Weltschmerz à Gogo on Nostr: When I see stories about Atomwaffen Division (AWD) or The Base, I often have to take ...

When I see stories about Atomwaffen Division (AWD) or The Base, I often have to take them with a grain of salt. On one hand, they're well known neo-nazis with a scary reputation, and people who are into the sensationalistic aspect of all of that never seem to get tired of hyping them. Sometimes that means making them look bigger or more widespread than they actually are, which is ultimately not very helpful.

On the other hand, nazi accelerationists have actually killed people and plotted (and likely carried out) some fairly serious infrastructure attacks; organizations like AWD, the Base, and the various groups they've devolved into and/or inspired are, in fact, real and dangerous.

This article gets at some of the real potential danger they and their ilk represent. The neo-nazi dream of fomenting a white ethnostate separatist movement has been around for a long time, and it has mostly produced some embarrassingly weak efforts at mobilization (and some possibly even more embarrassing attempts at revolutionary literature – yes, I'm talking about the late Harold Covington, may he rest in piss).

Part of why this particular moment is more dangerous than previous periods when the call for an ethnostate has come back into fashy fashion is (do I even have to say it?), as the headline suggests, US law enforcement agencies have all but entirely given up on even looking at violence from the right. This has always been the case to a greater or lesser degree, but at this point they are, as German antifascists sometimes say, almost completely "blind in the right eye."

But also, as this article mentions but doesn't really flesh out too much, fascist movements tend to grow and become more aggressive in the wake of wars, when there are lots of demobilized, often traumatized men who are desensitized to killing and are looking for a way to make their own lives meaningful again in a post-war environment. You see it in the first wave of the KKK after the US Civil War, the second wave of the KKK (which started in the teens, but really blew up in the early 1920s after WWI), the proto-fascist Freikorps units that were active in various parts of Germany immediately after WWI, the onset of Italian fascism, the white power groups that formed in the US after the war in Vietnam as well as the Vietnam vets who went to "Rhodesia," Nicaragua, and elsewhere to fight as mercenaries against anticolonial movements, etc., etc., etc.

Now there’s a whole cadre of neo-nazis who have fought on both sides in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine since 2014 and others who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. (That’s in addition to the toy soldiers who just like dressing up and shooting at things in the woods, which sounds dumb, but some of them have also killed people.)

Anyways, yeah, we do ultimately need to take it seriously when people in leadership positions within groups including/inspired by The Base, AWD, Terrorgram, etc., say that they’re particularly committed to organizing some bullshit in the US right now while the FBI just doesn’t give much of a shit about them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/22/neo-nazi-terror-the-base