Identitarian Ideas VIII

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^[1]Despite living near Sweden (Estonia) and being in good terms with many Swedish nationalists, this year was my first to visit the annual conference of Identitarian Ideas (Identitär Ide). I went to the conference together with three other Estonian nationalists from the youth movement Blue Awakening (Sinine Äratus), closely affiliated with the Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE). The conference was also attended by four Latvians from the country’s main nationalist party National Alliance, as well as some like-minded Poles. 

It took place in the western part of Stockholm, and as usual with nationalist events in liberal West, the attendees were only informed of the location a day before so as to avoid the attempts of Leftist organizations to disrupt the conference or to force its cancellation. It must have worked, as the only interaction I saw with Left-wing Swedes took place a day before the conference, when we were sitting in a Stockholm bar together with Latvians and some Poles, meeting with our Swedish friends from Nordic Youth (Nordisk Ungdom).

Suddenly, two feminists — easily recognizable by their looks — appeared at our table. I did not understand what they were saying, but soon the whole table was cheering for patriarchy in Swedish. The feminists quickly left, terrified by the sight, which in all probability is rare in Sweden, a country better known for its lack of national self-assertion. For me, the whole situation brought to mind Estonia during the Singing Revolution, when similarly, an identity repressed for half a century suddenly reemerged, bringing with it a warm and satisfying sense of freedom.

Despite the lack of Leftist disrupters, the beginning of the conference was still delayed by technical difficulties. The organizers apparently had to go and buy equipment for showing slides, which took especially long, considering it was a weekend. As a result, the conference began two-and-a-half hours later than planned. The organizational side of the event could certainly have been managed better, particularly as it was already the 8th conference in the series.

About half of the speeches were in Swedish which I unfortunately do not speak, thus I cannot give a comprehensive overview. Patrik Ehn, a former activist of the main anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats, appeared to describe the process how the party has recently become more liberal. He contrasted the 1990s and 2000s, when activists of the Sweden Democrats used to pose on pictures together with the founder of Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, with the current situation where the party is excluding its youth members whose views are too nationalistic according to mainstream standards.

Among other Swedish speakers were Dan Eriksson who works for the Swedish nationalist alternative media channel Motgift, and Ingrid Carlqvist, one of the few Right-wing journalists in the country. Daniel Friberg, founder of the website RightOn, gave an overview of the rising Right-wing figures across the globe, showing a bombastic YouTube video dedicated to Donald Trump — to which the public applauded — and mentioning the Brazilian opposition leader Jair Bolsonaro and Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. The last Swedish speaker Isac Boman described his book Penningmakten, which is a critique of the current monetary system. As I found out, Boman currently lives in Tallinn, and thus I was happy to invite him to speak on the subject in front of Estonian nationalists.

By far the best speaker was American-Iranian philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani, who gave a thrilling lecture on the concept of organic state based on his understanding of mankind’s potential increase in psychic abilities. Expansion of those abilities, Jorjani said, paired with advancement of biotechnology and other emerging fields of science, forces a return to an inegalitarian society which cannot be democratic in any modern sense. The only way out would be an archeofuturistic outlook that combines a traditional ethos with capabilities that we are close to discovering in this century.

Another Alt Right figure on the stage was F. Roger Devlin, whose speech summarized the main points of his essay and book Sexual Utopia in Power ^[2]. He began with describing both female and male sexual utopias, provoking laughter in the audience by comparing the male one to the Islamic paradise with its 72 virgins. According to Devlin, the sexual revolution of the 1960s was unable to satisfy either, and thus it followed the track of every utopian revolution: first liberation, then repression. Third wave feminism, in Devlin’s opinion, represents the repression stage of the sexual revolution.

Then spoke Dan Roodt, an Afrikaner from South Africa who I had already heard speak at American Renaissance in May. This time, his talk focused less on numbers and graphs and more on inspirational thoughts and anecdotes from the history of his nation and his own experience. He praised the ability of the Internet to spread dissenting opinions easier than anything before and was the only speaker to mention Pepe, to which the younger part of the audience was audibly delighted. Roodt ended with an inspiring note — we have to be thankful to be living in such an eventful era.

Alexander Markovics, a young spokesman for the Austrian branch of Generation Identity, ended the conference by outlining the main aspects of the identitarian worldview. His speech was one of the many moments during my visit to Sweden that gave hope about the European youth. Interestingly, he described Austria rather as a part of German nation and culture, emphasizing that for a nationalist it is an ethnic sense of belonging that matters, and not so much governments or artificial borders.

Sadly, two of the speakers that I had considered to be most interesting in the list — namely, Greg Johnson and Mimi Al-Laham (known as SyrianGirl on YouTube) — had been unable to make it to Stockholm. I would have been especially thrilled to see Al-Laham, a Syrian nationalist who wishes to retain the Syrian state in its current borders, and Jorjani, an Iranian who wants to restore the Persian Empire, debate the future of Kurdistan. Thankfully I had a similar experience after the conference, talking with Polish nationalists about their borders with Lithuania and Ukraine.

Although the organizational side had been somewhat faulty, the chance to meet again old friends from the Northern European nationalist scene and to make new contacts was great. Behind the liberal facade, Sweden has a strong network of multiple nationalist organizations that is growing with each year. The significance of organizing such a Europe-wide identitarian conference in a country that is known as one of the strongest Leftist strongholds cannot be underestimated. It must only be hoped that Identitarian Ideas will continue to be a voice for European nationalism and gather ever more attendance with each coming year.