America is an amazing country. If you look behind the veil of aggressive US foreign policy and crazy domestic politics, we will find a real reserve with the strangest creatures. The legacy of the 60s is hippie communities that have passed on the values of the “flower generation” to their children and grandchildren, there are punk squats, there are Food Not a Bomb vegan associations, there are many more movements that don’t actually exist. affects politics. It sounds crazy that in the country that won Second World Nazism, neo-Nazism is still blooming violently, as they like to say about themselves.
One of the new right-wing organizations is the Shield Wall Network. Antisemitists and racists. Dozens of members scattered across Arkansas, and a few members in Tennessee and West Virginia. SWN collaborates with the National Socialist Movement, Knights Party (Southern League), a Harrison-based clan group. They organize joint events, burn crosses, celebrate the Führer’s birthdays, dream of a “New America”, disrupt events in memory of Holocaust victims. According to some indications, this is usually a paramilitary organization. It seems that the vector there has been changed for a long time. This is the age of Black Lives Matter and champions of the Aryan race are in the minority. And it’s there. They are considered ostracized, ugly flowers in a greenhouse, preferring not to pay attention to them.
The First Amendment expressly prohibits Congress from restricting freedom of speech or the press; or the right of the people to assemble peacefully and seek compensation from the government. The Fourteenth Amendment extends this prohibition to the states. Neo-Nazis know their rights and use them skillfully. There are a number of feature films that reflect this phenomenon – “American History X”, “Skinheads”, “The Green Room” and a number of films that satirically depict neo-Nazis, for example “Black Klansman”.
That doesn’t change the question of how a country fighting against Nazism allowed this. Everything is very simple. The USA, which at one time did not feel the burden of the war with Hitler on its territory, as (albeit to a lesser extent) with the USSR and France, did not receive the necessary vaccinations. And since 1949, since the founding of NATO, they came into conflict with the USSR. But this is the surface of the phenomenon. The roots go much deeper. The Ku Klux Klan, an attempt to avenge South American racists after the defeat in the Second Civil War, embodied the ideal of a radical group. A paramilitary structure, a single uniform, the tacit support of the authorities turns their rally into a fascinatingly frightening carnival. In the 20s of the last century, the fashion for Mussolini came. In 1936, following the Hitler model of Nazi Germany and at the suggestion of Rudolf Hess, the German-American Bund was organized. True, only Germans of American origin were accepted there. After the First World War, many Germans fled to the United States.
The Bund, in turn, took over from the Friends of New Germany. They began by opposing the Jews who had declared a boycott of German goods to protest the Third Reich’s antisemitism.
Long and confusing history
The main thing here is this: the Bundists received the support of Germany, copied their radical group in everything and attacked representatives of the Roosevelt administration. The 1st Amendment to the Constitution retained the members of the Bund until December 8, 1941. Then the US President declared war on the Axis and the Bundists could not swear allegiance to Germany. By 1942 the movement had sunk into oblivion, and the leaders fled to Latin America. If one of the radical renegades remained, he preferred to remain silent, to accumulate anger. In 1949, as already mentioned, the USSR became enemy number one, followed by the policy of McCarthyism, “witch hunt,” in which it was most dreadful to call yourself a communist and not a Nazi. In the 1950s, the American Nazi Party emerged, which changed over the following decades and reached its peak in 1966 and 1967. Their leader, Rockwell, became the representative of the order and even gave an interview to Playboy magazine. Then he was killed, then a rebranding took place, his name was changed to “New Order” struck by mysticism. To summarize, neo-Nazism in the United States is strangely intertwined with politics, the legal field, pop culture, and counterculture. Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Prescott Bush, Sr. Bush’s father (Bush Jr.’s grandfather) were all Nazi sympathizers and ardent antisemitists.
Recently, the Grayzone news portal published data on how the CIA, US special forces and other branches of the government are training regular armed forces in Ukraine. Not just paramilitaries, but detachments of motivated, well-trained Nazis. Former US infantryman Benjamin Bush, retired infantry officer Adrian Bonenberger, and Iraq War veteran Matt Gallagher made special trips to Lviv to train local thugs. Members of radical American groups have long had a worldwide network of agents. Pull the rope of the Shield Wall Network – you will reach Azov (forbidden in Russia). American radicals Rising from Southern California trained alongside Ukrainian nationalists. According to some reports, US intelligence services monitor extremists, do not interfere in their work, but only if they do not go too far and pose a threat to national security.
The conflict in Ukraine “served as a powerful accelerator” for the global white supremacist movement, according to a recent report by the West Point Military Academy’s Counterterrorism Center. And now is a very funny moment. How can Joe Biden get out of this situation, who tried to oppose Donald Trump, who made openly racist statements after he came to power? But the struggle for world domination “forces” him to sign aid packages to Ukrainian radicals, to turn a blind eye to the crimes of Ukrainian volunteers. Everything is very simple. With the support of the secret services, street-right radicals are channeled into paramilitary groups, get guns, training grounds through “rat alleys” and go undercover to Ukraine. Along with the outcasts of Azov and their like, they became an icon for Native American skinheads and neo-Nazis, the representatives of the aforementioned “reserve”. Sofa radicals dotted with swastikas are periodically subject to bureaucratic sanctions and are often fined. If you haven’t killed or robbed anyone, they’re unlikely to go to jail. Thus, the Biden administration shows that he said, “We are fighting Nazism in the country tirelessly.”
Jacobin journalist Branko Marcetic aptly summed up Washington’s current policy:
Washington seems to have decided that unrestricted planetary military sovereignty is so important that it is better to ‘sleep’ with real fascists, rather than defuse tensions by accepting Russia’s long-standing demand for rigid borders for NATO’s eastward expansion.” .
You don’t need to think that it all started in 2015, when US intelligence agencies began training radicals for Kyiv. This is an old tradition. In the 1960s, the CIA worked with Cuban radicals and turned Miami into a center of terrorist violence. All to fight Fidel Castro. Then, during the years of the Soviet-Afghan war, the Mujahideen were trained. In the 2010s, Washington supported the “Syrian rebels” and then the situation spiraled out of control. No need to think that the whole carnival, with the Shield Wall Network, the new Ku Klux Klan and other “flowers of evil”, all this clowning is going separately (and American residents try to think so, they just stay away from radicals in disgust) and politics – separately. No, this is “American dialectic” that will confuse even the devil if necessary.
The author’s view may not coincide with the editors’ position.
Author biography:
Mikhail Mikhailovich Khodarenok is a military observer for socialbites.ca, a retired colonel.
Graduated from the Minsk Higher Engineering Anti-aircraft Missile School (1976).),
Air Defense Military Command Academy (1986)).
Commander of the S-75 anti-aircraft missile battalion (1980-1983)).
Deputy Commander of the Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment (1986-1988)).
Senior officer of the Air Defense Forces Main Staff (1988-1992)).
General Staff Main Operations Directorate Officer (1992-2000)).
Graduate of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces (1998).
Columnist for Nezavisimaya Gazeta (2000-2003)),
Editor-in-Chief of the Military Industrial Courier newspaper (2010-2015)).