Article by David Archibald in "The American Thinker":
The Danes have put extra resources
into controlling the country's links to Sweden because of bombs going
off in Denmark due to people coming from Sweden. The people from Sweden
are Islamist criminals. The Swedish government reacted to the Danish
move by calling the Danes Nazis. Swedish society has changed for the
worse, and the Swedish people are aware of what they have lost.
All
this is known, but what is interesting is that a former head of the
Swedish truck-maker Scania, a Mr. Leif Ostling, has said Sweden is
headed for civil war
because of the problem of its violent migrants who have no inclination
to integrate into Swedish society. As a successful businessman, his
views can't be dismissed as being from some sort of antisocial loon
living in his mother's basement.
This
raises the question: how do you have a civil war in this day and
age? Having a civil war is aspirational, but is it achievable?
The
population of Sweden is now 10.1 million, of which 8% are of the
Islamist persuasion. The first question is, who owns the guns, and how
many are there?
This site
says civilians in Sweden are estimated to hold 2,296,000 guns, legally
and illegally, of which about half are rifles. There is a big hunting
tradition in Sweden. As of the year 2011, licenced firearms per 100
head of population was 6.5, and registered guns per 100 people was
18.9. So the average gun-owner has three of them.
The
Swedish government is thinking along the same lines. They are
currently trying to restrict weapons use by hunters. Magazines and
ammunition are to be registered with the police and be kept apart from
the weapons.
The
Islamist elements have most of the hand grenades in civilian
possession, principally the M75 hand grenade from the former
Yugoslavia. Hand grenade attacks in Sweden peaked at 40 in 2016. The
Islamists also have more explosives on hand. In the first nine months
of 2019, there were 97 explosions in Sweden. Even the BBC
has noticed. A litany of horrors could be written about Sweden, with
all the murders and rapes and knifings and so on, but just consider that
there is an explosion just about every second day.
The defense forces in Sweden have 139,180 firearms, and the police a further 38,000.
All
in all, there are plenty of guns to go round to have a civil war
with. This won't be a brutish affair conducted with knives and sticks.
But
how will it play out? A t the moment, the Islamists attack police
stations, control no-go areas and enclaves, and are not sufficiently
discouraged from these activities by the police. Public opinion is
becoming less tolerant of the situation. In terms of the politics,
leftists won the last election, in September 2018, and the Social
Democrats retained control of the government. Their main opposition is
the Sweden Democrats, whom the prime minister has called "an extremist
and racist party." In a recent poll, the Social Democrats are at 22% support, and the Sweden Democrats are more popular at 24%.
A
sign of the shift in public opinion is the fact that the leader of the
Moderate Party, with 70 out of the 349 seats in the Swedish parliament,
has apologized
on Facebook to all those who had criticized the country's immigration
policies over the years. The shifting winds of public opinion will
encourage a crackdown on the Islamist enclaves, which in turn enrages
the Islamists, and they are likely to respond with more attacks on the
police and other public institutions.
How
we get to civil war is that the government reaction to the escalating
violence is likely to lag too far behind events and public opinion. And
then an officer in the armed forces will have his wife or daughter
killed and lead his unit in taking over the parliament building. Nobody
in the police force will stop him, because the police have been taking
the brunt of the Islamist violence for decades.
The
next phase will be the reaction of the lefties running Germany, France,
and the European Union. The yellow vests have been protesting in
France for over a year now. Early on, they were surprised to see
European Union decals on French armored personnel0carriers. It seems
that Macron and Merkel have conspired to create a French-German force to
put down insurrections in Europe. To get to Sweden, this force would
have to pass through Denmark, and the Danes are likely to stop them. If
that fails, any armored column is unlikely to get across the Oresund
Bridge that connects Denmark and Malmö in Sweden. The Swedes make good
antitank weapons.
Yes,
you can have a civil war in this day and age. With respect to Sweden,
what can't go on forever won't. If the state does not maintain its
monopoly on violence, the state ceases to exist.
People
can have a short memory for trials and tribulations when they have been
civilized and comfortable for a while. Across the border in Norway,
the Norwegians had a bad time in WW2, with near starvation
conditions. So in the 1950s, they built grain storage to last them at
least a year, in the manner of Joseph's advice to the Egyptian
pharaoh. Two generations later, all the pain had been forgotten, and
the grain silos were converted to student accommodations. The pain of Sweden's coming civil war won't be forgotten as quickly.