White Terrorism Shows ‘Stunning’ Parallels to Islamic State’s Rise

2019/08/07 Leave a comment

Of note:

Many scholars of terrorism see worrying similarities between the rise of the Islamic State and that of white nationalist terrorism, seen most recently in the carnage in El Paso, Tex.

“The parallels are stunning,” said Will McCants, a prominent expert in the field.

And they are growing more notable with each new attack.

Experts say that the similarities are far from a coincidence. White nationalist terrorism is following a progression eerily similar to that of jihadism under the leadership of the Islamic State, in ways that do much to explain why the attacks have suddenly grown so frequent and deadly.

In both, there is the apocalyptic ideology that predicts — and promises to hasten — a civilizational conflict that will consume the world. There is theatrical, indiscriminate violence that will supposedly bring about this final battle, but often does little more than grant the killer a brief flash of empowerment and win attention for the cause.

There are self-starter recruits who, gathering in social media’s dark corners, drive their own radicalization. And for these recruits, the official ideology may serve simply as an outlet for existing tendencies toward hatred and violence.

Differences between white nationalists and the Islamic State remain vast. While Islamic State leaders leveraged their followers’ zeal into a short-lived government, the new white nationalism has no formal leadership at all.

“I think a lot of people working on online extremism saw this coming,” said J.M. Berger, author of the book “Extremism,” and a fellow with VOX-Pol, a group that studies online extremism, referring to the similarities between white nationalism and the Islamic State.

In retrospect, it is not hard to see why.

The world-shaking infamy of the Islamic State has made it a natural model even — perhaps especially — for extremists who see Muslims as enemies.

A set of global changes, particularly the rise of social media, has made it easy for any decentralized terrorist cause to drift toward ever-grander, and evermore nonsensical, violence.

“Structurally, it didn’t matter whether those extremists were jihadists or white nationalists,” Mr. Berger said.

White nationalism in all forms has been on the rise for some years. Its violent fringe was all but certain to rise as well.

The feedback loop of radicalization and violence, once triggered, can take on a terrible momentum all its own, with each attack boosting the online radicalization and doomsday ideology that, in turn, drive more attacks.

The lessons are concerning. It is nearly impossible to eradicate a movement animated by ideas and decentralized social networks. Nor is it easy to prevent attacks when the perpetrators’ ideology makes nearly any target as good as the next, and requires little more training or guidance than opening a web forum.

And global changes that played a role in allowing the rise of the Islamic State are only accelerating, Mr. Berger warned — changes like the proliferation of social networks.

“When you open up a vast new arena for communication, it’s a vector for contagion,” he said.

The nihilism that increasingly defines global terrorism first emerged in the sectarian caldron of American-occupied Iraq.

A washed-up criminal from Jordan, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, exploited the chaos brought by the American-led invasion to slaughter occupiers and Iraqi Muslims alike, circulating videos of his deeds.

Al Qaeda, for all its religious claims, had, like most terrorist groups, killed civilians in pursuit of worldly goals like an American withdrawal from the Middle East.

But Mr. Zarqawi seemed driven by sadism, a thirst for fame and an apocalyptic ideology that he is thought to have only vaguely grasped.

Al Qaeda objected, fearing he would alienate the Muslim world and distract from jihadism’s more concrete goals.

Mr. Zarqawi instead proved so popular among jihadist recruits that Al Qaeda let him fight under its name. After his death, his group re-emerged as the Islamic State.

His group’s unlikely rise hinted at a new approach to terrorism — and sheds light on why white nationalist terrorism is converging on similar beliefs and practices.

Most terrorists are not born wishing to kill. They have to be groomed. Where past terrorist groups had appealed to the political aspirations and hatreds of its recruits, Mr. Zarqawi’s found ways to activate a desire for bloodshed itself.

The American-led invasion of Iraq had seemed, for many Middle Easterners, to turn the world upside down. Mr. Zarqawi and later the Islamic State, instead of promising to turn it right side up, offered an explanation: The world was rushing toward an end-of-days battle between Muslims and infidels.

In that world, Mr. McCants wrote in 2015, “the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense.”

This gave the group justification for attacks that otherwise made little strategic sense, like killing dozens of fellow Muslims out shopping, which it said would help usher in the apocalypse foretold in ancient prophecy.

Because the attacks were easier to carry out, almost anyone could execute their own and feel like a true soldier in the glorious cause.

Jihadism retained its core political agenda. But the things that made the Islamic State’s form of terrorism so infectious also made it less strategically rational.

With an ideology that said anyone could kill for the movement and that killing was its own reward, much of the violence took on a momentum of its own.

That, some scholars say, is what appears to be happening now with the extreme wings of the white nationalist movement rising globally.

Seeing a Global Race War

The ideological tracts, recruiting pitches and radicalization tales of the Islamic State during its rise echo, almost word-for-word, those of the white nationalist terrorists of today.

For the latter, the world is said to be careening toward a global race war between whites and nonwhites.

“The Camp of the Saints,” a bizarre 1973 French novel that has since become an unofficial book of prophecy for many white nationalists, describes a concerted effort by nonwhite foreigners to overwhelm and subjugate Europeans, who fight back in a genocidal race war.

So-called manifestoes left by the terrorist attackers at Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Tex., have warned of this coming war too. They also say their attacks were intended to provoke more racial violence, hastening the fight’s arrival.

Radicalization requires little more than a community with like-minded beliefs, said Maura Conway, a terrorism scholar at Dublin City University. While white backlash to social and demographic change is nothing new, social media has allowed whites receptive to the most extreme version to find one another.

Mr. Berger, in his research, found that these deadly messages, which have had mixed success in traditional propaganda channels in all but the most dire historical moments, can spread like wildfire on social media.

He termed the message one of “temporal acceleration” — the promise that an adherent could speed up time toward some inevitable endpoint by committing violence. And the “apocalyptic narratives,” he found, exploit social media’s tendency to amplify whatever content is most extreme.

As with the Islamic State’s calls for mass murder, this worldview has resonated among young men, mostly loners, who might have previously expressed little ideological fervor or experienced much hardship. It offered them a way to belong and a cause to participate in.

And, much like the Islamic State had found, social media gave white extremists a venue on which to post videos of their exploits, where they would go viral, setting off the cycle again.

In 2015, Mr. Berger wrote that the Islamic State had been “the first group to employ these amplifying tactics on social media.” But, he added, “it will not be the last.”

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , ,

In New Orleans, Monument to White Terrorism Finally Falls – The Daily Beast

2017/04/27 Leave a comment

Interesting account of a part of American history:

Since 1891 a monument celebrating white terrorism has proudly stood in the heart of New Orleans, yet this week the city of New Orleans finally removed the Battle of Liberty Place monument. The monument celebrates an attempt by the white supremacist terrorist group the White League to overthrow the government during Reconstruction, and return the city to being ruled by white oppression. Some residents of the city decried its removal and parroted the ludicrous “History Not Hate” rhetoric, and this only serves as a continuation of the pro-Confederacy propaganda movement the South has waged since the end of Reconstruction. As a society, we can no longer tolerate succumbing to this toxicity.

On Sept. 14, 1874, the White League stormed the New Orleans police station in an attempted coup d’état to remove the governor of New Orleans, Republican William Kellogg, and replace him with John McEnery, who had been his unsuccessful Democratic challenger in the 1872 election. The White League defeated the city’s integrated police department, and took control of the city for a couple of days before President Ulysses S. Grant sent down federal troops to reclaim the city. The White League quickly surrendered the city upon the arrival of federal troops, and the Battle of Liberty Place monument exists to remember the 100 White League members who died in the battle. That is to say, it exists to celebrate those who died in a failed coup with the explicit purpose of returning Louisiana to a white dominated society.

The White League, formed in 1874, was one of the last white terrorist groups that sprang up during Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan started in 1865 upon the completion of the war. The White League was founded by Christopher Columbus Nash, a former Confederate soldier who was a prisoner of war during the Civil War. On April 13, 1873, Nash led a white militia in the Colfax Massacre that killed approximately 150 freed blacks. The massacre erupted following white fury at the election of Kellogg to the governorship in 1872. This battle is one of the single biggest massacres of Reconstruction. Soon thereafter Nash formed the White League.

“Having solely in view the maintenance of our hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization, we appeal to men of our race, of whatever language or nationality, to unite with us against that supreme danger,” read the platform of the White League.

Despite their clear racist and terroristic foundations, they represented a more palatable form of terror than the KKK. The White League was more mainstream than the KKK. This brand of terror had become normalized over the previous decade. The White League openly collaborated with the KKK, Southern Democratic politicians, and white business owners who facilitated the Redeemers movement to terrorize freed blacks and Union sympathizers to swing elections in favor of the Democratic Party.

President Grant was so alarmed by the threat to democracy that the White League posed that he wrote about them in his 1874 State of the Union Address: “White Leagues and other societies were formed; large quantities of arms and ammunition were imported and distributed to these organizations; military drills, with menacing demonstrations, were held, and with all these murders enough were committed to spread terror among those whose political action was to be suppressed, if possible, by these intolerant and criminal proceedings.”

In New Orleans, a monument to Robert E. Lee was completed in 1884, and the Battle of Liberty Place monument arrived in 1891. In the early 1900s, Confederate President Jefferson Davis received a monument in 1911, and soon thereafter the “Little Napoleon” P.G.T. Beauregard’s monument was completed in 1915. For over a century New Orleans celebrated and normalized “intolerant and criminal” white supremacy and the erosion of our democratic fabric, yet now all four of these monuments are slated for removal.

In 1932, a plaque was added at the foot of the statue describing that the purpose of the battle was for the “overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers” and that “the national election of November 1876 [that ended Reconstruction] recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.”

Since the fall of Reconstruction as before, American society has largely chosen to turn a blind eye toward the reimagining of American history along a skewed, and seemingly polite, white oppressive narrative. We hear people utter absurd statements like, “Slaves and slave-owners got along peacefully before the Civil War.” A defender of the Battle of Liberty Place monument even claimed that his ancestor who died in the battle wasn’t a racist because he did not own slaves.

And all this isn’t as ancient as you might think. The Southern Mount Rushmore in Stone Mountain, Georgia, that depicts Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson was completed not in 1912 or 1922, but in 1972—at the location of the founding of the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915. The Daughters of the Confederacy had been dreaming about this monument since roughly 1912, and construction on the stone carving had been started in 1923, but largely remained unfinished for decades. Then, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s facilitated a renewed interest in repainting Georgia’s skyline in the image of Confederate heroes. And now all of America can visit this Southern Mount Rushmore, conveniently located at 1000 Robert E. Lee Blvd.

Throughout the late 1800s and 1900s buildings, roads, schools, parks, and more have been named after treasonous Confederates to palatably normalize their terror. Children have been named after Confederate leaders, and even today I’ve had people ask me if Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III might have been named after Jefferson Davis. Considering that Jeff Sessions Sr. was born in 1860 at the cusp of the Civil War, and the reverence the South still holds for the Confederacy, this question may not be farfetched. And we may need to ask if he was also named after the “Little Napoleon” Beauregard too.

The pervasiveness of Southern oppression can creep into any aspect of American life, and historically, any form of tolerance for white racial oppression has facilitated the further spreading of white terror and a distorted, whitewashed retelling of American history. New Orleans’ decision to remove these monuments and celebrate the rich diversity that has always existed in the city is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, more municipalities will follow suit and free our society from the shackles of America’s pro-Confederate propaganda.

Source: In New Orleans, Monument to White Terrorism Finally Falls – The Daily Beast

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