Iron March
Iron March was a fascist web forum to which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) linked nearly 100 hate crime murders as of mid-2018.[1]
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Type of site | Fascist, White supremacist, Neo-Nazi, Holocaust denial forum |
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Available in | English, with sub-forums in multiple languages |
Dissolved | November 2017 |
Predecessor(s) | International Third Position Federation |
Owner | Alexander Mukhitdinov |
Created by | Alexander Mukhitdinov |
URL | ironmarch.org |
Commercial | No |
Launched | 2011 |
Current status | Defunct |
History
Russian nationalist Alexander Mukhitdinov (who goes by the moniker "Slavros") founded the online message board Iron March in 2011.[2][1] Mukhitdinov remained a murky figure at the time of the leaks.[3]
Iron March became a platform for militant neo-Nazi groups such as the Nordic Resistance Movement, Azov Battalion and Golden Dawn. Some of the board's members were later linked to several acts of terrorism and murder, such as the murder of an anti-fascist in Helsinki in September 2016 and the murder of a left-wing rapper in 2013. A group consisting of Serbian Combat 18, "MC Srbi" and Atomwaffen also used the forum to traffic firearms.[4][5][6] The forum's users organized a number of violent neo-Nazi groups, including the Atomwaffen Division, Antipodean Resistance and National Action. The userbase embraced the accelerationist ideology of James Mason, a neo-nazi and associate of the serial killer Charles Manson. Members of Iron March republished and popularized Mason's book "Siege" and its brand of explicitly terroristic neo-nazism. According to SPLC:
[Iron March] became home base for those who were personally invested in neo-Nazism, fascism and organized white extremism on a global scale ... through total immersion in Mason's teleology, now, they are challenging the established far-right and far-left with their eagerness to perpetrate violence.[1][7]
In 2016, posters urging students to visit the Iron March website were posted on university campuses, including those of Boston University, Old Dominion University, and the University of Chicago. These posters included racist and antisemitic slogans, including "#Hitler Disapproves", "No Degeneracy, No Tolerance, Hail Victory", and "Black Lives Don't Matter".[8][9][10]
The website closed in November 2017; the reasons for its closure remain unclear[2] in 2020. According to an investigation by BBC Russia, it is suspected Mukhitdinov was pressured by the Russian government for raising funds for the neo-nazi Azov Battalion, which is considered a terrorist group in the Russian Federation. A spokesperson for Azov refused to comment on the case.[11]
In 2018, Iron March-affiliated Discord servers alongside several other hate-group servers were removed by the messaging service.[12]
In April 2018, a networking site called Fascist Forge was launched; according to a note by its founder, it was meant as a replacement for Iron March. The site continued Iron March's virulent propaganda and grew rapidly until February 2019, when the site was taken offline by its registrar.[13]
Notable users
In February 2015, three people were arrested for planning to commit a mass shooting at a shopping mall in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on February 14 that year. One of the suspects, 23-year-old Lindsay Souvannarath of Illinois, was found to have been an active member of Iron March and to have made many online posts in favor of fascist or neo-Nazi ideologies.[14][15]
Devon Arthurs, an Iron March user and member of the Atomwaffen Division (AWD), killed his two roommates, also members of AWD, in May 2017. Police found neo-nazi literature, radioactive materials, a photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and explosives in his home.[2] Arthurs' remaining roommate and fellow Iron March user Brandon Russell was arrested in Tampa, Florida, for stockpiling of illegal weapons and bomb-making materials.[1] Russell had been among Iron March's most prolific users, having written around 1,500 posts on the site.[16]
As a result of the Iron March leak in 2019, it was discovered the Latvian national-conservative politician and activist Raivis Zeltīts had posted on Iron March under the handle "Latvian_Integralist". Zeltīts acknowledged in a Facebook post that he had written using this handle, but Zeltīts said that he no longer held those views.[17] Zeltīts remained in contact with Iron March administrator Benjamin Raymond as late as 2015.[18]
Zack Davies, 26, of Mold, North Wales, attacked a Sikh man with a machete and claw hammer while shouting "White Power". Davies inflicted life-threatening injuries; in the judge's view, the victim would have died had Davies not been stopped by passers-by. In 2015 a British court found Davies guilty and assigned him a life sentence. Davies had an Iron March account and was a member of the British terrorist group National Action.[1][19][20]
Leak
In November 2019, an unknown individual uploaded a database of Iron March users to the Internet Archive; multiple neo-nazi users, including an ICE detention center captain and several active members of the US armed forces, were identified using information from the leak.[2][21][22]
A variety of individuals and organizations used information from the leak:
- Journalistic outlets and anti-fascist groups used the information to reveal the identities of users of the site.[17][21][23]
- The open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat and online magazine Small Wars Journal performed data analysis on the entire corpus to understand the online radicalization processes of the far-right.[3][16]
- Brett Stevens, editor of the far-right site "Amerika.org", used contact information from the leak to contact former Iron March users and direct them to his website.[24]
- In September 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism used the forum dump as training data for the sophisticated, flexible natural language generating artificial intelligence model GPT-3. They found that GPT-3--or more likely a copy of it if proper safety and sanitizing protocols are observed by OpenAI--could easily be used for misinformation and radicalization purposes.[25][26]
References
- Poulter, James (12 March 2018). "The Obscure Neo-Nazi Forum Linked to a Wave of Terror". Vice.
- Wilson, Jason (7 November 2019). "Leak from neo-Nazi site could identify hundreds of extremists worldwide". The Guardian.
- Ross, Alexander Reid; Bevensee, Emmi (19 December 2019). "Transnational White Terror: Exposing Atomwaffen And The Iron March Networks". Bellingcat.
- "Fašistička braća (Fascist Brothers)". Novosti (Croatia). November 15, 2019.
- "Canadian Soldier With Ties To Neo-Nazi Terrorist Groups Arranged For Illegal Weapons Sale In Bosnia". Canadian Anti-Hate Network. November 14, 2019.
- "Desničarske i neonacističke organizacije neometano ističu simbole u Prijedoru". BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina. 15 June 2020.
- "Atomwaffen and the SIEGE parallax: how one neo-Nazi's life's work is fueling a younger generation". Southern Poverty Law Center. 16 June 2020.
- Farrell, Brian (28 March 2016). "Fascist, pro-Nazi flyers posted at Old Dominion University". 13 News Now.
- Clauss, Kyle Scott (2 May 2016). "Neo-Nazi Posters Spotted on Boston University's Campus". Boston Magazine.
- Thorp, Adam (5 December 2016). "Militant Neo-Nazi Group Claims Credit for Hanging Hitler Portrait, Swastikas on Campus Building". The Chicago Maroon.
- ""Наполовину русский": история москвича Алишера Мухитдинова и его глобальной фашистской сети". BBC News (in Russian). 15 June 2020.
- Alexander, Julia (28 February 2018). "Discord is purging alt-right, white nationalist and hateful servers". Polygon.
- Lamoureux, Mack (15 February 2019). "Fascist Forge, the Online Neo-Nazi Recruitment Forum, Is Down". Vice.
- Lamoureux, Mack (21 February 2019). "The Woman Who Plotted a Valentine's Mass Murder Shares How the Internet Radicalized Her". Vice. Retrieved 14 June 2020.
- Neiwert, David (18 February 2015). "Illinois Woman With Neo-Nazi Leanings Charged in Canadian Mass Murder Plot". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved 14 June 2020.
- Singer-Emery, Jacques; Bray III, Rex (19 April 2020). "Lingua Ferro Iter: Insights Gained Through Linguistic Analysis of Iron March". Small Wars Journal.
- "Senior National Alliance figure apologises for "cloud" of far-right messages". Public Broadcasting of Latvia. 12 November 2019. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
- "De Facto: British neo-Nazi visited Latvian political party office". Public Broadcasting of Latvia. 25 November 2019. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
- Morris, Steven (15 June 2020). "Nazi-obsessed loner guilty of attempted murder of dentist in racist attack". The Guardian.
- "Lee Rigby revenge attacker Zack Davies given life sentence". BBC News. 15 June 2020.
- "ICE Detention Center Captain Was on a Neo-Nazi Website and Wanted to Start a White Nationalist Group". Vice News. 15 June 2020.
- "EXCLUSIVE: A U.S. Marine Used the Neo-Nazi Site Iron March to Recruit for a 'Racial Holy War'". Vice News. 15 June 2020.
- Losey, Stephen (13 November 2019). "Airman accused of white nationalist ties loses stripe after investigation—but still in the Air Force". Air Force Times.
- Reed, Jason (8 November 2019). "The neo-Nazi data dump has been a boon to Nazi recruiters". The Daily Dot.
- Wiggers, Kyle (18 September 2020). "AI Weekly: Cutting-edge language models can produce convincing misinformation if we don't stop them". VentureBeat.
- McGuffie, Kris; Newhouse, Alex (9 September 2020). The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Neural Language Models (Report). Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.