Last week’s elections for European Parliament swept a bountiful harvest of Euroskeptic thorns into the EU’s side. Among them are the Sweden Democrats; Trey Dimsdale has interviewed successful SD candidate Charlie Weimers for the Acton Line podcast, and Weimers contributes a book review of Kasja Norman’s stirring book Sweden’s Dark Soul: The Unraveling of a Utopia to Acton’s transatlantic website.
The book’s evocative opening leads to probing questions of Sweden’s searing self-doubt. Weimers writes:
Norman starts the book depicting hundreds of sexual violations of girls in their teens, and younger, during the “We Are Stockholm” festival in the summer of 2015. Despite hundreds of witnesses and police reports, the media did not report on the crimes committed at the festival, which was funded by the local government and took place only a few hundred yards from parliament and the royal castle. Norman interviews a psychologist who saw girls harassed and violated by groups of men. She describes how eyewitness tried, and failed, to persuade Sweden’s largest daily to cover the matter.
The newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has refused to acknowledge its decision not to publish this story was due to the fact that all the perpetrators were non-Swedish, but Norman makes a convincing case that this was the reason. She here puts her finger on a sore spot in a country that commends itself for being progressive on gender equality: Swedish feminists go into total paralysis when ….
Read his full review here. It casts light on the inner turmoil plaguing one European nation, and why so many EU voters sent a message that Europe must jettison secularist/socialist utopian visions and embrace a culture that is more historic, decentralized, economically free, and traditional.
And tune into the Acton Line podcast this week to hear Weimers’ interview.
(Photo credit: Public domain.)
