Army in Swedish ghettos? How Europe tries to adapt to migration instead of solving it

Lofven’s words last week were a response to statistics showing that more than 300 shootings occurred in 2017, the vast majority of them in the three biggest cities. Three decades ago gun crime was front page-worthy in a country with restrictive firearms ownership laws. Now, with nearly-daily media headlines about “turf wars,” “revenge killings” and “grenade crime,” attention has turned to the disadvantaged areas where they occur. A report last year indicated that more than 90 percent of shooting suspects were from an immigrant background.

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Despite grabbing international headlines, the earnestness of Lofven’s proposal should be taken with a pinch of salt. The former unionist’s rhetoric has been consistently tough on crime, and his minority government faces a battle for re-election against resurgent center and nativist parties later this year.

Yet the episode is important, because it serves as a textbook illustration of how Western leaders have dealt with immigration and resultant domestic terrorism. The army plan takes the idea that the government must be seen to be doing something to an extreme that is so macho it is comical. Unless Lofven genuinely believes that soldiers in fatigues marching Malmo rude boys to their parents’ doorstep is an effective long-term solution, the very idea is also preposterously cosmetic.

It is telling that while socialist Lofven was openly touting measures that would make a Gauleiter think twice, the leader of the party he called actual “Nazis” – the Sweden Democrats – was trying to offer a semblance of social analysis, however crude, saying that “this is the new Sweden – an exciting, dynamic, multicultural paradise.”

But while Lofven’s plan is still undoubtedly undergoing cost efficiency analysis, similar adjustments to the changed reality are all around us. Bollards and concrete blocks are being installed at Europe’s tourist squares. Until November 2017 France had lived under a state of emergency for two years, and children growing up there will think of a policeman as a bulletproof-vested figure armed with a submachine gun. There are riot-proofed police stations where officers have to be driven in in armored vehicles to avoid assault, and patrols outside synagogues. There are state-funded tent cities, and warzone style camps. Everyone’s given up complaining about the performative hell of air travel.

Everywhere are compromises, temporary solutions, maladaptations, constantly one step behind the unfolding situation. Some are outright ineffective, all are steps back from previous lifestyles, and all burdens on the innocent. And there are dozens more similar forced changes in the lives of Westerners that are less tangible, but more inconvenient than walking past a bollard.

Two decades ago most of these images would have been inconceivable in the West, but how quickly and unquestioningly this new reality is accepted, one step at a time. When Lofven’s predecessor, Olof Palme, the godfather of Sweden’s welcoming stance on modern migration, who said that a “society defines its success by how well it treats immigrants,” did he predict this for his sleepy and homogenous Protestant country, or even desire it? Did he know what would have to be done in the name of the same ideals he espoused by future members of his own party, and what price his native countrymen would have to pay?

This is not about immigrants – both refugees and economic migrants have human rights and legitimate self-interest. This is about the Western political establishment – not just Lofven, but Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, Jean-Claude Juncker and Antonio Guterres – and an unwillingness or inability to perform an honest and deep examination of the impact of migration, the value of assimilation, the capacities of their societies, and their future. Only then can they stop plugging leaks in the walls with words and family heirlooms, painting over the rot as it sets in, and instead develop a blueprint for a more harmonious and prosperous existence for all inside house Europe.

Igor Ogorodnev for RT