On a visit to Stockholm several years ago, a Swedish professor blandly told me the old Vikings were not as warlike as we think.  He told me this flaming lie while we were gazing at an enormous burial mound of some Viking chieftain long ago, when Scandinavian Vikings raided and terrorized Europe's coastal settlements from Scotland to the Mediterranean, reaching even to the Duchy of Muscovy.  The name "Russia" (Roos, or "red") dates back to that time, when red-haired Viking warriors rowed their raiding ships up the Moskva River, planning to kill, rape, burn houses, take slaves, and steal whatever took their fancy – unless they were met by equal force.  In which case they engaged in perfectly peaceful slave trading.

My Swedish professor knew all that perfectly well, of course, but he still felt obliged to tell me the PC lie of the day.

Sweden's coat of arms shows two fierce, roaring lions.  But a few years ago, Swedish feminists successfully campaigned to castrate the rampant lions (on a local version of the royal coat of arms), because their penises were too obviously ready for business.

Swedish politicians obligingly removed the offending members.  They have done much the same thing to themselves.

And thereby hangs a tale of feminized Sweden and the Muslim rape epidemic.

My visit to Sweden came to mind recently when I read that a parliamentary party leader in Stockholm just proposed that Sweden's Jews (who have lived there for centuries) should either renounce their religion or leave Sweden.  After the predictable public uproar, he clarified his comments by saying everybody should take on a specifically Swedish identity and leave his or her old one behind.

Bjorn Soder was desperately trying to dodge telling the truth.  The problem isn't peaceful groups of Swedish citizens practicing their faith.  The problem is violent religious groups whose name starts with an "M."  But just as with Obama, Mr. Soder could not allow himself to say the M-word.

And the ruling coalition is now trying to abolish all religious schools – not because they worry about Jews or Lutherans educating their kids the way they want to, but because they know perfectly well that violent jihad is being taught in all the Wahhabi mosques and madrassas.

Jihad is one of the five "pillars" of Islam, the obligatory duties of every Muslim.  Like Obama and all the rest, Sweden's political class is trying to say the obvious – no hate preaching, no violence – without actually saying so.

Violence.  The city of Malmö, with a Muslim majority, is now the violent rape capital of Sweden.  Socialist politicians are directly responsible for the suicidal mass immigration policy in Europe, where 44 million Muslims now live.  Some of them seem to be assimilating to their host culture.  Many are not.  But the political elite everywhere in Europe can't admit to their suicidal immigration policy mistake.  Which makes it impossible for Europe to fix their self-inflicted death sentence.

In Sweden and Europe generally, nobody is yet allowed to talk about reducing mass immigration of violence-prone Muslims coming from the tribal lands of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the rest.

Because that would be racist.

But back to my Swedish professor.  For some reason he took the trouble to show me a lesbian café, where gorgeous young blondes, looking like identical milkmaids, were passionately kissing each other.  I assume he was trying to prove how progressive and liberated people were in Sweden.  I asked where the teenage boys were hanging out  – there were none to be seen – but he dropped the subject.

In fact, many of the boys were busy doing the same thing in gay gathering places.  Non-traditional sex is very, very prized in PC Sweden.  LGBTs are a protected victim group, which means they have the power to expose, scapegoat, and, if possible, even fire dissenting heterosexuals from their jobs.

Which is why Muslim migrants from the tribal lands of Central Asia see their hosts as ripe for religiously sanctioned violence and rape.  So the Swedes are caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

When politically correct ideologues can actually quote these verses from the Quran, they may begin to address the problem:

Qur'an (33:50) - "O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those (slaves) whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee"

Qur'an (8:69) - "But (now) enjoy what ye took in war, lawful and good"

But just as Obama can't talk sensibly about jihad warfare in Islam, neither can the European socialists.

Now, next door to Sweden, Norway recently expelled almost a thousand Muslim immigrants for serious crimes, and behold!  The violent crime rate dropped by 30% in Norway.  Amazing but true.

Europe still suffers from a paralyzing multiculturalist hangover.  It is awash in the mind-fog of PC, although here and there signs of sanity are gradually showing up like wildflowers after winter.  The biggest trouble is that today's political class rose to power on the multicultural reign of intimidation.  "Racist" scapegoats were viciously smeared by politicians, the media, and the schools, enforced by eager volunteers – just like the PC commissars you and I have met in our own lives, the willing enforcers of politically correct lies.

Napoleon Chagnon's important field studies of the war-obsessed Yanamamo tribe of Chile has now finally convinced anthropologists about something historians have known forever: namely, that human tribes are not inherently peaceful.  Liberal fantasies about peace-loving Noble Savages have finally been shredded, at least in anthropology.  It was always a rank delusion, of course.

In tribal cultures, war-making males commonly commit rapes while raiding  enemy clans.  Even chimp gangs do it.  Chicago gangs do it, too – unless they are restrained by their own, or fear deadly retaliation.

Patriarchal tribes commonly circumcise boys at the beginning of puberty, in public, to test their courage and hardihood – and also to teach them to lay off the protected girls.  Circumcision and sub-incision of the penis make for very effective warnings.

No human culture promotes rape against in-group women; it is usually committed against out-group women.  In-group rape is taboo, because many tribes have strict rules of exogamy (having to marry and have children outside the clan to prevent inbreeding).

In Muslim tribal cultures, rape is sanctioned outside the family, the clan, and the faith, the umma.

However, rape and the worst kinds of violence are religiously authorized in jihad war against declared out-groups.  Punishment for rape can be severe if the victim is a protected family member.  But infidel women are free for all.  That is what ISIS is telling the world, in Iraq and Syria.

Daughters are valued in tribal cultures – not for themselves, but to barter for marriage contracts with other families for expensive dowries and to cement political alliances.  The virginity of daughters must be preserved until they are told to marry the right boy.  That way the husband's paternity is guaranteed.  Those rules may seem inhuman to us, but in clans and tribes they are common.

Vendetta wars enforce those rules over generations, to exact revenge for the kidnapping and rape of unauthorized girls some time in the past.  Homer's Trojan War provides a famous example of a vendetta war in the Bronze Age, after the beautiful Helen was stolen from her family by Paris.  The ancient Greeks and Trojans glorified warfare, as Homer shows.

The long history of human violence doesn't contradict the existence of sincerely peaceful groups, like early Buddhist monks in India.  But Buddhist monks were butchered en masse over multiple Muslim invasions, beginning around 1200, when the jihadi Ghurids celebrated ghastly mass slaughters of defenseless monks.  The monks were sworn to absolute reverence for life, and they either accepted violent death at the hands of the jihadis or tried to run away.

Buddhism never recovered in India, where Gautama Buddha lived and taught, but it thrives elsewhere in Asia.

Early Buddhist pacifism was suicidal.  It was wiped off the face of the Earth by one genocidal Muslim invasion after another.  

Today, fantastically ignorant liberals often claim to be "Buddhists" – at least when they are not joining some media mob trying to destroy the good name of a conservative, like Justice Clarence Thomas or neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson.  Liberal "pacifism" is a very, very selective thing.  It mainly shows up when some rising conservative needs to be destroyed as a "warmonger."

Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization is a popular history, but the Durants were scholarly historians. They wrote:

The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history.

The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of millions of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction and rape of Hindu women and children to slave markets and concubines, and the destruction of thousands of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD.

Millions of Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam by sword during this period.

History is repeating in Sweden today, and the political class is frozen – they don't know what to do.  So they launch perverse ideas as trial balloons, hoping to escape their own mental traps.

In Europe – and maybe America – we are trying to repeat the denial and pacifism preached by early Buddhism.  But Buddhist groups that survive today in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia had to abandon radical pacifism.  If they had not done so, we would never have heard the name of Gautama Buddha.  It would just be another extinct religion.

Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Europe's "Third Way Socialism" is crumbling from its own arrogance and conceit.  It is a sad sight, and it's obvious that our left suffers from the same mental trap.

Let's not have America follow them off the cliff.