White Lives Matter extremists aim to normalize racism and raise ‘racial consciousness’: report

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The extremists behind the racist texts projected on Rotterdam’s Erasmus Bridge at New Year’s aim to normalize racism and raise racial awareness by proclaiming the superiority of the white race. NOS reported this after infiltrating the extremists’ Telegram channel and monitoring their communications for a few days.

Members of the Telegram channel do little to conceal their extremist ideology, according to NOS. Slogans like White Lives Matter and Zwarte Piet have done nothing wrong, and thankfully white 2023 is common. Their manifesto states that they aspire to a country where at least 99% of its people are white. Other people can only enter temporarily if their presence benefits white people, such as tourists.

The Dutch group White Lives Matter has only around 1,300 members, almost half of whom joined after the screenings on the Erasmus Bridge. It is a daughter group of an international extremist group with less than 16,000 members. According to NOS, the Dutch manifesto is mainly a translation of the English manifesto of the global groups.

The group states in its manifesto that it aims to create its all-white country in a legal and peaceful manner. But according to Willemijn Kadijk, a researcher on extremism, you cannot have a country with only white people without violating the rights of others.

Peaceful actions are, of course, always better than violence, but that kind of message is concrete rot that can eventually cause problems, Kadijk told NOS. They try to form a group in society that is large enough to eventually realize their racist views.

Kadijk pointed out that there are fundamental differences between the Black Lives Matter movement and this group. Black Lives Matter emerged as an emancipation movement, while White Lives Matter emerged from the far right. He has an inseparable image of the enemy, he explained. According to the researcher, this type of right-wing extremism feeds on the belief that there is a so-called threat to the white race, and they feel they have to defend themselves against it.

The Public Ministry (OM) has opened a criminal investigation into the group following the screenings on the Erasmus Bridge.

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