David Myatt’s Imagined Emotionology, his Striving for Authentic Aryan Emotional Communities, and the Dishonourable Wulstan Tedder

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s David Myatt, a British neo-Nazi ideologue, was involved in attempts to establish Aryan enclaves; Myatt’s enclave vision imagined a space secluded from the inauthenticity of liberal multicultural modernity where an Aryan folk community could live authentically in accordance with his National-Socialist ideology. This ideology was founded on a cosmology which inextricably interlinked Aryans, the landscape, and the cosmos in a symbiotic relationship. Myatt therefore envisaged rural enclaves established in harmony with Nature, where Aryans could live authentic lives in an authentic community, founded on an imagined emotionology that centred the Aryan virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty. Myatt’s legitimacy as an ideologue was largely formed by his vigorous personal adherence to this concept of authentic Aryanism, but this authenticity and legitimacy was tested by Myatt’s deliberate tactics of obscuration.

Keywords:

• David Myatt
• fascism
• authenticity
• imagined emotionology
• emotional communities
• emotions

Introduction

In 1995, Searchlight, a long running anti-fascist magazine, reported that Wulstram Tedder and his ‘aide’ David Myatt were gathering support for a venture to establish an Aryan homeland, a community where an authentic Aryan life could be lived.¹ Tedder was the son of Baron Arthur William Tedder – a senior RAF Commander during World War II who was subsequently made Chief of the Air Staff – and had supported Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement (NSM) in the 1960s, before reappearing in the mid 1980s to write several intellectual pieces for Spearhead, at that point the magazine of John Tyndall’s British National Party (BNP), extolling the virtues of an authentic Aryan community.² Myatt had been active in the British extreme right since the late 1960s as an outright neo-Nazi, co-founding the crudely racist and violent National Democratic Freedom Movement in 1974 before reappearing in the early 1990s attached to Combat 18 (C18), a more potently violent paramilitary neo-Nazi groupuscule, and then founding his own National-Socialist Movement (N-SM) in 1997. He left the N-SM, having converted to Islam in 1998, and attempted to forge ideological links between neo-Nazism and Islamism. In spite of his public renouncement of extremism, presenting his own Pathei-Mathos religion in 2012, Myatt’s writings have become a key influence for the most severe and dangerous groupuscules of the contemporary extreme right, for example, National Action, Atomwaffen Division, and Feuerkrieg Division.³ Both figures can be considered ideologues, and both pursued neo-Nazi rhetoric of a metaphysical and esoteric nature, as part of an apparent quest for meaning and authenticity. I should clarify that Tedder remains an obscure figure, and information on him is difficult to source, thus I have presented biographical details as best I can. I should also clarify that the aristocratic neo-Nazi ideologue Wulstram Tedder never existed. Tedder was, partly or entirely, the invention of David Myatt, a fact Myatt admits to whilst criticising Nicholas Goodrick-Clark’s book Black Sun, stating that Goodrick-Clark: ‘mentions a certain Wulstram Tedder whom he claims was a former aide of Colin Jordan during the old NSM days, whereas “W Tedder” was one of the noms-de-plume I used’.⁴ This article will therefore examine Myatt’s deceitful masquerade as Wulfstram Tedder in the context of his desire to establish a community based around an avowed notion of Aryan authenticity, and explore aspects of the role that authenticity performed in both the enclave venture and Myatt’s National-Socialist ideology (which he always hyphenates to discern it from other neo-Nazi variants), with further emphasis on the emotional elements of these.⁵

Thus far, Myatt has received little academic attention in proportion to his influence on contemporary neo-Nazi and accelerationist groupuscules; Goodrick-Clarke’s Black Sun has long been held as the seminal, predominant text on the ideologue, although this merely amounts to the majority of a chapter, providing an overview of Myatt’s activities and ideology and contextualising him as a complex, uncompromising figure in a wider transnational history of intersections between neo-Nazism and the occultic.⁶ George Michael’s The Enemy of My Enemy also featured extended research into Myatt but concentrated on his - ultimately unsuccessful - attempts to instigate collaboration between the extreme right and militant Islamism. Beyond these two texts, the historiography is more piecemeal, with the most notable works being more minor, if meticulous and archival, attention from Paul Jackson and Graham Macklin, as well as detailed journalistic research, including face to face interviews, from Nick Lowles and Nick Ryan.⁷ Myatt has also been an infrequent subject in terrorism studies, whilst his alleged role in the satanic group the Order of Nine Angles, using the pseudonym Anton Long, has also seen him scrutinised varyingly in an increasing body of work on the group.⁸

This article will utilise various writings by Myatt. Some of these are longform essays with pretensions towards a philosophical register, either self-published or presented in significant UK or US neo-Nazi magazines, others are shorter, functional texts, such as organisational newsletters and bulletins. It will also draw on two antagonistic sources, the aforementioned Searchlight and Spearhead. Searchlight’s anti-fascist coverage is notable in that it appeared to take the fictitious Tedder at face value, even drawing a distinction between Tedder’s intellectual discourse and Myatt’s somewhat baser writings.⁹ Discussion of these sources will use the term ‘fascism’ in accordance with the ‘new consensus’ definition formulated by Griffin as a ‘genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of ultranationalism’; this will be accompanied by Mudde’s definition of the ‘extreme right’ as a subgroup of the far right that ‘rejects the essence of democracy, that is, popular sovereignty and majority rule’.¹⁰ ‘Authenticity’, deriving from ‘classical Greek: auto—self, and hentes—doer’, will be defined: ‘To be authentic is to identify with, or claim ownership of, a narrative of origins, or a sense of original and unadulterated selfhood. To assert or reclaim authenticity is to reject any force or process that separates or alienates the individual from their true identity, character, or sense of purpose’.¹¹ Finally, Tedder’s elusiveness is aided by a variety of first names: Wulstram, Wulfstran, and Wulstan. I will be using the latter - unless quoting a text that uses a variant - as the earliest published texts were attributed to Wulstan Tedder.

Myatt’s ideas will be scrutinised with the aid of concepts developed in the field of the history of emotions. Barbara Rosenwein’s notion of emotional communities will help frame Myatt’s theory of an Aryan folk: ‘groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value - or devalue - the same or related emotions’.¹² Individuals can inhabit multiple emotional communities simultaneously, with clear implications, as will be seen, for Myatt’s potential to recruit. William Reddy’s concepts of emotional regimes and emotional refuges will be used to articulate the relationship between Myatt’s idealised Aryan community and the wider society in which it was planned; an emotional regime is: ‘The set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them’, that underpin ‘any stable political regime’, whilst an emotional refuge is defined as: ‘A relationship, ritual, or organization (whether informal or formal) that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation of emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime’.¹³ This article will also utilise Reddy’s concept of emotional management: ‘Instrumental use of the self-altering effects of emotives in the service of a goal’, to analyse the emotional effort that Myatt’s vision of Aryanism might require.¹⁴ Katie Barclay’s notion of an emotional ethic as ‘feelings and embodied actions informed by a set of moral principles’, transposes insightfully onto Myatt’s existential National-Socialism, as an ideology that demands not only rigorous adherence to behaviours deemed Aryan, but also governs relations and interactions between Aryans, whilst Sara Ahmed’s notion of emotional hardness, a characteristic which deems ‘others’ as emotional, and thus inferior: ‘Hardness is not the absence of emotion, but a different emotional orientation towards others [Italics by Ahmed] ’, articulates a fundamental aspect of fascism, and one relevant to the study of Myatt.¹⁵

This article will examine Myatt’s vision of a thoroughly authentic Aryan community, explore the role that the pseudonymous Tedder performed in its propagation, and consider the further ramifications of this role regarding authenticity, Myatt, and fascism. It will begin by examining Myatt’s diagnosis of the world as apocalyptically degenerated by the effects of liberal modernity, producing Homo Hubris, the emotional anthesis of the authentic Aryan; after this, the briefest history of extreme right enclaves will be introduced, as a broad response to this general threat. Myatt’s particular vision of an Aryan enclave as an authentic ontological and existential venture in harmony with his National-Socialist Weltanschauung will then be discussed, pointing to the cosmic, natural, and rural aspects of his ideas. Myatt delineated a cosmology which centred race in its workings and manifested these cosmic laws in Nature (which Myatt always capitalised), thus making wilderness a sacred space for Aryans, therefore his insistence that enclaves should be rural and pastoral in character will be explored. Following this, Myatt’s envisaged enclave will be assessed as an emotional community based around a concept of Aryan authenticity that was founded on a rigorous, stoic sense of emotional management and preached the fundamental values of honour, loyalty, and duty, all of which was to be strived towards, potentially involving intense emotional management. Here, the article will suggest the concept of an imagined emotionology, as a propositional emotionology delineated as a spur to the creation of a corresponding emotional community. Next, Myatt’s attempts to establish enclaves in actuality will be scrutinised, pointing to not only the emotive appeal of his vision, but also its rejection by some, through differing concepts of an authentic struggle for Aryan palingenesis. Myatt himself will then be examined as a cynosure who centred a personal life of authentic Aryanism in his writings, and one who valued an Aryan existentialism over mere political activism. After this, Myatt’s Wulstan Tedder persona will be addressed, as a political tactic which presents a tension with Myatt’s adherence to his prescribed authentic Aryanism, and a venture that raises further issues regarding authenticity in research into fascism. Finally, the article will explore accusations of inauthenticity directed at Myatt from within the wider extreme right cultic milieu, before concluding with comments exploring how Myatt’s pursuit of authenticity intersects with wider themes in fascism and Aryan supremacy.

Myatt’s quest for a cosmologically authentic Aryan community

Myatt diagnosed the world as fundamentally decadent and degenerate: it was inauthentic, and now existed on the verge of apocalyptic cataclysm. It had been corrupted by nemetic Jewish forces, which he frequently referred to as ZOG (Zionist Occupational Government), who had utilised Christianity, liberalism, Marxism, capitalism, and multiculturalism to weaken and destroy Aryanism. Christianity had promoted a pacifist, egalitarian culture, reflected in liberalism, debilitating the West and holding it back from its historical destiny. Marxism threatened to transform this culture into a concrete totalitarianism, reducing humans into a subservient mass. Capitalism had created societies formed of materialist consumers, whilst multiculturalism, espoused and enforced by ZOG, attacked not only Aryan blood through miscegenation but also Aryan culture, with the virtue of tolerance engendering pacification, an act of infection and dilution. These malevolent influences were embodied in Myatt’s figure of Homo Hubris, the devolved antithesis of his authentic Aryan. Homo Hubris was an ‘urbanized denizen who knows nothing of the wild profundity of Nature ….vainly arrogant and weakly self- indulgent, addicted to personal pleasures’.¹⁶ Myatt envisions this new, devolved being living in a constant state of oscillation between boredom and distraction, never at ease in solitary, quiet moments, and driven by selfish desires, or by abstract wants manufactured by ZOG. Homo Hubris is an emotional being guided by emotions and feelings, neither rigorously ‘rational’ nor logical in Myatt’s eyes; they are rootless, not anchored in race, landscape, or the cosmos. They are greedy, lazy, shallow, and profane, in thrall to consumerist materialism and convenience; obsessed with the pursuit of a selfish, illusory personal happiness, they are fickle hedonists flitting from boredom to distraction, attracted by noise and trite excitement. Homo Hubris has no emotional control, and as a result they feel and express an excess of emotion, but an excess that is superficial, meaningless, and self-indulgent. Emotions have therefore made them selfish, submissive, and weak. They are soft and decadent, unable to act in the interests of their race or the cosmic laws governing the world. Thus they possess no true knowledge of self, a state which detaches them from any meaningful emotional life, most importantly manifesting as a profane ‘lack of knowing of and feeling for the numinous’, a concept central to Myatt’s view of authenticity: they have ‘little, or no, awareness of their connexion to Nature, to other life, to the Cosmos itself’.¹⁷ Homo Hubris is therefore detached from Nature on an everyday level, but also a substrative cosmological level, and Myatt warns that if this existential development is not reversed, ‘our Western world - and probably the rest of the world as well - will become an inhuman place to live’.¹⁸

Given this apocalyptic mindset, which runs in differing forms throughout postwar British fascism, the concept of an Aryan, or white, enclave represents a sanctuary, a fascist safe space strategy born of the recognition of the postwar marginalisation of extreme right ideologies. It is a site enclosed by borders - a hard outer skin reflective of Ahmed’s research into emotional hardness - against a nation perceived as having tipped over into racial chaos, where national or transnational ambitions of fascist dominance and regnancy have been diminished into the mere control of a parcel of land. Whilst this ‘geography of racial activism’ is most associated with ventures in the United States - most notably the Aryan Nations compound in northern Idaho, which existed from 1974 until 2001 - Britain has its own lesser history of enclave attempts, initiated by Colin Jordan whose transatlantic interests led him to adopt the idea, and his Vanguard Project sought to create a British enclave - a venture this article will examine Myatt’s involvement in.¹⁹ Enclaves remain a persistent aspiration for the British extreme right, most recently evidenced by The Woodlander Initiative. This venture, led by Simon Birkett of Patriotic Alternative, borrows from the contemporaneous concerns of globalist conspiracies of a ‘planned global technocratic transhuman vision’ and is raising funds for the purchase of land where an Arcadian life might be pursued.²⁰ The drive to establish white or Aryan spaces has obvious pragmatic, seclusive purposes, but it also represents a desire for authenticity; however, for David Myatt this authenticity had a further omnipresent cosmic significance.

Myatt’s notion of, and quest for, authenticity in a modern world he perceived as fundamentally decadent and inauthentic corresponds to Charles Taylor’s ‘three malaises about modernity’ which summarised unidentified critics of modernity as fearing ‘a loss of meaning’ and the ‘“disenchantment” of the world’, ‘the eclipse of ends, in face of rampant instrumental reason’, and the industrial-technological led ‘loss of freedom’.²¹ Whilst Taylor suggested that true authenticity derived from self-fulfilment as social beings, Myatt found his solutional authenticity, his Dasein, in racial authenticity - not so much ‘be yourself’ but ‘be your race’.²² This was the root of his National-Socialism ideology, an all-encompassing Weltanschauung with clear cosmological and ontological aspects; it was: ‘a practical expression of the unique racial spirit/soul, or ethos, of the Aryan race’, in accordance with the workings of a cosmos directed by the ’Cosmic Being’, terrenely manifested by Nature, and conducted via race.²³ Myatt declared that the superior Aryan race was defined less by physiognomy - though in these terms he described Aryans as ‘the European or White race’ - than by a set of cultural and thus emotional values founded on ‘honour, loyalty, and duty’, creating a ‘noble, Aryan warrior spirit, or ethos’.²⁴ Such values required protection from corruption, contamination, and dilution, and Myatt stated that National-Socialism thus expressed ‘the natural desire of healthy, noble, Aryans to live among their own kind, to preserve and extend their unique race and their unique culture, and to prosper and evolve still farther in accord with the laws of Nature’, in a ‘socially just society’, one ‘where Aryan values and Aryan customs are upheld’.²⁵ This would require ‘the creation of a separate ethnic homeland for Aryans, and Aryans only’, since National-Socialism, as a champion of ‘racial difference and diversity’ in accordance with Nature (according to Myatt, ‘for race is how Nature works, and how Nature is manifest to us, and in us, as individuals’) was an expression and affirmation of the ‘fundamental importance’ of race.²⁶ So Myatt’s enclave ventures were not only attempts to create mono-racial Aryan communities that were authentic on a political level, free from the degenerative influence of other races, and particularly the nemetic Jews, but also prefigurative political ventures that aspired to cosmic and ontological authenticity.

This authenticity demanded a community harmonious with Nature, as the earthly manifestation of cosmic laws, satisfying Myatt’s geographic, symbolic, and ontological desire to be as close to Nature as possible. Myatt’s esoteric Blut und Boden envisaged enclaves located in ancestral landscapes, but also specifically idealised the concept of wilderness, and thus firmly sited his vision in the countryside, free of the degenerative influence of multicultural, urban, ‘industrial wastelands’ which he observed materially and metaphysically ruining Nature.²⁷ Myatt therefore identified the remaining ‘unspoilt places where Nature [could] be felt and known’ as authentic for Aryans, geographic environments where Aryan communities might thrive.²⁸ This proximity to Nature was a significant element of National-Socialism: Myatt stated a key ideological aim as ‘encouraging healthy outdoor living’, and declared outdoor manual labour as ‘wholesome work for Aryans’, scorning Homo Hubris for working in ‘some enclosed building or house’, which by implication was unhealthy and of dubious virtue, thereby leading to physical, moral, and spiritual sickness - for Myatt even four walls and a roof could be viewed as an impediment to Aryan authenticity.²⁹ Myatt’s proposed rural enclaves therefore represented the acceptable limit of human interference with Nature, in balance with Nature, as an integral part of Nature. This relationship found its fullest consummation in Myatt’s insistence that enclaves should have a nature reserve attached in order that Aryans might ‘re-attune themselves to Nature’. Though Nature in its absolute form was only found in wilderness, where Aryans might experience and know the true presence and cosmological resonances of Nature and therefore feel true transcendence and authenticity as Aryans.³⁰

Myatt’s challenge was to formulate an authentic Aryan society rigorously constructed and conducted in accordance with this ‘ontic logos’, creating an omnipresent authenticity with echoes of ‘as above, so below, as within, so without’.³¹ Myatt’s construction of the rural as an imagined landscape envisions Aryans living in harmony with Nature’s laws, spatially and temporally linked to Nature via landscape and seasons, creating an environment where the behaviours and practicalities of everyday life can be fulfilled within an authentic Aryan ontology and habitus.³² In practical terms this was to be realised - initially at least - by small rural settlements built on plots of land acquired through collective fundraising, and peopled by Aryan volunteers who would run them as organic, mutualist, self-sufficient, agricultural communities. Farming would ‘use only organic methods’, with ‘horse-drawn equipment’, and ‘aim to rear and treat all livestock humanely, in accordance with the noble NS ideals of animal welfare’.³³ The enclave would be an autarkic Aryan micronation, mono-racial and cisgender heterosexual, with an organic hierarchy: a homeland where Aryans could experience, and progress towards, existential authenticity and purity. Myatt’s aim was therefore to create a living National-Socialist folk-community, where an authentic Aryan existence could be pursued in defiance of its myriad enemies. However, this defiance was expressed as a quiet superiority, not as an aggressive stance. The enclave would act as an emotional refuge from the emotional regimes of modernity where true Aryans could live and interact as they should, in accordance with a National-Socialist emotionology defined by Myatt. This emotional aspect of the enclaves was inextricably bound with their closeness to Nature, literally and ideologically, and found its fullest consummation in the nature reserve to be attached to each community.

The emotional aspects of the enclaves were of prime importance, given that these were to be sites of authentic Aryan living, in the wider context of Myatt’s predominant project to create a fascist ‘new man’. Whilst the enclaves cannot be assessed as actually existing emotional communities, Myatt’s vision for them can be analysed as an imagined emotionology: a prescription delineating an emotionology as a catalyst towards creating an emotional community sharing those emotional values. Myatt’s prescribed authentic Aryan emotionology, an Aryan emotional ethic, can be meaningfully reduced to resting on two precepts: a vision of the Aryan ethos as a warrior ethos which centralises the three concepts of honour, loyalty, and duty - an ethical triumvirate based on the SS motto ‘Meine Ehre heißt Treue’ [My honour means loyalty] - and Myatt’s stoic statement that a ‘man of honour, in public, is somewhat reserved and controlled and not given to displays of emotion’.³⁴ These principles, to be adhered to by all authentic Aryans striving towards the shared goal of a folk ‘Destiny’, would engender an ‘ordered society full of self-disciplined individuals who willingly cooperate together for their own greater good because they know or feel that such an ordered, self-disciplined society makes them better more healthy individuals, and gives them an opportunity to fulfill [sic] the real purpose of their lives. Thus can they, and their folk, evolve, and a new higher race of human beings comes into existence’.³⁵ Honour, loyalty, and duty are all inherently social virtues, governing interpersonal relationships and creating an emotional and affective economy that works towards organic hierarchies and community, where the most honourable, loyal, and dutiful acquire status and influence; the triumvirate also requires the suppression of personal desires, and consequently emotions, for the good of something greater - in this case the Aryan folk community - or learning to fit those personal desires and emotions into that greater framework.³⁶ In simple terms, it is a code that ennobles the virtue of ‘knowing your place’: Myatt’s authentic Aryan does not add noise into the social signal, the ideal of the Aryan folk must reign supreme.

Achieving racial and cosmic authenticity through aspiring to, and striving towards, emotional authenticity would therefore be a defining pillar of Myatt’s Aryan folk community, creating an emotional community based around intense emotional management. The social aspects of honour, loyalty, and duty, combined with Myatt’s aversion to public displays of emotion, were designed to establish meaningful antitheses to Homo Hubris. Authentic Aryans would be reserved, controlled, earnest, selfless, honest, forthright, and transparent in their actions and relationships, submitting fully to a wider folk community - which, following Myatt’s Weltangschauung, extends the concept of family to the entire Aryan race - and loving that community with pride. He declared that: ‘Each and every one of us must strive, on a day to day basis, to be honourable, to be loyal to our Comrades, and to do our National-Socialist duty’, adding: ‘I, for one, aim to be open and honest - I want to set a National- Socialist example’.³⁷ There was no place for dishonour, moral or emotional duplicity or laxity, or the ‘cowardly and treacherous’. This ‘destructive egotism’ was unAryan, inauthentic, and might hypothetically lead to an emotional style characterised by hypervigilance regarding utterances, bodily actions, even thoughts, through fear of transgression.³⁸ This also raises the question of where the public domain would end and the private begin - pursued to an extreme Myatt’s envisaged emotional community might reduce the private to the personal interior, where emotional liberty might only exist in the mind.³⁹ Myatt was keenly aware of the testing nature of this ‘high standard of behaviour, both in public and in private’, and indeed responded to criticism that it was ‘impractical’ and also ‘wholly unrealistic to expect people to live by some unyielding Code of Honour’: ‘The people who say that upholding the ideal of honour is impractical in the modern world are simply tainted by the decadence of the modern world - they either do not understand the true purpose of their own lives, revealed by National-Socialism, or they lack the personal character, the will, the toughness, to try and live in an honourable way [emphasis by Myatt]’.⁴⁰ Here, Ahmed’s concept of emotional hardness acts as a sorting mechanism between authentic Aryans and Homo Hubris, where living an honourable, loyal, and dutiful Aryan life was an indication of ontological superiority - whereas: ‘Neglect of one’s duty is a dishonourable act, and the sign of a weak personal character’, not only a personal failing but also a cosmic transgression.⁴¹

This was Myatt’s imagined emotionology, but how did concepts of an authentic Aryan community play out in actuality? In 1983 Searchlight reported extensively on Myatt’s attempts to enlist aid to create an enclave community in Church Stretton, Shropshire and printed correspondence between himself and Adrian Wiltshire.⁴² Wiltshire, volunteering his help, spoke of his hope of starting a family with his fiancée ‘away from the decadence of the city and all the evils that spread like a cancer within it’, and escaping the ‘shackles of materialist city life to live a true National Socialist existence’, signing his letters, ‘Yours for blood and soil’.⁴³ Whilst conceding that he had little ‘capital’ to offer, Wiltshire promised ‘enthusiasm and dedication to this rural project’, as well as the use of ‘a twin tub washing machine/spin dryer, fridge, three piece suite and weight training equipment’.⁴⁴ Replying to Wiltshire’s initial interest, Myatt elaborated on the early progress of the scheme and stated its short term goal as the achieving of a degree of ‘self-sufficiency in food within a year’, and a broader goal of creating ‘a healthy way of life consistent with NS ideals’; he therefore hoped to attract people to the community ‘by example’, and stated categorically that ‘people would come to work - not to waste time talking politics and certainly not for rallies’.⁴⁵ This austere vision of ‘very hard work’ - with Myatt underlining ‘very’ in pen, an emotive act in itself - was nevertheless attractive to Wiltshire who apparently shared Myatt’s belief in the authenticity of discomfort, or at least the deficiencies of easy living. The desire for comfort belonged to the urban Homo Hubris, betraying softness and the pursuit of ease and pleasure, whereas a healthy National-Socialist life, as dictated by Myatt, did not stray from the pursuit of the ideologically correct path, regardless of how much suffering it might entail - sentiments conspicuous in a wider decade associated with the pursuit of selfish hedonism and wealth. Wiltshire’s willingness, moreover enthusiasm, for uprooting his family in the pursuit of an authentic Aryan life is evidence of the emotive pull that Myatt’s enclave venture could evoke.

The Church Stretton enclave never materialised but Myatt’s persistence saw him pursuing the creation of enclaves during the 1990s, in conjunction with his comrades in C18. Despite Myatt believing he had found his Aryan footsoldiers with this relationship, the ideologue and C18 were always an alliance primed for dissonance, and their competing visions of an authentic Aryan enclave became an insightful expression of their differing emotional tenors. This tension is effectively addressed by Ryan and Lowles who both separately described the dissension between Myatt’s rural enclave and the Sargent brothers’ urban ideals.⁴⁶ Charlie and Steve Sargent, both leaders in C18 - a thoroughly urban organisation with a street-fighting culture - wanted to ‘slowly and surely take over … estates’ in Chelmsford, Essex, by mobilising supporters to move into these areas. The Sargents planned to create power bases, inspired by loyalist and republican estates in Northern Ireland, as urban fortresses in their struggle against ZOG.⁴⁷ This avenue forward was markedly different to Myatt’s concept, though Ryan writes that both would be combined, ‘with the paramilitary struggle taking place on the working- class estates, while a kibbutz-style smallholding or commune is set up in the countryside’.⁴⁸ However, the contrasting geographic locations for an Aryan homeland manifested the differing imagined emotionologies of Myatt and the Sargents; whilst Myatt’s rural vision was a retreat from the world, an environment aspiring to quiet, simplicity, and the pursuit of serene authenticity - an end in itself, the Sargents’ Aryan estates were a means of accumulating power, both political and personal, urban micro-secessions reflecting a reactionary version of contemporaneous white working-class culture. Myatt’s vision of authentic Aryan living referenced an esoteric, cosmic reading of neo-Nazism, seeking transcendent solitude in Nature, whilst the Sargents’s were informed by a more pragmatic, aggressive view of political change that craved collective urban conflict, abetted by an inflexible emotional hardness entwined with the hypermasculine football hooligan culture of C18.

Mr. Myatt and Mr. Tedder

Myatt’s crafted persona within the extreme right cultic milieu he was addressing for enclave volunteers was one of supreme authenticity; indeed, it would be reasonable to state that his claims to legitimacy as an ideologue rested not on promises of action but on a committed performance of adherence to Aryan authenticity: ‘a National-Socialist example’.⁴⁹ A particularly strong example of this is a newsletter Myatt wrote in 1998, anticipating legal prosecution for promoting racial hatred and incitement to murder after he had posted the insurrectionary manual ‘A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution’ on a Canadian website in November 1997.⁵⁰ ‘A Cosmic Perspective: Observations on a Forthcoming Trial’ is essentially a farewell to his comrades, should the worst happen, as Myatt details that he has done his honourable duty as an Aryan, and that the struggle must continue whatever happens to him personally.⁵¹ Myatt constructs a stoic text that cedes no ground to any form or degree of agitated emotive expression, or any utterance that might appear to derive from a process other than his logic. Regardless of these intentions, and a discourse of duty founded on knowledge and logic, the text centres Myatt and his emotions, evincing an emotional world; this is evident from the emotive opening sentence: ‘What happens to me, as an individual, is not important - what I do for my race, what happens to my race, is important’.⁵² Myatt recounts that he has simply performed his loyal duty honourably as an Aryan and willingly sacrificed his life to the cause, thus simultaneously depicting himself as a paragon of Aryan authenticity; this sense of duty permeates every paragraph - nearly every sentence - and a simple word count shows that ‘duty’ is the most prevalent word, used on nine occasions. However, despite the selflessness he extols, and linguistically performs, Myatt’s communiqué is a statement of personal worth, even greatness; an almost confessional public testimony to his actions and thought in the pursuit of the cause, presented as a badge of authenticity, virtue, and value. This concords with Reddy’s statement that: ‘A normative style of emotional management is a fundamental element of every political regime, of every cultural hegemony. Leaders must display mastery of this style’.⁵³ Myatt’s authenticity extended to a life in harmony with cosmic laws: ‘I would often rather be out walking in the hills or upon the moors, watching clouds, than sitting here writing this or any item others may deem “political”’ - again, the political is diminished as less authentic than an everyday Aryan existentialism, an authentic life which is rigorously lived by Myatt according to his texts.⁵⁴

Given that Myatt’s National-Socialism was fundamentally constructed around an ontic logos which inextricably interlinked all elements, microcosmic to macrocosmic, as integral elements of a perfect system, and called on all true Aryans to live authentically in accord with his Aryan emotionology, with himself representing a supreme apotheosis of the ideology, Myatt’s invention and deployment of Wulstan Tedder feels inconsistent at best, and fraudulent at worst. Tedder was not the only pseudonym that Myatt used - there have been several names associated with him, for example: Godric Redbeard, Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt, and of course Anton Long, and no doubt there are further more undiscovered as yet - but out of those names Tedder has the unique characteristic of being published in leading magazines of the far right: Spearhead and Liberty Bell.⁵⁵ Tedder’s texts are barely disguised as Myatt’s writings; beyond the clear duplication of themes, Tedder describes living in ‘distant and foreign countries’ as a youth, leaving Britain in the mid 1950s and returning in the late 1960s, he translates Ancient Greek, discusses physics - in an article destined to later become Myatt’s ‘Science and the West’ - and also writes yearning, metaphysical poetry.⁵⁶ These articles were published between August 1987 and January 1992, bookended by articles from Myatt in March 1984 and April 1994. This suggests that Myatt, whilst ostensibly inactive during this period, was in fact establishing his new Tedder persona as an ideologue.⁵⁷ Myatt also published two collections of Tedder essays, Physis, and Essays In Praise of National-Socialism, through his own Thormynd Press in 1992. These were possibly the ‘tracts on the roots of nazism’ that Searchlight briefly discussed in September 1994 when they first announced Tedder’s existence.⁵⁸ Curiously, it was here that Searchlight introduced Tedder as: ‘The son of the wartime Air Marshall Lord Tedder, Tedder junior made the press in the sixties for his support of the original National Socialist Movement, led by Colin Jordan’. None of these details are - thus far - verifiable, but if Lord Tedder did have a son named Wulstan - a name Myatt lists as his own middle name - he has been omitted from history.⁵⁹ Somewhat ambiguously, the Searchlight article also directly compares Myatt’s texts with Tedder’s, which might have been a knowing nod that they were aware of Tedder’s pseudonymous status if not for the further discussion of Tedder as a financial backer of John Tyndall. Searchlight also seemed unaware of Tedder’s Spearhead articles, and possibly also Myatt’s, describing Tedder’s texts as ‘more philosophical … than the gutter rants of Myatt’s old material when he lived in Leeds’, which might be true but a strange statement given Myatt’s intellectual and esoteric pieces in Spearhead.⁶⁰

Myatt himself revealed Tedder to be a pseudonym in ‘A Matter of Honour’ where he criticised Goodrick-Clarke’s Black Sun, which clearly repeated Searchlight’s reporting.⁶¹ This admission, apparently in the service of criticising and dismissing Goodrick-Clarke’s work, is rather telling, especially for an ideologue with numerous alleged pseudonyms who had built their reputation on a stringent concept of personal, Aryan honour:

A man of honour does not lie, once having sworn on oath (‘I swear on my honour that I shall speak the truth …’) as he does not steal from others or cheat others for such conduct is dishonourable. A man of honour may use guile or cunning to deceive his sworn enemies, and his sworn enemies only, provided always that he does not personally benefit from such guile or cunning and provided always that honour is satisfied.⁶²

Whilst Myatt (presumably) never swore any oaths regarding his writings as Tedder, the question of ‘guile’ is pertinent; it might be argued that the Tedder persona operated to deceive Myatt’s sworn enemies, anti-fascists and ZOG, but it sits uneasily with his constant emphasis on the fundamentality of transparent honesty and openness as virtues of an authentic Aryanism and an authentic Aryan community - especially as this Aryan authenticity - ‘The Inner Meaning of Nationalism’ - was a predominant theme in Tedder’s texts.⁶³ Indeed, one of the Tedder Spearhead articles opposed authentic identity rooted in racial values against the ‘psychological tyranny’ and brainwashing of liberal modernity that promoted ‘a set of values and ideas that [were] totally abstract, artificial and unnatural’.⁶⁴ This binding together of abstraction, artificiality, and unnaturalness as contradistinctions with, and threats to, Aryanism was a constant refrain in Myatt’s writings during the 1990s, but here this argument is delineated by a pseudonymous figure who is abstract, artificial, and thus unnatural. This incongruity is deepened elsewhere by Tedder’s deployment of autobiographical details, describing their personal experience of Britain’s decline, and their saluting at the lowering of a flag with solemn pride, in thoroughly emotive terms, concluding the article with a discussion of their feelings - manipulative emotive devices designed to connect with, and illicit sympathy from, the reader.

The question of where Searchlight’s reporting that Wulstan Tedder was the son of Lord Tedder originated from requires further research at this point. Given that the Searchlight article was written by Ray Hill, a far right activist turned mole and informant, it might be assumed that Hill would be well placed to know the existence, or not, of Wulstan Tedder, especially given Tedder’s apparent longevity in the post-war British extreme right cultic milieu.⁶⁵ One intriguing footnote to this is a membership list of ‘Birmingham & District Party Members (and Party No’s)’ that lists a ‘W. Tedder’ of ‘Chadwick Manor, Knowle, Warwicks’; an additional list on the same sheet is titled ‘Combat subscribers (Who are not members of the B.N.P.)’ so it would be reasonable to assume that the initial list details members of the first, 1960s, iteration of the British National Party, led by John Bean.⁶⁶ Bean’s organisation split in 1962, with a faction led by Colin Jordan and John Tyndall leaving to form the NSM. Whether ‘W. Tedder’ followed Jordan into the NSM cannot be verified, but it creates the possibility that Myatt was aware of ‘W. Tedder’ in some form, and also that Hill was aware of the name.⁶⁷ The last, and most striking, question is the identity of the person in a photograph stated to be Tedder by Searchlight. The figure is dressed in a Spearhead uniform, representing Jordan’s paramilitary groupuscule, and stood in a trio featuring Jordan. Again, it is unclear who the person actually is, or how Searchlight came to identify them as Tedder.⁶⁸ The addition of an image to Wulstan Tedder injects an emotive element to this research: suddenly there is a face staring at me, unclaimed by history.

Myatt the authentic Aryan

Regardless of our gaps in knowledge concerning Tedder, his call, alongside his ‘aide’ Myatt, for an authentic Aryan folk community was not successful, prompting the question of how Myatt’s enclave ventures were considered in the wider British extreme right cultic milieu. Firstly, it must be noted that Adrian Wiltshire was sufficiently moved by Myatt’s vision that he pledged allegiance and all he owned to the enclave - however, it must also be noted that the enclave was not established. Similarly, Myatt’s 1990s attempt was equally unsuccessful, indeed, having announced the venture in April 1995, a June 1996 bulletin declared that ‘no one has yet pledged one of the three £30,000 sums needed to start the project’, though ‘two people’ had ‘pledged to move and work on the farm when it is established’: presumably this is why The Order! reported that ‘Godric redbeard of the Thormynd press part of the N.S.A. Network has pledged £30,000 towards the purchase of an Aryan Kindred farm’.⁶⁹ Whatever the reasons, the establishment of an enclave where authentic Aryan lives might be lived was not prioritised in the wider British extreme right, and whilst the answer to this question must note that £30,000 was an unreasonable sum for most activists, another tangential avenue lies in a persistent perception of Myatt himself. Whilst Myatt gained small followings and furthered ideological developments within the extreme right cultic milieu during his career, he has also been severely criticised by his fellow travellers. Online posts on the Stormfront forum have described him as ‘not an orthodox National-Socialist’, as ‘a little cracked’, and ‘a nut job, the exact kind of person WN [white nationalism] needs to steer clear of’; Myatt is ‘the type of “man” that makes National Socialists look like lunatics’, whilst someone else warned that ‘Myatt can’t decide whether he is a Satanist, National Socialist, or a Muslim. I would take anything he says or writes with a boulder-sized grain of salt’.⁷⁰ The composite image is that of an eccentric at best, a crank at worst, an inauthentic charlatan - even Mittyesque, with the added RAF connections between Lord Tedder and the dreams of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty. Myatt himself recognised that he had been denounced as ‘“other-worldly”, and so unhelpful, even counter-productive’.⁷¹ Myatt’s perceived erraticism also provoked accusations that he was a state asset or provocateur, and whilst these are commonplace charges in a milieu rife with suspicion, this general distrust has ultimately banished Myatt to esoteric peripheries.⁷²

One reason for this perception of Myatt as inauthentic might originate ironically in his rigorous ontological and soteriological pursuit of authenticity: his desire to live an authentic Aryan life in an authentic Aryan community actually marked him out as nonnormative within his cultic milieu. There is a comparison to be drawn here with Derek Holland’s esoteric Political Soldier project in the National Front (NF) during the late 1980s, memorably described as ‘barmy’ by one NF activist; this suspicion regarding overt intellectualism was also present in C18, where swords were considered much mightier than pens.⁷³ C18’s roots in football hooliganism presented a severe contrast with Myatt; its members congregated around a blokeish culture of pubs and street violence which offered a sense of escape from mundane existence, a sense of freedom where men could cathartically revel in outbursts of intense emotion with grand displays of anger, rage, aggression, and hatred. Whilst the cultic milieu that both Myatt and C18 inhabited adopted David Lane’s Fourteen Words indicative of open neo-Nazism - ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’ - the overt familial aspects of the slogan, which would have been realised in a hypothetical successful manifestation of Myatt’s enclave vision, were less resolutely evident in C18; indeed, with hooliganism again in mind, it might be asked if the groupuscule’s physically violent street politics were not, in fact, for many a deliberate escape from the banality of family life.⁷⁴ In contrast Myatt’s enclaves envisaged a quieter life, an existence framed by Myatt as one of rigorous emotional management: Myatt offered individual fulfilment through emotional submission not emotional liberty.

This authenticity, achieved through submission to racial authenticity, was the only avenue to experiencing authentic emotions. The modern, liberal notion of the autonomous ‘individual’ with private needs, desires, and feelings, held sacred and propagated in the West, was false: all concepts of the self must submit to the wellbeing of the Aryan folk. Thus, all personal emotions and feelings must also surrender; none held any true meaning or value unless they were in the service of the Aryan race. Outside of this context, any emotions held or expressed were selfish, decadent, illegitimate, blasphemous, and therefore forbidden. In this respect, Myatt was not ascribing values to any particular emotion or its expression, rather all emotions were invalid unless they emerged from the struggle for the Aryan race: the individual must be completely subsumed by their race. Myatt’s authenticity was not achieved in the conventional manner by ‘being yourself’ in a ‘culture of narcissism’ that led to relativism or subjectivism, it was achieved by ‘being’ your race and culture.⁷⁵ This meant living in rigorous alignment with an Aryan culture firmly rooted in an authentic point of origin: the laws of the cosmos. Myatt’s concept of the rural enclave, and wilderness as a sacred space, was unequivocal here, and whilst the latter is not unique to National-Socialism, as nature has often been seen as a space where ‘one touches the Beginning, the time before history - and certainly before “modernity” - unspoiled and “pure”’, these ideas interplayed with a general fascist obsession with roots and origin to produce a scenario of supreme cosmic transcendence and absolute authenticity for Myatt, where an enclave community built in terra nullius from the ground up represented an Aryan endeavour untouched or influenced by history, and a desire for a ‘first contact’ with the world, a protoplastic engagement with the cosmos, as progenitors of a new Aryan race.⁷⁶

Conclusions

David Myatt’s attempts to establish Aryan enclaves, with or without the pseudonymous ‘Wulstan Tedder’, were pursuits of absolute Aryan authenticity in accordance with a National-Socialist cosmology and ontology that Myatt imbued with a religious observance. This pursuit of authenticity was an existential necessity in an apocalyptic world made degenerate and inauthentic by the corrosive effects of liberal multicultural modernity, capitalist materialism, and the egalitarian schemes of Christianity and Marxism. Myatt declared that this decadence was so pervasive that a new type of being had been created: Homo Hubris, a supreme example of Ahmed’s emotionally soft other, and the antithesis of authentic Aryanism. Myatt’s struggle against these developments in order to realise Aryan palingenesis placed significant emphasis on his vision of Aryan enclaves, where Aryans could live authentic lives in authentic Aryan communities, a concept that had become a persistent extreme right response to the postwar marginalisation of fascism. These enclaves, in order to be authentic, had to accord perfectly with Myatt’s National-Socialist cosmology, which posited a cosmos operating on cosmic laws that manifested themselves in Nature and race, he thus envisaged enclaves as close to Nature as possible, rural settlements with attached areas of nature reserves where Aryans could experience a sense of the wilderness: Nature represented in its most absolute form. This sacred space, and divine entity, was a spiritual and ontological homeland for the Aryan race where National-Socialists could exist authentically, at one with the laws that governed their lives, providing Myatt’s answer to Henri Lefebvre’s rhetorical question: ‘What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?’⁷⁷ Myatt therefore planned small autarkic agricultural communities where a simple, quiet Aryan life could be lived in harmony with the cosmos. These enclaves would be emotional refuges from inauthentic liberal modernity, representing an authentic Aryan emotional community built around an imagined emotionology centring concepts of honour, loyalty, and duty, with an emotional style that prohibited strong displays of emotion, thus potentially requiring intense emotional management from members of the Aryan folk.⁷⁸

Myatt’s enclaves never came to fruition, but the incomplete ventures still illuminate his pursuit of authenticity and its reception in the wider extreme right cultic milieu. Adrian Wiltshire was so inspired by Myatt’s ideal in the 1980s that he volunteered to uproot his life to live and work in the enclave, offering up not only his enthusiasm but also his worldly goods; both shared a common vision that Aryan palingenesis could not be reduced to mere political activism, and in fact required the existential pursuit of authenticity, and Aryanism as an emotional ethic. A decade later, the authenticity of Myatt’s enclaves was challenged by a C18 worldview that idealised the takeover of urban estates, as bases from which to build political power, a strategy born of an urban, working class, hooligan culture that centred aggression and violence, rather than Myatt’s Aryan existentialism - though it is important to note that despite the often metaphysical concerns of this article, Myatt advocated insurrection and violent race war throughout his neo-Nazi years.⁷⁹ This existential drive for authenticity defined much of Myatt’s writings, and his legitimacy as a neo-Nazi ideologue; he endeavoured to ‘set a National-Socialist example’ and live honourably, loyally, and dutifully as an Aryan.⁸⁰ These public statements of authenticity, and proselytisation for honesty, honour, and transparency as foundations of authentic Aryan values and behaviour, sit in ambiguous tension with Myatt’s deliberate establishment of the pseudonymous Wulstan Tedder persona over an extended period through several different publishing channels - to the extent that ‘Tedder’ escaped his grasp into the wider world as an autonomous being - to advocate an authentic Aryanism, exacerbated by emotive autobiographical passages in Tedder’s writings designed to persuade readers to relate on an emotional level to a non-existent author. The deployment of such pseudonyms in a marginalised countercultural cultic milieu might operate as security measures, enabling activists to write texts anonymously, or there might be deeper strategies of obscuration. Either way pseudonyms can create textual communities with fluid or unknown identities, with the potential to confuse or destabilise, or indeed engender a feeling of superiority, depending on whether you are ‘in the know’ or not. Moreover, these pseudonyms present issues for researchers who have to trace webs of obscuration like authorial genealogies. Further research is required to flesh out the mysterious circumstances of Wulstan Tedder, but the intriguing existence of a ‘W. Tedder’ in the 1960s BNP adds the potential further offence that Myatt knowingly borrowed someone’s name and life.

Whilst an effective propaganda strategy, Myatt’s frequent use of pseudonyms and obscuration has created distrust and suspicion in the wider extreme right milieu, fuelling discussion of him as an eccentric, a crank figure damaging to the Aryan struggle: inauthentic. It is ironically perhaps Myatt’s rigorous adherence to a concept of Aryan authenticity that has seen him marked as a peculiar figure by some in the extreme right, ridiculed or scorned for his submission to a vision of racial palingenesis that transcended conventional struggle for existential and ontological concerns. The rural/urban divide between Myatt and the Sargeants, and more pertinently the criticism Myatt has received for being ‘unworldly’ or odd, are both examples that point to the potential difficulties of realising the absolute palingenesis that lies at the heart of Myatt’s project, and indeed fascism as an esoteric or existential culture: whilst some members of extreme right milieux, like Myatt, might strenuously commit to this idea, others, like the NF activist who described the Political Soldier project as ‘barmy’, might see this radical degree of comprehensive transformation as perhaps an unnecessary step, even an inconvenience - their involvement with the extreme right might ultimately rest on a desire to improve their lot, in terms of status or agency, rather than add further burden to their lives. Thus, the striving to live a truly fascist or neo-Nazi existence, according to, for example, Myatt’s vision, might either be avoided, or become a venture that generates conflict with currently held emotional styles, as membership of Myatt’s emotional community creates tension with other emotional communities the individual is part of. Whilst Robert Paxton, for example, emphasised fascism’s ‘mobilizing passions’, the use of concepts from the history of emotions can add further rigour and insight to the study of fascism, with Ahmed’s concept of emotional hardness of particular note.⁸¹ It might jar to consider fascism in terms of ‘positive’ emotions, not least as an ideology sometimes explained as simple hatred or psychopathology - reflecting that ‘“morally good” affects tend to be ascribed to “good” ideologies, whereas “morally bad” affects tend to be emphasized in the analysis of “bad” ideologies’ - but the desire for, for example, an authentic community, and the desire to create one, can be fundamental emotional drives within fascism.⁸²

Myatt’s imagined emotionology focused centrally on defining how an authentic Aryan should behave, think, and feel, interpreting authenticity in racial terms, rather than as an individual quest that led to relativism or subjectivism; this required an authentic point of origin, which Myatt located in his cosmological vision of existence. This search for roots is a fundament of fascism, whereby an authentic life can be sought through the identification and pursuit of some defining, immutable, eternal essence, which can be accorded to through acts of self-overcoming. However, despite the individualist, Romantic - indeed Taylor refers to ‘ethical authenticity’ as ‘a child of the Romantic period’ - and even liberatory connotations of this, Myatt’s concept of authenticity ultimately switches from an articulation of individual meaning and sovereignty to a submission to Aryan group identity.⁸³ Race, represented by an Aryanism without temporal or spatial boundaries for Myatt, was all.

Data statement

Physical data supporting this publication is stored at the Searchlight Archive that is managed by the University of Northampton, and details on how to access this can be found here: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/about-us/services-and-facilities/the-searchlight-archives/. List of archive boxes consulted from this collection are: SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/004; SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005; SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/006; SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/007; SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/002; SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/005; SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/007; SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/007; SCH/01/Res/ BRI/21/002; SCH/01/Res/BRI/ 21/003; SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/003; SCH/01/Res/SCH/003; SCH/01/Res/SCH/005; SCH/01/Res/SCH/006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clive Henry

Clive Henry is a PhD student at the University of Northampton, researching the post-war British extreme right using history of emotions ideas and methodologies. This research is focussed on the neo-Nazi writings of the ideologue David Myatt (b. 1950), examining the emotional aspects and overtones of his ideological texts through the themes of Aryanism, masculinity, honour, nature, and time. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Searchlight, No. 239, May 1995, 2, SCH/01/Res/SCH/006, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

2 For Wulstram Tedder, see: Searchlight, No. 231, September 1994, 12, SCH/01/Res/SCH/006, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Searchlight, No. 239, May 1995, 2, SCH/01/Res/SCH/006, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; For Arthur Tedder, see, for example: Arthur William Tedder Baron Tedder, The War Memoirs of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder (London: Cassell, 1966).

3 For the NSM, see: Paul Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 107–147; for John Tyndall’s BNP, see: Graham Macklin, Failed Führers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 386–403; for a biographical overview of Myatt, see: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun (NY: New York Uni Press, 2003), 216–224; for a journalistic account of C18, see: Nick Lowles, White Riot (Milo Books, 2001); for the founding of the N-SM, see: The White Dragon, No. 4, September 1997, SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; for Myatt’s conversion to Islam, see: David Myatt, Myngath (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2010) unpaginated; for Pathei-Mathos, see: David Myatt, The Numinous Way of Pathei-Mathos, Fifth Edition, (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018); for an introduction to National Action, Atomwaffen Division, and Feuerkrieg Division, see: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/atomwaffen-division (Accessed December 23, 23).

4 https://www.davidmyatt.info/myatt-a-matter-of-honour.html (Accessed July 2, 23).

5 This hyphenation is justified in opposition to the ‘more common, and incorrect National Socialist. We do this is distinguish our Movement from others’: The National-Socialist. The Voice of Aryan Destiny, Number 27 108 yf [1997], Unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

6 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 216–224.

7 Jackson, Colin Jordan, 176; Macklin, Failed Führers, 313; Graeme McLagan and Nick Lowles, Mr. Evil: The secret life of racist bomber and killer David Copeland (London: John Blake Publishing, 2000); Nick Lowles, White Riot (Milo Books, 2001); Nick Ryan, Homeland: Into a world of hate (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2003).

8 For examples of terrorism studies research, see: Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Madeleine Blackman, ‘Fluidity of the Fringes: Prior Extremist Involvement as a Radicalization Pathway,’ Studies in Confiict & Terrorism (2019); Enrique Arias Gil, ‘La estrategia y táctica terrorista de los actores individuales en la extrema derecha estadounidense,’ Revista UNISCI/UNISCI Journal, No 47 (May 2018); Roland Heickerö, ‘Cyber Terrorism: Electronic Jihad,’ Strategic Analysis, Volume 38, 2014 - Issue 4 (2014); Daniel Koehler, ‘Dying for the cause? The logic and function of ideologically motivated suicide, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice within the contemporary extreme right,’ Behavioural Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, (2020), 13; DOI:10.1080/19434472.2020.1822426; Fredrik Wilhelmsen, ‘From New Order to the Millennium of White Power: Norwegian Fascism Between Party Politics and Lone-Actor Terrorism,’ Politics, Religion & Ideology, 22:1 (2021); Michael Whine, ‘Cyberspace-A New Medium for Communication, Command, and Control by Extremists,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 22:3 (1999); for research concerning the Order of Nine Angles, see, for example: Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood (London: Duke Uni Press, 2003); Jacob C. Senholt, ‘The Sinister Tradition: political esotericism & the convergence of radical Islam, satanism and national socialism in the Order of the Nine Angles,’ Paper presented at Satanism in the Modern World, Trondheim, 19-20th of November, 2009 [Senholt wrote this as the co-founder of Integral Tradition Publishing, which later grew into Arktos Media, both notable for their metapolitical publishing of Traditionalist and New Right texts]; George Sieg, ‘Angular Momentum: From Traditional to Progressive Satanism in the Order of Nine Angles,’ International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 4.2 (2013); Ariel Koch, ‘The ONA Network and the Transnationalization of Neo-Nazi-Satanism,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2022, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2021.2024944; Shanon Shah, Jane Cooper & Suzanne Newcombe, ‘Occult Beliefs and the Far Right: The Case of the Order of Nine Angles,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 2023, DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2023.2195065.

9 Searchlight, No. 231, Sept 1994, 12, SCH/01/Res/SCH/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

10 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), 26; Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 7.

11 Maiken Umbach & Mathew Humphrey, Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1-2.

12 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (New York: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2.

13 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework For The History Of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129.

14 Ibid.; Reddy defines emotives as: ‘A type of speech act different from both performative and constative utterances, which both describes (like constative utterances) and changes (like performatives) the world, because emotional expression has an exploratory and a self-altering effect on the activated thought material of emotion,’ Ibid., 128.

15 Katie Barclay, Caritas. Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2021), 3; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Second Edition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 54–55.

16 David Myatt, ‘The Meaning of Life: Race and Nature,’ Liberty Bell, Dec 1997, Vol. 25 No. 4, 35.

17 https://aboutdavidmyatt.wordpress.com/the-mythos-of-vindex-appendix-1/seven-essays-about-vindex/ (Accessed August 12, 23).

18 Myatt, ‘The Meaning of Life: Race and Nature,’ 35.

19 Kathleen M. Blee, ‘The Geography of Racial Activism. Defining Whiteness at Multiple Scales,’ in Spaces of Hate, ed. Colin Flint (New York: Routledge, 2003), 49; Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 222.

20 https://woodlanderinitiative.co.uk/mission-statement/ (Accessed September 8, 23); https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/V0NRbT4fFZa_EzyMVgPdMhFwBq8/appointments (Accessed September 11, 23); https://hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/patriotic-alternative-report-2021-11-v3.pdf (Accessed September 11, 23).

21 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992), 10.

22 Dasein was a concept developed by Martin Heidegger to represent an authentic self. Heidegger was himself a member of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party) and the extent of his belief in Nazi ideology remains contested; see: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/ (Accessed January 2, 24).

23 The National-Socialist, Number 4, June/July 106 yf [1995], Unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/TMP/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; David Myatt, ‘The Meaning of National-Socialism,’ Liberty Bell, Vol. 26 No.1 Sept 1998, 15.

24 David Myatt, ‘Racism: The Will of Nature,’ Liberty Bell, Vol. 25 No. 9, May 1998, 30; Myatt, ‘The Meaning of National-Socialism,’ 4, 9. It should be noted that Myatt’s obsession with honour was not novel, and was shared with his mentor, Colin Jordan, and he in turn with his mentor, Arnold Leese - indeed, the Leese, Jordan, Myatt lineage represents an important transgenerational relationship that acts as a thread running through British fascism, maintaining the foregrounding of antisemitism in the extreme right cultic milieu from the primordium of fascism to the present day - see: Macklin, Failed Führers, 1, 305.

25 Myatt, ‘The Meaning of National-Socialism,’ 8, 9.

26 Ibid., 9–10.

27 Myatt, ‘The Meaning of Life: Race and Nature,’ 35.

28 Ibid.

29 Myatt, ‘The Meaning of National-Socialism,’ 11; Aryan Kindred Farm, Info bulletin #1, June 107 yf [1996], SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Myatt, ‘The Meaning of Life,’ 35.

30 Aryan Kindred Farm, Info bulletin #1, June 107 yf [1996], SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

31 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 161; ‘as above, so below, as within, so without’: this phrase, frequently used in hermetic circles, is unattributable but based on a quote from Hermes Trismegistus.

32 Johannes Zechner, ‘Politicized Timber: The ‘German Forest’ and the Nature of the Nation 1800–1945,’ The Brock Review, February 2011, 19; for habitus, see: Richard Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu. Rev. ed. Key Sociologists. (London: Routledge, 2002), 74–75.

33 Aryan Kindred Farm, Info bulletin #1, June 107 yf [1996], SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Ryan, Homeland, 28; Aryan Kindred Farm, Info bulletin #1, June 107 yf [1996], SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

34 Myatt, ‘The Meaning of National-Socialism,’ 20.

35 David Myatt, ‘The Meaning of Life: Folk and Fatherland,’ 107yf [1996], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

36 For affective economy see: Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies,’ Social Text, No. 79 (Volume 22, Number 2), Summer 2004, pp. 117-139.

37 ‘One Race, One Homeland, One Destiny”, Information Bulletin Number 2, June 21st, 108 yf [1997], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/002, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

38 The National-Socialist. The Voice of Aryan Destiny, Number 37 109 yf [1998], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Myatt, ‘The Meaning of Life: Race and Nature,’ 51.

39 For emotional liberty, see: Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 129.

40 ‘The Spirituality of National-Socialism: A Reply to Criticism,’ Future Reich, Number 3, August 109 yf [1998], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

41 Myatt, ‘Meaning of National-Socialism,’ 5.

42 Searchlight, No. 104, February 1984, 4, SCH/01/Res/SCH/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

43 Ibid., 5.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Nick Ryan, Homeland, 28; Lowles, White Riot, 165.

47 Ryan, Homeland, 20-21.

48 Ibid., 28, 21.

49 ‘One Race, One Homeland, One Destiny”, Information Bulletin Number 2, June 21st 108 yf [1997], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/002, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

50 Searchlight, No. 273, March 1998, 24, SCH/01/Res/SCH/006, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Michael Whine, ‘Cyberspace - A New Medium for Communication, Command, and Control by Extremists,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 22:3 (1999), 242.

51 David Myatt, A Cosmic Perspective: Observations On A Forthcoming Trial, May 109yf [1998], SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

52 Ibid.

53 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 121.

54 David Myatt, ‘A Political Re-awakening,’ Spearhead, No. 307, September 1994, 13.

55 Godric Redbeard is explained in a letter from Myatt as a ‘precaution for when Gabby Gable [Gerry Gable] and friends reproduce this letter in their monthly ‘Searchlies’ [Searchlight]: SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Myatt wrote under the name Abdul-Aziz ibn Myatt, and variations of this, during his islamist period, c.1998-2010, for a summary of these activities, see: George Michael, The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2006),142-8; Myatt has long been suspected of being behind Anton Long, the founder of the satanic group the Order of Nine Angles, but has persistently refuted this; Long and/or the O9A are discussed in: see works mentioned in endnote 8; Spearhead was the magazine of John Tyndall, and associated with his British National Party at this time; Liberty Bell was a North American neo-Nazi journal founded by George P. Dietz in 1973.

56 Wulstan Tedder, ‘The Inner Meaning of Nationalism: An analysis,’ Spearhead, No.222, August 1987, 7-9, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Wulstan Tedder, ‘A Brief Look at the Einstein Myth,’ Spearhead, No.275, January 1992, 14, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Wulstan Tedder, ‘Spandau,’ Spearhead, No.224, October 1987, 11, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

57 Spearhead, No.222, August 1987, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Spearhead, No. 275, Jan 1992, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Spearhead, No.195, March 1984, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/004, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Spearhead, No.302, April 1994, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

58 Wulstan Tedder, Physis, Unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/002, Searchlight Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

59 See, for example: Vincent Orange, Tedder: Quietly in Command (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

60 Searchlight, No.231, Sept 1994, 12, SCH/01/Res/SCH/006, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

61 https://www.davidmyatt.info/myatt-a-matter-of-honour.html (Accessed July 2, 23).

62 Myatt, ‘The Meaning of National-Socialism,’ 20.

63 Spearhead, No. 222, Aug 87, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Wulstan Tedder, ‘The Inner Meaning of Nationalism: An analysis,’ Spearhead, No.222, August 1987, 7-9, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

64 Wulstan Tedder, ‘“Berlin Walls” of the Mind. A look at the psychological tyranny dominating the peoples of the modern West,’ Spearhead, No 271, September 1991, 14, SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/006, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

65 For Ray Hill, see: Ray Hill & Andrew Bell, The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network (London: Grafton Books, 1988).

66 Birmingham & District Party Members (and Party No’s), SCH/01/Res/BRI/20/007, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

67 Jackson, Colin Jordan, 104; Macklin, Failed Führers, 353.

68 For Spearhead, Colin Jordan’s paramilitary organisation, see: Jackson, Colin Jordan, 100-105; for John Tyndall’s BNP, see: Macklin, Failed Führers, 386-403.

69 The National-Socialist: Special Edition, April 106 yf, [1995] SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; Info bulletin #1, June 107 yf [1996], SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton; The Order!, Unnumbered, SCH/01/Res/BRI/12/005, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

70 https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t95395/; https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t109337-2/; https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t109337/ (Accessed September 25, 23).

71 James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (London: Penguin, 2013); The Spirituality of National-Socialism: A Reply to Criticism,’ Future Reich, Number 3, August 109 yf [1998], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/003, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

72 For example: https://aboutdavidmyatt.wordpress.com/david-myatt-agent-provocateur/ (Accessed September 27, 23).

73 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SetkAwYSKtE (Accessed September 3, 23).

74 Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2017), 116.

75 Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 11.

76 Bart Verschaffel, ‘(Sacred) Places Are Made Of Time: Observations On The Persistence Of The Sacred In Categorizing Space In Modernity,’ in Loci Sacri: Understanding Sacred Places Eds. T. Coomans, H. De Dijn, J. De Maeyer, R. Heynickx & B. Verschaffel, (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 55; terra nullius: unoccupied land.

77 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Ltd, 1991), 44.

78 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 129.

79 For example: Myatt, ‘Racism: The Will of Nature,’ 35.

80 ‘One Race, One Homeland, One Destiny”, Information Bulletin Number 2, June 21st 108 yf [1997], unpaginated, SCH/01/Res/BRI/21/002, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University, Northampton.

81 Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 42.

82 Gustav Westberg, ‘Affective rebirth: Discursive gateways to contemporary national socialism,’ Discourse & Society, Vol. 32(2) (2021), 214–230, 226; for further research that discusses the presence of ‘positive’ emotions in the far right, see: Hilary Pilkington, Loud and proud. Passion and politics in the English Defence League (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

83 Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 26.