Battleground of Humanisms: How Väinö Linna’s Under the North Star United What Liberalism, Socialism, and Fascism Tore Apart

ABSTRACT

In the contest between the three major modern political ideologies—liberalism, socialism, and fascism—the Nordic countries found a middle way with social democracy. For over four decades, Finland remained a class-divided anomaly after the failed socialist revolution in 1918 and fascist rebellion in the 1930s. Väinö Linna’s Under the North Star trilogy (1959–62), one of history’s most directly influential literary works, helped the Finns come to terms with their painful past, which enabled them to rejoin the Nordic path of social togetherness. By drawing on Yuval Noah Harari’s work on the history of human ideologies, my analysis of Linna’s trilogy suggests that insights from works of fiction that help societies unite may also prove useful for meeting the challenges we are expected to face in the present century, as we move toward a posthumanist era.

KEYWORDS:

• Väinö Linna
• Yuval Noah Harari
• fiction
• social democracy
• humanism
• liberalism
• fascism
• socialism

Notes

^1. Linna, Under the North Star; The Uprising: Under the North Star 2; Reconciliation: Under the North Star 3.

^2. Tepora, “Coming to Terms,” 488–90.

^3. Armstrong, “Ambiguity and Remembrance,” 597; Heimo, “Places Lost, Memories Regained,” 48.

^4. Laine, Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Here, Beneath the North Star); Akseli ja Elina (Akseli and Elina).

^5. Arto, “Kotimaiset suosikkielokuvat toiveuusintoina.”

^6. Halmari, “Power Relationships and Register Variation,” 36.

^7. Eskola, “Literature and Interpretative Communities,” 363–64.

^8. Pratt and Eriksson, Contrasts in Punishment.

^9. For more on the public debate that followed after Under the North Star 2, and for an account of how the film adaptations, as well, had a strong influence on this process of reconciliation, see Larsen, “Agreeing on History.”

^10. Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, Nordic Model of Social Democracy, 107.

^11. Fukuyama, End of History.

^12. Courtois, Panné, Paczkowski, Bartosek, Margolin, and Werth, eds., Black Book of Communism, 4.

^13. Linna, Under the North Star, 3. Hereafter the trilogy is abbreviated as follows: UNS1, UNS2, and UNS3, with page numbers cited in the text.

^14. Stormbom, Väinö Linna, 168–69.

^15. Browning, Constructivism, 112.

^16. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, “Pride and Prejudice,” 200.

^17. Tikka, “Warfare and Terror,” 117–18.

^18. Lindström, “Fascism in Scandinavia,” 297–308.

^19. Schoolfield, “Might-Have-Beens,” 237.

^20. Kissinger, “How the Enlightenment Ends.”

^21. Gates, “What Are the Biggest Problems.”

^22. Bostrom, “Vulnerable World Hypothesis.”

^23. Žižek, “Plea for Bureaucratic Socialism.”

^24. Every year since its first publication in 2012, The World Happiness Report has ranked the five Nordic countries among the top ten happiest nations in the world. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, Nordic countries occupied the top three spots. See Helliwell et al., World Happiness Report2020. For an account of why these countries perform so well, see “The Nordic Exceptionalism: What Explains Why the Nordic Countries are Constantly Among the Happiest in the World,” chapter 7 of the 2020 Report.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mads Larsen

Mads Larsen, MFA, is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation project, “Evolution Toward Social Democracy in a Millennium of Nordic Fiction,” focuses on the origins of Scandinavian egalitarianism and shows the mechanisms through which works of fiction can help humanity adapt to the disruptions brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. His work has been published in various journals, including Comparative Literature, Memory Studies, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and World Futures.