Farewell Sweden, My Beloved Country

(This is a translated version of my essay in Swedish written on the 21st June, 2023. In light of the latest riots in Britain, this essay may shed some light on a few of the factors at play)

December 22, 1988. That was the night my family and I arrived at Arlanda from Iran via India, as asylum seekers. I don’t remember everything, but I do recall being taken to a camp where we were provided with clothes, food, and beds for the foreseeable future.

I was eight years old, but the memory of how kind these people were has stayed with me ever since and has only been reaffirmed over the years. Not only did they welcome us to their homeland, but they also gave us everything we needed to not just survive, but thrive.

After our asylum application was approved in May 1990, we moved from the refugee camp to our new home in Mariestad, “The Pearl of Vänern”. A family with five children received residency, Swedish citizenship, a home, state support, and all the benefits available to the average Swede; free school, extracurricular activities, healthcare, dental care, and even paid public transportation.

My older sister and I got our own teacher, Agneta, dedicated solely to us two. We learned the language, made Swedish friends, became familiar with the term "svartskalle" (often expressed as a form of endearment, even admiration, though sometimes meant to demean), and fell in love with meatballs with mashed potatoes, lingonberry jam, and brown sauce.

I learned about Gustav Vasa's adventures and how he took back Sweden from the Danes, about Sweden's miraculous impact on the global market with brands like Volvo, IKEA, H&M, and ABBA, and about how I could speak ill of the king or prime minister without risking any form of retribution.

Sweden was a paradise, and the most welcoming, generous, and wonderful people I could have ever imagined. It is thanks to this amazing country that we five children grew up to have our own homes, with families and children, careers in what we are passionate about, and prospects that would never have been available to us had we stayed in Iran.

But something has happened in the country of lagom, which has transformed paradise into hell. A tumour that has metastasised exponentially and spread to every corner of what was once the most idyllic country on the planet. Sweden, which was the envy of the world, has turned into a nightmare, and the bleeding only increases with all the lies from those elected to stop it.

Can We Be Honest?

Sweden, the country that was the ideal for other nations to strive for, the model for what a near-perfect society could look like, today has the highest number of fatal shootings in peacetime Europe. We have the highest rate of rapes on the continent, despite desperate attempts to portray it as a matter of statistical arrangements and Kafkaesque language distortions about definitions. Violent crimes, theft, gun violence, robbery, sexual offences – name the crime and Sweden – SWEDEN! – is now, if not leading the world, definitely on the podium in the Western world.

And the tragic thing is that everyone knows what the problem is.

It's spelled mass immigration, and it is individuals who look like me who are holding our country hostage.

Can we be honest about this? Can we at least admit that up is up, and down is down?

No, it turns out. We cannot. Or at least not without desperately trying to find an explanation as to why it is the Swedes' fault that immigrants commit so many crimes.

After the 2022 election, I had dinner with a friend from Stockholm who is one of the country’s leading figures in the tech and startup circles. He sheepishly lamented, almost as if he were apologising, that the Sweden Democrats (SD) had done so well, assuming I would agree. To his shock, he heard that not only had I voted for SD, but many other immigrants from my generation had done the same.

We began to debate crime in Sweden, all the violent and sexual offences, and how it is almost always immigrants behind the acts. But my friend refused to accept this. Even if it was true that immigrants commit these acts, it is Sweden’s fault for not providing opportunities, forcing them into crime. Or it’s the Swedes’ fault for buying the drugs that immigrants sell. Sweden, my friend argued, has failed the immigrants, not the other way around.

I left the dinner thinking about the American philosopher Shelby Steele’s dictum on White Guilt. How white people are ready to blame everything on themselves and offer excuses for (in the American context) the black population, because once upon a time the USA had slavery and Jim Crow laws… I saw the exact same phenomenon with my friend. In his horror of being perceived as racist, he was willing to come up with any reason that shifted the blame from the perpetrators onto the Swedes and Sweden.

This form of excuse-making, which people like Magdalena Andersson, Nooshi Dadgostar, Stefan Löfven, and other politicians, as well as mainstream media, have mastered into an art form, is not only empirically wrong but also destructive. It assumes that immigrants, unlike Swedes, do not have their own agency. That we commit crimes because circumstances created by Swedes somehow force us to do so against our will.

We hear about racism, poverty, and vulnerable areas - but never the truth, which is that there is a subculture among these men - mainly between 15-34 years old with a Muslim background - that glorifies violence, dominance over women, and sexual conquest.

This is the truth that everyone knows but few dare to speak. People worry that a mythical wave of xenophobia will suddenly wash over the country and destroy our liberal democratic society if these facts are expressed. Thus, a vacuum is created that demands to be filled, but when honesty is avoided, the dialogue is handed over to racist entities like FriaTider.se and Exponerat.net.

Our elites prefer to talk about “the root of crime,” as if there is any meaning or point behind this cliché, or yet another meaningless investigation, which exists only to justify the existence of useless bureaucrats. Nowhere in the world where crime has been drastically reduced has anyone needed to first dig up some root cause of crime - you just need a strong, uncompromising police force and presence, long prison sentences, and tough measures.

An example from the USA is instructive:

In 1992, *¹East Palo Alto, California, had the highest murder rate in the country relative to its population. Just a year later, not only had murders but all other forms of serious violent crime been so drastically reduced that East Palo Alto was no longer in the top 50 of the worst cities in the country. And it was not because anyone researched the root cause of the crimes to then publish a journal of their findings, it was not because politicians formed a committee to investigate it, it was not because they lamented poverty or racism or came up with other excuses for why criminals commit crimes.

It was simply because they implemented a local police force that did not compromise with criminals, a prosecutor who took their job seriously and pursued the longest possible sentences, and judges who showed no mercy.

Another example is how New York reduced murders and other violent crimes by 86% from 1990 to 2019, primarily thanks to Rudy Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policy from 1994 to 2001, but in recent years has seen the trend reverse following “Defund the Police” and Andrew Cuomo’s initiative to reduce the police force to focus more on “Community Initiatives.”

In other words, the solution is simple. But with politicians who want to appear “humane” (having more sympathy for the perpetrators than the victims) and leftist ideology permeating all parties except SD, progress can never be made.

Subculture

There is not a single immigrant man who, if he is honest, does not admit that he knows what I am talking about when I mention this subculture.

This does not mean that everyone was involved in it, it does not mean that all immigrants are criminals or other nonsense that the left always accuses dissenters of in this matter.

But that the culture is partly a reality, and partly dominated by immigrants, is undeniable. I have personally seen and even been part of it, in cities as different from each other as Mariestad, Hudiksvall, and Gothenburg.

There are many names for this subculture; svartskalle culture, blatte culture, gang culture, immigrant culture... No established rules or principles. A Swedish person can be involved even if it is very rare. Girls are almost never involved in any other role than sexual partners. Even though it is dominated by immigrant guys with a Muslim background, it does not mean that Chileans or Greeks do not participate.

Whoever seeks a scientifically consistent theory will not find it there.

But what they all have in common includes:

1. Pride above all – one’s status is the most important thing about oneself, and anyone who in any way challenges it, willingly or unknowingly, must be punished, almost always with violence.

2. Superiority complex – Despite being here in Sweden, we are not part of Sweden. We are superior to Swedish norms and people, in everything from food culture to how we treat our elders. “Swedes are losers, man.”

3. Contempt for Women – mainly Swedish and non-Muslim girls. These are “fair game” to have sex with and dump. We will not marry a Swedish girl anyway, often because there is an arranged marriage in the cards further down the line, so until then we can treat these girls like lamb meat.

4. “Crime Pays” – Wherever I have come into contact with this subculture, one fact has been consistent: Everyone idolises Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s character in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” from 1983, about the immigrant who came to the USA with nothing and built a crime empire through drug trafficking and murder. He is the role model, the one who laid out the template for success. Why work like an idiot for 20,000 kronor a month when you can earn that in a few hours selling drugs? The police do nothing anyway.

5. Omerta – we keep everything within our own circles. We don’t snitch to the cops. We don’t go to the authorities. If someone breaks rank, we handle it internally.

I know this because I, as I said, have not only seen it but been part of this culture. For example, I went to the same class as Ikmet Kodzadziku, who later shot police officer Arne Sigve Klungland to death in the Stavanger robbery in 2004, at Ale Gymnasium between 1997-2000. I saw his journey firsthand, from a joker to a murderer. When I heard what he had done, I was not the least bit surprised – it was what he always wanted.

Ikmet was not particularly alpha among us, he was more like a joker, but he had the same ambitions as everyone else in our circle of friends; quick cash, girls, and gangster life. He was not the exception – Nasser in Hudiksvall who died of an overdose, Mohsen from Mariestad who went in and out of juvenile detention as a teenager to prison as an adult, Lorre from Bergsjön who is now serving 15 years for manslaughter… I can continue for hours. Friends and acquaintances from different circles, in different cities, all with the same ambitions and hopes.

2015

When Stefan Löfven’s “humanitarian” coalition government opened the borders for everyone who wanted to flood in during the summer of 2015, the idea was to help those affected by the war in Syria.

In reality, the majority welcomed were young men who had no legitimate reason to seek asylum but came mainly for economic reasons, from countries like Albania, the rest of the Middle East, Eritrea, Somalia, and Turkey. As long as they claimed to be from Syria, they could count on being accepted as refugees, and young men claimed to be significantly younger than they really were to be treated as children by the immigration board.

It didn’t take long before the left bloc’s humanitarian vision was confronted with reality. Every day we were inundated with headlines about sexual assaults and rapes at festivals, gang crime, humiliation robberies, car bomb attacks, shootings, and murders.

Sweden, which took in several thousand refugees a day without any plan on how to integrate them, or even how to determine whether someone had reason to be in Sweden as a refugee or not, now finds itself in an impossible situation.

Districts like Rosengård, Rinkeby, Hammarkullen, Bergsjön, Botkyrka, and Husby have now been joined by smaller towns like Linköping, Örebro, Södertälje, Landskrona, and Järfälla under the label “Vulnerable Areas.” The tumor has spread throughout the country, while our politicians want to focus on giving the social services more power, providing more resources to schools in these “vulnerable areas” and, laughably, “overcrowding... and an active labor market policy where young men who are unemployed today actually get into work” (SSU chairman Philip Botström, in a debate on gang crime on Expressen.se, September 10, 2020).

This is what can be expected when you task children with putting out a raging inferno with water pistols.

But when the Sweden Democrats propose measures, such as deportation for serious violent crimes, we suddenly find immense energy from these bunglers! Then they are powerful and eager with talk of human rights, the multicultural society, and how it would be unfair to the poor criminals.

As usual, leftist politicians have more willpower for criminals than for their victims.

The Myth of the Multicultural Society

What is a multicultural society? It is not, as is often claimed, a multiracial society, but a country where several cultures coexist. Often these are not in conflict with each other - for example, who can complain about the riches we have received in our food culture thanks to contributions from other countries? - but there are cases where one norm is directly threatened by another.

The Dutch journalist Machteld Zee spent several months in the United Kingdom where she visited Sharia courts and witnessed how a separate legal system, based on the Quran and Hadiths, has emerged in almost every town across the country - from London and Manchester to Wigan and Huddersfield.

She attended sessions where imams made judgments on everything from divorces to inheritance issues, all outside the purview of the state. How can a society function without a shared epistemology, wondered Machteld.

It is a question worth asking ourselves in Sweden. How can we, a country with 10 million inhabitants, expect to live in harmony if we do not share the same core values? The same fundamental principles?

The fact is, we cannot. No society can survive if we cannot agree on the most fundamental norms that should define it. But when, year after year, you import hundreds of thousands of people from cultures with vastly different norms, regulations, ideals, and values - is it then so surprising that subcultures and separate societies not only emerge but thrive?

Add to that an almost self-hating political elite, which tarnishes the values they are elected to uphold and sees “exotic” cultures as superior to the Swedish, and you have a perfect recipe for disaster.

How Did We Get Here?

We are not here because Sweden or Swedes, the least racist nation and people in the world, have been mean to immigrants. On the contrary - you have given us everything, without asking for anything in return. If a person says even the slightest critical thing about immigrants, they are forever labeled as a “racist”.

Jimmie Åkesson has never expressed anything racist that anyone can point to. He has never proposed racist policies, proposals, or conditions. But the media (especially Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest daily newspaper) has painted him as Hitler’s heir for over a decade.

The fact that SD branched out from the racist New Democracy is as relevant as the fact that Volkswagen was developed in the Third Reich - guilt by association.

Åkesson and SD are not unique here. There is no one in Sweden who is not labeled as a bigot if they do not fall in line with dogmatic leftist views that divide the world into victims (all immigrants, the working class, non-whites, non-heterosexuals, etc.) and oppressors (whites, primarily men, the working class also paradoxically, Swedes in general).

In a way, this is understandable; Sweden has long been portrayed as the world’s most humanitarian nation. It has led with compassion as the guiding star and principle, often at the expense of fundamental human rights (the government considers itself to have the right to decide what clothes private individuals can wear, for example).

But what happens when bureaucrats' perception of “The Greater Good” is never satisfied? When they always have to outdo their predecessors? When they are never held accountable for the outcomes of their policy decisions? When no one asks Thomas Sowell’s three critical questions:

• Compared to what?

• At what cost?

• What hard evidence do you have that what you propose will produce the desired results?

Swedish politicians have long been able to escape responsibility for the consequences of their actions. As long as they claimed to have good intentions, the outcomes have been secondary (if not irrelevant).

This, in itself, is nothing new or unique to Sweden. It is the inherent nature of bureaucrats to promise a lot, deliver little to nothing. Unlike private individuals or businesses who must budget with the limited capital they have, politicians do not spend their own money and can therefore do as they please without thinking about the consequences (the aforementioned Sowell has written dozens of books outlining this fact, including the excellent “Basic Economics”).

But where Sweden is unique is in this insatiable need to appear as a moral role model for others to follow. During the refugee crisis in 2015, there was only one other country competing with Sweden to take in the most foreign-born - Angela Merkel’s Germany.

The brilliant British author Douglas Murray says this is no coincidence. Germany, of course, has its dark history of xenophobia, and if they can somehow make amends for their historical sins today, they are grateful.

Naturally, Sweden also suffers from historical guilt. Not only did it not participate in the war against the Third Reich (it even allowed Hitler’s armies to use the country’s infrastructure), but more recently, the evil of racism has cast a shadow over our country.

The 1990s were, in many ways, a dark time for Sweden. The Laser Man “rampaged” the streets of Stockholm and Uppsala, shooting eleven dark-skinned/dark-haired people, one of whom died.

Then-Immigration Minister Birgit Friggebo, in an attempt to calm an agitated audience at a public meeting in Rinkeby to discuss racism in Sweden and specifically the Laser Man’s deeds, suggested that everyone sing “We Shall Overcome” together, in a segment that perfectly encapsulated Swedish naivety regarding these issues.

New Democracy, with Ian Wachtmeister and Bert Karlsson at the helm, made a lot of noise with their anti-immigrant policies in parliament around the same time, until they lost their parliamentary seats and almost all representation in municipalities and county councils in 1994, before going bankrupt in 2000.

In 1995, 14-year-old John Hron was murdered by four teenage neo-Nazis outside Kungälv in a case that shook the nation. One of the murderers received eight years in prison, another five. The other two received ten and four months in prison, respectively...

The same year, Gerard Gbeyo was murdered by 16-year-old Pierre Ljunggren, who earlier in the evening had boasted about how he wanted to “kill all n****rs”.

On May 28, 1999, police officers Olle Borén and Robert Karlström were shot dead by neo-Nazis Tony Olsson, Andreas Axelsson, and Jackie Arklöv in the aftermath of the Kisa bank robbery.

The list could go on, and there is no doubt that the 1990s Sweden included some of the most traumatic xenophobic incidents in the country’s modern history.

But what we easily forget is the resistance to these forces.

It has always struck me as odd that we let individual perpetrators and their grotesque crimes be more representative of our society than the massive uprising from the overwhelming majority that always follows directly after each attack.

We focus on the exception over the rule, the anomaly over the norm, the hysteria over the truth. When a neo-Nazi commits a murder, the ensuing dialogue is not focused on the perpetrator but on Sweden as a supposedly “racist society,” despite almost every Swede condemning the incident with every fiber of their being.

Sweden has a total horror of appearing as a racist country. Politicians who grew up in the 1990s are more sensitive to this fact than most, and in their desperation to avoid the accusation, they overcorrect.

They go to the other extreme - “We are so non-racist that we welcome everyone! See how anti-racist we are!”

The Lie of Integration

When you import hundreds of thousands of people, from markedly different cultures and values, often in conflict with the country’s own, in an extremely short time, without any plans for integration, what is the hope?

Is the idea that when an Islamist man sets foot in Sweden and breathes in Swedish air, he will give up his convictions about how women should be treated? About how non-Muslims have the same value as believers? About freedom of expression and freedom of religion?

Does anyone take this seriously?

Or is the plan that the Swede and Sweden must compromise? That the country’s core values and constitution, which have created the society that we immigrants voluntarily want to come to, now need to be reconsidered, compromised with, or even eroded?

And if it is the latter - do we have a say in it? We have not chosen this. We have not voted for this. We have not accepted that the principles and norms we have built and established for hundreds of years should be abolished over a social democratic mandate period. We have not even had a dialogue about this!

When politicians talk about this mythical “integration,” where is the evidence? Where in the world do we see it working? Does it work in Rinkeby? Angered, Biskopsgården, or Bergsjön in Gothenburg? Grønland in Oslo? De Baarsjes in Amsterdam? Luton or Tower of Hamlet in London? La Goutte d’Or in Paris? Nørrebro in Copenhagen?

Is there a single area in Europe with a majority Muslim population that is “integrated” today? What does this integration look like? Which model are we striving for? Which country can we point to and say “that is the model we want in Sweden”?

For years, the excuse has been that segregation is Sweden’s fault, not the newcomers'. They blame the government, politicians, society - everyone and everything except those who voluntarily choose not to integrate into Swedish society. As the incredibly overrated, unfunny “comedian” Özz Nûjen once said:

I did not come to Sweden to become Swedish, but to continue being Kurdish.

But what more can Sweden do? As immigrants to this country, we get everything one could ever ask for, without any demands on us. We get homes, education, healthcare, social benefits... What more does Sweden need to do for us to adapt?

In 2003, I found myself, to my shame, on the opposing side when author Dilsa Demirbag-Sten suggested introducing a “Driver’s License-like test for immigrants to become Swedish” on SVT Debatt. As a 22-year-old, I naturally thought I knew everything and argued that it was wrong and blamed segregation on everything I have explained above. Today, I wish I had been honest about the truth;

It is not Sweden that has failed the immigrants, but the immigrants who have failed Sweden.

No Solutions

I mention Thomas Sowell one last time here, and his insight into how there are no solutions, only *²trade-offs.

There is no initiative, no policy, no investigation that will lead to everyone winning. Whichever end of the rope we pull on, the other end must give way. The analogy Sowell uses here is about photography; if you widen the lens, you get much more of the surroundings in the picture, but less detailed focus on individual objects. On the other hand, if you focus the lens, you can get an incredibly detailed and rich image, but you miss the surroundings.

This is a fact that is true in photography as well as in politics, and it is something that no politician dares to admit in their endless promises of solutions.

Do we want a welfare state? Then we cannot have mass immigration. Do we want to appear welcoming to everyone who comes in? Then we cannot complain when a portion of those who come, regardless of how small, commit acts antithetical to our values. Do we want to fight crime and gang violence? Then we cannot simultaneously avoid the immigration issue.

How did it come about that SD went from 2.9% of the votes in 2008 to become Sweden’s second-largest party in 2022? Did Sweden undergo a metamorphosis where 17.5% of the voting population became racists in 14 years? Of course not, regardless of what Aftonbladet, SVT, or Nooshi Dagostar want to claim.

Swedes are still the world’s most welcoming, generous, and empathetic people.

But when our elites continue to say that the emperor has the finest garments when everyone sees that he is naked, sooner or later someone will shout that he is indeed naked. Accusations and allegations of “racism” have started to sound emptier and emptier with each gang rape, each car bombing, each fatal shooting.

Either we focus on protecting the victims or defending the perpetrators. And we can only do this if we acknowledge the simple fact that everyone can see: The majority of these are young men with immigrant backgrounds.

Farewell Sweden, My Beloved Country

Sweden was the envy of the world. I have lived in nearly ten countries and visited many more, and wherever you go, people admire you when you say you are from Sweden. The Land of Lagom is anything but.

I have heard how we got things right, how we found the perfect balance, how our inhabitants are among the happiest on the planet. How we care for our weakest and most vulnerable without stifling entrepreneurship and innovation. How we are innovative in research, entertainment, and education.

People want to talk about Zlatan, Robyn, and Spotify, about IKEA and Volvo, about the beautiful Swedish girls.

And I have to be the one to tell them that the impression they have of Sweden exists only in their imagination. The Sweden that once was, not long ago, is no longer.

It has been replaced by becoming the European champion in car bombings, shootings, and sexual offences. With clan wars and loan sharking.

About how “the world’s first feminist government,” led by Stefan Löfven and Isabella Lövin, not only appeased Islamofascist patriarchal states like Iran abroad but also domestically created one of the worst countries in Europe to be a woman in.

I have to tell them how murderers have received pathetically lenient prison sentences as long as they are under 18, about bulk discounts that only incentivise more crimes.

And when they ask me why, I can only say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Sweden my family and I came to as refugees almost 35 years ago no longer exists. The country that we, along with tens of thousands of other immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Bosnia, Albania, Nigeria, and Chile, embraced as our own is now gone.

It is not because it organically grew into something else, but because bureaucrats who were elected to uphold it decided instead to transform it. They thought they knew better than the common man and shame on you if you didn’t agree, you racist.

Fall in line or forever be shunned.

Parenthesis

Naturally, I will be accused of racism, self-hatred, bootlicking, and so on. Naturally, I will be condemned for not including the classic clichés “not all immigrants / only a minority / many Swedes commit crimes too.” I will be tainted with the invented term “Islamophobe” and called a traitor.

I will be challenged for not condemning the West’s actions in the Middle East, for not talking about how we are apparently the reason why so many “flee” their home countries and come to Sweden (the majority do not flee but come here voluntarily as economic migrants).

I will be condemned for thinking I have grown up so much better than everyone else, and for generalising.

Let me save my prosecutors some time:

None of that has anything to do with the matter at hand. Either what I have written is true, or it is not.

1. In previous version, I had mistakenly written “In 1992, Palo Alto, California, had the highest murder rate in the country relative to its population.” This was supposed to be East Palo Alto.

2. In previous version, I had written “compromise” - the accurate quote from Thomas Sowell is “trade off”