The number of trials against neo-Nazi individuals in the UK show why racial nationalism is still alive in the country. Despite the shift in the radical right’s discourse to issues of culture, racial nationalism is far from a dying threat. Newer radical right movements have distanced themselves from the overtly neo-Nazi groups of the past in an attempt to confer themselves legitimacy, with members avoiding using racially-charged slurs or dehumanising language. Yet neo-Nazism is far from dormant. In the United Kingdom, the biggest threat from neo-Nazi groups has come from the remnants of National Action, which was the first radical right group to be proscribed as a terror organisation in December 2016. Since then, there have been at least 14 trials involving more than 30 individuals formerly involved in the group. These cases deal with membership charges, hate crimes, and terror plots by individuals affiliated with neo-Nazi groups, including the youngest person ever to be convicted of planning a terror attack in the country. (…) After National Action was proscribed, members scrambled to regroup under new names, in a similar vein to how its Islamist counterpart Al Muhajiroun has tried to evade the law. Two main splinters quickly emerged: Scottish Dawn and National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action (NS131). Scottish Dawn was heavily linked to National Rebirth of Poland, a violent offshoot of the Polish radical right with presence in the UK. NS131 bore extreme resemblance to the aesthetics of National Action. Both were swiftly proscribed by the government as splinters of National Action in September 2017. Another more significant splinter was System Resistance Network (SRN), which emerged in the summer of 2017. (…) Sonnenkrieg Division is the latest iteration of National Action, although it takes inspiration from the US-based violent neo-Nazi cell Atomwaffen Division (in fact, they describe themselves as “Atomwaffen with less guns”). Atomwaffen (atomic bomb in German) grew from neo-Nazi website Iron March after some members started fantasising about infiltrating the US military and launching a fascist paramilitary insurgency to replace liberal democracy. Atomwaffen is considered as part of a global accelerationist movement, whose main ideological doctrine is to bring about civilizational collapse through acts of violence. The group is linked to several murders in the US, including Nicholas Giampa’s assassination of his girlfriend’s parents after they convinced her to break up with him for being a neo-Nazi. Sonnenkrieg Division has been linked to several recent trials in the UK, with many former National Action and SRN members becoming part of this new movement.
via open democracy: The many faces of neo-Nazism in the UK
