Pål Steigan

He co-founded Klassekampen as a monthly periodical in 1969, and during his leadership AKP (m-l) developed the periodical into a newspaper in 1977.

During his leadership of AKP (m-l), Steigan traveled to countries under communist regimes, such as China, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea).[1] He met Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha and Pol Pot.[4]

After meeting the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1978, he began to support the regime,[5] later admitting his support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge was a mistake explaining that he now believed it was not Marxist.[6] He has continued to be criticised for bearing a personal responsibility for his political support to the regime.[5]

In 1978, he told an interviewer from The Call, the newspaper of the American Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist), that since the foundation of the party five years earlier "we have been waging a struggle against two brands of revisionism" in Norway, "the Brezhnevist, Moscow revisionist type party, which is the old so-called Norwegian Communist Party, and a newer Eurorevisionist party."[7] According to Steigan in the same interview: "[I]t’s obvious that the Soviet social-imperialists are planning to take Norway in the initial stages of a war over Europe."[8]

He is a critic of capitalism, writing that it "has inflicted so many defeats upon the working class and people all over the world that it’s hard to give an account of them."[9]

Steigan founded the self-proclaimed "anti-globalist" alternative news site Steigan.no. The website has been described by extremism researcher John Færseth as a platform of conspiracy theories and pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda.[3][10] According to the fact checking website Faktisk.no, Steigan is part of an alternative and far-right echo chamber that also includes Document.no, Rights.no, Resett and Lykten.no, and where individuals linked to Stop Islamisation of Norway play a prominent role.[11] The secretary-general of the Red party Benedikte Pryneid Hansen said Steigan's blog is increasingly characterized by "extreme conspiracy theories" and a onesided coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.[12]

Steigan was denied membership in the Norwegian Association of Newspaper Editors (Norsk Redaktørforening), with the rationale that Steigan.no is not a journalistic medium, but rather an activist website that disregards accepted journalistic principles.[13]

Steigan's memoirs En folkefiende (A public enemy) were published in 2013.[4]

Steigan, Pål, Veiskille: finnes det noen vei ut av miljøkrisa? Oktober Forlag, Oslo, 1990, 244 s.