Some 6,000 people gathered in central Stockholm square on Monday evening at 6 pm to protest electoral success of the far-right political party, Swedish democrats, shouting “No to racism!” according to Swedish Wire.
“It has been a big shock for me that they got so many votes,” said one person. Another was quoted as saying, “It is very important to show that the big majority of the Swedish population is against the right-wing extremists like the Sweden Democrats.” The headlines in Monday’s Stockholm’s newspapers read, “Chaos!”
Sweden’s Parliament seat distribution prior to Sunday’s election
Sunday’s parliamentary election has caused two major problems for Swedes.
The first is the election of politicians that many believe are racist, according to Reuters.
I’ve read and heard some of the positions of the Swedish Democrats in various newspapers and on the BBC. Swedish Democratic party members claim that immigrants are coming to Sweden only to take advantage of the country’s very generous “socialist” social programs. Under the slogan, “Keep Sweden Swedish,” they wish to slow down the rate of immigration by 90%. They also demand assimilation — expecting immigrants to adopt the Swedish language and culture — and reject integration — which allows enclaves of immigrants to maintain their own languages and culture.
They emphasize three issues: The economy — “immigrants are costing the country too much money”; social factors — “immigrants are importing crime, as immigrants are grossly overrepresentated in crime statistics”; and cultural factors – “Swedes don’t feel at home in their own cities.”
Swedes in particular, and Europeans in general, are being roiled by bitter issues involving immigration and xenophobia.
In the last few days, we’ve seen bitter outbursts from politicians in Brussels, with an EU commissioner accusing France of using Nazi tactics in their treatment of the Roma Gypsies. There have been similar advances by anti-immigration parties in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Britain, and elsewhere.
Much of the anti-immigrant sentiment is targeted at Muslims, who have immigrated from Turkey, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and other Muslim countries.
If any event can be said to have triggered this anti-immigrant wave, a good candidate would be the murder, on November 2, 2004, by a Muslim extremist of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the great-grandnephew of famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, triggering widespread violence against Muslims. (See “Dutch Mosques and Churches burning after terrorist murder of author.”)
And then, just two weeks later, the Dutch people were given the opportunity to vote on the greatest Dutchman of all time. They rejected Rembrandt van Rijn, Vincent van Gogh, Erasmus, and William of Orange, and selected instead Pim Fortuyn, a harshly anti-immigrant politician who had been murdered two years earlier by an animal rights activist. (See “Dutch vote murdered anti-Islamic polemicist as ‘Greatest Dutchman of all time’.”)
A web site reader from Eindhoven, the city where van Gogh was murdered, wrote to me on Tuesday, questioning whether I had sensationalized the violence that followed the murder of van Gogh. His question piqued my interest, because I’m usually careful about such things. So I went into my personal news archives and extracted the news stories that appeared immediatedly after van Gogh’s murder, and I’ve put them into a separate web page, “21 news stories after the murder of Theo van Gogh.”
Going back and rereading these stories is an amazing experience, because the enormous shock that was felt in the immediate aftermath of Theo van Gogh’s murder is barely remembered today, only six years later.
Thus, one article by Holland’s Expatica begins, “Amid growing public tension in the aftermath of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the Netherlands risks falling into a situation similar to the one that led to the Crystal Night in 1938 and the hardening of Jewish persecution by the Nazis, a Danish newspaper has warned.”
This illustrates an important principle about Generational Dynamics: When you want to evaluate a historical event, then you must try to obtain descriptions of it from as many points of view as possible at the time that the event occurred, and then compare those accounts to later accounts of the same event. That comparison can yield a great deal of information about how perspectives change over time, and how different generations view the same event.
Comparing the 2004 attitudes to today’s attitudes, we can see that Europe has been trending increasingly towards xenophobia in general and Islamophobia in particular, a phenomenon we’ve also witnessed in America, as I’ve previously discussed. We also see xenophobia directed at America in the form of increasing anti-Americanism, which is another form of xenophobia.
I said that Sunday’s election presented Sweden with two problems.
The second problem is that Sweden now is facing political chaos because it has a hung Parliament. The diagram above shows the distribution of seats prior to Sunday’s election. There were seven major parties, split into two coalitions.
The governing coalition was “The Alliance,” a center-right coalition consisting of the Moderate, Liberty, Centre and Christian Democrat parties.
The opposition was the “Red-Green coalition,” a center-left group of Social Democrats, Left Party and Green Party.
After Sunday’s election, neither of the above coalitions has a majority of seats. The Swedish Democrats, who previously had held zero seats, now hold 20 seats. The Alliance now has 172 seats, and the Red-Green coalition now has 157 seats.
The Alliance now has to persuade one of the Red-Green parties to join the Alliance, according to Reuters. Of course, one coalition or the other could ask the Swedish Democrats to work with them, giving that coalition a majority, but politicians in both coalitions are holding their noses at such a prospect right now.
Hence the newspaper headlines: “Chaos!”
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, we’re seeing in action trends that I’ve been writing about for years, since they always occur during generational crisis eras.
One trend is an increase in xenophobia and disputes over immigration, which have surged around the world in the last ten years. The reason is the disappearance of the survivors of WW II. The Silent Generation that grew up during the war suffered a kind of generational child abuse that made them seek compromise and conciliation. As long as they were around, the kind of racial attitudes exemplified by the Nazis could never happen again. Now that younger generations are replacing the Silents, racial and ethnic xenophobia is sharply increasing.
The other trend is political chaos, leading to a major political realignment in a way that can’t be predicted. In America, we can see that happening through the instrument of the Tea Party. In Europe, we’re seeing the rise of multiple anti-immigrant parties that cause increasing conflict, and even hatred.
I’ve been writing about these trends for years, because they’re predicted by Generational Dynamics as occurring in every generational crisis era, throughout history. Typically, xenophobia continues to worsen, exacerbated by population growth, shortages or resources like food and water, and increased nationalism, as the survivors of the previous crisis war die off. The results are wars of extermination. In today’s world, those wars of extermination will spiral into the Clash of Civilizations world war. It’s happening right before our eyes, and all we can do is argue.
The old joke is that history never repeats itself, but it rhymes. We’re not seeing the rise of a new Hitler or a new Holocaust in Europe today, but we are seeing the gradual rise of something that’s very different, but not really different at all.
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