4 ms·

"Turns out very few people want to lead a shitty life doing menial jobs as a second class citizen. Isn't that weird?" This describes the huge population of gas

"Turns out very few people want to lead a shitty life doing menial jobs as a second class citizen. Isn't that weird?" This describes the huge population of gastarbeiter in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, but I am not aware of any violent movements arising from them being unhappy with their lot. (The violence one does remember from those years was from a different demographic entirely.) It describes the modern UAE, where I am unaware of any gang phenomena. So, is this really all that is to blame for Sweden's problems?

marginalia_nu 3y ago
There are a bunch of other factors as well. For one, the Mexican cartels are trying to expand into Europe, and basically offering franchise rights to local gangs. Sweden isn't uniquely targeted in this, but it sure did have a whole lot of dissatisfied youths. The Swedish legal system is also not very well suited to dealing with the problem, and the system for amending laws has a lot of inertia. A big problem is laws against information sharing between government agencies dating back to the shocking revelations about the STASI during the fall of the DDR. In calmer times this is a fine principle, especially given how much data is stored on Swedish citizens, but when you want to deal with organized crime, it's absolutely disastrous.
whstl 3y ago
> "The violence one does remember from those years was from a different demographic entirely." Indeed. Funny enough, in those discussions, a lot of people bring up the Vietnamese as a group that is well-represented in Germany, but are rarely if ever associated with violence. The interesting part is that there used to be a problem with Vietnamese gangs post-reunification [1], entirely solved by now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_people_in_Germany#Cigarette_gangs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_people_in_Germany#C...

marginalia_nu 3y ago

There are a bunch of other factors as well. For one, the Mexican cartels are trying to expand into Europe, and basically offering franchise rights to local gangs. Sweden isn't uniquely targeted in this, but it sure did have a whole lot of dissatisfied youths. The Swedish legal system is also not very well suited to dealing with the problem, and the system for amending laws has a lot of inertia. A big problem is laws against information sharing between government agencies dating back to the shocking revelations about the STASI during the fall of the DDR. In calmer times this is a fine principle, especially given how much data is stored on Swedish citizens, but when you want to deal with organized crime, it's absolutely disastrous.

whstl 3y ago

> "The violence one does remember from those years was from a different demographic entirely." Indeed. Funny enough, in those discussions, a lot of people bring up the Vietnamese as a group that is well-represented in Germany, but are rarely if ever associated with violence. The interesting part is that there used to be a problem with Vietnamese gangs post-reunification [1], entirely solved by now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_people_in_Germany#Cigarette_gangs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_people_in_Germany#C...