The Names Change, the Pattern Doesn't

By Left Unsaid — May 2026

On 14 April 2026, 19-year-old Ömer Ket opened fire at the Ahmet Koyuncu vocational school in Siverek (Şanlıurfa, Turkey), wounded sixteen people, and then killed himself. A day later, on 15 April, 14-year-old İsa Aras Mersinli shot ten people dead at the Ayser Çalık school in Onikişubat (Kahramanmaraş) — among them eight children and a teacher — and wounded twelve others. It became the deadliest school shooting in Turkish history (CNN, 2026; Wikipedia, 2026). School shootings are historically rare in Turkey, in part because of strict gun laws, and two attacks within two days were no coincidence but a pattern that could be read digitally: a Telegram group called C31K, with around one hundred thousand members, praised the attacks, circulated fake dates and locations of supposed new ones to spread panic, and had previously come to the attention of Turkish police in connection with the murders of Ayşenur Halil and İkbal Uzuner (Wikipedia, 2026). The group was taken offline on 16 April; one of its founders was arrested the next day. Within 72 hours of the first shooting, Turkish authorities had detained 411 people and blocked 1,866 URLs for misleading the public and undermining public order (Balkan Insight, 2026).

A week later, in the Netherlands, the AIVD published its 2025 annual report on 23 April 2026, formally recognising a new category of nihilistic violent extremism — a phenomenon in which online networks push young people toward disruptive violence with no clear ideological line (AIVD, 2026). In parallel, research by the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) in cooperation with the Capitol Terrorists Exposers found that around seventy Dutch youths — many of them minors — are active in the 764/COM network, where animal abuse, child sexual abuse, and incitement to suicide converge with neo-Nazi iconography (HCSS/CTE; Cops in Cyberspace, 2026). The report briefly made the news and then disappeared from the conversation.

And in Loosdrecht, by late April 2026, tensions had been building for more than ten evenings around a planned emergency reception centre for seventy asylum seekers, culminating on King's Day (27 April) in serious damage to the town hall on the Rading after a group of rioters attacked it with paving stones and a road sign (Hart van Nederland, 2026; RD, 2026). On the evening of Thursday 30 April, Lidewij de Vos of Forum for Democracy (FvD) appeared on the scene to express her support for the groups that — partly through Defend Netherlands and local Defend offshoots — were resisting the centre's arrival. Defend Netherlands is not a local youth club. Research by Pointer (KRO-NCRV) and the Justice for Prosperity foundation, run by former AIVD officer Jelle Postma, identified at least 35 local Defend groups in the Netherlands in March 2026, mostly grown out of football hooligan scenes around The Hague and 's-Hertogenbosch, with racist content and veiled calls to violence in their internal communications (NOS, 2026). Defend Netherlands — recently rebranded as Defend United — has, according to that research, an operational core of fifty to sixty people who travel the country to anti-AZC demonstrations, with the explicit strategy of staging small protests at town halls where actual decisions are made. The organisation sits within a broader ecosystem in the Netherlands built around Forum for Democracy, with ideological affinities and visible network ties to Curtis Yarvin (whom Baudet actively follows on X and at times retweets, much as Andreessen and the broader Thiel circle do), to Alexander Dugin (whom Baudet hosted in a Twitter Space on 5 July 2023), and to the accelerationist thinking that has become politically influential in the United States via Peter Thiel and Nick Land. A member of parliament who shows up at a Defend mobilisation is not merely backing a local outburst; she is openly lending political legitimacy to a mobilisation that researchers connect to a broader far-right network.

Three stories, three weeks, three countries — not because all of these phenomena are identical, but because they show how threat assessments are translated politically in very different ways. In Turkey, an entire security apparatus was activated within three days: arrests, URL blocks, the son of a DEM parliamentarian taken in for questioning, a Telegram group dismantled, a national teachers' walkout. The response was massive and, at the same time, highly convenient for the sitting government, which used the same momentum to bring social media and opposition figures under tighter supervision. The HCSS and AIVD findings about seventy 764-affiliated youths and several hundred accelerationists in the Netherlands stayed within reports that briefly hit the news and then faded. The Loosdrecht riots were largely handled by politicians as a local public-order issue, or used to push political self-interest, rather than read as a symptom of a transnational far-right ecosystem that has been working structurally for decades.

This difference is not new. It is precisely the difference that shaped the public debate about far-right violence in Europe in 1993, in 2000, and in 2011, and it points to a pattern that has been working consistently in the same direction for sixty years. This essay sets out why that pattern repeats, how state services and informant structures are woven into it, and why the current Dutch situation is historically predictable rather than exceptional. To do that, it walks through four cases, in four countries and over six decades: Column 88 in 1970s Britain, Combat 18 in the 1990s, the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund in Germany between 1998 and 2011, and Joshua Caleb Sutter in the United States from 2003 to the present. Running through all four is one figure — David Myatt — not as the only explanation, but as the name that keeps surfacing at the points where ideology, violence, and infiltration meet.

A short guide to the terms used here

Before going into the cases, three core terms that come back throughout. 764 and COM are online networks that, via Telegram, Discord and Roblox, push young people — often minors — toward self-harm, animal abuse, child sexual abuse, and incitement to suicide. They operate under an aesthetic of neo-Nazi iconography and satanic symbolism. Accelerationism is the political thinking that wants to speed up the collapse of the existing order through chaos and violence — not to reform it, but to bring on a breakdown out of which a new order would supposedly emerge. The Order of Nine Angles (O9A) is a British satanic neo-Nazi order, presumed founded under a pseudonym in 1973, whose ideological corpus still supplies the basis today for both accelerationist cells and 764. Lay these three side by side and you do not see separate phenomena, but overlapping generations of the same radicalisation milieu.

Beyond that, several abbreviations recur in this piece. AIVD is the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands. BfV is the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the German domestic intelligence service. A V-Person (Vertrauensperson) is a Verfassungsschutz informant. NSU stands for Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund, a German neo-Nazi cell that committed ten murders between 2000 and 2007. CTER is the counter-terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation unit of the Dutch national police. FvD is Forum for Democracy. PGNL is the Palestinian Community in the Netherlands. With those out of the way, every reader can follow along, regardless of background.

Column 88: Gladio and the paramilitary precedent of the 1970s

Before Combat 18 was set up in 1992 as the British National Party's enforcer arm, the United Kingdom had already housed a paramilitary neo-Nazi formation for more than two decades whose operational structure provided a direct blueprint for what came after. Column 88 took its name — the eighth letter doubled, HH, for Heil Hitler — from an Austrian underground group set up in 1934 after the Austrian government banned the NSDAP, and according to Gerry Gable the group traced back to a covert British post-war Nazi network into which Colin Jordan was sworn at nineteen (Thurlow, 1987; Gable, 1991). Open activity began only in 1970, when Column 88 absorbed elements of the National Socialist Group, a paramilitary splinter linked to the British Movement (Barberis, McHugh & Tyldesley, 2000). The military commander was Major Ian Souter Clarence, a former Special Forces officer and Black Watch veteran on whom MI5 had held files on weapons stockpiling since 1946; the overall leader was Leslie Eric Lutz Vaughan, a veteran of the British National Party (1960) and its paramilitary wing Spearhead (Macklin, 2007; Hill & Bell, 1988).

What sets Column 88 apart in this analysis, and distinguishes it from an isolated far-right subculture, is its documented entanglement with the NATO stay-behind structure that became internationally known as Gladio. Two academic sources state the connection explicitly: Cheles writes in 1995 that Column 88 was tied to the Gladio networks set up after the Second World War, with American CIA support, as anti-communist resistance organs, and Durham documents in 1998 that Souter Clarence helped set up Column 88 in the 1960s as the British section of Gladio (Cheles, 1995; Durham, 1998). On 22 April 2007, Dutch crime journalist Peter R. de Vries devoted an episode of his SBS6 programme to the Dutch branch of that same stay-behind network, examining weapons caches, possible figures involved, and the lack of government transparency about that period. Structurally, this is the same pattern that produced bombings on Piazza Fontana (1969), Piazza della Loggia (1974), and the Bologna train station (1980) in Italy under the heading strategia della tensione: state-touched paramilitary infrastructure where the line between intelligence work and terror was, in practice, not maintained.

Column 88 ran its training camps under Souter Clarence — including one in November 1975 in cooperation with the League of St George, reported on by Searchlight — and first came into public view in 1975 when the Western Daily Press reported that Column 88 members had been training in Savernake Forest with elements of the Territorial Army, a revelation that prompted parliamentary questions (Hill & Bell, 1988; Wilkinson, 1983). During the 1970s, the group carried out bombings against the Socialist Workers Party, the Anti-Nazi League and the pacifist Housmans bookshop in London, claimed arson attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, and infiltrated the Army Cadet Force (Barberis, McHugh & Tyldesley, 2000; Wilkinson, 1983).

For present-day analysis, what matters most is who belonged to the leadership circle of Column 88. Alongside Souter Clarence and Vaughan, three separate academic sources — Goodrick-Clarke (2001), Kaplan (2000) and Michael (2006) — name Joe Short and David Myatt as leading members. That second name, David Myatt, will return three more times in this piece — at Combat 18, at Sutter, and at the 764 network — and is therefore the figure who spans the six decades this essay reconstructs. Myatt has been broadly identified by academic researchers of the Order of Nine Angles, including Goodrick-Clarke, Senholt and Monette, as the likely pseudonymous grand master 'Anton Long' who wrote the O9A corpus from 1973 onward, and in 1980 he authored the pamphlet A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution, whose lone-wolf doctrine is directly recognisable in David Copeland's London bombing campaign of April 1999 (Goodrick-Clarke, 2001). Through one person, then, a direct line runs from the Gladio-touched British paramilitary milieu of the 1970s to the O9A corpus that, thirty years later, would feed the ideological infrastructure of Atomwaffen Division and the 764 network via Joshua Caleb Sutter and Martinet Press.

In 1983, Column 88 was back in the news when reports emerged that Souter Clarence had hidden three German neo-Nazi terrorists — Odfried Hepp, Ulrich Tillmann and Walter Kexel, all three wanted for bombings of American military bases in Germany — in safe houses (Macklin, 2007). The fact that a British Gladio figure was sheltering three men who had attacked NATO targets illustrates how entangled those circuits were in practice, and shows that the question of state-paramilitary overlap does not begin only with Combat 18 or the NSU, but already inside infrastructure that NATO itself had helped set up.

Combat 18: the precedent from the 1990s

Combat 18 was founded in early 1992 as a stewards group for the British National Party. The '18' refers to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet — A and H, for Adolf Hitler — and its founders included Charlie Sargent and the American Harold Covington (Encyclopedia.com, n.d.; Wikipedia, 2026a). From 1992, Combat 18 published the magazine Redwatch, listing names, photos and addresses of political opponents, and within a few years grew from a British stewards' club into an international neo-Nazi network with cells in Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and eventually worldwide (Wikipedia, 2026a). The group was directly connected to Blood & Honour, the neo-Nazi music network set up by Ian Stuart Donaldson of Skrewdriver, and to Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, particularly the Ulster Defence Association (Bell, 2023). And David Myatt — the same figure who turns up in the Column 88 context — is described by The Observer as the ideological heavyweight behind Combat 18, and was around the same time the founder of the National Socialist Movement, of which David Copeland (the London nail bomber) was a member.

What makes Combat 18 so usable for present-day analysis is what came out in public during and after the 1997-1998 murder case around Chris Castle. In February 1997, Castle, a go-between in the growing internal feud between Sargent and his rival Will 'Wilf the Beast' Browning, was stabbed to death in a caravan in Essex by Martin Cross at Sargent's instigation (Statewatch, 1998). Sargent and Cross were sentenced to life in prison in January 1998. It was during the run-up to that trial, in an ITV World in Action broadcast, that Searchlight researchers and former Combat 18 members went public with the claim that Sargent himself had been working for Special Branch, supplying information about the UDA, and that the authorities had let Combat 18 run its arson and terror campaign because Sargent was operationally valuable as a source (Bell, 2023). Different analysts have treated the direct evidence for Sargent's informant status as alleged but never definitively established (Encyclopedia.com, n.d.) — a Scottish 'not proven' verdict, in effect.

What has been definitively established is that Darren Wells — Browning's right-hand man and co-author of the central C18 pamphlet — publicly stated in 2002 that he had been an informant for both Searchlight and Special Branch since the late 1990s (Notes from the Borderland, n.d.; Bell, 2023). That makes it incontrovertibly clear that the British state had informants in central positions inside the leadership circle of Combat 18, precisely while Combat 18 under Browning was carrying out the Danish letter-bomb campaign, planning the murder of a journalist — evidence the police seized in 1995 but, in Andy Bell's words, "either didn't realise what they had, or paid it no attention at all" (Bell, 2023) — and expanding internationally into Germany and the United States. The question raised by various authors — Lowles (2001) in White Riot and Ryan (2004) in Homeland — is therefore not whether there was state involvement, but how far it went.

After three decades, Combat 18 stands as banned in Canada (2019), banned in Germany (2020), and as the historical ancestor of nearly all contemporary neo-Nazi cells whose operational template — paramilitary protection of political parties, linked to terror cells, linked to music revenue, linked to transnational networks — provided the blueprint. The 2019 murder of German politician Walter Lübcke by a far-right perpetrator was, in the broadest sense, treated by Combat 18-Germany as ideologically adjacent, and the group was banned shortly afterwards (Wikipedia, 2026a). The infrastructure set up in 1992 to protect BNP meetings was, for seven years, a terror network whose leadership partly consisted of British state informants, and it was carried on under other names without its ideological continuity ever being broken — a continuity for which Myatt's O9A corpus and his National Socialist Movement formed one of the load-bearing layers.

The NSU: ten murders and shredded files

In Germany, between 1998 and 2011, a far more serious case played out, and that case shows that the Combat 18 paradox was not a British exception but the structural norm. The Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund — Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, in hiding since a January 1998 police raid in Jena — committed ten murders, three bombings and fifteen armed robberies between 2000 and 2007 (Mediendienst Integration, 2026). Nine of the victims were migrants, mostly Turkish and Greek small-business owners, and the tenth was the German police officer Michèle Kiesewetter, killed in Heilbronn in 2007 (Mediendienst Integration, 2026; Human Rights First, 2018). Until 2011, German police and press framed the killings as the "Döner murders" — as if these were Turkish underworld settlements — while the actual perpetrators were a hidden neo-Nazi cell with somewhere between one and two hundred Unterstützer (supporters) drawn from the broader far-right scene (Mediendienst Integration, 2026).

What made the NSU affair into one of the largest post-war German intelligence scandals is what surfaced during the subsequent parliamentary inquiries and the trial of Zschäpe (Munich, 2013-2018). From the mid-1990s onward, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) had informants — V-Persons — in the immediate orbit of the NSU cell and the wider Unterstützer network (Human Rights First, 2018). Andreas Temme, a V-Person of the Hessian Verfassungsschutz, was physically present in Halit Yozgat's internet café in Kassel on 6 April 2006 at the moment Yozgat was shot dead by the NSU (Human Rights First, 2018). Tino Brandt, a V-Person until 2001 for the Thuringian Verfassungsschutz, received roughly 200,000 Deutschmarks in informant payments over the years, part of which, according to his own later statements, he funnelled to the NSU Unterstützer structure (Human Rights First, 2018).

Carsten Szczepanski — V-Mann codenamed 'Piatto' — was a violent offender with an eight-year sentence who, while imprisoned, was recruited as an informant by the Brandenburg Verfassungsschutz, was released early, was able to distribute the far-right magazine United Skins from detention, and was inserted as a Funktionär into the NPD (Bundestag, 2017). Szczepanski supplied information that was used in the banning of Blood & Honour Germany — the very group he himself had helped sustain, and inside which NSU Unterstützer were also believed to be active (Bundestag, 2017). When the NSU inquiry committee asked whether recruiting a convicted violent offender as a V-Mann did not cross a red line, Brandenburg Verfassungsschutz representative Milbradt answered that Szczepanski had offered himself as a source from detention — an answer that the committee found less than reassuring (Bundestag, 2017).

On 4 November 2011, shortly after Mundlos and Böhnhardt killed themselves following a botched bank robbery in Eisenach, and on 8 November 2011 when Zschäpe turned herself in, the BfV began destroying files immediately. On 12 November 2011 — the same day the NSU confession videos became public — Axel Minrath, codename 'Lothar Lingen', had files about NSU informants shredded (Bundestag, 2017; Mediendienst Integration, 2026). The BKA had at that point formally requested all NSU-related information. BfV president Heinz Fromm resigned on 2 July 2012 under the pressure of these revelations (Bundestag, 2017). Several parliamentary inquiry committees — in the Bundestag and in the federal states of Thuringia, Saxony, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia — have since tried to reconstruct what German intelligence services actually knew and what they actively covered up (Mediendienst Integration, 2026).

German historian Hajo Funke and political scientist Steffen Kailitz have publicly argued that the NSU almost certainly had more than three core perpetrators, with local Mittäter (accomplices) who were never seriously investigated (Funke, in Mediendienst Integration, 2026). The relatives of the victims, who for years were treated as suspects themselves by police that categorically denied a racial motive, filed a complaint in 2015 with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination about institutional racism in the German police and intelligence apparatus (Human Rights First, 2018). Ten murders, thirteen years undetected, a pattern at least partially facilitated by the country's own services — this is the clearest evidence of where the Combat 18 paradox can lead when it is not structurally broken.

Sutter: the present-day mirror in the United States

In the United States, a comparable case has been running since 2003, but only became public in 2021. Joshua Caleb Sutter was convicted in 2003 for possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number and an unregistered silencer, and was recruited as an informant by the FBI from prison (Lamoureux, 2021; Winston, 2022). According to court documents in the case against Atomwaffen leader Kaleb Cole, first made public by Vice journalist Mack Lamoureux in August 2021, Sutter received more than $140,000 between 2003 and 2021 for his work as a confidential informant, of which $78,133 was specifically for his work inside Atomwaffen Division between February 2018 and 2021 (Lamoureux, 2021).

What makes the Sutter case especially significant is that during this period Sutter was not merely an informant: he was simultaneously the most influential proselytiser of the Order of Nine Angles in the United States. Through his publishing house Martinet Press, founded in 2014, Sutter put out, among other titles, Liber 333, Iron Gates and Bluebird — books that Atomwaffen Division treated as required reading and in which murder, torture, rape and child sexual abuse are framed as satanic initiation practices (Winston, 2022; Lamoureux, 2021). Sutter and his wife Jillian Scott Hoy founded Tempel ov Blood, a nexion of the O9A which, from 2017 onward and under the leadership of John Cameron Denton, ideologically took over Atomwaffen Division and steered it in a more strongly satanic-accelerationist direction (Winston, 2022). Hoy was not a side figure but a co-leader of Tempel ov Blood and director of Martinet Press; in internal ToB correspondence brought out by journalist Nate Thayer, Sutter and Hoy used the titles "Master of the Tempel" and "Blood-Mistress", and Hoy used the name of Savitri Devi as a Facebook pseudonym for years (Middlebury Institute/CTEC, 2024).

Here David Myatt returns for the third time in this story, and this time as the direct line to the present-day 764 network. Sutter, under the pseudonym Wulfran Hall, interviewed Myatt as early as 2005 in Fenrir, an O9A publication. The corpus that Myatt had written from 1973 onward under the name Anton Long — with insight roles, transgression as initiation, and violence as spiritual praxis — was put into circulation in the United States by Sutter and Hoy through Martinet Press as militant accelerationist literature. According to journalist Nate Thayer, at least nine members of the Sutter-linked Tempel ov Blood held key positions inside Atomwaffen Division — the same group on which Sutter was informing for the FBI (Thayer/NK News, 2013; Winston, 2022). Atomwaffen members have since been convicted in the United States of murder, conspiracy to intimidate journalists, and planning attacks on infrastructure. In Italy in 2020, the American soldier Ethan Melzer, an O9A adept and member of the Sutter-adjacent Rapewaffen cell, was arrested for planning an attack on his own 173rd Airborne Brigade during deployment in Turkey (Winston, 2022).

From 2021 onward, O9A ideology built a direct bridge to the 764 network, classified by the American FBI as nihilistic violent extremism and by the Dutch police CTER unit as nihilistic accelerationism (Veiligheidsalliantie, 2025). The Wikipedia entry on O9A states that its visual aesthetic was "widely adopted within the 764 network that emerged from the United States in 2021", and Wired journalist Ali Winston wrote in 2022 that O9A is "ever-present in the most violent corners of the contemporary far right" (Wikipedia, 2026e; Winston, 2022). That network, of which Dutch authorities now have around seventy young — often underage — adherents under investigation, is in a direct ideological line out of publications by someone on the FBI payroll, based on a corpus that the British Column 88 figure Myatt had laid down in the 1970s.

The Pine Hall Brick anomaly

Around Sutter, a real-estate matter arises that gives the informant paradox an additional dimension. On 7 February 2003 — five days before Sutter's arrest — the Strunk family sold a property in Lexington County, South Carolina, to Pine Hall Brick Co., based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for $80,000. On 31 July 2003, Pine Hall Brick sold the same property on to David T. and Laura Darlene Sutter — Joshua's parents — for $5,000. A difference of $75,000, in a transaction between two parties with no other discernible business relationship to Lexington County. Pine Hall Brick had no other recorded transactions in Lexington County before or after this one. The deed was further corrected in February 2004, and a Wells Fargo mortgage runs on the land. These are not ordinary real-estate movements.

What that property became next is documented across several source layers. As early as 2013, journalist Nate Thayer documented for NK News that the Sherwood Drive property functioned as the headquarters of the Rural People's Party (RPP) and the Songun Politics Study Group USA — Sutter's pro-North Korean organisations from that period — and published photographs of the mobile home on the lot, complete with a North Korean flag and Kim portraits (Thayer/NK News, 2013). In the same article, Kevin Walsh, a participant in the pro-North Korean network, said he suspected the Rural People's Party was being run by the FBI. Later summaries of the Sutter case go further: the Wikipedia entry on Joshua Caleb Sutter, citing Zenn (2023) among others, states that the FBI used Sutter's family home as part of an operation against pro-North Korean Americans, and Wired journalist Ali Winston confirms that Tempel ov Blood, the Rural People's Party and New Bihar Mandir were "based at or near" Sutter's property in South Carolina (Wikipedia, 2026d; Winston, 2022).

Taken together, these layers make the Pine Hall Brick transaction journalistically highly relevant. The deed itself is hard primary-source material: names, dates, amounts, the absence of any other Pine Hall Brick transactions in that county, the corrected deed of 2004. The function of the property as the operational headquarters of Sutter's RPP/Songun organisations has been publicly documented by Thayer since 2013. The claim that the FBI used the property for an operation of its own is source-dependent and layered: a participant's suspicion from 2013, and later summaries that are more explicit. What emerges is not a closed dossier but a well-supported anomaly with multiple source layers, in the same period in which Sutter was already being monitored by the FBI and shortly afterwards began functioning as a paid informant. At what point does infiltration end and infrastructure begin? In a real-estate transaction whose financial logic has not been publicly explained, in a mobile home that was both a Songun headquarters and — according to participants and later sources — a state operation, and in a nexion that has never been dismantled, that point can no longer be drawn.

When Sutter's informant status became public in August 2021 through the defence motion in the Cole case, the FBI kept quiet. The Order of Nine Angles continues to exist, Sutter himself still publishes via Substack, and Martinet Press is still active. Tempel ov Blood has not been dismantled. Atomwaffen has carried on under the name National Socialist Order, with Sutter involved at some level (Winston, 2022). The legal disruption that Sutter's informant work should theoretically have brought has, in practice, turned into network reinforcement — because in deploying Sutter, the FBI necessarily had to keep alive the very ideological infrastructure he was building, in order not to lose his cover.

The Dutch pattern: documentation without political translation

All of these structural dynamics are present in the Netherlands, and the AIVD documents them systematically and in numbers. The 2025 annual report explicitly names accelerationism as the largest and most dominant source of inspiration for far-right terrorist violence, with several hundred adherents in the Netherlands (AIVD, 2026). In this same report, the service introduces the new category of nihilistic violent extremism. In addition, research by HCSS in cooperation with the Capitol Terrorists Exposers found that around seventy Dutch youths — many of them minors — are active in the 764/COM network, where, via Telegram, Discord and Roblox, incitement to self-harm, animal abuse, suicide and lethal violence takes place (HCSS/CTE; Cops in Cyberspace, 2026). The AIVD signals that antisemitism is dominant within far-right terrorist groups and that six of the eleven people detained in 2025 for concrete plans of violence were under the age of 24 (AIVD, 2026).

Political scientist Jelle van Buuren of the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University documented the O9A bridge explicitly in De Groene Amsterdammer in June 2025: under the influence of O9A, accelerationist groupings such as Atomwaffen Division, Feuerkrieg Division and Rapewaffen Division took up satanism, paedophilia, rape and murder into their repertoire, turning the nihilistic 764 milieu into an attractive recruitment pool for accelerationist groups out of the harder far-right milieu (Van Buuren, 2025). Within the 764 network, documents from O9A and other satanic groupings circulate, and the ideological line runs directly back to Sutter's Martinet Press publications — and before that to Myatt's British corpus from the 1970s (Van Buuren, 2025; Veiligheidsalliantie, 2025).

At the same time, Pointer (KRO-NCRV) and the Justice for Prosperity foundation, run by former AIVD officer Jelle Postma, identified at least 35 local Defend groups in the Netherlands in March 2026, mostly grown out of football hooligan scenes around The Hague and 's-Hertogenbosch (NOS, 2026). Defend Netherlands — recently rebranded as Defend United — has an operational core of fifty to sixty people who travel the country to anti-AZC demonstrations, with the explicit strategy of staging small protests at town halls where actual decisions are made, on the reasoning that ten people shouting there have more impact than hundreds on an empty Malieveld (NOS, 2026). The Loosdrecht riots of late April 2026 — multiple evenings of riot-police deployment, an injured officer, fireworks and cans thrown at police, vandalism of the town hall on King's Day — fit inside this strategy, and on 30 April Lidewij de Vos, parliamentary leader of FvD, publicly aligned herself with the protest under the framing of peaceful resistance (Hart van Nederland, 2026).

OneWorld documented at the end of April 2026 that public support for asylum reception is in fact relatively broad, and that fifty to sixty active Defend supporters are generating disproportionate media attention — creating the impression that resistance to asylum reception is widely shared, when the opposite is true (OneWorld, 2026). Researcher Remco from the antifascist research collective Kafka, which has been documenting the far right since the late 1980s, estimates the active hard core at these fifty to sixty people who travel structurally (OneWorld, 2026).

Here is where the selective political translation becomes visible. The AIVD annual report mentions — in the same paragraph, of comparable length — about ten people in the Netherlands tied to a European political network aimed at fundraising and lobbying for Hamas, and signals that this network is involved in broader organisations that organise demonstrations on behalf of a larger part of the Palestinian community (AIVD, 2026). The report adds explicitly that those demonstrations did not lead to violent incidents in 2025 (AIVD, 2026).

On these ten people followed, within weeks, a chain of political action: JA21 council member Italiaander filed formal council questions in Amsterdam about the role of Hamas in anti-Israel protests (NIW, 2026), the Nederlands Israëlitisch Weekblad translated the finding directly to the Palestinian Community in the Netherlands (PGNL) as the embodied organisation (NIW, 2026), and in the British parallel, fast-tracked legislation and calls for protest bans followed (ITV News, 2026). On the several hundred accelerationists and seventy 764 youths, no comparable chain followed — no parliamentary questions linking political parties to those networks the way Hamas was linked to PGNL, no fast-tracked legislation on far-right terror financing, no calls to ban Defend demonstrations, no extra millions for the protection of mosques in the same period in which synagogues did receive targeted millions.

The AIVD finding, then, is not unequal; the political translation of it is. Ten non-violent lobbyists lead to legislation and protest bans; several hundred violence-prone accelerationists lead to a paragraph in an annual report.

What the pattern teaches us

Six decades, four countries, four different names — Combat 18, NSU, Atomwaffen, 764/COM — and the same structural pattern showing up in every decade. Running through all four is David Myatt: from Column 88 in the 1970s, to Combat 18 and the National Socialist Movement in the 1990s, to the O9A corpus that — via Sutter and Martinet Press — shaped the Atomwaffen culture, to the 764 network whose visual and operational aesthetic today goes directly back to that same corpus. The ideological infrastructure (Mason's Siege, Myatt's Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution and Anton Long corpus, Sutter's publications) keeps circulating regardless of arrest waves. The informant structures provide operational value to the services and at the same time keep alive the networks they observe. Political and media attention is selectively pulled toward threats that are politically useful for expanding powers and curtailing protest, not necessarily toward threats that are quantitatively the most serious. And every new generation watches the previous one being dismantled, learns from the organisational lessons, and shows up younger and more rapidly radicalised than the one before (AIVD, 2026; Van Buuren, 2025).

Three observations follow. First: the AIVD in 2026 is essentially documenting what the BfV should have been able to document in 2011 and what MI5 already knew in 1997. The services are not blind to the pattern. The question is what gets done with that knowledge beyond the annual reports. Second: the informant paradox that ties Combat 18, the NSU, and Sutter together is not an incident but a structural feature of how state services deal with far-right networks. Deploying informants obliges the services to keep alive the very ideological infrastructure within which those informants can function. Third: the selective political translation of security findings — in which far-right violence potential receives quantitatively less political attention than numerically smaller but politically more usable threats — is not a recent development but the norm since at least the 1990s.

The Dutch situation of 2026 is, then, not historically exceptional; it is consistent with a pattern whose operational logic is six decades old. For investigative journalism and OSINT work, a productive line of inquiry follows from this. The question is not whether current authorities know what is happening on the far-right flank — they do, and their own documentation can be cited. The question is why the political translation of that documentation consistently filters in the same direction, which actors have an interest in that filtering, and what pattern the filter structure makes visible over time. Column 88 in 1970-1983, Combat 18 in 1992-1998, the NSU in 1998-2011, Sutter-Atomwaffen-O9A in 2003-2021, 764/COM and Defend NL in 2021 to the present — taken together, these cases form a single story about a continuity of toleration in which the names change but the pattern does not.

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