BRENDAN O’NEILL: The Culture War Over Sweden. “In truth it is thanks to the cult of relativism and the surge in identity politics and the political and intellectual elites turning their backs on the fundamental founding values of the modern West – liberty, democracy and tolerance – that our societies have become confused and tetchy and even conflictual. . . . This Orwellian memory-holing of facts, this airbrushing of inconvenient reality, is possibly the most dangerous trend in the Culture Wars today. It reveals the extent to which Europe’s welcoming of millions of Middle Eastern migrants, done above the heads of the demos, was largely an act of elite virtue-signalling; an ill-considered, little-discussed initiative designed more to boost the moral standing of Angela Merkel and other EU and Western European leaders than to alleviate the suffering of Syrians and Afghanis or to address economic and political needs in Western nations themselves. . . . The most important thing for the Western political and media class is the rush of virtue that ‘saving’ Syrians and others provides them with, and reality cannot be allowed to dilute that rush.”