Real Fascism is Boring

Socialist Norway's only major private institution for independent press grants etc., the wealthy liberal Fritt Ord (“Free Word”) Institution, has recently decided to award a stipend of NOK 75000 to Peder Nøstvold Jensen aka. Fjordman, whose counter-jihadist ramblings combine all the smugly resentful self-appointed victimhood of leftists like his parents (except with himself in the role of the Palestinean) with the misogynistic elements of the “Men's Rights Movement” and what appears to be a paralyzing fear of angry men with beards.

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek describes how, in Fascism, the surplus-enjoyment derived from the ideological praxis is repressed and becomes its obscene underside. In this respect Fjordman's ideology goes one step further – reactionary thought sans jouissance, Fascism without the fun bits. How depressing! How perverse! As for the underlying psychological mechanisms motivating Fjordman's meticulously quixotic reconquista, we may only speculate, but between the attention of U.S. think tanks like Middle East Forum and an apparently never-ending horde of resentful basement dwellers, I'd say he has a future ahead of him regardless of petty grants for books and such.

Much more interesting is the matter of where the good old reactionaries went. The Goebbels types went into Marketing and Advertising, the advisory committees and consultant firms. The Heydrich types started making drones and are wealthier than ever. The Himmler types seem to have gone back to Agrochemistry and its nephew, the GMO industry. But what of the sick, joyous visionaries? The Rosenbergs? The Evolas? The Codreanus? We are taught to fear these demagogues for their destructive rhetoric and their dangerously stupid ideas – meanwhile the quiet paper-pushers, enterprising middle-managers and engineers of corporate feudalism have found a new rhetorical basis excusing and legitimizing new and more profitable ways to perform the same basic routine without the Dionysiac excesses of Despotism, but with the same ruthlessness.

From my own basement-dwelling far-right internet troll days, which began around September 2006 and ended in 2008, I remember Fjordman's tear-dripping dirges over a Europa which has burned and, as the song goes, will burn again. Why wouldn't it? And why must the really existing Fascism be so boring and uninspired?