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Stockholm has been the scene of riots this week, to much of the world’s surprise, with the unrest flaring up in immigrant-dominated neighborhoods on the city’s periphery. The Stockholm media reports cars burning in at least fifteen suburbs, stone-throwing against police, firefighters and ambulance personnel, injured police and protesters, and dozens of people arrested.

The capital city of Sweden had been basking in the still-warm glow of the nation’s World Hockey Championship win over Switzerland and the well-staged Eurovision music contest in the southern city of Malmö, which was until now perhaps best known abroad for its immigrant unrest. Most citizens were preoccupied with plans for upcoming Midsommar celebrations and summer vacations. The ABBA museum next door to Gröna Lund amusement park had just opened. Riots and unrest are not items usually found on the tranquil Swedish smörgåsbord.

The fire was sparked literally and figuratively on Sunday night, May 19, in the northwestern suburb of Husby, about 12 kilometers from the city center. A 69-year-old man was seen waving a knife and machete and threatening other people, then went into an apartment after police arrived. One woman, identified as the man’s wife, was known to be in the apartment. After two hours of negotiations, a police SWAT team stormed the residence and shot and killed the man after a distraction grenade failed to do its job. Determined people, these immigrants.

The situation exploded after that, with groups of mostly young men in Husby burning cars and confronting police, who moved into the neighborhood in force. Shades of Paris in the autumn of 2005–a similarity that did not go unnoticed in some media accounts of the current Stockholm troubles. The anger spread to other immigrant-dominated suburbs that ring the city, and soon reports flared up of burning cars, stone-throwing and police-’gang’ confrontations. This morning, the main headline in the online daily Dagens Nyheter (DN) blared, “Yet another night with fires and stones”, including a police station set afire and stones thrown at ambulance personnel. This did not likely go down well with the breakfast of Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

Hard-cooked eggs to swallow

Reinfeldt likes nothing better than to blend termite-like into the knotty-pine camouflage image of a Sweden that takes care of its people while still enabling capitalists and entrepreneurs to thrive. His tenure has been distinguished by a Coolidge-like silence behind the humming machinery of Sweden’s  prosperity compared to the dire economic news from other parts of Europe and the world. Now the fires are forcing him out of the woodwork.

At a press conference at the Swedish Parliament after a visit to Husby, Reinfeldt (whose five-o-clock shadow and tv demeanor tend toward the Nixonesque) said, “Sweden as a democracy believes in law that applies equally for all, over all of Sweden.” He went on: “This strides against those who believe in violence as a method. They have the idea that you can do what you want.” And, “If we give in there, then we’re on the way to changing the social model.” He also used the occasion to plug the entrepreneur-driven educational policies of the ruling center-right Alliance, which has championed private for-profit schools over traditional public schools–to the detriment of the latter. “We want to make more efforts to achieve better school results, especially when aimed at schools and the sort of outsider-environment we are now discussing,” said the Prime Minister.

Ethnic slurs aren’t just for Finns any more

The outsiders in Stockholm and Sweden are immigrant and immigrant-descent families who have come to Sweden for economic and political (asylum) reasons. The world’s image of a Sweden filled with blond, blue-eyed, Nordic folk is a stale dish: as many as two million Swedes (out of a population of 9.2 million) have immigrant backgrounds. Immigrants have been part of Sweden for nearly as long as the thousand-year history of the nation: Germans, Walloons and Finns came here in significant numbers from medieval times into the modern age, while the mid-late 1900s saw immigrants from Italy, Greece and other (mostly) European regions coming to fill the worker ranks in Sweden’s highly developed industries. The story changes after that, marked by tens of thousands from former Yugoslavia, notably Bosnia, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, successive waves of immigrants and refugees have come from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Poland and other countries.

Rami Al-Khamsi is a leader of Megaphone, an organization that bills itself as working to end social injustice and has an influential presence in the suburbs. In a DN interview on Tuesday, he put a different spin on the Stockholm fires than Prime Minister Reinfeldt’s. Instead of “law” and “societal model”, the words that resonate from Al-Khamsi are “racism” and societal “structural problems” that politicians have not addressed. Racism and ethnic slurs are part of the everyday Swedish menu, even if they are not advertised as daily specials.

Al-Khamsi zeroed in on this subject in his interview when he was asked if the police at Husby used insulting language: “Yes, we were surprised how the police acted toward people, using dogs and batons against children and parents and expressing themselves with words such as ‘nigger’, ‘blackheads’ and ‘monkeys’”. (The ethnic slur “svartskallar” or “blackheads” is directed often at dark-haired people who are perceived as having Middle Eastern backgrounds).

Al-Khamsi said, “The government chooses to solve social problems by increasing the police presence and militarizing the suburbs. As long as this continues people will rise up and choose something else. It doesn’t create change, but for many people the only way to meet power is with violence.”

Right-wing groups such as the Sweden Democrats political party are accusing Megaphone of inciting violent uprisings. Al-Khamsi demurs: “It doesn’t help to either defend or take a position on what is happening, we can only understand it. Megaphone works for social reparation and has a constructive and peaceful role. It’s the not first time unrest has happened in Husby. …As the (social) gaps become greater, there will unfortunately be people who take out their frustration in this way.”

Flames attract more than moths

The Sweden Democrats (SD), like other political parties, have been quick to seize the unrest as a channel to further their own agenda. The party has its roots in a neo-Nazi movement that did a not-so-extreme makeover into a recognized political entity in the 1990s. SD now gathers almost 9% support in the latest national opinion polls (higher in southern Sweden) and has 20 members seated in the 349-seat Riksdag (Parliament). There, SD can be a deciding bloc playing off the almost evenly-matched Alliance and its opponets from the Social Democrat, Green and Left parties.

An SD leader has now called for martial law, rubber bullets, teargas, and water cannon to deal with unruly elements, along with deportation hearings for immigrants who have not yet obtained citizenship, and police are to be granted the right to “use the tougher measures that are required”. In the long run, SD wants an end to the mass immigration and multi-culturalism policies that have transformed Sweden during the past decades. In the short run, the spokesman added, SD’s proposals for police to take hard-line measures will “make the rioters realize quickly who it is that decides things in this country”.

A sinister tinkle of Kristallnacht 1938 in Germany is easy to discern here, but in this land of Orrefors-KostaBoda art glass and crystal such outright persecution might be difficult to mobilize. Nevertheless, oppression in Sweden exists, whether real (according to many immigrants) or exaggerated (SD and others). One of its forms can be expressed in high unemployment rates for young people as a whole and young immigrant-background men in particular. Unemployment among all Swedes under the age of 25 is over 24% (UN figures, 2013). Among young Swedes who have immigrant backgrounds, estimates range  as high as 40% or more.

The paper ceiling

Many of the jobs that people with immigrant backgrounds do have would be classified as “menial” by some. Swedish employment has a “paper ceiling” instead of a glass one: in general, someone born in Sweden, with a Swedish last name, stands a much better chance of landing a job than someone who is darker and whose name is not Svensson.  If you live in Sweden, the odds are high that the people cleaning your home or office, baking your pizza, dry-cleaning and pressing your clothes, driving your taxi, or running your kebab-and-hot dog stand have immigrated to Sweden or have recent roots in other lands. It’s not unknown for people with non-Swedish names, especially from non-western regions, to change their last names via marriage or legal process: this, they hope and believe, will help them to get a foot in the employment door.

A broader picture of employment and society in general would show that many immigrants and their descendants have succeeded in building good lives for themselves in Sweden, and it would be unfair to exclude this image.

Real integration of immigrants and their descendants into Swedish society is still out on the horizon. Sweden is a country that prides itself, and rightfully so, on its willingness to take in refugees. It is also justly proud of its past efforts to instill equality regardless of gender, sexual orientation, race and other qualities–the multi-culturalism that SD so earnestly opposes.

But legislation cannot force minds and hearts to comply, and many Swedes are reluctant to exchange the enduring values of their traditions for a newer version of Sweden that accommodates non-western elements. Kebabs, pizza and Thai food have become highly appreciated additions to Swedish cuisine, but underneath this acceptance runs a deeper reluctance to embrace more than superficial values from non-Swedish societies. For their part, many immigrants show the same reluctance to embrace Swedish culture and live in ersatz versions of Baghdads or Mogadishu set in the housing projects of outer Stockholm. Both sides exhibit what the other side interprets as indifference, or intolerance, or worse. A synthesis arising from mutual acceptance and tolerance is likely to evolve, but this will likely take several generations or longer.

In the meantime, many young people in this country, particularly those with immigrant backgrounds, live with hopelessness as the staple item of their existential diets. As long as that is the case, there will be smoke and probably fire.

S. C. Hahn lives and writes in Stockholm and can be reached at stevencrhahn@gmail.com

I am not naïve.  Embassies have been centers of intrigue, propaganda disseminators, bases for political intervention in a nation’s internal affairs, intermediaries for the promotion of markets and investments, etc., practices not confined to those representing the US, and hardly confined to recent times.  That said, Benghazi (technically, a consulate), signifies, as so much else under the Obama Administration, a qualitative departure from the customary.  Lines are becoming blurred in the table of organization—the State Department, CIA, Pentagon, White House—all, with some rubbing of elbows, have been pressed in the service of imperialism, less cohesive than POTUS would like, but sufficiently unified as to make US embassies active weapons, stalking horses, outposts (whichever you prefer) in establishing, solidifying, and focusing the power of America’s presence in a global geopolitical strategy of military-economic-ideological dominance, loathe, on Obama’s watch, to be relinquished as the world structure itself is in process of decentralizing.  The US is engaged in a Sisyphean struggle as it slides from the post-World War II state of unilateral hegemonic, into a multipolar context of China’s ascendence, Third World emerging industrialization, and  postcolonial mass aspirations.

So much the need for Benghazis everywhere (along with the vast network of military bases) if America is to remain top dog, or at least think of itself that way—until its fantasies are overtaken by reality, at which time even the militarization of diplomacy can be expected to give way to naked displays of power as such.  We’re almost there.  There is something psychopathological about the current political debate on Benghazi, in which both major parties are squaring off against each other, as meanwhile neither one questions the desirability, profitability, and wisdom of imperialism, that which embassies are intended to serve.  And designed to serve: the more unwanted the American presence in a country, the greater the concrete (as though giant bunkers), the greater the military protection, the hulk announcing and embodying US influence, right down to exempting private contractors (think Blackwater under its new corporate name)  for crimes committed against the laws of the penetrated—in some cases, occupied—country.  In the last three days, an article in the Washington Post (May 21) by Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung and the New York Times editorial (May 23) make clear that Benghazi is but a pawn not only in US domestic politics, but also in spreading America’s  emphasis on paramilitary operations worldwide, beyond what other presidents contemplated, and at one with the program of armed drones for targeted assassination.  Embassies are beachheads for more forward maneuvers, both political and military.

Benghazi was primarily a CIA installation, its “annex” given the cloak of diplomatic immunity.  The Post article details the way David Petraeus, then DCIA, did everything possible to protect the Agency, such as drafting the so-called talking points used by Susan Rice (the present tempest-in-a-teapot fueling inter-party rage) while obfuscating its interventionist mission, while the Times editorial rightly pointed to CIA’s primacy within the consulate, in both cases, although the larger question is not addressed, nailing down that these facilities are often fronts for a range of covert activities.  Politely put—given the role of operatives and mercenaries running loose, itself reason enough for the anger expressed by the crowds, which then turned to violence.  That larger question, still an untouchable (just as drone assassination is untouchable), involves, not cost-benefit analysis, or what others may think of us, or even, the danger of setting precedents which might come home to haunt us, but the intrinsic morality of domination, in its manifold forms, military, economic, political, cultural, ideological, all of which are aided by the Benghazis numbering in the tens if not hundreds.

My Comment on the New York Times editorial, which deserves commendation for its implicit criticisms of the CIA, its presence there, its role in managing the news, follows:

“Reforms are under way,” states the editorial, except the one reform which merits frank discussion: Why these embassies in the first place, because, far from representing traditional diplomatic functions and concerns, they have proven to be the forward edge of US hegemonic intent, such as the massive hulk in Baghdad, or in this case, a CIA outpost? The locals know the score and deeply resent the armed fortresses spread globally, the claims of diplomatic immunity when personnel or the protectors (often private contractors, aka, mercenaries) violate the laws of the country when committing crimes, such as the clearing of intersections when passing through.

Embassies have become instruments of war and/or social control, and, not surprisingly, elicit hostile feelings and attacks. Renounce imperialistic policies, demonstrate good will, keep CIA and related forces out, and I doubt there would be attacks. Nothing is any longer normal, given the total politicization of the American presence  in foreign lands.

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.

Madea Benjamin before she was escorted out of Obama’s speech. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

How did Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, a well-known anti-war protester, get into President Obama’s speech Thursday at the National Defense University?

By listing herself as press. In a statement, the university explained that Benjamin “was given access via the list of media attendees expected.”

After repeatedly interrupting Obama’s speech on counterterrorism policy, Benjamin was escorted out of the room and questioned by police.

Benjamin told the Huffington Post Thursday that she got an invitation to the event from someone whose name she could not disclose and was surprised herself that she was able to get in so easily.

The speech was not open to the general public. “Attendance for non-media was limited to invited guests from the National Defense University faculty, staff, and student body,
along with those invited by the White House,” the university said.