Two days from now will see Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer consolidate links with the English Defence League at the “Worldwide Counter-Jihad Meeting” in Stockholm. The local Swedish Defence League will also be providing a couple of speakers at the event; Islamophobia Watch has cast an eye over them:
The leading figure in the SDL, who has acted as the group’s spokesman, represented it at the EDL’s Aarhus protest in March, and according to the Swedish anti-fascist magazine Expo has been directly involved in organising the Stockholm demonstration, is an individual named Isak Nygren…
Back in 2008 Nygren reportedly applied for membership of the neo-Nazi Nordiska förbundet but eventually joined the Sweden Democrats, becoming an SD councillor in Katrineholm. Nygren’s budding career in the party came to an abrupt end last year, however, when Expo published a comment he had posted on a discussion thread at a far-right internet forum that addressed the question “Why is race mixing bad?”…
Further:
The SDL’s platform speaker in Stockholm, according to the EDL news report, is one Richard Abrams. He has a blog called Chamber of manifestation which shows him to be a fervent admirer of Nazi occultism. Along with the proud announcement that he will be representing the SDL at Saturday’s rally, Abrams reports that “Me and some friends are fighting a struggle; RECLAIM THE SWASTIKA!” (“If you want US to respect OTHER cultures, you must also respect OUR culture and its symbols”). And just in case you were in any doubt where his political sympathies lie, Abrams reproduces a quotation from Nazi intellectual Alfred Rosenberg (“The old beliefs will be brought back to honor again. The whole secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the demonic. We will wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race. The religion of the blood”)
[UPDATE: As Apuleius Platonicus notes in the comments, the quote attributed to Rosenberg is not authentic. A look on Google Books and Amazon shows that it has been derived from statements attributed to Hitler on page 55 of The Voice of Destruction: Conversations With Hitler 1940, by Hermann Rauschning. The author claimed to have written down statements made privately by Hitler, although mainstream scholars today either doubt or dismiss the book’s credibility.]
Islamophobia Watch also draws attention to a jokey picture posted to the SDL Stockholm Division Facebook page on 23 July; it is a photo of Ander Breivik rubbing his eyes in court, giving the appearance of crying; a large caption has been added: “That’s when I ran out of bullets”. That should amuse the EDL’s Tommy Robinson, who has been known to joke about the mass killer.
Abrams’ website is for the most part macabre and disturbing: among weird occultic images we find statements such as “I will be remembered as the one who beheaded presidents in righteous wrath”. He is also a musician, sometimes using the fuller name “Richard Isak Abrams”. According to a blurb for his band on LastFM:
Iblis Industries (or 1blis 1ndustries) is a Swedish project created in 2005 by Richard Abrams (also in Sitra Ahra and Hypothermia.)
The music released so far consists of a variey of elements such as; Neoclassical, Downtempo, Black metal, Industrial and Noisestep.
The themes of Iblis Industries is mainly cultivated in a search for the divine embers.
Of course, a provocative interest in the grotesque and and the dark is par for the course with this kind of music, and it is unclear how far one can extrapolate from stage persona to political identification. However, for an organisation seeking wider credibility, the impression given by Abrams’ site is unattractive. And given the links between the self-described “Counter-Jihad Movement” and elements of the Christian Right, such an association is likely to be awkward.
UPDATE (4 August): Some publicity materials for the event (including Geller’s blog) list “Richard Abrahamsson” rather than “Abrams”, while the European Freedom Initiative website has scrubbed all mention of him under either name (access to cache has been blocked, but his name can still be seen in the Google preview). Abrams has also scrubbed his announcement from his Chamber of Manifestation website.
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The “wash off the Christian veneer” quote is not from Rosenberg. Indeed, it could not be, since Rosenberg was a strong supporter of Christianity. Rosenberg’s major “theoretical” work, “The Myth of the Twentieth Century” starts off with a quote from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, who is mentioned (always approvingly) by name dozens of times throughout the work (40, to be precise). Luther is praised 45 times in that same work, and Jesus Christ over 100 times. Rosenberg explicitly rejected any suggestion that he favored a return to Germanic Heathenism. This is to be expected, since Rosenberg modeled himself on Houston Stewart Chamberlain (whom the Nazis officially hailed as the author of “the gospel of the Nazi movement”) was a fervent and outspoken Christian.
In fact, the “veneer” quote does not appear to be from any verifiable source at all.
Thanks, I’ve looked into it a bit further and added an update. However, I think Rosenberg as a Christian is going too far the other way – judging from the assessment in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigmann-Gall, Rosenberg appropriated certain Christian ideas for his own ends, but rejected most of what we would call “historic” Christianity.
According to this blogger, it’s one of a number of fake quotes attributed to Hitler for propaganda purposes. It’s from a 1940s book called “The Voice of Destruction: Conversations with Hitler”
by Hermann Rauschning.
As Abraham Lincoln said “Don’t trust quotes published on the internet.”
Richard Bartholomew,
The respected British academic Dr Matthew Goodwin has kindly provided a screenshot of the list of individuals scheduled to speak at the demonstration in Stockholm tomorrow: http://twitpic.com/aezwg9.
The SPLC have also put together a detailed article about the event: http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2012/08/03/anti-muslim-activists-to-gather-in-stockholm-tomorrow/. It’s very informative about Pamela Geller’s further plans too.
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