Fascists are the Tools of the State

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 02, 2018 6:11 am

Ahead of rally, Patriot Prayer leaders goad supporters and antagonize Portland
August 01, 2018

Rachel Janik


The far-right groups Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys will converge on Portland in a matter of days, but Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson and his followers were apparently unable to wait until this weekend to harass the city’s residents and provoke left-wing activists.

The two groups have momentum from their last violent outing in Portland, a rally on June 30 that quickly became an all-out melee between right-wing rallygoers and antifascist counter-protesters. Gibson has said attendees plan to bring guns and other weapons to the city for the upcoming August 4 rally. The Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group styled as a men’s drinking club, will provide armed “security” for the event. In 2018, the SPLC named the Proud Boys a hate group because of its members’ ties to the racist right, their rhetoric denigrating Muslims and women, and the group’s affiliation with events featuring right-wing extremists.

Unable to pass up the opportunity to needle their political opponents, Gibson and a herd of supporters traveled to Portland’s “Occupy ICE” camp twice last week to harass activists there protesting the Trump administration’s child-separation immigration policy. He recorded the group’s activities on Facebook Live. Claiming he just wanted to talk, Gibson instigated a series of fruitless, sometimes unintelligible exchanges with the demonstrators at the camp. Behind him, members of his posse can be heard taunting and challenging people. In one video, the Patriot Prayer group is separated from the ICE protesters by a chain link fence, and Gibson argues with a masked man on the other side. Contradicting his insistence that his group is there to start a dialogue, his associate, Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys member Tusitala “Tiny” Toese baits the protester, “That’s all you do, talk. Try something!”

Toese has cultivated a reputation for violence at Patriot Prayer’s many far-right rallies, and for seeking it out apart from those demonstrations as well. In June, a Portland man told the Guardian that Toese and two other Proud Boys taunted him outside a shopping center, and when he talked back, Toese got out of the pickup truck and punched him in the face. On June 30, police arrested Toese and his companion, Donovon Flippo (also a member of the Proud Boys), on assault charges that appear to be connect to the alleged attack. In May, Toese and fellow Proud Boys member Russell Schultz drove through Vancouver, Washington into Portland flying a flag with an antifascist symbol on it, which they had spray painted over with the words “Nazi fags.” Toese recorded the incident and posted the video on Facebook.

“We’re coming for you!” Toese says in the video in a singsong voice. “We’re gonna send you a clear message today.”

“I identify as a motherfucker who’s gonna punch you in your fuckin’, fuckin’ commie mouth!” Schultz yells into to the camera. Later, he adds, “We know where you live.”

Gibson does not explain his decision to bring someone with Toese’s temperament along in pursuit of a peaceful dialogue. At the end of that Occupy ICE video, Gibson suggests he fully anticipated Toese would become violent, chuckling to the camera that the masked protester got off easy. “Tiny’s gone a long way, to hold back for that long. I’m surprised he didn’t tear down that whole fence and eat him. Damn, that kid’s lucky.”

Later in the video, he obfuscates Patriot Prayer’s role as instigator by shifting the blame onto Portland’s law enforcement. “Obviously August 4th there will be conflicts, there will be violence,” Gibson said. “Because the police will probably stand there and wait until people are bleeding and on the ground.”

Gibson’s Facebook live streams are riling up his followers online. The videos of the Occupy ICE confrontations are replete with comments cheering the prospect of violent confrontation. “I should introduce them to my riot stick,” wrote one user, while another counseled Toese to “save” his aggression “for the 4th.”

“Love to kick him in his grill,” one person wrote. “Shit [sic] up bitch ass.”

“Why talk just end their lives,” another commenter wrote. That person went on, “Civil war needs to happen…They’re trash.”

In the run-up to Saturday’s rally, Gibson has posted periodically on Facebook about the event’s logisitics, including emphasizing that Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys intend to bring firearms — as he insists they always have. In the past, guns were restricted in the actual rally area, which was a federally managed park. But the venue this time is a few blocks away in the Waterfront Park, where the rules are governed by a local ordinance allowing guns if you have the proper concealed carry license. Gibson also said in one Facebook video that the buses bringing rallygoers from Vancouver to Portland will have “armed security” carrying their guns across state lines.

Vincenzo Molino commented, “If the ninjas try to rush the bus again this weekend, [Proud Boy guards] will let 2 or 3 lucky ones on the bus and say, ‘now youse cant leave’ and the rest will watch in horror through the glass on what happens, itll be be [sic] a great show, like looking at hookers thorough the glass in Amsterdam.” Molino has attended Patriot Prayer events in the past and is a “Fourth Degree Proud Boy” — a distinction members earn by beating an antifascist protester.

On Tuesday, Gibson appeared on Alex Jones' conspiracy mill, Infowars, where he told Jones he had a plan for far-right agitators, most of them Proud Boys, to don masks and “infiltrate” groups of left-wing antifa counter-protesters on Saturday.

He elaborated in a Facebook video posted that afternoon, calling the scheme “fun” and “unique” and eagerly predicting it would “bug” counter-protesters “emotionally and psychologically.” But when discussing melee tactics, he also suggested the infiltrators would engage in physical violence. He told supporters not to worry about charging in to confront antifa, because, “remember, we’re gonna have a bunch of people within antifa, okay? And they’re gonna take care of business within their group, too.”

“It is hard to do what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s easy to do what they do. Until they get punched in the face and knocked out and then have to go to the hospital.”


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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Fri Aug 03, 2018 5:54 am

Unite the Right, Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, & the Proud Boys

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While most members of the Alt-Right and white nationalists of all stripes would argue that it is a lost cause to preserve white dominance over American politics, economics, and culture, especially after the changes to immigration policy in 1965 which allowed non-whites to enter the country in great numbers. Thus an all white ethno-State must be created argues the Alt-Right, while paleoconservatives would argue that a non-revolutionary solution is still on the table. This is why groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have put so much of their energy and their branding into backing Trump, as they see him a vehicle to enact the policies that they think will re-solidify white (or ‘Western’) male dominance over American society.


Read more: https://itsgoingdown.org/unite-the-righ ... roud-boys/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby Jerky » Fri Aug 03, 2018 6:34 am

The dilemma here is that one sure fire way of making the political situation in the US even worse than it currently is, is to give these fascists (and they are undeniably that) precisely the kind of violent reaction they've been so desperately begging for (and that they clearly deserve) since Trump was elected.

I am reminded of a video from one of these events. It took place prior to Charlottesville IIRC. In the video, a representative from the Southern Poverty Law Center showed up with a videocamera to document the goings on for future commentary, and also just to bear witness and document the truly vile, thuggish nature of these right wing "demonstrations", and prevent the truth from going down the memory hole too quickly, as it usually does. The fellow is pretty good natured about things. The demonstrators recognize him (his SPLC cap gave him away) and give him a very hard time, calling him names, cursing at him, accosting him with angry demands that he answer their "questions" (all of which are rhetorical, and most of which are screamed into his face even as he attempts to answer previous asked questions). On top of that, he gets shoved around quite a bit, and has his SPLC cap slapped off his head and stolen. He smiles through it all, and at one point, I guess hoping to join in on the "good natured ribbing", snatches the MAGA cap off the head of one of the lead instigators (I think it might have been Based Alaska). That's when all Hell breaks loose, and dozens of burly, bearded fascists jump on this frail, fifty-something anti-hate activist. As they throw him to the ground, throwing kicks and punches, they scream "THAT WAS ASSAULT!!! YOU JUST ASSAULTED HIM!!!" They were like a pack of wild animals, like monsters really, and in the moment, it's obvious that, even though what they were saying was incredibly ridiculous and the very definition of hypocritical... you could tell they believed it, and that they felt totally heroic and righteous. All while being the most disgusting pack of bullies one could imagine this side of ICE or the IDF.

Talk about your "Tools" of State.

Does anybody else remember that video? I think that seeing it was the precise moment that I realized there will be no salvation for a significant chunk of the American population, when and if the New Fascist International's plans for us are exposed and shut down.

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby Jerky » Fri Aug 03, 2018 6:54 am

Look how that incident is STILL being portrayed in the alternate history world of far right media...

http://gotnews.com/disavow-splcenter-st ... ttesville/

This, of course, now that the "long form" version of the video has apparently been scrubbed from the Internet.

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 06, 2018 2:53 am

Anti-Fascist News shared an event.

The police protected Patriot Prayer in Portland yesterday and attacked the much larger crowd of antifascists, including firing flash grenades that almost killed a protester. This cannot stand.


AUG
8
Demand Police Accountability in Portland
Wed 9:30 AM PDT · Portland City Hall · Portland, OR


Image

On August 4th, 2018, a peaceful protestor was shot in the back of the skull with a flash bang grenade, by the Portland police. It penetrated his helmet, and caused severe damage to the back of his head. Had he not been wearing a helmet, he would certainly have lost his life.

This action goes against national standards for engagement regarding crowd control, use of force, and use of “specialty impact munitions.”

It’s time that we demand accountability from the city of Portland. It’s time that the city stop justifying the violence perpetrated by the Portland police towards peaceful protestors. It’s time to demand that the PPB stop protecting and enabling violent and dangerous groups such as Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys, and various white nationalist and white supremacist groups that attend their events.

The city must see what happened to our fellow citizen, and friend, at the hands of those employed by the state, and entrusted to “protect and serve” the community.

Join us at city hall on Wednesday, August 8th 2018, from 9:30am until 12:30pm, for the city council meeting. Demand justice. Demand accountability. Demand an end to police violence.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 07, 2018 6:07 am

Who Needs Fascists When There Are Police?: Reflections on Portland

Collusion between police and fascists is nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan openly coordinated with police in many parts of the United States throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, when the relationship between police and openly fascist groups is not recognized, this enables the authorities to present themselves as a supposedly neutral solution to the problem of “extremism,” justifying an intensification of surveillance and control that are then used to implement increasingly totalitarian measures.

Conventional wisdom has it that the role of fascists is to do the dirty work of the state, carrying out attacks that the police cannot, like last month’s Nazi assault on the Occupy ICE encampment in San Antonio. Yet on August 4 in Portland, it was the police who did the dirty work for the fascists. They were the ones who perpetrated the violence that the fascists had been promising to enact. They allowed participants in the fascist rally to gather outside the area for which they had obtained a permit, rather than within it, so as to avoid being searched. Then, permitting the fascists to retain the majority of their weapons, they accompanied them around downtown like a bodyguard, facing outward away from the fascists to protect them from the entire city of Portland. Finally, the police attacked the crowd, initiating hostilities by shooting concussion grenades at people’s heads.

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A police officer fired this concussion grenade at an anti-fascist demonstrator’s head, inflicting a grievous head wound. If the demonstrator had not been wearing a helmet, the grenade surely would have killed him.

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Police officers grinning as they employ potentially lethal force against those in the path of the fascist march.

The following day, a similar scenario played out in Berkeley at another demonstration called by the same network of fascists. Few fascists showed up, yet intense conflicts unfolded between anti-fascists and police.


More: https://itsgoingdown.org/who-needs-fasc ... -portland/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 07, 2018 6:10 am

Cops And Klan Go Hand In Hand: A Report from Berkeley

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The overt State strategy of favoring fascists over the much larger antifascist contingents is a rising trend in numerous police forces.

The cities that allow these police to implement their racist agenda of attacking antifascism and protecting the rather pathetic, tiny gatherings of the Alt-Right are guilty of direct collaboration with the fascist resurgence.

This goes for “liberal” Berkeley just as it does for “green” Portland.


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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 07, 2018 6:56 am

Germany's top domestic spy advised far right xenophobic political party on how to avoid being billed as "extremists"

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The Alternative For Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party whose ranks include neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers; in a new tell-all book by "AfD dropout" Franziska Schreiber (once the head of the AfD's youth wing), we learn that party leader Frauke Petry worked closely with Hans-Georg Maaßen, the president of Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a domestic surveillance agency with 3,100 employees and an annual budget of €350m).

According to Schreiber, Maaßen is sympathetic to the AfD's cause, and he extensively advised the party bosses on how to skirt the line that would brand them as domestic extremists, which meant that they avoided surveillance and sanction.

At the same time, Maaßen's agency branded any left-wing party that opposed the rise of the far right as extremists and subjected them to public smears and unknown quantities of secret surveillance.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution was formed after WWII and incorporated many of the Reich's most aggressive strategists and foot-soldiers, including members of the Nazi party and the Organization Consul.

Maaßen, who claims to be unaffiliated with any party, has been a top official in the state intelligence apparatus for almost 30 years. In 1991, Otto Schily (SPD), then federal minister of the interior, brought Maaßen into his ministry, where he quickly became the head of the department on immigration law. In this capacity, he prevented the Guantanamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, who grew up in Bremen, from returning to Germany in 2002.

In August 2012, Maaßen was appointed president of the BfV by then-Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU). A short time later, he attacked whistleblower Edward Snowden as a “traitor” and called for the media to collaborate more closely in the strengthening of state security. In 2015, Maaßen brought forward several criminal charges to initiate an investigation against two bloggers from “netzpolitik.org” on suspicions of treason. With this action, Maaßen unleashed a major attack on freedom of the press.


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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Aug 09, 2018 3:02 pm

New Charlottesville Doc Exposes Neo-Nazi Leaders & Their Ties to U.S. Military & Weapons Contractors

AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about Charlottesville and Rob Rundo’s presence there.

A.C. THOMPSON: So, he wasn’t there, but his people were there. And they were involved in multiple skirmishes that we saw. So, one of them was a guy named Mike Miselis. And Mike Miselis, we have documentary evidence of him hurling a full Coke can at counterprotesters. We believe he threw a rock at counterprotesters. He came with his hands taped up like a boxer, as if he was preparing for a fight. He was wearing a mouth guard like a boxer would wear. And we have video of him engaging in this altercation with counterprotesters, where he pushes a couple to the ground and starts punching them when they’re on the ground. His colleague, Ben Daley, enters into the fray and chokes and attacks two female counterprotesters, leaving them bloody. So this was a pretty nasty fight that we saw that seemed totally unnecessary and that we captured on video. Our goal was—when we first started doing this work, we didn’t know these guys’ names, we didn’t know what they had done. We were trying to identify them. And we said we want to know who these guys in this video are.

AMY GOODMAN: So, on July 5th, you reported a story about Michael Miselis for ProPublica headlined “He Is a Member of a Violent White Supremacist Group. So Why Is He Working for a Defense Contractor With a Security Clearance?” One day after your story was published, Michael Miselis lost his job. Talk about how you tracked him down.

A.C. THOMPSON: You know, so we had these photos and videos, and we had seen him at these rallies, but we didn’t know his name. We didn’t know who he was. Eventually, over many months, we were able to get a break that led us—that gave us his name. And we were able to corroborate that, yeah, this is the guy.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that break.

A.C. THOMPSON: We had a law enforcement source who said, “Hey, this is evidence that’s going to lead you to this guy,” and helped us lead us to that name. We went and saw Michael Miselis—and it’s in our film—and said, “Hey”—

AMY GOODMAN: And you confront him when he’s getting in his car, where?

A.C. THOMPSON: This is in Southern California, not far from the Northrop Grumman plant. And you can watch the video and decide what you think about it, but I was struck by the fact that he seemed kind of highly unsurprised to have somebody come and say, “Hey, what were you doing in Charlottesville last summer?” To me, he didn’t seem particularly shocked by that.

AMY GOODMAN: He immediately said, of course, “I wasn’t there.” But you kept pushing.

A.C. THOMPSON: Right. He said, “I wasn’t there,” and he denied being there, at the time. He has since—or his group has since gone back on that and acknowledged that he was there.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about Northrop Grumman.

A.C. THOMPSON: So, Northrop Grumman at first said nothing. We kept asking them, “Hey, what’s the story with this guy? How did he get a security clearance? What is he doing working for your company?” And they said nothing to us. We made repeated queries to them about this. Then, when we published our story, they issued a statement saying, “Hey, we don’t approve of this. We’re investigating. We’re concerned about this.” The CEO of the company at the time sent out a bulletin to everybody on the staff, an internal bulletin, saying, “This is not good. We’re not down with this.” And eventually we were alerted that they had been—that he had been let go from the company.

AMY GOODMAN: And when was that?

A.C. THOMPSON: The day after, about 24 hours afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN: And what other images did you—did you have images of him at other locations?

A.C. THOMPSON: We had video of him in Berkeley, and we had video of him in Charlottesville, both times in these violent altercations and really looking like he was prepared for violence, so hands taped up, goggles, a mouthpiece in, that kind of thing.

AMY GOODMAN: And when you talk about these protests in California, for those who are not familiar with them, know Charlottesville because, well, a person died there—

A.C. THOMPSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —Heather Heyer—and, again, in a few minutes we’ll be talking with her mother. But you had seen this coming. Talk about the series of “Unite the Right” rallies that were held throughout California.

A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, so there was—in 2016 and 2017, there was a whole string of far-right and racist rallies that occurred throughout California, and almost every one of these turned into a bloodbath. So, you had a Klan rally in the spring of 2016 in Anaheim; three people were stabbed. You had a Nazi rally in Sacramento in 2016, the summer; seven people were stabbed. And then you had conflicts in Huntington Beach, a Trump march, where the Rise Above Movement first made its presence known, and there were numerous altercations. A journalist from the OC Weekly newspaper was attacked there by the Rise Above Movement.

And then you had Berkeley. And the Berkeley battles, the Berkeley demonstrations, were incredibly violent, sort of street-fighting, political-warfare-in-the-streets events that went on through the spring, that Rise Above Movement was present, Nazi groups were present, other white supremacist groups, and also sort of less extreme pro-Trump groups were there. But these were really highly, highly violent scenarios that were poorly policed, where they got out of control and just spun on for hours.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, earlier I asked you if you were tracking the FBI tracking them. But, I mean, I think what clearly comes through in your documentary is your sort of utter surprise that you felt like you were out there on your own tracking these people.

A.C. THOMPSON: Right, exactly, like that was our—that was our sense for much of the work that we were doing, was that there was not a lot of interest from law enforcement in these characters. I believe that has possibly changed now. But while we were doing our work, it wasn’t like there was an investigative trail left by law enforcement for us to follow.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about the U.S. Marine Corps lance corporal who you identify as a neo-Nazi and assailant during last August’s bloody white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A.C. THOMPSON: So that’s Vasillios Pistolis. And Pistolis is, I would say, a fascinating and disturbing character. At the time of the Charlottesville rally, he was a member of what I would say is the most extreme, most dangerous white supremacist group, and that’s the Atomwaffen Division, which is a group of committed domestic Nazi terrorists whose goal is to start a race war, overthrow the U.S. government and establish a fascist state. And they aim to do that through guerrilla warfare, assassination and political terrorism. So, at the same time Pistolis is serving in the Marine Corps, he is in a group that is dedicated to overthrowing the government through force of arms.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Atomwaffen, A-T-O-M-W-A-F-F-E-N?

A.C. THOMPSON: Right. So that means—in German, that means nuclear weapons, and then with the English word “division.” So it’s sort of a nod to the Third Reich.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about the encrypted chats that they have online. Talk about Discord.

A.C. THOMPSON: Right. So, working with my colleagues, Jake Hanrahan and Ali Winston, we were able to get access to 250,000 chat messages sent privately by the group. And they sort of really lay out the group’s ideology, their intentions and sort of their menace. You know, some of the chat messages that we got included people talking about specific plans to blow up the power grid in Western states. They talked about plans to manufacture weapons. They talked about training camps that they were doing in the Nevada desert, in the Midwest, training people in hand-to-hand combat and guerrilla warfare.

AMY GOODMAN: You took your information back to Emily Gorcenski—

A.C. THOMPSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —in Charlottesville. And explain what you found and what she had been looking for, as well.

A.C. THOMPSON: Right. So, Emily and I had been messaging one another since shortly after the Charlottesville event. And she was trying to figure out, “Hey, who attacked me on the night of the 11th?” And we had some notion that perhaps it was the Rise Above Movement. We knew that they were there and they were close to her. Maybe it was somebody else. And eventually I come across, in these chat logs, Vasillios Pistolis talking quite explicitly about attacking Emily, as well as attacking many other people. He said—

AMY GOODMAN: But wait, this is really important. He didn’t just say, “I attacked this person.” He talked about her, Emily Gorcenski.

A.C. THOMPSON: Right, right. That was what was stunning to me. That was what—like, you never see that, right? It’s like somebody has just offered you up the evidence right there. And I think it’s because Emily had been live-streaming that, and so people started—on the far right, started knowing her name. And then he wanted to take credit for that assault.

And from everything we can tell, we know he was there. We have video of him entering that fray. Emily is not entirely sure if the kick that he launched actually hit her. But she knows, and we can see from the video, that he propelled himself into that melee and that basically the violence escalated from the time that he jumped in. He also, you know, later said—we have video of him beating somebody with a wooden flagpole the next day. And he posted these messages saying, “Hey, I split”—I think he said, “I split three skulls today, with virtually no damage to myself. You know, I had so much fun at 'Unite the Right.'” So he was a guy who was bragging about the violence he engaged in. You know, he posted photos of himself, in these private chats, attacking people.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk about how you tracked him to his employer.

A.C. THOMPSON: So, that’s one of the fascinating things about these chat logs from the Atomwaffen Division, is you start looking at them, and you realize, oh, there are several people who are active-duty or former military in this group, people that have good combat training, people that know their way around weapons. And we thought, let’s finally go—when we had enough evidence—go to the Marine Corps and say, “Hey, look, this is what we know about this guy who works for you. This is”—

AMY GOODMAN: And where does he work for them?

A.C. THOMPSON: At that time, he was a lance corporal at Camp Lejeune down in North Carolina, which is a place that’s actually had sort of persistent problems with white supremacists over the years.

AMY GOODMAN: This Atomwaffen leader.

A.C. THOMPSON: Yeah, he’s down there. He’s on base, working with the Marine Corps down there. He was a water purification specialist at that time. And we said, “Look, here’s photos. Here’s video. Here’s what we’re going to say. We need to know if you guys have taken action against this guy at all. Do you know about him? And what should we know about him?” you know, and put that out to them.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did they say?

A.C. THOMPSON: What we found out was that there had already been an investigation into Pistolis by military investigators. And apparently the investigation stalled or was dropped or didn’t go somewhere. But there had been an investigation, for at least six months, into his conduct. In the military, you cannot be a member of an active white supremacist group. That is against military regulations in all branches of the service. You also—you know, engaging in criminal activity, like assaulting people, is also barred. But for some reason, the Marine Corps had not acted on the information that it had, that it had had since before we talked to them. Six months before, they were tipped off about this. And they had allowed him to remain in the corps.

AMY GOODMAN: So you have all the evidence. You have the video. You have him beating—

A.C. THOMPSON: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —Emily Gorcenski and others.

A.C. THOMPSON: Right. And at that point, it seems like they took more aggressive action. So they ended up court-martialing Vasillios Pistolis, and they recently separated him from the service, which is jargon to say that they have ousted him from the service. But I would point out that the court-martial that they did with Pistolis was basically a misdemeanor court-martial. And it just said, “Hey, you weren’t following orders. You were misleading your superiors,” and gave him 30 days in the brig. And then the discharge that they went through him, I would say, from what I can tell, is not a particularly severe sort of discharge, because those things are graded. You know, an other-than-honorable, a dishonorable discharge, these are serious. And I’m not sure that that was the kind of thing that he got.


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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sat Aug 11, 2018 4:34 am

“Racial dissidents have lost the ability to organize openly”: Alt-rightists on Trump, ICE, and what is to be done

By Matthew N Lyons


Addendum – A note about Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer

I want to add some brief comments about Patriot Prayer (PP) and Proud Boys (PB) in light of the August 4th confrontation in Portland, Oregon, when a Patriot Prayer rally faced off against a larger counterprotest—until the counterprotesters were violently attacked by police.

Joey Gibson’s Patriot Prayer and Gavin McInnes’s Proud Boys were both founded in 2016 as part of the wave of right-wing enthusiasm surrounding candidate Donald Trump. The two organizations are not identical, but they represent similar politics and have become closely intertwined. They offer a slightly sanitized version of right-wing racism. Both organizations have longstanding close ties with white nationalists and are staunchly anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant, yet they disavow explicit white supremacist ideology and include small numbers of people of color as members. Both groups uphold patriarchal ideology and glorify political violence.

Unlike alt-rightists and other white nationalists, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer do not advocate a white ethno-state or a radical break with the U.S. political system. Rather, they want to reassert white male dominance within the existing system. As “The Grouch” put it on the antifascist website Its Going Down: “what they want most of all is to be called on by the State in order to attack perceived enemies of the existing social order. Chiefly this means social movements in the streets, but also journalists who are critical of Trump (or the Proud Boys and the far-Right), migrants, people of color, queer and trans people, and so on.” Unlike the alt-right, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer are solidly and unambivalently pro-Trump.

Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys are currently engaged in a drive to rebuild the kind of broad coalition of right-wing streetfighters that operated for several months in 2017. This coalition encompassed alt-rightists, neonazi skinheads, and other white nationalists, alongside “alt-lite” Trump supporters and Patriot movement activists. The effort fell apart in the wake of Charlottesville, amid in-fighting, deplatforming by media companies, and mass antifascist resistance. So far the revival of a right-wing streetfighting force has been limited to the Pacific Northwest. Continued militant opposition is needed to shut it down and keep it from spreading.

The August 4th events in Portland, like previous confrontations, indicate a close, friendly relationship between Patriot Prayer/Proud Boys and the police. As The Grouch commented, despite the fact that militant rightists are perpetrating more violence than their opponents, police look on right-wingers “as a group of victims, and anyone that stands up to them as instead a group of criminals and terrorists.” System-loyal right-wing groups such as Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer are better positioned to develop a collaborative relationship with the police than alt-rightists or neonazis, who don’t accept the existing system as legitimate. However, the intricate ties between Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys on one hand and white nationalists on the other underscores that we can’t treat the dividing line between system-loyal right and oppositional right as rigid or fixed. This is a dynamic situation, and I would not want to predict how things will develop from here.


http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2018/ ... ty-to.html
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sun Aug 12, 2018 5:54 am

To the Charlottesville Anti-Fascists

A Message from the Mothers of Murdered Anti-Fascists in France

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Collectif des Mères Solidaires: Who We Are

A collective to support victims of fascism and state repression.

We live in a Europe that boasts of being a haven of peace, freedom, prosperity, and justice, built upon the blood shed by the partisans during the battles to liberate it from fascism. However, our children, engaged in various social and political struggles, are beaten, arrested, sentenced, and in some cases killed by state authorities or fascists.

We, their mothers, affirm that the politics conducted by the governments of Europe are responsible, directly or indirectly, for this:

By thwarting our children’s aspirations to transform our societies and standing in the way of experimentation with alternative models founded on cooperation and self-organization.

By ignoring calls to respect human rights and the earth in order to defend the economic interests of the wealthy, exacerbating social injustices in their own countries and throughout the world.

By provoking hopelessness throughout society, by encouraging fear of foreigners, by tolerating or allying themselves with violent movements of the extreme right, they facilitate the resurgence of fascism that terrorizes and kills.


Exercising their freedoms of expression and of struggle, our children denounce injustice, discrimination, and the unrestrained capitalism that is ravaging the world. They defend their rights and those of the most marginalized. They fight against all forms of the drift towards fascism. They struggle for a world based in solidarity, openness, and respect for the environment.

Because they dare to take a stand against the state, they are considered a threat. And they face disproportionate repression from:

Police forces that use instruments of death, beatings, and arrests against those who don’t present any real danger;

A justice system that enables police impunity and mobilizes any means at its disposal, particularly imprisonment, against those who it wants to silence;

A prison system that violates the most basic human rights.


The state institutes these police, judicial, and carceral forms of violence as its normal mode of functioning to serve the powerful and to criminalize social, environmental, and political struggles.

Because we have raised them with the values of truth, solidarity, justice, and freedom, we, their mothers, demand justice and freedom for our children.

We denounce:

The fact that these states designate them as enemies of the Republic and of democracy, and seek to paralyze them through intimidation;

The violence and repression that is exercised against them;

The fact that these states tolerate the existence of fascist or neo-Nazi groups and on occasion guarantee them impunity.


Faced with the powerlessness of individual protest, we unite our voices so that those of our children may be heard. We share the struggles of other mothers, in Europe and throughout the world. We help and support one another.

We will neither forget nor abandon one another. We will not allow our devastated hearts to be engulfed by the silence of the cemetery or crushed by the humiliation of prisons.

For mothers like us, the slums where the children of migrants face discrimination, the refugee camps and the detention centers where those fleeing poverty, war, or political repression in their country are humiliated—these will always be spaces of mobilization.

And the anniversaries of the deaths of our children will always remind us of the urgent necessity of struggle.

-Collectif des Mères Solidaires—Collective of Mothers in Solidarity, France


More: https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/10/to-th ... -in-france
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 20, 2018 1:11 pm

On Periscope, Alex Jones tells supporters to get their “battle rifles” ready against antifa, the mainstream media, and “Chicom operatives”

Jones: It's time to act before the media carries out a “false flag”

Video ››› August 14, 2018 5:14 PM EDT ››› MEDIA MATTERS STAFF

From an August 13 video posted to Alex Jones’ Periscope account:

ALEX JONES (HOST): It now stands with you and the U.S. military who I know already understand who the Chicom operatives and the traitors are to understand who's trying to take the First Amendment, who’s trying to bankrupt the country, who’s trying to shut down everything, who went ahead and admitted they wanted to bankrupt health care in America to bring us to our knees. We’re under attack and you know that, and you pointed out mainstream media is the enemy.

But now it’s time to act on the enemy before they do a false flag. I know the Justice Department's crippled, a bunch of followers and cowards. But there’s groups, there’s grand juries, there’s -- you called for it and it’s time politically and economically and judiciously and legally and criminally to move against these people. It’s got to be done now. Get together the people you know aren’t traitors, and aren’t cowards, and aren’t hedging their frickin’ bets like all these other assholes do, and let’s go, let’s do it. Because they’re coming. Now, in your wisdom you may be playing possum and waiting for them to come in. But America needs to know that they’ve got their little pathetic commie red teams ready. And they’ve got their targets picked out: the sheriffs, the judges, the police chiefs, the patriots, the veterans, the talk show hosts, everybody. And everyone’s going to be amazed when they come and when those cowards come and it’s going to hit in the middle of the night, and they’re coming. And they’re coming. And they’re coming.

They think they can really take down America. And this is it. So, people need to have their battle rifles and everything ready at their bedsides and you got to be ready because the media is so disciplined in their deception. Antifa attacked all these people at the White House, beat up reporters, beat up women, children, no coverage. And they’ve got discipline folks, they’ve got criminal discipline because they’re a bunch of followers.



https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2018 ... dia/220995
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 4:20 pm

Russia Is Co-opting Angry Young Men

Fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serve as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries.

MICHAEL CARPENTER
6:00 AM ET


Image
Members of the Night Wolves motorcycle group pose on top of a Red Army tank.

Deep in the forests of Slovakia, former Russian Spetsnaz commandos trained young men from a right-wing paramilitary group called the Slovak Conscripts. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, some of these freshly-minted paramilitaries went to fight with Russian forces in eastern Ukraine while others stayed at home to agitate against nato as a “terrorist organization.”

On the streets of the French city Marseille, Russian soccer hooligans sporting tattoos with the initials of Russia’s military intelligence service, GRU, brutally attacked English soccer fans in June 2016, sending dozens of bloodied fans to the hospital. Alexander Shprygin, an ultranationalist agitator and the head of the All-Russian Union of Supporters (a soccer fan club that he claims was established at the behest of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB), was arrested during the melee and deported from France.

In Budapest’s Fiumei Road Cemetery in May 2017, a Russian motorcycle gang carrying giant red flags displaying the Soviet hammer and sickle rode up to a World War II memorial. Somewhat incongruously, the tattooed bikers, accompanied by pinstriped Russian Embassy diplomats, disembarked from their motorcycles to lay red carnations in front of the memorial and then posted a video clip of it online.

It seems almost too strange to be true: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries. It sounds more like an episode of The Americans with a dash of Mad Max and Fight Club mixed in. Yet this is exactly what is happening across Europe and North America as Russia’s intelligence services co-opt fringe radicals and angry young men to try to undermine Western democracies from within. And not just in the virtual world, but in real life.

Part of the appeal of this strategy is its sheer outlandishness. It may seem implausible that Russia’s secret services could recruit or radicalize skinheads or social outcasts in the West. The Kremlin can easily argue that whatever ties exist between far-right groups in Russia and the West occur spontaneously, and have no connection to the Russian state. But whether it be Serb ultranationalists in Montenegro or neo-Nazis in Hungary, the hand of Russia’s intelligence services has in many cases already been exposed. Russia’s ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, waged using separatist proxies under the firm command and control of the Russian military, has provided a convenient recruiting ground for right-wing fanatics from Brazil to Belarus.

After the Kremlin accelerated its covert war against Western democracies in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s intelligence services dramatically ramped up their “active measures” (in Russian intelligence jargon, aktivnyye meropriyatiya or “active measures” refers to a broad range of covert influence and/or subversive operations) using radical-right and fringe groups. These groups serve as the perfect unwitting agents to accomplish Moscow’s twin goals of destabilizing Western societies and co-opting Western business and political elites.

By forging ties to radical groups on the far right, and sometimes on the far left, the Kremlin has developed convenient local surrogates that can amplify its talking points, even as Russian trolls reinforce the divisive narratives such groups spread online.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that the partnerships between the Kremlin and these groups are always marriages of convenience. Many are genuine partnerships based on a shared aversion to liberal democracy and a desire to undermine it.

The Kremlin’s recruitment of skinheads, biker gangs, soccer hooligans, and street fighters does not usually appear geared toward the armed overthrow of democratic governments. Far more often, the recruitment, indoctrination, and manipulation of fringe right-wing groups seems aimed at sowing political chaos in Western democracies and subverting or weakening democratic institutions. But occasionally, as in Ukraine, these proxies can operate directly in support of Kremlin operations.

An imposing figure at 6 foot 3, Alexander Zaldostanov, a former dental surgeon with scraggly shoulder-length hair and a goatee, is now the leader of a Russian motorcycle gang called the Night Wolves. Typically photographed in black-leather biker gear, Zaldostanov is a well-known figure in Russia: He was a torchbearer for the 2014 Sochi Olympics and a recipient of the Order of Honor from Russian President Vladimir Putin for “patriotic education of youth.” An ardent nationalist, Zaldostanov tries to evoke the spirit of romantic imperialism and conquest modeled on Russia’s famous Cossack horsemen, as well as a countercultural rebelliousness designed to appeal to Russian Millennials and youth. The Night Wolves’ unifying “ideology,” to the extent that one exists, is based on contempt for the West, which is portrayed as feeble, decadent, rootless, and libertine. Zaldostanov once suggested “death to faggots” would be an appropriate motto for the “anti–color revolution” group he founded with the ultranationalist politician Nikolai Starikov and others.

After arriving in Sevastopol in February 2014, Zaldostanov took charge of a detachment of Night Wolves and set up roadblocks around the city. A couple weeks later, the bikers helped storm the Ukrainian naval headquarters to force the surrender of the beleaguered forces stuck inside, marking a decisive turning point in Russia’s semi-covert operation to annex the peninsula. The Night Wolves’ operational role in this armed takeover was second only to Russia’s infamous “little green men,” Russian special-operations forces with their insignias removed. As far as the GRU’s psychological operations (“psy-ops”) were concerned, however, the Night Wolves played the leading role.

Russian state-owned media, and some Western journalists who followed suit, portrayed the Night Wolves as patriotic locals acting spontaneously in support of the Russian putsch, reveling in the attractive story line and the accompanying photographs and video footage of tattooed bikers. The Kremlin’s narrative of “tough guys” taking matters into their own hands was carefully stage-managed to distract attention from the story the Kremlin did not want told: the Russian military’s coordinated attack on Ukraine.

Although the exact nature of the Night Wolves’ ties to Russia’s secret services is still somewhat murky, the U.S. government believes that, at a minimum, their operations in Crimea from February to March 2014 were closely coordinated by the GRU. When the United States sanctioned the Night Wolves in December 2014, the Treasury Department noted in a press release that “the Night Wolves have been closely connected to the Russian special services.” The statement enumerated the group’s actions in support of the takeover of Crimea, including intimidation, criminal activities, abduction, storming a gas-distribution station, and exfiltrating members of Viktor Yanukovych’s regime from Ukraine.


The Night Wolves’ links to the Kremlin are, however, readily apparent. Putin has met with the bikers numerous times since 2009, and he personally hopped onto a Harley Davidson three-wheeler to ride alongside them in the port city of Novorossiysk in August 2011. (One has to wonder, though, about his choice of vehicle.) Whatever the original impetus may have been for establishing the club, by 2010 it had been thoroughly transformed. The Kremlin political strategist Vladislav Surkov—who later oversaw Russia’s covert operations in eastern Ukraine— supported the idea of using the Night Wolves as an anti-Western spectacle to galvanize Russian-nationalist sentiment, according to Peter Pomerantsev, an expert on Russian information warfare. It was also reportedly Surkov who gave the Night Wolves prime-time billing on Russian television, transforming the obscure biker club into a household name.

One series of Night Wolves “shows” for children (subsidized by the Kremlin) featured Russian characters chastising Americans for threatening Russia with sanctions, bragging about their country’s nuclear weapons, and “denouncing the ‘stupidity’ of the west,” The Guardian reported. Today, the Night Wolves often stage elaborate concert-like performances across Russia that double as nationalist rallies and Cirque du Soleil–type extravaganzas, at which they sell branded motorcycle gear and market their own clothing line.

As their ties to Russia’s intelligence services deepened following the Crimean operation, the Night Wolves expanded their activity into a number of European countries. The Night Wolves’ visit in March 2018 to the Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska was underwritten by a $41,000 grant from the Kremlin, according to The New York Times, and had a clear geopolitical aim: to provide visible support to the pro-Kremlin president of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, and tacitly support his calls for the secession of Republika Srpska from the rest of Bosnia. (Secession would result in the breakup of Bosnia’s fragile multiethnic state and preclude its membership in nato and the European Union, a key Kremlin foreign policy goal). Outside of Republika Srpska and Serbia, the Night Wolves are viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Georgia, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states have banned the Night Wolves from entering their countries, understanding their mission as fomenting confrontation and chaos within Western societies on behalf of the Kremlin. Slovak President Andrej Kiska recently called the Night Wolves “a tool of the [Putin] regime” and “a serious security risk" for Slovakia.

However, while some Western countries have banned the individual members of the Russian Night Wolves by putting them on visa blacklists, constitutionally they cannot prevent their own citizens from establishing local Night Wolves chapters. Such local chapters exist in Ukraine, Slovakia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Germany, Serbia, and Bosnia. Most of these offshoots are run by Russian émigrés, many of whom are likely dual citizens. In the United States, according to the Miami Herald, a former FSB official, Svyatoslav Mangushev, established a biker club in South Florida called “Spetsnaz,” which was loosely modeled on the Night Wolves.


In 2014, during the same year that the original Night Wolves were leading armed attacks to seize the Crimean peninsula, one of the members of the Spetsnaz club petitioned the Night Wolves headquarters in Moscow for permission to formally establish a U.S. Night Wolves affiliate. According to the Miami Herald, one of Mangushev’s business partners at the time was a Russian government official who had invested nearly $8 million in South Florida real estate (though where he got the capital for such investments, given his government salary, remains a mystery). Today, the Spetsnaz motorcycle club is defunct, perhaps as a result of the extensive media attention it attracted. But the curious case of this pro-Kremlin biker club in South Florida illustrates both the far-flung and opportunistic nature of Russia’s covert-influence operations.

To understand how far-right fringe groups can be mobilized by Russia’s intelligence services, one need only consider the case of Montenegro, where the government claims the GRU sought to organize a coup d’état to assassinate the country’s prime minister and sow chaos during the country’s most recent parliamentary election, in October 2016. The GRU’s plan, according to Montenegro’s chief special prosecutor investigating the coup, involved using cyberattacks to hack into popular messaging apps like Viber and WhatsApp and spreading false rumors that the vote count had been rigged by the ruling party. Using this disinformation, prosecutors allege, the GRU sought to mobilize protesters into the streets. Next, a group of hired mercenaries, dressed up in stolen Montenegrin police uniforms, was to storm into the Parliament building and fire on protesters to sow mayhem and disorder. In the ensuing chaos, the prime minister was to be assassinated in order to render the country rudderless.


To mask its involvement in such a daring operation against a country on the cusp of nato membership, the GRU reportedly turned to fringe, radical-right groups to carry out its planned attack. Aleksandar Sindjelic, a cooperating government witness in the case, claims to have been a key ringleader. Sindjelic identified two Russians as GRU officers, saying that they organized and financed the plot, and described the operation in great detail. Sindjelic, who is wanted on murder charges in Croatia, is a Serb ultranationalist who had fought on behalf of pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.

Back at home in Serbia, Sindjelic was a member of the local Serbian chapter of the Night Wolves motorcycle club. His co-conspirators shared similar backgrounds as radical nationalists and many were either petty criminals or foot soldiers for organized-crime groups in the region. After Montenegro made public the alleged plot, Putin’s national-security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, immediately flew to Belgrade to extricate the fugitive operatives from Serbia. The two men, Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov, flew back to Moscow the day after Patrushev’s visit. They are now being tried in absentia, along with 12 individuals being held in Montenegro. The trial has not yet concluded. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, following his meeting with Putin in Helsinki, has publicly questioned the U.S. commitment to defending Montenegro in the event of an attack, despite the country’s status as a nato ally.


Russian fight clubs provide another example of how largely innocuous groups that exist independently of the Kremlin can be instrumentalized by Russia’s intelligence services. One particular type of martial-arts club, based on the systema combat style, which has its origins in medieval Russia, is popular with Russian special forces. Systema uses a fluid and improvisational fighting style, less bound by rules than judo or karate, and is designed to inflict maximum pain and lethal blows on an opponent. Aside from the hard-core nature of its enthusiasts, systema clubs operate just as normal judo or karate clubs do, holding classes and training sessions in Russia and many other countries, including the United States.

In the West, the majority of systema clubs are exactly what they appear to be. However, according to an investigation by the EU Observer, a number of systema fight clubs in Europe and North America prominently display their links to Russia’s special forces and even use GRU or FSB insignia in their promotional materials. They appeal to nationalistically minded expatriates such as military veterans, and tap into a particular Russian-nationalist subculture that extols the secret services, much like that Spetsnaz club in South Florida. Many systema practitioners also travel regularly to Russia to receive advanced training.

Boris Reitschuster, a German expert who has written extensively on systema fight clubs in Europe, alleges that even if the vast majority of members are ordinary fight-club enthusiasts, these groups are actively being used by Russia’s intelligence services to recruit agents. Reitschuster cites the estimate of a Western intelligence agency that in Germany alone, systema clubs have been used to recruit between 250 and 300 agents.

In such cases, however, the term agent may be somewhat misleading. While systema clubs may include Russian intelligence agents in the traditional sense of the term (that is, active-duty officers), many others are likely “agents of influence” who do not necessarily serve in the GRU with a rank or formal affiliation. Such agents of influence are not typically used to access secret information, and many are unaware of their own manipulation by a foreign intelligence service.

If some Russian fight clubs in Europe and North America harbor a small fraction of GRU-affiliated agents instrumentally tapping into the street-fighting milieu to drive home an anti-Western (and pro-Russia) message, then their activity is not much different from the trolls who work for Russia’s Internet Research Agency. The key difference would be that the indoctrination and recruitment is being done in person rather than online.

Neo-Nazis, skinheads, soccer hooligans and similar violence-prone groups on the radical right also have the potential to serve as ready, often unwitting, Kremlin agents of influence who can be manipulated to undermine Western democratic institutions. The Kremlin makes use of far-right groups for a number of reasons. First, these groups can be manipulated and indoctrinated through social media, which makes them ripe targets for organizations like the Internet Research Agency, whose trolls can mobilize their members with carefully crafted messaging. Second, these groups are likely to find the Kremlin’s ideology of “traditional Russian values” appealing, particularly when contrasted with Western liberal values such as individual rights, tolerance, and self-expression. Right-wing groups are more easily drawn into the Russian orbit with anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-feminist rhetoric and by a narrative that stresses a collectivist, tribal, and racially exclusive worldview.



Finally, the Western radical right is attractive to the Kremlin not only because it provides a pool of recruits—often angry young white men—for stirring up social protests, but also because it serves as a backdoor for establishing ties with far-right political parties and anti-establishment politicians. The Kremlin views such politicians—like France’s Marine Le Pen, Germany’s Frauke Petry, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini—as battering rams that can be used to demolish democratic institutions and to challenge the political establishment’s support for nato, the EU, and transatlantic ties. Although the Kremlin’s effort to co-opt Western politicians is beyond the scope of this article, it is a key reason why Russia invests resources in cultivating fringe radicals in the West.

For obvious reasons, however, the Kremlin tries to hide its support for far-right groups, both in Russia and elsewhere. A BBC documentary on Russian neo-Nazi soccer hooligans secretly recorded the leader of Moscow’s Spartak “ultras” explaining that his army of followers served as “Putin’s foot soldiers.” Shortly after the documentary aired, Russian police issued a call for all those who had been interviewed in the film to report immediately to local stations across Russia and sign forms saying they had been coerced into lying by the BBC.

Despite efforts to hide such ties, the evidence of the Russian state’s support for far-right circles across Europe is mounting. István Györkös, a Hungarian neo-Nazi who leads a far-right paramilitary group called the Hungarian National Front, serves as a perfect example of the sort of radical militant Russia’s intelligence services target. The Hungarian National Front is a neo-Nazi hate group that glorifies the Waffen-SS and regularly attacks the United States, Jews, LGBTQ persons, and liberals. It holds paramilitary combat-training sessions and extols Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross movement, which was active in the 1930s and during World War II. Although it is unclear exactly how Györkös’s ties to Russian intelligence were first established, in 2012 Györkös launched a website called hidfo.net, which glorified Putin’s Russia and began disseminating Kremlin propaganda.

In October 2016, Hungarian law-enforcement officers arrived at Györkös’s home to investigate reports of illegal weapons use on his property. In the ensuing confrontation, Györkös shot one of the detectives, prompting a wide-ranging investigation in which Hungarian authorities discovered that Györkös had regularly been holding combat training sessions for members of the Hungarian National Front in the woods outside his home. More shockingly, the authorities learned that these exercises were attended by active GRU officers who were serving under diplomatic cover at the Russian Embassy in Budapest.


Similar cases have been documented in other European countries. In Sweden, when law enforcement authorities investigated a bomb attack on a refugee center in the western town of Gothenburg in January 2017, they discovered that the neo-Nazis who had perpetrated the attack had received weapons training from a Russian paramilitary group. The group, Partizan, is tolerated by the authorities and operates freely in Russia. Its weapons-training courses are run on behalf of an ultranationalist organization called the Russian Imperial Movement, which was actively involved in the Russian war in eastern Ukraine and whose current geopolitical aim, according to one member, is to create a “Right Wing International.” In Denmark, law-enforcement authorities learned that the leader of the Danish far-right National Front, Lars Agerbak, also received weapons training in Russia. After being convicted for breaking gun laws in Denmark, Agerbak moved to Russia. Although these may seem like isolated cases, the far-right community in Europe is large and growing, and its ties to the Russian state are commonplace. In the Czech Republic, the radical-right and staunchly pro-Russian Czechoslovak Soldiers in Reserves, which, like the Hungarian National Front, regularly organizes combat training, was estimated in 2015 to have 6000 members.

In the United States too, the alt-right and Kremlin ideologues share a common cause. While many of these ties are the result of mutual admiration more than active recruitment, the recent charges against the gun-rights advocate Maria Butina for serving as a Russian agent prove the Kremlin is also actively seeking to cultivate groups on the American right.


Fringe-right groups already consider the Kremlin an ally. At the alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, chants of “Russia is our friend!” were commonplace. Richard Spencer, who led the Charlottesville rally and directs an alt-right organization called the National Policy Institute, has praised Putin as a protector of the white race. His website, altright.com, features such articles as “Why Anti-Racism is Nothing but a Lie” and defends the alt-right’s associations with Putin by arguing that “Russia is one of the few countries left that supports and upholds Pro-European values such as strength, unity, racial awareness, etc.” Similarly, the alt-right figure Alex Jones fawns over Putin and has hosted the Kremlin’s court ideologue Alexander Dugin on his show. Even the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is seen in a positive light by American right-wing groups, which portray him as a savior of Christian minorities, echoing a common Kremlin propaganda line. Matthew Heimbach, an American white nationalist who has extensively praised Putin, sums up the alt-right’s views when he says “I see Russia as kind of the axis for nationalists … and that’s not just nationalists that are white—that’s all nationalists.”


To understand how fringe groups like soccer hooligans, neo-Nazis, and hard-core fight-club enthusiasts would attract the attention of Russia’s intelligence services, it is important to understand that fringe radical groups have a history of being co-opted by Russian intelligence. In the Soviet Union, the KGB had entire departments focused on penetrating and, if necessary, eliminating groups on the fringes of society that operated independently of the state and were not authorized by the Communist Party. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB could no longer maintain a vast gulag of prisoners and more often favored co-opting groups hostile to the state (though, to be sure, the Russian state has a history of exploiting criminal groups that extends back to the Soviet and even Tsarist periods). Rather than constantly chasing after delinquent groups in attempts to arrest their members only to discover new members popping up elsewhere, Russia’s intelligence services at some point decided it was far easier to allow a few informally sanctioned groups to exist so long as they could be monitored and (at least partially) controlled.

The lessons for the United States and its allies are clear. Russia’s manipulation of fringe far-right groups is part of a deliberate strategy to undermine Western democratic institutions. Russia’s trolls and intelligence services prey on social outcasts in order to radicalize them and recruit them to wage war on their countries’ liberal institutions. To do this, the Kremlin reinforces their belief that liberal democracy is rotten and cultivates their restless anger and propensity toward violence. In addition to stoking anger and resentment, the Kremlin also uses covert financing to bankroll their destructive agenda. These efforts occur both in person, via martial-arts studios and motorcycle clubs, and in the virtual world of social media, where they are largely hidden from law enforcement and the general public. The strategy for fighting against this radicalization will therefore have to meld together what is known about combatting domestic hate groups with an updated counterintelligence toolkit. Finally, the effort to identify, expose, and disrupt Russia’s manipulation of anti-democratic groups is likely to succeed only when it transcends national boundaries and involves active coordination among all democratic states susceptible to this particular form of malign influence.


https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... en/568741/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Aug 29, 2018 8:31 pm

CrimethInc.

At the demonstration yesterday where Silent Sam stood, here is a supporter of the Confederacy with the EXACT SAME 3%ER TATTOOS as Officer Cole Daniels. The police chief has instructed Daniels to keep his tattoo covered, but he is making his department safe for white supremacists.

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