Major White House move against white supremacism

“There were very fine people on both sides”. These words resonated throughout the United States. They were spoken by President Donald Trump on August 15, 2017. Three days earlier, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Unite the Right platform had called for a demonstration in which all kinds of racist symbols were displayed. Local people mobilized and gathered in front of them with groups of anti-fascists. There were clashes. In the fray, a young man from the extreme right drove his car into the crowd. He killed the lawyer Heather Heyer and injured 30 other people.

Because of his lukewarm and equidistant reaction, President Trump was heavily criticized across the country, also by voices from the more moderate right. The New York tycoon's benevolence toward his white supremacist supporters had been a constant since he made the leap into politics. However, this attitude may be changing.

For the first time, the White House has taken the step of labeling an armed far-right group as a terrorist organization. The group in question is the so-called Russian Imperial Movement (RIM). This is a paramilitary entity based in St. Petersburg, but with numerous connections in other European countries and on US soil.

The RIM is considered responsible for the recruitment and training of two Swedish men who, after spending time in their training camps, carried out several attacks in Gothenburg and other nearby locations in Scandinavia. Those episodes occurred in late 2016, according to media reports by Nathan A. Sales, the White House Counterterrorism Coordinator. 

The label of terrorist organization, applicable only to organizations outside the United States that represent a danger to national security, had been monopolized, to date, by entities with a jihadist aetiology; a circumstance, in a way, logical, since the fight against terrorism has focused more on this type of threat throughout the last decades.

The security perspective, however, seems to be changing or at least seems to have expanded. Earlier this year, the US Congress, with the support of both major parties, passed a motion expressing a firm and explicit rejection of nationalism and white supremacism. In the same vein, just two months ago, in early February, FBI Director Christopher Wray already defined racially motivated terrorism as a “priority national threat”.

The designation of the RIM as a terrorists implies that the Treasury has the capacity to intervene in the assets of those people who, from US soil, are willing to collaborate with the group. Similarly, it can act on the assets of its members in the country. The organisation's leaders, Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariyev and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov, are also marked as terrorists and can be subject to personal sanctions.

“Let me be clear: the designations made today send an unambiguous message that the United States will not hesitate to use its sanctioning authority aggressively, and that we are prepared to target any terrorist group, regardless of its ideology, that threatens our citizens, our interests abroad or our allies,” said coordinator Sales at the end of his speech.

The truth is that, over the last few years, terrorism associated with extreme right-wing ideology has represented a greater threat in the United States than terrorism of jihadist inspiration. According to a report published in September 2019 by the prestigious think tank The Soufan Center, almost three quarters of the terrorist acts perpetrated in the country from 9/11 to the end of 2016 were inspired by white supremacism (62 attacks, as opposed to 23 committed in the name of jihadism).

The impact of this type of extremist violence is not simply confined to US territory. Examples include the attack by an Australian neo-Nazi on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed in March 2019. 

Nor is Europe spared; in the collective memory of the old continent, there remains the massacre perpetrated by the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik on the island of Utoya in the summer of 2011. Almost 80 people, mostly teenagers, perished that day. More recently, a German citizen opened fire on two 'shisha' premises in Hanau, near Frankfurt. Ten people were killed.

Many of these attacks have shared a common trait, beyond the ideology that inspired them: the individuals who carried them out left behind manifestos that they themselves had developed to explain their motives for committing terrorist acts. One of the patterns that can be identified in these texts lies in the constant references to what is called the “Great Replacement theory”. 

This hypothesis, popularized by Frenchman Renaud Camus and based on conspiracies rather than empirical data, suggests that Western governments, in collusion with the Jewish lobbies that dominate the world, are somehow allowing Muslim immigrants to arrive in territories that have traditionally been mostly Christian. In the long term, this policy will result in European lands being left in the hands of the Muslims. In the end, this “replacement” would translate into a “white genocide”.

What inspires many of these attackers is therefore a conviction supported by conspiratorial, identity-based ideas that support the supremacy of the white Christian race, anti-Semites and Islamophobes. Thus, it is an idea that represents an updating to the reality of the 21st century of some of the doctrinal points that characterized the extreme right-wing totalitarianisms of the first half of the 20th century.

Documents produced by The Soufan Group and other entities dedicated to the study of security threats warn against lowering our guard against this type of terrorism. They highlight a point in the world's geography that goes largely unnoticed, but which continues to record significant war activity: Ukraine.

The Donbas War is a conflict that remains open with no prospect of a short-term resolution. This scenario has served as a perfect laboratory for many supremacist groups - both Ukrainian and Russian - to perfect their tactics and techniques of combat and commission of attacks. In fact, Ukraine is even considered to be the Afghanistan of extreme right-wing terrorism', since it was during the Afghan-Soviet war that the wave of jihadist terrorism emerged with the birth of Al-Qaeda. The process of the emergence of the terrorist threat has been, in that sense, similar in both cases.

It is also worrying that a large part of these groups - such as RIM itself or the Ukrainian Azov Battalion - have been supported by Moscow and Kiev, as well as by the active participation of fighters from other European countries and the United States. As in the case of the Iraq and Syria war with Daesh, the extreme right has its own 'foreign fighters' who, at a given moment, can return to their countries of origin.

This is why, contrary to what it may seem, white supremacist groups have developed a really strong network of connections in recent years that extends across much of Europe and North America. Organizations such as the Atomwaffen Division or Blood and Honor in the United States or the British National Party are just some examples of the far-reaching reach of violent right-wing groups.

Like Daesh and other jihadist terrorist entities, they have taken advantage of the possibilities offered by the Internet and social networks to expand their influence, strengthening their propaganda mechanisms, their financing instruments and their networks of recruitment and violent radicalization.

This is paradoxical, but even though in many cases these are groups that espouse ultra-nationalist ideologies, supremacist target terrorism represents a transnational threat. Its members have been able to weave broad alliances that transcend borders. Consequently, the response must be global. That the United States is beginning to label these organizations as terrorists is, without a doubt, an absolutely positive step. However, without coordinated multilateral action at all levels of government, it will be very difficult to implement strategies to prevent radicalization and thus to curb the spread of the threat.