Sweden as a deterring example" of mass immigration gone wrong.
What would any country in the throes of a crime wave do? In Sweden's case, the government and media have launched a concerted campaign to downplay the problem.
In February 2017, a month after a hand grenade was lobbed through the window of a police station in Katrineholm and days after another exploded in Södertälje, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a press release debunking "simplistic and occasionally inaccurate information about migration, integration and crime in Sweden." In it, gun crime was portrayed as a consequence of "criminal conflicts" and rising sexual violence attributed to a change in the definition of "rape" in Swedish law. The grenade attacks weren't mentioned, and the claim that the government isn't doing enough to stamp out crime was dismissed.
The publication rubbished the link between immigrants and crime. However, a recent study from the Swedish Defence University has warned that the Swedish justice system is ill-equipped to police the parallel societies developing in immigrant neighborhoods, and newspaper Dagens Nyheter pointed out that 90 percent of shooting perpetrators in Sweden are either first or second generation immigrants.
Swedish police have identified 50 neighborhoods it considers "vulnerable" - a term many have taken as a euphemism for "no-go zones." In tackling crime within them, the government has come up with some novel solutions, like implementing a 'grenade amnesty' last year, and kindly asking residents of violence-plagued Malmo to "stop shooting" each other. Neither measure seems to have worked.
Still, the government would seemingly rather Sweden be associated with IKEA and social cohesion than immigrant gangs and grenade attacks. After all, admitting to the crime wave would undermine the supposed success of the Nordic model, and suggesting that it may be connected with immigration would call into question Sweden's self-righteous status as a "humanitarian superpower," as former Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom described the country in 2015.
To that end, the government has not ordered a police crackdown in crime-stricken neighborhoods nor held a national debate on integration. Instead it has launched a PR campaign to fix Sweden's tarnished image abroad. The Swedish taxpayer funds the operation of the Swedish Institute to the tune of nearly $50 million per year. The institute is a sort of in-house PR agency that "promotes interest in Sweden around the world."
Among its projects are English-language videos downplaying the country's newfound reputation for crime, and the @sweden Twitter account, which spends its time literally telling critics "nothing has happened here in Sweden."
More than 14,000 journalists, authors and politicians have been blocked by @sweden for asking difficult questions, among them Israel's ambassador to the country. However, the account's curators reversed course when some online media kicked up a stink.
"The truth is that we are a country that gives the rest of the democratic world hope," Deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin said last January, weeks after grenade attacks in Malmo, Stockholm and Gothenburg. In Stockholm, an elderly man died when he picked up an unexploded grenade near a metro station.
Meanwhile, with paramedics, firefighters and postmen refusing to serve high-crime immigrant neighborhoods, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven publicly denied the existence of 'no-go zones'. Stockholm Police Chief Erik Åkerlund told Swedish Radio a year earlier that 50 neighborhoods identified by police as "vulnerable areas" were "more like 'go-go zones.'"
Less than a week after Åkerlund's interview was aired, a man was hospitalized when a grenade ripped the facade of a house apart in Lindängen, a suburb of Malmo added to the list of "go-go zones" that year.
Call them what you will, but zones characterized by bombings, shootings, and an atmosphere that forbids essential services from entering without police escorts are no-go zones. Endemic bombings are the hallmark of countries at war, not countries that give "the rest of the democratic world hope." And "humanitarian superpowers" should at bare minimum ensure their own citizens - native and immigrant - are protected against hand grenade attacks.
Sweden does not have an image problem. Sweden has a crime problem.
Comment: See also:
- Malmo, Sweden hit by grenade blasts; 4th attack in under a week, 30th this year
- Sweden: Suspected hand grenade attack on police station in Malmo - two people detained
- Sweden may deploy Army in no-go zones ravaged by organized crime
- Journalist investigating claims of migrant-related violence in Sweden 'escorted by police out of Rinkeby' (VIDEO)
- Swedish police suggest organized crime is behind wave of car-burnings as number of Stockholm 'no-go areas' grow
- Sweden sees 'massive' increase in deadly shootings over recent years
Reader Comments
R.C.
It's apparent everywhere now that all whites are under attack.
Second of all, if it takes an EXTERNAL factor such as a massive wave of muslim migrants to break that system, than that is proof of its success... I am referring to the economic system known as "nordic model", not to migration. Of course mass migration is a huge problem.
If you drop hundreds or thousands of even millions of such migrants in Japan, in Canada, in Switzerland or some other countries, that would also lead to problems and one could hardly blame that on those countries economic systems! Migration is to blame, not social-demcoracy. And proof of that is that Finland and Denmark which are also social-democracies are doing fine on that respect.
So this crisis is caused by mass migration and not by the nordic economic model, but the text insinuates the opposite.
I remember a distant past when Sott.net helped people see through bullshit, manipulation and ideologic intoxication. Nowadays, Sott.net spreads it.
Where do immigrants who HAVE NO MONEY get the money to buy grenades from? You'd think any little money they had would go into buying basic stuff to survive!
Also, if it's immigrants why are grenades only being lobbed around in Sweden?
Whatever is happening here seems to be connected to Sweden hence why it's happening there and no where else!
And of course it is not Gladio V 2.0, not ever !
Immigrants are the Barbarians. The Barbarians are at the door of the empire, threatening civilization and order... We must amass our legions to go and defend us from the hordes that threaten to overrun us all.
Cmon, this propaganda has been in play for thousands of years and people are still falling for it.
It's the whole Barbarian shtick from the Roman empire.Reminded me on an adage: "Empire start to rot at the core, and to fall apart at the periphery".
R.C.'s "New & Improved!" Version:
"Empires, like dying lepers , start to rot at the core, and to fall apart at the periphery".R.C.
I'm not a chemical engineer, but feel more then confident to create a similar explosive device from scratch. To this day, I need to add. Having had an interest in chemistry right after secondary school, I did not fail to notice the tightening control over base materials during the last 3 decades. In the early nineties, one could still get concentrated nitric acid in a regular drugstore. Today, you would be taken away by a SWAT team immediately.
My point - the simplicity of creation of explosive devices is totally incommensurate with the number of attacks, and simultaneously, the amount of sales control. Hmmm, how could that be ...
Knowing that the NSA et al. have available EVERYTHING 24/7/365 available to them, what T-word worth his 'hate of America for its freedoms-salt' would communicate online?
But we, like the 99.9% who represent no danger, can't even write openly on stuff that's easily available to photocopy at your local library. It's called the free speech chilling effect, and were getting down towards zero, not C, nor even F, but Kelvin!
R.C.
I too know a little chemistry - got an award for it once, someplace, time.Congratulations, I decided for electrical engineering. My only Chemistra Award is to still have all fingers and eyes, despite all the experiments I did ...
Isn't it silly that we have to super qualify what we write?With every month, I feel we (I) slide back into the Eastern Bloc like communist past - where I grew up. Constant propaganda, surveillance, and fear. A divided, impoverished, and militarized society.
But we, like the 99.9% who represent no danger, can't even write openly on stuff that's easily available to photocopy at your local library.Hmmmm, perhaps check some times in an internet cafe if that infamous 'anarchist's cookbook' is still out there. Or just watch news, and count the number of lads blowing themselves up now and then ...
Islamic State Weapons in Yemen Traced Back to US Government: Serbia Files (part 1)
While US President Donald Trump boasts about the defeat of Islamic State in Syria, US government-purchased weapons appear in the hands of Islamic State terrorists in Yemen. Recently I anonymously...Think, McFly, think!