David Myatt
David Wulstan Myatt, also known by the pseudonym Abdulaziz ibn Myatt al-Qari, is a British writer, religious leader, far-right and former Islamist militant, most notable for allegedly being the political and religious leader of the theistic Satanist organization Order of Nine Angles from 1974 onwards. He is also the founder of Numinous Way. He is a former Muslim.
Early life
David Wulstan Myatt grew up in Tanganyika, now part of Tanzania, where his father worked as a civil servant for the British government, and later in the Far East, where he studied martial arts. He moved to England in 1967 to complete his schooling. He is reported to live in the Midlands.According to Jeffrey Kaplan, Myatt has undertaken "a global odyssey which took him on extended stays in the Middle East and East Asia, accompanied by studies of religions ranging from Christianity to Islam in the Western tradition and Taoism and Buddhism in the Eastern path. In the course of this Siddhartha-like search for truth, Myatt sampled the life of the monastery in both its Christian and Buddhist forms."
Beliefs and career
Political scientist George Michael writes that Myatt has "arguably done more than any other theorist to develop a synthesis of the extreme right and Islam," and is "arguably England's principal proponent of contemporary neo-Nazi ideology and theoretician of revolution."He described Myatt as an "intriguing theorist" whose "Faustian quests" involved studying Taoism and spending time in a Buddhist and later a Christian monastery, and allegedly involved exploring the occult, and Paganism and what Michael calls "quasi-Satanic" secret societies, while remaining a committed Neo-Nazi.
In 2000, British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight wrote that:
At a 2003 UNESCO conference in Paris, which concerned the growth of antisemitism, Response, the magazine of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre reported that Myatt had been described as "the leading hardline Nazi intellectual in Britain since the 1960s has converted to Islam, praises bin Laden and al Qaeda, calls the 9/11 attacks 'acts of heroism,' and urges the killing of Jews. Myatt, under the name Abdul Aziz Ibn Myatt supports suicide missions and urges young Muslims to take up Jihad. Observers warn that Myatt is a dangerous man..."
This view of Myatt as a radical Muslim, or Jihadi, is supported by Professor Robert S. Wistrich, who writes that Myatt, when a Muslim, was a staunch advocate of "Jihad, suicide missions and killing Jews..." and also "an ardent defender of bin Laden". One of Myatt's writings justifying suicide attacks was, for several years, on the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades section of the Hamas website.
In addition to writing about Islam and Neo-Nazism, Myatt has translated works by Sophocles, Sappho, Aeschylus, and Homer. He has also developed a mystical philosophy which he calls The Numinous Way and invented a three-dimensional board-game, the Star Game.
Alleged involvement with occultism
Myatt is alleged to have been the founder of the occult group the Order of Nine Angles or to have taken it over, written the publicly available teachings of the ONA under the pseudonym Anton Long, with his role being "paramount to the whole creation and existence of the ONA". According to scholar Jacob C. Senholt, "ONA-inspired activities, led by protagonist David Myatt, managed to enter the scene of grand politics and the global 'War On Terror', because of several foiled terror plots in Europe that can be linked to Myatt's writings".David Myatt has always denied such allegations about involvement with the ONA.
Jeffrey Kaplan has suggested that Myatt and Long are separate people, as did the religious studies scholar Connell R. Monette who wrote that it was quite possible that 'Anton Long' was a pseudonym used by multiple individuals over the last 30 years.
Order of Nine Angles
The Order of Nine Angles originally was a Wiccan organization founded during the 1960s. In 1974, it became a theistic Satanist organization once the leadership was allegedly taken over by David Myatt, previously known under the pseudonym of Anton Long, a former bodyguard and supporter of the British Neo-Nazi leader Colin Jordan. In 1998, Myatt converted to radical Islam while continuing to lead the Order of Nine Angles. In 2010, he repudiated the Islamic religion and publicly declared to have renounced all forms of extremism. The Order of Nine Angles identify as theistic Satanists and affirm to practice "traditional Satanism".The doctrine of the Order of Nine Angles is complex and multifaceted. Sociologist of religion Massimo Introvigne defined it as "a synthesis of three different currents: hermetic, pagan, and Satanist". The medievalist and professor of Religious studies Connell Monette dismissed the Satanic features of the ONA as "cosmetic" and contended that "its core mythos and cosmology are genuinely hermetic". According to the scholar of Western esotericism Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, "the ONA celebrated the dark, destructive side of life through anti-Christian, elitist, and Social Darwinist doctrines", together with the organization's implicit ties to Neo-Nazism and the appraisal of National Socialism.
The Order of Nine Angles believe that the seven planets and their satellites are connected to the "Dark Gods". Satan is considered to be one of two "actual entities", the other one being Baphomet, with Satan conceived as male and Baphomet as female. The organization became controversial and was mentioned in the press and books because of their promotion of human sacrifice. Since the 2010s, the political ideology and religious worldview of the Order of Nine Angles have increasingly influenced militant neo-fascist and Neo-Nazi insurgent groups associated with right-wing extremist and White supremacist international networks, most notably the Iron March forum.
Myatt is regarded as an "example of the axis between right-wing extremists and Islamists". He has been described as an "extremely violent, intelligent, dark, and complex individual"; as a martial arts expert; as one of the more interesting figures on the British neo-Nazi scene since the 1970s, and as a key Al-Qaeda propagandist. According to Daniel Koehler of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, Myatt "is a complex persona who defies simple answers to the question of why he changed groups and milieus so often and so fundamentally. It is also obvious, that during large parts of his life, Myatt was driven by a search for meaning and purpose."
Before his conversion to Islam in 1998, Myatt was the first leader of the British National Socialist Movement. He was identified by The Observer, as the "ideological heavyweight" behind Combat 18.
Myatt came to public attention in 1999, a year after his Islamic conversion, when a pamphlet he allegedly wrote many years earlier, A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution, described as a "detailed step-by-step guide for terrorist insurrection", was said to have inspired David Copeland, who left nailbombs in areas frequented by London's black, South Asian, and gay communities. Three people died and 129 were injured in the explosions, several of them losing limbs. It has also been suggested that Myatt's A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution might have influenced the German National Socialist Underground.
In 2005, Joshua Caleb Sutter, under the pseudonym Wulfran Hall, a fellow esoteric neo-Nazi and radical Islam sympathizer, interviewed Myatt in the ONA's journal Fenrir.
In 2021 The Counter Extremism Project listed Myatt as one of the world's 20 most dangerous extremists.
Political activism
Myatt joined Colin Jordan's British Movement, a neo-Nazi group, in 1968, where he sometimes acted as Jordan's bodyguard at meetings and rallies. Myatt later became the Leeds Branch Secretary and a member of British Movement's National Council. From the 1970s until the 1990s, he remained involved with paramilitary and neo-Nazi organisations such as Column 88 and Combat 18. He was imprisoned twice for violent offences in connection with his political activism.Myatt was the founder and first leader of the National Socialist Movement of which David Copeland was a member.
Myatt co-founded, with Eddy Morrison, the neo-Nazi organization the NDFM, which was active in Leeds, England, in the early 1970s. Of the NDFM, John Tyndall wrote in a polemic against NDFM co-founder Eddy Morrison: "The National Democratic Freedom Movement made little attempt to engage in serious politics but concentrated its activities mainly upon acts of violence against its opponents. Before very long the NDFM had degenerated into nothing more than a criminal gang."
Myatt founded the neo-Nazi Reichsfolk group. The Reichsfolk organization "aimed to create a new Aryan elite, The Legion of Adolf Hitler, and so prepare the way for a golden age in place of 'the disgusting, decadent present with its dishonourable values and dis-honourable weak individuals'".
It is alleged that in the early 1980s Myatt tried to establish a Nazi-occultist commune in Shropshire. The project was advertised in Colin Jordan's Gothic Ripples newsletter, with Goodrick-Clark writing that "after marrying and settling in Church Stretton in Shropshire, attempted in 1983 to set up a rural commune within the framework of Colin Jordan's Vanguard Project for neo-Nazi utopias publicized in Gothic Ripples".
Michael writes that Myatt took over the leadership of Combat 18 in 1998, when Charlie Sargent, the previous leader, was jailed for murder.
Alleged influence on David Copeland
In November 1997, Myatt allegedly posted a racist and anti-Semitic pamphlet he had written called Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution on a website based in British Columbia, Canada by Bernard Klatt. The pamphlet included chapter titles such as "Assassination", "Terror Bombing", and "Racial War". According to Michael Whine of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, "he contents provided a detailed step-by-step guide for terrorist insurrection with advice on assassination targets, rationale for bombing and sabotage campaigns, and rules of engagement."In February 1998, detectives from S012 Scotland Yard raided Myatt's home in Worcestershire and removed his computers and files. He was arrested on suspicion of incitement to murder and incitement to racial hatred. The case later dropped, after a three-year investigation, because the evidence supplied by the Canadian authorities was not enough to secure a conviction.
In 1999, a copy of the Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution pamphlet was discovered by police in the flat of David Copeland, the London nailbomber - who was also a member of Myatt's National Socialist Movement - which allegedly influenced him to plant homemade bombs targeting immigrants in Brixton, Brick Lane, and inside the Admiral Duncan pub on Old Compton Street in London, frequented by the black, Asian, and gay communities respectively. Friends John Light, Nick Moore, and Andrea Dykes and her unborn child died in the Admiral Duncan pub. Copeland told police he had been trying to spark a "racial war."
Following the conviction of Copeland for murder on 30 June 2000, after a trial at the Old Bailey, one newspaper wrote of Myatt: "This is the man who shaped mind of a bomber; Cycling the lanes around Malvern, the mentor who drove David Copeland to kill Riding a bicycle around his Worcestershire home town sporting a wizard-like beard and quirky dress-sense, the former monk could easily pass as a country eccentric or off-beat intellectual. But behind David Myatt's studious exterior lies a more sinister character that has been at the forefront of extreme right-wing ideology in Britain since the mid-1960s."
According to the BBC's ''Panorama, in 1998 when Myatt was leader of the NSM, he called for "the creation of racial terror with bombs". Myatt is also quoted by Searchlight'' as having stated that "he primary duty of all National Socialists is to change the world. National Socialism means revolution: the overthrow of the existing System and its replacement with a National-Socialist society. Revolution means struggle: it means war. It means certain tactics have to be employed, and a great revolutionary movement organised which is primarily composed of those prepared to fight, prepared to get their hands dirty and perhaps spill some blood".