From Canada to Finland, a US neo-Nazi fight club is rapidly spreading across the globe

 

‘Active clubs’ that use martial arts to espouse far-right, fascist ideologies are proliferating in the US and abroad

More than a dozen men wearing black masks and sunglasses – obstructing any open source investigators from easily identifying them – appeared in a Telegram video in front of city hall in London, Canada, in June.

“Mass deportations now,” the men yelled in unison, holding up banners with the same slogan. “No blood for Israel.”

While this type of scene with masked men chanting is a relatively common occurrence in the US, this incident in Canada illustrated the underbelly of a surging global movement: neo-Nazi “active clubs”, American-born neofascist fight clubs, are rapidly spreading across borders.

London, a larger Canadian city in what is a rust belt in the province of Ontario, has had a long history with the Ku Klux Klan dating back to the 1920s and a racist murder of a Pakistani-Canadian family in 2021. But the arrival of an active club, which has also shown itself in other nearby towns and cities like Toronto (the country’s largest metropolitan area), is a relatively new development.

“Welcome to Hamilton, our city,” one Telegram post from the same Canadian active club wrote with its symbol posted on a sticker beside a sign for one of Ontario’s largest cities. “Folk-Family-Future!”

Around the world, Canada isn’t the only country being introduced to these clubs, which are fitness and mixed martial arts groups operating out of local gyms and parks that espouse neo-Nazi and fascist ideologies. Already proliferating across the US in a number of states, active clubs openly take their historical cues from the Third Reich’s obsession with machismo and their modern inspiration from European soccer hooliganism.  (more...)

From Canada to Finland, a US neo-Nazi fight club is rapidly spreading across the globe

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