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For many years Sweden has been an envied model for its quality of life, its welfare and its expensive yet generous welfare state. Regarded as a welfare paradise , the Scandinavian monarchy, heir to the powerful empire of King Gustavus Adolphus, has over the past decades built an effective administrative machine that has been able to combine economic growth and social security for the country's roughly ten million inhabitants.

A not-free paradise

The Scandinavian country, as mentioned, did not get all this for free, but the achievements made through the reversal of this model, which came about largely through the Social Democratic Party of Sweden (Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti) governments, involved strong dirigisme on the part of the state, as much in the economic sphere as in the ethical and social spheres. Although Sweden is known as the home of rights (Stockholm was the first in the world to grant the vote to women, as early as 1862), it is important to point out that this condition is actually the child of a design quite far removed from what we now call classically understood liberal democracy.

Democracy yes, but from above

With the throne ruled since 1818 by the Bernadotte family, descendants of the Napoleonic general and former Jacobin Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte who ascended the throne under the name Charles XIV, Sweden has been transformed over the past two centuries from a Prussian-like country-caserne into a kind of dirigiste-democratic state, where democratization, framed in a typically Lutheran-Protestant paternalistic outlook, met revolutionary ideas imported from France and moderated by the role of the sovereign and the royal house. The strong ethical valence of the state, typical of Lutheran countries, was thus declined in Sweden into a kind of democratization from above, not without a certain moralism (Sweden was the only European country to have attempted to impose a U.S.-modeled alcohol prohibition) with intentions, not even too broadly, aimed at a true paideia of the state. The shocking eugenic legislations passed in the Scandinavian country during the twentieth century (and supported by Nobel laureates such as Mr. and Mrs. Myrdal), which provided for, among other things, forced sterilization and the taking away of children from single mothers, should also be read in this sense.

An ethical state in the name of rights

Buoyed also by the ethical role bestowed upon it by Lutheranism (which lost its status as a state religion headed by the sovereign only in the year 2000), the state in Sweden has always been vested with a moral and pedagogical authority unknown to continental European countries and the United States. The state, therefore, still finds it very difficult today to perceive itself as a guarantor of individual freedoms and not rather a pedagogical structure above the individuals themselves. That such a context gave rise to one of the strongest and most popular social democratic parties in the world should therefore not surprise us, given the similarity between the purely Protestant conception of the displacement of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the human context, and that of social democracy, which aspires to arrive at socialism by a series of reforms and refinements of unjust arrangements on earth.

Sweden a victim of its own success

The similarities with U.S. Protestant messianism are also obvious, and it is no coincidence that Sweden is, just like the States, one of the sanctuaries of political correctness and genuine cultural wokeism. The results are there for all to see, starting with those observable in a country that is a victim of its own success: the most generous and inclusive welfare in the world has become so famous that it has attracted from all over the Third World (and beyond) masses of men of women anxious only to live in its shadow, an ambition that in Germany, another country with some similarities to Stockholm, they would call Sozialtourismus (social tourism).

Ghettos are blooming in the land of inclusion

The mass immigration of which Sweden has been (and still is, despite the current center-right government) a victim has, for some decades, contributed to Swedish prosperity, with high numbers of immigrants who, at low cost, have contributed to the exponential growth of the profits of the large industrial hubs of Gothenburg (Volvo, Ericsson), and Malmö. The very high percentage of Middle Eastern and Muslim Horn of Africa immigrants, however, has contributed to the emergence of veritable “ghettos,” similar in many ways to the French banlieues , with high criminogenic potential. Rape, in particular, seems to constitute a real national emergency in a country that has always made women's rights its banner.

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The statistics speak for themselves, Sweden is in fact widely at the top, among European countries, in the dismal ranking of rapes, in a percentage and in a manner that, given the geographical correspondence of the misdeeds with the major areas of migratory incidence, leaves little doubt as to the correlation between the two phenomena. Mindful of its pedagogical and inclusive role, however, the Swedish state, while trying to study and suppress the phenomenon, has repeatedly been alarmed whenever anyone, whether politicians or sociologists, has attempted to relate rape and mass immigration.

The gag on scholars

Studies such as the one by Ardavan Khoshnood, professor at the University of Malmö, Henrik Ohlsson, Jan Sundquist and Kristina Sundquist, published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research in 2021, came immediately under the eye of state pedagogues upon the delusion of a student. Alarming them was the data, which, although not explicitly researched by the scholars, showed the unequivocal correlation between migration phenomenon and rape in Swedish cities. In fact, the Ethics Review Committee (ÖNEP), the state's veritable political watchdog, spoke of a “violation of theprivacy and personal data” of rape perpetrators, whose “confidentiality” the scholars allegedly violated in carrying out their research; a “crime” that, if recognized as such, can lead to dangerous criminal and labor consequences in Sweden.

Is this an isolated case? Not anymore

The rapes are there but, in essence, it should not be said who commits them, whether the offender is a foreigner or, as it is used today, “with a migration background.” The consequences, both on freedom of expression and research and on the very credibility of the mass media, increasingly seen as unreliable and lying by public opinion, are easy to imagine, and it matters little that in the end the academics who authored the study were exonerated. Indeed, the trend seems to be emerging at the European level: in the United Kingdom, in order to avoid riots and riots, the authorities almost always avoid disclosing the ethnicities of the perpetrators; in France it is even forbidden, while in Germany Alternative Für Deutschland activist Marie-Thérèse Kaiser was sentenced to a six-thousand euro fine for disclosing official German government data and statistics showing that in the Teutonic country almost 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by foreigners, particularly Algerians, Tunisians, Somalis, and Afghans, and only 10 percent by European citizens (of whom only 3 percent are German citizens).

Liberalism wanted

In the face of this politically correct offensive, which results, without even hiding it anymore, in the Ethical State, will it still be worthwhile, if such an offensive is successful, to claim before the world that we still live in liberal democracies? And what, assuming they still exist, will genuine liberals say in the face of such a denial of every most basic liberal postulate?

Marco Malaguti
Marco Malaguti
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Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.