Women at the Capitol riot are just the latest reminder of a long history. It’s tempting to think of the storming of the US Capitol on Wednesday as toxic masculinity run amok: a mob of mostly white men, carrying guns and wearing animal skins, trying to overthrow democracy on behalf of a president who once bragged about his ability to grab women “by the pussy.” It’s even more tempting to embrace this narrative when, in a bizarre statement, that president’s campaign press secretary describes him as “the most masculine person, I think, to ever hold the White House.” But focusing too much on masculinity obscures a crucial truth: Many women were either present at the riot or cheering on the insurrectionists from back home. There was Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran and apparent devotee of QAnon ideology who was killed during the riot. There was the woman photographed with “zip-tie guy” Eric Munchel, now believed to be his mother. There was Martha Chansley, the mother of the widely photographed “QAnon shaman” who wore a horned hat and carried a spear to Congress. She wasn’t present at the riot but later defended her son in an interview, calling him “a great patriot, a veteran, a person who loves this country.” And, of course, there were the women lawmakers who boosted conspiracy theories and false claims about the election being stolen, including Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon adherent who railed against Democrats and Black Lives Matter protesters in a speech on the House floor this week while wearing a mask reading “censored.” Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, meanwhile, described January 6 as “1776” before the riot began, live-tweeted from the House during the attack (including a mention that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been removed from the chambers), and this week, refused to allow police to search her bag after it set off metal detectors outside Congress. During her campaign, Boebert promised to bring her gun with her to the House. White women have been part of white supremacy in America since the very beginning, experts point out, dating back to their role in slavery. “They were at the table when the system was designed,” Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a history professor at UC Berkeley and author of the book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, told Vox. “They were co-architects of the system.” That remained true after the Civil War, through the birth and evolution of the Ku Klux Klan, and during the civil rights movement when white women were some of the most vocal opponents of school integration. And it remains true today, when women hold a key role in spreading QAnon ideology and sustaining white nationalist groups and movements. “Like other parts of our economy and society, these movements would collapse without their labor,” Seyward Darby, author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, told Vox.
For years, domestic terrorism researchers have warned that there are police departments in every region of America counting white supremacist extremists and neo-Nazi sympathizers among their ranks. To these experts, and the activists who have been targeted by law enforcement officers in past years, it came as no surprise that police officers were part of the mob that stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. In fact, the acceptance of far-right beliefs among law enforcement, they say, helped lay the groundwork for the extraordinary attacks in the American capital. “I’ve been trying to ring the alarm since before Donald Trump was elected,” said Cedric O’Bannon, a journalist and activist who was stabbed at a 2016 neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento and was later targeted by the investigating officer. “It’s nothing new. We’ve seen it getting worse and worse. The law enforcement collusion with white nationalists is clear,” he said. (…) Extremism experts and survivors of far-right violence have for years cried foul about the close ties between some police and white supremacist groups. These links have escalated under the Trump era, they’ve warned, with numerous examples of police openly protecting far-right organizers, including armed and violent ones. (…) The number of white supremacist extremists within US police forces is unknown, but even relying solely on cases that have been publicized shows the problem is widespread. Johnson, the Georgetown expert, testified in Congress last year about white supremacist infiltration of police. She found that since 2009, more than 100 police departments in 49 states have faced scandals involving officers making overtly racist statements. In Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana and elsewhere, active police officers have been outed as members of organized hate groups, including the KKK, she found. And this is likely the “tip of the iceberg”, she said, adding that polls showing that 10% of Americans believe it’s acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views, and that 12% supported the Capitol attack. Those rates are likely higher for police officers, she said, given that officers are disproportionately white and male.
“Healthy, female workers between the ages of 20 and 40 wanted for a military site,” reads the job advertisement from a 1944 German newspaper. Good wages and free board, accommodation and clothing are promised. What is not mentioned is that the clothing is an SS uniform. And that the “military site” is Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. Today the flimsy wooden barracks for the prisoners are long gone. All that remains is an eerily empty, rocky field, about 80km (50 miles) north of Berlin. But still standing are eight solidly built, attractive villas with wooden shutters and balconies. They are a 1940s Nazi version of medieval German cottages. That is where the female guards lived, some with their children. From the balconies they could overlook a forest and a pretty lake. “It was the most beautiful time of my life,” said one former female guard, decades later. But from their bedrooms they would have also seen chain-gangs of prisoners and the chimneys of the gas chamber. (…) Some 3,500 women worked as Nazi concentration camp guards, and all of them started out at Ravensbrück. Many later worked in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau or Bergen-Belsen “They were awful people,” 98-year-old Selma van de Perre tells me on the phone from her home in London. She was a Dutch Jewish resistance fighter who was imprisoned in Ravensbrück as a political prisoner. “They liked it probably because it gave them power. It gave them lots of power over the prisoners. Some prisoners were very badly treated. Beaten.” (…) Ravensbrück was Nazi Germany’s largest female-only camp. More than 120,000 women from all over Europe were imprisoned here. Many were resistance fighters or political opponents. Others were deemed “unfit” for Nazi society: Jews, lesbians, sex workers or homeless women. At least 30,000 women died here. Some were gassed or hanged, others starved, died of disease or were worked to death. They were treated brutally by many of the female guards – beaten, tortured or murdered. The prisoners gave them nicknames, such as “bloody Brygyda” or “revolver Anna”.
Von <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Stw-kunst&action=edit&redlink=1″ class=”new” title=”User:Stw-kunst (page does not exist)”>Stw-kunst</a> – <span class=”int-own-work” lang=”de”>Eigenes Werk</span>, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Rinaldo Nazzaro, founder of Nazi terror group the Base, is attempting to once again set up a paramilitary training network across the U.S. Amid a raging backdrop of far-right violence in the U.S., the Russia-based former leader and founder of a neo-Nazi terror group has turned his attentions to a new project: re-establishing secretive paramilitary training across the U.S. Rinaldo Nazzaro, 47, a former Pentagon contractor originally from New Jersey who is said to have worked on targeting operations with U.S. Special Forces, founded and led the Base until a nationwide FBI crackdown dismantled the organization and close to a dozen of its members were arrested for, among other things, an assassination plot and planning a mass shooting. While some of those members languish in jail, Nazzaro’s new training project is designed for a “system collapse”—neo-Nazi lingo for a potential second civil war—and seeks to unite local cells into a national patchwork of future combatants. (…) Nazzaro claims he is now on an American no-fly list, and is believed to be trying to coordinate this online and covert network of trainers and recruits to do work in firearms, battle drills, urban reconnaissance, and other paramilitary skills—even offering to pay for local training, inside the U.S.— from St. Petersburg, Russia. Nazzaro did not respond to a request for comment. The news that a former Pentagon contractor with a high security clearance is actively attempting to train new potential domestic terrorists from Russia is sure to raise concerns in American law enforcement and intelligence circles that are already suspicious of the foreign support of the violent coup attempt on Capitol Hill weeks ago.
Ersten FBI-Erkenntnissen zufolge haben sich mehrere Personen mit Verbindungen zum Militär am Sturm auf das US-Kapitol beteiligt. Laut »New York Times« reagiert nun das Pentagon. Vor gut zwei Wochen haben Anhänger des scheidenden Präsidenten Donald Trump das US-Kapitol gestürmt. Der Vorfall sorgte international für Entsetzen und löste in den USA eine Debatte über Rechtsextreme innerhalb der Armee und anderer staatlicher Sicherheitsbehörden aus. Einem Bericht der »New York Times« zufolge will das Pentagon seinen Kampf gegen Rechtsextreme und Anhänger der »White Supremacy« -Bewegung in den eigenen Reihen nun intensivieren. Zudem sollen nationale Ermittler dem Bericht zufolge klären, wie viele Armeeangehörige und Veteranen sich an der Erstürmung des Kapitols beteiligt hätten. Sechs Personen mit Verbindungen zum US-Militär identifiziert. Seit den Vorfällen am 6. Januar seien hochrangige Militärführer damit konfrontiert, dass sich ehemalige und aktive Armeeangehörige unter den Mob gemischt haben könnten, heißt es in dem Bericht weiter. Zählt man die aktiven Truppen und Reservisten zusammen, gehören dem US-Militär mehr als zwei Millionen Menschen an.
Im Kanton Zürich und im Kanton Luzern sind sechs junge Erwachsene festgenommen worden. Sie sollen rechtsextremes Gedankengut verbreitet haben. Mehrere Waffen wurden sichergestellt. Die Festgenommenen sind im Sommer 2020 durch die Verbreitung von rassendiskriminierenden Inhalten in den Fokus der Polizei geraten, wie die Kantonspolizei Zürich mitteilte. Umfangreiche Ermittlungen hätten zu fünf Personen im Kanton Zürich und zu einer Person im Kanton Luzern geführt. Die sechs Schweizer im Alter zwischen 18 und 20 Jahren wurden nun in einer gezielten Aktion verhaftet. Ausserdem wurden Beweismittel sichergestellt.
siehe auch: Schlag gegen Neonazi-Szene – Kopf der Winterthurer Eisenjugend verhaftet. Die Polizei hat am Mittwochmorgen sechs mutmassliche Rechtsextreme verhaftet. Darunter ein 20-Jähriger aus Winterthur, Kopf der Neonazi-Zelle Eisenjugend. (…) Eszil – 20 Jahre alt, Kunststudent, Waffennarr und einer der führenden Köpfe der Winterthurer Neonazi-Szene. Bekannt wurde er als Mann hinter der Eisenjugend, einer rechtsextremen Gruppe, die von einem apokalyptischen «Rassenkrieg» träumt. Nach einem Artikel im «Tages-Anzeiger» war es im August 2020 zu einer Hausdurchsuchung bei Eszil und einem seiner Kameraden – Deckname «Rotbart» – gekommen. Dabei beschlagnahmte die Polizei mehrere Schusswaffen. Laut einem Jugendfreund besass Eszil bis dahin eine Kalaschnikow, zwei Karabiner, zwei Pistolen, ein halbautomatisches Gewehr des Typs SIG-522 und Munition.
Fears emerge about law enforcement complicity and securing Joe Biden’s inauguration. In the aftermath of the violent insurrection against Congress on Jan. 6, many national security experts were stunned by what looked like a catastrophic failure to prepare by law enforcement agencies, foremost the Capitol Police. But the idea that the broad assault came as a surprise defied credulity, and concerns quickly focused on whether the attacks by enraged mobs of pro-Trump rioters were more orchestrated than was generally understood. For several weeks before the siege, the national security community was “swimming in threat intel” about far-right Trump partisans with potentially dangerous plans, a senior US law enforcement official told me. Some of the threats metastasized online. According to a social media analysis cited in the New York Times, the phrase “Storm the Capitol” was mentioned 100,000 times across various platforms in the 30 days preceding the attack. Violent far-right extremist groups exchanged ideas about concealing weapons and using guerilla tactics to target political enemies. On Twitter, President Trump himself spent weeks inciting violence focused specifically on Jan. 6, the day Congress would certify Joe Biden’s election victory. The day prior to the attack, a FBI field office in Virginia issued a stark internal warning about extremist talk of going to “war” in Washington, including individuals sharing a map of the Capitol complex. Further reporting since the insurrection has heightened concerns about the failure of law enforcement leadership, according to interviews with current and former national security officials. Among the mob and those who invaded the Capitol there was widespread use of two-way radio communications, tactical gear, chemical munitions, and what law enforcement officials believe may have been a diversionary planting of pipe bombs. Particularly grim was the participation by some police officers and ex-military personnel in the siege. Did agency leaders installed by Trump or who were sympathetic to his lies about the 2020 election look the other way from looming danger on their radar? (…) But what about sympathies for Trumpism among those with security responsibilities? Last August, former FBI special agent Michael German authored a report for the Brennan Center for Justice focused on the unknown extent but clear existence of extremist views among American law enforcement. “The continued presence of even a small number of far-right militants, white supremacists, and other overt racists in law enforcement has an outsized impact on public safety and on public trust in the criminal justice system and cannot be ignored,” German wrote. There has also been mounting evidence that police officers around the country have been caught up in apocalyptic pro-Trump conspiracy theories stemming from the dangerous QAnon movement, which Trump last fall refused to disavow even after it had been designated by the FBI as a domestic terrorism threat.