Alternative War: Unabridged Read online

  Something seedy was visible in the growth of insular, nationalist politics. Right-wing parties of a similar ilk were working together globally, with a vast machinery of alternative media, cyber-attacks, and data-laundering behind them. And, I found, this international network was directly linked to Russia.

  People were taken by surprise with Brexit and then Trump but, if they had looked to Sweden, a country where the home-grown nationalists have much clearer Nazi roots – and where the government has acknowledged the political and physical threat posed by Russia – perhaps neither would have even come to pass.

  By March 2017, support for the right-wing Sverigedemokraterna62 (Sweden Democrats) party had almost doubled, with polls showing anticipated votes of between 19% and 23%, putting them in second place, nationally. Contrary to the evidence I’d uncovered through my investigation, the party website claims: “The overall net impact of mass immigration from distant countries [is] strongly negative, both economically and socially.”

  With roots planted deep in fascism, the party was officially founded in 1988 and rose from the white supremacy movement. The SD logo from the 1990s until 2006 was a variant of the torch used by the United Kingdom’s National Front but, after that, was changed to a distinctive blue flower with a yellow centre, the blåsippa (Hepatica). I don’t know the significance of it and the internet records on its meaning are not quite simple as they are when it comes to Wales and the Daffodil. Originally at its politically strongest in the South of Sweden, the right-wing party gained 13% of the vote in the 2006 municipal elections in Malmö and, by the 2014 general election, they had gained traction in the North, towards Stockholm – they polled at 12.9%, winning forty-nine seats in the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament). For now, however, they remain politically isolated due to a policy of the other parties not to enter a coalition with them, which I fully understand having taken a closer look at their affairs.

  Gustaf Ekström, a Waffen-SS veteran, was the first auditor of the party and Anders Klarström, once a member of the Nordiska rikspartiet ("Nordic Reich Party"), was an early chair. From the outset, the party sought alliances with the National Democratic Party of Germany and the American National Association for the Advancement of White People – founded by David Duke, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Duke managed one-term as a Republican Louisiana State Representative, and, bizarrely, went on to be a candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries in 1988. By 1992, he was back to being a Republican and stood in the primaries on that side. Over the years he has conducted unsuccessful campaigns for the Louisiana State Senate, United States Senate, United States House of Representatives, and Governor of Louisiana and, in 2002, pled guilty to defrauding supporters by falsely claiming to be impoverished and in danger of losing his home, in order to solicit emergency donations. It transpired Duke was completely financially secure and had channelled the donations he received towards recreational gambling.

  It seems Duke63 was an early starter in the development of the alt-right, or at least the forerunning attempts to make white supremacy more palatable to the masses. In 1974, he founded the Louisiana-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), where he became Grand Wizard. One politically astute and forward-thinking follower, Thomas Robb, changed the title of Grand Wizard to National Director and replaced the known white robes with business suits. Duke started in earnest to sell himself – and the Knights – as a new breed of Klansman: well-groomed, engaged, and professional. The self-presentation of alt-right figures in 2017 America was more than inspired by the same approach. Duke’s commentary on Trump’s rally statement also turned out to be the same fallacy peddled by the modern day versions of him, his Twitter feed being full of such gems as “Sweden had no idea what @realDonaldTrump was talking about. #WhiteGenocide.” In a way he was right, of course, Sweden had no idea what Trump was talking about because it wasn’t true.

  The early leadership of Sweden’s own far-right party, the SD, also sought links with publications such as the Nazi Nation Europa and Nouvelle École, the latter being a newspaper which advocates racial biology.

  Nation Europa (also referred to as Nation und Europa) was a monthly magazine published in Germany between 1951 and 2009 when it was closed down64.

  The publication was founded by former SS commanders, Arthur Ehrhardt and Herbert Boehme, and took its title from a quote by Oswald Mosley, which described his “Europe a Nation” ideology. Initially, the largest single shareholder was Swedish neo-Nazi and former Olympic athlete Carl-Ehrenfried Carlberg. In later years, the publication would become more closely associated with Deutsche Liga für Volk und Heimat (The German League for People and Homeland), a far-right political group, and Nation Europa was eventually accused of giving space to Nazism. It was subsequently investigated by the German government. Nouvelle École was equally extreme, being a journal which declared its commitment to “racial purity” in its editorial.

  Despite their clear preferences, it wasn’t until after photographs surfaced of Swedish Democrat members posing in Nazi regalia that the wearing of any kind of uniform was formally banned in 1996. This was the point when the party began to try and present itself more moderately and the youth branch was eventually expelled due to racism and links to extremist groups in 2015. The youth group has, however, been re-initiated under the name Ungsvenskarna (Young Swedes), though they are far from the only section of the party which hasn’t escaped the image it was trying to shake off to make broader progress. In November 2012, Swedish newspaper the Expressen released a series of videos from August 2010 for the second time.

  The ‘iron pipe scandal’, as it subsequently became known65, was recorded on film by one member of the Riksdag, Kent Ekeroth, and featured his fellow SD MPs Jansåker Almqvist and Christian Westling. Almqvist was shown arguing with comedian Soran Ismail, while referring to Sweden as “my country, not your country” before the trio went on to argue with another drunken man. Ekeroth was then approached by a woman, who he called her a whore before pushing her. The three then went on to pick up scaffold poles in a continuance of the original argument with Ismail.

  As a result, Almqvist left his position as the party's economic policy spokesperson and resigned from his seat on the executive committee after the video’s second publication gained more traction. The party itself went on to announce Ekeroth would “take a break” from his position as the SD’s justice policy spokesman. Before their own expulsion, the youth movement also argued the Swedish Democrats should not have bowed to the media pressure.

  Shortly after the departures, another Swedish Democrat MP, Lars Isovaara, left his seat after reporting to the Polisen that “two unknown men of an immigrant background” had robbed him of his backpack. The party backed the claim until the Expressen66 revealed Isovaara had simply forgotten his backpack at a restaurant and, it transpired, the two innocent men had only helped him when he fell out of his wheelchair. The same MP was also reported to the police for racial abuse against Riksdag security guards.

  After the scandals and dismissals, however, the Sweden Democrats began to rise dramatically in the polls in 2015. This was at the peak of incoming immigration and the party was actively seeking rigid controls of those coming in for “the benefit of indigenous Swedish citizens” while, simultaneously, remaining openly critical of the special rights given to the indigenous Sami people of northern Sweden. In 2008 they had gone as far as adopting a motion against the rights to reindeer husbandry, arguing those “who do not involve themselves with reindeer husbandry are treated as second-class citizens.” They had also expressed a desire to abolish funds supporting the Sami and redistribute them “regardless of ethnic identity and business operations” and still appear keen to abolish the Sami Parliament. The position strikes me a deeply hypocritical.

  In a mirror of right-wing part policy across Europe, the Sweden Democrats have set out that they reject any notions of joining the Economic and Monetary Union of the EU, stand opposed to the accession of Turkey – an argument also used
the Leave campaigns during Brexit – and want to renegotiate Swedish membership in the European Union. Within this political party’s background is the key to exposing the global network of purported nationalist parties – a mockery of the ‘anti-globalisation’ rhetoric they have all now adopted.

  The Sweden Democrats not only have long-term links with the extreme right but have also shifted – trying to escape this image and found themselves aligning with the newer, more acceptable face of this politik: what is now known as the alt-right.

  During the course of their rise, the party has found itself in regular scandal situations, being accused of antisemitism, having members expelled for extremism, and having its website blocked by the Swedish government for posting anti-Islamic cartoons. They are also still boycotted from advertising space by some Swedish newspapers – something which has helped hinder their traditional reach to the electorate and subsequently goes a long way to explaining the shift to new media. This doesn’t always go so well, however. A few weeks prior to the general election of September 2014, the chairman of the Swedish Democrat’s Stockholm branch, Christoffer Dulny, resigned from his position having been found to have been calling immigrants “shameless” and mocking them on alternative media sites. Additionally, in December 2016, Anna Hagwall was thrown out of the party after using arguments associated with antisemitism to argue for a bill she introduced in the Riksdag, intended to “reduce the concentration of media ownership” in Sweden. She was attempting to make way for alternative outlets through legislation. It is somewhat unsurprising, then, that right-wing sites Info Wars and Breitbart have been posting articles with a supporting lean towards the Sweden Democrats since 2015 at least. You can find this out on a cursory search alone, but the meaning is not immediately obvious. The link is easy to miss unless you are looking for it specifically.

  Breitbart was founded by a right-wing journalist, Andrew Breitbart who died in 2012 and, though it retains his surname, was headed up by Steve Bannon, chief advisor to President Donald Trump. It is now known Bannon was funded directly by billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer whose involvement was first mooted while he was still investing in Ted Cruz’s candidacy in the eventual Trump/Clinton election race. His involvement, however, was only officially outed well after the election of Trump, in 2017. Breitbart News Network CEO, Larry Solov, publicly acknowledged the family’s involvement67, though he denied the Mercers held any editorial input.

  The idea was first developed by Andrew Breitbart68 when he visited Israel in 2007 and he then outlined the concept as being a website which “would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel.” By 2010, Andrew Breitbart had told the Associated Press he was “committed to the destruction of the old media guard,” through the site. Later, under Bannon, the site aligned with the European populist right and the American alt-right, at which point the New York Times started to describe Breitbart News as led by “ideologically driven journalists” to churn out controversial “material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist.” Bannon himself declared Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right” in 2016, though he later denied all allegations of racism and even stated he rejected the “ethno-nationalist” tendencies of the movement. The money men behind Breitbart have always refuted any connection with the extreme right though, after the election of Donald Trump, more than two-thousand companies removed Breitbart from their advertising buying lists for this reason. Breitbart has also published a number of false articles and wild conspiracy theories, with inexhaustive examples including Barack Obama supporting ISIS, a number of features about Hilary Clinton’s health, and a heavily edited video of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. With the original mission being to “take back the culture”, Breitbart launched careers of a host of controversial ‘alt-right’ figures – none of whom I am giving oxygen to – and the site came to London in 201469, with Bannon saying the coming 2015 election (and subsequent 2016 referendum) were a key focus in their “current cultural and political war.”

  In November 2015, Breitbart began to post content under the banner “Sweden Yes”, though this was limited to five articles, according to reports70, until Trump’s comment in February 2017. According to the web encyclopaedia Know Your Meme, “Sweden Yes” first appeared on a far-right German message board in 2012, from where it spread to Reddit where it is currently “quarantined” due to “shocking or highly offensive content.” Also popular on “4chan”, the meme is directly connected to Swedish webcomics which are openly despising of multi-culturalism and show interracial intercourse in a dim light, or feature immigrants engaging in criminality. Breitbart-wise, the content listed under “Sweden Yes” was mostly written by Chris Tomlinson, a London contributor who openly supports Marine Le Pen and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders. Following Trump’s Florida speech, Breitbart labelled thirty-two articles of a total of thirty-seven released in the same month, with the “Sweden Yes” tag.

  While some of these back links to Sweden are more obvious – for example, Duke and the SD have a long history, and Bannon’s appointment in the Trump cabinet was publicly hailed a success by Duke – they are only, in fact, small components which come together and form a broader, more complex picture. And this jigsaw builds to a point where it goes well beyond even the other obvious links between the Sweden Democrats and their EU parliamentary associations with Nigel Farage’s UKIP and Marine Le Pen’s Front National. Mercer once worked for IBM designing revolutionary technology – which went on to form the basis of today’s artificial intelligence – and became CEO of a complex hedge fund which uses algorithms to trade. One of the funds is reported to be the most successful in the world.

  Robert Mercer71 attended a National Youth Science Camp in West Virginia in 1964 where he learned to program and went on to study for a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the University of New Mexico. During his university degree, he also held a job at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland, writing military programs. He’s since publicly said the experience left him “with a jaundiced view of government-financed research.” In the 1970s he joined IBM, where he developed what’s known as “Mercer Clustering” – a standard code now used in speech recognition – and in 2014 received the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award for this work. By the end of 1993, Mercer had joined the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. The founder, James Harris Simons, had a well-known preference for hiring mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists rather than business school students or traditional financial analysts, and in 2009 Mercer and another colleague from IBM, Peter Brown, became co-CEOs of Renaissance when Simons retired. By 2014, Renaissance was already managing twenty-five billion dollars in assets.

  Since the start of the decade, Mercer has also focused millions on right-wing, “ultra-conservative” political donations and the Washington Post called Mercer “one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics” in 201572. According to estimates across the internet, Mercer had already donated about thirty-five million dollars to federal campaigns by 2006. In this, Mercer joined forces with the Koch brothers, a conservative political donor network, but Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, went on to establish their own political foundation: The Mercer Family Foundation, which is run by Rebekah. Rebekah Mercer later became one of the members of Donald Trump's Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee. Both Robert Mercer and Bannon are also linked to controversial data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which uses big data to focus tailored messaging on voters down to an individual level. This company became one the subjects of my investigation beyond Sweden, building a picture of the mass manipulation of the electorate with the aim of controlling not only geopolitics but the financial markets too.

  Mercer was a major – if not the major – supporter of Donald Trump's successful 2016 presidential campaign, and Rebekah is broadly accepted to have played the primary role in the ascent of Bannon and controversial peddler of “alternative
facts”, Kellyanne Conway, into their senior roles in the Trump White House. Rebekah had worked with Conway on the Cruz Super PAC, Keep the Promise, in the Republican primaries, while Mercer also financed another Super PAC, Make America Number One, which supported Trump. According to reports73, Nick Patterson, a former colleague of Mercer's, said: “In my view, Trump wouldn't be President if not for Bob.” Mercer, I went on to find, also played a part in Brexit and, by that point, I’d formed a detailed picture of the vital factors in the success of any campaign like Trump or the EU referendum. A combination of the use of psychometrics, big data, propaganda and disinformation, artificial intelligence, and hacking. The unifying feature which the strands hung off was the involvement of Russia – who I found to be involved in state-sanctioned hacking and AI targeting of Western elections.

  Once again, Sweden was the key to unlocking everything. You see, the Sweden Democrats do have direct links to Russia and this has raised a significant concern over security within the Riksdag and impacted on foreign and defence policy decisions by the country74. This began when a Russian-born political secretary for the SD resigned in September 2016, after making several million kronor in a suspect property deal with a St Petersburg “businessman.”