Investigation Packaging hate – the New Right publishing networks Adam Carter finds individuals and organisations with explicit links to the extreme right behind a series of New Right publishers ALTHOUGH SEARCHLIGHT has shaping social values and reframing Right (in some cases translating mainly focused on the British aspects the mainstream discussion of issues them into English for the first time) of the New Right group, whose bi- such as race, immigration, identity as well as works by contemporary monthly London meetings have and equality. activists and theorists including some gathered together racists and from the explicit neo-nazi wing of antisemites from across the UK Book publishers the right. extreme right, it is important to In the past few years, helped by There is considerable overlap recognise that it is part of an advances in digital and printing between the different publishers, international movement espousing technology which make it easier to which often share authors and links similar ideas. The meetings produce physical books, a number of and distribute each other’s books. All themselves, as reported last month, small English-language publishing are active on social media such as have drawn speakers and attendees companies have sprung up Twitter and Facebook and are also from a number of countries in dedicated to promulgating the ideas part of a wider network of ambitious Eastern and Western Europe, as well of the New Right. They include blogs and websites sympathetic to as from America and Australia, and Wermod & Wermod, Arktos and New Right politics including several some of them have been influential Black Front Press in the UK, Finis influential ones based in the US such figures within their respective Mundi in Portugal and Counter- as Counter-Currents, Alternative nationalist political movements. On Currents in the US. These publishers Right and Attack the System. the level of personal contact and have concentrated, although not Arktos Media Ltd is probably the networking the New Right is itself always exclusively, on republishing most active, varied and prolific of an international movement. works by key thinkers who have the publishers considered here but However, in addition to the face- intellectually influenced the New despite its claims that it is interested to-face meetings, there is a complex cultural ecosystem of blogs, websites, magazines, book publishers, radio stations and even music companies, operating on an international scale, which exist solely to support the New Right worldview. This should be no surprise as the New Right ideological struggle is primarily a cultural one – the belief that by influencing culture, one can later shape politics – so one would expect the movement to be extremely active in transmitting and disseminating propaganda via a variety of media. In this strategy, publishing activities, such as books, CDs, magazines and online postings, play a crucial role in spreading the anti-egalitarian, antisemitic and racist message of the New Right and are vital to the wider political and intellectual objectives of Formation documents of Arktos Media Ltd showing its initial subscribers 8 | Searchlight | February-March 2012 solely in unifying a variety of perspectives against the modern world, Searchlight has uncovered evidence linking it directly to the Swedish neo-nazi movement and the people behind websites that deny the Holocaust and advocate white supremacy. Arktos is based in the UK (its registered address is that of a London solicitors’ firm specialising in company law) and is run by John Black Morgan, who apparently lives in Mumbai, India. According to company records obtained by Searchlight, it was formed in 2009 as a merger between Integral Tradition Publishing (ITP) and NFSE- Media AB, a company based in Sweden, in which both organisations were given 300 shares. Its directors, Shareholders of Arktos Media Ltd at November 2011 according to its annual return of November 2011, were Patrick Boch, expanded its publishing to incorporate convictions for violence and illegal a lawyer based in India, Daniel translations of Evola and prominent possession of arms and was the Friberg, a business analyst based in figures from the French Nouvelle owner of the Nordic Publishing Sweden, and Jacob Christiansen Droite such as Alain de Benoist and company, at one time arguably the Senholt, a graduate student at Guillaume Faye as well as the biggest distributor of white power Aarhus University in Denmark who Croatian extremist Tomislav Sunic. It music and racist literature in has written on esotericism and the has also published work by Pentti northern Europe. extreme right. Linkola, a Finnish environmentalist NFSE-Media was responsible for with extreme Malthusian views who establishing Metapedia, a nazi ITP claimed that it was interested advocates decimating the world’s in publishing “traditionalist” version of Wikipedia which went live population and has praised the in its English language version in authors. Traditionalism describes a Holocaust as a means to this end. variety of conservative, but non- 2007. Metapedia imitates the look racist, approaches to spirituality In addition to Southgate, other and design of the popular online which were influenced by Eastern authors with a fascist pedigree encyclopaedia but the entries are include Kerry Bolton, a longtime religious thought and is associated given a disturbing nazi twist, so activist on the New Zealand extreme primarily with the French scholar Hitler is praised, the Holocaust is right and former Satanist, and René Guénon (1886-1951) and the denied, there is explicit racism and Henrik Johansson, a Swedish right- Swiss-German philosopher Frithjof antisemitism as well as vicious wing extremist and regular speaker Schuon (1907-1998). Traditionalism attacks on anti-racist and anti-fascist on the neo-nazi circuit, who was however did have its “dark side”, individuals and organisations. arrested in 2008 after an internecine which also encompasses figures on Metapedia also attracted attention feud over mailing lists descended the extreme right such as Julius for listing Jews prominent in public into violence. Evola, and some of traditionalism’s life in Sweden and this was regarded anti-liberal and anti\-modern ideas by some as an incitement to violence (the major academic study on the Links with Swedish neo-nazis against those individuals. As a result, movement is called Against the This is not the only link between the Swedish police began an Modern World) have been co-opted Arktos and Swedish right-wing investigation into NFSE-Media and and reworked by the European New extremism. NFSE-Media AB, the Lagerström. Right. ITP only published a handful original co-founder of Arktos, is an According to other reports in the of books before the merger. One explicitly neo-nazi operation Swedish press, Friberg is a known was a collection by Troy Southgate, majority owned by Lennart Berg, a activist in right-wing circles while the organising secretary of the New former member of the Swedish another Arktos shareholder, Jonas de Right in the UK, and another a Resistance Movement, who is based Geer, is a revisionist historian and collection lauding Evola. in Karlskoga. It is run by Anders former editor of the (now defunct) Since then, as Arktos, it has Lagerström from Linköping who has upmarket right-wing Salt magazine. February-March 2012 | Searchlight | 9 Investigation Another of Arktos’s shareholders, Institute for Historical Review, as Lightning Source feel about having Tobias Ridderstråle, had to quit his well as other contributions from such a dubious client as Arktos and job at a law firm when it was other white supremacists and also whether Alain de Benoist, who revealed that he had donated antisemites. frequently asserts that he has no money to the organisation. Morgan has also written a number truck with white supremacy, will It is absolutely clear given these of essays for Counter-Currents, an continue to wish to be associated types of individuals behind the American blog/website that with the company. scenes at the publisher and some of functions as a meeting point for Black Front Press is owned and the authors it has published that European New Right thinking and run by Southgate, organising Arktos is no ordinary “traditionalist” old style Nazism and white secretary of the New Right (see last publisher. One can discern a clear supremacy. In one article based on a month’s Searchlight). It was agenda to develop and publish reinterpretation of former Klansman established in 2010 and its public extremist and racist ideas while Louis Beam’s leaderless resistance presence consists of nothing more using the fig leaf of “alternative idea (the advocacy of decentralised than its Facebook page. It is viewpoints”. John Morgan, who is terrorist cells operating practically a vanity press outfit as editor-in-chief at Arktos, has been independently based on a shared nearly all of the 14 books it has coy about revealing the publisher’s racist ideology), he emphasises the published so far have been edited or links with the Swedish extreme significance of cultural written by Southgate himself. The right. In an interview with the dissemination to the white books range from several collections Amerika blog, he states: “Towards nationalist struggle stating, “This is of Southgate’s ramblings to edited also what my own organization, collections on a variety of political Arktos, is attempting to achieve by figures including Nietzsche, the offering intellectual and cultural Romanian fascist Corneliu resources to stimulate the type of Codreanu, the German “left-wing” new thinking, new myths and new Nazi Otto Strasser, the American symbols that will need to be poet and fascist sympathiser Ezra embraced if a successful movement Pound and Evola. dedicated to our principles, and which is capable of motivating a Its latest book is a reader on large number of people, is ever to National Anarchism (see last be born,” but he argues that month’s Searchlight) featuring the practical activism as well as cultural likes of Southgate, Keith Preston production is also needed to drive (from the Attack the System blog), the movement forward.