In reality, the basis of democracy has been completely turned on its head. It is said: ‘democracy is a certain way of thinking, a specific set of opinions, and if you do not share them, then you aren’t democratic, and then we condemn you and you ought to be eliminated. The People? That is not democratic. We the Elite, we are democracy.’ It is grotesque and it certainly has nothing to do with democracy, more like a kind of moral dictatorship.”

Before the national elections in the fall of 2006, members of all the established parties, including the so-called right-wing opposition, are cooperating in efforts to boycott any collaboration with the Sweden Democrats or other “xenophobic” parties after the elections. This is widely applauded by the Swedish media establishment. The majority of headmasters in Stockholm ’s high schools want to block the Sweden Democrats from participating in pre-election debates at their schools because they disagree with their “perspective on humanity.” Party members can seldom hold meetings without being hassled by political hooligans, who make noise, destroy equipment or even resort to violence. Violent assaults and life threatening attacks against members of the Sweden Democrats, by Muslims or “anti-Fascists,” have taken place many times, but are rarely mentioned in the media. No dissent is tolerated in Sweden .

In one such attack, which extreme Leftists were later openly bragging about on the Internet, around 30 members of the Sweden Democrats were attending a private party outside the town of Växjö . “To clearly demonstrate that the Sweden Democrats are not welcome in our area, about 20 anti-Fascists chose to attack the party.” “The Sweden Democrats were attacked with knives, axes, iron bars and other weapons. After that, their cars were destroyed.” The brave Leftists then smashed the windows and threw tear gas into the building, forcing people outside, where they were again attacked and beaten with iron bars and axes. Several of the people were hospitalized after the attack. This was a peaceful, private party by unarmed members of a perfectly legal political party that just happens to be critical of the country’s immigration policies. These brave Leftists or “anti-Fascists” do, for some curious reason, seem to behave pretty much like, well, Fascists, a bit like the Brown Shirts in the 1930s, physically assaulting political opponents to silence them. In another incident in Stockholm , members of the Sweden Democrats handing out leaflets for the party were attacked by a group of extreme Leftists, who started beating and kicking them. One of them got tear gas sprayed in his face. According to Oscar Sjöstedt from the Sweden Democrats in Stockholm , this was the third tear gas attack against them in a few months.

Seemingly encouraged by the silence over these attacks from the police and the political establishment, who seem in no rush to stop these assaults on troublesome political opponents, the extreme Leftists have recently stepped up their attacks to also include mainstream parties represented in parliament. Two windows were smashed at the Centre Party’s offices in Stockholm . Several of the Centre Party’s offices around the country have been vandalised. A party representative said that they suspected that the attacks were in protest against the party’s proposal for special labour agreements for newly employed young people. Similar attacks have been carried out elsewhere. On the Internet and at demonstrations, a ‘faction of the Invisible Party’, a group said to be extreme left anarchists, has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

While critics of immigration are demonized in Sweden , Communists are much more accepted. The Left Party is a support party for the current Swedish Social Democratic government, whose party does not hold a majority in parliament by itself. Leader of the Left Party, Lars Ohly, has called himself a Communist after he was elected party leader. In 1999, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he stated that: “I stand for a modern Leninism based on class struggle.” He has also said that “we must never accept a conception of democracy elevated far above the class struggle.” Senior party members had close contact with the repressive regimes in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. In Sweden , it is OK to openly support an ideology that killed 100 million people during the 20th century and enslaved millions more, but “undemocratic” to call for limitations in Muslim immigration.

The website “The Local”, a good source of Swedish news translated to English, notes that it looks increasingly likely that any government led by the Social Democrats will also include the Left Party in a formal coalition after this fall. Apart from quoting approvingly from Marx’s Communist Manifesto, “the party’s economic policy document contains such gems as a six hour working day, renationalization of previously state-owned companies, and policies for large companies to be taken over by workers or the state.” For the past two parliaments, the Social Democrats have ruled with support from the Greens and the Left Party, but neither party has been given a formal place in government. Soon, Sweden “could have cabinet ministers arguing for large tax increases in a country which already has one of the world’s highest tax burdens. Alternatively, they could be demanding nationalization of industry in a country where the state already owns mining companies, mortgage lenders, drinks makers, pharmacies and betting companies.” The leader of the Left Party is putting his foot down before national elections this September. If the Left Party doesn’t get a ministerial post, Lars Ohly told newspaper Dagens Nyheter his party might not support a Social Democrat-led minority government.

Swedish blog the Stockholm Spectator comments on the strong support for these “reformed” Communists among Swedish journalists, documented by opinion polls: “Unlike the American media landscape, where accusations of bias are routinely leveled and ritually denied, it isn’t uncommon in Sweden to admit that coverage is lop-sided. Left-wing journalist Jan Guillo, responding to a study showing a disproportionate amount of Left Party (former Communist party) voters in Stockholm newsrooms, admitted that “The statistics are true…There is a definite overrepresentation of leftists in the media world.” The same Guillo has also bragged about the fact that unlike Scandinavian neighbors Norway and Denmark , Sweden doesn’t have a significant political party critical of Muslim immigration. This is, according to him, because Swedish intellectuals have stuck together to prevent this from happening. “Swedish Radio correspondent Ceclia Udden who, when accused of systematic bias in covering the American election, blithely agreed with her critics and expressed bewilderment as to why anyone would be bothered by such trivialities. “On such issues as the US right and Israel …there was a Swedish…consensus, and any reporting had to be based on that,” she said.”

Ethnologist Maria Bäckman, in her study “Whiteness and gender,” has followed a group of Swedish girls in the suburb of Rinkeby outside Stockholm, where native Swedes have been turned into a tiny minority of the inhabitants due to rapid immigration. The subjects of the study were “teenage girls, living in the suburbs, who are identified both by themselves and by others as Swedish. But they are Swedes living in what is usually called an immigrant suburb. Thus they are seen as different.” “They may encounter prejudices such as the idea that Swedish girls act and dress in a sexually provocative way or that blonde girls are easy.” Bäckman relates that several of the girls she interviewed stated that they had dyed their hair to avoid unwanted attention and sexual harassment. They experienced that being blonde involves old men staring at you, cars honking their horns and boys calling you “whore.” We thus have a situation where being blonde in certain areas of Sweden means being a target of harassment. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten visited Rinkeby to find out if the rumors were true. They spent several hours there, in a suburb of the Swedish capital, without finding a single blonde, Swedish girl. Almost all the inhabitants there are of immigrant background. Virtually none of them referred to themselves as Swedish, they usually said they came from somewhere else. Many of them also asked the journalists questions about Swedes, to hear what they are like. They thought Swedes were idiots, but they hardly ever met any of them.

A report from organization Save the Children tells of how being a young Swedish girl today means feeling unsafe. The girls are scared of being raped, a possibility that appears very real to them. Many girls are planning how to go home at night, how to pretend to be talking on the mobile phone, how to keep their keys in their hand to defend themselves or how to simply run all the way home. Both the fear and the choice of strategies indicate that many girls feel genuinely unsafe outdoors during certain hours of the day. The fear is well founded. A striking number of girls have experienced harassment from boys or men. Most frequently, the harassment comes from boys of the same age as the girls. Being called “whore” has become so common in some schools that several of the girls say the teachers no longer react to this.

Tensta is a suburb in northern Stockholm with a very high concentration of immigrants. Nalin Pekgul, a member of parliament between 1994 and 2002, recently left Tensta because she thought it had become too unsafe. “I understood then that many are wearing bulletproof vests here. What has happened here, I wondered. Is this Tensta?” Pekgul, who is a Muslim herself, has also noted that fundamentalistic variants of Islam are growing stronger in Tensta. Her children come home and wonder why their mother doesn’t wear a hijab or why their family don’t go to the mosque. “I don’t like it when my son comes home and says that ‘Mom, we Muslims don’t lie, but Christians do, because they don’t have God.’ He hasn’t got that from us,” she says. Actress Ylva Törnlund has visited several schools in Tensta, and was alarmed by the harsh atmosphere she discovered there. “The attitudes we meet in the schools are frightening. One boy talked about how girls should be f**ked to pieces until they bleed,” Törnlund said. She decided to visit the area after a rape that took place in a public bath nearby in broad daylight. A 17-year-old girl was raped, and none of the other guests did anything to stop this. The girl was first approached by a 16-year-old boy. He and his friends followed her as she walked away into a grotto, and inside the grotto he got her blocked in the corner, ripped off her bikini and raped her, while his friend held her firm.

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