United States: behind the riots on Capitol Hill, the power of the militias
Supporters of Donald Trump protest in Salem, Oregon on January 6, 2021, as others enter the Capitol in Washington DC AP - Paula Bronstein
Text by: Oriane Verdier Follow
4 min
The riots around and in the Capitol that took place on Wednesday, January 6, witnessed the rise of far-right militias in the United States.
For many, they are the ones who organized and led this movement to the Capitol.
Oriane Verdier joined for RFI Francis Langlois, researcher at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair at the University of Quebec, in Montreal.
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Who are these armed groups that are gradually asserting themselves on the American political scene
?
After the
Vietnam War
, a good proportion of the veterans who returned disappointed, who were not reintegrated into society properly, organized militias and eventually turned to them.
They are the ones who provided the framework for the first wave of militias which peaked in the 1990s. And since the election of Barack Obama, most of them, and indeed the nebula of the extreme right, have tried to go from the virtual world to the real world by organizing different events: we saw it in
Charlottesville
, we saw it in Nevada in 2014 and in various other events.
And
what happened on Wednesday
was the culmination of this far-right desire to come forward in the real world, to have a voice in the political discussion in the United States.
Is it a homogeneous voice, do all militias have the same priorities
?
The militias and the whole of the far right have several quarrels between them about the objectives, the means, the targets to aim for.
That being said, the leaders of the far right - which include militias that are found all over the place, especially in the American Midwest - came together, they worked hard to create events that would unite the right or the far right. right in a political movement, but without uniting it in a very hierarchical organization at the national level.
We know it's impossible to do because there are too many quarrels.
So, we create events that will bring together, which will show the grassroots that we are capable of organizing major events that will disrupt the political order.
Moreover, there is nothing more symbolic than what happened on Wednesday: we literally stopped the national electoral process.
And finally, is it really a success for these militias, since it risks accelerating the division within the Republicans, and the distancing of a part of the Republicans vis-à-vis the Trump camp?
In fact, I have the impression that we have to separate
Donald Trump
from the objectives of these people, who have an objective of their own.
They like Donald Trump: yes, "
he is sympathetic
", "
he upset the order
".
But the objective is to go further: overthrow the order, or at the very least be fully recognized as legitimate political interlocutors.
So, if we destroy the Republican Party and succeed in creating a political vehicle in which the more radical people - more mobilized if you will - are able to express themselves, whether at the political level or at the physical level as we saw it on Wednesday, for them it is a great victory.
Now, it is possible that the federal state decides to take action and severely crack down on these movements.
So we will see what will happen in the next few weeks, the next months.
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