As attention is focused on the spread of the deadly coronavirus, the virus of violent right-wing, white supremacist nationalism is also spreading worldwide. On Wednesday night, a white nationalist extremist shot up two bars frequented by people of Turkish and Kurdish extraction in the German town of Hanau, just outside of Frankfurt, killing 9 in the bars before turning the gun on himself and his mother. The 43 year old shooter had posed a racist video and manifesto that echoed many conspiracy theories advanced by alt-right fanatics in the U.S.:
"Experts in global extremism said the comments paralleled several recent conspiracies popular with American far-right, including the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, which prompted an American gunman to invade a popular pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, in 2016, believing that it was the centre of a secret child abuse ring run by high-ranking Democratic politicians. In that incident, the gunman fired his military-style rifle inside the restaurant, but no one was injured.
The Hanau attack is evidence that 'conspiracy theories that are circulated by Americans in the United States, and through message boards that are predominantly American, do have an impact in other places,' said Dr Joan Donovan, a expert in technology and online extremism at Harvard University. [snip]
'What we have occurring now is white supremacy integrated on a global scale,' said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.The virulent hatred of immigrant populations stoked by bigot-in-chief Donald "Rump" Trump's "very fine people" has resulted in mass shootings in the U.S., and their international imitators have taken note:
The internet has helped 'nationalist' extremists connect across borders and find common cause, advancing 'the idea that if you act on and commit violence in one country, it’s for the good of the white race globally,' Donovan, the Harvard expert on online extremism, said." (our emphasis)
"Globally, white nationalist attackers have targeted synagogues in the United States and Germany; mosques in England, Norway, and Christchurch, New Zealand; and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, near the border between the United States and Mexico. Some attackers have described migrants and immigrants as 'invaders,' as well as elaborating on the belief that a range of enemies, from Jewish people to feminists to leftists, are conspiring against the white race."Trump knows that stoking bigotry helps to get his base out. By downplaying the threats that the neo-Nazi / KKK / militia groups pose as he had done, he gives them his tacit permission to continue. And they will.
(photo: Candles for the victims in Hanau, Germany. Getty Images)
