Sweden Yes

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About

“Sweden Yes” is a catchphrase used to mock multiculturalism and gender equality politics, specifically Swedish ones. The catchphrase has also inspired the phrasal template “X Yes”, refered to countries with a progressive ideal.

Origin

The first use of the phrase can be found on the German imageboard Krautchan’s international board in mid-January 2012, when a problem with the board software removed users’ flags. On January 18th, 2012, a thread asking the users to tell reply with their country of origin and if they had ever tasted semen was submitted, with the first reply being, “Sweden Yes,” as a mockery of Sweden’s bad multicultist reputation.

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Background

Sweden has been known for being positive towards non-european immigration, and being the EU member state that accepts the most political refugees. A poll made in January 2015 showed that more than the 70% of the Swedish population was positive towards non-european immigration, 23% of which were very positive towards it.^[9]

Spread

On November 13th, 2013, the subreddit /r/SwedenYes was created, featuring news related with immigration and gender equality.^[8] The earliest archived instance in /pol/ comes from a novelty thread where the Family Guy character Brian Griffin asks for the best country to immigrate to. One of the posts, made on November 29th , 2013, contained the message “Sweden Yes”.^[3] On the same day on the same board, a thread about Swedish military contained a post with the catchphrase.^[4] The same thread featured various posts with the catchphrase.

Captain Sweden

Captain Sweden is a series of webcomics featuring an anthropomorphisation of Sweden multiculturalist and progressive thinking named Captain Sweden, often depicting him having interracial intercourse. The first instance of the comic can be found on a Diary.ru post by user ~dovolen, on April 5th, 2007, featuring two immigrants robbing a woman, when Tolerastov, a man dressed as a drag queen, appears and persuades the robbers into having intercourse with him.^[5] The first translated version of the comic can be found on Rule34, adding the Swedish flag to Tolerastov and naming him Captain Sweden, also featuring the catchphrase.^[10]

On May 4th, 2013, user Taikuri uploaded to the Finnish media sharing webite Naamapalmu another Captain Sweden comic, despicting Captain Sweden making a snowman more “tolerant”.^[7] Both comics began being posted on multiculturalist discussions, specially on /pol/.^[6]

On March 28th, 2015, animator Alerta Judiada uploaded to YouTube a video named “Captain Sweden Saves the Day!”, featuring an adaptation of the original comic, gathering over 72,000 views in less than two months.