»Invandringen har varit katastrofal«

TV tip i aften SVT 1 kl 22. “Den ultimata integrationsdebatten.” Jeg har tilladt mig at rette en mindre upræcision i SVT´s overskrift. 

De senaste femton åren har utanförskapet vuxit lavinartat. År 2004 presenterade folkpartiet liberalerna utanförskapets karta (pdf 78 sider,) som för första gången gav en samlad bild över tillståndet i miljonprogramsområdena.,20 maj: Sverige fortfarande magnet för asylsökande. Antalet asylansökningar i Sverige är mer än fem gånger högre än EU-27 snittet.

“Vi lider av en akut brist på ett öppet offentligt samtal i Sverige”

I en tid när media sedan länge skåpat ut hela sociala skikt i den offentliga debatten och i bästa fall har vanligt folk som en tyst publik, en kuliss, vill Debatt i stället göra dem aktiva, deltagande och ta dem på allvar. Detta gör programmet viktigt men också kontroversiellt.Jag medger att vi ändå allt för ensidigt favoriserar debattörer som är verbalt begåvade, som kan ta för sig och snabbt slänga ut en tänkvärd replik. I vissa sändningar har stämningen blivit något för hätsk. Jag tar åt mig av den kritiken.

Men redaktionen lägger ner ett otroligt hårt arbete på att få tv-ovana människor att medverka. Ett avsevärt svårare journalistiskt arbete än att ringa upp det kringflackande cirkussällskap av proffstyckare som valsar omkring i vartenda tv-program. Faktum är att 99 procent av svenska folket skulle kunna försvinna ner i en grop i morgon, utan att det skulle märkas annat än som en nyhet om att folket försvann. Tv-utbudet skulle kunna fortsätta med samma personer, som på samma välartikulerade sätt uttrycker sin mening om miljön, finanskrisen eller jämställdheten, eller om precis vad som helst. 

Vi lider av en akut brist på ett öppet offentligt samtal i Sverige. Det är olyckligt att det demokratiska samtalet är så strikt uppdelat mellan vad som skrivs och framförs på ledarsidor, debatt- och kultursidorna och vilka åsikter som är i svang i arbetsplatsens fikarum eller vid köksborden. Det ena fint och välformulerat, det andra mindre broderat och inte så rumsrent. Inser man inte det blir journalistiken mer teater än en verklig skildring om vad som händer.Janne Josefsson: “Debatt får inte bli mysprogram”

Voldskultur: Mandsopdækning

film af Beate Schwarz,  sendt af Spiegel TV 23.2.2009.  Alle afsnit her. Som man hører dommeren sige i sidste afsnit: “Vores straffesystem har nul effekt på dem”.

Caldwell: Et øjebliks uopmærksomhed

Opmærksomme læsere vil huske, vi allerede omtalte bogen i efteråret. I dag anmelder Klaus Wivel den i Weekendavisen den. Køb avisen :

Den første europæiske generation, der ikke så islam som en trussel, skal blive den sidste. I dag har alle europæiske lande de samme konflikter med indvandrere, ligegyldigt hvilken politik de har ført. Amerikansk kommentator har rejst gennem et kontinent i krise…..

Hvis indvandring havde været et valg, ville nogle lande have fravalgt det, skriver han. De europæiske befolkninger vil nemlig ikke have indvandring, og det har de aldrig villet. Og de har altid været i flertal og er det stadig. Kun 19 procent europæere mener i dag, at immigrationen har været godt for deres samfund…

Nu er regningen kommet. Generationen, der er født efter 1960, skal betale for deres forældres ædle principper, skriver Caldwell. Det krævede 50 års masseindvandring, før Europa igen blev bange for sine minoriteter. Værst ser det ud for Storbritannien, profeterer den amerikanske kommentator. Her vil vold og politisk ekstremisme dominere gadebilledet. Af alle europæiske lande vil adskillelsen mellem indvandrere og indfødte i Sverige være den, der er vanskeligst at tilbagerulle. Spanien har størst chance for at bryde sammen under tyngden af flygtninge……

Europæerne har gennem årene lagt øre til den ene elendige undskyldning efter den anden for, hvorfor vi skulle åbne grænserne – alle undskyldninger er ankommet forklædt som storslåede behov, skriver Caldwell. Stort set hele det politiske spektrum, fra socialister til kapitalister, har i den store folkelige opdragelses navn sunget i kor. Weekendavisen: Islam: Et øjebliks uopmærksomhed

Financial Times: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe
Review by Mark Mazower

Caldwell is an American journalist, an editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for this newspaper. He knows the banlieues and has talked to more than his fair share of extremists of all persuasions. But Reflections on the Revolution in Europe provides less an analysis than a call to arms to a continent supposedly already capitulating to the new enemy in its midst.

His argument, baldly put, is that Enoch Powell was more right than wrong. Europe is in decline from an “adversary culture”, and Muslim immigration, in particular, poses a mortal threat. He fails, however, to deliver the Burkean tour de force implied by his title.

Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, he plays fast and loose with the data and switches between talk of immigrants, Muslims and “non-natives” as it serves his argument. Europeans, he alleges, are fleeing abroad out of fear of Islam. But the best case of “white flight” he can find is of emigrating Jews and even this is unpersuasive since the number of those leaving for this reason is small and almost certainly exceeded by the reverse flow from Israel and elsewhere. Oddly, Caldwell unselfconsciously invokes the Jews as indigenous Europeans when just two generations ago they were regarded much as he regards Muslims.

Does Islam threaten European traditions of free speech? It is not fear of offending Muslim sensibilities that lies behind recent unprecedented efforts to criminalise scholarly interpretation. As Caldwell admits, Holocaust denial and debates about slavery, the legacy of empire and the Armenian genocide have been far more important catalysts for European legislators than anything to do with Islam. By contrast, the efforts he mentions by anti-racist or Muslim groups to get expressions of prejudice prosecuted have generally ended in judicial or legislative failure.

Nietzsche’s observation that all philosophy is disguised psychology is useful to bear in mind when seeking to understand why commentators such as Caldwell talk about Europe in such alarmist tones. They would say they have to because Europeans have been cowed into submission. Caldwell’s fast-breeding, over-sexualised immigrants have already established what he calls “beachheads” – the idea that the immigrants are the vanguard of a larger invading force – and engineered a reverse “colonisation” of historic cities abandoned by their native inhabitants. Muslim immigration, apparently nothing less than a “project to seize territory”, is well on the way to bringing Europe within the House of Islam. But this sinister fantasy has less to do with reality than with neo-conservative anxieties about the decline of the west.

As a concept the idea of the west has always had its expansively confident side. Yet for decades it also conveyed the fear of its own cultural and racial demise, a fear reflecting Europe’s massively weakened position in the world after 1945 and uncertainty whether the US possessed the self-confidence and political will to step in and take over.

The collapse of the USSR made people wonder what would happen with no shared enemy to keep the transatlantic partnership of the west intact. Then came 9/11 and the sharp divisions over Iraq and the war on terror that split the western alliance in its aftermath. One could trace these divisions back to profound disagreements that emerged between Europeans and Americans about the nature of international institutions, the rule of law and the path to peace in the Middle East. Preferring moral and cultural explanations to political ones, however, neo-cons attribute European dissension to a softening of the continent’s moral fibre, to burgeoning anti-Americanism and, as the ultimate cause of both, to the growing importance of Islam on the continent.

Of course in many ways, Islam ought to attract them – for at least in the stereotypical version presented here, Muslims believe in family, in honour, in fighting for one’s beliefs. Above all, they are united. Caldwell insists that talk of Islam’s diversity is beside the point. Behind the critique, one therefore detects a profound ambivalence: for all their primitivism, Muslims are, in fact, almost what Europeans should aspire to be. The truth, of course, is that generalities of this kind are not much use either in understanding Islam or in finding answers to complex social problems.

No question about it: immigration is one of the key issues facing contemporary Europe. But if you want a good guide to the debate, this is not your book: it is too unhinged, too doggedly provocative, for that. Yet the cultural historian of the future may find it valuable nonetheless, for it reveals the beleaguered cast of mind commonplace among some Americans at the moment when the waning of Washington’s power became evident and a new epoch in world history opened up.

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University. His ‘Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe’ (Allen Lane) won the LA Times Book Prize for History

The Financial Times Limited 2009

Der er andre anmeldelser. The National:

He concludes that Europe is in terminal decline, its spirituality reduced to an empty consumerism. It no longer wants to “write history in letters of blood”, to use the words of the French thinker, Raymond Aron. In Caldwell’s view, the migration across the Mediterranean to the north is no different from the military led colonisation of the southern shores of Mediterranean by Europe in the 19th century.Caldwell’s book provides no prescriptions for addressing the issues arising from immigration in Europe. Rather it is a moral fable, a scare story, to show the Americans what happens when nations lose their religion, their patriotism and their sense of identity. 

og New York Times ´Downturn Draws a Veil Over Islam