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Since the end of World War II, the possibility of fascism and totalitarianism as a global threat continues to proliferate in American art and literature to the point that many individuals paradoxically desire the very things that seek to control them. Postmodern literature often portrays fascism and totalitarianism as it exists under contemporary capitalist systems as a multiplicity of discreet machines operating within objects of desire. These objects are complicated by the 24-hour news cycle and the popularity of solitary, on-demand entertainment that in turn mediates the desires and fears of a population through strict control of information. This thesis examines works by George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace through a post-structural lens and seeks to explore the moments in these novels where desire and fascism intersect to create an endless, self-replicating form of control that is often too discreet to notice.

This thesis examines the unique set of circumstances which led to the rapid rise of a supposed right-wing populist party in Sweden. The Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) are not the first nationalist party to enter the Swedish parliament, but are the first to survive multiple parliamentary elections and are currently the third largest party in parliament. This thesis argues the Sverigedemokraterna do not constitute a political party, but remain a populist movement within Swedish politics, are not right-wing but rather a lagom-inspired hybrid, and the stabilizing effects of the culture of lagom prevents the permanence of extremism in Swedish politics. The increase in immigrants from predominantly Muslim states due to the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war stoke the anti-Islamic rhetoric of this nationalist group, but did not cause their rapid ascent and neither did the entry of Sweden into the European Economic Community. The Sverigedemokraterna are a single-point culmination of a century of nationalist and fascist groups splitting and merging within Sweden, but as other groups continue to appear the SD cannot be the only culmination. / Master of Arts

Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have attempted to understand why Fascist Italy chose to adopt the racial laws in 1938. For sixteen years, Benito Mussolini rejected the existence of antisemitism in Italy, leading many to assert that the antisemitic program was a foreign import. The rise of Nazi Germany, expansion of Fascist Italy's colonial empire, and the desire to create the new fascist man are generally believed to be the main factors that pushed Italian fascism towards a racial program. Yet these factors do not fully explain the radical shift in Fascist Italy's approach to its Jewish minority. This dissertation argues that the turn towards official racism should also take into consideration the development of fascism's other long-standing minority program. Beginning in 1923, the Fascist government instituted policies to "Italianize" the Germanic and Slavic ethno-linguistic minority communities of South Tyrol (Venezia Tridentina) and the Adriatic (Venezia Giulia), known as the allogeni. To "make Italians" of the allogeni the Fascist government stripped them of their linguistic, cultural and political rights, and attempted to absorb them into the national community. However, by the end of the 1920s, Fascist officials began to question whether the assimilation of these ethno-linguistic Others was sufficient or even desirable. I argue that the failures of Italianization led to the delegitimization of assimilation - the foundation upon which Jewish inclusion had been built. The decline of assimilation was an important precursor to the rise of fascism's racial program. This dissertation posits that the borderland Italianization program and racial laws were different phases of the Fascist "redemptive struggle," aimed at redeeming the Italian people and nation through their unification in both being and spirit. The borderland Italianization programs also established some of the methods and procedures that would be adopted for the implementation of the racial laws.

This thesis examines the history of the Office of Special Investigations' campaign to identify, denaturalize, and deport Nazis and Nazi collaborators. By analyzing documents from the work of the Office's predecessor, the Special Litigations Unit, in 1977, up to and including the case of George Lindert in 1995, this research aims to provide an understanding of the Office's origins, methods, and motivations. This work was done through the consultation of court records, internal memos, letters, an official government report on the Office's activities, other literature written on this topic, and interviews conducted by the author with two former members of the Office of Special Investigations. This paper finds that while the Office did manage to bring numerous persecutors to justice, and greatly contributed to the broader understanding of the inner-workings of the Holocaust, the long delay before the United States undertook these proceedings, the lack of clarity in the law regarding the subject, and the highly political nature of this public effort all resulted in inconsistent and sometimes questionable outcomes. Going forward, proactive investigations and clear legislation could aid in avoiding such difficulties in the future.

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