Before embarking on his livestreamed murder of 51 Muslim worshippers in two mosques in Christchurch last year, the Australian white supremacist Terrorist Brenton Tarrant posted a manifesto online. He claimed that his ideological beliefs were shared “in every place of employment and field” in Western countries but “disproportionately” so “in military services and law enforcement”. He estimated that the “number of soldiers in European armed forces that also belong to nationalist groups to number in the hundreds of thousands, with just as many employed in law enforcement positions”. Tarrant may not have been entirely exaggerating. In recent weeks, reports broke of extensive infiltration by neo-Nazis of Germany’s most elite special forces unit, known by its German acronym, the KSK. Certain KSK members reportedly pilfered 62 kg of explosives and 48,000 rounds of ammunition from KSK stocks. This prompted the German defence minister to disband an entire KSK fighting company seen as infested with extremists. White supremacist sentiments within the security forces is hardly a German problem.
In the United Kingdom, there have been similar concerns of white supremacist groups such as National Action targetting British servicemen for recruitment. Across the Atlantic, violent white supremacist groups such as the Atomwaffen Division and others have indoctrinated a number of United States servicemen as well. This disturbing phenomenon of white supremacist penetration of Western security forces is a function of the societal and political mainstreaming of such ideas in wider communities in Western countries such as Germany. THE GREAT REPLACEMENT MOTIF White supremacist extremism, also known as “right-wing” and “far right” extremism, is a broad label of convenience that lumps together, amongst others, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant, anti-gun control, anti-LGBTQ and increasingly even misogynistic grievances. While its key tropes have gestated for decades, an underlying theme that has come to the fore in recent times has been the notion of what the French philosopher Reynaud Camus in 2012 called Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement). This argument holds that white, Christian Europe is being overrun by masses of black and brown Muslim immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa. (…) That said, their ideas have become mainstream in European circles to such an extent that some observers note that “if you go to a horse race betting bar and talk politics” and “mention the ‘great replacement’, people will understand what you mean”. Worse, the Great Replacement motif has been weaponised as a rallying cry for white supremacist shooters around the world, including Tarrant, whose own manifesto is tellingly entitled — The Great Replacement. THE WIDER ECOSYSTEM OF WHITE SUPREMACISM Certainly in Germany itself, the Great Replacement theme finds expression within the intellectual ranks of the so-called New Right. This is a broad, well-networked movement with transnational links comprising — not the neo-Nazi skinheads of the “Old Right” — but rather well-educated, social media-savvy businessmen, publishers and young civil society activists of groups like Generation Identity, as well as the older, equally well-heeled politicians of the right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD. As one observer put it, the New Right has rebranded white supremacist extremism in Germany, giving it “a friendly face”. The New Right message is not that friendly though.
via todayonline: When extremists and white supremacists infiltrate security forces