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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

As far as I understand, it's a relatively global operation. Swedish gangs essentially franchise the business model from the Mexican cartels.

Swedish immigrants are susceptible to this because Sweden did a spectacularly poor job at integrating these people. The idea was to liberally accept immigrants to solve the demographic crisis and the pension system, but along the way most of the immigrants who moved to the country were let down and given fairly shitty life prospects.

Turns out these people aren't filled with grateful joy over having undignified dead end jobs and living in dinky apartments in segregated communities in derelict apartment buildings from the '70s. Quelle surprise.

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These are not American-style (overseas) immigrants, with relative wealth and degrees. These are poor refugees who might never have wanted to live in the West anyway. Integrating them in an advanced European monoculture sounds like an impossible social engineering task, no?

Yeah, I think the project was pretty naive.

I think there has been a somewhat conceited attitude among the Swedish political class to assume that Swedish values and ideals are an inevitable logical conclusion from enlightenment, and if someone doesn't share these values, it's because the poor souls haven't been informed of the correct way to think yet, and when encountering superior Swedish values, they willingly abandon their unenlightened opinions and assume the enlightened values of Sweden in their place.

Well as it turns out these values are a logical conclusion only if you've been indoctrinated in them since you were a toddler.

Surely "monoculture" is an exaggeration.

The Swedish population includes a large number of Finns, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden says even 50 years ago 10% of the population was born to foreign born mothers.

If Sweden isn't a monoculture then your argument suggests integration should be possible, yes?

That doesn't mean it would be easy to integrate refugees. Just look at how hard it was for Miami to integrate Cuban refugees. Anti-Castro extremists, for example, set off car bombs in the 1970s and 1980s. http://cuban-exile.com/doc_051-075/doc0073.html

Knowing this, yes, other European countries should have done more, to helped share the effort needed.

To make sure I understand the topic, I researched more about Sweden's multicultural history.

https://www.informationsverige.se/en/om-sverige/individens-r... says "There are five recognised historical national minorities in Sweden: Jews, Roma people, Sami people, Sweden Finns, and Tornedalians" and historically they were deliberately oppressed by monocultural policies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornedalians gives one example:

> Tornedalians were the targets of extensive so-called "racial biology" and swedification policies. In the early-to-mid 1900s Herman Lundborg and others from the State Institute for Racial Biology performed skull measurements on Tornedalians, with Lundborg performing the first measurements in 1913. At the same time speaking Finnish in schools was banned in parts of the country, including the Torne Valley. This ban was only revoked by the Riksdag in 1957.

How does that fit into your concept of "monoculture" in Sweden?

I think that's missing the point. Sweden has been an overbearing consensus culture with relatively limited room for debate or differences in opinions or values beyond the superficial.

Minorities like the Roma have been permitted to exist, but they've had zero place in the public sphere.

I don't know how to interpret that.

Yes, historically Sweden has been overbearing consensus culture, including using so-called "race science" to justify their positions, as with the Tornedalians.

But didn't official policy change long before they accepted many poor refugees from the non-West, which is the criteria shrimp_emoji used at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37336674 ?

That change, as I understand it, included creating the autonomous Sámi parliament back in the 1990s, and recognizing the Tornedalians and Sweden Finns, yes?

Plus, by the time of the Middle Eastern refugees, Sweden had accepted Western refugees, like Chileans back in the 1970s and Balkan refugees of the 1990s?

How then is Sweden a still meaningfully a monoculture even by, say, 2005?

I mean, I can understand how a government can be a monoculture, even if the country is not (eg, Afrikaans and South Africa), but I took shrimp_emoji to refer to the overall population, not the government.

Jews have had full civil rights in Sweden since before 1910, and took in a large amount of refugees from the Holocaust (famously, the entire Jewish population of Denmark). Sounds like the did a good job there.

Sweden has a chequered history when it comes to it relation to Jews. Before and during the first years of the second world war Sweden was mostly "neutral on the side of Nazi-Germany", it was only when the tides of war began to turn that Sweden became "neutral on the side of the allies". The stamped "J" (for "Jüde" or "Jew") in German passports for Jewish citizens was put there on the suggestion of Swiss and Swedish authorities which otherwise would have demanded visa for all Germans [1]. If you want to learn more about this history there is a book on the subject written by a (Jewish) stand-up comedian-turned-political-commentator named Aron Flam. The book is titled "This is a Swedish Tiger" [2] ("Det här är en svensk tiger", a pun on a Swedish wartime motto which relies on the double meaning of the term "en svensk tiger" in Swedish which means both "a swedish tiger" as well as "a swede keeps silent" and thus served the same purpose as "loose lips sink ships" for the allies and "feind hört mit" (the enemy is listening) for the Germans). In this book Flam describes how the Swedish state tried to profit from its "neutrality" by trading with Nazi Germany, allowing German troop transports to use the Swedish railroads while denying the Norwegian king to cross the border in order to flee those same troops, providing the German war machinery with vital components like ball bearings (a Swedish invention and speciality. the well-known SKF brand stands for "Svenska Kullagerfabriken", "Swedish Ball Bearing Factory"). The book is available in e-Book form in English, just search for "This is a Swedish Tiger" wherever you tend to search for books.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-passen

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Det_h%C3%A4r_%C3%A4r_en_svensk...

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