Flags, signs and symbols of racist, white supremacist and extremist groups were displayed along with Trump 2020 banners and American flags at Wednesday’s riot at the U.S. Capitol. The pictures tell part of the story of the beliefs of some of those who chose to show up on that day — from passionate and peaceful Trump supporters to extremists who showed their hate with their symbols as well as their actions. (…) “This was an event designed to oppose the results of a free and fair democratic election and the transition of power that would naturally follow,” Mark Pitcavage, a historian and expert in extremism with the Anti-Defamation League said. CNN spoke with him to identify the symbols and understand the chilling messages of tyranny, white supremacy, anarchy, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred they portray. (…) A rioter inside the Capitol wore a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. The bottom of the shirt reads “Work brings freedom,” which is the rough translation of the words “Arbeit macht frei” on the gates of the Nazi concentration camp. Auschwitz was the largest and most infamous Nazi concentration camp, where about 1.1 million people were killed during World War II. Pitcavage says he believes the shirt came from the now-defunct website Aryanwear. The design, which has been around for about 10 years according to Pitcavage, has been popping up on differing websites in recent weeks, though it is often taken down when a complaint is made. A social media image shows Nationalist Social Club stickers on what appears to be U.S. Capitol Police equipment It’s unclear when the photo was taken, but it was posted Wednesday in a Telegram chat the group uses, which includes a Nazi symbol as part of their name. NSC, apparently a word play on the National Socialists or Nazi party, is a neo-Nazi group that has regional chapters in both the United States and across the globe, according to the ADL. It is unclear if the sticker on the right refers to a New England chapter, or because the group originally called itself the New England Nationalists Club.
via ctvnews: Decoding the extremist symbols and groups at the Capitol Hill insurrection
siehe auch: These are some of the extremist groups responsible for the violence on Capitol Hill. The mob of U.S. President Donald Trump’s supporters who overran police and stormed Washington’s Capitol Hill included members of several well-known extremist and white-supremacist groups. Federal authorities have begun to ingest thousands of hours of pictures and video of the mob violence in an effort to identify and potentially charge perpetrators. Other organizations like investigative journalism heavyweight Bellingcat, also put out a call for civilians to save any and all livestreams, footage and pictures they find so that they can begin to “scrape” the material to piece together the sequence of events and identify extremists, like they did for the “Unite the Right” rally in August of 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. The violence did not come as a surprise to Barbara Perry, Director of the Centre for Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University. “I think I was [only] surprised that it took that long for something like this to happen. A lot of us had anticipated that we would see violence immediately following the election, especially if he [Donald Trump] lost,” Perry said in a phone interview with CTV News.ca Friday. Perry said she agrees that there has been a “mainstreaming of hate,” in recent years, and that the attack on the Capitol was a perfect example of it. “That’s an indication, I think, of how deeply embedded this has become in American politics in particular. But it certainly has become much more mainstream, not just in the political context, but in the media and popular discourse as well,” Perry said. Canada has not escaped the rise in extreme views either. “If we look at even Canadian public opinion polls, you know, we’re seeing quite a dramatic increase in attitudes around immigration, around Muslims, around legitimacy of government,” she said; Conspiracists, neo-Nazis, gun activists: The Trump loyalists who stormed Capitol. Naming the names: A look at some of the more prominent rioters who assailed the US Capitol this week The tattoo-chested man in a horned headdress, the middle-aged intruder with his foot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and the woman shot dead by police: Their images have been beamed around the world, but who are the Donald Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol?
