Combating Terrorism: The Challenge of America’s Violent Far Right
I’m going to go out on a limb and state that those on the right wing will claim that Arie Perliger’s recent paper published by the Army’s Combatting Terrorism Center isn’t talking about them (No True Right Winger), when Perliger highlights the challenges and threats posed by the American violent far-right.
The paper notes three ideological movements within the violent far-right: a
racist/white supremacy movement, an anti-federalist movement and a fundamentalist movement.
As Charles and others at LGF have been pointing out for quite a while now, there’s been a confluence of these movements across the nation, including appearances at 2d Amendment events.
So, what feeds into this violence? Well, politics plays a significant role. Attacks tend to rise preceding national elections, and there’s a relationship between the identity of the party controlling the legislature (a weaker relationship was established between party of President and far right violence).
Other conclusions which can be extracted from the findings presented in Table 4 raise interesting questions. First, the two groups most involved in mass-casualty attacks—Christian Identity and Militias—are the most lethal. Nonetheless, overall the great majority of attacks are perpetrated against specific individuals or facilities, and the far
right has limited tendencies or capabilities to engage in mass-casualty attacks. This may be the result of limited capabilities, an attempt to avoid further de-legitimization—important mainly for groups operating in the domestic arena—or because they are not deprived groups which feel hopeless. The latter assumption is compatible with some of
the more popular explanations for extreme violence, such as suicide terrorism. For instance, Pape emphasized that groups who adopt this tactic are mostly those whose constituency is suffering long-term occupation.The Militias and the Christian Identity groups are also more prominent in terms of their use of firearms and explosives
Perliger notes that there has been a significant increase in the number of attacks perpetrated by these groups since 1990, peaking in 2008. They’ve declined some since 2008, but we’re still talking about an average of about an attack a day in 2011 (see Figure 1, page 87).
This is an ongoing problem facing the nation, and various outlets that are mainstreaming the language of the extreme right is allowing their ideology to spread. In particular, the Internet allows these groups to share information and methods as well as easily disseminate ideologies that can foment violence down the line. But it’s hardly alone - and the problem even extends to the US military.
For instance, the neo-Nazi who murdered a number of Sikhs at a Wisconsin temple, was exposed to white supremacists and a Neo-Nazi underworld that thrived within US Army at Fort Bragg. Even the military’s own Military Law Review acknowledges that soldiers had openly recruited for the National Alliance - a neo Nazi group.