David Myatt

Personal life

Myatt grew up in Tanzania, where his father worked as a civil servant for the British government, and later in the Far East, where he studied the martial arts. He moved to England in 1967 to complete his schooling, and has said that he began a degree in physics but did not complete it, leaving his studies to focus on his political activism. He is reported to live in the Midlands and to have been married three times.

According to Professor 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 Professor 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" not only involved studying Taoism and spending time in a Buddhist and later a Christian monastery, but also allegedly involved exploring the occult, and Paganism and what Michael calls "quasi-Satanic" secret societies, while remaining a committed National Socialist.

Myatt is also alleged to have been the founder of the occult group the Order of Nine Angles (ONA/O9A) 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 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, and using the pseudonym Anton Long. and has repeatedly challenged his accusers to provide evidence of such allegations, which so far they have failed to do. Academic George Sieg expressed doubts regarding Myatt being Long, writing that he considered it to be "implausible and untenable based on the extent of variance in writing style, personality, and tone" between Myatt and Long's writings. Jeffrey Kaplan also 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.

In 2000, British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight wrote that: "[Myatt] does not have the appearance of a Nazi ideologue ... [S]porting a long ginger beard, Barbour jacket, cords and a tweed flat cap, he resembles an eccentric country gentleman out for a Sunday ramble. But Myatt is anything but the country squire, for beneath this seemingly innocuous exterior is a man of extreme and calculated hatred. Over the past ten years, Myatt has emerged as the most ideologically driven nazi in Britain, preaching race war and terrorism [...] Myatt is believed to have been behind a 15-page document which called for race war, under the imprint White Wolves."

At a 2003 UNESCO conference in Paris, which concerned the growth of anti-Semitism, it was stated that "David Myatt, 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 (the military wing) section of the Hamas website.

Since 2010, Myatt has written extensively about his rejection of both Islam and his extremist past, writing that: "What I [...] came to understand, via pathei-mathos, was the importance - the human necessity, the virtue - of love, and how love expresses or can express the numinous in the most sublime, the most human, way. Of how extremism (of whatever political or religious or ideological kind) places some abstraction, some ideation, some notion of duty to some ideation, before a personal love, before a knowing and an appreciation of the numinous."

In addition to writing about Islam and National Socialism, Myatt has translated works by Sophocles, Sappho, Aeschylus, Homer, translated and written a commentary on the Greek texts of the Poimandres, Ιερός Λόγος, κρατῆρ ἡ μονάς, and five other sections of the Corpus Hermeticum, and written several collections of poems. He has also developed a mystical philosophy which he calls both The Numinous Way and the Way of Pathei-Mathos, and invented a three-dimensional board-game, the Star Game. He is currently translating and writing a commentary on the Greek text of the Gospel of John and has so far made publicly available Chapters 1 to 4.

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 would later become 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, and 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. He also co-founded, with Eddy Morrison, the neo-Nazi organization the NDFM (National Democratic Freedom Movement) which was active in Leeds, England, in the early 1970s, and the neo-Nazi Reichsfolk group, and which 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'".

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, writing in his autobiography Myngath, admits that during this time he did organize a small gang "whose aim was to liberate goods, fence them, and make some money with the initial intent of aiding our political struggle." Myatt was subsequently arrested in a raid by the Yorkshire Regional Crime Squad, and imprisoned for leading this gang.

It is also alleged that in the early 1980s Myatt tried to establish a Nazi-occultist commune in Shropshire, although Myatt denies this allegation, claiming that his aim was to establish an agrarian community solely based on the Nazi principles of Blood and Soil and which project was advertised in Colin Jordan's Gothic Ripples newsletter, with Goodrick-Clark writing that "after marrying and settling in Church Stretton in Shropshire, [Myatt] 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 posted an allegedly racist and anti-Semitic pamphlet he had written called Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution on a website run out of 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, "[t]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, but the case was dropped because the evidence supplied by the Canadian authorities was not enough to secure a conviction.

It was this pamphlet that, in 1999, allegedly influenced David Copeland, the London nailbomber – who was also a member of Myatt's National Socialist Movement – and who planted 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 June 30, 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 "[t]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".

Conversion to Islam

Myatt converted to Islam in 1998. He told Professor George Michael that his decision to convert began when he took a job on a farm in England. He was working long hours in the fields and felt an affinity with nature, concluding that the sense of harmony he felt had not come about by chance. He told Michael that he was also impressed by the militancy of Islamist groups, and believed that he shared common enemies with Islam, namely "the capitalist-consumer West and international finance."

While, initially, some critics – specifically the anti-fascist Searchlight organization – suggested that Myatt's conversion "may be just a political ploy to advance his own failing anti-establishment agenda", it is now generally accepted that his conversion was genuine.

Following his conversion to Islam, Myatt dissociated himself from nationalism and racialism, openly stating that racism is wrong.

As a Muslim, he travelled and spoke in several Arab countries, and wrote one of the most detailed defences in the English language of Islamic suicide attacks – having become an advocate of such attacks and defended the killing of civilians in such attacks. He also expressed support for Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban, and referred to the Holocaust as a "hoax". An April 2005 NATO workshop heard that Myatt had called on "all enemies of the Zionists to embrace the Jihad" against Jews and the United States.

According to an article in The Times published on 24 April 2006, Myatt then believed that: "The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West ... For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy... Jihad is our duty. If nationalists, or some of them, desire to aid us, to help us, they can do the right thing, the honourable thing, and convert, revert, to Islam — accepting the superiority of Islam over and above each and every way of the West."

Departure from Islam

In 2010, Myatt publicly announced that he had rejected Islam, having developed his own weltanschauung, writing that "the Way of Pathei-Mathos is an ethical, an interior, a personal, a non-political, a non-interfering, a non-religious but spiritual, way of individual reflexion, individual change, and empathic living, where there is an awareness of the importance of virtues such as compassion, humility, tolerance, gentleness, and love", and that "living according to the way of pathei-mathos [...] means being compassionate or inclining toward compassion by trying to avoid causing, or contributing, to suffering".

"The Numinous Way" and Pathei-Mathos

Myatt describes the Numinous Way as "the result of a four-decade long pathei-mathos and [...] the often difficult process of acknowledging my many personal mistakes", and writes that it is an apolitical, and individual, way of life, based on empathy and πάθει μάθος, pathei-mathos, where race and the concept of the folk not only have no place but are regarded as unethical abstractions.

He defines pathei-mathos by saying: "The Greek term πάθει μάθος derives from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (written c. 458 BCE), and can be interpreted, or translated, as meaning learning from adversary, or wisdom arises from (personal) suffering; or personal experience is the genesis of true learning." Pathei-Mathos is thus an aspect of or element in the Numinous Way, although the former term comes to predominate over the latter in Myatt's writings beginning 2012.

Myatt writes that "the numinous sympathy – συμπάθεια (sympatheia, benignity) – with another living being that empathy provides naturally inclines us to treat other living beings as we ourselves would wish to be treated: with fairness, compassion, honour, and dignity. It also inclines us not to judge those whom we do not know; those beyond the purveu – beyond the range of – our faculty of empathy".

Myatt links his Numinous Way to Hellenistic philosophy and places it in the Western philosophical tradition.