Studies show that massacres in the United States encourage radical European nationalists

Written by Danilo Albin.

The hatred of the far right smelled like gunpowder. Someone pulls the trigger and enjoys the bloodbath; There are also those who feed on weapons and explosives, waiting to be drowned. On one side or another of the Atlantic Ocean, dreams of death are one. Dream victims too. It’s white supremacy with a gun. It is the threat of far-right terrorism.

“What we need is resilience. We need these attacks not to happen, and the ideas that drive these terrorists not finding fertile ground,” Norwegian activist Bjorn Ehler was forced to write a few days ago. Shocking news emerged from the United States on his computer and around the world: a white supremacist murdered 10 people in Buffalo. He broadcast it live on the Internet. It had 22 spectators.

Eller knows what he’s talking about: in 2011 he survived a massacre by far-right Anders Breivik on the island of Utoya, in which 68 people were killed. The buffalo terrorist movie was completely indescribable. His book has been copied – literally and figuratively – from others,” as highlighted on May 20 in a text released by Antifascist Europe, an initiative promoted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation to closely monitor the activities of neo-Nazi groups on this continent.

White supremacy also exists in Spain. Last January, the National Police dismantled a cluster of such properties with ramifications in Barcelona, ​​Torrejon de Ardoz, Alcoy and Ontinente. There were a total of seven detainees who, according to the police force at the time, “formed a cohesive group through social networks, inciting hatred and extreme violence against hostile and vulnerable groups.”

Then the agents responsible for the investigation warned of the possibility of “one or several cells made up of ideologically biased people who could be arrested and indoctrinated with other ideas in order to commit acts of violence aimed at undermining the constitutional order.” During the searches, a pistol, three short rifles, imitation firearms, ammunition, knives, baseball bats and explosives manufacturing manuals were seized.

“Given the increasing seriousness of the phenomenon in other Western countries, it is necessary to pay attention to it in Spain as well, in order to take the necessary preventive measures,” according to a report published last February by the Vitoria Memorial Center for Victims of Terrorism.

In a detailed study, historians Juan Aviles Vari and José Luis Rodríguez Jiménez noted that “the most distinctive feature of the new far-right terrorism is that those who commit the attacks are unilateral actors who are not part of organizations, but are highly connected, even at the international level, through Internet networks “.

The document states that “in 2019, 1,706 hate crimes were recorded in Spain, including 320 injuries, but fortunately there were no murders; 35% of the total were ideologically motivated and 30% racist or xenophobic.” In any case, the authors of the report stress that the prosecutor’s office does not distinguish between hate crimes “whose motives respond to a particular ideology,” making it difficult to know their true scope.

Its authors note that “there is currently debate about the degree of similarity between terrorism and hate crimes.” They stressed that “the reality is that in many Western countries, far-right violence tends to be considered a hate crime, so its severity is less clear.”

This concern is reflected in the European Union Action Plan on Firearms Traffic 2020-2025. In that document, the European Commission warned that “the focus is increasingly on far-right activists, due to the stockpiling of weapons they use”. “All of this shows how firearms can increase the threat posed by organized and serious crime, including terrorism,” he noted.

As the European Union Criminal Justice Cooperation Agency (Eurojust) found at the time, “smuggling networks interacted with individual terrorists or terrorist organizations.” Along these lines, Europol’s various threat assessment reports have placed the Western Balkans “among the main regions where trafficking originates in the European Union”.

Reports specifically addressed by the European Union noted that the weapons used in terrorist attacks on European soil in recent years were “obtained through the domestic markets of illicit firearms, the provenance of which was revealed in the Balkans”.

more attention

There is other data that supports these concerns. The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP)’s 2019 Global Terrorism Index found “a 320% increase in far-right terrorism in the West in the past five years.”

The rise in far-right attacks “has led some observers to claim that domestic far-right terrorism has not been taken seriously enough in the West, and that security and intelligence services should pay more attention to this threat,” the IEP noted. .

For its part, the report published by the Memorial for Victims of Terrorism warned against “the terror of a new generation of white wolves gathered in virtual Internet communities”, which revolve in their mind around a terrifying concept: “One terrorist can kill many people.”

Researchers cite some commonalities between far-right terrorism and jihadism. As they explain, in both cases the terrorists “rely on the anxiety felt by many citizens, Western and Muslim, in the face of accelerating social change that calls into question their sense of traditional identity”, which provides them with “a base of social support that remains scant in the case of Far-right terrorism, but it may increase in the coming years.”

Civil war

Europol’s latest report on terrorism warns that “although not all white supremacists are violent, they constitute the far-right ideological component that is most likely to inspire serious violence or terrorist attacks.”

Anti-Semitism is also so present in these discourses, “that immigration and feminism are sometimes presented as instruments of a global Jewish conspiracy, or even of a Zionist shadow government aimed at eliminating the white race.”

They noted that “some anticipate the coming of a day when a civil war will begin between the ‘whites’ and their enemies, including politicians, Jews, Muslims, feminists, gays, bisexuals and transgender peoples.”

(taken from general)