Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

[American Dream]

Colorized photograph of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War


“The hillsides ring with ‘free the people’/Or can I hear the echo of the days of ‘39?/With trenches full of poets, a ragged army/Fixin’ bayonets to fight the other line”

http://class-war-hooligan.tumblr.com/po ... he-spanish

[Novem5er]

What do people make about the 2016 Oscar nominations? I remember many years ago Hollywood celebrating itself for being more inclusive. I remember the year that both Denzel and Halle Berry won Oscars. Hollywood celebrities openly campaigned for Obama. Now we have 2015 and 2016 without a single black actor being nominated for anything. I know the people who vote for the nominations are not, themselves, actors or directors. It begs to question exactly who are these invisible Academy voters.

Can a system of voting be so color blind that, by random chance, eventually all white nominations can happen? Could it ever then happen that an all black list could happen some day?

Well, Spike Lee's had enough.

"How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White? And Let's Not Even Get Into The Other Branches," Lee wrote under the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag.

"40 White Actors In 2 Years And No Flava At All. We Can't Act?!" said Lee, who was awarded an honorary Oscar in November.

Both Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith are boycotting the 2016 ceremony.

Pinkett Smith, who appeared in two "Matrix" movies, also said she would skip the Feb. 28 ceremony.

"Maybe it's time we pull back our resources and we put them back into our communities, and we make programs for ourselves that acknowledge us in ways that we see fit, that are just as good as the so-called mainstream," she said in a video on Facebook.

It's kind of funny mentioning the Matrix movies in there (a low blow?). Her comments, however, were kind of concerning to me. Is this what leads to closed-cultures and extremism? When a group of people feel ignored and belittled by a larger society that they turn inward for strength and return outward with anger? If so, that'd seem like a point scored for the racist forces.
[url]
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-award ... SKCN0UW22N[/url]

[Nordic]

It's so stupid. Somehow people think that the Oscars are somehow the final word on what's "best". And that they are fair. They are neither. They have always been pretty random and capricious. And unfair as all hell.

Think of all the deserving white people that didn't get nominated. And if the "Jewz run Hollywood" why weren't there more Jews nominated?? What about Sarah Silverman in her incredible performance in "I Smile Back".

It's an outrage and a clear conspiracy to keep the Jewish woman down.

[American Dream]

https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/201 ... 6-mrr-393/

National-Bolshevism, communism of-by-for fools: “What’s Left?”

February 2016, MRR #393

Wir tanzen mit Faschismus
Und roter Anarchie
Eins, zwei, drei, vier
Kammerad, komm tanz mit mir
Laibach, “Tanz Mit Laibach”

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Laibach has been accused of glorifying fascism in the past to which their response has been: ‘We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.’ Which I assume means they are fascists, they’re just very, very bad at it.
John Oliver. “Laibach goes to North Korea,” Last Week Tonight #45 (7/19/15)

It’s been close to a century since Karl Radek popularized the concept of National Bolshevism. It was June of 1923, after the successful workers’ revolution in Russia and a failed one in Germany which ended the first World War. As the Secretary of the Third International—the Communist International or Comintern—Radek hoped to rally support and solidarity among disaffected German rightwing soldiers, veterans and rank-and-file nationalists for the besieged Soviet Union. The goal was to firm up an alliance between the German Reichswehr and the Russian Red Army, irrespective of the interests of their different working classes, and to this end Radek made an infamous speech in the Executive Committee of the Comintern called “Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void,” which was endorsed by both Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek praised Schlageter—a conservative WWI veteran who joined the German paramilitary Freikorps to suppress the German workers’ soviet revolution of 1918-19 and who then was executed for sabotage against the French occupation army of the Ruhr—as a national hero and argued that “[t]he insistence on the nation in Germany is a revolutionary act.”

Long before the present-day red-brown alliances in Russian politics, over a decade before the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, Radek’s “Schlageter Line” imposed an opportunistic alliance between para-fascist ex-military types and Germany’s revolutionary leftwing working class via the ever-pliant German Communist Party, the KPD. This was a strategy of National Bolshevism for the KDP and the German working class, ultimately to defend the Soviet Union and further that country’s interest in an alliance with Germany. To seal this pact with the devil, KDP Zentrale shut down the insurrectionary Hamburg Uprising by the district KP Wasserkante on October 22, 1923. Radek and Trotsky quickly defended the decision to stop the insurrection by condemning the uprising as premature. What followed was nearly a decade of on again/off again collaboration between the KDP and the NSDAP in the streets and the Reichstag against the SDP-dominated Weimar Republic.

This attraction to National Bolshevism on Radek’s part came as much from his personal experiences in Moabit prison trying to convert reactionary German nationalists to Bolshevism as from his reading of two renegade Hamburg communists, Laufenberg and Wolffheim, who coined the term National Bolshevism. These national communists promoted the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat in the service of German nationalism, the formation of a German Red Army, and a German-Soviet nationalist-socialist alliance in an all-out war against the US and UK. Sound familiar? Radek’s temporary and purely tactical “Schlageter Line” was part of a shameful history of Soviet and KDP intransigence, sectarianism and double-dealing that ultimately delivered the German working class into the hands of the Nazi Party in power, much as the PCE’s (Spanish Communist Party) machinations and red terror finally betrayed the Spanish proletariat to the clutches of Franco. Radek’s contribution to this debacle was to legitimize, for the first time as an official representative of the Comintern, the synthesis of right and left, ultra-nationalism with revolutionary socialism in Germany, that was the prototype for the obsessions of fascism’s leftwing thereafter.

To be fair, there were plenty of left-leaning German fascists in the 1920s and 30s, both inside the Nazi Party (Röhm, Gregor and Otto Strasser) and outside (van den Bruck, Jünger, Niekisch). And had the concept of National Bolshevism not existed in Germany by 1923, circumstance would have contrived something analogous, mirroring a common argument made about Hitler. But the initial willingness on the part of the Bolsheviks to cultivate National Bolshevism in Germany came to bite the Left on its ass. (Victor Serge said of the Schlageter tactic: “It’s playing with fire—all right let’s play with fire!”) The ideal of a red-brown, Soviet-Nazi, Russian-German alliance has been a goal of leftwing fascism ever since. From the NSDAP breakaway Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists through the ultra-Zionist, anti-imperialist LEHI (Stern Gang) in Mandated Palestine to the left Peronist FAR-Montoneros guerrillas in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the archetypal synthesis of revolutionary left and right epitomized by National Bolshevism has recurred over and over, much like a periodic, virulent outbreak of herpes. Most recently, the anarcho/ultra milieu has witnessed @ publisher AK Press accuse white South African journalist, writer and AK author Michael Schmidt of being a secret National Anarchist in league with Troy Southgate.

AK Press did its due diligence, thoroughly investigated Schmidt’s background, and determined that the rumors of his involvement in National Anarchism were true despite his outward adherence to an odd-duck anarchist Platformism. So AK stopped publication of his current book, removed his previous books from its inventory, and disseminated its lengthy, damning findings as widely as it could in the anarcho/ultra milieu. Schmidt’s story is that he is an anarchist and a journalist who was engaged in legitimate research of fringe fascist elements, and that every fact dug up by his detractors has another more innocent explanation. I think that the evidence is overwhelming that Michael Schmidt is at present a National Anarchist-identified fascist. Now, I really don’t care whether Schmidt infiltrated anarchism with his authentic NA fascist beliefs intact or simply developed his decentralized, tribal white nationalism “organically” over his time in the anarchist movement. The purported synthesis of revolutionary left and right that is at the core of National Bolshevism, National Syndicalism, National Anarchism, National Autonomism, ad nauseam—what this fascist tendency likes to call metapolitics—is a clear enough political signature for folks on the Left and the left of the Left to help screen against infiltration or “entryism,” or even genuine conversion.

Well done.

The issue is not jurisprudence or a fair trial or innocent until proven guilty or incarceration. Libertarians forget that, in promoting voluntary association, they automatically authenticate voluntary disassociation; everything from caveat emptor to outright ostracism. The anarcho/ultra milieu is just that—a milieu—and not a community, so its ability to put social pressure to bear is limited. Nevertheless, the option exists and needs to be exercised.

The initial opportunism and sectarianism that marked Bolshevik Russia’s attempt to set up a German National Bolshevik sock puppet does not account for the ongoing opportunism and parasitism of this fascist tendency’s constant attempts to piggy back onto the Left. But neither does it set up some sort of equivalency between socialism and fascism. This is not an argument either from Hanna Arendt’s sophisticated if misguided thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism or its dumbed down High School version that, if one travels far enough along the extremes of either political Left or Right one circles back around toward its supposed opposite, and thus that all political extremism is essentially the same. There are plenty of credible differences that make a true distinction between extreme Left and Right—libertarian and totalitarian—which I’ve covered in past columns. Unfortunately, this sophomoric understanding of politics persists, as does its flip side, a kneejerk contrarianism. So, when a mendacious former columnist proclaims on Facebook by analogy to the original American revolution that “This time it’s TWO royal families,” the Bushes and the Clintons, from which we must declare our independence by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, the sheer knuckle-dragging idiocy is breathtaking. He was never the sharpest tool in the shed, particularly when it’s clear there’s no exaggeration, hyperbole or parody intended in his political analysis, such as it is.

What is involved is a sentiment akin to épater la bourgeoisie, the rebellious, indiscriminate desire to stick it to the establishment, which needs to be critiqued. The post-Romantic Decadents of the fin de siècle were fond of skewering the cultural banality, economic regimentation and political conformity of the stodgy middle-class society of their day. In this they prefigured virtually every rebellious Bohemian youth culture that followed, from the wandervogel to punk rock. Michael “Bommi” Baumann expressed this best in How it all Began/Wie Alles Anfing when he wrote: “You still didn’t feel like part of the left; but everything that was in opposition was good, including the neo-Nazis. […] Fascism as such was in opposition though, and you found pure opposition better than this petit-bourgeois mediocrity. You considered everything good that didn’t agree with it.” Or, as Sean Aaberg of Pork Magazine crudely puts it in protesting what he considers our “increasingly uptight society,” his magazine’s rebellion for its own sake and swastika iconography is “not suitable for squares” and a way of “outing closet totalitarians.”

As for Laibach’s sly lampooning of similar left-right political lunacy, return to the postmodern angst which begins their song “Tanz Mit Laibach” and defines the épater les bourgeois motivating much fascist courting of the Left:

Wir alle sind besessen

Wir alle sind verflucht

Wir alle sind gekreuzigt

Und alle sind kaputt
Von Reiztechnologie

Von Zeitökonomie

Von Qualität das Lebens

Und Kriegsphilosophie

[American Dream]

Metal & Racism: How Many More Chances for Phil Anselmo?

The unpalatable truth, however, beyond Anselmo’s iconic image is that the man has ‘previous’ in this area. Following the release of 1994’s Far Beyond Driven album, the singer was interviewed by MTV about allegations of racist undertones in his lyrics. Wearing a T-shirt from the controversial New York crossover band Carnivore depicting three interlocking number 7s – a symbol employed by the South African white supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement – Anselmo dismissed the accusation but stopped short of condemning Pantera fans who shouted “White Power” at gigs, saying “I ain’t them kids, and them kids are going to yell what they’re going to yell anyway.”

More at: https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2016/02 ... l-anselmo/

COUNTER-CULTURE FASCISM
Historically, fascism has had a strong cultural orientation, and since the 1970s, a prime location for fascist activism has been in the counter-cultures. (I am referring here to the more self-consciously political, post-WWII subcultures, including punk, skinhead, hippie, metal, neo-folk, industrial, and techno). The most famous success has been the creation of the Nazi skinhead milieu, but racist activism continues today among different musical scenes. Fascists tried to achieve political dominance in the counter-culture, and have occasionally been successful. During the height of the Nazi skinhead movement, for example, they dominated the punk scene in certain cities.9



The circulation of obscure fascist imagery and themes by a number of neo-folk and goth bands has encountered resistance from anti-fascist fans, who regard it as a form of crypto-fascism. Tours by the band Death in June, in particular, have been met with boycott calls.

In the past, counter-cultures have been carrier groups and social bases for anti-capitalism, anti-racism, feminism, ecology, queer politics, and a variety of other progressive political movements. Counter-cultures are inherently “radical” in the sense that they seek to negate the current social reality and try to create an alternative. Politically, though, they are not intrinsically Left or Right. Fascism—as distinct from most other types of right-wing politics—seeks a radical transformation of the current Western social order (based on liberal­ism and democracy) and as such can appeal to counter-culturalists just as much as Marxism or anarchism can.

Therefore, the presence of Far Right attitudes in these counter-cultural scenes—even when they do not directly translate into fascist organizing—also has negative effects. Instead of a progressive, pro-queer, and feminist milieu, an atmosphere filled with reactionary social attitudes can become dominant. Even when the bands aren’t committed Nazis, a Far Right-leaning scene further repels the participation of those targeted by the Right. To give two concrete examples: few women may wish to attend concerts glorifying rape, and few Jews want to be entertained by bands playing neo-Nazi cover songs

.
Continues at: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2015/0 ... -fascism/#

[Wombaticus Rex]

Up Next: Is Ted Nugent REALLY a Vegan Progressive?

Everyone in Pantera has been openly problematic for decades now. I understand this is getting attention lately because Phil pulled something Clapton-esque at a recent Dimebag tribute. It is interesting to witness the antifa/SJW machine try to mobilize against a group with a truly anti-fragile fanbase, though. This is a continuation on a theme that General Patton was bringing up earlier today: do you really think that media campaigns like this are doing anything but giving their album sales a bump this quarter?

"Oh yeah, Pantera....fuck, I loved those dudes..."

[American Dream]

Because everyone here knows that White Power, White Separatism, White Pride are utter bullshit.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Because everyone here knows that White Power, White Separatism, White Pride etc.are utter bullshit.

Not sure how to parse that -- I don't think you're dumb enough to believe that your time here at RI is some kind of important social mission with any meaningful impact. (I really hope that's true, but it's also pretty funny if not. And you wouldn't tell me either way.)

I'm talking about the effort exerted by your antifa allies in publicizing Anselmo's outburst and raising awareness for a 90's metal band who still have albums in stores right now. What is the desired outcome? Because all that really happens is additional promo for Pantera.

Do you think that antifa elements might be unknowingly participating in a viral marketing campaign because your responses are so mundanely predictable?

I'm not speculating here -- a lot of their back catalog is back on the Billboard 200 in recent weeks, although their "20th Anniversary Edition" of Far Beyond Driven is out of stock, they've got 5 albums charting right now.

[American Dream]

I actually do think that conspiracy culture is a potentially important venue for making a better world. I believe that Jeff agrees. Certainly he thinks that crypto-racist/fascist shit is bad news all the way, and I definitely do agree with him.

Still holding out for anti-racist/anti-fascist conspiracy exposure as an important means to fight the Power, and I do not mean that in some bonehead "neither Right not Left" sense...

[Harvey]

and I do not mean that in some bonehead "neither Right not Left" sense...

Nevertheless, neo-liberal and neo-conservative are the same people, they've co-opted the language and idiom of both left and right. Well, haven't they?

[Searcher08]

I actually do think that conspiracy culture is a potentially important venue for making a better world.

Yet you have been consistently posting articles about conspiracy culture which say it is nonsense.
Your declared position on the subject is pseudoskeptic - your views are more aligned with Cass Sunnstein than Jeff.
Remember Conspirituality?
Remember Mr Illuminutti?
Remember OWS invaded by "Conspiracy Theorists"?

I believe that Jeff agrees.

No he doesn't. He doesn't agree with that at all.

Certainly he thinks that crypto-racist/fascist shit is bad news all the way, and I definitely do agree with him.

More accurately, you leave out that he very definitively does not espouse Anarcho-neoTotalitarianism and the approve of re-education camps.

Still holding out for anti-racist/anti-fascist conspiracy exposure as an important means to fight the Power, and I do not mean that in some bonehead "neither Right not Left" sense...

How successful has this approach been at RI?
If it has been, please share some of the successes
If not, why not?

[jakell]

Surely you are using some creative licence with the phrase 're-education camps'

Surely?

[Searcher08]

Surely you are using some creative licence with the phrase 're-education camps'

Surely?

Just a question of scale.

AD's hero Spenser Sunshine comes across to me as positively Red Guard-ish.

Progressive groups should come up with their own criteria for people who want to move away from Far Right politics and toward progressive political communities. Recommendations for this include:

1) requiring the person make a public statement disavowing Far Right views, and posting it in their former group’s media;

2) turning over all Far Right books, t-shirts, buttons, etc. to antifascists—especially patches or other insignia of any organizations they were members of;

3) removing all Far Right contacts on social media, and not attending events (either social, cultural, or political) hosted by these individuals or groups;

4) making a sincere statement of why their former views were problematic, with apologies made to anyone hurt by their actions. (The letter written by former White nationalist Derek Black, son of Stormfront founder Don Black, is exemplary.23) If they want to become actively involved as progressive political organizers, they should also

5) be required to go through a debrief to provide information about their former Rightist group’s structures, membership, recruiting tactics, and beliefs. -

See more at: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2015/03/05/drawing-lines-against-racism-and-fascism/#sthash.YhdmbVQm.dpuf

[jakell]

Surely you are using some creative licence with the phrase 're-education camps'

Surely?

Just a question of scale.

AD's hero Spenser Sunshine comes across to me as positively Red Guard-ish.

Progressive groups should come up with their own criteria for people who want to move away from Far Right politics and toward progressive political communities. Recommendations for this include:

1) requiring the person make a public statement disavowing Far Right views, and posting it in their former group’s media;

2) turning over all Far Right books, t-shirts, buttons, etc. to antifascists—especially patches or other insignia of any organizations they were members of;

3) removing all Far Right contacts on social media, and not attending events (either social, cultural, or political) hosted by these individuals or groups;

4) making a sincere statement of why their former views were problematic, with apologies made to anyone hurt by their actions. (The letter written by former White nationalist Derek Black, son of Stormfront founder Don Black, is exemplary.23) If they want to become actively involved as progressive political organizers, they should also

5) be required to go through a debrief to provide information about their former Rightist group’s structures, membership, recruiting tactics, and beliefs. -

See more at: http://www.politicalresearch.org/2015/03/05/drawing-lines-against-racism-and-fascism/#sthash.YhdmbVQm.dpuf

That's pretty heavy handed stuff (wondering how no. 2 plays out regarding tattoos). sort of explains AD's rather shrill interrogations of me when I landed here properly in 2013.

I suppose similar born-again style methods could be applied to the Oasis vs Blur controversy, and when deprogramming former members of MUG (Marmite Users Group).

[backtoiam]

American Dream wrote:

I actually do think that conspiracy culture is a potentially important venue for making a better world. I believe that Jeff agrees. Certainly he thinks that crypto-racist/fascist shit is bad news all the way, and I definitely do agree with him.

Still holding out for anti-racist/anti-fascist conspiracy exposure as an important means to fight the Power, and I do not mean that in some bonehead "neither Right not Left" sense...

hmmmmm.....so you presume to speak for Mr. Wells? I don't think so. I doubt it.