Sometime in the course of the second half of the twenty-first century (demographers dispute whether it will be 2055 or can be postponed to, say, 2080), ethnic Swedes will become a minority in Sweden. How’d that happen? All those millions of colonial subjects from the vast Swedish Empire on every continent making their way to the metropole?
Not so long ago, we would have taken as read that the first requirement of any such thing as Sweden is that it be brimming with Swedes. Now we are all “proposition nations”: anyone can be Swedish as long as he embraces Swedish “values”. In practice, the inverse seems more likely: we will embrace their values. In a telling bit of symbolism, the most famous Swede on the planet, Greta Thunberg, the angry environmentalist turned angrier Hamas groupie, is already wearing a keffiyeh.
It’s odd to become a minority in your own hitherto ethnically homogeneous nation within three generations. And it’s even odder to do so without the subject being raised as part of mainstream public discourse. In London, for example, by 2021 the “white British” population was down below 37 per cent—which the Office of National Statistics attributed blandly to “
the increasingly multicultural society we live in”. Which is, of course, a good thing. Whereas “the Great Replacement” is merely a “far right” conspiracy theory—even though it’s happened, and even though national statistical agencies are implicitly celebrating it.
The late novelist Martin Amis asked Tony Blair whether, when he got together with his Continental colleagues, it was part of the “European conversation”. Well, replied the Prime Minister,
it’s part of the “subterranean conversation”. “We know what that means,” remarked Amis:
it cannot be honestly discussed in public. That was in 2007. A generation on, it still can’t, no matter how obvious the consequences become. Indeed, an ever-lengthening list of fascinating conversational topics are now also “subterranean”—because, in the abandonment of the idea that Sweden is the land of Swedes and the retreat to the mystical realm of “values”, you can’t help noticing that all the values are being ditched even faster—not least freedom of speech.
In the German town of Solingen, eleven patrons of a “Festival of Diversity” (yes, that was its name) got stabbed, three of them fatally. Did they at least have the frisson of being stabbed by someone “diverse”? Well, no, not really:
he was drearily predictable—a twenty-six-year-old Syrian “migrant” yelling “Allahu akbar!” Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/politics/how-the-west-was-lost/