What If It Isn't Islamism Per Se That's Behind the Swedish Riots?

Hear this guy out.

Immigrants who have recently arrived lack country-specific human capital. This includes language skills, labor-market experience, and cultural knowledge. In the United States, recent immigrants typically earn less than natives do, but they experience faster wage growth as they accumulate work experience and skills. Immigrants eventually tend to catch up.

In the Swedish welfare state, people live comfortably even if they are unemployed. This means that few are willing to accept low-paying or disagreeable work, preferring to live on welfare until something better shows up. But immigrants who never enter the labor market rarely catch up to natives in skills.

Immigrants who do not enter the labor market remain isolated from Swedish society. Integration is not only a question of work. It is also about getting to know the natives and learning their customs. This is difficult for unemployed immigrants, who tend to live in segregated areas and often have not once set foot in the home of a native Swede. The generosity of Swedish welfare thus paradoxically traps many immigrants in permanent exclusion from the labor market and, by extension, from society. In segregated neighborhoods, not working eventually becomes the norm through social osmosis, creating a vicious cycle that carries on into the next generation.

Economic factors tell only half the story, however. Multiculturalism itself is an even bigger impediment to integration. Multiculturalism teaches that natives have no moral right to impose their culture on immigrants. Instead, immigrants are encouraged to cling to the culture of their home country. This approach impedes integration into both the Swedish way of life and the Swedish economy. The Swedish establishment has embraced multiculturalism perhaps more wholeheartedly than any other country has.

I'm not sure it's "multiculturalism" per se. I think it might be an element of multiculturalism-- or rather, an element of straight-up Marxist critique which informs most of so-called "multiculturalism."

There really isn't anything particularly wrong, I don't think, with being open to other customs, or maintaining the Official Position that No One Is Better Than Any Other. (While everyone secretly believes their own culture to be superior, naturally.)

The problem is the Marxist attack on society generally, the unending critique. All good little Marxists and multiculturalists know that they're always supposed to talk about how Their Own Culture is sick and perverse and violent and evil. Actually, of course, such persons are not speaking of their own culture; their own culture is that of Transnational Progressivism, or simply "Marxism," but they pose as persons critiquing themselves for the same reason Andrew Sullivan poses as a "conservative" -- a critique has more authority when it is lodged from a member of the group under critique than from without it.

The combination of this Marxist attack on the culture of the West plus the "Multicultural" boosting of everyone's self-esteem produces a singularly lopsided, and singularly false, message about the culture of the West-- the West is constantly subject to withering scrutiny and calumny, while any non-Western culture is condescendingly praised. The sins of the West, such as miitarism, racism, nationalism (tribal chauvanism), misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and war, are thundered against, whereas the sins of non-Western culture -- such as, yes, militarism, racism, nationalism (tribal chauvanism), misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, and war, and also, for an added bonus, terrorism and mass murder -- are papered over or alleged to not exist at all.

If you were a relatively uneducated unemployed immigrant living in a ghetto, and all you heard all day was that the country you lived in (and the race of people that constituted the majority) were just Terrible Sinners Deserving of Punishment and you, on the other hand, were an Angel From Heaven Who Just Needed to Be True to Himself, what would you end up thinking?

An even bigger problem in all of this is that Western culture is now so feminized and disdainful of any masculine virtue that young immigrant men see nothing in the West's culture for them. Men -- particularly the "less cultured" sorts of men rioting in Sweden -- have a natural desire to be virile and to demonstrate their virility.

But in the West, masculinity is almost shameful. Certainly it's not accorded any status of honor.

It is the young immigrant men who are the problem, not the young immigrant women (by and large).

Which culture would the young immigrant men choose? They have two bad choices: The culture which seems to run contrary to their impulses, generally looking down on masculine virtue, or the one which promotes a ridiculous version of masculinity as little but Warrior-Tribe aggression displays, violence, and rape. And of course some rioting, and of course some terrorism and slaughter, too.

Is there any man in Sweden willing to stand up and forcefully assert the value of the Swedish culture? Or will the only speech in favor of one's culture forever be from violent-minded, uncultured young men in ghettos?

via @comradearthur

posted by Ace at 04:47 PM

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