What do most people associate with Sweden? Probably social welfare system, good work-life balance, the unpolluted nature, all things many Swedes are proud of. Yet, what hides behind the beautiful rosy facade of this Scandinavian folkhem (people’s home) are ugly vampires of settler colonialism, fascism, and imperialism, continuously sucking blood out of the third world for around five centuries. Without these blood-sucking vampires, the rosy façade of the “Swedish model” would immediately collapse into empty bubbles.
For most white Swedes across the political spectrum, these vampires are completely invisible, as they were told since they were young that the façade can hang itself magically in the sky thanks to “Western civilisation” and their hard “class struggles”, and the rosy colour is simply a colour of “democracy and freedom”.
However, for us black and brown people, our daily encounters with the white society constantly remind us of the very existence of these bloody vampires, and the bare fact that “Western civilisation” is a meat grinder that grinds black and brown children into capital, “class struggles” are class betrayals of white labour aristocrats forming alliance with white bourgeois ruling class against the entire third world, and “democracy and freedom” are synonyms for national chauvinism and white supremacy.
Examples of daily encounters that reveal the existence of bloody vampires
These daily encounters may seem insignificant, but they are “great” lessons for us black and brown people to learn the logic of settler colonialism, fascism, and imperialism first-hand.
For example, the encounters with the immigration office.
Many Westerners may argue that it is just an “unfortunate” incident that teenagers born and raised in Sweden are deported to their “original” countries that they have never been to due to immigration policy changes.
But it is a matter of fact that the logic of imperialism is deeply rooted in the entire immigration policy in the whole of Western Europe, even in the visa application process for more “privileged” black and brown people with university degrees who simply want to study and work for a while in Sweden. While one can easily get a visa within two weeks with a white passport, black and brown people with “third-world” passports have to wait for months, and many will eventually be denied the visa without any reason after having paid for very expensive visa application fees.
Despite that Western Marxists spares no effort to save face for the imperialist West and deny the notion of “core-periphery”, the immigration policy in European countries like Germany and Sweden teaches all black and brown people every day that the world is divided into two classes, the imperialist core, i.e, the U.S. empire, its Zionist friends and its junior partners in Western Europe and Japan, and the imperialised periphery, i.e, the third world.
For example, the encounters with the strict rules about train tickets.
While in most countries, student discount of train ticket is available for all students (at least for all full-time students), in Sweden, a student discount is only available for one class of students, the class that can afford the membership fee of student unions and has time to take part in student union activities. If students without the membership bought the student ticket, they would get a fine of around 150 Euro, an unaffordable sum for most students.
In other words, with this “clever” definition, student discount becomes mostly a white privilege reserved for students from the white labour aristocracy class, as proportionally there are more students from low-income and/or immigrant families or third-world countries who have neither money nor time to join the student union, although this group of students needs the student discount the most.
This seems to be a minor issue. But behind it hides the fascist logic inherited from Nazi Germany. The strict train ticket rule is not an invention of Sweden, but of Nazi Germany. In 1935, the Nazi regime enacted the “German Criminal Code”, and Section 265a criminalised the unpaid fines for fare evasion. Until today, around 9000 people are imprisoned for not being able to pay train ticket fines every year in Germany. As most people who are unable to pay for the train tickets or fines are poor and/or racialised and/or have disabilities, this “insignificant” law serves as an effective tool for fascism to punish the “inferior” class of people (Untermensch).
And the narrow definition of “student discount” and the heavy fine in case of violation by Skånetraffiken is exactly the Scandinavian “sweetened” version of the German fascist law.
For example, the encounters with the pro-zio.nist state apparatus.
Apart from Sweden’s close and complex military-industrial relationship with Isreal through contracts like the Elbit Systems Agreement, apart from Sweden’s increasing arms export to Isreal, many pro-Palestinian activists with immigration backgrounds face constant unfair treatment by the pro-zio.nist state apparatus.
For example, a Palestinian student, Isra Barham, in Gothenburg was denied Swedish citizenship due to her pro-Palestine activism on campus. Another PhD student, Tesfaye Woubshet Ayele at Stockholm University, lost his supervisor simply because of his pro-Palestine and anti-zionist political stand. And the new “good conduct” law issued in July makes it possible to deny immigrants the residence permit on the ground of “contact with terrorist organisation”, preparing legal ground for the further intensified oppression on black and brown pro-Palestine activists in the near future.
The support of Sweden for the Zionist state Isreal is not a coincidence, but a continuation of the settler colonialism in Sweden, a history that has been deliberately buried in the dust by colonisers.
White labour aristocrats are unaware of their own Zionist, fascist and imperialist history
In the world of white labour aristocrats in Sweden, such encounters are beyond imagination, and the history of settler colonialism, fascism and imperialism in Sweden has long been forgotten. When they hear black and brown people talking about these encounters and the existence of those vampires, most of them will simply turn off their ears and get irritated by how much these “uncivilised” people complain about their “democratic and free” country.
This is exactly the fundamental problem. The main reason why these blood-sucking vampires are still alive is that white labour aristocrats choose to betray their black and brown brothers and sisters and to continue enjoying their comfortable imperial mode of living built by the vampires of settler colonialism, fascism and imperialism. And they can only do so without feeling guilty by deliberately looking away from their own past and present.
Thus, I would like to bring the ugly past and present of Sweden to daylight, showing these white labour aristocrats the hidden vampires behind the rosy façade. Every Western country has similar vampires; some are even bigger than those in Sweden. But I choose to write about the vampires in Sweden because they are less known than, for example, those in Germany, France and Spain.
Swedish settler colonialism
The first wave of Swedish settler colonialism of Sweden can be traced back to the 17th century. From 1638 to 1655, Swedish settlers, together with their Dutch allies, successfully colonised the Delaware Valley and built a settlement called “New Sweden” on the land of native American tribes, causing some tensions between the Lenni Lenape and Mingo tribes. The presence of Swedish settlers continued until 1713.
Alongside settler colonialism, Swedish colonisers also took an active part in the slave trade. The Swedish Africa Company was founded in 1649. Despite having only existed for 13 years, it had established the colony of Cabo Corso (today’s Cape Coast, Ghana), and accumulated a significant amount of wealth by delivering, for example, 500–600 enslaved people to the Dutch colony of Curaçao by 1657.
Moreover, even after 1662, Sweden continued to suck bloody wealth out of the African continent by making “voyage iron”, metal rifle barrels, and shackles used to chain enslaved people for the inhuman slave trade. By the 18th century, Sweden had become Europe’s leading exporter of “voyage iron”. In 1739, about 954 tons of bloody “voyage iron” was shipped from Stockholm and another around 1350 tons from Gothenburg.
One century later, another wave of settler colonialism began. Between 1850 and 1950, around 1.3 million Swedes, approximately 25% of the total Swedish population, immigrated to North America and settled on the land of native Americans.
For three centuries, the Swedish vampire of settler colonialism successfully sucked the first batch of blood out of the African and North American continents, partially completed its primitive accumulation, and got rid of its surplus population, which made it possible for the white labour aristocracy class to demand higher wages, shorter working hours, and better social welfare after World War II. In other words, the first foundation of the Swedish social welfare state is settler colonialism and the slave trade.
Sweden’s support for fascism during World War II
As stated by Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda in 1942, in Mein lieber Reichkanzler,
“Sweden has done more for the German war effort than is generally recognised. Above all, it has in some respects given us substantial support in the war against the Soviet Union – it indeed protects its neutrality, but much to our advantage.”
Apart from the “neutral” support for Nazi Germany to transport more than two million German soldiers and around 100,000 wagons with weapons and munitions on Swedish railways between June 1940 and August 1943, the Swedish capitalist class, like owners of the Grängesberg Company, also supported the war machine of Nazi Germany with iron ore in exchange for gold stolen from Jewish families and other financial benefits. According to Rolf Karlbom, four out of every ten German guns were made with Swedish ore, a significant figure if one considers the small size of Sweden. Capital accumulated from the iron ore trade with Nazi Germany during World War II helped complete the primitive accumulation in Sweden, laying the material foundations for the future social welfare state.
Furthermore, fascist and anti-communist ideologies were deeply penetrated into Swedish society during World War II. The Swedish government not only banned all communist newspapers, but also established many labour camps, like the first Labour Company Storsien set up in 1939 to imprison communists and other trade union activists and force them to dig trenches and build roads as slaves. This prepared the ideological ground for building imperial socialism in Sweden after World War II.
This is just a small corner of the vast iceberg of Sweden’s support for fascism during World War II. This part of history has more far-reaching material and ideological impacts on Swedish society than most Swedes feel comfortable admitting. While many Western leftists are deeply concerned about the rise of fascism in Sweden, fascism has in reality never disappeared in Sweden since the beginning of its settler colonialism.
Sweden’s imperial socialism
After World War II, Sweden started expanding its social welfare system in the 1950s. Until the 1970s, the “Swedish model” became the best example used by the imperialist West to brag about the “superiority” of capitalism over the Soviet Union’s socialism. Even today, some Western leftists regard the Swedish system as “real socialist”, while criticising how “capitalist” and “imperialist” actually existing socialist countries like Vietnam and China are.
Many Swedes choose to believe that the folkhem is a result of hard class struggles and the wealth of Sweden is accumulated through hard work with high productivity. But in reality, social welfare is a bribe from their ruling class, the global imperial class, to buy their loyalty as class traitors of the international working class, and the wealth of Sweden has nothing to do with high productivity.
Without Western imperialism actively cheapening and wasting lives and nature in the third world with both war machines and soft financial weapons, white European countries like Sweden could never have secured their superior class position.
Without the superior class position, white labour aristocrats in Sweden could not have earned ten to fifty times more than their black and brown siblings in the third world, could not have gotten the imperial cake crumbles from their ruling class, i.e, the social welfare and long holidays, and could not have enjoyed their imperial mode of living.
And how about productivity? To paraphrase Ali Kadri, children in West Asia who are shot dead within one second are more productive than white Swedish workers sitting in well-furnished offices. As killing is the most lucrative activity for the global imperialist class, people in West Asia and Africa who actively participate in this bloody activity are the most productive “components” in the capital accumulation process for the Epstein class.
As Torkil Lauesen pointed out, “Sweden is riding the wave of imperialism”. To secure imperial rents for the folkhem, Sweden, despite being “neutral” before 2024, has took active part in imperialist wars in the third world, including the illegal NATO war on Libya that reduced one of the most developed African countries to an open slave market and the two decades imperialist “war on terror” in Afghanistan that turned West Asia, a materially and culturally rich region, into the blood-sucking playground for the Epstein class. To further safeguard its class position in the imperial core, Sweden officially joined NATO in 2024, a decision that has been welcomed by all major political parties; even the “left” party (vänster partiet) has pledged its loyalty to NATO recently.
However, the imperial mode of living of the labour aristocracy class can not continue much longer. With the axis of resistance fighting bravely against the imperialist West and making great progress, with non-aligned countries like Iran, Russia, China, DPRK actively building alternative world order to the current genocidal imperialism, with socialist countries like Vietnam and China breaking free from the “core-periphery” trap and rising their wage levels against the unequal exchange, the imperial cake crumble left for the white labour aristocrats in Western countries including Sweden is gradually diminishing.
Sooner or later, these privileged white workers will face two choices: either following the Epstein class on the path of fascism to the abyss, or changing their side to the side of life and tearing the white empire apart. Which choice they will make depends on if they have enough courage to abundon their class interests and commit class suicide.
Some thoughts on “Swedish model”
Six years ago, when I travelled to Sweden for the first time, I was amazed by the Scandinavian lifestyle, i.e, imperial mode of living. My dad told me that China will never be able to become Sweden. I did not understand. Six years later, having read about unequal exchange and dependency theories, having witnessed countless instances of violence by European countries against the third world, having experienced racism, or more specifically Sinophobia, firsthand, I finally understand what my dad meant.
China, as a third-world country, cannot follow the Swedish model. It has to rely on the sacrifice of its peasants to accomplish primitive accumulation, has to bend down to the Epstein class and allow them to exploit its workers and nature to get advanced technologies and capital investment, and has no “fourth world” to colonise and plunder. That is why China can never become a “perfect utopia” socialist country as many Western Marxists are fantasizing about.
What Sweden has built is imperial socialism for the white folk (people), for the labour aristocracy class; what China is building is real socialism for the yellow people, for the popular class. Just like the Swedish student discount is only for privileged students with a paid membership, the Swedish model is only reserved for white people.
Actually, The world's first truly global colonial power was the Dutch Empire.
This small nation was a laboratory for every Capitalist innovation that would later metastasize across the globe: corporate imperialism, financialized capitalism, industrialized slavery, and the bureaucratic machinery of racism.
Every empire that followed—British, French, American—was essentially copying the Dutch playbook, just with bigger populations.
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bettbeat.substack.com/p/the-tiny-country-that-never-got-credit
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