S. A. Swaffington is a plagiarist

The self-published novelist S. A. Swaffington (aka Ryan West) has become something of a recurring topic on this blog. Back in April I wrote a post about his history as a neo-Nazi propagandist, demonstrating in the process that he had been using a sockpuppet account to praise his own work on Amazon; his less-than-eloquent response to this was to call me a racist paedophile.

Now, the saga continues: I have evidence that S. A. Swaffington is a plagiarist.

Look at the cover of Swaffington's latest novel, Hengist & Horsa: The Wrath of the Gods (in case he alters the cover, I've archived the Amazon page here):

Something seemed fishy to me. The illustration's nice, but the design is very amateurish - he's just clumsily slapped some Arial text over the picture. This made me wonder who provided the illustration, and whether or not they approved of its usage here.

Turns out that Swaffington did a pretty rotten job of covering his tracks. Within a few minutes I was able to trace the source of the image: it is a piece of publicity art for a computer game called Mount & Blade, developed by a Turkish company called TaleWorlds:

Incidentally, the warriors depicted are not Anglo-Saxons; they are apparently "Nords", a fictional Viking-like tribe invented by the developers of the game which takes place in an imaginary world called Calradia. It is amusing that Swaffington - a supposed historian - has confused an historical people with a fantasy tribe from a video game, but this kind of thing is fairly common in the Englisc nationalist movement: see here, here and here for other examples.

I also noticed this promotional image on Swaffington's Facebook page:

This, too, originates from Mount & Blade:

I decided to take a look through Swaffington's past work and see if I could identify any more plagiarism. I was not disappointed.

In 2012 Swaffington published a book entitled Anglo-Saxon Trolls, Wights, Faeries, Orcs & Other Supernatural Creatures. This is no longer available on Amazon, but still has a page on Goodreads:

The cover image is obviously stolen from Gnomes, a 1976 book by the Dutch team of Poortvliet and Huygen. My library has a copy, so I was able to scan the relevant portion:

Swaffington appears to have later republished his book with a new title and cover:

This time, the cover illustration was... erm... borrowed from the cover to Robin Bates' book How Beowulf can Save America (I believe that the illustrator is Chris Kelb):

Then we have an earlier book in Swaffington's Hengist & Horsa series, The Scourge of the Gods. Swaffington has since changed the cover, but the original cover design can be seen on Goodreads:

Swaffington seems to be very proud of this cover art, as he has it as his Twitter avatar:

This time, the image comes from an artist who is known on DeviantArt as "Arrsistable" (and is, incidentally, an American - funny how this patriotic English author has relied so much on the work of foreign artists):

Seriously, did Swaffington actually believe that nobody would notice any of this?

The time S.A. Swaffington vomited over my inbox

I use my Google account almost exclusively for blogging, and rarely for social networking. Only occasionally do I check its emails. So, I was quite surprised when I hopped into my inbox and found that, back in May, I received a string of messages from someone called Lisa.

"Lisa", it quickly turned out, was actually S.A. Swaffington. I wrote about Swaffington, also known as Ryan West, back in April when I took a look at his novel The Rise of the Saxons. Published in 2008 through some kind of vanity press, this is a delightful book which glorifies the racially motivated murder of children in the name of Teutonic supremacy - although Ryan West/S.A. Swaffington insists that he's changed his ways since then.

An excerpt from The Rise of the Saxons.

The first message was from May 18:

Hi, Maggie 

I am the author of the Rise of the Saxons, a book I wrote when I was a kid living at home with my mum. I'm the first to admit that it was a terrible and offensive book and is now something which I'm deeply ashamed of. 

I could never have imagined that 7 years later someone would spend the time and effort to cyber-stalk me and even post my pictures on the web. when I wrote the book, I was an impressionable and angry young kid and had no desire to make a career out of writing, hence the poor spelling and offensive scenes. 

At the time I was angry at the oppression of the English identity and felt a need to express that. I did a poor job, I know. I am now all grown up with a young family and have long-since washed my hands with the book in question. As I've grown up, my views and opinions have also grown and changed. 

I find it shocking that I'm being made to be a racist and a Nazi by someone who has never met me and knows nothing about me. From the backlash I received from that book, several people pointed me in the right direction and educated me on my ancestors. I once believed that the early Anglo-Saxons were racist, cruel invaders, the same as how I portrayed them. I now know this was wrong. I've spent the last 7 years writing new books which show the early English settlers for who they were and not how I was led to believe they were by the mainstream media who are oppressing the English identity. 

The English identity is very important to many of the |English community, and I shall continue to promote our history and identity in a positive manner and continue to write new and exciting books, without any material that you or others like you could use to discredit me. I would hope that you would now be kind enough to remove the article, allow me and my family our privacy and stop stalking me. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. 

Kind regards, Ryan

Okay. First off, I'll address the claim that I posted Swaffington's pictures on the web. I used two photographs of him in my post: one is from his author profile on Goodreads, the other is part of a screencap of his Facebook page which I posted to demonstrate that he was (and, at the time of writing, still is) friends with Ron McVan, an American white nationalist with connections to the convicted terrorist David Lane.

In both cases, I was merely using images which Swaffington himself had made publicly available. As he is a published novelist, and consequently a public or semi-public figure, this is entirely fair game.

 A review of Mein Kampf which S.A. Swaffington posted in 2008 using his "Angelcynn" sockpuppet.

As for "cyber-stalking", this appears to be a reference to how I provided evidence that Swaffington had been using a sockpuppet account on Amazon, known variously as "Angelcynn", "Mr England" and "Free-Thinker", to promote his own work.

Was it "stalking" when Johann Hari's opponents demonstrated that he'd been using a sockpuppet to defend himself on Wikipedia? Was it "stalking" when R.J. Ellory got caught out using sockpuppets to hail his own books as "magnificent"?

Again, as a published novelist, Swaffington is at the very least a semi-public figure. He should accept that, if he uses a sockpuppet to promote his novels on Amazon, then there is a good chance that he will get caught.

Swaffington messaged me again on May 20:

I'm waiting for a response, Maggie. Strange that you're ignoring me, when you're so eager to put my pics on the internet.

On May 21 I updated my post with conclusive evidence that "Angelcynn" was a sockpuppet operated by Swaffington. Shortly afterwards, he changed the account's name to "I'm being cyber-stalked by Maggie Benn (She's an Anglophobic racist)"...

...and sent me another message:

Still stalking me????? But won't get in touch????? I've just changed my profile name. I think you'll like it, you racist, Anglophobic, stalking weirdo. Get a life! And where's all your condemning the Muslim peados who have abused thousands of English children?????????? Hmmmm, clearly you must support them, as do most left-wing liberals, right? You should be utterly ashamed of your self! You disgust me!!!! 

Clearly you don't think that's radical enough for your crappy page, but a book I wrote 7 years ago is worth your time and effort???? WTF???? You've convinced me that you must see me as some kind of threat to your anti-englisc liberal, pro-peado way of life. This just fuels me to continue writing and shove it in the face of you anglo-phobic loonies.

His final message came on the same day:

Gutless coward....

Okay, let's unpack this.

Yes, it's true that I haven't publicly written about the issue of Muslim grooming gangs in Rochdale, Oxford, Derby and elsewhere and the related coverups. But as far as I can tell, neither has Swaffington.

I've looked through his posts at the Anglo-Saxon Foundation and Amazon, and although I've seen him complain a lot about inaccurate media portrayals of pre-Norman England...

...I can't find a single post in which he mentions Muslim paedophiles.

Does that mean that he considers historical inaccuracies in the media to be worse than authorities covering up child abuse? No, of course it doesn't. And by the same token, the fact that I've blogged about his book rather than the Muslim paedophile gangs does not mean I believe him to be a graver issue.

The simple fact is that, as this is a small blog with little influence, it makes sense for me to focus on issues that are not being covered elsewhere, or at least ones which I can add my own research to. For example, when I blogged about the Charlie Hebdo murders (an event which received a lot of media coverage) I chose to focus on a British Islamist forum where certain members had endorsed the killings (something which I had never seen mentioned anywhere in the media). Similarly, although I haven't written about high-profile Islamic extremists such as Anjem Choudary, I have written about lesser-known specimens such as Abu Ibraheem Husnayn. This is also the reason I've written at length about the Englisc nationalist movement instead of more prominent racist groups, such as the BNP.

Swaffington's argument relies on the fallacy of relative privation, also known as appeal to higher problems or, less formally, the "not as bad as" argument. The central flaw is that, if I had written about the Muslim grooming gangs, then he'd be able to point to some other issue which I hadn't covered. No blogger is able to give coverage to every single issue in society; inevitably, some things will be left to other writers.

Coming across all of these messages at the same time was an amusing experience. I saw how they started with Swaffington trying to sound sober-minded and reasonable; so much so that, had I seen that post when it first arrived, I may actually have given him the benefit of the doubt and removed my post about him. And then I saw him swiftly collapse into incoherent rants about paedophile-supporting liberal anglophobes, thereby confirming that - yup - he's the same as all the other Anglo-Saxon Foundation looneys.

Swaffington is a popular fellow at the Anglo-Saxon Foundation - in fact, his name is amongst the forum's most-used tags.

Let's not forget that, as a member of the ASF, Swaffington will be used to seeing racism - actual racism, not the phony "anti-Englisc racism" which he attributes to me. He will also have seen his fellow members openly discuss the prospect of murdering political opponents:

This is exactly the kind of murderous hatred that he was stirring up with The Rise of the Saxons. So how can I possibly believe that he feels remorse about writing that novel when he continues to consort with these extremists?

If Swaffington really wants to atone for his past as a neo-Nazi propagandist, then a good start would be to publicly denounce the Nazi sympathisers in his beloved Englisc nationalist movement - such as Wulf Ingessunu, Wotans Krieger, Clive Calladine, Jim Morgan and Walter Greenway.

When he does that, I will consider the possibility that he is a changed man.

The strange case of S.A. Swaffington and Ryan West

S.A. Swaffington, aka Ryan West.

In an earlier post I spoke about The Rise of the Saxons and the Legend of Hengest and Horsa, a 2008 novel by Ryan West which has been widely condemned on Amazon as a work of thinly-veiled neo-Nazi propaganda. I also mentioned that the author is now writing under the name S.A. Swaffington; I am unsure which is a pen name and which (if either) is his real name, although it is worth noting that he still goes by Ryan West on Facebook (notice that one of his friends is Ron McVan, an American white nationalist):

Unsurprisingly, Swaffington is a poster at the racist Anglo-Saxon Foundation forum:

What I did not mention is that he has since disowned Rise of the Saxons, passing it off as a mistake of his youth:

I decided to pick up a copy of the book myself; it currently sits right alongside The Turner Diaries in my collection of novels by crazy people.

Here is a typical scene in which our young hero, Hengest, meets the twenty-five-year-old Saxon warrior Hrothgar - a man best described as the illegitimate offspring of Conan the Barbarian and Herbert the Pervert:

Hrothgar's kiddy-fiddling ways are no big deal, however, and after this altercation he and Hengest become fast friends. Together, they join in the manly sport of tormenting a mutilated slave:

Eventually, as per legend, Hengest grows up to lead the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain. Here is his rousing speech to his soldiers:

Well, it's hardly Churchillian, but I suppose it does the job.

Much burning and pillaging ensues, with this scene being fairly typical:

In case you're wondering, "Dances with Corpses" is the name of Hengest's sword; he also has a spiked flail which he calls Gertrude.

So, what does our dashing hero Hengest do upon finding out that the only occupant of the hut is a nine-year-old boy? Surely he wouldn't harm a defenceless child?

Well...

It goes on like this:

And if you're wondering what Hengest's pervy pal Hrothgar has been up to during all this, well...

All of this is rounded off with a night's festivities:

At this point, you may be doubting whether Hengest and Hrothgar are really meant to be the heroes of the book. But they are. Just look at the author's afterword:

So, by writing this atrocious novel, Ryan West/S.A. Swaffington was attempting to honour the achievements of his ancestors and strike a blow against "the people that wish to oppress English identity." In short, he expects English people to feel proud of the behaviour portrayed in his book.

In my earlier post I spotlighted a review on Amazon which accused the novel of sexualising children in addition to being very racist. Since then, an argument broke out in the review's comments section: Amazon user "Angelcynn" concurred that the "this book is appaling, violent and does not do the historical characters any justice" but objected to the charge that it sexualises children:

This is not the only time in which Angelcynn has objected to a negative review of the book, although it does appear to be the first time that he has criticised the novel himself while doing so. In this discussion from 2008 Angelcynn describes Rise of the Saxons as "a great book", "amazing", "a good laugh to read" and "a good history lesson":

So, what he once considered "a great book" is now "appalling" in his eyes. Like the author, Angelcynn's opinion of the novel appears to have soured over time.

Notice, also, how the other people in the above thread refer to Angelcynn as "Mr England", which was evidently the name of his account at the time. This is significant when we take a look at one of the other negative reviews...




I should mention that Angelcynn/Mr England doesn't have a review of the book posted, although it could easily be that he deleted it after being outed. "Popeye" makes the same claim elsewhere:

Most of Angelcynn's posts in the above discussion have been deleted, with one exception:

Angelcynn faces off against both Popeye and Obelix - poor guy doesn't stand a chance!

Could Popeye's claim be true? Is Angelcynn/Mr England actually Ryan West/S.A. Swaffington, pulling a leaf out of Anne Rice's book and slagging off his detractors on Amazon?

If you would like further evidence, look at this exchange:



Angelcynn is referred to as "Ryan" by one of his fellow nationalists. He does not correct this, so it would appear that Ryan is his real name.

It should also be noted that Angelcynn appears to be fixated with the writing of S.A. Swaffington, and has spent multiple posts promoting it. See here, for instance:

Or here (incidentally, I did some digging and it turns out that Fenris Wulf is Offa: Rise of the Englisc Warrior under another name):

Or on this list:

He's also promoted the books in forum discussions about recommended historical novels. Not to mention spamming up people's reviews with praise for Offa.

Is "Angelcynn" actually a sock puppet used by S.A. Swaffington/Ryan West in shameless self-promotion? I do not know for sure. But as a final note, here are some more of Angelcynn's reviews which shed a good deal of light on his political sympathies:

UPDATE 17/5/2015: At some point in the half-month since I posted this, "Angelcynn" has changed his account name to "Free-thinker" and deleted the above two reviews (although I was able to archive a cache of the second) [EDIT: I've also managed to get an archive of the Mein Kampf review here]. Make of that what you will...

UPDATE 21/5/2015: I can now confirm that, yes, Angelcynn/Free-thinker/Mr. England is, in fact, S.A. Swaffington/Ryan West.

I took a look at Free-thinker's profile and, out of idle curiosity, clicked through to his wishlist. Here is what I found:

Inevitably, it consists of a Swaffington book. But just look at the name above.

Ryan West.

Bit of a giveaway, don't you think...?

Given that Swaffington has already demonstrated a tendency towards deleting embarrassing information, I decided to save both Free-thinker's profile and wishlist at Archive.is. If you go to the former and click the "public wishlist" link on the left, you will be taken to the latter. The evidence is there to see.

So, I can safely say that it was S.A. Swaffington who wrote a glowing review of Mein Kampf. It is also S.A. Swaffington who, rather pitifully, praised one of his own books as "the greatest historical novel ever written."

Just another Nazi sympathiser in the English nationalist movement.

UPDATE 15/7/2015: See Swaffington's response to this post here.