REVIEW: Midsommar — an ethnonationalist-egalitarian dystopia?
The egalitarian and pastoral ethnonationalism of European ressentiment
Extreme self-abnegation is never good, regardless of how ‘white’ it is. Living in a community where everyone looks like your cousin isn’t ‘European’, just because your neighbours don’t look like your hated ethnicity of choice. And for all of Christianity’s cultural shortcomings, it should at least be credited for swapping out our pagan, ‘Earth Mother’, flowers-and-fruits aesthetic for black crosses, golden chalices, and gore. A strong belief in the value of civic nationality may indeed make us prey to the vicissitudes of mass migration, but at least it makes it possible for us to have freedom of association and cities. Still not convinced? Watch Midsommar (2019) by American filmmaker Ari Aster. And no, it’s not just a Nordic version of The Wicker Man (1973), or a Jewish misunderstanding of European paganism, as some have claimed. (Spoilers ahead.)
Midsommar is a horror-thriller film that follows a group of American postgraduates who, at their Swedish friend Pele’s invitation, visit a remote Swedish commune called Hårga. At Hårga, they celebrate the Nordic holiday ‘Midsommar’ — which, although part of a pagan pantheon of solstice celebrations, has persisted in Scandinavia for far longer than it has in the rest of Europe. Hårga is a strange, egalitarian, and psychedelically-influenced commune in which everyone lives in dormitories, wears national dress, follows (neo-)pagan ceremonies, and, curiously, is forced to kill themselves once they reach the age of seventy-two. Despite this, the villagers are, in other ways, substantially touched by elements of modern Swedish culture.
Five of the visiting outsiders who were lured to the commune by the Swedes are eventually horribly murdered for their infractions: the Londoners Simon and Connie for insulting the suicide ceremony of two elderly Hårgans; Mark for urinating on a sacred tree; Josh for attempting to sneakily photograph the Hårgan ‘scriptures’ for his doctoral thesis on summer solstice rituals. Christian, after being drugged and semi-forcibly conscripted into impregnating a Hårgan girl in a bizarre sex ceremony, discovers the murders, and is paralysed by the villagers. His girlfriend Dani, who spied on the ceremony, and who is by now integrated into the cult (even winning a dancing contest and becoming the ‘May Queen’), chooses to sacrifice him (over the option of a Hårgan volunteer) as part of a ceremony, taking her revenge by burning him alive in a bear skin, along with the corpses of four Hårgans and the other four outsiders, while she and the other villagers look on, crying out in collective displays of emotion.
Midsommar’s Hårga must be situated somewhere above the 66° parallel, as the sun does not set during the summer solstice. Nevertheless, it shares its name with the actual Swedish municipality of Hårga (61° parallel), which is also located in Hälsingland (though Midsommar was, in fact, mostly filmed in Hungary due to budget constraints). This gives the film an uncanny effect, much akin to literature in the magical realist style. The trippy rotating camera effect alerts us to the fact that this is no ordinary Scandinavian countryside settlement, but an isolated northern cultural outpost even within its own country.
Upon entering the town, we can see a banner that reads ‘Stoppa Massinvandringen till Hälsingland: Rosta på Fritt Norr! Host! (Stop Mass Migration into Hålsingland: Vote for Fritt Norr! This Autumn!)’ — clearly a campaign banner for a (fictional) far-right fringe party, Fritt Norr (‘Free North’). This banner is not translated, and moreover is upside down, and the non-Swedish-speaking audience may just assume that it is an ordinary welcome banner. Similarly, almost none of the Swedish dialogue (and there is a lot of it) in the film is given subtitles, which is intended to give make the audience, much like the protagonists, feel like isolated outsiders.
All other such references towards Nazism, ‘white nationalism’, et cetera, are similarly hidden and are entirely non-verbal, blending seamlessly into the story, thus eliciting greater alarm and dread when spotted by only the most astute minority of viewers. One example of this is a book entitled The Secret Nazi Language of the Uthark, resting on one of the dormitory tables, perhaps hinting at the commune’s collaborationism with the Nazis during the Second World War.
But while Hitlerist symbolism is nothing new (cf. Star Wars and the Stormtroopers), Midsommar aesthetically and thematically focuses upon an element of it that we, the audience, are far less used to in Western cinema: a certain form of white nationalist (as opposed to white supremacist) symbolism, which in some ways stands in direct opposition to what we might call Fascist orthodoxy, which, at least as first developed in Italy, is generally implacably elitist and warlike: out with the exaggerated German accents, angry skinheads, and leather uniforms; in with blonde crown braids, sundresses, and the fertility cult.

The movie, it should be noted, is not entirely faithful to what we might call ‘Nordicism’, and not just because the community are presented as being somewhat ‘modern’ (the inhabitants of Hårga watch Austin Powers and drive cars). The national costumes the women wear are not really Swedish, but rather are more similar Ukrainian/Belorussian Vyshyvankas. Meanwhile, there is nothing about their form of circle dancing that should make it distinguishable from that of Romania or Poland. They are really an amalgam of the aesthetics of every revivalist folk culture in what I would like to call ‘Jew Europe’ — those parts of Europe where the main ‘other’ for most of history was the Ashkenazi Jew. (It will soon become clear that the label ‘Jew Europe’ emerges as, if anything, a compliment to Jews. So please do not get offended. This article is not endorsing any sort of conspiracy.)
This phenomenon is what is being represented in Midsommar: kitsch, obnoxiously egalitarian, creepy, and suffused with ressentiment.
To fully understand this, we need to introduce a tripartite typology of European nationalism. Broadly speaking, there are three regions within Europe: ‘Gypsy Europe’, ‘Jew Europe’, and ‘Western Europe’. These regions, in turn, gave rise to three varieties of nationalism in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The idea here is that all of Europe can be subdivided into categories based on whether their prominent and ostracised minority was traditionally Jewish, Gypsy, or neither. Though the Ashkenazi Jews in the north-east by no means occupied the same societal role as the gypsies in the south-east, these two ‘outsider’ groups would both play a significant role in how people cultivated their national identities, and whom volkisch populists considered to be undermining national unity and identity. Is it the scrounger and petty criminal who undermines the Volk? Or is it the intellectual and the moneyed banker? The two main ‘outsider’ groups in Europe could not be more different.
‘Gypsy Europe’ is comprised of the Balkans, European Turkey, and Slovakia. ‘Jew Europe’ is Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, the Baltic states, Austria, and Germany. (Virtually every country that participated in the Holocaust is automatically part of ‘Jew Europe’, regardless of whether they are Slavic or not.) ‘Western Europe’ comprises of the British Isles, Scandinavia, and the Iberian Peninsula (and, more disputably, France and Italy). A few countries have elements of more than one of these three Europes: Hungary and Romania have elements of both ‘Gypsy Europe’ and ‘Jew Europe’ (Wallachian Romania is much more ‘Gypsy Europe’, Moldavian Romania somewhat more ‘Jew Europe’, Transylvanian Romania somewhere between the two); France was somewhere between ‘Jew Europe’ and ‘Western Europe’, but eventually decisively sided with the latter, especially following the Dreyfus Affair.
‘Western Europe’ is simply ‘Western Europe’, because its pre-1945 nationalism was not steeped in fundamentally embarrassing ethnic theories that, when viewed with a critical eye, seem almost solely designed to separate a native population from an unpopular minority group that is ultimately of foreign origins. This was either because there was never really a sizeable gypsy or Jewish population there in the first place (Scandinavia), or a mediaeval pogrom had sent them all into permanent exile centuries before the emergence of modern nationalism (England and Spain). Uncomplicated claims to economic and cultural superiority were thus able to form the unassailable bedrock of ‘Western European’ nationalisms when they emerged.
In both ‘Gypsy Europe’ and ‘Jew Europe’, by contrast, it was the image of a timeless, pristinely white, eternally suppressed peasant class that permeated most discussions about what it was to be Polish, or Belorussian, or Lithuanian, and so on. Germany was initially something of a hybrid, but National Socialism brought German nationalism into permanent disrepute by decisively tipping it into mystical territory by celebrating a magical, pre-industrial volksgemeinschaft, suffused by ressentiment against their oppressors (i.e., the Jews) to boot. France, as we have mentioned, also for some time hung in the balance, but chose the opposite path.
Unlike in ‘Gypsy Europe’ and ‘Western Europe’, in ‘Jew Europe’, nationalism is (or at least was) fundamentally anti-intellectual, collectivist, folksy, and obsessed with ‘purity’ of ethnicity and phenotype to an extreme. Unlike in ‘Gypsy Europe’, where physiological differences between the native European population and gypsies were obvious, the relative similarity in appearance between the Ashkenazi Jews and the native Europeans of ‘Jew Europe’ caused proto-nationalists in these countries to make up all sorts of exaggerated caricatures, not just of phenotype but of their own culture, often going so far as auto-Orientalising themselves, to give the impression of a much more vast difference than there actually was.
The nationalism of ‘Jew Europe’ also had strong pagan undertones. Once again, this was most likely a gimmick employed to exclude the Jews from the host country’s national identity, because: (a) European paganism is further from Judaism than is Christianity; and (b) pagan religions are almost always ethnic religions, either explicitly or implicitly, thus excluding outsiders (such as the Jews) whose ancestors did not worship the old gods. Notice how, by contrast, paganism features relatively little in the nationalisms of the Balkans. This is because the Balkans is in ‘Gypsy Europe’. Similarly, Romanian fascism (though virulently anti-Semitic) was explicitly Orthodox, and made no appeals to the ancient Dacian god Zalmoxis; Croatian fascism, also virulently anti-Semitic, was explicitly Catholic (thought this was obviously substantially directed against the Orthodox Serbians).
Europe after Hitler is different. Anti-Ziganism may have survived the War, but anti-Semitism perished from the mainstream. The victory of the Allied Powers — one Western European, one spawned from Western Europe, and one ‘Jew Europe’-turned-Communist — has meant that LARPing as an anti-Semitic mediaeval peasant is now deeply unfashionable, and tolerance fashionable. It is now seen as embarrassing for your country to complain about the influence of a historic or extant Jewish population, as this is (rightly) interpreted as a sign of economic backwardness; and, moreover, you risk having all your industrial and urban achievements detached from your native European population and assigned to something ‘foreign’ (hence the reference to ‘auto-Orientalising’). Nowadays, the Europeans who endorse anti-Semitism are mostly the sort of people who think cities and modern production methods are inherently evil, and will endorse endogamy if it means a million blonde, homogenous, peasant children can be born in England next year. But while the most of the European right — whether liberal-conservative, national-conservative, or even ‘dissident’ — have (by and large, with some exceptions) moved on, the embarrassing obsession that much of the nineteenth-century European right had with physical homogeneity in the narrowest sense, anti-Semitism, the fading of a supposedly ‘pure’ peasant class, and ancient gentile legends has been hard to erase from the European mind in its entirety.
Living in a period of unprecedented mass-migration — ‘Stoppa Massinvandringen’ indeed — has made it harder than ever to abandon this Volkisch attitude, as all European national identities, no matter how ancient, have been called into question by leftists. One can almost empathise with the frustrated, uneducated Lithuanian who turns to pagan myth and blonde hair, as he is once again lectured on how his country’s unstable political history means that Lithuania (and the Lithuanian ethnicity) is no more than a ‘construct’, and that as a consequence they need open borders and cultural influence from the world latrine-culture. Even the Scandinavians, whom all Europe holds in high regard for being tolerant, are starting to speak of their racial homogeneity with a weird glimmer in their eyes, something which would have been unthinkable in 1990.

Decades of political suppression has meant that most European nationalisms have been frozen in amber since 1945. I am not blaming the Nazis… except I am blaming the Nazis. Their particularly obnoxious brand of ‘Jew Europe’ faux-Nordicism continues to dominate (whether the participants know it or not) right-wing discourse on ethnicity and culture. This is partly because the murderousness of the Nazis made it mostly unacceptable in the nearly eighty years since for Europeans, not least those in ‘Jew Europe’, to speak of nation, culture, and ethnicity enough for them to evolve past their nineteenth-century conceptual forms.

Most Europeans have long since abandoned popular anti-Semitism, yet its cursed legacy still haunts us — and not in the way that centre-left Guardian columnists, alarmed at hordes of foreigners shouting at Jews and marching for Palestine, think. On the Western right, there remains a significant group of people who refuse to centre European identity around something that is actually worthy, and that is genuinely distinctive of our region: whether that be industry, mediaeval Christianity and its advances, or liberty and individualism; and, even if they do, it is only to endorse some form of protectionist race absolutism, which is in many ways antithetical to the idea of liberty in the first place.
The nationalism of nineteenth-century ‘Jew Europe’ has now infected the nationalism of ‘Western Europe’, even in England, where many have turned rabidly Anglo-Saxonist — notice that few English nationalists nowadays prize their Celtic heritage, despite the Celts being more unassailably autochthonous to the British Isles, and contributing more than the Anglo-Saxons to the English gene pool — Teutonicist, and/or pro-Viking Nordicist. You now find many English, even those who are relatively politically moderate, trying to claim Norse mythology for their own culture, or emphasising their ancient ‘Saxon’ kinship with ‘the Germans’. They want their precious rocks and flower crowns, things for which English cultural history is poorly equipped, so Scandinavia via pan-Germanicism is where they turn. Yet it was not actually the Scandinavians, whose love of national costumes and Norse mythology had long been more cosmetic than real, who actually provided the blueprint for the faux-Nordicist, blood-and-soil, anti-Semitic, agrarian, ressentiment-filled nationalism of which we are all aware: this was, in fact, a ‘Jew Europe’ — specifically Nazi — creation.
As a consequence, the nationalisms of modern Scandinavia, Britain, and Germany are still fundamentally under the spell of the antiquated nationalisms of the old ‘Jew Europe’. As such, it should be no surprise that one of the ways that Ari Aster foreshadowed the ‘fascism’ of the seemingly egalitarian Hårga was through The Secret Nazi Language of the Uthark book. All nationalist roads now lead to Hitler. And thus the right-wing, pro-growth, pro-modern ‘Western Europe’ style of nationalism is in decline, and a sizeable chunk of Western European nationalists have begun to act more like boorish Russian peasants than their cultured and enterprising middle-class forebears. Although only a minority are actively anti-Semitic, their populist ethnonationalist leanings and their refusal to acknowledge the theoretical1 validity of a passport, and by extension civic nationality, makes them nearly as bad. Some are anti-internationalist — an attitude at least partly of ‘Jew Europe’ origins — to such an extreme that they even disapprove of intra-European cultural exchange or alliances in a manner not dissimilar to the ‘Balkan nationalist’ infighting that many Western Europeans so love to mock.
After all, if they were honest, such types would admit that Midsommar’s Hårga is, for them, a nigh-on utopia:
They are pagan. And even then, their religion is so absurdly ethnocentric that it borders on more of a civil theology than an actual spiritual belief in something that is beyond our temporal world (more on that later).
They are homogenous in appearance. Actually, they are entirely homogenous in all things, even their emotions. It is precisely the sort of charming faces that once pervaded the pre-modern countryside of ‘Jew Europe’ and Scandinavia.
They judge eugenic suitability on phenotype, and not intelligence or even genotype. They did not run a 23andme on the two white visiting American male postgrads (Mark and Christian) to find out if they were of Swedish ancestry — nor did they check, or even ask, about any potential Jewish ancestry — when deciding whether to breed them. Instead, the white males were all just sufficiently Swedish passing to make the cut.
They even hate old people! (There is a ceremony in which all people reaching the age of seventy-two need to commit ritual suicide.) No old people, no grey vote.
There is polygamy, of sorts — not polygyny, since this is progressive Sweden, and polygyny is sexist and exotic. The commune has a surfeit of teenage maidens who are always keen to reproduce, even when underage, since they leave the village at eighteen to go on ‘pilgrimage’ and are only allowed to return at thirty-six. Presumably, there is no need for them to take the child with them, as their child will be raised by the village community. Such a communal, collective form of social organisation helps erode any personal unwillingness (or inability) to raise multiple children from being a hindrance to the fertility rate, because of how resources are pooled. Decades ago everyone would have found this practice to be utterly abhorrent in its contempt for individualism and freedom. But more recently, this model has been reappraised by primitivist-leaning ethnonationalists who think we should all pay taxes for the government to fund and maintain others’ children — only a hop and a skip away from approving of raising them communally.
There is no crime here, sometimes at the expense of there being no real privacy, as everyone knows everyone and everyone sleeps communally. If you commit a crime in this commune, you will either be executed (like the offending visitors), or, I suspect, so socially ostracised that you’ll find it nearly impossible to function in that society. The social controls are just that strong.
But perhaps the most unappealing aspect about Hårgan culture is the sort of personality it produces. The emotional shallowness these people possess means that they are extreme-right national populism personified.
I know what you must be thinking: ‘How could they be? Nationalism, by default, relies on sophisticated modern forms of social organisation and a polity big enough for there to be sufficient anonymity while the individual’s direct relationship with the state remains impersonal, but real, thus achieving individualism. As for populism, all governments ought to be popular. Overall, you need a country of people with fairly sophisticated emotions to achieve a modern nationalism, which is also popular.’ Except modern rational nationalism is one thing, whereas strong, irrational populist ethnonationalism is another. They feel emotion collectively. Now, this happens to most groups, at least from time to time. If three girls stumble across the same wounded puppy they will all feel the same sense of sadness and pathos. Sometimes, social units like families or businesses also feel ‘collective emotion’, as sometimes it is impossible for only one person to be affected by something from the outside when it ultimately concerns all of them. But these are all concrete, logically explainable instances.
What Hårga is up to is something else. It is this fictional idea, often employed in impressionistic, ‘organicist’ nationalist philosophy, an idea which (once again) is ultimately of German origins: that is that that the nation-state is a unit that is so integral that people within its borders share each others’ burdens entirely, feel completely together as one body. Extremely simplistic emotions are demanded of each citizen in order to fulfil this absurd fantasy. You can feel only two emotions in this system: love, for your fellow countrymen, who bring you sunshine, warm food, and housing; and fear, of outsiders, who bring competition, austerity, and doubt. No wonder the peasant is so central to such ideas. These theories could only work if it would make no difference whether I go to Bob, 36, builder from York; or Nancy, 21, Sociology BSc from the University of Brighton, for an answer as to how this country should be governed, because their ‘shared Englishness’ is supposed to override their individual personality traits and outlooks. There is nothing modern about such an idea: it’s a big village with an overpopulation problem.
It is impossible for all of us to feel the same thing at the same time because we are not one body — and if anyone considered themselves as such, it is usually in the universalist, Christian sort; a category so large that we could just as well be individual. So why is Hårga any different? Because of their invented religion: as previously mentioned, their religion is so pagan that it is, in effect, merely a civil theology that lacks any real accountability beyond the immediate needs and desires of the villagers. An entire cosmology is invented where their curiosity about the supernatural and inexplicable is confined to their group.
Objectively, these amount to no more than superstitions. The weird caste of (literal) deformed cretins who write the Hårgan scriptures are simultaneously ‘pure’ yet intentionally catastrophically inbred, and smatter the pages with feeling, not thought, as they do not write, but instead just smear paint over a page, with their ravings interpreted by the Hårgan elders. When one of the characters, Josh (an African-American doctoral student in Anthropology), points out to one of the Hårgan chiefs that one of their fertility practices was similar to that of an Indian tribe he had studied, the chief coldly brushes him off.
Hårga is, ironically, the ultimate pastiche of a number of essentially global phenomena that are in no way distinctively European; indeed, in some ways they are actively anti-European: the fertility-cult, collectivistic culture, bizarre yet oddly convenient superstitions. They are fundamentally generic, yet know that there is nothing noble in being generic, hence why they cannot accept Josh’s comparative anthropology. Most civil theology functions the same way. It splits hairs over minor differences like no other in outward performance, but in terms of values, it is merely superstitious, collectivist, ahistorical, folkist, and ethnocentric to an embarrassing degree. It favours no one but simple people with simple emotions, who want to argue from ‘ancestry’ and ‘blood ties’ in order to guilt you into giving them welfare, just as you would feel obligated to help out your drug-addicted 17-year-old daughter, or a son whose fallen on hard times since his divorce.
This movie is, in many ways, about precisely the sort of primitive, ethnocentric culture that leads not to development, but welfare chauvinism. Wealth is constantly redistributed, with no sight towards making more, no admitting that some people should just be cut off for being useless, regardless of whether they are white, brown, or green. The deeper you look into the movie itself, the clearer it is that despite the ‘Jew Europe’ Nordicist aesthetic quality of the village, there is something profoundly Scandinavian about Hårga and its people. Most of them speak passable English, especially the younger villagers; they move and speak in this introverted, meek manner that many nordic people regrettably do, as though they are constantly scared that someone will hear them or that they are disturbing someone; they abide by Swedish ideas of decency, such as the minimum age of consent; they draw upon Swedish minimalism for their architectural inspiration; most go to university during the ‘pilgrimage period’ of their lives; incest is a taboo (except for the production of their cretin mystics); women pick the men they want to have sex with (and not vice versa), and men are peer-pressured (or worse) into accepting their advances by the wider Hårgan community.

The Hårga community, then, is essentially the product of double descent from contemporary Swedish socialism and the Nordicist nationalism of ‘Jew Europe’ — and they blend together seamlessly. And the one thing that they have in common is welfare chauvinism. What Denmark is doing is not worthy of praise: the egalitarian mentality which breeds it is almost as toxic as the one that which enables mass immigration. The utopias that the two systems envisage are, in the end, surprisingly similar.
I put ‘theoretical’ there because I acknowledge that this point is now contentious because of mass migration. However, no mass migration should turn the ‘civilised european’ into a pitchfork-wielding serf just to ‘scare off’ the third-worlders. Want to stop mass migration? just make good laws and enforce them. The rest is a waste of time.
The Law of Jante reigns supreme in Hårga! A terrible state of affairs. You are quite right, many of our guys need to be disabused of these un-aspirational communitarian notions. European Paganism ought to be a piratical religion! And all that that entails.
I do find it strange that the killing of olds is a feature of this community. I think that was a mis-step on behalf of the director. But I appreciate the youthful aesthetics that they bring.
Man, sounds damned good to me compared to San Francisco or modern Berlin. Many Europeans sure have a lot to be ‘resentful’ about towards their political and economic ruling elites. I hope to see more of it and destruction of liberalism in all forms. You can have your liberal individualism and ‘freedom’ along with tent cities, feces, and rude third world trash asserting their ‘rights’ as our newfound fellow citizens.