I was recruited to Sweden in the 1980s and stayed on. That makes me an immigrant, now a Swedish national of Indian origin, but where my “Indian culture”, in everyday life, is subordinated to the dominant, mainstream, “Swedish culture”. However my presence here probably does contribute – even if in very small measure – to bringing some little parts of my culture into the evolving mainstream.
In recent times, it has become very clear that parallel cultures have splintered society. Criminal (mainly immigrant) gangs have been running rampant in some parts of large cities in Sweden. There have created no-go areas with their own rules and social hierarchies. Cars are torched every weekend and kids are knifed as initiation events. Rival gangs bomb each others hangouts. They set up their own checkpoints, indulge in shoot-outs with rival gangs and even torture victims with methods that ISIS would be proud of. It may not be due to their religion, but I perceive Muslim immigrants as being hugely over-represented among the criminal gangs.
It is my contention that over the last 50 years the liberal left in Sweden (and in Europe) has not had the common sense (or the courage) to distinguish between multi-ethnic and multicultural. A multi-ethnic population needs a unifying culture to form a coherent society. Having multiple cultures without an over-riding culture only gives a fractured society. Having many cultures present as sub-cultures enriches society but multiculturalism tries to deny that one must dominate. Promoting multiculturalism prevents integration, and together with a multi-ethnic community can only give multiple, parallel, abrasive, communities which makes a fractured society inevitable.
The future of Europe is multi-ethnic but not multicultural
I have for long held the position that a society needs a single overriding culture to be a society. All cultures are dynamic and change as times change and as new groups may be assimilated into it. The new culture inevitably contains elements of what new communities bring to the table and the original culture of that community – in some adjusted form – can continue as a sub-culture, but subordinate to the overriding culture. What is not tenable is the idea that a single society can remain a single society when it is splintered into a collection of many parallel cultures (and which are not subordinate to an overriding culture). It has been the misguided, do-gooding, politically correct approach of the “liberal left” in Europe which has actively encouraged new communities to maintain the cultures of where they came from and remain separate to the existing, prevailing culture. There has been little emphasis on getting new communities to assimilate and a far greater emphasis on separateness. This approach has also given rise to the fear of demanding assimilation from new communities. That has in turn led – and not very surprisingly – to the immigrant ghettos, the no-go areas and large parts of the new population who cannot even speak the local language (into the 3rd generation in some cases).
I have a theory that part of the problem in Sweden is that governments have been so ashamed, and so afraid, of Sweden’s past role in promoting Race Biology and eugenics, that they have overcompensated and been blind to the folly of multiculturalism in a multi-ethnic community. Many of the leading politicians (including Social Democrats) of that time were part of the Eugenics Network which provided the Nazis with the academic legitimacy and support they needed for their own Race Biology theories. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal were among the leading Social Democrats who supported eugenics but so also did George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells and Leon Trotsky. The Sami and the Roma (rather than the Jews) were the main targets for Swedish eugenics.
The collective Swedish amnesia about sterilisation is difficult to explain. From the outset it was viewed as an integral and widely-proclaimed part of the Swedish welfare programme. … The Swedish commitment to eugenic sterilisation was especially emphasised in the widely-known writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal; their book on the Crisis of the Population Question of 1934 achieved best-seller status, and was translated into English in 1940. The sequel, Alva Myrdal’s Nation and Family, appeared in English in 1941. Both books forcefully argued the case for sterilisation on eugenic grounds, and the second described the work of the Swedish Royal Commission on Population, which produced a report on sterilisation in 1936. This led to strengthening of the sterilisation law, as a consequence of which the number of sterilisations increased and peaked shortly after World War II.
Though the Swedish eugenics movement started in 1909 and was most active before WW2, Sweden’s sterilisation policies continued all the way till 1976 under a series of Social Democrat governments.
Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for “crimes” such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children’s homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their “low intelligence”, being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.
Sweden’s Race Biology Institute included leading academics and politicians and played a crucial role in selling Eugenics not only to Germany but throughout Europe and the USA. (The origins of Planned Parenthood, for example, in the US lie with Margaret Sanger and eugenics and a desire to control black fertility).
The eugenics network consisted mainly of academics from a variety of disciplines, but with medicine and biology dominating; connections with German scientists who would later shape Nazi biopolitics were strong. The paper ……. also outlines the eugenic vision of the institute’s first director, Herman Lundborg. In effect the network, and in particular Lundborg, promoted the view that politics should be guided by eugenics and by a genetically superior elite. The selling of eugenics in Sweden is an example of the co-production of science and social order.
Whether the overcompensation for the past eugenics connections is the main reason for promoting multiculturalism or not, the fact remains that Swedish cities are now paying the price for the stupidity of promoting multiculturalism in a multi-ethnic community.
Tags: Eugenics, multi-ethnic, muticultural
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