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White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18
During the 1990s a gang of neo-nazi thugs embarked on a campaign of terror on Britains streets.. They took their name from the first and eighth letters of the alphabet, the initials of Adolph Hitler, and recruited skinheads, violent racists and the most notorious football hooligan gangs. Their aim was imple: to start a race war.In this shocking expose, author Nick Lowles describes how Combat 18 fought street battles with their political rivals, muscled their way to control of the lucrative Blood and Honour music scene, forged links with Loyalist paramilitaries in Ulster and dreamt of creating a whites-only homeland. They led attacks by England soccer fans on tripsabroad, targeted celebrities and inspired an orgy of mayhem in Scandanavia., culminating in car bombings and the killing of two police officers. Finally their leaders fell out in a murderous feud that left one man dead and two others serving life jail terms.
' - a detailed insight into the wellsprings of Fascism in Britain today.' - Daily Mail
' - Grounded in impeccable research - this excellent book reminds us of the need to be vigilant.' - Morning Star
' - a detailed insight into the wellsprings of Fascism in Britain today.' - Daily Mail
' - Grounded in impeccable research - this excellent book reminds us of the need to be vigilant.' - Morning Star
338 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 3, 2016
The story of the violent rise of the BNP bodyguards who came to be known as Combat 18, a tale that encapsulates Loyalist paramilitaries, the Skinhead music scene, letter-bombs and Satanism. A real page turner, if only because you find it difficult to believe there are genuinely people as narrow minded as this - the epic repulsiveness of Browning and Sargent's Aryan supremacist rants is almost beyond rational belief. A car smash, a train wreck, a tramp bleeding to death by the side of the road of a book. You can't look away, and you'll hate yourself for it.
December 17, 2016
A fascinating insight into the oft-neglected militant far-right in the UK. In a year where an MP was murdered by a far-right extremist, this is more relevant than it has been in a long time. I just wish the whole thing was better edited...
January 30, 2025
I found this book in the ‘Politics’ section of a famous London bookshop. It had clearly been misshelved. It should have gone in the ‘True Crime’ section instead.
Combat 18 were thugs, and any political beliefs they held were secondary, and, one suspects, largely adopted as an excuse for their thuggery.
Origins
Most accounts claim that c18 began as a stewarding group for the BNP.
Though this fact was used to discredit the BNP through association, it had always struck me as unlikely. With its aspirations towards electability, the BNP was hardly likely to name its stewarding group with a numerical representation of the initials of Adolf Hitler.
Lowles repeats the claim, but then, contradicting himself, debunks it.
The BNP did set up a stewarding group that included many men later involved in c18, but c18 itself was formed at a later meeting, with many of the same men present, but with BNP officials absent.
Thus, from its first meeting, c18 evinced an intention to establish an identity independent of its ostensible parent.
Football Violence
The other main myth about c18 is that they were responsible for the Landsdowne Road riot, when England fans ran riot at an away international in Dublin.
Actually, Lowles admits, no c18 were even present that day.
Instead, the riot was spontaneous, motivated perhaps partly by politics, more by the booing of the British national anthem and singing of IRA songs by sections of the home support—but mostly by the fact that the English were one-nil down and had had a goal disallowed for offside.
But c18’s links to football hooliganism were very real. Earlier nationalist groups had used hooligans as muscle, but c18 was the first group composed and led by thugs themselves (p18).
In this respect, they set the model for later groups, like the EDL, Casuals United and Football Lads Alliance.
Yet, by the time c18 was formed, not only was hooliganism on the wane among English football fans—so was racism.
Black players were a fixture in virtually every top-flight team. The monkey chants that Bill Burford once described as ubiquitous are now unknown.
Of course, racism and hypocrisy go together. Fans could sing racist chants, while also cheering their own black players, just as:
If black players are common, Muslims, especially British Muslims, remain rare.
Football Rivalries
Yet recruiting among football fans inevitably meant that there would be animosity between fans of rival teams.
Though formed from the East End Barmy Army, who included supporters of all London clubs, c18 became increasingly associated with the West London Chelsea Headhunters firm.
This association with Chelsea increasingly alienated fans of other clubs. Thus, after the surprise BNP by-election win in Millwall in 1993:
Splits
As a group led by thugs, it was inevitable that c18 would violently fracture. The key conflict was between Paul ‘Charlie’ Sargent, the group’s self-appointed führer, and his former enforcer, Wilf Browning.
Although his main source seems to have been Sargent’s brother Steve, who, despite his politics, agreed to be interviewed by antifascist Lowles, Charlie is portrayed very negatively, as a braggart and police informant, mostly motivated by money, who ordered others to commit violent acts while avoiding trouble himself.
His rival Browning receives a marginally more favorable portrait, as a courageous fighter, fanatical Nazi (actually, not sure that’s a good thing) and puritanical, teetotal, vegetarian fitness fanatic, but also a complete lunatic, liable to turn violent at the slightest provocation and dedicated to terrorist revolution.
Yet it is Sargent who has spent most of the years since the Lowles’ book came out in prison, while Browning has largely avoided serious legal trouble.
It was also Browning who was smart enough to mastermind c18’s move into music production.
Music
Though most leading figures had, by the time c18 was formed, switched to the ‘football casual’ look, c18 was formed among the no longer youthful—and, in most cases, no longer skinhead—remnants of the last generation of the skinhead youth subculture.
Sargent was a former roommate of Ian Stuart, lead singer of premier racist rock band, Skrewdriver, and his co-defendant in the murder that forms the climax of Lowles’s narrative, Martin Cross, was a guitarist for the same band. His rival, Browning, was a guitarist for perhaps the second most infamous such band, No Remorse.
In the 80s and 90s, white power rock was big business. But, if record labels in the US have a reputation for ripping off black artists, in Europe white power bands seem to have fared even worse.
Ian Stuart was, by 1990s, an internationally famous rock star, yet, according to Stewart Home:
C18’s key innovation was to set up their own label, IDS Records, and take control of the entire process of recording, cutting, pressing and distributing records, enabling them to achieve an enviable position of financial independence.
Yet it was bickering over these proceeds that led to the violent split.
Ideological Leadership
As an organization led by thugs, this left a vacuum for ideological leadership. Thus enters the oddest figure in Lowles’s narrative—David Myatt.
A sometime Benedictine monk, Taoist, Islamic jihadist and all-round oddball, Myatt is, depending on whom you believe, a Nazi fanatic who posed as, first, a Satanist and then a jihadist to further the ends of Nazism; an occultist who infiltrated Nazi and Jihadist groups as a form of Satanic initiation or ‘insight’; a state agent entrusted by his handlers with infiltrating, first, the Nazi and then the Islamic terrorist scene; a man devoted to a lifelong quest for spiritual enlightenment; or just a confused individual with a temperamental attraction to extreme ideologies.
Yet, ironically, of all his reinventions, Myatt is best known for the one persona with which he has consistently denied any involvement—namely as Anton Long, founder of the Satanist, Order of the Nine Angles.
For his part, Lowles attributes Myatt’s various reinventions to cowardice: Whenever Myatt faced renewed law-enforcement scrutiny, he simply lay low by becoming a monk or conveniently converting to Taoism.
Described by Lowles himself as “one of Britain’s foremost post-war national socialist thinkers”, if only by dint of the paucity of the competition, Myatt seems an unlikely figure to be mixed up with the assorted thugs of c18.
The link was Sargent’s brother Steve. Described by Lowles as “more intelligent” than his brother (p22), and “by far the most political and well-read” of the two (p20)—again, one suspects, only by dint of the paucity of the competition—Steve was, according to Lowles, “one of the few [in c18] who actually read Myatt’s work” (p158).
Myatt himself meanwhile is credited as “one of the few NSA supporters who really understood nazi ideology” (p125).
Personally, I am not convinced there is much coherent to understand in the first place.
Indeed, Myatt’s own take on Nazism is especially odd. His own writings reveal an obsession less with race or Jews, and more with the importance of reintroducing of duelling as a popular pastime and means of dying.
Actually, Hitler himself had opposed duelling, because he thought it led to too many pointless deaths among brave young potential Wehrmacht officers, who would, he felt, have been far better off dying in his own pointless wars of conquest. He thus proposed replacing duels with boxing.
Evidently, however, leading Nazi intellectual David Myatt never got that particular memo.
Ideology
What then was c18’s ideology—or what passed for ideology among its assorted thugs and oddballs.
Rejecting the electoral strategy of the BNP as hopeless, c18 advocated instead violent revolution.
This may have been even more hopeless than the electioneering of the BNP, but, for the disaffected thugs of c18, it at least promised more thrills.
Yet, perhaps recognising the impossibility of their task, c18 aimed, not to overthrow the government, at least not at first, but rather only to establish an autonomous white homeland somewhere in Essex.
This might sound completely bonkers, and indeed is completely bonkers, but there was some logic here.
From Mosley to the Millwall by-election victory in 1993, the East End had long been a heartland for British nationalism—or at least the closest thing such a marginal movement had to a heartland.
But now, driven from their beloved Bow Bells by increased immigration, to escape the immigrants the cockneys had themselves migrated, mostly to Essex, which henceforth became a heartland for UKIP and the Brexit vote.
It was only natural, then, that any Aryan homeland would be in Essex.
Lowles argues that this idea was conceived in imitation of the success of Nazi groups in the US in establishing autonomous rural compounds, and of the IRA in establishing no-go areas in parts of Ulster.
I suspect the so-called ‘North-West Territorial Imperative’, whereby it was envisaged that white Americans would carve out an Aryan homeland in the Pacific Northwest, espoused by, among others, Nazi bank robber and c18 hero Robert Mathews and alleged c18 co-founder Harold Covington, was also a factor.
Of course, even in America, with its wide, open spaces, the idea was unrealistic. In Britain, especially the densely populated South-East, it was preposterous.
Legacy
I began this review by suggesting that, rather than a political group, c18 are best viewed as a criminal gang.
But even as a crime group c18 were unimpressive.
They were hardly the Mafia, and, despite styling themselves ‘Combat 18 Terrormachine’, nor were they a real terror threat—something that actually rebounds paradoxically rather to their credit.
Any group that has to tell you that they are terrorists, probably aren’t. Real terrorists usually insist they are ‘freedom fighters’.
Lowles reports:
Indeed, it is doubtful if the ideology to which they claimed adherence—national socialism—has sufficient coherence, or even a sufficiently precise meaning, to qualify as an ideology in the first place.
The few who did take the ideology seriously were, not intellectuals, but cranks.
Admittedly, his book makes an entertaining, if sordid, read, like much literature in the true crime genre—especially for physical cowards like myself, who enjoy violence only vicariously.
Moreover, even a few maladjusted misfits—or even a ‘lone wolf’ like London nail bomber, David Copeland, to whom Lowles devotes considerable attention despite his only indirect links to c18—may nevertheless be capable of doing considerable harm.
In addition, powerful groups sometimes grow from inauspicious beginnings.
Thus, if c18 were mere thugs, much the same could be said of their likely idols, the Brownshirts, who played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power.
Likewise, if David Myatt was a crank, not a serious political thinker, the same could be said of Gottfried Feder, with his self-taught economic theories, or Rosenberg and Himmler with their odd religious ideas.
Yet, unlike the Nazis, c18 never did outgrow its inauspicious beginnings.
Indeed, today, the original c18 no longer seem to exist.
Yet c18 has enjoyed a shadowy afterlife, copycat groups using the same name having sprung up as far afield as Eastern Europe and North America.
Indeed, since c18 ostensibly espoused an strategy of ‘leaderless resistance’ and hence gave up any claim to trademark on their name, these groups can indeed claim to represent the ‘real’ c18.
Why then does the group still enjoy a certain name recognition and infamy? Why are members of the police, prison service and armed services in the UK still explicitly barred from membership of this now nonexistent group?
The worldwide name recognition the group achieved partly reflected its association with the Nazi rock scene, which enjoyed a worldwide audience.
Certainly, it had little to do with the achievements of the original group, which were few and largely counterproductive.
In addition, four groups have a vested interest in exaggerating the threat posed by groups like c18.
First, the groups themselves, as it flatters their vanity.
Second, the left, who seek to play down the threat posed by Islamic terror, and hence reduce the stigmatization of Muslims, by exaggerating the threat posed by far right terror, and hence increase the stigmatization of white males—although ironically both threats arguably result from the same misguided immigration policies.
Third, violent self-styled ‘antifascists’, since exaggerating the threat posed by their opponents makes their own cause all the more heroic, hence flatters their own vanity and justifies their own thuggery.
Fourth, professional antifascists like Lowles, because exaggerating the threat posed by groups like c18 helps him attract more charitable donations and government funding for his group, and hence pays his salary.
The result is that, whereas during the Troubles in Ireland, the UK government was long criticized for not proscribing the UDA until 1992, despite its long, documented association with political and sectarian killings, today they seem to have adopted the opposite approach, successively banning a whole series of miniscule neo-Nazi groupuscules—the Base, National Action, Sonnenkrieg Division, Feuerkrieg Division—the extent of whose terrorist activity at the time of their proscription seems to have amounted to posting edgy memes on the internet.
Indeed, the extent of the terrorist threat posed by some of these groups is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that one was, at the time of its proscription, literally led by a 13-year-old.
Combat 18 were thugs, and any political beliefs they held were secondary, and, one suspects, largely adopted as an excuse for their thuggery.
Origins
Most accounts claim that c18 began as a stewarding group for the BNP.
Though this fact was used to discredit the BNP through association, it had always struck me as unlikely. With its aspirations towards electability, the BNP was hardly likely to name its stewarding group with a numerical representation of the initials of Adolf Hitler.
Lowles repeats the claim, but then, contradicting himself, debunks it.
The BNP did set up a stewarding group that included many men later involved in c18, but c18 itself was formed at a later meeting, with many of the same men present, but with BNP officials absent.
Thus, from its first meeting, c18 evinced an intention to establish an identity independent of its ostensible parent.
Football Violence
The other main myth about c18 is that they were responsible for the Landsdowne Road riot, when England fans ran riot at an away international in Dublin.
Actually, Lowles admits, no c18 were even present that day.
Instead, the riot was spontaneous, motivated perhaps partly by politics, more by the booing of the British national anthem and singing of IRA songs by sections of the home support—but mostly by the fact that the English were one-nil down and had had a goal disallowed for offside.
But c18’s links to football hooliganism were very real. Earlier nationalist groups had used hooligans as muscle, but c18 was the first group composed and led by thugs themselves (p18).
In this respect, they set the model for later groups, like the EDL, Casuals United and Football Lads Alliance.
Yet, by the time c18 was formed, not only was hooliganism on the wane among English football fans—so was racism.
Black players were a fixture in virtually every top-flight team. The monkey chants that Bill Burford once described as ubiquitous are now unknown.
Of course, racism and hypocrisy go together. Fans could sing racist chants, while also cheering their own black players, just as:
“At Chelsea, and among football firms in general, some of the most racist thugs will tolerate or befriend black hooligans if they are on ‘their’ side” (p96).Interestingly, however, the EDL, though, like c18, recruiting among hooligans, officially eschews racism, focusing instead on Islam.
If black players are common, Muslims, especially British Muslims, remain rare.
Football Rivalries
Yet recruiting among football fans inevitably meant that there would be animosity between fans of rival teams.
Though formed from the East End Barmy Army, who included supporters of all London clubs, c18 became increasingly associated with the West London Chelsea Headhunters firm.
This association with Chelsea increasingly alienated fans of other clubs. Thus, after the surprise BNP by-election win in Millwall in 1993:
“[c18] toured the surrounding pubs hoping to enlist fighters for their racist cause but were unable to gain a single recruit. Their connection to Chelsea was well-known and the Millwall hooligans, however racist, simply did not want to know” (p175).Steve Sargent had earlier marvelled in a c18 fanzine at how c18 represented a racist ‘Rainbow Coalition’:
“Fans from throughout London’s teams and further afield joined together as one… Arsenal, Spurs, Chelsea, Millwall, Charlton and Orient… It shows that it’s possible for rival fans to join together to fight the common enemy” (p79).But one suspects the “common enemy” in question was as likely to be fans of Man Utd or Liverpool—or perhaps the Judean People’s Front—as it was the racial enemy favored by c18.
Splits
As a group led by thugs, it was inevitable that c18 would violently fracture. The key conflict was between Paul ‘Charlie’ Sargent, the group’s self-appointed führer, and his former enforcer, Wilf Browning.
Although his main source seems to have been Sargent’s brother Steve, who, despite his politics, agreed to be interviewed by antifascist Lowles, Charlie is portrayed very negatively, as a braggart and police informant, mostly motivated by money, who ordered others to commit violent acts while avoiding trouble himself.
His rival Browning receives a marginally more favorable portrait, as a courageous fighter, fanatical Nazi (actually, not sure that’s a good thing) and puritanical, teetotal, vegetarian fitness fanatic, but also a complete lunatic, liable to turn violent at the slightest provocation and dedicated to terrorist revolution.
Yet it is Sargent who has spent most of the years since the Lowles’ book came out in prison, while Browning has largely avoided serious legal trouble.
It was also Browning who was smart enough to mastermind c18’s move into music production.
Music
Though most leading figures had, by the time c18 was formed, switched to the ‘football casual’ look, c18 was formed among the no longer youthful—and, in most cases, no longer skinhead—remnants of the last generation of the skinhead youth subculture.
Sargent was a former roommate of Ian Stuart, lead singer of premier racist rock band, Skrewdriver, and his co-defendant in the murder that forms the climax of Lowles’s narrative, Martin Cross, was a guitarist for the same band. His rival, Browning, was a guitarist for perhaps the second most infamous such band, No Remorse.
In the 80s and 90s, white power rock was big business. But, if record labels in the US have a reputation for ripping off black artists, in Europe white power bands seem to have fared even worse.
Ian Stuart was, by 1990s, an internationally famous rock star, yet, according to Stewart Home:
“At the time of his death, Stuart's career was at its peak, he was grossing somewhere between £100 and £200 a week from his ‘musical’ activities, about the same as the wage for a badly paid labouring job” (Cranked Up Really High).Splitting from White Noise, a label run by the National Front, because they felt they were not receiving their fair share of royalties, Skrewdriver were thenceforth distributed by Rock o Rama Records, who also had a reputation for underpaying artists. But, with other labels unwilling to touch such material, bands had little option to negotiate a better deal elsewhere.
C18’s key innovation was to set up their own label, IDS Records, and take control of the entire process of recording, cutting, pressing and distributing records, enabling them to achieve an enviable position of financial independence.
Yet it was bickering over these proceeds that led to the violent split.
Ideological Leadership
As an organization led by thugs, this left a vacuum for ideological leadership. Thus enters the oddest figure in Lowles’s narrative—David Myatt.
A sometime Benedictine monk, Taoist, Islamic jihadist and all-round oddball, Myatt is, depending on whom you believe, a Nazi fanatic who posed as, first, a Satanist and then a jihadist to further the ends of Nazism; an occultist who infiltrated Nazi and Jihadist groups as a form of Satanic initiation or ‘insight’; a state agent entrusted by his handlers with infiltrating, first, the Nazi and then the Islamic terrorist scene; a man devoted to a lifelong quest for spiritual enlightenment; or just a confused individual with a temperamental attraction to extreme ideologies.
Yet, ironically, of all his reinventions, Myatt is best known for the one persona with which he has consistently denied any involvement—namely as Anton Long, founder of the Satanist, Order of the Nine Angles.
For his part, Lowles attributes Myatt’s various reinventions to cowardice: Whenever Myatt faced renewed law-enforcement scrutiny, he simply lay low by becoming a monk or conveniently converting to Taoism.
Described by Lowles himself as “one of Britain’s foremost post-war national socialist thinkers”, if only by dint of the paucity of the competition, Myatt seems an unlikely figure to be mixed up with the assorted thugs of c18.
The link was Sargent’s brother Steve. Described by Lowles as “more intelligent” than his brother (p22), and “by far the most political and well-read” of the two (p20)—again, one suspects, only by dint of the paucity of the competition—Steve was, according to Lowles, “one of the few [in c18] who actually read Myatt’s work” (p158).
Myatt himself meanwhile is credited as “one of the few NSA supporters who really understood nazi ideology” (p125).
Personally, I am not convinced there is much coherent to understand in the first place.
Indeed, Myatt’s own take on Nazism is especially odd. His own writings reveal an obsession less with race or Jews, and more with the importance of reintroducing of duelling as a popular pastime and means of dying.
Actually, Hitler himself had opposed duelling, because he thought it led to too many pointless deaths among brave young potential Wehrmacht officers, who would, he felt, have been far better off dying in his own pointless wars of conquest. He thus proposed replacing duels with boxing.
Evidently, however, leading Nazi intellectual David Myatt never got that particular memo.
Ideology
What then was c18’s ideology—or what passed for ideology among its assorted thugs and oddballs.
Rejecting the electoral strategy of the BNP as hopeless, c18 advocated instead violent revolution.
This may have been even more hopeless than the electioneering of the BNP, but, for the disaffected thugs of c18, it at least promised more thrills.
Yet, perhaps recognising the impossibility of their task, c18 aimed, not to overthrow the government, at least not at first, but rather only to establish an autonomous white homeland somewhere in Essex.
This might sound completely bonkers, and indeed is completely bonkers, but there was some logic here.
From Mosley to the Millwall by-election victory in 1993, the East End had long been a heartland for British nationalism—or at least the closest thing such a marginal movement had to a heartland.
But now, driven from their beloved Bow Bells by increased immigration, to escape the immigrants the cockneys had themselves migrated, mostly to Essex, which henceforth became a heartland for UKIP and the Brexit vote.
It was only natural, then, that any Aryan homeland would be in Essex.
Lowles argues that this idea was conceived in imitation of the success of Nazi groups in the US in establishing autonomous rural compounds, and of the IRA in establishing no-go areas in parts of Ulster.
I suspect the so-called ‘North-West Territorial Imperative’, whereby it was envisaged that white Americans would carve out an Aryan homeland in the Pacific Northwest, espoused by, among others, Nazi bank robber and c18 hero Robert Mathews and alleged c18 co-founder Harold Covington, was also a factor.
Of course, even in America, with its wide, open spaces, the idea was unrealistic. In Britain, especially the densely populated South-East, it was preposterous.
Legacy
I began this review by suggesting that, rather than a political group, c18 are best viewed as a criminal gang.
But even as a crime group c18 were unimpressive.
They were hardly the Mafia, and, despite styling themselves ‘Combat 18 Terrormachine’, nor were they a real terror threat—something that actually rebounds paradoxically rather to their credit.
Any group that has to tell you that they are terrorists, probably aren’t. Real terrorists usually insist they are ‘freedom fighters’.
Lowles reports:
“Most of what they called political action owed more to drunken, yobbish behaviour than coordinated terrorist strategy” (p311).He concludes:
“While supporters were united and motivated by political ideology rather than simply fashion or music, their actions and mentality differed little from other manifestations of youth subculture, especially football hooliganism, from which many of them came” (p305).But even the claim that c18 were “motivated by… ideology” seems problematic, since the word “ideology” rather implies too much intellectualism.
Indeed, it is doubtful if the ideology to which they claimed adherence—national socialism—has sufficient coherence, or even a sufficiently precise meaning, to qualify as an ideology in the first place.
The few who did take the ideology seriously were, not intellectuals, but cranks.
“The few who most studied the ideology were weirdos and misfits—uniform fetishists, fantasists, Satanists… like David Myatt” (p307).Yet, if c18 were such a pitiful group, why has Lowles bothered to write a book about them, and, more to the point, why does he expects anyone to read it?
Admittedly, his book makes an entertaining, if sordid, read, like much literature in the true crime genre—especially for physical cowards like myself, who enjoy violence only vicariously.
Moreover, even a few maladjusted misfits—or even a ‘lone wolf’ like London nail bomber, David Copeland, to whom Lowles devotes considerable attention despite his only indirect links to c18—may nevertheless be capable of doing considerable harm.
In addition, powerful groups sometimes grow from inauspicious beginnings.
Thus, if c18 were mere thugs, much the same could be said of their likely idols, the Brownshirts, who played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power.
Likewise, if David Myatt was a crank, not a serious political thinker, the same could be said of Gottfried Feder, with his self-taught economic theories, or Rosenberg and Himmler with their odd religious ideas.
Yet, unlike the Nazis, c18 never did outgrow its inauspicious beginnings.
Indeed, today, the original c18 no longer seem to exist.
Yet c18 has enjoyed a shadowy afterlife, copycat groups using the same name having sprung up as far afield as Eastern Europe and North America.
Indeed, since c18 ostensibly espoused an strategy of ‘leaderless resistance’ and hence gave up any claim to trademark on their name, these groups can indeed claim to represent the ‘real’ c18.
Why then does the group still enjoy a certain name recognition and infamy? Why are members of the police, prison service and armed services in the UK still explicitly barred from membership of this now nonexistent group?
The worldwide name recognition the group achieved partly reflected its association with the Nazi rock scene, which enjoyed a worldwide audience.
Certainly, it had little to do with the achievements of the original group, which were few and largely counterproductive.
In addition, four groups have a vested interest in exaggerating the threat posed by groups like c18.
First, the groups themselves, as it flatters their vanity.
Second, the left, who seek to play down the threat posed by Islamic terror, and hence reduce the stigmatization of Muslims, by exaggerating the threat posed by far right terror, and hence increase the stigmatization of white males—although ironically both threats arguably result from the same misguided immigration policies.
Third, violent self-styled ‘antifascists’, since exaggerating the threat posed by their opponents makes their own cause all the more heroic, hence flatters their own vanity and justifies their own thuggery.
Fourth, professional antifascists like Lowles, because exaggerating the threat posed by groups like c18 helps him attract more charitable donations and government funding for his group, and hence pays his salary.
The result is that, whereas during the Troubles in Ireland, the UK government was long criticized for not proscribing the UDA until 1992, despite its long, documented association with political and sectarian killings, today they seem to have adopted the opposite approach, successively banning a whole series of miniscule neo-Nazi groupuscules—the Base, National Action, Sonnenkrieg Division, Feuerkrieg Division—the extent of whose terrorist activity at the time of their proscription seems to have amounted to posting edgy memes on the internet.
Indeed, the extent of the terrorist threat posed by some of these groups is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that one was, at the time of its proscription, literally led by a 13-year-old.
May 24, 2015
When I read non-fiction I try to select true stories that are indeed, stranger than fiction. The rise and fall of Combat 18 is as exciting as it gets if you forego the genuine dismay of reading about such terrorist activities which happened not so long ago on our doorstep.
The book is like a complete jigsaw puzzle that puts together the few bits on information we heard from the media as events happened at the time whilst adding all the remaining facts, necessary to have a full understanding of what Combat 18 were all about and how they operated.
Nick Lowles is excellent in ‘telling it as it is’ with no moral judgment or bias but equally spending some time in describing the individual members and their bizarre reasoning. The book highlights quite accurately their disorganised, contradictory and ultimately unsuccessful (lucky for us!) attempts to change society quite typical of other far-right extreme groups. Their members’ lack of social skills and limited self control eventually caused Combat 18 to implode. The book underlines the importance of leadership in achieving anything as a group; passion and shared ideological ideals alone can only take you so far.
One can’t help but smile, cringe or feel dazed when reading Lowles’ accurately described situations and members’ profiles, which make the book rich and highly entertaining.
Very enjoyable, hard-hitting and educational all in one; 4 stars fully deserved.
The book is like a complete jigsaw puzzle that puts together the few bits on information we heard from the media as events happened at the time whilst adding all the remaining facts, necessary to have a full understanding of what Combat 18 were all about and how they operated.
Nick Lowles is excellent in ‘telling it as it is’ with no moral judgment or bias but equally spending some time in describing the individual members and their bizarre reasoning. The book highlights quite accurately their disorganised, contradictory and ultimately unsuccessful (lucky for us!) attempts to change society quite typical of other far-right extreme groups. Their members’ lack of social skills and limited self control eventually caused Combat 18 to implode. The book underlines the importance of leadership in achieving anything as a group; passion and shared ideological ideals alone can only take you so far.
One can’t help but smile, cringe or feel dazed when reading Lowles’ accurately described situations and members’ profiles, which make the book rich and highly entertaining.
Very enjoyable, hard-hitting and educational all in one; 4 stars fully deserved.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews