Sweden and Multiculturalism: A Terminal Condition?

Arktos: The Swedish Syndrome: How Elites Commit National Self-Destruction  (Amazon)
Karl-Olov Arnstberg 
Arktos Media, 2025.

In 1973 a bungled bank robbery in the Swedish capital led to an extended hostage situation. Over time the hostages, four bank employees, came to sympathize with their captors, felons who were putting their lives at risk. The phenomenon where captives identify with their captors has been termed the Stockholm Syndrome. Swedish ethnologist Karl-Olov Arnstberg sees parallels to the wider Swedish society where the populace is held in psychological captivity by a hostile elite. The author’s thumbnail description of the Swedish Syndrome is: “an identity-based social psychosis, an illness that takes the form of cultural self-harm.”

This book is a case study of how Swedish society became woke. The affliction has now spread to all Western societies, but various factors led Sweden to become an early and extreme adopter. Today the national ideology is explicitly multicultural. Of course this was not always the case.

The seeds of destruction were planted decades earlier. We see again how pivotal World War II was in Western history, in World history. Sweden was neutral during the war, so they emerged from the conflict with their population and infrastructure intact. While Germany was made to feel guilty for what it did during the war, Sweden was made to feel guilty for what it did not do. Rather than oppose Germany, it was a major trading partner. On a deeper level Swedes needed atone for the purported excesses of National Socialist Germany. While the ideology of the NSDAP was specifically nationalistic, it promoted the Aryan or Germanic ideal. Sweden, being a Nordic nation, was required to accept that alleged war crimes had been perpetrated in the name of their race, creating feelings of guilt.

The post-war years produced a society as peaceful, prosperous, and progressive as humanly possible. So in addition to vicarious war guilt, affluence brought anxiety about unearned privilege. Why should Swedes enjoy the good life while millions in the Third World suffer from malnutrition and disease? This mentality was most pronounced among the elite as most Swedes continued to be patriotic and productive citizens.

In 1960 Sweden had one of the most homogeneous populations in Europe. The few immigrants were European, mostly neighboring Finns. But it was a society with no great cause to work for, no larger projects to accomplish, and a leadership that was becoming estranged from their own people. It turned out that paradise was rather dull. That was soon to change. It began with a change in the zeitgeist that can be illustrated in the work of two Swedish public intellectuals: Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) and Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973).

The economist Myrdal is best known as lead author of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). This social research tome (1500pp) sold over 100,000 copies. It laid out the sociological blueprint for a multiracial American society. To summarize: U.S. Blacks are oppressed by the White majority leading to poverty, ignorance, and vice. These characteristics reinforce White negative attitudes towards Blacks. However, if Whites provided Blacks with better housing, education, and health care, they would achieve White cultural standards facilitating racial integration. Thus, the so-called Negro problem was really a problem of White racism. This was the basic reasoning behind the early civil rights movement, and An American Dilemma was cited in the 1954 Brown Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools.

Yet years earlier Myrdal had different concerns. In 1934 he, along with his wife Alva, wrote Crisis in Population. Sweden was hit hard by the Great Depression. Birth rates plummeted raising the possibility of population decline. Arnstberg quotes from the Myrdals’ book:

The consequent decline in population would signify the degeneration of the race and “the suicide of the family.” As population pressure was reduced, the country would be flooded with immigrants from foreign races with higher fertility rates. By right of the strong these would take over and reshape our precious cultural heritage.

The genesis of the modern welfare state, the Folkhemmet—the people’s home, the national community—lay in pronatal policies designed to save the race.

Between 1935 – 1939 the well-known Swedish novelist Vilhelm Moberg wrote a semi-autobiographical folk and soil trilogy published in English as a single volume, The Earth is Ours (1940). Without romanticizing them, Moberg praised the rural folk who were rooted in the land and part of an authentic community. In contrast were the alienated urbanites of Stockholm.

Both Myrdal and Moberg identified with the Left, but their 1930s versions would be considered ethno-nationalist by current standards. This raises the question of how the Left became explicitly anti-White as it did so starkly in Sweden. Unlike many European countries Sweden did not have a nationalist mass movement during the interwar period, though there was some support among the bourgeoisie for National Socialism as a bulwark against communism. Had Germany prevailed against Bolshevism their influence on postwar Swedish culture and politics would have been immense.

Politically Arnstberg notes a postwar transition from popular rule to elite rule in Sweden. And as non-White immigration increased during the 1970s and 80s there was a shift from assimilating newcomers to multiculturalism. This was inevitable because culture is, in part, genetically based. Assimilation is only possible if the immigrants do not deviate too greatly from the culture and ethnicity of the host population—10,000 Estonians small: problems; 10,000 Somalis: big problems.

The implementation of multiculturalism required a soft totalitarian regime that could turn hard if met with resistance. Important factors were the full cooperation from the mass media and censorship of dissent including internet censorship by both government and private surveillance groups. Labor unions, schools, churches, and NGOs were coopted. Swedish history and culture needed to be deconstructed. Many in leadership actually “despise and deny Swedish culture.” And there was the politicization of the law, resulting in a two-tiered legal system.

It seems that one would need to be in denial to believe that multiculturalism has increased the quality of life for the average Swede. Yet in international surveys Sweden always ranks among the top ten happiest countries. One can image the mindset: “Well, I can’t complain; things could be worse. And think of all the exotic cuisine and football stars we have.”

The book characterizes Swedish society as statist individualist – a strong state plus personal autonomy. The country scores high on both individualism and conformity—what one might call the paradox of individualism (see also Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition on Scandinavia). There is tolerance for individual idiosyncrasies and respect for personal space. But on boarder social issues, Swedes are very compliant, with “no other opinions in the public sphere than the prevailing ones.” In a high-trust society there is trust not only between people, but between the people and the government. Arnstberg references the theories of Belgian psychologist Mattias Desnet on mass formation psychosis leading to groupthink.

Prof. Arnstberg (b. 1943) is old enough to have witnessed the full trajectory of his country’s decline, and The Swedish Syndrome supplies statistical and antidotal evidence to support his thesis (30 percent of the population is foreign-born or children of foreign-born). The author is quite pessimistic about the future. In the last paragraphs of the book, he lays out two future scenarios for Sweden. One, “more of the same,” leading to a poorer and more dangerous country. “There is an even scarier alternative: … In a decade or so we may have civil war-like conditions in Sweden.” Both of these possibilities are tragic, but at least the latter offers some hope for a Swedish instauration, and there is still a lot worth saving.

The Swedish edition, Sverigesyndromet, (2022) was published just as a center-right coalition government came into office promising to limit immigration and crack down on crime. This has led some to believe that the fever has broken and the country has stepped back from the abyss. In the English edition (2025) editor and social psychologist Josh Neal tempers Arnstberg’s gloom. He believes that “Trumpism” has had a positive international impact. There is now a “new intellectual climate” and Arnstberg’s book “will usher in a new era of Swedish conservative intellectualism.” Perhaps, but it will take more than a tepid conservatism to save the nation. In the end it may depend on how much of the spirit of the Varangian Vikings and the pikemen of Gustavus Adolphus still resides in the hearts of the Swedish people.