Fascism 10 (2021) 166-185 ‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction Mattias Gardell Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies of Racism, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
[email protected] 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. Keywords Sweden – fascist culture – fascist fiction – violence – heroism – death – love – radical nationalism 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. It offers its adherents to be part of something greater than themselves, invoking their longing for glory, honor, and beauty, and inducing their capacities for hate, love, self-sacrifice, and violence. An important avenue © Mattias Gardell, 2021 | doi:10.1163/22116257-10010004 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailingDownloaded cc-by license from Brill.com09/30/2021at the time of 05:35:12PM publication.