Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

From the New York Times courtesy of Eschaton:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."

Click here for the rest.

As if it weren't bad enough that the American right wing is in the grips of what Seattle journalist David Neiwert calls pseudo-fascism, or, to put it into more plain language, “movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally,” a quote Neiwert pulled from Robert Paxton's book The Anatomy of Fascism. This is a very bad development. As the Times article observes, it was in the army that Timothy McVeigh was turned on to neo-Nazi philosophy, which, in turn, inspired him to commit his own homegrown act of terrorism, which, I might add, apparently didn't "change everything"--for that, we had to wait until non-white people pulled their own horrifying stunt on September 11, 2001. Needless to say, recruiting Nazis into the US armed forces is tantamount to training terrorists to kill Americans. It cannot be tolerated.


photo courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center

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