A police deployment startled the 200 residents of Pobla de Cérvoles on September 11, 2020. In a joint operation, Mossos d'Esquadra and the Civil Guard took over the small municipality, located on the border between Lleida and Tarragona, to arrest a young man arrived in town months ago.
At the same time, another police group arrested his crony in Alicante.
Both had bought two houses in Pobla in which they spent the confinement of the pandemic without attracting attention.
They lived self-sufficiently, grew marijuana and barely went out to buy food.
It is impossible to assume that the two arrested were planning a far-right attack: in their homes they kept firearms, a library of extremist propaganda and $15,000 in cash.
The investigation had started a year earlier, when agents found a manifesto titled Iron Pills, a heroic life project,
on an internet forum
.
In it some of the keys to the new extreme right were exposed: “Are we Nazis?
No, we are not National Socialists.
We are racists, but we do not have a political ideology because we have ruled out the political route,” read the text written by the two young people detained after months of monitoring.
It was the end of an adventure that had the purpose of “taking action” and to which white men “willing to commit” were invited to join in “some hypothetical race wars.”
According to the Mossos, they were already discussing objectives: “We do not fit into this system that denies our existence and identity.
We seek its destruction for the creation of something new,” says, in summary, the end of the declaration of intentions of this germ of militia.
This is the pioneering case of terrorism of the new extreme right in Spain.
“In much of Europe it has long been the number one terrorist danger, above jihadism.
In Spain the threat level is not so high, but because we work to prevent it.”
The speaker is a member of the General Information Commissariat (CGI) of the National Police dedicated to investigating and monitoring extremist movements.
“Worried?
Yes a lot.
There is a problem, although the majority of society is not aware of it,” he explains.
“We get paid to care and see beyond.
That's why we put ourselves in the worst.
We are not reactive, we are an Intelligence unit.
We work to ensure that that does not happen.”
A person in charge of the General Information Commissariat of the Mossos d'Esquadra agrees that this threat is invisible.
By not transcending the media, there is no feeling of danger: “Before 11-M no one thought something like this could happen.
The next day, everyone seemed to already know what was going to happen.”
From top to bottom: Anders Behring Breivik gives the Nazi salute upon arrival at the trial in Norway;
the American Elliot Rodger, and, to the right of him, Stephan Balliet, accused of killing two people in the synagogue of Halle (Germany). Ole Berg-Rusten (AFP / Getty Ima
This alarm has reached much higher levels in countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries.
Just one example: in Berlin, the Minister of the Interior announced in May 2021 that the extreme right was already the main threat to the country's security, ahead of jihadist terrorism.
The statement came after a list of attacks that have claimed 23 lives in the last two decades.
In December 2022, 3,000 German police officers participated in an operation that dismantled an extremist group that planned to carry out a coup d'état by “military means” to overthrow the federal government.
But what exactly is worrying the Police?
What difference is there with the far-right violence already seen in previous decades?
When talking about the extreme right, the collective imagination usually quickly travels to skinheads, neo-Nazis or those nostalgic for totalitarian regimes.
It is not perceived that way, at least as potential terrorists, by the security forces, who are aware of the evolution of a growing phenomenon, a darker and less known ghost that lives on the Internet, that transcends causes and ideologies and that, at times, takes human form and attacks.
That is why it is very important for researchers to make distinctions in labels.
“We consider extreme right to be that which can reach the parliamentary level.
They are extreme ideas that nevertheless fall within the law.
Beyond that is the extreme right, a concept that does not exclude violence and that seeks to subvert the system.”
The explanation is given by an official from the Mossos d'Esquadra.
“At the same time, within the extreme right we distinguish two branches.
The first: neofascists, national socialists above all.
They operate in gangs and urban groups.
They do activism, graffiti, pamphlets, demonstrations and, occasionally, they practice violence.
The second is made up of extremists of a different, more diffuse nature.
It is a recent phenomenon and in the face of possible terrorist attacks it is the one that worries us the most.”
The National Police agrees and summarizes: “There is an extreme right that seeks to profit, to make money.
And there is another one that doesn't.
We are concerned about both, but especially the second.”
This second, the new extreme right, does not have a hierarchical or group scheme.
They are, in reality, an amalgam of currents of thought, ideas and theories that coexist and are shared, almost entirely, virtually.
It is a broad umbrella that is structured around some essential ideas: white supremacism and nationalism, extreme misogyny and homophobia, anti-Semitism and outright rejection of immigration, especially that related to Islam.
Accelerationists, Incel and conspiracy theories
White supremacism has its most extreme version in a current called accelerationism, which defends the urgent need to take action through violence.
Accelerate from thought to actions.
That is, it proposes and explains how to attack a system that, according to its logic, has failed and needs to be subverted.
“It is the most worrying thing right now in Europe,” says the Mossos d'Esquadra investigator.
It is an evolution of Nazism, a nihilistic position that does not believe in the principle of authority and that considers that in the West everything is rotten: everything must be destroyed and a new order established.
They seek a racial war that will lead to the creation of a white ethnostate with a Christian tradition.
In Spain and much of Europe, white supremacy has an aesthetic linked to the Templar and also to Scandinavian mythology.
They transcend the typical swastika or traditional fascist image.
So much so that there are currents called White Jihad or White Sharia that applauded the taking of Kabul by the Taliban, since they agree on their ultra-conservative precepts.
Paradoxically, they tend to long for a Europe deeply linked to Christianity as a tradition, not as a religion, and they frontally reject any type of immigration, especially Muslim immigration.
Misogyny is the other great pillar that supports the new far-right currents.
It has its most extreme expression in the Incel movement (involuntary celibates, according to its acronym in English).
It is an ideology developed in the United States that expresses a visceral hatred of women.
They blame feminism for the emotional and sexual failure of some men and have organized themselves in virtual spaces (known as the
manosphere
) dedicated to sharing their frustration and demanding the rights of men.
Incels
believe that there is a sociosexual pyramid dominated by women and alpha males to which the rest of the men are subordinate
.
They also reject the LGTBI collective and reinterpret the film
Matrix
(1999).
According to them, the simulation of reality that a blue pill grants in that film keeps the man subjugated by the woman.
They propose “taking” the
red pill
, the red pill of the film, which allowed us to reach the real world.
That is, they invite their faithful to abandon the matrix in which men supposedly live and are managed.
For some time now, a more extreme theory called
the black pill
has also gained intensity , according to which physical appearance marks a person's life above any other circumstance.
That is to say, if you were not born physically graceful, you have nothing to aspire to.
The MGTOW (men who follow their own path, according to their acronym in English, or men on their own, in the free translation into Spanish) are a current within misogynistic hatred, with the difference that these are voluntarily celibate men, as a final expression of women's separatism.
All of these movements have been growing as feminism has grown.
The violent manifestation of this trend had its peak in 2014, in the Californian town of Isla Vista, when student Elliot Rodger killed 6 people and injured 13 others, after attending a party ready to lose his virginity;
It turns out that not only did he not lose her, but he ended up getting beaten up for bothering the girls.
The next day, he carried out the massacre and was later found dead after publishing a manifesto in which he blamed women for rejecting him.
Today he is idolized in the
manosphere
.
Later, other attacks occurred in Europe, such as the one in Hanau (Germany) in 2020, when Tobias R. murdered 10 people, including his mother, and then took his own life.
He also left another 25-page text for posterity.
The following year, in Plymouth (England), Jake Davison, linked to
incels
, shot five people to death, including a three-year-old girl, and also his own mother.
On his YouTube channel he developed the
black pill
theory .
Janine Wissler, of the party Die Linke (The Left), during the commemoration of the nine victims of the mass shooting in Hanau, Germany.
Thomas Lohnes
Conspiracy theories are the third great factor that fuels the new extreme right.
The covid pandemic unleashed hypotheses of all kinds, but before that there were ideas such as QAnon, coming from the United States and which maintains that the elites of the world are constituted in a kind of satanic and pedophile club (as spread by the Pizzagate conspiracy, which tried to connect Democratic Party politicians to an alleged child abuse plot).
Theories such as that of the Great Replacement, according to which there is a preconceived plan to replace the white population of Europe with Muslims and other non-white immigrants, have reached some speeches by candidates for European governments.
The Order of the Nine Angles, an Aryan pagan sect, or ecofascism, a totalitarian demand for the environment, are other ideas that complete this crucible of the contemporary extreme right.
At the base, in the background, the Jews almost always appear, pointed out as the culprits of all evils.
For example, the Incel movement maintains that feminism is a Jewish invention.
Anti-Semitism is, perhaps, the most common idea among this range of fanatical thoughts.
“The differential thing about these ideas is that they are not crystallized in their warlike expression in one or two large organizations, as is the case with jihadism, which finds a space in ISIS or Al Qaeda,” explains a head of the CGI of the Mossos de 'Squadron.
“They are thoughts that live on the internet and do not stop being shared and mutating.”
All of this is accompanied by the fact that “radicalization is hyper-individual, that is, they do not identify with a group.”
It is told by Anna López, doctor in Political Science and expert on the rise of the extreme right in Europe.
“An individual goes from one group to another without problem.”
This is what a police officer defines as “liquid capacity”: radicalization processes are invisible as they are virtual, and they have a global vocation, so extremists adapt the same ideology to their own context.
The consequence is that people who, in reality, do not suffer from these supposed problems can be recruited.
It happened in New Zealand in 2019. The Australian Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in two mosques, despite the fact that in that country there are no problems of coexistence nor a massive presence of Muslims.
Tarrant adopted supremacist ideas that he absorbed on the Internet and acted in his community in accordance with what he had perceived in places like France or Belgium.
In fact, the investigation showed that he had done field work to do the most damage possible in the place around him where there was less police pressure.
During his trial, Tarrant traveled through various places of Templar origin in Spain, and on the weapon he used the name of Don Pelayo could be read, among others.
“Until recently, fascism was limited to each State or nation.
However, accelerationism promotes an identity that transcends borders and that unites a white supremacist population,” says a National Police official.
“It is hive terrorism.”
The soup of hate
These tangles of currents of radical thought, which are hidden on the Internet and are shared from all corners of the world, represent a major challenge for the Intelligence and Information services.
The majority of this enormous soup of hate remains virtual, but there are individuals who complete their radicalization process and go on to terrorist action.
Anna López tries to draw a profile of these individuals based on her experience: “In 85% of the cases it is a man, young and usually with problems socializing.”
The robot portrait maintains striking parallels with that of the lone wolves of jihadist terrorism.
“The most radicalized individuals we encounter,” continues the head of the Mossos d'Esquadra, “have a tendency toward addiction.
They spend many hours at home, in front of the computer, consuming propaganda.
In it they find relief and an explanation for their anger and frustration.
They often feel aggrieved by their inability to adapt to the system and socialize, because they have usually been good students and have done everything they were supposed to do to be successful.”
From there they make a story that is soothing to them.
They settle into victimhood.
“Women don't pay attention to them because of feminism, that invention of the Jews;
They don't get good jobs because of capitalism, they don't socialize because of immigrants, etc.
They find meaning in their grievance by building palpable enemies,” the researcher reasons.
And he adds: “This profile of potential terrorist has not belonged to ultra groups or Nazi gangs, he does not even share their aesthetics.
He has no criminal history or experience on the street.
He hasn't socialized.
“He subscribes to supremacist propaganda, but consumes it from the privacy provided by his home and the internet.”
“The problem is that these ideas are going further,” says Anna López.
“What is happening is ideal for creating terrorists.
Europe is facing a great challenge that will not stop growing.
In Spain, security forces are working very well, with more than 3,000 websites under surveillance.
But there is a lot of information missing.
Citizens are not aware of the dimension of the problem.
There are hardly any institutional reports that analyze this issue.
We do have transparency reports from Facebook and in them we see that hate speech is growing unstoppably.
“Facebook alone deletes a million hate messages a day globally.”
A man arrested last year in Monforte de Lemos (Lugo) for his alleged participation in the neo-Nazi organization 'Combate 18'.Europa Press News (Europa Press via Getty Images)
Those who complete the radicalization process and decide to take action usually show very similar patterns and behaviors.
The decision to plan an attack appears due to a trigger.
“It can be an event that marks them: from a personal contempt or grievance or the construction of a mosque in their neighborhood to the conflict between Hamas and Israel or an attack that they have seen somewhere in the world,” the Mossos explain.
In fact, the jihadist attacks on European soil put the authorities monitoring far-right radicals on high alert.
In each Islamist attack, hate messages multiply.
The reality is that far-right terrorism is not taking shape to replace the already well-known jihadist: it is an addition, a new threat to Europe.
The case of Anders Breivik was the first to show the true dimension of this threat.
Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in July 2011. “He became a catalyst for us to focus on the study of the extreme right: at the age of 23 and from a computer he had soaked up supremacist theories and wanted to liquidate the young people who were going to bring about the end of white Europe,” says Anna López.
A year later, an attempted attack inspired by that tragedy was aborted in Spain.
Despite the fact that the networks were in incipient times, the Police discovered that Juan Manuel Morales, a Majorcan student, expressed radical opinions on his blog, with references to the Columbine massacre (Colorado, United States, 1999, 13 victims) and to himself. Breivik attack.
When they arrested him, they found 140 kilos of explosives purchased online in his house, with which he intended, according to the Police, to bomb the University of the Balearic Islands.
He financed himself through
online
gambling and in the documentation found he expressed supremacist ideas and proclaimed his hatred of university students.
He was sentenced to four years for possession of explosives.
The final step before taking action is to write a manifesto.
It is, again, a repeated and replicated behavior, in which they leave evidence of their ideology and try to give maximum dissemination to their decision.
Manifestos almost always incorporate a phrase that constitutes a founding idea for accelerationists.
It is a premise written by David Lane, a white supremacist leader and American writer who died in 2007: “We must ensure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The phrase, built with 14 words, constantly appears in far-right virtual content.
Sometimes, its representation is reduced to the number 14.
As if it were a game
After publishing the manifesto comes the attack, which is almost always covered in video game aesthetics: rifle, military equipment and clothing and, normally, a camera with which they broadcast live.
Leaving the record, offering the attack in
streaming
, is essential for them.
Stephan Balliet broadcast live on Twitch his attack on a synagogue in Halle (Germany) in which he murdered 2 individuals.
Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in two mosques in New Zealand in 2019, achieved 2,000 views in the first minute of his attack.
“They turn terrorism into an
online
game ,” says the researcher.
So much so that there are
rankings
of the terrorists who have killed the most people.
The objective is to beat the macabre record achieved by Anders Breivik, considered the
top scorer
(top scorer) on a list made up of Los Santos: among the propaganda that the Police have seized in Spain, some illustrations of these
top scorers
characterized as saints stand out.
These lists, together with the manifestos, attempt to perpetuate the state of radicalization.
In far-right propaganda it is what they call the Holy Terror.
Researchers call it the
copycat
effect , according to which individuals emerge who take reference from previous attackers to follow their model and spread messages of praise in radicalized forums.
The figure of the
incel
Elliot Rodger is a good example: this terrorist has received express tributes of veneration from other later murderers, such as Alek Minassian, who ran over 10 people in Toronto in 2018. Before starting the van, he wrote on Facebook: “Hail Supreme Knight Elliot Rodger.”
That same year, Nikolas Cruz opened fire at a high school in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people.
Cruz had left written messages that “Elliot Rodger would not be forgotten.”
His followers on the forums even declared March 23, the date of the massacre, and also of his death, St. Elliot's Day.
Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown identifies murder suspect Elliot Rodger (pictured right) and some of the weapons he used, at a news conference in Goleta, California, in May 2014. ROBYN BECK (AFP via Getty Images)
Finally, and unlike jihadist terrorism, the far-right attacker does not have martyrdom as his goal.
That is to say, it is exceptional that they commit suicide.
They are arrested and become part of Los Santos.
Internet, your world
The virtual world is the world of far-right radicals.
Social networks, messaging applications and forums are their habitats.
In most cases, messages and rants are exchanged publicly.
To do this, they mainly use X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
Critical of the moderation rules, many radicalized profiles migrated to Parler, an active social network although blocked two years ago by Apple, Google and Amazon, from where, according to researchers, the assault on the US Capitol in 2021 was organized. Hence They moved to Gab, a network that came to be defined as “Twitter for racists.”
In Spain, the extreme right disseminates its messages through national forums and, to a lesser extent, in other English-speaking forums such as 4chan or 8kun.
But the favorite environment is Telegram, where dozens of channels with thousands of subscribers coexist.
This amalgamation of channels is known as Terrorgram.
In all these spaces, one tool stands as the star: the meme.
Simple, universal and, above all, viral, memes are the most common expression when it comes to sharing propaganda.
Five years ago, the National Intelligence Center (CNI) removed from a forum on the bubble.info website an extensive dossier of almost 150 pages titled
Spanish Militant Accelerationism
.
It contained anti-Semitic, misogynistic and supremacist propaganda.
He encouraged violent actions and terrorist attacks and insisted on the idea that anyone can do a lot of damage to the system.
Small-scale acts that can cause a contagion effect.
Two pages of the manifesto withdrawn by the CNI in which they call for attacks and praise the figure of far-right terrorists.
All these scenarios are monitored by security forces in what is called virtual patrol.
Most are public spaces that can be monitored without obstacles.
It is in this first round where investigators try to detect potentially dangerous elements.
“We control and analyze movements, their publications and their follow-ups,” explains an investigator from the National Police.
They have certain phrases, words and messages protocolized that put them on alert.
“A braggart who uploads hate messages all day is not the same as certain behaviors that we have controlled and that are indicators of potential terrorism,” the Mossos d'Esquadra say.
When one of these profiles shows these types of messages, they usually isolate themselves afterwards.
They leave open spaces and end up in private groups.
“If the subject becomes radicalized, he or she accesses closed Telegram channels or private Facebook groups.
We cannot enter there without judicial permission,” they say from the National Police.
When they obtain these permissions, security forces create fake profiles—digital infiltrators—to join private groups.
The National Police investigator resumes: “Infiltrating is problematic.
They ask for photos and there are meet-ups.
They may ask you to participate in some action.
"We have to overcome these issues."
On many occasions, police infiltrators are detected and expelled.
At that moment the investigators lose track and are left blind.
“These are tense moments because there are advanced stages of radicalization.
But you don't know if you can intervene," they explain from the National Police.
“We always have to play seven and a half and get to them without going over.
In other words: we have to try to stop it before the attack arrives.
But if you come in early, the lawyer is going to knock you down and they are going to go to his house.
It's a silver bullet: if you fail, you lose."
In these shadow spaces, video game chats stand out.
“
Gaming
is probably the most unpunished and difficult to monitor radicalization forum,” admits the researcher.
As predictable as it is inevitable
One of the differences between the United States and Europe in terms of the number of attacks is access to weapons.
Therefore, one of the imminent challenges for European authorities is 3D printing.
“At the moment you cannot print a complete automatic weapon, you always need to purchase a firing pin.
But it can be done soon.
There is no point in following the trail of a weapon if anyone can make it at home,” the Mossos d'Esquadra explain.
An example of the short distance to action was uncovered in Spain in September 2020, during the pandemic.
In Operation Odilo, the National Police dismantled an illegal weapons manufacturing workshop with printers in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and arrested a 55-year-old man who possessed far-right propaganda and who, according to investigators, was already radicalized.
In August 2022, a new police intervention, Operation Saguaro, dismantled another clandestine weapons printing workshop in the province of A Coruña.
A person who shared manuals on a supremacist channel in Spanish and who had a practically finished AR9 submachine gun was arrested.
The threat of the extreme right does not always appear in isolated forms.
There are organizations with historical members from ultra sectors.
In 2022, after a two-year investigation, the National Police launched Operation Ario against a group of neo-Nazi ideology that incited violence on the networks and stockpiling weapons through WhatsApp.
One of the detainees, who was a member of the self-proclaimed National Democratic Party, was held responsible for the attack on a headquarters of an LGTBI association in Alcoi (Alicante).
On other occasions, cells from formations with a long international career appear.
This is the case of Combat 18, the armed wing of the historic National Socialist organization Blood & Honor, whose Spanish branch was dismantled this fall in an operation by the National Police and the Mossos d'Esquadra.
A total of 16 people were arrested on October 17 in what is one of the largest operations against the violent extreme right in Spain.
A 'collage' with the photos of the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, murderer of 51 people;
Tobias Rathjen, who killed 10 in Hanau (Germany) and then committed suicide, and Jake Davison, who murdered 5 individuals in Plymouth (United Kingdom).John Kirk-Anderson (AFP / Getty
Despite this operation, the security forces assure that the situation has nothing to do with that of some European countries, where there are terrorist organizations and even training camps.
In 2020, Germany dismantled Gruppe S, a gang that intended to carry out large-scale attacks against politicians, authorities and immigrants with the aim of triggering a civil war.
Also in Germany, two years later, the Police arrested 25 members of the Reich Citizens Movement, accused of planning a coup d'état.
In Sweden, the Nordic Resistance Movement even created a political party.
This supremacist organization, with some of its leaders in prison, aims to turn the Nordic countries into a white ethnostate.
In Russia, the Russian Imperial Movement (MIR), born in 2002, is constituted as a white supremacist and ultra-Christian paramilitary organization.
They have at least two training camps, located near Saint Petersburg, where they develop urban military tactics.
Many members of the MIR are fighting voluntarily in the war against Ukraine, where a neo-fascist faction of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion also has a presence.
In some areas of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Hungary, security forces have located training camps for neo-fascist groups.
According to a study carried out by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, in Europe alone there are 410 groups, associations or movements linked to the extreme right or the extreme right, a number that has grown exponentially in recent years and that threatens to continue to grow. do it.
“It is not a question of if it will happen, it is a question of when,” says a member of the National Police in reference to a possible terrorist act.
“The outlook is not very encouraging and, of course, the police fight alone will not be enough.”
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