The nation waits with bated breath for news of one of its favorite and most delicate sons, the ‘rap artist’ A$AP Rocky. Mr Rocky is held hostage by the military of the barbaric regime of an anti-Western failed state called Sweden. The Scandinavian rogue nation is widely suspected of having colluded with the military of another barbaric regime of another anti-Western failed state, Iran, which last week kidnapped an entire oil tanker under similar circumstances.
Mr Rocky claims to have been minding his own business with two of his minders when they felt it necessary to kick an Afghan asylum seeker in the body and head while taking an early evening stroll in the rubble of Sweden’s Mogadishu-like capital, Stockholm. The British government said something similar about the tanker just minding its business in the international waters of the Gulf of Oman. The Iranian regime has proven to the entire world, or perhaps just Trita Parsi and some German technology exporters, that it is cruelly misunderstood, by freeing the ship’s crew. The Swedish authorities, however, are showing no mercy.
Mr Rocky, born an idiot called Rakim Myers, is notoriously tough, but even he cracked under interrogation by coffee and cinnamon buns. Asked by Swedish police if he had any pseudonyms, Myers brushed sugar dusting from his chin and admitted, ‘Yes. Rocky, A$AP Rocky, Pretty Motherfucker, I can’t think of any more.’
Rocky’s lawyer, echoing the complaint of parents who have accompanied their children to his client’s Swedish concerts, claims that Rocky’s human rights have been violated. It’s rumored that in Sweden’s famously harsh jails, prisoners are forced to assemble their own flatpack furniture — without instructions, while the guards laugh and dangle the Allen key through the bars. In solitary, the hot dogs are served without condiments. In 2016, an UN prison inspection committee led by Cuba, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe and Belgium called this practice ‘dehumanizing, dry-bunned and inedible’.
President Trump has rightly called his fellow Americans’ attention to Sweden’s egregious violation of the globally accepted principle that Americans can do whatever they like, anywhere in the world. This principle, established in the summer of 1945 as the dust cleared at Hiroshima, has been a cornerstone of the international order for decades. The United States would never have won the Vietnam War without it. Nor could the US have turned Iraq into a beacon of liberal democracy without it.
This sacred principle of freedom has never been more seriously threatened than it is now, by Russian meddlers, Chinese peddlers, Iranian proxies, and Swedish judges who let fall chilling phrases of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from their slightly coffee-stained lips as they condemn freedom-loving Merkins to the living hell of the Scandic gulag.
Fortunately, Trump is not standing alone for American values. The First Lady agrees. So do Kim Kardashian and the Henry Kissinger of rap, Kanye West. And the ‘hip-hop community’, ABC News reports without laughing, is ‘up in arms’.
These arms are not to be confused with the weaponry that rappers occasionally wave in each other’s faces when debating a finer point of musicology. They are actual arms, with cell phones attached, and they are being waved at the news cameras to say ‘No more!’ Already, world-famous nonentities Tyler, the Creator, SchoolBoy Q and Slim Jxmmi have vowed that they will never perform in apartheid Sweden, where so many black American jazz musicians lived in the Sixties, to be joined by so many other black musicians from South Africa.
The American military has long prepared to fight a war on two fronts. In this perilous hour, when the fate of the world is as balanced as precariously as it was in the Cuban Missile Crisis or the hours after the shooting of Biggie Smalls, we’re lucky to have a wise and cautious leader like Donald Trump. The president has made it clear that the enemies of liberty won’t trick him into dividing his forces. Like a elephant shrugging off a gnat, Trump has made it clear that tangling with tiny Iran is beneath America’s dignity. Instead, he’s concentrating his forces on the oil-rich key to the Middle East and Central Asia, Sweden.
‘Give A$AP Rocky his FREEDOM,’ the president tweeted, literally capitalizing on the situation to draw attention to Scandinavia’s human rights’ problem. ‘We do so much for Sweden but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Sweden should focus on its real crime problem. #FreeRocky!’
Mikael Lindström, press secretary to Sweden’s ‘democratically elected’ dictator Stefan Löfven, replied with the provocative arrogance of a regime determined to upend the international order: ‘In Sweden, everyone is equal before the law. The Government is not allowed, and will not attempt, to influence the legal proceedings which are now ongoing’.
The Pentagon estimates that it’ll take 48 hours to bomb Sweden back into the Stone Age, apart from in the vast majority of Swedish territory, which never left the Stone Age, because it’s still covered in fir trees. Of course, the usual America-haters and apologists of appeasement have come out. Benny from ABBA has chained himself to the gates of an IKEA store, and Ace of Bass have threatened to reform in protest. Rap-listening, blunt-smoking Kamala Harris has described Trump’s denunciation of Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven as ‘a misuse of power’. In western Sweden, the sound of laughter has been heard from across the border with the Hermit Kingdom of Norway.
Ignore them. Once the Iranians see Trump playing hardball for Rocky, the Gulf will be a quiet as the grave, or a municipal park in Malmö in winter.
Dominic Green is Life & Arts Editor of Spectator USA.
