In Search of Identity
Swedes are among the leaders in a sad Western European competition to be the first nation in the 21st century without a state. Swedish politicians have embraced multiculturalism so thoroughly that a ”National Day of Sweden” was instituted as a holiday in 2005—so as to give multiculturalists the opportunity to display Africans dressed in Swedish national costumes. The entry of the Sweden Democrats to the parliament last fall may have begun to change the situation, but even they are afraid to assert nationalism openly, focusing instead on defending ”Swedish values” from anti-semitic and homophobic Muslims.
It took me a long time to recognize what the word ”identitarian,” which features prominently on the Swedish website Motpol, is actually supposed to mean. Identitarians use slogans like ”100 % identity, 0 % hate,” which makes it sounds like a play on words to dodge the accusations of ”racism” that are bound to come. But then it came to me that people living in the postmodern, post-national, mass-democratic societies of the West actually need an ideology to articulate the thoughts and feelings that at other times have been considered natural. In our age, love for one's own kin and the country one grew up in actually need to be explained in terms of an abstract concepts.
”Identitarianism” as an ideology sees its enemy in the global, miscegenated consumer society that has been forming in the West and is spreading around the world. But it also covers radical traditionalist ideas, while eschewing National Socialism. One must point this out in Sweden, because it is one of the countries where actual National Socialists have been after WWII, and where any conservative or nationalist movement is attacked by its associations with ”former Nazis.”
Irrespectively of the exact content of their ideology, Motpol has a number of interesting writers who comment on German nationalists and conservative revolutionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries, paneuropeanists, and other ”New Right” thinkers; they also discuss traditional Nordic folkways. I wanted to get to know these intellectuals in the nationalist or right-wing scene in Sweden and bought a ticker for ”Identitarian Idea,” a one-day seminar organized by Motpol.
