Season 3 On Extremism (MINI)

We are taking a small break from our regularly scheduled programming to give listeners a little taste of the mini episodes that Patreon subscribers receive every other week. That's right, for subscribers Here There Be Dragons is a weekly podcast.

Support us at: www.patreon.com/htbdpodcast

You might remember that in episode 2, The Malms, we interviewed a Swedish-Chilean woman, Paulina Torres. If you haven’t listened to that episode, you might want to go and listen to it.

Paulina told us about a traumatizing experience she had when she was about 16 or 17, in 1996. She was in the metro with her mother and grandfather when they got attacked by a mob of neo-nazis.

Her story made it all the way to public radio. A well-known Swedish reporter Bosse Lindquist got in touch with Paulina. Together they tried to get answers from the police who just would not follow up on Paulina’s complaint.

Today on the mini, we talk with Bosse Lindquist about what happened to Paulina in 1996 and more generally about the rise of neo-nazism in Sweden in the 1990s.

Script

[INTRO]

Jess 0:16

Hi! Here There Be Dragons listeners. We are trying something a little bit different this week. We are about halfway through this season, so we want to take a pause and release one of the mini-episodes that the Patreon subscribers get as a part of their subscription. This was the second mini-episode and it is an excellent companion to episode two of this series. You might remember in that episode, there is a girl named Paulina, who told us the story of how she was assaulted by Neo-Nazis in the 1990s while she was on public transit with her family.

We followed up with the investigative journalist that helped her report her assault to the police. His name is Bosse Lindquist. We wanna also thank our Patreon subscribers and encourage you if you are on the fence, support us! We are an independent podcast and we are so pleased and proud to bring this type of content to you. So without further ado, please open your ears for Bosse Lindquist.

BOSSE 1:31

My name is Bosse Lindquist, and I'm a documentary filmmaker working for Swedish Public Public Service TV. At that time, the point of time of the night, the Nazis were quite violent and they had these there were these regular demonstrations a couple of times a year, but they celebrated some hero and would go smashing things up and beating people up and with the police doing very little. And it was a very violent time generally in Sweden. There were there were a number of murders and a number of people killed by Nazis. But not this was much more violent then than it is today. And again, the police did very little about these investigations as well. So, I just read this sort of 8-liner thing in the newspaper, and I thought that I should investigate what was behind that story.

I thought it was so extraordinary. I mean, she was she was just this basically very young woman who alone stood up against a couple of hundred of Neo-Nazi violent hooligans and protected her grandfather and all the kids, siblings, and mother from this whole world of guys. And she I mean, I think was sort of an enormous bravery.

She was surprised because she hadn't she had no reactions to what happened that evening, which was really, really traumatic. And she had gone to the police with her family just after the incident. They didn't take down. What's the term when you make a report? When you

Adélie 3:00

Her complaint?

BOSSE 3:01

Yeah. Her complaint. And then we decided that we would confront the police together. So so there was a couple of weeks later and I went up together with Paulina to the police station and we said that we wanted to see the report that she had made and to know when nothing was happening. I mean, there was well-known, well documented that these hundreds of neo-Nazis actually had subway stations at that very moment and splash the cars at subway stations, etc. So it was scared because something had happened.

The police claim that no report had been made. And while I was I was recording the conversation with the police, with her, and then they became aggressive and threw us out

Adélie 3:56

Bosse made an hour-long radio documentary about Paulina’s story… You can hear excerpts in episode 2. And if you speak Swedish and want to listen to the whole thing, you’ll find a link in the reading room on our website.

Unfortunately, Bosse explained that the documentary had very little effect on Paulina’s case...

BOSSE 4:16

Sweden hadn't really woken up yet, that there was sort of this there was this predominant view that we don't have racism in Sweden. We are we are very egalitarian. We are the most egalitarian nation in the world. So it was sort of that it was a part of the Swedish self-image that we actually had these things that have been going on. So I think that was also that changed. But that took maybe 5, 10 years more before it was very clear that we had this this real threat in Sweden.

Adélie 4:50

Neo-nazis were a real problem in Sweden in the 1990s. Their presence in the center of Stockholm shaped a lot of people’s understanding of the city. We asked Bosse to give us a bit more context about the attacks perpetrated at that time…

BOSSE 5:06

It was this 16-year-old boy called John Hron happened to be out in the countryside in the summer by a lake to take a swim late at night. And five Neo-Nazis appeared who were looking for someone to beat up, and they slowly killed him that night. And so that was sort of one of these cases. Several of them were of known homosexuals. There was there was this ice hockey, very, very skilled ice hockey player. And so he was clearly targeted because of this, because of this and and sort of killed with 67 knife, what we call that slashed sixty-seven times. So it was a mix. Sometimes it was like Paulina it was just random. They were hoping to find someone with, you know, with dark complexion and there she was or darker complexion. And sometimes it was very much targeted.

There was a number of different events, partly connected, partly not. There were for example, there was this very hardcore group who had been doing different… I mean, they have beaten people up, they have been slashed people…done different things. But then they robbed a bank. And during the car chase, after robbing the bank, they assassinated two policemen in cold blood. So, there were a couple of such things that happened that forced people to face the fact that they who they really were. But it was a number of killings that took it took a long time, took maybe 10 years.

Adélie 6:41

Are you aware of any other cases of violence from the Neo-Nazis which the police refused or forgot or lost the official complaint?

BOSSE 6:52

I'm sure there are other cases because it was very clear that the police were ignoring these kinds of happenings. And I get to be the right thing on these things. And I looked at a couple of the the criminal cases and how they were handled. For example, the ice hockey player who was killed by sixty-seven slashes and the police were doing an incredibly poor job. They were not taking the threat seriously. They were not…they were these killers were neo-Nazis. They had been very clearly explaining why they killed them from ideological reasons. And the police just ignored that. They completely ignored the ideological factor in the killing. And they did very superficial lousy investigation, where were they missed this obvious thing. One guy I remember, one of the gang members who had these Confederate flags in his room and had all these symbols all over his walls, are the police looking and didn't notice them. They didn't take that down. They didn't know. So there was sort of the ideological component was made invisible.

Adélie 8:02

Was it common that there was no police around the demonstrations?

BOSSE 8:08

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that was that was the normalcy that the police were in to see the numbers, that they were sort of treating them with kid gloves, that they I think they really saw them as sort of their their brothers, young, wayward sons. They didn't see the ideology. They what the what they were saying. They just saw them as young guys that could have been themselves or they could have been related to them.

[Music]

BOSSE 8:49

I think it's a little bit like in the US today, I mean, where the police seem somewhat baffled by white extremism and the and the kind of violence that you saw, for example, recently from right-wing white people. And in Sweden, there has been I mean, Nazism has been around for as long as it's been in existence. I mean, Sweden and Germany were parallel, though, of course, it was much more violent and virulent in Germany than in Sweden. And then because we had the luck in different ways to stay out of the war and we didn't have the Germans here actually doing anything. So eventually when the Germans started losing the war and when the true story of what happened in Germany sort of faced the Nazis and got out of vogue in Sweden and but it it remained sort of been the undercurrent. There were always these groups that that had this history since the 30s and 40s. And they were lying low during the 50s, 60s, 70s, which was sort of, you know, the heyday from the more socialist-communist parties in this part of the world, and then started to rise again in the 80s and had a peak in the 90s with a couple of hardcore groups that were quite organized and who amassed weapons, did some bank robberies to get funds. There were a number of killings, really, really bad killings. And at that point, the police did, didn't…they… It's hard to say why, but the Nazis were not on their radar, whether that was because they were sympathizing with them slightly. Some were perhaps maybe it's also because the police were predominantly white ethnic Swedes at the time and so were the Nazis. So I think at least some of the policemen that I met and talked to about these things, these things, it was clear that they had they could sort of that felt that they were more akin to the Nazis rather than their their victims, which obviously were, you know, the usual homosexuals people from South America, Africa, where sort of the opposite of what the Neo-Nazis thought were something different.

[OUTRO]