By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and LINDSAY WHITEHURST (Associated Press)
The shooter who killed eight individuals at a Dallas-area mall was sporting a patch that learn “RWDS” — quick for “Right Wing Death Squad” — a phrase that has been embraced in recent times by far-right extremists who glorify violence towards their political enemies.
Authorities haven’t mentioned what they consider may need motivated 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, who was killed by a police officer who occurred to be close to the mall Saturday when Garcia opened hearth.
Posts by Garcia on a Russian social networking web site expressed a fascination with white supremacy and mass shootings. Photos he posted confirmed massive Nazi tattoos on his arm and torso, together with a swastika and the SS lightning bolt emblem of Hitler’s paramilitary forces.
Here is a take a look at the time period “Right Wing Death Squad” and the way it grew to become a well-liked image amongst violent extremists:
WHAT’S THE HISTORY OF THE TERM?
The “RWDS” acronym is one in all numerous shorthand phrases utilized by extremists. Others embrace “RaHoWa,” quick for “racial holy war,” and “ 1488,” an alphabet-driven code combining references to a white nationalist slogan and Adolf Hitler.
The time period “Right Wing Death Squad” initially emerged within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s to explain Central and South American paramilitary teams created to help right-wing governments and dictatorships and oppose perceived enemies on the left, mentioned Oren Segal, vice chairman of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
It reemerged within the 2010s amongst right-wing teams who apply it to stickers, patches and in on-line boards. Other far-right gear and on-line memes particularly glorify Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the brutal Chilean navy dictator whose dying squads killed 1000’s of political opponents.
“It essentially became a phrase that was co-opted to demonstrate opposition to the left more broadly by right-wing extremists,” Segal mentioned.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, mentioned the Proud Boys, the neo-fascist group of self-described “Western chauvinists,” are largely chargeable for injecting “RWDS” into the far-right vernacular.
The group has bought patches and T-shirts adorned with the acronym and celebrating Pinochet’s dying squads. Proud Boys have been photographed sporting “RWDS” patches at rallies and sporting T-shirts that learn, “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”
Photos shared on social media appeared to point out former Proud Boys nationwide chairman Enrique Tarrio and one other former Proud Boys chief, Jeremy Bertino, amongst those that have worn such patches.
Tarrio was convicted final week of seditious conspiracy within the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol for what prosecutors have described as a violent plot to maintain President Donald Trump in energy. Bertino, who was vice chairman of the South Carolina Proud Boys chapter, beforehand pleaded responsible to seditious conspiracy within the Jan. 6 riot.
WHICH GROUPS HAVE EMBRACED IT?
The Proud Boys aren’t the one far-right extremists to undertake the time period.
“Right Wing Death Squad” was the identify of the smaller teams that participated within the white nationalist “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, based on the Anti-Defamation League. The rally turned lethal when a white supremacist rammed his automotive right into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a lady.
Facebook banned a number of hate-filled pages, together with one named ‘Right Wing Death Squad,’ after the bloodshed in Charlottesville, the New York Times reported.
“It has really become something over the past couple years that has cut across and far beyond any individual group,” mentioned Jon Lewis, a analysis fellow on the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
“It has kind of become this rallying cry to some extent: This is what we want, to seize the levers of democratic power, just like Pinochet did, and we want to use the power of the state to then engage in violent genocide effectively against whoever is against us,” he mentioned.
American University professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the varsity’s Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, mentioned extremists who undertake these phrases and symbols usually don’t absolutely perceive their origins.
“Nobody is going to accidentally have a ‘Right Wing Death Squad’ patch,” she mentioned. “But it’s because of this whole meme culture, and generally the way that iconography is used to signal encoded speech or messages, they don’t always know exactly” what it means.
WHITE SUPREMACIST GROUPS HAVE NON-WHITE MEMBERS?
Far-right extremist teams just like the Proud Boys usually level to their Black and Hispanic members to rebut claims that they promote racism or white supremacist ideologies. Tarrio, the previous Proud Boys chief, is Cuban American, for instance.
The Daily Stormer, a number one neo-Nazi web site, launched a Spanish-language version in 2017 tailor-made for readers in Spain and Latin America.
Some Hispanics establish as white.
But those that don’t take into account themselves to be white “can still be attracted to and support movements that are inherently or explicitly white supremacist,” mentioned Miller-Idriss, creator of “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right.”
“And that is the same way that women can support patriarchal or male supremacist movements,” she added.
Tanya Hernández, a legislation professor at Fordham University and creator of “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias,” mentioned Latinos are sometimes considered “as an unwanted other” within the U.S.
“If you are a Latino who is already affected by being viewed as other and want desperately to be part of the club that is the U.S., what better way to make a claim … than to be part of the enforcement, the policing of whiteness within a white supremacist hate group?” she mentioned.
___
Associated Press author Michael Balsamo in New York contributed to this report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”