Children imitate their parents. So also the children of the upper class. But the sons and daughters of the aristocracy are also naturally reflected in previous lineages – they are named after their grandparents and inherit land, jewelry and money from them. Are the ideological inclinations of the ancestors also traded? The contempt for democracy? The feeling of being chosen? The blood and birth mystery?
Of course, it's not that simple. The Nordic Resistance Movement - the terror-classified sect that administers Nazism's ideas about the importance of a pure-bred body of people - is not a political force in Östermalm or in the villa towns on Lidingö or Djursholm.
It seems unlikely that the 4.7 percent of students at the Manilla School who voted for NMR imitated their parents - that ideas from the movement's hard-line and convicted "dialogue patriots" in Bergslagen would have been traded at the kitchen tables on Narvavägen and the surrounding area.
One cannot ignore the fact that some of the school's most notable students are born into families with Nazi family histories.
But if you are to understand the fun of the elite students in this year's school elections - the prank to provide NMR with a parliamentary mandate - you can perhaps also not ignore the fact that some of the school's most notable students are born into families with Nazi family histories. That that legacy lived in the grandparents' growing up environments. They have jokingly voted for a party that manages a family tradition. Perhaps not because they themselves are filled with a violent hatred of multiculturalism. But because it's tickling to play with the uniforms in the attic, the shameful skeleton of one's own family history.
In the summer of 2023, I posted an innocuous photo on Instagram of a relative wearing a kippah, the Jewish headdress. Soon I received a direct message from a former acquaintance, a father who had children at another of Stockholm's most prestigious schools. Jews, he informed me, are "rats of the earth". The frankness took me by surprise. Are you serious, I had to ask. "Beware of the Jew. Simple," he replied. It had been a few years then since DN revealed that students from Fredrikhov Castle's school sang on film to the tunes of Richard Wagner during a study trip to Auschwitz.
Of course, not everyone at Manilla and Fredrikshovs are descendants of royalty or nobility. Just like at Lundsberg, the student body is a combination of old ancestry and new money. The father who enlightened me about the nature of the Jews is an upstart with roots in the suburban hip-hop environment. The racist jargon that is repeated in the rituals of the elite schools alloy aristocratic anti-Semitism with the kind of Jew-hatred that Kanye West has made himself a spokesperson for, as Expressen revealed in the Left Party during this year's election campaign, and which fills the internal chats of Republican youth associations in the United States.
The fact that NMR's racial biology is considered to have comedic potential at elite schools with royalty in its ranks could possibly also be due to a kind of latent anxiety in the collective student body. Children in Manilla are hardly unaware that they are placed there because their parents have ambitions for their schooling, they must manage the family's money, secure the family's status and assets. In a grotesquely twisted form, this is roughly what the ideology of the Nordic Resistance Movement is all about: save the tribe from invasive species for another generation, ensure the survival of the Nordic gene pool.
In that respect, the Manilla School's votes on NMR are perhaps to be seen as an ironic protest against the parents' intentions, rather than a confirmation of their political choice.
