‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction

Mattias Gardell

doi:10.1163/22116257-10010004

Abstract

Abstract Fascism invites its adherents to be part of something greater than themselves, invoking their longing for honor and glory, passion and heroism. An important avenue for articulating its affective dimension is cultural production. This article investigates the role of violence and passion in contemporary Swedish-language fascist fiction. The protagonist is typically a young white man or woman who wakes up to the realities of the ongoing white genocide through being exposed to violent crime committed by racialized aliens protected by the System. Seeking revenge, the protagonist learns how to be a man or meets her hero, and is introduced to fascist ideology and the art of killing. Fascist literature identifies aggression and ethnical cleansing as altruistic acts of love. With its passionate celebration of violence, fascism hails the productivity of destructivity, and the life-bequeathing aspects of death, which is at the core of fascism’s urge for national rebirth.

Highlights

Fascism – here used in its Griffian sense as a generic term for revolutionary nationalisms centered on a mythic core of national rebirth – has a discernible affective dimension
Fascist Noir is characterized by a passionate celebration of violence, an element that Klaus Theweleit found in the Freikorps literature and held central to the attraction of fascism itself
When fascists write of the everyday, their relations to themselves, their work, or their sensibilities, their language is meaningless, voided, aborted; when their writing is associated with violence in pursuit with world-historic missions, political foes and inferior via free access races, depraved beasts and white sisters, their language is animated, intense, alive.[47]

Summary

Fascist Fiction

There is a rich body of astute scholarship on fascist art, sculpture, literature, film, theatre, and architecture during the interwar years, as well as under the fascist regimes in Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany.[10]. Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, 2017; Nancy Love’s Trendy Fascism, 2016),[19] but there are hardly any studies of contemporary fascist fiction beyond a few works on William Pierce’s trend setting race-war novels The Turner Diaries and Hunter.[20] Contemporary fascist literature in other languages has, to the best of my knowledge, received less attention.[21]. The establishment, the anti-racist community, and all her friends take exception to her Seeking revenge, she wants to buy a gun from a criminal immigrant, but is fooled, robbed, beaten, and about to be raped again when she is miraculously saved by a ‘real man’, a true man, a Swedish man, a white national socialist man, Alexander, a cleanshaven, well-mannered, muscular hero. ‘Not even murder is necessarily evil or frightening; on the contrary, it may be self-defense’ and serves the cause to secure the liberty and dignity of the white Nordic race.[31]

Fascist Nordic Noir

The Politics of Passion