Brasilien: Bolsonaro åtalas för förskingring av dyrbara klockor

RIO DE JANEIRO. Donald Trumps valseger stärker Jair Bolsonaros chanser att återvända till makten i Brasilien. Det menar hans son, kongressledamoten Eduardo Bolsonaro. – Om Trump återvände i USA finns det en chans att Bolsonaro kan återvända i Brasilien, säger han till den brasilianska tidningen Folha de S. Paulo.

Världens lunga – Amazonas regnskogar – brinner. En ovanligt långdragen torka, förvärrad av väderfenomenet El nino, gör bränderna svåra att bekämpa, i såväl Brasilien, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia som Bolivia. I Brasilien ligger brandröken tung också i flera storstäder. Många av bränderna har startats av bönder, för att bereda marken. Det traditionella svedjebruket har tillfälligt förbjudits helt i landet, på grund av torkan, men myndigheternas beslut efterföljs inte. – Om den nuvarande utvecklingen inte bryts kommer våtmarken Pantanal, Amazonas och därmed hela Brasilien vara hotade, säger Flavio Dino, domare i Brasiliens högsta domstol. Värre än 2019 Brasiliens vänsterregering har lovat krafttag för att skydda Amazonas. Avverkningen av regnskog, såväl den legala som den illegala, ökade dramatiskt under Jair Bolsonaros tid vid makten. Men torkan, som pågått i över ett år, hotar nu alla reformer för att rädda regnskogen. Enligt satellitövervakning har 61.572 bränder registrerats under början av september, jämfört med drygt 46.000 under hela månaden förra året. Vattnet sjunker Brandbekämpningen försvåras av att floderna torkar ut. Såväl i Amazonfloden och dess biflöden, som i det vidsträckta våtmarksområdet Pantanal, har vattnet sjunkit dramatiskt dom senaste månaderna. Det oroar lokalbefolkningen. – Vattnet betyder allt för oss, det är en del av vårt dagliga liv och en transportväg för alla som bor här, utan vatten är vi ingenting, säger Fransisco Alvaro, som bor i Tefe Lake. Hans hus brukar flyta, men nu har vattnet sjunkit undan och hela timmerkonstruktionen är blottlagd. Det har han aldrig tidigare varit med om. Klimatet förändras Längre norrut, i Leticia i Colombia, har Amazonfloden sjunkit tio meter. Klimatförändringarna förstärker dom problem som avskogningen skapat, menar biologen Santiago Duque, forskare på Colombias nationella universitet.

– Förändringen av Amazonfloden går allt snabbare, vi håller på att förstöra den. Den största och rikligast strömmande floden på jorden kommer aldrig att bli sig lik igen, säger han.

Elon Musk reagerar starkt på beskedet att Högsta domstolen i Brasilien har blockerat plattformen X, som vägrat att stänga högerextrema konton som tillhör anhängare till den tidigare presidenten Jair Bolsonaro. Blockeringen innebär att X stängs ute från sin fjärde största marknad.

RIO DE JANEIRO. Den federala polisen i Brasilien har avslöjat att expresidenten Jair Bolsonaro haft en högerextrem enhet inom den brasilianska underrättelsetjänsten som avlyssnade oppositionella politiker, domare och journalister. Hittills har fem agenter gripits.

▸ En panel i Brasiliens kongress anklagade på onsdagen landets förre president Jair Bolsonaro för att ha anstiftat…

Samtidigt som de stora utsläpparna börjar ställa om för klimatet syns en annan trend. En anti-klimatrörelse, skriver The Economist. Människor har börjat oroa sig för att omställningen kommer att bli dyr, obekväm och en liten andel ifrågasätter till och med om klimatförändringarna ens existerar. Som exempel på backlashen skriver tidningen om svenska Bensinupproret, Donald Trump och populistiska politiker runt om planeten. Cost, convenience and conspiracy-mongering undercut support for greenery By The Economist 11 October 2023 ”We need to be good stewards of our planet. But that doesn’t mean I need to do away with my gas vehicle and drive an electric vehicle with a battery from China,” said Kristina Karamo, the chair of the Republican Party in Michigan, on September 22nd. America’s Democrats, she warned, are trying to “convince us that if we don’t centralise power in the government, the planet is gonna die. That seems like one of the biggest scams [since] Darwinian evolution.” It would be tempting to dismiss Ms Karamo as an irrelevant crank, but she is not irrelevant. She represents an extreme wing of a movement that is gathering pace around the world: a backlash against pro-climate policies. One of its more familiar cheerleaders could be America’s next president. On September 27th Donald Trump said: “You can be loyal to American labour or you can be loyal to the environmental lunatics but you can’t really be loyal to both…Crooked Joe [Biden] is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy our country itself.” On September 20th Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, announced a weakening of net-zero targets, including a five-year delay of a ban on the sale of new petrol cars. Two weeks earlier, Germany kicked a mandate to install green heating in new homes years into the future. France has seen huge protests against high fuel prices, and could one day elect as president Marine Le Pen, who deplores wind farms and thinks the energy transition should be “much slower”. In America climate change has become a culture-war battleground: at a recent debate for Republican presidential candidates, only one admitted that man-made climate change is real. How serious an obstacle is all this to curbing global carbon emissions? Michael Jacobs of the University of Sheffield in Britain sees reasons for cautious optimism. The world’s biggest emitter, China, understands the need to decarbonise and is investing massively in solar and wind. The second-biggest emitter, America, has taken a green turn under Mr Biden. Brazil has sacked a rainforest-slashing president; Australia has ditched a coal-coddling prime minister. Nearly a quarter of emissions are now subject to carbon pricing. And the pace of innovation is impressive. Two years ago the International Energy Agency, a global body, estimated that nearly 50% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net zero by 2050 would come from technologies that were not yet commercially available. In September it said that number had fallen to 35%. The political undercurrents are less reassuring. Voters are realising that remaking the entire global economy will be disruptive. Some—a minority—dispute that man-made climate change is under way. Others object to certain policies deployed to tackle it, because they impose costs on ordinary citizens, or add hassles to their overstretched daily lives. Some, particularly the elderly, do not like change at all, especially when it means fuss today in return for benefits they may not live to see. Even among those who accept that action is needed, views differ as to who should shoulder the burden. Many would prefer it to fall on someone else. Awareness of the dangers of climate change seems to have risen over the past wildfire-charred decade. In polls of 12 rich countries by Pew, an American think-tank, the share of respondents who said it was a “major threat” rose in every country except South Korea, where it was already high (see chart 1). Clear majorities everywhere bar Israel agreed with this description. Yet this does not mean they are willing to pay more taxes to help prevent climate change (see chart 2). In a survey of 29 countries by Ipsos, a pollster, only 30% of respondents said they would be willing to cough up. Perhaps most alarmingly, a partisan gap has opened even on scientific questions. In all of the 14 rich countries surveyed by Pew in 2022, people on the political right were less likely to see climate change as a major threat than those on the left (see chart 3). In Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden the gap was very large: between 22 and 44 percentage points. In America it was a gobsmacking 63 points. And a new poll by YouGov for The Economist found that whereas 87% of Biden voters believed that climate change was caused by human activity, only 21% of Trump voters agreed. In democracies such divisions have consequences. (Public opinion matters in dictatorships, too, but that is beyond the scope of this article.) In rich democracies, especially, divisions over climate are aggravated by populist politicians, who take real problems (such as cost and disruption) and exaggerate them, while claiming that the elite who impose green policies don’t care about ordinary motorists because they cycle to work. Populism tends to undermine effective climate policy in several ways. First, populists are often sceptical of experts. When people say “trust the experts”, suggests Ms Karamo, they really mean: “You are too stupid to make decisions about your life.” Second, populists are suspicious of global institutions and foreigners. “Every subsidy we award to an electric-vehicle manufacturer is really a subsidy to the [Chinese Communist Party], because we depend on them, like a noose around our neck, for the batteries,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate. Such attitudes are bad for climate mitigation, argues Dan Fiorino of the American University in Washington, dc, because “climate policy is as much a matter of foreign relations as it is of economic policy.” Third, populists encourage people to believe that the elite are plotting against them, thus adding paranoia to public life and making compromise harder. Mr Trump frames policies to promote electric cars as a threat to the American way of life, and does so in ways that make his fans bristle with rage and laugh out loud. “They say the happiest day when you buy an electric car is the first ten minutes you’re driving it, and then, after that, panic sets in because you’re worried. Where the hell am I gonna get a charge to keep this thing going? Panic!” he told workers in Michigan. “If you want to buy an electric car that’s absolutely fine...But we should not be forcing consumers to buy electric vehicles…There’s no such thing as a fair transition to the end of your way of life.” If Mr Trump is re-elected in 2024, he would once again pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. He would also roll back executive orders on such things as methane emissions. He would probably not be able to repeal Mr Biden’s big climate law (misleadingly called the Inflation Reduction Act), which involves huge subsidies that are popular with recipients in red states as well as blue ones. But he would appoint bureaucrats who could obstruct its implementation. At a minimum, America would cease to offer leadership on climate change at a crucial moment, says Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat. “You cannot preach temperance from a barstool. You cannot tell other countries to do the right thing if you as a country are not.” Similar arguments against greenery have taken root in Europe, too. Even where populist parties are not in government, they can influence it. In Sweden, where only 4% of people say climate change is “not a threat”, the centre-right ruling coalition has nonetheless cut taxes on fossil fuels several times in the past year. One reason is that it cannot pass a budget without support from the populist Sweden Democrats, who have 20% of parliamentary seats. The populists want cheaper fuel. So do lots of Swedish voters. “Fuel Rebellion”, a Swedish Facebook group, boasts 600,000 members. Peder Blohm Bokenhielm, one of its leaders, says cars “have always been a big part” of his life. His father imported American Mustangs and Corvettes to Sweden. His first word as a child was “car”. And he has practical reasons for objecting to high fuel taxes, too. In a small Swedish village “there are no shops, and just two buses a day,” he says. “If you want to buy groceries, you need a car.” Charging points are not yet everywhere, and a car’s range matters in a country where journeys are long and getting stranded in the snow is hazardous. And don’t get people started on the cost of home-heating. Politicians who keep high fuel prices in place are “making it harder for people to live where they want to live”, Mr Bokenhielm says. In Germany this year the hard-right Alternative for Germany (afd) has risen in the polls—and did well in state elections on October 8th—by lambasting the energy policies of the ruling coalition, which includes the Green Party. It says they will “impoverish” the country. The AfD is ostracised by mainstream parties, but the centre-right borrows its talking-points. The Greens hurt their own cause with a plan to make green home-heating almost mandatory before there were enough skilled installers to install heat pumps. Householders struggled to book tradesmen. The government backed down in September and extended the deadline—but the political damage had been done. Now in Germany it is not just the hard right that bashes the Greens. Their rallies have been pelted with stones, eggs and insults. Martin Huber of the Christian Social Union (csu), the main centre-right party in Bavaria, told The Economist that all the Greens do is make Verbotsgesetze (laws that forbid things). At a rally in Andechs, a pretty village 40km from Munich, the head of the csu, Markus Söder, drew guffaws from a beered-up Oktoberfest crowd with a series of jabs. When the lights suddenly brightened he quipped: “So at least they are still sending us electricity from Berlin.” An elderly supporter said: “I heat my house with wood. How can I afford to change this, and why should I in my old age?” In Britain, the Conservative prime minister has adopted the main populist themes. In a speech last month, Mr Sunak stressed that he favours curbing emissions, but decried the way Britain’s climate goals had been set “without any meaningful democratic debate about how we get there”. (His party has been in power since 2010.) He also lamented that green policies “will impose unacceptable costs”. He named specific, frightening sums. “For a family living in a terraced house in Darlington, the upfront cost [of a heat pump] could be around £10,000 ($12,200).” He vowed to scrap plans that have never seriously been considered: “taxes on eating meat…compulsory car-sharing [and] a government diktat to sort your rubbish into seven different bins”. And he played the nationalist card. “When our share of global emissions is less than 1%, how can it be right that British citizens are...told to sacrifice even more than others?” (Brits are less than 1% of the global population.) “Rishi is playing with fire,” says Michael Grubb of University College London. Businesses crave predictable policies in order to plan for the long term. “Making climate change part of a culture war will undermine investor confidence.” James Patterson of Utrecht University in the Netherlands argues that anti-green backlashes sometimes occur when environmentalists overreach; for example, by enacting policies so coercive that many people deem them illegitimate. This has happened in the Netherlands. A new populist party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement), shot to prominence when the government began to penalise farms emitting too much nitrogen. Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas; the problem is that big intensive Dutch farms produce enough of it (from fertiliser and cowpats) to threaten important nature reserves. The government wants to buy out farmers, leading to a reduction in the number of livestock of between a fifth and a half. Such bossiness has provoked rustic rage, with tractor protests and farms across the country flying the national flag upside down. The Farmer-Citizen Movement took 20% of the vote in provincial elections this year—in a country where only 2.2% of people farm. At a general election on November 22nd the more eco-friendly parties are expecting a thumping. For the most part in developing countries, climate change is a less divisive topic in domestic politics than it is in rich ones. The elite discuss it—governments want to be compensated for the industrialised world’s past emissions and to attract investment for the energy transition. But during elections in India or Africa the topic is barely mentioned. However, voters in developing countries are even more sensitive to rises in the cost of living than those in rich countries. So they often resist policies that they think will batter their budgets. Hence the difficulty of cutting fossil-fuel subsidies, which were a staggering $1.3trn (1.3% of global gdp) in 2022, according to the imf. Such handouts are so popular that the harm they do to the environment is seldom motive enough for governments to get rid of them. Nigeria’s new president, Bola Tinubu, scrapped a fuel subsidy this year not because it encouraged people to burn carbon, but because selling petrol at below-market prices was bankrupting the treasury. In 2022 it cost $10bn, leaving the state oil firm with nothing left for the federal government, of which it is usually the biggest bankroller. Abolishing the subsidy frees up billions for public services, with the happy side-effect of reducing emissions. However, there is pressure to reinstate it. As oil prices rise, some fear a subsidy will be quietly reintroduced. Several middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and India, are burning more fossil fuels even as they try to reinvent themselves as green powers. India’s government plans to triple renewable-electricity-generation capacity by the end of the decade. It has also declared a moratorium on new coal plants and aims to become a big producer of green hydrogen. This is good news, but seems to be driven at least as much by worries about energy security as climate change: last year’s green-hydrogen strategy mentions a plan to be “energy independent” by 2047 before the target to achieve “net zero” by 2070. And despite the moratorium on new coal plants, Indian coal production grew by 14.8% last year. National-security arguments can be a spur to green investment. Building wind farms can reduce dependence on energy imports, which is a point that many politicians emphasise. But if such arguments also spur governments to erect barriers to foreign inputs, it will make the energy transition more costly. From a green perspective, the big middle-income country that has improved the most in the past year is probably Brazil. Yet it, too, is complicated. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, deforestation in the Amazon in the first eight months of the year fell by a cumulative 48% compared with the same period in 2022, when his logger-loving predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, was in charge. However, Lula also supports a push by Petrobras, the state oil firm, to increase output from 2.9m barrels a day to 5.2m by 2030. And his green plans have met resistance. In Congress 347 out of 594 lawmakers belong to the agri-business caucus, whose members fret that greens block development. Congress has curbed the powers of the environment ministry. In most developing countries, net-zero targets are far in the future and voters have not yet been asked to make big sacrifices to reach them. For many, the harm wrought by climate change itself is a bigger worry. A massive 74% of Indians, for example, say they have experienced the effects of global warming, up from 50% in 2011, according to a survey by Yale University. “We’ve lost crops because of extreme heat and rains and it has got worse in the past few years,” says Shiv Kumari, a farm labourer in Delhi whose fields were flooded this summer. Such trauma translates into greater support for green policies: 55% of Indians say India should reduce its emissions immediately without waiting for other countries to act, up from 36% in 2011. Globally, innovation will eventually ease the grumbles that drive so much of the anti-climate backlash. “The clean is already cheaper than the dirty in many parts of the economy, and those parts will just get bigger and bigger,” says Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. But it matters immensely how fast this happens. Many green technologies require hefty upfront investment, which is harder when interest rates are high. This particularly affects the poor world. “Look at Africa. If you pay 15% interest, wind and solar are not cheaper than fossil fuels for generating electricity, though they are cheaper at 7% or 8%,” says Professor Stern. He suggests supercharging multilateral lenders to crowd in other sources of finance. “The most unrealistic and dangerous thing of all would be to go slow,” he says. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

När en man skjuter ihjäl två människor på en bar i Bratislava är det med homofobiskt och rasistiskt motiv. I det manifest han publicerar på engelska framkommer att han stöder idéer från vit makt-grupper i USA. Ideologin bygger ofta på teorier som ”det stora folkutbytet” – en föreställning som används allt oftare av den amerikanska extremhögern. Efter att USA regelbundet kritiserat andra länder för export av terrorism, börjar nu andra – allierade – länder lagstifta mot amerikanska individer och grupper som man betraktar som terrorister från vit makt-miljön, skriver de amerikanska terrorforskarna Bruce Hoffman och Jacob Ware i Foreign Affairs. How the United States Became a Leading Exporter of White Supremacist Terrorism By Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware 19 September 2023 In its decades-long fight against terrorism, the United States regularly criticized countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia for exporting extremist ideologies and violence. Ironically, today the United States stands accused of doing the same. The spread of homegrown American conspiracy theories, beliefs in racial superiority, antigovernment extremism, and other manifestations of hate and intolerance has become such a problem that some of the United States’ closest allies—Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—have designated both American groups and citizens as foreign terrorists. Although little reported by the U.S. press, the October 2022 killing of two people at a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, by a man espousing racist and homophobic views is an example of the pernicious effects of this “made in America” ideology. In a now all-too-common pattern, the gunman posted a manifesto explaining his intent just before the attack. Written in English, the document displayed all the racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic justifications that have become de rigueur for this type of hate-filled violence. More significant, the manifesto expressed a solidarity and affinity with a U.S.-centric white supremacist ideology that has gained greater currency in both the United States and other countries in recent years. “The number of non-White invaders in America continues to grow and grow, unchecked,” the killer wrote. The gunman also cited a white supremacist terrorist attack earlier that year on a supermarket in a Black community in Buffalo, New York, as having inspired him. After decades of insufficient and ineffective efforts to suppress a racist antigovernment fringe, the United States has become the exemplar of far-right extremism and terrorism. Far-right violence today is increasingly fueled by a deadly combination of ideology and strategy imported from the United States. The “great replacement” theory, which claims that nonwhite individuals are purposefully being brought into Western countries to undermine the political power of white voters, got its start in France, but this kind of thinking has long been a fixture of American white supremacism. These days, it is making its way into mainstream rhetoric in the United States and is acquiring an increasingly international audience. These American extremists have also adopted from Marxism the strategic goal of “accelerationism,” meaning hastening the collapse of society by fomenting chaos and bloodshed. The United States’ exportation of these two ideas is radicalizing men and women across the globe, prompting foreign governments to take steps to protect their citizens. But at base, this is an American problem, and it therefore requires American leadership to solve it. In the United States, the great replacement conspiracy theory has been supercharged over the past decade by social media and the backlash to the election of President Barack Obama. Once a fringe theory popular among white supremacists, the theory developed deeper roots in the United States as it also spread further abroad. At the same time, the far right in the United States promoted the idea that violence is needed to kick-start the collapse of U.S. institutions and society. The great replacement theory holds that there is an ongoing diminution of white people and culture as part of a deliberate strategy by Jews and liberal elites. The theory claims that this goal is being achieved by generous immigration laws and uncontrolled illegal cross-border migration, the vigorous enfranchisement of minority groups, and the erasure or fundamental recalibration of traditional cultural norms. The French nationalist Renaud Camus popularized the theory in the early 2010s, but it in fact has deep American roots, dating back to at least the Reconstruction Era. After the Civil War, as the country integrated millions of newly freed African Americans, segments of the country’s white population adopted replacement rhetoric, citing race riots, allegations of rapes of white women by Black men, and fears that the Black population was being granted constitutional rights in order to dilute the existing white vote. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan sent delegations to the national presidential conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties and helped the Republicans’ 1924 presidential nominee, Calvin Coolidge, win election that year. It lobbied for the infamous Immigration Act of 1924, which was designed to deter Asians, Italians, and Jews from settling in the United States. These racist views gained a renewed lease on life in the 1980s, when a succession of white supremacists embraced replacement arguments. Robert Mathews, the founder and leader of the Order, a neo-Nazi terrorist group active in 1983-84, boasted of having drunk deeply from this well of white supremacy, racism, and anti-Semitism. In a membership form distributed during the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Butler, the leader of Aryan Nations, another neo-Nazi group, similarly used replacement theory to attract new adherents to the movement. “Aliens are pouring over as a flood into each of our ancestral lands, threatening dispossession of the heritage, culture, and very life blood of our posterity,” he explained. Then came the election of Obama, the country’s first African American president, which for racists provided fresh evidence that tyranny and electoral malfeasance had occurred. Meanwhile, populist movements were gaining momentum across the democratic world, in no small part in response to refugee flows stemming from wars in the Middle East and to Black Lives Matter activism in the United States. Right-wing parties won elections in the United States in 2016 and Brazil in 2022 and triumphed in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in 2016. During the administration of Donald Trump, these nativist fears gained even greater currency in the United States. His campaign had repeatedly caricatured both nonwhites and non-Christians as threats to U.S. national security and indeed to Americans themselves. In 2017, after an activist was killed in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a “Unite the Right” rally in which white supremacists and neo-Nazis paraded through the University of Virginia campus with torches chanting slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” Trump declared that there had been “very fine people on both sides.” The far right embraced the president’s statement as an endorsement, and the movement was suddenly given a new lease on life, with the most powerful supporter of all sitting in the White House. The great replacement theory’s spread was abetted by the terrorist strategy known as accelerationism, an effort to foment cataclysmic violent chaos as a means to seize power. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels initially articulated the idea in their seminal 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. In the United States, the term “accelerationism” first surfaced as a concept for a white supremacist revolution in the 1980s-era newsletter Siege, which was written by James Mason, a dedicated acolyte of William Luther Pierce, an even more influential white supremacist ideologue. Pierce wrote arguably the most influential book of American white supremacist literature, a 1978 call to arms titled The Turner Diaries. The novel tells the story of a 35-year-old electrical engineer named Earl Turner who joins “The Organization,” a white nationalist movement, and takes part in its two-year terrorist campaign after a predatory government attempt to seize all legally held firearms, forcing him and his “fellow patriots” underground. Among the more noteworthy moments in the book is the “Day of the Rope,” when the Organization carries out a public mass execution by hanging alleged “race traitors.” The book details a bombing of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., a particularly important passage given its chilling similarity to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Both of these scenes from The Turner Diaries perfectly captured the accelerationist ethos by detailing acts of violence against the government that brought on an apocalyptic race war. Accelerationism has provided both a stunningly simple and seductively attractive ideological and strategic model for would-be terrorists. Few twenty-first-century terrorists have more emphatically embodied accelerationism and its American roots than Dylann Roof, the gunman responsible for the mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. “It is far from being too late for America or Europe,” his manifesto declared. “I believe that even if we made up only 30 percent of the population we could take it back completely. But by no means should we wait any longer to take drastic action.” John Earnest, a gunman who attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, in April 2019, was similarly inspired by a desire to accelerate a new civil war. “In case you haven’t noticed we are running out of time,” Earnest wrote. “If this revolution doesn’t happen soon, we won’t have the numbers to win it.” Indeed, echoes of The Turner Diaries and its accelerationist credo are also found in the treatises of today’s anti-government extremists. The Boogaloo movement, which attracted increasing attention during the chaotic summer of 2020, takes its name from its ambition to spark a sequel civil war. And a scaffold and hangman’s noose symbolically erected outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, showed the “Day of the Rope” was far too close to becoming reality. Thanks to technology, these isolated expressions of racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and homophobia can rapidly acquire a global audience and play to an international constituency. The ideology bounces across oceans through networks brought together by central marketplaces on social media. In March 2019, Brenton Tarrant, a white supremacist terrorist animated by these dangerous ideologies and strategies, murdered 51 worshipers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He linked his choice of weapons, primarily an AR-15 assault rifle, to the impact it might have in the United States, declaring to have chosen “firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide, and the affect it could have on the politics of United states and thereby the political situation of the world.” Scrawled across the stock of his semi-automatic weapons were several key terms from the history of far-right violence, including references to the “14 words,” a credo of U.S. origin extolling the importance of protecting the white race for future generations. Tarrant was also an outspoken proponent of accelerationist doctrine, proudly declaring, “True change and the change we need to enact only arises in the great crucible of crisis.” The dark shadow of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol has also inspired others similarly seeking to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power in their countries. Earlier this year in Brazil, a mob motivated by grievances similar to those of the Trump supporters in Washington sought to emulate the January 2021 rioters by storming their capital city’s government center in hopes of overturning an election outcome. Their preferred candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, watched the events unfold on television from his self-imposed exile in Florida. The United States’ stature as a pillar and exemplar of democracy had been overtaken by the Trump administration’s election denialism playbook. Bolsonaro’s supporters even sought guidance and advice from senior former White House officials, including the former senior Trump adviser Steve Bannon. “We have become exporters of right-wing extremism, damaging one of our best weapons in securing our international standing—our example,” the terrorism expert Matthew Levitt wrote after January 6, 2021. And such violence has profound implications for the United States’ place in the world: it contributes to the United States’ being viewed as weak, divided, and vulnerable. It also diverts American resources and energy to healing divisions at home rather than to confidently engaging the world on key issues such as climate change, pandemic prevention, and protecting the international order. Knowing this, adversaries of the United States have exploited this vulnerability in their own influence and information operations. Russia, for instance, has supported neo-Nazi groups such as the Russian Imperial Movement, which was designated a global terrorist group by the Trump administration in 2020. The group maintains an open symbiotic relationship with the Russian government and American and European officials believe it carried out a letter bomb campaign in Spain toward the end of 2022. Iran has also taken steps to encourage far-right terrorism in the West. In December 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray and at least 11 other senior U.S. officials were put on an online hit list targeting U.S. government officials who publicly backed the integrity of the 2020 election results. They were deemed “Enemies of the People,” and their home addresses and other personal information were shared. Later that month, the FBI announced that it had linked Iran to the site. As right-wing extremism spreads, partners of the United States have taken steps to try to stop it. The Canadian government, for instance, has designated one of the groups involved in the January 6 attack, the Proud Boys, as a terrorist entity, noting, “The group and its members have openly encouraged, planned, and conducted violent activities against those they perceive to be opposed to their ideology and political beliefs.” The United States’ closest ally now singles out American groups and individuals as threats to their country the same way the United States has targeted entities with ties to al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Canada has also designated other U.S.-based neo-Nazi movements as terrorist entities, including Atomwaffen and the Base as well as Mason, the American author of Siege. Because today’s right-wing extremism is first and foremost an American problem, solving it will depend on American leadership. To start, the White House should direct the State Department to designate foreign neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Of the 73 such groups on the State Department’s current list, no relevant neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups are included. This is especially surprising because the most recent National Strategy for Counterterrorism, released in October 2018, named two violent far-right extremist organizations: the Nordic Resistance Movement in Scandinavian countries and the National Action group in the United Kingdom. Congress should also consider passing a domestic terrorism law to formally criminalize plots and violence targeting individuals on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, national identity, sexuality, gender, political affiliation, and other protected categories. Today, violent American extremists cannot be charged for providing material in support of patently violent domestic groups or for plotting acts which are otherwise classified as terrorist attacks when a foreign terrorist entity is involved. This omission in the law reinforces a perception that foreign terrorists, often only distinguishable by skin color or religion, are treated more harshly by the judicial system than domestic terrorists. The absence of domestic terrorism laws has also led to an inequity in sentencing depending on whether the crimes were committed on behalf of a designated foreign terrorist organization or a domestic violent extremist group. Providing the U.S. Department of Justice with the ability to designate violent extremist groups and individuals as domestic terrorists is both controversial and challenging. Critics of this proposal have argued that the designation of domestic violent extremist groups as terrorist organizations would inevitably become dangerously politicized and partisan. Those fearing overbearing legal remedies should remember that in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant created the Department of Justice specifically to counter the terrorism being carried out by the Ku Klux Klan and other violent groups that were active in Southern states. But a new domestic terrorism law seems a small step by comparison, and it would send a resounding message: there is no place for political violence in a democracy. © 2023 Council on Foreign Relations, publisher of Foreign Affairs. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency. Read the original article at Foreign Affairs.

▸ En 51-årig anhängare av Brasiliens expresident Jair Bolsonaro blev den förste att dömas av det sydamerikanska landets…

Den första domen har fallit i rättsprocessen efter stormningen av en rad myndighetsbyggnader i Brasília i januari. På torsdagen dömdes en 51-årig man till 17 års fängelse för att ha delaktigt i upproret, skriver nyhetsbyråerna. Aecio Pereira bröt mot elva brott när han stormade senaten tillsammans med tusentals anhängare till den tidigare presidenten Jair Bolsonaro, menar domstolen. Inne i byggnaden spelade Pereira in ett videobudskap där han uppmanade likasinnade att ge sig ut på gatorna. – Upprorsmakarnas avsikt var att belägra Brasília och driva på för en kriminell attack mot rättsstatsprincipen i hela landet, säger domaren Cristiano Zanin. Pereira fälldes mot sitt nekande.