A department of a world neo-Nazi community the UK authorities suspects of involvement in terrorist exercise is organising a two-day live performance in Budapest. It gained’t be for the primary time.
“Greater than 10 bands from Europe” will take the stage in early February, in response to the Hungarian affiliate of Blood & Honour (B&H), a UK-founded worldwide neo-Nazi music community.
The gig is the newest in a collection of worldwide neo-Nazi occasions held within the Hungarian capital, a few of which have been banned in earlier years. February is very essential for Hungarian and worldwide far-right teams. Many journey to Budapest to honour Nazi and collaborationist forces who tried to flee the besieged Hungarian capital in February 1945. They’ve billed these occasions as a ‘Day of Honour’.
“Blood & Honour is a world right-wing terrorist community,” Thorsten Hindrichs, an skilled on European far-right music scenes from the Johannes Gutenberg College of Mainz, instructed Bellingcat.
“I worry that the competition will contribute to the additional normalisation of right-wing extremism and terrorism, particularly if state safety authorities and political officers merely let it occur with out additional ado,” Hindrichs added.
“Hungary.….has declared zero tolerance towards Nazi ideology, open anti-Semitism and racism,” a consultant for the nation’s nationwide police instructed Bellingcat. The police “will take agency, unambiguous motion towards extremist manifestations, in proportion to the seriousness of the offence, the place vital.”
Live shows Are a Important Supply of Income
Live shows aren’t nearly music for the far-right. They’re additionally an essential supply of earnings from ticket gross sales and merchandise, researchers of the Worldwide Centre for Counter-terrorism (ICCT), a Netherlands-based assume tank, wrote in a 2024 evaluation. Far-right trend objects are particularly essential merchandise, as Bellingcat has proven.
The price of the February 2025 live performance is marketed on Blood & Honour’s web site at €30 as a “help charge each days” (“támogatás mindkét nap” in Hungarian), although it’s unclear from the wording in each languages whether or not this charge is for the entire occasion or 30 euros for every day. Organisers solely settle for money funds and indicated the live performance would happen “on personal land someplace in Hungary.”
Final February, Blood & Honour’s Hungarian department charged a complete of €45 for a two-day occasion. Additionally they highlighted the chance to purchase merchandise, together with objects from the so-called Blood & Honour “help store”. Whereas the department advertises merchandise on its web site, it is just out there on the market at in-person occasions. Most of the objects use open Nazi symbolism, with one shirt bearing a Totenkopf over a swastika with textual content beneath studying ‘White Energy.’
In October 2024, one other two-day neo-Nazi live performance came about at a group corridor in Csömör, a village close to Budapest. Ticket costs had been €100; a Telegram channel selling the live performance claimed 300 tickets could be out there, suggesting that ticket gross sales alone probably introduced in tens of hundreds of euros in income. Hungarian media stories have instructed that the group corridor was rented below false pretences by the neo-Nazis, with a non-public particular person reportedly claiming it was for a birthday celebration with overseas visitors. The occasion was promoted because the ten-year anniversary of the French neo-Nazi and Blood & Honour affiliate Tomasz Szkatulski’s trend model.
Native activists recognized the situation after the live performance. Utilizing a video posted on Szkatulski’s Telegram channel from the occasion and evaluating it to imagery from the group corridor, Bellingcat was in a position to independently affirm the geolocation.
Szkatulski was banned from getting into Germany and Bulgaria in 2023, following a Bellingcat investigation into the far-right “Worldwide Battle Evening” deliberate for Budapest in Could that 12 months. Szkatulski was a co-organiser and participant of the occasion.
In December 2024, yet one more neo-Nazi live performance was held simply west of Budapest, as reported by Hungarian media outlet Telex. Hosted by a Budapest-based “cultural affiliation” and music label with ties to Blood & Honour, this live performance featured worldwide neo-Nazi bands with antisemitic lyrics, together with a Greek band that brazenly advocates violence towards Jews of their songs.
The organisers of the upcoming 2025 live performance indicated on their web site that they might not be revealing the names of all of the bands slated to seem “so as to make sure the invited bands arrive.” Bands presently publicly marketed to carry out on the February live performance embrace neo-Nazi bands from Sweden, Spain, Poland and Hungary.
Banned In A number of International locations
This January, the UK authorities introduced that it was freezing all property within the nation owned by Blood & Honour and its associates below counter-terrorism sanctions.
“The UK Authorities has.…affordable grounds to suspect [Blood & Honour] of being concerned in terrorist actions by means of selling and inspiring terrorism, in search of to recruit individuals for that function and making funds out there for the needs of its terrorist actions,” the federal government acknowledged.
Blood & Honour: A Transient Historical past of Bans
2000: Blood & Honour banned in Germany
2010: Spain additionally bans B&H
2019: Affiliate in France dissolved by authorities decree
2019: German politician Walter Lübcke assassinated by a far-right extremist with hyperlinks to Fight 18, a violent affiliate group of Blood & Honour
2019: Canada designates each Blood & Honour and Fight 18 as terrorist organisations2020: Fight 18 banned in Germany
Regardless of this, skilled Thorsten Hindrichs instructed Bellingcat that he “wouldn’t be shocked if a number of the earnings generated in Budapest additionally benefited the British [affiliate] of Blood & Honour.”
Blood & Honour’s Associates: Legio Hungaria
Blood & Honour and Fight 18 produce other far-right mates in Hungary. Considered one of them is Legio Hungaria which has been the principle organiser behind a number of so-called ‘Day of Honour’ occasions in Budapest. Legio Hungaria additionally has hyperlinks to the worldwide Energetic Membership motion.
In 2023, Legio Hungaria’s chief, Béla Incze, publicly admitted that his organisation has a “sturdy relationship” with Fight 18. The interview was revealed on an internet site run by American white nationalist Greg Johnson, who reportedly moved to Budapest in 2019 after being deported from Norway.
Incze is a veteran of Hungary’s far-right scene. In 2010, he reportedly instructed Hungarian journalists he was not anti-semitic however merely preventing for a world “with out Jews”. He was arrested in 2012 after being accused, alongside a far-right politician, of defacing a Holocaust memorial for Jewish victims of Hungarian Nazi collaborators with antisemitic slogans that reportedly included “Not your nation, you filthy Jews!”
Different teams with which Incze claimed Legio Hungaria has a “sturdy relationship” embrace the Hammerskins, a world neo-Nazi gang banned in Germany in 2023, and Betyársereg (Outlaws Military), a far-right group led by a former Blood & Honour member who served virtually two years in jail for aggravated assault on a Roma Hungarian.
In 2022, Legio Hungaria posted on its public Telegram channel about an occasion it “collectively organised” with C18’s Hungarian affiliate honouring a former Waffen-SS member. The put up praised the previous Nazi soldier for having “remained devoted” to the SS motto.
In 2020 Legio Hungaria was a part of a live performance occasion to honour Ian Stuart Donaldson, the neo-Nazi founding father of Blood & Honour. In a Telegram put up, Legio Hungaria indicated they might have propaganda supplies, merchandise and a “recruitment station” arrange for his or her group on the 2020 neo-Nazi live performance.
Neither Blood & Honour nor Legio Hungaria replied to Bellingcat’s requests for remark; Legio Hungaria’s chief, Béla Incze, posted a response on his private Telegram channel.
Within the posts, he acknowledged that neither he nor another Legio Hungaria chief would reply to Bellingcat’s inquiry. He additionally stated that the Hungarian B&H and Hungarian C18 had been affiliated teams that had been organising private and non-private occasions for a few years. “If their actions had been in any means linked to terrorism or help for terrorism, they might have been contacted by the related authorities way back,” Béla Incze posted.
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