In the United States, but also around the world, fascism is on the rise again, similar to what occurred in Germany and Italy after World War I. Its foot soldiers in the US include right wing extremists who enter the military, where they are welcomed and encouraged, for empowerment and training. The current Trump administration, includes Christian Nationalists, such as Pete Hegseth who heads the Pentagon, and openly supports fascist and Zionist leaders — Javier Milei in Argentina, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, to name a few. To understand the rise of neo-Nazis in the US military and law enforcement, Chris Hedges speaks with British investigative journalist Matt Kennard. For his new book, “Irregular Army,” Kennard interviewed hard-right veterans who were open about enlisting to gain the skills they need to wage RaHoWa, a Racial Holy War, at home. The book demonstrates that the War on Terror gave rise to the Trump presidency. He cites the repressive powers granted to the state under the Patriot Act, the rise of the Imperial Presidency, the loosening of restrictions on qualifications for military recruitment, the cover up of atrocities committed by military members in Afghanistan and Iraq and the epidemic of PTSD as factors that allowed White Supremacy and racism to flourish in the United States government and military brass. Hedges asks if an even more extremist body politic could develop. Kennard’s response is that many alarm bells are ringing: “I think that we’re on a slippery slope and things have been normalized now that we wouldn’t have even believed could be normalized a long time ago.” The fact that those in power do not have a cohesive strategy provides a ray of hope, but if we are to develop strategies to stop the rise of fascism, we must first understand the social and political factors that underlie it. 
Transcript Chris Hedges: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw the United States military, straining to meet recruitment quotas, jettison past restrictions, including felony convictions, membership in neo-Nazi groups, learning disabilities, psychiatric conditions, mental health concerns, or even racist tattoos. It has raised its minimum enlistment age from 35 to 42. The induction of right-wing extremists into the military has emboldened and empowered, not to mention trained, these extremists whose ideology of white supremacy and race war is embraced by the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who has several symbols and words that identify right-wing extremists tattooed on his body. Hegseth is also at the same time forcing out tens of thousands of women, Blacks, and transgender people from the military. These extremist groups have powerful allies in the Trump administration. The White House unveiled a new counterterrorism strategy that will now target narco-terrorists, Islamic terrorists, and what the Trump administration calls “violent left-wing extremists”. The far right is noticeably absent from this list, although a 2024 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that right-wing extremists had killed 112 people over the past decade, compared to 13 people killed in left-wing attacks and 82 killed in jihadist attacks. At the same time, the Trump administration has targeted groups that monitor these extremist right-wing groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigates and documents hate crimes. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been indicted on federal fraud charges by acting Attorney General Todd Blanch for allegedly improperly raising millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for inside information. The center was attacked by the Trump administration last year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk for characterizing Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled, “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024”, as a case study of the hard right in 2024. Videos and images of the January 6th storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters, such as those showing Air Force veteran Larry Brock Jr. inside the Senate chamber, wearing a tactical vest and helmet and gripping plastic handcuffs, as well as the arrests of several dozen American service members or veterans for their involvement in the incursion, are a signal that the marriage between the right-wing extremists and the military has ominous consequences domestically. Matt Kennard investigates the infusion of the extreme right into the military and its consequences in his book, “Irregular Army”. Matt is an investigative journalist and co-founder of Declassified UK, a news outlet covering British national security issues. He worked as a staff writer for the Financial Times. He is also the author of “The Racket”, which documents how the US rigs the global economy for the benefit of its elite. Matt, in the book, you interview several of these neo-Nazi hard-right veterans. I just want to begin by asking you about one of the most fascinating points that I found in those interviews, and that’s their sense of betrayal, their sense of abandonment. Matt Kennard: Yeah, but many of them who were sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan did not believe in the War on Terror. That was one of the interesting takeaways from doing all those interviews because I came into it thinking, well, this is a martial ideology and it’s a country full of brown people, so if you send racists there, they want to go and kill people. Many of course did kill people. But many of them said the reason they signed up and went out to the Middle East was because they wanted to get training courtesy of the US taxpayer and bring that training back to the United States for what they call RaHoWa, which is Racial Holy War, which is this idea that America will descend into a civil war with all the races pitted against each other, which will end with a white supremacist regime in Washington. There have been many cases of veterans actually plotting and carrying out domestic attacks who were trained in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, it was a hugely eye-opening experience. It’s also interesting how open they were about their experiences because the other thing is you would think that they would want to keep it quiet, but the story that they were telling was that they were not only welcomed, they were promoted because of their ideology while in Iraq particularly. Forrest Fogarty, who is one of the neo-Nazis I interviewed - I went down to Tampa, Florida to interview him and ended up going to the zoo with him and his kids actually - but he was talking about how his commander would say to him, “I like the fact you’re a Nazi.” And he said that he sent him on the hardest missions and liked the fact that he saw him as a warrior. Now, obviously, that’s him saying that. I can’t say that it’s true, but that was an experience I got from many of the neo-Nazi veterans I talked to, that they were welcomed and treated in a way that was like, well, it’s good to have you in here, boys. So, it’s a hugely, hugely worrying thing for every American because you have to remember that there’s two million veterans of the War on Terror in the United States now. And that includes thousands of these neo-Nazi white supremacists, tens of thousands of gang members, which is another group which was enfranchised by the War on Terror. And they’re not coming home to become priests. They’re coming home to either see out their ideological convictions in the form of Racial Holy War or, in the case of gangs, to use their resources and their training to kill other members of other gangs to help the drug trafficking regime. And the thing is this is all bubbled under the surface. So, it’s not often that it comes out to the fore. Of course it does at certain points, like in 1995 with Timothy McVeigh with the Oklahoma City bombing. That was a major, major attack that completely changed America in many ways. But he was a veteran of the first Gulf War. But there hasn’t been an attack by one of these veterans of that scale. But on a lower level, if you look at local news reports from local American newspapers, there’s criminal activity happening all the time involving the veteran community, neo-Nazis, white supremacists who served, gang members, criminals who got in through what was called the Moral Waiver Program, where they allowed felons and people guilty of serious misdemeanors, who previously wouldn’t have gotten in, to serve. So, it’s a major issue in the United States, but you wouldn’t know it if you read the media. The other important point, and I’ll end here, is we kind of are aware of what’s happening in the United States because the media covers it on the local level and law enforcement. You can’t get away with killing people and plotting terrorist attacks in the United States. But what were they doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? We don’t know a lot of the stuff that they were doing because nearly every atrocity that was committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military was denied and covered up until it got to the point that the US military couldn’t do it and that’s their ethos. I mean, I remember in the book we reference actually an article you wrote with Laila Al-Arian about the conduct of the US troops and about how carefree they were with just shooting civilians and shooting anyone on site. And there was one case, just specifically to link this policy with atrocities that were carried out. There was an infamous massacre in 2006 called the Mahmudiyah Massacre, where a group of American soldiers went to a house south of Baghdad, separated a 14-year-old girl from her family, and then killed the dad and the sisters, went into the other room, and they all raped her, and then killed her and then burnt the whole house down. Now, this was a crime that was covered. The soldiers said this was the work of insurgents, which is why they burnt the house down. That was a lie that was accepted by the US military for a while until there was a soldier that had a crisis of conscience who revealed what had actually happened. And who was the leader of that massacre? A guy called Steven D. Green, and he’d got into the US military during the War on Terror through the Moral Waiver Program. He had convictions for stuff that would previously have not allowed him to serve. So, that’s just a taste of what impact this had on the occupied population. It’s a two-front problem. And also, as you mentioned in your intro, a lot of the research I was doing on these soldiers that were getting in with swastikas and SS bolts and other things. We’ve now got a situation where it’s institutionalized. You mentioned Pete Hegseth. This is a guy that has Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest, which is Neo Crusader imagery. He’s got the word Kafir tattooed on his arm in Arabic, which is just a statement to say that he sees Islam as a threat... Please go here for the original interview and full transcript: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/how-the-war-on-terror-created-the Please go here for more from Chris Hedges: https://chrishedges.substack.com/. |
No comments:
Post a Comment