Despite its government’s best efforts, Germany is suffering through a wave of right-wing violence. Triggered in part by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit thousands of refugees from the Syrian Civil War, networks of clandestine neo-Nazi groups whose ambitions encompass the overthrow of the Federal Republic have appeared. Particularly...
US President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for COVID-19 on the evening of Thursday, October 1. In retrospect, the diagnosis should not have become as a complete surprise. For months, Trump and most of his entourage ignored the advice of public health specialists, in his own administration,...
Since the Vietnam War era in the United States, radical-right groups have articulated an apocalyptic vision under which white people would be restored to their “rightful place” of dominance on the North American continent. Over the years, various groups and personalities have expressed this vision in slightly different ways, though...
Over the course of his 2016 campaign and his subsequent presidential term, Donald Trump has sought to exploit popular fears of foreigners and certain American ethnicities to his political advantage. His verbal attacks have been selective. Irish, Italian and Polish Americans, for example, have proved immune to his insults (at...
On the morning of June 10, 2020, the body of a young black man, Robert Fuller, was found hanging from a tree in a park opposite City Hall in Palmdale, California. The police initially ruled the death a suicide. Suspicions were raised though when the body of a 38-year-old homeless...
Dr. Jerome Adams, the surgeon general of the United States, made an announcement on March 23 warning Americans of the mounting death rate likely to occur over the next few weeks as COVID-19 spreads throughout the country. He remarked that “this is going to be our Pearl Harbor moment, our...
Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” has been made into a six-part TV series and shown recently on HBO in the United States and Great Britain. David Simon wrote the script for the television version and directed the production. Simon’s earlier credits include “The Wire,” “Treme” and “Murder:...
The anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, has become a date identified by the UN to commemorate the Holocaust on an annual basis. In the midst of the various ceremonies performed to remember the event, there may be some benefit in recalling exactly what...
The leaders of neo-Nazi and other white nationalist groups in the United States face a major problem, one having to do with their claims of white or Aryan racial superiority. What to do if the groups involved appeal primarily to white men — and some women — who, by most standards, fail...
During the 1980s, Louis Beam — a Vietnam War veteran, Klansman and Aryan Nation activist — wrote what became an influential observation about ways in which racial supremacists could employ violence to get what they wanted. Beam reasoned that it was becoming progressively harder for right-wing extremists to launch attacks...
