There are several things which make this particular comparison of a Swedish and a Dutch party feasible: their contexts are similar enough in that they were both active in comparatively stable liberal democracies and were fighting their battles in similar pluralistic electoral systems. Neither country had participated in the First World War, which had important implications for the kind of social base the fascist parties could draw on. They both shared the same organisational indebtedness to the NSDAP.

The differences are what makes the comparison interesting, however: they were of different sizes and faced very different geographical landscapes and communications infrastructure, which had an immediate practical impact on organisation. The Netherlands was vastly more urbanised than Sweden. These differences allow for an insight into how practical factors affected organisation: party size, landscape, urbanisation and infrastructure, among others.

World War I was very important to the birth of fascism, so it may be surprising to some of us to see it grow in countries without direct participation in that war, but remember that the Kingdom of Italy was originally neutral, too, much to Benito Mussolini’s displeasure.

The author goes on to describe how these parties’ bureaucratic structures mutated to adapt to their own gains and losses. This unconsciously reflects Mussolini’s honest (if somewhat exaggerated) statement ‘Fascism is not a museum of dogmas and principles.’

In Sweden, directives tended to be issued by the district until 1939; district leaders had more autonomy from the propaganda department and could direct regional propaganda on their own initiative. Correspondence shows that in Sweden local functionaries frequently needed to be privately admonished in writing, so that the organisation was less bureaucratised.

Coordinating the geographically isolated Swedish groups was managed to some extent by the monthly paper Porg, which discussed party organisation matters, the compulsory and ‘confidential organ for the NSAP’s functionaries’. In theory, a supplement to Lindholm’s Service Regulations (Tjänsteföreskrifter; TF), in practice it helped the central departments direct functionaries nationally, although as Porg itself noted, not all functionaries executed its orders down to the smallest detail, nor, quite bizarrely, did all functionaries subscribe.

The autonomy that many fascist organizations had clearly contradicts the oversimplified stereotype of a Führer micromanaging almost every aspect of people’s lives. In reality, it was simply far easier, cheaper, and more convenient to allow state actors, businessmen, and various other antisocialists a great deal of autonomy; as long as they followed fascism’s goals, which usually benefited them anyway, the head of state’s direct intervention would have been redundant.

As will be shown later, the dual‐structure could quickly cause internal strife, since paramilitary and party functionaries could issue conflicting directives to the same groups. Required to be combat trained, the WA often found itself at the centre of public controversies. Although dissolved at the end of 1935, two years before the law against paramilitaries came into effect, many ex‐WA members continued to engage in violent actions against political opponents.

Here we see liberalism’s failure to control the petite‐bourgeoisie and its antisocialist paramilitaries (the reasons for which are hopefully obvious).

The Kingdom of Sweden had a significantly more rural landscape than the Netherlands did. This means that Swedish fascists had worse coordination than Netherlandish ones did; Swedes had less access to modern transport like locomotives and bussing, whereas the Netherlandish had more. Swedish fascists also relied heavily on district leaders’ initiatives and were wanting in control agents. Some Swedish fascist formations outright ghosted the party headquarters. While geography greatly contributed to the Swedish fascists’ poor coordination, it was not the only factor:

Lindholm [the Swedish Führer] and Mussert [the Netherlandish Führer] fulfilled very different functions within their organisations, going some way towards explaining the superior centralisation and coordination of the NSB. The peripatetic Lindholm was frequently occupied with a wide variety of party work, ranging from the editing of DSN to organising meetings, but also the most basic tasks normally left to the cadres: advertising meetings, leafleting towns and recruiting new members. His annual propaganda tours took him away from the headquarters for entire seasons, forcing him to rely on the rest of the party leadership.

Mussert, on the other hand, was invariably found in Utrecht. He was directly involved in the construction of the basic party organisation in 1932–3 and its expansion for the rest of the decade. Organisation and direction defined Mussert’s day‐to‐day tasks, typically acting as speaker only a handful of times per month. At the same time, Lindholm could be speaking at several meetings per day. Power was much more centralised in the NSB and also naturally more focused in Mussert’s own hands.

Even in this centralization, though, Netherlandish fascists still suffered discoordination:

In July 1934 van der Goes van Naters — a high‐ranking functionary who would also rebel against Mussert in 1937 — wrote a litany about the departments of organisation and propaganda. ‘Firstly the Dep. Organisation floods the entire NSB with circulars, correcting circulars, additional circulars, circulars which contradict each other on vital points. And through this paper waterfall, local authorities are confused and halted in their own work.’ If anything the propaganda department was even worse:

instead of being a centre of zeal, which pushes and encourages the entire movement, one notices little else from it but bookmarks of different formats and with different imprints: a petite bourgeois patchwork shop goings‐on [klein burgerlyk lapjes winkel gedoe], which for outsiders is only ridiculous, and distr[a]cts the attention of NSB members away from the greater goal and task, towards rubbish irrelevancies.

Netherlandish and Swedish anticommies (also like their Italian counterparts) strived to win over the youths, and the Swedish ones were more successful:

During the electoral campaign the entire city was leafleted, meetings for thousands were held, propaganda cars drove around with slogans and a thousand balloons with placards were handed out to children (though of doubtful efficacy, on account of the wind).

But the unruliness of the cadres showed through. During a speech by the minister of finance at a Social Democratic meeting, some members had dropped a large placard attached to ten balloons, decorated with a large swastika and the letters NSAP, from a window in the roof, which slowly descended into the meeting place to the astonishment of onlookers.

The party leadership noted that ‘we must remember that our opponents tend to portray and regard us as childish pranksters. It might be unnecessary to pander to this perception.’

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

The deliberate efforts to pander to the kiddies, sometimes to the point of reveling in the aesthetics, traces all the way back to the days of the PNF to the generic neofascists of today. Remember frenworld? I could give example after example of the Fascists and the neofascists doing this, but that’s for another topic. Anyway, thanks for reading.