by Kevin Coogan

Achmed Huber is not only a devout Mus­lim and sup­porter of polit­i­cal Islam; he also a lead­ing mem­ber of the avowedly pagan Swiss-based Avalon Gemein­schaft (“Avalon Soci­ety” also known as the Avalon Kreis or Avalon Cir­cle). Avalon’s esti­mated 150 mem­bers include aging Swiss SS vol­un­teers, youth­ful far right fanat­ics, and died-in-the wool Holo­caust deniers. Each sum­mer sol­stice this mot­ley mélange of char­ac­ters jour­neys deep into the Swiss woods to rit­u­ally wor­ship the pre-Christian Celtic gods of ancient Europe. They then spend the rest of the year bemoan­ing the Enlight­en­ment and deny­ing the Holocaust.

Although Huber is one of Avalon’s lead­ing mem­bers, he was not involved in found­ing the group. Avalon began as a curi­ous mix­ture of Old Right and New Right cur­rents that reflected its found­ing mem­bers involve­ment in a far right youth group known as the Wiking-Jugend Schweiz (WJS) as well as their later rejec­tion of cadre-based pol­i­tics for the cre­ation of Avalon as a self-proclaimed elite soci­ety. Besides being steeped in mys­ti­cal imagery, Avalon’s founders also embraced “New Right” jar­gon most fre­quently asso­ci­ated with the French the­o­rist Alain de Benoist, his Paris-based think-tank, GRECE (the Groupe­ment de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civil­i­sa­tion Européene), and GRECE’s Ger­man coun­ter­part, Pierre Krebs‚ Thule Seminar.

Avalon’s ori­gins begin in the end of 1986 with the for­ma­tion of the WJS by two young far right­ists, Roger Wüthrich and Andreas Lorenz. After Wüthrich and Lorenz returned from a win­ter camp in Ger­many spon­sored by the Wiking-Jugend Deutsch­land (WJD), they were granted per­mis­sion by the WJD to form a Swiss branch of the orga­ni­za­tion. The WJS was for­mally launched in April 1987 and began pub­lish­ing a paper, Nord­wind, that specif­i­cally tar­geted Swiss youth. As WJS pro­pa­ganda put it, “Have you had enough of degen­er­ate art, jun­gle music, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion, immoral­ity, and Coca-Cola cul­ture? Then come to us! Work with us for a bet­ter worth­while future. Travel, camps, sports, adven­ture, com­rade­ship and love of our home belong to our pro­gram. Hard work, dis­ci­pline, good man­ners, courage, and honor are things that for us again have mean­ing. The zero (Null) bloc of youth is already shuf­fling off to its decline with a Walk­man in its ears and ham­burg­ers on its brains. Not us! Join us! Viking Youth! That is the youth move­ment faith­ful to the peo­ple of Switzerland.”

In the sum­mer of 1988 the WJS, with help from the WJD, orga­nized a sum­mer camp in Seel­is­berg, Switzer­land. Par­tic­i­pants were told that they would learn things like folk danc­ing, old Ger­man let­ters, and sports like box­ing. The WJS promised all who signed up the expe­ri­ence of “forced marches in ankle deep mud” until the “dead tired” finally reached their goal “filthy, soaked with sweat, with a ban­ner in hand, and a proud smile on [their] face.” The forced marches were a nec­es­sary camp expe­ri­ence, Nord­wind explained, because “in the all mas­cu­line cul­tural cir­cles to which we belong, dis­ci­pline and morals are the key­stone of our view of life.”

Alas, few Swiss youth seemed will­ing to part with their blue jeans and Coke cans for folk dance lessons and forced marches. In Feb­ru­ary 1991, at the WJS‚s fourth con­ven­tion in Wor­blaufen, Switzer­land, the group voted to dis­solve itself. Along with its fail­ure to recruit youth cadres, the WJS was equally con­cerned about pos­si­ble adverse pub­lic­ity. Just a month ear­lier, a Swiss far right­ist named Robert Burkhard – pres­i­dent of the Nation­al­rev­o­lu­tionären Partei der Schweiz (NPS) – had been arrested for a hand grenade attack on a jour­nal­ist in Win­terthurer, Switzer­land. After the police dis­cov­ered WJS mate­r­ial inside Burkhard‚s apart­ment, the WJS feared that it too might now come under scrutiny by the Swiss author­i­ties. Equally trou­bling was the devel­op­ment of ide­o­log­i­cal dis­sent inside the WJS itself. The Aar­gau Can­ton branch, for exam­ple, openly broke with the WJS‚s lead­er­ship and embraced a “national rev­o­lu­tion­ary direc­tion” com­plete with open over­tures to the Swiss Left. Roger Wüthrich, the WJS‚s co-founder, was par­tic­u­larly appalled by this move because he con­sid­ered National Bol­she­vism a polit­i­cal dead end, par­tic­u­larly given the fall of Communism.

The Birth of the Avalon Gemein­schaft
Fol­low­ing the offi­cial dis­so­lu­tion of the WJS, Wüthrich and another right­ist named Andreas Gross­weiler decided to build a new elite cadre orga­ni­za­tion, the Avalon Gemein­schaft. They struc­tured their new group on the New Right model espoused by de Benoist and GRECE in France and by Pierre Krebs and the Thule Sem­i­nar in Germany.

Wüthrich and Grossweiler‚s turn from a failed cadre-based polit­i­cal activist model to a self-proclaimed elite struc­ture did not occur out of the blue. The for­ma­tion of the Avalon Gemein­schaft came after the Swiss far right had learned about French and Ger­man “New Right” the­ory, which pri­mar­ily occurred through the activ­ity of a young Geneva-based right­ist named Pas­cal Junod. In 1983 Junod first estab­lished the Cen­tre national de la pen­sée européene with for­mer mem­bers of the New Euro­pean Order (NEO) backed stu­dent group, the Nou­vel ordre social, to help pop­u­lar­ize New Right ideas in Switzer­land. One year later, Junod next estab­lished another Geneva-based orga­ni­za­tion, the Cer­cle Proud­hon, in 1984. Junod also helped orga­nize the Swiss branch of the Thule Sem­i­nar while he also served as the Swiss cor­re­spon­dent for GRECE’s jour­nal, Nou­velle école.

In his book Strate­gie der kul­turellen Rev­o­lu­tion, Pierre Krebs, head of the Thule Sem­i­nar, gives a use­ful overview of New Right think­ing when he embraces the the­ory of “intel­lec­tual hege­mony” taken from the Ital­ian Marx­ist Anto­nio Gram­sci and “detourned” by the New Right. Krebs also artic­u­lated New Right themes when he attacked the “prin­ci­ple of equal­ity” and instead demanded a “War against Egal­i­tar­i­an­ism and Root­less­ness: For Orig­i­nal­ity and Iden­tity! Against Amer­i­can­ism and Col­lec­tivism: For Cul­ture and Organic Human­ism! Race is Class! For a Het­ero­ge­neous World of Homo­ge­neous Peo­ples! Vive la difference!”

Start­ing in 1987, mem­bers of the Swiss branch of the Thule Sem­i­nar took part in a pagan gath­er­ing around the Celtic hol­i­day Lug­nasad, along with a del­e­ga­tion from the WJS and var­i­ous neo-Nazis from across Europe. In 1988 the Swiss branch of the Thule Sem­i­nar, along with the Cir­cle Proud­hon, orga­nized seem­ingly scholarly-sounding talks on top­ics like “The His­tory of the Tem­plers and “The Her­itage of the Indo-Europeans” on the grounds of Geneva University.

Although lack­ing the schol­arly chops of a de Benoist or a Krebs, Avalon’s founders were quick to pro­claim their own elite sta­tus as well as their embrace of pagan ideas. Gross­weiler, for exam­ple, said that Avalon’s mem­bers “con­sider our­selves as an intellectual/spiritual elite and know that our ideas are incom­pre­hen­si­ble to sim­ple peo­ple.” Avalon’s emer­gence also came wrapped in a heavy dose of Celtic mys­ti­cism. One Avalon tract began, Avalon – white mist cov­ered island in an icy sea. Avalon, land of inner rest and the con­fi­dent, holy land of the Celts. Avalon, orig­i­nal home­land and secure pole of our Euro­pean cul­ture. The land of King Arthur gives our soci­ety its name. Many of our way and beliefs shall find the power in the cir­cle to resist the time of the wolf (the destruc­tion of value). This is our spir­i­tual place of refuge, [the] place of the call­ing to mind of Europe‚s eter­nal val­ues, Courage, Honor, Loyalty.

Huber and Avalon
Achmed Huber’s later emer­gence as a key Avalon leader no doubt reflects both his well-developed net­work­ing skills as well as his pow­er­ful con­tacts inside the Euro­pean right. Huber’s par­tic­u­lar asso­ci­a­tion with Avalon, how­ever, may also be due in part to Avalon’s New Right trap­pings. New Right­ists are almost by def­i­n­i­tion extremely anti-American, and many look favor­ably on col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Islamic world. In tra­di­tional Islam they see a cul­ture that has resisted the siren song of the Enlight­en­ment. GRECE leader Alain de Benoist (who has vis­ited both Iran and Libya) also reg­u­larly crit­i­cizes Jean-Marie le Pen’s Front National for its harshly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views.

That said, Avalon appears to be a rather poor copy of the GRECE model. The New Right, it should be recalled, emerged in Paris in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a response not just to the cul­tural Amer­i­can­iza­tion of Europe but also as a reac­tion by a post ’68 gen­er­a­tion of young right-wing activists to the failed Old Right’s tedious embrace of Hitler nos­tal­gia and crude anti-Semitism. Against this, the New Right rev­eled in redis­cov­er­ing unortho­dox the­o­rists, par­tic­u­larly from the 1920s “Con­ser­v­a­tive Rev­o­lu­tion­ary” move­ment in Ger­many; thinkers like Carl Schmidt, Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch, and Ernst Junger. All of these men‚s ideas had either been highly mar­gin­al­ized or actively sup­pressed dur­ing the Nazi era. Under Huber and Wüthrich, how­ever, Avalon is far more close to intel­lec­tu­ally spu­ri­ous groups like the California-based Insti­tute for Holo­caust Review than with the elite Parisian salon world of de Benoist.

Still, Huber and Wüthrich have tried to give Avalon some veneer of respectabil­ity. In March 1998, for exam­ple, on the two hun­dredth anniver­sary of his death, Huber and other Avalon mem­bers laid a wreath at the memo­r­ial to Gen­eral von Erlach, who was killed by Napoleon‚s troops in 1798. Erlach’s death sym­bol­ized not just the end of Bern’s Ancien Régime and the tri­umph of Napoleon‚s army but the vic­tory of the Enlight­en­ment ideals of equal­ity, democ­racy, and broth­er­hood asso­ci­ated with the French Rev­o­lu­tion that both Avalon and the New Right so despise. By lay­ing a wreath at Erlach’s tomb, Huber and Avalon were sug­gest­ing that they were will­ing to fight once more to recap­ture a world once thought hope­lessly vanished.

Huber and Wüthrich have also por­trayed Avalon in a press com­mu­niqué as a highly respectable group that spon­sors gath­er­ings ded­i­cated to sci­en­tific and cul­tural themes – par­tic­u­larly the hon­or­ing of Europe‚s “Celtic Ger­manic inher­i­tance” – as well as to ground­break­ing crit­i­cal research into ques­tions of con­tem­po­rary his­tory. Avalon’s eager embrace of Holo­caust deniers, even more than its strange cel­e­bra­tions of the sum­mer sol­stice, have stripped it of even a vague sense of legit­i­macy as an seri­ous orga­ni­za­tion engaged in his­tor­i­cal research.

Avalon func­tions as a kind of umbrella orga­ni­za­tion for the Holo­caust denial move­ment in Switzer­land. Under the cover name of the Stu­di­en­gruppe für Geschichte (His­tory Study Group), for exam­ple, Avalon spon­sored a 1993 pre­sen­ta­tion by lead­ing French Holo­caust denier Robert Fau­ris­son at a hotel con­fer­ence room in Bern. Some 70 peo­ple, includ­ing the NEO’s Gaston-Armand Amau­druz, attended the gath­er­ing. Huber’s close friend Jür­gen Graf, a lead­ing Swiss Holo­caust denier who is now liv­ing in Tehran, pro­vided the simul­ta­ne­ous trans­la­tion from French to Ger­man when Fau­ris­son spoke. Robert H. Count­ess, an Amer­i­can edi­tor of the Insti­tute for His­tor­i­cal Review, also addressed an Avalon gath­er­ing in April 1995. Huber’s later par­tic­i­pa­tion (along with Graf and the Ger­man NPD’s Horst Mahler) in an IHR con­fer­ence that was to have occurred in Beirut in the spring of 2001 can be seen as a log­i­cal exten­sion of the kind of Holo­caust denial activ­ity that both Huber and Avalon have been involved with for years.

Finally, it seems par­tic­u­larly ironic that a self-proclaimed Mus­lim like Huber would be asso­ci­ated at all with any “New Right” group­ing, even with a pale par­ody of the New Right, as Avalon appears to be. Huber, after all, is a self-proclaimed devo­tee of Islam, an utterly monothe­is­tic reli­gion. In the New Right canon, monothe­ism has always been por­trayed as the orig­i­nal sin. This has been so ever since de Benoist iden­ti­fied the Enlightenment‚s uni­ver­sal­is­tic val­ues as a sec­u­lar exten­sion of a monothe­ist world­view; namely the Judeo-Christian tra­di­tion which Islam claims to complete.

New Right the­o­rists insist that they embrace pagan­ism and the pagan notion of a uni­verse of plu­ral­is­tic gods pre­cisely out of their desire to dethrone monothe­is­tic thought struc­tures which they see as essen­tial to the future elim­i­na­tion of Amer­i­can “mono­cul­ture.” That a fanat­i­cal Islamic monothe­ist like Huber could spend each sum­mer sol­stice out in the woods wor­ship­ing Celtic gods is one more bizarre twist to his already bizarre life.