Well
first off Lucia is the big winter festival here
The story of St. Lucy is what all Swedish school children celebrate on or around December 13th and is as big if not bigger than school nativities or any other religious ritual/observance in the UK
It’s a huge part of Swedish Christian ritual & every school child takes part, all pre-schools too
All Lucia celebrations involve a Luciatåg - a procession with St. Lucy and her candle crown leading the parade.
It’s a big deal to be chosen to be Lucia and lead your school Luciatåg and traditionally Lucia has been a blonde, blue-eyed girl (despite St. Lucy actually being Sicilian)
So anyway Lucia has for at least a couple of hundred years been some kind of proxy Swedish/Christian beauty pageant (with all the white supremacist/crusader overtones that go with it)
As you’d expect, this has more recently resulted in the Lucia question becoming something of a focal point for the ‘political correctness’ debate as various schools have either chosen male Lucias or non-aryan Lucias or altered the pagaent in other ways as to make it more inclusive
So, December 2016 and Ahléns - Sweden’s biggest department store with a 120 year history and branches in every high street ‘unveil’ their Lucia
cue internet hatestorm war between would-be Swexiters & would-be Swemainers
Entirely predictable & clearly part of the marketing campaign to ‘go viral’ in this way, Åhléns marketing dept. sitting on their woke high horse & loving every repost
So what? Well, at the centre of this storm is an actual 10 year old boy who’s seeing his face all over the news & mainstream media and his family who are receiving death threats and hate mail.
Åhléns refuse to take down the picture/end the campaign because that would be ‘giving in to racists’ meanwhile the boy & his family want the company to stop the campaign because of the threats & anxiety they are having to deal with. Eventually the company give in to the parents’ demands
So what did we learn?
Well it’s actually astonishing just how little criticism there was of the company itself. Even otherwise sane individuals I spoke to had extreme difficulty in parsing Åhléns marketed image of a diverse & inclusive Sweden of fair representation with their actual actions ie exploiting a 10 year old child and exposing them to the danger of public anger in order to sell goods
See, a lot of people don’t seem to realise that scaling up what is done voluntarily under the right conditions on a grass roots or personal level (ie individual schools or groups breaking norms or taboos) to a mass media marketing campaign is hugely damaging on a variety of levels.
That misappropriation of real movements, feelings & ideas critical of a system get subsumed, regurgitated & resold as lifestyle choices for a season by that very same system is a precise mechanism that confuses our picture of the world and feeds into our apathy & powerlessness
it’s also why so many people think that racism/facism & anti-racism/anti-facism are ‘two sides of the same coin’
it’s a fucking cancer
