My European Trip, Part 4: Sweden Wrap-Up
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This is where I just touch on a bunch of topics that relate to Sweden but weren’t big enough to warrant their own posts or didn’t quite fit into the other posts contextually.
Skeletons in the Closet
Since coming back from Sweden and Amsterdam, I’ve been doing some research on both countries. I found out something utterly amazing about Sweden. From this article:
The revelations in Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, shocked the world: long admired as a model of the enlightened and humane social welfare state, Sweden had forcibly sterilized more than 60,000 people, mostly women, between 1935 and 1976. The sterilizations were part of a government program designed to weed out “social undesirables” in the pursuit of a stronger, purer, more Nordic population. Those undesirables included, as the paper put it in a subhead, “‘mixed race individuals,’ single mothers with many children, deviants, Gypsies, and other ‘vagabonds.’”
The program’s Nazi overtones were disturbing, yet inescapable. Under the headline racial purity in the welfare state, reporter Maciej Zaremba put it this way in his two-part series in August: “In Sweden, it was only under Social Democratic rule and in Germany only under Nazism that citizens could be deprived of their reproductive functions as a result of their origins or their disabilities.”
His stories may have been a jolt for Swedes, but it was no surprise that it was Zaremba who produced them. For more than a decade, Zaremba, 46, has been exposing the underside of Sweden’s welfare state in Dagens Nyheter, a 380,000-circulation morning newspaper that is Sweden’s most influential voice. He has uncovered abuses in trusted institutions: the State Marine Institute, the Ministry of Social Affairs, and Sweden’s celebrated judicial system. But this time he challenged the utopian vision Swedes hold of themselves and their government, and called into question a piece of their national identity.
The sterilization program is not mentioned in Swedish history texts. Like most Swedes, Zaremba didn’t know very much about the Swedish Sterilization Act, which was passed by the Parliament in 1935 and stayed on the books for forty-one years. Early in 1997, Zaremba came across an obscure book about sterilization, which was co-written by historian Gunnar Broberg of the University of Lund, but published only in the United States. Immediately, Zaremba knew he was looking at a major story: “The numbers of sterilizations Broberg uncovered convinced me this program was much bigger and more widespread than anyone ever imagined.”
So Zaremba read everything he could about sterilization in Sweden and around the world — including the U.S., where forced sterilization of the mentally disabled, certain criminals, and others was legalized in several states starting in 1907 and continued until the 1960s. In Sweden, meanwhile, Zaremba learned that the sterilization program was rooted in the study of eugenics, a pseudo-science devoted to the creation of a superior race. But the program was expanded in 1941 to include any Swedes who exhibited behavior judged by the state to be anti-social…
More disturbing, Zaremba discovered that the sterilizations had never been voluntary, as was believed in Sweden, and as they were portrayed on paper. In the largest group of cases, adolescent girls who fit the state’s criteria had been removed from their parents’ homes by state officials and put in reform schools or institutions. Then, as a condition for their release, they were forced to undergo sterilization. And the state’s criteria could be alarmingly arbitrary: people who fell behind in school were labeled “stupid,” people who were outgoing were “sexually promiscuous,” and people who were quiet or shy were deemed “anti-social.” All were grounds for sterilization. It was clear from the files that sterilization had been forced upon vulnerable and often terrified women, a point Zaremba drove home forcefully in his articles:
Freedom of choice was in fact totally illusory. The person concerned was either declared ‘of unsound mind’ — a simple procedure — or was subjected to irresistible pressure. Sign this or we’ll take the children, sign this or there’ll be no social benefit, no flat, no leave . . . and so on. Sweden went furthest in the way of legalized blackmail . . . .
That just blew my mind! This is something that really is hardly talked about in any shape or form. I was over there with multiple guidebooks, each of which had extensive, in-depth histories of Sweden from ancient times until now, discussing every last tidbit of Swedish culture. I went to many historical museums while there, and no mention of this. Apparently it’s still a very touchy subject there, much like slavery is among some southern whites today in the United States.
And think about it, 1976 is quite recent, and the sterilization program went on for decades. For many it was a requirement to receive welfare. I wonder if it plays any role in why Swedish people seemed to look so damn good. 40 years of weeding out “undesirable” genes? I’m not saying that this 40 years turned them from a homely people into supermodels overnight, but just that maybe it bumped them up a few notches from just good looking to ridiculously good looking. Who knows? I’m sure there are articles and speculation on the subject, I can’t be the only person to notice the correlation between the physical appearance of Swedes and the fact they had decades of eugenics under their belt. Sure it’s only 60,000 people or so overall, but they were among the members of the population who were likely to have the most kids, and whose kids were likely to have the most kids in their generation, so who knows how many lives were prevented by the sterilization of these 60,000? But I’m sure I’m oversimplifying. Who knows? If anyone knows anything about this topic, please tell me more. Now on a lighter note…
When to Visit Stockholm
I learned to interesting tidbits of info when I was talking to people from Stockholm. First, people get paid once a month, and everyone gets paid on the same day. If I remember correctly, that day is the 24th of every month. It comes into the bank accounts at midnight. On the days leading up to payday on the 24th is when people have the least money and are the most broke, but on midnight of the 24th when that money hits the bank account people will be flush with cash and drinking and partying even harder.
Also, the weather for most of the year can be pretty drab in Stockholm I was told. People will stay inside more during winter months, and there few daylight hours. So when May rolls around, it’s like coming out of hibernation. People have months and months of pent up partying in them, and I was told that as crazy as Stockholm was in August when I was there, it pales in comparison to Stockholm in May when the summer just starts. The streets are even more packed with people and the partying is even more rambunctious.
So putting these two pieces of info together, it seems to me that the best time to visit would probably be May 23, the night of the first payday of the first month of summer. Damn I’m brilliant. I have to jump back and kiss myself sometimes for the shit I come up with.
Swedish Rap
I went to a outdoor free concert thrown by the local urban radio station there, The Voice. Man was it a blast. I met some people from Gothenburg who were in Stockholm for the day just to attend the concert, and they took me with them. (Gothenburg people were by far the nicest people I met in Sweden, and when I go back I will definitely spend a few days in Gothenburg as well as Stockholm) The main act was American rapper Flo Rida, but almost all the opening acts were Swedish rappers. A few of them were wack, but two were quite good. One guy’s name I don’t know because everything he said was in Swedish, but the other guy, although a native of Sweden, rapped completely in English, so I was able to get his name and the names of his songs. His name is Adam Tensta, here’s his Wikipedia entry, here’s his Myspace and his videos are below. He raps totally in English with very little hint of a Swedish accent over hot electro beats, very much like N*E*R*D or Timbaland when they are on their A game and not phoning it in, or Kanye with better rhymes and less obvious samples:
I hope the dude makes it big in American music circles, but then again if that happened he’d probably start making duets with Justin Timberlake and sucking immediately, so maybe not.
Recommended Reading:
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Rap is music for people who can’t sing or play instruments. It should go away.
It’s funny, most of Sweden is PC-bound, they have tons of laws restricting speech and feminists run amok. The Feminist Party there wanted to abolish marriage, and made some headway for a while. It’s illegal to criticize Islam over there, btw. Defined as “racism” which is a jail-time offense. Of course, the racism goes only one way.
What is your sense of Sweden lasting? Their birth rates are very low, 1.67. I’ve seen projections that it’s a majority Muslim nation in 30 years, given the fertility disparities and immigration levels. Sense of how many immigrants are around, the no-go areas, what places non-Muslims must avoid?
I don’t think Eugenics affected the looks. You can see the same effect on boys and girls whose parents came up from Mexico. It’s all nutrition. The parents look very “Indio” that is short, squat, small arms and legs, often barrel chested. Their children, however, often have long legs, long arms, and can be quite tall. A woman and her husband, often both under 5′5″, can have a daughter at 5′10″. You can see the same with Vietnamese in the younger generation.
More wealth = better nutrition = better looking. The Dutch were not known for their height, until fairly recently, as more and more nutritional advantages, including that of prenatal care, came into play.
Reply to whiskeyThere’s a live recording of Adam Tensta from the concert at:
Reply to M.http://webbradio.thevoice.se/i.....;cattype=4
Click on “The Voice 08: Konsert & intervjuer”
nice wrap-up. interesting stuff about the eugenics (Go USA! glad to see we were well ahead of the game there! LOL) I’ve got a friend from the UK who half-jokingly suggested that back when the vikings were rampaging, they took most of the britons’ best-looking young women. thus, the reason the swedes are so hot and the brits…well not so much. Yeah, I’ll have to look for more from Adam Tensta.
now, onward to Amsterdam!
Reply to steve lurkelMan, I’m jealous that you got to see Adam Tensta in concert!
I got his album this year and it is, quite possibly one of the best rap albums I’ve heard in 2008. The dude hasn’t really gotten any shine outside of Sweden though (even in the UK he’s unknown) which is sad.
Don’t know if you’re a fan of R&B, but I suggest you check Little Dragon and Kissey Asplund and Lykke Li for more Swedish goodness.
Reply to StoneA few decades ago they were building an Aryan master race, and now they’re mass populating the country with Muslim immigrants in an effort to wipe out Swedish culture and give Europe its very own third world Islamic theocracy.
In retrospect, maybe they should have sterilized all leftist liberals.
Reply to random passerbyWhiskey:
Totally, but it’s catchy as hell. Problem with a lot of other music like Led Zeppelin and other really good rock of the 60s and 70s is that it got so technically proficient and introspective and pedantic that it totally gets you stuck in your own head, which is why I think so many white men in recent generations lost the ability to dance with women. Too many navelgazing 13 year olds got used to sitting locked up in their room with headphones analyzing Led Zep chords while smoking weed. Is rap technically inferior to other forms of music? Yes. But unlike rock music, it’s primal, it’s outwardly directed and it encourages people of the opposite sex to interact with each other. While I’m not crazy about all the toxic messages in rap songs, I’d hate to imagine social interaction around the world if you eliminated it totally. There’s a reason why rap has caught on like wildfire around the world and in Europe in particular among younger generations is, as you pointed out in the comments to a previous post, many countries in Europe have “deep seated inhibitions that PC imposes on interaction between the sexes, lack of mediating institutions for young people to get together (sober), and the isolating factor urban anonymity.” Rap music and culture and the venues that embrace it address all those problems more directly than anything else in pop culture right now.
I’m not sure about this. It’s a topic I’m reading about a lot these days, mainly in the writings of Theodore Dalrymple, Bernard Lewis and Bruce Bawer. I will say that despite the public appearance of political correctness regarding all things Muslim in Europe, in one on one conversation with Europeans there, no matter what the country, angst about Muslim assimilation was hands-down the biggest common concern I found there. Everyone thinks it, everyone say it in small circles, but no one speaks out about it except for a select few, he seem to get punished for it.
As for no-go areas, I was told about some outlying suburbs with lots of Muslims, but I never went to them because I had no reason to. A lot of them came into Stockholm for the free concert, and that was the most I saw in my time there, but otherwise it was often very segregated, especially if you hung out in Stureplan and in the city. Many of the nicer clubs routinely turned away Muslims who dressed and looked “prole.” I am going to post more about the Muslim situation in both Sweden and Amsterdam in one post later on.
Agreed, but the eugenics eliminated the offspring of precisely those less wealthy people who would be most likely to suffer the worst nutrition. It would be like if the poorest of Mexico, the people most likely to have malnourished kids that looked extremely “Indio,” were suddenly sterilized, while those who had the money and means to give their kids proper nutrition and not pass on the same “Indio” looks and have taller children were allowed to reproduce. I agree it has to do with wealth and nutrition, but those were among the selection criteria for who got sterilized and who didn’t.
This is true Whiskey. Here’s a great (and short) article on it if anyone wants to learn more. And another one from USA Today.
M.
Thanks. That was the concert I was at. I will check out those other groups on Youtube and Myspace. Do you know the name of a white Swedish rapper who was there with sunglasses and a scruffy, grungy looking beard?
lurkel
joking or not, that makes a warped kind of sense. As for Amsterdam, let me warn you now, the stories will be a lot more boring than you’d expect.
random passerby
Yeah, the irony of that was not lost on me. Suicide by polite political correctness.
Reply to T. AKA Ricky Rawrandom p, leftist liberals were the ones who set up the forced sterilization programs. Racial hygiene was the progressive fad of the day and sterilization hitting mostly gypsies seems to have gone on until the collapse in some socialist countries. Hell, it’s still a progressive fad: see how angry they are about brown and black bears moving north and dating white bears…
An obvious correlation is that the people who objected to abortion objected to forced eugenics. Sterilization programs were common in northern Europe, but they were not common in those Catholic countries where religious conservatives were influental. The conservative right was generally strongly against eugenics and left/right syncretist movements like Nazis were the exception. But leftist professors write the history books, so today we all “know” that racial hygiene is a right-wing idea.
Sweden’s eugenics program is of course well known in Finland, at least among us nationalists since their racial ideologists mostly targeted Finns. Sometimes I think I should start a blog just to translate the dirt we have on the Swedes for all the world to see.
Reply to jaakkeli“random p, leftist liberals were the ones who set up the forced sterilization programs.”
Huh. How did they make the leap from eugenics to multiculturalism? In any case, I still say they should have sterilized leftist liberals.
Reply to random passerbyHow did they make the leap from eugenics to multiculturalism?
It’s not that much of a leap. The eugenicists and racial theorists were the liberal intelligentsia of the time, playing the same heal-the-world role with different ideas. Today you can’t propose helping the poor of the world with breeding schemes but supporting crazy schemes to help the poor of the world without ever actually asking the opinion of the poor of the world is still the mark of a true progressive. The only thing that keeps changing is which schemes are considered good and progressive.
The heart of eugenics programs was a coalition of nationalists (the pagan right) and the left. It would not have worked without some support across the political spectrum because it’s so easy to demonize. The reason it seems strange now is that the leftists have been very successful in covering up their part in it and blaming it all on the nationalists.
Christian conservatives have not forgotten the left’s role in it, but everyone else ignores them since their anti-eugenics is buried under anti-evolutionism.
Reply to jaakkeli“Tensta” is actually the name of one of Stockholm’s more multicultural suburbs. It can be classified as a no-go zone, at least by swedish standards. Listen to the lyrics of Bangin’ on the system: “and where I am from, Tensta, where the politicans move their kids from”
The line refers to something that happened a few years ago. A semi-famous politican, herself an immigrant, went out publicly in an radio interview said that she would move from Tensta because of the increasing violence and islamic fundametalism.
On the way home one day, she and her eight year old son witnessed the crime scene of a shooting. Nalin Pekgul, the politician, didn’t think that it was appropriate for an eight year old kid to see something like that. There was too much blod, apparently. Later she found out that the victim of the shooting incident had survived - thanks to his bulletproof vest.
In the interview, she went on describing how her kids come home from school asking why they don’t go to the mosque and asking why mom doesn’t walk around veiled. Oh, and one day her kid came home from school and said “Mom, we muslims don’t lie, but the christians do because they don’t have a God”. Nalin didn’t like that. I wonder why she wanted to move?
What made the whole thing so great was the fact that Nalin Pekgul belongs to Socialdemokraterna (The Social Democrats) - the largest party in Sweden, in many peoples eyes *the state* even when they aren’t ruling - and is the spokesman (uh, spokeswoman) for the “Social Democratic Women”. How could anybody critisize her? She didn’t belong to a fringe group, she’s woman, a leading feminist and an immigrant from Turkey/Kurdistan. And oh, she’s a muslim too. Needless to say, her politican friends weren’t too happy about her outspokenness.
By the way, I had to visit the homepage of the Social Democratic Women just to see what they called themselves in english. While there, I read an article about their “Democratic campaign”: they have some sort of town meetings in Tensta every week: “It’s good for Tensta that politicians are present [in Tensta] at least one day a week. The habitants [of Tensta] realize that they are in fact Swedish citizens and have the right to take part in the democratic process”. Ah, yes, it’s a good thing to remind your newly imported voting cattle that they have the right to vote [for you].
Reply to M.M, I added the “Bangin’ on the System” video to the post so that people could see what you were referring to.
Reply to T. AKA Ricky RawFirst off, my jaw is still on the floor over that eugenics stuff.
Reply to Bangs and a BunSecondly, Tensta is the shit!
@stone-Lykke Li is the next big star. Good stuff T. Like you, I love to travel. I read about Sweeden’s eugenics program from a link about USA eugenics programs. It’s amazing what human beings can and are willing to do in the name of progress.
Reply to ChicNoir“Is rap technically inferior to other forms of music? Yes. But unlike rock music, it’s primal, it’s outwardly directed and it encourages people of the opposite sex to interact with each other.”
oooh. while i agree with your overall point, i gotta disagree with you here. Not to sound like the defender of hip-hop or all things “black.” Far from it. But i this statement’s guilty of that ol’ “mutual exclusivity assumption.”
I went to a high school with a pretty strong music and arts program. Second only to laguardia here in new york. So many of the classically trained concert pianists couldn’t translate their skill to jazz piano. With practice i’m sure they’d get somewhere, but there technical proficiency didn’t help them understand the underlying structures that ALLOWS for jazz improvisisation.
But every jazz pianist i’ve ever known could sub in for a classical pianist in a pinch. Depending on the musician they may not have been as technically precise, but the untrained ear would not hear the difference.
(exceptions abound to both comments, i’m sure but the point is generally clear.)
Rap is like any other form of art. Not only is there good, bad and ugly but there’s various facets; poetry, lyricism, beat-making, production, DJ-ing, musicianship etc.
What Lil’ Wayne, Nas or Black Thought does is separate from what ?love, JayDilla or DJ Qbert does. That’s 6 distinct aspects of “rap” or “hip-hop” yet all might participate in the unified artform the same way Miles Davis and Gil Evans participated in a single artform, Ella and Gillespie, etc.
My point is to compare Rap, which is as multifaceted as Rock, (and this is to concede that rap is not a form of Rock which is not to be assumed) to an admittedly highly technical example of one form of Rock is unfair.
You must compare lyricism to lyricism. Poetry to poetry. hall of fame technical production to hall of fame technical production. etc.
Ruffs last blog post..New Poem…NEW POST!!!
Reply to RuffGreat points Ruff.
Reply to T. AKA Ricky Raw