How do you judge a political idea? In the real world, it is quite a simple process. You see the people professing that idea, and then you test it against reality.
The Soviet Union was a declared Marxist paradise, and then it crumpled and imploded, with millions of Russians burning their party membership cards in roadside bins, and millions more Soviets of different nationalities and ethnicities dragging down and toppling the statues of Joseph Stalin in the early 1990s while thousands of Marxist sympathizers in the West clawed the last straw of “not real socialism,” an excuse we are apparently not tired of hearing and which somehow remains hugely popular in the intelligentsia, media, and academia.
Given their metrics, Sweden must be heading towards the claim of “not real feminism” soon. Sweden is the world’s first officially self-declared “feminist” government, a position now being chased by Canada and France, and almost all the U.S. Democratic presidential candidates, and bizarrely, by Theresa May of the United Kingdom.
This is important, as Sweden was the leading country in “resistance” against the election of Donald Trump (who was roundly mocked for correctly pointing out that something is rotten in the state of Sweden). It considers itself a frontline bastion against the rise of the Euro-right. Everyone remembers the infamous Swedish photoshoot of all-female government officials signing Green legislation mocking Trump, days after all of them wore hijabs to meet Iranian leaders. Swedish social science and gender studies professors led universities in an academic boycott of the United States in 2017.
However, a recent report indicates that bombing and gang wars in Sweden have reached a national emergency level: “It is the kind of news we usually associate with war zones, but this bombing took place in Linköping, a peaceful university town in southern Sweden. Remarkably, it was not the only explosion in the country that day; another, seemingly unrelated, a blast was reported in a parking lot in the city of Gothenburg earlier in the morning. Three explosions have been reported in Malmö since Tuesday morning. As of this writing, no arrests have been made.”
Overall, 50 explosions were recorded in only the last three months, incredible for a country with a population as small as Sweden. The report further states, “In the past four years, fatalities include a 63-year-old man who unknowingly picked up a hand grenade lying in the street; an 8-year-old boy who was asleep when a hand grenade was thrown into the apartment where he was staying; and a 4-year-old girl killed in a car bombing.”
Superficially, there are no such things as a feminist foreign policy, other than quotas for women in cushy jobs (not manual labor, never), and esoteric academic gibberish in fringe corners of the social sciences, and money-laundering disciplines. But practically, there are a lot of changes, which almost all lean hard left. As I wrote in 2017,
But that’s nothing compared to what feminist Sweden has unleashed on its own population. Uncharted migration has correlated with a record number of rapes, and crimes against women, which the Swedish media and government have tried to jointly cover up. Swedish police have been gagged by the government, told not to talk about mass sexual assault by certain minority groups, which has resulted in individual police officers venting in private. I could go on, but the most thorough breakdown of Sweden’s social structure seems to have occurred under their feminist government. The burdens of growing social security costs, ossifying academic orthodoxy, increasing Soviet-style nanny-state control, and the resultant far right backlash, is all described in detail by James Traub in Foreign Policy.
Sweden is unfortunately turning out to be a case study for when feminism is actually used as a theory of governance. I asked Paulina Neuding, the European editor of Quillette, about the crime scene of Sweden after its feminist turn, and the reality of what is known as the rape crisis of Sweden, and if it has subsided since 2015. Apparently not, and it is a new normal.
“Swedish authorities present annual reports on both reported and self-reported sexual offenses. Both sets of figures indicate a steady rise in sex crime,” Neuding said. Yet it is showcased in a completely different way in the international media, as a victory of feminism.
“The problem lies in the official interpretation and presentation of the statistics,” says Neuding. “They are not officially seen as a reflection of an actual rise in crime, but rather of: a wide definition of rape (because we’re feminists); and women’s willingness to report (because we’re feminists). It’s a brilliant analysis. The higher the rape numbers, the better.”
With that interpretation, of course, soft-censorship comes along: “We know from older studies from The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention that immigrants from the Middle East and Africa are strongly over-represented in sex crime. But the link between immigration from these very regions and the rise in reported sex crime has not been properly studied in recent years for political reasons. The Council published a study a few weeks ago on the topic, but it was not taken seriously due to obvious method flaws.”
To those who watched the series “Chernobyl,” the phrase “not studied for political reasons” sounds ominous. But this is also the inevitable logical end-point. Consider any ideological and “progressive” government, whether feminist or socialist, anywhere in the world, with either a state-controlled or an ideologically submissive media, and you would see the same result. Saving the narrative with a dubious interpretation of statistics becomes more important than showcasing reality.
The current Swedish government (as opposed to average Swedish people, who are as much a victim of this as Russians under the Soviets) is no different and offers a valuable case study for those who are unquestioningly promoting a “feminist future” in the West. It is time to ask them what they actually mean, and how they justify what is happening in Sweden. If nothing else, let them say for everyone to hear that Sweden is “not real feminism.”
