It is election time and the all the well-known political themes are flourishing. One theme that seems unable to sustain its steady dominance since 2001, however, is that of national identity. This, of course, poses a bit of a problem for the party primarily devoted to this sole theme. They appear strangely left out and ignored and their cries for a significant position in the spotlight sound ever more hysterical.
One such desperate voice belongs to Marie Krarup, daughter of long time member of parliament for the Danish People’s Party (DF) Søren Krarup. He is retiring this year but the next generation is ready to take over, to continue the fight for “true conservatism.”
Klaus Wivel interviewed her for Weekendavisen and her statements played in a similar key to that of the Zizek quote brought up in Che vuoi? A spinning top made out of pork:
One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted “between the lines,” through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition […]
In my own sloppy translation, Marie Krarup said the following:
The values represented by my father and Jesper [Langballe] are a well considered conservatism, where you feel rooted in Denmark and want to fight for God, King and country, and where you have the arguments to support it. The value of my father’s and Jesper’s presence in parliament has sprung from their ability to precisely formulate the feelings of the silent majority that we do not want to be a multicultural society; we do not want to lose our identity; and we do not want to be shut down by the EU. […] What the Danish People’s Party represents is the ordinary danishness that people are unable to specify.
Do these repeated references to a lacking ability of the silent majority to precisely formulate a national identity not revolve around the spectral dimension sustaining an explicit symbolic tradition? Or some sort of desperate necromantic conjuring of ancestral ghosts to revive a faded symbolic tradition that no longer seems so explicit and coherent? A necromantic conjuring that turns into hysterical cries of an obscurantist hocus pocus when realising that it has forgotten the proper incantation?
“My father and Jesper” were the ones able to communicate with the ancestral ghosts and Marie Krarup is ready to assume the role of shaman. But she seems daunted by the task and aware of her own impotence. The paternal generation was supposedly able to speak for the “silent majority” but, at the same time, the vast majority is brainwashed. Not to be brainwashed is to be an exception, part of the resistance:
Luckily, not everyone is brainwashed. Not everyone finished their higher education in Denmark
“Not everyone…” The few, those happy few, who are not brainwashed but persecuted by the inhabitants of Denmark. Where does the silent majority fit in? They are the real Danes, the ones not brainwashed by the globalised, multicultural elite, the one who feel that “What is Danish is not great enough. We have to be international, global, and such fancy stuff.” The silent majority was silenced by the elite nomenclature, the journalists, the scholars, the artists.
This blurred opposition of silent majority versus cultural elite nomenclature is felt all through the interview:
We also have communists. It is also a part of Danish culture to be convinced by such atrocities. Of course, Danish culture is many things. But luckily, the dominant mood is to support Denmark and its flag – a community surrounding the flag, the church and the queen. We still have that. It is just that only few appreciate it.
The dominant mood is only appreciated by the few. The true essence of Denmark – the flag, the queen and the church – still persists, but only among the few. She acknowledges that this is because Denmark has changed:
Yes, and I want to fight it. I want to fight the brainwashing, the internationalization and multiculturalism that seeks to demonise danishness.
The silent majority shall be liberated from the reigning majority, the crushing elite nomenclature and its brainwashing demonising of all things Danish. This demonising, perhaps, consists not in the active disavowal of the spectral dimension but the refusal to sacralize it. Not revering the tabu and its flag totem, this multicultural internationalist heresy, turns the protective paternal ghosts into demons. No wonder, then, that the “next generation” seeks to revive the shamanic powers of the fathers, the ability to talk to ghosts, revive the spectral foundation, vanquish the dominant heretical blasphemy and liberate the unseen, silent majority of true believers. Believers in what? The flag, God, Queen, the Church and country? They are but the fetishist’s stand-ins for the spectral dimension. Believers in what, then? Only the ghosts know.
