The liberal left likes to hold Sweden up as a model socialist state, proving that socialism can work.

They could not be more wrong.

Sweden is a country wrecked by political correctness and Muslim immigration, and made so wretched by its own folly that it’s committing national suicide.

This is from Front Page, by Bruce Bawer:

Sweden is self-destructing, and more and more people are writing about it – but, with very few exceptions, still not in the mainstream Swedish media, where denial continues to reign supreme. Indeed, even as concerned observers abroad (especially in neighboring Denmark and Norway, where the elites still look to their larger neighbor as a multicultural role model while many, if not most, ordinary householders view it as a cautionary example) are sounding the alarm about the fallout of Swedish immigration policies, Sweden’s own mainstream media – and the rest of its cultural establishment – are laboring overtime to silence the truth-tellers and keep the rabble from openly questioning the wisdom of their betters. …

One rare recent exception to the Swedish media’s see-no-evil approach to immigration and its consequences was a fascinating map, published last month in the newspaper Sydsvenskan, showing the relative levels of danger in the various neighborhoods of Malmö, the city that is regarded by many cogent observers as the ninth circle of the Scandinavian inferno.

Meanwhile, as I say, the admonitory essays keep coming. One example: “Sweden’s Race to the Bottom,” a bracingly frank piece that appeared on December 4 on the website of Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s biggest newspaper. The author, Morten Uhrskov Jensen, didn’t mince words. His opening sentence: “Sweden has chosen to break down.” Jensen went on to outline the steady slide in the quality of education in Swedish primary schools over the last decade or so, as detailed in a recent PISA study, and to link that decline to what Jensen bluntly called the country’s “insane immigration policy.” Sweden, warned Jensen, “will have to pay a very high price for its experiment with permitting excessive immigration from dysfunctional states.” He placed special blame on the media …

Five days later, Jyllands-Posten offered another grim report, this one entitled “A Land of Ghosts and Shadows.” In it, Danish author Mikael Javling recounted the repercussions of a recent advertisement in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. The ad was for a book – its title might best be translated as The Immigration Cover-Up – that quietly but devastatingly lays bare the suicidal folly of Sweden’s immigration regime. It’s a remarkably comprehensive work, providing an informative overview of such topics as asylum smuggling, immigration and crime, sharia law, the costs of immigration, censorship of Islam critics, the wielding of the word “racism” as a weapon, the treachery of such pro-immigration authors as Stefan Jonsson and Mattias Gardell, and feminist fecklesness in the face of Muslim patriarchy. Privately printed by the authors, Karl-Olav Arnstberg (an ethnologist) and Gunnar Sandelin (a former reporter for Swedish television), after they failed to secure a publisher, the book, Javling wrote, can justifiably be described as a piece of “underground literature” which, like Solzhenitsyn in the USSR, is being read “only behind closed curtains.”

The Dagens Nyheter ad for The Immigration Cover-Up was a rare exception to the Swedish media’s systematic exclusion of alternate views. According to Javling, the newspaper’s editors put Arnstberg and Sandelin through several rewrites, forcing them to tone down their language and make the ad as innocuous as possible, before they finally agreed to print the thing. Nonetheless, anodyne though it was, it thoroughly enraged the crème de la crème of the Swedish left, who gathered in Stockholm to protest what one of them denounced, in a fiery speech, as “racist propaganda” and to demand that the editors of Dagens Nyheter make a public show of contrition. (All this in response to a nearly 400-page scholarly tome that – crammed with statistics and footnotes – is every bit as dry and dispassionate as the left’s reaction was hot-headed and hysterical.) Jalving didn’t hide his disgust: calling the PC profs, pols, and pressmen at the demo “spoiled little children in suits,” he contrasted them with the majority of Swedes, whom he characterized as “seasoned and lucid Vikings” who’ve “had enough of the elites’ lies and careerism.” I hope he’s right, but I wonder how long these Vikings plan to wait before actually doing anything to try to pull their country back from the precipice.

The day after Jalving’s piece appeared, Expressen, the Swedish daily, ran a story announcing that its editors had hooked up with a Swedish research group, imaginatively named Researchgruppen, to perform a serious, in-depth investigation. Of what? Muslim terrorist cells? Of course not. In good Swedish-media fashion, the goal of Expressen‘s probe was to unearth and expose the names of the readers of three alternative online news sources, Avpixlat, Fria Tider, and Exponerat. I call these sites “alternative” because they run the sorts of stories – about things like, oh, Muslim terrorist cells – that mainstream Swedish media won’t touch. But Expressen doesn’t call them “alternative.” It calls them “hate sites.” (I’ve seen hate sites, and though I haven’t done a thorough study of these three sites, the material I’ve read on them from time to time is no more hateful than the typical article at Front Page or PJ Media.) Anyway, Researchgruppen managed to figure out the e-mail addresses of no fewer than 6200 people who had left “hateful comments” at the three “hate sites” – and then managed to figure out whom those addresses belonged to and proceeded to gather “personal data” on them, which, Expressen promised, would be served up in future articles.

Among the individuals exposed by Expressen as a participant in the discussions on these three sites was Anders Dahlberg, a member of both the National Guard and the Sweden Democrat Party. He lives in the southern town of Skåne and is currently running for a local political office. Researchgruppen identified him as the author of a number of anonymous comments at the Avpixlat site. The one Expressen singled out for opprobrium was his suggestion that it might be impossible to end Sweden’s multicultural society without the use of force, and that ethnic Swedes might want to arm themselves in preparation for that eventuality. Members of the Swedish elite rushed to express their revulsion at this contemptible sentiment – none of them, of course, pausing to ask whether Dahlberg’s statement is, in fact, more or less contemptible than the roles they themselves have played in the ongoing erasure of the nation that he’s plainly determined to save.

Then, this past Tuesday evening, somebody threw a bomb into the mail slot of Dahlberg’s home. The explosion caused the front door to fly off its hinges and across the living room. Although Dahlberg, his wife, and their children were all home at the time, nobody was hurt. The news of the attack was followed hard upon by a report that Dahlberg had been stripped of his position in the military. “What he has written is not consistent with the values of the Ministry of Defense,” said an armed forces spokesman.

So it goes. On Thursday evening, in reaction to a clash in Stockholm between neo-Nazis and “anti-racists,” thousands of citizens of Uppsala, Gothenberg, and Malmö took to the streets in yet another iteration of that favorite Scandinavian pastime, the torchlight procession against racism. …

Stockholm anti-racists plan a Sunday demo. Perusing images of the Thursday evening processions, which showed the pious multicultural multitudes flaunting yet again their proud refusal to test their common ideology against reality, I couldn’t help pondering the melancholy question: are they really unaware that they’re marching their country into oblivion, or are they consciously embracing extinction in the belief that even self-slaughter is preferable to being called a racist?

We take these extracts from a speech to be found in full at Front Page. It was delivered by Ingrid Carlqvist, founder of Sweden’s Free Press Society, at the 2012 International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights held in Brussels on July 9, 2012.

Ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ingrid Carlqvist and I was born in Sweden in 1960, when the Social Democrats were gonna rule forever and ever and our country was the nicest and safest and most progressed in the world. Now I live in Absurdistan – a country that has the highest figure of reported rapes in the world, hundreds of so called “exclusion areas” where people live outside the Swedish society and with newspapers that hide all these horrible facts [from] the people. …

When I grew up our prime minister was Tage Erlander, a Social Democrat. In 1965 he said in parliament, after violent race riots in America:

“We Swedes live in a so infinitely happier situation. The population in our country is homogeneous, not just according to race but also in many other aspects.”

Now I live in a nation that is not homogeneous in any respect. Olof Palme that came after him decided that homogeneous was a bad thing and opened up our borders for people from all over the world. And from right to left the politicians told us that there was no such thing as a Swedish culture, no Swedish traditions worth mentioning and that we Swedes should be grateful that so many people with REAL culture and REAL traditions came to us.

Mona Sahlin, a later leader of the Social Democrats, said in an interview [in] 2002 with the magazine Euroturk, when asked what Swedish culture is:

I’ve often had that question, but I can’t think of what Swedish culture is. I think that is what makes us Swedes so envious of immigrants. You have a culture, an identity, something that ties you together. What do we have? We have Midsummer’s Eve and such corny things.

She also said: The Swedes must integrate into the new Sweden. The old Sweden is not coming back.

In this New Sweden we have more reported rapes than any other country in the European Union, according to a study by professor Liz Kelly from England. More than 5 000 rapes or attempted rapes were reported in 2008 (last year it was more than 6 000). In 2010 another study reported that just one country in the world has more rapes than Sweden, and that is Lesotho in South Africa. For every 100,000 inhabitants Lesotho has 92 reported rapes, Sweden has 53, The United States 29, Norway 20 and Denmark 7.

In 1990 the authorities counted 3 exclusion areas in Sweden, suburbs where mostly immigrants live, where very few have a job to go to, almost all of them live by welfare and the children don’t pass their exams. In 2002 they counted 128 exclusion areas. In 2006 we had 156 and then they stopped counting. In some cities, like Malmö where I live, a third of all inhabitants live in an exclusion area.

What sort of immigrants would those be? What sort of people now dominate Malmö?

Interesting that she doesn’t say. It’s highly likely that if she did, she would be prosecuted, condemned, fined, even jailed.

What did Tage Erlander mean when he said that the Swedish population was homogeneous, not just according to race but also in many other aspects? I think he meant things like norms, values, culture and traditions. A feeling of fellowship. That we all, in the Old Sweden, had a similar view of what a good society is and how we solve conflicts. He KNEW what the Swedish culture was all about, in contrast to Mona Sahlin.

In the New Sweden we need armed police officers at our hospitals because rivalling families fight each other in the hospital rooms. They gun each other down in open streets and they rob and beat old people up. The crime rate grows by the minute, but the Swedish politicians and journalists tell us that it has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. The fact that our prisons are full of foreign people is just a coincidence or is explained by socio-economic factors.

For many years I was a journalist in the mainstream media. But I was always a bit of a troublemaker, always suspicious of what people said was THE TRUTH. When everybody ran in one direction, I turned around in the other direction to see what was there.

In January 2011 something happened to make me loose my last hope about Swedish journalists. I was the vice chairman of The Society of Publicists in Malmö and had invited the Danish journalist Mikael Jalving to talk about his coming book “Absolute Sweden – a Journey in the Country of Silence.” One day the chairman phoned me and said: We must cancel Mikael Jalving because he is going to talk at a meeting arranged by a newspaper called National Today.

It didn’t matter to him, or to anyone else on the board of this society for journalists that Jalving was going to talk about his book. If he went to that meeting he would be infected by nationalist ideas and probably he would become a Nazi. …

That’s the way it works in the New Sweden, the country I call Absurdistan. The country of silence.

I was furious and left the board of that society. That led to my being invited to The Danish Free Press Society to talk about the strange country of Sweden and that led to my founding of The Swedish Free Press Society.

That is how Lars Hedegaard* and I found each other. But we didn’t settle for running one Free Press Society each; since we both have a solid background as journalists we decided to start a newspaper. …

To break the silence. A risky project!

It will be called Dispatch International “because our vision is that this newspaper will become worldwide one day.”

Dispatch will be printed in two versions – one Danish and one Swedish – but all the stories are the same. And on the internet you will be able to read our stories in English and German as well. We will write about politics in our countries and in the world. We will write about all those things that mainstream media have been hiding for so many years now. We will distinguish between news stories and commentaries and the tone will be subdued. We will let the facts talk, the facts that mainstream journalists hide from people.

And at last she comes to speak the almost forbidden words:

In Sweden NOBODY talks about immigration problems, the death of the multiculti project or the Islamisation/Arabisation of Europe. If you do, you will immediately be called a racist, an Islamophobe or a Nazi. That is what I have been called since I founded the Free Press Society in Sweden.

She concludes by asking for support for International International, by taking a subscription or becoming a shareholder or just donating money. If you do, she says –

You will take me one step closer to home. To the Sweden that once was, the Sweden I want back.

We sympathize with her optimism, and admire her project, but we do not believe she will ever have back the Sweden that once was.

* Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, brought to trial for “racism”, because he said that Muslim men maltreat women. See our posts: The new heresy, January 11, 2011; Protecting Islam from criticism, December 18, 22011; The most important struggle of our time, April 16, 2012; The last days of Europe, June 9, 2012.

 Watch this video of a peaceful pro-Israel rally in Sweden, held with a permit, being broken up by the police because violent Muslims and pro-Muslims demonstrate against them, with no permit.