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‘Dagens Nyheter owes me an apology for racist slur’

Prominent Swedish writer and opinion shaper Johan Norberg explains why he has become embroiled in a heated debate with newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Published: 20 February 2008 12:07 CET
'Dagens Nyheter owes me an apology for racist slur'
Photo: Johan Norberg, The Local

I know it’s hard to follow every twist and turn when a debate really heats up, so for the sake of convenience I have summarized here the false assertions made about me by Andreas Malm at DN Kultur over the past week. Malm has told a total of three lies in order to portray me as a racist and an Islamophobe. These can easily be disproved:

1. It began on February 12th when Andreas Malm wrote an article characterizing Bruce Bawer’s book While Europe Slept as an Islamophobic tract with leanings similar to those of the Sweden Democrats. In this context, Malm tries to point to me as a central source of inspiration for Bawer:

“From Johan Norberg — one of the Swedish debaters cited by Bruce Bawer as an information source, alongside Dilsa Demirbag-Sten and Mauricio Rojas — he has learned that Sweden, while maybe not a one-party state, is a ‘one-idea state’ where kowtowing to Islam is endemic. And so Sweden suffers with a growing Muslim population that has ‘a disproportionate tendency towards violence’, has made the

murder rate ‘twice as high in Sweden as in the United States’, and is at its craziest in Malmö, ‘where the rape rate is five or six times higher than in Copenhagen, and child rape has doubled in ten years'”.

There are two assertions here: in the first, Malm accuses me of claiming that “kowtowing to Islam is endemic” in Sweden; in the second, he attempts to make it seem like Bawer has sourced the claims that follow from me (as well as from Demirbag-Sten and Rojas).

Both assertions are false. I have never written anything remotely like that and Bruce Bawer has never claimed that I have. My quote concerns the way in which the Social Democrats’ power over our institutions affects our view of state, market, growth and redistribution. Here is the original quote from Bawer’s book (page 46):

“Johan Norberg, a Swedish scholar, feels that the social-democratic establishment consensus is so significant a feature of Western European society that he’s given it a name: ‘the one-idea state’. Norberg (whose country has an even more lockstep elite than most) notes that ‘the social democrats’ power over our minds, authorities, universities and media starts a process of adaptation from all sides, including the opposition, so that individualists and innovators are shut out.'”

Islam and Muslims are not mentioned once on that page in Bawer’s book. I am referred to on just one further occasion in the book (page 127) in connection with a comparison between the relative per capita GDPs of the EU and the US. (The assertions about Demirbag-Sten and Rojas are also false — the quote from Rojas is not even about Muslims (it is about Swedes being a tribe that is too homogeneous for its own good).

2. When Dilsa Demirbag-Sten and I were given the opportunity to write a short reply on DN Kultur, Malm and the editorial team did not respond with a correction or an apology. Instead Malm was given the last word and another opportunity to repeat his lies (February 13th).

He also put two more lies in the mix. Unfortunately, I was not permitted to reply. Malm wrote:

“Sweden is described as a country in which nobody dares criticize Muslim immigration […] since Social Democrats have indoctrinated Swedes in a ‘one-idea state’. The writer who coined this term, and on whose ideas this reasoning is based, is Johan Norberg. […] It’s there in black and white in a book that is selling well and has

already been translated into several European languages.”

Yes, the term is mine, but the reasoning is not. (On the contrary, I have attacked the Social Democrats for their inhumane immigration policies, which of course have affected Muslims.) When discussing my description of a ‘one-idea state’, Bruce Bawer does not take up any arguments about mass immigration.

3. Later in the same text, Malm produces more false evidence in order to pin me down as an Islamophobe.

“In his blog Norberg complains that I ‘treat Bruce Bawer’s book While Europe Slept as an Islamophobic and racist contribution to the debate’. As if it were not just that. […] The lines between the Islamophobic and the liberal agendas have become ever more porous in the public debate of the western world.”

What I actually wrote on my blog was the following:

“While treating Bruce Bawer’s book While Europe Slept as an Islamophobic and racist contribution to the debate, Malm writes as follows: […]”

And here I go on to cite Malm’s attempt to associate me with Bawer’s book. What I said was simply a description of the content of Malm’s article and was in no way a criticism of his depiction of the book (which I have not read) as Islamophobic or racist.

Andreas Malm has lied about me three times, but DN Kultur is refusing to allow me to respond to the last two lies.

Hundreds of thousands of readers of Sweden’s biggest “quality” newspaper have seen me portrayed as an Islamophobe and a racist in articles that will define people’s view of me for some time to come. And I am not being given a chance to set the record straight.

In an interview with Sveriges Radio, DN’s culture editor Maria Schottenius characterized me as a “dogmatist” for my protests at being treated in this way.

When I asked her a direct question as to whether she, hypothetically speaking, would consider it problematic for somebody writing on her pages to lie in order to portray an opponent as a racist, she, quite remarkably, refused to comment.

Instead she replied that she cannot be held responsible for everything published in DN Kultur. The paper houses many different opinions, she said, some of which were “controversial”. This, she said, she found “interesting”.

It is perhaps relevant at this juncture to mention that I have supported an open borders policy on immigration for the last decade, I have hidden Muslim refugees from the Swedish authorities and argued that Europe probably wouldn’t have had the Renaissance and the Enlightenment if it hadn’t been for ideas imported from the Muslim

world.

This is something I have written about extensively in the past. I even had an article [in Swedish] on the subject published in DN Kultur. But that was before Maria Schottenius’s time.

Johan Norberg is a freelance writer and regular media commentator. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning In Defence of Global Capitalism (2001), which was later adapted by Channel 4 in the UK to form the basis of the documentary Globalisation is Good.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Why Germans’ famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

Germans are famous for their love of efficiency - and impatience that comes with it. But this desire for getting things done as quickly as possible can backfire, whether at the supermarket or in national politics, writes Brian Melican.

Published: 24 May 2023 10:38 CEST
OPINION: Why Germans' famed efficiency makes the country less efficient

A story about a new wave of “check-outs for chatting” caught my eye recently. In a country whose no-nonsense, “Move it or lose it, lady!” approach to supermarket till-staffing can reduce the uninitiated to tears, the idea of introducing a slow lane with a cashier who won’t sigh aggressively or bark at you for trying to strike up conversation is somewhere between quietly subversive and positively revolutionary – and got me thinking.

Why is it that German supermarket check-outs are so hectic in the first place?

READ ALSO: German supermarkets fight loneliness with slower check outs for chatting

If you talk to people here about it – other Germans, long-term foreign residents, and keen observers on shorter visits – you’ll hear a few theories.

One is that Germans tend to shop daily on the way home from work, and so place a higher premium on brisk service than countries where a weekly shop is more common; and it is indeed a well-researched fact that German supermarket shopping patterns are higher-frequency than in many comparable countries.

Bavarian supermarket

A sign at a now-famous supermarket in Bavaria advertises a special counter saying “Here you can have a chat”. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Karl-Josef Hildenbrand

Another theory is that, in many parts of the country (such as Bavaria), supermarket opening hours are so short that there is no other way for everyone to get their shopping done than to keep things ticking along at a good old clip.

The most simple (and immediately plausible) explanation, of course, is that supermarkets like to keep both staffing and queuing to a minimum: short-staffing means lower costs, while shorter queues make for fewer abandoned trolleys.

German love of efficiency

Those in the know say that most store chains do indeed set average numbers of articles per minute which their cashiers are required to scan – and that this number is higher at certain discounters notorious for their hard-nosed attitude.

Beyond businesses’ penny-pinching, fast-lane tills are a demonstration of the broader German love of efficiency: after all, customers wouldn’t put up with being given the bum’s rush if there weren’t a cultural premium placed on smooth and speedy operations.

Then again, as many observers not yet blind to the oddness of Germany’s daily ‘Supermarket Sweep’ immediately notice, the race to get purchases over the till at the highest possible rate is wholly counter-productive: once scanned, the items pile up faster than even the best-organised couple can stow away, leaving an embarrassing, sweat-inducing lull – and then, while people in the queue roll their eyes and huff, a race to pay (usually in cash, natch’).

In a way, it’s similar to Germany’s famed autobahns, on which there is theoretically no speed limit and on which some drivers do indeed race ahead – into traffic jams often caused by excessive velocity.

Yes, it is a classic case of more haste, less speed. We think we’re doing something faster, but actually our impatience is proving counterproductive.

German impatience

This is, in my view, the crux of the issue: Germans are a hasty bunch. Indeed, research shows that we have less patience than comparable European populations – especially in retail situations. Yes, impatience is one of our defining national characteristics – and, as I pointed out during last summer’s rail meltdown, it is one of our enduring national tragedies that we are at once impatient and badly organised.

As well as at the tills and on the roads, you can observe German impatience in any queue (which we try to jump) and generally any other situation in which we are expected to wait.

Think back to early 2021, for instance, when the three-month UK-EU vaccine gap caused something approaching a national breakdown here, and the Health Minister was pressured into buying extra doses outside of the European framework.

This infuriated our neighbours and deprived developing countries of much-needed jabs – which, predictably, ended up arriving after the scheduled ones, leaving us with a glut of vaccines which, that very autumn, had to be destroyed.

A health worker prepares a syringe with the Comirnaty Covid-19 vaccine by Biontech-Pfizer. Photo: John MACDOUGALL / AFP

Now, you can see the same phenomenon with heating legislation: frustrated by the slow pace of change, Minister for Energy and the Economy Robert Habeck intended to force property owners to switch their heating systems to low-carbon alternatives within the next few years.

The fact that the supply of said alternatives is nowhere near sufficient – and that there are too few heating engineers to fit them – got lost in the haste…

The positive side of impatience

This example does, however, reveal one strongly positive side of our national impatience: if well- directed, it can create a sense of urgency about tackling thorny issues. Habeck is wrong to force the switch on an arbitrary timescale – but he is right to try and get things moving.

In most advanced economies, buildings are responsible for anything up to 40 percent of carbon emissions and, while major industrials have actually been cutting their CO2 output for decades now, the built environment has hardly seen any real improvements.

Ideally, a sensible compromise will be reached which sets out an ambitious direction of travel – and gets companies to start expanding capacity accordingly, upping output and increasing the number of systems which can be replaced later down the line. Less haste now, more speed later.

The same is true of our defence policy, which – after several directionless decades – is now being remodelled with impressive single-mindedness by a visibly impatient Boris Pistorius.

As for the check-outs for chatting, I’m not sure they’ll catch on. However counterproductive speed at the till may be, I just don’t see a large number of us being happy to sacrifice the illusion of rapidity so that a lonely old biddy can have a chinwag. Not that we are the heartless automatons that makes us sound like: Germany is actually a very chatty country.

It’s just that there’s a time and a place for it: at the weekly farmer’s markets, for instance, or at the bus stop. The latter is the ideal place to get Germans talking, by the way: just start with “About bloody time the bus got here, eh?” So langsam könnte der Bus ja kommen, wie ich finde…

READ ALSO: 7 places where you can actually make small talk with Germans

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