Nazis getting what they deserve

These people are scum. Fortunately they were also stupid and suffering from delusions of grandeur. They had no chance of ever achieving their goals but they could still have caused atrocities.

Three people have been convicted of belonging to the banned neo-Nazi group National Action. Adam Thomas, 22, and his partner Claudia Patatas, 38, were found guilty with Daniel Bogunovic, 27, of being members of the far-right group - which was proscribed under anti-terror laws after it celebrated the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox. The BBC can now tell the story of National Action and the threat posed by its members.

National Action was founded in 2013 by Ben Raymond, now 29, and Alex Davies, now 24. At the time Raymond, a recent politics graduate from the University of Essex, and avowed neo-Nazi, was living in Bognor Regis. After university, he had drifted into a job as a double-glazing salesman and would go on to work at a job centre, assisting claimants.

Much of his free time was spent online immersed in disturbing extreme right-wing content. He designed memes, edited videos, and wrote long diatribes, including for the obscure Integralist Party, which was seeking a "nationwide fascist army" for its "racial religion that inspires and demands fanaticism".

The pair believed young people across the UK would eagerly embrace the group's toxic blend of Hitler worship, Holocaust denial, and malicious conspiracy theories. In reality, it would never exceed 100 members, and those it did attract were a disparate set of fanatics united by various deviancies and irrational hatreds. No attempt was made at engaging in democratic politics, with the organisation instead regarding itself as a youth-based street movement. Its logo was strikingly similar to the paramilitary arm of the Nazi party - the Sturmabteilung, or SA.

The group claimed to be patriotic, but was hostile to all domestic institutions, the rule of law, the democratic process, and everyone who did not share its worldview. Politicians and other public servants were a particular focus of hatred. During one speech, senior National Action member Matthew Hankinson said they would ensure that "traitors" ended up "hanging from lampposts".

"We must be ruthless - and if innocent people are cut down in the process, then so be it," he said. The organisation was openly genocidal and said that all Jewish and non-white people would have to go. In one document it declared that: "It is with glee that we will enact the final solution across Europe."

But National Action did not restrict itself to admiration for the Nazis. Its members also took inspiration from the Khmer Rouge, the brutal regime that ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s under the Marxist leader Pol Pot; the radical right-wing Norwegian terrorist and mass murderer Anders Breivik; and even the Islamic State group.

Evil and stupidity aren't mutually exclusive, however :

Training included boxing, martial arts, and a series of outdoor training camps. One such camp - where participants were expected to "drink mead and live like Vikings" - ended in farce when one neo-Nazi ended up sleeping in a phone box to escape the rain and snow.

And sometimes it's just bizarre :

Thomas told jurors that, aged 18, he went to Israel and considered converting to Judaism because it would have allowed him to join the Israeli military. Thomas disclosed that he first "started learning about Judaism to discover why he was supposed to hate them," Mr Simpkins recalled.

Avishai Grosser, who works with converts, told the BBC that Thomas, who "knew big proportions of the Torah by heart", dropped out of several conversion programmes and eventually ended up on the streets before returning to the UK.

It is understood that after he returned, he told people in far-right circles that his time in Israel related to an involvement with the white supremacist Christian Identity movement.

.... When the BBC returned to Swansea with a television camera and approached Raymond in the street outside his bedsit, he swore at us and fled inside, refusing to answer questions.

In the video underneath this quote you can witness a BBC journalist being a braver man than I.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45919730