Sweden rushing to do itself in before the rest of the EU

Bruce Bawer writing at FrontPageMag gives us a glimpse into Sweden's socialist paradise gone drastically wrong.  He also relies on research done by   Jon Sjunnesson  in a new book "The Swedish Story".   The article is really worth reading in full to give us an understanding of how brainwashing  from early childhood into the socialist mold is easily accomplished by a socialist state  and how generation upon generation of Swedes know not how to act independently from what the State dictates.  Orwell's "1984" is Sweden's "2013".

Europe is slowly committing suicide,  but Sweden is plainly determined to do itself in faster than the rest. Earlier this month, on a visit to Lagos, Nigeria, Sweden’s Minister of Finance, a fellow named Anders Borg, made one of those staggering comments, drenched with contempt for one’s own nation and culture, of the sort in which Swedish officials excel. Paying tribute to the beauty of Nigerian women’s colorful attire, Borg couldn’t just leave it at that; he felt compelled to use the occasion to complain that his own countrywomen too often wear dull, black outfits. Speaking with a reporter for Expressen, he expressed the hope and expectation that in ten years’ time his own country, and Europe generally, will look far more like Africa. It’ll be more multicultural, he explained, and thus better......

....Indeed, it’s a measure of the utter irrationality of the modern religion known as multiculturalism that a Western politician like Borg is able to lavish such praise on an overpopulated, underdeveloped African country whose very name is synonymous with cheesy Internet scams; a country that has a life expectancy of 47 years, a 32% illiteracy rate, a political culture rife with corruption, and a deplorable human-rights record; a country where twelve of the 36 states are governed according to sharia law,  where over a hundred people perished in Muslim riots over the 2002 Miss World pageant, and where jihadist violence has taken hundreds of lives in recent years.....

.....Take education. Of course, real education means, above all, helping students learn how to think critically. In a country like Sweden, however, schools and universities are primarily sites of indoctrination whose purpose is to create good socialists. If the Swedish system celebrates kids who are great at sports while all but punishing kids who stand out academically (“Excellence of bodies yes, brains no”), part of the reason is a fanatical devotion to equality of result, and part is an awareness that kids with first-rate minds are potential critics of the system. Hence socialism’s preference for mediocrity over excellence..........

.......In Sweden, the brainwashing starts early – not in school, but in day care. No fewer than 85% of Swedish children under age three are in municipal (or municipally administered) day care. This figure is probably the highest percentage in the world. ...

......“Meek as sheep”: that’s how Sjunnesson describes his fellow Swedes. They’re afflicted with a “silent conformism,” the result of a “spiral of silence” driven by a “fear of exclusion” and a perceived need to maintain a social order founded on perceived consensus views. Whether the perceived consensus views actually are the consensus views doesn’t matter: “When no opposing views are heard, people do not believe there are any even if they themselves dissent.” .......

.........Then there’s the story of how a frank Fox News report on the Islamization of the city of Malmö led an irate member of Parliament to demand that the Swedish counterpart to the FCC close down Fox News’s operation in Sweden. As Sjunnesson sums it up: “freedom of speech means little in Sweden.”......

..........In socialist countries, after all, the state doesn’t exist to serve the people; the people exist to be shaped into unquestioning servants of the state – servants who accept that the state is them and that they are the state. In such countries, it’s taken for granted that there’s no need to place any limit on state power or to provide mechanisms to protect citizens from that power, because, by definition, as Sjunnesson puts it, “the state always is good.” We may mock the European Union for banning jugs or bowls of olive oil on restaurant tables, but this is what socialism does: the powers that be need to have their fingers in every pie, need to minimize the number of situations under which freedom may actually be experienced, need to accustom citizens to a society in which their lives are increasingly regulated. They need, in short, to create a country in which the land and the system are, in the minds of the general public, one – a country, that is, in which the people simply cannot imagine the nation itself without the socialist state.......