Immigration, youth, old age, and Europe's normalisation of the far-right
In an opinion piece for The Guardian titled How Sweden lost its soul – and stopped being Sweden Martin Gelin comments on Sweden’s shift away from egalitarianism.
[…] many previously unthinkable far-right ideas are now comfortably embedded in the mainstream of Swedish politics. The past four years have been characterised by an astonishing acceptance of ethnonationalist views, xenophobic rhetoric and authoritarian policies, increasingly targeting children. And many of these ideas have been absorbed and appropriated by the centre-left opposition Social Democrats.
[…]
A new Sweden has emerged, cruel and cold for migrants, including highly skilled employees of research institutions, universities, tech and medical companies – who have been stunned to learn that they are no longer welcome to work in a country where they have lived for years, sometimes decades.
I am here interpreting Martin’s point through the prism of what I have analysed at length in Gigantism and Europe’s far-right transformation (2026-09-08). The gist of what I wrote is that those liberals who today shed crocodile tears about the recrudescence of the far-right will be the enforcers of far-right policies tomorrow.
Compassion requires understanding
Locals in any given culture who profess tolerance of immigrants typically do so from a position of ideology, not lived experience. They are perfectly fine with migration, in abstract, because it does not harm their vital interests, but they are not exposed to the struggles an immigrant faces. At some basic level, they cannot relate to what it is like to be a foreigner in general and a foreigner in their own society in particular.
The average liberal thinker is comfortably middle class and privileged in ways whose extent they are not aware of. They were not forced by economic hardship to remain silent in the face of blatant exploitation. They did not live outside the private banking system and did not have to rely on the acquiescence of others. They were not displaced from their homeland to begin with.
This does not, ipso facto, make the locals malevolent. It merely introduces a barrier that can only be overcome by becoming aware of it and then working to move past it.
The menial jobs I have done were always among migrants, with only the bosses being locals. As a bartender, I worked mostly with Eastern Europeans. In construction sites, I collaborated primarily with Syrians. In agriculture, I was together with people from the Indian subcontinent. Each group has its own niche.
Whenever I was lectured about “tolerance” was from those who have not used a pickax in their life; those who were not forced to work until their palms would start bleeding. That is what teaches you tolerance for good, not books.
Beware of comfortable ideologues
A labourer among labourers feels at home because each person understands the other’s predicament, despite their otherwise diverse cultural backgrounds. The problems arise when the person has to integrate in the broader local society, which now includes the parvenu and rich classes.
I discovered as much when I worked among leftists and other progressives of a Western European background at the European Parliament and beyond in the 2010s. With a couple of exceptions, they shared the same profile of the economically well-off, highly educated figure, who pontificates about workers the way parrots talk about programming.
My colleagues would comment in the most polite fashion on my “North African looks” and encourage me to wear expensive clothes because with those I “looked impressive”. I am confident about my appearance (I am confident in general) and will appreciate a fine piece of clothing. Though this otherwise innocuous language hints at a person’s assumptions and default cultural programming.
What they were actually saying, again without bad intention, is that my path to mainstream acceptance passed through money. With enough wealth or pretence thereof I too could become invisible in phase one and attractive in phase two.
Invisibility is not a matter of skin complexion per se. In the West, “whitening”, if we are to call it thus in the interest of brevity, is a process of assimilation into the dominant cultural group. If you do what they do and say what they say, if you too worship money, then they will recognise you as their equal. Start thinking for yourself, however, dismiss their idols, and deviate one bit from their worldview only to learn that now you have an appearance that stands out, which becomes a set of values they do not approve of, which becomes your entire being rendered as an “other”.
It is for this reason that the average centrist party will become a cheerleader of both far-right doctrine and conduct. At that point, though, what could originally be justified as ignorance must now be treated as complicity and, indeed, malevolence.
The cultural vitality of youth
Europe is an ageing continent. The natives are literally dying because they shifted to the urban life en masse, where the atomic family is the upper limit of their daily community experience. They stopped having extended families, which only really occur in rural areas with the inclusion of grandparents, uncles/aunts, cousins, and neighbours whose lineage is fully known.
This society-wide ageing is not merely a matter of people becoming older. It has far-reaching cultural implications. Older people tend to lose their cutting edge on all matters of collective living. They are not as keen on experimentation because they are settled in their ways. They become less open to new ideas and gradually stop searching for fresh thinking altogether. They lose their physical fitness, which prevents them from doing sport. They lack the playfulness for theatre, fashion, art in general. They are jaded and disinterested. Thus increasingly more facets of cultural experience are eroded until they are washed away by the inexorable passage of time.
Youth provides a power impulse to culture at-large. Younger people tend to be more interested in trying things out. To experiment with new technologies, to entertain potentially useful ideas, to push the boundaries wherever possible, to do sport, to play music, to organise festivals. This practically means that there also are more job opportunities for everyone.
For example, if I had thirty young lads in my mountains here in Cyprus I could easily play football as a hobby (I am elite physically) and even be their coach as a part-time job. Same idea for being their language instructor or life mentor. But without the youth I have no chance of getting a single interested party in these or practically any other activity. And all I ask for is thirty individuals, not thirty thousand. Even that tiny number is not available. Culture as a quotidian affair is thus non-existent.
The zombification of nations
Older people in communities that have plenty of youth get a second wind in life. The generations interact with each other through shared events. The elders provide experience and guidance while the younger ones act as the spark of energy that makes things happen. A healthy society has intergenerational solidarity, which contributes to its vitality.
Conversely, the lack of youth leads to the zombification of the nation. Europe’s native populations are in this rapidly deepening phase right now, which will become the driver for their increasingly intolerant reflexes because of how old age makes society less interesting overall.
The ideologues who dismiss any argument in favour of children as “natalist”, in a derogatory sense, those who are irresponsible and selfish enough to interpret “family” as far-right dog whistles and who thus give the extremists an easy win, do not realise how the prevalence of old age kills culture.
Much like the ignorant middle class liberals vis-à-vis migrants, they are not exposed to the insidious erosion of culture I mentioned above. By the time they understand what is actually happening, they will be zombies themselves.
Europe’s increasing irrelevance in global affairs
That Europe is punching below its economic weight in international affairs is not a coincidence. Same for its Russophobia and Sinophobia. Its decline is a function of the aforementioned. Without that spark of vitality at the micro scale, there shall be no potent force at the macro level.
Europe still has a lot of influence on the global stage, owning in large part to its colonial legacy, but its relative weakening is undeniable. As with many processes in life, change happens slowly until it happens all of a sudden. This is the predicament Europeans are in.
The continent is saddled in depth. Economic growth is frail. The industrial base is weak. Competitiveness is missing. Social movements have been infiltrated and inwardly corrupted by various brands of individualism.
What the political elites have for a while now understood as their short-term escape from this death spiral is the turn to the war machine, as I explained in my previous essay about gigantism and Europe’s far-right transformation.
The elite’s gambit is to antagonise Russia and China. Plus, with the help of Israel, which remains their friend despite minor noises about the occupied West Bank, they wish to exert wider control over the Middle East and North Africa. This wider region, culturally defined by its Muslim heritage, is showing strong signs of capacity for independence and has the potential to break free from the clutches of the Western empire.
Europe’s toxic cocktail of necessity and intolerance
Whatever they do, however, European societies require mass migration to prevent their disorderly collapse. I state as much because I have no faith that there can be a quick and thoroughgoing change in attitudes that would inject new life from within.
The average European native is complacent in their ways and unwilling to tolerate any kind of perceived discomfort, preferring instead the road of short-term inertia that ends in longer-term annihilation.
Immigrants are the only force that can, in practice, invigorate Europe: highly skilled experts but also working class people. Many of those immigrants will be of a Muslim background, because Islam remains a religion of vitality, in the sense of I have described herein. This means that Europe is bound to change face in order to stay relevant or submit to the rising powers of the world.
The problem, however, is that those immigrants are entering a society of intolerant zombies. The native Europeans are not open to much anymore and will only treat with hostility the growth of those migrant communities.
They will pick totemic issues, such as the scarf Muslim girls wear to school, in an attempt to enforce conformity with their own norms. They will deny any wrongdoing, making this a matter of “liberation”. Facts are their first enemy. They will go after vagrants who purportedly are a burden on the welfare state, only to end up targeting everyone. They will not hesitate to become vigilantes who burn the Quran and who generally use brutality to force people into submission. All to extend their privilege for a little longer. And they will do it while still claiming the moral high ground and touting their “European values”.