Homo Sacer' Out of Left Field

'Homo Sacer' out of Left Field: Communist "Slime" as Bare Life in 1930s and Second WorldWar SwedenAuthor(s): Michael LandzeliusReviewed work(s):Source: Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 88, No. 4 (2006), pp. 453-475Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and GeographyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621540 .Accessed: 20/06/2012 04:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell Publishing and Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=swedish

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4621540?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

'HOMO SACER' OUT OF LEFT FIELD: COMMUNIST "SLIME" AS BARE LIFE

IN 1930s AND SECOND WORLD WAR SWEDEN

by Michael Landzelius

Landzelius, M., 2006: 'Homo Sacer' Out of Left Field: Commu- nist "Slime" as Bare Life in 1930s and Second World War Swe- den. Geogr. Ann., 88 B (4): 453-475.

ABSTRACT. This article maps ways in which radical left-wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico-biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article engages Agamben's and Foucault's thinking on 'biopolitics' and 'biopower',and extensively exemplifies dehumanizing discourse as deployed by leading So- cial Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as by editors of both right-wing and Social Democratic press. Ways in which individuals labelled 'Communists' were spatially managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration are addressed. I further discuss state measures that may be seen as elements of a state of exception, some measures implemented against 'Communists', and others against individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics seen to be hereditary. In employing Agamben's notion of 'inoperosity' in a discussion of a state paradigm of social productivity, eugenic measures in the building of the Swedish welfare state are then related to the dehumanizing framing of 'Communists'. In conclusion, conditions for regaining a place in the body politic are briefly addressed. The article's focus on ways in which the ethnic and racial same was dehumanized within a democracy on political grounds results from a conscious effort to complement studies of dehumanization as related to colonialism, dictatorial regimes as well as identity politics.

Key words: Agamben, Foucault, biopolitics, biopower, anti-communism, dehumanization, Sweden

Introduction This article maps ways in which radical left-wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico-biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article addresses ways in which individuals labelled 'Communists' were managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration. The dehumanization complex of the Holocaust is well known yet incomprehensible (Agamben, 1999), and people have been rightly shocked by the dehumanizing discourse of 1930s Stalinism (inside as well as outside the Soviet Union) as extensively applied not only to attack political adversaries but in the Soviet Union

also against party members during the Moscow tri- als (for Swedish 1930s newspapers on this subject, see Pollack, 2005). And in the present, with a highly developed sensitivity to identity politics, extensive attention is given to forms of dehumanizing or racializing othering based on ethnic or 'racial' grounds.Yet, ways in which the ethnic or racial same has been dehumanized within democracies on political grounds have been given very little attention. I will approach the dehumanization of 'Communists' in Sweden through an engagement with Giorgio Agamben's and Michel Foucault's thinking on 'biopolitics' and 'biopower'.

In relation to the present, Claudio Minca has suggested that the rhetoric behind the "war on terror" includes "a set of new geographies of anarchy and chaos (or, terror), chaos no longer confined within specific far-off places ... but present in our own cities, within our own countries; a 'geography of evil' that threatens our own freedom and order" (Minca, 2005, p. 410). I suggest that these very same words could be used to characterize the Swedish case here addressed. Alleged 'Commu- nists' were framed as "vermin" and "poison" in a likewise spatialized geography of evil: "bubonic hotbeds" engaged in treasonous "cell-activities", and very much "present in our own cities". A key thinker in current theorizing of today's 'state of emergency' was Walter Benjamin (as Agamben makes clear) who coined the term 'moment of danger' in reference to the time period here under scrutiny. Yet, memory is short. The connection between 'Communists' and racialized others, particularly Jews, should not be forgotten. Benjamin was not only Jewish but also and importantly one of those marked 'Communist' by his persecutors, his expa- triation from France to Germany requested by the Gestapo in 1939. In Thesis V, Benjamin writes that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" (Benjamin, 1940). I sug-

@ The author 2006 453 Journal compilation @ 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography

MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

gest that the image of 'Communists' in the Swedish 1930s and 1940s should be of concern to reflect upon in the current state of emergency.

The comprehensive measures taken before and during the Second World War to control and in cases of perceived necessity detain Swedish citizens who were considered to be security risks included diverse kinds of elements: dormant emergency powers legislation; dehumanizing medico-biological discourse; surveillance centres, military labor company camps; and multiple layers of (to most citizens) invisible geographies extracted from and imposed upon the Swedish territory, in the built environment, upon daily newspapers, and upon Swed- ish citizens as vigilant as well as intimidated bodies. The measures taken also included comprehensive registers of individuals who were alleged security risks; assessments of their political affiliations and activities; lists of their residential addresses; lists of office addresses as well as of alleged meeting places; mappings of events that were or were believed to be the results of subversive activities, and so forth. And these measures were just the beginning; they were to be extended along paths prepared to include the creation of an exceptional geography of sites for detention with plans for the potential evac- uation of, for example, schools, military barracks, prisons and mansions, and their conversion into guarded camps for political dissidents.

The story of these comprehensive measures will be related here under six headings. I will first, in- troduce the notions of 'biopower' and 'biopolitics' in relation to the issue addressed here; second, present dehumanizing discourse on 'Communists' in governmental documents; third, exemplify the Social Democrats' corresponding discourse on 'Communists'; fourth, discuss a number of Swed- ish state measures during this period that simultaneously framed 'Communists' and related to a state of exception; fifth, in relation to notions of 'biopower' and 'biopolitics' address the simultaneous building of the Swedish welfare state on medico- biological grounds and the dehumanizing framing of 'Communists'; and finally, engage Agamben's notion of 'inoperosity' to address the dehumanization of 'Communists' in relation to a state paradigm of social productivity.

Biopower/biopolitics - extending the real/ politics of 'realpolitik' The comprehensive measures summarized above are documented in previous research. But the par-

ticular issue addressed here - how radical left-wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico-biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments - has not been researched. This lacuna may be understood in relation to two factors. First, due to a metaphysics of presence, research on discourse has engaged in an interpretive search for the essential or true meaning of standpoints taken. A telling example is Molin's informative study of the Social Democrats' parliamentary politics from 1939 to 1945. In accounting for the position of those Social Democrats who in a 1940 debate were against ban- ning the Communist Party, Molin states that they believed "that the ongoing campaign against the communists represented the best way to rectify the problem". Although Molin mentions "the character of this campaign", his interpretation is that those Social Democrats believed in "the road of argument, which from a democratic point of view is the ideal solution" (1974, pp. 314-315). Molin refers to the parliamentary arguments of Social Democrat O.W. Lifgren, who was also editor of the newspaper Norrliindska Socialdemokraten. Below, we will see how the "campaign against the communists" in Lifgren's paper contained dehumanizing discourse far from "the ideal solution ... of argument". In another context, Molin states that "there is no corresponding case in modern Swedish history to the persecution on all levels that then befell the communists" (1983, p. 48). Yet there is an immediate cause for this persecution: "That this became the case was because the presence of The Red Army in a neighboring country [Finland] brought a new realism to the violent plans of upheaval" (1983, p. 48). In addition, Molin states that the repression of communists was not seen as "good in itself"' even among conservatives and the military, but that both "in correspondence and public debate the picture was carefully developed of the threat against which one wanted to protect oneself' (1983, p. 51). From such a position, the phenomena studied in this article cannot but appear as ornaments, impossible to account for in other ways than to discount as ines- sential or explain away through interpretive violence by which "the road of argument" is produced as historical fiction.

Second, in a related and likewise epistemologi- cally flawed fashion a strong tendency among Swedish historians has been to assert that accounts of Sweden during this period belong either to a "moral and ideological" paradigm or to one an- chored in notions designated by the German term

454 ? The author 2006 Journal compilation @ 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography

'HOMO SACER' OUT OF LEFT FIELD

Realpolitik. The paradigm of Realpolitik starts from the presupposition that history is about politics and politics about rational consideration of op- tions available to agents. Agents can be individual subjects, but are normally states, which are accordingly reified as subjects with interests and inten- tions (see Schmidt (2002, pp. 29-32), for a critical discussion). This approach has been particularly clear in Swedish research on the Second World War, where the focus has been on the "realistic" Swedish negotiation of foreign policy in a situation of power politics (Ekman, 1986, 1997). The paradigm of Realpolitik being "based on apositive view of the coalition government's objective of keeping Sweden out of the war" (Ekman, 2003, p. 13, emphasis added) it is inexplicable how Swedish historians have been able to understand this paradigm as normatively neutral.Yet this has enabled the construction of a dichotomy that in a naive and flawed fashion by default makes any other approach appear moralistic and ideological. In his assessment of European anti-communism and communism with regard to Swedish politics, Schmidt in reference to Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony' argues a different heterogeneous approach where "[s]tate policy in general and foreign policy in particular crystallize out of and must be explained through an analysis of a multi-faceted whole of internal social as well as international structures" (2002, p. 32). Schmidt thus understands "the anti-communist crusade" in Sweden to be an element in the quest for political hegemony in which the military, busi- ness interests, as well as the Social Democrats, all of them internally fraught, struggled to influence and control state power.

There is, however, a tendency in Schmidt to understand anti-communism as a consciously deployed tool, with too little attention to the way in which discourse speaks through subjects. By fore- grounding actual statements of anti-communism, the analysis below reveals repetitive elements and figures that make this discourse point beyond inten- tionality towards productive differance and enunci- ative modalities (see Derrida, 1974; Foucault, 1972). In tracing connections with medico-biological discourse, I suggest that anti-communist sentiments became further dehumanizing in a fashion that un/in- tentionally produced other forms of conventional politics, such as surveillance, registration, and in extension, a state of emergency. However, not only political discourses contribute to produce different humans as beings of certain sorts: also spaces and things are political in that they "might authorize, al-

low, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on" (Latour, 2005, p. 72), as constitutively associated elements of 'more-than-human-aggregates'. We might also think here of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the concept of 'machinic assemblage'. Objects may thus in a certain sense produce subjects, and the nation- state may be seen as such a productive machinic assemblage, a more-than-human-aggregate through which subjects are made to appear in a certain fashion. As is clear from the enumeration above of different measures taken to combat alleged 'Commu- nist' security risks within the nation-state, dehumanizing anti-communism was not a matter of simply naming real risks, but a productive element in the creation and transformation of political bodies in the body politic (Landzelius, 2004). Since no systematic research exists on the topic at hand, the empirical material presented below consists of fragments from research on other topics, as well as information gath- ered during my own archival research on related or other topics. I will thus not be able to assess the spread and frequency of this anti-communist discourse across the polical spectrum. Nevertheless, the findings cover more than a decade from the early 1930s to the Second World War, and include statements by leading Social Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as editors of both the right-wing and Social Democratic press. The findings suggest a widespread long-term presence of dehumanizing deployment of medico-biological discourse in the construction and conjoined treatment of 'Commu- nists'.

While the biopolitical formula of sovereignty is based on the right to decide over the life and death of subjects, the position of human life in biopolitics as biopower is in contrast based on the formula "to 'make' live and to 'let' die" (Foucault, 2003, p. 241; Agamben, 1999, pp. 82, 155). In Foucault, 'biopower' is the modern paradigm of power understood "as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression" (Foucault, 1980, p. 119). When sovereign right is not replaced, but, as Foucault writes, penetrated and permeated by the new right to make live, governmental power practices are turned towards forms of normalization and regularization of the human species; to make efficient and controlled use of the liv- ing considered not as individuals but as "a multi- plicity of men" (Foucault, 2003, p. 242; 1997a, 1997b). With his notion of 'biopolitics', Agamben


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

in a certain sense seeks to return the modern paradigm of government to the formula of sovereign power. Modern power is in his analysis based upon the nomos of the camp, a permanent state of exception characterized by a polarization between sovereign power and naked or bare life. This life emerges in relation to a force of law that emanates from a particular kind of modern sovereignty which constitutes itself as such by holding the threshold between biological life (zoe) and political life (bios politikos) in a state of indeterminacy (Agamben, 1998, 2000, 2005; see also Derrida, 1992). In the context of this article, one should note Agamben's comment on 'race' in Nazi discourse and practice.

It is impossible to grasp the specificity of the National Socialist concept of race - and, with it, the peculiar vagueness and inconsistency that characterize it - if one forgets that the biopolitical body that constitutes the new funda- mental political subject is neither a quaestio facti ... nor a quaestio iuris ... but rather the site of a sovereign political decision that operates in the absolute indistinction of fact and law.

(Agamben, 1998, p. 171)

In a parallel fashion, I suggest, Foucault understood the tension between biopower and sovereign power to be mediated through 'state racism'. Foucault pointed out that Darwin's evolutionary theory in the second half of the nineteenth century led to a transcription of "political discourse into biological terms" and became "a real way of thinking" not only about, for example, colonization, madness and mental illness, but also about "the history of societies with their different classes" (2003, p. 255; see also Bevir, 2002; Kelly, 2004; Spektorowski and Mizrachi, 2004). In the words of a Social Democratic paper to which I will return: "One should not argue with lunatics. Asylums are their place". Evolutionary theory enabled the sep- aration of individuals within the state, and state racism thus came to function as "primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die" (Foucault, 2003, p. 254). State racism is the solution to what Agamben finds to be a "permanent crisis" of the modern nation-state. The old nomos of the nation-state was a triangulation, writes Agamben: "founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localiza- tion (territory) and a determinate order (the state),

which was mediated by automatic regulations for the inscription of life (birth or nation)". However, the modern nomos of the nation-state is founded on the "permanent crisis" brought about when "the state decides to undertake the management of the biological life of the nation directly as its own task" (2000, p. 43). Without automatic regulations of this triangular interdependency, a threshold will appear as a zone of indeterminacy where the force of law will decide or not decide on naked life's continued or not continued existence inside or outside the zone.

There is something that no longer functions in the traditional mechanisms that used to regulate this inscription, and the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or, rather, it is the sign of the system's inability to function without transform- ing itself into a lethal machine.

(Agamben, 2000, p. 43)

According to Agamben, this state of indeterminacy is dependent upon the eighteenth century shift observed by Foucault from 'discipline' to 'security', where: "discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder" (Agamben, 2001). The conception of 'security' was in the eighteenth century closely connected with "'policy' [police], in the sense given to the word then: that is, the set of means necessary to make the forces of the state increase from within" (Foucault, 1997a, p. 69). Important in a discussion of relations between Foucault and Agamben is that the concept of 'police' as well as that of 'security' in the eighteenth century contained elements of both productive biopower and sovereign biopolitics. While Foucault focused on the increased concern with disciplining bodies and managing pop- ulations, Agamben discerns a development in particularly the twentieth century towards a situation where security is reconfigured and "becomes the ba- sic principle of state activity" due partly to a "pro- gressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state" (2001). Rather than in terms of being contradictory, I suggest one might here think in terms of one or the other being a 'cultural dominant' (Jameson, 1984, p. 56),or as Agamben has stated with regard to a related topic: "we must learn to see these oppositions not as 'dichotomies' but as 'di-polarities', not substantial, but tensional" (2004). Hence, although there are differences between Foucault's focus on the productive employment of the plenitude of life, and Agamben's juridico-philosophical emphasis on the sovereign

456 @ The author 2006 Journal compilation ? 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography


execution of power over a reduced bare life (see Dil- lon, 2005; Genel, 2004, Margaroni, 2005; Ojakan- gas, 2005a, b; Protevi, 2006), I will seek to produc- tively engage both Agamben and Foucault in analys- ing the Swedish 1930s and the Second World War framing of 'Communist' political convictions as embodied, and the conjoined exposure of such bodies to a state of exception. And although no decision was made that led to the actual transformation of this discourse into a machinic assemblage of lethal practices,the discourse on 'Communists' mobilized against certain citizens made them other than 'social', they were de-socialized as they were dehumanized and demonized, abandoned in a zone of indistinction with further measures prepared.

"Extermination" of "simpler souls" in governmental documents

During the time period here under consideration, the political left was no doubt considered to be the main anti-democratic threat due to ambitions to vi- olently or otherwise illegally subvert and change state order. Governmental concerns related to propaganda resulting in lack of discipline and increased support for communism, as well as communists' acquisition of military skills that could be deployed for revolutionary and treasonous purposes.

From 1932 to 1936 the Swedish Cabinet consisted only of members of the Social Democratic Workers Party (the Social Democrats), while between 1936 and 1939 there was a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Agrarian Party. In connection with the outbeak of war, a broad coalition was formed in December 1939 and remained in effect until the end of the Second World War, with cabinet members from the Social Democrats, the Agrarian Party, the Liberal Party and the Con- servative Party, with an independent diplomat as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Support for the Swed- ish Communist Party and the Socialist Party in the parliamentary elections during this period amount- ed to 1932: 8.3% (207000 votes); 1936: 7.7%; 1940: 4.2%. The Socialist Party moved towards the right and became increasingly marginalized during the 1930s, while in the 1944 elections, the Com- munist Party reached 10.3%, or 319 000 votes. The Communist Party had approximately 20 000 members in 1939, but that figure had been reduced a year later to 11 200 largely due to discontent with the 1939 non-aggression pact between the Soviet Un- ion and Germany as well as the Soviet attack on Finland, also in 1939 (Hirdman, 1974).

In 1933, the Swedish Committee Concerning Activities Subversive to the State was appointed after a Conservative motion in Parliament received majority support (regarding the activities of this committee; see Bring, 1985; Eliasson, 2005; Fly- ghed, 1992; L66w, 1990; Molin, 1983). No Mem- bers of Parliament belonging to the Communist Party were allowed on the committee. The Social Democrats were internally divided, in general less prone to suggest measures, and stressed that measures taken should apply also to the extreme Right. The queries of the Committee thus came to concern Communist, Syndicalist and Anarchist as well as National Socialist organizations and individuals. Regional County Boards, the military and the police, as well as the public school system, were governmental bodies to which Committee queries were referred. The Committee queried sixty-six military bodies, and while thirty-eight of those bodies reported on communist activities, only nine reported about Nazi propaganda. In responses to the Committee, some local police valued the Na- tional Socialists as a positive strongly national social force, and the growing support for the Nazis was seen as a reaction against the 'Communists' and a lack of measures from national authorities to deal with the "communist threat" (on political sympathies in Sweden on the extreme right, see Berg- gren, 2002; Nilsson, 1996; Richardson, 1996). Re- sponses "from the military in many cases bear witness to a horror of communists, a fear of infiltrators, spies and incendiarism by Communist elements" (L66w, 1990, pp. 371, 375), and were often of such a general character that the actual existence of propaganda and indisciplinary behavior is difficult to assess (Bring, 1985). Neglecting the instructions given by the Committee, military bodies also pointed to activities of peace organizations, since they regarded pacifist ideas to be a threat to national security by subverting the will to defend the nation (L66w, 1990). Turning to actual statements, one local Head of Police disapproved of both Nazi and Communist extremism:

It is clear that the radical extremists at present pursue a rather intense propaganda. ... To judge from contacts the undersigned in duty has had with those individuals that organize meetings of the different political extremist parties, however, one dares state that the leaders of the local organizations are rather intellectually inferior.

(Quoted in L66w, 1990, p. 378)


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

The response to the Committee from the County Board of Norrbotten in Northern Sweden focused on the Left and did not find Nazism a danger to the state. The County Board referred to the fact that the Communist Party received "every fourth vote in the latest election in Norrbotten", and con- cluded:

Among simpler souls, the Bolshevist world view has taken on an almost religious and fa- natical character. The importance of the movement must in no way be disregarded.... The County Board's general position with regard to the communist threat and its warding off is accordingly that communism should simply not be allowed in the country, it should be struck down and exterminated. Information or softer means of power do not help: their effects would if any be so slow that incurable damage could occur underways.

(Quoted in Litw, 1990, pp. 380-381,384-385)

Turning to the military, the Head of the Dragoon Regiment in Northern Sweden made the following assessment:

The communist in uniform is not easily recognized. He is most often an excellent soldier, trusted by his commanders. The propaganda is no doubt practiced individually, only after he has formed an opinion about the character of the individual [to be approached].

(Quoted in L66w, 1990, p. 375)

Similarly, the hidden and probably extensive activities of the 'Communists' are stressed by the Head of the Stockholm Navy Base:

The cell-activities mentioned in the report are probably pursued not only within military organizations, but in many places, and even among women and children, that accordingly become imbued by doctrines that they have no capacity to assess the meaning of. This is a way of poisoning the whole nation, against which the strongest measures must be taken.

(Quoted in L66w, 1990, p. 376)

One might finally note that in responses to the Committee some local police authorities indicated activities of the Social Democrats as subversive of the existing political and state order (L66w, 1990),

despite the fact that the Social Democrats at that time held state power and were supported by close to half of the electorate. Not surprisingly then, Committee members disagreed on the proposals of the final report of 1935, and the Social Democrats on the Committee registered reservations with regard to proposing an emergency powers act direct- ed against politically subversive organizations, and to ban members of subversive organizations to have state positions (see references above). The only major proposal that became law was a revision of the legislation on espionage. Although without legal support for increased surveillance and other measures, the military continued to act, and in the mid-1930s one "activity that was to remain undis- closed for the government was the attempts to es- tablish limited cooperation with the anti-communist bureau of Nazi-Germany in the propaganda war against the Communists" (Eliasson, 2005, p. 161; see also pp. 84-88).

In August 1939 foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, and in November the Soviet Union attacked Finland. In Sweden, non-governmental support was immediately mobilized under the slogan: "The Finnish Cause Is Ours". Representatives from the National Horse Guard in Stockholm campaigned against 'Com- munists' and petitioned the Defence Minister with a list of 1834 people who demanded a dehumanizing "weeding out" of communists (NSD, 6 April, 1940, p. 8). And in March 1940, the Social Democratic the Norrliindska Socialdemokraten reported on a campaign at a military regiment in northern Sweden where editor Ove Casparsson was chairing a committee responsible for circulat- ing a petition also demanding communist conscripts to be "weeded out" (NSD, 3 March, 1940, p. 8). Concerns were also raised in dehumanizing terms by the Regional Commander of northern Sweden, General Pontus Reuterswird, a Swedish aristocrat, who in 1940 wrote to the County Gov- ernor of Norrbotten:

In case of our country being drawn into war with Russia [sic] along our northern border, there is an obvious danger in having these communist hotbeds operating behind the back of our own army. To me, it is likely to believe that, in a critical moment, these hotbeds are the selected places from which the signals in- stigating sabotage and treason will be given.

(Quoted in Molin, 1982, p. 50)

458 @ The author 2006 Journal compilation @ 2006 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography


During the first years of the war Swedish and Ger- man high-ranking military officers from the Defence Staff of both countries met in Sweden as well as in Germany. One issue concerned joint military planning against the Soviet Union (Schmidt, 2002; Wechselmann, 1995). Concessions were also made by the Cabinet, such as allowing 15 000 fully armed German troops to travel through Sweden during two summer weeks of 1941 in order to fight the Soviet Union on a northern front. The construction of fear and threat from a right-wing position is clear in a 1941 memorandum from the Commander-in-Chief, General Olof Thmrnell, to the Foreign Minister. Th6rnell "emphasized the great strategic advantages of a German-Finnish victory, which would eliminate the Russian threat for foreseeable time", and also warned that a Soviet victory "could lead to the continued Bolshevization of Europe, including Swe- den". He encouraged a more active contribution from Sweden and found that "a positive attitude to the German-Finnish attack on the USSR could hope- fully lead to a better status for Sweden in the Ger- man-dominated Europe of the future" (Cronenberg, 1984, p. 176). In a circular letter of 1941, the Army Staff encouraged Swedish officers to resign in order to enable them to accept command of German troops at the eastern front, yet offered guarantees of reposi- tioning upon return. This undertaking was stopped by the coalition Cabinet in August 1941 (Wechsel- mann, 1995). In October 1941, the King of Sweden, Gustav V, sent a message to Adolf Hitler through the German legation in Stockholm. In this message he found Bolshevism to be a danger not only to the Nor- dic countries but also to all of Europe, and continued in dehumanizing language to state that he "would openly like to express his warm thanks to der Fiihrer for having decided to exterminate this pestilence" (quoted in Schmidt, 2002, p. 24).

In the population of Sweden as a whole, the pro- portion of nobility around this time was c. 0.2 per cent. In the military, one third of all officers in 1939 were noblemen (Andolf, 1984; Molin, 1982). In addition, the senior officers of the Swedish military were quite old at the outbreak of the Second World War. The Commander-in-Chief General Olof Th6r- nell was born in 1877, the General Pontus Reuter- swird was born in 1871, and several others were born around 1880 and thus in their sixties. Although lower ranking officers were somewhat younger, the high age of the officer corps points to the significant circumstance that the majority of Swedish officers were around 40 years of age already when universal suffrage was introduced on the municipal level in

1919, and on the national level in 1921. Hence, when the Second World War began, liberal democracy had existed for as little as two decades while the world- views of most military officers had been shaped in an earlier period of undemocratic forms of patriarchal government, excluding women in general as well as men of the laboring classes. In the Norrliindska Socialdemokraten, an extensive editorial addressed "The Military Defense and the Citizens" (NSD, 3 November, 1939, p. 4) and the reformist Left's concern about military discipline and class society. Nu- merous accounts exist about military officers' har- assment of working-class conscripts around this time (see Wechselmann, 1995). It has been generally acknowledged that:

[T]he system of organized violence and mili- taristic values creates a decision-making process that is too often secretive and beyond public review, skewed in favour of strong, section- al, military interests, and corrosive of public accountability and democratic participation more generally.

(Held, 1995, p. 184)

In early March 1940, seven people attacked the wooden building of the Communist newspaper the Norrskensflamman in the northern Swedish town of Lulea. In the nightly attack, they used explosives in order to destroy the printing equipment (Old- berg, 1972). In the fire that followed, five lives were lost: two children, two women and one man, while five others managed to escape by climbing down on sheets. The attack was carried out by four military officers, the head of police in the town of Lule6, a right-wing journalist and a store clerk. In his com- plaint after having been sentenced to seven years in prison with hard labor, one of the perpetrators claimed as extenuating circumstances "the general spirit of the day and events taking place in the whole country and particularly in Nothern Swe- den". He also quoted from both a Conservative and a Social Democratic newspaper published shortly before the arson took place in which terms such as "Bolshevik weed", "breeding grounds", and "treason" appeared (RA, Nedre Justitierevisionen, Bes- vars och ans6kningsmil, 1941, Vol. CLXIV).

Social Democrats suggest: "exterminate" "slime animals" and "lunatics" In 1938, a year before the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany was signed,


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

Allan Vougt, leading member of the Social Demo- crats as well as Member of Parliament and Chief Editor of the newspaper Arbetet, had expressed positive sentiments with regard to developments in the Soviet Union. This was despite what he knew about forced labor, disappearances and lack of democracy (Alm, 2005).After the pact was signed, he expressed his dislike for communists in the following manner:

It would be strange if the democracies did not vomit and spit them out, disgusted by a human type so degraded, down to the level of the most despicable beast, a human variant of slime animals such as the world has never seen before - not even when the German regime orders its subjects to regard as good what yesterday was evil, as right what yesterday was shamefully wrong. ... But the labor movement, having the communists in their own neighborhood, must make use of a particularly effective broom to wipe away this refuse, this slag - these 'subhu- mans', to use an expression employed by the Nazi prophets until yesterday, when they sud- denly in their deep cowardice fell in the arms of their previous enemies.

(Arbetet, 26 August, 1939, p. 6)

In the Stalinist politics of the Third International the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was a jus- tified shift from a struggle against fascism to what was characterized as a revolutionary struggle against the imperialist war, in which European So- cial Democratic parties were seen as implicated because of their nationalist politics undermining united class actions of the proletariat (see statements by Stalin and Molotov referred to in NSD 28 Au- gust, 1939, p. 1; NSD, 1 November, 1939, p. 1; see also Schmidt (2002, pp. 78-79), on the particularly strong national isolationism of the Swedish Social Democrats). This sudden shift from a popular front strategy which had included cooperation with democratic forces made the military establishment and right-wing political parties as well as the national reformist Social Democrats perceive the Communist Party as a security threat. In addition to level-headed analyses of the situation (NSD, 26 August, 1939,p.4; NSD, 30 September 1939,p.4), discourse decisively changed. In an editorial, the Norrlindska Socialdemokraten stated that "it is just as meaningless to have a discussion with a communist as it is to give medicine to a dead" (NSD, 30 August, 1939, p. 4). A key question for

the labor movement, Social Democrats as well as Communists, was the issue of loyalty within a nation-state across class divisions, or loyalty within the class across borders to foreign fellow laborers. In the Norrliindska Socialdemokraten, the editorial columnists O.W. L6vgren, Henry Karlsson and Sven Backlund repeatedly attacked communists, particularly in the winter of 1939 to 1940. This is the nationalist geopolitical vision of the Social Democrat Backlund:

In a moment when every civilized society con- siders incarcerating those who do not want to understand that loyalty to fellow countrymen excludes relations of dependence on foreign governments, it is necessary to clarify international relations. ... Orders from outside, that could make a group of citizens turn against their own country, cannot be tolerated in any shape whatsoever. This is not an expression of nationalism: on the contrary, it follows from the demand of a legalization of all international relations through a League of Nations - and that demand is the highest expression of inter- nationalism.

(NSD, 19 November, 1939, p. 2)

The Soviet-German non-aggression pact was followed by the Soviet attack on Finland, and at a meeting in the City Council of Stockholm in De- cember 1939, almost all representatives of all the political parties reacted to these events by leaving the room when a member of the Communist Party took the floor. One of the few remaining representatives was a Social Democrat who read a statement from his party group, declaring that the Social Democrats in the council had decided "not to give Communist speakers and Communist contribu- tions any attention at the meetings of the council, and further to reject any Communist demand on representation in committees, boards, and other bodies of the city" (quoted in Molin, 1982, p. 34). Such spatial measures were conjoined with dehumanizing discourse. While Backlund's fellow columnist Henry Karlsson wrote that "[t]he labor movement commits a crime against itself if it does not keep the movement clean from the communist vermin, and from their similarly noxious newspapers" (NSD, 5 December, 1939, p. 4), columnist O.W. Li6vgren argued that the Communist Party had to be seen as a "Russian spy and sabotage organization" (NSD, 30 December, 1939, p. 4). These were not isolated statements. The traits of



'Communists' to some seemed to justify that communists should be deprived of their citizen's rights and the notion of weeding out 'Communists' was pushed to the limit of citizenship not only as a political right, but also in terms of territorial belonging. The signature 'Kire' wrote:

The Nazi-Bolsheviks' coward cringing for the red imperialism has evoked an abhorrence towards this stinking scab that in many places has led to physical conflict.... The best thing they could do would be to immediately pack their stuff and deport themselves as fast as possible to their spiritual motherland. There is no place for them here.

(NSD, 13 December, 1939, p. 6)

The Board of The National Confederation of Trade Unions in December 1939 decided to encourage organized workers to systematically isolate and vote down communists from positions on all levels. The resolution, signed by the Social Democrats August Lindberg and Ragnar Casparson of The National Confederation and published in several newspapers, explicitly referred to the attack on Finland (NSD, 21 December, 1939, p. 4). During the months that followed, basically all Social Demo- cratic newspapers aggressively detailed their readers about how "Nazi-communists" and "Moscow agents" were "thrown out","pushed out" and "weeded out" from positions in the unions. January 1940 saw the Norrliindska Socialdemokraten publish the following unsigned attack on 'Communists'.

One should not argue with lunatics. Asylums are their place. ... 'Lunatic' is a foul expression but one which must be used with regard to people that are so retarded that they do not realize the enormous treason represented by the pact between the Soviet Union and Ger- many.

(NSD, 10 January, 1940, p. 4)

Three days later, the same paper published an editorial by columnist Henry Karlsson which contained language of quite extreme character:

They are not humans in the normal sense of the word. Among the most hardened criminals, one can as a rule find something good. Among the genuine communists, trying to find anything good is in vain.... Only loathsome asocial individuals can, day after day, week after

week, praise the atrocious acts of murder against the peaceful Finnish people that the Russian state engages in. Confronting bestial mass-murders, even morally inferior people usually show their disgust. ... The communists are traitors of and poison the working class and must be dealt with as such. ... The communist press must be completely exterminated.

(NSD, 13 January, 1940, p. 2)

Yet, not all workers and local labor unions suc- cumbed to the pressure. In G6teborg on 28 January, 1940, the workers at Sweden's major shipyard voted in favour of a resolution, saying:

We do not have anything in common with the bourgeoisie in Sweden, Finland or any other country. Our allies in the struggle against capitalism and the empires of rich men, and for a change into socialism are the workers of Fin- land, the Soviet Union, and all other countries. Our common enemy is the bourgeoisie of all countries.

(Quoted in GMP, 30 January, 1940, p. 4)

Thus the local union rejected the request from the National Confederation of Trade Unions to fire the communists from the board, as well as rejected an appeal to contribute to the support of Finland. The discursive placing of 'Communists' in a zone of indeterminacy outside of both territorial and political belonging was clear in Allan Vougt's imagery of "the communist swamp" (Arbetet, 31 January, 1940, p. 6). And the imaginary surrounding 'Com- munists' did lead to further spatial measures when, in January 1940, "the Minister of Social Affairs, the Social Democrat Gustav M6ller, persuaded the chief of the security service Eric Hallgren to pre- pare for a nationwide raid with house searches against members of the Communist party" (Elias- son, 2005, p. 162; see also pp. 114-118). In Febru- ary 1940, member of parliament, radical left-wing Social Democrat, editor-in-chief, Zeth H6glund of the Social-Demokraten wrote in terms of "cleansing" and "national health":

[The raids] ... are in conformity with that strong and growing opinion which demand energetic measures against a movement that unashamedly offers its duties to foreign powers against its native country [literally: "fa- thers' country"]. ... This cleansing process has in all camps of our country been viewed as


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

a testimony of national health and democratic self-assertion. One can hardly claim that the authorities have acted too early, now that they have undertaken ... an extensive investigation of the Nazi-Communistic hotbeds for their undermining of the nation's defence powers, and for their systematic instigation of treason.

(SD, 11 February, 1940, p. 4)

In one editorial, the likewise Social Democratic paper the Ny Tid similarly stressed the need to "weed out the communists" and "exterminate communism" (NT, 3 February, 1940, p. 4), In an unsigned editorial, most probably written by the editor-in- chief and influential right-wing Social Democrat Rickard Lindstr6m, the paper wrote:

The communists are obviously not such idiots that they have not tried to carefully erase the traces of their activities. ... Most [evidence] is probably destroyed or hidden. One can only hope that the police has found some clues that show the way to the secret communist organization that surely must exist. ... The searches and raids could be of importance. But we doubt they are the axe cutting off the roots of the evil. Also experienced political police in other countries ... has been fooled by skilful and intelligent conspirators.... The mission is to weed out the bubonic hotbeds without get- ting too close to legitimate interests.

(NT, 12 February, 1940, p. 4)

Shortly later, it was reported that in G6teborg a communist was caught in the raids with a secret radio transmitter with which he "could reach Mos- cow" (NSD, 20 February, 1940,p. 5), but seemingly nothing came out of this implied evidence. Similar- ly blaming and then retracting, the Norrliindska So- cialdemokraten first ran the headline: "Russian Money to Sweden in Silk Belts. The Communists Use Cipher and Cover Addresses in the Manner of Spies. Handbook in Revolution Interesting Find by Police" (NSD, 12 February, 1940, p. 1). Then a week later the same paper reported briefly that eve- ryone had been released except for two foreign citizens (NSD, 17 February, 1940, p. 4), and two days later the paper reported that three men were held assumed to have been spying, not for the Soviet Un- ion, but for the Allies (NSD, 19 February, 1940, p. 4). Simultaneously with such unsubstantiated at- tacks on the 'Communists', some Social Democrats voiced favourable opinions about Nazi-Germany.

In 1940, the leading member Allan Vougt declared in Parliament that the "very strong German ambition ... to organize Europe in a better way than the democratic states in the League of Nations have been able to do" was "praiseworthy" (quoted in Boathius, 1992, p. 121). In 1941 Vougt also noted that "Germany is predestined to occupy a leading position in a united Europe ... a truth that is not dis- puted by any enlightened human being in the Nor- dic countries" (quoted in Boathius, 1992, p. 121). While Vougt found "slime animals" in "the communist swamp" (see quotes above) he found a Europe organized by the Nazis a praiseworthy imperialist ambition. Nazi-Germany was here characterized in opposite fashion to the dehumanizing language of Vougt's anti-communism. The fact that the language in which Social Democrats framed 'Commu- nists', although obviously calculated and deliberate, apparently was a blind-spot made it possible to invoke the similar language of Soviet workers as a sign of their inferiority, as in the following unsigned commentary in the Norrliindska Socialdemokraten on the labor unions of the Soviet Union.

In relation to European standards, the language used by the Russian workers in their resolutions concerning Finland and respected Finnish politicians is highly provocative. "Dirty bandits", "provocateurs", "war-incen- diaries", "criminal elements", "slave-nation", and similar expressions appear daily and in different combinations. ... The language of criminals [literally: "of the under world"] has become theirs.

(NSD, January 10, 1940, p. 8)

There is here an implied divide between Europe and Asia, and in a claim on European superiority, the author of this piece sets his own standards apart from the alleged criminal language of Asian/Rus- sian workers. 'Communists' thus discursively come to appear as unfit intruders below the Euro- pean standard (see also Blomqvist, 2003).

The Social Democrats were not the only ones engaged in anti-communism, and before turning to states of exception in Sweden during the investi- gated time period, a few examples of dehumanizing discourse in the bourgeois press are in order. In dis- cussing the international political situation after the Soviet-German non-aggression pact had been signed, the liberal Stockholm newspaper Dagens Nyheter deployed medico-biological language, writing about communism in terms of "contagion"



(DN, 23 August, 1939, p. 3). However, this was not an immediate attack on Swedish communists. The day after the police raids on the Communist Party in February 1940, the conservative Stockholm newspaper the Svenska Dagbladet wrote:

Better late than never, and an overwhelming Swedish opinion greets with great satisfaction the fact that the government finally, after months of futile discussions, has moved from words to action. It is now a matter of continu- ing to display power and consistency, so that the Bolshevist weed can be pulled up by the roots.

(SvD, 11 February, 1940, p. 4)

The right-wing paper Giteborgs Morgonpost, which during the 1930s moved from a conservative to a pro-Nazi position, actively campaigned against alleged 'Communists', suggested they should be banned from public positions, and in 1940 attacked individual civil servants such as the County Architect as well as the Head of the City Planning Office in G6teborg for being 'Commu- nists'. One editorial referred to communism as a "revolution of nihilism", explaining that "communism as a world view is the most consistent preaching of animal uninhibitedness and liberty of the instincts that humanity hitherto has met on its path towards absolute materialism" (GMP, 2 Feb- ruary, 1940, p. 4). In the parliamentary debates during the winter and spring of 1940, conservatives as well as several liberals raised an old proposal to ban the Communist Party, and short of that in March 1940, the Social Democrat Profes- sor Lundstedt suggested a new law that would prohibit communists from parliamentary representation (NSD, 30 March, 1940, pp. 1, 8). The coalition Cabinet postponed any such decision, and while the Parliament in June 1940 passed an emergency powers act that made it possible to dissolve organizations treasonous to the state, the Swedish Communist Party was never outlawed (Drangel, 1976; Hirdman, 1974; Molin, 1974).

"Intimate cooperation between the patriotic public and the police authorities" This section addresses Swedish state measures against free speech, military labor company camps for "politically untrustworthy" conscripts, surveillance organization and measures, and extensive planning for detention of alleged security

risks. With regard to public access to information, a majority of newspapers cooperated with the government and accepted imposed constraints. In De- cember 1939, the Swedish Prime Minister Social Democrat Per-Albin Hansson threatened the press:

Highly valuing free speech, the Cabinet does not want to make use of the possibilities offered to prosecute and confiscate. Yet such measures have had to be employed. Many people argue they should have been used more extensively than has hitherto been the case. And maybe it will be necessary to act tougher if nothing else helps.


Early in 1940, the government invited press organizations to appoint members to a new Press Board, an agency to be placed within the simultaneously created State Information Board (NSD, 2 March, 1940, p. 1). The State Information Board was to be responsible for public information, yet, headed by the German-friendly Professor and Vice Chancellor of Stockholm University Sven Tunberg, came to function as a pre-censoring authority that continuously issued directives concerning which topics were to be and which were not to be allowed in the press (see Andolf, 1994; Schmidt, 2002; Zetterberg, 1993). Reporting on a meeting attended by a civil servant of the State In- formation Board, a newspaper ran the headline: "Propaganda an Important Issue in Times of Cri- sis." The article, with approval, quoted the civil servant as saying: "Perhaps the most important task today is the creation of a real spirit of Swed- ishness in the nation" (NSD, 18 April, 1940, p. 5). In effect, both of these bodies became instruments of silencing. Although several of the editors on the Press Board were influential chief editors, they ad- ministered an extensive self-censorship rather than protested against the restrictions imposed, possibly in order to avoid further governmental measures against newspapers. Hence, in June 1940, readers of the Swedish press were informed that "The Parliament Passed the Law on Censor- ship," and that the Prime Minister in this context had declared that "the Swedish press has mostly been loyal ... however, there are newspapers of different political orientations that are not suffi- ciently careful, or have not been fully loyal" (NSD, 13 June, 1940, pp. 1,3).

The legislation on censorship stayed dormant


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

during the war (Molin, 1974) and while most newspapers accepted the pressure the government deployed other means than direct censorship to combat the few papers that did not. To keep the press quiet, an old paragraph from 1812 concerning 'slander' was deliberately misinterpreted by the Department of Justice(!) and reinvigorated for purposes other than those intended 130 years earlier. Rather than bring newspapers to trial, this deliberate misinterpretation enabled the government to quietly confiscate editions in which material deemed to be offensive was published by having state officials scrutinize newspapers already at the printing plants (Zetterberg, 1993). When, for example, the liberal Goteborg publisher Torgny Seg- erstedt questioned the appropriateness of the Swedish Commander-in-Chief's acceptance of an honorary medal from Nazi-Germany in the midst of war (GHT, 8 October, 1940), the edition of the newspaper in which his comment appeared was confiscated on order of the Minister of Justice Karl Gustaf Westman of the Agrarian Party. Ironically, Westman was also Professor of Legal History at Uppsala University. In this fashion, Segerstedt's newspaper as well as a number of other papers that dared to utilize freedom of speech had editions regularly confiscated by the government. In addition, in February 1940, a revision of the constitution became effective that did not actually prohibit the printing of critical matter but enabled the government to issue a so-called 'Transport Prohibition' which meant that editions containing objectionable material were not allowed to be distributed by mail or otherwise through the public transportation network (Drangel, 1976; L66w, 1990; Molin, 1974, 1982). During the years 1940 to 1943, Swedish newspapers were confiscated on 315 occasions: the communist press approximately 140 times; the democratic press around 130; and the Nazi press around forty times. In more than 250 instances, the reason for confiscation was due to writings critical of Nazi Germany (cf. Boathius, 1992).

Elsewhere, I have addressed Second World War military labor company camps in Sweden for two different categories of conscript soldiers, by the military labelled "politically untrustworthy" and "constitutionally undisciplined" (Landzelius, 1996, 1999, 2003). Evidence connected with these labor company camps shows that political and discipli- nary concerns were articulated through medico- biological discourse, which was mobilized in the construction of the two categories of conscripts. Through metaphorical condensations the multitude

of left-wing political affiliations considered "politically untrustworthy" were indiscriminately labelled 'Communist', and in addition such alleged 'Communists' were repeatedly treated under the same sign as the "constitutionally undisciplined", namely as an aggregate of degenerates. The labor company camps were temporary constructions, erected for the detention of 'subversive' conscripts by the Swedish military in the late 1930s and during the war, and gained after-the-fact approval from the Cabinet (Bring, 1985; Molin, 1982). In Decem- ber 1939, after the Soviet Union had attacked Fin- land, both the Commander-in-Chief General Olof Thornell and the Chief of the Second Army Corps in northern Sweden, General Nygren, approached the Cabinet requesting tougher measures towards the communists. Their request was actively supported by other officers and local military authorities (Molin, 1982), and the first labor company camp was in place from 19 December, 1939 (Kieri and Sundstrim, 1985).

One should note that the camps were not explicitly intended to encroach on civilian citizens' political rights, but were thought of as a legitimate measure to safeguard the military against destabi- lizing, subversive activities. In response to an in- terpellation from a Communist in Parliament, the Minister of Defence Per Edvin Skbld, a Social Democrat, stated in June 1940 that only "individuals that with reason could be suspected of engaging in propaganda intended to weaken the defense will of troops, or that are guilty of spreading false and worrying rumors" were to be transferred. Thus Skold argued that the company under discussion was "not a concentration camp, there are more labor companies than this, if political persecution does not take other forms than this, no wrong has been done" (ST, 14 June, 1940, p. 7; see also GHT, 21 October, 1941, p. 11). However, in the case of individuals placed in labor companies due to their political sympathies, many were either drafted directly from civilian life to such a company camp, or pre-emptively removed from their military units on the basis of allegations of being 'Communists'. In 1942, responding to queries from the Army Com- mander about communist sympathies and conscripts that should possibly be transferred to labor company camps, a Captain Schildt in Stockholm wrote:

[N]o immediate reason for complaints [on NN], but... Although there is no direct evidence, one can state that NN pursues harmful



propaganda within as well as outside of the unit. This is a shared opinion among all officers. A compass instrument, for which NN was responsible, disappeared under circumstances difficult to explain.

(KrA, Arm6staben, Sektion III, Serie E II, 510)

While some were thus accused entirely without proof, several of those accused had not even been able to engage in subversive activities within the military, which was the legal justification given by Skild for their incarceration. In fact, this meant that some of those in labor company camps could, although conscripts, be understood to have been incarcerated civilians, and legal practice would have stipulated that they be prosecuted in civilian courts had they broken the law.

In rather ambiguous disregard for legal checks and balances, Swedish democracy was undermined under the pretext of national security, and in practice encroached upon yet not replaced by a state of exception. In relation to the Swedish military labor company camps, one should note Agamben's re- mark that "The first concentration camps in Ger- many were the work not of the Nazi regime but of the Social-Democratic governments, which in- terned thousands of communist militants in 1923 on the basis of Schutzhaft" (1998, p. 167). The Prussian institution of Schutzhaft was an institution that authorized the retention of citizens without for- mal charges, and was later also used against for- eigners including eastern European Jews (Agam- ben, 1998, 2000). There are manifest similarities between the juridical status of this institution and the conditions under which the labor company camps were established by the Swedish military and defended by the Cabinet. And since the creation of labor company camps was politically defended and the spread of information constrained by the government, the military was not really affected by the relatively scant public attention that was given to the camps. Yet their presentation to the general public was a matter of some discussion in the military. A Captain Ernst Leche noted that the labor companies were beginning to be seen as "concentration camps for political dissidents" and that therefore "the activities of the companies should - at least to the public - be given an appearance of a reasonable purpose", and suitable and useful manual work should be arranged for the incarcerated (Molin, 1982, p. 153).

All documents concerning the camps were to be,

and most have been, destroyed. No archival material thus exists that can disclose the real figures, yet the number of alleged 'Communists' who were actually transferred to labor company camps during the Second World War may have been relatively small (approximately 700). However, there was in effect as of May 1941 an order from the Command- er-in-Chief with instructions to plan for the detention (in case of Sweden entering the war) of all registered conscripts, with priority on the individuals deemed to be most dangerous. In autumn 1941 this list named around 3500 'Communists' (Molin, 1982), which corresponded to approximately one- third of the Communist Party membership. During 1941 and behind the scenes, possibly due to public attention as well as letters of protest from those incarcerated, the Minister of Defence requested the Commander-in-Chief, the German-friendly Olof Th6rnell, to explain the military's policies and prin- ciples. The Social Democrats distrusted the military's capacity to reasonably assess political threats, which also prompted them to double-check on some listed individuals transferred to labor company camps by contacting those Social Democrats who came from the same places as the incarcerated 'Communists' to gain more reliable local knowledge of their politics (Molin, 1982, pp. 153-157). In November 1941, new directives were given to the military, and while it was stressed that Nazis should also be under scrutiny, political affiliation in itself was deemed to be an insufficient reason for transfer to a labor company camp, and "actual reasons" such as "propaganda, spreading of discontent, or being difficult" were stated as necessary (Molin, 1982, p. 160).

In the late 1930s, a comprehensive plan for a new civilian Secret Service was developed by the above-mentioned Captain Leche when as a conscript officer he worked in the Defence Staff. New- ly appointed to the Department of Justice in 1938, he was instrumental in pushing through this proposal (L6•iw, 1990; Wechselmann, 1995). The new Secret Service was organized in cooperation with the Defence Staff and had resources of its own as well as coordinating functions between already existing civilian police and military bodies. In June 1938, the Minister of Social Affairs, the Social Democrat Gustav Miller, signed a proclamation concerning extended powers of this new Secret Service organization, to be implemented in the event of war. In September, Eric Hallgren was appointed head of the organization. Hallgren was a Stockholm police officer who had worked with po-


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

litical surveillance since the 1920s and apparently had conservative sympathies (Wechselmann, 1995). In November he received the new instructions from the government (L66w, 1990). The proclamation authorized the Security Service to super- vise mail, telephone, telegraph and radio traffic, as well as to engage in supervision and reconnais- sance related to suspected individuals. The Securi- ty Service was organized at four levels with the Head Office and central surveillance functions in Stockholm. On the local operative level, not only police but also ordinary citizens were engaged: sal- aried or paid for piecemeal information, as well as reporting anonymously (L,66w, 1990). Denuncia- tion thus became part of proper citizens' behavior (on such accusatory practices, see Fitzpatrick and Gellately, 1997). In the war climate of suspicion, columnist Livgren of the Norrldndska Social- demokraten wrote in an editorial entitled 'The Spies':

We believe that the most efficient struggle against spying in all areas [of social and eco- nomic life] must be based on an intimate cooperation between the patriotic public and the police authorities ... each and every one in a position where he has any reason to suspect the existence of spying must watch carefully and sharpen his vigilance, and if there is reason of suspicion bring that to the knowledge of the proper authority.

(NSD, 19 February, 1940, p. 4)

In this climate and preceded by pressure from the military, the legislation concerning surveillance, searches and seizure was revised in 1939 and early 1940 in order to authorize the Security Service to employ further extensive means in their control of the population. The suggested measures caused no parliamentary debate and the proposals by the Cab- inet were adopted. The effects of the new legislation are illustrated by the fact that during the war in a country that in 1940 had a total population of 6.37 million people, more than 11 million phone calls were tapped, 6000 individual phones were tapped continuously, and 47 million letters and packages were opened and searched (L66w, 1990; Molin, 1982). In considering this volume of surveillance, one should note that telephones were not a widespread household item in the 1930s and 1940s, and that, as mentioned above, the Communist Party in 1940 had a total of 11 200 members. In 1942 and 1943, the Stockholm unit of the Security Service

that was responsible for surveilling mail, telephone, telegraph and radio traffic had more than 800 employees.

Among the cases that were handled by the local security police, apart from the purely political ones, were also black-market transac- tions, smuggling of refugees, corpses washed ashore, spies, sabotage, downed airplanes, general immorality, illegal abortions, mysteri- ous strangers, smuggling of goods, informing, etc. ... Reports were regularly compiled on subjects as, among others, the situation for draftees, sexual morality in the nation, alcohol abuse, and the relationship between officers and privates.

(Ld6w, 1990, pp. 401-402)

With regard to the matter of how this invisible geography was to be turned into a machinic assemblage of detention and incarceration, much research re- mains to be done. Without further presentation of this particular material, L66w has stated that based on experiences from the raids and searches of the Communist Party and alleged 'Communists' in 1940, refinements were made and in 1942 'Tempo- rary Custody Registers' were created in every police district. In this process, "very detailed plans were made for the seizure of people", and "military and police personnel were assigned detainment and transport duties" (Li6w, 1990, p. 430). Places for the incarceration of detained people were also identified, and "in each security region, a survey was made of the [countryside] palaces and larger farm mansions, prisons and military barracks that could potentially be utilized. With regard to prisons, planning was made for the release of short-term convicts, in order to make place for politically untrustworthy" (L66w, 1990, p. 430). Criminal convicts were to be replaced by political suspects, and thus a system of justice with a state of exception. With regard to the extent of measures and preparations, one should note that in the mid-1930s, the so-called Intelligence Unit within the Defence Staff appears to have had a register of more than 100 000 individuals allegedly known to be or suspected to be 'Com- munists' (Molin, 1982). The civilian secret police had, according to Schmidt, a register in 1936 of 120 000 "subversive elements" (2002, p. 73). And in 1941, the Intelligence Unit of the Defence Staff apparently had 36 000 conscripts listed as communists, a list prepared in cooperation with the Secret Service (Molin, 1982). In terms of the struggle for



state power addressed by Schmidt and the possible far-reaching consequences of the surveillance, registration and detainment planning carried out, one should note that cooperation between Swedish secret service bodies and the Gestapo during the 1930s and into the war has been disclosed with regard to a number of matters, such as exchange of information on Swedish volunteers from the civil war in Spain, on German anti-Nazi refugees in Sweden, and so on (Flyghed, 1992; Schmidt, 2002; Wech- selmann, 1995).

"A healthier species is the goal - let us all become A-humans!" The above account shows that real or imagined 'Communists' were the main focus but not the only ones targeted. Yet there are connections between 'Communists' and those who during this time were seen as 'asocial' or 'feebleminded', as well as with those surveilled by the Secret Service due to "general immorality". The above discloses how 'Com- munists' again and again were characterized as "retarded" "lunatics" and "simpler souls" of "animal uninhibitedness" or in other terms referred to as less mentally capable than the 'normal' majority. In November 1941, a Company Commander, Ingiald Elg, responding to queries about possible transfer of soldiers to labor companies, described a conscript with a "clearly communist position" as "unreliable" and "unwilling". He continued:

At local caf6s Wolf has in addition been guilty of transgressions such as not paying for meals (later settled by me) and behaving impertinently towards the waitresses. His older brother ... is in Orsa known as an extremely aggres- sive propagandistic communist according to NN, who is from Orsa. I also know the older brother as an unreliable and disagreeable individual, hence I understand wherefrom the influence on the younger Wolf comes. With rev- erence I request that he with urgency may be dismissed from the company as well as from this location, since also civilians here have several times been irritated by Wolf's arrogant behavior.

(KrA, Arm6staben, Sektion III, Serie E II, 190)

It has been stated that left-wing propaganda against the military encouraged conscripts to show "indo- lence, idleness, and unwillingness in duty" (Bring,

1985, p. 42). Yet the above quote dwells on the per- sonality traits and behavior of an individual seen as transgressive in general, and there is not much on his 'Communist' politics within the military. Such "unreliable" and "unwilling" 'Communists' appear in sharp contrast to the male figure of a 1937 campaign organized by the Swedish Dairy Associ- ation. In full-page advertisements, a man was de- picted carrying a pick across his shoulder - with ex- tra appeal by looking both like a rural farmer and an urban construction worker - inviting the reader to become part of the building of a healthy state through the consumption of milk, butter and cheese. The saturation of this campaign with organicism, nationalism, racial overtones and notions of social purification is clear from the heading "A Healthier Species Is The Goal - Let Us All Become A-humans!" and the use of such phrases as "sound A-humans, fit-for-life" (GHT, 1 November, 1937, p. 9). What I want to explore here is the question of how "A-humans" and the ones thus implied to be 'Z-humans' or 'Non-A-humans' at the other end of the spectrum were distinguished from one another when medico-biological assumptions framed the understanding of political difference. In extension, or at the core, this concerns the question of who was to be included in the nation-state (or within 'the social'; see Latour, 2005) and who was to be placed under the conditions of a camp, in "a space for naked life as such" (Agamben, 2000, p. 40). To pro- ceed with this argument, I will need to outline some elements of the Swedish context of eugenics and sterilization.

Across the Western world during the period here discussed political discourse regularly conceived of the nation-state in terms of organicism, and scientific discourse on sterilization and eugenics identified a vast number of symptoms of deviation from the 'normal' as reasons for medical interventions. In promoting racializing thought, Swedish research and medical practice in the first half of the twentieth century laid claim to the scientific front line. In 1921, a broad political majority in the Swedish Par- liament voted in favour of a motion to create the State Institute for Race Biology. Opened in 1922, it was the first state institute of this kind in the world. Racial thinking influenced also the Social Demo- crats, and in 1925, Allan Vougt authored and had the Social Democrats' youth organization issue a propaganda publication on race biology and socialism in which he attacked both conservatives deploying eugenic arguments against social reforms, and communism. While he was in favour of race


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

improvement, he found communism to seek "nivel- lization", and this was one reason why "socialism could not accept Bolshevism, which undoubtedly can lead to degeneration" (Blomqvist, 2006, pp. 328-329). As quoted above, Vougt later found 'Communists' to be "slime animals". In a major exhibition space of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 further connections were made between eugenics and social position. The space was called the Svea Rike, or "the realm-kingdom-queendom of Mother Svea" (Pred, 1995,p. 133; see also Pred, 1992), and sported displays prepared by the head of the State Institute for Race Biology, the pro-German anti- Semite Professor Herman Lundborg (Broberg, 1995; Broberg and Tyd6n, 1996). Panels of alleged 'racial types', photo portraits arranged by occupation, and so on, together made up "[a] genealogy of power which equated accomplishment and societal contribution with heredity" (Pred, 1995, p. 138).

What I want to stress here is that a connection was made between occupation and 'racial type'. In teasing out how 'Communists' could be framed and treated as dehumanized others, one has to note the "clear bias toward the lower classes" in eugenics, as well as "a widespread tendency to regard social misbehavior as a question of genetic inferiority" (Broberg and Tyd6n, 1996, pp. 120, 124-125). The zoologist and geneticist Nils von Hofsten, Pro- fessor, and from 1943 also Vice Chancellor of Upp- sala University, was from its creation a member of the Board of the State Institute for Race Biology (which from 1936 was headed by the Social Demo- crat Professor Gunnar Dahlberg). Hofsten was a core figure in the Social Democrats eugenics program and was also a member of the National Board of Health, which was the state authority that ap- proved sterilization applications. With regard to what was referred to as "the lowest stratum of society", in 1933 nobleman von Hofsten assumed that this group partly consisted of "genetically inferior individuals [who sank] into it due to their inferior qualities" (quoted in Broberg and Tyd6n, 1996, p. 125). Such a generalized medico-biological turn towards targeting various forms of social deviance is also illustrated by the fact that, in 1931, one in every twenty people facing criminal charges was ordered to take a mental health examination, while in 1940, this figure had increased to one in five (Ar- betet, 9 September, 1941, p. 5).

In their discussion about Swedish eugenics, social margins and notions of a productive society, Spektorowski and Mizrachi note that "eugenics is usually linked with conservative ideologies" and

that "[flew have stressed the association between eugenics and socialism, especially reformist socialism" (2004, pp. 333-334; see also Blomqvist, 2006). Foucault did address this topic in his discussion about how notions of both biopower and class struggle are fused with racism in socialist thought, yet he contended that social democracy liquidated such racism "by the reformism that was bound up with it". In thus having no intention to kill, social democracy did not need to "rationalize the murder of its enemies" (Foucault, 2003, p. 262). However, contrary to Foucault's notion, under the banner of building the Folkhem (the People's Home), in the words of the party leader Per Albin Hansson in 1928, the Social Democrats were decisive in turning social hygienism into governmental practices as part of the welfare state project. This hygienism was double-sided in a way that corresponds in a certain sense to the different foci of Foucault and Agamben. On the one side productive 'positive' biopower, and on the other a 'negative' biopolitics of thanato-power institutionalized in an extensive eugenics and sterilization program based on legislation enacted in 1934 and revised in 1941, on both occasions with broad parliamentary support (on this program, see Broberg, 1995; Broberg and Ty- d6n, 1991, 1996; Frykman, 1981, 1994; Hirdman, 1989; Johannison, 1997; J6nsson, 1998; Lindholm, 1995; Runcis, 1998; Tyd6n, 2002, 2006; Zaremba, 1999). During the period here under consideration, from the program's initiation in 1935 up until 1945, approximately 9 200 Swedish citizens, of which 74 per cent were women, became victims of sterilization (Broberg and Tyd6n, 1996).

Some proponents of eugenics pushed such ideas to include 'Communists'. In 1918, Wilhelm Krauss, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who had studied anthropology, arrived in Uppsala. He soon made Herman Lundborg's acquaintance and was recruited to the State Institute for Race Biology as anthropological assistant, where he encountered the German "future Nazi race ideologist" Dr Phil Hans F. Giinther (Broberg and Tyd6n, 1996, p. 90). Giinther lived in Stockholm for several years in the 1920s, and in 1924 gave a series of lectures for the Institute's personnel at Uppsala University. In the late 1920s, Krauss sent Gtinther a letter containing photographs of "'rassischen Kommunistenftihr- ern' - since such were hard to obtain" (Broberg, 1995, p. 56). Krauss, himself a Jew, thus found that leaders of communism could be identified based on racial appearance. With regard to this particular eugenic understanding of communism as identifiable



marks appearing upon the body, the Nazi-German case is similarly informative. Already in 1933, immediately upon the National Socialists seizing power, the SA stormtroopers in Oranienburg deployed the Prussian Schutzhaft-institution, mentioned above, and turned an old brewery into a concentration camp for Communists and others of the political opposition (cf. www.gedenkstaette-sach- senhausen.de/gums/en/). Not only were political dissidents the first to be incarcerated, they were also seen as medico-biological others. Referring to a propaganda publication from 1934 written by the Oranienburg Camp Commandant Werner Schafer, Gellately and Stoltzfus have commented that: "The Nazis ... came to view political convictions, especially deeply rooted ones, in social and even in semi- biological terms. According to Nazi propaganda, the die-hard Communists in the concentration camps could be recognized by their deformed head shapes and the twisted features of their faces" (2001, p. 5).

In the Swedish context, there were in addition links established between gender, eugenics and communist politics. This was made clear by the military officer who claimed that "women ... become imbued by doctrines they have no capacity to assess the meaning of"'. Female communists were in such a logic by definition feebleminded, and vice versa, to the extent that they expressed communist sympathies this would be a proof of their feeblem- indedness. What the application of medico-biological discourse in a dehumanizing fashion effected, then, was to push 'Communists' across the border, over the edge, from the 'social' sphere of political life (bios politikos) within the boundary of the nation-state, into the zone of biological life (zoe) to be treated according to protocols of indeterminacy. To be a 'Communist' was to be at "the level of the most despicable beast, a human variant of slime animals such as the world has never seen before". In combination with a kind of spatial mobilization of medico-biological discourse with terms such as "cell-activities", "poison" and "bubonic hotbeds", the perceived threat of 'Communists' turned into imaginations where no proof became proof of that which was to be proved (on scapegoating in general, see Douglas, 1995). While this imagineered 'Communist' treason produced numerous sorts of bodily-spatial invasive measures, one might note that the passing on of information to Nazi-Germa- ny by rightwing Swedish officers probably did amount to treason (Wechselmann, 1995). The medico-biological framing of certain individuals as

unfit 'Communists' in relation to a healthy body politic of "sound A-Humans" through a consistent- ly de-humanizing discourse was an integral moment in the execution of power as fear and abandonment through "an exercise in ontological trans- formations" (Olsson, 1991, p. 119). The brutal violence of de-humanizing discourse concerned ways in which to include yet exclude (see Agamben 1998, p. 28) these allegedly less-than-humans in an ontology that was characterized by continuous ef- forts to delimit and impose the borders of the 'social', the 'normal' and the 'people', in order to make the suspension of the norm appear to be reasonable and the imagined threat to appear to be real.

[I]f exceptional measures are the result of pe- riods of political crisis and, as such, must be understood on political and not juridico-constitutional grounds ..., then they find themselves in the paradoxical position of being juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms, and the state of exception appears as the legal form of what cannot have legal form.

(Agamben, 2005, p. 1)

This absence of legal form immediately concerns the tension observed by Agamben between "governance through law and governance through management" (2004) and the connected "confusion between the acts by an executive power and those by a legislative power" (2002). In Agamben's argument, governance through management represents an extension of sovereignty, and thus of unaccount- able power. Taking the police as an example, Ag- amben notes how they always operate in a state of exception where they "have to decide on a case-by- case basis" in a fashion "symmetrical to that of sovereignty" (2000, p. 104). Although theorized dif- ferently, one should in this context note that Fly- ghed (1992) details the constitutional crisis that in effect resulted from measures taken in Sweden during the Second World War. As an authority within the state simultaneously authorized by the state, the police incarnate the tension between legislation and execution. Yet, numerous other state authorities are also engaged in the zone of indistinction surrounding sovereign decisions over the line between life and death, a line "in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

priest" (Agamben, 1998, p. 122). Authorities and experts will thus come to operate in a territory of indeterminacy in relation to legislative power. The line between life and death is the zone within which Foucault's notion of state racism operates, and as discussed above this line affected both forms of life politics: biopower and biopolitics. The dehumanization of "Communists" concerned exactly the question of where and how this line was to be drawn. By definition, sovereign power cannot be held to account. When acts of state agents are not only understood to be dependent on situational circumstances of individual cases, but also judged according to internal criteria of non-legal character established by the very same agents, and furthermore defined as legally valid because delegated (also in the sense of Latour), then accountability becomes an illusion and the sovereign execution of power becomes a dispersed bureaucratic formality. For example, laws may include categories such as "feebleminded" and "Communists", but can never iden- tify the individuals to which those categories are by the legislator intended to refer.

What we have witnessed with our own eyes from the end of World War I onward is instead a process by which the enemy is first of all ex- cluded from civil humanity and branded as a criminal; only in a second moment does it become possible and licit to eliminate the enemy by a "police operation". Such an operation is not obliged to respect any juridical rule...

(Agamben, 2000, pp. 106-107)

The reign of the law thus risks turning into the free reign of uncontrolled delegated power. Yet this analysis may be pushed further and beyond bureaucratic power and the police. In commenting on feasts and carnivals of the past and present as "characterized by unbridled license and the suspension of normal legal and social hierarchies" (2005, p. 71), Agamben, following notions of the Swiss philolo- gist and folklorist Karl Meuli, suggests that such feasts "point toward the real state of exception as the threshold of indifference between anomie and the law" (2005, pp. 72-73). "With a brilliant intui- tion", writes Agamben, Meuli related anomic me- dieval feasts with popular justice and a state of sus- pended law that "replicate the different phases of the cruel ritual in which the Friedlos and the bandit were expelled from the community, their houses unroofed and destroyed, and their wells poisoned or made brackish" (2005, pp. 71-72). I suggest that

such a threshold of indifference was indeed ambig- uously incarnated by those police and military officers who murdered five innocent people when the building of the Communist newspaper the Norr- skensflamman was "unroofed and destroyed" through arson. The dehumanizing abandonment of 'Communists' has an additional political dimension in terms of being a moment in the production of hegemony as well as a community-empowering con- sent through which sovereign powers were distributed not only beyond legislative to executive branches of government, but also to various kinds of NGOs that mobilized ordinary members and citizens, whose "abhorrence towards this stinking scab ... in many places has led to physical conflict".

Social productivity and dehumanized inoperosity In contrast to the function of biopower, which is to make operative, to make productive, the function of sovereign biopolitics is to make inoperative, to kill, to sterilize, to place in camps. In the building of the Swedish welfare state as a pure and productive body politic of "sound A-humans fit for life" there was an element that directly involved this operative/inoperative distinction in the spacing of alleged 'Communists'. To the Social Democrats, the nation-state was to be a Folkhem for the welfare of the Swedish people. The crucial biopolitical question 'Who belongs to the Swedish people?' was thus unavoidable, and this boundary problem of the people corresponded directly to the division of the population enacted and mediated by state racism, as discussed above. Although the Swedish sterilization program did not target individuals based on political affiliation, the fact that eugenics discourse included widespread notions of social misbehavior as hereditary opened up for dehumanizing combinations with prejudiced positions on the lower classes in general as well as on 'Communists' in particular (on theories of deviance in relation to class, see Traub and Little (1999); on notions of deviance during the period here addressed, see Sum- ner (1994)). When proponents of medico-biological discourse found certain behavior to be for example, 'asocial' or 'feebleminded' in conjunction with class, racial and ethnic prejudices, this could not but include a fuzzy distinction between capacities and expressions/behavior. To the extent that the valuation of mental capacities were made dependent upon the expressions/behavior through which capacities were revealed to the person de-



ploying medico-biological discourse, the charac- terization in such terms of an individual's capacity simply risked mirroring the examiner's normative position with regard to certain forms of expression/ behavior. Such a move made an extended repertoire of behavior and ways of thinking possible to understand as genetically embodied. And when such discursive figures were made operative with regard to and intruded upon what we conventionally think of as a separate politico-ideological field of discourse, anti-rational and medico-biological understand- ings of political differences were manifested.

In contrast to the nationalist vision of the Folkhem as a pure body politic made even more so through eugenic purification, 'Communist' inter- nationalism appeared to represent a danger of pol- lution. "This stereotype anticommunism/antide- mocratism often had yet another component: anti- Semitism. And anti-Semitism was in turn associated with cosmopolitanism which similarly to communism was interpreted as anti-national, as potentially treasonous" (Schmidt, 2002, p. 25). The connection 'Jewish Bolshevism' was well established in the 1930s, but the fear of 'Communists' extended beyond anti-Semitism and regularly took the form of a general fear of invasion from outside by less worthy and less capable people of 'Non-A-humans' (although not focused upon anti-communism; see Blomqvist (2006) for an extensive discussion of a racialized notion of 'socialist white- ness' in the Swedish labor movement up until the 1920s). The impact of this kind of thinking is "most clearly manifested in the highly restrictive Swedish immigration laws, which were practised until well after the outbreak of war in 1939" (Berggren, 2002, p. 413). This idea of a pure Swedish space threatened from outside came to expression in an assessment by the Admiral Commander of the Navy Base in Karlskrona, on the Baltic Sea, who believed that Communist propaganda was widespread among conscripts because they were sailors, "among whom communism is quite common, while the conscripts of other units mostly consist of farm- workers and similar laborers who are normally not influenced by communism" (quoted in L66w, 1990, pp. 373-374). Similarly, in "speculating over the uneven geographical spread of communism" and asking why communism was so strong in GbSte- borg, the major Swedish port on the Atlantic coast, a conservative G6teborg newspaper implied the importance of a labor force with international connections (GMP, 30 January, 1940, p. 4). Such sentiments implied that 'Communists' mobilized

more-than-human-aggregates (e.g. language skills, caf6s, bars, shipyards, ports, merchant ships) in ways that were out of control of establishment means of power. Yet this assumed international influence of communism on Swedish 'Communists' was also understood in terms of non-Swedes being less capable: as part of Swedish Social Democrats' anti-communism, Soviet workers were denigrated and understood to be less articulate when compared to "European standards".

In addition to possibilities opened up by the link established above between de-humanization of 'Communists' and the thanato-power of sterilization, "the productivist reasoning of eugenics" (Spektorowski and Mizrachi, 2004, p. 334) expanded the symptoms according to which individuals and groups could be targeted through medico- biological discourse. In the parliamentary debates before the revised sterilization legislation was passed in 1941, the Social Democrat Oscar Olsson "played down the idea of biological inheritance and talked only of 'social inheritance"'. Olsson claimed that "one must as far as possible, prevent the reproduction in coming generations of asocial individuals who lead a socially destructive life" (quoted in Spektorowski and Mizrachi, 2004, p. 349). Spektorowski and Mizrachi make sense of the Swedish Social Democrats' position on eugenics through an analysis of the "strong tenden- cies towards a Fabian concept of industrial democracy and an exclusionist concept of social welfare, serving as a basis for social eugenics" (2004, p. 334). The question, "why and how did Swedish social democratic leaders and intellectu- als think and address similar issues with criteria akin to those of the Fabians?", should, argue Spektorowski and Mizrachi, be understood in light of the focus in the vision of the Folkhem "on issues such as the quality of the population and the central function of social engineering" (2004, pp. 338, 339). The revised Swedish sterilization legislation of 1941 gave expanded room to social in- dicators that particularly targeted itinerant groups and 'antisocial' behavior defined in terms of vagabondry, immorality and idleness (Broberg and Tyd6n, 1996; Spektorowski and Mizrachi, 2004; Zaremba, 1999; see also Cresswell, 2001). One should note here that vagabondry was deployed as an essentially spatial category of misbehavior, and the figure of the vagabond thus unavoidably implied a lack of (productive) "loyalty to fellow countrymen", although not necessarily cosmopolitanism. There is also a religious Christian dimen-


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

sion related to immorality, namely the 'Commu- nist' as an atheist or as otherwise religiously de- viant and therefore morally inferior, which in turn can be related to the notion of the Lutheran work ethic (Thing, 2003) and thus to the paradigm of social productivity.

I wish to connect this reasoning with the important idea of 'inoperosity'. While Agamben's Ital- ian term inoperositct is variously translated into English as 'inoperativeness' (Agamben, 1998, p. 61), 'inoperability' (Agamben, 2000, p. 140), 'in- operativity' (De Boever, 2006, p. 154), and 'inoperosity' (Franchi, 2004, p. 33), the original French term is desoeuvrement. The term may be traced to the figure of the voyou desoeuvr" (in English colloquially rendered as "lazy rascal") of Raymond Queneau's novels as discussed by the French philosopher Kojive, and later by Bataille, Blanchot, and Nancy. In his book La communaute" desoeuvrde (The Inoperative Community), Jean- Luc Nancy imagined "a community without sub- stance, without communion or communism, and in this sense an unmanageable, 'unworking' or 'inoperative' community beyond instrumental control" (Dallmayr, 1997, p. 176). In Agamben's usage, the concept has double references, both to the inoperosity of the sovereign (who thus per- forms sovereignty particularly by not deploying the lethal force which defines the position) and the inoperosity of the lazy rascal, which in Agamben is linked to an idea of a human existence beyond current social forms.Although I share Nancy's understanding of communism as "wedded to the goal of a totalizing and manageable community" (Dall- mayr, 1997, p. 178), I none the less contend that the threat of 'Communists' in the Swedish 1930s and during the Second World War was configured as an unmanageable 'antisocial' threat to the Swedish version of such a goal in terms of the Folkhem. In my use of the notion of 'inoperosity' here, I am further influnced by the critique against Agamben delivered by Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno concerning the importance of"returning the question of bio-politics to the potentiality of la- bour-power" (Neilson, 2004, p. 76).

Everything depends on what is meant by 'inoperativeness'. It can be neither the simple absence of work nor (as in Bataille) a sovereign and useless form of negativity. The only co- herent way to understand inoperativeness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not exhausted (like individual action or

collective action understood as the sum of individual action) in a transitus de potentia ad actum.

(Agamben, 1998, pp. 61-62)

Bringing this thought into resonance with the case at hand, to retain one's labor power, to refuse to have it exhausted in the biopower practices of transitus de potentia ad actum characterizing the efficient Swedish nation-state under the Social Demo- crats, could be understood as an 'antisocial' of- fence. The notion of inoperosity may thus in an in- verse manner be linked to the biopower paradigm of productivity and social eugenics. In that sense the lazy rascal emerged as a mirror image of the "sound A-humans fit for life", hence possible to diagnose in medico-biological terms. In Agamben, inoperosity is understood as a positive element of a "passive politics" which turns against the core notion of homo economicus in Western thinking (see Franchi, 2004). Franchi finds "thematic affinities" between Agamben's notion of 'inoperosity' and the Italian 'workerist' interpretation of Marxism, which in terms of suggested political practice included "a withdrawal of labor, or more generally, a refusal to collaborate with capital in the organization of labor by presenting, for instance demands that cannot be satisfied" (2004, p. 38). I suggest that this connects with the ways in which 'Communist' behavior was experienced from the point of view of those engaged in the Folkhem project of extensive class cooperation between labor and capital. Hence 'antisocial' behavior took shape in the border zone between what appeared to be immoral and illegal in terms of the "insane" "animal uninhibitedness" or "intellectually inferior" refusal of 'Communists' to accept the productivist paradigm of class cooperation, thus displaying target symptoms of social eugenics: lazy and improductive, refusing to work, disorderly, sabotaging production, and so on. In- deed, dehumanizing discourse on 'Communists' did deploy terms and phrases that overlapped with definitions of 'antisocial' behavior, such as: "unreliable", "unwilling", "morally inferior", "behaving impertinently", "trying to find anything good is in vain".

To become social/to regain a place The systematic exclusion of Communist Party members from political bodies and labor union positions as well as Parliamentary proposals to ban the Party and to ban and oust them from Parlia-



ment, police raids and searches, and so on, show how fighting 'Communists' was carried out in terms of spacing into zones of indeterminacy through forms of literally undressing and making naked, forms of taking away rights that had previ- ously belonged to them. The management of 'Communists' was undertaken by measures am- biguously related to legislation, extensive surveillance decided upon by the police and military; legally dubious and initially politically unauthorized drafting of civilian conscripts directly to military labor company camps; police raids and searches neither based on nor producing evidence; the creation of Temporary Custody Registers and detailed plans for the seizure of people; extensive deployment of dehumanizing terminology and thus abusive use of the freedom of speech without in- terference from government, while simultaneously the state enacted dormant censorship legislation and engaged in deliberate misinterpretation of out- dated existing laws in combination with the so- called Transport Prohibition in order to curb free speech. The spacing of 'Communists' into zones of indeterminacy was also explicitly proposed in terms of no longer belonging to the territory in which they were born, and hence directly in terms of citizenship. 'Communists' were recommended to "pack their stuff and deport themselves as fast as possible to their spiritual motherland". Dehu- manization was directly linked to a suggested de- nationalization, which if not effected implied other measures of zoning such as internment and detention: "There is no place for them here". This was not only a more-than-human-aggregate of anti- communism, but what we encounter is a machinic assemblage with lines of abandonment defining and producing the spaces of bios and zoe.

In order to possibly regain a place in the body politic, although in a permanent state of indeterminacy in Agamben's understanding, rules of ritual and cleansing had to be followed. The Social Democratic newspaper the Norrliindska Social- demokraten willingly published statements that were part of such rites of passage from 'antisocial' to 'social'. Apologetic statements from previous communists or alleged 'Communists' appeared repeatedly in the paper's columns. The vehement at- tacks around which this article has circled were not ad hoc labels pasted on to situations that would have been the same without those epithets having been invoked. To again become 'normal' had to include taking on the other's hatred as self-hatred, as an inversion of one's ethos, pathos and logos, to do

what Benjamin encourages us not to do, to make one's own past disappear irretrievably. Between late December 1939 and May 1940, the Norrlind- ska Socialdemokraten published more than thirty statements of the following kind:

The dreamland we thought we saw in the East has been covered in the blood of women and innocent children. That human being who is not indignant in the depth of his/her soul must be a devil in human clothes, worthy of nothing else but all honest humans' deep contempt and holy abhorrence.


Owing to present circumstances, I would hereby like to make public that I for the last seven years have not been a member of the Communist Party, and that I have nothing whatsoever to do with this party or its activities. Indeed, as a righteous worker it is un- thinkable to in any way sympathize with communism.

(NSD, 31 January, 1940, p. 4)

[I], who have never been a member of the Communist Party nor sympathized with its activities, would in this way like to publicly an- nounce these facts and simultaneously state that I regret that I have been exposed to such a misunderstanding. It appears that some ma- levolent person has wanted to harm me per- sonally, harass me in the eyes of my employer, but this will prove unsuccessful, I hope.

(NSD, 1 February, 1940, p. 3)

Michael Landzelius Gateborg University Department of Conservation Sweden E-mail: landzelius @icug.gu.se

Sources Documents in Riksarkivet (RA, The Swedish Na- tional Archive); Krigsarkivet (KrA, The Swedish Military Archive); and the following daily newspapers: Arbetet, Dagens Nyheter (DN), Gdteborgs Handels- och Sj6fartstidning (GHT), Giteborgs Morgonpost (GMP), Norrliindska Social- demokraten (NSD), Ny Tid (NT), Social- Demokraten (SD), Stockholms-Tidningen (ST), Svenska Dagbladet (SvD).


MICHAEL LANDZELIUS

References AGAMBEN, G. (1993): The Coming Community. University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. AGAMBEN, G. (1998): Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare

Life. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. AGAMBEN, G. (1999): Remnants ofAuschwitz: The Witness and

the Archive. Zone Books, New York. AGAMBEN, G. (2000): Means Without End: Notes on Politics.

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. AGAMBEN, G. (2001): 'On security and terror'. Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 September, 2001, trans. Soenke Zehle [www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-on-security-and- terror.html].

AGAMBEN, G. (2002): 'The state of emergency'. Extract from a lecture given in 2002 at the Centre Roland-Barthes, Univer- site Paris VII, Denis-Diderot, trans. unknown [www.genera- tion-online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm].

AGAMBEN, G. (2004): 'Life, a work of art without an author: the state of exception, the administration of disorder and private life', Siiddeutsche Zeitung, 6 April, 2004. Interview by Ulrich Raulff, trans. Morag Goodwin. [www.germanlawjour- nal.com/article.php?id=437]

AGAMBEN, G. (2005): State of Exception. The University of

Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. ALM, M. (2005): 'Den svenska Sovjetbilden 1935-1947', in

KOLL, A. M. (ed.): Kommunismens ansikten: repression, ivervakning och svenska reaktioner. Symposion, Stockholm/ Stehag, pp. 19-49.

ANDOLF, G. (1984): 'The social origins of the Swedish officer corps during the twentieth century', Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire, No. 57: 187-214.

ANDOLF, G. (1994): 'De gri lapparna: regeringen och pressen under andra viirldskriget', in HUGEMARK, B. (ed.): Nya fronter? 1943 - spiind vdntan. Probus, Stockholm, pp. 304- 349.

BENJAMIN, W. (1940): 'On the concept of history'/'Theses on the philosophy of history' [www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/ staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html].

BERGGREN, L. (2002): 'Swedish fascism - why bother?', Jour- nal of Contemporary History, 37: 395-417.

BEVIR, M. (2002): 'Sidney Webb: utilitarianism, positivism and social democracy', The Journal of Modern History, 74: 217- 252.

BLOMQVIST, H. (2003): '"Socialismus Asiaticus": Bolsjevis- men som orientaliskt hot f6r svenska socialdemokrater', in BLOMQVIST, H. and EKDAHL, L. (eds): Kommunismen hot och lofte: arbetarrbrelsen i skuggan av Sovjetunionen 1917-1991. Carlssons, Stockholm, pp. 13-38.

BLOMQVIST, H. (2006): Nation, ras och civilisation i svensk ar- betarrirelse fire nazismen. Carlssons, Stockholm.

BOETHIUS, M-P. (1992) Heder och samvete: Sverige och andra

viirldskriget. Norstedts, Stockholm. BRING,T. (1985): 'Arbetskompaniernas firhistoria', Militiirhis-

torisk Tidskrift, 39-63. BROBERG, G. (1995): Statlig rasforskning: en historik over Ras-

biologiska institutet. Lund University, Lund. BROBERG, G. and TYDtN, M. (1991): 06nskade ifolkhemmet:

rashygien och sterilisering i Sverige. Gidlunds, Stockholm. BROBERG, G. and TYDEN, M. (1996): 'Eugenics in Sweden: ef-

ficient care', in BROBERG, G. and ROLL-HANSEN, N. (eds): Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, pp. 77-149.

CRESSWELL, T. (2001): The Tramp in America. Reaktion Books, London.

CRONENBERG, A. (1984): 'The armed forces as instruments of

security policy', Revue Internationale d'Histoire Militaire, No. 57: 135-186.

DALLMAYR, F. (1997): 'An "inoperative" global community? Reflections on Nancy', in SHEPPARD, D., SPARKS, S. and THOMAS, C. (eds): The Sense of Philosophy: On Lean-Luc Nancy. Routledge, London, pp. 174-196.

DE BOEVER, A. (2006): 'Overhearing Bartleby: Agamben, Melville, and inoperative power', Parrhesia, 1: 142-162.

DELEUZE, G. and GUATTARI, F. (1987): A Thousand Pla- teaus: Capitalism and Schizoprenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN.

DERRIDA, J. (1974): Of Grammatology. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

DERRIDA, J. (1992): 'Force of law: "The mystical foundation of

authority"', in CORNELL, D., ROSENFELD, M. and CARL- SON, D. (eds): Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice.

Routledge, London, pp. 3-65. DILLON, M. (2005): 'Cared to death: the biopoliticised time of

your life', Foucault Studies, 2: 37-46. DOUGLAS, T. (1995): Scapegoats: Transferring Blame.

Routledge, London. DRANGEL, L. (1976): Den kdmpande demokratin: en studie i

antinazistisk opinionsrdrelse 1935-1945. Liber F6rlag, Stockholm.

EKMAN, S. (ed.) (1986): Stormaktstryck och smiistatspolitik: As-

pekter pd svensk politik under andra viirldskriget. Liber, Stockholm.

EKMAN, S. (1997): 'Skilful Realpolitik or unprincipled oppor- tunism: the Swedish coalition government's foreign policy in debate and research', in EKMAN, S. and EDLING, N. (eds): War Experience, Self Image and National Identity: The Sec- ond World War as Myth and History. The Bank of Sweden

Tercentenary Foundation and Gidlunds, Stockholm, pp. 188- 208.

EKMAN, S. (2003): 'Introduction', in EKMAN, S. and AMARK, K. (eds): Sweden's Relations with Nazism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The Swedish Research Council, Stockholm, pp. 11-30.

ELIASSON, U. (2005): Overvakning i firsvarets intresse: sdiker- hetspolisens 6vervakning och registrering av ytterlighetspar- tier 1917-1945. Stockholm University, Stockholm.

FITZPATRICK, S. and GELLATELY, R. (1997): 'Introduction to the practices of denunciation in modern European history', in FITZPATRICK, S. and GELLATELY, R. (eds): Accusa-

tory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History 1789-1989. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, pp. 1-21.

FLYGHED, J. (1992): Riittsstat i kris: spioneri och sabotage i Sverige under andra viirlskriget. Federativs, Stockholm.

FOUCAULT, M. (1972): The Archaeology of Knowledge. Tavis- tock, London.

FOUCAULT, M. (1980): 'Truth and power', in GORDON, C. (ed.): Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writ-

ings 1972-1977. The Harvester Press, Brighton. FOUCAULT, M. (1997a): 'Security, territory, population', in

RABINOW, P. (ed.): Essential Works, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjec- tivity and Truth. The New Press, New York, pp. 67-71.

FOUCAULT, M. (1997b): 'The birth of biopolitics', in RAB- INOW, P. (ed.): Essential Works, Vol. 1: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press, New York, pp. 73-79.

FOUCAULT, M. (2003): Society Must Be Defended. Penguin, London.

FRANCHI, S. (2004): 'Passive politics', Contretemps, 5: 30-41.



FRYKMAN, J. (1981): 'Pure and rational, the hygienic vision: a study of cultural transformation in the 1930s', Ethnologia Scandinavica: 36-63.

FRYKMAN, J. (1994): 'On the move: the struggle for the body in Sweden in the 1930s', in SEREMETAKIS, C. N. (ed.): The Senses Still. Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Westview Press, Boulder, CO pp. 63-85.

GELLATELY, R. and STOLTZFUS, N. (2001): 'Social outsiders and the construction of the community of people', in GEL- LATELY, R. and STOLTZFUS, N. (eds): Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 3-19.

GENEL, K. (2004): 'Le biopouvoir chez Foucault et Agamben', Methodos, 4. [methodos.revues.org/documentl31 .html].

HELD, D. (1995): Democracy and the Global Order. From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Polity Press, Cambridge.

HIRDMAN, Y. (1974): Sverges Kommunistiska Parti 1939- 1945. Allminna Fdrlaget, Stockholm.

HIRDMAN, Y. (1989): Att liigga livet till riitta: studier i svensk

folkhemspolitik. Carlssons, Stockholm. JAMESON, F. (1984): 'Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of

late capitalism', New Left Review, No. 146: 53-92. JOHANNISON, K. (1997): Kroppens tunna skal: sex essdier omn

kropp, historia och kultur. Norstedts, Stockholm.

JONSSON, L-E. (1998): Det terapeutiska rummet: rum och kropp i svensk sinnessjukvdrd 1850-1970. Carlssons, Stockholm.

KELLY, M. (2004): 'Racism, nationalism and biopolitics: Foucault's Society Must be Defended, 2003', Contretemps, 4: 58-70.

KIERI, G. and SUNDSTROM, I. (1985): Fdrsta arbetskompaniet Storsien (3rd rev. edn) Arbetarkultur, Stockholm.

LANDZELIUS, M. (1996): 'The politics of spatial imagery: Swedish internment camps in World War II', paper presented at the 5th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, 14-17 December, 1996, University of California, Berkeley, CA.

LANDZELIUS, M. (1999): 'Spatial distortions of democracy: Swedish military camps and the abjects within', paper presented at the 4th 'Other Connections' Conference, 25-28 Oc- tober, American University of Beirut.

LANDZELIUS, M. (2003): 'Commemorative dis(re)membering: erasing heritage, spatializing disinheritance', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21: 195-221.

LANDZELIUS, M. (2004): 'The body', in DUNCAN, J., JOHN- SON, N. and SCHEIN, R. (eds): A Companion to Cultural Geography. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 279-297.

LATOUR, B. (2005): Reassembling the Social. Oxford Univer-

sity Press, Oxford. LINDHOLM, G. A. (1995): Viigarnas folk: de resande och deras

livsviirld. Etnologiska fireningen i Viistsverige, Gdteborg. LOOW, H. (1990): Hakkorset och Wasakiirven: En studie av na-

tionalsocialismen i Sverige 1924-1950. Gbteborg University, G6teborg.

MARGARONI, M. (2005): 'Care and abandonment: a response to Mika Ojakangas' 'Impossible dialogue on bio-power: Ag- amben and Foucault', Foucault Studies, No. 2: 29-36.

MINCA, C. (2005): 'Viewpoint: the return of the camp',Progress in Human Geography, 29: 405-412.

MOLIN, K. (1974): Fdrsvaret, folkhemmet och demokratin. So- cialdemokratisk riksdagspolitik 1939-1945. Allmiinna For-

laget, Stockholm.

MOLIN, K. (1982): Hemmakriget. Om den svenska krigsmaktens htgirder mot kommunister under andra viirldskriget. Tidens, Stockholm.

MOLIN, K. (1983): 'Den svenska antikommunismen: attityder och motiv 1929-1941', Meddelande frdn arbetarriirelsens arkiv och bibliotek, No. 24-25: 44-51.

NEILSON, B. (2004): 'Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism', Contretemps, 5: 63-78.

NILSSON, K. N. A. (1996): Svensk iverklassnazism 1930-1945. Carlssons, Stockholm.

OJAKANGAS, M. (2005): 'Impossible dialogue on bio-power: Agamben and Foucault', Foucault Studies, No. 2: 5-28.

OLDBERG, U. (1972): Attentatet mot Norrskensflamman. Bon- niers, Stockholm.

OLSSON, G. (1991): Lines of Power/Limits of Language. Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. POLLACK, E. (2005): 'Moskvaprocesserna i svensk press', in

KOLL, A. M. (ed.): Kommunismens ansikten: repression, 6vervakning och svenska reaktioner. Symposion, Stockholm/ Stehag, pp. 50-84.

PRED, A. (1992): 'Pure and simple lines, future lines of vision: the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930', Nordisk Samhiillsgeo- grafisk Tidskrift: 3-61.

PRED, A. (1995): Recognizing European Modernities. A Mon-

tage of the Present. Routledge, London. PROTEVI, J. (2006): 'The Terri Schiavo case: biopolitics and

biopower: Agamben and Foucault', paper presented at the 6th Annual Foucault Circle Conference, University of Memphis.

RICHARDSON, G. (1996): Beundran ochfruktan: Sverige infir Tyskland 1940-1942. Carlssons, Stockholm.

RUNCIS, M. (1998): Steriliseringar i folkhemmet. Ordfront, Stockholm.

SCHMIDT, W. (2002): Antikommunism och kommunism under det korta 1900-talet. Nordic Academic Press, Lund.

SPEKTOROWSKI, A. and MIZRACHI, E. (2004): 'Eugenics and the Welfare State in Sweden: the politics of social margins and the idea of a productive society', Journal of Contempo- rary History, 39: 333-352.

SUMNER, C. (1994): The Sociology of Deviance. Open Univer- sity Press, Buckingham.

THING, M. (2003): ANTI: Begreberne antikommunisme - an- tisemitisme og deres historie. Roskilde Universitetsbibliotek, Roskilde.

TRAUB, S. H. and LITTLE, C. B. (1999): Theories of Deviance, (5th rev. edn) F.E. Peacock Publishers, Itasca, IL.

TYDEN, M. (2002): Frin politik till praktik: de svenska sterili- seringslagarna 1935-1975. Almqvist & Wiksell Internation- al, Stockholm.

TYDiN, M. (2006): 'Rashygien i omvandling: det eugeniska pro- jektet i Sverige under inre och yttre tryck'. Presentation of ongoing research project funded by the Swedish Research Coun- cil [www.historia.su.se/swenaz/pages/tyden.htmj.

WECHSELMANN, M. (1995) De bruna f6rbindelserna. Ord- fronts Fdrlag, Stockholm.

ZAREMBA, M. (1999): De rena och de andra: om tvdingssteri- liseringar, rashygien och arvssynd. Bokf6rlaget DN, Stock- holm.

ZETTERBERG, K. (1993): 'Presspolitik som sikerhetspolitik: en studie i statsmakternas presspolitik under det andra viirldskriget', Presshistorisk irsbok: 60-81.
