Tore Hund spears Olaf at the battle of Stiklestad, Peter Nicolai Arbo, 1859. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.A mere week after Norway commemorated
the six years that have passed since the worst terrorist attacks in modern
Norwegian history, perpetrated by the white right-wing extremist Anders Behring
Breivik, residents and tourists in the sleepy southern Norwegian city of
Kristiansand (population 61,000) were shocked to find a group of 60-70 neo-Nazis
occupying the main shopping street of the city for an entire day earlier this
summer.
The neo-Nazis, all but two white
males, were marching under the slogan ‘Crush The Gay Lobby’ and handing out
leaflets ascribing the power of said ‘gay lobby’ to the work of ‘Jewish
Cultural Marxists.’ In the aftermath, they celebrated their taking over the
central shopping street in Kristiansand as a significant victory, and declared
that they had managed to turn Kristiansand into a ‘National Socialist Zone.’
And it was some kind of achievement, for Norway has not seen so many marching
Nazis in the streets since the Nazi German Occupation of Norway during World
War II (1940-45).
The day was Saturday July 29,
known as Olsok in Norway. It is
ascribed particular importance by the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish
neo-Nazis who had gathered in Markeveien in Kristiansand that morning due to
the fact that in Norwegian mythology, the famous battle at Stiklestad in
mid-Norway, in which the Viking king believed to have turned Norway into a
Christian domain, Olav II Haraldsson (993-1030) or Olav The Sacred, was killed,
battling his heathen enemies on this day in 1030 A. C. This is an act of
cultural and historical appropriation similar to that which the disturbed
Anders Behring Breivik undertook in declaring himself a conservative Christian
‘Knight Templar.’ It is by no means without
precedent in Nazi circles in Norway: the Norwegian Nazi collaborationist
regime under Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling during World War II emphasized and
instrumentalized Norse and Norwegian mythology, and appropriated Stiklestad and
Olav The Sacred in their propaganda.
Serious historians actually hold
that Olav The Sacred was not even killed at the battle of Stiklestad, but at a
minor battle elsewhere during the same year. The demonstration in Kristiansand
proceeded under the protection of some twenty-six local police officers. This
was despite the fact that local police had neither granted permission for the
event, nor been notified of it in advance as required by Norwegian law. Two
counterdemonstrators who tried to exercise their legal rights to freedom of
expression in the form of counter-speech were arrested by the police. Video
footage from the scene shows one of the counterdemonstrators being manhandled,
spat on and yelled at by the neo-Nazi demonstrators before being arrested. It
is a telling demonstration of the limited practical applicability of the
revered notion of counter-speech or ‘more speech’ as the universal solvent
against racist and extremist hate speech, when it takes place under conditions
of vastly assymetrical power and the threat of violence.
To the extent that consumers of
the international media hear news about Norway and Scandinavia at all, it is
often positive news. Norway was earlier this year rated as the country with the
happiest people on the planet. It regularly features at the top of
international standards and quality of life indexes, as well as being one of the
most gender equal societies on earth. And true enough, there is actually a lot
to celebrate in Norway’s comparatively low level of socio-economic inequality,
our advanced welfare state, our free public education and health care. But it
also often seems that the international news media is so heavily invested in
these notions, that the dark
undercurrents of Norwegian and Scandinavian societies past and present go
largely unnoticed.
A majority of the demonstrating
neo-Nazis in Kristiansand this summer were in fact not Norwegian, but Swedish.
They were hard-core members of a violent neo-Nazi outfit which goes under the
name of the Nordic Resistance Movement (Den Nordiska Motstandsbevegelsen, DNM).
In Sweden, this movement has a particularly strong organization in the largely
rural province
of Dalarna.
In Dalarna, members of the DNM
have succeeded in getting themselves onto municipal councils through democratic
means. And there have been cases in which municipal council members from
parties who have opposed them have been forced to resign due to serial
harassment from DNM members. It was in the city of Falun, the administrative
centre of Dalarna that a group of five hundred Scandinavian neo-Nazis marched
under heavy police protection on International Worker’s Day, on May 1, this
year. And it is in Dalarna that the head of the Norwegian section of the
movement, the former heavy metal rocker Haakon Freiwald, lives and from which
he co-ordinates the organization’s activities in Norway.
In Sweden and in Finland, members
of this movement has been involved in murders of immigrants and anti-racist
campaigners, and in murderous arson attacks on asylum reception centers. Key members
of this movement are known to have undergone military training with Russian
ultra-nationalist forces. A joint
investigation by Filter Media in
Norway and Expo in Sweden found that
among the Swedish neo-Nazis demonstrators in Kristiansand there were individuals
with criminal records relating to violent assaults on police, immigrants
and anti-racist activists.
Eighteen neo-Nazis from Sweden who
had attempted to get to Kristiansand on July 29 were arrested
by Norwegian police on the border: police found knives and batons in their
possession. It has since come to light that two of the Norwegian neo-Nazi
activists who marched in Kristiansand, a couple in their early thirties, had
three weeks earlier been arrested and charged for illegal
possession of weapons. The male activist currently facing charges for
illegal possession of guns has a long criminal record.
In Norwegian right-wing circles,
the fact that Sweden has a much stronger and violent right-wing extremist
milieu is often ascribed to Sweden having received a substantially larger
number of immigrants from ‘non-Western’ countries since the 1960s, courtesy of
its historically more liberal immigration policy. But this neglects the fact
that Sweden has ever since the 1950s had an organizationally and numerically
much stronger neo-Nazi scene than Norway.
In the period 1925 to 1945,
significant sections of Sweden’s financial and intellectual elites were
attracted to German Nazism, and Sweden’s policy of official neutrality during
World War II also meant that Nazism in Sweden was never as discredited and
associated with national treason as it was in Norway. In contradistinction,
Norway was occupied by German Nazi forces for five years during World War II,
and the Nazi collaborationist regime of Vidkun Quisling (1940-45) entered
international language as a byword for treason. However, the contemporary
Norwegians who proclaim neo-Nazism and right-wing extremism are ‘Swedish
imports’ are deluding themselves as much as the syndicated white Norwegian
media commentators who regularly proclaim racism and discrimination to be
negligible phenomena in Norway. Norway last had a serious problem with violent
neo-Nazis in the 1990s, when the militant neo-Nazi group Boot Boys attracted
hundreds of marginalized and disgruntled white males in and around the capital
of Oslo. The appeal of Boot Boys only subsided in the aftermath of three young
white Norwegians knifing a random fifteen-year old Norwegian-African boy named
Benjamin Hermansen at Holmlia in Oslo East in 2001, which led to a
concerted effort by Norwegian police and civil society to stamp out violent
right-wing extremism.
Nor can one forget that it was a
Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, (for ten years an active member of the
Norwegian Progress Party which has been in government in Norway since 2013),
who perpetrated the worst terror in the violent annals of Scandinavian right-wing
extremism back in 2011. The past four years in Norway have given the lie to
those Norwegian political analysts who, without any supporting research
evidence, have proclaimed that a populist right-wing party in power acts as a
brake on the rise of right-wing extremism by providing a democratic channeling of
far-right hate and resentment of immigrants in general and Muslims in
particular.
The neo-Nazi march in Kristiansand
happened on the watch of a Progress Party Minister of Justice, Per-Willy
Amundsen, who in his former days as an MP had a long and sustained record of
whipping up popular sentiment against immigrants and Muslims in Norway. Six
years ago, Amundsen, then an MP, went on record as approving a fellow party
politician who had drawn an analogy between Islam and Nazism. Amundsen is surrounded by cabinet ministers
from his own party some of whom have in the course of the past four years been
caught greeting well-known Norwegian right-wing extremists with a friendly
‘good night, and thank you’ on their open
Facebook pages, and sharing
Facebook posts from a British right-wing extremist organization, Britain
First .
Though we lack a solid baseline
for comparisons due to the lack of systematic police registration of such
crimes prior to 2013, hate crimes against Norwegians of immigrant and minority
background appear to be on the increase.
Much like in the US presidential election campaign last year, this
year’s parliamentary election campaign in Norway has so far revolved around a
divisive and polarizing white identity politics. The agenda of the political
debate is set by an army of highly paid governmental and parliamentary
communication advisors fast outnumbering Norwegian investigative reporters.
Norway’s 4.2 per cent of Muslim background are the main target of this white
identity politics, as they have been ever since the mid-1980s.
The Norwegian Police Security
Services (PST)’s Annual Open Threat Assessments list, both before and after 2011,
declared that radical Islamists posed the pre-eminent terror threat in Norway.
Norwegian radical Islamists have however always been numerically and
organizationally weak in comparative terms. The PST’s analysis, in the face of
an ascendant right-wing extremism, is starting to look threadbare. There has
for a number of years now been a strong traffic in ideas and rhetoric in the
far-right spectrum, which includes right-wing extremists and right-wing
populists, in both Norway and Sweden. It seems a fair bet that this mutually
reinforcing upwards spiral between democratic and non-democratic political
forces on the far-right of the spectrum in Norway and Sweden will continue in
the years to come.