There’s a popular twitter account, “Peter from Sweden”, run by Swedish journalist Peter Imanuelsen, which does little but post stories of crimes committed in Sweden, particularly sex crimes.
The assertion repeatedly made by Immanuelsen, who has some 350,000 followers worldwide, is that there is a direct link between immigration into Sweden, and a rise in sex crimes in the country. In a post on his substack, written before the elections this week, Immanuelsen writes:
In the year of 1975, Sweden had 421 reported rapes for the whole year. Fast forward to 2021 and that same number has gone up to a shocking 9 668.
Nobody seems to dispute the figures. To the extent that there are disputes with Immanuelsen, they follow a familiar pattern: Claims that his figures are not put in their proper context, given that Sweden has changed how it records sex crimes over time; Claims that he disproportionately highlights rapes and sexual offences committed by migrants and ignores the wider problem of, ahem, “toxic masculinity”. When those don’t work, claims that he is just an out and out racist. If you’ve ever taken an opposing viewpoint on a matter of any salience to that of an Irish NGO, you’ll recognise the playbook. It crosses borders.
None of this is to endorse Immanuelsen’s work in any way: I do not read it closely. What is clear though is that the strategies of those who oppose Immanuelsen and his views are no longer working, at least in Sweden.
One in five Swedes voted, this week, for the so-called “far right”, which shares these views. The “far right” will now be in Government, which is very useful, because we will see just how “far right” they really are. Perhaps the rounding up of Communists will begin tomorrow. More likely, politics being what it is, they will enter Government, moderate a bit, lose popularity, and become the establishment that they despise. That is what usually happens, after all.
But the future aside, what is happening in Sweden is in many ways inevitable, and will happen right across the modern west in time. It is inevitable because we live in the era of pretend, and the entire western establishment is almost entirely dependent on keeping us pretending.
It is a pretence, for example, that immigration has no negative social consequences, and that only the far right claim otherwise. That is why Peter in Sweden resonates: Because it confronts us with something we mostly know, but must pretend is racist to think.
Similarly, it is a pretence that higher taxes on diesel can stop the Antarctic from melting in 80 years. It is a pretence that a little boy can decide to become a little girl tomorrow and that we must believe that he has always been a little girl. It is a pretence that we can abolish prisons, effectively, and end crime by just being nice to people. It is a pretence that we can end homelessness if we just wish very hard, and tax some landlords. We live in an era of pretence.
There is another thing to say here: The “far right” is not on the rise because of the left. It is on the rise because of the “centre right”, which has, right across the west, surrendered to this era of pretence.
On the matter of climate and refugees and justice and all the other modern touchpaper issues of culture, there is not a cigarette paper between the centre right and the hardline left. The choice in most societies is progressivism with high taxes, or progressivism with low taxes. That is true in Ireland, just as it was in Sweden until recently.
The problem with all of this is that it is very easy to see the pretend. Peter in Sweden has 350,000 global followers because they can see the basic logic in his argument: That when you bring people with radically different cultural attitudes to women and sex into a society, they will bring those cultural attitudes with them, in large or small degree. And the more people shout that he is racist, the more people simply conclude that the truth is what they are calling racist. And therefore, “racist” loses its impact considerably.
We are not yet, in Ireland, anywhere close to a point where one in five people are willing to vote against the pretence, but on various issues we see a growing resistance to it. At the moment, that resistance is still kept in check by Ireland’s very powerful cultural incentives to shut up, say nothing, and keep your head down – incentives which are consciously and deliberately reinforced at every possible moment by those with the power to do so.
But this winter will test those incentives. It is notable, for example, that social media sentiment on the matter of Enoch Burke is much more divided than mainstream media sentiment, and that politicians in Ireland are under pressure on trans issues from a campaign that is sustaining itself without so much as a whisper of mainstream political approval. As winter bites, I suspect the same will become true of climate policies. And as I wrote yesterday, the Government is already talking about the growing resistance it faces on immigration. All of this is encouraging.
It is encouraging, by the way, not because those in opposition to pretence are necessarily right. Some of them are wrong – particularly, I think, on matters like the Ukrainian war and covid vaccines. But the era of pretence is devastating for public policy and social cohesion. And eventually, like in Sweden, it will come to an end here as well.