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Time magazine published an article by American author Brian Castner in which he addressed the phenomenon of the emergence of far-right movements that emerged from the womb of societal crises and conflicts in Russia and the United States. The article focused in particular on what the author called “white mercenaries fighting for a lost cause around the world.”
Wagner
At the beginning of his article, Castner, a journalist and former US Army officer who participated in the Iraq war, described Russian mercenaries as the real bogeyman in the war in Ukraine, and most of them belong to the company known as “Wagner”, a private paramilitary group linked to the Kremlin that acts as a violent tool for policy Russian President Vladimir Putin’s foreign affairs around the world.
He said that deliberate media disinformation is the dominant feature of the operations carried out by that group, although Wagner mercenaries leave behind evidence. He gave an example of this with the landmines, booby traps and hand grenades that they planted in the homes of civilians in the Ain Zara suburb as they withdrew from the front lines after the siege was lifted from the Libyan capital, Tripoli, in May 2020.
When Wagner’s agents withdrew, not only did they leave the booby traps behind, but they painted swastikas and slogans of neo-Nazis and white racists on the walls of all the areas they set foot.
According to the writer, the group was named after the German composer Richard Wagner, known for his anti-Semitism, and whose operatic works made Nazi leader Adolf Hitler cry.
Wagner’s relationship to white supremacy
According to the author, many of the founding members of the Wagner Group belonged to the white supremacist Russian imperialist movement, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
Perhaps this relationship between extremist armed movements and mercenaries is also clear in the United States. It is not a coincidence – in the author’s opinion – that a company is active in recruiting mercenaries from an organization that raises the slogan of white power, and who joins a militia is very similar to the type of people who join a group Russian Wagner.
The writer pointed out that the rioters who attacked the US Capitol Hill on January 6 were raising the flags of right-wing groups that believe in the supremacy of the white race, flags embodying in one way or another the lost cause and its slogan “We are facing the world,” which claims that A weaker but ideologically pure group, it has been unfairly undermined, crushed or defeated and stabbed in the back.
According to the Time magazine article, this is not just an American phenomenon because the United States, in addition to Hollywood movies and fast food, issues racist symbols, slogans and ideas (memes).
Online white supremacist groups are fueling resentment across borders and victimizing people from Ukraine to southern Africa and the Middle East, a feeling that is once again being felt in the United States.
But the “lost or lost cause” is not a myth unique to America. In this regard, says Dr. Kathleen Bellew, author of Bringing War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, this description has been popular worldwide, having previously applied to apartheid in South Africa, and more recently in Russia and across Scandinavia. and Australia.
Bellio adds that building a lost or lost cause narrative has a strategic goal of showing that the white race is “at risk”.
The new Crusaders
In his article in the American Time magazine, Castner goes on to say that the symbols of white power are gaining great importance in the circles of Russian mercenaries, and it is no surprise that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have produced their own version of the lost cause.
The writer believes that the Wagner Group emerged from a “toxic” combination of the internal collapse of the Soviet security services, the lack of job opportunities for young people, and the emergence of white racist groups.
According to the article, Wagner in its current form is a group of private companies, all of which are under the control of an ally of Putin, who was recently seen in eastern Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who denies his connection to the group, but rather asserts that it does not exist.
In response to a journalist’s question, Prigozhin described American and European civilization as being in a moribund state led by “a pathetic bunch of perverts who are in danger.”
The writer recalls that Wagner’s mercenaries fought wars in Ukraine and Libya in support of retired Major General Khalifa Haftar, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Syria.
Castner quotes Candice Rondo, professor of Russian, Eurasian, and Oriental Studies at Arizona State University, as saying that the narrative often circulated on the Internet between white supremacist Americans and Russians is that the rise of the Islamic State also betrays a clash of civilizations.
