By Barachiel
“Birds of a feather flock together.”
I don’t know how or if this saying applies to personal relationships, but it is true in the world of politics. And though they undoubtedly hate to admit it, the populist parties of the Nordics and Europe are not exempt. The PS’ problematic relationship with Suomen Sisu is proof enough of this. But even though we are well aware of the ties between populist parties like the PS and racist groups like Suomen Sisu, what about the ties to intolerant people and groups abroad?
There are many. With enough unsavory people to sufficiently embarrass the populist parties.
While the links between the populists and their American fans may not always be reciprocal, they nevertheless shine a light on the ultimate mindset of the populists. If parties like the PS and their immediate neighbor organization, the Sweden Democrats, really weren’t racist and xenophobic, I doubt they’d get attention from the people listed below, among countless others.
This indeed would be a case of birds of a feather flocking together. Or more fittingly, moths mingling with butterflies around the bug-zapper of intolerance.
Theodore Beale, a.k.a. Vox Day
Theodore Beale, better known by his pseudonym Vox Day, is a blogger and columnist for the extreme-right U.S. website WorldNetDaily. Like most of the contributors on that site, Vox Day propagates all manner of anti-Obama and anti-government conspiracy theories, as well as attacks on minorities. This is what Vox Day said about Finland and the PS on WorldNetDaily in 2011:
Being a more pragmatic nation than most, the Finnish people are the first to openly reject the idea that sending millions of Euros to other European countries and importing large quantities of foreigners is beneficial to the nation of Finland. Unlike Americans, the Finns recognize that a foreigner who comes to Finland is not a Finn. He is merely a foreigner in Finland, and his interests have little in common with those of the Finnish people.
Meanwhile, on his regular blog, Vox Day criticized The Wall Street Journal for editing a letter-to-the-editor by PS boss Timo Soini. Invoking conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Vox Day expressed support for Soini occupying the Oval Office:
Since the election of Mr. Soetoro [Obama] has demonstrated that absolutely no documentation is required of an American presidential candidate, why not nominate Mr. Soini for the presidency? He’s a damn sight better than anyone else the Republicans are likely to choose, he isn’t too old, and as the leader of a popular, electorally successful party, he can’t possibly be called unelectable.
Vox Day
“The Wall Street Journal Scrubs The True Finns”
VoxPopuli.BlogSpot.com
May 11, 2011
Even for an extreme site like WorldNetDaily, Vox Day’s attacks immigration are unabashedly racist. In late 2012, Vox Day wrote WorldNetDaily piece in which he called for a whites-only secessionist movement, lamenting “the U.S. bifactional ruling party’s hatred and contempt for white Americans who still hold to traditional values” and “the infestation of even the smallest American heartland towns by African, Asian and Aztec cultures.”
Vox Day, it should be noted, is an expat living in Italy.
Elsewhere, Vox Day has called for “traditional Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture” to be reclaimed through ethnic cleansing, and has reasoned that: “If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”
VDARE.com
VDARE.com – named after Virginia Dare, the first reputed white settler to be born in the North American colonies – is a non-profit anti-immigration website that has been officially listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Founded by Peter Brimelow, former editor of the ultraconservative periodical National Review, VDARE.com posts all manner of propaganda pieces by anti-Semites, white nationalists, and race-baiting pseudo-scientists.
VDARE.com – through an irregular columnist named Rafael Koski, a Ph. D student from northern Europe – has taken to writing laudatory, rabble-rousing pieces about the PS…
The True Finns have been taking votes from left, right and center, by exposing the incompetence and arrogance of the ruling elite. True Finns have gained a lot of votes from the Social Democratic Party, which has abandoned its traditional focus on fighting for the economic improvement of workers and adopted the crazy-left focus fighting against reality. (cf. U.S. Democrats.) The other two parties, the centre-right Center Party (rural population) and National Coalition (city bourgeoisie), are Europhiles and have been losing their nationalist voters to the True Finns.
And the SD, too…
Swedish media elites and the Establishment parties made fools of themselves by calling the Sweden Democrats a Nazi party trying to get away with Goebbels-style propaganda . . . The party got a publicity victory by showing that it is being treated unfairly by the Establishment parties and their media supporters. The reaction against the Sweden Democrats overshadowed all other election themes and ensured that protest votes would end up to the Sweden Democrats.
Who else does VDARE.com take stock in besides Koski? There is Kevin MacDonald, a college professor who says that Jews are genetically predisposed to undermine whites by pushing for non-white immigration; John Derbyshire, a disgraced National Review columnist who claims that “white supremacy…is one of the better arrangements history has come up with”; and Jared Taylor, a white nationalist who founded the “racial-realist” webzine American Renaissance.
What other topics does VDARE.com cover? Apart from attack pieces on what it calls the “Treason Lobby” – VDARE.com’s term for human rights groups who defend immigrants, such as the ACLU – the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented articles entitled “Freedom vs. Diversity”, “Abolishing America”, “Anarcho—Tyranny: Where Multiculturalism Leads”; and “Why Immigrants Kill.”
Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)
Known for its national television program The 700 Club, hosted by far-right televangelist Pat Robertson, CBN airs “news” stories which seemingly confirm Robertson’s contention that “Satanic” Muslim immigrants are out to conquer the world. Two CBN “reporters” – “terror analyst” Erick Stakelbeck and foreign correspondent Dale Hurd – have emerged as significant U.S. mouthpieces for European “counter-jihadist” parties, including the SD.
A March 2009 report by Hurd that aired on The 700 Club presented the SD as legitimate critics of Sweden’s immigrant community, with no mention of the party’s historical roots in neo-Nazism. Hurd took the party’s word for it that it wasn’t racist; dismissed criticism of the party as manufactured smears from Sweden’s “liberal media”; and cast two members, Kent Ekeroth and Erik Almqvist, in a martyr-ific light, along with the party in general…
KENT EKEROTH (Sweden Democrats international advisor): “I filmed the police chief [at a counter-demonstration of Islamic extremists in Malmö] and asked him why are they [sic] not reacting to [violence], why are they not doing anything. And he–he simply answered, ‘It’s their right according to the Swedish constitution to be there.’ We apparently did not have that same right because we were forced out of there, so…”
DALE HURD (voice-over): “Swede Ted Ekeroth [sic] helped film the Arab-left counter-demonstrations. He saw Arabs throwing rocks at a ninety-year-old Holocaust survivor.”
KENT EKEROTH: “Hopefully, you can show some of the clips from our demonstration for Israel, which is always peaceful and always with a message of peace. And theirs is always the quite opposite — death, hate, and killing of Jews.”
[…]
DALE HURD (voice-over): “But the Swedish Democrats [sic], who stand up for traditional Christian values and limits on immigration, have been stigmatized by the Swedish media as ‘fascist’ and ‘bigoted.'”
ERIK ALMQVUIST: “The media has tried to portray us as extremists, racists — we’re almost inhuman.”
DALE HURD (voice-over): “Erik Almqvuist, national youth leader for the Swedish Democrats, faces regular death threats and was almost killed recently in a left-wing knife attack.”
ERIK ALMQVUIST: “The multicultural system in Sweden has polarized this society. We have ethnic polarization. We have also political polarization.”
With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sure I am not the only one chortling as Ekeroth and Almqvist insist – those two specifically – that the SD are neither violent or racist.
Both men became infamous after a video – shot a year after the 700 Club interview – showed them engaging in racist and thuggish behavior, resulting in the “iron pipe scandal.” Not only did that scandal expose Ekeroth and Almqvist as hypocrites, but also exposed as Hurd as an ideologue-posing-a-journalist who openly refused to look into the SD’s agenda. Hurd certainly didn’t cover the iron pipe scandal when it broke.
Hurd seems supportive of racists from both sides of the pond. His 700 Club reports include sympathetic stories on the violent English Defence League and the white nationalist “Identitarians” of France. Hurd’s public Facebook page shows pictures of him interviewing Jean and Marine Le Pen; as well as posing with ultraconservative writer George Gilder, who once called African and Native American cultures “destructive cultures”, “tragic failures” and “virtual social suicide.”
With supporters like these, how could the PS, the SD, and other anti-Islam parties present themselves as comfortably mainstream? Again, I doubt that rabid scribes like Vox Day and propagandists like VDARE.com and CBN would pay so much attention to these parties if they weren’t bigoted.
We have to avoid guilt by association, Barachiel, but your key premise is hard to argue with, that PS would not get this kind of support from more obvious bigots if it did not recognise the ‘birds of a feather’, i.e. bigotry.