As I've been saying and writing for years, if you want to see what the political left has in mind for the United States, just look at Europe. That's the blueprint. Liberals and progressives have been touting European practices and policies for years as the way things ought to be, even though those policies rarely produce good results in the long term.
Case in point: Sweden. Sweden has, for years, tossed open their doors to largely unchecked, unvetted immigration. Now, Sweden is suffering a gang crisis. Stockholm is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
According to Euronews, Stockholm is one of the most dangerous cities in Europe: it has recorded 55 shootings up until August this year, resulting in nine deaths, while nationwide, there have been 113 incidents, leaving 33 people dead.
The country has become a hotspot for drug gangs that often deploy teenage hitmen and makeshift explosives in their violent turf wars.
The scale of the problem is not confined to the capital. Malmö, Gothenburg, and Uppsala are also scarred by shootings, bombings, and killings linked to rival groups.
Sweden’s homicide rate involving firearms ranked third highest in Europe in 2022, behind only Montenegro and Albania. This marks a stark departure from the country’s historic image of Nordic order and stability.
We have gang problems of our own, of course. Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Denver all have these problems, some with home-grown gangs, some stemming from gangs from foreign countries. These gangs, such as Tren de Aragua, MS-13, and similar groups, deal drugs, prey on the citizenry, are involved in human trafficking, and more. But there's a difference between the gangs that American law enforcement has to deal with and the gangs in Sweden.
Arvid Hallén, Program Director at the Oikos conservative think tank in Sweden, told europeanconservative.com:
Clearly, we have had for a long time a very strongly increasing amount of crime, especially gangster-associated crime. These criminal organisations, to a quite exceptional degree, commit crimes using guns and bombings—at a level which is unique in Europe.
A series of high-profile attacks has highlighted the crisis. In April this year, three young men were gunned down in an Uppsala hair salon in a feud between two gangs. In August, a man was killed in a shooting outside a mosque in Örebro.
The Swedish government has been forced to introduce sweeping changes to combat the crisis. New legislation will lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 13 for serious offences such as murder and bombings, aiming to disrupt the gangs’ recruitment of minors.
That's a start. If a 14-year-old is capable of planning and executing a murder, or a bombing, or any other such act of terror, they should be treated accordingly - as an adult.
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It seems, though, that many in Sweden's government either can't or won't address the elephant in the room. Arvid Hallén touches on it:
Hallén argues that the roots of the problem lie in decades of mismanaged immigration policy:
This is all, of course, a direct consequence of the last few decades of irresponsible immigration policy in Sweden. If Sweden had had mass immigration from Denmark or Germany or Poland, we wouldn’t have these issues, but the problem is that we’ve had immigration from the Middle East, North Africa, mostly the Horn of Africa. These groups are much harder to integrate.
There's a word he's leaving out: Islam.
Some of these gangs that are causing so much trouble very likely have the same methods and motivations as the gangs that vex American law enforcement and immigration officials - money. Money from the illegal drug trade, which leads to vicious turf wars, and money from human trafficking and prostitution, which leads to the hideous abuse of, in particular, women and children. They extort money from the citizens by extortion, and they engage in open warfare in the streets, with innocents too often caught in the crossfire.
But some of the troubles are religiously motivated. Those attacks, not just in Sweden but in Europe generally, are increasing, in number and in viciousness. That's the elephant in the room - Islam.
Religion can be a source of comfort and purpose to many people. Most world religions have that as their primary goal, and it generally works; faith can be the glue that holds a society together. But Islam, as practiced by too many today, is a religion based on conquest, on violence, on war against the "infidels" - the rest of us. They aim to spread Islam by force, and history tells us that religious wars can be the nastiest wars of all.
That's what many of the nations of Europe are avoiding dealing with. And it's very likely too late. The current influx has been going on too long, the perpetrators are too entrenched, and parts of major European cities are no-go zones, which many of these recent immigrants seek to expand.
What the nations of Europe are missing is this: This isn't an immigration problem, although there needs to be a major reform of Europe's immigration policies. This is a national security issue. It's an issue of the survival of the cultures and lifestyles of those countries. The one thing that might save them - immediate mass deportations - seems not to be on the table.
Europe, or large parts of it, is probably already lost. And this is the blueprint for the American left here, in America.
