A leading US military news organisation providing independent news and information to the military community across the globe has highlighted concerns over former servicemen and women preparing for ‘the next civil war’, writes Stanley Szecowka.
The Stars and Stripes, published locally for sailors serving at the US navy base in Juffair, highlighted the case of an Iraq War veteran and enlisted National Guard member calling for taking up arms against police and government officials in his own country.
He is one of more than 480 people with a military background accused of extremist crimes in the US since 2007 and comes just days before people vote for a new president in a highly contentious, bitter and country-splitting election.
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris held a marginal three-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump – 45pc to 42pc – as the two stayed locked in a tight fight to win the November 5 race to the White House, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
While the number of US service members and veterans who radicalise make up a tiny fraction of the millions who have honourably served their country, an Associated Press investigation has found that people with military backgrounds have been radicalising at a faster rate than the general population, the Stars and Stripes reported as part of six-page special on the issue.
The US military trained Chris Arthur, for example, in explosives and battlefield tactics. He has posted publicly on YouTube with titles such as ‘The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War’.
In his telling, the US was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.
He isn’t an anomaly. He is among hundreds with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the US insurrection after the last election.
In May, US District Judge James C Dever III sentenced Arthur to 25 years in federal prison after a jury convicted him on charges related to teaching the FBI’s informant how to make bombs meant to kill federal law enforcement officers, as well as illegal weapons possession.
Prosecutors said they’d found improvised grenades and other ‘mass casualty’ and ‘indiscriminate’ weapons on his farm.
But he is unrepentant. In messages to the media from a federal prison in Tennessee, he claimed he was a target of ‘political warfare’.
“I’m a political prisoner,” he wrote, echoing the language former President Donald Trump and others have used to minimise the crimes committed in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6.
In Arthur’s view, the imprisonment of ‘vets and patriots’ like himself and the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania prophesy the civil war he has long argued is coming, the Stars and Stripes reported yesterday.
“This is happening,” he wrote. “All the signs are there.”
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