Military institutions and police forces are failing to contain right-wing extremism within their ranks, and the problem goes beyond just “a few bad apples.” After news coming from Germany that an elite military unit has had to disband and a local police chief has resigned due to right-wing extremism concerns, there seems to be legitimate questions about the scale of this threat within the country’s security forces. But this is not an isolated case, as we have seen a pattern of members of the military or police being linked to the radical right in other countries too. At the beginning of the year, Germany announced that 550 soldiers were under investigation for suspicion of extremism. In Canada, an internal military briefing suggests that between 2013 and 2018, 16 members have been active members of extremist groups while 37 have engaged in racist behavior. In the UK, 4 soldiers were arrested in 2017 for linkages to the neo-Nazi proscribed group National Action. Two years ago, the British Army released a statement claiming that “far-right ideology is completely at odds with the values and ethos of the armed forces” after a video emerged of a group of soldiers cheering and taking pictures with far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Yet there has been a number of high-profile cases where individuals were found to be members of a proscribed or extremist organization while actively serving in the security forces, be that the military or the police. In the UK, for example, an investigation by anti-fascist group “Hope Not Hate” found that two members of Generation Identity were serving in the Royal Navy, with one of them set to become an engineer in a nuclear submarine. One year later, the two men have not been expelled from the Navy. A British Metropolitan Police officer has just been charged this month for belonging to the proscribed terrorist group National Action between 2016 and 2018.
In the US, one man who tried to recruit 12 individuals to neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen was expelled from the Navy earlier this year. Another member of Atomwaffen was found in 2018 to have served in the Canadian Armed Forces, despite celebrating the murder of Jews on online posts in neo-Nazi defunct forum Iron March. In Germany, a soldier was arrested in June for compiling a list of politicians that included personal details like their addresses and disseminating the list on extremist chats, only after another member of the German Special Forces was arrested in May for stacking weapons and Nazi memorabilia. Just this year, by the author’s own compilation for the International Observatory for Terrorism Studies, we have had 10 cases where individuals arrested for plotting or committing acts of violence were former military. The makeup is as follows: six from the United States, one from Germany, one from Canada, one from Spain and one from France. This speaks to a wider global problem rather than a localized phenomenon.
via rantt: Militaries Around The World Have A Neo-Nazi Problem