The failure of the Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups

Late last year I wrote a post with a rundown of the various English Community Groups that had been set up at the behest of the Steadfast Trust. With this organisation currently on ice, we should not be surprised that its ECGs are in pretty poor shape themselves:

The Ipswich ECG appears not have made any moves since 6 January.

The Portsmouth ECG seems to have frozen up a week before its Ipswich cousin.

The Southampton ECG - a group so obscure that I didn't even know it existed when I wrote my last rundown - let out its death rattle at the same time.

The Essex ECG,  I believe, closed its doors in late 2014.

The Dorset ECG merged into the English Volunteer Force, a not-particularly-significant EDL splinter group.

The Northants English Welfare Society is still active - but it seems unlikely to attract widespread support, given that its frontman Walter Greenway is an unabashed Nazi sympathiser. Incidentally, "Walter Greenway" is a pseudonym, and the man in question also appears to go under the name "Gamlegorm the White". I am unsure what his real name is, but a short while back I received hits from someone searching for "ragnar northants english welfare society", "gamelegorm the white walter greenway" and "walter greenway northants english welfare stephen osborne". Make of that what you will.

 A typical posting from the Northants English Welfare Society.

Recently, however, there has been one more nail in the coffin: ECGL.org, the official website of the Leicester ECG, has closed down as a result of its domain expiring on 17 September.
For a bit of background, the ECGL - the most prominent of the ECGs - was founded on 2011. In March last year it announced that it would rebrand as a nationwide group called English Advocates.

This is where things get a little fiddly. The ECGL Facebook page changed its name to English Advocates and the group's Youtube channel rebranded as "Ethnic English", but the ECGL website remained and the old group was, officially, still active. Ingram (or one of his cohorts) even restarted its Facebook presence as a separate page.

But that second ECGL Facebook page closed as well. Now, with the closure of the website, all that is left of the English Community Group Leicester is the English Advocates page - which is basically just Lee Ingram ranting:

Lee Ingram argues that living in England is as bad as living in war-torn Syria.

I took the opportunity to archive the ECGL website just before it went down. Of particular interest is the photo gallery, where I found this image...

Hmm, wonder what those papers they're distributing could be about...?

Well, it just so happens that the site offered a closer look:

Now, what does that stack of fliers on the left say...?

Ah, yes. Woden's Folk.

For those unfamiliar, Woden's Folk is a neo-Nazi cult that believes Hitler to have been an avatar of the god Woden. The cult is eagerly awaiting the return of Woden/Hitler, in the belief that he will save the Aryan race from the dark forces of Judaism. Lee Ingram and his pals, for reasons of their own, felt that this cult was worth promoting.

If you're reading this, Lee, please don't insult my intelligence by claiming that you were unaware of the cult's neo-Nazi beliefs at the time. We're talking about a group with "Woden" in its name. That alone should have been more than enough to set off alarm bells.

The Steadfast Trust's English Community Groups were meant to represent ordinary English folk. Instead, they ended up as magnets for neo-Nazis. Had anyone voiced these concerns at the beginning of the project, they would doubtless have been dismissed as Anglophobes. However, as history has shown, those concerns turned out to be entirely valid.

Of course, the failure of the English Community Groups is just one of many casualties in the short history of Englisc nationalism. My report on the impending demise of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation turned out to be overoptimistic - the forum's domain was renewed for another year - but we need only take a quick look around the movement to find numerous other groups that have bitten the dust. English Shieldwall? Dead. Englisc Resistance? Dead. Steadfast journal? Dead.

Englisc nationalism will never gain a foothold amongst the English. Simple as that.

Englisc Resistance

I decided to make a post about a racist Facebook page called Englisc Resistance, partly because I've seen a degree of misinformation about it being spread in antifascist circles. During the course of my research, however, the page closed down - although you can see an archive of it here. The Englisc nationalist movement can notch up yet another casualty...

As far as I can tell, the first significant mention of Englisc Resistance in an antifascist context is in this Vice article from September 12 2014, which briefly namechecks it as one of multiple "small but likeminded ethnic English groups".

Three days later Vice.com published an article by a different author, about a protest that was attended by members of far-right groups; "From the flags, it looked like it included the National Front (NF) and someone from the Englisc Resistance (that is the correct spelling)", states the article. This comment is illustrated with a photo showing the flags referred to:

This is where things have started to become distorted. The author appears to be working on the assumption that the symbol on the left-hand flag, showing a white dragon, a stylised swastika/fylfot and the slogan "Englisc - We Fear No Foe", is associated specifically with Englisc Resistance. This is presumably because both use the antiquated spelling "Englisc".

What the author seems unaware of is that Englisc Resistance is one part of a larger movement which also includes the Anglo-Saxon Foundation, the Steadfast Trust and other groups. Multiple people within this movement - which I have termed Englisc nationalism - have used the logo in question; for example, the Anglo-Saxon Foundation member Wodensson has it as his forum avatar:

I've also noticed a variation of the symbol, with St. George's Cross instead of a swastika, being used by some of the slightly less extreme nationalist groups:

A few months after the Vice.com articles went up, the Bristol Antifascists blog ran a list of various far-right groups. Influenced by Vice's work, this list includes Englisc Resistance in relation to the "Fear No Foe' swastika logo:

The description beneath the photo actually fits Englisc nationalism as a whole - the blog is confusing Englisc Resistance with the wider movement to which it belongs. The reference to burning crosses in forests is clearly derived from the first Vice article, which covers an unspecified nationalist group engaging in this activity but gives no indication that Englisc Resistance was responsible.

The following month, Brighton Antifascists published a list of far-right symbols which identifies the "Fear No Foe" swastika as the logo of Englisc Resistance:

 

I believe the man in this photograph to be Piers Mellor, who briefly appeared in the Exposure: Charities Behaving Badly talking about his involvement in the BNP, British Movement and National Front. Here is Mellor's response to the above snippet:

To give Mellor his due, I believe that he's entirely right in this tweet.

Having - hopefully - cleared up some misconceptions about Englisc Resistance, let's take a look at exactly what the people behind this now-defunct Facebook page stand for...
To start with, ER engaged in the tried-and-true Englisc nationalist practice of referring to non-white people as "orcs" and gloating over their deaths:

Despite being ostensibly focused on England r ather than the southern USA, the page showed a strange fascination with the Confederate flag. The first of these images is my favourite, making a nonsensical relation between the losing side of the American Civil War and the Anglo-Saxon festival of Eostre:

There are flags which Englisc Resistance was less keen on, however - such as the rainbow flag of gay rights:

In this post, Englisc Resistance republished an antisemitic cartoon from Der Sturmer:

In July the group posted a set of photos from a military exhibition; I did some digging and found that these images come from the War and Peace Revival in Kent. Predictably, English Resistance focused on the Nazi exhibits:

Englisc Resistance also appreciated this display of Ku Klux Klan memorabilia:

Who was behind Englisc Resistance? Well, the page was rather secretive on this front. Just look at the crudely scrawled-out faces in these photographs:

(Incidentally, the last of these images is from a Woden's Folk event at Avebury - more photos from the occasion can be seen in this video)

I couldn't help but notice that all three photos appear to show the same person. Each time the subject shares a similar build and, in two of them, even wears the same coat. So who is this mystery man?

Well, looking closely at the second image, I spotted something awfully familiar about that half-shaved haircut. He reminded me of Darren Clarke, one of the Steadfast Trust supporters seen in the Exposure: Charities Behaving Badly documentary. Here's a comparison:

I then compared the other two photos of the Englisc Resistance mystery man with one of Darren Clarke, taken at a March for England event:

Yup. I think we have our man.

Who is Darren Clarke? Well, when I first mentioned him on this blog, he was just another racist in the Englisc nationalist movement. He then went on to become the secretary of the Ipswich English Community Group. Not long afterwards he became an unlikely TV star when he turned up in the undercover footage seen in the Exposure documentary. I later demonstrated that Clarke was almost certainly the author of the book White Wyrm Rising: A Journey into Modern English Nationalism; in the same post, I provided strong evidence that Clarke is also the identity of the Stormfront member "Atrociter".

There is further evidence tying Clarke to Englisc Resistance. He was a regular poster in the page's comments section; here he is, showing his support for the Confederate flag:

Like many in the Englisc nationalist movement, Clarke likes to paint himself as an ordinary Englishman. But how many ordinary Englishmen feel such a passionate commitment to the cause of the Confederate States? How many would literally fly the flag for a neo-Nazi cult, as Clarke appears to be doing in the photo of the Woden's Folk gathering?

I will be keeping an eye out for Englisc Resistance in case it turns up again in a different form...

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 last days of the Anglo-Saxon Foundation?

The Anglo-Saxon Foundation has been one of the richest sources of material for this blog, so it is with mixed feelings that I report on the likelihood of its impending demise.

The ASF is run by a Manchester-based racist who calls himself Seaxan. Back in April, Seaxan made a lengthy post announcing his retirement, and the closure of the ASF if nobody steps in to save it. He also talks about setting up a private forum, but it seems most unlikely that this would attract anyone outside of the ASF's dwindling pool of regulars.

The post is not publicly viewable, but here's a screencap I dug up with my mole powers:

In fact, Seaxan has been pouring this kind of seemingly drunken rambling onto his forum for some time now, these two long-winded rants being typical of his posting style:

Seaxan is, to put it mildly, an odd chap. He seems to live in some sort of parallel universe, one in which the British police force is "gladly beating and arresting white racist Heathens for the sake of diversity" (er, got any evidence of this taking place, Seaxan?)

As the above screencaps demonstrate, Seaxan believes that he is fighting in a war. If this is the case, then he is practising the redoubtable martial technique which military experts refer to as "sitting around ranting about gay people":

Seaxan is also a graphic designer, although his attempts at setting up an English nationalist graphic design outfit never really took hold. A few years back he set up a sticker and t-shirt label called White Wulf Merchandise, but he had to abort this endeavour in late 2011 due to a lack of sales (good lord, who could possibly have predicted that...?)

Still from this video of the "English Folcmoot" in 2011. The video's description claims that White Wulf Merchandise had a stall at the event, and this would appear to be it: just compare the items on sale there with the t-shirt and sticker designs posted here.

And as I showed in my history of the ASF, Seaxan was involved with a similarly ill-fated graphic design website called Saxon North; this site was run by someone called Jamie. I do not have much information on Jamie, but in researching Englisc nationalist circles on Facebook I came across a Manchester-based nationalist graphic designer named Jamie Ashcroft:

A coincidence? A business partner of Seaxan's? Seaxan himself, maybe? Who knows?
Ah, the mysterious world of nationalist graphic design.

As a final note, Seaxan's domain Englisc-Gateway.com is set to expire on 4 September. I wonder if anyone will put it to good use after that; perhaps I could buy it to use as a gay dating website.

Hmmm, the design will need bit of an overhaul, though...

Much better.

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.