The standard answers of the left are wrong.
From an American perspective, the Swedish riots hold at least two lessons. First, they illustrate the weakness of the left’s go-to explanation for mob violence—that it is a function of inequality and poverty. Sweden, after all, is an exemplary country in terms of both social equality and treatment of minorities. But not even in Sweden, apparently, is taxpayers’ generosity sufficient to maintain law and order, according to this standard interpretation.
Second, the riots are a reminder of the left’s inexhaustible egalitarian ambitions. Not even in a welfare state like Sweden is the left willing to abandon the idea that the solution to violence and destruction lies in ever more social programs and more radical redistribution of wealth. There is always a new, absolutely necessary social reform waiting around the corner. What is the actual situation in Sweden, then? What are the intolerable social injustices that force young men into the streets? [..]
In other words, the Swedish riots pose a real challenge to the standard progressive theory, which tends to explain social problems with reference to a lack of resources, inadequate public investments, and uneven distribution of wealth. If not even egalitarian Sweden is spared riots and violence, and if the progressive theory is the answer, to what lengths must we go in order to persuade unruly youths to channel their grievances through the democratic process? Paulina Neuding i Weekly Standard
Neuding gendriver udmærket den svenske, socialpsykologiserende standarforklaring på opstandene, som hele det politiske spektrum abonnerer på, da de alle er lige værdipolitisk røde, men hun er også selv udfordret: Hun har ikke så meget som antydningen af et eget bud på, hvorfor det skete. Er hun blank eller bange for at være ærlig?
Så skriver hun at “In the American blogosphere the idea has spread that the Swedish riots are related to Islam. This is not the case,” og det er jo rigtigt nok. Der er ikke påvist nogen sammenhæng overhovedet, hvilket dog ikke betyder, at der ikke kan være en. Foreløbig står vi altså med forkerte svar, og Neudings ikke-forklaring på opstanden (der intet havde med en machetesvingende, sindsforvirret portugisers død at gøre.) Måske er det så enkelt, at der er grupper af unge der keder sig, har en småtbegavet forkærlighed for ildebrande, som dansk politi siger, og har et medbragt, kulturelt had til statsmagter og deres repræsentanter, siden det nu gentager sig i enhver europæisk indvandrerforstad. Måske ved Säpo noget, de ikke har fortalt offentligheden? Riksdagen gør i al fald ikke, kan man høre. Én ting er sikkert – det kommer igen og også denne sommer og det rette ord for det, er lavteknisk terror uanset hvad grunden er.
Et andet bud på engelsk, der går længere i kritikken, men ikke meget i forklaringen. Måske er det som med visse sygdomme: Man kender forløbet, men ikke den præcise årsag og der er kun pseudokure for den: Åreladninger og Riksdagsdebatter. MARGARET WENTE, Sweden’s immigration consensus is in peril i canadiske Globe and Mail:
When the immigration minister, Tobias Billström, mildly suggested that “we need to discuss the volume” of immigration, his own party nearly disowned him. What accounts for this excruciating excess of political correctness?
The best explanation I have heard comes from Jonathan Friedman, an American anthropologist who is married to a Swedish woman, and lived in Sweden for several years before moving back to California. He blames a “politics of submission by Swedish elites.” Continued large-scale immigration, he told me in an e-mail, is untenable in a situation of economic decline. But Sweden’s elite “refuses to see what is really happening and instead holds on to absurd ideologies of immigration as enrichment.”
In other words, such outbreaks are bound to happen. And they are bound to create big cracks in Sweden’s famous tradition of social cohesion. As Swedes redistribute more and more of their wealth to people whose habits are culturally alien, and who are permanently dependent on the state, the immigration consensus is bound to crack. We love to envy Sweden. But really, it’s Sweden that should envy us.





