![]() ![]() Louis Beam’s “leaderless resistance” strategy seems to be working: lone wolf terrorism is on the rise and the government currently lacks an effective means of preventing it. The only alternative, Beam argued, was “leaderless resistance.” Rather than leading organized terrorist operations, he encouraged individuals to act spontaneously in support of his cause. ![]() Another option, the “cell” model of leadership used by the Russian Communists during the Cold War, required a level of organizational sophistication that the white supremacists lacked. He argued that the traditional “pyramid” model of leadership was too easily dismantled. 3 Although Beam avoided conviction, he saw the need for a revised strategy. Back in 1987, the federal government had uncovered a white supremacist terror organization and indicted fourteen of the leading white supremacists in the US. Beam expanded on the formula and repurposed it for use by terrorist “resistance” groups within the US.īeam knew about terrorist leadership from experience: he had led several KKK groups as well as the White Nationalist/neo-Nazi organization Aryan Nations and openly advocated the violent killing of enemies of the white race. Ulius Louis Amoss, the concept of leaderless resistance was originally designed as a strategy For US citizens to adopt in the event of a Communist take-over. Louis Beam, a prominent leader in white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles, advocated for the adoption of “leaderless resistance” in 1988. But while communities such as Hammerskin Nation serve as the ideological fuel for lone wolf terrorism, they generally do not engage in actual conspiracy or incite anyone to commit terrorist acts and are not prosecutable. The online community “Hammerskin Nation” is one such group named by the Anti-Defamation League as “the most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States.” 2 Hammerskin Nation calls itself “a leaderless group of men and women who have adopted the White Power Skinhead lifestyle.” The website speaks positively of lone wolf violence and encourages racial hatred. That is not to say that lone wolf terrorists arise out of a vacuum indeed, ideological “hate groups” flourish throughout the US, especially in cyberspace and on social media. Traditional methods of infiltrating terrorist organizations obviously cannot work when single, unaffiliated terrorists arise unpredictably out of the populace. Most lone wolf terrorists, however, possess no membership to any established terrorist organization. This means infiltrating terrorist organizations, exposing them, and dismantling them before the terrorists have the opportunity to act. Since 9/11, the US Intelligence Community and law enforcement have focused their counterterrorism efforts on stopping terrorism before it starts. The real challenge of combating lone wolf terror is trying to deal with its leaderless model. The great majority of all attacks had no connection to Islam, Islamism, or jihad. Of these later terrorist acts, half seem to have been motivated by “ideologies of hate” (i.e., Islamism, white supremacy, etc.) and the other half by antigovernment, or anarchic, ideologies. 2015 were planned and conducted by two or fewer people. According to the study, 74% of terrorist operations in the US were planned and perpetrated by single persons, and 90% of those perpetrated between April 2009 and Feb. In February 2015, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) published a study on domestic terrorism within the US, covering sixty-two acts of terror perpetrated between the US from 01 April 2009 to 01 February 2015. Recent evidence suggests that since 2001, non-Islamist lone wolf terrorists are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in the U.S. 1 US law enforcement and intelligence agencies may need to develop fundamentally new strategies for combating and preventing lone wolf terror. Since 2001, these types of terrorist attacks are increasing in number and frequency and are particularly difficult to engage from a preventative standpoint. The distinctive aspect of the lone wolf terrorist is that he or she plans and perpetrates acts of terror independently, without any direct influence from a terrorist organization. A lone wolf terrorist is, like any other variety of terrorist, a violent political extremist. ![]()
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