By Ariel Koch

In June 2020, an American soldier was charged with sending sensitive information about his own unit’s location, movements and security measures to members of the Nazi-Satanist group, Order of Nine Angles (ONA). He used an ONA-affiliated channel, which promotes Nazism, Satanism, terrorism and sexual violence, on the encrypted messaging service, Telegram.

Three months later, a man was arrested and charged with first-degree murder following the stabbing of a man outside of a mosque in Toronto, Canada. Months beforehand, on 2 February, the suspect had allegedly uploaded a short video titled “Chant (ONA)” to YouTube.

Since the emergence of terrorist groups such as the National Action in the UK and Atomwaffen Division (AWD) in the US, there has been a growing interest in neo-Nazi Satanism. While both groups have been officially disbanded, they have left their mark on the fringes of the white supremacist movement by introducing a racist and apocalyptic form of Satanism inspired by the ONA.

These Satanist neo-Nazi groups promote and legitimise sexual violence and terrorism against perceived enemies, pushing adherents beyond sharing edgy images and texts and towards real-life violence.

So who are they and how are they growing online?

A Short History

The ONA, which was founded in the UK in the 1970s, “promotes a supernatural, hateful system of thought which condemns liberal, Judeo-Christian [‘Magian’] society and longs for a new imperial age”, said HOPE not Hate’s Nick Lowles.

Members believe that “civilisation must be undermined and destroyed from within”, encouraging adherents to commit “random acts of violence, sexual assaults, and even the ‘culling’ [ritual killing] of human victims”. While it is unclear how many people currently follow the ONA, the group is known to have inspired individuals and groups across the world.

The ONA encourages its adherents to join the police and the army or to infiltrate religious groups, with the intention of subverting their ideologies and/or morals and to engage in real-life violent experiences.

The group’s founder is one ‘Anton Long’ – believed by many scholars to be David Myatt, a former British neo-Nazi militant ideologue who at some point tried to merge neo-Nazism and Islamism before denouncing Nazism and Satanism in 2011. Myatt denies ever having been involved with the ONA and using the pseudonym ‘Anton Long’.
A global network

ONA’s chapters, known as ‘nexions’, as well as its individual adherents, are spread around the world. They are anarchistic in nature and can be described as a decentralised network of like-minded individuals and groups.

In Australia, the ONA’s nexion is known as the Temple of THEM. In Italy, it is called Secuntra 9, and operates a blog in English and Italian. One of the photos posted on their blog features five group members: the one in the middle holds Secuntra 9’s flag (an ONA nine-angles star with the symbol of the Italian nexion), while the four others give a Nazi salute.

With “2,000-3,000” followers worldwide, ONA021 claims to be the ONA’s biggest nexion. On its English-language blog (the nexion also runs blogs in Russian and Chinese), ONA021 describes itself as an “international esoteric/occult organisation based on following the teachings of the O9A”, below an image of an AK47.

While the group admits to having “some beliefs in national socialism”, it denies following any one political ideology: “Our Occult ideology covers, Satanism/Luciferianism, Islam, and some ancient original Christianity and Cabala [sic] texts, following of insight roles, and a number of other doctrines of the O9A.”

In the US, perhaps the most extreme of ONA’s nexions is the Tempel ov Blood (ToB). ToB’s literature encourages sadism and sexual violence, glorifies mass-murderers and terrorists, and calls for adherents to engage in racially motivated violence depicted as a holy war.

The ToB is reportedly run by Joshua Caleb Sutter, an alleged neo-Nazi occultist activist who converted to militant Hinduism; and who is said to have founded an astonishing pro-North Korea group in South Carolina named the Rural People’s Party.

openDemocracy has attempted to contact Sutter about these allegations but has been unable to reach him.

The AWD’s required reading material included ‘Liber 333’ and ‘Iron Gates’, both of which were authored by Sutter and released by Martinet Press, which is run by his wife and fellow ToB militant, Jillian Scott Hoy.

‘Libre 333’ is a satanic manual, which guides neo-Nazis who fantasise about evolving into a new form of vampiric Aryan predator, and openly calls for infiltrating entities with “sinister potential”, such as the military, the police, religious or right-wing groups; while ‘Iron Gates’ is sci-fi gore that tells the story of a blood-thirsty death cult, and contains graphic descriptions of rape, torture, and murder.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, while “Sutter and ToB’s texts helped turn AWD toward a more ‘sinister’ [Satanic] direction”, they also caused infighting and distanced some members from the organisation.

Nonetheless, others have been attracted to this form of militant occultist neo-Nazism. The Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD), a British affiliate of AWD, which was banned as an alias of National Action, included teenage neo-Nazi Satanists among its members, such as a teenager who is the youngest person to ever be convicted on terrorism charges in the UK.

Neo-Nazi-Satanism online

All the above-mentioned groups started online, using the internet to forge connections and establish a presence in other countries. While the accounts associated with such groups are usually banned, and as such there is no official ONA website, less attention is given to ONA-affiliated platforms. These blogs – such as o9a, Omega9Alpha and Lapis Philosophicus – continue to disseminate its philosophy and help to push neo-Nazis in a ‘sinister direction’.

Meanwhile on Telegram, neo-Nazi channels such as the now-deleted ‘Terrorwave Refined’ – which promoted AWD and white supremacist terrorism – encourage followers to read ‘Iron Gates’ and post ONA symbolism. There are also different channels who share ONA/ToB symbolism and promote this worldview through texts, images, and videos.

The channel of a relatively new Nazi-Satanist group, Rural People’s Nationalist Party’s (RPNP), has shared instructions for building home-made bombs and asked members to infiltrate violent or militant entities, institutions, or organisations such as the police or the army –directly echoing the strategies of the ONA/ToB.

The RPNP, which is known to have placed recruitment stickers in locations in the southern United States, mixes Hitler-worshipping, North Korean Juche ideology and Satanism – as well as endorsing child rape, radical right terrorism and political tyranny. The posters it produces incite extreme racial violence. One of the photos in the RPNP channel – of Adolf Hitler, accompanied with the text “finish what he started” – was forwarded from the now-deleted channel of the National Socialist Order, a neo-Nazi group founded in late July 2020 by former AWD members.

On 20 September 2020, after reports of the Toronto mosque stabbing, the NSO published a new poster featuring the attacker along with the call to “siege your local mosque” and the ONA symbol. A similar poster featured the Christchurch shooter, who killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019.

ONA and ToB content – literature, images, and correspondence – can be found on every major social media platform. For example, ToB’s still-active Martinet Press Twitter account shared a link to the YouTube channel Beast Barracks, which contains ToB’s videos.

One video on this channel is ‘Agios o Terror’, featuring a Nazi-Satanist altar that includes ‘Siege’, an “increasingly radical” newsletter that the Southern Poverty Law Centre describe as being “more popular than ever with the racist right internationally” published by James Mason, whose “involvement with [the US’s] organized neo-Nazi movement dates back to the late 1960s”. The video also featured photos of Hitler and prominent American neo-Nazis, as well as a pistol. At the end of the video, a masked person with a shotgun enters the frame.

This is just one example of a phenomenon that appears to be spreading quickly. There has been a recent rise in violent incidents involving ONA, and there are calls for more to come. While still a fringe group, ONA and ToB have succeeded in moving people from online activism to real-life action – and are recruiting, through its nexions, more and more people to their sadistic worldview that legitimizes violence and portray it as a sacred mean that must be used in order to fight its enemies.