The Jewish origins of multiculturalism in Sweden

In The Culture of Critique and other writings I have developed the view that Jews and the organized Jewish community were a critical necessary condition for the rise of multiculturalism in the West. In Chapter 7, on Jewish involvement in shaping immigration policy, I focused mainly on the U.S., but also had brief sections on England, Canada, Australia (greatly elaborated recently in TOO  by Brenton Sanderson), and France.

One question I often get is about the role of Jews in Sweden and other European countries with relatively few Jews. Now there has been a translation from Swedish of an article, “How and why Sweden became multicultural,” that summarizes academic writing on the Jewish role in making Sweden into a multicultural society. This article should be read in its entirety, but some salient points:

The ideological change started in 1964 when David Schwarz, a Polish born Jew and Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Sweden in the early 1950s, wrote the article “The Immigration problem in Sweden” in Sweden’s largest and most important morning newspaper – the Jewish-owned Dagens Nyheter (“Daily News”). It started a rancorous debate that mostly took place in Dagens Nyheter, but which subsequently continued even in other newspapers, on editorial pages and in books. …

Schwarz was by far the most active opinion-former and accounted for 37 of a total of 118 contributions to the debate on the immigration issue in the years 1964-1968. Schwarz and his co-thinkers were so dominant and aggressive that debaters with an alternative view were driven on the defensive and felt their views suppressed. For example, Schwarz played the anti-Semitism card efficiently in order to discredit his opponents. …

It was the conservative Rightist Party who first embraced the idea of ​​cultural pluralism and greatly contributed to shape the new radical direction. It is worth mentioning that the chairman of the Rightist Party 1961-1965, Gunnar Heckscher, was the party’s first leader of Jewish descent.

As in the U.S. and elsewhere, Jewish activists were aided by Jewish media ownership. Activists stressed the need to reshape immigration policy to atone for persecution of Jews—in the case of Sweden, the role of the Swedish government vis-à-vis Jews during World War II. (Similarly, in the U.S., Jewish activists emphasized that the 1924 immigration restriction law was motivated by anti-Semitism, and many activists, including academic activists like Stephen J. Gould [in his notorious The Mismeasure of Man; see here, p. 30ff] claimed that U.S. immigration restriction resulted in Jews dying in the Holocaust. Even Stephen Steinlight, who advocates restriction of Muslim immigration [and only Muslim immigration], termed  the 1924 law “evil, xenophobic, anti-Semitic,” “vilely discriminatory,” a “vast moral failure,”a “monstrous policy”; see here, p. 5.) 

Assimilation to Swedish culture was viewed as an unacceptable goal:

The starting point was thus a cultural pluralist perspective, which meant that immigrants with massive government intervention and financial support would be encouraged to preserve their culture (and thus send out signals to the world that Sweden is a tolerant country where everyone is welcome). The meeting between the Swedish culture and minority cultures would be enriching to the whole community and the majority population would begin to adapt to the minorities.  …

It is not a coincidence that Europe’s organized Jews consistently dissociate themselves from politically organized critics of Islam, because every negative generalization towards a minority group ultimately can hit the Jews.

The article notes, and I agree, that Jews are motivated by the desire to break down ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies  because of fear that such societies may turn on Jews, as occurred in Germany, 1933–1945, but also because of traditional Jewish hatred toward the Christian civilization of the West. It concludes by noting that, besides Jewish media ownership, Jewish influence was facilitated by the dominance of academic anthropology by the Boasian school — a Jewish intellectual movement — and its views on cultural relativism and denigration of Western culture.

I agree entirely that Jewish influence stems from their being an academic and media elite, as well as their ability to develop highly effective, well-funded activist organizations. Here, the role of Bruno Kaplan of the World Jewish Congress is emphasized.

This is an important contribution to the understanding of the impending death of the West. Needless to say, such an analysis does not obviate the need for an understanding of why Western cultures have been uniquely susceptible to ideologies that view the destruction of the West as a moral imperative. Nevertheless, it is vitally important to understand the forces that have actively sought to move Western cultures in this direction.