SAN FRANCISCO
Lee Heidhues 1.24.2024
I just spent much of Sunday being entertained by National Football League (NFL) playoff games on network television. The games are interspersed with commercials which tout America’s most beloved assets: Cars. Junk Food. Wireless communication companies. Mindless mind numbing television programs.
However there is one product I did not see amongst all the noise and bombast on network television. An American export which has come to prominence since Donald Trump entered the blood stream of American politics.
AMERICAN HATRED GOES GLOBAL.
Excerpted from Foreign Affairs Magazine – 9.19.2023
In its decades-long fight against terrorism, the United States regularly criticized countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia for exporting extremist ideologies and violence. Ironically, today the United States stands accused of doing the same.
The spread of homegrown American conspiracy theories, beliefs in racial superiority, antigovernment extremism, and other manifestations of hate and intolerance has become such a problem that some of the United States’ closest allies—Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—have designated both American groups and citizens as foreign terrorists.
Although little reported by the U.S. press, the October 2022 killing of two people at a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, by a man espousing racist and homophobic views is an example of the pernicious effects of this “made in America” ideology.
In a now all-too-common pattern, the gunman posted a manifesto explaining his intent just before the attack. Written in English, the document displayed all the racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic justifications that have become de rigueur for this type of hate-filled violence. More significant, the manifesto expressed a solidarity and affinity with a U.S.-centric white supremacist ideology that has gained greater currency in both the United States and other countries in recent years. “The number of non-White invaders in America continues to grow and grow, unchecked,” the killer wrote.
The gunman also cited a white supremacist terrorist attack earlier that year on a supermarket in a Black community in Buffalo, New York, as having inspired him. After decades of insufficient and ineffective efforts to suppress a racist antigovernment fringe, the United States has become the exemplar of far-right extremism and terrorism.
Far-right violence today is increasingly fueled by a deadly combination of ideology and strategy imported from the United States.
The “great replacement” theory, which claims that nonwhite individuals are purposefully being brought into Western countries to undermine the political power of white voters, got its start in France, but this kind of thinking has long been a fixture of American white supremacism.
Members of the Atomwaffen Division have been held responsible for a number of murders, bombings, planned terrorist attacks, and other criminal actions.
These days, it is making its way into mainstream rhetoric in the United States and is acquiring an increasingly international audience.
These American extremists have also adopted from Marxism the strategic goal of “accelerationism,” meaning hastening the collapse of society by fomenting chaos and bloodshed. The United States’ exportation of these two ideas is radicalizing men and women across the globe, prompting foreign governments to take steps to protect their citizens. But at base, this is an American problem, and it therefore requires American leadership to solve it.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/guest-pass/redeem/6cOlo7Ocd1A
Lee's Perspective 