Stieg Larsson on the myth of the lone, lunatic fascist gunman
Following the atrocity in Oslo, we have already seen a raft of headlines stating that the racist assassin Anders Behring Breivik was acting alone:
BBC headline: “Norway gun suspect 'acted alone' - ˮ- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14266815
English Independent headline: A nation's enemy within: The far-right loner who wiped out nearly 100 souls - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/a-nations-enemy-within-the-farright-loner-who-wiped-out-nearly-100-souls-2319549.html
All this made me go back to a report written by Stieg Larsson for Expo magazine in April 1999. Many Cic Saor readers may be unaware that before his untimely death Stieg (now world famous as the author of the Millennium series of crime novels) was a militant anti fascist and a very effective campaigner against white supremacist propaganda. Stieg helped found Expo magazine in Sweden so as to provide a platform, not only for pro democracy and anti racist views, but also to investigate the far right in Scandinavia. Below, I have translated extracts of Stieg’s very effective dismissal of the idea that right wing assassins are nothing more than lunatics who invariably act on their own. It was written in 1999 but has direct relevance to what is happening in extreme right wing circles today.
Stieg Larsson - a brilliant writer, a brilliant comrade
DEN NYA FOLKRÖRELSEN - STIEG LARSSON
THE NEW PEOPLE'S ARMY - STIEG LARSSON – EXPO APRIL 1999
“THE THREE BOMBS in London this spring attracted worldwide attention. They were nail bombs - made to cause as much damage to human life as possible. The targets were immigrant areas and a gay bar. When 23 year old David Copeland was arrested after an intensive hunt by the police, this terror campaign suddenly had a face. London breathed a sigh of relief, as the police announced that Copeland was a “lone madman”, without any political links whatsoever.
The problem is that Scotland Yard was wrong.
For several years David Copeland had been active in various right wing extremist factions. He was a member of the Nazi British National Party (BNP) and had gravitated towards the circle around the party’s leader John Tyndall. This is the same Tyndall who as early as the 1960s had been convicted of being an activist in the Nazi group Spearhead following a series of attacks on synagogues.
The authorities have a marked tendency to dismiss far right terrorists as “lunatics acting alone”. This applies both in England and Sweden. There seems to be an inbuilt resistance to the idea that Nazis are actually deadly serious when they speak of their intention to crush democratic society. There is a simple explanation for this: a "lunatic acting alone" is far less disturbing and simpler to explain than the scenario that Nazis are actually out there and organising terrorism on an international scale.
But that is the fact of the matter. Travel time between Sweden and foreign shores is negligible these days. The same groups who are organising terror in the USA and England have their counterparts in Sweden. BNP members have visited Sweden on countless occasions, and Swedish right wing extremists have paid exchange courtesy visits to Tyndall.
The USA’s “lonely lunatics” – Ben Smith and Buford Furrow were active in the militant Nazi group Church of the Creator, which for several years had a Swedish chapter - Kreativistens kyrka (The Creationist Church), which in turn was dissolved into other Nazi groups. Ben Williams had links to Aryan Nations and the so called Christian identity movement, an organisation that is at the moment trying to gain a foothold in Sweden.”
It is worth quoting two more brief sections from Stieg’s prophetic report because they show how Nazi ideology has changed and gives a pointer to their new goal which is the destruction of multi racial and multi cultural societies.
“FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE 1980s onwards, European militants began to glean their ideological sustenance from the American extreme right, which had produced dozens of handbooks on “the theory and practice of racial war”. Their "Bible" quickly became The Turner Diaries, which was written at the end of the 1970s by William Pierce, a leader of the Nazi group "National Alliance”.
The Turner Diaries is a novel that describes how an underground "Aryan" soldier initiates an armed campaign against Jews and “race traitors" - the American government. The Turner Diaries have become a kind of set of guiding principles in the art of prosecuting a racist terror campaign. The book, in other words, has become a Nazi classic and has been republished many times. One person so inspired by The Turner Diaries was Timothy McVeigh who murdered 170 people in the terrorist bomb attack in Oklahoma City in 1995. An identical copy of, the bomb used by McVeigh is described in the Turner Diaries.
The Turner Diaries seeks to assert that Jewish agents are in fact secretly controlling and manipulating the centres of power in all western governments. These governments – be that Bill Clinton in the USA or Göran Persson in Sweden – are called ZOGS, an abbreviation for “Zionist Occupation Government"- are "secretly working in order to destroy the white Aryan race”. The new militant groups began to argue that the only way to fight the ZOGS was to unleash a RAHOWA – an acronym for Racial Holy War.
Thus “legitimate” targets in this race war were expanded exponentially. The main enemy was no longer just individual immigrants or Jewish targets but, in fact, democracy itself and the infrastructure of government in the USA and western Europe. This was the reason why the federal building in Oklahoma City became a target and it is also the same reason why Swedish neo Nazis are urging their followers to shoot policemen.”
Anders Behring Breivik - Fascist Assassin
Stieg’s Expo article in 1999 goes on to show how Scandinavia has become a key focal point for white supremacists and emphasises the links stretching across Europe and England to the USA. Evidence is now emerging that Oslo assassin Breivik was in regular contact with the English Defence League.
Another very clear lesson from what Stieg says is that tolerance of virulently racist groups gives encouragement to the likes of fanatics like Breivik in Oslo, when in fact the state should be monitoring white supremacists very closely and restricting their room for manoeuvre. However, to do this would mean a clampdown on influential groups like the Tea Party Movement in the United States and the EDL and BNP in England.
The only point that I would add to what Stieg says is that military intelligence services the world over very often use right wing extremists as “assets”. We have seen this in Ireland where Britain’s covert state used pro British (and racist) death squads as proxy killers. More should be done, in my view to investigate the links between the far right and the military intelligence community. The fact is that many soldier spies are themselves right wing extremists and survivalists.
@Paul Larkin
Baile Átha Cliath
Mí Iúil 2011