They’re Rioting in Sweden (and in France and in Great Britain)

A report in The New York Times highlighted the connection between the recent riots in Sweden with earlier events in France in 2005 and Great Britain in 2011. A storm is threatening these countries, and Europe more broadly: fundamental problems with immigration policies and national political identities, and in a tragic way, the whole world is not watching. Rather festering problems are being ignored, with politicians putting their heads in the sand, nicely demonstrated by Sweden’s center-right prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt: “Just hooliganism.”

Timo Lyyra, the former assistant director of The New School’s Transregional Center of Democratic Studies, presently working in Gothenburg , Sweden, and my friend, gave a clear response to this know-nothingism on his Facebook page. -Jeff

Hooliganism? No; it’s a conflict in a class society built along racial and ethnic lines and reinforced through, not even always very subtle, social, cultural, economic, and geographic segregation.

The 1st generation is always happy just to be able to bring the kids to safety; the 2nd generation is always optimistic they’ll become like everyone else once they get an education; and the 3rd generation realizes that education helps nothing, and they’ll never get out of the miserable faraway suburbs they’ve been confined to and never become accepted as “real Swedes” on equal footing with everyone else.

And nothing is getting better, only worse, often significantly worse. Your chances of getting a job today if you have a foreign-sounding name on your CV and there is a Sven Svensson applying too: near zero this side of the few specialist fields where they need your language skills for a service business of some sort.

The frustration is beginning to boil over for those who don’t just give up and set up their own shadow society, shadow economy, and shadow lives; and those who do, declare a war on the oppressors going after them — the official Sweden.

Yes, the public identity is that of a nice person welcoming all, but that’s as long as they don’t then stay for very long, move into my neighborhood, put their kids in my child’s school, and start crowding my tram in the mornings — as long as they stay invisible, in other words, and when they don’t, at least support my sense of sanctimonious self-satisfaction through their humbleness and gratitude and then shut the fuck up.

Until now the riots have been mostly confined to other cities outside Stockholm (Malmö and Gothenburg most sensationally). A couple of years ago there was a much larger (in scope, spread, and duration) upheaval in Gothenburg that almost ran out of control; for those reading their papers and watching their news it was, however, just once more about “violent (immigrant youth) street gangs” and “organized (immigrant) crime” making trouble god knows where out there in their “dangerous” ethnic suburbs far away from here. I’m kind of glad it’s spread to the capital city now, too. Makes it just a little bit harder for the bigwigs to brush it all aside in their press meetings as just another “police matter” involving the usual suspects busy doing their thing in that well-known wog hotspot of theirs where no ordinary, decent citizens who vote, have their own parties and MPs, and know how to challenge the system by submitting complaints and review requests anyway ever go and even less live.

Timo was obviously venting, outraged by structured and ignored injustice. Yet, I think he was getting at the heart of the matter, with implications beyond Sweden and Europe in a world where labor and capital move widely and rapidly, but at different rates, with clear winners and losers. -Jeff