Making More Timothy McVeigh's?
nazisinthemilitary.com
“I find it very disconcerting that there are high-level military officials that are unaware of this growing problem. This is a serious issue that deserves serious attention from the Pentagon brass.”
Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Littleton) asking General David Petraeus about the infiltration of American gangs into the United States military during a hearing on U.S. progress in Iraq on April 9th 2008.
Forrest Fogarty was 14 when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi.
After bullying at the hands of black and Mexican children at high school in Los Angeles, his adolescent rage needed an outlet. He turned to the three passions that would sustain him to the present day: the skinhead movement, hardcore violence and neo-Nazi punk music.
At 15 he moved from LA to downtown Tampa, Fl, with his father, a celebrated Vietnam veteran, and started at Leto Public High in the sunny climes of Hillsborough County. Within a year he had been kicked out. His incessant fighting and penchant for spouting his Hitler-inspired racism was too much for the school authorities to permit.
He never went back to education and forged an identity through immersion in the hate-filled music of the neo-Nazi movement. He became obsessed with Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of the British skinhead band Screwdriver and at 16 got the their album cover – a Viking carrying a staff – tattooed all the way up his left forearm. Soon after he had started his own Nazi band, Attack.
For the next eight years he drifted through dead-end jobs in construction and landscaping. He began hanging out with the National Alliance, one of the biggest neo-Nazi organizations in the U.S. at the time, and became a member.
But construction wasn’t what he wanted to do; Fogarty had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior. In 1997 he decided to act on it. He resolved to do what two generations of Fogarty’s had done before him: join the military.
Letting everybody in
The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the U.S. military reported back as far as the Korean and Vietnam wars. The leaders in the movement have often encouraged members to sign up in an effort to receive combat and weapons training to bring to the Race War domestically.
The U.S. military command in turn has periodically introduced legislation and guidelines in an effort to stifle the infiltration of white supremacists and neo-Nazis into their ranks.
Since September 11th 2001 and the two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq, this fraught relationship has taken a new turn. In January 2008, there were 158,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq, with 17,000 in Afghanistan. In all, over a million individuals have served in both wars.
In 2005 the army missed their enlistment targets by the largest margin since 1979. This strain on the army in terms of maintaining these huge troop levels has caused their enlistment standards to slip. From educational attainment to criminal records, less is now asked. According to every white supremacist and neo-Nazi organization I talked to in the U.S. – which has included over a dozen different groups – this new laxness has included the military attitude to far-right extremists as well.
Tom Metzger is one of the Godfathers of the neo-Nazi movement in the U.S. The former Grand Wizard of the Ku-Klux-Klan and the current leader of the White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R), he has seen the ebbing and flowing of the military attitude to far-right extremists over the past forty years.
“Now they are letting everybody in,” he says. “All the gang-bangers, all the blacks, Mexicans, and white supremacists. I would say that 10 percent of army and marines –they are not in the Navy and Air force so much – are racist extremists of some variety.”
Erich Gliebe, the chairman of one of the most important neo-Nazi groups in the United States, the National Alliance, agrees. “I’ve heard the military have relaxed the regulations from a couple of members that are in there,” he says. “I think if a person wants to get into the military with just saying that they are in the National Alliance now that they can. In 2008, with the declining number of troops, I don’t think they are as picky as they used to be.”......Very Long Article......
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