The leader of Nordreich, one "Magnus Nordir, Head of State of the Folksish Reich of Vinland", ridiculed Norway's Foreign Ministry and press in a statement Wednesday for misinformed efforts to curtail free speech in connection with a game.
"Our 'group' is based in a popular online nation simulator/Role playing game called Cyber Nations; located at http://www.cybernations.net. The game consists of tens of thousands of players, of which participate in several player created alliances of all different types of affiliations, be they conservative, communist, nationalist, libertarian, or "far right"," Nordir wrote in a forum at Cyber Nations, aiming his statement at the government and press of Norway.
Nordir called the participants at Nordreich "a fictional organization comprised mainly of political minded teenagers that harbor a conservative/nationalist/European pride ideology" and stressed that the group was in no way a genuine neo-Nazi organization.
Nordir emphasized that the group was both fictive and international, and included players from Norway. The group was not a conspiracy to recruit followers to a neo-Nazi organization, and Nordir called for truly investigative journalism from Norway, and asked if the government of Norway didn't have better things to do than pursuing a socialist agenda and playing police in an online game.
But the (genuine) neo-Nazi group Stormfront does define Nordreich as a potential recruiting ground for their extremist organization, and in their online forum they discuss precisely this. The white supremacist group Stormfront has a number of members who admit to being active in Nordreich.
Erik Johannessen, an active Cyber Nations player from a different alliance, said that Nordreich is not at all likely to be a neo-Nazi group, but that there were Nazi elements there who used the platform to recruit to extreme right-wing organizations.
Johannessen said that he believed the true neo-Nazi elements in Nordreich would likely break off and form a purely right-wing extremist alliance.
