Povl Heinrich Riis-Knudsen | |
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 Povl Heinrich Riis-Knudsen speaks at the DNSB meeting | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Povl Heinrich Riis-Knudsen (1949-10-29)29 October 1949 (age 75) Denmark |
| Political party | National Socialist Movement of Denmark |
Povl Heinrich Riis-Knudsen is aDanishneo-Nazi, prominent in the US as well as Denmark. Riis-Knudsen is known as the author of the articlesNational Socialism: A Left Wing Movement (1984) andNational Socialism: The Biological World View (1987), as well as for having been involved withMatt Koehl of the American Nazi Party.
Riis-Knudsen first came to prominence whenMatt Koehl took charge of theWorld Union of National Socialists (WUNS) and sought out Riis-Knudsen, already a leading neo-Nazi in Denmark, as hisEuropean contact. Riis-Knudsen, who felt that Nazism in Europe was hamstrung by the continent's historical experience, welcomed the move as he felt theUnited States had less of this and so he became General Secretary of the WUNS.[1] At the time he at the head of an expansion for the group with the likes ofGaston-Armand Amaudruz inSwitzerland,Ramon Bau inSpain andVictor DeCecco inItaly affiliating.[2] Before long, however, Riis-Knudsen lost this position as he did not then share Koehl's desire to form a religion based onNazism, claiming that "normal people were few and far between" when he visited Koehl's supporters.[3] Following the breakdown of this relationship, Riis-Knudsen began to concentrate more on writing.
His seminal work was the 1987 articleNational Socialism - The Biological World View in which he argued that Nazism had its basis in thelaws of nature and was in effect the culmination of the search for truth as the founding principle of life.[4] Much of what he has written is based on the mysticism ofSavitri Devi.
He also publishedNational Socialism - A Left Wing Movement (1984), which argued that therevolutionary nature of Nazism set it apart from thereactionary ways of theright and so Nazism was in fact aleft wingideology.[5]
According to Riis-Knudsen inNational Socialism - A Left Wing Movement:
Riis-Knudsen had come to look for more of an accommodation with communism, becoming part of a tendency in the Europeanfar right at the time to think this way. AlongsideJean-François Thiriart, he rejected abstractMarxism but was nonetheless attracted to the practice ofcommunism.[6] He even went as far as to visit theSoviet Union in 1978, a move which led to controversy in the Danish press who knew Riis-Knudsen as a neo-Nazi.[6] He came to viewRussia, rather than the United States, as the saviours of theAryan race and made this break clear inA Left Wing Movement.[5]
In Denmark itself Riis-Knudsen served as chairman of theDanmarks Nationalsocialistiske Bevægelse (National Socialist Movement of Denmark), an openly neo-Nazi organisation founded in 1970. The movement had around 1000 members by 1988.[7] In this capacity Riis-Knudsen built up a network of contacts across Europe, working withGermanMichael Kühnen andHolocaust denierThies Christophersen.[8] He also wrote forCEDADE in a special edition of their bulletin which also featuredSalvador Borrego,Wilfred von Oven andRichard Edmonds.[9] In more recent years his international contacts have includedMark Cotterill and formerNew Order spokesman Martin Kerr.[10]
Riis-Knudsen caused further controversy in the late 1980s when he appeared on TV calling for Denmark to be purged of allimmigrants, thedeath penalty for anyone caught transmittingAIDS,labour camps for his political opponents andsterilization of non-whites. The appearance caused outrage inNorway andSweden and was banned from being screened in Denmark.[11] He has also declared his support forPalestine againstIsrael and a sympathy withIslamic fundamentalism, albeit balanced against a desire to seeIslam expelled from Europe.[12]
Expelled from the DNSB in 1992 for "race mixing" in an engagement to aPalestinian Christian whom Riis-Knudsen argued was a "whiteArab",[13] As a consequence the DNSB left the WUNS and switched its allegiance to theNSDAP/AO, a rival international network.[14] Riis-Knudsen has since turned his attention to running his own publishing house,Nordland-Verlag, fromAalborg. This has courted controversy as it has published a series of books on the topic of Holocaust denial in theDanish language.[15]
Riis-Knudsen has blamed the Western countries for making the2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine necessary. He has claimed that theBucha massacre was staged. He has claimed that the Ukrainian presidentVolodymyr Zelenskyy does not work for Ukraine but rather for some undisclosedpowers and that the goal for Zelenskyy is a nuclear war. Riis-Knudsen has urgedChina to invadeTaiwan.[16]
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