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… read about post-group white supremacy.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that closely tracks hate groups in the US, released a report [[link removed]] highlighting how few of the people who stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6 were known members of the white supremacist groups it tracks. This is not an indication that the insurrectionists were not largely white supremacists — their statements make their interest in white nationalism clear. Instead, SPLC researchers write, it suggests that violent hate in the US is entering a “post-group world,” where organizing takes place more online than in person, and delineations between groups become less important as people move freely between message boards, Telegram channels, and other digital gathering places for white supremacists. The decentralization of the movement makes it more difficult for law enforcement to track, and encourages movement members to undertake individual violent actions rather than wait for a more coordinated effort.

Enemy of my enemy

In an essay [[link removed]] in “War on the Rocks,” security analyst Elliot Stewart argues that one of the cannier players of the Great Power Competition Game is … ISIS. Stewart examines the question of why ISIS has, since 2017, basically ignored China as a target for rhetoric or attacks. The answer, he argues, is that ISIS sees China as an important competitor to its more important enemy: the US.

There was a period in 2017 when it seemed as though the Chinese government, alarmed by nascent ISIS recruitment among ethnic Uighurs, might join with the US in a global counter-ISIS campaign.

Instead, ISIS has stepped back from speaking out against China, and the Chinese government has chosen to dramatically step up domestic repression of Uighurs rather than engage the US global war on terror.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] How to do gender analysis

Women, Peace and Security expert Phoebe Donnelly has a new handbook [[link removed]] out on how to do gender analysis of non-state violent groups. It is primarily directed at people evaluating programs for countering or preventing violent extremism, but her advice holds for anyone who wants to interrogate the crucial role gender plays in the form and function of organized violence.

Donnelly emphasizes that gender is a method of structuring power, and that understanding how different groups and movements treat gender is a way of understanding how power is distributed within those groups and movements.

To do that, researchers have to move beyond asking, “Well, what are the women up to?” Everyone’s power within a group is shaped and circumscribed by their gender identity, and patriarchal structures hardly mean that men are exempt from gender affecting their participation in armed movements.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Political science of the periphery: Part II

Last week in Deep Dive, we read research on how states' difficulties with extending power into borderlands changes how they make and implement policies for those areas. This week, we’ll look at research on what happens when a state makes a major effort to incorporate borderland residents into the core state identity.

During World War II, Nazi Germany added much of the land around Germany to its Reich. The idea that the concept of Germanness extended beyond the geographical bounds of Germany was core to Nazi ideology. When new countries or regions were added to the Reich, part of the Nazi political and ethnic project in those territories was Germanization — making new members of the Reich feel German. This involved extending the Holocaust into those areas as a means of brutal ethnic cleansing, but it also meant education programs on Germanness for those who were not killed or imprisoned. Among these education programs, few were more fundamental than the Hitler Youth, which sought to inculcate young people with German identity at their most impressionable age.

In a recent article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Borderland Studies, historian Lisbeth Matzer writes about how the Germanization project of the Hitler Youth played out in the borderlands of the Reich’s new holdings. In two areas on the border between Slovenia and Austria — Lower Styria and Upper Carniola — records of Hitler Youth activities during the war have survived, allowing historians to piece together the German approach to incorporating borderland youth into the Nazi project.

Lower Styria and Upper Carniola in 1941 seemed primed for Germaization in some ways. A German-speaking minority already lived there, and had a long history of political organizing around German identity. They had established clubs which funded German-only schools and tried to encourage Germans and Austrians to move to the borderlands to grow their demographic power. They even requested that Germany annex the regions after the Nazis came to power, and the Nazis eventually obliged.

That the German-speaking minority in Lower Styria and Upper Carniola was organized to that extent against the states that controlled those regions speaks to the nature of life on the periphery. Living on the border meant being able to build an entire life around affinity with Germany, rather than Slovenia or the Habsburg Empire or any of the other polities that had actual territorial claim to the area at various points. When German annexation did come, then, part of their pitch to the residents of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola was that joining Germany gave them the opportunity to be part of the ethnic, if not geographical, center of a large German state, rather than at the periphery of a Slovenian one.

That offer was compelling to many German speakers, but the Nazis wanted to get the non-German speaking majority to buy into it as well. After the German campaign against the Soviet Union started to go poorly, the Nazi war machine could ill-afford to be picky about who it recruited into its ranks — it needed the young Slovene speakers of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola as much as it needed the young German speakers. To that end, the Hitler Youth began a project to, as they put it, “remind” locals of their essential German nature that was expressed not in their native language but through (and this is some prime Nazi propaganda speak) “the voice of the blood that flows within you.” “According to your blood,” a German propagandist concluded, “you belong to us.”

Youth were strongly encouraged to express their inner Germanness by speaking German. All schools conducted instruction in German, and Hitler Youth groups ran required German language courses for members. Speaking Slovenian during youth group activities was prohibited, and there were competitions organized between youth units to see who had the best German language skills. The better part of the Hitler Youth resources were put into welcoming a new generation of Lower Styria and Upper Carniola young people into the master race through language instruction.

Yet, it didn’t work. Many young people joined the Hitler Youth, responding to a range of powerful state inducements to do so. Inside the group, however, commitment to the German language didn’t take. When unit leaders weren’t watching, many youth would converse in Slovenian. In some areas, it was the Hitler Youth that was forced to bend to local linguistic customs, sending out invitations to unit events in both German and Slovenian. Most people never came close to the stated goal of the Styrian Hitler Youth, that Styrian and Carniolan youth “not only learn German, but speak German, think German and feel German.” Nazi propagandists reverted to their claims that Styrian and Carniolans were German in the blood regardless of their preferred language, but the dream of incorporating them into a German ethnic center was lost. Most people simply declined to trade their borderness for Germanness.

By the end of the war, the Germanization project in the borderlands was dead, and some members of the Hitler Youth leadership in Upper Carnolia had even defected to anti-Nazi partisan resistance groups. Borderland identity, which had brought the regions into the German orbit in the first place, proved too great a barrier for even the Nazis totalitarian approach to statebuilding to overcome. The methods of survival learned from living on the periphery, it turns out, are difficult to unlearn.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Jason Strother examined [[link removed]] the contradictions in South Korean policies intended to increase the country’s birth rate, the lowest in the world. The government said in December 2020 that it would pay cash bonuses to married parents and cover some child care costs. However, as experts pointed out to Strother, these benefits exclude same-sex couples, single parents, and all other nontraditional families. For South Koreans outside of a heterosexual marriage — same-sex marriage is still outlawed in South Korea — regulations and social discrimination still make it very difficult to raise children.

Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright argued [[link removed]] that the inauguration of a new US president should not end efforts to limit presidential control over launching nuclear weapons. In the current system, a president can order a nuclear attack with no input from their top advisers by calling the National Military Command Center directly. President Joe Biden, they point out, could limit his own launch authority by requiring the assent of other defense officials before Command Center personnel could relay such an order to nuclear forces. It’s hardly a no-first-use pledge, but it would be a start in efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Liz Theoharis reflected [[link removed]] on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the wake of one of the most tumultuous years in the US since the great civil rights leader’s death. One of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a dramatic widening of the already massive gap between rich and poor in US society. This month, 20% of families with children in the US face serious food insecurity. Over the course of 2020, by contrast, the amount of wealth held by US billionaires jumped over 30%, to around $4 trillion. Poverty and inequality were two ills King forcefully campaigned against and, Theoharis argued, should both be major areas of focus for politicians and social movements in 2021.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

In a good metaphor for American gerontocracy, a tricenarian bear in Yellowstone has been gumming [[link removed]] calves to death.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s decades of experience in the foreign service have prepared her well for the high-minded debate [[link removed]] she’ll face as US ambassador to the United Nations.

Every image in this years-long thread [[link removed]] of contraband recovered by Brazilian police is incredible, but the videos [[link removed]] of police carefully arranging cocaine and banknotes to communicate their artistic vision are sublime.

Something [[link removed]] to keep in mind next time you see an Air Force recruitment ad touting it as the most technologically advanced service.

A good clarification [[link removed]]!

In an upset, this week’s award for achievement in headline writing goes to a dissertation chapter [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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