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by zond 3407 days ago
The swedish government has no censorship powers.
1 comments

It's not that simple. There's a lot happening on this front, and when the government controls a substantial part of the economy, they have effective censorship powers even when they're not actually burning books.

National economist Tino Sanandaji has been writing about how BRÅ (Brottsförebyggande rådet) has ceased to make statistics about immigration-rateld crime, for political reasons.

He published a book about this subject [1], and it's quite a success, but libraries are refusing to buy it because it is "inciting hatred". ("Mein Kampf" and very many extreme-left books are still available from the same libraries, they are not "inciting hatred".)

Tino Sanandaji and people like Hanif Bali are, however, able to write about the subject without much fear or prosecution, because they have a Middle-East immigrant background themselves.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massutmaning

[edit:typos]

Librarians are socialists and liberals to nearly 100% no surprise there. They also have a lot of autonomy in deciding what books to buy.

And the fact that people from the Middle East would have more room to maneuver in discussions about racism without being accused of racism is hardly surprising.

Surely not all librarians are socialists, but e.g. this one appears to be of the more fact-resistant kind, and comes up with repeatedly different and increasingly funny explanations for why the library shouldn't get a bestseller book. The latest one is "it's not fact-checked", as if the other books in the library (like the mentioned Mein Kampf) were.
Of course - I'm generalizing. My point is that the opinion of librarians aren't representative of the public discourse.
Just in case someone is interested, here is Tino Sanandaji's piece on this, published today.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445237/sweden-crime-ra...