Fascists are the Tools of the State

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 08, 2018 8:30 pm

Confronting Escalating Repression in Germany : In the Aftermath of the G20, a Call for Resistance from the Rigaer 94

The threat to forward the data to extra-parliamentary Nazi organizations such as the Autonomous Nationalists shows that the authors of this letter are actively involved in far-right organizing. Furthermore, sending such a letter demonstrates that the authors have a great deal of confidence in and support from the police department. This is shown not only by the downright fascist ideology that the letter expresses, but also by the means itself. Slander and the sending of anonymous threats are known in all parts the world where political tension is high and regimes entrust their stability to security organizations. These techniques were developed in the 1960s in the US, where the FBI used similar methods to target the Black Panther Party. Named COINTELPRO, this program was exported to all dictatorships. The East German secret service, utilizing their strategy of “decomposition,” employed similar measures.

Cooperation between organized Nazi groups and the police is nothing new. During the siege and eviction of the Rigaer 94 in the summer of 2016, the personal information of people recognized by the police at the demonstrations was leaked to a Nazi blog in the “Halle-Leaks.” In addition, fliers illustrated with SS symbols were distributed in the area expressing support for the police. We also recall the right-wing activist Marcel Göbel, whose false testimony about the Rigaer 94 and the Kadterschmiede was enough for the secret service to classify these places as “Autonomous strongholds.”

Lastly, the threatening letter confirms the claim made by the Rigaer 94 in their call for a manhunt against the police: fascist ideology lives inside the police departments, especially the secret services and state security. This is cause enough for us to renew our struggles.


Read more: https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/08/confr ... -rigaer-94
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Jan 17, 2018 6:22 pm

https://web.archive.org/web/20081212053 ... info=15301

Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO's Stay-Behind Armies

Chronology

1940 In England Prime Minister Winston Churchill creates the secret stay-behind army Special Operations Executive (SOE) to set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory. After the end of World War Two the stay-behind armies are created on the experiences and strategies of SOE with the involvement of former SOE officers.

1944 London and Washington agree on the importance of keeping Western Europe free from Communism. In Greece a large Communist demonstration taking place in Athens against British interference in the post war government is dissolved by gunfire of secret soldiers leaving 25 protesters dead and 148 wounded.

1945 In Finland Communist Interior Minister Leino exposes a secret stay-behind which is being closed down.

1947 In the United States President Harry Truman creates the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The covert action branch of the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) under Frank Wisner sets up stay-behind armies in Western Europe.

1947 In France Interior Minister Edouard Depreux reveals the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed „Plan Bleu“.

1947 In Austria a secret stay-behind is exposed which had been set up by right-wing extremists Soucek and Rössner. Chancellor Körner pardons the accused under mysterious circumstances.

1948 In France the "Western Union Clandestine Committee" (WUCC) is being created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. After the creation of NATO a year later the WUCC is being integrated into the military alliance under the name “Clandestine Planning Committee” (CPC).

1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is founded and the European headquarters is established in France.

1951 In Sweden CIA agent William Colby based at the CIA station in Stockholm supports the training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and in the NATO members Norway and Denmark.

1952 In Germany former SS officer Hans Otto reveals to the criminal police in the city of Frankfurt in Hessen the existence of the fascist German stay-behind army BDJ-TD. The arrested righ-wing extremist are found non guilty under mysterious circumstances.

1953 In Sweden the police arrests right winger Otto Hallberg and discovers the Swedish stay-behind army. Hallberg is set free and charges against him are mysteriously dropped.

1957 In Norway the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protests strongly against the domestic subversion of his country through the United States and NATO and temporarily withdraws the Norwegian stay-behind army from the CPC meetings.

1958 In France NATO founds the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare and the stay-behind armies. When NATO establishes new European headquarters in Brussels the ACC under the code name SDRA 11 is hidden within the Belgian military secret service SGR who has its headquarters next to NATO.

1960 In Turkey the military supported by secret armies stages a coup d’état and kill Prime Minister Adnan Menderes.

1961 In Algeria members of the French stay-behind and officers from the French War in Vietnam found the illegal Organisation Armee Secrete (OAS) and with CIA support stage a coup in Algiers against the French government of de Gaulle which fails.

1964 In Italy the secret stay-behind army Gladio is involved in a silent coup d’état when General Giovanni de Lorenzo in Operation Solo forces the Italian Socialist Ministers to leave the government.

1965 In Austria police forces discover a stay-behind arms cache in an old mine close to Windisch-Bleiberg and force the British authorities to hand over a list with the location of 33 other MI6 arms caches in Austria.

1966 In Portugal the CIA sets up Aginter Press which under the direction of Captain Yves Guerin Serac runs a secret stay-behind army and trains its members in covert action techniques including hands on bomb terrorism, silent assassination, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare.

1966 In France President Charles de Gaulle denounces the secret warfare of the Pentagon and expells the European headquarters of NATO. As the military alliance moves to Brussels secret NATO protocols are revealed that allegedly protect right-wingers in anti-communist stay-behind armies.

1967 In Greece the stay-behind army Hellenic Raiding Force takes over control over the Greek Defence Ministry and starts a military coup d’état installing a right wing dictatorship.

1968 In Sweden a British MI6 agent closely involved with the stay-behind army betrays the secret network to the Soviet secret service KGB.

1969 In Mocambique the Portugese stay-behind army Aginter Press assassinates Eduardo Mondlane, President of the Mocambique liberation party and leader of the FRELIMO movement (Frente de Liberacao de Mocambique).

1969 In Italy the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milano kills sixteen and injures and maimes 80 and is blame on the left. Thirty years later during a trial of right-wing extremists General Giandelio Maletti, former head of Italian counter-intelligence, claims that the massacre had been carried out by the Italian stay-behind army and right wing terrorists on the orders of the US secret service Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in order to discredit the Italian Communists.

1970 In Spain right wing terrorists including Stefano delle Chiaie of the Gladio stay-behind army are hired by Franco’s secret police. They had fled Italy following an aborted coup during which right-wing extremist Valerio Borghese had ordered the secret army to occupy the Interior Ministry in Rome.

1971 In Turkey the military stages a coup d’état and takes over power. The stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla engages in domestic terror and kills hundreds.

1972 In Italy a bomb explodes in a car near the village Peteano killing three Carabinieri. The terror, first blamed on the left, is later traced back to right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra and the Italian stay-behind code named Gladio.

1974 In Italy a massacre during an anti-fascist demonstration in Brescia kills eight and injures and maims 102, while a bomb in the Rome to Munich train “Italicus Express”, kills 12 and injures and maims 48.

1974 In Denmark the secret stay-behind army Absalon tries in vain to prevent a group of leftist academics from becoming members of the directing body of the Danish Odense University whereupon the secret army is exposed.

1974 In Italy General Vito Miceli, chief of the military secret service, is arrested on charges of subversive conspiracy against the state and reveals the NATO stay-behind secret army during trial.

1976 In Germany in the secret service BND secretary Heidrun Hofer is arrested after having revealed the secrets of the German stay-behind army to her husband who was a spy of the Soviet secret service KGB.

1977 In Turkey the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla attacks a demonstration of 500'000 in Istambul by opening fire at the speaker's platform leaving thirty-eight killed and hundreds injured.

1977 In Spain the secret stay-behind army with support of Italian right-wing terrorists carries out the Atocha massacre in Madrid and in an attack on a lawyer's office closely linked to the Spanish Communist party kill five people.

1978 In Norway the police discovers a stay-behind arms ache and arrests Hans Otto Meyer who reveals the Norwegian secret army.

1978 In Italy former Prime Minister and leader of the Christian Democratic Party, Aldo Moro, is taken hostage in Rome by an armed secret unit and killed 55 days later because he wanted to include the Italian Communists in the government.

1980 In Italy a bomb explodes in the waiting room of the second class at the Bologna railway station, killing 85 and seriously injuring and maiming a further 200. Investigators trace the crime back to right-wing terrorists.

1980 In Turkey the commander of the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla, General Kenan Evren, stages a military coup and seizes power.

1981 In Germany a large stay-behind arsenal is being discovered near the German village of Uelzen in the Lüneburger Heide. Right wing extremists are alleged to have used the arsenal in the previous year to carry out a massacre during the Munich October bear festival killing 13 and wounding 213.

1983 In the Netherlands strollers in the forest discover a large arms cache near the Dutch village Velp and force the government to confrim that the arms were related to NATO planning for unorthodox warfare.

1984 In Turkey the stay-behind army Counter-Guerrilla fights against the Curds and kills and tortures thousands in the following years.

1984 In Italy right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra in court reveals Operation Gladio and the involvement of NATO’s stay-behind army in acts of terrorism in Italy designed to discredit the communists. He is sentenced to life and imprisoned.

1985 In Belgium a secret army attacks and shoots shoppers in supermarkets randomly in the Brabant county killing twenty-eight and leaving many wounded. Investigations link the terror to a conspiracy among the Belgian stay-behind SDRA8, the Belgian Gendarmerie SDRA6, the Belgian right-wing group Westland New Post, and the Pentagon secret service Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

1990 In Italy judge Felice Casson discovers documents on Operation Gladio in the archives of the Italian military secret service in Rome and forces Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm the existence of a secret army within the state to parliament. As Andreotti insists that Italy had not been the only country involved in the conspiracy the secret anti-communist stay-behind armies are discovered across Western Europe.

1990 In Switzerland Colonel Herbert Alboth, a former commander of the Swiss secret stay-behind army P26, in a confidential letter to the Defence Departement declares that he is willing to reveal „the whole truth“. Thereafter he is found in his house stabbed with his own military bayonet. The detailed parliamentary report on the Swiss secret army is being presented to the public on November 17.

1990 In Belgium the NATO linked stay-behind headquarters Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meets on October 23 and 24 under the presidency of Belgian General Van Calster, director of the Belgian military secret service SGR.

1990 In Belgium on November 5 NATO categorically denies the allegations of Prime Minister Andreotti concerning NATO's involvement in Operation Gladio and secret unorthdox warfare in Western Europe. The next day NATO explains that the denial of the previous day had been false while refusing to answer any further questions.

1990 In Belgium the parliament of the European Union (EU) sharply condemns NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies.

1991 In Sweden the media reveals that a secret stay-behind army existed in neutral Finland with an exile base in Stockholm. Finnish Defence Minister Elisabeth Rehn calls the revelations "a fairy tale", adding cautiously "or at least an incredible story, of which I know nothing.”

1991 In the United States the National Security Archive at the George Washington University in Washington files a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request concerning the secret stay-behind armies with the CIA in the interest of public information and scientific research. The CIA rejects the request with the standart reply: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request."

1995 In England the London based Imperial War Museum in the permanent exhibition "Secret Wars" reveals next to a big box full of explosives that the MI6 and SAS had set up stay-behind armies across Western Europe.

1995 In Italy the Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino researching Operation Gladio and the assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro files a FOIA request with the CIA. The CIA rejects the request and replies: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request."

1996 In Austria stay-behind arms caches set up by the CIA are discovered. For the Austrian government Oliver Rathkolb of Vienna University files a FOIA request concerning the secret stay-behind armies with the CIA. The CIA rejects the request and replies: "The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request."
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Jan 18, 2018 1:58 am

I've been wondering lately about Sweden and why it has such a chronic problem...



NATO's Secret Army in Neutral Sweden - Daniele Ganser
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sat Jan 20, 2018 1:12 pm

Buenaventura Durruti interview - Pierre van Paasen

Image
In 1936, after the liberation of Aragon from Franco's forces, leading Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti was interviewed by Pierre van Paasen of the Toronto Star. In this interview he gives his views on Fascism, government and social revolution despite the fact that his remarks have only been reported in English - and were never actually written down by him in his native Spanish - they are worth repeating here.

"For us", said Durruti, "it is a matter of crushing Fascism once and for all. Yes; and in spite of the Government".

"No government in the world fights Fascism to the death. When the bourgeoisie sees power slipping from its grasp, it has recourse to Fascism to maintain itself. The Liberal Government of Spain could have rendered the Fascist elements powerless long ago. Instead it compromised and dallied. Even now at this moment, there are men in this Government who want to go easy on the rebels."

And here Durruti laughed. "You can never tell, you know, the present Government might yet need these rebellious forces to crush the workers' movement . . ."

"We know what we want. To us it means nothing that there is a Soviet Union somewhere in the world, for the sake of whose peace and tranquillity the workers of Germany and China were sacrificed to Fascist barbarians by Stalin. We want revolution here in Spain, right now, not maybe after the next European war. We are giving Hitler and Mussolini far more worry with our revolution than the whole Red Army of Russia. We are setting an example to the German and Italian working class on how to deal with Fascism."

"I do not expect any help for a libertarian revolution from any Government in the world. . . . We expect no help, not even from our own Government, in the last analysis."

"But", interjected van Paasen, "You will be sitting on a pile of ruins."

Durruti answered: "We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute."


Taken from http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/spain/ ... rview.html
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 01, 2018 4:28 pm

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-ne ... -soldiers/

Army to pay $4 million to families of Marysville man, girlfriend killed by extremist soldiers

Originally published January 31, 2018 at 5:46 pm Updated January 31, 2018 at 6:56 pm

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Army Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, of Chelan (Stephen Morton/The Associated Press)

Michael Roark, a former soldier who became entangled with the group of extremist soldiers, was killed along with his 17-year-old girlfriend because the killers feared Roark couldn’t be trusted.


The Army has agreed to pay $4 million to settle a lawsuit by the families of a Marysville man and his girlfriend who were killed in 2011 by a group of renegade soldiers — led by another Washington man — intent on overthrowing the government and starting a race war.

The unusual settlement, reached after months of mediation, includes $1.7 million for the family of Michael Roark, a former Marysville soldier who became entangled with the group of extremists soldiers while stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Roark was killed by the group of soldiers — along with his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York — because the extremist soldiers worried they couldn’t trust him.

The killings were ordered by the leader of the group, Army Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, of Chelan.

Aguigui is serving life without parole for the murder of his pregnant wife, an Army sergeant whom he strangled. He then used the $500,000 the military gave him in death benefits to finance plans that included poisoning Washington’s apple crop, bombing a public park in Savannah, Georgia, and assassinating then-President Barack Obama.

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The settlement is striking because the Army had already succeeded in having the claims filed by Roark’s parents — Tracy Jahr, of Marysville, and Brett Roark, of Daytona Beach, Florida — dismissed in 2016. U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein said she had no choice but to comply with a doctrine that prevents the military from being sued for injuries arising from military service.

However, in allowing the York case to trial, Rothstein said the jury in that case would be told that both the Army and the FBI knew Aguigui posed a “substantial risk” to the public at least two months before Roark and York were killed, but did nothing.

The York case in U.S. District Court in Seattle relied on claims filed by York’s parents. Meantime, Roark’s parents had appealed Rothstein’s dismissal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals when the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., agreed to take both cases into mediation, said Brian Brook, the New York attorney representing the two families.

That was last June. The case settled earlier this month.

“At the end of the day, the government agreed to pay the Roark parents $1.7 million — for a dismissed case,” Brook said. “If you can find a precedent for that, I’d be interested to know about it.”

Tiffany York’s parents, Timothy York, of Kerman, California, and Brenda Thomas, of Richmond Hill, Georgia, will receive $2.3 million for their daughter’s death.

The Army, in a pair of settlement stipulations, admitted no liability or blame. The Army did not respond to a request for comment.

“The government does not admit any wrongdoing,” Brook said. “But from my clients’ perspective, the payments in settlement of their claims is a tacit admission that mistakes were made, and without the continued stress of pending litigation.”

“Ultimately, none of this is close to compensation for the loss of their children,” he said.

Brook uncovered significant evidence that the Army knew Aguigui was a threat, including that he had almost certainly strangled his pregnant wife, Army Sgt. Dierdre Wetzger, six months before Roark and York were killed.

That investigation languished, however, while the Army went ahead and paid Aguigui $500,000 in death benefits, which he used to recruit and fund his private extremist militia on base, which he called FEAR — an acronym for “Forever Enduring, Always Ready.” He used some of that money to buy $32,000 in firearms from a Wenatchee gun store in September 2011, according to court documents.

Aguigui joined the Army after being home schooled in Chelan. He recruited troubled soldiers with drugs, video games and big talk of overthrowing the government, and he attracted a handful of followers into FEAR, including Roark, by the winter of 2011.

However, Roark got into trouble and was discharged, and according to court documents and news reports, Aguigui worried he might give away their plans. In December, Roark and York were lured into the woods outside the base, where another member of the group, former Sgt. Anthony Peden, a heroin-addicted combat veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, shot York, a high-school junior.

Another FEAR member, Pvt. Christopher Salmon, forced Roark to his knees and shot him as he begged for his life, according to evidence at the trials.

Aguigui and Salmon were sentenced to life without parole for those killings. Peden was given life with parole, with the judge citing his extensive combat record and his suffering from a traumatic brain injury.

As much as anything else, the Aguigui saga has shone a light on an issue that the military has struggled with for years — the existence of extremists within its ranks, said Ryan Lenz, a senior investigative writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and militias.

The phenomenon seen in the Aguigui case is not new, but it is always disturbing because almost every extremist group has an end game of violence in mind, be it a race war or a confrontation with the federal government.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 1:22 am

GREAT HEROIN COUP - DRUGS, INTELLIGENCE AND INTERNATIONAL FASCISM

By Henrik Kruger; Jerry Meldon, Translator

South End Press 1980


Parabellum was a Miami‑based arms sales firm set up by soldier-of‑fortune Gerry Patrick Hemming, and headed by Cuban exile Anselmo Alliegro IV, whose father had been close to Batista.[24] Parabellum in turn was sales representative for Hemming's friend Mitch WerBell III, a mysterious White Russian, OSS‑China veteran, small arms manufacturer, and occasional U.S. intelligence operative, with unexplained relations to the CIA, DEA, and the major drugs‑for‑arms deal for which he was indicted but acquitted.[25] (The government's case failed after the chief government witness, arms and dope smuggler Kenneth Burnstine, was killed in the crash of his private plane.)[26] As we shall see, another client interested in producing the Ingram M‑10 machine pistol in Latin America, under license from WerBell, was the international fugitive and Nixon campaign contributor, Robert Vesco.

Like other European journalists, Kruger notes that the same 9mm automatic pistol, better known (after its inventor) as the Ingram M‑10, was found in February 1977 among the effects of the Italian neo‑Fascist, Luigi Concutelli, of Ordine Nuovo, who had used it in the July 1976 political murder of the Italian centrist judge Vittoria Occorso.[27] Its presence among Concutelli's effects was considered especially significant because the M‑10, manufactured by WerBell's former firm the Military Armaments Corporation, was supposed to be delivered only to intelligence services (such as Spain's D.G.S.), and every sale of the M‑10 required a special permit from the Munitions Control Branch of the U.S. State Department.

According to the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Concutelli's Ingram M‑10 had been modified in a clandestine arms factory in Madrid, discovered in a raid by Madrid police on 22 February 1977.[28] Arrested in connection with that raid were six Italian leaders of Ordine Nuovo and Mario Sanchez Covisa, the leader of a Spanish terrorist group (the Guerrillas of Christ the King, or GCR) which had just assassinated a number of left wing Spanish activists on the eve of Spain's first general election after the death of Franco. According to a detailed study by the French journalist Frederic Laurent, the two chief advisers to Sanchez Covisa, the Italian Stefano Delle Chiaie and the Frenchman Yves Guerin‑Serac, escaped arrest with the others. In turn, all but one of the rest were released three months later. The reason for this leniency., according to Laurent, was that the GCR had served as a parallel police for the Spanish intelligence service (DGS) in its murderous repression of the Basque (ETA) separatist terrorist network.[29]

Clearly the Sanchez Covisa episode had international overtones, and a number of newspapers, even including the New York Times, mentioned speculations that the GCR might be functioning in coordination with a newly created "Fascist International." Such notions gained credence when Spanish police discovered among the GCR's assets three gold ingots which had been stolen the preceding summer by a group of French rightists and OAS veterans in a spectacular $10 million robbery of the Societe Generale de Nice.[30] The leader of this well‑organized group was Albert Spaggiari, veteran of an OAS assassination attempt against de Gaulle. When Spaggiari was captured by the French police in October 1976, the British press service Reuter noted reports from police sources that Spaggiari "had links with an international organization with members in right‑wing circles in Italy, Lebanon, Britain and elsewhere."[31]

Spaggiari's international milieu acquired an even more intriguing dimension when it was revealed that in September 1976, after the robbery, Spaggiari had flown to Miami and offered his services as a mercenary to the CIA, citing his role in the Nice robbery as among his qualifications. Contrary to what he had expected, the CIA chose to transmit this information to the FBI, who in turn notified the French police through Interpol. It was this contact with the CIA which thus led to Spaggiari's arrest one month later.

After thirty‑seven hours of noncooperation, Spaggiari suddenly admitted his role in the Nice robbery. According to LeMonde, this was part of a negotiated deal with the French police: Spaggiari would plead guilty to the $10 million dollar robbery, and thereby escape indictment on a still more serious charge of international arms trafficking. Spaggiari gained acceptance of this proposal after citing "the name of an important personage in the Ministry of the Interior, sometime participant in the cabinet of [French Interior Minister] Michel Poniatowski, who, for various reasons, was aware of the traffics in which he [i.e. Spaggiari] was involved."[32]

Five months later, in March 1977, Spaggiari escaped by jumping through the second‑story window of the Nice Palais de Justice, landing on the roof of a waiting truck. Meanwhile the French weekly, L'Express, revealed that Spaggiari had been in contact in 1976 with a gang in Rome, "the Marseilles clan," who in turn had been close to Concutelli, and had been indicted by the latter's victim, Judge Occorsio.[33]

As Henrik Kruger points out, CIA‑trained Cubans and their new patrons from the intelligence service and parallel police of the military police‑states of Chile and Argentina, were also directly in touch with the so‑called "Fascist International" milieu of Concutelli's Ordine Nuovo, Sanchez Covisa's GCR and Spaggiari's connection. As he points out (Kruger p. 204), an Argentine, Jorge Cesarsky, and a Cuban, Carlos Perez, were arrested in January 1977, in connection with one of the murders organized by Sanchez Covisa's GCR.[34] Carlos Perez is of particular interest to U.S. readers, because he was the Madrid representative of the Movimiento Nacionalista Cubana (MNC), an ideologically Fascist Cuban exile group, two of whose leaders (Ignacio and Guillermo Novo Sampol) have recently been convicted in connection with the assassination in Washington, in September 1976, of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt.

As has now been confirmed in part by a U.S. court, the assassination of Letelier by MNC members and Chilean intelligence agent Michael Townley was one of a series of "crimes in which Cuban exile terrorists and Chilean officials have collaborated since 1973."[35] Senior members of the Chilean junta intelligence service (DINA) initiated the Letelier murder, while junta leader Augusto Pinochet himself, according to a U.S. government official, was personally responsible.[36] One of these shootings, that of former Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife (who was left paralyzed for life) took place in Rome in October 1975. Zero, a Cuban exile terrorist group allied to the MNC, took credit for the shooting in a well‑informed communique. American sources have claimed that the attack was arranged through either Michael Townley or his wife Mariana Callejas, working for two Chileans who had collaborated earlier on the murder of Chilean General Rene Schneider.[37] European journalists have added that the terrorists in Rome were connected to a former mercenary group, once based in Lisbon, known by its cover name of Aginter‑Press, and more particularly to Aginter's Italian "correspondent" Stefano Delle Chiaie.[38] Both Aginter‑Press and the Townleys had collaborated in the 1973 Chilean coup group Patria y Libertad (a group indirectly subsidized by the CIA), while Delle Chiaie and his friend, the Italian Fascist Prince Valerio Borghese, had visited the Chilean junta in 1974.[39]

Delle Chiaie has already come to our attention as the Italian attached as senior adviser to the GCR in Spain, along with Yves Guerin‑Serac, the former leader of Aginter‑Press and, like most Aginter members, a veteran of the OAS. We should like to recall that Delle Chiaie and Guerin‑Serac escaped because of their relationship to the Spanish, DGS arrest for the same murder in Madrid which led to the temporary arrest of Cuban MNC representative Carlos Perez. In other words the Letelier killing, horrible in itself, was only one incident in a larger web of international conspiracy.

The Latin American aspect of this larger story has already been told in the United States: the creation of an international Cuban exile terrorist network at the service of dictatorships such as Cuba, Brazil, and Nicaragua (under the Somozas), in exchange for payments in arms and future support in actions against Fidel Castro. Thus the Letelier killing has been traced back to the creation of a Cuban exile umbrella organization, CORU (Coordinacion de Organisaciones Revolucionarias Unidas), in the Bonao mountains of the Dominican Republic, in June 1976, under the leadership of Cuban exile terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had visited Chile in December 1974 with Guillermo Novo, and had spent a year there at junta expense.[40]

Bosch himself spoke to New Times reporter Blake Fleetwood about these activities. While declining to talk about the Letelier killing which was then under investigation, he cheerfully admitted setting up the murder of two Cuban diplomats in Argentina, in conjunction with the Argentine right wing terrorist AAA (to which Jorge Cesarsky, arrested in Spain, belonged).[41] Government sources told Saul Landau of the Transnational Institute in Washington that the Bonao meeting, attended by a U.S. Government informant, broke down into workshops for the planning of specific crimes, including the murder of Letelier and the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, in which seventy‑three people were killed.[42] Bosch returned from the Bonao meeting to Venezuela, at the invitation, he maintains, of the Venezuelan intelligence service DISIP, who gave him a DISIP identification card.[43]

Given the nature, and the scope, of this network of governmentassisted terror, of which the U.S. government was well‑informed, it is interesting to recall the initial charade which the U.S. intelligence agencies put on for the benefit of the U.S. press:

On October 11, 1976, Newsweek magazine reported that "the CIA has concluded that the Chilean secret police were not involved in the death of Orlando Letelier." The CIA also reassured the U.S. Department of Justice of this "fact." A Washington Star reporter (8 October 1976) was told by FBI sources that "Letelier might just as well have been killed by leftist extremists to create a martyr." David Binder of the New York Times reported (12 October 1976) that "intelligence officials" were "pursuing the possibility that Mr. Letelier had been assassinated by Chilean left wing extremists as a means of disrupting U.S. relations with the military junta"[44] .... But the biggest flood of distortion and rumors came from former and retired FBI and CIA officials.... Members of such groups as the Association of Former Intelligence Officers headed at that time by David Phillips (Phillips, incidentally, headed the CIA's Latin American covert action department at the time of the Sept. 11, 1973 coup in Chile) delivered documents from Letelier's briefcase [to suggest, falsely] that Letelier was... not only a Cuban agent, but... a Soviet agent as well.[45]

After persistent pressure from Letelier's U.S. associates and friendly journalists, Letelier's principal assassin (Michael Townley) has received a 10 year sentence (he will be eligible for parole in 1981). For some reason the CIA was withholding relevant information from the Justice Department at the same time it publicly advocated its theory of DINA's innocence. Those who ordered Townley's crime have not even been indicted. On the contrary, a related case against another Cuban exile for receiving heavy‑caliber arms, reportedly in "part payment for the Letelier‑Moffitt murders," was unsuccessful; largely, it has been charged, because the CIA helped throw the case.[46] As I write these words, a Congressional Committee has just released a bill which responds in part to mounting pressures to "unleash" the CIA. Thus Kruger's book is urgent and timely: it lifts the veil on the global networks of these parafascist terrorists who can so frequently plot and murder with impunity, thanks to their relationships and services to the intelligence agencies of the so‑called "free world." In short, it tells a story which our own media have systematically failed to tell.

http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2013/ ... d-and.html
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 06, 2018 4:30 pm

Attacks on immigrants highlight rise of fascist groups in Italy

Antifascists say authorities have no will to stop ‘unconstitutional’ far-right parties

Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo Tue 6 Feb 2018

Image
Far-right activists perform fascist salutes during a rally in 2012.

More than 70 years after Benito Mussolini’s death, thousands of Italians are joining self-described fascist groups in a surge of support that antifascist groups blame on the portrayal of the refugee crisis, the rise of fake news and the country’s failure to deal with its past.

The shooting in Macerata on Saturday that left six Africans injured was only the latest in a series of attacks perpetrated by people linked to the extreme right. According to the antifascist organisation Infoantifa Ecn, there have been 142 attacks by neofascist groups since 2014.

As Luca Traini, 28, was questioned over the Macerata shooting, four North Africans in Pavia told police on Sunday that they had been beaten up during the night by a group of 25 skinheads. On 13 January in Naples, dozens of people belonging to the far-right association Forza Nuova broke into a bar where a meeting on Roma culture was being held, causing damage and wounding a female organiser.

In 2001, Forza Nuova had just 1,500 members. Today, it has more than 13,000 and its Facebook page has more than 241,000 followers, almost 20,000 more than the Democratic party, Italy’s biggest leftwing party. The fascist-inspired CasaPound party has almost 234,000 followers. Its secretary, Simone Di Stefano, is running for prime minister in the 4 March general election.

“We grew up on our own, without the help of the media,” Adriano Da Pozzo, a Forza Nuova leader, told the Guardian. “The other parties aimed at promoting their candidates, while we aim for the promotion of our ideas.” The far-right group has offered legal support to Traini.

Antifascist groups say an apparent reluctance to take action against the far-right groups is allowing their rise. A bill introduced last year into the chamber of deputies, the parliament’s lower house, by the MP Emanuele Fiano to prohibit fascist propaganda would have allowed up to two years in jail for those who sold fascist souvenirs or performed the Roman salute, which is illegal in both Germany and Austria. After the opposition of Silvio Berlusconi’s party, Forza Italia, and the Lega Nord, the bill was blocked in the senate.

“We are very worried,” said Carla Nespolo, the president of the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI), a group founded by members of the Italian resistance against Mussolini. “These new fascists attack our offices and there seems to be no will to stop them. We asked the government to prevent the participation of fascist-inspired parties in the upcoming elections, because they were unconstitutional, and we never received an answer.”

The Italian constitution forbids the “promotion of any association that pursues the aims of the Fascist party or anyone who exalts its principles.” Yet the authorities have never intervened against CasaPound and Forza Nuova, whose members show off swastikas and fascist flags during their demonstrations.


Continues at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... s-in-italy
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 07, 2018 3:22 pm

Denver GDC Sets Record Straight on Fascist Attack at CSU

On Friday, February 2nd, the Young Democratic Socialist chapter at Colorado State University organized a protest to an event hosted by Turning Point USA, a right-wing organization that has become increasingly active on college campuses in recent years. The protesters also spoke out against the recent rise in neo-nazi fliers posted around campus in recent weeks.

Although there were many heated debates and arguments throughout the plaza, the protest was almost entirely peaceful. There was a small presence of Young Republicans, Proud Boys, and other fascist groups, but they only engaged in argument. Violence did not erupt until a group of neo-nazis with the Traditionalist Workers Party [TWP] arrived towards the end of the event.

At around 9:00 pm, after two hours of peaceful protest, police formed a line blocking the East side of the plaza and, to the confusion of everyone in attendance, declared over loudspeaker that this was an unlawful assembly and that everyone had to disperse or face police action. The protest itself was winding down so there was little reason to announce this.

Immediately after declaring the protest an unlawful assembly, approximately a dozen members of the TWP, appeared on the opposite side of the plaza wearing riot gear masks, and carrying large metal flashlights and a flag with a neo-nazi symbol on it. Earlier in the night, police had combed through the anti-racist protesters and took away canes, flag poles, and harassed a medic for carrying trauma shears, because these items “could be used as weapons.” Police made no clear effort to disarm the TWP, demonstrating a clear double-standard and destroying the illusion of impartiality.

The crowd was then pushed into a confrontation with the neo-nazis. At the front of the crowd various anti-fascists and community members engaged in a heated shouting match with the fascists. Tensions rose, and both sides exchanged swings and feints, but violence was largely avoided. Everyone started to leave campus once the police started blasting their LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) and moving towards the crowd, effectively pinching the protesters between fascists and the cops.

This is when violence broke out. As the crowd confronted the TWP, the fascists attacked members of the crowd with their shields and flashlights. Some protestors were injured, including a member of the Denver Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World and General Defense Committee. This fellow worker sustained injuries to the head that required sutures.

The protesters continued to chase down the neo-nazis until they retreated. But all this begs the question: why did police push protesters in that direction just as TWP showed up armed with shields and poles? Many in the crowd speculate that police were working with the fascists. The fascists likely waited until the protest had the least amount of people before they made their cowardly attack.


More at: https://denvergdc.com/2018/02/06/denver ... ck-at-csu/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:34 am

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3556-t ... gilantism/

The State and Ultra-Right Vigilantism

"There is much in the relationship between states and ultra-right vigilantism that makes the dividing line ambiguous" – Liz Fekete

Image


Today’s ultra-right scene offers apprenticeships in pimping and extortion, money laundering, drug- and arms-running, human smuggling, vigilantism and armed combat (Scandinavian neo-Nazis are among those fighting in Ukraine). In Saxony, there are so many unsolved ultra-right criminal acts against refugees that anti-fascists now speak of ‘the new NSU’, a reference to the phenomenon of attacks on asylum centres and the state’s failure to protect them. Major trials involving ultra-right criminal conspiracies have either taken place in recent years or are on going in many countries, including Germany (NSU, White Wolves Terror Crew, Old School Society, Freital Group),10 Spain (Anti-System Front), Austria (Objekt 21), Italy (New Order), France (White Wolves Klan) and Hungary (Roma serial murders by neo-Nazis who formed their own private militia). All reveal collusion, either direct or indirect, between the neo-Nazis, the police, the military, the intelligence services, or a mixture of these elements.

In 2016, in Greece, the trial continues of seventy-two members of Golden Dawn (including eighteen MPs) on charges of forming a “criminal organisation, weapons procurement, soliciting the murder of the anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fysass in Athens, the attempted murder of three Egyptian fishermen in Perama, near Piraeus, and the near-fatal attack on the president of the metalworkers’ union and other Communist trades unionists in the dockyards of Piraeus. In June 2013, Clément Méric, an eighteen-year-old French activist from the Parti de Gauche, was left brain-dead after being punched in the face by a skinhead wearing a knuckle-duster during a fight between left-wingers and skinheads near a railway station in the 9th district of Paris. The trial for manslaughter of three of the skinheads linked to Troisième Voie (Third Way), a private militia that has since been banned, has yet to take place. Since then, many more have died in far-right-inspired attacks. In Finland, Jimi Karttunen, a twenty-eight-year-old anti-racist, died of head injuries sustained during an attack at Helsinki railway station by a member of the Finnish Resistance Movement. Karttunen’s assailant was eventually cleared of aggravated assault, receiving a two-year sentence for grievous bodily harm. The murder of the UK Labour Party MP Joanne Cox took place in June 2016 in the small market town of Birstall, West Yorkshire, in the run-up to the EU referendum. Five months later, Thomas Mair, a white supremacist who repeatedly shouted, ‘Britain First!’ as he shot and stabbed the MP, was convicted for her murder.

Such blatant political killings are bad enough, but there is also evidence of ultra-right elements infiltrating the forces of ‘law and order’ so as to compound or confound the issue. One would have thought that, in Germany at least, the circumstances surrounding the shooting dead in Bavaria of a police officer by the leader of Citizens of the Reich would have made police affiliation to far-right groups a cause for immediate action. It seems possible that the armed far-right leader may have been tipped off about an imminent raid on his home to confiscate weapons. Fifteen police officers are now suspected of association with Citizens of the Reich, including two who were part of a WhatsApp group that had previously chatted with the killer. After the arrest in May 2017 of a first lieutenant in the German army (he had, it is alleged, created a false identity as a Syrian refugee in order to mount a terror attack), the authorities announced the possibility that a neo-Nazi cell of at least five people might exist within the army.

Privatised far-right security is another concern. In the eastern German state of Saxony – where, as we have seen, ultra-right assaults on refugee centres are numerous – the neo-Nazi NPD has openly called on supporters to join Saxony’s Security Watch – a volunteer civilian unit that supports the police – arguing that membership would provide an opportunity for its activists to work completely legally in a security-related field. According to Popular Action Against Impunity, the situation in north-east Spain following the collapse of the trial of eighteen members of the Anti-System Front (FAS) in Autumn 2014 also raises issues of collusion between the neo-Nazis and the military, as well as rogue police officers who allegedly tipped off FAS about an ongoing police investigation. As a coalition of left political groups and social organisations, Popular Action Against Impunity is affected by the neo-Nazi violence in north-east Spain, which has included bomb attacks against left-wing and trades-union targets, mosques, social centres and official ceremonies and public events (more than twenty bomb attacks between 2005 and 2008 remain unsolved by the police). At the trial of the FAS members, two of whom were from the military and one the son of a police officer, the judge ruled police intercept evidence inadmissible on the grounds that phone taps should not have been authorised, since hawking arms online was a normal activity. Among the weapons seized during the police raids that preceded the trial was a grenade launcher.

The ultra-right has also taken it upon itself to impose its own law – namely, vigilante justice – with its own private militias and paramilitary squads. In Greece, prior to the arrest of the organisation’s MPs, black-clad Golden Dawn supporters armed with clubs were in the habit of sweeping through migrant areas on motorbikes, beating everyone in sight. Its use of battalion squads of paramilitary fighters to police and intimidate certain neighbourhoods all took place under the watchful eye of the Hellenic Police. Between August 2012 and February 2013, the Hellenic Police were involved in their own sweep against migrants, in the form of the racial profiling exercise Operation Xenios Zeus. This led to almost 85,000 suspected foreigners being forcibly taken to a police station for verification of their immigration status (94 per cent were found to have a legal right to remain in Greece). At the trial of Golden Dawn, reported on every day by the websites Golden Dawn Watch and Jail Golden Dawn since it began in April 2015, compelling evidence has emerged to suggest that, from 2010 to 2013, Golden Dawn operated as a para-state agency, cleansing neighbourhoods with the collusion of local police – and that it financed its activities through protection rackets, blackmailing shop-owners, selling weaponry used by its battalion squads, and providing services to businessmen. Collusion also extended to the National Intelligence Service (EYP), one high-ranking official responsible for the telephone surveillance of Golden Dawn resigning in 2013 after media allegations of his links to the organisation.

Such vigilantism and paramilitarism show no signs of abating. No country or region of Europe is immune, with so-called civilian militias attempting to create a climate of low-intensity terror in contested areas, and emerging in areas where the far right already has a base. The Roma, living in shacks and sheds in the poor villages of north-eastern Hungary, were the first targets of the black-clad militia of the Civic Guard Association for a Better Future (a revival of the Second World War fascist militia, the Arrow Cross) and the neo-Nazi Outlaw Army. The latter organisation has routinely patrolled Roma neighbourhoods armed with whips and axes, singing war songs, bellowing abuse, shining floodlights into the windows of Roma families at night and carrying out random inspections of yards and living accommodation ‘for cleanliness’. But since Viktor Orbán’s militarisation of the Hungarian border, the likes of the ‘field guards’ of the Jobbik mayor of Ásotthalom (a village on the Hungarian–Serbian border) have been encouraged. The situation in Bulgaria, where the Bulgarian National Front Shipka (a reference to a battle in 1887 in which a Russo-Bulgarian force defeated the Ottoman Turks) patrols the Bulgarian–Turkish border dressed in military fatigues, is equally alarming. Official support (even adulation) for the Organisation for the Protection of Bulgarian Citizens, and freelancers like the twenty-nine-year-old semi-professional wrestler Dinko Valev, was only withdrawn after the international media broadcast a graphic video showing armed civilians tying up refugees, forcing them to lie down and shouting, ‘No Bulgaria! Go Back to Turkey!’

Nor are the countries of northern and western Europe immune from the emergence of vigilante militias, including anti-Islamic groups. In France, much vigilante activity in Calais seems to take place under the radar. In 2016 the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales (BHRC) carried out a fact-finding mission to the unofficial makeshift ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais (completely demolished in October of that year).11 The report drew attention not only to worrying levels of violence inside the camp, but also to generalised and specific violence emanating from the police. It is the possibility that members of the CRS riot squad, accused of beating camp residents with batons, sticks and truncheons, could be colluding either directly or indirectly with vigilante groups that is of most concern, given that the CRS has traditionally been linked to high levels of support for the extreme right. A far-right anti-migrant group, Sauvons Calais, had also been active in Calais since 2013, justifying its marches and provocations on the grounds that the town’s mayor, Natacha Bouchert, had called on citizens to inform on migrants squatting in the town. Police have been accused of failing to take action, as far-right groups, now including Génération Identitaire, travel to Calais with the specific intention of targeting migrants. BHRC was concerned that many of the Jungle camp’s residents it interviewed spoke of the police as possibly complicit in vigilantism, claiming that attackers often wore police uniform, or had similar batons or boots to the CRS.

Vigilante patrols, both at borders and internally, often take on an anti-Islamic character, acting to stop the ‘Muslim invasion’. In 2014, Britain First, an offshoot of the British National Party whose structures are inspired by Ulster loyalism in Northern Ireland, organised a series of Christian patrols and invasions of mosques, all in the name of protecting British and Christian morality. Such activities came to a temporary halt in 2017, when the High Court served an injunction on its leaders banning them from mosques across England and Wales for the next three years. The latest pan-European development comes in the form of the Soldiers of Odin, which first emerged in the northern Finnish border town of Kemi, before expanding into the Nordic and Baltic countries, then the Dutch towns of Groningen and Winschoten, and even popping up in Ireland. Claiming to defend native women against ‘Islamist intruders’, they unite around slogans such as ‘Loyalty, respect, honour!’, assuming police functions and carrying out patrols.

Superficially, it may seem that these civilian militias and vigilante squads are free agents, operating without the official endorsement of the state; but there is much in the relationship between states and ultra-right vigilantism that makes the dividing line ambiguous.

– by Liz Fekete, Excerpted from Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 09, 2018 8:07 pm

California police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue 'anti-racist' activists, documents show

Officers expressed sympathy with white supremacists and sought their help to target counter-protesters after a violent 2016 rally, according to court documents

Sam Levin in San Francisco Fri 9 Feb 2018

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Sacramento mounted police officers at the June 2016 rally, which was organized by a neo-Nazi group.
Photograph: Jerry H. Yamashita/AP


California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter-protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with “anti-racist” beliefs, court documents show.

The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.

Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.

“It is shocking and really angering to see the level of collusion and the amount to which the police covered up for the Nazis,” said Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley teacher and anti-fascist organizer charged with assault and rioting after participating in the June 2016 Sacramento rally, where she said she was stabbed and bludgeoned in the head. “The people who were victimized by the Nazis were then victimized by the police and the district attorneys.”

Steve Grippi, chief deputy district attorney prosecuting the case in Sacramento, vehemently denied the claims of bias in an email to the Guardian, alleging that anti-fascist stabbing victims have been uncooperative and noting that his office has filed charges against one member of the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP), the neo-Nazi group that organized the rally.

Some California highway patrol (CHP) investigation records, however, raise questions about the police’s investigative tactics and communication with the TWP.

Felarca’s attorneys obtained numerous examples of CHP officers working directly with the TWP, often treating the white nationalist group as victims and the anti-fascists as suspects.

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Members of the group called Antifa Sacramento (Anti-Fascism Action) outside the state capitol building in 2016.
Photograph: Sacramento/Rex/Shutterstock

The TWP is “intimately allied with neo-Nazi and other hardline racist organizations” and “advocates for racially pure nations”, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Its leaders have praised Trump, and the group claimed to bring more than 100 people to the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, where a counter-protester was killed.

In one phone call with Doug McCormack, identified by police as the TWP affiliate who acquired the permit for the Sacramento rally, CHP investigator Donovan Ayres warned him that police might have to release his name in response to a public records requests. The officer said he would try to protect McCormack.

“I’m gonna suggest that we hold that or redact your name or something until this gets resolved,” Ayres told McCormack, adding that he didn’t know who had requested records of the permit and noting, “If I did, I would tell you.”

Ayres’s reports noted that McCormack was armed at the rally with a knife.

The officer’s write-up about an African American anti-fascist activist included a photo of him at the hospital after the rally and noted that he had been stabbed in the abdomen, chest and hand.

It is shocking and angering to see the level of collusion and the amount to which the police covered up for the Nazis
Yvette Felarca, teacher anti-fascist organizer

Ayres, however, treated the protester like a suspect in the investigation. The police investigator recommended the man be charged with 11 offenses, including disturbing the peace, conspiracy, assault, unlawful assembly and wearing a mask to evade police.

As evidence, Ayres provided Facebook photos of the man holding up his fist. The officer wrote that the man’s “Black Power salute” and his “support for anti-racist activism” demonstrated his “intent and motivation to violate the civil rights” of the neo-Nazi group. He was ultimately not charged.

Ayres’s report also noted Felarca’s political activism in great detail, referencing her activism on behalf of students of color and women’s rights protests.

“This is a textbook case of a political witch-hunt and selective prosecution,” Shanta Driver, one of Felarca’s attorneys, said in an interview.

Officers also worked with TWP member Derik Punneo to try to identify anti-fascist activists, recordings revealed. Officers interviewed Punneo in jail after he was arrested for an unrelated domestic violence charge. Audio recordings captured investigators saying they brought photos to show him, hoping he could help them identify anti-fascist activists.

The officers said, “We’re pretty much going after them,” and assured him: “We’re looking at you as a victim.”

Ayres’s report noted that Punneo was armed with a knife at the neo-Nazi rally and that one stabbing victim told officers he believed Punneo was responsible. Using video footage, Ayres also noted that Punneo was “in the vicinity” of another victim at the time he was injured, but the officer said the evidence ultimately wasn’t clear.

Punneo and McCormack, who could not be reached for comment, were not charged. Ayres’s report included images and names of three other TWP-affiliated men who he said were armed with knives, but who also have faced no charges.

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Several people were stabbed at the rally, where rightwing extremists clashed with leftwing counter-protesters.
Photograph: Paul Kitagaki Jr./AP


The CHP declined to comment.

In a response filed on Thursday, prosecutors said “every assertion” in the motion to dismiss is “inaccurate or fabricated” and accused Felarca’s lawyers of using the filing to “make a political statement”. The response also repeatedly blamed the stabbing victims for ignoring the district attorney’s inquiries: “Despite the fact that we have not gained the cooperation of these victims, the investigation to hold their attackers responsible continues forward.”

Prosecutors also said the charges were based on video evidence and argued that “no one is beneath the protection of the law, no matter how repugnant his or her rhetoric or misguided his or her ideals”.

Allegations of police bias and collusion with neo-Nazis have emerged in similar cases across the US. Last year, US prosecutors targeting anti-Trump protesters in Washington DC relied on video evidence from a far-right group with a record of deceptive tactics.

At an Oregon “alt-right” event, police allowed a member of a rightwing militia-style group to help officers arrest an anti-fascist activist.

Police in Charlottesville were widely accused of standing by as Nazis attacked protesters, and a black man who was badly beaten by white supremacists was later charged with a felony.

Sam Menefee-Libey, an activist who advocated for protesters charged for Inauguration Day rallies last year, said the government has repeatedly gone to great lengths to target anti-fascists: “We have patterns of acknowledged and unacknowledged overlaps between the interest of ultra-right nationalist organizations and the police and prosecutors’ offices.”


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... er-protest
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 15, 2018 10:31 am

Image

Running the Fascists Out of Town
Then and Now


Settler nativism and Canada’s far right

Fascism’s ideological emphasis on nationalism, racial hierarchy, and patriarchal order has had a sustained presence among Canada’s far right since its emergence in the 1920s. Although white nationalist movements are often written off as fringe tendencies of an otherwise tolerant society, they are an extension of structural inequalities already enacted by the settler-colonial nation-state: strict immigration policies against non-whites, the dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous peoples, and the promotion of Canadian nationalism.

Under the pretext of free speech, far-right movements typically capitalize on people’s exploitation under capitalism to stir up a form of social unrest that scapegoats those already marginalized. In the 1920s, Klansmen blamed social disorder and unemployment on Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian immigrants in B.C., and in Saskatchewan claimed that Jewish and Black immigrants “put white Canadians … out of business.” During the Great Depression, Canada’s self-proclaimed führer, Adrien Arcand, published racist newspapers in Quebec and managed to fill Massey Hall with 1,500 fascist supporters who revelled in his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and staunch nationalism. And during periods of economic recession in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, white power movements increasingly attracted disaffected young people by offering racist explanations for white working-class poverty.

Steeped in a politics of fear and hatred, far-right ideologues mobilize anti-establishment sentiments through a reactionary nationalist politics, rather than critical working-class or anti-racist consciousness. Far-right groups adopt the coded language of “white nationalism” as an attempt to legitimize their desires and distance themselves from Nazism or white supremacy, but the underlying genocidal and racist politics remain. In these movements, allegiances to pure ideas of “law and order” prevail as leaders call for the restoration of a “once-great nation.” The movements are incubated within capitalist democracies and often protected by the police. During the 1930s, police in Montreal and Toronto focused more on shutting down communist and socialist groups than on the activities of fascist organizations. Chief Draper’s anti-communist “Red Squad” in Toronto, for instance, prevented left-wing rallies while doing little to stop swastika clubs from inflicting violence on the Jewish working-class community. In 1993, during a Toronto ARA protest, mounted police charged into a crowd of about 500 protesters to escort neo-Nazis into a courthouse. In later news reports, police tried to distance themselves from the Nazis and some media commentators described anti-racist organizers as terrorists.


https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles ... ut-of-town
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:21 am

We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire

by Stephan Pfohl

Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimurm Igni: a Film. London: Pelagian Press, 1991.


Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation, another way of acting within the historical and psychic geographies in which the event of your own reading is here and now taking place; here and now taking the place of other ways of making passionate and energetic connections between us. Imagine a situation that, in all likelihood, you've never been in. Imagine that you are sitting in a movie theater with me watching the sixth and final film of Guy Debord. Imagine, that as you and I gaze upon the screen of flickering electronic images our eyes meet those of another cinema audience. The other audience is staring fixedly in a perfect reverse shot at the screened image that you and I are becoming. Who are you? What or who are you becoming? What about me? What are our material relations to each other, to ourselves, and to others in history? What historical epoch is it that we are both within and ceaselessly remaking in some ways, but not other ways? When you think of the comfort and/or the anxious disdain you are feeling, sitting here with me in this theater, what other images cross the flesh of your mind? What if you're not happy with these images? What if you sense, perhaps beyond words, that this situation which I am asking you to imagine is but a filmic preface to a more complex, dangerous, and seductive situation - a situation demanding the pleasures and also the risks of revolting historical actions?

Loosen up. Have a drink. A devilish voice layers itself upon the images we are watching, as we pass together through a rather brief moment of time. It is the voice of Guy Debord. The voice declares: "I will make no concession to the public in this film... This public, so completely deprived of freedom, and which has put up with everything, deserves less than any other to be spared. The manipulators of advertising, with the traditional cynicism of those who know that people are inclined to justify insults which they do not avenge, calmly announce today that 'when you love life, you go to the cinema'."

Now the images before our eyes are changing. First we find ourselves surveying a large complex of standardized houses. Neatly separated houses. Neatly boring, neatly standardized houses for a standardizing culture: the architectural packaging of an intensely commodified culture. Then we observe a modern employee in her bath, with her young son. Something appears missing in this picture - something that haunts the cinematic framing of this very movie. Tracking shot towards a bed adorning the same room. Cut to a long line of people waiting patiently outside the entrance of a cinema. Perhaps they are waiting to watch the very film that you and I this very moment are watching. Perhaps, in order to watch this film, these patiently waiting in line people are calmly, and in an excessively civilized fashion, handing over their national/transnational New World Citizen ID cards to be scanned by a remote Prop 187 culture data input module. Waiting in line. Waiting on line. What's the difference? One thing is for sure - these people are waiting; endlessly, patiently waiting. This is life. This is cinema.

Debord's words continue: "But this life and this cinema are equally paltry; and that is why you could actually exchange one for the other with indifference." Long tracking shot. Newt Gingrich, portable PC under one arm. He's chasing OJ Simpson with a camcorder. Background images of Bosnia, then Chechnya. Cut to image of Beacon Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, the United States of America. Image of a white Euro-American man with a hunting rifle in his hand. God the Father is in this man's mind. The man approaches a women's health center and abortion clinic. Cut to a long shot of Mexico City; pesos piled higher than banks. Then to images of Montreal. Photo likenesses of the faces of the editors of this very journal flash across the screen. Then to Hollywood. Rats running everywhere. Then to Washington, D.C. where the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are testifying on how best to police Haiti. Then flash screen to Tokyo. City center images of huge data boards with moving figurations. A barely clad white woman with brown, deep brown, skin appears. She dives into the blue, deep blue, hyper-blue waters off the side a Caribbean cruise ship. This ship is named Carnival. The waters are so blue, deep blue, hyper-blue, that you can't see the blood. See the history. Newt appears again. He corners OJ and gives him a freshly inked copy of the GATT agreement. Both men smile enigmatically. They join a long line of people waiting patiently outside the entrance of a cinema. Waiting; endlessly, patiently waiting. No. This can't be the right film. I must be getting ahead of myself. Still, I'm no futurist. "But what does it matter?," cautions Guy. "The Future is in the Past. Shipwreckers have their name writ only in water... The existing images only serve the existing lies."

Guy Debord was born in France in 1931. He lived, by most accounts, with great intensity until the Fall of 1994. Then he took his own life. Never one to behold the times in which he lived with anything but contempt, Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle, was also a radical Lettrist film maker. [1] In 1957, he participated as a founding member of the Situationist International, an adventuresome political ensemble of (mostly male) activists, avant-garde artists, writers, theorists, and revolting practitioners of a hybrid of Marxian, anarchist, and festively inspired approaches to cultural and economic rebellion. Legendary for the provocative and organizational energies they lent to the Parisian revolts of May 1968, the Situationists attempted to both strategically theorize and inspire disgust for the increasingly commodified character of everyday social life. As proclaimed in a diverse array of pamphlets, journal articles, "detourned" comic strips, visual and performative political interventions, and incendiary street activism, for Situationists, life lived under the sign of commodified spectacle was life separated from life, life enslaved by the cybernetic imperatives of image-driven forms of advanced capitalist power. Concerned that even its own subversive appeal would be spectacularly packaged by the French media as if nothing but marketable icons of consumable revolutionary praxis, the Situationist International ended its organizational identity in 1972.

In the following year, Debord returned to radical filmmaking. After a hiatus of nearly twelve years, he produced a cinemagraphic version of Society of the Spectacle, a feature-length montage of appropriated film, magazine, and newspaper imagery, mixed with a sound track composed of materials from Debord's book and other "found" texts. This demanding "theory film" was followed, in 1975, by the short Refutations of all judgements, for or against, which have been brought to date on the film Society of the Spectacle. This represented an unprecedented cinematic response to criticisms of Debord's previous film. In 1978 Debord directed In Girum Imis Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, the movie you and I are currently watching. Look out for the flames.

In March of 1984, Debord's close friend, publisher, and political ally, Gerard Lebovici, the owner and editor of Editions Champ Libre (a primary publisher of Situationist and other left-oriented texts) was assassinated in Paris. Debord believed the murder bore traces of covert neo-fascist death squads in operation within the French state. Conservative French media, however, insinuated that Debord was somehow behind this hideous crime. Outraged, Guy vowed to never to again allow any of his six films to be shown in France. Shortly thereafter, he left the country for an extended period of voluntary exile in Italy. The film we are today viewing has not been screened in public since that time.


Continues: http://library.nothingness.org/articles ... display/87






American Dream » Fri Jun 02, 2017 5:38 am wrote:Back to GLADIO and the Strategy of Tension:

Preface to the fourth Italian edition of The Society of the spectacle - Guy Debord

The kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro was a mythological opera with great machinations, where terrorist heroes are, by turns, foxes so as to ensnare their prey, lions so as to fear nobody as long as they retain it, and stool-pigeons so as not to draw from this coup d'etat anything harmful to the regime they aspire to defy. We are told they [the Red Brigades] have the luck of having to deal with the most incapable of police, and that, besides, they were capable of infiltrating its highest spheres without hindrance. This explanation is hardly dialectical. A seditious organization that would put certain of its members in contact with the security services of the State -- unless it had them worm their way into it a number of years previously, in order for them to loyally undertake their task when a great opportunity arises for them to make use of -- should expect that its manipulators would be in turn sometimes manipulated, and would be thus deprived of this Olympian assurance of impunity that characterizes the Chief of Staff of the "Red Brigade." But the Italian State has something better to say, with the unanimous approval of those who support it. Like any other State, it has thought of infiltrating agents of its special services into the clandestine terrorist networks, where it is so easy for them to ensure for themselves a rapid career track up to leadership positions, from which they bring about the fall of their superiors -- as did Malinowski, the man who deceived even the cunning Lenin on behalf of the Czarist Okhrana, and Avez, who, once at the head of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party's "combat organization," carried this mastery to the point of instigating the assassination of Stolypin, the Prime Minister. One single unfortunate coincidence came to interfere with the goodwill of the State: its special services had just been dissolved. Up to now, a secret service had never been dissolved like, for example, the lading of a giant oil tanker in some coastal waters, or a fraction of the modern industrial production in Seveso. While keeping its archives, its informers and its practicing officers, the secret service simply changed its name. It is thus that in Italy, the S.I.M. (Military Intelligence Service of the fascist regime, so well known for its sabotages and its assassinations abroad) became the S.I.D. (the Defense Intelligence Service) under the Christian-Democratic regime. Moreover, when a kind of robot-doctrine of the "Red Brigade" -- a gloomy caricature of what one would be presumed to think and carry out if one were to advocate the disappearance of the State -- had been programmed on a computer, a slip of which (how true it is that these machines depend on the unconscious of those who feed data into them!) has caused these same initials -- S.I.M., as in the "International Society of Multinationals" -- to be attributed to the only pseudo-concept that the "Red Brigade" repeats automatically. This S.I.D., "steeped in Italian blood," had to be dissolved recently because, as the State acknowledges post festum, it was the organization that since 1969 had carried out directly, most often but not always with bombs, this long series of massacres that were imputed (according to the time of year) to anarchists, neo-fascists or situationists. Now that the "Red Brigade" does exactly this same work, and, for once, with a distinctly superior operational value, the S.I.D. cannot combat it, since it has been dissolved. In any secret service worthy of the name, even its dissolution would be secret. Hence one cannot distinguish what proportion of units in the S.I.D. was permitted an honorable retirement, what other proportion was assigned to the "Red Brigade" or perhaps lent to the Shah of Iran to burn down a cinema in Abadan, and what other proportion was discreetly exterminated by a State probably indignant to learn that sometimes its instructions have been exceeded, a State one knows that will never hesitate to kill the sons of Brutus[11] in order to make its laws respected, since its intransigent refusal to envisage even the most minimal concession to save Moro has proved at last that it had all the staunch virtues of republican Rome.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 23, 2018 11:11 am

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/ford ... icio-macri

When Ford Built a Torture Chamber

BY
IAN STEINMAN


In the 1970s, Ford was doing more than making cars — they were helping torture and kill leftists.

Image
Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla at the opening of 1976's ''Exposicion Rural'' in Palermo, Buenos Aires.

On March 25th, 1976, one day after the military coup that brought the bloody Argentine dictatorship of General Videla to power, a director at Ford Motor Company´s main production plant summoned the union representatives to a meeting. Guillhermo Gallaraga, the director of labor relations, together with a military official, read out an official declaration calling on workers to forget any union demands. Gallarago went on to add: “All the problems are over, Ford Motor Company in Argentina has become an objective and priority of the military.”

Tomas Quintana, a lawyer now representing the workers, described the scene that unfolded over the next few weeks on the Ford Factory floor: “The majority were kidnapped while they were on the production line. They were taken at gunpoint and made to walk by all the other workers so they could see what happened to their union representatives. This created an environment of terror in the workplace which prevented any demands, over salaries, over working conditions, over anything.”

Carlos Propato described how on April 13th he was kidnapped by military officials. Alongside four other workers, he was taken to the recreation center. What had once served as a socializing and organizing space for the workers was transformed into one of the many interrogation and torture centers constructed by the new military dictatorship. Carlos was tortured from eleven in the morning until eleven at night. In addition to beatings, which continued from the moment he was seized, he endured the brutal electrical torture devices that had become a signature of the Argentine police and military. Interrogators would apply the electric prod to victims’ genitals, eyes, lips — anywhere to cause the maximum amount of pain and suffering. Propato described how he was electrocuted to the point of having a stroke. The impact on his health continues to this day.

When a worker was kidnapped, Ford would immediately send out a termination notice for their “failure to appear” at work. In Propato´s case, his household received the notice while military officials were torturing him inside the Ford plant. Attempts to contest notices with the argument that workers were being held within the plant were rejected by Ford.

From the plant detention center Propato was taken to the local police station, where he endured forty days of “daily torture, hunger, and filth. I lost an eye and they broke one of my vertebrae.” Some were released after a few months; in Propato’s case he faced two more years in prison before he was finally released. The ordeal did not end there, as it was almost impossible to find work and he was now disabled as a consequence of the torture. Yet despite torture, imprisonment, and unemployment, he began a long struggle for justice that is just now starting to see results.

Rank-and-File Insurgency

After more than forty years, that patient work is finally moving closer to the prosecution of a few of the company officials responsible. It’s the first time in Argentine history that directors of a multinational company will be judged for crimes against humanity. Two company directors, Pedro Müller and Francisco Sibilla, as well as ex-general Santiago Riveros, stand accused of the kidnapping and torture of twenty-four workers. Francisco Sibilla, the company director of security, actively participated in at least one of the torture sessions, suggesting questions to the interrogators. Pedro Muller was the director of manufacturing and second in command in the Ford plant’s corporate hierarchy. The president of the company and the director of labor relations were also both accused, but died before the case could advance.

The history of Ford’s active collaboration with the dictatorship is clear. Indisputably, they hosted a military interrogation center on plant property. They provided military officials with employee identification cards and helped the military draw up lists of union activists and leftists. While the case going forward pertains to the twenty-four workers, the crimes committed by the dictatorship and Ford did not end there. While an exact number is difficult to come by, the forced disappearance — murder — of at least five Ford workers has been documented.

Ford, like many of the era’s national and multinational businesses, helped to promote, support, and collaborate with military officials in order to exterminate union activists. What took place on the factory floor was quite literally a form of corporate-sponsored terrorism. Through torture, fear, and the very real threat of death at the hands of the dictatorship, Ford succeeded in decimating worker activism and ensuring its own profitability.

Workers at Ford, along with others across the country in the 1970s, were protagonists in a powerful rank-and-file workers’ movement. A new wave of organizing had begun around basic issues of worker safety. Those in the chassis department were dying of lead poisoning and lung cancer from toxic fumes on the production line. When they inevitably became too sick to work, the company would fire them and provide barely enough compensation to the families to pay for the funerals.

To build rank-and-file organization and fight for even basic health and safety needs, the workers quickly found themselves struggling on two fronts: against the company, and against the leadership of their own union. As Propato recalled in an interview, “the union bureaucracy was one of the greatest traitors that we had in this era.” The government in the lead-up to the coup, that of Isabel Peron, had its strongest support among the leaders of the union bureaucracy. To suppress the Left and secure governability, there was an ever greater expansion of the “Triple A” — the Argentinian Anti-Communist Alliance — which carried out the kidnapping, torture, and assassination of socialist and trade union activists.

Worker militants like Propato succeeded in driving the bureaucracy from the shop floor, and a large rank-and-file movement of activists built itself up across the Buenos Aires industrial zones, staking out a position of class independence. Over the course of 1975, this movement coalesced into “coordinating committees,” which united workers across Buenos Aires factories. In April of that year, one of the largest working-class marches in history was organized. Propato recalled how the right to march was secured by seizing a gas truck and declaring to the police that if they attempted to repress the march everyone would go flying across the province.

This militant working-class spirit increasingly clashed with government attempts to implement ever more stringent austerity measures. Later that year, rank-and-file discontent forced the unions to call a general strike against the latest austerity measures, in the so-called “Rodrigazo” — named for the disgraced economic minister who proposed the economic reforms. The strike showed definitively that the government of Isabel Peron and her allies in the union bureaucracy were no longer capable of controlling working-class discontent.

At high levels of the business and military elite, plans for a military coup were set in motion.

Remembering the Carnage

The terror that unfolded in 1976 on the Ford factory floor was part of a conscious and deliberate plan to terrorize Argentina’s working class into submission. The physical annihilation of the Left and trade union militancy was seen as essential to restoring the stability and profitability of capitalist industry in Argentina.

In an era when even a hint of left-wing affiliation could be a death sentence, the fact that the twenty-four tortured workers were ultimately released reflected the state’s recognition that they were “only” trade union activists. The goal of the torture was terror: making it clear to every worker, as they watched their union leaders taken away at rifle point, that resisting exploitation was a potential death sentence. If they complained, if they organized, they could be next.

The Ford case underscores the active collaboration of multinational firms in the horrific atrocities of Argentina´s military dictatorship. This was the real purpose of military intervention: to unleash an unprecedented campaign of state and corporate terrorism in workplaces across the country. Some of the military officials directly responsible for the concentration camps, torture, and mass assassinations of leftists have since been prosecuted. Yet the fortunes accumulated on this grizzly foundation have remained untouched. Economically, socially and politically, modern Argentina remains the product of this gruesome blood sacrifice.

Current Argentinian president Mauricio Macri, like most of Argentina´s hereditary elite, is no exception. The Macri business group grew from seven firms in 1973, during the brief democratic opening, to forty-seven by the end of the dictatorship. A fortune was made from key construction and privatization contracts, all of which required close ties to military officials to secure. In 1982, the state even assumed $180 million of the group´s private debt.

The case plays an important role in highlighting the active collaboration of multinational corporations with the terror unleashed by the military dictatorship. In the current political environment, it will not be easy to secure a conviction; Macri’s government has frequently attempted to diminish the scale of the political genocide. Recently a notorious torturer from the military dictatorship, Miguel Etchecolatz, was allowed to leave prison for a lax regime of house arrest, despite remaining implicated in the 2006 disappearance of Julio Lopez, a key witness in the legal case against him.

Yet it is precisely this attempt to bury the past and usher in a neoliberal post-history that makes the struggle for long-delayed justice all the more important. Propato underscored this point as he reflected on his long struggle for justice.

We are simply a page in a history book of what has already been forty-two years, of a struggle without quarter, in which many of us fell on the path. However, what is important is to say to the new generations that we must be united, that we all belong to the same working class and we must be united. That all of this that happened to our generation does not happen again, that these big businesses like Ford Motors Argentina, General Motors, Mercedez-Benz, can´t do this again. For this the new generations need to work together and know the history of what happened in the ‘70s; we weren’t the best but we fought for this cause which was worth it. The new generations need to raise up again the workers banner and feel that they truly are workers, not that they belong to another social class. The worker is a worker.


The history of this struggle remains just as important to those of us in the United States or Europe, or any of the global headquarters of these multinational companies. As we work to rebuild the labor movement we must restore the international solidarity that once lay at its core. The next time companies like Ford work to unleash terrorupon our brothers and sisters abroad — whether in Argentina, or more likely today in Honduras or Egypt — we must keep this history in mind and prepare to carry the struggle for their defense into the heart of empire.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 05, 2018 9:42 am

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/ital ... mmigration

It Never Went Away

BY CARLO FLORENZI

In Italy, where fascism was born, far-right violence is a growing feature of political life once again.

Image
Far-right groups CasaPound and Student Block rally in Rome on May 7, 2010.

A terrorist attack in Macerata close to Italy’s Adriatic coast on February 3 sharply illustrated the persistence of fascist violence in the country. The drive-by shooting spree, which targeted African immigrants, injured eight people. But even as the gunman Luca Traini handed himself into police, Italian politicians were quick to insist that the real problem stemmed from migration itself.

Throughout Italy’s election campaign its main parties have imitated anti-migrant and racist rhetoric from the far right, an alarming trend in a country where fascist groups are increasingly finding a foothold again. The Left’s weakened social roots and a pliant media have combined not only to boost hard-right forces like the Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, but also militant fascist groups such as CasaPound and Forza Nuova.

Italy has a long history of anti-fascist struggle, but developing the tools to stem the latest rise in far-right politics will take more than a veneration of the country’s resistance heritage. As fascism becomes popular again in the country of its birth, Italy’s left desperately needs to rebuild its social roots in the communities the far right is targeting.


A History of Fascist Violence

It was a normal Saturday in Macerata, Italy, last month when Luca Traini began shooting. Targeting foreigners, he injured at least eight West Africans — seven men and one woman. When the police finally stopped him, Traini draped an Italian flag over his shoulders and gave a fascist salute. Last year Traini ran in local elections for the anti-immigrant Lega in the nearby town of Corridonia. After the shooting it also emerged that he was close to the neofascist parties Forza Nuova and CasaPound.

Less than two years ago in Fermo, also in the Macerata region, Emmanuel Chidi Nnamdi — a Nigerian man aged thirty-six — was killed by fascist ultra Emanuele Mancini in an attack that began when Mancini hurled a racist insult at Namdi’s partner. Having pleaded guilty of manslaughter with racist aggravation, Mancini was released from prison after one year for good conduct, whereas Namdi’s partner, a refugee escaped from Boko Haram in Nigeria, has had to leave Fermo.

These two cases were part of a longer pattern. In Florence in 2011, CasaPound supporter Gianluca Casseri killed two Senegalese men, Samb Modou and Diop Mor, and injured a three others,Mbenghe Cheike, Moustapha Dieng, and Sougou Mor, and then killed himself before he could be captured by the police. While the mainstream media and political parties have treated these events as isolated incidents caused by lone wolves, they are in reality chapters in the story of resurgent fascist and xenophobic ideas in Italy.

Although the fascist regime was defeated at the end of World War II, Italian fascism never really went away. The Italian constitution might have explicitly prohibited the reconstitution of the fascist party, but no sooner than it was introduced the Italian Social Movement (MSI) was founded. This party made explicit reference to the Italian Social Republic, the fascist regime that Mussolini established under Nazi protection in northern Italy after the Allies and the Italian partisans had freed the central and southern part of the country. From 1946 onward, MSI regularly participated in Italian elections, increasing its vote share to the point of becoming the fourth largest party behind the Christian Democrats, the Communists, and the Socialist Party.

In spring 1960, MSI offered external support for the government led by the right-wing Christian Democrat Fernando Tambroni. However, the Tambroni government was dissolved after only four months thanks to a wave of demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people in many Italian towns and cities. Organized by left-wing opposition parties, these protests were often violently repressed by police. The demonstrations were also notable for the large number of young people who participated, combining an anti-fascist spirit with a broader desire for social change in a country that was characterized by conservatism. In fact, the 1960s marked the beginning of a wave of social struggles that continued across the following decade. The student revolt in 1968 was soon followed by an important cycle of workers’ struggles: the Hot Autumn.

While this strong popular opposition destroyed the MSI’s chances of entering government, fascists could still be useful for sections of the Italian ruling class. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s sectors of the the country’s political and military elites made use of a myriad of subversive fascist groups to pursue “strategy of tension” aimed at containing the wave of social struggles which were emerging in the country. The goal was to create a climate of fear among the population, which would then justify authoritarian measures to reestablish order — including through the suppression of the Left.

Despite the smokescreen which still hangs over the events of these years, it has been established that fascist groups were involved in at least one coup attempt (the so-called Golpe Borghese, named after the former fascist Navy official behind the initiative) and a number of massacres across the 1960s and 1970s. The bomb that killed seventeen people and injured eighty-eight in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 marked the beginning of a decade that culminated in the August 1980 with the bombing at Bologna railway station, which left eighty-two people dead. Although we still don’t know the names of the instigators, trials have established that fascists carried out both atrocities, as well as a number of other killings and shootings throughout that decade.

The 1980s were a decade of political disillusionment and retreat, marking the end of the social struggles which characterized the two previous decades. From the outside, it appeared that this could also be the end of Italian fascism. The 1990s saw the end of the MSI, which turned into the more “institutionally respectable” Alleanza Nazionale (AN). During a 2003 visit to Israel, Gianfranco Fini — the final secretary of the MSI and the leader of the transition towards the AN — went as far to declare that the Italian fascist regime of Mussolini was part of the “absolute evil,” on account of its 1930s “race laws” against Jews. Italy, it seemed, might finally be about to leave its fascist past behind.

A Renewed Threat

Believing the country was moving beyond political “extremes,” both center-left and center-right parties engaged in an attempt to rewrite history, aimed at creating a fictitious shared memory of the years of the fascist regime and the Italian Resistance. The Italian Social Republic was progressively normalized, with politicians from the left and the right arguing that it was time to try to understand the motives of the defeated fascists, who were increasingly characterized as young people who fought for the wrong cause.

At the same time experience of the Italian resistance against fascism was gradually emptied of its original political significance. This led to a situation where in 2017 the governing party, the centrist Democrats, turned the annual demonstration in commemoration of the Resistance, held every April 25, into a celebration of the European Union. To add further embarrassment, PD militants were photographed holding signs celebrating a series of “European patriots,” among whom they included Coco Chanel, in fact known to be a Nazi collaborator.

But the reality was, against this backdrop of ideological confusion, Italian fascism had not disappeared. Many politicians in “institutional” right-wing parties maintained links with the far-right milieu and a number of neofascist organizations continued operating. In a telling reflection of these often untold links, in 2008 a number of supporters of Rome’s new mayor Gianni Alemanno, a former chairman of the MSI youth organization and a prominent AN member, gave fascist salutes and chanted in homage to Mussolini after Alemanno’s election victory.

Fascists did not stop killing, either. In 2003, two fascist brothers and their father stabbed to death Davide “Dax” Cesare, a militant of a social center in Milan, who they held responsible for an attack on the family’s older brother a week before. In 2006 two young fascists stabbed to death Renato Biagetti, a militant of Rome’s Acrobax social center. In 2008 Nicola Tommasoli, aged twenty-eight, died in Verona after a savage beating by a group of five far-right ultras.

But it is with the recent economic crisis that Italian fascists’ strategies have become more overt. In the context of rising unemployment and poverty, triggered by the EU-backed austerity policies implemented by all Italian governments since the beginning of the crisis, neofascist organizations such as Forza Nuova and the new CasaPound tried to build support by shifting blame onto immigrants. In perfect continuity with the historical experience of fascism, neofascist organizations have politicized the crisis along racial and not class lines, exploiting also the weakness of the Italian left, which has been unable to provide a radical alternative during the recession.

The demand “put Italians first” has not only been a rhetorical device. As the housing situation became explosive during the crisis, with evictions skyrocketing as tenants were unable to pay their rent, fascist groups promoted squatting for Italians only, or attempted (often successfully) to impede migrant families’ rightful access to public housing. Playing on the burgeoning feelings of fear and insecurity, fed by a media campaign over migrant criminality, fascists instigated neighborhood patrols, often under the cover of murky citizens’ associations. Taking advantage of an increasing poverty rate, they have collected food in front of or even inside supermarkets, but for indigenous Italians only.

In this pivot to service provision for the poor, fascist groups well understood that they were stealing the Left’s clothes. As one group said in a recent interview, “We do what the Communist Party stopped doing. In the poorer areas, in the outskirts of the cities, the Communist Party is not there anymore but CasaPound is there now helping.” Helping maybe — but only some, solidifying their base among white Italians suffering from the economic crisis while fomenting animus against their immigrant neighbors.

In shifting the focus away from class politics and driving warfare within the working class, fascists have served the interest of the Italian ruling class. It is therefore unsurprising that they have been gradually normalized within the public debate. CasaPound’s self-defined “fascists of the third millennium” has received increasingly benign media coverage, with interviews of its leaders and a widespread description of its militants as young and passionate activists, in contrast to the apathetic majority of the younger generations.

This reached fresh heights last November, when a fashion magazine published an article describing some of the more visible women within the organization in admiring tones. Last fall, famous journalists participated in the preelection debates held in the CasaPound headquarters in Rome. Moreover, as documented by the Wu Ming collective and the researchers of the Nicoletta Bourbaki group, recent years have seen increasing number of connections at the local level between exponents of the centrist Democratic Party and CasaPound. Local Democratic figures have participated in initiatives hosted by CasaPound, and vice versa, even to the extent that some fascist militants complained publicly on Twitter about such strange connections.

Mainstreaming Fascism

Not only have fascist organizations been progressively normalized, but their xenophobic ideology has become more mainstream. The right-wing Lega’s leader Matteo Salvini has built the relaunch of his party, highly discredited after a scandal about the misuse of party funds, on shifting away from its older separatist stances against the “profligacy” of southern Italy and focusing on a harsh anti-immigration rhetoric. The Lega still polls badly in central and southern Italy, as voters seem to remember the two decades in which the party railed against the supposed laziness of southerners.

However, another right-wing party which built its campaign on anti-immigration positions, Fratelli d’Italia, is polling well in the South. This is unsurprising, as Fratelli is a post-fascist party with its roots in the MSI, which was traditionally strong in southern regions. Both parties are in coalition with Forza Italia, the party led by the elderly media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, and they are set to come in first place in the coming elections, though it is not clear if this will guarantee the number of seats necessary to create a government. While Berlusconi is now seen by EU elites as a possible counterweight to Salvini’s more extreme positions, the heightened competition between Forza Italia and the Lega has in fact led Berlusconi to adopt bombastic anti-immigration stances. Immediately after the Macerata terrorist attack, Berlusconi made a Trump-style claim that Italy needed to kick out the six hundred thousand immigrants living illegally in the country.

Things are no better among the other big Italian parties. The populist catch-all Five Star Movement (M5S) has turned its initially ambiguous position on immigration into one more closely aligned with the right. Last year Luigi Di Maio, the M5S candidate for premier, labeled the NGOs working to save migrants crossing the Mediterranean a “sea-taxi.” The main point of the M5S program on immigration is a target of zero migrants disembarking on the Italian coast. This resonates well with the immigration policies implemented by the current government, led by the Democratic Party, whose Interior Minister Marco Minniti reached an EU-backed agreement with Libya to prevent migrants leaving African shores.

While the agreement led to reduced numbers of migrants reaching Italy, its main result has been to hold thousands of people prisoner in obscene detention camps in Libya, described by UNICEF as “hellholes.” A few days after the Macerata attack, Minniti claimed credit for the agreement with Libya, stating that he implemented it because he foresaw attacks of this kind, and even calling it “an Italian asset of which we should be proud.” Minniti is no isolated case among the Democrats. The party’s chairman and candidate for premier Matteo Renzi wrote in his most recent book that there is no moral need to receive the migrants and that we should instead help migrants “in their home country,” the same rhetoric which the Lega has championed since the 1990s. In May 2017 Debora Serracchiani, the party’s former vice-chairman, stated that sexual violence was more unacceptable if committed by an asylum seeker, in response to which she was offered honorary membership of the fascist Forza Nuova. Shortly afterwards, Patrizia Prestipino, a member of the Democrats’ national leadership, stressed the need to support “Italian mothers” to sustain the continuation of the “Italian race.”

Which Anti-Fascism?

The Democratic Party tried to refresh its anti-fascist credentials by promoting the Fiano Law, a law which is supposed to strengthen the punishment for fascist propaganda. The emptiness of this legalistic approach to fascism became fully apparent in the aftermath of the Macerata attack. The local social center Sisma called an anti-fascist demonstration for Saturday, February 10, exactly a week after the shooting.

Responding to fascist violence with huge popular demonstrations has always been customary in Italy. In 1969, after the bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, the three union confederations called a general strike on the day of the victims’ funerals, and thousands of people filled the streets of the city.

This time, however, Romano Carancini, the Democratic Party mayor of Macerata, astonishingly called for the cancellation of any demonstrations that day, in order to avoid disturbing the shocked population. Carancini’s call well expressed his party’s embarrassment faced with the Macerata terrorist attack, incapable of taking a strong position against fascism and xenophobia with the fear of losing precious votes in the election.

The leaderships of four of the main forces on the institutional left — the CGIL union confederation, the anti-mafia association Libera, the ARCI network, and the ANPI partisans’ association — decided to withdraw their participation from the demonstration, with a public statement in which they canceled a demonstration that they had themselves helped to call. These four organizations settled for organizing a demonstration in Rome on February 24, three weeks after the Macerata attack. The Interior Minister Minniti was quick to praise these associations’ decision, saying that if the demonstration’s organizers had not called it off, he would have moved to ban it.

It stood in stark contrast to the emphatic response from fascist groups. Forza Nuova expressed its full support to the gunman, even offering to cover his legal expenses. Meanwhile CasaPound chairman Simone Di Stefano visited Macerata. Although he condemned Traini’s actions, he again drew attention to the migrant threat. A few days later, CasaPound officially presented its program for the coming elections in a room of the Italian Parliament.

It was only thanks to the determination of the Sisma social center and the other movements and grassroots unions which supported the Macerata demonstration since the beginning that it ultimately took place on Saturday, February 10. Despite the climate of tension created by the authorities, who even closed the schools for the day, more than twenty thousand people from all parts of Italy rallied to stage a peaceful but resolute demonstration against fascism and xenophobia. Many branches of the CGIL, Libera, ARCI, and ANPI disobeyed their leaders’ calls and participated in the march. Solidarity demonstrations were also held in many other Italian and European towns. It was undoubtedly a good day for Italian anti-fascists.

Beyond the Election

With election day approaching, Forza Nuova and CasaPound have intensified their activities, holding election rallies across the country. While local councils have been shy in forbidding such rallies (showing once again the inconsistency of the current anti-fascist legislation), they were confronted by a wave of anti-fascist counterdemonstrations. Whereas the fascists have been able to mobilize only a few dozen militants, the counterdemonstrations in towns such as Bologna and Venice have involved thousands. Yet, instead of stressing this numerical disproportion, the media has preferred to focus on the clashes between the police and the anti-fascist rallies, fueling a narrative about the danger posed by “opposite extremisms.” This has played into the idea that the country needs “stability,” exactly the perspective a grand coalition government would want.

The Left should learn two things from these events. First, while fascist and xenophobic ideas are on the rise, we should not succumb to a logic of pessimism. The fact that thousands of people took the streets against fascism in several Italian towns — even without the support of large traditional left organizations — means that there is a substantial base from which we can start building a large front to oppose fascism. Second, the hesitation that these traditional left organizations (sadly including the ANPI partisans’ association) have shown in joining a march of such importance as the Macerata demonstration means that the Italian left must to go beyond the traditional anti-fascist rhetoric.

For years, most of the Italian left has effectively ignored the problem of the growing pervasiveness of fascist ideas, contenting itself with annual rhetorical celebrations of the ideals of the World War II Italian resistance. All the while, fascist organizations were establishing their presence in peripheral areas, and xenophobic ideas were becoming hegemonic. The Left must return to the workplaces and to the communities where working-class Italians live, unmask the false logic behind the fascist-promoted warfare between the poor, and build a front between national and foreign working classes against the common enemy: capitalism.

It is no coincidence that some of the most advanced struggles in Italy — such as those in the logistics sector — have seen migrant workers at the forefront. And it is no coincidence that the social movements and grassroots unions which have been such an active part of those struggles have also driven the Macerata demonstrations and the others which have followed. This must be our starting point.
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