Vital Importance of Reaching "Herd Immunity"

Sweden Bucked Conventional Wisdom

Other Countries Are Following


By John Fund & Joel Hay
National Review Online


No lockdown, no shuttered businesses or schools, no stay-at-home. And no disaster, either.
Spring is in the air, and it is increasingly found in the confident step of the people of Sweden.

With a death rate significantly lower than that of France, Spain, the U.K., Belgium, Italy, and other European Union countries, Swedes can enjoy the spring without panic or fears of reigniting a new epidemic as they go about their day in a largely normal fashion.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s Emergencies Program, says: “I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model — if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns.”  The Swedish ambassador to the U.S., Karin Ulrika Olofsdotter, says: “We could reach herd immunity in the capital” of Stockholm as early as sometime in May. That would dramatically limit spread of the virus.

A month ago, we first wrote about Sweden’s approach, which we said “relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown.”

A fortunate constellation of circumstances ensured that Dr. Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist of Sweden, was in charge of that country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the misgivings of many Swedish politicians and foreign observers. Tegnell heroically bucked the conventional wisdom of every other nation and carefully examined the insubstantial evidence that social-isolation controls would help reduce COVID-19 deaths over the full course of the virus.

As Tegnell told NPR in early April: “I’m not sure that there is a scientific consensus on, really, about anything when it comes to this new coronavirus, basically because we don’t have much evidence for any kind of measures we are taking.”

Well, a month later we now know more.

Something Rotten in Scandinavia

Paradise Lost

For many long years the New Zealand Labour Party has been fascinated with Scandinavia.  The previous Labour politician, Helen Clark--Prime Minister for three parliamentary terms--was besotted with an ambition to make New Zealand more like Scandinavia.  One did not need to be a genius to understand the attraction: in Scandinavia the State provided all--at least all that was needed to live a comfortable life.  Clark and others wanted New Zealand to be remoulded into being the Scandinavia of the South Pacific.

One can understand the Left's fascination and enthusiasm for the Nordic utopia.  Tony Judt, in his magisterial Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage/Random House, 2010) summarizes the attraction of Scandinavia as it was in the 1970's:

To many foreign observers and most Scandinavians the results appeared to speak for themselves. . . . Scandinavians lived longer, healthier lives than most other people in the world (something that would have amazed the isolated, impoverished Nordic peasantry of three generations before.)  The provision of educational, welfare, medical, insurance, retirement and leisure services and facilities was unequalled. . . . By the mid-1960's, Europe's "frozen north" had acquired near-mythic status: the Scandinavian Social Democratic model might not be replicated readily elsewhere, but it was universally admired and widely envied.  [Judt, p.367.]

And so it was that the Left in New Zealand turned away from a slavish adulation of communism to the kind, gentle, non-authoritarian, inclusive democratic paradise of Scandinavia.  No labour camps in sight.  Socialism with a kind, human face.  What was there not to like?

But something was not right.

Nothing to See Here; Move Along

Sweden: Men of Migrant Families Responsible for 90% of Gun Violence

Virginia Hale
BreitbartLondon

Almost all murders and attempted murders in Sweden using firearms are carried out by people with foreign backgrounds, according to a new study.

According to research carried out by Dagens Nyheter, 90 out of the 100 offenders and suspected offenders examined by the liberal daily newspaper have at least one foreign-born parent, the vast majority having roots in the Middle East and North Africa.

In around half of the cases, the men were born in Sweden whilst others migrated to the country at a young age. The study looked at 53 convicted and 47 suspected perpetrators involved in shootings in public places which have taken place since 2013.  “The fact is that street gangs, and violence are phenomena that occur in some areas, and most of the people who live in these areas are of foreign descent,” said Amir Rostani, a sociologist at Stockholm University.

Around 80 per cent of the men have roots in the Middle East and North Africa, with offenders having roots in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Somalia, and Eritrea.  “This is well in line with a study I previously conducted, on members of criminal networks,” Amir Rostami told Dagens Nyheter.

Myopic Folly On A Grand Scale

Sweden: An Example of How Not to Handle Immigration

We’ve taken in far too many people and we’re letting them down badly – especially the children

Tove Lifvendahl
The Spectator


 

For a British boy to be killed by a grenade attack anywhere is appalling, but for it to happen in a suburb of Gothenburg should shatter a few illusions about Sweden. Last week’s murder of eight-year-old Yuusuf Warsame fits a pattern that Swedes have come slowly to recognise over the years. He was from Birmingham, visiting relatives, and was caught up in what Swedish police believe is a gang war within the Somali community. Last year, a four-year-old girl was killed by a car bomb outside Gothenburg, another apparent victim of gang violence.

For years, Sweden has regarded itself as a ‘humanitarian superpower’ — making its mark on the world not by fighting wars but by offering shelter to war’s victims. Refugees have arrived here in extraordinary numbers. Over the past 15 years, some 650,000 asylum-seekers made their way to Sweden. Of the 163,000 who arrived last year, 32,000 were granted asylum. Sweden accepts more refugees in proportion to size of population than any other nation in the developed world — when it comes to offering shelter, no one does it better. But when it comes to integrating those we take in (or finding the extra housing, schools and healthcare needed for them), we don’t do so well.

It may be news to the rest of the world, but gang warfare has been a feature of our country for years now.

Dialogue of the Deaf

A Swedish Gaffe That Wasn’t 

The world guffawed when it thought Donald Trump was hallucinating about Sweden. But he wasn’t really wrong.

By Jonathan S. Tobin
National Review Online

Late-night television hosts got another gift from President Trump over the weekend, but it turns out the incident wasn’t so much comedy gold as it was an illustration of everything that is wrong about the colloquy between Trump and his critics on immigration and refugees.

On Monday evening, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers made a meal out of the latest Donald Trump gaffe. Trump was lambasted for saying that there had been a terror attack in Sweden on Friday night. Since there had been no such attack, it prompted the usual avalanche of mockery in the president’s direction. But while Trump’s vague language and willingness to fabricate facts to suit his talking points often justifies the brickbats thrown in his way, in this case there were two problems with the hilarity: Trump didn’t actually claim there had been a terror attack, and the facts about Sweden actually do back up his claim about a surge in violence by Muslim immigrants in Europe.

During the course of his campaign-style rally in South Carolina on Saturday, Trump said:

We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris.

Given the context, in which he appeared to be referencing violence in Belgium, France, and Germany, it sounded as if Trump was saying there had been an attack the previous evening in Sweden. Except he wasn’t.

Serving the Paymaster

The Swedish Church As Ministry for State Propaganda

The church in Sweden is funded by the State.  It comes as no surprise then, that as the years have passed, the church has morphed into a motley collection of false prophets, dancing dervishes to please Herod.  Never bite the hand that feeds, says the pragmatic realist.  

Sweden has evolved to where it believes multiculturalism is the highest of all humanist values.  It is the secular kingdom of god.  Yes, yes, yes chant the false prophets.  The following report was written by Nima Gholam Ali Pour for the Gatestone Institute:

After a French priest, Jacques Hamel, was murdered by ISIS sympathizers in Rouen, France, on July 26, 2016, an initiative started in Sweden where Swedish Christians took "selfies" with a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians. The initiative, called "Mitt kors"("My cross"), was started by three priests from the Church of Sweden.

The Church of Sweden, however, criticized it. Gunnar Sjöberg, Head of Communications for the Church of Sweden, wrote on his Facebook page:  "I really do not know about that. This thing about Christians suddenly wearing a cross as a sign for or against something. It is actually nothing new, but the call seems seditious and un-Christian in the conflicts that already exist."

So now, according to a senior official in the Church of Sweden, the call to wear a cross to show solidarity with persecuted Christians is "un-Christian".

Androgynous Drones: Sweden's Inhumanity to Man, Part II

Going Solo

In the nineteen sixties, the Swedish regime decided that it would move rapidly to create the New Model Man, Sweden style.  It sought to achieve a rebuilding of society upon Marxist lines, without resorting to Mao's dictum that power grows out of the barrel of a gun.  Its new society was to be accomplished indirectly, by making each citizen depend more and more on the State and its regimes.

One critical objective was to deconstruct and dismantle the institution of the family.  In this grand endeavour, Sweden's regime has been remarkably successful.  The regime's first target was the push women into the workforce--a goal which was achieved by taxation policies that made it far more profitable to have women leave homes and enter the work force.  The regime also punished employers who would not co-operate in meeting hiring quotas for females by predatory fines.  Today, 91 percent of Swedish women between 25 and 54 are employed in the work force.  Behold the New Model Androgynous Humanity.

The Swedish state opened up an additional front.  It systematically began to remove any special distinction or status attached to marriage and family.  The objective was to make marriage and family a minority lifestyle--a vestige of a former faded primitive time.

Androgynous Drones: Sweden's Inhumanity to Man, Part I

Forced Labour By Whip and Bribe

Sweden is a magnet for rape and rapists.  Why?  Because it is a society where the family has been systematically weakened and even destroyed by purposeful design.  By intent, the State has replaced the family.  All sorts of unintended, disastrous consequences have followed and will follow.  One is that Sweden has the highest rate of rape in Europe--in fact, the highest rate of all Western nations.

Whilst the nation had toyed with the ideas of achieving a similar destruction of the family as was occurring in Soviet Russia, Sweden did not get serious until the 1960's.  The objective was to create a truly Marxist society where both men and women were measured and treated primarily as economic entities, as units of labour.  This meant that women needed to get out of the home and away from caring for children, and needed to be put to work in paid employment.  This, in turn, could only be accomplished by policies which deconstructed the family.  Angelo Codevilla takes up the story:

The centrepiece of the government's effort was to push and pull women out of the home into the labor market.  The push came from Sweden's steeply progressive income tax.

Sweden Traverses the Arc

Devolution Before Our Eyes

We were reading a piece on Sweden recently that was entitled, "Sweden Lowers Intelligence Requirement For New Police Officers".  Hardly a promising outlook for Sweden, one would have thought.  However, the body of the article contained some information far more compelling--it offered an explanation as to why Sweden is needing more police officers and so has been considering lowering the entrance requirements..

In the forty years since the Swedish government decided to turn Sweden into a multicultural society, the rate of violent crime, and rape in particular, has soared to unprecedented levels. According to the Gatestone Institute, Sweden is now number two on the global list of rape by country, hitting 66.5 rapes per 100,000 people in 2012, second only to the tiny south African nation of Lesotho.

In 2014, some 6,620 rapes were reported in Sweden, up from 421 reported to the police in 1975, an increase of 1,472 per cent. Violent crime meanwhile has risen by 300 per cent in the same period. [Breitbart London]

If you are wondering which country sits at the top of the list of countries with a rape culture, to which Sweden has become a fast-following second, it is Lesotho, the land-locked state within South Africa.

The politically correct frame adorning most commentary upon Sweden is that it has achieved socialist paradise.  It is offered as a model of Progressivism, a blueprint for how gradualist, Fabian socialism can achieve the best outcomes possible for human society.   Socially liberal in almost all human lusts, wants, and desires, Sweden is also economically prosperous in the sense that one can live quite comfortably without working a day in one's life--so generous are the welfare transfer payments.  There appears to  be little lacking.

Yet, crime is rising.  Rape in particular.

See No Evil, Hear No Evil

Sweden's Somnolence

Oliver Lane
Breitbart London

The world recoiled in horror in January after a young woman who worked in a ‘unaccompanied minor’ refugee centre was murdered by one of her charges, but it has now been revealed the killer shouldn’t have been in the children’s centre at all, as he lied about his age.

Twenty-two year old Alexandra Mezher was rushed to hospital in late January after being repeatedly stabbed. She had been a worker at a migrant centre in Mölndal, Sweden caring for unaccompanied minors aged between 14 and 17 years old and was killed by one of the residents there, Somali-born Youssaf Khaliif Nuur.

There were some doubts of the man’s true identity from very early on in investigations, including over his age which seemed remarkably young for the bearded, six foot man.

Letter From the UK (About Swedish Gun Crime)

Gun Crime in Just One Swedish City Higher Than All Nordic Nations Combined

By Oliver Lane
BreitbartLondon

As neighbouring Norway becomes so safe police are preparing to hand in their firearms, Sweden is riding on the crest of a migrant gun crime wave fuelled by bloody gang wars.

Not only is gun crime in Sweden higher than all other Nordic nations combined, but such violence in just one city is enough alone to beat Sweden’s neighbours. Third largest city Malmö, in Sweden’s south-west, and just a ten minute train ride from Danish capital Copenhagen over the border, has recorded 63 people shot in the past five years.

In next-door Copenhagen, the number is 30. In Oslo and Helsinki, the capitals of Norway and Finland respectively, just ten people have been shot in the past five years each. Already multicultural paradise Malmö is higher than these three capitals combined, but this number is dwarfed in turn by gang warfare trouble city Gothenburg, where 109 people have been shot.

In Sweden’s own capital Stockholm, 189 people have been shot in the same time frame, reports AftonBladet.

The latest of these attacks was on Saturday, as a 37-year-old man was killed in a Southern Stockholm suburb. Shot 14 times in the chest and back, the Expressen reports he had previous convictions for drug dealing. This shooting came less than 24-hours after a 26-year-old man was shot to death in Gothenburg, western-Sweden while he played hockey on a school field. A sub-machine gun, pistol, and hand grenade were later found discarded nearby.

Tolerance Has Its Limits

Some Murders are More Acceptable Than Others

Sweden has been called the most peaceful country in Europe. It has been a nation which celebrates tolerance, albeit in a secular humanist form.  Anything and everything goes, as long as one does not disturb the peace.  Humanitarianism--which is much celebrated in a self-satisfied manner--proclaims that nothing human is foreign or intrinsically bad.  The adage, "I am the master of all things, and nothing human is foreign to me" is the credo of its humanitarian society.  Sweden has sought to live out these beliefs consistently in its civil and national government.

One has always suspected that the official blurb did not reflect reality.  Recently, the suspicion has hardened into evidential certainty.  Sweden is under attack from external, yet imported, forces.  It is crumbling from within because effete smugness and self-satisfaction does not cope well with violent external threats.  For the Swedes, the reason violence is rising lies with the failure of Swedish society.

Migrant, imported violence is on the rise.  The Swedes feel guilty about it.  Sweden is to blame.  Smugness has morphed into guilt.  At the same time, violence against migrants is also rising.  Once again, Sweden is racked with guilt.  This from Oliver Lane, writing for Breitbart London:

Islamic Jihad At Work in Sweden

‘Convert Or Die’ – Chilling Message To Christian Fast Food Shop Owners

Oliver Lane
Breitbart London

A spate of Islamist graffiti in the multiculturalist Swedish city Gothenburg has been compared to the harassment of the Jewish community in Germany in the 1930s, with Christian business owners being told to “convert or die”.

The threats are yet another conflict imported to Europe from the Levant, as the Assyrian Christian Asmar family awoke to find their pizza parlour had been daubed with threats in red paint. Their experience is becoming increasingly common in the city, as legitimate asylum seekers fleeing persecution find it has followed them to Northern Europe, thanks to Sweden’s open door immigration policy.

‘Convert Or Die!’ / Syrian Academic Foundation

The Goteborgs-Posten records the remarks of the local Assyrian association’s president: “Imagine yourself having fled from persecution in a country and then to find yourself staying next door to ISIS sympathizers here in Sweden. It is everyday life for many people”.

Sweden's Rabid Abortionism

Abortion Opponents Compared to Jihadists

The Observatory

 

February 2015: Mona Sahlin's, the national coordinator against violent extremism at the Swedish Ministry of Justice, stated during a panel discussion on religion and democracy that the midwife Ellinor Grimmark, a Christian who refuses to participate in abortion, was an "extreme religious practitioner who is fighting in a similar way as do the people fighting for the Islamic state.”

Source:
www.varldenidag.se/nyhet/2015/02/09/Sahlin-jamstallde-jihadister-med-abortmotstandare
www.citizengo.org/de/19049-christen-mit-gewissen-sind-keine-djihadisten

The Dark Underworld of Sweden--Part II

The Emasculation of the Church of Sweden

We posted recently on the unofficial dark underworld of Sweden. Whilst this country has for decades triumphalistically paraded itself as a democratic socialist paradise, it would seem that the reality is far from the image.

Recent works of fiction (by Swedes) portray Sweden as living a double life: on the surface there is the Sweden most Swedes believe exists--the country of their experience. Beneath, there is the Sweden of criminal conspiracies run by the powerful and wealthy, with the complicity of the authorities. Ordinary Swedes, it would seem, prefer not to look.

Another facet of the Sweden's deformation is what has happened to the Church within its boundaries. It is a cautionary tale. The national church in Sweden, the Church of Sweden, since the time of the Reformation, has been state-established: its clergy were paid by the government, and the church was supported by taxation. This anti-biblical construct has meant that in principle the Swedish national church, since the time of the Reformation, has been in thrall to the state.

But in 2000, the Swedish government cut its ties with the national church. No longer would the state fund the clergy. Membership "dues" are still collected through the tax system, but it is up to the church to continue to attract members. Now, on the surface, this might have seemed a great boon to the Church of Sweden--since the former national church would now need to depend upon its own resources, which might have produced a revival of energy and commitment. It would be reasonable to expect that a return to a more biblical pattern of church government might have resulted in a spiritual revival amongst the flock.

Alas, this has not worked out. Why? The Swedish Social Democratic government feared an independent church. The apparatchiks feared that with the separation of the national church from state government, the more active church members (that is, true believers) would gain greater influence in the church. Thus, the government has moved to ensure that political parties still retain control of the church.

Parish councils have not been and are not elected simply by churchgoing people. The political parties mobilize voters and ensure that church government is not controlled by worshipers (sic) within the church. Many parish council members attend church rarely, if at all. Some consider themselves atheists or agnostics. Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism, (Wheaton, Crossway, 2009), p. 144.

The Swedish state cannot tolerate dissent; consequently, it has retained soft--but extremely effective secular control over the Church of Sweden. As Baker narrates:

It appears that the church will be forced to live or die as a pale mirror of dominant attitudes and mores. The state secularizers prefer a church under their control to a free one and are loathe to see it change. . . . Some pastors have already drawn the obvious conclusion and have left the church. Anders Lindstrom, the former vicar of Munkedal and a fourth-generation Lutheran pastor, believes the modern period has left the church "unreservedly" handed over to the political parties. When he showed a pro-life video to teenagers at his church's youth meetings, he was attacked by the media and by the community's church politicians. Ultimately, he concluded the Church of Sweden can "no longer be called a Christian church" and resigned his pastorate. (Baker, p.145)

The Church of Sweden was little more than the government's Department of God whilst it was the established church. Once it was severed from the State, the Swedish apparatchiks and power elites moved swiftly to ensure that the Church of Sweden remained under their control as an organ of state-propagated social democracy (aka, socialism).

The Church in Sweden will only prosper when the true believers within the moribund and "turned" Church of Sweden depart from their "father's house" and become sojourners once again. Meanwhile, Sweden continues to be a sinister place indeed.

The Dark Underworld of Sweden--Part I

Corruption and Filth in High Places

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.