The tragic thing is that those Western countries likely used to be on the same or even better level a few decades ago as Scandinavia and Central Europe today, but they are no more.
By the way, I wouldn't necessarily mention South-Eastern Europe in the same sentence as Central Europe; the Balkans have quite a tradition of being a hotbed of conflict.
And let's not just reduce safety to murders. There is the petty crime too, which I hear is becoming widespread in some problematic areas of big cities in Western Europe. There are social tensions, there are protests with occasional deaths and property damage, there is the radicalization of politics which may lead to all sorts of "interesting" things down the line. There is the "reasonable" restrictions on freedom of speech to counter the former, and yeah, it seems we are now talking about restricting privacy in the name of war on terror, which guarantees further increase in tensions and may enable a slide into totalitarianism in the future.
Remember that when Stalin started, he didn't intend to kill millions of people for fun, he just wanted social justice. The terror "happened" along the way.
By the way, I wouldn't necessarily mention South-Eastern Europe in the same sentence as Central Europe; the Balkans have quite a tradition of being a hotbed of conflict.
And let's not just reduce safety to murders. There is the petty crime too, which I hear is becoming widespread in some problematic areas of big cities in Western Europe. There are social tensions, there are protests with occasional deaths and property damage, there is the radicalization of politics which may lead to all sorts of "interesting" things down the line. There is the "reasonable" restrictions on freedom of speech to counter the former, and yeah, it seems we are now talking about restricting privacy in the name of war on terror, which guarantees further increase in tensions and may enable a slide into totalitarianism in the future.
Remember that when Stalin started, he didn't intend to kill millions of people for fun, he just wanted social justice. The terror "happened" along the way.