[A military is, of course, innately hierarchical, authoritarian,
and adversarial, and war, by definition, is terror. There is an
inheritance of violence in our increasingly militarized land that
ought to concern us all, too. ] [[link removed]]

THE FAR RIGHT IN UNIFORM: HOW EXTREME IS THE U.S. MILITARY?  
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Nan Levinson
April 6, 2021
TomDispatch [[link removed]]

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_ A military is, of course, innately hierarchical, authoritarian, and
adversarial, and war, by definition, is terror. There is an
inheritance of violence in our increasingly militarized land that
ought to concern us all, too. _

,

 

It was around noon and I was texting a friend about who-knows-what
when I added, almost as an afterthought: “tho they seem to be
invading the Capitol at the mo.” I wasn’t faintly as blasé as
that may sound on January 6th, especially when it became ever clearer
who “they” were and what they were doing. Five people would die
due to that assault on the Capitol building, including a police
officer, and two more would commit suicide in the wake of the event.
One hundred forty police would be wounded
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(lost eye, heart attack, cracked ribs, smashed spinal disks,
concussions) and the collateral damage would be hard even to tote up.

I’m not particularly sentimental about
anyone-can-grow-up-to-be-president and all that — in 2017, _anyone_
did — but damn! This was democracy under actual, not rhetorical,
attack.

As the list of people charged in connection with that insurrection
rose, ways of analyzing their possible motivations grew ever more
creative: at least nine of the rioters who broke into the Capitol had
a history of violence against women
[[link removed]];
almost 60% had had money troubles
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and above all, 50, or 14.5%, of the 356 people arrested at last count,
had military connections, as did the woman killed by a policeman that
day. (Veterans and active-duty personnel account for 7.5% of the U.S.
population.) More than a fifth of the arrested veterans have been
charged with “conspiracy.”

The need to understand why an estimated 800 people ransacked the
Capitol, attacked the police, and threatened elected representatives,
journalists, and the basic functioning of American democracy is both
practical and emotional. Thinking that we know what motivated the
rioters makes their rebellion feel a little more manageable (at least
to me) and might just help prevent something like it from happening
again.

Given my background — I’ve been writing about soldiers and
veterans for years — my management technique has been to look at the
military links to that assault.

I’m hardly alone. In one of the few times other than Veterans Day in
this century when American journalists seem to have remembered that
our military was crucial to our national experience, a number of them
began covering that link
[[link removed]].
A regularly updated NPR list
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shows that almost all of those with military affiliations in the
Capitol that day were veterans. Several had previously been deployed
to Iraq or Afghanistan; one had worked on presidential helicopters and
so (like another of the rioters) would have had a top-secret security
clearance; one, who wasn’t actually at the Capitol but whom the FBI
is eyeing for conspiracy charges, was on the staff of former
congressman Ron Paul; and one had even been in the Peace Corps. Nearly
all of them were men and nearly all were white. Two were Citadel
cadets, but only two were active-duty personnel. (One of those
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had, in the past, come to work at a Navy yard in New Jersey decked out
in a Hitler mustache and hairdo and reportedly made anti-Semitic
comments daily. He got admonished for the mustache; the comments
continued.)

I admit that I was surprised by all this, although I probably
shouldn’t have been. After all, last year, even in the age of Trump,
the FBI had opened 68 investigations
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into domestic extremism involving current or former members of the
military.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that many of those
veterans were affiliated
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with the far-right Proud Boys or Oath Keepers and much has been made
of why such groups would want to engage people with military
experience who bring with them training, skills, possible access to
weaponry, and the twisted credibility of government-issued hero
status. Far less was said about why people in the military might be
attracted to far-right groups.

THE LINK BETWEEN EXTREMIST CULTURE AND THE MILITARY

A week after the Capitol invasion, 14 Democratic senators wrote a
letter
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calling on the Pentagon’s Inspector General to investigate “white
supremacy” and “extremism in the military.” The next month, a
House subcommittee held a hearing
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under the rubric “Alarming Incidents of White Supremacy in the
Military — How to Stop It?” Meanwhile, on February 5th, the first
Black secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, directed
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commanding officers at all levels to conduct a one-day stand-down
before April 1st to address extremism in the military and provide
training in avoiding involvement with extremist groups. At the same
time, the Pentagon admitted that it didn’t have a handle on the
scope of the problem or what to do about it.

The link between extremist culture and the military goes way back, as
do efforts to track and deal with it. The names of the groups have
changed over the years — they used to sound German, now they sound
moralistic — but the problem hasn’t. For instance, in 2009,
Operation Vigilant Eagle, an FBI program focused on the recruitment of
veterans by white supremacist groups, came to light, and that same
year a Department of Homeland Security assessment warned that
“right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize
returning veterans” — returning, that is, from America’s
distant, never-ending wars. Conservative politicians, media
personalities and veterans’ groups found that DHS report insulting
to veterans and got it withdrawn.

Keep in mind that active-duty service members are officially
restricted in their political activities, so there were undoubtedly
many still in uniform who didn’t show up at the Capitol but would
have liked to do so. And though the Proud Boys have focused their
recruiting on the military and law enforcement, it’s hardly
necessary to join such loosely structured groups to support their
ideology and aims. A 2019 _Military_ _Times_ survey
[[link removed]],
for example, found that 36% of military respondents had “witnessed
examples of white supremacy and racist ideologies” in the ranks.
   

Military rules tend to delineate the rights soldiers don’t have more
than those they do, but Department of Defense Directive 1325.6
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gives active-duty members the right to participate in political
demonstrations as long as they are off base, out of uniform, within
the United States, representing only themselves, and not slandering
the president or high officials. However, activities like fundraising
for, distributing the political material of, or wearing the totemic
clothing of white supremist and other extremist groups could indeed
get you kicked out of the military, as could certain kinds of
social-media posts.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D-CA) has been pushing
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to track the social media activities of all enlistees and the Pentagon
claims
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that it’s looking for a “scalable way” to add that into
background checks.

Members of the armed forces have a duty to report such behavior,
though don’t count on that, since it’s probably seen as snitching.
Commanders also have considerable leeway when it comes to how they
might respond to the proscribed actions.

It goes without saying, of course, that soldiers are not supposed to
engage in any kind of violence — except the violence they’re
ordered to take part in as soldiers.

THAT’S NOT OKAY — ISH

America’s military was designed to be politically neutral and has
prided itself on being nondiscriminatory and merit-based, traits
theoretically crucial to maintaining an all-volunteer force (though in
racial terms over the years it’s been anything but
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at least when it came to the high command). All branches now purport
to screen for supremacist, extremist, or criminal-gang involvement at
the time of enlistment and military leaders, who probably don’t want
troublemakers in their commands, are reportedly taking pains to
confirm that such extremists will not be tolerated
[[link removed]].

Except when they are.

The design of military justice makes it hard to track advocates of
extremist violence, as there is no centralized record-keeping for such
things and, often enough, such behavior is simply brushed aside.

In my own unscientific survey, I recently asked two active-duty
soldiers and three Iraq War veterans if they had encountered
right-wing extremism while in the service. Four initially said no —
the fifth, a Black sailor, at one point had had a noose dangled in his
face — but then began recounting tales of what was permitted or
considered normal behavior: a U.S.-based paramedic talking about
avoiding a Black neighborhood where he would encounter “animals”;
a call from a friend and Stryker platoon leader in Germany who found
_arbeit macht frei_, the slogan at the gates of the Nazi concentration
camp at Auschwitz, carved into the interior of some of his unit’s
vehicles; a fellow recruit at basic training revealing a giant
swastika on his back. He was soon sent packing, but had made it
through the enlistment process where such things are supposed to be
caught. (My source thought his quick dismissal came only because his
training instructor was Black. He didn’t consider such a response
typical.)

Nobody I talked to was okay with any of this, but one active-duty
soldier admitted, “When I was most brainwashed, I saw it as
cathartic, being comfortable without having to worry about ‘cancel
culture.'”

EXTREMISM IN A WORLD OF NEVER-ENDING WAR

Organizing within the military isn’t easy. At least, it wasn’t for
antiwar activists during the Vietnam and Iraq War years (as I found
out when researching my book, _War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar
Soldiers and the Movement They Built_
[[link removed]]).
But maybe what’s going on now among the soldiers of the far right
isn’t organizing as much as a signaling or sharing of interests and
affinities, particularly on the Internet. Or maybe it’s
“self-radicalizing” — reading extremist material, following the
websites of supremacist groups, or connecting on social media; what,
in other circumstances, we might call educating yourself — which
breeds sympathy, if not membership.

As separate as the military may seem from civilian culture, it’s
anything but immune to the vicious discord which now plagues this
country. But the military was fertile territory for right-wing
sympathies long before Donald Trump became president or the Proud Boys
and Oath Keepers came along. The turning of the post-Vietnam War
military into an all-volunteer force only seems to have exacerbated
such tendencies. As an Army captain emailed me, “The military
recruits heavily from the same population that extremist organizations
do — socially isolated, downwardly mobile, and economically
vulnerable young men.” Jonathan Hutto, a Black veteran who
challenged the racism he encountered in the Navy, wrote that his
shipmates didn’t need to be “inculcated with Racist-Fascist
Ideology” because they had arrived primed for it by their families
and communities.

A former captain in the Marines told me that veterans often find
themselves battling with the VA over benefits and services they
thought they’d been promised when they went to war and that leaves
them embittered against the government. Their difficulty in even
talking honestly about their war experiences, not to speak of the PTSD
they may be experiencing, often leaves them feeling out of sync with
the country — and so they become ready recruits for extremist and
white supremacist groups that offer them a sense of belonging.

Active-duty service members also often feel betrayed by recruitment
promises which never pan out and multiple deployments in distant war
zones which accomplish little or nothing at all. Speaking of that
sense of resentment, Garett Reppenhagen, executive director of
Veterans For Peace [[link removed]], says, “They
just can’t pinpoint where it comes from. The frustration is
legitimate. It’s just focused wrongly.”

Kathleen Belew, a historian much cited
[[link removed]] in the wake of the January 6th
insurrection, studied the appeal to veterans of white-power groups in
the aftermath of the Vietnam War. In her book _Bring the War Home_
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she explains how they came to see the state as the enemy and
patriotism as something other than defending the nation. The parallels
to today, while striking, lack one reality of this moment: unlike in
the Vietnam era, America’s wars in this century have simply never
ended and so continue to produce alienated veterans.

It’s striking, after all, that the veterans who joined the Capitol
insurrection weren’t exactly kids. In fact, only seven
military-connected rioters arrested so far are 30 or younger.

Unlike with Vietnam (long as it was), when wars never end but
continue, as if on a Mobius strip of belligerency and repetitious
deployments, there _is_ no aftermath, no recovery. People now old
enough to enlist have never known a United States not at war. As a
result, the pressures now at play and producing extremism in the
military could be seen as related to what one veteran I interviewed
termed a larger “cultural project” that, however unexamined, is
aimed at creating an ever-more-militarized (which also means an
ever-more-extreme) society.

Here, war is sold, not just as acceptable, but as necessary to
maintain the vaunted American way of life. Meanwhile, its actualities
are largely cloaked from scrutiny until they shimmer into a very
pricey item loved by
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both parties. It’s called the Pentagon budget
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AN INCREASINGLY MILITARIZED HERITAGE

However many military-related figures broke into the Capitol on
January 6th, what if the tendency toward violent extremism is more
endemic to that military than we’d like to think? What if the very
purpose of such a military creates the conditions for the racism and
violence we’re now seeing? What if far-right radicals aren’t some
enemy out there but a seamless outgrowth of the institution we think
of as so categorically American? And if all that’s so, what have we
really been thanking
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service members for, so devotedly all these years?

A military is, of course, innately hierarchical, authoritarian, and
adversarial, and war, by definition, is terror. Tenets inculcated from
basic training on — venerating tradition, idealizing heroism,
valuing action for action’s sake, equating masculinity with
militarism, and thinking of anyone who disagrees with you as
potentially treasonous — are eerily similar to the ideology of
far-right groups. And don’t forget this either: American wars of the
past 70 years have functioned by reducing the enemy to gooks
[[link removed]]_,
_sand n***s, and hajis [[link removed]]
(the last, a term of respect in Islam twisted into an epithet by
American troops) — in other words, using baked-in racism to
dehumanize enemies and make it easier to hate and kill them.  

Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m by no means saying that everyone in
the U.S. military is racist or enamored of violence, or that they
condone or support racist, violent ideologies. What’s true, however,
is that the military’s actions are based on dividing the world into
friends and foes: the first to be protected out of all proportion to
the threat, the second to be humiliated and defeated out of all
proportion to the need — though, in this century, ironically enough,
the defeated have turned out to be us
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Such overkill in attitude and approach naturally bleeds into society
as a whole (even when its members are paying remarkably little
attention to the wars being fought in distant lands). Of his
country’s treatment of Palestinians, the Israeli novelist David
Grossman
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wrote, “I could not understand how an entire nation like mine, an
enlightened nation by all accounts, is able to train itself to live as
a conqueror without making its own life wretched.”

Only a small crew of people in the military actually join radical
right-wing groups and there’s little question that its leadership is
concerned about those who do. But there is an inheritance of violence
in our increasingly militarized land that ought to concern us all,
too.

Copyright 2021 Nan Levinson  Reprinted with permission.

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands
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(the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
[[link removed]], and
Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
[[link removed]],
as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
[[link removed]] and
John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since
World War II
[[link removed]]._

_Nan Levinson's most recent book is War Is Not a Game: The New
Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built
[[link removed]].
A TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]],
she teaches journalism and fiction writing at Tufts University._

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