Taking a page from Soviet internal policy of the Leonid Brezhnev era, Dagens Nyheter, through Böhm’s poorly written and incompetently reasoned article, accuses the membership of the Sweden Democrat Party of suffering from mental disease. In daring to point out the culturally suicidal implications of virtually unrestricted immigration from the Magreb, East Africa, and other parts of the Muslim world – and in dissenting from the official doctrine that no culture, not even one’s own, should be preferred over another – the Sweden Democrats have thus made themselves a lightning rod for conformist ire in one of modern Europe’s most vehemently conformist and methodically totalitarian nations.

If one dissented from orthodoxy in such a context, then it would follow, based on politically correct premises, that one was crazy, a potentially contagious pest-carrier of unsanctioned judgments. Such people ought to be cast out or at least safely isolated from the rest of society. That is the intention of Böhm’s rhetoric. (For reference, Böhm’s article is here and the website of the Sweden Democrat Party is here.)

I.

Böhm’s article – “The Sweden Democrat Party is an Orthodox Minority Group” – offers itself then as a representative specimen of contemporary Leftwing or “Gnostic” bigotry. An examination of its assumptions, errors, rhetorical nastiness, and outright mendacity will therefore be instructive. First, however, a few words should be devoted to the object of Böhm’s censure, the Sweden Democrat Party. Having something in common with Denmark’s Folkepartie and again with Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, the Sweden Democrat Party, or “Sweden Democrats” (Sverigedemokrater), came into being, in the late 1980s, in response to an acute perception among attentive individuals that the Swedish state had ceased to represent or even adequately to serve the Swedish people. Rampant bureaucracy, administered by appointed rather than elected personnel, had become an autonomous power within the state. Ideologues ensconced as bureaucrats set out dictatorially to reshape society according to an antinomian vision inimical, not only to custom and tradition, which would be bad enough, but to the basic legal freedoms long taken for granted by Swedes, such as the freedom of speech.

According to the Party website, the Sweden Democrats say, “We are nationalist democrats and dissociate ourselves from all forms of totalitarianism and racism.” Furthermore: “Our party [has] declared that we consider the UN universal declaration on human rights as fundamental for our politics.” Among the several Party platform-planks, one finds commitments to shrink welfare and lower taxes, to encourage stable families and promote an above-replacement birthrate for Swedes, and “to stop the development of a multicultural society.”

The Sweden Democrats seem to have taken a page from James Madison and Thomas Jefferson: “The vision of the Sweden Democrats is a well-functioning democratically-anchored constitutional polity within which all citizens are equal before the law.”

Twenty-five years of relentless social restructuring by Stockholm’s bureaucratic elites have validated the founding suspicions of the Sweden Democrats. Social pathologies traceable to immigrant enclaves afflict Stockholm, Malmö, and Gothenburg; Swedes who formerly never thought about such things must now take rape and assault into consideration as facts of their social existence. While the Sweden Democrat Party remains small, it has also proven its tenacity: “Early on in 2002 [the Sweden Democrat Party] won its first seat in Riksdagen [the Parliament]. Sten Andersson, member of the Riksdag for [the Moderate Party] since 1983, decided to join [the Sweden Democrats]. Sten Andersson has for many years been known to be the only member of Riksdag who questions the immigration policies of the government.” Sven-Olle Olsson, a popular former mayor of Sjöbo, followed Andersson into the Riksdag. “Sven-Olle Olsson won national fame in the late eighties for calling a local referendum on the question of signing a contract with the national agency of immigration, providing for housing and social benefits for a number of third world immigrants. The contract was then rejected with a substantial margin by the voters.”

Böhm begins his cynical mistreatment of the Sweden Democrats by invoking a bizarre misrepresentation of the Swedish nation – or perhaps it is the Swedish people, as Böhm uses key terms with the semantic slipperiness characteristic of men and women whose ideological convictions put them at odds with the structure of reality: “People in Sweden consist of heterogeneous groups under a common Swedish umbrella – city dwellers, country folk, academics, workers, immigrants, their descendants, those on sick leave, single people, cohabiters, addicts, [and] people with dietary needs [näringsidkare]. I was reminded, by Böhm’s taxonomy, of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who in one of his stories purports to parody a Chinese encyclopedia. Borges’ fanciful reference book divides the animal kingdom into “those that belong to the emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids [and, among others] those that from a long way off look like flies.” One might say that, from a long way off, Böhm’s categories look like an orderly arrangement.

But not in close-up… Böhm’s opening statement in fact disintegrates on examination right down to the level of its basic grammar. Consider the phrase, “people in Sweden consist of” (“Människor i Sverige består av”): Theologically, one might say that a human being consists of a body and a soul; or chemically, that it consists of several common mineral-compounds and a few quarts of water; or philosophically one might say that the human being, essentially considered, consists of rationality on the one hand and mortality on the other. But to say, as Böhm does, that, “people… consist of,” followed by his lunatic taxonomy, makes no sense. (Never mind the lunatic taxonomy just yet – we shall come to it.) Böhm’s “people” is a plural of person, and no person “consists of” the things that Böhm names.

It is not difficult to divine the origin of the odd construction: Böhm will under no circumstance iterate the phrase, the Swedish people, because doing so would confirm the existence of the thing that he wants to deny. The utterance “people in Sweden,” a circumlocution, thus reveals Böhm obeying his own taboo on certain verbal anathemas. That neurosis-like avoidance is characteristic of Left-liberal thinking, which strongly resembles primitive thinking. I shall presently come to other instances of the same resemblance.

As for the set of component-types into whom “people in Sweden” may, according to Böhm, be subdivided: it is either a piece of masterful, deliberate nonsense intended to stultify readers into delinquency of their critical acumen or it is the second reality – the ideological delusion – of a social worker and committed Left-liberal who has completely fused with his job and his party-doctrine. The dichotomy of “city dwellers and country folk” tells us nothing specifically about Swedes. Town and country are a traditional polarity in every nation. The pairing of “academics and workers” is reminiscent of Marxist discourse and again entails no specifically Swedish implication. Notice that Böhm’s list has extended itself thus far by pairs. To be consistent with the pattern, the next pair must link “immigrants” with “their descendants.”

But since when have Swedes – the inhabitants of the Eastern half of the Scandinavian Peninsula since the Fifth Century AD at the latest and probably from much earlier – been classifiable as “immigrants”? During the mid-Twentieth Century, refugees from Stalin and Hitler came to Sweden, but they were few in number and swiftly assimilated. Sweden, like Norway, has been one of the most demographically stable regions of Europe.

This leaves “those on sick leave, single people, cohabiters, addicts, [and] people with dietary needs [näringsidkare].” While “single people” and “cohabiters” form a complement, “those on sick leave,” “addicts,” and “people with dietary needs” are anomalous and nonsensical. One remarks again the tendency to substitute awkward politically correct terms for customary usages. Customarily, one speaks of single people and married couples; the term “cohabiters” blends away any specificity and could frankly apply to a man, his Martian friend, and their monkey. “Those on sick leave,” “addicts,” and “people with dietary needs” are entirely arbitrary and have no cultural implication – but abolishing coherency is Böhm’s point.

II.

Having attempted to annihilate the notion of Swedishness, Böhm now avails himself of a standard gesture of Left-liberal rhetoric, the wild, scapegoating accusation prefaced by an appeal to a seemingly benevolent concept. The seemingly benevolent concept is “tolerance.” The “common umbrella” of the “heterogeneous groups” referred to earlier by Böhm “implies,” as he writes, “tolerance for all differences.” (Note the sweeping “all,” to which we shall return.) Having lulled readers into complacency by invoking the highest of liberal virtues, Böhm launches his accusation: “For a long time,” he writes, “we in psychology have known that suspicion and xenophobia come from a fear of the unknown.” The claim begins with a professional in-group self-reference. This particular first-person plural is the order of adepts or illuminati, destined to govern the unwashed. Gnostic piety always introduces itself in this priestly manner, ex cathedra. Just as “tolerance” serves the reigning illuminati for a supreme virtue, “suspicion” and (the inevitable) “xenophobia” serve for supreme vices.

According to Böhm, “we all have fear of that which we do not recognize, likewise for the unrecognized even within ourselves, [a fact] which tempts us to stigmatize groups that appear different or weak.” (“Vi har alla en rädsla för det vi inte känner till, liksom för det okända inom oss själva, som är frestande att lägga ut på grupper som verkar vara annorlunda eller svaga.”)

As soon as one encounters the word tolerance in contemporary speech, one knows that the only possible consequence is a display of extravagant intolerance. Böhm confirms one’s experience in this matter with his next sentence: “Xenophobia often expresses itself as opposition to the complex or foreign, that which is not immediately recognizable or understandable in simple categories.” The accusations of “suspicion” and “xenophobia” belong to the standard verbal praxis of modern elite intolerance. Thus Böhm abuses both of his terms, treating suspicion (främlingsrädsla) as though it were emotional rather than rational and then immediately trading it for xenophobia, as though the two words signified the same thing. Suspicion and the closely related prejudice are cognitive attitudes rooted in the fact, always ignored by utopians, that the greatest danger to human beings historically speaking has always been other human beings. When parents of young children notice a strange man loitering about the neighborhood playground, knowledge and experience motivate them to scrutinize the unknown person and, if necessary, take appropriate action.

The term xenophobia (främlingsfientlighet) designates thematic incontrovertible hatred of anyone outside the tribe. In prehistoric circumstances, xenophobia likely had a survival function (tribes hated each other with genocidal ferocity); but in modern, civic society, under the rule of law, it is an inassimilable anachronism. In shuffling his terms – xenophobia for suspicion – Böhm taints the Sweden Democrats with a charge of primitive behavior. Böhm quotes a number of statements from the party’s website. For example: “Immigration- and integration-policies [in Sweden] have been a monumental disaster.” Again: “To be Swedish is to have a predominantly Swedish identity, and to understand oneself and be understood by others as Swedish.” And again: “Within some decades [due to immigration] Swedes risk becoming a minority in their own country,” a development which, should it come to pass, will impinge “on all aspects of social life and… transform the nation into something unrecognizable.”

As to the first statement, considering the fact that whole areas of Stockholm and Malmö are in effect off-limits to Swedes and not subject to the rule of Swedish law, it seems entirely defensible. The second statement no more than describes any national or ethnic self-identity including the Swedish. Thus it was obvious to Swedes between 1940 and 1943, when the Third Reich exerted pressure to facilitate the rotation of Wehrmacht troops in and out of Norway and Finland via Swedish Rail, that the German soldiers riding in the sealed cars were not their co-nationals. This was not “xenophobia” but rigorous prudence based on acquaintance with and knowledge of the passengers and their propensities. The third statement accurately describes the relation between demography and national survival: people have the right to define themselves collectively and to assert sovereignty, within the national boundaries, on the basis of their self-definition. They have a right to defend their sovereignty.

III.

Böhm sees it otherwise, as Left-liberals invariably do. He adduces no facts to repudiate the claim in the first statement. He dismisses the second statement as “circular reasoning,” which it is not (it is an axiom). And he refers to the statistical logic of the third statement as “racist or xenophobic mythology.” Böhm then offers the red herring that, “Sweden has always been changed by those who live here.” Yes, Herr Böhm, one would like to say, but until recent decades ninety-nine per cent of the people who lived there were Swedes, and not merely under the technicality of their residence. Swedes have long savored their awareness of internal differences – the language in Skåne stands closer to Danish than it does to the official Stockholm dialect – but Swedes have lived with the idea of their unified nationhood since the Gustavian dynasty. When I honored my maternal ancestry by studying Swedish in college, at UCLA in the 1970s, it entailed many things, including the drudgery of grammar as a foundation for language and culture, but it did not entail my learning Arabic or my familiarizing myself with Sharia-law. That would have represented an entirely different interest.

Böhm charges the Sweden Democrats in one of his paragraphs with being “afraid of complexity,” which, in his view, they “grind down to a Swedish simplification of Swedish/Un-Swedish.” (Suddenly it is possible to identify something as “Swedish.”) In a subsequent paragraph Böhm writes of “the demagogic simplification of avoiding complex relations and appealing to black-and-white, either-or thinking.” The automatic condescension, with its implicit dualism of enlightened / unenlightened, belongs with the self-nominating righteousness of the adept or illuminatus. In Augustine’s Confessions, in his description of the Manichaeans, the autobiographer notes how the theoreticians of that Gnostic faith flaunted pamphlets outlining extraordinarily baroque schemes of existence but, when questioned, grew tongue-tied and could not explain their own doctrines. Once, when stymied by Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, comedian-interviewer David Letterman of Late Night tried to evade a vise-grip syllogism by invoking the notion that, “I’m an intelligent person who appreciates complexity.”

One speaks English or one does not; one speaks Swedish or one does not; one observes the law of the land and lives in civic amity with one’s fellow citizens or one does not. Traditions, rooted in long habitation in a particular place, live through active commemoration or they die. Some things, as the actual lesson of life teaches us, are dichotomous rather than infinitesimally graduated. The fact that some things are simple belongs indeed to the complexity of existence. Thus, when the Sweden Democrats argue that “the continued growth of alien enclaves in the preponderance of cities is unsustainable,” the proposition is either true or it is false. Evidence for the proposition’s truth may be gleaned from a wide variety of resources. Here, for example, is a well-documented story by “Baron Bodissey” on the epidemic of sexual assault in Sweden. Böhm never addresses evidence; he merely and peremptorily dismisses the proposition as “demagogic” another factotum-word in his lexicon of vituperation.

According to Böhm, “A central problem is that [the Sweden Democrat Party] couples together Swedishness – national identity, language, and culture – with repudiation of other groups, that is to say immigrants, especially those who come from distant places.” Böhm misrepresents his object. I would say that he misrepresents it deliberately and with a demagogic intention. The Sweden Democrats do not oppose immigration; they oppose the reckless imposition of a multicultural society – a chimera that does not, in fact, exist – on the Swedish nation in its longstanding character of some hundreds of years. The Sweden Democrats have indeed mustered the acuity to notice and the courage to state that the very word multiculturalism is a nihilistic swindle. “In recent years,” the Sweden Democrats observe, “immigration has been of a different type [than in the past].” In particular, “This has involved tens of thousands of immigrants each year, from distant parts of the world, which has not been good for Sweden.” These new immigrants not only burden the society; they also serve as instruments in an ideological campaign essentially totalitarian in its methods and aims.

To quote from the website of Sweden Democrats: “Multiculturalism [has] seriously impaired the conditions for continued democratic development of our country. In recent decades, political desire for a multicultural society has weakened the foundation of commonly held values that shaped and made possible the internal framework of the Swedish nation state.” The Sweden Democrats note that the destructive policies have never been referred to the Swedish people for approval but have always been imposed by fiat. In many ways, as a result, and not merely through the imposition of what amount to foreign colonies in Swedish cities, “Sweden is becoming a divided country.” Multiculturalism, as the Sweden Democrats and others have discovered, is another form of radical antinomianism whose ultimate aim is the destruction of existing societies and the harassment and oppression of their people.

Böhm’s retort to the Sweden Democrats on this issue takes the pathetic form of the dubious claim that, “it is likely that even members of the Party and those who speak for them have as many immigrants among their forefathers as the others.”

IV.

In true Left-liberal fashion, Böhm, as the psychoanalysts like to say, projects. In smearing the Sweden Democrats as bigots and fanatics, he is revealing aspects of his own personality. Indeed, it is possible to perform a modest and easily completed experiment that supports this inference. I invite readers to run a YouTube video search on Sverigedemokraterna. This search will turn up hundreds of video clips from Swedish television over the last decade, virtually every one of which traffics in the same hate-filled clichés that turn up in Böhm’s screed. Every electoral victory of the Sweden Democrats becomes the occasion for hysterical denunciations of the Party, the supposed “intolerance” of which arouses the actual intolerance of Sweden’s official Left-liberal establishment.  The video clips reveal the arrogance of the secular saints in full dudgeon-like spate. One detects in such unanimous ire the deep-seated primitive revulsion against the impurity of heterodox preference – again, exactly the characteristic that the elites use to slander those whose ideas differ from their own.

Böhm proposes his own notion of “Swedishness” to counter that of the Sweden Democrats. Böhm’s notion is, of course, erected entirely on abstractions and is logically self-contradicting. “One could argue,” as Böhm writes, “that to be Swedish is to be tolerant and not to see Swedish identity as something clear and fixed for everyone.” A bit later: “Swedishness means then also to tolerate groups that hold to their own opinions and views on how they shall live.” What could “tolerance” mean in this vapid but wicked context except submission? I have referred earlier to Left-liberal comportment as “Gnostic,” using the term as the philosopher Eric Voegelin did to describe the self-sanctifying, auto-apotheotic character of modern radical politics. Voegelin saw liberalism, socialism, National Socialism, Bolshevism, and Maoism as secular religions. To this list one could add, from recent experience, feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.

Among the symptoms of Gnostic dementia, Voegelin remarked pathological alienation from the world, as it is given to us; he also remarked that this alienation easily tips over into outright destructive hatred. The Gnostic sees reality as tyrannical and intolerable because God or some power has brought reality about, endowing it with the character that it possesses, without consulting the Gnostic. The Gnostic is someone – he might even be atheist, as most self-identifying modern people and most Left-liberals are – who in effect resents the fact that he is not God and who wishes to become or to replace God, or whatever the power is that has led to the present constitution of reality. In nominating himself as the replacement-deity, the Gnostic strives to demonstrate his god-equivalence by remaking or transforming existence. He wishes to be absolutely sovereign and will tolerate no competitor or rival. Destroying longstanding traditions and replacing them by synthetic abstractions belong to this project, as the histories of the ideological dictatorships will reveal.

Moving large populations around also belongs to this project. The Soviets forcibly removed whole populations of Balts, for example, to Western Siberia while settling Russians and Ukrainians in large numbers in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Chinese Communists have done the same thing in Tibet. Before their defeat, the National Socialists wanted to empty whole regions of Russia and Ukraine as Lebensraum for German colonization.

The Sweden Democrats have noticed that the blandly named multiculturalist enterprise of importing large nuclei of inassimilable foreigners to small nation states conforms to this savage dictatorial pattern, which one might think had disappeared with the dictatorships, but which has not. It is the clarity of vision of the Sweden Democrats that outrages their enemies, who desperately want to conceal their own actual motives. Thus Böhm classifies the Sweden Democrats with “orthodox people who believe that everything can be reduced to right and wrong”; Böhm proclaims that such people “cannot be allowed to dominate a society.” But the Sweden Democrats show no sign of wanting “to dominate” Swedish society. In their own words, they want Swedish society to be democratically self-determining and sovereign; their opposition to appellate-proof diktats issued by unelected bureaucrats thus runs in perfect consistency with, and is logically prior to, their objection to destructive immigration-projects inflicted on a small nation of nine million people.

A good part of the contemporary immigration problem in Sweden stems from the presence in the country of hyper-orthodox foreigners of fanatical conviction who take from the welfare state while acting aggressively and even criminally against Swedes and Swedish custom. They resist assimilation and demand concessions from the larger community. This is not “complexity”; it is barbarity, for which no justification exists. Indeed, in those cases where large colonies of Europeans once settled themselves in Africa and Asia and acted to alter local custom, Left-liberals are quick to denounce the evils of colonialism. To see the truth of the situation, as the Sweden Democrats do, is to see something that is actually simple and easy to understand. That is why Presbyters of Correctness, like Böhm, reflexively pervert ordinary language. They attack normative definitions and obscure the genuinely simple under the falsely complex to hide their motives and calumniate their critics – for example, by calling them insane. The Sweden Democrats are morally right to oppose the elites.