Sweden’s violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image

https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-bombings-grenade-attacks-violent-reality-undoing-peaceful-self-image-law-and-order/

by kushti • 8 years ago

43 53 8 years ago

politico.eu

Zolomon• 8 years ago

This does not reflect at all with my own experience living in both south of Sweden and in Stockholm. Feels like misinformation in order to spread FUD about Sweden.

refurb3• 8 years ago

Sixteen grenade (grenade!) attacks in 2017. Three more this year. In a country of just under 10M.

There is even its own Wikipedia page on it! [1] I wouldn't say that's FUD.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...

alkonaut4• 8 years ago

the guns criminals use are from the war in jugoslavia. At some point someone smuggled a crate of grenades to Sweden. The rest is history. You might argue that had “normal” guns been easier to aquire, gangsters wouldn’t have to use weapons of war, at least not that stupid weapons (because hand grenades have very very little practical use to a criminal other than sending a message). I don’t buy the idea that weapons should be easier to aquire - so I’d wish for stricter border control for weapons smuggling (there is effectively none within the EU).

jeffreyrogers2• 8 years ago

This Economist article raises similar points https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21738389-young-men-kal...

danielvf2• 8 years ago

I hear people talk about how they would never move to the US because of how violent it is. And yet the reality of living in the US middle class is that violence almost never affects you or the areas you frequent. Most shootings in the US are between criminals, and happen in high crime areas that are geographically small in comparison to the entire country.

I'm guessing this is similar in Sweden. It sounds like specific areas have increasing violence, and that this looks even worse, given the country's historical low rates of violence.

ropeadopepope2• 8 years ago

I'm guessing this is similar in Sweden. It sounds like specific areas have increasing violence, and that this looks even worse, given the country's historical low rates of violence.

No, Swedish violence has been accelerating past what even Americans would consider acceptable. Unless there's been a spat of grenade attacks in the US that the media hasn't been covering.

http://www.informationliberation.com/files/grenade-attacks-s...

PS: That number is even higher for 2017 and 2018.

apropostrophe• 8 years ago

It's an interesting genre, and one that the author's sadly been in for a while now. This is just the latest international example. On last week's Kvartal podcast (Veckopanelen) she tried to coax an outspoken police officer panelist into warning of increased violence from failed asylum seekers. He disagreed, and harrumphed and resorted to talking about two famously brutal cases instead. We'll likely be seeing more instances of this article.

Melchizedek• 8 years ago

I am Swedish. Everything in this story is true.

What "experience"? Sweden is segregated -- I'm pretty sure you didn't spend a lot of time in the no-go zones at night.

So you think Paulina Neuding, a well known Swedish journalist, writing for a respected publication, simply likes to spread FUD for no apparent reason? That's your theory?

bobthechef• 8 years ago

Is the Swedish media being silent about these things, and hence why the other Swedes here are denying these things?

jeffreyrogers2• 8 years ago

I'm hesitant to comment on this because I expect to have my viewpoints be misrepresented as racist, but it seems difficult to integrate immigrants into society who fundamentally oppose core principles of progressive, western democracies.

systems• 8 years ago

we need to start dropping the term western when describing certain democratic model or ideals

i am not denying, or trying to take away credit, that some western countries adopted those ideals first

but not all the west agrees that those ideals are, which makes is hard to exactly identify what one is referring to when the term western is used

also, it gives ownership of those ideals to specifics countries and geographic locations, which adds a needless aspect of nationalism to some ideals that should not be linked to nationalism

canoebuilder4• 8 years ago

We need to stop calling Chinese food, Chinese, it's just food, man... Stop all the 'Appropriation' & 'Racism' & 'Nationalism' ™

I want the world to be more like the propaganda i was force fed throughout all my 'education,' it's draggin' me down man.

Also, no more capitalization or punctuation. Damn the consequences!

i mean

damn the consequences

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

it seems difficult to integrate immigrants into society who fundamentally oppose core principles of progressive, western democracies.

It's difficult, but spanning as great a gulf in societal integration has been done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr9GRgRw_M

bassman9000• 8 years ago

_as great a gulf in societal integration_

It doesn't seem that cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants were that big. Economic ones, true. But those two big branches were one for 1500 years. I may be missing something here.

aphextron• 8 years ago

The Nordic states have been some of the biggest winners in the world from globalization over the past 30 years. They've been safely protected by NATO, and free to sell their oil to anyone in the world. Now the world comes knocking and you want to cry foul? Either accept the rough and tumble, multicultural, imperfect world that we live in with open arms as we have in the US, or wall yourself off and don't expect any of the benefits.

nabc45• 8 years ago

I don’t understand why participating in global trade and accepting thousands of immigrants who oppose the principles of your society have to go hand to hand.

amag2• 8 years ago

free to sell their oil

Sweden doesn't have any oil to sell. We're also not crying foul about the increase in shootings as if the rest of the world is to blame. There is definitely a problem here in regards to the shootings, but it's also election year and some parties have a bigger interest than others in portraying Sweden as a lawless country.

ique• 8 years ago

Hahaha really HN? As a Swede this is so ridiculous, I don't think the author has any idea what they're talking about and have done no fact-checking at all. They even contradict themselves.

drop in homicides has been, however, far smaller in Sweden than in neighboring countries

So there's been a drop in homicides

Shootings in the country have become so common

But shootings have _become_ so common? So they're just missing more or what?

What a ridiculous article, I guess HN is the new Fox news.

specializeded• 8 years ago

HN is a link aggregator and this link will probably be flagged off the front page in less than ten minutes, I’d direct ire at Politico in this case.

edit less than 1 minute apparently!

dogma11387• 8 years ago

Politico, Economist, The Spectstor all have simmilar articles with the same statistics either they are all “fake news” or something is going on.

dogma11387• 8 years ago

306 shootings in 2017 that seems quite a lot compared to W.EU.

https://www.thelocal.se/20171222/in-figures-2017s-shootings-...

danielvf2• 8 years ago

A previous decrease in homicides since the 90's. Shootings increasing the last few years. Not contradictory at all.

psychometry• 8 years ago

Is Sweden's supposed failure to integrate migrants into society really a failure in a historical context? I would guess that it would take at least a generation to see the fruits of initiatives to encourage integration. Migrants are fleeing a dysfunctional and oppressive ISIS regime, but even these oppressed people harbor views that many Westerners consider regressive and authoritarian. How do you even approach this problem?

alkonaut4• 8 years ago

I think one just accepts that people’s views change slowly or not at all. So you accept that change is slow, some times only generational.

IanDrake• 8 years ago

Is it a problem worth solving?

A native Swede bigot thinks “I hate all non-straight people.” and a normal Swede thinks “I really wish we could get rid of bigots like that dude. Too bad we can’t deport jerks.”

An immigrant thinks the same thing as the bigot and the same normal Swede thinks “We need to help these people, how do we take in more of them?”

Seems foolish to me. Being oppressed in their homeland doesn’t make them intrinsically “good” people.

canoebuilder4• 8 years ago

I would guess that it would take at least a generation to see the fruits of initiatives to encourage integration.

We are decades into this horrible experiment gone awry in much of western Europe. The second and third generations are integrating to a lesser extent than their parents in part due to rising numbers of their compatriots and their inherently anti-integration ideology. Much of the Islamic violence is carried out by second and third generations.

There are about 3 million Turks in Germany stemming from a Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program starting in the 50s and 60s, being "guest workers," the idea was they would return to Turkey, most never did and today still live in their own neighborhoods and enclaves largely separate from the rest of Germany.

Regarding this history and other problems, Angela Merkel herself said what everyone can see, https://www.google.com/search?q=merkel+multiculturalism+fail...

Micoloth• 8 years ago

TRUMP WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG

..or was he?

No seriously tho, at this point I legit can't understand anymore if this is fake news or not. Crime rate is not supposed to be subjective is it?

Good job us!

maxerickson3• 8 years ago

Well, the homicide rate in Sweden is considerably lower than the rate in the US.

So I guess you have to start by deciding what Trump meant to begin with. Did he mean that Sweden was crazy for doing something that made their rate of homicide decrease more slowly than similar neighboring countries, or was he just fear mongering by shouting about something that had been in the media?

canoebuilder4• 8 years ago

Crime rate is not supposed to be subjective is it?

Welcome to clown world.

https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+cover+up

https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+white+pixelation

mpweiher• 8 years ago

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/polisen-43-personer-skots...

43 people were shot in Sweden in 2017, in a country of almost 10 million.

That's 0.43 / 100K.

The US gun homicide rate in 2016 was 4.62 / 100K.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

Chicago had 650 homicides in 2017, down from 762 in 2016, with a population of 2.7 million.

http://www.blacknews.com/news/chicago-sees-drop-in-violence-...

Just to put things into perspective.

dogma11387• 8 years ago

That’s 43 (41) dead, there have been 135 injured and 41 dead with 306 shooting incidents according to https://www.thelocal.se/20171222/in-figures-2017s-shootings-...

While this isn’t “impressive” by US standards it is an oddity by Western European ones.

refurb3• 8 years ago

Every western country looks better than the US when it comes to gun violence. Not sure your stats get you that far.

It's obvious there is a increasing crime problem in Sweden.

supreme_sublime• 8 years ago

Don't you think looking at only gun homicide is a bit restrictive? Their violent crime rate is definitely going up[0], which is strange because afaik most violent crime around the world is going down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#/media/File:Sw...

Yetanfou2• 8 years ago

Not only that, the violence is largely concentrated in a number of areas where the homicide rate is markedly higher. Both the number of these areas as well as their size are increasing, as does the intensity of the violence.

Possibly the biggest problem in Sweden is that it is still taboo to discuss the facts around this increased crime rate, even though those facts are well known and have been confirmed many times. As long as this taboo persists it will be impossible for Sweden to do anything about these problems as any action which goes counter the narrative of those who prefer to look away will be branded: racist, xenophobe, islamophobe, 'against our ethical foundation'[1], hostile to strangers ('främlingsfientligt').

Good examples of this can be seen in the recent spat at KTH (a technical university) where a student was about to be sacked because he'd made a document summarising the results of different studies on the subject of the relationship between rising crime and the number of immigrants from the Middle-East and Africa. The document itself did nothing more than summarise the results of these studies but this was deemed unacceptable because it was said to violate the institute's 'värdegrund'[1]. KTH directly violated the Swedish constitution which guarantees freedom of expression [2] but it was only when the subject was taken up in several alternative media that KTH backed down. Regular Swedish media did not publish anything on this subject until much later.

A similar case just surfaced where a school rector actually reported some students to the security police (SÄPO) and regular police for publishing a similar document, again just a summary of conclusions of official reports [3]. It is highly unlikely that the police will do anything, let alone the security police but the mere fact that publishing statistics can be ground for removal from an institution or reporting to the authorities shows how deep the taboo goes in certain areas.

[1] The Swedish concept of 'värdegrund' and 'allas lika värde', a form of non-religious dogma which trumps law and common sense in that violating it directly raises a black flag. It can be summed up as 'moral relativism'.

[2] http://academicrightswatch.se/?p=3226

[3] http://www.friatider.se/gymnasieungdomar-skrev-faktablad-om-...

hedwall• 8 years ago

You're referencing two far right extremist sites as source...

alkonaut4• 8 years ago

The title is a bit misleading: Shootings are up but violent crime is down. Basically, an influx of guns it would seem. We used to have barely any in circulation, but obviously they will be smuggled to where they collect the highest price (most illegal weapons are Balkan war arms as I understand it).

angel_j• 8 years ago

Good for them! They are handling their problems without going crazy reactionary, and declaring war on immigrants, the poor, drugs, etc.

That would be in line with their "Swedish Model". The article reads like a "tattle tale", as if they are trying to hide explosions! A grenade in an US police station would shake the wasp's nest all the way to the national guard.

It's precisely that "Western Democracies" crony ideology that demands the media and government react with pitch forks and blame.

refurb3• 8 years ago

Considering the grenade attacks have been going on for years, I'd say they aren't handling the problems at all.

Simulacra• 8 years ago

This seems awfully skewed. Not sure it belongs here

uoaei• 8 years ago

I was born in the US, moved to Sweden last year. I live in an area of the country that seems to have been designated as a place to put migrants, and it shows.

People have different cultural expectations, and act accordingly. It's no surprise that meshing the two viewpoints is difficult. But the biggest disservice, IMO, is segregating them into their own communities. Here there is no incentive to integrate, and life continues as before--in some ways opposed to the ideals that Sweden tries to set forth.

You are what you surround yourself with. Sweden is far from multicultural, and prefers (well, kind of railroaded itself into) playing the "live and let live" card a little too ideologically without considering the long-term impacts. The one that is the most apparent to me is the way housing is handled, and how it affects not only migrants but any immigrant coming here for any purpose.

Sweden’s violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image

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