The ‘Volk en Vaderland’ (VoVa) weekly newspaper served as the principal propaganda tool which allowed the Dutch fascist organisation National Socialist Movement – Netherlands (NSB) to propagate a meticulous blend of antisemitic, anti-Marxist and anti-‘establishment’ conspiracy theories, operating in complementary capacity to the ill-defined palingenetic vision of Dutch national rebirth (‘palingenesis’). Later in the wartime collaboration years, the various components of Dutch fascism were concretised (‘finished’) not by the NSB but by the Berlin-directed civilian occupation regime. As will be presented, utilising mixed-methods content analysis, VoVa’s double scrutiny in both a quantitative and qualitative examination points to the conclusion that the collaboration period had a stout germanisation effect on the completion and even replacement of the various facets of the initial NSB ideology: With pan-Dutch nationalism becoming increasingly outphased by pan-Germanicism; anti-jewish measures being introduced in the Netherlands by Berlin supported by NSB propaganda; and, finally, the revitalisation of ‘abolitionist’ antisemitic and anti-Marxist rhetoric occurring in virtue of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Thus, skewing the expectations of the natural fascist development under a heuristic fascist studies theory model, with particular attention paid to the elements most relevant to Holocaust & genocide studies, the NSB case study alludes to various noteworthy effects of intra-fascist wartime collaboration, and how it completed or even altered the propagated visions for societal transformations and persecutions. Therein, the thesis finishes with the recommendation that other national fascist organisations across World War Two Europe may have suffered equal changes to their abolitionist and palingenetic agendas following intra-fascist wartime collaboration with Germany and Italy; requesting further research is engaged in on other such fascist organisations across Europe, and not only for the Dutch example now treated in this study.

The focus of this thesis is on the process of myth-making (mythopoeia) in the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB) and the Swedish National Socialist Workers' Party (NSAP), using a cultural pragmatic approach to analyse the practicalities and implementation of mythopoeia comparatively. A variety of fascist performances, scripted and unscripted, are considered as having mythopoeic potential, and understood as performative in character, i.e. constituting the thing they claimed to represent. Multiple parts of this mythopoeic process are analysed: the resources, organisation, and technologies required to implement it, and the nature of the process, the events, performances, in other words the actual implementation, and reception by audiences. Secondly, it uses respectability as a means of seeing how in a national context this process was limited, inhibited, or otherwise defined by the standards of the public and media, to which fascists ultimately tried to appeal, thus providing an external perspective on fascist activities to contextualise them. The thesis is divided into four chapters, which deal with the party apparatus, leader myth, political uniforms, and the role of aesthetics and spectacle respectively. Together these chapters explore the relationship between mythopoeia and respectability as refracted through party organisation and administration, as embodied by the 'charismatic' fascist Leader, in the day-to-day behaviour and appearance of the rank-and-file, and ultimately the holistic experience of fascist aesthetics, i.e. the fully scripted and organised spectacles of party congresses. Ultimately it is shown that the fascist movements of Sweden and the Netherlands were highly innovative organisations. Mythopoeia had a powerful mobilising capacity, which could make up for the diminutive financial power and low membership figures of fascist parties. Finally it appears that the relationship between myth and respectability was not a straightforward dialectical one, but multivalent, and highly dynamic.

SammanfattningI  denna  studie  utforskas  kapaciteterna  och  begränsningarna  hos  avancerade  stora språkmodeller (SSM), med särskilt fokus på ChatGPT-4 och Google Bard. Studien inleds med att ge en historisk bakgrund till artificiell intelligens och hur denna utveckling har lett fram till skapandet av dessa modeller. Därefter genomförs en kritisk analys av deras prestanda i språkbehandling och problemlösning. Genom att evaluera deras effektivitet i hanteringen av nyhetsinnehåll och sociala medier, samt i utförandet av kreativa uppgifter som pussel, belyses deras förmåga inom språklig bearbetning samt de utmaningar de möter i att förstå nyanser och utöva kreativt tänkande.I denna studie framkom det att SSM har en avancerad förmåga att förstå och reagera på komplexa språkstrukturer. Denna förmåga är dock inte utan begränsningar, speciellt när det kommer till uppgifter som kräver en noggrann bedömning för att skilja mellan sanning och osanning. Denna observation lyfter fram en kritisk aspekt av SSM:ernas nuvarande kapacitet, de är effektiva inom många områden, men möter fortfarande utmaningar i att hantera de finare nyanserna i mänskligt språk och tänkande. Studiens resultat betonar även vikten av mänsklig tillsyn vid användning av artificiell intelligens (AI), vilket pekar på behovet av att ha realistiska förväntningar på AI:s kapacitet och betonar vidare betydelsen av en ansvarsfull utveckling  av  AI,  där  en  noggrann  uppmärksamhet  kring etiska  aspekter  är  central.  En kombination av mänsklig intelligens och AI föreslås som en lösning för att hantera komplexa utmaningar, vilket bidrar till en fördjupad förståelse av avancerade språkmodellers dynamik och deras roll inom AI:s bredare utveckling och tillämpning.