Who are the neo-Nazis?

Damascus (ST): With the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine to protect the Donbas region and the Ukrainian demilitarization, which has entered its second month, there has been much talk about the “neo-Nazis” and “extremist nationalists” who control the government in Ukraine, and they are the same ones that a number of heads of state warned against in their words, including the Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bashar al-Assad, who referred to them by his speech that Western countries support the terrorists in Syria and the Nazis in Ukraine, but many people still do not know who they are and where they came from?

Neo-Nazis are members of an extremist, racist, political, ideological movement that has been described by several terms, including “neo-fascism” or “neo-Nazism,” as it follows the goals and principles of the old Nazi movement that had its origin in Germany after the First World War. The movement was active in Western European countries as a trend with an interest in people with white skin  and anti-black, Asian, Semitic and Middle Eastern people, according to the digital content archive of the Way back Machine.

Some countries tried to confront this movement and its spread by banning the expression of ideas that supported Nazism, in addition to banning anything related to the symbols of Nazism, especially in Germany, where belonging to Nazism is a crime punishable by German law due to the destruction, wars and suffering caused by the former Nazi ideology for the population of Germany and Europe, according to the website Germany e-portal. 

On the other hand, this movement received support from some political figures and parties from several countries, most of them in a secret manner. One of its supporters was the “National Socialist German” party, which incites hostility to immigrants from Turks, Arabs, Africans and Asians and calls for their deportation from Germany. Therefore, it supported this racist movement and supporters of this movement began to spread in Europe; they even appeared in France, Austria, Holland, Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

Those in charge of the movement tried, during their quest to increase and expand the number of its adherents, to attract mercenaries, the unemployed, young people, those demobilized from military service in European countries for various reasons, and prison graduates to lure them to join the movement and train them in fighting, street warfare, intimidation and provocative actions.

Over the past years, some Russian and international news agencies worked to raise awareness about the danger of this movement, and videos were published that showed the heinous criminal methods used by members of the neo-Nazi movement to kill minorities, but on the other hand, there was a Western media machine trying to reverse the image, cover and remove this information.

The neo-Nazi racist extremist ideology spread to some parts of Eastern Europe due to immigrants and others. Individuals from Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and even some media outlets indicated that there are elements of its supporters in the Israeli entity.

The neo-Nazis in European countries promote the idea that 70 percent of crimes and thefts that occur are due to the large number of foreigners in their countries, “meaning non-Europeans,” meaning immigrants from other races, claiming that any race other than Europeans causes an imbalance in demographics, ancestry, and customs and undesirable traditions in European society, especially if they are Muslims or from poor countries, and that they must be eliminated or fought in order to justify the goals of their movement.

Russia, in recent years, has stressed the need to warn of the danger of this movement and its threat to the presence of Russian nationals, especially in the “Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk,” which have been subjected to major provocations by extremist Ukrainian nationalists, especially those who belong to the Ukrainian “Azov” battalion that bears the ideology of neo-Nazism with all its behavior and calls. 

K.Q.