Left wing extremists often have middle class background

Yester-day the Swedish Magazine Fokus published a long article about both leftwing and rightwing extremism. The conclusion is that they are no longer only fighting each others, there are some new targets. For the left particularly politicians from right wing parties and authorities, mainly staff that are handling employment and migration issues. They also point to the fact that both left and right consists of small independent groups taking action without asking any leaders and often towards local targets. The article describes a situation that I can recognize from my own writings (mainly from the book “Gatans parlament”, 2006).

One interesting thing with the article in Fokus is that they have investigated Swedish courts in order to get a picture of how these often very young criminals are described in the police reports. It might not come as a surprise but left wing extremists are generally described as middle class well educated people and right wing extremists more as “white trash” (social problems, drinking, drugs, former criminality etc).

They made an interview with me last night in Channel 4, unfortunately it’s in Swedish, just as the article in Fokus. The picture shows a demonstration in the central of Stockholm January 2006, I’m the photographer.

Young Nazis killed handicapped man

The trial against 3 boys 15-16 year old, accused for killing a physically handicapped man, has finished. The court could prove that at least 2 of them committed the murder.

The case has attracted a lot of interest partly because the cruelty shown towards the 55 year old man, partly because one or possible two of the boys are members of a Nazi organisation (National Socialist Front, NSF). In the beginning it was suggested that the motive was linked to the fact that Nazis generally consider handicapped people as racially deprived. Still, such cases have been rare in pre-war time as I write in my book “Vit makt och blågula drömmar” (White Power and Blue and Yellow Dreams).

But quite soon it was found out there were certain other circumstances in this case. The strongest motive is probably that the boys were accusing the man of delivering alcohol to a mother with severe problems with drinking. They both are said to have a diagnosis of being slightly autistic.

Still they might have been attracted to the idea of consider their victims as symbols in a war against society rather than human beings. This is not the first case with more or less disturbed and socially deprived young boys being attracted to this kind of ideologies. Or maybe one could rather say they were attracted to the image of neo-Nazism. But the link with the organisation seems rather weak; there are no signs of this murder being linked to any kind of activity within or in connection with the organisation.

Links (unfortunately all in Swedish):
Previously Aftonbladet.
After the trial in Aftonbladet.
Nationalsocialistisk Front (NSF) comments the case.