Thursday, November 30, 2006

Got nazis?

It's the time of year for insane Swedish holidays and festivities (Lucia etc), and starting off the season is November 30th, the day when far right crazies celebrate the memory of King Charles XII - who by the way (according to Wikipedia) spent his childhood "harden[ing] his body for war by riding horses bareback and hunting the wolves of Sweden's fir forests". See, you just don't get that caliber of royalty anymore.

Sweden was never much of a colonizing super power - we mostly just bullied the fins and norwegians as best we could for a few hundred years - but there was a brief period of time (around the second half of the 17th century) when Sweden could actually claim to be a major player in Europe - also known as the time of "the Swedish empire" (no, seriously). Charles XII was somewhat optimistically called "the Alexander of the North", and for a few years Swedes' egos nearly exploded with their own international importance (kind of like whatever the hell is going on with swedish indie music nowadays). The only thing remaining of Charles XIIs legacy today is a bunch of turkish dishes he imported, a statue and an obscure scholarly debate on wether it was the norwegians or his own soldiers who shot him - and then of course the aforementioned crazies.

Swedish neo-nazis don't have a lot of national heroes to hang on to, as most Swedes through history have opted for a more discreet flavour of racism, rather than the balls out, shaved head approach. In the spirit of loving the one you're with, and with a little creative history rewriting, Charles fit the bill of aryan über king well enough to suddenly find himself - three hundred years after his death - as the poster boy for an annual "pro-swedish march". This of course made the far-left crazies (who I personally have lot more sympathy for than their right wing counter parts) super miffed,they in turn got organized, and in no time at all November 30th had gone from "obscure memorial-day" to "Can the nazis really do that publicly?-day" to "Riot in the streets-day". The perhaps worst result of this alarming development was the truly horrific, based-on-West-Side-Story, even-worse-than-it-sounds teen romance flick 30:e November, which was savagely released onto an unsuspecting public in 1995.

Tomorrow I expect to read about a few half assed manifestations in the paper - as much as they try, the reclaim-kids of today just don't seem to have the fire they did back in the day (or maybe they're saving it for the Salem march, but that's another story), and the fascists are currently doing their very best impression of a bunch of really nice guys who just like to have a bit of law and order (also another - long and scary - story). In other words, the rest of the country can take a deep sigh of relief and then continue to slowly mozy along towards the right wing - business as usual.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow and I thought you guys just made the meatballs. A Swedish Superpower... sort of speak.

10:16 AM  
Blogger Teresa said...

well, at least we're humble :)

10:29 AM  

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