Recently by Gary North: On Escaping the Mercantilist Mindset
Stockholm’s rioting goes on, night after night. The police seem powerless to stop this.
Immigrant youths are in the streets, burning cars that belong to immigrant adults.
Certainly, wandering around Husby last week, it was hard at first glance to see quite what the problem was. Built in the 1970s as part of the “Million Programme” that aimed to give affordable housing for all Swedes, the estate is one of dozens on Stockholm’s outskirts that now house mainly immigrant populations, including large numbers from Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iraq.
It turns out that open immigration, a generation of state handouts to immigrants, and tolerance greater than any in Western Europe has not work as planned. Surprise, surprise!
Two decades on, though, “white flight” has left only one in five of Husby’s flats occupied by ethnic Swedes, and many of their immigrant replacements do not seem to share his view that a new life in Sweden is a dream come true. Last week, the neighbourhood erupted into rioting, sparking some of the fiercest urban unrest that Sweden has seen in decades, and a new debate about the success of racial integration.
“In the old days, the neighbourhood was more Swedish and life felt like a dream, but now there are just too many foreigners, and a new generation that has grown up here with just their own culture,” he said, gesturing towards the hooded youths milling around in Husby’s pedestrianised shopping precinct.
“Also, in Sweden you cannot hit your children to discipline them, and this is a problem for foreign parents. The kids can feel they can cause whatever trouble they want, and the police don’t even arrest any of them most of the time.”
Liberalism is coming home to roost in Europe’s model welfare state.
The disturbances erupted in Husby last weekend, after police shot dead an elderly man brandishing a machete inside his house. Angered at what they saw as police heavyhandedness, youths torched cars and buildings and stoned police and firefighters. Police were then forced to draft in extra manpower from outside Stockholm as the trouble spread to other immigrant-dominated suburbs of the capital and towns such as Orebro in central Sweden, where 25 masked youths set fire to a school on Friday night.
So, they burned down a state-funded school. This is the equivalent of sacrilege in statist Western Europe: worse than burning down a church.
What caused this? Liberals know. “Meanwhile politicians from the Swedish Left, which has ruled the country for most of the post-war period, blamed the trouble on social spending cuts introduced by Mr Reinfeldt, whose Moderate Party vowed to trim – though not slash – the welfare budget when he took office in 2006.”
That’s right. Sweden needs more wealth redistribution, more taxation, more handouts. That will fix it!
Certainly, claims of racism upset many Swedes, who have little colonial history, and whose decision to admit large numbers of Third World migrants from the 1980s onwards was born of no particular political obligation, more just a very Swedish sense of humanitarian duty to the wider world. From the very start, the government also sought to avoid creating a German-style “guest worker” class by promoting immigrants’ rights and introducing a plethora of programmes to promote racial integratkion.
Yet despite Swedish language education being offered free to all long-term immigrants, ghettos of foreigners have flourished in recent years.
No kidding! Will wonders never cease?
“We have tried harder than any other European country to integrate, spending billions on a welfare system that is designed to help jobless immigrants and guarantee them a good quality of life,” said Marc Abramsson, leader of the National Democrats Party. “Yet we have areas where there are ethnic groups that just don’t identify with Swedish society. They see the police and even the fire brigade as part of the state, and they attack them. We have tried everything, anything, to improve things, but it hasn’t worked. It’s not about racism, it’s just that multi-culturalism doesn’t recognise how humans actually function.”
Swedes ask: “But where is the gratitude?” Swedes are silly.
Still, some of Husby’s younger generation argue that it is unreasonable of Swedes to expect them to be perennially “grateful” for taking them in, even from the dire circumstances in their homelands.
Among them is local youth worker Rami al Khamisi, 25, whose family escaped to Sweden from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq back in 1994, smuggling themselves first through Turkey and Russia and then across the Baltic in a fishing boat commandeered by a people smuggler. “I was six years old and the boat was packed with about 60 people,” he said. “An old man died, and they threw him in the water because his body was smelling a lot.”
That, though, he says, is his only real memory of the hardships of his early life, and as such, he finds it hard to be as thankful as his parents still are to his adopted homeland. “They compare it to Baghdad or Somalia,” he said. “But we younger immigrants only really know Sweden, and we just compare our situation to the one around us.”
And then they torch cars in their own neighborhoods.
This is envy in action. It is resentment against visible signs of success. It cannot be placated. The very fact that the welfare state liberals offer to buy it off with more welfare breeds resentment. The fact that white Swedes have money to use to buy off the rioters enrages the rioters even more.
White Europeans no longer reproduce at replacement rates. The future of Europe is in the immigrants’ ghettos.
As Dr. Phil asks, “How’s that working out?”
Continue Reading on www.telegraph.co.uk
May 28, 2013
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2013 Gary North
