Alex Constantine - September 24, 2023
By Alex Constantine
Predatory Birds of a Feather ...
Proud Boys reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (Maranie R Staab/AFP/Getty Images)
Americans generally can't see the forest fire for the trees, unaware of living in an international fear factory where heated far-right rhetoric at home translates into political upheaval overseas.
There are also direct interactions between domestic and foreign Nazi groups. Ranking members of the Rise Above Movement, a neo-Nazi gang of street brawlers in southern California, mingle with their corollaries in Europe. The Hitler-worshipping Atomwaffen Division mixed with their peers in England, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere.
In April 2020, the U.S. State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) as Specially Designated Global Terrorists. "Russia's RIM has forged links with American white supremacists," The Guardian noted on November 7, 2019.
This September 19, England's Independent reported that German authorities "banned a neo-Nazi group with roots in the United States, and raided the homes of 28 members nationwide." This gang paraded under the banner "Hammerskins Deutschland," a spin-off of the "Hammerskins Nation", a group that boasts it constitutes the skinhead elite. (The number of Germans engaged in ultra-right activism surged 14.5% to some 38,800 last year.)
The SPLC reports that since the end of WW II, "there has been a thickening web of connections between individuals and groups on the extreme right in the United States and their compatriots in Europe. Although these links were at first tenuous, involving a handful of German ex-Nazis and their fascist American admirers, they have multiplied over the years, particularly in the last decade or so. This is partly because of the rise of 'pan-Aryanism,' a white supremacist philosophy that emphasizes the idea that white revolutionaries must adopt a global strategy to succeed. In the words of American neo-Nazi William Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, 'We must understand that we are in a planet-wide race war, and survival of our race depends on our winning this war.'"
The tentacles of the National Alliance have also stretched to England, culminating with this Washington Post headline on June 17, 2016:
"Did a U.S. neo-Nazi group inspire the slaying of British lawmaker Jo Cox?" It seems Tommy Mair, the leading person of interest in the killing, "paid the National Alliance over $620 in 1999. One of the items he purchased from the neo-Nazi organization was a manual that includes instructions for building pistols, among other publications with titles such as 'Chemistry of Powder & Explosives.' ... The National Alliance was known for its virulently anti-government rhetoric, and the idea that 'the state is the organ you have to destroy."
The Counter-Terrorism Center at West Point reports that on July 25, 2020, "a blog post appeared on an extreme far-right website that announced the formation of the 'National Socialist Order' (NSO), a new terrorist group situated within the broader neo-Nazi accelerationist milieu. The NSO declared that it would 'build an Aryan, National Socialist world by any means necessary.'" The NSO "represents one example of a much larger trend within neo-Nazi accelerationism around the world: the continual collapse, reshuffling, and reemergence of groups over time."
Violent extremists in Europe have influential friends in the US, as two US senators discovered in March, 2017, when Sen Ben Cardin issued the following press release:
'U.S. Senators Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) today called on the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to investigate whether senior White House counterterrorism advisor Dr. Sebastian Gorka falsified his U.S. naturalization application by failing to disclose his membership in a Hungarian neo-Nazi organization. According to the Forward, leaders of the Historical Vitézi Rend have identified Dr. Gorka as a member of the organization who took a 'lifelong oath of loyalty.'
“'We note that this Administration has expressed a special interest in ensuring that those with extremist views do not exploit our immigration laws,' the senators wrote. 'We are deeply concerned by reports that Dr. Gorka concealed the material fact of his membership in the Vitézi Rend, a far-right anti-Semitic Hungarian organization, when he applied for U.S. citizenship.'”