The Economist magazine has bestowed on Sweden the title of world’s most democratic country. Bruce Bawer, author of the penetrating work While Europe Slept, disagrees, calling the country “breathtakingly undemocratic.” He says it is a country…
…in which the people are fed by their political, press, and intellectual establishment an unvarying diet of propaganda promoting the socialist welfare state, demonizing Israel [and America], and whitewashing Islam.
By way of example, Bawer cites Jonathan Friedman, a New Yorker who teaches social anthropology at the University of Lund, on the subject of immigration. There can be no public debate on the matter, Friedman asserts, because Sweden’s “political class,” controls public debate and simply suppresses the topic. Bawer illustrates:
Recently, the city of Stockholm carried out a survey of ninth-grade boys in the predominantly Muslim suburb of Rinkeby. The survey showed that in the last year, 17% of the boys had forced someone to have sex, 31% had hurt someone so badly that the victim required medical care, and 24% had committed burglary or broken into a car. Sensational statistics — but in all of Sweden, they appear to have been published only in a daily newssheet that is distributed free on the subways.
Bawer describes the Swedish elites’ manipulation of public opinion as “soft totalitarianism.” Can such trends be reversed in Europe? Or will they congeal into unmitigated totalitarianism?
The European public needs to hash out these dangerous developments. But sadly, as Bawer concludes, it is not a discussion likely to be had in Sweden.