A Touch of Madness: 3. Dreaming of Atlantis

Svartskalle, vi hatar dig! Ut, ut, ut, ut! Nordens folk, vakna nu! Skjut, skjut, skjut, skjut!
Nigger, we hate you! Out, out, out, out! Nordic People, wake up! Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot!
(Lyrics, Commit Suiside, Swedish white power band – my translation to English)

The Belgian right-wing is much more than Vlaams Belang, and it has the oddest outgrowths. One of them is Association des Successeurs des Ases, known as Fils des Ases, a Brussels-based group which seeks to defend the «Nordic race». Its spokesman, Bernard Mengal, is a rich property scion and one of those guys you don’t meet to often these days: He’s a militant pagan. In the year 2000 report from the Stephen Roth Institute he’s described as «the initiator of works based on biological racism and an obsessive antisemitism». The report stated that recent publications «have unmistakably endorsed a shift toward armed combat against the establishment».

One of Mengals collaborators, Pierre Chassard, author of a book published by Mengal, has stated views like:

Is it not necessary to be unusually [emotionally] sensitive, maybe ill, to feel attraction towards a Northern African? There’s a physiological discomfort felt on the skin. A black man whose race has not been spoiled is sometimes less repulsive than a mestizo of several mixed races. Mixed races are usually not beautiful.

This, of course, has very little to do with Swedish Tommy Funebo, a Swedish politician now left partyless. But there is a story involving both Mengal and Funebo; a story we could begin – perhaps – with a leaflet published by Sverigedemokraterna (SD, the Sweden Democrats) befor the 2004 European parliament elections. Underneath the slogan «The party with a heart for Sweden», three people are quoted. The first one of them is none other than Bernard Mengal. It was a condition that needed to be met for him to pay the 200.000SEK (21,600€) the leaflet costed. According to Funebo, who was holding a central organisatory position in SD, it was the last drop. He had voted against accepting money from Mengal. But there was more to it, more drops that had slowly filled Funebo’s glass. In several interviews Funebo tells a story of the 30th birthday of one of the leading members of the party:

- People were joining in on the song «Vit makt svartskalleslakt» (‘White power, nigger hunt’), it’s a band called Commit Suiside who does it. They’re known amongst Nazis. One person in a leading position walked around «doing heils». The worst thing was that no one seemed to care, it was seen as perfectly okay.

From the Sverigedemokraterna leaflet with Bernard Mengal

One could question Funebos credibility as a source. However, someone singing a Commit Suiside song at an SD-gathering should hardly be a surprise. Ulf Ekberg of Ace of Base wasn’t the only member of Commit Suiside to become well-known later on. Anders Klarström, the leader of Sverigedemokraterna from 1989 to 1995, was another member of the band.

II

Never have violence, injustice and cynicism victored more than this unmerciful year of 1945. We who were dreaming of a new morning for the Western culture, we who chose to become the guards of white culture in our country against the barbarism from east, we have seen our dreams crushed.

(Per Engdahl, December 1945)

Klarström did not only play Nazi music. He had also been a member of the Nordic Reich Party, an openly Nazi party founded in 1955. In 1986 he was sentenced for illegal possession of a firearm after an investigation into threats against the entertainer Hagge Geigert. Klarström allegedly said «We will burn you, you fucking Jewish bastard».

Like anyone else, a Nazi can change. Political viewpoints change too, and extreme views often soften over time. In fact, former Nazis have become socialists, centrists and concervatives, and some have even turned towards the Marxism they used to loath. The Sweden Democrats claim, of course, that they’re not the only Swedish party to have former Nazi sympathisers in their midst – and point at Klarström themselves, now reputedly a member of the Swedish Social Democratic party. And of course, the Sweden Democrats are right. A number of prominent Swedes were once members of Per Engdahl’s fascist organisation Förbundet Det Nya Sverige (New Sweden Association) or other fascist and national socialist groups in the thirties and fourties. IKEA-owner Ingvar Kamprad is just one of them. Although he hardly ever gives interviews, he knew he had to speak when journalist Pelle Tagesson rang and told Kamprad’s colleagues that he demanded an interview. When asked why, he simply replied: – If I say Engdahl, perhaps that’s enough.

Like Ulf Ekberg, Ingvar Kamprad is a regretting sinner. You would also have to look long and hard for the touch of madness in mainstream political parties in Sweden. Not so with the Sweden Democrats. There you would not have to look long at all. You could, in fact, just take a look at the party’s political roots, the organisation Bevara Sverige Svenskt (Keep Sweden Swedish). This group had a program opposing immigration («serious people from culturally and ethnically related countries» is an exception) and international adoption. They also suggested repatriation of immigrants, as well as stricter laws on abortion.

Gösta Bergquist, an engineer and – amazingly – an Atlantis theorist claiming that Atlantis was situated in the North Sea, was a central member of BSS. In his youth he had been a member of another political movement, Svensk Socialistisk Samling, until the late thirties called the National Socialist Workers Party. Is Bergquist another regretting sinner? Hardly. In 1996 he took part in the Hess march in Trollhättan, wearing a military helmet. He was subsequently excluded from an SD trying to distance itself from its past. But the roots of madness remain. Ten years earlier, in 1986, the BSS founded a party called Sverigepartiet together with the minor right-wing party Framstegspartiet. Following internal strife, Sverigepartiet burst again the year after, and former BSS members went on to establish the Sweden Democrats. In February 1988 they started publishing the party newspaper Sverige-Kuriren, featuring – amongst other things – support for the apartheid regime in South Africa, as well as poems by an old star on the Swedish Nazi sky, Carl-Ernfrid Carlberg.

Carlberg was the founder of the Manhem Society, a Swedish Nazi group heavily inspired by older Swedish Gothicism. The society took its name from Olof Rudbeck’s legendary history work from 1677, Atlantica, where Rudbeck tried to prove that the Atlantis of the myths was in fact Sweden.

A loose connection, perhaps? There are many more. Amongst the top candidates for the party in the 1994 local elections were a number of people with connections to other groups, including Swedish Hammer Skinheads, Riksfronten (a group aligned to Engdahl’s Nysvenska Rörelsen), the Nordic Reich Party and Stockholms Unga Nationalsocialister. At the time, its youth organisation was led by one of Sweden’s leading neo-Nazis, Robert Vesterlund, who had joined the party under the name Robert Wennerstedt and is seen as an infiltrator by SD-spokesmen. Following the elections Vesterlund left the party, and the youth organisation was soon to be shut down by the mother party.

Tina Hallgren Bengtsson was one of the five mandates that did get elected for SD in the local elections. Bengtsson also took part in meetings arranged by Nationalsocialistisk Front (NF); and are by some sources said to have left SD for NF, although she denies having been truly active in NF herself. After leaving the movement entirely, she was interviewed by the Swedish daily Aftonbladet in December 1999. – It works as a network [...] you meet the same people here and there, and you jump a bit back and forth. In the interview she points out that she does not have any contact with Nationalsocialistisk Front anymore. – I have started all over.

III

It would be a lie to say that all of Sverigedemokraternas members and activists are fascist. In fact, the party calls itself both anti-Marxist and anti-Nazist, and although words like that are often meaningless, a number of more radical members have either left or been excluded from the party. At the same time, it would also be a lie to say that there are no connections between SD and movements that are anything but democratic.

To the right of SD in the Swedish political spectre another small and genuinely fascist party called Nationaldemokraterna (ND) can be found. The party is repeatedly being described as Nazi-influenced even by SD themselves. This is interesting, since Nationaldemokraterna is nothing else than the result of a 2001 split in – you guessed it already – Sverigedemokraterna. Its first leader Anders Steen, and other prominent members like Tor Paulsson, Vavra Suk and Tomas Johansson all come from SD. Its current leader, Nils-Eric Hennix, an author of four books and translator of a book of Oscar Wilde quotes, comes from the miniscule Freedom Party, and brought with him demands for low taxes and animal protection when the two parties joined together in December 2005. Amongst the supporters of the party is Bernard Mengal, who functions as a «political advisor». The party also has intimate connections to German NPD and – according to its website – «good relations» to the «national democratic» Vlaams Blok.

Its foremost ideologist, however, is Vavra Suk, an immigrant from the Czech Republic:

Multiculturalism does not work, it has never worked. In spite of the enormous amounts being used to keep up appearances and suppress the indigenious population; not a single example exists anywhere in the world on a successful socalled integration between Europeans and non-Europeans.

Although both stupid and false, these are not uncommon words these days. At the same time the old – and even uglier – agenda is never deeply hidden. On the ND website the Gay Pride festival is referred to as a «sodomy parade», «an orgy in perversions and decadence», and a symbol of the decaying Swedish society. According to the party the next goal of the «gay lobby» is to «legitimise and establish political support for pedophilia». Members of the party were convicted for violence after attacking Facundo Unia and others. But it’s not only the «sodomites» ND has a problem with, it is also the Jews. Jonas De Geer has been speaking at a number of ND-events. When David Duke’s book «Jewish Supremacism: My awakening to the Jewish question» was translated to Swedish, it was De Geer who wrote the introduction. In a speech published on ND’s website, he concludes that there will soon be a war of race and religion across Europe:

The development has not come this far yet, but the process is obviously being hastened by the fact that so many European countries actively take part in or accept, the aggression towards the Muslim world by the Zionist-ruled United States. The forces that have worked systematically and effectively to undermine the moral, religious and ethnical infrastructure of the Western peoples, now themselves start to fear the monster that they have created and named «multicultural society». In one or two decades, I dare say that, the whole of Europe will stand in fire, and it will no longer be possible to hide this behind the lies of the Jewish-dominated mass media. Within fifty years it will become obvious that Sweden and the rest of the wide world is heading towards destruction or rebirth. To a large degree, it is up to us.

Indeed it is. People like Nationaldemokraterna will continue to peddle their ideas. And when 56 per cent of Germans (in a recent poll) think that there should be a ban on building mosques in the country and 40 per cent say they support strict limits on the practice of Islam, thus ending Germany’s constitutional right of freedom of religion, the conditions for fascism are once again present in Europe. It will not be as recognisable as in «V for Vendetta». But it is up to us to defeat the hatred and the dreams of an all-white Atlantis. Diversity is a reality. It has always been.