Pippi Longstocking — Victim Of Sweden’s Immigration “Problem”
04/21/2018
Earlier: How Safe, Low-Crime Sweden Was Sacrificed to the God of Diversity.
say it, took a little heat, but that was OK, because I proved to be right.' ['I proved to be right' President Trump tells Swedish prime minister after making claims last year that violence had spiked thanks to immigration, by Nikki Schwab, Mail Online, March 6, 2018].
Of course, Trump was always right. One sad expression of Sweden’s immigration problem:
Last July, I took my family to a children’s paradise in Stockholm: Junibacken, a children’s cultural center dedicated to the literary works of Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002). Her most famous creation: Pippi Longstocking, a tom-boyish, Peter Pan figure who lived unsupervised in her buccaneer father’s rural idyll. First published in the 1940s, the Pippi Longstocking books and television series became a central part of the Swedish brand. People are attracted to Sweden by these kinds of chocolate-box portrayals, perhaps tempered by a hint of ABBA and an unembarrassed attitude toward nudity.
There was nothing flashy about it. No rollercoasters or exhilarating rides: Just a series of surreal rooms in which you can dissolve into an idealized, pre-television world. My children explored a mock-up house where time seemingly stopped somewhere around 1940. They put on the clothes, marvelled at the old-fashioned telephone, inhaled the smell of leather-bound books. Then, a special indoor train shuttled us back in time to a virtual world of enchanting children’s stories.
But beyond the veil of Junibacken looms the real Sweden, an oppressive place where women are now warned to cover up in public, and where Muslim migrants have turned public swimming pools into ordeals of rape and sexual assault. [Sweden: Sexual Assaults at Swimming Pools, by Ingrid Cariqvist, Gatestone Institute, March 7, 2016]
This didn’t happen overnight. It was developed over the decades by socialist leadership using the sledgehammer of Political Correctness.
And children are a key target. Consider the following:
Repeats of the Pippi Longstocking TV series have been edited to remove a scene where Pippi squints her eyes to impersonate a Chinese person. Pippi’s father no longer fights the "Negro King."
- Many other Swedish children’s books, some written as recently as 20 years ago, have been censored for potentially offensive language or racial or religious stereotypes.
- The popular Haribo candy known as “Skipper Mix” was changed a few years ago because one of the candy shapes was an African tribal mask.
- In 2014 the country’s supposedly conservative Moderate Party Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt asked: "Is this a country that is owned by those who have lived here for three or four generations, or is Sweden what people who come here in the middle of their lives make it into and develop it into? To me, it is obvious that it is the latter" [Sweden’s Holy War on Children’s Books, by Judith Bergman, Gatestone Institute, May 21, 2016]
And finally, copies of Lindgren’s book, Pippi in The South Seas, in which Pippi visits and plays with Polynesian children, are being physically destroyed by Swedish Libraries. [Sweden’s Libraries Destroying Pippi Longstocking Children’s Books Because of Racist Phrases, by Wojciech Zdrojkowski, Breitbart, July 19, 2017]
Of course, it’s not only about the children. Everyone must accept the new normal.
- Eva Brunne, the Church of Sweden’s lesbian Bishop of Stockholm, urged in 2015 that crosses be removed from churches and marking the direction of Mecca within them. This would make them more welcoming to Muslims, she said. In November 2017 Brunne’s church discouraged priests from referring to God as “He.” [Liberal Church of Sweden Set to Lose 1 Million Members, Start Selling Its Property, by Stoyan Zaimov, The Christian Post, February 15, 2018]
- Former Social Democrat leader Monica Sahlin declared she hates Sweden, accusing Swedes of being jealous of immigrants, who have, "a culture, an identity, a history." [Self-Loathing Sweden Should Only Welcome Persecuted Immigrants, Not the Persecuting, by Virginia Hale, Breitbart News, April 20, 2015]
- Until last year, this country of 10 million had established a pattern of accepting roughly 100,000 asylum-seekers annually, mostly from the Islamic world, and in 2015 alone Sweden admitted a staggering 160,000 migrants. This was the highest per-capita rate of influx in all of Europe. [Sweden has taken in more migrants per capita of any European nation. What Swedes think now, by Dominic Hinde and Daniel Silberstein, USA Today, April 12, 2017]
- At least 30 percent of people in Sweden under the age of 34 are now foreign-born [The numbers are out: Swedes will be a minority in few years, Speisa, 2015]
- Sweden has seen the transformation of migrant enclaves into no-go zones, where police and emergency personnel fear to tread. [‘Youth gangs openly sell drugs, carry guns in Swedish no-go zones’ — local shopkeeper to RT, August 31, 2017.
- In January 2016, police admitted Stockholm’s main train station was overwhelmed by Muslim mobs groping and stealing from women. [Swedish police warn Stockholm’s main train station is now overrun by migrant teen gangs ’stealing and groping girls,'by Sara Malm, Mail Online, UK, January 25, 2016].
- In August 2016, a young woman was gang-raped in a Stockholm suburb by 20 Muslims. She had difficulty finding anyone to help her because, as one neighbor admitted, "you learn not to hear or see too much." [Sweden: Nobody helped woman raped by 20 Muslim migrants — neighbors have 'learned not to see or hear too much,' by Nicolai Sennels, Jihad Watch, November 28, 2017]
- According to Swedish statistics, 92 percent of rapes are perpetrated by migrants. [Dangerous refugees: Afghans 79 times more likely to rape, 10 News, June 30, 2017].
- A rash of migrant-perpetrated sexual assaults occurred at Swedish music festivals in 2014 and 2015. But Police failed to release this information to the media until last year, after several bands cancelled appearances at the festivals [This cover-up of sex assaults in Sweden is a gift for xenophobes, by Andrew Brown, The Guardian, January 13, 2016]
- In April 2017 a Muslim from Uzbekistan, who had been denied asylum, hijacked a truck and plowed it into a crowd in Stockholm, killing five and injuring 20. [Radicalized Uzbek Akilov to address court over Stockholm terror attack, The Local, Sweden, February 20, 2018]
The only party fighting against this insanity is the Sweden Democrats, which cleared the threshold to get into Parliament in 2014 with 13 percent of the vote. In February 2017, two Swedish Democrat leaders authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing President Trump’s characterization of Sweden as "the rape capital of Europe" didn’t go far enough. [Trump Is Right: Sweden’s Embrace of Refugees Isn’t Working, By Jimmie Åkesson and Mattias Karlsson, February 22, 2017]
Subsequently, the socialist government, realizing its own policies have propelled the Sweden Democrats into the mainstream, has responded by tightened immigration laws, a move branded "racist" just a few years earlier. [Swedish immigration is not out of control — it’s actually getting more restrictive, by Admir Skodo, The Conversation, February 28, 2017]. But the Sweden Democrats are still boycotted by the other parties.
What is it about Sweden that has led to such a fervent embracing of Political Correctness?
The country has always had a strong culture of consensus, perhaps because its ultra-cold climate meant that only cooperative groups survived. Once a set of ideas is adopted, very few dissenters rise up. By the time a bad idea becomes so obvious it can no longer be denied, the damage has been done and is often irreversible.
In the 18th century, Sweden was a highly restrictive religious state. It wasn’t good enough to simply be Lutheran. You had to be the correct kind of Lutheran. Any religious activity not sanctioned by the clergy was deemed illegal. Pietist groups competed to make things even more severe. It was a crime for Lutherans to convert to another denomination until 1860. You couldn’t leave the (tax-levying) Lutheran church, without giving a reason, until 1951. And you couldn’t establish a religious institution without government permission until 1977.
The Political Correctness phenomenon took up the torch handed down from extreme Lutheranism, utterly intolerant, no diversity of opinion, fanatical, rather like Luther himself. The populace continued to be manipulated to think the right things, overtly idolizing the disempowered (though the Swedish poor have been replaced by the immigrant), and seeing minor disagreements as inspired by the devil himself. Thus Roland Huntford argued in his 1971 book The New Totalitarians — which Wikipedia reports greatly influenced The Patriot Game, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow’s 1986 book on Canada — that Sweden had thus never developed a civic, individualist culture but instead remained centralized and authoritarian..
Unlike its Nordic neighbors Norway, Finland and Denmark, Sweden managed to sit out World War II. Sweden’s socialist government chose to be neutral while exporting iron ore to the Nazis. Thus the country has no recent experience of having to fight for its survival, which might have stimulated nationalism.
So Junibacken is more of a museum of a vanished Sweden than a children’s cultural center. The real Sweden lies a tram ride away — oppressive, dangerous, increasingly Islamic, and Looking-Glass crazy.
Harri Honkanen is a student of Scandinavia.