In this file photo taken on February 29, 2020, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, his wife Yulia, opposition politician Lyubov Sobol and other demonstrators march in memory of murdered Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in downtown Moscow [File: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP]
The storming of the US Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump has shaken the world. In Russia though, the events of January 6 were all but overshadowed by the banishment of the US president from Twitter. The focus shifted to Trump’s deplatforming in no small part because Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny weighed in on the issue by describing the ban as an “unacceptable act of censorship”.
Throughout the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, as journalists and politicians expressed their stunned astonishment, one couldn’t help wondering: hadn’t they heard about the hundreds of people, some of them armed, who stormed the Michigan state capitol building in April, objecting to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order? Had they forgotten that a young woman was killed during the August 2017 Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia – a neo-Nazi event that Donald Trump declined to unequivocally condemn? Had their interns not been keeping up with – and informing their bosses about – the popular Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of far-right hate groups and extremist conspiracy theorists? Had no one explained that the Proud Boys’ T-shirt insignia – 6MWE – means “Six Million [Jews] Weren’t Enough”?
The right-wing riot at the United States Capitol on Wednesday – and President Donald Trump’s acknowledgement, after weeks of disputing November’s presidential election results, that a transfer of power would occur – has been seen by some analysts as the end of Trump’s right-wing era.
The group of rioters that breached the building in support of Trump and his false allegation that the presidential contest was stolen through voter fraud was met with widespread condemnation.
But one expert says far-right groups and white nationalists in the US view the takeover of the Capitol as a new beginning to be celebrated.