A columnist for the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Björn Werner, has written about a new British television experiment that, in his account, reveals something about how Britons picture fascism. The piece was published on Monday, 9 November 2026.
According to Svenska Dagbladet, the experiment is built around a common assumption: that people believe they already recognise what fascism looks like. That image, Werner writes, is drawn from newsreels of Germany in the 1930s.
He lists the elements of that familiar picture: fervent mass rallies, military parades, athletic "Aryan" bodies, Albert Speer's plans for stone structures on a scale far beyond human proportions, and stylised propaganda posters carrying blunt, hard-edged messages.
The column's argument, as reported, is that this mental template may not be an adequate guide to recognising fascism in other forms or other settings. The British experiment is presented as the vehicle for testing that gap between the assumed image and reality.
The source material does not describe the format of the programme, the participants, or the specific results it produced, and those details are not available here.
What to watch next: whether the programme's findings are published in fuller form, and how commentators beyond Sweden respond to Werner's reading of them.
