Fascists are the Tools of the State

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Mar 28, 2016 11:18 am

Cries From the Past: Torture's Ugly Echoes
Sunday 23 May 2010
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye, t r u t h o u t | Report



What Was Project Artichoke?

The CIA initiated Project Artichoke in August 1951 at the direction of CIA director Walter Bedell Smith and the Agency's Scientific Intelligence Director, Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell. The code name "Artichoke" was selected with sardonic humor from the street appendage given to New York City gangster Ciro Terranova, who was referred to as "the Artichoke King."

Following a brief period of bureaucratic infighting over which CIA department would have jurisdiction over Artichoke, it was decided that the project would be overseen by the Agency's Security Research Staff, headed by Paul F. Gaynor, a former Army Brigadier General, who had extensive experience in wartime interrogations.

Gaynor was notorious among CIA officials for having his staff maintain a systematic file on every homosexual, and suspected homosexual, among the ranks of Federal employees, as well as those who worked and served on Washington's Capitol Hill. Gaynor's secret listing eventually grew to include the names of employees and elected officials at State government levels, and the siblings and relatives of those on Capitol Hill.

In early January 1953, State Department employee John C. Montgomery, who handled considerable classified material, hanged himself in his Georgetown townhouse after learning of his addition to Gaynor's list. In 1954, U.S. Senator Lester C. Hunt (D-WY) killed himself in his senate office after he was threatened by Republicans, using information provided by Gaynor's staff, to publicly expose his son's homosexuality. By the early 1960s, according to one former Agency employee, "It was pretty much routine to consult Gaynor's 'fag file' when conducting background or clearance checks on individuals."

Gaynor's veiled and more despicable activities also extended to racist matters, a fixation he seemed to share with many of the CIA's early leaders, as well as with some of the Pentagon's early ranking officials. According to one former CIA official, Gaynor was once informally cautioned by Allen Dulles concerning his overt support of former Congressman Hamilton Fish III, a strident Nazi sympathizer, and for associating, along with fellow CIA official Morse Allen, with John B. Trevor Jr., an ardent racist, anti-Semite, pro-Nazi, who called for amnesty for Nazi war criminals. Before the CIA was formed, Gaynor was also associated with Trevor's father, John B. Trevor Sr., a Harvard-educated attorney who worked with Army intelligence and who once strongly advocated arming a group of citizens with 6,000 rifles and machine guns to put down an anticipated Jewish uprising in Manhattan that only took shape in Trevor's twisted mind.

In 1997, former CIA Technical Services chief, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who had been born into a Jewish family, said, "Throughout the 1950s, and for some time beyond, the Agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities. Those who were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their heads down when certain matters were discussed or rallied round."

Here it should be emphasized that inevitably lurking within, near, and around all of the CIA's early mind-control experiments was a strong element of racism that generally manifested itself through the Agency's principle objective of establishing control over the perceived "weaker" and "less intelligent" segments of society. That the CIA's initial mind control activities show a close kinship with many prominent characters within the racist and anti-immigration eugenics movement is no coincidence. Thus comprised was the central leadership of the CIA's Project Artichoke.



http://www.truthout.org/cries-from-past ... gly-echoes
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 05, 2016 6:50 pm

RED YEARS, BLACK YEARS Anarchist Resistance to Fascism in Italy from Revista Anarchica (Translated by Alan Hunter) eBook £1.00/€1.50 (see eBookshelf)

It is a sad fact that so little historical material is available today dealing with the role of the various resistance groups throughout Europe. There are many reasons for this, ranging from the obvious; secrecy equals survival, to the more surprising and depressing fact, fascism was not defeated in 1945. Those who really fought the fascists, as opposed to those who only claim they did, still have to be careful even now. It was only in 1983 that the notorious butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, was brought to trial. Between 1945 and his capture he was at various times working for the CIA, the Catholic Church, Latin American drug barons and Bolivian death squads. Likewise Paul Touvien, head of the Milice (fascist paramilitary) in Lyon, was only captured in 1989. He was protected for almost 50 years by a huge network of extreme right-wing followers, many in the highest positions in the land. If the fascists have such connections then it is quite understandable why those who have fought them do not wish to discuss these matters too openly.


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http://www.christiebooks.com/ChristieBo ... bookshelf/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 20, 2016 3:42 pm

Blaize said...

If New Zealand is anything like the US the answer to the question of whether the cops are watching the right wingers is "probably not." Or, as has turned out to be the case here, "They don't have to infiltrate the meetings; they're already going to them as members." Here in the US people were shocked, SHOCKED! at a number of KKK member cops that were revealed after Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in St. Louis. But really, if you're a jackbooted racist being a police officer would seem like a perfect job. You get to, um, vigorously assert your dominance over people, and they have great dental insurance. Win-win!


http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2016 ... rters.html
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 29, 2016 12:36 pm

https://datacide-magazine.com/datacide- ... the-state/


Neo-Nazis, the National Socialist Underground and the State

In datacide twelve, we detailed the scandal surrounding the killing spree of the Neo-Nazi terrorist organisation Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU) and the involvement of the domestic state security agency Verfassungsschutz (VS). This was followed by an update in datacide thirteen. In the meantime, the court case against Beate Zschäpe (the surviving member of the NSU ‘terror trio’) et. al. has continued. Simultaneously, the various parliamentary fact-finding commissions have been at work supposedly to shed light on the backgrounds of the crimes as well as the role the security services may have played in them.

The court case seemingly took a fundamental turn when Zschäpe decided to make a statement after all. Unsurprisingly, her 53-page statement was designed to exculpate herself from the accusations of complicity in the murders and claimed that she hadn’t been a member of the NSU, which conveniently – since they are both dead – only consisted of Uwe Böhnhardt and Uwe Mundlos.

This was after she had already had her conditions of detention softened because the NSU supposedly no longer existed. Even though her claims were widely seen as lies, the possibility of a much larger membership of the terrorist organisation is barely being investigated.

In the meantime, parliamentarians in the fact-finding commissions experienced that state attorneys and police were generally not very forthcoming with information, blocking effective investigations of the connections and overlap of the domestic security services and the Neo-Nazi scene. The state agencies remain very economical with the truth. This situation is not helped by the fact that five witnesses have died under suspicious circumstances, the first in 2009, the fifth as recently as February 2016.

When asked ‘What lessons do you draw from the NSU-affair?’, the president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, answered ‘the lesson from the ten murders of the NSU is that the threads of process (‘Verfahrensfäden’) have to be pulled together. With the intelligence services network (‘Verfassungsschutzverbund’), the strengthening of the central office through the reform of the Constitution Protection Act, we have taken care of this. All the information converges with us’. (Ostsee-Zeitung, 13-12-2015). This shows that the office has not a shred of self-criticism – except that it wasn’t centralised enough.

It is also interesting that the word ‘Verfahrensfäden’ doesn’t actually exist in the German language, so the sentence means even less. Former vice president, now state secretary in the Ministry of the Interior, Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, was blunt, defending the stonewalling of state agencies in the face of the inquiries: ‘No secrets must be exposed which could impair the activity of the state … the welfare of the state is more important than parliamentary elucidation’. (Wildcat 95 editorial, also Interview with Stefan Aust/Dirk Laabs, Bayerischer Rundfunk 16-06-2014). In the end the office has emerged strengthened from the scandal, and no provisions whatsoever have been implemented to prevent it from financing far right groups, including violent and terrorist organisations.

Even the latest embarrassment – that Mundlos was employed in the business of an agent of the VS while being underground and after the killing spree had already begun – is unlikely to change that.

So was the NSU the only far right terrorist group? And is right wing terrorism now over? Nothing could be further from the truth. To start with, it’s wrong to claim that the NSU consisted only of the “terror trio”. The concept of “membership” in such a group is somewhat questionable – obviously there are no membership cards or lists. Membership is attributed either by a person admitting to or claiming it, or by the state attorney trying to prove “membership in a terrorist organisation” as a criminal offence. It speaks volumes that no such attempt is being made against the support network that the NSU undisputedly could count on. Perhaps because agents of the VS could be amongst the people who would come under investigation?

With or without the NSU, there is a veritable wave of xenophobic far right terror sweeping the nation. In 2015 there were over 1,000 attacks against refugee homes, many of them arson attacks. More recently there has even been an attack with a hand granade (FAZ, 29-01-2016). It completely misses the point to look for an “organisation” behind these attacks – much of right wing terror is conducted according to the principles of ‘leaderless resistance’, first developed by Ulius Louis Amoss, a former US secret agent, for anti-Communist subversion in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War in 1953, and popularised in the far right scene by Klu-Klux-Klan member Louis Beam since 1983. The idea is to avoid the traces more structured organisations will leave and avoid the danger that whole networks could be swept up if a single cell or individual is caught. Amoss’ dictum was ‘we do not need “leaders”; we need leading ideas’. This works particularly well for dickhead ideas like violent xenophobia and other simple-minded aims. It also leaves it more or less open to the legal prosecution to construe or deny the existence of a terrorist organisation.

In German practice, this has lead to numerous left wingers being sent to prison for ‘membership in a terrorist organisation’ in the absence of other crimes, while in the case of the NSU the book is being closed before things can be investigated thoroughly. Similarly to David Copeland’s nail bombings in London these are now seen as isolated incidents or “lone wolf” attacks. But Copeland is a perfect example that this assessment is often disingenuous – he had direct connections to the British National Party (see datacide seven, p. 3) which were purposefully brushed under the carpet. One of the NSU crimes, a nailbomb attack in Cologne in June 2004, was a direct copycat attack of the ones perpetrated by Copeland – even down to the size of the nails. Scotland Yard even supplied a 90-page dossier pointing out the similarities, but German law enforcement chose to ignore it (Aust/Laabs interview, see above).

But attacks against foreigners, refugees and asylum seekers are by no means the only violent activity that Neo-Nazis engage in; there have also been attacks against whole streets they consider strongholds of the radical left both in Berlin (Rigaerstrasse, September 2015) and Leipzig (Connewitz, January 2016). The latter has been extremely violent when more than 200 Neo-Nazis went on a rampage with baseball bats, iron bars and axes, smashing windows and physically attacking people.

While recent rallies of the organised hard right, such as the National Democratic Party (NPD), have only attracted very few die-hard activists and have been successfully countered by anti-fascists, the right wing populist mobilisations – such as Pegida – and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are attracting many people for their rallies and many votes at local elections. Neo-Nazis are successfully mingling with and influencing the rightward-lurching ‘enraged citizens’.

The state however has shown – with a massive raid against a left wing house project right on Rigaerstrasse only a few days after the events in Leipzig-Connewitz – that it firmly sees its enemies on the left.

Datacide Author: Christoph Fringeli
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 30, 2016 1:23 pm

The Police vs. Pasolini, Pasolini vs. The Police

By Wu Ming

On February 13, 1964, in front of the Casa dello Studente in Rome, a Fiat 600 tries to run over a group of Pasolini's friends who were defending him from a fascist attack. The person driving the car is Adriano Romualdi, disciple of Julius Evola and son of Pino Romualdi, member of parliament and president of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Msi). Whilst the event is detailed in every Pasolini biography, it is nowhere to be found in Romualdi's Wikipedia page.

Pasolini does not press charges, neither for the media slander nor for the physical aggressions. It is a pondered-upon decision: he doesn't want to lower himself to his persecutors' level. Furthermore, were he to press charges, he would only increase the already inordinate amount of time spent in courtrooms.

...Why such a persecution? Because he was homosexual? He was certainly not the only one amongst artists and writers. Because he was homosexual and communist? Yes, but this isn't enough either. Because he was homosexual, communist, and expressed himself openly against the bourgeoisie, government, Christian Democracy, fascists, judges, and police? Yes, this is enough. It would have been enough anywhere, let alone in Italy and in that Italy.
As Alberto Moravia wrote, Pasolini scandalised that "Italian bourgeoisie that had created within four centuries two of the most conservative movements in Europe, namely counter-reformation and fascism."

Italian bourgeoisie has taken its revenge, and still does in devious ways. That nonsense about how "Pasolini sided with the police," repeated by today's fascists, conformists, and fake anti-conformists, comes on the heels of the revenge of yesterday's fascists, conformists and fake anti-conformists.

Even the posthumous portrayal of Pasolini — simplified, flattened, polished and reduced to a cardboard cutout — is also part of that revenge.

...Autumn '69 — known as "hot autumn" — is a season of important struggles and workers victories. As a response, a bomb explodes on December 12 in Piazza Fontana, Milan. Like clockwork, a campaign is kicked off to fabricate the involvement of anarchists or leftist and worker movements. On December 15, Giuseppe Pinelli dies. On December 16, Rai 1's newscast correspondent, Bruno Vespa, tells millions of people that "Pietro Valpreda is the culprit, one of those guilty of Milano's carnage." The anarchist Valpreda becomes the monster.

Pasolini, Moravia, Maraini, Asor Rosa and other intellectuals sign a call "against the repressive surge." In the issue of Il Borghese dated December 28, 1969, Alberto Giovannini doesn't miss his chance and writes:


Apart from Valpreda, who is used to not only turning his back to the hated bourgeoisie but also to the young boys he so loves, there are many other 'transvestites' and 'faggots' among the arrested; and this cannot let P.P. Pasolini indifferent, as he is most certainly the spiritual father of all the capsized of Italy, only because this thankless nature [...] has not allowed him to be their mother.


In the issue of Tempo of January 10, 1970, Pasolini speaks directly to social-democratic MP Mauro Ferri, and writes:


The extremism of minority and extra-parliamentary leftist groups has in no way brought about the Piazza Fontana carnage (it is heinous to even think that): it has brought about the greatest victory for metalworkers. Before the actions of Potere Operaio and of other minority groups outside the parties, trade unions were sleeping.


For two months, starting on March 1, 1971, Pasolini acts as the editor of Lotta Continua's publication, knowing he risks being investigated, indicted and tried for the paper's contents. That happens on October 18 of that same year, on account of having "instigated militaries to disobey orders [...], carried out anti-national propaganda, for the subversion of the State-sanctioned economic and social orders and for publically instigating to commit crimes." Maximum sentence in the penal code: 15 years of imprisonment. Witnesses for the prosecution: officers, petty officers, public security agents, and carabinieri.

After this indictment, Rai blocks the airing of Enzo Biagi's television programme, dismissing any kind of presumption of innocence. Today it's one of Pasolini's most famous television appearances, but many don't know it was censored and was only aired after his death, five years after the recording.

Meanwhile, members of the police are at the forefront to demand — and most often obtain — the requisition of Pasolini's work. In Bari, inspector of police Santoro emphasises the "horrifying" obscenity of the film Decameron. In Ancona, a complaint is filed against the same film by forestry inspector Lorenzo Mannozzi Torini, a "pioneer of truffle cultivation" according to Wikipedia.

Definitely worn out but certainly not intimidated, Pasolini finances and shoots with Lotta Continua's cinema collective a investigative documentary on Piazza Fontana and on the state of struggles in Italy. With a screenplay by Giovanni Bonfanti and Goffredo Fofi, the documentary, named "December 12", comes out in 1972 with a caption: "from an idea by Pier Paolo Pasolini."

...Three weeks later, in the night between the 1st and 2nd of November, Pasolini's body lies in Ostia's mud, thrashed, reduced to a single blood-soaked rag.

Now, to conclude, I borrow Roberto Chiesi's words:

If you go through the horrible photographs of Pasolini's corpse's discovery, there is one, maybe the most horrible, which shows the tortured body, surrounded by some investigators and policemen on their knees. There is a policemen sitting next to Pasolini's corpse, he smiles. The photo shows it unmistakably: it is a scornful smile, a disdainful smile. This image can be taken as a sample of a worse Italy, one we should refuse, condensed in that black and white image, published at the time on many newspapers' front pages.


Pasolini continued to be against the police, the police continued to be against Pasolini.


http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2719-th ... the-police






American Dream » Wed Jan 21, 2015 9:37 am wrote:Originally found at Who Makes the Nazis?:


http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/arch ... d-pasolini

How P2 and its fascist henchmen murdered Pasolini

Published on Thursday, 05 April 2012 13:16 Written by Alfio Bernabei

Neofascists played a role in the killing of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the writer and film director, who was found battered to death on the night of 1 November 1975 on a stretch of beach at Ostia, near Rome.

Thirty seven years after the event that shook Italy’s cultural and political world, a picture is gradually taking shape of a planned execution carried out by a gang of up to six people. At least two of them frequented a branch of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano), the party founded after the Second World War by the diehard nazifascists of Mussolini’s Salò Republic.

Some testimonies also point to links with individuals who were later to be found connected to the terrorist organisation Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR – Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari), as well as with the Roman underworld associated to the far right, in particular the Banda della Magliana, a criminal gang that was subsequently named during investigations into some notorious murders, including those of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the banker Roberto Calvi.

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Pino Pelosi, the only man convicted for the killing

The disappearance of documents belonging to Pasolini, and the hastily discarded testimonies gathered by an undercover agent who obtained confessions from the two neofascists of responsibility in the murder, also cast doubts on the role of the Italian Secret Service and members of the judiciary. Both were at the time heavily infiltrated by P2 (Propaganda Due), a Masonic lodge that was using rightwing terrorists and petty criminals to carry out atrocities and executions as part of the so-called “strategy of tension”.

Suspicion is mounting that Pasolini’s murder was carried out within the framework of P2’s plans to subvert the constitutional order. According to the 1981-1984 parliamentary investigation led by the MP Tina Anselmi, P2 was acting as a clandestine “parallel government” or “a State within the State”.

Interest in Pasolini’s murder was reignited last December when Pino Pelosi burst into a crowded room during the presentation of a book in Rome and announced that the killer was still alive. Pelosi, now 53, was arrested on the night of the crime and told police he had acted on his own to protect himself from sexual advances. He was 17 at the time. With his nine and a half year jail sentence well behind him, Pelosi is now admitting that he was used by people who had devised a plan to silence the author.

At the time of his death Pasolini was vehemently attacking destructive forces in Italian society which, in his opinion, were creating a wasteland for a whole generation of young people, a process amounting to a kind of mental rape for which much of the responsibility rested with the politically corrupt ruling Christian Democratic Party and its cronies.

In books and articles he was proclaiming the need to put “the State on trial”, by which he probably meant the entire Cabinet, the heads of the then publicly owned companies and a large chunk of the military and even of the judiciary. Endowed with a clear insight into the riddles and obfuscations of power games, he was convinced that Enrico Mattei, President of ENI, the Italian Petrol Company, had been assassinated in a staged plane crash. A book he was working on at the time of his death, Petrolio (Oil), published posthumously, dealt with the Mattei affair. After Pasolini’s murder 78 pages disappeared from the only manuscript in existence. They have never been found.

Rumours have circulated for years that the man who took over from Mattei, Eugenio Cefis, was the real head of the P2 Masonic Lodge, part of the Stay Behind/Gladio organisation. The purpose of this network was to prevent the Communist Party from gaining enough strength to form a government. Among the “gladiators’” tasks was to maintain a climate of fear through terrorist acts with the objective of making a military intervention appear justifiable for the restoration of law and order.

Acting through a variety of neo-Nazi outfits, the P2/Stay Behind/Gladio network was targeting those who were getting too close to unmasking its plotters at the top. Journalists and leftwing investigative magistrates were the victims of attacks and assassinations. As a novelist and film maker reaching for truths outside the purely forensic, Pasolini could be perceived even as a bigger threat. Moreover, he had a huge following among the intelligentsia. Though capable of embarrassing blunders, like his servile interview with the poet Ezra Pound, his firm stance against fascism was to be found in virtually every book he wrote. Many of his films also focused on a critique of oppressive forces, whether in the shape of social conventions (Theorem, Pigsty) or perverse political power (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom).

At the time of his death he was completing the latter film, perhaps the most eloquent and disturbing attack on fascism in the history of cinema. The plot dealt with the sexual components of power and its maintenance taken to murderous extreme. Using the literary framework of one of the Marquis de Sade’s libertine novels, he was showing how even sophisticated cultures ranking high in the production of the arts – music, literature, architecture, all referred to in the film – can succumb to the unscrupulous manipulation of power hungry thugs who, by imposing their will on supine populations, can abuse and destroy whole generations.

With unprecedented directness, Pasolini was warning audiences that while nazifascist threats can be easily detected when dressed up in the conventional garbs of brutal domination, enabling a counter reaction, it is far more dangerous when the process of subjugation is carried out in ritualistic forms of apparent ordinariness by seemingly innocuous people, until they turn into monsters, by which time it’s too late and everyone feels complicit and compromised with the fait accompli. This is why the message of Salò was and remains so shocking.

Particularly in Italy, where no purge had occurred after the Second World War, the film contained an exhortation to remain vigilant about nazifascists lurking in every office, in every street, in schools, at newspaper desks, among intellectuals and in the Church.

Seen in the light of Pelosi’s most recent revelations, Pasolini’s murder was planned with extreme care. First, there was the theft of film cans from the shooting of Salò. Pasolini wanted to retrieve the material. The youth he had befriended, Pelosi, already in contact with petty criminals and neofascists, was probably used as the go-between to let the author know that the cans could be retrieved, but if he called the police or made too much noise everything would be destroyed. As Pasolini and Pelosi remained in contact, the chances were that sooner or later the latter would entice the homosexual author to some secluded place where the killers could step in and commit the crime undetected, thus allowing the “killed by his own depravity” version of events to prevail in the investigations and in popular belief.

On the night of 1 November Pasolini and Pelosi drove to a beach in Ostia. Pelosi now says that soon after they parked, a scooter arrived with two men. Then a car pulled in with three or four men on board and finally a second car arrived carrying only its driver. “We had been followed all the way”, Pelosi says. The trap having been set, Pasolini was savagely beaten up. One of the cars drove repeatedly over his body to crush the thorax and make sure he was dead.

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Police examine the murder scene on a beach at Ostia

Pelosi maintains that he took the blame for the killing because his family received threats. At his trial it was found that he could not have acted alone. No investigations followed to find his accomplices. A confession of responsibility in the crime obtained by a lone undercover policeman, Renzo Sansone, who questioned two brothers, Giuseppe and Franco Borsellino, was quickly discarded. Pelosi now confirms the two brothers, who frequented the MSI branch in the Tiburtino district of Rome, were indeed present at the scene of the killing. Among others named is a man called Sergio Pinna, who vanished soon after, never to be found again, and Giuseppe Mastini, still in jail because of a string of murders.

According to some testimonies, Mastini’s links with neofascists went as far as being friendly with Gilberto Cavallini who was to become one of the leaders of NAR, the nazifascist armed group whose members were later to be found guilty of the 1980 Bologna massacre in which the P2/Gladio organisation was involved.

There are many aspects of Pasolini’s murder that are still unclear. But little doubt remains that those who decided to silence him relied on some neofascists for his execution.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 20, 2016 12:46 pm

Image


Nebraska Drops “Death to the Klan” Track

White supremacists are showing up at the RNC, cops are shooting black people down in the street, institutions of power are closing in on those we love; we have no recourse or protection besides one another. In these times, a good track can really make our days a little better. This one called “Death to the Klan” by Nebraska really did it for me today, mixing together sounds of southern rebellion via an archival tape from the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, musings on how innocence functions as a code for nonthreatening to white civil society, and a great beat, too.


Listen here: http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-mommy-i ... o-the-klan
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sat Jul 23, 2016 9:32 am

Searching for Justice

How a neo-Nazi campaign of terror was ignored by German police.

by Friedrich Burschel


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A mural depicting murder victim Enver Şimşek in Berlin. Bernd Sauer-Diete

Thirty-eight-year-old Enver Şimşek ran a large flower distribution center in southern Germany. On one particular day in the late summer of 2000, he found himself working at a small flower shop on a busy street near the edge of Nuremberg, sitting in for a worker on vacation. After setting up the shop, the practicing Muslim paused to recite a morning prayer, withdrawing to the back of his white delivery van labelled “Blumen Şimşek” to do so.

Suddenly, two men in bicycling outfits approach the van by foot, throw open its doors, and open fire on Enver, before slamming them shut and disappearing on bicycles stashed nearby.

Eventually, waiting customers begin to wonder what happened to the flower shop’s attendant and call the police, who promptly discover Enver, still clinging to life in the back of the van, shot eight times in the head and torso. Enver Şimşek would die from his injuries two days later on September 11, 2000, leaving behind a wife and two children aged thirteen and fourteen.

Şimşek was the first victim of a series of murders and bombing attacks that puzzled German authorities for eleven years, not least because potential racist or political motives were systematically ignored, despite the fact that nine of the ten murders were carried out with the same Česká 83 pistol and the first nine victims were all of Turkish or Kurdish backgrounds, with the exception of one Greek small businessman.

On June 13, 2001, forty-nine-year-old Nuremberg tailor Abdurrahim Özüdoğru would meet a similar fate, as would grocer Süleyman Taşköprü (thirty-one years old) in Hamburg on June 27 and Munich shop owner Habil Kılıç (thirty-eight years old) on August 29. All three were murdered, shot in the head with a Česká 83.

Following a noticeable two-and-a-half-year pause, the Česká 83 reemerged in the coastal city of Rostock on February 25, 2004, implicated in the murder of twenty-five-year-old döner kebab seller Mehmet Turgut. The same pistol would go on to kill İsmail Yaşar (fifty years old) on June 9, 2005 — Nuremberg’s third victim.

Only six days later, forty-one-year-old locksmith co-owner Theodoros Boulgarides would die in Munich. On April 4, 2006, thirty-nine-year old Mehmet Kubaşık would be shot in Dortmund, and only two days later a twenty-one-year-old internet café proprietor named Halit Yozgat would be gunned down in Kassel.

For the victims’ families, the shock of their murders was followed by years of gut-wrenching investigations as suspects in their loved ones’ deaths by German police. The list of clichés and ethnic stereotypes deployed by authorities in their investigation spoke volumes about the attitudes harbored by police towards Turkish immigrants in Germany.

Police suspected the murderers were related to Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) protection rackets, the Turkish mafia, private debts, gambling addictions, tax dodging and, most often, jealousy and marital disagreements.

Enver Şimşek’s wife Adile was shown a picture of a “blonde German woman” by police, telling her it was her murdered husband’s secret lover with whom he had conceived two children. By doing so, the police hoped to compel Adile, whom they suspected of killing her husband in a fit of jealousy, to admit to the crime. Only much later would the family learn that the story had been a fabrication.

None of the officials tasked with the investigation considered racist motives as a potential factor, although multiple individuals interviewed by authorities expressed concerns that a violent racist was on the loose, hunting immigrants. Witness statements from more than one of the murders described two men on bicycles, but police largely ignored this fact as well.

When asked why police neglected to pursue links to Nazism or the bicyclists, then-chief investigator of the Munich murder commission and popular author Josef Wilfling responded, “Have you ever seen a Nazi on a bike?”

Police in Nuremberg went so far as to open up a fake döner kebab shop to lure the Turkish mafia into collecting protection money. In one instance, police even flew in a psychic from Iran who claimed to be in contact with the victims. Authorities were determined to investigate every possible lead, or at least every lead that confirmed their prejudices about the Turkish and Kurdish immigrant communities.

The media, supposedly a democratic society’s fourth estate responsible for holding the government to account, accepted the police’s racist assumptions uncritically and began referring to the series of killings as the “Döner Murders”. This stereotypical narrative dominated public perception of the case.

Despite pleas for help from victims like Envir Şimşek’s nineteen-year-old daughter Semiya, few outside of the Turkish and Kurdish communities listened. The two-thousand-strong demonstrations held in Kassel and Dortmund a month after the deaths of Mehmet Kubaşık and Halit Yozgat under the slogan “No Tenth Victim” remained almost exclusively Turkish events.

Indicative of the state’s attitude at the time, a position paper drafted by the Baden-Württemberg State Office of Criminal Investigations in January 2007 stated: “Given that killing human beings is considered highly taboo within our cultural space, we can safely assume that the perpetrator is, in terms of his behavioral system, located far outside our local system of values and norms.”

This treatment went on for years. The friends and family of the victims would finally learn the true identity of their murderers in 2011, albeit not as a result of effective police work, but through the self-incrimination of the murderers themselves.

A motor home in the Thuringian city of Eisenach burst into flames on November 4, 2011. Inside, the charred remains of two bodies were found, both of which had clearly suffered violent deaths before the fire.

Hours later, two hundred kilometers away in Zwickau, Saxony, another apartment exploded and burned to the ground. Over the following days, Germany would be rocked by a series of scandals and revelations.

Four days later, a woman named Beate Zschäpe turned herself in for the apartment explosion, and revealed that the corpses inside — Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt — were her onetime comrades in a neo-Nazi terrorist cell named the National Socialist Underground.

The NSU was responsible for nine racially motivated murders, the killing of one police officer, and the severe injury of another between 1998 and 2011. The group also committed at least three bombing attacks, including detonating a nail bomb on a busy street in Cologne on June 9, 2004, and robbed at least fifteen banks and businesses.

Before turning herself in, Zschäpe distributed a series of bizarre and disturbing propaganda videos claiming responsibility for the killings to media, government institutions, and even leftist and antifascist organizations on November 4.

The White Supremacist Web

The life stories of Beate Zschäpe (now forty years old) and the deceased Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt have been pored over in the course of the investigation. Adolescents when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the three grew up in the East German city of Jena at a time when the old German Democratic Republic (GDR) authorities were compromised and powerless, but no new authority had emerged to fill the vacuum.

This fed into a wave of racist violence across Germany, albeit primarily in the former East, in the early 1990s, culminating in racist pogroms in Hoyerswerda (Saxony) and Rostock-Lichtenhagen (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) for which few participants were ever punished. The government would ultimately respond to the racist street mob by rewriting the constitution to significantly curtail asylum and immigration rights, giving many participants the impression that their violence had helped to enforce the “will of the people.”

The young Nazis from Jena would radicalize over the coming decade, taking inspiration from American far-right groups and keenly reading the classic American Nazi tract The Turner Diaries, which almost everyone implicated in the trial had a PDF copy of on their computer.

Like Timothy McVeigh and The Order before them, these German Nazis were drawn to the book’s call for “leaderless resistance,” random violence against perceived racial enemies, and an underground, outlaw existence. British neo-Nazi David Copeland, responsible for a devastating nail bomb attack in London in 1999, had likewise been inspired by the Diaries; the NSU’s own nail bombing in 2004 may quite possibly have been inspired by Copeland.

Another American import, the Ku Klux Klan, also played a role in the development of neo-Nazi structures in post-reunification Germany. In the early 1990s, KKK hardliner Dennis W. Mahon went on a speaking tour across Germany to recruit young Germans for his “race war,” and would meet Ian Stuart Donaldsen, the founder of Blood & Honour, in Saarland.

Suspiciously, several key witnesses of the KKK’s influence on far-right terror networks in Germany have died under mysterious circumstances, such as KKK police informant Thomas Richter, aka “Corelli,” whose death in April 2014 from “hyperglycemia” remains shrouded in suspicion to this day.

The role of KKK members within the Baden-Württemberg police also remains unclear. For example, the commander on duty at the time of the attempted assassination of police officers Michèlle Keisewetter and Martin Arnold was, as it turns out, a KKK member. Additionally, incontrovertible evidence shows that FBI agents were in immediate proximity to the scene of the crime.

We know this information because the trial has focused extensively on the five defendants — Beate Zschäpe and four men accused of “aiding and abetting a murder” and “supporting a terrorist association” — and their history.

But the NSU was not confined to these individuals; they had hundreds of behind-the-scenes supporters and enjoyed a high level of contact with the state. This contact has meanwhile become the biggest scandal in the history of the postwar German intelligence services.


Continues at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/nsu- ... r-murders/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Fri Jul 29, 2016 2:28 pm

Violence, Counter-Violence, and the Question of the Gun

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Group Violence and Its Enablers

Group violence manifests itself in numerous citizens joining together in a common cause to perpetrate violence against other citizens who in some way fit the intended target of that cause. When discussing group violence, it should be noted that the subjects are non-state actors. While these groups may be directly or indirectly supported by the state, they essentially carry out their acts of violence as groups autonomous from the state apparatus.

The Ku Klux Klan (which is currently attempting to make a comeback[22]) has for decades engaged in numerous acts of group violence, from public lynchings to terrorism and coercion to bombing churches.[23] The purpose of this group violence has been to maintain a social order in which Anglo-Saxon, Protestant white men are able to keep their hands on the reins of power in the U.S., if not systematically, then culturally and socially.

In many cases, because they may share interests, group violence intertwines with and complements state violence. During Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, the KKK had well-known ties to the more official southern state apparatus of power. In the modern era, white supremacists who adhere to notions of group violence have purposely and strategically infiltrated formal arms of state violence, including both the U.S. military and many local police departments around the country.[24][25] A similar group that is making major headway today is the Neo-Fascists, who can be seen in Europe being legitimized and assimilating into mainstream political parties such as Greece's Golden Dawn, the UK's UK Independence Party, Austria's Freedom Party, and France's National Front. Like the Klan, these groups seek to maintain a race-based, social status quo that benefits their own group. In the polls, they seek to gain some influence on the use of state violence, whereas on the streets they adhere to group violence and domestic terrorism.

A difference worth noting between the old-school group violence of the Klan and the new-school group violence (or at least contributing to an atmosphere of violence) that neo-fascists encourage and enact is that the new-school violence has been legitimized in many ways by both the media and the public at-large. In other words, we now have large segments of the population who are openly defending the neo-fascists through legitimizing means.

Back in the heyday of the Klan, there was violence, yet no one defended it under the banner of free speech or attempted to legitimize it through mainstream channels. It was certainly supported by mainstream power structures, and even gained steam through the insidious white supremacy which characterized American culture, but it wasn't openly defended. The KKK often carried out its operations in a clandestine manner, attacking and terrorizing at night, and wearing hoods to maintain anonymity. And many black people actively took up arms to defend themselves against it. [26][27] Today, the situation has been turned on its head, with many people arguing that fascists have the right to free speech and that they should be protected.

An example of this changing paradigm regarding right-wing extremism and group violence could be seen after a recent fight between Neo-Nazis and antifascists in Sacramento, California in late June 2016.[28] The incident brought out many defenders. Sacramento police chief Sam Somers stated that "Regardless of the message, it's the skinheads' First Amendment right to free speech." [29] Debra J. Saunders, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in an article that "the bullies who were protesting against fascists seemed to have a lot in common with fascists - they're also thuggish and simpleminded" and that "An informal army of anarchists uses violence to muzzle unwanted speech."[30] The Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that they agreed with Antifa Sacramento that racism shouldn't be tolerated, but "What we disagree with is the idea that skinheads and neo-Nazis, or anyone else with a wrongheaded view, shouldn't have a 1st Amendment right to free speech." [31]

There are a number of problems with these statements. First, by defending fascists through arguments couched in free speech, such commentators are not only ignoring the underlying group-violence historically perpetrated by these groups, but also misusing the First Amendment itself. The First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." [32] Note, the Amendment says nothing about how other citizens may respond to free speech, nor does it say that groups of citizens can't abridge free speech; rather, it specifically applies to Congress and its prospective legislation. In other words, the Constitution of the United States applies strictly to the government and how it relates to its citizens, whereas the laws created by the government apply to the individuals and how they relate to the government.

Then there is the matter of ignoring power dynamics and creating a false equivalence. These responses create the illusion that each side is doing something negative and so neither side should be supported. This ignores the fact that one side (the neo-nazis and fascists) are assembling with the purpose of oppressing others, while the other side (the anti-fa and anarchists) are assembling to stop (violently, if necessary) the one side from oppressing. While the former adheres to violent means to oppress people based on the color of their skin, or their sexuality, or their Jewish heritage, the latter adheres to violent means to resist this oppression, or essentially oppress the oppressor. To equate their motivations is irresponsible and dangerous. This false equivalence that has been deployed by much of the media, both liberal and conservative, amounts to placing a murderous and whip-lashing slave owner in the same light as a rebelling slave who murders the slave owner to gain freedom. By using this hypothetical, it is easy to see that there is a fundamental difference between violence and counter-violence.

Another side effect of this public defense of the oppressor, and subsequent legitimization of group violence, is that it is used to increase state violence. Marcos Brenton, a writer at The Sacramento Bee, argued that "I would bet that future demonstrations will see a shared command center between the CHP and Sac PD instead of what we saw Sunday: CHP officers overwhelmed by warring factions. […]Law enforcement wasn't ready this time, but they have to be next time. In a climate where life isn't valued, life will be lost."[33] This is an argument that is implicitly in favor of an increase in state violence from an already hyper-militarized police force. And, when used in this context, the deployment of state violence will almost always be directed at those who assemble to stop oppressive group violence, because arguments housed in free speech and false equivalencies erase any and all distinctions between violence and counter-violence.

This is where the connection between state and group violence often manifests itself. As mentioned before, there is a rather long history of the police and the KKK being connected: On April 2, 1947, seven black people in Hooker, GA were turned over "to a Klan flogging party for a proper sobering up" by Dade County Sheriff John M. Lynch. In Soperton, GA in 1948, "the sheriff did not bother to investigate when four men where flogged, while the sheriff of nearby Dodge County couldn't look into the incident"[34] due to his being busy baby-sitting.

There is also the famous case of the Freedom Riders, three Civil Rights activists who were killed by the Klan, which amounted to three individuals being "arrested by a deputy sheriff and then released into the hands of Klansmen who had plotted their murders." [35]

This connection has yet to end. In 2014, in Florida, two police officers in the town of Fruitland Park were linked to the Klan [36] and in 2015 in Lake Arthur, LA, a detective was a found to be a Klan member and even attended one of the group's rallies.[37]

These connections allow for the state, and all the power and resources it wields, to be used directly to further the ends of white supremacy and empower fascistic, racist group violence in the streets. It also puts racial minorities from within the working class at greater risks since many of these bigoted individuals who carry out group violence on their own time are also allowed to carry out state violence while on the job. As agents of the state, they can kill, terrorize, harass, and imprison racial minorities with impunity vis-à-vis their roles as state enforcers and are further empowered by the public's and media's reverence of oppressive forms of assembly and "free speech," as well as the police officers who defend this.


More at: http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/viole ... -guns.html
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 24, 2016 9:49 pm

Alt History
How a self-published, racist novel changed white nationalism and inspired decades of violence


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Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh speaking with his attorneys in 1995.

J.M. BERGER SEP 16, 2016


Before there was an alt-right, there was The Turner Diaries.

First published nearly 40 years ago, the infamous dystopian novel depicts a fictional white nationalist revolution culminating in global genocide.

The events of the book open 25 years ago today—September 16, 1991, the date of the first entry in Earl Turner’s diary. The fictional diary describes a racist’s vision of a nightmare world, in which “The System”—African American enforcers led by Jewish politicians—attempt to confiscate all guns in the United States. A secretive organization known as The Order rises up to take back the country for white supremacists, eventually winning an apocalyptic insurgency and nuclear war, first taking over the country and later the world.

The Turner Diaries was created in the 1970s by William Luther Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance. Crudely written and wildly racist, The Turner Diaries has helped inspire dozens of armed robberies and more than 200 murders in the decades since its publication.


The Turner Diaries first made headlines when a violent white nationalist gang appropriated the name of The Order, following the tactical blueprint for terrorism in the book. Turner catapulted to national prominence when it was revealed to be a key inspiration for Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people using a truck bomb strikingly similar to one described in detail in the book. Since then, The Turner Diaries has inspired hate crimes and terrorism across the United States and in Europe in more than a dozen separate plots through the present day.

But beyond the violence committed by its readers, The Turner Diaries was also the seed of significant shift in white-nationalist ideology and recruitment, the effects of which are increasingly relevant today. In “The Turner Legacy,” a new paper for ICCT – The Hague, I examine the complicated history of racist dystopian propaganda and the reasons for Turner’s enduring impact.

White nationalism was the law of the land in the United States through most of the country’s history. In the wake of the Civil War, institutionalized white supremacy began to erode, a process that accelerated into the 20th Century. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, white nationalism began to develop complex ideologies, with a number of different strains emerging.

Pedestrian racism—simply disliking or discriminating against people based on race—still played a significant role in society, but as mainstream white nationalism became increasingly stigmatized, these ideological variants became subcultures in which violent extremism could fester.

The most important movements to emerge from this dynamic were neo-Nazism and Christian Identity. Neo-Nazism is heavily focused on Holocaust denial and symbolic identity markers, while Christian Identity is based on an elaborate religious justification that evolved out of a 19th century religious conspiracy theory called British Israelism, which claimed Anglo-Saxons were the lost tribe of Israel. Both movements trafficked heavily in anti-Semitism, but their animus was directed to all non-white people.

These movements, along with the Ku Klux Klan, became the face of white nationalism, resulting in further marginalization due to their flamboyant racism and increasing scrutiny from law enforcement, as their views and rhetoric became increasingly extreme.

It was within this context that William Luther Pierce split from the American Nazi Party and founded the National Alliance. Pierce, an atheist and scientist, was attuned to the fact that these ostentatious forms of white nationalism were deeply alienating to “normal people,” attracting recruits he described as “defective” and “crippled.” The National Alliance downplayed swastikas and goose-stepping, and instead focused on creating propaganda capable of sidestepping mainstream media gatekeepers appealing to broader audiences.

The Turner Diaries was one of his earliest efforts, and undoubtedly the most successful. Serialized in a National Alliance newsletter, and later published in collected form, The Turner Diaries is a dystopian novel about a United States where non-white minorities have disarmed and oppressed white Americans, leading to an armed white nationalist revolution. In sparse, simplistic prose, the apocalyptic plot follows a white supremacist guerrilla resistance movement known as The Order as it launches a series of terrorist attacks, eventually blossoming into a full-blown insurgency. The Order wins in the end, and embarks on a campaign of global genocides against non-whites.


Continues at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... sm/500039/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 05, 2016 10:32 pm

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2016 ... y-and.html

William Massey and the apocalypse

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This photograph was taken at Otahuhu library last month, when Paul Janman and I inaugurated the Toia Talks programme by showing cryptic film clips and photographs and talking about some of the odder people who have stalked the Great South Road. Our talk and the question and answer session that followed it have been filmed, and will be deposited in the public library system to puzzle future generations of schoolkids and scholars.

We spent a few minutes discussing British Israelism, the peculiar doctrine that won the support of thousands of Pakeha New Zealanders in the first half of the twentieth century. The British Israelites believed that Anglo-Saxons were the descendants of a lost tribe of Jews. Like their ancestors in the Old Testament, they were God's chosen people, and the British empire's anabolic growth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a sign of their special mission. The enemies of the Anglo-Saxons were satanic, and were doomed, like the fallen angel himself, to defeat when Christ returned to the earth and reigned over a global British empire.

The faith healer and preacher AH Dallimore, who performed before writhing and screaming audiences at the Auckland Town Hall in the 1930s, raised a British Israelite church in Otahuhu at the end of the decade. The building was given the same dimensions as some of the inner chambers of the Giza pyramids, because Dallimore, like a lot of British Israelites, believed that those structures had been designed by the ancient Jews, and contained hidden prophecies about the destiny of the British Empire.

In 1935 a British Israelite named Laurence Beavis passed through Otahuhu on the Great South Road, pushing a wheelbarrow. Beavis was on his way to Wellington, and had stowed a banjo as well as a tent in his barrow. He planned to sing to and solicit donations from the communities along the Great South Road, until he had enough money to build a ship to take him to the Middle East, where he was expecting to see the sort of apocalyptic events that Dallimore predicted in his sermons.

A few days after our presentation at Otahuhu, the most prominent New Zealand advocate of British Israelism suddenly became a talking point in newspapers and on social media. Steve Elers, a scholar at Massey University, suggested that the institution change its name, because of racist statements made by William Massey, who was Prime Minister of New Zealand between 1912 and 1925. Elers pointed out Massey's claim that 'Nature intended New Zealand as a white man's country, and it should be kept as such'.

Elers' argument was ridiculed by Alan Duff and by David Farrar, who both defended William Massey as 'a man of his time' who should not be judged by standards set in the twenty-first century. To remove Massey's name from public places would mean, Duff and Farrar warned, losing some of New Zealand's history.

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But Duff and Farrar seem, in their own way, to want to forget the past. When they suggest that virtually all Pakeha Kiwis thought like Massey a century ago they stereotype the inhabitants of the past, and ignore the diversity and tumult of early twentieth century New Zealand. The tens of thousands of workers who staged a general strike in 1913 and fought street battles with the mounted special constables they nicknamed 'Massey's cossacks' did not share a worldview with the Prime Minister. Nor did the thousands of New Zealanders that Massey sent to prison for refusing to fight in the First World War. Massey's super-imperialism, as well as his hostility to trade unionism, were regularly attacked by the Maoriland Worker, the paper of New Zealand's radical left.

Despite his political success, William Massey was in some ways an unusual inhabitant of fin de siecle New Zealand. He emigrated to this country from northern Ireland, where he had learned a sectarian contempt for Catholics and an almost parodic love of the British empire. He graduated to British Israelism from the Orange Order, which once had lodges throughout New Zealand.

Massey always remained a member of the Presbyterian church, but it is possible to argue his belief in the divine destiny of the British people, and the inferiority of non-Britons, influenced the decisions he made during his long tenure at the top of New Zealand politics. Massey interpreted the war against the Kaiser as a struggle against Satan, and was therefore unforgiving of men who would not fight. I have argued that his decision to allow untrained Legion of Frontiersmen to join the New Zealand army that occupied Samoa was influenced by the similarities between the beliefs of the Frontiersmen and British Israelite ideas.

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Paul Janman and I have been trying, without much success, to find some folk memories of AH Dallimore and the British Israelites. Our audience at Otahuhu was amazed that such a strange ideology as British Israelism ever existed, and incredulous that its adherents had raised a church locally. A few of us chuckled at the thought of what Dallimore, the prophet of a racially pure British empire, would make of contemporary Otahuhu's ethnic diversity.
It is very easy to laugh at a creed like British Israelism. It is also easy to ignore the parallels between British Israelite beliefs and ideas that are popular in our own time.

The notion that Britain is a divinely inspired nation may now seem quaint, but at the beginning of our century the idea that America had a special, religiously mandated destiny motivated the invasion of Iraq and was defended by powerful neoconservative thinkers. The American alt-right, with its belief in the inherent superiority of whites and its opposition to miscegnation, has unpleasant beliefs in common with the British Israelites. Some of Donald Trump's more excitable supporters have asserted that he is the instrument of a God anxious to restore America's greatness and domination over the globe.

Instead of dismissing William Massey as an exemplar of the thinking of a bygone and irrelevant era, as Alan Duff and David Farrar want to do, we should treat him as one of the carriers of a virus that still infects some of us today.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby Luther Blissett » Wed Oct 26, 2016 4:30 pm

Very interesting, disorienting, depressing, and depersonalizing investigative report from Mother Jones about the Three Percent United Patriots militia's activities on the southern border in Arizona. The whole thing is chilling, but certain passages are worth more of a read.

The recruits are told to imagine they are out in Arizona and have been captured by a drug cartel. They're put in a stall in a horse barn and subjected to sleep deprivation. "We keep 'em up. Keep 'em hungry," Showtime says. The mock detainees are cuffed to a table sloped at an angle and asked questions like how many people are in their group and what radio frequency they use. Their task is to resist giving any information. "We got a stress box," Showtime says. "We put 'em in there. Stick a cattle prod through the holes. One guy, he tried to turn around and we got him right between his legs in the ball sack."

Sometimes when Showtime interrogates people, he cuffs them to a metal chair. "I'll take battery charger cables and hook it up to the chair," he says. "The cord is broke, but they don't know that." Showtime will occasionally stand a habanero-covered dildo on the table in front of them and tell them to suck it. If they resist, he shoves it into their faces.

One time, he says, they tied a man upside-down on the tilt-table with his arms stretched over his head. Fifty Cal filled a syringe with hot sauce, dripped some hot sauce on the man's lips, and said, "This is going in your dick hole." Then Fifty Cal took a syringe full of water and dripped some on the man's penis. The man, thinking it was hot sauce, shouted, "I quit! I quit! I quit!"

A female member of 3UP was in the room, he says. "I fucking had her by the neck with a Taser. I told him if he didn't tell me something I was gonna light her up. He just looked at me, so I lit her up. That's not working, so I get a cattle prod. Lit her up. Hit her in the calf."


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... tion-bauer
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Oct 26, 2016 4:45 pm

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 24, 2016 9:59 pm

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Although nationalists and the far right resent the capitalist elite, they have historically formed alliances with them when possible and necessary. In turn, some capitalists view the far right as a necessary evil––and even, at times, an opportunity. Often a dance of mutual repulsion and attraction develops between the two, in which each alternately confronts and accommodates the other while attacking their chosen enemies. In the U.S, right wing movements target enemies of the nation, and their democratic rights, in the name of “real” citizens, sometimes understood as the white middle and working classes. But these attacks ultimately undermine the political and social conditions of the working class as whole, including those of white workers. In a roundabout manner, then, nationalist populism and the far right can fulfill the general tendency of capital to drive down the cost of labor power by creating an authoritarian society in the search for a solution to its crisis – a crisis that is today systematic, global, and not going away.


http://unityandstruggle.org/2016/11/15/ ... -of-trump/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 10:49 am

Rethinking the Lumpen: Gangsters and the Political Economy of Capitalism

by Gerald Horne

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In his classic Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx provides a vivid description of what he calls the lumpen proletariat: “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [procurers], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars” (1979, 149; see also Engels 1975 and Winston 1973, 75).

This class - or stratum - is not to be confused with the unemployed, or with the proletariat itself; indeed, this grouping tends to prey on the working class. They are the detritus of capitalism and, in some ways, form a mirror image of the parasitical and exploitative practices of the bourgeoisie itself.

Class analysis is a staple of the Marxist method, and volumes have been devoted to various classes, ranging from the bourgeoisie to the petit bourgeoisie to the working class to the peasantry. Herbert Aptheker’s work on slavery can also be seen in this context in that it focuses on the irreconcilable antagonism between one class, slaves, and another class, slaveholders.

The lumpen proletariat, however, has not received the kind of sustained attention it deserves in the analysis of capitalism. This is unfortunate, for the lumpen over time have come to play an increasingly outsized role in the evolution of exploitative societies. Indeed, as one examines the fate of the former Soviet Union, it is apparent that what has transpired over the past decade is the decline of working-class organization and ideology and the rise of the lumpen (Sterling 1994; Handelman 1995).

In the United States, the lumpen historically have played a large role. Just as England dumped lumpen elements in its colony of Australia, it did the same thing in Georgia and other colonies (Salgado 1982; Hughes 1987; Wood 1984; Galenson 1991; Asbury 1928). This served multiple purposes: it provided a safety valve for England itself, allowing the nation to rid itself of elements that might be disruptive and that were viewed as undesirable. Moreover, the kind of violence and subterfuge necessary to subdue indigenous peoples, whether they were in Australia or North America, was a particular specialty of “mountebanks,… tricksters,… brothel keepers” and the like, acting at the behest of powerful elites.

What needs to be considered more carefully is that over time not only did lumpen elements, particularly in the United States, develop powerful syndicates or organized crime families but some lumpen elements also, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, became part of the bourgeoisie itself and came to influence the already degraded culture of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, scholars and activists need to pay more attention to the role that organized crime has played in the evolution of the vaunted U.S. economy (Johnson 1995a; Browning and Gerassi 1980). Seeing imperialism itself as a form of organized crime tells us quite a bit, but not enough.

In the United States, the lumpen have come to dominate entire sectors of the economy and have attained particular influence within an industry that garners enormous profits while shaping consciousness - the entertainment industry. The images flowing from this industry have blanketed the planet and helped to inject the culture of U.S. imperialism into the four corners of the globe. Again, the import of this development needs to be considered more carefully, if we are ever to understand and subvert imperialism itself.

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[Quantrill’s Raiders, pro-slavery organization aligned with Confederacy during American Civil War]

Of all of the crimes perpetrated by colonialism and imperialism in Africa, one of the most dastardly has been the dumping of lumpen elements in colonized lands. In 1961, the Bureau of African Affairs in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, quoting Sir Cornwall Lewis, sadly reflected on the social costs of this practice: “The scum of England is poured into the colonies, briefless barristers, broken-down merchants, ruined debauchees, the offal of every calling and profession are crammed into colonial places.” Citing the author Mabel Jackson, the report continued, “Each year a shipload of human flotsam and jetsam is sent to Angola and Mozambique from Portugal. Beggars embittered by hardship, thieves, assassins, incorrigible soldiers and sailors, together with a sprinkling of political exiles are dumped into the colonies. She tells us that sometimes these men are called degradados - [and] are accompanied by their wives who are girls from orphanages or reformatory schools whom they marry at the moment of embarkation from Europe” (Voice of Africa 1961).

These declassed elements took quite quickly to the reigning philosophy of white supremacy, as this new racial status of “whiteness” rescued them from their declining class status (see, for example, Roediger 1991, Ignatiev 1995, and Saxton 1991). Over time they helped to introduce and fortify a lumpen culture that is bedeviling independent Africa to this day.

Lumpen elements also have played a key role in another phenomenon that has plagued Africa over the years: mercenaries. Of course, the deployment of European mercenaries was not unique to Africa. For years the Swiss developed a notorious reputation as suppliers of mercenary forces to various regimes in Europe; these regiments were heavily lumpen (McCormack 1993, 80; see also Langley and Schoonover 1995). The promiscuous use of mercenaries was a close cousin to the deployment of pirates, buccaneers, and soldiers of fortune, whose bloodthirsty escapades often were the basis of the primitive accumulation of capital itself. One scholar has observed that the concept of “plausible deniability,” which has served imperialism so well in episodes ranging from Watergate to the Iran-Contra scandal, was actually invented by rulers in the early seventeenth century as a spur to mercenarism and piracy: thus, if these bandits obtained the necessary booty - fine - and if they did not or were apprehended, then responsibility for their activity could be denied (Thomson 1994; Tilly 1990).

These freebooters were a useful adjunct to U.S. foreign policy, as this young nation in the nineteenth century sought to seize territory throughout the hemisphere and beyond and to circumvent the ban on the slave trade (Brown 1980; Smith 1978; Krasner 1978). When the Civil War began, many of these forces joined with the Confederacy and terrorized entire states, particularly Kansas. A noteworthy band of thugs, Quantrill’s Raiders, spawned the notorious outlaws Jesse and Frank James, Cole Younger, and a generation of cutthroats, providing a vivid example of the connections between the lumpen, racism, and war (Schultz 1996).

Nevertheless, the impact of what the Portuguese call the degradados has been most dramatic in the continent that Western Europe has specialized in degrading - Africa. The dumping of these forces in Africa continues to resonate, even though European colonialism has been uprooted. For example, in South Africa, the apartheid authorities concentrated more on fighting political dissent than crime. As a result, independent South Africa is faced with a staggering crime problem, fueled by what one newspaper there has called “state sponsored gangs who used government patronage to build criminal business empires.” In the province of Mpumulanga they are called “businessmen’s gangs” and were known to have worked with the Zulu chauvinist Inkatha Freedom Party; one gang was “run by five heavyweight black businessmen” (Weekly Mail and Guardian, 6–12 September 1996). An estimated 278 organized crime syndicates in South Africa are involved in drug-dealing, car-jacking, and worse (Zimbabwe Herald, 15 February 1996). Then there are the firms of mercenaries, such as Executive Outcomes, that sell their services to governments in exchange for diamond concessions (Horne 1995a).

Of course, the lumpen are far from being unique to Africa. In Japan, the highly influential Yakuza - gangsters known for their tattooed bodies and amputated fingers - are quite close to certain financial elites. They pioneered in running movie houses, strip shows, prostitution, and gambling (Saga 1991, 195). In China, before the advent of Communist Party rule, the nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek collaborated with racketeers like Du Yuesheng of the notorious Green Gang; these thugs acted as labor bosses and plant managers and helped the nationalists break workers’ power in 1927 (Wakeman 1994; see also Emsley and Knafla 1996).

Even today, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review (1 May 1997), it is estimated conservatively that about 10 percent of the elected officials in the legislature and National Assembly of Taiwan had gang affiliations. Taiwan’s most well known gang-affiliated politician, Luo Fu-tsu, “has identified himself as the ‘spiritual leader’ of one of Taiwan’s largest gangs, the Heavenly Way Alliance.” He is also “chairman of the legislature’s judiciary committee,” which formulates the basic laws of this rebel province of China.

Ascertaining the influence of this pervasive lumpen culture on the political culture of China - including the culture of the Communist Party - is a task worthy of consideration. In any event, these racketeers flourish during times of unrest and war, when normal channels of production are disrupted, as was the case, for example, in London during World War II (Murphy 1993, 81).

It is clear that the lumpen have not always had an entirely baneful impact. The role of “social bandits” is well known (Perez 1989; Schwartz 1989). Just as one distinguishes between big and small peasants and between workers who make $1 million a year and those who earn less than $10,000, one must make distinctions among various types of lumpen in their sociopolitical impact and potential. Still, as Alisse Waterston has pointed out, what must be carefully scrutinized is the rampant notion that gangsters represent some sort of culture of resistance to capitalism. There may be a scintilla of evidence imbedded in this idea but often ignored is the salient point that gangsters in the United States most notably have been highly accommodating to larger cultural norms and to the requisites of social production. Ultimately their defiance is limited to symbolic suggestion and often remains on the level of appearance. Indeed, the experience of most gangsters in this nation suggests that their goals are congruent with and help to sustain the goals of capitalism itself. The heralding of the alleged resistance represented by gangsters obscures their true role in social reproduction, subverts actual resistance, and helps to suppress alternatives - particularly those of the working-class variety (Waterston 1994).

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[Herbert Hunke]


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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 30, 2016 11:54 am

Murakami Ichiro and Ultra-Nationalist Intimidation in Japan

David McNeill

January 14, 2004
Volume 2 | Issue 1 | Number 0



On December 19, 2003, Japanese police arrested 54-year-old rightist Murakami Ichiro, along with five accomplices, charging them with violating the Firearms and Swords Control Law.

Murakami is accused of leading a terror campaign, under the banner of the Kenkoku Giyugun (Nation-Building Volunteer Corps), and the Kokuzoku Seibatsutai, (Volunteer Corps to Punish Traitors), which conducted 23 shooting, arson and bomb attacks on targets across Japan over a one-year period beginning in November 2002.

The targets included the offices of the Hiroshima Teachers Union, the facilities of the religious cult Aleph (formerly known as Aum Shinrikyo) in Tokyo and Osaka, the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryun), and in the most high-profile attack, the home of Foreign Ministry official Tanaka Hitoshi, the man widely held responsible for a short-lived 2002 thaw in Tokyo-Pyongyang relations.

Typically, Murakami's arrest was followed by a quick bout of contrition and a string of confessional pronouncements leaked to the media, which were then used to scrutinize his motives. A businessman who dabbled in sword collecting, Murakami was "enraged" after watching TV footage of Japanese abductees returning home from North Korea in October 2002. He was "a Japanese national with a heart" who felt that he "couldn't let North Korea get away with" the abductions, quoted the Asahi newspaper.1

Thus couched, and divorced from any historical analysis of Japanese ultra-right activities, Murakami's attacks could be seen as the understandable if extreme manifestation of widespread popular anger against Pyongyang, and an isolated, atypical phenomenon. An alternative analysis, however, might place Murakami's brief flurry within the context of a long campaign of violence and intimidation by ultra-nationalists against the enemies of "pure" Japan, one with deep structural roots in the Japanese political landscape and an established modus operandi.

Friends in High Places

Those wishing to understand these historical roots and the relationship between the ultra-right, their bedfellows in organized crime, and the political establishment, are advised to re-read Alec Dubro and David E. Kaplan's recently re-released Yakuza, a seminal work that purports to uncover how a "criminal enterprise can infect the very heart of modern capitalism," no idle boast.1 The book makes clear that Murakami Ichiro's political forefathers rose from the ashes of the Second World War, thanks to sponsorship from powerful mainstream figures such as Kimura Tokutaro, minister of justice under Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. That the nation's highest-ranking law official operating, it will be remembered, under the leadership of the U.S. occupation authorities, saw fit to unshackle (in the interests of fighting communism) organized crime and the same ultra-nationalist forces that had helped propel Japan to disaster in 1931-1945, should be some indication of how "isolated" the Japanese ultra-right has been from that time forward.

Of course, links from the top of the political tree to the criminal underworld is not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, as those familiar with the Italian and even U.S. cases are aware. The attempts by U.S. spooks, operating under the Kennedy administration, to enlist the help of the mafia and other criminal elements to assassinate Fidel Castro show that even the most supposedly liberal political figures lose their political scruples when confronted with an enemy they considerer worthy or threatening enough.3

But the Japanese underworld can boast links to those in power second to none. While observers might plausibly argue that the Kennedy/Mafia affair was a brief, isolated fling, they could hardly do so in Japan. From Kimura and Yoshida, through to Kishi Nobusuke, prime minister from 1957-1960 and grandfather of current LDP Secretary General Abe Shinzo, to ex-Prime Minster Mori Yoshiro, the list of establishment politicians who have huddled with nationalists and gangsters is long and undistinguished.4

A senior member of Japan's No.3 organized crime group, the Sumiyoshi-Kai, recently told me that trying to compare the Japanese underground with the U.S. mafia was completely mistaken. "Most Japanese politicians know who we are and what we do, and there are many who call on us when they need help," said Agata Mitsunori. "They might try to control us if we get too big for our boots, but they won't destroy us. We're too useful."


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