We have become accustomed to Sweden's portrayal as a social nirvana where high taxes are willingly paid to support a permanent welfare class, where social ethics are proudly loose, where the meatballs are perfect, and socialism has achieved its first paradise on earth. (We in New Zealand recall that the dominant feminist and homosexual wings of the Clark Labour Government openly modelled their view of the future of New Zealand upon Sweden and have sought to re-craft New Zealand into Sweden's image.)
Recently we came across a couple of sources which call the Shangri-La image of Sweden's bureaucratic libertinism into question. The first of these was a recent articlein the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled A Very, Very Dark Side. Apparently Sweden has a very sinister underworld indeed--but ironically it is not being exposed by the police or government actions, but by books of fiction, film and television crime shows. The film currently playing in New Zealand, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, based on the Amazon Best Seller book by the late Stieg Larsson is an example of this new genre. Larsson wrote three volumes in the series, called the Millennium Trilogy, before a fatal heart attack. Why is his work significant? It attacks the Shangri-La stereotype of Sweden.
Another example is the Wallander series by Henning Mankell, which has now been adapted into a BBC series.
Larsson, as with . . . Mankell, spends much of the time pulling apart the stereotype of happy-ever-after, perfectly educated, socially democratic and joyfully tolerant Swedes enjoying wild sex lives and perfectly cooked meatballs. The Millenniumtrilogy tracks Blomkvist and Salander's attempts to uncover murders by rich neo-fascist families as well as state-sanctioned sexual abuse, paedophilia and rape.
Larsson was a campaigning anti-Nazi journalist. Mankell was a well-established mainstream author before he created Wallander. He did so to investigate paedophile rings at the heart of Sweden's security services and expose public and institutionalised racism.
Wallander and Blomkvist wade through some of the extremely unpleasant undercurrents beneath Sweden's tranquil social order. In Larsson's and Mankell's stories, both characters encounter neo-Nazis and corrupt agents of SAPO, the Swedish security and intelligence service. In their version of Sweden, racism is rife, violence against women is commonplace and the trafficking of children for sex is facilitated by highly placed lawyers and doctors.
But the begged question is how close to reality these works of fiction are. When it comes to Sweden's carefully coiffured image of socialist respectability it appears to be more a case of the elderly Doctor Cameron's advice to tyro Doctor Finlay: "Things are not always what they seem, Dr Finlay."
In 2007 the US State Department recorded 6192 cases of child abuse in Sweden by November of that year. It also reported homophobic crime was on the rise, and tens of thousands of rapes and domestic violence incidents in a population of just 9 million.
A report from the group Global Monitoring in 2006 on the commercial sexual exploitation of children found systemic faults in Sweden, including allowing child pornography to be viewed, although not downloaded, and failing to care properly for children caught up in sex trafficking.
We suspect that once the Shangri-La propaganda veil is torn off, ordinary Swedes will find they have been duped by the powerful for decades. The failing of ordinary Swedes is that they have been willingly and complicity duped by their government and its all pervasive bureaucracy. It is possible that these recent crime thrillers might startle them out of the soporific somnambulism.
The second article will look at how the Swedish apparatchik has chillingly silenced the Church.
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