A few days ago, a patch with the inscription "Boogaloo 2020" and the colors of the American flag appeared on Amazon. It seemed harmless, but was soon removed by the platform. The reason? Boogaloo is a term used by the most warlike factions of the local far-right, who call themselves boogaloos. The provenance is diffuse: those who say that it all started as a joke in a group of Telegram and others that comes from the movie Electric boogaloo, whose full title is Breakin '2: electric boogaloo. Through places like 4chan (where most of the ideologues of the American alt right pass ), memes with the inscription can be seen more and more frequentlyCivil war 2: Electric boogaloo.
The boogaloos have become famous for wearing Hawaiian shirts. The reason - again - is a play on words: The Big Luau is a celebration in which pigs are roasted. Pigs is a word that far-right militants (and many others) use to refer to the police. So, with one of those surreal turns of the waist, the demonstrations of the neo-Nazis in the United States have been dyed in bright colors and edgy prints, which serve as a counterpoint to assault rifles, bulletproof vests and knives with 30 centimeters of edge. The second amendment to the US Constitution, which allows any American to possess firearms, half-imploded the pandemic: never before have so many been sold in the history of the country.
Similarly, igloos (as a symbol of resistance) and signs that mix aloha with supremacist emblems have emerged in dozens of groups that predict the arrival of a new civil war and ask their militants to start storing ammunition and food. But, despite the folklore derived from a wardrobe that borders on parody and reminds us of that crazy man played by Robert De Niro in The Cape of Fear, the funny nickname (boogaloos) and the delirium of his theories, which worries experts is that this collective of indecipherable symbolism for others does not stop growing in number and, in addition, it has unlimited access to all kinds of weapons. His threats are not a simple kind of warlike prose.
The Nazis change a lot of wardrobe
First were the fingers. The index, the heart and the annular forming the initials of the Ku Klux Klan. Then the 14 words, later the RaHoWa ( sacred racial warfare initials ), then the Helly Hansen garments by their initials; 88 (for the eighth letter of the alphabet, the H, in duplicate: Heil Hitler) or the Columbia garments, whose blades seem to form a swastika. Every gesture, every logo, every slogan has had its speakers throughout history. From the tirades of the great Klan cyclops in Alabama to the songs of Skrewdriver or No Remorse, to the conspiracy delusions of QAnon, the mysterious agent of chaos who claims to have access to secret information and whose mission - he insists - is to destroy the deep state, a kind of power within power. The same people who one day say that Obama belongs to the reptilian extraterrestrial race clung to the revisionism of David Irving, the British historian who claims that the Holocaust never existed, a few years ago. Forums, social networks, the recesses of the Internet are full of strange theories, codes and secret doors. They never close, and are always capable of generating new, increasingly elaborate material.
But now the American extreme right (and therefore the world right) has other faces, other mantras, other objectives. And of course, everything has changed: the ideological nuances, the discourse and the costumes. American neo-Nazis now call themselves accelerationists: they believe that modern democratic regimes are already over, but they need to be dealt the final blow, speed up the process. For this, any means is lawful, including terrorism. The theory mixes Lenin with national-socialism and both with the idea that only by destroying everything can something better emerge.
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