Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the most aggressive generals of his generation, and after his military service ended in a bitter fashion, he went home to Tennessee and found a new way to fight. A defeated general in the Confederate army, Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan and was named its inaugural “grand wizard.”
Forrest was in the first wave of American veterans who turned to domestic terror once they returned home. It also happened after World War I and II, after the Korean and Vietnam wars — and it is happening after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sedition trial now taking place in Washington, D.C., features five defendants accused of trying to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, and four are veterans, including Stewart Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers militia. In December, another sedition trial is set for five members of the Proud Boys militia — four of whom served in the military.
A relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence.
The point here is not that all or most veterans are dangerous. Those who engage in far-right extremism are a fraction of the more than 18 million Americans who have served in the armed forces and returned to civilian life without indulging in political violence. Of 897 people indicted after the January 6 insurrection, 118 have military backgrounds, according to the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. The point is that a relatively small number of veterans are having an outsized impact on white supremacist violence, thanks to the respect that flows from their military service. While they are outliers from the mass of law-abiding vets, they are the tentpoles of domestic terror.
“When these guys get involved in extremism, they shoot to the top of the ranks and they are very effective at recruiting more people to the cause,” noted Michael Jensen, a senior researcher at the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.
So opens Peter Maas' garbage for THE INTERCEPT.
The crazy veteran. Aren't we so lucky to have Peter Maas resurrect that stereotype.
Back in the seventies, some wanted COMING HOME to feature the crazed veteran who would open fire on people once he was back home in the US. Jane and the other producers of the film rightly rejected that nonsense. But then, they had taste.
Peter Maas has none and wants to paint on a broadsheet with broad strokes the crazed vet. His actual research doesn't back up his hype but, hey, he didn't want to report, he wanted to inflame.
There's a way to deal with the topic and it's not to resort to sensationalism or to tarring wide sections of a the American people.
I don't have anything else to say tonight, that 'report' is just disgusting.
