Canadian intelligence and law enforcement officials say they are contending with a new form of violent extremist behaviour that’s mostly targeting youth and young adults online, known as “nihilistic violent extremism.” The term was identified as a “new threat” within the expanding landscape of ideologically-motivated violent extremism in the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) latest annual report, released this month. The report said CSIS has noted a growing trend of youth radicalization associated with violent nihilistic online groups like 764 and the Maniac Murder Cult, which have recently been listed as terrorist entities in Canada. Multiple Canadians have been arrested for allegedly carrying out violence in association with those groups, including a Quebec man detained last month on terrorism charges. (…) In its report, CSIS says nihilistic violent extremism, or NVE, is defined as “serious violence based on the rejection or negation of traditional moral, religious and social values.” “NVE promotes the belief that life lacks inherent meaning or purpose,” the report says. “The ultimate objective for followers of NVE is to engage in violent chaos.” Hart says that, while many terrorist or extremist ideologies can have nihilistic views or want to spread chaos, most in the ideologically-motivated violence space have a particular goal in mind for the benefit of a particular group. Islamist extremists, for example, have carried out violence with goals such as creating a future Islamist state or sphere of power, or attacking individuals and symbols associated with the West. Many right-wing and white supremacist groups seek a similar ethnostate but for white people. “For nihilistic violent extremists, what we’re seeing is that there really isn’t a proposed end state,” she said. “It’s this really overwhelming sense of misanthropy, so this hatred of humanity and this idea that actually no one is worthy of inheriting anything.” Some advocates of NVE have voiced support for “returning humanity to this idea of natural selection and social Darwinism” where only the strongest and fittest survive, Hart added. NVE followers have aligned with neo-Nazi and even Satanist ideologies, while also showing interest in “gorecore” and promoting or encouraging suicide, officials and researchers say. (…) One of the main NVE groups, 764, was founded in 2020 by then-15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead of Texas, who was arrested a year later and is now serving an 80-year prison sentence. Successive leaders of the group have also been arrested and charged. The term NVE was used by FBI Director Kash Patel in U.S. Senate testimony last September, who said it accounted for a “large chunk” of 1,700 ongoing domestic terrorism investigations — a 300-per cent increase in opened cases from the year before. Patel described NVE followers as “those who engage in violent acts motivated by a deep hatred of society, whatever that justification they see it is.”
via globalnews: What is nihilistic violent extremism? The ‘new threat’ eyed by CSIS, police
