Sweden Down the Tubes

The short version.

Get It Try It

A country once respected, Sweden gradually succeeded with the impossible - the total destruction of that reputation until today it's a laughing stock. What follows is a brief list of some of the classic bloopers of this Scandinavian nation. There are many Swedes who deplore what's happened, but it's still happened.

This sad story isn't so much a matter of right and wrong as a matter of PR damage control. The Swedes really suck at it. Last night's kerfuffle over Snoop Dogg serves both as the perfect example and a catalyst for further discussion. What did the Swedes stand to gain by harassing the Snoop? Nothing. Or close to nothing. What did they stand to lose? Look at the bad PR all across the globe this morning. Swedes are being laughed at. Again.

'Social graces' doesn't translate into Swedish. This is especially painful as Sweden is today an EU member state and not a Nordic Tibet anymore.

A famous British PR consultant once told a story of how Swedes just don't get it. There was a Swedish business representative on his way to Germany to seal a very important deal. He'd done his research and knew all about his counterpart. At a gala dinner for dozens of friends and business associates, the German sat the Swede at the high end of the table, then brought out the family's pride and joy - a bottle of their vineyard's finest dinner wine. The German gets ready to pour the wine, but the Swede interrupts him, reaches down into his attaché, and pulls out a bottle of Ramlösa which he puts on the table. 'No wine for me', he tells the German flatly.

Guess if he got the contract.

This gauche behaviour could be forgiven in the old days, when Swedes still had so many good things going for them. But now that those good things are gone...

Sweden became the wonder of the world in the 1930s and 1940s. As other countries struggled with the aftershocks of the Great Depression in the US, the Swedes built up a remarkable society. By the end of the second world war, they were well on their way. Because they'd been smart enough to not let themselves become a battlefield, they could offer services to all the other countries that had been battlefields, and help them with reconstruction. Prosperity flowed into Sweden.

As the standard of living rose, so did other things. Swedes were never the most sexually liberated - that was and remains the Danes - but they were second best (and they got more publicity). And as Swedes can do a lot of thinking, there was widespread discussion about how to proceed to the ideal state. Per Albin Hansson was replaced by Tage Erlander who was replaced by Olof Palme who was assassinated. And at that point, things started to go downhill. Every prime minister since then has been a huge disappointment. The synergy of politics and art was destroyed. Sweden was again a hayseed country.

The Swedes were still on their way to enacting the most visionary sex legislation on the planet when the former girlfriend of a national bard had a temper tantrum. First she accused the bard of putting her in his debut novel, then she wrote a novel of her own which was an outright attack on him, then she started soliciting letters from women who had gripes with their sex lives like she'd had. She put all the letters into a book, and the book went gangbusters. The legislative committee got cold feet and knock knees, and turned around and produced the first edition of what became the craziest and most repressive sex laws in the world.

Sweden is the country of a former leftist leader who kept getting busted at rave parties in a harbour south of town, in the wee hours, together with her preteen children. Then she was busted twice by the tax authorities for cheating with deductions, then she went into rehab twice. Then her party told her to leave and vacate her seat in parliament. She refused to leave her seat, and instead started launching tirades in session against Swedish men who were all 'worse than the Taliban'. She went on to make a publicity stunt of burning a serious chunk of cash to demonstrate how women are unfairly treated. No, no one got the point.

Then we have the wife of the former leader of the conservative party. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth. One of the main architects and engineers of the country's new wacko sex crime legislation. She's also the one who made headlines all over the world for her 'nigger cake' where she took a spoonful of the cake's genitalia, only to feed it into a real life 'negro' face. And this was supposed to be a publicity stunt to protest female genital mutilation in Africa? It worked great.

To fully appreciate how tilted this woman is, consider: current Swedish sex legislation only works with a man as a perp and a woman as the victim. A woman can do most anything to a man - there's no crime committed. Men get their careers ruined for overheated loins; women who do the same thing - buy (mostly black) toy boys in the tropics - are heralded as heroes and get praise in the media. Have a piece of 'nigger cake' and enjoy the party.

The Swedish feminists have their own special interest groups in the judiciary - one for prosecutors, one for judges.

The Swedes also have one of the wackiest judicial systems in the world: evidence isn't formally evaluated, with both hearsay and hunches allowed. There are no juries save in cases of freedom of speech. The lay judges who preside over trials have been shown to be woefully ignorant of the most basic jurisprudence - many believe it's alright to convict with no evidence whatsoever, as long as one metes out a lighter sentence.

Lay judges control the courts, yet have been found to often have severe criminal records themselves. There is no screening process, and educated magistrates say they're not interested in anything like that anyway. Many lay judges have been found out intimidating people about town in personal conflicts by using their position to threaten and wield power. The list goes on and on and on. And coupled with the toxic climate in the country, all bets are off for a fair trial.

Former lawyer Pelle Svensson, now retired, says it's impossible to get a fair trial in Sweden in a sex case: the feminists turn proceedings into what he described as 'Greek theatre', replete with dramatic outbursts and well choreographed fainting spells. Attorneys were quick to catch on that merely whispering 'child sexual abuse' in a divorce hearing could win the day for female clients.

Music mogul Billy Butt, today cofounder of the Swedish civil liberties union, was sent to jail for the rape of a woman who admits she got up from the bed where she was supposedly being raped, as she needed to pee, only to return to bed so she could submit to being raped again, only to travel to England with Butt where she told her friends that Butt was 'great in the sack' and they too should try to seduce him. This ridiculous story was believed not just in one but in two court instances because - as the court of appeals put it - 'it's inconceivable that any Swedish girl would want to have sex with someone with Butt's singular appearance'. (Butt is Kenyan and of Indian heritage.)

And of course the humiliating story of Thomas Quick. The world's most fiendish serial killer who, it turns out, harmed no one at all, save Sweden's rapidly crumbling international reputation. The police, the prosecutor, and the defence attorney conspired to withhold facts that would have shown the courts it was all a sham, and they did this not in one but in EIGHT cases. The verdicts have now all been overturned, but the drinking buddy of the defence attorney - the last line of checks and balances - made a spectacle of himself in the media by using his position as supreme court justice to try to whitewash his corrupted friend.

Then there's the ongoing case of Julian Assange, an unwitting Australian who, like so many others, had no clue how messed up Sweden had become. He got entangled with two girls on his trip to the country in August 2010, and he's been paying for it ever since. The police documents are all over the web, translated into English, and anyone can see how ridiculous the whole thing is. People can also see that one of the girls tried her hand at revenge, clumsily faking evidence, and those who know this may also remember that the Swedish media consistently refuse to cover the crime lab report which unequivocally shows this to be true.

That same lawyer, the drinking buddy of the weird supreme court justice, tried to use the Assange kerfuffle to get back his good name. It hasn't worked, but the WikiLeaks founder is still tied up in an embassy. He can't expect a fair trial anyway, but he'd still go for it if he could. It's just that he knows the US wants him, and the Swedes have never refused a surrender request from the US. It'd be a revolving door if he returned - he'd hardly get the soles of his shoes on Swedish soil before he was being whisked off to the eastern tip of Cuba.

Pär Ström was a voice for sensibility. An award-winning writer, Ström tried to counter vitriolic feminist attacks with facts. The PC elite had no weapon to use against him, so they bullied and intimidated and threatened him (in person) until they could make him go away.

Oscar Swartz published a landmark volume on 'Swedish Sex', a two-year research project with thousands upon thousands of reports from the media for the past 50 years. He was pushed out as well, his Kindle book silently withdrawn from Amazon.

No one's allowed to go against the PC elite in Sweden. Julian Assange cautiously called Sweden 'the Saudi Arabia of feminism' but that's not at all off the mark.

Feminist conventions end on the high note of singing how they're going to murder and dismember men; theatre groups put on fake killings of men where the girls masturbate with joy and lick blood after the deed is done; they've even got into preschools where they torment the boys as a way of giving them a 'proper education'. And higher learning is unreal today, with legislation on the books that says that all courses must be in accordance with the latest theories in 'gender science'. Professors who protest or otherwise resist - they get sacked. So says the new Swedish law.

Sweden used to be a great country with an incredible social system and one of the most beautiful populations - both physically and spiritually - on the planet. Intellectuals abroad rolled their eyes in admiration at the country. But that is no more. Today the Swedish state desperately attempts to salvage credibility with a Twitter account where carefully recruited 'ordinary Swedes' tweet about anything as long as it's not really important. From a country where everyone in all possible situations discussed politics all the time and even in bed, they've devolved into a silly state where even current events are taboo.

This week's tweets, for example, have been about cats, the summer weather, trams in Gothenburg, gay parades, barbecue mishaps, silly selfies, computer games, Alice Cooper, hair bands, meatballs, coffee breaks, elks on highways, DJs, soccer, cola drinks, shrimp salad - and comic books. Yesterday's big news item wasn't mentioned once.

And that's only the beginning. That's only the short version.

I'm playing Witcher 3 right now. Which game(s) are you currently playing? :D
 - Sweden's official Twitter account