24 August 2017

openDemocracy: Scandinavian Nazis on the march again

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 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. [...]

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 .

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