IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY

by Rafael Koski

Swedes are among the leaders in a sad Western European competition to be the first nation in the 21st century without a state. Swedish politicians have embraced multiculturalism so thoroughly that a ”National Day of Sweden” was instituted as a holiday in 2005—so as to give multiculturalists the opportunity to display Africans dressed in Swedish national costumes. The entry of the Sweden Democrats to the parliament last fall may have begun to change the situation, but even they are afraid to assert nationalism openly, focusing instead on defending ”Swedish values” from anti-semitic and homophobic Muslims.

It took me a long time to recognize what the word ”identitarian,” which features prominently on the Swedish website Motpol, is actually supposed to mean. Identitarians use slogans like ”100 % identity, 0 % hate,” which makes it sounds like a play on words to dodge the accusations of ”racism” that are bound to come. But then it came to me that people living in the postmodern, post-national, mass-democratic societies of the West actually need an ideology to articulate the thoughts and feelings that at other times have been considered natural. In our age, love for one's own kin and the country one grew up in actually need to be explained in terms of an abstract concepts.

”Identitarianism” as an ideology sees its enemy in the global, miscegenated consumer society that has been forming in the West and is spreading around the world. But it also covers radical traditionalist ideas, while eschewing National Socialism. One must point this out in Sweden, because it is one of the countries where actual National Socialists have been after WWII, and where any conservative or nationalist movement is attacked by its associations with ”former Nazis.”

Irrespectively of the exact content of their ideology, Motpol has a number of interesting writers who comment on German nationalists and conservative revolutionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries, paneuropeanists, and other ”New Right” thinkers; they also discuss traditional Nordic folkways. I wanted to get to know these intellectuals in the nationalist or right-wing scene in Sweden and bought a ticker for "Identitarian Idea," a one-day seminar organized by Motpol.

The location of the meeting was not disclosed beforehand, but participants received an e-mail a few hours before the start time, informing them of the metro station that was used as a gathering point. That morning, there were some 30 people staring at each other wondering whether someone here is an "anti-fa" informant. Many were obviously coming ”out” for the first time as nationalists, and the waiting lobby of the venue was filled more with silence, awkwardness, and suspicion than happy greetings of old friends. Most of the participants were nerdish looking intellectuals, but there were a few yuppies out of a Tiger of Sweden-catalog, and some muscular, tattooed fellows. The atmosphere changed when more people started coming and the seminar got going. Altogether, there were close to 100 in attendance, mostly young men and a handful women.

The seminar began, surprisingly, late and, rather dramatically, with a minute of silence in observance of ”fallen comrades.” It was a bit unclear for many of the participants whose comrades these people were: nationalists in general or ”identitarians”/”new rightists,” and how they had fallen (presumably not in street fighting). After that moment had passed, the seminar on ”the Future of Europe” began.

Baron Jonas de Geer is one of the most prominent writers at Motpol. He used to be active with his own publication, Salt, about 10 years ago, but after its closure, he retired to a Scottish island. There he lives with his family near a Society of St. Pius X monastery and waits for the apocalypse. As he explained, European societies no longer function even in basic services like providing security, and when the welfare states run out of money, as they inevitably will, non-European immigrants in the suburbs are bound to start real riots, even wars.

Geers’s message was on the ”soft propaganda” that has been used since WWII to impose an ”anti-culture” of disdain for family, God, and country on European peoples. He compared it to the brainwashing of Romanian fascists after Communists took over in 1945 described by Dumitru Bacu. After a few months of physical torture, prisoners were forced to desecrate everything they held dear. As pious Christians, they were forced to slander Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The next step was for them to tell lies about Romanian national heroes and the prisoners’ own families. Finally, they were to recount an autobiography of perversion and criminality, which the new Communist party would clear them off. This slow repetition of propaganda, Geers explained, is what is destroying European peoples.

Other Identitarians spoke of the need for protecting the living environment, of the unknown poisons in consumerist products, as well of as the weird personality cults and CIA influence behind the "Entartete Kunst" on display in museums today. Less philosophically-inclined nationalists told of their attempts to organize around a newspaper and distribute it on the streets. The day the seminar was held, some young nationalists had demonstrated in front of a reception center for ”asylum-seekers,” the inhabitants of which were recently caught molesting a 11-year-old child at a local swimming pool.

The main speaker of the evening was the Croatian-American ”New Rightist” Tomislav Sunic. He talked of his Croatian and other identities, and how he would prefer an explicitly racialist identity as a White European. He acknowledged, though, that as long as discourse is controlled by the enemy, it makes sense to use more neutral terms like ”identitarian.” He wanted to remind the more action-oriented nationalists that the real enemy is not the immigrant, but always the liberal capitalist plutocrat, who, despite appearances, will always be ready to sell his country for profit.

Sunic gave an entertaining account of all the forms of propaganda that have been used to create a ”negative identity” based on guilt for European peoples. This negative identity is manifest in the various commemorations for the sufferings of all kinds of foreign peoples around the world. This produces a "victimology" in which different groups compete for status as the one most oppressed by evil White heterosexual males.

But this victimology will never bring peace to liberal society, because the ”victims” are haggling for the money that is expropriated from the White man. Sooner or later, the ”oppressor” will cease paying taxes, or cease to exist altogether.

Sunic talked a lot about the need for discipline and cooperation in order for us to beat the Left. But he himself couldn't restrain from gratuitous attacks on the Catholic Church on account of its acceptance of multiculturalism. He explained how the lack of discipline on the Right leads to everyone wanting to be their own leader and having a one-man show, but when asked by Geer a simple yes-or-no question on whether the pre-Vatican II Church would ever have promoted mass immigration to Europe, Sunic refused to answer, started reformulating the question, and changed the topic. Overall, the seminar, with its tardy start and eccentric setting, wasn't such a show of discipline and organization that one would hope of the New Right.

If no coherent or comprehensive answers of what to do, and how, was offered, the seminar did present a vision of a better future. And that’s no small matter. Winglord performed his soundtrack of archeo-futurism, spiced with videos of European monuments sampled from historical movies. The audience was impressed. Elevated spiritually, attendants could go home to think about how to find expression for their identity in postmodern conditions.

So long as Swedish and European men can still gather and talk about real issues that concern them, there is still hope for a renaissance. It is important, however, for our side to resist the temptation of descending into victimologist talk and having gatherings that act as quasi-support groups. White men claiming to be ”oppressed”—whether by PC, the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, ”capitalism,” or feminists—are not really building a movement but just living the postmodern lifestyle of self-indulgence.

Real authority is based on principles higher than the self.