Perspective: Swedish strifeBomb Attacks Are Now a Normal Part of Swedish Life
“Normalization” is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Paulina Neuding writes that explosions have become so normalized in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news program that evening. The explosions were left to the local news. Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University, has warned that the situation has become so dire that the integrity of the Swedish state is in jeopardy. “The state’s monopoly on violence, the actual token of a sovereign government, has been hollowed out bit by bit and no longer exists,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “The armed criminal violence is having effects that are increasingly similar to those of terrorism.”
“Normalization” is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Paulina Neuding writes in The Spectator that explosions have become so normalized in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news program that evening. The explosions were left to the local news.
Neuding writes:
To understand how Sweden arrived at this degree of normalization, consider the statistics: between January and June this year, more than 100 explosions were reported in the country, up from about 70 in the same period last year. A total of more than 160 suspected attacks with explosives were reported last year. There are no comparable figures available for earlier years because it’s such a recent phenomenon. Until recently no one would have thought of adding a column on bombings to the national Swedish crime statistics.
Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University, has warned that the situation has become so dire that the integrity of the Swedish state is in jeopardy. “The state’s monopoly on violence, the actual token of a sovereign government, has been hollowed out bit by bit and no longer exists,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “The armed criminal violence is having effects that are increasingly similar to those of terrorism.”
A new report from the Swedish Defense University warns that clan structures in some immigrant areas are putting the Swedish justice system under “severe stress.” In these parallel societies, the Swedish state is weak, witness intimidation is systematic and ordinary citizens are pressured to submit to clan rule.
She adds:
Sweden’s gangs, which mainly operate out of the country’s socioeconomically weak immigrant neighborhoods, do not only use explosives to assert their dominance. Sweden had 45 fatal shootings in so-called criminal environments last year — a tenfold increase in one generation.
By contrast, Norway has fewer than three such shootings a year. According to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, nine out of ten perpetrators of Sweden’s gang shootings are either first- or second-generation immigrants. The country has gone from having among the lowest rates of violent crime in western Europe to one of the highest. When it comes to bombings, no other developed country in the world which is not at war has experienced anything like Sweden’s epidemic.
