 Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is History is Here to Help on a Given Thursday and we're going to talk today about right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism with Peter Hoffenberg, a professor of history and Jean Rosenfeld, also professor of history. Right, I get that right. Okay, let's begin with the finding out terms. If I tell you we're talking about right-wing extremists, what is a right-wing extremist for this discussion, Peter? Well, I'm going to defer to Jean to start. Dr. Rosenfeld. I was going to ask her to define domestic terrorism. Well, I'll let her define both then we can have a conversation. But if your viewers are just joining us, they just want to say Dr. Jean Rosenfeld is a scholar of the history of religion and among her particular interests are the relationships between religion, nationalism, religion and populism, and particularly today's topic, religion and how we're going to define terrorism and extremism. So let me defer. Thank you, Jay. Let me defer to Jean to get us started. I think it'd be really helpful because the words are thrown around all over the place. Well, we should add that the third leg of the stool would be religion. Perfect. And where that plays in the definition of these two terms. So we're going to right-wing extremists. This is not an easy task, Jean. Domestic terrorists and religion. So can you help us define and connect those terms? I'll try. I'm sure everyone has their own ideas about it. They're very common terms. But to quote a famous scholar on terrorism, terrorism, he describes very succinctly as violence unrestricted by the rules of war to pursue political agendas. So it is also directed at targets that are selected to further that end of political agenda. And of course, if you have our targeting of political agenda, you need an ideology. Some people speak of religions as ideologies and ideologies as religions. So religion is a condition of being ultimately concerned according to my colleagues in the history of religions who study new religious movements, commonly called cults. And religion as ultimate concern means that which you are willing to die for or live by means of. It's a coherent to you form of belief that you live by and are willing to die for. And we saw this in January 6th when the people who entered the Senate chambers had a prayer meeting. That's what they did with the shaman. In the capital building and somebody who showed this and some did not because when you see a video it's edited and they often edit out the religious portions of it. Things we recognize as religion and they'll say, oh no, that's not important. So they put it into the trash can and we scholars take it out of the trash can be look at it very carefully because human beings create symbolism and symbolism creates meaning and people become invested in meaning they connect to one another they bind themselves together by meaning and religion also means it comes from word meaning to bind together. So you bound together with ultimate concern about things you're willing to die for and things that you live by and it can take any form because human beings are very creative and they create all these what we call fictional narratives that they become invested in and it becomes an alternate reality for them. And that's kind of the shortest version I can give you ideology, religion connected to the political agenda they seek to achieve as a result directed by that ideology and that interconnectedness that they feel that sense of meaning. And so domestic terrorism is some is terrorism which doesn't extend beyond the boundaries of the nation. Although when we speak about our domestic terrorism today, it does extend beyond the boundaries of our nation. The relationship between right wing extremists and we're getting into this, who are responsible maybe for 40% of the domestic terrorist acts in the United States currently they reach out to Europe and Europe reaches out to them. So you have like groups in Germany and other places in Europe that they're affiliated. They know each other in Scandinavia in Germany. This Aryan preoccupation with white supremacy is I think more distinct and better to focus on than right wing extremists quote unquote because the right wing isn't necessarily terrorist. The right wing is legitimate it's conservative. And we need a right wing. Okay. But to balance us as Joe Biden pointed out the other night. But extremism is kind of a generic word that avoids insulting anybody. But let's look at the core belief that unites the current 40% the people in who attack in El Paso who attack in San Diego who attack in Philadelphia against Jews and Hispanics and other targeted groups and Asians. But this is more of an individual thing. I'm speaking now well yes and we can get into long walk terrorism that I don't want to complicate things right wing extremists is better thought of from Charlottesville in 2017 to January 6 and 2020 as white supremacy based on a fear of being replaced by alien peoples and upwelling of something very common in American history called nativism. Well I am much more troubled about all those three terms than I was a few minutes ago. Thanks. Thank you for the definition. How about you Peter are you more troubled about them. I will trouble you some more. I completely agree as usual with Gene I would just add a few things particularly from the European protected system historian of Europe. My difficulty with religion in the way that Gene described it not Gene's description has been problematic but the issue is not really whether you're willing to die for your religion. The problem is are you willing to kill for your religion. I think you should be very careful. For example in Jewish tradition there is a tradition of martyrdom where one dies. There is not a tradition of martyrdom where one kills other people. I think we have to be very clear about the distinction between willing to die for something and willing to go and kill for something and I think that's more problematic and more troublesome. It's a trouble so it's an issue I think which transcends religion and transcends nativism. It's a question of the militarism of my society. So I think today the distinctions between you know a press wrap was dear old friend but the distinctions between you know non-state non-military and domestic terror are blurred. Many terrorists, direct-to-terrorists are either current soldiers or policemen. They train themselves as military units. The conspiracies are military attacks. So I think we're dealing with a very fundamental problem of militarism. That is the necessity to be violent and violence which is not like the Buddhist monk biting himself on fire to protest the corrupt war. It is a kind of militarism which says I'm going to kill some of these. Okay. Secondly I think that G is obviously right about connections and the connections really go way back particularly connections of ethnic nationalists. Everybody knows on this reminder that many of the German policies were based upon American literature, American and not-of-file policies but based on American writing and in fact if you look at some of the most stringent ethnic immigration laws, anti-Asian, anti-eastern or southern European, they're based upon the 1920s American nation. So Gene's absolutely right about the connections but the connections are not just the product of current events or a product of current technology. I'm deeply concerned about the learning of the lines very much. Well I'm just going to end here. Terrorism, I mean Grappo is absolutely right. What European historians though would have had is that terrorism is based upon fear. It is based upon telling somebody else that wherever you are I could eventually get them and so there is a kind of politics to this certainly and that's that's in nature and that's where military operations and domestic terrorism often match. Okay so that'll trouble you even more. Well I'm troubled not only by the you know the silos of these definitions but by the connection among the groups that you define and describe and my question to Gene is you know what's the dynamic here? It seems to me that there's a legitimate question as to whether these groups have more connections now you described and it was shocking to me you know the connection of you know domestic terrorists with foreign terrorists that's very troubling especially in Germany of course but I'm wondering if we have connections among all of these right wing groups all of the the right wing religion right wing extremists politically and of course the you know the white supremacists and domestic terrorists it seems to me that before we could we could see them in isolated silos to some extent. They didn't necessarily come together they were doing their thing whatever it was but now it seems like they they have they have found common ground that they do in fact talk to each other that they do in fact plan and use social media to do conspiratorical thinking and and I think the January 6th affair was a way where they could rub shoulders rub elbows talk to each other make make make relationships and so when they left wherever they went home to they carried these new relationships and now we have these these various defined groups connected more than before what do you think? Well first of all I'd like to just pause for a moment and go back to the very fine point that Peter made about militarism and freedom to kill there is a fault line that runs through new religious movements or cults and that fault line is between violence and non-violence. What's difference about jihadism from conservative Muslims? A significant difference and the same thing obtains with our terror groups today in the United States. Are you willing to act as the hand of God? In 1985 a paradigmatic group called the Covenant the sword and the arm of the Lord and the act is the arm of the Lord. These are groups that feel not only that they must die for something if necessary but they do have a a mandate to kill under certain circumstances and you go to every major group that has committed homicide or terror and you can always find in their literature and in their teachings that which says you may kill or you must kill okay and I won't go into detail but you can do this with every group just about. Secondly back up a little bit in terms of the definition of terrorism it is beyond the rules of war. War has rules. Terrorists have their own rules and they're different. They're irregulars. They're not a well-regulated militia. They are irregular militias and we have to discern what their rules are in order to beat them because sometimes we can use those rules against them but basically they are not the standard military per se. They can infiltrate and take over the standard militaries they did in Nazi Germany but they are not the standard military and so we need to recognize that it's beyond the rules of war. It's something that's why we call it terror and we set it apart. There's something very different. With respect to connections let me simplify by going back to the first instance of domestic terrorism noted by David Rappaport in the United States. That was Samuel Adams in Massachusetts. The Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty, the Tarring and Feathering of British sympathizers went on for 10 years from the Stamp Act of 1865, 1765, Stamp Act of 1765 until 1766 and then 1776 when we had the beginning of the war and I'd like to even jump further and look at what's the all these separate issues of terrorism, what finds them together there's a paradigm. First you get a sense of oppression then you get a response to that sense of oppression and the Stamp Act was a sense of oppression then you have the slogan of no taxation without representation formulated by the Sons of Liberty and a regular group under Sam Adams and they also had committees of correspondence meaning that they didn't have an internet but light groups grew up in several of the colonies and they had secret correspondences so they they didn't have an internet but they had a means of communication so there's always a means of communication to find them together and their sense of connection and then you have a consequence as a result of these resistant long-term terrorist groups Sons of Liberty 10 years resulting in a revolution okay again in the Civil War you had the run up to the Civil War you had a bloody Kansas in the 1850s after the Missouri compromise comparable to the Stamp Act then you have the irregulars in Kansas including John Brown and you had the massacre in Lawrence Kansas and the resulting massacre by Brown and his sons in Pottawatomie in I believe 1850-56 and then ultimately in 1859 you had Harper's Ferry and in 1860 you had the Civil War so there you have again a provocation and a regular response and a consequence the consequence of dividing the country into two separate dual opposites that could not reconcile and so you had a national consequence it sounds like these these ramp-ups you know we can learn from them of course but it sounds like we're in a kind of a ramp-up now Gene maybe maybe you know what happened actually there was a ramp-up in the 1990s there was a low level insurrection in the United States that was greatly troubling the FBI it was almost overwhelmed we had in 1993 I believe in the incident of Waco which was not right-wing extremism it was a religious group an apocalyptic religious group then you had a response to that in 1995 with Oklahoma City which was the greatest act most horrible act of domestic terrorism and it was to incite a revolution and it was based on an ideology which was an American Nazi ideology expressed in the Turner Diaries that Tim McVeigh admired and enacted as the hand of Kiska and then you had the Jordan Montana standoff of the Freeman who were operative in multiple states and really distressing local municipal governments and overwhelming judges and juries and it was an ideology of separating oneself from American citizenship and creating a whole new system in the United States or at least the Pacific Northwest they wanted to actually succeed in the Pacific Northwest so in the 1990s you had a lot of incidents of terror against the police you had incidents of terror against the populace there was an assassination of Alan Berg and Denver a Jewish talk-through show host by the order and it looked like we were really going to ramp up to something but then what happened was um 9-11 and these groups went underground and then they popped up again before Donald Trump and it was Charlottesville so interesting so you can see it you know I I see it kind of like a bacterial colony forgive me this where there are various life phases in the bacterial colony and one of the phases is you know the the phase where it's it's just knitting together you don't see it and then later on it it shoots up in a very dramatic way reaches a plateau um and at that point I suppose you could have real violence by a number of people that ultimately dies every bacterial colony works that way the only and the only end to the bacterial colony uh well the the end is natural but the only continuation of the colony is when some other bacteria are introduced there's something to be learned from bacteria I always feel that you know there's something to feel Peter um this is this is all very troubling the notion that we're involved in a ramp up now and that things are knitting under the surface maybe we don't see it necessarily or realize you know where it goes the dynamic uh could could go to those violent military people um and it has happened before I wasn't aware of this gene I studied American history at college you know but I wasn't aware of this so Peter if we are in a ramp up now what are the signs that we should be looking for as far as a ramp up we should be be looking for whether or not those who gene has described are either ignored or vetted by one of the two major political parties these these issues really become nationally dangerous when the quote unquote normal politics in one way or another either ignores AIDS or that's that's one thing I would be worried about whether people in office are going to out and speak out against it uh whether there'll be some kind of regulation of arms so that's one one concern and as long as one major party essentially ignores this or in some cases cultivates it we do have a problem secondly and this gene and I approach this as dear friends from very very different perspectives so from my perspective is everything that's been described as terror as always historically been described as freedom fighters so we have a really a macro issue about whether or not society is going to accept violence of really any nature because most of the acts of domestic terror are in response to state's terror and nobody's mentioned the black panthers the black panthers were a large quote unquote either freedom fighting group right or terror group and I'm going to answer your question by saying that the state and governments has to do what we're trying to do and take positive steps to improve the general life of society and the way one of the ways to attack a bacteria right is to isolate the bacteria yes and you isolate the bacteria by I mean the rest of the peatery dish can go and then you have a big dose of antibiotics so one of the things that worries me and this I'm sure is exactly in jeans wheelhouse is the number of local sheriffs who are part of these groups right in other words the number of folks who are important intersection of law and order the old takers for example who really are borderline terror group I mean an official of the government who tells people not to wear masks or an official of the government who says that eight to ten guys aspiring to potentially murder the governor in Michigan were just a bunch of good old guys hanging out that's a real political problem these groups are most dangerous when they have traction within the general political within the general political system okay and thirdly I am very concerned that we are not appreciating the fact that for many people there is no distinction between state government violence and terror and non-state government violence and terror you know when the U.S. government decides to pull out of Afghanistan and the same year increases the Pentagon's budget that's not an end of the war anti-militarism so I do worry because one of the responses right to white christian right wing militarism is for blood groups to harm themselves and I do see a dangerous Romeo and Juliet where the families are dueling and the prince is going to have to say you cannot do it and the way to say you cannot do it is to get away get these guns out of public life well you anticipated my my next question to gene if we if we look at the people who are willing to kill then we have to look at guns and what we and when we look at guns we find that there's a lot of people who are wedded to guns and this is a psychological sociological question how many people really need to have the comfort the power of a gun or multiple guns and after a while they get to think how they would use those guns and then they contort the second amendment to license to keep those guns and the government is is unable it doesn't have the political will pretty much everywhere in the country to stop those guns how does that play into this this line we are talking about between the non-violent and the military violence this has got to be a significant a significant feature a catalyst if you will to take these people over the line well a gun is an instrument it's it's an instrument of death it's also a tool and why do you wear a gun it's something that can lethally you know as a lethal weapon here the police we we gave our police guns they didn't do that in britain they gave their bobby sticks now they wear guns perhaps now we're giving them tanks leftover military equipment right now we have hostage rescue teams swap teams hostage rescue team and the FBI swap team and the local police departments which are based on special forces in the military they're all connected they all know one another when something is performed in the public in the public official way it's subject to vigilance and controls and limitations and professionalism people we learned from the dirick chauvin trial that police are trained in the application of force there is a rational training method for applying force because the police often are facing military type situations with people where you know they they're assassinated that happened here in honolulu actually and so there it's a question of perspective of training of political acceptance by the body politic versus again over the line you have the irregulars you have the ideologies which are new and creative and focus on mandate for violence mandated by a power above and beyond a god and you have control by a secretive group only as the committees and correspondents set their own rules they're not the rules we live by they're different rules and you have a political agenda which is to divide and to foment chaos and revolution to destroy the existing system in any way possible by recruiting people by influencing people by giving them lethal weapons by telling them that you are the sons of liberty in the current generation and wearing the symbols of the boston tea party in the gatson flag don't tread on me which is from the war i believe in 1812 and and you go back and you influence people in this way to make them think they are freedom fighters you know one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter so it's again the gun is an instrument when it's employed by those with a lethal ideology then it's an instrument of terror when supplied by those who are abiding by rules that we all conventionally accept then it's it's a tool to maintain stability and peace gene well it's just i want to ask you for final i'm gonna ask you a question okay because gene is thoughtful and rational it's a broad view of the world i would like every american to tell me why any american needs they are victim it is a simple question there's no there's no good answer for that there it's no good answer and that it is it is in the dna of the country that this is happening it isn't like for example it is but it's a it's a matter of establishing public safety and public good and that may require the old tradition that the states i mean ever since weapons began the state made an effort to monopolize the means of coercion the differences were supposed to have a democratic state but as soon as there were handguns in europe they were laws regulating them one of the reasons you can go to england and have a great time seeing the castles is that the armories were established romeo and juliet is all about what happens when two families who don't like each other have what for the time was a weapon of mass destruction which was the sword in the street killing each other so gene is absolutely right about it being a tool but it is a tool whose only purpose is to fire an excessive amount of bullets at a rapid rate accurately and there is no no good reason there is no reason to go to horbat for anybody to have that now will that end extremism no it will not an end extremism but if you believe in economics and how much people are willing to put into something and what the cost of something is it's going to be a hell of a lot more difficult to do a lot of things that people would like to do if they didn't have these weapons if they didn't have the military training to use them i mean don't you find it odd that everybody wears camouflage shorts see for me that is an an oddity in a liberal society and it is almost equivalent to carrying weapons it is the militarization of clothing why would you wear camouflage shorts to the beach what are you what are you saying are you saying that the military military clothing it's attractive you're making a statement gene let me ask you the last question because we have to go soon and that is um you know if we take weapons out of the formula if we somehow get congress and the state legislators state legislatures to to ban or seriously limit weapons outside of government you know just hypothetically would that would that solve the problem peter suggests it will no i said we'd not solve the problem we'd not solve the problem how do you feel about it well in 1866 alfred novell invented dynamite which made bombing possible which made international terrorism possible and started off the four waves in the late 19th century in 1866 he invented dynamite and and with the anarchists in russia and then of course it came to the united states with many markets and all that um so there's always uh it's the way you wield the weapon i mean that made bombings possible it made mass murder possible why do we have the nobel prize today because alfred novell felt so guilty of what he unleashed on society which was a map weapon of mass destruction and we see bombings today what they have resulted in um the sword the sword was employed uh after 9 11 to terrorize people through the executions remember the the quote beetles in iraq the british Arabs that were were cutting off the heads of their hostages that you know it's not the number of people that are killed in this case it's the the video of it to the world and the terror insights and other people's hearts so they're using the sword in a in a different way in a in a way that that goes beyond the rules of war it's their own rules which they love so you can have anything as a weapon the gallows that was set up in in front of the white house uh in front of the capital on jen on january 6 was an image of terror because it was then associated with the threat to mike pence and also it was associated with the turner diaries and the uh seen in the terror diaries where they set up uh gallows from lampposts in los angeles near ucla to execute professors and liberals that associated with blacks and other peoples so the gallows becomes a symbol and it becomes something larger than itself it's not a weapon but the threat of a weapon and then the intent and and the political intent to use it well this goes this goes to peter's point that taking the weapons away may not solve the problem if you can suggest that there there are other ways to hurt people and kill people um you know what you guys so uh we're out of time i we could go on and i want to go on and i hope we can gene is this okay we can schedule another show with you i like that uh we continue this conversation because you know the world around us is changing and thus the conversation is changing thank you gene and thank you peter hopper thank you very much great discussion here on history is here to help and it does thank you very much