Category: justice

Who Are the Sweden Democrats?

“Keep Sweden Swedish” – a campaign poster for the Sweden Democrats

Shockwaves will go through the West in the aftermath of the Swedish General Election on the 9th September. Opinion polls are suggesting that the post-war Swedish consensus is about to be shattered, with it looking increasingly likely that the Sweden Democrats are going to win the most seats. This essay seeks to explain who the Sweden Democrats are and how they rose to prominence.

It’s the Swedish Summer of 2008. The country has been rocked by the news that the Sweden Democrats, considered by most to be neo-Nazis, have just come over the 4% threshold in latest opinion polls. If they can maintain this level, they will enter the Riksdag (Parliament) at the next election. I’m sitting at the waterfront, not far from the centre of Stockholm, discussing the situation with a politically engaged friend of mine, a member of the Social Democrats.

I had just spent the summer in the North of Sweden, a vast and rural area, long known as the heartland of the Social Democrats. The Far North has always been poorer than the Swedish South, for a variety of reasons, and therefore somewhat dependent on government assistance. Many people up there are unemployed and on benefits, and they were not happy about immigration.

Talking to these people and listening to their grievances, I got a sense that the bounds of solidarity had been extended too far in Sweden. These people had been raised to think of Sweden as a giant family, where the high levels of homogeneity meant that everyone had something in common, and so everyone looked out for each other. The mass importation of Muslim and African immigrants could only mean less solidarity for the rural Swedish poor, which was reflected in their poverty.

For whatever reason, this unhappiness with the state of the nation was not taken seriously by the ruling classes. Sweden Democrat voters are poorer and less educated than average (like nationalist voters elsewhere) and the attitude of the Swedish ruling classes seemed to be that these people could be dismissed as simple racists and hicks.

It was apparent from talking to my friend in Stockholm that this grievance movement was not being taken very seriously. Of course the Swedish poor are poor, the argument went, but the refugees are even poorer, so it’s fair that the Swedish poor are made to go to the back of the queue in favour of the refugees. If they didn’t like that, then they didn’t appreciate how good they had it in Sweden, which was of course the world’s best at everything.

In any case, the rural poor were usually just smygracister – a word that describes a person who makes decisions out of racism, but is too ashamed to admit it. I pointed out that calling these angry people who felt betrayed ‘racists’ was not going to help the situation. In fact, it would make them feel that their anger was justified and that the government and the ruling classes had truly betrayed the Swedish people.

But the denial persisted. The Muslims and Africans would “försvenskar sig” (make themselves Swedish) and they would then be exactly like us, and all of the grievances would disappear. Being a psychologist, and having a deep interest in history I knew that the immigrants didn’t give two shits about becoming Swedish, or about Sweden in general. Sweden was, to them, just a bitch to be exploited and used. The fact that she gave herself so willingly was ample justification.

Few agreed with my dire prognosis at the time, but having met and spoken to Sweden Democrats voters, I knew that their movement would only grow in strength. Because the grievances of their voters would not be met, their march to power was inexorable, and that would not be a good thing for a foreigner like myself. For that reason, I decided to leave Sweden in 2008.

Sweden Democrats voters are the disaffected poor, who have come to feel that they are not represented by the neoliberal tag-team of the Social Democrats and the Moderates. They are the people who have lost out from neoliberalism, and from the freedom of capital to drive down wages through strategies such as mass importation of incompatible Third Worlders. They are not just dumb hillbillies who have been aggravated by far-right wing rhetoric.

The way they felt about mass immigration was how I would feel if my parents gave my inheritance away to some random strangers because they felt kinder helping strangers than helping their own family.

Sweden Democrats supporters feel deeply, deeply betrayed by the decision of the Swedish ruling classes to open the borders to the Third World. If you are Swedish, and poor, and you need help from the state for the sake of a physical or mental illness but can’t get it because of a lack of funding, it’s extremely difficult, and galling, to watch the government spend money on refugees.

The heaviest concentration of Sweden Democrats voters is in the Far South, which is also the area with the heaviest concentration of Muslim and African immigrants. In some areas in Skåne, the Sweden Democrats are predicted to get over 40% of the vote – which will be most ethnic Swedes. These are the people who have seen first hand the effects of mass immigration, and they understand more than anyone else how much has been lost, and how bad things could get.

These people are not bad people, and they’re not stupid losers. They’re simply people who have been lied to and betrayed by their rulers, and are angry and trying to take action to prevent further losses and humiliations. They’re not necessarily nice people, and they’re not necessarily open-minded, but neither of those things will stop them from getting their will through.

It’s already apparent that the other parties will work together before they allow the Sweden Democrats into power. After all, the Social Democrats and the Moderates are both neoliberals, and mass immigration is one of the main policy planks of neoliberalism. This can only mean that the Sweden Democrats will continue to grow in strength until the day where they take power outright.

When that day comes, anything can happen. The Sweden Democrats, and their supporters, utterly despite both the Social Democrats and the Moderates, and will be more than happy to throw everything out the window in order to stop Sweden from disintegrating into a Third World country. Anyone who suffers from this, Swede or otherwise, will be considered merely collateral damage.

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The Case For South Island Independence

There has been some talk recently about a South Island independence movement, and the initial reaction of most has been to assume it is a joke. If one thinks about it rationally, however, it actually makes more sense for the South Island to become independent than for it to remain part of New Zealand. This essay will argue that North Islanders and South Islanders are a closely related, but fundamentally different people, and therefore that South Islanders ought to have the right to govern themselves separately.

There are five major reasons for this.

The first is legal. The mainstream propaganda tells us all that the Treaty of Waitangi was the founding document of the nation, and that this gave the British the right to settle here in exchange for Maoris being given the protection accorded to British citizens. Like most mainstream propaganda, this is a heavily North Island-centric viewpoint which ignores the reality of the situation for South Islanders.

The truth is that British sovereignty over the South Island was never asserted on the basis of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like Stewart Island, the South Island had so few people living on it that the British asserted sovereignty over it by right of discovery. This occurred on the 21st of May 1840, and is an undisputed matter of historical record.

If the Treaty of Waitangi was not why British sovereignty was asserted over the South Island, then it does not apply. Therefore, those of us who live on the South Island are not bound by it, and neither are we bound to the grievance industry (based on the American model) that has sprung up around it. The Treaty of Waitangi applies to the North Island only – legal recognition of this would require that the South Island becomes independent from New Zealand.

The second reason is historical, and relates to the first. The North Island and the South Island have developed in very separate ways since the first European settlement of these islands. The South Island was not really “discovered”, but, thanks to the efforts of Ngati Toa war chief Te Rauparaha, it was close to empty when settlement began. This meant that immigration from Britain was able to proceed without much of the cheating and swindling that characterised land purchase arrangement up North.

As a consequence, relations between Maoris and white people are mostly respectful on the South Island. There is none of the pointless shit-stirring and separatist hysteria that has poisoned race relations up North. On the South Island, white people and Maoris tend to see themselves and each other as equal participants in a collective battle against the elements and against the ennui inherent to life. North Islanders have a different, darker and more antagonistic history.

Furthermore, South Island independence will give us the chance to avoid the recent monumental historical mistakes of Europe and Canada (it is already too late for the North). We don’t want to become Brazilianised like the North Island, which is now little more than a patchwork of racial enclaves and ghettoes, utterly divided and conquered and incapable of self-determination. We want to keep our own historical character, and independence is the best vehicle to achieve this.

The third reason is cultural, and relates to both the first and the second reasons. The culture of the South Island is much more like large parts of Australia than it is like the North Island. After all, the North Island has by far the densest population of any state South-East of Indonesia with the exception of the ACT, whereas the South Island, like all Australian states (again with the exception of the ACT), is sparsely-populated.

South Islanders aren’t city people. The thought of being crammed into tight suburbs like sardines being presented for consumption is alien to us. Even people who live in Christchurch get out of the city and into Nature most weekends. South Islanders look at the North and see “a greasy take away after the soul is gone”; North Islanders look at the South and see a terrifying, chaotic wilderness. Mentally, we are fundamentally different.

More difficult is the fact that neither Maoris or white people have the same culture in the North and the South. Te Rauparaha is a war hero on the North Island; on the South he is a genocidal maniac akin to Hitler, responsible for the extermination of many peaceful tribes around Nelson and Marlborough. North Island Maoris have a grievance culture where the white man is to blame for everything, whereas South Island Maoris just get on with life (and consequently become considerably wealthier, healthier and better educated than their North Island kin).

White culture is also significantly different. The colonists of the South Island are unrepentant; we don’t have ethnomasochists. Maoris are our equals and anyone who tries to split us apart with rhetoric about unsettled grievances can go fuck themselves. There are very few virtue signallers down here. North Islanders will spend all day crowing on FaceBook about how open-minded they are, and then go to parties where only white people are in attendance – we prefer real people.

The fourth reason is practical. The geography of New Zealand is such that it encompasses a wide range of different latitudes – from 34 in the North to 47 in the South. New Zealand is actually a fairly decent-sized country, roughly the same size as Britain, Japan and Germany, all of which have administrative subunits. The South Island is very poorly served by laws made in Wellington to suit Auckland.

For example, houses on the South Island ought to be built with a fair amount of insulation in order to be safe, but North Islanders write the New Zealand building code, and they did so mostly to suit Aucklanders. Moreover, laws that need to encompass a wide variety of people are sometimes necessary in the North and not on the South. People in the South Island have things in common with each other, such as a strong commitment to genuine environmental guardianship, and this cultural homogeneity must allow for a different degree of freedom.

The alcohol laws are another good example. The South Island has a strong and deeply entrenched cannabis culture. In Nelson, the West Coast and large parts of Dunedin and Christchurch, cannabis is more popular than alcohol. This newspaper has called for cannabis cafes on Bridge Street before, and will continue to do so. Many of us down South have moved on from pisshead culture – but the Wellington-based Government, beholden to major alcohol manufacturers based in Auckland, force cannabis prohibition on us anyway.

The fifth reason is purely selfish. The North Island, by itself, looks like a province of Brazil. The racial ghettoisation and segregation is so advanced that cities like Auckland and Wellington are starting to suffer from pronounced white flight. In the North Island, no-one knows their own neighbours, and there is no sense of community or solidarity. The North Island has no soul; it’s just 3.8 million people trying to make quick money by selling ever more expensive houses to each other.

The South Island has an excellent opportunity to jettison the greed-fuelled, no tomorrow thinking of North Islanders before it drags us down with it. Let’s keep our culture, let’s keep our soul. We don’t have to open the immigration floodgates just to prop up house prices and consumption; we can admit that neoliberalism has not delivered. Let the North Islanders have this insane, rape-the-planet ideology and suffer the consequences of it.

Not only would the South Island free ourselves from what is by any honest measure a failed society, but we could profit immensely from the fees that we would charge on electricity and agricultural produce, which the North Island is far from self-sufficient in. We would naturally keep the immigration channels open to North Islanders, especially Maoris and highly-educated people, but the insanity of letting in hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Africans – currently fashionable among North Islanders – would be avoided.

The details would remain to be worked out. Certainly this proposal will meet with some alarm in certain centres up North, especially those whose waste and inefficiency is subsidised by hard, honest work by Southern people. Nevertheless, the conclusion is inescapable: for both selfish and moral reasons, the South Island ought to break away from the North and become its own country.

SOUTH ISLAND PRAYER (for BT)

God
Don’t let me die in Auckland
Rotting in the heat before your
eyes are closed:a greasy take
away after the soul is gone.
Jessus,no

Let me go with the old southerly
buster:river stones in the grey
flecked sky and that white wind to keep your chin up.
Christ, yes.

– Owen Marshall

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If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).