The right should take the new threat seriously
“Here it is. Enjoy,” said Elon Musk. For 48 hours, the turkey movie director was streamed Uwe Bolls new action film “Citizen Vigiliante” for free on platform X. Musk had bought the rights because the film was denied a distributor in Germany. The film depicts a white man who takes the law into his own hands and embarks on a bloody revenge spree against criminal gangs with an immigrant background.
The world’s richest man continues to use his media platform to spread far-right violence. On the same day that Musk became history’s first trillionaire, he took the opportunity to spread a call from the British right-wing extremist Tommy Robinson. A call to take to the streets after a Polish-English man was stabbed to death in Belfast. It was the starting point for a pogrom where young men dressed in black attacked residential areas dense with immigrants.
But who is that which should suffer the vengeance? “Citizen Vigiliante” sparked a discussion in Musk’s feed. Is it against the immigrants or the politicians that the violence should be directed? “Deal with the traitors first, then the invaders,” Musk replied, in a post that singled out a German feminist left-wing politician.
The threat to democracy has been a recurring theme in Expressen’s editorials in the past month. Patrik Kronqvist believes that the threat from the right has been exaggerated while the terror frenzy from the left undervalued. “Swedish anti-fascism has simply proven to be intellectually and morally bankrupt”, notes the freelance editorial writer Henrik Mattsson. The warnings for the development under the Tidö government are “dangerously close to the border where political opponents are portrayed as democratically illegitimate”, writes Kronqvist.
At the same time, the Social Democrats are alleged to have been infiltrated by criminals and The left party of Islamists and anti-Semites. Expressen’s investigations of the Left Party should “have led to powerful and immediate consequences”, Mattsson writes, despite Expressen reporting that the 25 representatives they investigated are no longer eligible.
The reasoning requires substantial acrobatic pirouettes. Kronqvist and Mattsson ignore the Forum for Living History’s new survey that anti-Semitic values are most common among right-wing voters and least common among the Left Party. In its latest overview of developments in violent extremism and terrorist threats warns the Security Police for an increased right-wing radicalization of young people. International forums and platforms play an increasingly important role in domestic attacks. The security police use the term “stochastic terrorism” for this connection between propaganda, designations and attacks.
During the Tidö government’s four years in power, a new underground wave of far-right terrorism has emerged. The legal processes are now succeeding each other, where a loose network of different perpetrators who were inspired by each other is unraveling. It is a unique situation where young Swedes are sentenced for participating in terrorist organizations and planning terrorist acts. Security analysts struggle to make sense of the development, which they describe under a host of new labels: accelerationism, misanthropic nihilism, anti-state extremism and violent misogyny. The names of the terrorist cells are also new to the media: Maniac Murder CultNo Lives Matter, 764 and the Green Brigade.
That which everyone the new right-wing groups share is that the attacks are filmed to spread in online forums. It is terror to create “content”. There is no longer any need for pompous manifestos, the actions can speak for themselves. The step from Uwe Boll’s romanticized avenger who takes matters into his own hands is short.
During this period of government, we have seen the resumption of the Nazi Salem marches and the street warriors Aktivklubb carrying out attacks on political meetings and Pride parades. A violence that is eagerly documented for the internal online forums. By the same people, as Dagens ETC showed in their reviews, who then sold filmed provocations to the Sweden Democrats’ related media channel Riks.
This is what revenge fantasies look like in practice. Enjoy. Elon Musk will guarantee they will be streamed.
