Sweden to use military against warring gangs
Recent spate of violence provokes intense drama and bizarre solutions
Sweden has been plagued by gang warfare and a proliferation of semi-organized crime for a couple of decades by now, but the last few months have seen a festering conflict between major grops erupting in a wave of targeted assassinations amounting to the worst continuous instance of bloodshed on Swedish soil since we were invaded by the Russian Empire in 1808-1809 (but that’s almost a joke since we’re of course not anywhere close to those numbers).
The root causes are many, but include ill-advised immigration policies and an almost non-existent and often even undermined integration to an entrenched, highly credentialized and nepotistic service-economy, which has resulted in class and immigrant status overlapping very closely.
Often, the by far most attractive career choice for a young man in the increasingly isolated and invisible (other than token-wise) ethnic communities is to connect with organized crime. This is not a good thing.
Anyway, so now the conflict has resulted in basically a shooting every day, and since early summer, a new apartment building is reported having been bombed a couple of times a week.
The media circus really picked up speed a couple of weeks ago, though.
It was like a champagne cork popping, since in the established media, there has for various reasons more or less emerged a reluctance towards addressing crime connected with immigrant groups. And since these observations then were quickly monopolized by the radical right alternative media, the MSM by and large did what they could to avoid affirming their narratives.
But now, when the general atmosphere has shifted, and reporting on these issues has become acceptable and morally proper… Well, things have escalated very quickly.
It’s in this context that former prime minister Magdalena Andersson (socdem) cried for “calling in the military” a couple of days ago:
And this was then mirrored by current right-wing PM Ulf Kristersson who has “been in talks” with the military over suppressing gang violence.
Of course this is only media posturing to assuage voter fears, everyone gets that, but it’s an incredibly dangerous discourse nonetheless.
What rears its ugly head here is the normalcy of the neoliberal imagination in targeting the racialized other with violence. It’s literally the first thing the political theatre actors respond with when the Overton window now shifts.
For really, what’s the military going to do? What’s the big idea here? They want daddy to come and help out?
So is the military going to engage ethnic criminal gangs in combat and street fighting? No, of course not. This is a civilian population interspersed thoughout society that engages in drug trafficking and sometimes targeted assassinations. You can’t wipe them out with artillery.
Are the Swedish Armed Forces going to be deputized to perform in the functions and roles of the police? But the problem isn’t that we’re lacking patrolmen keeping an eye on properties or mobs of unruly peasants. More bodies in uniform is going to do very little against a guy on an e-scooter tossing a hand grenade at an apartment building in the dead of night.
No. What we’re seeing will amount to militarized internal border controls, where the state is empowered to arrest and search individuals without due process. The security apparatus will be used to further target “disruptive discourses” through the gathering of online data and the algorithmic curating of discourse, and the lines between terrorism, crime and political dissent will be further blurred.
The radical right, oh, they will run with this narrative as the perfect foil. They will spin this forever. The majority population is currently more or less in a rage, calling for all visibly non-ethnic Swedes to be rounded up and deported. The radical right and its alternative media will then project the most extreme solutions that can be sold to the public at this moment, and the mainstream media and politicians will provide us with the “moderate” alternative. Two steps forward, one step back.
This crying for the military to step in and solve the fallout of neoliberal globalization namely fits perfectly well within the process of expanding state power and a de facto erosion of civil liberties in the framework of digital surveillance and algorithmic propaganda efforts. The fact that the mythical entity of the army is the immediate go-to solution touted by our top politicians as soon as the narrative atmosphere permits is a perfect expression of the continuous militarization of society, and its reframing of the socially fundamental narratives in accordance with warfare and violent conflict, where all information is combat, and where politics and governance is rather like war than anything else. The war on virus. The climate war. The Ukraine conflict as something crucially important, dominating the media narratives and playing out in the imaginations and conversations of every peasant in the developed world.
In Rupert Smith’s analysis, war among the people “is the reality in which the people in the streets and houses and fields—all the people, anywhere—are the battlefield. … Civilians are the targets, objectives to be won, as much as an opposing force.” The true aim in using military force is to “win the clash of wills” and to that end to “change or form the intentions of the civilian population.” “Individual guerrillas” or “alternative political leaders” move and fight among “the specific people of [their] interest, whilst the audience of these conflicts has become, courtesy of the media, the people of the world.” This audience influences political decisions at least as much as do “events on the ground,” and thus the guerrillas or alternative leaders “use the media to influence decisions, and above all the will of those people they seek to lead and co-opt. This is not so much the global village as the global theatre of war, with audience participation.”
(Liljefors, M., Noll, G., Steuer, D. War and Algorithm. 2019.)
It also really needs to be further emphasized that targeting immigrant groups and the working class with the threat of organized military violence is supposed to be the self-evident solution to the consequences of four decades of neoliberal policies. This says quite a lot.
For it’s not “criminal gangs” that are being targeted here. Not really. The top politicians are appeasing the fears and prejudices of the propagandized populace by overtly displaying the threat of military force over the immigrant. Against the racialized other upon which bourgeois society literally and figuratively is projecting its shadow, its contradictions and deepest fears.
The eternal racialized other, first targeted abroad by the perpetration of neocolonial policies and then actual military warfare, and finally as marginalized refugees structurally situated as an underclass in internal enclaves for supplying the economy with cheap labour.
Another aspect mixed into all of this but never mentioned is the bargain, the trade made, in engaging in decades of regime change wars by proxy, as Sweden has done. You strike a deal with those proxies. What are the terms of that deal? Cash, arms, political support… but what else is in the package deal? No one ever asks. Because no one even acknowledges that this is done although it is hidden in plain sight
Reminds me of Desantis and others in the US who think it's a good idea to use the military to go after Mexican cartels...
Never mind, they ignore the cause of the opioid crisis: big pharma and a lack of good mental health and addiction care.
It's just like modern medicine that blames most diseases on viruses, without looking at the real causes. They too obsess over the symptoms of disease and call that the cause, but pay no mind to the elephant in the room.