Nietzsche said that when you stare long into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you. If the abyss is neo-Nazi politics, Searchlight magazine rather seems to prove his point. It has a bad reputation for employing some of the same tactics as the groups it monitors and attempts to disrupt and subvert. It is also said to have collaborated with British counter-intelligence, who are in their turn said to have collaborated with loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland, who are in their turn said to have collaborated with Combat 18, the subject of this book by a Searchlight journalist.
It's easy to understand why that looks like a circle-jerk. What may be less easy to understand is why Searchlight journalists might be interested in a group called Combat 18. To see why, look at the first eight letters of the alphabet: ABCDEFGH. If you cut out the letters in the middle you're left with A and H, letters number one and number eight. In other words, AH = 18. If you can think of any famous figure from history whose initials those are, you'll understand why Searchlight journalists might be interested in Combat 18. They were named in tribute to Adolf Hitler and they are indeed what Searchlight says they are: neo-Nazis.
Whether they were as dangerous Searchlight says they were I'm not so sure. The impression I got from this book was that Combat 18 were little more than a football hooligan gang with some nasty right-wing views. And some of those nasty right-wing viewers weren't necessarily genuine. The book describes one member as later saying that he had never really believed the holocaust was invented, he'd just said he did because it was something that would shock and disgust the sort of people he enjoyed shocking and disgusting. Other members seem to have been there for the violence, not the politics, and I find it hard to believe that Combat 18 were ever a serious threat to democracy in this country: their leaders, or some of their leaders at least, saw them as the vanguard of white working-class revolution in the UK, but they seem to have been all van and no guard. The British National Party (BNP) may become a serious threat because they appear respectable and can attract mass support, but respectability is precisely what drove the founders of Combat 18 away from the BNP and its forerunner the National Front. The late Ian Stuart Donaldson of the neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver didn't like the way the National Front tried to stop him singing about "niggers" and "yids", so he split away from them to form his own group, Blood and Honour.
It's a very old story, although it's more familiar from religion and left-wing politics than it is in right-wing politics. Movements with very strong views tend to schism unless they can win power, and the schismatic groups can often spend much more energy fighting each other than fighting their original enemies. That seems to be what has happened with Combat 18: Blood and Honour was run by Combat 18 and if this book is to be trusted - it isn't always, of course - some of Combat 18's leaders were more interested in the money they could make selling neo-Nazi music than in furthering the cause of neo-Nazism. There were feuds, accusations of betrayal, and a murder, and the hints are that Searchlight helped keep the pot boiling by spreading disinformation and rumors through the moles they have undoubtedly run inside Combat 18. Certainly this book is written at least as much for neo-Nazis as it is for anti-Nazis. The message is: we're watching you, we know what you're doing, and we're even occasionally killing you off. Running a label for neo-Nazi bands is dangerous: if a former comrade doesn't murder you, you can easily die in a car-crash, like Ian Donaldson.
And car-crashes have, of course, long been a favored way for intelligence agencies to dispose of someone. It's fast and doesn't arouse suspicion the way other forms of murder might do. And as evidence of how closely Combat 18 are watched by counter-intelligence I would contrast their record with the record of the Soho Bomber, David Copeland. Despite their numbers, their relative wealth, and their links with loyalist terrorists, Combat 18 didn't attempt terrorism in the UK. True, they've posed in balaclavas with automatic weapons - and Searchlight have the private photos to prove it - but their actual thuggery seems to have been much less ambitious. For example, they waged a vendetta against a fanzine editor at Chelsea who tried to confront their racism and they would probably have put him into intensive care if they'd caught him, but unpleasant as that was, it hardly threatened the foundations of the state.
Now compare that with the Soho Bomber. He had been associated with the BNP and Combat 18 but in the end he worked alone in the end, and that was why he got away with it for so long: the smaller the group, the harder counter-intelligence find it to infiltrate and manipulate, and lone psychopaths often don't turn up in the files until they act. Combat 18 has its share of psychopaths but they talk to each other and to other members of the group, and MI5 and Searchlight know what they're getting up to. The group still exists but they're seem much more like a cult now, concerned with the purity of their faith, not in ever bringing that faith to the masses. I don't completely trust the account this book gives of them and their history to date, but I wouldn't trust their own account, and this book is at least well-written and easy to read. In Alan Moore's phrase, fascism is vile but insidiously glamorous, and you can learn a little more both about its vileness and about its glamour here.
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