Swedes = Neo-Nazis!

Parents in Sweden are amazingly NOT ALLOWED to educate their own children:

Local school officials reported the Himmelstrand family to the social services in November when their 7-year-old son did not show up for mandatory schooling. Jonas Himmelstrand — like many other homeschoolers in Sweden — was forced to meet with local “social” officials to explain himself.

“It was just harassment,” he said. “But we were not going to take any chances with anything.... You never know with Swedish social authorities. You never know.”

Another homeschooling family, the Johanssons, was viciously ripped apart by the authorities in 2009 over the issue of home education as they attempted to leave for India. The traumatic episode still haunts Swedish homeschoolers and is always in the back of their minds when considering their options.

Himmelstrand went to the social services meeting alone — without his son — after making sure that his family was safe on the Aland Islands in Finland. He asked the social services if they would guarantee that his family could remain in Sweden safely. They said no, matter-of-factly stating that to homeschool safely, the family would probably have to leave country.

So they did.

There were huge fines involved, too. Around Christmas, the family received a letter explaining that the authorities had decided to impose a fine of about $26,000 – $13,000 per parent. “At that point we kind of felt like, are these people crazy?” Himmelstrand told The New American in a telephone interview. “Don’t they realize that would ruin our family?”

The Himmelstrands responded with a strongly worded letter asking officials to clarify whether they truly intended to destroy an innocent family based on such a controversial political principle. The family also warned authorities that they would leave as exiles before allowing themselves to be destroyed by the punitive fines.

Incredibly, the local government responded with a letter imposing yet another fine. And that, Himmelstrand said, was the last straw. The family moved promptly thereafter, not making the news public until everyone was safely beyond the grasp of Swedish officials. Himmelstrand did not want to wait around to find out what the local government’s next move might be, he explained.
Some commentators have even seized on the issue of persecution to call for structural reforms such as a true Constitution that protects individual rights in Sweden. The Nordic kingdom — which prides itself on its reputation — has also attracted fierce global condemnation for its half-baked campaign to abolish homeschooling and alternative education. Such schemes have not been attempted in a Western nation since Hitler’s Nazi Germany tried to eradicate home education.

Of course, even before home education officially became “illegal” in Sweden, it was severely restricted. And when parents attempted to educate their children without government permission, Swedish authorities often responded with brute force.

Historians will no doubt remark at the astonishing lack of popular resistance to continued encroachments on liberty, in nominally *democratic* countries.

Perhaps it's easier for the lumpen masses to rise up against a brutal dictator than against a faceless, tyrannical bureaucracy?