SPUTNIKNEWS – May 3, 2018: Three members of the notoriously violent neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division are on active duty in the US military, a new report confirms, while at least three others have been identified as former US service members.
Atomwaffen Division is markedly different from other white supremacist groups that have emerged into American public consciousness in recent years. Groups like Identity Evropa, the recently-defunct Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America and others have come into focus for holding public rallies, whereas Atomwaffen is far more secretive and smaller. Its members are actively preparing for a “coming race war” in the United States and training for guerilla warfare. Members exist in more than 20 states, according to Pro Publica, which viewed 250,000 private online messages obtained earlier in 2018.
It isn’t clear where those messages came from, although far right networks on the video game messaging application Discord have experienced extensive leaks of their chat logs since the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one woman dead and 19 injured after a car driven by 20-year-old James Fields rammed into a group of marchers in August 2017.
However, posts from Vasillios Pistolis, one of the active service members identified by Pro Publica, are available on Unicorn Riot, a media collective’s website. Those are available because they were posted in chat logs for the Unite the Right rally, which were leaked to Unicorn Riot in late August 2017.
Meanwhile, a servicemember by the name of Joshua Beckett trained Atomwaffen on how to use firearms and hand-to-hand combat. He was a US Army combat engineer between 2011 and 2015, which he says woke him up “to race and the war woke me up to the Jews.” Combat engineers are highly trained in the use of explosives. Beckett offered to assemble assault rifles for fellow members of Atomwaffen. Another service member in the group wrote that in Afghanistan he spent his time blasting “lead into sand n*****s.”
The eighteen-year-old Pistolis bragged that he “cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself,” on August 12, 2017, in an online post following his participation in the now-infamous torch-lit march on the University of Virginia campus.
At the torchlit march, Pistolis attacked Emily Gorcenski, a prominent organizer of the leftist counterprotest. He claimed in an online post to have “drop kicked” that “tr*nny” during the torch-lit march on August 11 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and posted a bloodied flag he’d taken, saying “not my blood.”
Pistolis also posted detailed instructions on battling leftists the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, which was taken off the regular internet and relegated to the deep web after the violence in Charlottesville.
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