On Monday, November 12th, 2018 the last of three trials against members of the neo-Nazi group National Action ended with convictions of three people, including Daniel Bogunovic and a couple, Claudia Patatas and Adam Thomas. They will be sentenced on December 14th.
National Action was a British openly neo-Nazi group founded in 2013. The group cultivated a militant image and notoriously carried a banner with the slogan “Refugees not welcome” and the hashtag #hitlerwasright at public demonstrations. Since December 2016 the group has been proscribed under the Terrorism Act 2000. Since then, however, they have continued to organise under different covers. They are believed to have prepared for a “race war”, plotted an assassination, and advocated violence against and extermination of Jews and “non-whites”. They also celebrated the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox. Following investigations and arrests, several court cases have led to convictions for membership in a terrorist organisation and other offences. Several members were sentenced to prison terms of up to eight years (various news sources here [1], here [2] and here [3])
While the press was very much concerned with the fact that Patatas and Thomas gave their baby son the middle name Adolf, that they had a swastika-shaped cookie cutter and that they were dressing up in Ku Klux Klan outfits, the connection to the far right Neofolk music scene remained overlooked.
For the BBC story providing a more detailed overview of the National Action case click on screenshot:
[1]
A tumblr blog called harsherreality [4] has collected evidence that Patatas was a “close associate of Death In June’s Douglas Pearce, Sol Invictus’ Tony Wakeford, Allerseelen’s Gerhard Hallstatt, fascist publishers Michael Moynihan and Troy Southgate and a host of neo-folk musicians and activists – most of whom publicly deny their fascist involvement.”
The image is showing Patatas with her former partner – who was a tour driver with Death In June – and Douglas Pearce (who essentially is Death In June [5]). Patatas who is said to have been a “part-time wedding photographer” in the BBC article, also took pictures for record covers of several Death In June releases. Also note Tony Wakeford (ex-DIJ, Sol Invictus) commenting on the picture. Other pictures on the blog show connections to some of the others mentioned by harsherreality.
[4]
Her partner Adam Thomas, a former Amazon security guard, is seen posing [3] with a copy of Troy Southgate’s “National-Anarchism. A Reader” as pictured in the Daily Telegraph. Southgate somewhat bizarrely claims on his web site, “I was, and shall remain, an anti-fascist”, despite the fact that he was a member of the National Front, the International Third Position and other, well… fascist, organisations. Of course it can be argued that National Anarchism is a development of classical fascism, but serious research [6] suggests it’s a form of re-branding of fascism itself and certainly not a form of anti-fascism.
[3]
While it is hard to say how close and deep the involvement of Patatas and perhaps other National Action activists is with the far right music scene, it stands without a doubt that there is a direct connection. As John Eden wrote on Twitter: ‘This raises a number of awkward questions for the dwindling number of Death In June fans who still insist that the group is not political, and is just fascist cosplay for people who want to wank off about the “darker side of humanity”‘.
[7]
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