The growing Nazi axis

At the end of February 2017 an international Nazi conference took place in Stockholm organised by the National Socialist publishing group Arktos Media. Some of the key groups present are those that Searchlight has been monitoring for several years, some of which have appeared more publicly since the election of Donald Trump.

These groups have made common cause with President Putin’s Russia, Trump’s America and a range of British and other European far-right organisations.

Over the past three years we have halted an earlier conference in Hungary and had the top US Nazi Richard Spencer banned from Europe for three years and from the UK for life as a result of a report we were invited to write for the Home Office, which named the groups about which we were most concerned. These were Generation Identity, the Traditional Britain Group, the London Forum and its regional offshoots in Yorkshire, Wessex, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and Mixed Martial Arts, a paramilitary training set-up.

The most coherent body that bonds together these groups and has strong Russian and US links is Arktos Media.

Since the February meeting in Sweden, the US alt-right and Breitbart News have added to their people working in the UK and RT, Putin’s international TV propaganda service, has been beefed up all over the world.

On 20 May another international gathering is due to take place in Sweden using the title Scandza Forum. This will be another step in the Nazis’ forward progress. It will be followed by a Scandza Forum conference in Oslo on 1 July titled Globalism vs the Ethnostate.

According to Scandza Forum the speakers so far include:

Greg Johnson, PhD, former editor of The Occidental Quarterly and current editor of Counter-Currents/North American New Right, and author of numerous articles and books pertaining to the destiny of the West. His latest book is In Defence of Prejudice (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017). Dr. Johnson is one of the leading ideologists of White Nationalism and the Alternative Right.

Jonas De Geer, prolific writer and longstanding intellectual in the conservative and nationalist movements in Sweden. In the early years of the new millennium, Mr. De Geer edited the successful conservative journal SALT and is now the co-host of the popular radio show Motgift (‘Antidote’).

Brittany Pettibone, award-winning author of Hatred Day and co-host of the successful video podcast “Virtue of the West”. Ms. Pettibone has a huge following in social media and is a leading spokeswoman for the growing number of young women who are concerned about the destiny of the West.

Lauritz von Guildhausen, host of and contributor to the prominent Alt Right podcasts “The Third Rail” and “Honoring our History”. Lauritz is a rising star in the Alternative Right and was a regular contributor to the hugely popular, shortly re-launched, radio show “Fash the Nation”.

It appears that 119 people have been invited to this conference on Facebook. They include the far-right barrister Adrian Davies; Matt Tait, the British Nazi activist involved in paramilitary training with Russian and Polish experts; John Black Morgan, founder of Arktos Media; Michael Brooks, a British national socialist activist and counter-intelligence officer for parts of the British Nazi scene; and Charles Krafft, the US Nazi artist who raised money in Britain last year for Horst Mahler, a convicted Nazi terrorist who failed to return to prison after hospital treatment and has fled Germany.

Searchlight would like to thank the International Business Times for co-operating with us in exposing the enemies of democracy.

We ask our readers to link to this post on your websites and social media.

Introduction to the Searchlight dossier

The election of Donald Trump to the White House and his choice of Steve Bannon as his chief strategic adviser has raised the sound of alarm bells from a tinkle to a deafening crescendo.

Bannon’s role until recently as head of the alt-right news service Breitbart had placed him in a world of international national socialists such as Richard Spencer, who heads the US National Policy Institute (NPI). Spencer is currently banned from the UK and European countries that are signatories to the Schengen Agreement because of his links with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s sphere of subversive influence. His ban from the UK was the result of Searchlight’s lobbying of the Home Office and his previous failed attempt to hold an international Nazi gathering in Budapest.

TV audiences around the world saw Spencer addressing his followers after Trump’s election victory. His audience responded with Nazi salutes to his own Nazi-style “Hail Trump” greeting and coded language proclaiming to his followers that they will win “because they are the children of the sun”.

This evidence of how the extreme right had arrived close to the President of the world’s most powerful nation prompted us to research and produce a 200-page dossier, which gives an up-to-date insight into how close they have come to impinging on the freedom of the citizens of countries with democratic governments around the world.

Searchlight has existed since May 1964 and in recent years we have charted the progress of Putin’s subversion and the 140-plus far-right political groups in this country that are part of this threat.

We have been monitoring from inside those from whom the threat is most evident. These are the Traditional Britain Group (TBG), Generation Identity, the Nazi Forum groups that have expanded their closed meetings playing host to far-right extremists from around the world, and the publishing operation that is the glue that holds the others together: Arktos Media.

Our dossier has been circulated to the media in the UK, USA and Sweden and is now posted below.

Arktos Media started to gain an international profile around five years ago for reprinting old Nazi and hate material as well as new books for a new generation of more sophisticated rightwing extremists, especially European New Right and Identitarian books. It was born out of the violent Swedish Nazi movement and is named after the Greek word for “bear”. It was based in India from 2010 to 2014, then moved to Sweden, and since 2015 has been based in Budapest. It is now responsible for organising an annual international Identitarian Ideas conference, the latest of which – the ninth – took place in Stockholm on 25 February.

Arktos Media and the individuals associated with it have extensive international connections, including with the Traditional Britain Group, and most intriguingly with a Swedish mining company, Wiking Mineral AB. One of the directors of this company, Daniel Friberg, is also chief executive of Arktos.

Wiking Mineral

Wiking Mineral AB is an independent mineral exploration and mine development company, engaging in the exploration and development of gold, and base and precious metal deposits in Sweden. It operates in the Bergslagen and Västervik areas and the Skellefte District. The company was founded in 2005 and is based in Danderyd, Sweden.

Friberg was one of the founders of Arktos Media and was appointed as a director in May 2010. Between 2010 and 2016, he held a number of senior positions in Wiking Mineral but resigned as managing director in February 2016 in order to concentrate on Arktos. At the same time he moved from Sweden to Budapest.

At the age of 21, Friberg was prosecuted for hate speech in Gothenburg over comments posted on the white supremacist website Options Media. He was also reportedly connected with the violent Swedish Resistance Movement and Klas Lund.

A former member of the Swedish Nazi group White Aryan Resistance, Lund has several convictions, including one for bank robbery and another in 1986 for manslaughter for killing an anti-racist campaigner, Ronny Landin, who intervened to stop an assault on three immigrants.

In 2001, Friberg appears to have severed links with neo-Nazi groupings and shifted his attention to publishing, think-tanks and online forums including, Motpol.nu, the Nordic Association, Identitär Idea and most recently, Arktos.

Friberg is not the only Wiking Board member with far-right connections. The main shareholder of the company is Patrik Brinkmann, a millionaire and leading figure in the international far-right scene, who like Friberg, recently moved to Budapest. His Continent Europe Foundation includes several key far-right activists among its members. He has close contacts with neo-fascists in Spain and Italy, as well as with Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party (NPD).

Until 2008, Brinkmann operated discreetly from rural Sweden. In 2008, he relocated his political activities to Berlin after paying €3.3 million for a villa in the Zehlendorf district in 2007 together with his wife Svetlana. Brinkmann signed the purchase contract for the villa at a Berlin lawyer’s office on 26 April 2007 as a trustee of his wife who is the official owner of the property, and who also owns other real estate from which her husband profits. Before buying the property Brinkmann had resolved a lengthy dispute with the Swedish tax authorities in 2006.

Since 2004, Brinkmann has gathered ultra-right intellectuals from all over Europe in his foundation, which until 2008 operated from a post box address (Box 167) in the Swedish town of Jönköping. Among them are far-right professor Pierre Vial from France and the former advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, professor Wjatcheslav Daschitschev.

Two NPD activists belong to Brinkmann’s foundation: Lutz Dessau, who writes for the NPD newspaper Deutsche Stimme, is a member of the foundation’s directorate. Former teacher Andreas Molau, a member of the NPD’s national executive, is on the foundation’s Board.

Brinkmann is also believed to be behind a further real estate purchase in Germany. In May 2007, Molau’s wife bought a sizeable manor in the Brandenburg town of Rauen for €200,000. The property appeared to have been bought to house an NPD training centre. Frau Molau was acting on behalf of an obscure Swedish firm that shared the same post box address as Brinkmann’s foundation.

In 2011, Brinkmann re-focussed his attention on Wiking Mineral following negative publicity. Former Swedish government Minister Sven-Otto Littorin joined the company’s Board in 2012 which caused further negative press coverage, eventually ending with Littorin reporting Expressen to the Swedish Press Ombudsman.

Brinkmann moved to Budapest in 2014 but remained on the Board of Wiking Mineral until 2016. In an open letter to the Hungarian Daily News, Brinkmann stated that he considered the Hungarian economic climate promising in the long term and appreciated the culturally conservative social climate, as well as the national conservative government. He also praised the right-wing populist party Fidesz.

Brinkmann was replaced on the Wiking Board by his 22-year old son Philip Brinkmann in 2016. Philip Brinkmann founded the investment company Turul Capital Zrt in Budapest in 2014 with a focus on private equity. Like his father and Friberg, Philip Brinkmann also lives in Budapest as does John Morgan, Arktos’s editor-in-chief, who is also a director.

In July 2014 Patrik Brinkmann and his family controlled just over 50% of Wiking Mineral, a listed company with about 1,400 shareholders.

In March 2017 Morgan resigned as editor-in-chief and was appointed senior editor of Greg Johnson’s Counter-Currents Publishing, a USA-based organisation. Johnson is a regular visitor to the UK and is yet another key figure in the Russian sphere of influence.

Arktos and the TBG

Friberg and Morgan have both spoken at TBG conferences. Other non-executive writers published by Arktos have also been a regular feature at these conferences, including Marcus Willinger and Sir Roger Scruton.

TBG vice-president Gregory Lauder-Frost has been instrumental in leading this initiative and in 2016 was appointed UK Head of Arktos. Following this appointment the registered office address for all Arktos activities was relocated to an accountants’ address in Berwick-upon-Tweed, a 15-minute car journey from Lauder-Frost’s home.

Intelligence acquired through direct conversations with TBG executive members in 2014 provided strong indications that visits had been arranged to Budapest for Richard Spencer’s NPI Conference by Louis Welcomme, TBG’s chairman, and Lauder-Frost.

It was at this time that Olivia Pistun relinquished her position as the TBG’s website administrator and was believed to have moved to Budapest with Morgan. Morgan continued to visit the UK and was observed at a TBG Christmas social.

Spencer was invited to speak at the TBG conferences in 2012 and 2013. Monitoring of social media and live conversations at subsequent TBG events indicate an ongoing relationship between Lauder-Frost and Spencer.

Prominent individuals associated with the TBG also continued to develop their relationships with the NPI, in particular Matt Tait who attended the NPI’s Budapest conference in October 2014 and the 2016 New York conference at which he was a speaker.

Tait, a former British National Party organiser and election candidate, is a prominent activist in Generation Identity UK and co-founder of Western Spring, a white racial nationalist think-tank. Monitoring undertaken at a number of TBG events between 2015 and 2016 point to a close relationship between Tait and Lauder-Frost with the two regularly engaging in conversation in a friendly and informal manner, sometimes at great length.

The connections between the TBG and the American alt-right continued after 2014, with Michael Cushman of the Southern Nationalist Network being invited as guest speaker at the 2015 annual dinner. Intelligence gathered before the dinner revealed that Cushman was to be banned from entering the UK which prevented him from appearing.

Another link between the TBG and the US scene is Jason Reza Jorjani, an Iranian-American academic living in New York, who was spotted at a TBG meeting in 2016. Jorjani was subsequently appointed as editor-in-chief at Arktos at the same time that Lauder-Frost became its UK head.

In January 2017, Searchlight established that a direct link existed between Arktos and Spencer in two further ways: the establishment of a new Washington DC area headquarters for a joint European and American movement to be known as the AltRight; and the launch by the NPI and Arktos Media of a joint AltRight website. The link extends to Jeremy Bedford-Turner’s London Forum, as the AltRight website posted videos of the Iranian speakers at the Forum event on Saturday 4 February 2017.

Bannon and the TBG

A Breitbart Radio Show, News Daily, on 27 May 2016 revealed a link between Bannon and the TBG. Bannon opened the broadcast and Oliver Lane presented the third item.

Lane, a TBG regular and close friend of Lauder-Frost, is a Breitbart journalist specialising in terrorism and radicalisation. His previous occupations have included assistant lecturer at King’s College, University of London teaching applied classical and modern military strategy, researcher for Get Britain Out, and maritime and naval forces researcher for the Institute for Strategic Studies.

He has also been a Conservative Party county council candidate, chairman of the British Monarchist league, a Royal Navy midshipman, consulting analyst for Onsight Intelligence, and a researcher for The Military Balance published by Routledge. He follows Generation Identity on Twitter as well as many UKIP members.

Katehon

Searchlight has also unearthed a link between Lauder-Frost and a Russian think-tank called Katehon. One of the members of Katehon’s supervisory board (listed here) is Leonid Reshetnikov, lieutenant-general (retired) in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Another is Alexandr Dugin, the fascist behind the “Eurasia” movement, who has close ties to the Kremlin. Dugin was due to attend the Stockholm conference on 25 February to promote some of his new publications.

Contributions by Lauder-Frost to Katehon can be found here.

Stockholm conference

The Stockholm conference in February was billed as “the most important AltRight event in Europe – and possibly the World – in 2017”. Its long list of speakers included Friberg, Morgan and Jorjani, and one of its purposes was to launch an English language edition of the book Rising from the Ruins by Joakim “Oskorei” Andersen. We reproduce here the publicity material for the conference and book.

Another of the speakers in Stockholm was Dan Eriksson, chairman of the EU-funded foundation Europa Terra Nostra and a longstanding Swedish Nazi leader. A former propaganda chief for the National Democrats, when that party went into decline he joined the Nazi Party of the Swedes, previously known as the National Socialist Front. We reproduce here Terra Nostra’s description of itself.

Connections

Generation Identity has, so far at least, kept a low profile in the UK, but behind the scenes it is trying to build an upper-middle class core of future leaders and is recruiting at universities. Trump’s election has given the whole of the alt-right a boost.

The extensive international connections of the alt-right and extreme right, reaching right up to the seat of power in both the USA and Russia, mean that the threat from the extreme right is now at its highest since 1945.

The links between the various prominent individuals mentioned in this article are represented in this graphic.

Organisations such as Generation Identity and TBG flourish through their secretive invitation-only meetings featuring influential international speakers. Home Secretary Amber Rudd has excluded some of these individuals, but others are still getting into the country. For the sake of our freedom and democracy, the Home Office must remain vigilant, identify those who pose a threat, and keep them out.