The Threats to the Nordic Model

Below is another guest-essay from our Norwegian correspondent Zylark.


The threats to the Nordic Model
by Zylark

During the entire post-war period the three Nordic countries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, have excelled in one thing: well-being.

The “Social-Democratic” paradises, so to speak. The Third Way — not quite socialism, not quite capitalism.

It was the child of Labour rule. A system by the people and for the people, whilst keeping the industrialists and innovators happy and thus providing work and a future for the people.

In every person there is a worker just bursting to participate in the joy of contributing to society, or maybe to start his or her own business. At the very least, realizing oneself and one’s potential without artificial boundaries. A meritocracy, as opposed to the nepotism which was the earlier paradigm.

That is how it was anyway, or at least what the Social Democratic ideal was. And in denial of reality, many Social Democrats still think it is.

That was before about half the working population was on some state benefit. It was before we imported “immigrant-workers” of the Muslim kind, where only one in three actually work. Which I guess is why we need more “Muslim immigrant workers”. Though, with one new taxpayer for every two new moochers, I don’t see any profit coming out of this scheme anytime soon.

All other immigrant groups for some officially unexplained reason show comparable or higher work-participation than even natural born Nordics. Which is why I am all for immigration as such, just as long as we keep the slacker Muslims out.

No society in 1400 years has benefited from Islam gaining a toehold, much less having a say. It’s just centuries of looting and mooching on the back of others. This lack of willingness to build good societies but instead to destroy existing ones seems endemic in the Muslim world, history and genesis.

That Islam is detrimental to any society is pretty obvious. One need only look at Muslim-ruled societies. It is, after all, an ideology born out of the idea that one can take what one wants with no need to work for it. As exemplified best by their dear pedophile prophet, a warmonger and pirate. His favorite target for looting was Jewish villages, which were at one time not all that uncommon in the Middle East. Why did they disappear shortly after Islam became dominant in the region?

A more immediate concern than Islam, one which is more detrimental to the country, is the behavior of our own political parties. Social Democrats of all stripes — whether they are called socialists or “conservatives” — are supposed to care for the population in general, but they do no such thing.

They do not care about reality, only ideals. They follow a map that has long since lost any relevance to the terrain.

We Danes, Swedes and Norwegians are proud of our societal model. We like it. It worked. We worked hard for it.

Yes — past tense. It does not work anymore. The welfare model require honesty and willingness to participate. Sadly, both attributes are declining.
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Where is the honesty in women’s rights organizations and governmental departments that are mysteriously quiet concerning honor killings, female genital mutilation, spousal rape, hijabs and, those tents which must be worn at all times outside of the home? I guess “equal rights!” is not as important as “I’m not a racist because I refuse to criticize backwards culture and ideology posing as religion!”.

The very liberal gay movement seem to suffer from the same diminutive (dhimmi even, are the words related?) attitude. Sure they put on their parades, but when attacked with ever increasing intensity and violence in our “liberal” cities, as they invariably are, it is all just some cultural misunderstanding. Say what? Better walk quietly, don’t tell, certainly don’t show; it might offend someone.

What is most scary is the blatant Jew-hatred. Imagine, just some sixty-four years after we defeated Nazism, we can again hear mobs calling for the gassing of Jews in our streets! The saddest part is that the people who enable these Jew-haters are those I once thought of as defenders of human rights and equality, the leftists and liberals. In fact, they are in the same mob, speaking the same hatred, only disguised as anti-Zionism or some other “Israel is a bad racist monster; Muslims are peace-loving pacifists!” delusion.

Never mind that the organizations in our midst claiming to speak for Muslims have this tendency to connect large pebbles or high-strung nooses to concepts such as homosexuality, Judaism, and unenslaved women. Not to mention us, the heretics who follow no scripture or deity but only reason, and even dare speak our minds contrary to their very sore toes regarding anything embarrassingly Islamic. Even concerning Islamic terrorism, which I have yet to see a Muslim demonstration against. While they wish death and beheadings on practitioners of free speech, on the other hand…

Not only that, our teens can not any longer have school class parties, for fear that gangs of violent enrichers might crash them. Our critical politicians, publishers, writers, and cartoonists must have 24/7 security details assigned to them. Lucky for them I guess, since our kids who speak their minds and stand up for themselves in the schoolyards all over Europe have no such security against these supremacist barbarians.

Our tax money goes to support these seditious elements in our midst. The very ones seeking to destroy our way of life are the ones we support by giving them the resources to live in our highly developed culture, and plenty of idle time to spread their Islamist Nazi ideology.

They see something despicable and sinful in our culture of equality, mutual respect, and tolerance, where I see options and freedoms. The two perspectives cannot live in peace, and the two are by no means equal.

Immigrant moochers and seditionists aside — of which there are plenty — another big problem is the indigenous population’s lack of effort. This is a far larger threat to our secure welfare societies.

We had a nice little sandbox, where all the able kids did their part, and all were equal. The poor and disabled kids were taken care of. Unlike kids in general, in some of the other sandboxes, we’re not cruel, not by design at any rate.

Now we have a bunch of “disabled” able kids, wanting to play on equal terms with their toy-cars in the sandy city we made. As if that is not enough, from dysfunctional sandboxes we have invited the ones who cried the hardest, and now demand that we take care of them whilst they’re stomping on our carefully made sandcastles.

We had rules that said if some brat comes here and try to ruin our fun, we’ll deny him access to our sandbox. Those rules are gone.

We had rules that said if you can handle any kind of job in our sandbox, you can take that kind of job. Even if that just means filling the bucket of the resident sandbox engineer, who made a four story castle just yesterday, and is trying for five today. If not, your toy car is not welcome. Those rules are also gone.

Now the indigenous among us are too lazy to do work that for some reason is “beneath” us. Non-localized back-pain and various other less-than-debilitating complaints are the number one cause of “disability” pensions. Which is a polite way of saying permanent social security for the lazy amongst us, those who could not quite see themselves working at some low-level job fitting their skillset, and don’t see the harm in collecting benefits on the back of the rest of us.

In short, it has become common, and respectable, to not work.

What the hell?

That is not why we have welfare! That is not why I pay taxes. We do not have a very generous safety net so that people who are able to work may live a good life not working. We have that security so that those with genuine disabilities, genuine mental problems, genuine strokes of bad luck, can live a decent life through a period of hardship, and preferably, despite their disadvantage, eventually return to contribute again.

I simply refuse to believe that 50% of the Norwegian workforce (between the ages 18 and 65) are so disabled that they can not contribute. Danish and Swedish numbers are not that different. There is something very wrong here. Our welfare model has taken a wrong turn if we think this is in any way, shape or form sustainable.

We try; oh, do we try! We bend over backwards to make things just right to accommodate the disabled. Pay half-wages for a year or two? No problem. For those who are willing, it does help get a foot into the workforce. Make the workplace fit your ergonomic necessities? Not a problem. It may help tremendously. Supply you with a custom-made car so you can commute efficiently? Not a problem. The only thing worse than public transport is to be disabled and relying on public transport.

But, of course, all these supports require one thing, one thing that most on disability pension lack: the will to get back into productive work.

Those who do want to work but are on disability are the ones who do get to work and do get off disability. What we are left with is a minority that needs the disability benefits for genuine reasons, and a majority of people who are nothing more than deadbeats.

What we do see is that only those with some spirit and self-respect in them, no matter the disability, resume contributing by working. These are people playing to their strengths, and not seeking pity for their handicaps. They deserve all the support they can get. These are the ones we want to bend over backwards for. They are true heroes.

That is a liberal Social Democracy. Doling out benefits right, left and center is not. That is just idealistic naïveté. If you give without making demands, then you get nothing in return. Actually worse than nothing; a deficit, a burden.

Our society was not built on nothing, it was built on the work ethic and participation. On equality and duty. It is time we wage earners (let’s face it, that is most of us) re-establish our power, and once again remind our politicians that we are their bosses, not the other way around.

By some freakish turn of events, most of our politicians, even the ones claiming to represent the people — the majority that elected them — are a severe echo-chamber of a minority of academics who are out of touch with the real world.

Don’t get me wrong; higher education is invaluable, and can give us insights. But amongst us academics there is a certain schism between the postmodernists (a.k.a. relativists) and those of us who find Occam’s razor an indispensable tool. Our groups don’t usually see eye to eye.

Politics has become a profession. Like that of a physician or engineer, only without the final exam that says you have any real proficiency. Politics is a highly-paid profession that requires the possession of politically correct opinions. That ensures two things: careerists with a bloated sense of self-worth flock to it, and they will say and do anything as long as it does not put them out of favor with the established order.

I apologize for the generalization to the few honest, working-or-the-people politicians that we do have. But you know who you are, and be certain we wish there were more of you.

The irony is that the careerist party-politicians who claim to speak for the people and for the benefit of the majority deride the parties and politicians who have an ear to the ground and take the people seriously, and do not see them as just an obstacle to be duped, I mean, overcome, at election time.

Careerist politicians, hatchlings of the political establishment nest, think so-called populist politicians are simple, not smart. Not able to connect the purported oblique dots which require years of study to interpret properly. What they are bickering about is who is right in his interpretation. None of them seems willing to look at the premise: what are the dots?

Using another more down-to-earth set of eyes, the dots are rather apparent, not obscure, and it is a simple matter of drawing a line from one to the other.

We might get it wrong, so we prefer pencils, not ink. When we make a mistake, we admit it, and try something different. Only morons do the same thing over and over and expect a different result to happen eventually.

We’ve been doing the same thing over and over now for more than thirty years. We’ve gone full circle and we are back where we started, with political nepotism compounded by a quagmire of political correctness. It runs rampant in our societies, contrary to all our ideals, and it is time we put a stop to it.

It is time once again to put some reality into politics — sacred cows be damned!