Sweden’s best selling newspaper has denounced Disney’s blockbuster animated film The Lion King as fascist propaganda, and has suggested Swedish youth should be shown films of migrant children coming to Europe instead.
Disney villain ‘Scar’ surveys his massed troops, an army of Hyenas recruited abroad. Far from a fascistic scene, Walden believes Scar to be a comic “cultural Marxist” who is defeated by the fascist hero, ‘Simba’ / Disney / Youtube
Turning the more common idea of the film’s villain ‘Scar’ as a fascistic dictator on its head, Aftonbladet columnist Andrev Walden has re-cast the protagonist child-lion ‘Simba’ as a fascist folk hero that plays to the narratives of Sweden’s nationalist and populist parties.
Rather than famous scenes from the children’s classic showing the king’s brother reviewing his invasion troops as a homage to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the “disfigured, feminised” lion is an allegory for a cultural Marxist leader.
Although most likely lost on children, the imagery should be plainly obvious to adult watchers, explains Walden, as the character fits the idea of Marxist political actors as lacking in the traditional masculine leadership qualities right-wingers apparently enjoy.
Scar as a “weak” leftist has to “short circuit the natural order with lies and deceit”.
The over-reaching plot too is a typical fascist “blood and soil” laden with fascist sexual imagery, he argues, with lion-cub ‘Simba’ playing the role of the people’s hero. After the ascent to power of the left-wing Scar, who welcomes into the previous harmonious animal kingdom an invasion force of “degenerate” foreigners — Hyenas — the honest taxpayers of the land are forced to work harder to pay for their new guests.
In Walden’s words: “Hyenas, invariably useless, called early in the film “Dirty spongers” park themselves in sleepy groups around the Lion Rock. The original rulers are now forced to work twice as hard to provide both themselves and the work-shy migrants with food”.
The nation having been “plagued by parasites and a loss of masculinity” now enjoys a “purification and rebirth” with the hyenas cast into the fire, the Marxist leader killed by his own migrants, and the return of the true king.
For these reasons, the “left wing journalist”, as he is described by Sweden’s FriaTider contends the film is “like an animated course in fascist propaganda”.
These are images and themes to which children are apparently susceptible, and so Mr. Walden suggests instead children should be shown an “antidote” — pictures of migrant children.