Povl Riis-Knudsen
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Povl Heinrich Riis-Knudsen (born 1950) is a prominent Danish Neo-Nazi.
Riis-Knudsen is best known as the author of the articles National Socialism: A Left Wing Movement (1984) and National Socialism: The Biological World View (1987).
[edit] Life and ideas
Riis-Knudsen first came to prominence as the closest European ally of Matt Koehl and was appointed General Secretary of the World Union of National Socialists during Koehl's leadership. Before long, however, Riis-Knudsen lost this position as he did not then share Koehl's desire to form a religion based on Nazism. Following the breakdown of this relationship, Riis-Knudsen began to concentrate more on writing.
His seminal work was the 1987 article National Socialism - The Biological World View in which he argued that National Socialism had its basis in the laws of nature and was in effect the culmination of the search for truth as the founding principle of life. Much of what he has written in based on the mysticism of Savitri Devi Mukherji.
He also published National Socialism - A Left Wing Movement (1984), which argued that the revolutionary nature of Nazism set it apart from the reactionary ways of the right and so Nazism was in fact a left wing ideology. Moreover, Riis-Knudsen embraced left wing concepts of environmentalism and the rise of the proletariat.
According to Riis-Knudsen in National Socialism - A Left Wing Movement:
- "It is a historical fact that nothing good has ever come out of the right wing. If it had not been for such revolutionaries as Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo, we should still believe that the earth is flat and the center of the universe. When capitalism developed, the establishment made no attempt to solve the social problems resulting from the industrial revolution, but went on to exploit the new working class mercilessly— thus giving rise to revolutionary thoughts as expressed in Marxist ideology. And all the necessary and just social improvements we have seen during the past 100 years have only been introduced after hard pressure from the left wing, with right-wing conservatives in constant retreat, pitifully trying to preserve as much as possible for themselves."
This idea proved controversial among a few other neo-Nazis, who generally preferred to dismiss the left-right dichotomy altogether and position themselves outside of it.
Riis-Knudsen served as chairman of the Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Bevægelse (National Socialist Movement of Denmark), an openly neo-Nazi organisation founded in 1970, until he was expelled in 1992 for 'race mixing' following a short-lived engagement to Nidal Khazouf, a Palestinian Christian.
Following his expulsion, Riis-Knudsen has turned his attention to running his own publishing house, Nordland-Verlag, from Aalborg. This has courted controversy as it has published a series of books on the topic of Holocaust denial in the Danish language.
