Iron Man 2 Movie Internet Archive

[Lyric Maro]

Mostcoverage of the neo-fascist accelerationist terrorist movement in the United States has, so far, treated the Atomwaffen Division as an umbrella organization and more recent groups such as The Base as its spinoffs. In the June 2021 issue of this publication, Alex Newhouse argued that, rather than an umbrella organization or the top of a hierarchical network, the Atomwaffen Division should be viewed instead as one node in a distributed transnational neo-fascist accelerationist network.1 The backbone of this network is a group of organizations that grew out of Iron March, a neo-fascist web forum that was active from 2011 to 2017.

Although there has always been cross-border contact between neo-fascist movements, most neo-fascist terrorist groups, such as The Ordere in the United States and the Black Brigadesf in Italy, have been local ethnonationalist organizations. The skull mask network internationalized without a territorial base because it began as a closed international social network and only turned to terrorist violence later in its development. This process is distinct from that by which an international network forms around a geographically bounded movement, as in the case of the Islamic State, and from the process by which disparate local organizations become networked online after face-to-face interactions between their members, as in the case of earlier U.S.-based white nationalist groups.g

To understand the genesis of the skull mask terrorist network, it is necessary to explain both how the transnational movement came together without roots in a local territorial base, and how that network evolved toward clandestine terrorist violence. The first section of this article examines how the Iron March network acted as the online incubator of the skull mask terrorist network. The second section looks at how online members of the Iron March network built offline connections to other Iron Marchers in their vicinity and began to build in-person activist groups. Both these offline and online spaces acted as incubators for the skull mask network, the emergence of which is described in the third section of the article. The fourth section of the article examines the influence of the Order of Nine Angles on the training and indoctrination practices of the network, influences that contributed toward terrorist radicalization. The fifth section examines terrorist attacks and plots by individuals within the skull mask network and the skull mask network terrorist groups that emerged after the closure of the Iron March forum. The final section offers some conclusions.

Online Incubation: The Iron March Network

The Iron March forum served as the incubator in which the strong group identity and interpersonal bonds necessary to sustain the skull mask terrorist movement developed. Specialized online communities, whether focused on Traditionalist neo-fascism or on model trains, aggregate groups of people with shared interests and values, and facilitate the formation of both personal relationships and collective identities through sustained interaction over time, requiring only that members share a common language. In the Iron March case, the constraints of the web forum format, in particular the public visibility of forum posts and the slow pace of discussion, drove members who wanted to have private, real-time interactions to other platforms more suited to one-on-one conversation or discussion in small groups. This network of private groups served as the incubator for the common identity and strong social bonds necessary to maintain a transnational clandestine movement.

From the beginning, Iron March had a transnational userbase, although it is impossible to extract complete user statistics from available archives because Iron March did not retain information on accounts that were deleted or banned. Nevertheless, the posts and messages themselves provide a rough picture of the demographics of the Iron March userbase. Young people who congregated on Iron March described themselves as having grown up on social media, internet messaging, and image boards, largely disconnected from organized neo-fascism.11 Those who became involved with the Iron March community made their way to its forums both from other online communities where extremist political expression was encouraged, like 4chanh and Kiwifarms,i and from links shared on mainstream social media sites in the period before extremist content was extensively policed.12

In forum posts and in private messages, a number of Iron March members referred to failed attempts to start fascist organizations on their college campuses or in their hometowns before they joined.41 The incubation of local groups occurred in parallel with the formation of personal ties between Iron March members and the creation of informal online social spaces. From the beginning, Iron March members reached out to others who lived nearby, looking both for friendship and political alliances.42 Users regularly discussed aspirations to create in-person organizations ranging from militant cells to think tanks to social clubs.43 Meanwhile, both in the Iron March forum and in private Iron March messages, users tried to make contact with other members in the same geographic area.44 The forum moderators actively encouraged this by creating dedicated sub-forums for any country with enough active Iron March members interested in that country to sustain discussion.45

The new Iron March groups were already networked together because of their common origin on the forum, which continued to fulfill its prior role as a space in which ideology and aesthetic values were defined even as it also became the locus of collaboration between the new in-person groups. It is clear from the private message logs that the founders of National Action, Atomwaffen Division, Skydas (a Lithuanian group), and Antipodean Resistance were in regular contact with each other both on Iron March and on other online services.46 Members saw the groups as an extension of Iron March: By 2017, official Iron March materials created by the site administrators to promote groups founded by Iron March members divided the Iron March Global Fascist Fraternity into affiliated groups, directly created either by Iron March members or through Iron March-related activity, and supported groups with which Iron March members sympathized and which in some cases had membership overlap with Iron March.47

Based on the experiences of the Iron March members who founded National Action, the Iron March leadership drew up activist manuals to assist other members who were interested in starting local in-person groups.55 The private message logs show that Iron March members coordinated directly with National Action activists in setting up Atomwaffen Division in the United States, Skydas in Lithuania, and Antipodean Resistance in Australia.56 The founders of these new groups received endorsements, advice on organizational matters, assistance with websites and donation drives, and even propaganda design from the Iron March moderators.57

A National Action member was responsible for the third and last plot linked to Iron March before the site went offline. In fall 2017, Jack Renshaw of National Action was arrested in connection with a plot hatched in July of the same year to assassinate Member of Parliament Rosie Cooper.129 Renshaw told prosecutors his plot was inspired by the murder of Jo Cox by far-right extremist Thomas Mair in 2016 and that he targeted her because of her pro-immigration views.130 Renshaw pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2019.131

New skull mask network nodes have been founded since the end of the Iron March forum. The post-Iron March skull mask network is much more fluid, with groups forming and dissipating quickly in response to law enforcement actions.132 As Alex Newhouse has outlined in this publication, the post-Iron March skull mask network is not strongly hierarchical: Individual groups have internal hierarchies, but network-level cohesion is maintained through shared aesthetic and ideological commitments and through overlaps in membership rather than through top-down organization.133 The Base and Feuerkrieg Division were the largest and most active nodes to emerge after the disappearance of Iron March.

Smaller skull mask groups have also planned terror attacks and, in one case, have attempted to create cross-ideological coordination with jihadis. Ethan Melzer,o a private in the U.S. Army, was arrested in Italy in summer 2020 for his alleged involvement in a plot to attack an overseas U.S. military base.153 Prosecutors allege that Melzer was affiliated with O9A and with a small skull mask group called Rapewaffen, about which little is known.154 His O9A associates claim to have been in contact with al-Qa`ida operatives who were meant to assist with the attack.155

Conclusion

Iron March served as the incubator in which the ideologies, aesthetics, and interpersonal bonds necessary to sustain the skull mask network developed. Frustrated at the lack of compatible local groups to join, Iron March users created their own local organizations that were networked from the beginning by their common origin on the forums. Later, the introduction of O9A rituals provided a convenient method for habituating members to violence and creating a shared sense of commitment to militancy. Together with constant communication among members, these factors allowed the network to survive the loss of Iron March as an organizing platform and the subsequent transition to a more diffuse mode of organizing.

The survival since 2017 of the skull mask network, despite the loss of Iron March as an organizing platform, shows that takedowns of public, centralized, online organizing platforms are not necessarily enough to disrupt violent extremist networks if members have already formed strong social connections that can survive the migration to other communication services. Even after a group loses its centralized platform and disperses across small groups on encrypted messaging services, the social connections necessary to repair the network after de-platforming can persist as long as enough individuals are able to maintain membership in multiple nodes in the network. Disrupting the skull mask network will depend on breaking down the social bonds that connect members at the individual level, not merely on closing down centralized platforms.

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