Daniel Friberg is the Co-founder and CEO of the publishing company Arktos Media Ltd., author of “The Real Right Returns” and chairman of Swedish conservative think-tank. The interview was published in a print version of Demokracija magazine.
Could you please tell us when and under what circumstances did you first came into contact with the right wing ideas, and what were the main reasons that you decided to become active within the right wing and identitarian movements? Maybe you could also tell us which were some of the main philosophers and thinkers that influenced you the most in your activities and writings?
My political awakening came in my early teens, when I first came into contact with multiculturalism and realized that the media was lying and covering up the negative effects of immigration, and I wanted to find out why. I started doing my own research and read plenty of books, and realized they were lying to us about many other things as well. To fight this deceitful agenda of our elite, I decided to become politically active. I first joined the Sweden Democrats for a short while, but soon decided that party politics was not my cup of tea. Opinion-forming activities were much more appealing to me, and a few years later, in my late teens, I founded my first small publishing company, including a magazine dealing with topics such as immigration and media propaganda which I managed to distribute for free to all third-year high-school students in our two biggest cities. That was the start of my career in metapolitics.
I was mostly influenced by Swedish authors in the early years, but some of my earliest, most important influences outside of Sweden were Richard McCulloch, Guillaume Faye, Alain de Benoist and Pierre Krebs.
Can you tell us the story behind the establishment of the Arktos media and publishing house?
It all started with me and three other people from the think-tank ‘Motpol’ getting together in Aarhus, Denmark, in November 2009, for a meeting about starting up a new publishing company. I had previously been running a Swedish publishing house called ‘Nordic Publishing’ for seven years, but I, as well as my three colleagues from Denmark and Norway, felt it was time to do something bigger. During that weekend, Arktos was born. We came up with the name, the logotype, and the general direction we were about to take. After that, we got started on an aggressive investment strategy where we acquired the rights to the most important books by Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist right from the start, effectively monopolizing the most important New Right works shortly after founding the company.
You are also the founder of the Swedish right wing think tank Motpol. Could you tell us something more about its activities?
Motpol was founded in 2005 with the express purpose of introducing ideas and thinkers from the French New Right and the early Identitarian movement into the Scandinavian countries. Since 2005 we’ve published thousands of articles, organized a multitude of meetups and nine annual conferences in the popular ‘Identitarian Ideas’ series. The latest conference took place in Stockholm, February 2017, and featured nearly 400 guests and speakers from all over Europe and the US.
The so called »Alt-right« movement which appeared a few years back, has in fact grown out of the website altright.com. You were one of the founders of this website, and its regular contributor. Please tell us a few words about the altright.com, and how would you define the term »Alternative Right«? Also, please give us your opinion on the Alt-right movement?
Altright.com emerged from the general energy and excitement following watershed anti-globalist events like the Brexit vote and the Trump election, and provided a platform for incisive analysis by talented writers who, for their unconventional views, couldn’t write elsewhere. While a good idea, the project ultimately failed due to external circumstances, and I chose to leave the company as well as the editorial board for the site in spring last year.
The ‘Alternative Right’, as its name suggests, provides a real political alternative to our failing, and in many cases pathetic, conventional right. The Alt-Right is difficult to define, because it has always included a lot of different currents. This has made it both innovative and difficult to pin down. Everyone involved, however, is fed up with degeneration in politics and culture, is concerned with the future of European and European-derived ethnicities, and is opposed to the forces of globalism and one-worldism. Alt-Righters are willing to look critically on liberalism, the endless US- and Europe-led wars in the Middle East and parts of Africa, and the growth of international money power. They see the political Establishment as not only inefficient, but even in many cases malicious, and they are looking for new solutions to the problems that the Establishment has caused.
One of our books, A Fair Hearing: The Alt-Right in the Words of Its Members and Leaders, is a collection of essays discussing the American Alt-Right in particular. The Alt-Right movement was a very important step in American politics. It altered the narrative in the United States and produced a kind of populism that would not have been possible without it. It even played a part, and maybe a decisive part, in electing Donald Trump to office. This led to the emergence in Europe of similar, though distinctly European, movements. The American Alt-Right has suffered setbacks and lost the momentum that set it going. But though the name is used less frequently than when Altright.com was founded, its influence is as real now as ever, and it could very well make a reappearance, perhaps under a different brand, in the 2020 American elections.
The Alt-Right has changed the worldview of many people in both America and Europe, and has opened up political possibilities which were not possible even five years ago. That is its great metapolitical achievement.
You are the author of the book »The Real Right Returns«. The two of the many themes that you write about in the book are the concepts of Ethnopluralism and Metapolitics. It seems you strongly advocate these two concepts, which are also at the core of the identitarian idea. Could you please briefly explain those two concepts to our readers, and give as a short introduction to the other themes you write about in your book?
Ethnopluralism is rooted in the simple idea that every unique ethnicity has the right to govern itself, on territory which has historically belonged to it. This idea is accepted without argument for practically every ethnicity on the planet except for Western ethnicities; in Western countries, multiculturalism is the dominant paradigm. Multiculturalism holds that cultures and ethnicities can and should be freely intermixed in liberal societies, each somehow magically keeping to its distinct traditional ways and respecting the rights of every other to do the same. Ethnopluralism sees the absurdity in this. In liberal states, different ethnicities will of course always engage in identity politics, using politics to benefit their kind at the expense of everyone else. Vastly different ethnicities that are brought to live side by side either violently clash with each other on account of their irreconcilable differences, or else they homogenise and lose everything which is characteristic to them. The only way that ethnicities and cultures can be truly preserved is by maintaining the physical distances and the national boundaries that separate them. This is as true in the West as anywhere on Earth, and it is the core meaning of ethnopluralism – the true multiculturalism.
Metapolitics on the other hand refers to a kind of action aimed at changing the political tendencies of individuals, by changing the worldview of society as a whole. The strategy of metapolitics, as I outline in my book, originated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who wrote a series of notebooks while in prison in Fascist Italy, in which he he concluded that communism had failed in Italy because it had occupied itself too much with politics and not enough with culture. This insight led to the development of the Frankfurt School and all the epochal changes which that School brought.
The strategies and the tools of metapolitics can and must be used by the Right as well, and this includes work on many different levels – everything from publishing the kinds of books that Arktos offers, to providing podcasts, articles and interviews like the present one, to having debates with your family and friends, to trolling on the internet. What is important is that everyone finds a way of joining the struggle, whether publicly or privately, to shift the present worldview.
My book also discusses the decline of the Left, the necessity of putting politics before economics, the importance of Europe’s unity on the geopolitical level, and the fundamental question of gender roles. This last is important because without large traditional families, Europe will lose the demographic race and will suffer the consequences in terms of more forced non-European immigration and the continually diminishing political weight of native European ethnicities. Also, men and women cannot reach their full potential if they refuse to attempt to do so as men and women, by embodying the specific virtues of their genders.
»The Real Right Returns« is one of the books which explains the concepts of the New Right to all the people new to these ideas. Which other books would you also recommend to the readers interesed to learn more about the New Right and the Identitarian thought?
We have published an excellent overview of the Right by my friend and colleague, Joakim Andersen, Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century, which I highly recommend as an introduction to the various strands of the contemporary Right. For the New Right in particular, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe by Michael O’Meara is an excellent place to begin, along with some of the works of the founders of the New Right themselves, such as Why We Fight by Guillaume Faye and the View from the Right trilogy by Alain de Benoist. The Identitarian movement and its tactics are summarised nicely in Generation Identity by Markus Willinger. For those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the New Right and related movements, I suggest the work of Julius Evola, Alexander Dugin, and other books by the above authors, many of which are available from our publishing house.
Could you describe the current political situation in Sweden to our readers? Are there any organisations or political parties that you cooperate with? What is your opinion about the conservative party Sweden Democrats?
It’s less than ideal, to put it mildly. We have, by international standards, a radically left-wing, feminist, pro-LGBT, pro-immigration government that prioritizes open-borders and virtue signaling at the expense of the future of Swedish people. Sweden has had by far the highest non-European immigration per capita in Europe for close to three decades, and this newly imported Lumpenproletariat is slowly supplanting the Swedish voters, making it more difficult for the Swedish people to assert their political interests with every passing year.
Since I and the projects I’m involved in are metapolitical in nature – which means they would be weakened by overt affiliations with political parties – we don’t have any ongoing cooperation.
The Sweden Democrats, being socially conservative civic nationalists, are the only relatively sane party in the Swedish parliament, and they are growing with every election. They are currently the second biggest party in the polls, taking around 20% of the votes.
The hegemony of the liberal left in the mainstream media and in the public life in general, and the enforcement of political correctness, which is currently present in most of European countries, seems to be especially strong in Sweden. Could you tell us how does this reflect on Swedish society? How strong is the censorship and have you and Arktos media ever had any problems with the state due to the so called »hate speech« laws?
Sweden has a small population of just over ten million people living on land with harsh terrain and hard winters. To survive here, the Swedes became very closely knit, very trusting, well-organised, and obedient to rules and laws. But these virtues have been used against them by our hostile politicians to import masses of foreigners and to censor dissident opinions. More than a fifth of the population in Sweden is foreign, and most of these foreigners come from outside the European Union. Sweden has suffered from exploding crime rates and the total disruption of its urban life especially.
However, everything which has led the Swedes to be one of the worst-abused of all European peoples in the migrant crisis could become enormously beneficial to them. When the Swedes awaken to the truth of their situation, their capacity to work together, to forge strong communities, and to follow a course of action to the very end will help them reclaim their country and their national and ethnic destiny. If anyone is interested in knowing more about the Swedish situation, and that of Western Europe more generally, The Ideology of Failure: How Europe Bought Into Ideas That Will Weaken and Destroy It by Stephen Pax Leonard is a great resource.
Arktos has of course been targeted by the general censorship. Several major Swedish bookstores were among the first to take our titles off their shelves, and they have been followed by bookstores in a few other countries. We have had one title – A Fair Hearing – banned from Amazon.com without any real justification, and the works of Alexander Dugin have also been suppressed due to American sanctions against Russia. We are also a continual target for various groups who have decided that everyone who doesn’t think like them should be censored. These groups are usually nothing better than globalist lapdogs, and so we welcome their hostility; it means we’re doing our job.
The millitant left wing group Antifa seems to be quite strong in Sweden, even attacking homes and property of patriots. Can you tell us something about this attacks, and have you, or anyone from Arktos, ever faced any threats from them? Tell us also how does the mainstream media portraits these attacks in the news and were you ever harrassed by the left wing journalists?
Antifa in Sweden barely exists, and they are more of a joke than any serious threat to anything. Arktos has never had any problems with the Swedish Antifa. As for left-wing journalists, these are still a problem, in the sense that they routinely publish lies and complete fabrications about right-wing, nationalist people, including myself, and try their best to incite censorship and violence against us.
We will see how long they last. With the dwindling readerships of the fake news media platforms and well-deserved mass-layoffs of leftist journalists working for the older generation of newspapers and TV channels, I doubt it will be for much longer. Alternative media outlets will eventually push these people out. The only thing that could possibly save them is draconian censorship of the Internet, which I frankly think will be impossible.
Mass migration has been on the rise in Sweden for quite some time now, resulting in higher crime rates, rapes and riots. Could you tell us what is the current situation regarding non european migrants and the troubles they cause ? Also tell us what do you believe are the real reasons hiding behind this lunatic open borders policy of EU leaders, and what would be the most efficient solution to this problem?
You are certainly right, and the riots, for instance, are visible proof of the changes in Swedish society over the past few decades. It would once have been impossible to imagine open battles in Swedish streets, with stone-throwing, car fires and attacks on the police; now, it is not unusual to see Swedish cities go up in flames because this or that ‘migrant community’ isn’t happy with the way things are going. The rape statistics in particular are shocking; rape has risen in Sweden 24% in the past decade. In rape assault cases, 85% of the perpetrators are non-European. Keep in mind that these are official statistics in a country whose politicians and media almost neurotically excuse immigrants for their misbehaviour, so the real numbers are certainly higher.
But some things can’t be hidden: Sweden is now the hand-grenade-attack capital of Europe, and one of the rape capitals of the entire world. Back when it was almost exclusively ethnically Swedish, with most of its immigrants coming from other parts of Europe, it was one of the safest countries in the world. It doesn’t take sophisticated analysis to see what’s causing the problems here.
Open-borders policies are sought for a lot of reasons. Part of it originates in a real concern: to be politically competitive on the global scale, Europe needs a strong economy and a flourishing population. But rather than encouraging Europeans to have more children, as I do in my book, Europeans are actively encouraged not to have children from frankly absurd environmental and economic pretexts. So while the demographic issue is a real problem, it is only part of the reason for open-border policies.
A larger factor here is the greed of cosmopolitan globalists, who understand how much they’ll profit if they can transform as much of the world as possible into a homogeneous mass of consumer/laborers. They do whatever they can to open European borders, to destroy our native European ethnicities and to eradicate all sense of rootedness or belonging. This is why I dedicate sections of my book to the relation between politics and economics and family-building; Europe can’t survive in the current geopolitical reality unless it unites, begins to grow its population through the promotion of healthy European families, and forcibly limits the power of the supranational elites, who now do whatever they please across the globe with almost total impunity.
As far as immigration goes, before anything, our borders must be secured. We often hear the press and our politicians claiming that nothing can be done to stop immigration, but we have seen in countries like Hungary and Italy, and also in your own Slovenia, that secure-border policies are not only possible but potentially highly effective. If more of the major non-EU immigration destinations in Europe began to protect their borders, the word would quickly spread to Africa and the Middle East, and that would already be a powerful deterrent to future immigration into Europe. This is why metapolitics is so important.
What would you say the future hold for Arktos media? And what do you believe awaits Sweden and the rest of Europe in the coming years?
As the nightmarish consequences of the globalist worldview become clearer, more and more people will seek real alternatives. Arktos is the premier publishing house for books along these lines, so I believe that our future is bright. If things continue to go badly in the West – as I obviously hope they do not – we will remain one of the few publishing houses brave enough to honestly and openly discuss the real problems of our countries, and if things finally turn around and the West enjoys a new renaissance, we will be among the avant-garde promoting new visions for a renovated society. One way or another, Arktos’ future is tied to the future of Europe itself, and that is as it should be.
There could be dark days in store. There will almost certainly be a rise in violence in many parts of Europe (and in the US and other Western countries) before things can turn around again, and this might even lead to the break-up of countries or to civil war, as Guillaume Faye predicts in his most recent book, Ethnic Apocalypse: The Coming European Civil War.
Right now the biggest question is what country will flare up first. Sweden is one candidate, given its extremely high percentage of non-European immigrants and Muslims. Malmö, for instance, which is full of so-called ‘no-go zones’, is about one-third first-generation immigrants, and this statistic doesn’t even count immigrant children born in Sweden. There are 150 languages spoken in Malmö alone. We are talking about a time bomb. Paris, London, several major Swedish and German cities and many places in the US have all shown similar signs of strain. But whatever city – or country – goes first, it will awaken the peoples of the West to the fact that something must be done.
I am confident that the fighting spirit of our peoples will reawaken. We have lived comfortably for a long time now, but harder times are coming. When things get tough, I believe we will see the old virtue of the European-descended peoples arise again. And once that day comes, there is no one who can predict what we might achieve.
Thank you very much for this interview! Do you have any last messages for our readers and for the Slovenian nation?
It’s been my pleasure! Thanks to you and to your audience for the opportunity.
Slovenia occupies an important position at the southern border of Central and Western Europe. You showed enormous courage during the migrant crisis when you put up a wall at your border to control the so-called ‘Balkan Route’. That put pressure on other countries in front of Slovenia in the lines, like Croatia and Greece, to do the same. You were demonized by much of the mainstream media when that happened, and it was even claimed that you were threatening the future of the European Union. But all of those who really love Europe understood. The latest news is that you are planning to continue with the perimeter fence; all true Europeans will applaud you for your pro-European efforts along these lines.
Unfortunately, we can be almost certain that there will be other migrant crises from the Middle East and Africa, which will certainly flood into Southern and Eastern Europe and put our borders and our will once more to the test. I’m sure the Slovenian people will be up to the task when the time comes.
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The response of the Slovenian patriot, president of the largest opposition SDS party and former Prime Minister of Slovenia Mr. Janez Janša: “Congratulations Mr. Donald Trump for one of the best speeches in the history of the UN.” (HERE)