Two Canadians Arrested, Charged With Terrorism For Participating in Neo-Nazi Groups

The RCMP, Canada’s federal police force, have announced terrorism charges against two men accused of supporting the neo-Nazi movement.

The arrests come after an 18-month investigation, according to an RCMP press release Friday. The press release does not name the two men but reads the two were involved in “the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division (AWD) recruiting videos, in support of far-right extremism and the neo-Nazi terrorist movement.”

The first individual charged is facing eight counts, which include three counts of commission of hate crimes offenses for a terrorist group, two counts of participation in the activities of a terrorist group, one count of facilitating terrorist activity, one count of instructing a person to carry out terrorist activity, and one count of counseling the commission of a terrorism offense. The other individual is just facing one charge of participation in the activities of a terrorist group.

“Investigators uncovered evidence supporting criminal charges against two individuals,” reads the press release. “In 2021, Atomwaffen Division became a listed terrorist entity in Canada. After the listing, many former Atomwaffen Division members joined Active Club Canada. Members of Active Club Canada have been observed performing combat training exercises in local community parks, as pictured below. Members of the group have ties to a group called the Hammerskins in Durham region.”

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Atomwaffen was built around the ideology of militant accelerationism, meaning its aim was to hasten the fall of society so members could build a white ethnostate out of the ashes. The extreme nature of the ideology and members led to the group being connected to multiple murders and other various crimes.

The Terrorgram Collective, which both are accused of being a part of, is an online collection of militant accelerationists who create work in the attempts to inspire terror attacks in the vein of Christchurch where 52 Muslims were killed by a neo-Nazi live streaming the attack. In October of 2022, a man in Bratislava shot up a LGBTQ nightclub, killing two before turning the gun on himself. In his manifesto he mentioned the collective by name—some researchers even believe that members of the collective even helped the neo-Nazi murderer write his manifesto.

“These arrests, and the associated charges, demonstrate the severity of the terrorist threat from militant accelerationism. The significance of RCMP specifically identified their role in the creation of the Terrorgram Collective’s terrorist content - materials that have inspired terror attacks and radical many - cannot be understated. The militant accelerationism movement and its associated entities like AWD and Active Clubs present a clear and present danger to our societies,” Matt Kriner, a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told VICE News.