The sun has been rising from the North for quite some time on the NATO land. Since mid-2009, the chair of NATO secretary general has been occupied by Northern Europe’s politicians: first the former Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen and then (since October 2014) the former Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg. Brussels extended Stoltenberg’s contract to September 2022. The not so far deadline is already prompting the first discussions among the Atlantic partners.

Next year, the new secretary might be introduced at NATO’s Madrid summit in late spring or early summer. According to the Western zeitgeist, a woman is largely expected to reach the top civilian rank inside NATO for the first time. To complete the identikit, you have to consider the shift toward North, North-East of the Alliance that since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is progressively positioning his troops around the Russian borders.

The first three names circulating are the former presidents Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović of Croatia and Dalia Grybauskaitė of Lithuania; and present Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid. The play is far from over, and many other countries will push their candidates. Despite her poor public relations skills and charisma, the UK could try with the former number 10, Theresa May. In a time of rising tension with Russia one thing is sure: the standard of the new incumbent should meet the same flattening attitude towards Washington that the two last northern secretaries ensured so dutifully.

As Moscow (and everyone in the world, indeed, except the European mainstream media) knows, the strategic power of the alliance lies on the Western side of the Atlantic only. Viewing from the U.S., one of the most appreciated attitudes of European allies is unconditioned obedience. A quality that the Northern European countries epitomise best. Surely more than the comparatively less trustable Southern countries like France, Italy or Spain. Or the Germans. Linked to Russia by an eternal geopolitical love/hate relationship, Germany has recently blocked the supply of NATO weaponry to Kiev despite Washington’s pressures. Having a robust commercial relationship with Russia, Berlin views economic war with Moscow, not to mention an actual military conflict, a nightmare to cope with reluctantly only when the American pressure becomes unbearable.

So if you want to find the NATO hardcore militant, you have to meet the elites of Northern Europe. Peoples are a different matter; even though in recent times the pools are going slightly towards NATO support, the public opinions are still largely divided and generally inclined to a neutral attitude on  security matters. If you let ideology apart, it is difficult to explain why a more aggressive NATO stance should be in those countries’ national interest. This consideration works well for the entire Eastern side of the Atlantic Alliance.

For many years, the cooperation between the governments of the Nordic Council (a body for formal inter-parliamentary collaboration among Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland) avoided security issues out of respect for Sweden and Finland’s non-aligned status. But last November, the usual fair play was somehow put aside. NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg addresses the 73rd Session of the Nordic Council in Copenhagen, saying: “By remaining united and continuing to adapt to a changing world, we will keep the ’deep peace’ here in the Nordic region and in Europe”.

In the most aggressive interpretation of ancient “Si vis pacem para bellum”, the “deep peace” is pursued through a constant military push towards the Russian border. When Russia reacts, as in the Ukrainian case, Western media are there to shout at the new barbarian aggression.

Despite Sweden’s new Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson recently saying that Sweden would not be applying for NATO membership, the country is a stable satellite of the Alliance. Last June, Sweden hosted, with a crucial role, the Exercise Arctic Challenge 21, one of the largest air-power drills in Europe. Arctic Challenge deployed warplanes from the U.S., Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain for air defence, close air support, air-defence suppression and air-to-ground strike training.

The Swedish government has reintroduced military conscription, approved a staggering 40 per cent increase in defence spending (the Country’s hugest defence-spending increase in 70 years), defined a new security doctrine, the “Total Defence,” and started a military build-up in Gotland, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea with a charming “view” on the Baltic Countries.

Since 2016, Stockholm has been a key U.S. partner in providing a flexible global-strike capability (read: against Russia) of the long-range American bombers. The new spending will increase the size of the country’s military by 67 per cent, reorganise the army into mechanised brigades, add air-defence systems to warships, build up the size of the navy and deploy a next-generation fighter-bomber.

In early November, Sweden received its first Patriot missile defence system from the United States. The military industries of the neutral and pacifist Sweden are going under full sail: sales increased from 172 USD Million in 2019 to 286 USD Million in 2020, with Pakistan and Emirates at the top of the list. In recent years, this trend has been in ironic contrast with the irregularly pursued Sweden’s feminist foreign policy (FFP).

Finland is the other regular-irregular at  NATO’s table. Finnish President Sauli Niinistö has just replayed like this to the last Russian appeal not to join the eastwards shift of the Alliance: “Finland considers NATO to be a factor that is fostering security and stability in Europe. Maintaining a national room to manoeuvre and freedom of choice is the foundation of Finland’s foreign, security and defence policy. This also includes the possibility of military alignment and applying for NATO membership”.

In a 2019 poll, half of Finns, 51 per cent, said they are against joining NATO while the yes faction scored 26 per cent. At the end of October, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg praised Finland and Sweden’s close partnership with the Atlantic Alliance while visiting the Swedish Navy base in the Hårsfjärden fjord near Berga, Haninge, during the joint Swedish/Finnish Naval Exercise, Swenex-21.

“It is important that NATO allies, Finland and Sweden continue to train and exercise together. Over the years, we have been working more and more closely together. We have seen the security situation in the region deteriorate, with Russia’s aggressive posturing and its military build-up. This makes our cooperation even more important”, said the secretary general.

Finland has just chosen the F-35A Block 4 multirole fighter to replace its fleet of 62 old F/A-18C/D Hornets. Helsinki has confirmed its intention to buy 64 examples of the Joint Strike Fighter. All included: armament, training, maintenance, and other services, with deliveries of the jets scheduled to start in 2025. The estimated global expense is 8,3 billion euros. The Swedish, with their challenging Saab Gripen E, were the great losers. The F35 is a very advanced fighter and Helsinki is to develop a domestic support network that will be among the most sizable anywhere outside the U.S., probably only behind Israel. Despite this reality, the moral of the story is that when it comes to NATO, Europe loses, and America wins, either strategically or economically. The game is not to reverse the unrealistic narrative of bad Russia against the good Western Alliance but to understand that European countries’ national interest is not the main concern of the American-led alliance.

Early in the “coronavirus-19” — subsequently called “Covid-19” — pandemic, Denmark and Sweden were often being compared with one-another because both are Scandinavian countries, but on 13 March 2020, Denmark had started a lockdown and imposed strict recommendations for businesses and personal behavior, whereas Sweden did nothing of the sort, and so the two countries were considered to be especially suitable to serve as being an almost controlled experiment in what the results would be of socialism versus libertarianism in social policy (regulations) regarding a communicable disease.

On 26 March 2020, EuroNews headlined “Neighbours Denmark and Sweden miles apart on coronavirus confinement”. Whereas both countries had socialized healthcare, and were also otherwise generally considered to be similar, Sweden was pursuing Europe’s most libertarian policies on coronavirus or Covid-19, and yet Denmark had a 15% higher percentage of its population who had come down with that disease. On 29 June 2020, I headlined “‘Herd Immunity’ Is a Failed Response to Coronavirus: Comparing Denmark versus Sweden on Coronavirus,” and reported that in early April Sweden’s population-percentage who had the disease had switched (increased so fast as) to become 14% higher there than Denmark’s population-percentage who had Covid-19, and that Sweden’s percentage was also increasing much more quickly than Denmark’s. And, so, at that time, as of 28 June 2020, Sweden had 2.5 times as high a percentage of its population who had contracted the disease, as compared with Denmark’s percentage. There were 131 reader-comments to that news-report, at Reddit, and they were overwhelmingly in denial, and pro-libertarian, anti-socialist, though each comment had a different excuse for their reality-denial.

CNN headlined on 28 May 2020 “Sweden says its coronavirus approach has worked. The numbers suggest a different story” and made clear that, at least up till that moment in time, Sweden’s approach was a failure, not only in competition as compared to Denmark’s, but globally.

Then, on 12 May 2020, Foreign Affairs, the prestigious journal of America’s Council on Foreign Relations, bannered “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s: Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely”, and presented the standard libertarian argument: “There are good reasons for countries to begin easing their restrictions. It will take several years to tally the total number of deaths, bankruptcies, layoffs, suicides, mental health problems, losses to GDP and investments, and other costs attributable not just to the virus but to the measures used to fight it. It should already be obvious, however, that the economic and social costs of lockdowns are enormous.” In other words: the best “regulation” is to let nature rule, not to impose any human-imposed regulations, but just “the free market” should reign.

On 7 January 2021, the Scandinavian Journal of Public health headlined “A comparison of COVID-19 epidemiological indicators in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland” and reported that:

Compared with its Nordic peers, Sweden had a higher incidence rate across all ages, a higher COVID-19-related death rate only partially explained by population demographics, a higher death rate in seniors’ care, and higher all-cause mortality. Sweden had approximately half as much mobility change as its Nordic neighbours until April and followed similar rates as its neighbours from April to July. Denmark led its Nordic peers in testing rates, while Sweden had the highest cumulative test-positivity rate continuously from mid-March. …

Looser government restrictions at the beginning of the outbreak are likely to have played a role in the impact of COVID-19 in Sweden. In an effort to improve epidemic control, Sweden has increased testing rates, implemented more restrictive prevention measures, and increased their intensive care unit bed capacity.

Here are the figures as-of 30 April 2021:

Denmark cases per million = 43,282

Sweden cases per million = 95,909

Denmark deaths per million = 428

Sweden deaths per million = 1,384

Denmark March unemployment rate = 4.5%

Sweden unemployment rate = 10.0%

But Denmark versus Sweden aren’t, by any means, the only indicators that libertarianism was failing on Covid-19.

On 1 August 2020, I headlined “India and Brazil Are Now the Global Worst Coronavirus Nations”, and that statement was forward-looking, predictive, and not referring only to the numbers at that time but to where the various nations were heading, and it was referring only to medium-sized and large nations (for example, not to the worst performer of all, Andorra, which currently has 171,029 cases per million and a population of only 77,367 people). (Andorra has had a total of 13,232 cases, which is 17.1% of its entire population. The only country that has a population of over 10 million and which is among the 9 worst — and America scores as being absolutely the world’s 10th-worst — is Czechia, the Czech Republic, which has 152,046 cases per million. At the end of this article, Czechia will be discussed.)

As-of 30 April 2021, the following are the world’s only nations that have had more than 6,000,000,000 Covid-19 cases:

USA = 33,044,872

India = 18,881,587

Brazil = 14,592,886.

Those are now the Covid-19 giants (the worst-performing major countries), which, back on August 1st, is what I was expecting them to be, by the present time. Ultimately, I expect Brazil and India to be scoring even worse than the United States. All three countries have been exceedingly lax in their anti-Covid-19 policies, extraordinarily libertarian regarding this.

On 20 September 2020, I headlined “All 8 of America’s Worst-Hit Coronavirus States Are Now in the South.” That reported “the worst 11 states … are: Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, Iowa, Arkansas, and Texas” — and all 11 of them had voted for Donald Trump, the more-libertarian (and losing) candidate, in 2020. The United States therefore provides overwhelming evidence of the failure of libertarianism regarding coronavirus-policies.

On 14 March 2021, I headlined “Republican States Have Higher Covid Rates than Democratic States” and — ranking all from the best (#1) to the worst (#51) — reported that the average state which had voted for Trump scored 33.3 or two-thirds of the way down the list of the 51 states + DC, and that the average state which had voted for Biden scored 19.5 out of the 51.

The more corrupt a country is, the more libertarian it is, and on 5 May 2020, I headlined “America’s Design Causes It to Fail the COVID-19 Challenge” and reported that because America is an extraordinarily corrupt country (very libertarian, as compared to other nations), “America is designed so as to fail the coronavirus-19 challenge. The power of big-money (concentrated wealth) is destroying this country. It controls both Parties and their respective media, so the public don’t know (and certainly cannot understand) the types of realities that are being reported (and linked-to) here.”

India and Brazil are nipping at America’s heels on this, but, still, the record up till the present moment shows America as still retaining its title as being the worst of all major nations on coronavirus-performance.

Finally, here, will be considered what might be the strongest exception to the general principle that libertarian policies are inferior to socialistic policies in order to control and limit a pandemic: Czechia. Wikipedia’s article “COVID-19 pandemic in the Czech Republic” says:

The Czech Republic was the first^[11] European country to make the wearing of face masks mandatory from 19 March onwards.^[12] COVID-19 testing was made widely available with drive-through locations from 14 March,^[13] and from 27 March anyone with a fever, dry cough or shortness of breath was eligible for a free test.^[14] From 13 April onwards, COVID-19 testing capacity significantly surpassed demand.^[15] Contact tracing in the country also included voluntary disclosure of mobile phone position and debit card payments data for previous days and the quarantining of identified contacts.^[16] By 1 May 2020, altogether 257 COVID-19-related deaths were identified in the Czech Republic compared to 2,719 in similarly populous Sweden, which did not impose a full lockdown. However, Belgium, also with a similar population, had suffered 7,866 deaths at that time, despite having implemented an early and strict lockdown. …

By April 2021, the Czech Republic has recorded the highest confirmed death rate in the world after Hungary. There are some root causes speculated.

None of those proposed explanations of this is any sort of scientific explanation for it. A great deal remains that is important to know but that is currently unknown about Covid-19. Obviously, Czechia is the most challenging case, not because it is the worst, but because it has been a leader in adherence to international guidelines but has nonetheless disastrously failed on this virus. If that’s not a warning for the world to do lots more research on the Covid-19 problem, then nothing is.

Marcello FERRADA DE NOLI

The elderly have comprised the vast majority of Covid-19 fatalities in Sweden, either dying in care homes or their own residence, often alone.

By mid-May 2020, only 13 percent of the care home victims had received treatment at Swedish hospitals.  In August 2020, only five percent of the Covid-19 patients admitted for treatment at Swedish hospitals came from care home facilities.

Sweden has by far the highest proportion of deaths among confirmed Corona cases in the Nordic countries.  Let’s look into the possible reasons.

Herd Immunity

International comparisons of the Covid-19 situation may help to assess the efficacy of the different strategies used by developed countries’ health authorities.

Such strategies may have been assimilated by some countries formerly known as “Third World” because of continued economic dependency; the praxis of attributing superior technical know-how in matters of public health to countries seen as more economically developed still exists in some governing circles.

For this reason, populations in Latin America and Africa and other regions have been ruthlessly targeted with propaganda by developed countries promoting their epidemiological methods.

In Europe, Italy was the first country to apply the “lockdown” approach.  At the start of the “second wave” it had one of the lowest incidences of new Covid-19 cases.

The model presented as alternative is “herd immunity,” most associated with  Sweden’s neoliberal interpretation of it.

Economy First

The idea here is to prioritize the economy: no closing factories, schools, or restaurants.  Sweden’s Public Health Agency’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell said, “if we close the schools we would lose 25 percent of the labour force” (parents would have to stay at home).

He has also stated, “herd immunity is the one thing which eventually will stop the spread of this virus.” In the words of Johan Giesecke, the agency’s senior adviser, herd immunity strategy would consist of “letting the virus pass through the population.”

In response to the international criticism that ensued, the Swedish government tried to distance itself from the term but in practice the strategy has not changed.

Sweden’s ambassador to the U.S. declared that “Stockholm could reach herd immunity by May.” However, five months’ later this has not been achieved, and Sweden’s economy has suffered just as much, if not more, than its neighbors who used lockdown measures.

The epidemiological indicators I present below expose the flawed, not to say macabre, effects of the Swedish exporting model.

The message to other nations is: Don’t buy it. Survive instead.

Case Fatality Rate in Sweden & Nordic
Neighbors: Denmark, Finland, Norway

Based on current international data, I have carried out a comparison of mortality indicators among Nordic countries that applied forms of lockdown, and Sweden.

There certainly are multiple models for such international epidemiological comparisons. However, I start with the simple method to determine whether there is a statistical significance in the reported differences regarding total number, number per capita, etc.

(As we know, not all differences in mortality rates are epidemiologically/statistically significant, although they can appear as such in media reports).

Results found through comparisons between the number of Covid-19 deaths in Sweden (n = 5,883) and ditto the total numbers in Denmark, Finland and Norway (n = 1,284), give a significant overrepresentation of the Swedish deaths (X² = 3023.3239, p = <0.00001). The difference is thus highly statistically significant.

Another method is the Case Fatality Rate (hereinafter referred to as CFR). CFR intends to estimate the proportion of deaths among confirmed cases. It shows the proportion of those who were ill and who eventually died; the World Health Organization considers it “a measure of severity among detected cases.”

Among more than 200 countries included in the international tables on Coronavirus, Sweden is currently ranked 14th out of the 15 countries with the highest Covid-19 death rate per 1 M population.

However, when CFR is taken into account, Sweden increases to sixth place in that group, illustrating the significance of the CFR method.  This ranking position has remained rather even for Sweden. My calculation (as of Oct. 7 , 2020) indicates the same results established in a research paper from May 2020.

Regarding the comparison among the said Nordic countries, I have used two CFR calculation models. One is the usual CFR, which only needs the death toll and the number of reported Covid-19 patients.

The second consists of a more refined method, also recently described by the WHO, which in addition requires the number of cases that have recovered from the disease.

With the first method, the current CFR calculation results in: Denmark 2.18, Finland 3.16, Norway 1.8, and Sweden 6.11 percent.

Table 1: Case Fatality Ratio in Denmark, Finland, Norway & Sweden

(Data for the CFR calculation: Worldometer, Oct. 6,  2020.)

Furthermore, according to the WHO, the CFR result may be underestimated when delays in reporting deaths occur,  which is the case for Sweden, as demonstrated by a recent  article authored by nine Swedish researchers.

So, even if  Sweden’s above-mentioned CFR appears definitely higher than that of neighboring countries, it could be even higher when considering the bias mentioned by WHO.

The second CFR model consists of a calculation which also includes the number of recovered cases. The question is, could that calculation accurately be applied in the international comparison that includes Sweden?

The answer would be no. At least not officially. This is because Sweden does not report data regarding such cases internationally. Why not? Because in the first place – according to the explanation given by Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) – they do not even keep a record of the total number of the country’s recovered cases.

This was the reply I received from the statistic coordinator at Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsens Statisksamordnade), who emailed me on Oct. 6, 2020: “Socialstyrelsen does not have an estimate of the overall number of recovered cases of Covid-19.”

However, there are two findings that would help to approximately estimate Sweden’s  missing (or unreported) number of recovered cases.

First is the percentage of cases confirmed world-wide that have recovered, which is 75 percent, thus providing a 75 percent average.

The second finding shows that the number of recovered from confirmed cases in the Nordic countries neighboring Sweden also gives an average of 75 percent.

Table 2: Covid-19 recovered cases, percent of confirmed cases

Therefore, I would estimate the number of recovered cases in Sweden to be 75 percent of the total confirmed cases in the country  (n= 96,145), which gives n= 72,109.

Table 3: Case Fatality Ratio in Denmark, Finland, Norway & Sweden

(*Estimated Sweden’s recovered cases would be 75 percent of confirmed cases.)

 Sweden’s High Covid-19 CFR

In Sweden, most of the Covid-19 victims were 70 years or older. By June 2020, half of those individuals (n=2036) were known to be living in nursing homes, with a further number (n= 1062) in the home-care system, or in residences where many victims lived alone.

Only 13 percent of the care home victims had received treatment at Swedish hospitals by mid-May. By August, Covid-19 care-home residents made up only a 5 percent of such patients treated at hospitals.

While in Denmark, half of Covid-19 patients over 70 were admitted to intensive care, and in Norway 30 percent were admitted, in Sweden only 21 percent of the same age group received access.

Health authorities in Sweden issued a directive stipulating certain groups of patients should be left out of intensive care. These included: those over 80 years of age, those over 70 years of age with one significant illness and those between 60 and 70 years of age with at least two organ diseases including heart, lung and kidney.

Ensuing, in May 2020, Karolinska Hospital reported that only 80 percent of IVA places at Karolinska Hospital were occupied.  This prompted Swedish TV to broadcast it as “very positive,” while Aftonbladet wondered whether “we are making it better than in other countries.”  Meanwhile scores of Swedish elderly had been denied treatment at those intensive care facilities.

In its definition, epidemiology strives to identify both the risk factors that can lead to the morbidity/mortality of the disease and the population groups that are particularly exposed.

As an explanation for Sweden’s disproportionate Covid-19 mortality among the elderly, the Swedish Public Health Agency’s General Director Johan Carlson declared that chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has no responsibility in “what has happened in elderly care” in Sweden, which [instead] “is a consequence of a neglected structure and preparedness.”

Thus, the elderly were a known risk group, including for the spread of the virus. Why then was that “structural” problem not taken into account in the architecture of the Swedish Covid-19 strategy from the beginning?

For example, why was the national directive on nursing homes (from April 1, 2020) so delayed? A few weeks later, it became known that nursing homes in 81 percent of Sweden’s municipalities  “had confirmed or suspected cases of Covid-19.”

Are Sweden’s Mortality Statistics Comparable?

Swedish epidemiologists would try to explain that Covid-19 mortality statistics for Sweden are difficult or not accurate, for international comparisons because the number of actual individuals with the disease should be estimated higher that the confirmed cases, like in the case of Infection Mortality Rate (IMR).

But then, why has Sweden’s testing for Covid-19 been the lowest among its Nordic neighboring countries, and also low in comparison with European countries?  Is Covid-19 testing in Sweden incompatible with other countries?

Nevertheless, regarding testing, logic’s answer is simple: Reducing the number of tests means fewer opportunities to detect those with the disease. Which is not the same as assuming that those diseased individuals do not exist.

Indeed they do exist, and they are contagious. However, the ‘gain’ here about this is that we had a smaller number of new cases to report. Hence, a real public health problem is turned into a tool to cover a flawed  epidemiological strategy.

What Do We Need?

Don’t follow the herd immunity model. To decimate SARS-cov-2 what we do need is a vaccine. What countries in disarray need is to start with available vaccination programs.

By adopting a Swedish public-health model you may be serving a political establishment whose remits are greed, corporate economic power and adherence to its own interpretation of what democracy should mean.

For what is democracy in the context of this debate? Who shall ultimately decide the domestic strategy of a problem threatening the life of every single citizen of a country?

Democratic decisions are built on the participation of all, and in the interests of all, ensuring all voices are heard. In my experience, this is not the case in Sweden.

The findings of this work were refused publication by Swedish mainstream newspapers.   They prefer, instead, to control discourse, permitting only mild criticism, which serves the authorities in the current Covid-19 debate.

This new Ikea-wrapped neoliberal concept of democracy, should not be unpacked by countries in Latin-America, Africa and other latitudes.  There, a dignified formula for democracy should preclude the Swedish praxis of how – without the participation of the demos (Greek for “people”), those in power exercise the kratos (“rule”) to politically benefit themselves.

The Indicter via consortiumnews.com

A second student housing area with another 59 student apartments lies in an adjacent building. The residence is marketed by Tunabyggen’s communal home page as a “multicultural residential area”. Together they make up more than two-thirds of the city’s student housing.

But the students don’t want to live in them, Swedish daily Fria Tider reported.

The university’s rector contacted the municipality four years ago, in connection with a woman being raped, and demanded that they arrange other student housing in the municipality not located in Tjärna Ängar, especially because female students felt unsafe in the immigrant-dense suburb.

“This is unacceptable. Students must be offered a residence when they are accepted, or at least at the beginning of instruction. The housing’s general standard must be reviewed, and above all, students must be able to feel safe and not worry about their personal security. It is not debatable,” said the rector, Marita Hilliges, at that time.

Somalis have not been integrated into Swedish society. The Somali community associations are generally based on clan affiliation. According to an interview study done by Malmö University in 2013, Somalis express strong concerns about losing their culture and Islamic religion. Adult Somalis stated their greatest worry was to ensure a Somali identity among their children, which led to endless conflicts with daycare institutions and schools who “ignore their cultural preferences and teach children things which are the exact opposite of what their parents preach”. Photo: Yasin Yusuf

But the student housing has remained. And now, international students who are placed in the residences are protesting against being forced to live there. After experiencing shootings outside the student residences on several occasions, the students write that they “experience a glimpse of war-torn countries” in Tjärna Ängar with arson and firefights between criminals and police.

There are many horrific examples in the letter. Several female students have been followed and harassed by “unknown men” and feel that they are unsafe when they are outside the house. Two people were recently stabbed right outside the complex.

One student awoke in the morning when robbers climbed up the face of the building and into the room. They stole his phone, money, and other valuables. A female student was similarly awakened in the same way by a thief in the room, according to the letter.

“The general perception of the students is that they don’t feel they are living in Sweden, they don’t hear the language, and can’t experience the culture or traditions, which makes them feel they live in a segregated environment,” reads the letter in which the students demand to be allowed to live somewhere else.

Many international students, who began university during the autumn, have already dropped out of instruction and left Sweden.

“Little Mogadishu” boasts a high proportion of immigrants from Somalia, which in the period 2017-18 accounted for 36,8 percent of the area’s inhabitants. Nine out of ten in the area are foreign-born.

Only between 14 and 17 percent of the population have a high school education and only 36-37 percent of the population aged 25-64 have a job. Some 16,2 percent are unemployed and 39,8 percent of the population receive social benefits.

The official population was 3 500 in 2018, but unofficially, analyzes of waste volumes and water consumption indicate that the actual number may be closer to 10 000.

The district has been classified by the Swedish police’s National Operational Department (NOA) as a risk area where “the situation is considered alarming” with 83 percent of the inhabitants under 45 years old and 54 percent under 25.

Drug trafficking is the main economic activity in the area and it has a parallel legal system used by at least parts of Tjärna Ängar’s population.

freewestmedia.com

Eleanor GOLDFIELD

From Djurgården, I walk along the water on Strandvägen – a rising fall whips in a determined wind across the water, slicing at remnants of summer and carving pathways around centuries-old buildings. Colors like Nordic interior design catalogs look like they’ve been stirred among clouds – a muted vibrance that evokes a calm and stoic resolve.

Albeit quieter than a typical early fall day, there’s a bustle. People are out and their faces are bare. Buses and trolleys roll by and not a mask can be seen inside. Scuffed and faded stickers on the street remind people to keep their distance yet they seem like relics from a time long gone when a global pandemic was something people needed to worry about. The only time I could feel the ghostly press of the pandemic was in the Old Town. Typically wall-to-cobbled-street-wall with tourists, it was surprisingly empty. A few crinkled and hand-scribbled signs in shop windows announced limited hours or closures – no opening date, just closed.

But like a fleeting eerie patch in a lucid dream, as soon as I wandered across the bridge to Söder, the Southern island of Stockholm, the bustle was back – and bigger. On Götgatan, the main thoroughfare that runs the length of the island, streets and sidewalks were thick with pedestrians. Bikes zipped to and fro, people sauntered, rushed and stopped to chat. Absolutely nothing was out of the ordinary. Restaurants were open, barbershops, clothing stores, and even pharmacies were welcoming unmasked patrons in. As I stepped tentatively into a shop I’d frequented many times – looking for a special Swedish soap – my flowery mask was greeted as if I had strapped a giant dildo to my forehead. By the register, a plexiglass shield sat uselessly as the woman ringing me up poked her head around it to speak to me. I couldn’t help but laugh. Into my mask.

Ice in your belly

Enter Anders Tegnell, the controversial State Epidemiologist who has led Sweden’s COVID response – or lack thereof. As nations around the globe locked down, mandated face masks, and engaged in contact tracing and mass testing, Sweden implemented measures such as banning gatherings of more than 50 people, closing high schools and universities while keeping younger children in school (homeschooling is not allowed except in “extraordinary circumstances”). Shops stayed open as did most other businesses save big amusement parks, concert venues, and the like. As I was headed back to the states in early September, a neighbor’s high school kids were on a three-day rotation: two days in school for at most a half-day, and then one day of remote learning.

None of these moves were spontaneous or without measured consideration. Ask any Scandinavian – Swedes aren’t known for our carefree spontaneity. No, at the start of the pandemic, the plan was clear. Tegnell and friends said they’d be leaning heavily on “folkvett,” which basically translates to common sense. Of course, the problem with common sense during a pandemic is twofold. One, not everyone has it. Two, common sense doesn’t help address the failures or shortcomings of a government butt-scooting down the human decency curve on a neoliberal slip-n-slide. Still, like any neoliberal endeavor, this one comes pre-packaged with all kinds of slick excuses and explanations.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Tegnell notes that the goal from the beginning was “sustainability… to be resistant to quick fixes, to realize that this is not going to be easy… it’s not going to be fixed by one kind of measure.” The fallacy here of course is to conflate stricter measures with a quick fix and to ignore the fact that stricter measures on the front-end saves lives and allows for an easing of restrictions later on (just look at New Zealand and South Korea). But ignore this he does! Tegnell taps an old Swedish saying “is i magen” which translates literally to ice in your belly – the idea that you should remain calm and not panic in stressful situations. Here again, Tegnell falls into a false equivalency. Panic is not the same thing as a calm but quick and logical response. An EMT for instance has to act quickly, but should obviously not panic in the midst of stabilizing a patient for transport from the bloody scene of an accident.

Tegnell, Sweden’s COVID-19 guru, gives a daily update on the coronavirus situation in Stockholm, June 3, 2020. Anders Wiklund | TT via AP

Tegnell, however, is the EMT in the passenger seat smoking a cigarette. He trusts that things will work out fine and in Tegnell’s case, he feels that they largely have. Back in June, he conceded during an interview that “If we would encounter the same disease, with exactly what we know about it today, I think we would land midway between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world did.” Yet, come September he told the Financial Times that he’s actually not sure the response would have changed much. This comes after an incident in mid-August where he again drew international ire for saying that wearing masks could actually be “dangerous” as it gives the wearer a false sense of security. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Biden’s quip when asked if he feels bad about any of his policy choices: “I regret nothing.”

Sadly, Tegnell’s thinking is something you can hear echoing across the political spectrum in Sweden. From my more conservative friends to anarchists, people are saying that wearing masks just promotes carelessness as opposed to safety. There’s a surprising uniformity of support for the government’s COVID response. The nearly 6,000 deaths of predominantly seniors are astonishingly shrugged off by the center and right while those to the left point a singular finger at the privatization and diminished quality of elder care in the country.

A neoliberal wet dream

An article from April in the leftist media outlet The Proletarian notes that some 21 percent of Swedish elder care is privatized, compared to 10 percent in Norway. What this shakes out to in terms of quality of care is that private firms require lower levels of schooling, fewer employees overall, and a more rapidly revolving door of part-time and temp employees thanks to corporate attempts to side-step the benefits guaranteed to full-time, non-temp workers. This also means that the workers have less power in the workplace, and there have been more than a few cases of workers quietly showing up to work with symptoms simply because they want to keep their jobs and not give the boss cause to fire them. Sound familiar?

Indeed, Sweden’s elder care is a neoliberal wet dream in many ways and provided a ready petri dish for COVID. That being said, shitty elder care and a shitty COVID strategy are not mutually exclusive issues. For instance, back in April, the Guardian reported on the fact that workers in Swedish elder care facilities weren’t wearing masks or gloves. When questioned, workers said they were just following guidelines.

As of September 14, according to the Public Health Authority, 41 percent of all the COVID deaths have been among those aged 80-89 years old, and an astonishing 88 percent of all deaths have been among those aged 70 and over. That is both a failure of COVID policy and a failure of elder care policy. It’s reminiscent of the legend of the ättestup which tells that in Viking times, the elderly were supposedly thrown off of cliffs or jump of their own accord so as not to be a burden to their communities. While historians have debunked this legend, it would seem from recent events that Sweden is attempting a morbid modern-day re-enactment of this old legend.

To give some context to these numbers, with a population roughly that of North Carolina, Sweden has the fifth-highest mortality rate per capita in Europe – five times higher than Denmark, and ten times higher than Norway and Finland.

Laid-off flight attendants learn basic skills to work in nursing homes due to the coronavirus outbreak, in Stockholm. David Keyton | AP

Still, Tegnell seems undeterred. In a September interview with news outlet France24, he notes that “Of course something went wrong when 5,800 people died. That’s definitely not something we expected. Nothing we planned for, nothing we hoped for. So that’s definitely gone wrong. But that does not mean that the strategy itself has gone wrong.” One might be inclined to wonder what it would take for Tegnell to admit that a strategy is wrong.

One might even be inclined to ask what that strategy is. In that same interview, Tegnell denied ever suggesting that herd immunity was the goal of the Swedish strategy despite the fact that leaked emails from March of this year prove otherwise.

In the same email dump, Tegnell responds to his Finnish counterpart, Mika Salminen who expressed concern over Tegnell’s wish to keep schools open, pointing out that closing schools could stop the spread of COVID to vulnerable age groups by 10 percent. Tegnell’s response: “10% might be worth it?” Worth it how exactly? So you can eat at a restaurant? So third-year students can celebrate their final exams, as was suggested in another email to Tegnell? We may never know the answer to this question – or others – considering the fact that Tegnell deleted many emails that were requested by journalists in Sweden. Maybe he should get some tips from Hillary Clinton on private servers.

Cast off the cliff of capitalism

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which of the many possible reasons Tegnell chose to sidestep scientifically-proven measures during a pandemic. What matters is that almost 6,000 people were cast off the cliff of capitalism unnecessarily. Indeed, if the hope was to shelter Sweden’s capital, that didn’t work out either. In an analysis of data by the Financial Times, Sweden’s economy is doing worse than the economies of both Finland and Norway, while again leading the way in COVID deaths for Scandinavia – by a long haul. Unfortunately, the global capitalist market doesn’t really care whether or not Sweden stayed open for business.

If anyone can be thanked for avoiding all out disaster, it is (some of) the Swedish people themselves. A recent analysis from researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Virginia School of Medicine show that nearly a third of Swedish residents voluntarily self-isolated. Many people, particularly those in high-risk groups, ignored Tegnell and donned masks and face shields in order to go shopping, using creative hand signals to remind people to respect the time-honored Swedish tradition of social distancing. Some families, including high-risk households, even tried to keep kids at home when schools reopened this fall, precipitating either fines or harassment from social services. Experts and academics signed on to a letter demanding a “more responsible policy” at the start of the school year, citing ongoing research that shows children do spread the virus, even if they are asymptomatic themselves.

People sit in a crowded restaurant in Stockholm. David Keyton | AP

And herein lies the crux of the whole shebang – a silver lining and indeed a silver thread that connects our struggles here in the U.S. with those in Sweden and across the globe: at best, the government does nothing, and more often than not they actively obstruct people’s ability to thrive or even survive. Sweden still enjoys many socialized institutions and is admittedly a far cry from this shitty city upon a hill – this most capitalist of all cut-throat capitalist goons that is the U.S. But they are headed this way. The siren call of neoliberalism can be heard in more places than just elder care centers. The rise of fascism there learns and adapts from the rise of fascism here.

And so we too must adapt. We must decouple our minds from the decrees of our politicians. Again, the striking support for Tegnell’s dumbshittery across the political spectrum in Sweden is very worrisome. We must indeed consider and fight for something sustainable – but that should not be (and in reality can not be) a sustainable capitalism. Indeed, what better current critique of capitalism is there than the fact that people must cheat death in order to financially survive? Or that our lowest paid workers are our most essential?

It is beyond infuriating, and unacceptable to think that (as I write this) 5,877 people have died from COVID in Sweden. But in the dark reality of government failures, we can see the light of actual common sense, of collectively using it. We can see laid bare the deeper cancers eating away at our present and our future. The French Revolutionary Maximillien Robespierre once wrote that “Louis must die so that France may live.” To repurpose that for our times: capitalism must die so that the world may live.

mintpressnews.com

On March 13th, U.S. President Donald Trump declared a pandemic national emergency, because the number of daily new cases was now suddenly doubling within only three days. However, no lockdown was imposed. The policy-response was instead left to each individual. This is in accord with America’s libertarian ideology. Trump even announced that “he was allowing his health secretary to bypass certain regulations to provide more flexibility to doctors and hospitals responding to the outbreak” — outright reducing, instead of increasing, federal regulations, this being his way to address the matter. That’s the libertarian response.

Covid-19 (coronavirus-19) cases started soaring in the U.S., from 600 daily new cases on March 13th, to 25,665 on March 31st. Americans were scared to death, and facemask-usage soared, and independent small businesses started laying people off en-masse. (Restaurants, hair salons, travel agencies, inns, dental offices, etc., were hard-hit.)

Immediately, the alarming rise in new cases halted on April 4th (at 34,480), and the daily new cases remained approximately flat, but slightly downward, from March 31 to June 9th (when it reached bottom at 19,166), but then soared yet again, to 78,615, on July 24th.

But, then, it again declined, so that, on September 8th, it was at only 28,561. This was already returning to around what the new-cases rate had been back on March 31st. So: despite peaking again on July 24th, the rate of daily new cases was little changed between March 31st and September 8th. And, all during that 5-month period, people were coming back to work.

The key immediate and direct economic variable affected by Covid-19 is the unemployment rate. Here, that economic effect is clearly shown:

U.S. unemployment: March 4.4%, April 14.7%, May 13.3%, June 11.1%, July 10.2%, August 8.4%

Though the daily-new-cases rate went down after March 31st and after July 24th, the unemployment rate progressed far more gradually downward after March 31st: the small businesses that had been panicked by the explosion of new cases during March were now gradually re-opening — but they remained very nervous; and, so, unemployment still was almost twice what it had been during March.

Here, that experience will be compared with two Scandinavian countries, starting with Denmark, which declared a pandemic national emergency on March 13th, just when Trump also did. “Starting on 13 March 2020, all people working in non-essential functions in the public sector were ordered to stay home for two weeks.” The daily new cases fell from the high of 252 on March 11th, down to the low of 28 on March 15th, but then soared to 390 on April 7th, and gradually declined to 16 (only 16 new cases) on July 9th. Then it peaked back up again, at 373, on August 10th, plunged down to 57 on August 26th, and then soared yet again back up to 243 on September 8th. The new-cases rates were thus irregular, but generally flat. By contrast against the experience in U.S., Denmark’s unemployment-rate remained remarkably stable, throughout this entire period:

Denmark: March 4.1, April 5.4, May 5.6, June 5.5, July 5.2

Sweden’s Government pursued a far more laissez-faire policy-response (“The government has tried to focus efforts on encouraging the right behaviour and creating social norms rather than mandatory restrictions.”), and had vastly worse Covid-19 infection-rates than did the far more socialistic Denmark, and also vastly worse death-rates, both producing results in Sweden more like that of the U.S. policy-response than like that of the Danish policy-response, but far less bad than occurred on the unemployment-rate; and, thus, Sweden showed unemployment-increases which were fairly minor, more like those shown in Denmark:

Sweden: March 7.1, April 8.2, May 9.0, June 9.8, July 8.9

That was nothing like the extreme gyration in:

U.S.: March 4.4%, April 14.7%, May 13.3%, June 11.1%, July 10.2%, August 8.4%

Why was this?

Even though Sweden’s policy-effectiveness was more like America’s than like Denmark’s at keeping down the percentages of the population who became infected, and who died from Covid-19 (i.e., it was not effective), Sweden’s policy-effectiveness at keeping down the percentage of the population who became unemployed was more like Denmark’s (i.e., it was effective, at that). Unlike America, which has less of a social safety-net than any other industrialized nation does, Sweden had, until recently, one of the most extensive ones, and hasn’t yet reduced it down to American levels (which are exceptionally libertarian). Therefore, whereas Swedes know that the Government will be there for them if they become infected, Americans don’t; and, so, Americans know that, for them, it will instead be “sink or swim.” Make do, or drop dead if you can’t — that is the American way. This is why Swedish unemployment wasn’t much affected by Covid-19. When a Swede experienced what might be symptoms, that person would want to stay home and wouldn’t be so desperate as to continue working even if doing that might infect others. Thus, whereas Sweden’s unemployment-rate rose 27% from March to May, America’s rose 202% during that same period. Americans were desperate for income, because so many of them were poor, and so many of them had either bad health insurance or none at all. (All other industrialized countries have universal health insurance: 100% of the population insured. Only in America is healthcare a privilege that’s available only to people who have the ability to pay for it, instead of a right that is provided to everyone.)

On September 9th, Joe Neel headlined at NPR, “NPR Poll: Financial Pain From Coronavirus Pandemic ‘Much, Much Worse’ Than Expected”, and he reported comprehensively not only from a new NPR poll, but from a new Harvard study, all of which are consistent with what I have predicted (first, here, and then here, and, finally, here), and which seems to me to come down to the following ultimate outcomes, toward which the U.S. is now heading (so, I close my fourth article on this topic, with these likelihoods):

America’s lack of the democratic socialism (social safety-net) that’s present in countries such as Denmark (and residual vestiges of which haven’t yet been dismantled in Sweden and some other countries) will have caused, in the United States, massive laying-off of the workers in small businesses, as a result of which, overwhelmingly more families will be destroyed that are at the bottom of the economic order, largely Black and/or Hispanic families, than that are White and not in poverty. Also as a consequence, overwhelmingly in the United States, poor people will be suffering far more of the infections, and of the deaths, and of the laying-off, and of the soon-to-be-soaring personal bankruptcies and homelessness; and, soon thereafter, soaring small-business bankruptcies, and ultimately then big-business bankruptcies, and then likely megabank direct federal bailouts such as in 2009, which will be followed, in the final phase, by a hyperinflation that might be comparable to what had occurred in Weimar Germany. The ceaselessly increasing suffering at the bottom will ultimately generate a collapse at the top. Presumably, therefore, today’s seemingly coronavirus-immune U.S. stock markets, such as the S&P 500, are now basically just mega-investors who are selling to small investors, so as to become enabled, after what will be the biggest economic crash in history, to buy “at pennies on the dollar,” the best of what’s left, so as to then go forward into the next stage of the capitalist economic cycle, as owning an even higher percentage of the nation’s wealth than now is the case. Of course, if that does happen, then America will be even more of a dictatorship than it now is. Post-crash 2021 America will be more like Hitler’s Germany, than like FDR’s America was.

The Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is just as corrupt, and just as racist, as is the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. And just as neoconservative (but targeting Russia, instead of China). Therefore, the upcoming November 3rd elections in the U.S. are almost irrelevant, since both of the candidates are about equally disgusting. America’s problems are deeper than just the two stooges that America’s aristocracy hires to front for it at the ballot-boxes.

The earliest popular ideological debate regarding coronavirus-policy was between advocates of Denmark’s socialistic approach, versus neighboring Sweden’s laissez-fair approach. EuroNews headlined on March 26th “Neighbours Denmark and Sweden miles apart on coronavirus confinement”, and reported that “when it comes to handling the coronavirus crisis, they are on very different trajectories,” which were Denmark’s socialism, versus Sweden’s libertarianism.

At that time, there was no clear indication, yet, as to which approach would win out. For example, on April 19th, Denmark had 1,275 Covid-19 cases per million, whereas Sweden had 1,424. So: per million inhabitants, they were about the same.

Even as late as 12 May 2020, three libertarian co-authors at the prestigious U.S. neoliberal and neoconservative Council on Foreign Relations’s journal Foreign Affairs headlined, confidently, that libertarianism would win out: “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be the World’s: Herd Immunity Is the Only Realistic Option—the Question Is How to Get There Safely”.

But, by the time of June 29th, the data had become clear to the exact contrary, and so I headlined “‘Herd Immunity’ Is a Failed Response to Coronavirus”, and reported the subsequent increases in each of these two countries’ numbers.

On April 22nd:

DENMARK = 1,329 (up 4%)

SWEDEN = 1,517 (up 7%)

On May 10th:

DENMARK = 1,782 (up 34%)

SWEDEN = 2,567 (up 69%)

On June 17th:

DENMARK = 2,123 (up another 19%)

SWEDEN = 5,404 ( up another 111%)

And here it is as of June 28th:

DENMARK = 2,188 (up another 3%)

SWEDEN = 5,450 (up another 1%)

And, finally, on 22 August:

DENMARK = 2,783 (up another 27%)

SWEDEN = 8,515 (up another 56%)

Furthermore, one of the leading libertarian arguments against taking action has been that supposedly the economy will perform better if there are no coronavirus-restrictions placed by the Government. However, Sweden’s unemployment-rate has been hit at least as hard by coronavirus as Denmark’s has:

Denmark’s unemployment-rate was 4.1% in March, 5.4% in April, 5.6% in May, and 5.5% in June.

Sweden’s unemployment-rate was 7.1% in March, 8.2% in April, 9% in May, and 9.8% in June.

So, on that day, August 22nd, I sent to an influential libertarian website (not as influential as Foreign Affairs, but more populist — not funded by billionaires like the CFR is), which has come to specialize on coronavirus, the following article for them to consider, since it discredits their many libertarian articles about coronavirus:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coronavirus-strategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/

and the response from them three hours later was:

I appreciate you’re willingness to engage on this topic, but your choice of source is poor. The logic is bad, and whole areas of policy are ignored.

Firstly, comparing Sweden only to Denmark and Norway is absurd. Sweden imposed no lockdown, yet fared far better than many countries which did so (Belgium, Netherlands, UK, Spain and Italy). This alone is a perfectly strong argument that lockdowns are totally ineffective for their stated aims.

Secondly, it at no point talks about deaths caused by lockdowns, which is a huge factor (accounting for nearly half the excess deaths in the UK).

Thirdly, it mentions GDP but doesn’t discuss that the economy is MORE than that. A suffering economy is not about money or finance, it is about well-being for the working class. Good wages, affordable rent and the freedom to run your own small business. All of which have been destroyed by the lockdown policy, which Sweden shows was (at best) pointless.

I promptly replied:

The Belgian policy-response was unclear, unfocused, and such a mess that nothing has even been generally reported regarding their contact-tracing (which is such a crucial aspect of effective policy-response to the virus).

None of the countries with good results have achieved them via an expectation of ‘herd immunity’. No country is anywhere near the 70%-infection-rate that produces herd-immunity. It’s a myth; it’s just a lie.

For example, though the imperialistic libertarian country United States warns travelers that the coronavirus risk is exceptionally high in Uganda (warning “Level 3,” which is their highest), Uganda is actually one of the world’s lowest coronavirus-risk countries, and they achieved it by stringent policies, which is exactly what you reject. Whereas U.S. now has 17,587 cases per million, Uganda has 47. The country that has a 374 times higher percentage of its population coronavirus-infected, warns its suckers to stay away from the country that has 1/374th of the risk.

Why is [your site] feeding into this deception of its readers, instead of exposing it to them? Have you switched to being pro-imperialistic (pro-neoconservative, which is a variety of neoliberal or “libertarian”)? All of a sudden, the neoliberal countries, such as U.S., Brazil, and India, which are or have been the world’s worst on coronavirus-performance, are the ones to emulate? Why? Or else: which countries ARE the ones to emulate on this? Say it. Prove it. The statistical data by now are certainly sufficient to do this. Why don’t you do it, instead of continue to deceive readers? Why do you deceive readers so that they would support, instead of condemn, the imperialistic U.S. Government’s alleging that Uganda is more coronavirus-dangerous than the U.S. itself is? It’s a lie, but how would your readers be able to know this?

I don’t get it. You seem stuck in your existing false beliefs. Please explain so that I will become able to understand. Right now, I don’t.

I received a reply that said I should “apologise” because “We have never expressed any support for the US or its Imperial policies in any way, shape or form,” and “the statistics speak for themselves — the virus is harmless to the vast majority of people, and in no way justifies any of the draconian or authoritarian laws being imposed opportunistically in many countries around the world (including the United States).” In other words: the U.S. under Trump isn’t being sufficiently laissez-faire about this matter. The evidence that I had cited was ignored, not discussed, by him.

Subsequently, I checked a few of the other nations that are among the best on coronavirus-performance. For example, there’s China. It has 59 coronavirus-19 cases per million population, and the U.S. has 298 times as many cases per million, but the U.S. Government rates China also in the highest-risk category, “Level 3,” for Americans to visit, on account of its supposedly higher-than-U.S. danger of becoming infected with that virus.

Then, there’s Vietnam, which the U.S. Government had tried to conquer but couldn’t. Vietnam has only 10 coronavirus cases per million inhabitants. America has 17,587 per million; so, obviously, that’s 1,759 times as many. Vietnam also is rated “Level 3” — the worst, most coronavirus-dangerous, category. The Government of Americans is warning Americans to avoid visiting Vietnam because it’s just too dangerous a coronavirus-risk for an American, whose country has 17,587 cases per million. Obviously, no intelligent person trusts a government such as this. (No more than such a person would trust the Government that had promised it was certain that WMD existed in Iraq in 2002, or that Syria had gassed people on 7 April 2018, or that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President in 2014 was a ‘democratic revolution’ instead of a U.S. coup — or on, and on, such as about “Russiagate”.)

Then, there’s Myanmar, which has only 8 cases per million inhabitants — 1 divided by 2,198 times as many cases-per-million as the U.S. does — and the U.S. Government refuses even to call that nation “Myanmar,” but instead calls it by what the British did when they had it as a colony, which is “Burma,” and the U.S. regime’s travel-advisory rating of “Burma,” for ‘Burma’s would-be now U.S. imperial masters, is likewise exactly the same as they rate Uganda: “Warning — Level 3”. The U.S. regime is telling its citizens that a country which is 2,198 times safer on the coronavirus danger than the U.S. itself is, is instead too unsafe on coronavirus for Americans to travel to. They care so much about the safety of their own citizens, as to warn them against visiting a country that’s thousands of times safer. How sincere is that? But some people still respect the lie, and the liars (serial-liars), as if they weren’t.

Perhaps people who are in denial about coronavirus are simply in denial about reality — the broader, global, reality.

On coronavirus-19 — this pandemic — the best data regarding the international reality is this, which is the constantly up-to-date listings of all countries and their respective numbers. To see the rankings there of all countries on the crucial outcome-variable of “Tot Cases/1M pop” just click onto that column’s heading and countries will be ranked that way. Same for the other crucial outcome-variable “Deaths/1M pop,” and for the far less-crucial process-variables (such as “Tests/1M pop”). Two successive clicks onto the given column-heading will reverse the ordering of the countries regarding that variable. You’ll be seeing there the existing rankings, as of that given moment. To see the trends within any given country, just click onto the name of that country, and then scroll down to the charts “Daily New Cases” and “Daily New Deaths” (tracking both of the crucial outcome-variables)

However, people who are in denial about coronavirus-reality avoid those numbers like the plague. Perhaps they do that because, to their libertarian ideology, these numbers are “the plague.”

The Danes have put extra resources into controlling the country’s links to Sweden because of bombs going off in Denmark due to people coming from Sweden.  The people from Sweden are Islamist criminals.  The Swedish government reacted to the Danish move by calling the Danes Nazis.  Swedish society has changed for the worse, and the Swedish people are aware of what they have lost.

All this is known, but what is interesting is that a former head of the Swedish truck-maker Scania, a Mr. Leif Ostling, has said Sweden is headed for civil war because of the problem of its violent migrants who have no inclination to integrate into Swedish society.  As a successful businessman, his views can’t be dismissed as being from some sort of antisocial loon living in his mother’s basement.

This raises the question: how do you have a civil war in this day and age?  Having a civil war is aspirational, but is it achievable?

The population of Sweden is now 10.1 million, of which 8% are of the Islamist persuasion.  The first question is, who owns the guns, and how many are there?

This site says civilians in Sweden are estimated to hold 2,296,000 guns, legally and illegally, of which about half are rifles.  There is a big hunting tradition in Sweden.  As of the year 2011, licenced firearms per 100 head of population was 6.5, and registered guns per 100 people was 18.9.  So the average gun-owner has three of them.

The Swedish government is thinking along the same lines.  They are currently trying to restrict weapons use by hunters.  Magazines and ammunition are to be registered with the police and be kept apart from the weapons.

The Islamist elements have most of the hand grenades in civilian possession, principally the M75 hand grenade from the former Yugoslavia.  Hand grenade attacks in Sweden peaked at 40 in 2016.  The Islamists also have more explosives on hand.  In the first nine months of 2019, there were 97 explosions in Sweden.  Even the BBC has noticed.  A litany of horrors could be written about Sweden, with all the murders and rapes and knifings and so on, but just consider that there is an explosion just about every second day.

The defense forces in Sweden have 139,180 firearms, and the police a further 38,000.

All in all, there are plenty of guns to go round to have a civil war with.  This won’t be a brutish affair conducted with knives and sticks.

But how will it play out? A t the moment, the Islamists attack police stations, control no-go areas and enclaves, and are not sufficiently discouraged from these activities by the police.  Public opinion is becoming less tolerant of the situation.  In terms of the politics, leftists won the last election, in September 2018, and the Social Democrats retained control of the government.  Their main opposition is the Sweden Democrats, whom the prime minister has called “an extremist and racist party.”  In a recent poll, the Social Democrats are at 22% support, and the Sweden Democrats are more popular at 24%.

A sign of the shift in public opinion is the fact that the leader of the Moderate Party, with 70 out of the 349 seats in the Swedish parliament, has apologized on Facebook to all those who had criticized the country’s immigration policies over the years.  The shifting winds of public opinion will encourage a crackdown on the Islamist enclaves, which in turn enrages the Islamists, and they are likely to respond with more attacks on the police and other public institutions.

How we get to civil war is that the government reaction to the escalating violence is likely to lag too far behind events and public opinion.  And then an officer in the armed forces will have his wife or daughter killed and lead his unit in taking over the parliament building.  Nobody in the police force will stop him, because the police have been taking the brunt of the Islamist violence for decades.

The next phase will be the reaction of the lefties running Germany, France, and the European Union.  The yellow vests have been protesting in France for over a year now.  Early on, they were surprised to see European Union decals on French armored personnel0carriers.  It seems that Macron and Merkel have conspired to create a French-German force to put down insurrections in Europe.  To get to Sweden, this force would have to pass through Denmark, and the Danes are likely to stop them.  If that fails, any armored column is unlikely to get across the Oresund Bridge that connects Denmark and Malmö in Sweden.  The Swedes make good antitank weapons.

Yes, you can have a civil war in this day and age.  With respect to Sweden, what can’t go on forever won’t.  If the state does not maintain its monopoly on violence, the state ceases to exist.

People can have a short memory for trials and tribulations when they have been civilized and comfortable for a while.  Across the border in Norway, the Norwegians had a bad time in WW2, with near starvation conditions.  So in the 1950s, they built grain storage to last them at least a year, in the manner of Joseph’s advice to the Egyptian pharaoh.  Two generations later, all the pain had been forgotten, and the grain silos were converted to student accommodations.  The pain of Sweden’s coming civil war won’t be forgotten as quickly.

americanthinker.com

That’s the only conclusion one has to draw from this week’s announcement by Swedish prosecutors that they were dropping a preliminary probe into sex-offense accusations made against Assange nearly a decade ago.

This is the second time Swedish authorities have dropped their investigation for “lack of evidence”. Yet, because of these specious allegations and abuse of due process, Assange has endured detention and deprivation of his freedom for more than seven years.

The Australian founder of Wikileaks and his worldwide supporters have always claimed that the Swedish, British and American governments were conducting a nefarious conspiracy to entrap him. The initial sex claims made against Assange by two Swedish women in 2010 were flimsy and contradictory; there is evidence that the complaints were doctored by Swedish police.

The ultimate goal was always to persecute Assange for is ground-breaking journalism which exposed troves of war crimes committed by the US and its British ally. Additionally, Wikileaks exposed far more crimes and corruption, such as illegal global spying on all citizens by US and British intelligence agencies, as well as countless diplomatic intrigues against foreign states.

Thus, Assange had to be destroyed by the US and British state criminals in order to serve as a warning against other independent journalists.

To avoid the bogus sex-offense case and possible extradition to Sweden and thence to the US, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012. He repeatedly offered to cooperate with Swedish prosecutors via video link, but they declined. British police besieged the embassy for nearly seven years, forcing Assange to live in a single small room with few visitors permitted and limited communication with the outside world. It also turns out, he was being spied on by American intelligence agencies seemingly in cahoots with the Ecuadorian embassy. All told, it was a grave violation of asylum rights and due process.

When a new pro-US Ecuadorian government connived in removing asylum status, British police stormed the embassy in April this year and strong-armed Assange to a maximum-security prison. He continues to be held in solitary confinement awaiting an extradition trial next year to the US where he will face charges of espionage and a possible 175 years in prison.

The official British reason for taking Assange into custody in April was that he skipped bail in 2012 over the Swedish case. He was sentenced to 50 weeks for what was a minor bail infringement. It now turns out that the Swedish authorities have no case against Assange. So, why was he imprisoned after being dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy? His indefinite detention is a travesty of justice and legal standards.

Assange’s father and UN Special Rapporteur Nils Melzer have warned in recent weeks that his life is in danger from the extreme conditions of deprivation and psychological torture.

At his last court hearing in October, 48-year-old Assange was barely able to articulate his name. Evidently, his incarceration is intended to break him physically and mentally. One of his supporters in court, renowned journalist John Pilger, said it was a shocking “show-trial” in which the British judge’s callous deliberations were being obviously directed by unknown personnel from the US embassy who were sitting beside the judge’s bench.

It is abundantly clear that the ghastly treatment Julian Assange is being subjected to is a medieval-like witch-hunt. The grossly extreme conditions he is suffering are totally out of proportion to his alleged activity, whether the now-obsolete sex claims by two Swedish women, or the latterly tacked-on US government allegations of “espionage”.

Assange’s persecution is simply because of his truth-telling journalism. His denial of legal rights and his incarceration under torturous conditions are grim proof of the barbaric nature of the US authorities and their British and Swedish co-conspirators.

The fact that Swedish prosecutors have announced that after nearly 10 years of “investigating” dubious claims against Assange, that shows the scandal of his detention and torture.

The near-silence of the Western news media is also shameful. For years, they have peddled the false claims against Assange, smearing him as a “pervert”. Those smears served to advance the heinous agenda of the US and British governments for destroying Assange.

Now that the Swedish prosecutors have finally dropped their sex-offense probe against Assange, there is a scandalous indifference among the Western trial-by-media outlets who previously condemned Assange as guilty.

The Western human-rights NGOs are also indicted by their relative silence over Julian Assange’s plight, yet these same NGOs are only too willing to condemn foreign states for alleged human rights abuses when it suits Western governments’ agendas. Their selective concern illustrates who is calling their tune.

International public protests and campaigns by journalistic unions and societies, as well as UN bodies, must demand the immediate release of Julian Assange.

His principled, fearless journalism literally changed the world and how we understand it. Wikileaks and courageous whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden shone a critical light on the crimes committed by Washington and its NATO allies. Citizens all around the world have been empowered by the exposure of hypocrisy, deceit and corruption. Assange et al exposed the emperor with no clothes.

This is much bigger than the individual fate of Julian Assange, as deadly serious as that may be. Independent journalism, freedom of expression, truth and justice for everyone is at stake.

Now that ISIS is being defeated by Syria’s Government (and by its allies Russia and Iran) in Syria, the United States and its allies are trying to find other governments that will take them in as refugees. It’s part of a deal the US regime reached with ISIS.

The issue of what to do with the thousands of surviving but (temporarily) defeated ISIS members — and with their spouses and children — has raised hypocrisy to perhaps the highest level in all of history. Its background needs to be understood if one wants to understand the sources of that enormous hypocrisy. Here’s this background:

When Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, it greatly disturbed the US regime, which therefore started on 12 October 2015 to air-drop weapons into that area so as to help the jihadists to shoot down Russia’s jets, which were bombing ISIS. America’s Fox News Channel headlined "US military airdrops 50 tons of ammo for Syrian fighters, after training mission ends”. The US didn’t start bombing ISIS in Syria until 16 November 2015, and the US Government’s excuse for not having bombed them earlier was "This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike.” They pretended that it was done out of compassion — not in order to extend for as long as possible ISIS’s success in taking over territory in Syria.

And then on 26 February 2019, Syria’s government news-agency reported that the US had sent to the US Federal Reserve 40+ tons of gold that ISIS had accumulated from selling, on the international black markets, oil from Syria’s oil-producing region around Deir Ezzor — Syria’s oil stolen by ISIS and the proceeds now being stolen yet again by the US regime — and this gold now being sent to the US (On March 8th I reported the further background and context of that US theft from Syria.) The US regime had offered to ISIS-members who were in Syria’s oil-producing region a choice either to become captured and killed by Syria’s Government, or else for them to give to the US that gold, and the option which was selected by the jihadists was to give the gold to the US, which is therefore now trying to find other countries to send the jihadists to as ‘refugees’ (since Syria certainly doesn’t want them, and neither does the US regime). The US regime is honoring its commitments to those ‘former’ ISIS members and their families, to assist them to find countries which will accept those people as ‘refugees’. Sweden, being very liberal (meaning ideologically very confused), happens to be one of these countries, and is actually considering and debating whether to allow them in.

Zero Hedge is perhaps the keenest news-site for exposing The West’s rampant hypocrisies (and so all of The West’s propagandistic ’news’-sites hate it and call it ‘fake news’ even though it actually is more reliably accurate than the mainstream ones themselves are); and, on March 10th, it pointed out that Sweden was in a flurry over whether to accept, as refugees, ISIS jihadists who have escaped, and their spouses and children. Zero Hedge truthfully pointed out that,

Sweden's new government, which was finally formed in January after months of delay, is introducing policies that will lead to more immigration into Sweden — despite the main governing party, the Social Democrats, having run for office on a promise to tighten immigration policies.
The right to family reunion for those people granted asylum in Sweden who do not have refugee status is being reintroduced — a measure that is estimated to bring at least 8,400 more immigrants to Sweden in the coming three years. According to the Minister of Migration, Morgan Johansson, this measure will "strengthen integration," although he has not explained how.
"I think it is a very good humanitarian measure; 90 percent [of those expected to come] are women and children who have lived for a long time in refugee camps, [and] who can now be reunited with their father or husband in Sweden", Johansson said.

This is supposed to be ‘democracy'?

However, that article, as noted at Zero Hedge, was written by Judith Bergman, of the Gatestone Institute. Sometimes, even such vicious propaganda-organizations, as that, produce authentic news, and here was such an instance. (It’s yet another reason why arguing ad-hominem, instead of strictly — that is, 100% — ad-rem, is essential to avoid, in order to determine truth and reject lies. That was a truthful article. Though Bergman wrote for a hate-mongering anti-Muslim site, the reporting in it was honest and factual. So, here’s some ad-hominem background to it, not as a part of the argument in this particular case — regarding Sweden’s debate over whether to accept former ISIS members as refugees — but instead as context explaining how this truth came to be published by the hate-mongering Gatestone:)

The Gatestone Institute is a rabidly pro-Israeli-Jews, and rabidly anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim operation, which was founded and is run by the heir and grand-daughter, Nina Rosenwald, of the biggest early (1895) investor in Sears Roebuck & Co., Julius Rosenwald. He died in 1932. His heir and son was Nina’s father, and in 1939 he“was one of three founding members of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA).[12] [Nina] Rosenwald's mother, a professional violinist, was a refugee from both the Russian Revolution and Nazi Germany.[9].” Nina, being not very bright, was never able to rid herself of the prejudices her parents felt against Palestinians and generally against Muslims (since Israel’s main supremacism is against Muslims, because Israel’s ruling ethnicity, Jews, have been stealing land from Muslims). Nina identifies herself as “a human rights activist”. (As was said at the start here, this issue “has raised hypocrisy to perhaps the highest level in all of history.”) She had, in fact, hired John Bolton as Gatestone’s Chairman; and, for his service as that, during June 2017 to March 2018 (when he became hired as Trump’s National Security Advisor), Bolton received $310,000. So, Bill Berkowitz headlined on 27 September 2018 "Meet Nina Rosenwald, the Sears Heiress Seeding Islamophobia at Home and Abroad”, and he brought together and linked to the great reporting by Max Blumenthal and by Lee Fang, documenting the Gatestone Institute’s rabid global hate-mongering for Israel.

But, in this particular case (the article by Judith Bergman), there was no deceit, because nothing in her reporting violated Nina Rosenwald’s biggest hatred, hatred of Muslims — so, these truths were acceptable to Rosenwald. Bergman’s article happened to be truthful Israeli propaganda. (After all: some propaganda is truthful.)

The Israeli regime won’t have any credibility whatsoever unless it condemns Sweden’s compassion for jihadists and for the wives and children of jihadists. Israel’s Minister of Justice had endorsed exterminating all Palestinians, but that rationale — sheer bigotry — for opposing them, isn’t suitable for foreign consumption, and so it was almost immediately disappeared from its public posting (shown there at that link). If Israel can’t pretend to be against Muslims on account of jihadists, then Israel’s barbaric treatment of its Palestinians won’t make any sense at all to the many fools (mainly in America, Israel’s chief patron) who support Israel (such as the Rosenwalds do). The US regime hides the barbarous reality of Israel, but that reality isn’t blacked-out quite as much in the rest of the world; so, Israel can’t afford to be publicly silent regarding jihadists, even in cases where the US regime would prefer such silence. Obviously, the US regime wants Sweden to accept those ‘former’ ISIS members (because the US regime aims to conquer Russia and all nations — such as Syria — that are allied with Russia, and uses ISIS, Al Qaeda, and nazis, as “boots-on-the-ground” mercenaries, in order to do that), and so this ISIS-as-refugees issue is one on which the American regime and the Israeli regime happen to disagree.

Bergman closed her article by describing the Swedish Government’s efforts to be compassionate toward jihadists while the Swedish Government also provides an appearance of caring for the safety of non-jihadist (the vast majority of) Swedes:

On a positive note, however, at the end of February, the Swedish government presented plans to introduce legislation that would criminalize membership of a terrorist organization. This new law would enable the prosecuting of returning ISIS fighters who cannot be connected to a specific crime, but who were proven to have been part of a terrorist organization. Critics have pointed out that it has taken years for the government to take steps to criminalize membership of terror organizations.

Sweden is hypocritically ‘neutral’, but actually a vassal nation of the United States. Sweden is being pushed by its master, the US regime, to accept some of the people the US Government had been protecting in order for the US to become enabled to take over Syria and to deliver it to the US aristocracy’s chief ally the Sauds; and, so, the Swedish Government is now trying to square this circle, in order to satisfy everyone at least somewhat. This split loyalty (between the imperial master, and the domestic public) is what’s called ‘democracy’, nowadays. The master pulls one way, the public are confused or undecided, and the US regime’s other main Middle Eastern ally, Israel, is pulling in the exact opposite direction, on this particular matter. This is how international affairs actually are being decided. The various aristocracies come to an agreement on how to proceed. The respective publics are virtually ignored, except as fronts for their PR. That’s today’s international order, just as has been the case for thousands of years: it is agreements that are reached between aristocracies.

Back in September of 2018, the US regime was backed by the United Nations in opposing Russia’s and Syria’s plan simply to slaughter all of the tens of thousands of Al Qaeda-affiliated jihadists (and their families), whom the Syrian Government had exiled to Idlib, Syria’s most pro-jihadist province, and who were being collected there with the intention to destroy them all at the very end of the war — finally to finish them off there. Both Syria’s Government and Russia’s Government wanted simply to destroy them en-masse, at the war’s end. However, because of the success of that US-based (and also U.N.-backed) international propaganda campaign arguing that bombing them would be ‘inhumane’, those jihadists survive, and will probably also be moved to other nations. Sweden could become one such nation, if they decide to take in not only ‘former’ ISIS but ‘former’ Al Qaeda, as ’refugees’. The US has protected both of those groups, against Syria’s Government.

Hypocrisy exists when people don’t care enough about their values so as to think carefully through to decide what values — if any — they actually hold, and what their actual priorities are. Fools like that are the meat upon which their aristocrats constantly feast, producing, as the aristocracy’s excrements, bigots (such as jihadists, and such as the majority of Israelis — and such as people who accept those bigots). Without those fools, aristocrats would need to actually earn a living, instead of merely to live off the fat (the fools) of the land and thereby producing this waste-matter, bigots, who make things difficult for everybody else, including for any decent people who might happen to exist in the given receiving nation (such as in Sweden).

The origin of The West’s hypocrisies that claim to be supporting “human rights” and “democracy” around the world, while actually invading or overthrowing target-governments, go back at least as far as Cecil Rhodes in the late 1800s, and the rationale that’s given of it is entirely fraudulent. It is the difference between, on the one hand, an authentic revolution, which can sometimes produce a democracy, versus, on the other hand, a coup or else an invasion, neither of which can, nor is actually designed to, produce a democracy. But the PR has to say the reason for an invasion or coup or sanctions (such as against Venezuela or Iran or Syria or Libya or Iraq or Ukraine) is to promote ‘human rights’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘oppose corruption’ in the given target-country that’s to be, basically, destroyed. Suckers are necessary, in order for this fraud — the actual aristocratic control of international relations — to succeed. And that’s how the system works. It works by that combination, of liars and fools.