Arvika, 4 May 2012
The following article was prepared and has been published at the request of the Indian National Magazine, Pravasi Today and covers the Domenic Johansson child abduction case in Sweden.
In what is being described by some as the Swedish Government's biggest blunder in modern times, a little half-Swedish, half-Indian boy called Domenic Johansson is standing in the middle of a political tsunami that threatens to rip apart the myth of the 'Swedish Utopia' and expose the Scandinavian régime as one of the worst and most systematic violators of human rights in Western Europe.
Described by lawyer Michael Donnelly, director of international relations for the US-based Home Schooling Legal Defence Association as "the darkest of régimes for families in Western Europe" because of its family policy, many are beginning to question whether Sweden is truly a Western-type democracy at all and are comparing it with the defunct communist East Germany.
The record is certainly bad. With as many as 10,000 to 20,000 children out of an overall population of 8 million being taken away from their parents each year in what has become one of Europe's worst state-sanctioned child trafficking businesses, and on the flimsiest of pretexts, by a highly corrupt and unaccountable Social Services system, the boastful image that Sweden is one of the most democratic and enlightened democracies in the 21 century is becoming badly tarnished.
Domenic Johansson, with his Swedish father Christer and Indian mother Annie, have unwittingly - and painfully - found themselves at the centre of a political storm that casts doubt as to whether Sweden is actually a true democracy in anything but name, at least as far as family rights are concerned.
From the very beginning, the Social Services department and the Gotland Municipality have cast a veil of secrecy around the whole case. Domenic was seized by armed police on an airliner waiting to fly the family back to India where they were planning to resettle, without a warrant, on 25 June 2009. What was their crime? For homeschooling..only homeschooling was fully legal at the time (Sweden virtually banned it in 2010) and was - and still is - protected by the European Convention and by the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. Later, the Johanssons were falsely accused of child neglect because of some tooth cavities that the parents were planning to have fixed upon arrival in India. More pretexts for abducting their child were invented after the event, all false and so palpitably absurd, that when questioned by reporter Alex Newman, all the head of the Gotland Municpality would say was that the matter was "secret". And so it has remained ever since, both the Municipality, the Social Services and the régime in Stockholm surrounding itself with a wall of silence.
For a detailed summary of the events surrounding the Johansson case, please see this Timeline.
Anti-democratic and anti-libertarian forces in Swedish politics have, for a long time, desired to create what for them is believed to be the perfect utopian system consisting of a blend of Western liberal democracy and communism. The result has been a curious mixture of anarchism and totalitarianism. But unlike the Marxists of the former Soviet Union who focussed on collectivising agriculture and industry, the Swedish Utopians have more or less conceded, like the commununist Chinese, that Marxist economics don't work and have rather thrown their energies into collectivising education and child-rearing instead. This has been taking place incrementally since the early 1970's.
Sweden is now a totalitarian social Marxist state with a dollup of free market capitalism to give it some taste.
In this peculiar blend of a free market and strict government control of the family, in which the state claims prior right to ownership of children over the parents, Sweden has created a social prison in which everyone is expected to act and think in the same way. Culminating in the new Education Act of 2010, all education was brought under government control, private education virtually banned, and everyone forced to submit to exactly the same educational curriculum nationally. Homeschooling, though highly regulated and difficult to get permission to do before the new Education Act (2010), suddenly became virtually illegal. The Johanssons found themselves at the cusp of this new paradigm shift.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the régime responsible for this change is the current Right-Centre Rheinfeldt Coalition and not the Left, even though the new Education Bill was the brainchild of the Social Democrats and their former allies in the Green and Left (Communist) party alliance. As is true in much of politics in the West today, it is hard to know what the difference between 'right' and 'left' is anymore, precisely because the Swedish political system (and those governments abroad seeking to imitate it) is a hodge-podge of ideologies without any clear direction. Traditionally, the democratic right is for free markets, accountability, liberty and independence whereas the democratic left is for collectivism and human rights. In Sweden no such distinctions exist anymore and nobody seems to have a clue what they are doing and therefore there are no longer any concrete goals. Swedish democracy is in a state of confusion.
One thing most of the parties seem to agree about is the need for more and more state control. Whose interests this imperative serves is never made particularly clear - it is simply assumed to be in the 'best interests' of the people.
It is impossible to understand the Domenic Johansson case without first understanding this mentality which basically is this: the individual is incapable of exercising his freedom responsibility so rearing must be left to the 'village' - in a word, to the state. And the Social Services are now to be every child's ideal Parent - best Dad and best Mum who know other 'best Dads' and other 'best Mums' to send them to after breaking up their original families, even if these are institutions that drive children to delinquency and sometimes to suicide - the statistics are appalling. Sweden is statism loosed from its libertarian moorings.
Like most homeschoolers, who believe in natural individual rights above any state rights, the Johanssons are freethinkers and have taught their son to be independent-minded too. Such is, of course, taboo in a totalitarian system where the government expects to do all the thinking 'democratically' for its citizens whilst permitting them to let off steam in the politically correct media of their own making. Thus whilst the people find an outlet in which to vent their frustrations in what is more-or-less free speech for most (but by no means all), the government pays scant attention to what the people say anyway. They never listened to homeschoolers and they're not listening to them now. Indeed, they want all homeschooled children to be abducted by the state. And they certainly never listen to the parents of state-abducted children - they're simply frozen out.
Both in Sweden and globally, the Johanssons find themselves in the middle of a kind of no-man's-land, on the front line between the forces of totalitarianism, on the one side, and of democracy and liberty on the other. The Swedish system, whilst recognising and indeed practicing democracy does not extend the same rights to liberty-seeking people. There is no Swedish equivalent of a British Magna Carta or American Bill of Rights. And as I have myself pointed out many times, democracy without liberty always leads in the end to totalitarianism, as it has done in Sweden. There is no point in having a vote if you don't have any guaranteed human rights, because without cast-iron human rights, liberty can be voted out of existence by the political class who can then claim all was done in the name of 'democracy'.
As a friend of mine from the People's Republic of China told me:
"Homeschooling is a profound freedeom movement and for police states like China, homeschooling is an urgent need".
So it is in Sweden. Thus the Johanssons, who were only ever interested in spirituality and participating in humanitarian projects, having no interest whatsoever in politics, sudddenly found themselves unwillingly in the middle of a political storm of global proportions, their child being used as an 'example' by the state to cower the rest of the homeschooling and liberty-loving community into submission. They are the proverbial scape-goat, the ones whom the state wished to make an example of. Unable to cower them, they have set upon another homeschooling family and done the same there, and have driven most the rest into political exile abroad, including the President of the Swedish Homeschooling Association, Jonas Himmelstrand.
There are those who believe that the Domenic Johansson abduction case is simply an unfortunate accident or mistake by uninformed, over-zealous local Social Service agents that could have been - and ought to have been - rectified immediately upon the error being discovered. And this is, admittedly, a possible explanation of events, even though subsequent research has shown this to be a common phenomenon in Sweden.
Why has nothing been done? Because the Social Services department, like the established political class in general in Sweden, bloated with power and unaccountable as they are, and involved in the sordid lucrative child racketeering business (a lot of money is paid to foster parents and foster institutions), are closely interlinked. Worse still, the courts are closed to public scrutiny and never admit they are wrong. The Johansson case has been conducted behind closed doors and decisions reached privately between judges and the Social Services. And since the Social Services are an important cudgel of the political class in the battle to impose social uniformity and conformity on the population, such a symbiosis and mutual reliance exists between the two that to hurt one is to simultaneously hurt the other.
Domenic has been legally kidnapped by a pirate Swedish state. Somewhere along the line, Sweden has lost its way, and badly. As chief editor Thomas Ander of the online news magazine, Newsmill reminds us:
"Democracy is not about dictatorship of the majority. True democracy is rather about the responsibility of the majority to see to ... the minority's needs".
Sweden has, until now, been able to hide behind its language barrier. With only about 10 million speaking Swedish in Sweden and Finland, and an even smaller number able to understand it in Norway, Denmark and Iceland, the affairs of the Swedish state have tended to slowly percolate into the international English-media through the carefully controlled and well-oiled propaganda machinery of the state. No more. Now the Swedish state must bear the full brunt of international criticism and learn that you can't fool the world indefinitely. The cat is out of the bag.
The Swedish Utopia is a fairy tale, there is a very real Swedish Hell too, and the Johansson family are the most glaring evidence of that. Today they have many friends and they are growing in number daily. Where the law, with all its injustices, has failed them, the vox populi - the voice of the masses - will not.
Mahatma Ghandi who knew what it was like to struggle for justice and for freedom understood well the process that those like the Johanssons have to go through:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"
Now that mother India is waking up to this abuse of one of her children we are confident that the Johanssons will have final victory. They absolutely must. And it will not be enough, after all the trauma they have suffered, for some shady deal to be worked out between the Swedish government and the Indian as happened in another recent case involving the equally corrupt Norwegian Social Services. Domenic Johansson cannot just be shipped off to some relatives abroad - he must be returned to his rightful parents, and they - with their son - must be allowed this time to leave the Swedish Gulag without police interference and to the freedom of India.
There is no saving of face for the corrupt Gotland Social Services in this case. Justice must be done so that this nightmare is never repeated again and the wicked child trafficking trade in Sweden is brought to an end. Homeschooling must be restored to Sweden in recognition of a fundamental human right and for the sake of liberty, both of which exist in India. We must see an end to fascism in the West once and for all.
India, as an emerging world power along with Brazil and other nations marginalised from the 'Western Club' must become a voice for freedom and liberty. India's influence must be felt, and be felt strongly, not only on behalf of one of her own sons - Domenic - but for all children worldwide. She has made her voice heard in Norway - now she must make sure that Sweden hears too...and emphatically. This is not just a question of 'culture differences' but of freedom. Sweden must learn from India to properly temper minority rights with majority rule for these are fast disappearing in the Scandinavian-type of 'Utopia' as everything becomes homogenised into a grey morass.
We are looking now for Indians to raise their voices on behalf of Domenic and the hundreds of thousands of suffering broken families in Sweden and in the West!
Reader Comments
"Just read your latest column on FreeSweden for the Indian newspaper. It was absolutely fantastic! Thanks for the work you do and the courage you show in exposing this lunacy" (Alex Newman, American Journalist based in Sweden, 5 May 2012).
"We thank you for such an incisive article. It has been posted on our site" (Amit Guin, Sub Editor Pravasi Today, India, 5 May 2012)
"Fantastic article!" (TBM, United States, 5 May 2012)<
"Great job on this article Christopher! Thanks for sending it" (American Daily Herald, 7 May 2012)
"This is great! Spread this around, everyone! A very good and well developped analysis of the situation!" (KY, United States, 8 May 2012)
