Anti-fascist discourses, practices and confrontations in 1930s Iceland

This chapter considers the ways in which fascism found resistance by exploring anti-fascist discourses, practices and confrontations in 1930s Iceland. Communist politics during the early 1930s in Iceland entailed an emphasis on direct action against the employers and the bourgeois state apparatus. When considering interwar Icelandic anti-fascism, it is important to bear in mind that the Icelandic Social Democratic and labour movement was younger, weaker and far less centralised than its sister parties in the Scandinavian countries. The emergence of organised fascism in Iceland in 1933 marked the beginning of a long and ambiguous relationship with the Independence Party. In 1933, Icelandic Communists orchestrated several actions where workers protested against the Nazi takeover in Germany. Entering the Icelandic political landscape during the early days of Nazi Germany’s dissolved democracy, and violent persecution of its political adversaries, the Icelandic Nazis were seen as a threat to the existence of the radical left, and to the labour movement as a whole.