TheNorthern League was aneo-Nazi organisation founded byRoger Pearson. It was active in theUnited Kingdom and in northern continental Europe in the latter half of the 20th century.
Roger Pearson established the Northern League in collaboration withPeter Huxley-Blythe, who had been active in severalneo-Nazi organizations with connections inGermany andNorth America.[1] The League published the periodicalThe Northlander.[2]
According to its founders, the League’s stated objective was to preserve the so-called "Nordic race" from what they described as the "annihilation of our kind" and to "fight for survival against forces which would mongrelize our race and civilization".[3] The Northern League later merged its publications with those of theBritons Publishing Company, anantisemitic press and one of the principal distributors of theProtocols of the Elders of Zion.
Prominent members included the Nazi racialeugenicistHans F. K. Günther, who continued to publish under a pseudonym in the post-war period. Other figures associated with the League wereRobert Gayre, founder ofMankind Quarterly; its editorsRobert E. Kuttner andDonald A. Swan; the AmericansegregationistEarnest Sevier Cox; and formerWaffen-SS officer and post-war neo-Nazi leaderArthur Ehrhardt. Several post-war British fascists were also involved. Contemporary observers, including other far-right groups, regarded the Northern League as particularly extreme in its racial ideology.[4]
Among its co-founders and later activists wasAlastair Harper, who stood as aUnited Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) parliamentary candidate forDunfermline West in 2001.[5]
Northern League publications adopted the rhetoric and style ofscientific racism, drawing influence from authors such asRaymond B. Cattell, a collaborator of Pearson. The League’sStatement of Aims reflected nineteenth-century concepts ofRasse andVolk.Andrew S. Winston of theUniversity of Guelph analyzed the group’s ideology as follows:
According to the “Aims”, Northern Europeans are described as “the purest survival of the great Indo-European family of nations, sometimes referred to as theCaucasian race and at other times as the Aryan race.” It asserted that most “classic civilizations of the past were the product of these Indo-European peoples.” Intermarriage with conquered populations was said to lead to the decay of those civilizations, particularly through unions with slaves. The “rising tide of color,” according to the League, threatened to overwhelm European society and bring about the “biological annihilation of the subspecies.”[6]