Talk to Rick Eaton, the Nazi hunter who played a key role in the discovery of Erich Priebke in Patagonia – 04/08/2019

"The problem does not only concern acts of violence.In addition, after the event, someone seems to deny it." Rick Eaton He knows that words are not carried away by the wind. He is a researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, perhaps the largest international institution in terms of documentation and recording of Holocaust victims and Nazi war criminals. "Half of my life I've been a journalist." I'm now investigating I hate digital"That is to say the so-called" hate groups "(hate groups), those that exist since the world is the world, that can derive from the activities of cyberterrorism and whose proliferation is terribly amplified by social networks.

A few lines to understand the relevance of a character like Eaton. First, 33 years ago, he pursues all kinds of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and homophobic activities.; in short, all that relates to hatred against specific social groups.

Secondly, his most famous "agent" is a story that has nothing to do with spoilage: he pretended to be an anti-Semitic millionaire and wanted to talk to the Nazis in Germany in the 90's. thus found in a trip to Bariloche where could find the war criminal Reinhard Kopps, refugee in Argentina with a false name. As a result of this meeting, a journalist from the American channel ABC, interested in the character discovered by Eaton, obtained crucial information. In the words of Eaton, "that was really the big blow in history. I was in Bariloche and it was called Erich Priebke"

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"But no, I will not have the time to tell all this to my students in Tucumán," he says in an exclusive interview with Clarin. Eaton came to Argentina as part of an agreement between the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Juan Manzur, governor of that province, to form young people interested in digital detection of hatred. The idea is to do targeted work in Latin America. Eaton came to give the lecture "initiation". Participants will send their reports to the Los Angeles-based center.

What kind of work does a "persecutor" do? "Some time ago, in an American TV show, they said"We are going to have a ginger kick & # 39; & # 39;"(" We are going to spend a day hitting a redhead. ") In social networks, the theme was imposed and a date was set: November 20. For this sentence there was ten or twenty guys beaten across the country. We are looking for that kind of thing, from the most bbad to the biggest. "

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The Simon Wiesenthal Center produces an annual report "which has about 700 entries," detailed Eaton, and can be accessed at digitalhate.net. The badysis shows the most vile of societies. Argentina, besides the fact that the law 23 592 incriminates the discriminatory acts of 1988, did not escape to appear with several mentions.

It is worth highlighting the one linked to the intense discussion on the legalization of abortion: a group against this practice has ridiculed those who support it, through a retouched image in which Adolf Hitler wore a green tissue. The epigraph said: "For a humanity where only the desired people are born"

For Eaton, "the use of any Nazi symbol in the political discourse is wrong, we have had similar actions in the United States against Presidents Bush and Obama, which has no place in the political discourse".

-It is uncomfortable to talk about it, but in societies where freedom of expression is a respected value, one has to wonder if those who state violent messages do not have the right to Express. What are the limits of "acceptable" hatred?

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-Odio is a very difficult word to define. They are usually people who promote things against other groups, other races, other ethnic groups. But every country has its rules. In Germany, it is illegal to promote Nazism, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust and for good reason. In the United States, as long as you do not say "let's go out and attack this group"You can say almost anything, but hate speech must be viewed in the context of hate crimes. It may not be a crime to spread a certain message, but it has an obvious residual effect.

Social networks (rather than their weak filters) are in the center line of the Wiesenthal Center: "We are trying to see where they are going, we have recently interacted with Facebook, Twitter and Google, and in the last time they had to be more Twitter, for example, three years ago, was the worst. hate groups like ISIS sent literally a hundred thousand messages a day on Twitter. Now they have become more serious, especially since the events in Charlottesville (where a woman died and nearly 20 wounded in 2017, at a demonstration of white supremacists) and the recent Christchurch mbadacre (New Zealand ). "

To the extent that the policies of these platforms are more restrictive ",they push extremists to other places without so many rules. In the meantime, we discover where they are going and we follow them in their activity ".

-They look for them, find them, and then what?

-Follow what they say. For example, if you want to protest a problem related to immigrants, let us warn the security forces so that they are prevented. Detest groups They like to show up, go to places where they are visible and protest. They need attention to recruit members.

The action is cooked in words and forums are ideal corners. "For example, Stormfront, the first page of white supremacists, created in March 1995, is still online. It has become a gigantic international forum. You can see it, it's very safe: it's not biscuits nor try to find out who you are, "proposed Eaton, and continued:"It currently has 12 million posts and hundreds of thousands of threats. "

Now, "let 's say that someone who has just arrived in the country goes to the" Argentina "section of Stormfront and says: & # 39;I have just moved to Buenos Aires and I would like to meet someone to have a beer& # 39; Someone answers, they meet and stay connected. We see this all the time in the forum. In the middle, discriminatory propaganda is postulated and hate crimes are questioned. "

That does not help, says Eaton, the proliferation of nationalist governments in Europe and the painful rhetoric of leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro: "Hate groups can not be quantified, the numbers are very dynamic, but there is a scale: at one extreme are hate groups Of those who are not worth worrying about. In the other, those that you will not be able to eradicate. And in the middle are the people that political leaders must reach. The descent comes from above".

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Eaton says that these days he is walking around Buenos Aires. On the Internet, he was already mocking: "You have a surprising number of Nazi profiles online. I just saw some who call it "vegan movement", which have branches in every country in the region. On Twitter, they are everywhere. They are first and foremost Nazis. They are based on the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian. This is a philosophy that has already been used by other groups: that of cleaning the environment and the streets … your neighborhood is unique to minorities. A mixture of Nazism and naturalism. Pure spirit, clean body. "

DD