Saturday, September 1, 2012

How to distance yourself from racism by making racist claims.


A leader for the notoriously anti-immigrant "politically incorrect" populist party "The Sweden Democrats", Pär Norling recently did an interview on why SD refused to participate in an anti-Nazi rally in the city of Bollnäs. According to Norling, "it would've been fine if it was against the Nazi's, but it was for multiculturalism, which we oppose". Apparently, Mr Norling believes that this is something that is seriously misguided, stating something along the lines that Nazism is basically to be blamed on immigration policy. "There has been too much immigration, so Swede's have been put aside. Young and unemployed people are usually worse of than immigrants." I did not occur to him that a lot of immigrants are young and unemployed, apparently. He then claimed that we should ban Islam from Sweden, stating that "well really they exercise freedom of religion, but this religion is so different that it need not exist in Sweden. They mistreat people, children, circumcise..."

This, of course, is pretty outrageous. SD chose to exclude him from their organization, stating that it was against the "democratic principle". But this rhetoric is something the Sweden Democrats have been using since the beginning, not only hinting at radically excluding Muslims from Swedish society, but using the idea that immigration, in a sense, is what causes bigotry between races. If only people from different cultures and different religious backgrounds are segregated into their own community without overlap can we respect them and understand them. Or?

What is really implied is that the average Swede has a set of prejudices against people from Muslim or Arabic countries, and that these prejudices have been proven correct by their integration into the Swedish society. The Arabs really ARE uncivilized desert dwellers, insane terrorists, haters of white people, who all REALLY believe in violent jihad against Christians, even though they don't state they do, who are genetically incapable of comprehending and practicing the principles of Democracy.  The Sweden Democrats have internalized these very misguided ideas about Muslim communities, and like most racists, they assume every other Swede has too. Basically, they are saying this:

We have very racist prejudices against Arab and other minority people. But we're against racism! The reason racism exist is that Arabs are here to confirm all our racist prejudices and thus creating social and economic problems. Racism won't exist if we just kept to a monoculturalist policy and let all our racial prejudices against Arabs and other minorities be left unconfirmed by unnecessary exposure to other cultures that would just prove us right in how terrible and hateful they are! Shame on the leftist ideals of open borders and plurality, see how they break down the healthy culture of hating people on a distance? Boo-hoo.
When you see statements like "racism is caused by immigration", you might want to step back to look at what is really said. In reality, they are defending the idea that prejudices against a certain ethnic groups are true, and that they themselves hold these prejudices, but it is masked poorly by a notion that after all, racism is bad.  So they're racists, claiming that their racism is negative, but not their fault.

/Jakob Pettersson