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At the beginning of Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, the protagonists arrive in South Carolina and see a young woman running away in a panic.
“‘My children, they are taking my children away from me!’ The audience sighed at the familiar refrain. They had heard it so often in their lives on the plantations, the mother’s complaint about her poor offspring.
The novel is in many ways a fantasy of American slavery, in which Whitehead gives physical form to the “railroad” – the network that helps people escape north – with locomotives and dilapidated freight cars. But everything described about the fundamental nature of slavery is true, not least that which concerns children. Not all families separated, but the danger of separation was ever-present. Every slave owner had the right to separate his spouses, separate his siblings, and take children away from his parents. Only real people were entitled to family ties, so to speak.
In today’s Sweden The brutality of the so-called youth expulsions brings to life the question of what a family actually is – and who has the right to it. In the past, children were typically given permanent residency if they were allowed to stay because of their ties to their parents – perhaps because it was believed that the children’s future would reasonably be built in the country where they grew up with family and friends. Today, these teenagers are forced to view the day of authority as an abyss. It is a grotesque order that runs counter to the course of life itself.
In Sweden’s deportation industry, the family is simply abolished. How else could anyone even think of sending a single four-year-old to Bosnia, regardless of his status or papers? The boy in question has now received a temporary residence permit for a generous 13 months. “We have found that both parents play an important role in the child’s life,” says the press officer of the migration authority (DN 9/2). And now an eight-month-old baby is to be deported to Iran, even though the parents are allowed to stay.
It’s like a parody of a country of sociopaths.
“Death of the Family” The debate used to be heated in his quarters, and there is certainly justified feminist criticism of the family. The nuclear family was often a dangerous and oppressive place for women and children – and that is precisely why it was important that rights be attributed to the individual and not the collective. We don’t vote as a household, we don’t pay taxes together, and our student loans aren’t awarded based on what Dad currently makes.
State individualism is usually referred to as state individualism. To a modern person, the UN definition that the family is the “natural and fundamental unit of society” has always seemed somewhat distorted. I am an individual, thank you very much.
This is the sunny tradition that Sweden is now joining in declaring that immigrants’ family ties – unlike ours – have no value or meaning
But as a cultural radical, you are missing something essential if you do not see how the denial of family ties can be used as a form of violence, often with racist undertones. History gives us many examples, long after the days of slavery. Here you’ll find everything from Germany’s Nuremberg law banning “mixed marriages” to Swedish forced sterilizations to the Danish Spiral campaign that denied thousands of Greenlandic women the opportunity to become parents in the 1990s.
Here is the scandal with the “stolen generation” of Australia’s indigenous people and the children kidnapped into the international adoption industry, often with the good memories of the authorities. This is the sunny tradition that Sweden is now joining in declaring that immigrants’ family ties – unlike ours – have no value or meaning.
If the state now actively intervenes to destroy the lives, networks and relationships of certain people, Swedish state individualism simply becomes a weapon – which must be wrested from the hands of power.
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