An Interview with Morgan Finnsiö on the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM)

ICCT's Senior Programme Manager Kacper Rekawek sat down with Expo Foundation's Morgan Finnsiö to discuss the Nordic Resistance Movement organisation. 

Kacper Rekawek (KR): What is the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM)? Why did it garner so much attention among the watchers of extreme right and what made it so special? 

Morgan Finnsiö (MF): The NRM is a revolutionary Nazi group whose stated goal is to overthrow democracy in the Nordic countries and replace it with a Nazi dictatorship. They are strategically ambiguous about how they will go about this overthrow. They say that their preference is to do this by legal means, but they will have a militant struggle if they need to. So this is a hardcore neo-Nazi group, also in its ideology. It doesn't, to any significant extent, try to repackage Nazism. It is a group that reveres Adolf Hitler, reveres Corneliu Codreanu, and with some slight modernisations, is basically a classically neo-Nazi group. I think that several things make it significant. One thing is its sheer longevity; it was founded in 1997 and survived a number of splits and problems that would probably have caused other groups to fold. It's also significant for its rigid and hierarchical, almost bureaucratic, structure. It is also very violent. It is violent in its rhetoric, its norms and its doctrines, and it is very violent in practice, as it carried out a number of brutal acts over many years, targeting many different people in the Nordic countries, some with a lethal result. In addition to all this, they have always been relatively good at propaganda, at the propaganda game, at publicising themselves. They have been taking advantage of the Swedish context, which not only is very lax and soft on violent extremism and right-wing extremism and white supremacy, in particular, in a legal and constitutional sense but there is also an overall laxity and low level of competence on the part of politicians, civil servants, and law enforcement to contain and restrain this group. So, all of these factors combined mean that this is a group that is able to present itself in a spectacular way. They are very audacious and bold in what they do. And this, of course, is very valuable from a propaganda perspective because they are able to point and say: “Look, we're saying openly these revolutionary goals. We're stating openly our antisemitism and our fanatic Nazism. We are violent, we are audacious, we're bold. We're all over the place and doing these things, and no one can stop us”, and really being able to boast about that. So all of these factors combined make this a spectacular type of right-wing extremist group, and I think that has grabbed the attention of watchers of the extreme right, and that has also made them very inspirational to like-minded groups in other parts of the world. 

I think that the problem that we’ve had in Sweden is not taking the Nordic Resistance Movement seriously enough. And that has allowed the security threat they pose to materialise on a number of occasions. So, the concern and the attention paid to the NRM is rightful. I think it is fair to say that it is one of the most dangerous Nazi groups in the world. It's certainly the most prominent and violent in Northern Europe. As we trace the arc of its development, there are certainly fluctuations; they have had periods when they were stronger and when they were weaker, and they are currently stabilising at a relatively low level of capacity. But it is still a security threat. They continue to physically attack political opponents. They continue to incite against their opponents, against minorities, et cetera. 

KR: How did it fare in the post-pandemic world?  

MF: They were at their peak in 2018 in terms of their popularity, recruitment, , number of activists, and in terms of capacity to mobilise boots on the ground, as it were. In 2019, there was a split after a failed electoral effort, and that was really when most of its troubles started heaping up. They were banned in Finland in 2020, and with the split they started having problems with recruitment and lost a lot of members. They also lost a lot of high-profile and veteran activists with years of valuable experience, people with a proven capacity for violence. A lot of those people left the organisation, so the NRM found itself having to try to scramble to recruit and replenish their ranks, and they struggled with that for a couple of years. And in the same period, several disillusioned former members of the NRM went over to the growing Active Club milieu. So, the NRM has definitely faced a lot of challenges in the post-pandemic world, but they did get a new leader in 2024. Simon Lindberg, who had been leading the group for eight years, was replaced by his close associate Fredrik Vejdeland. From this point on, the NRM is once again able to recruit some new people. They are able to grow their rate of activity in in some parts of the country. They have stabilised at a smaller size than they were during their peak, roughly comparable to how they were in the past, before Simon Lindberg came in and grew the organisation. They are still a dangerous organisation, just like they were back in 2012–2014, when they were smaller but very violent and very aggressive.  

KR: Why designate it by the US Department of State now? 

MF: Well, I think that we might flip that question around and say the surprise is that they weren't designated earlier. The US State Department has been considering designating the NRM as a terror group since at least 2022, perhaps earlier. We know that there have been pushes in Congress since at least 2019 to designate them. We know that in 2020, the Russian Imperial Movement [RIM] was designated, with reference to the fact that they had trained NRM members in a paramilitary training camp, who, only some months after returning from that training, carried out a series of terror attacks in Gothenburg. This was given as the reason for why the Russian Imperial Movement was designated. Given that the RIM designation only took place in 2020 because of contacts that occurred in 2015 and 2016, that is a  four-year lag. In that sense, it is perhaps not strange that the NRM was designated only recently, because these processes can take a long time. Just in 2018, the Swedish State Security Service said that the NRM has the potential to carry out acts of terror. Even though NRM members appear to have acted of their own volition and not on orders of the group's leadership, they did carry out terror attacks in Gothenburg in the winter of 2016–2017. This group has thus a demonstrated capacity for terror. 

KR: Is there anything recently that might have triggered the US State Department to push them over the line to do this designation?  

MF: That is not known at this time, but it might be that the NRM has tried to establish itself in some way in the United States. They might have had fresh contacts with American right-wing extremists. For example, we know that they have had contacts with Patriot Front and with the National Justice Party. There might have been some other triggering event or circumstance that we don't yet know about, but I don't think that we should be too surprised by the timing because we know that the US has, in short, been looking at this for some time. There has been a build-up to this over a number of years, you know, depending on your perspective, really going back to 2015, which is now almost ten years ago. 

KR: What consequences will it have for the organisation?  

MF: The NRM already admitted since the designation that they will have a very difficult time doing transactions or having any financial interactions with American counterparts. Moreover, the various US agencies concerned with security will now be monitoring the NRM more closely because it stands to reason that they are looking more closely at groups listed as terror groups. This increased level of scrutiny will result in information sharing with Swedish authorities, especially in light of Sweden joining NATO and becoming a security partner, in a much closer and more integrated sense, with the United States. We also know that the NRM, again, is a transnational organisation. It is based in Sweden, but it has branches in Denmark and Norway, and it used to have a branch in Finland until it was banned in 2020, and also has frequent contact with European counterparts. Moreover, by travelling across Europe, they will come into contact with many security services in other European countries that will, to varying degrees, also have security cooperation with the United States, and where an American terror designation might be quite significant. In Sweden, the designation does not have any immediate formal effects for Swedish authorities, because they operate based on the EU terror list as opposed to the American list. However, in reality, it will have consequences and make life more difficult for the NRM. It's also going to be consuming a part of their energy and initiative for some time trying to deal with the effects of this, including the psychological and demoralising effects, which I think it will have on some members. In particular, some members will experience  confusion and anxiety over what this means and what they now have to think about. This will be consuming their attention in the short term. On the other hand, they are certainly going to make hay out of it for propaganda purposes. They will use it to pose as this big, bad, dangerous group. Being an enemy of the United States is certainly valuable prestige currency in the white supremacist world. So that is something they are going to make use of and may, to some extent, profit from. I think that the designation will also have other consequences for Sweden in general, in terms of the public discussion about the nature of right-wing extremism, security, and terror threats. It is going to affect the context in which the NRM operates and it will make things more difficult for them. So, in that sense, I think the designation will be  detrimental to the NRM. 

KR: What will be the effect on Sweden? It is now the second country in the world after Russia with a US-designated extreme right group. 

MF: Swedish politicians have, not all of them, but many of them, most of them, a remarkable ability to ignore this problem and ignore this threat [of right-wing extremism]. I can't exclude the risk that even this [designation] is brushed off – and I think we're already seeing some signs of that in the public debate, where people are going: “well, this is unnecessary. The NRM is an irrelevant group. They're a tiny group.” – there's this ostrich mentality about it, but having said that, I think that this will have an effect. I think that the United States designating a Swedish domestic extremist group is not something that people can handwave, especially in the current political climate and the current public discussion in Sweden – which is very much focused on security issues, with the war going on not far away, and certainly with Sweden joining NATO, which has been a huge public discussion here for the past years. I think the designation will have an effect, and I hope it will help put the issue of the public security threat of right-wing extremism, and from the NRM specifically, on the agenda in a more robust way. It remains to be seen, however, whether there is space for this in the Swedish public debate, which is more geared towards talking about the threat from radical Islamism, which also is real and serious, but not to the point of exclusion of anything else, or to the point of completely ignoring the threat from right-wing extremism in spite of its lethal and bloody track record in Sweden. Upwards of forty people have been killed by this milieu over the past couple of decades.  

KR: What are the main international contacts of the NRM? Who do they cooperate with? 

MF: When we looked at the patterns of travel of the Nordic Resistance Movement in 2019 we found that their most frequent destinations were not Russia or America, but Germany and Poland. For many years they have been quite close to the German group Der Dritte Weg in particular. They have been traveling to Germany a lot, but they also travel all over Europe, and they have contacts with white supremacist groups all over the world, for whom they continue to play a sort of inspiring role. In 2023 for example, they went to Spain to attend a conference called ‘The Day of the Blood’ organised by the Spanish white supremacist group Devenir Europeo. They went to Sofia in Bulgaria to take part in the Lukov March. They went to Paris to take part in a meeting arranged by the group Les Nationalistes. They celebrated the five year anniversary of Legio Hungaria in Budapest, and attended a meeting organised by a group called “The Committee for the first Gerd Honsik European Congress” in Vienna On their podcast, they have been interviewing representatives of the Blue-Black Movement in Finland, and they have also had a lot of American guests. They have Swedish and English podcasts, and in other languages. Even though they have been weakened over the years in the Swedish context, their presence on the international stage and their propaganda maintained a high level. This is why they continue to exercise a sort of spiritual or symbolic, important influence, and wield a lot of prestige and clout in the wider Western white supremacist scene. They boast, not idly, that they have inspired other American groups over the years: the Traditionalist Workers Party, the Folkish Resistance Movement, and Patriot Front, for example. The NRM is skilled at reaching out with their propaganda and presenting themselves as this leading, authoritative white supremacist group.  

KR: The NRM is also infamous for its Russian connection, can you tell us a bit more about that?  

MF: The Russian Imperial Movement has maintained a presence in Sweden, perhaps in as limited a form as one man, perhaps more, but it has had a presence in Sweden and contacts with Swedish white supremacists since at least 2012. As NRM is the leading Swedish neo-Nazi group, they developed friendly relations with them. It was not, however, until the Russian war in Ukraine really started in 2014, that these contacts became substantial. The overall Swedish white supremacist milieu initially sided with Ukrainian white supremacists and right-wing extremists.. There were Swedish combatants who travelled to the theatre of war to take part in that side of the conflict. Initially, the Nordic Resistance Movement was not pro-Russian, but it was also not clearly pro-Ukrainian. NRM was slightly more neutral and detached, but perhaps, like the rest of the milieu, leaning more pro-Ukrainian. What then happened was a kind of charm offensive on the part of the Russian Imperial Movement in relation to the NRM. Friendlier ties were developed, and eventually, a kind of top-level summit meeting between the Russian Imperial Movement and the Nordic Resistance Movement took place on Swedish soil in 2015. A small amount of money was handed over. That may have been more of a symbolic gesture but any amount would have been welcomed because the NRM is not a very wealthy organisation. An invitation appears to have been made for members of the NRM to train in the paramilitary training camp operated by the Russian Imperial Movement outside of St. Petersburg. Two NRM members indeed went to the camp, trained there, and some months after returning to Sweden, they  carried out a series of terror attacks, IED bombings, in Gothenburg, targeting leftists and asylum seekers. The NRM members appear to have been acting of their own volition, saying privately that they wanted to go further than what the leadership of the group was at that time willing to do. They remained active members and kept going to NRM rallies and events even during the period of these attacks. After they were arrested, after their trials and after eventually, in 2020, the US designated the Russian Imperial Movement as a terrorist group, the contacts between the two organisations began to be much more discreet. We don't really know what level of contacts they have today. The NRM is probably more difficult and wary about interaction with the Russian Imperial Movement. Members of the RIM have told Russian broadcasters that they visited the NRM bombers in jail. They said that one of them “writes in flawless Russian”. This indicates that individual NRM members who were involved in the attack continued to have contact, at any rate, with the Russian Imperial Movement afterwards. What those contacts are now we don't really know as the NRM, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has been a little bit more ambivalent with regards to who is right and who is wrong [in the war]. They say: “This is a fraternal war. Whites should not be fighting whites. There are no winners in this war, except globalism.” They are saying that the war is effectively engineered by some shadowy Jewish influence, they firmly believe in such conspiracy theories. But overall, they have continued to lean pro-Russian, I would say, since the full-scale invasion. This has become especially clear over time, if you look at their various propaganda channels like their website and Telegram channels, where they are basically parroting Kremlin talking points. They basically repeat statements by spokespeople for the Kremlin, so, they are still pro-Russian in their orientation. I might also mention that we know that in the period between 2015 and 2020, there were attempts by Ukrainian right-wing extremists to recruit Nordic Resistance Movement members to come and fight in Ukraine. The NRM members who were contacted asked their bosses for permission to go, but the answer they got was a “no.” That is potentially a difference that the Russian Imperial Movement's friendly ties with the NRM may have had; it will certainly have made it less likely that the NRM would be drawn into the conflict on the Ukrainian side.  

KR: What is the NRM’s view of the Gaza war?  

MF: With regard to the Gaza war, the NRM’s position is very simple: they are very anti-Israel. I will not say that they are pro-Palestinian because they are not; I mean, they are deeply racist and white supremacist. They hate Muslims, they hate Arabs, they hate Palestinians, but they hate Jews even more. They consider Israel, very much in line with the white supremacist tradition, as this evil Jewish state that is responsible for half of the bad things that happen in the world and the Jewish diaspora as responsible for the other half. The NRM is just vehemently, stridently anti-Israel, and certainly has some kind of admiration for Hamas because it views Hamas both as an antisemitic, anti-Jewish resistance group and as a nationalist group. Even though Hamas is also Islamist, it is appreciated by the NRM from an ethno-nationalist point of view. Therefore, unlike a lot of contemporary Western radical right groups who support Israel in this war, the NRM does not, as it has this neo-Nazi position of hoping that Israel will be destroyed. 

Photo by Frankie Fouganthin