False Front: The Left and the “Anti-Imperialist” Right

[American Dream]

Standing with Syrians: An Open Letter to an Anti-Imperialist

Eva is a real person who I have known since 2007, as described in this article. But in this text Eva also stands for many other people, whether outspoken or silent supporters of the Syrian regime and its allies. I will not re-post her photo here. In a world flooded with images, it is important to maintain our ability to imagine a moment.

Eva,

For the past couple of years I have meant to write you, but I simply could not find the words. Then, on December 13 an old post of yours came up on my Facebook feed with a photo of you next to a smiling Syrian military officer in Aleppo.

I remember when years ago you risked your life for the people of Gaza, when you risked your life for others, joining ambulance drivers to the most dangerous areas in the hope that the Israeli military machine might spare the lives of civilians because a white Canadian activist accompanied them. You stood on the side of the oppressed. I never lived through the brutal Israeli military assaults on Gaza that started shortly after I lived there. I don’t think I would have had the courage to do what you did; for this I respect you deeply. During those weeks you certainly saved countless innocent lives when the far more powerful Israeli military relentlessly ravaged the Palestinian population, at times snuffing out the souls of entire families hiding in their homes because they had nowhere else to flee, or gassing the internally displaced in UN shelters. Later you wrote the stories of the people you met, as so often is said about the privileged like you and me, “to give a voice the voiceless.”

I am a film-maker, I work with images. The way I read it, the photo you posted from Aleppo was intended to display the kindness of the Syrian army and more importantly to prove that you, as in Gaza, were there in Aleppo as a witness to what was happening--as noted in the caption, on November 5, “prior to full liberation.” More on this image later.

After you left the Gaza Strip, you made your way to Syria. There your thinking took a drastic turn, you chose the side of the victor. You ignored the most vital factor of the reality in Syria: large sections of the Syrian population had chosen to rise up, as in Egypt, Tunis, Bahrain and elsewhere in the region, for freedom and dignity, much as Palestinians have since the colonization of their land against their occupier. Yet, unlike the Palestinians who face a US-backed Zionist occupation of their land, Syrians were facing a Russian-Iranian backed dictator. The danger of a black-and-white way of thinking has made you fall into a trap of letting ideology alone determine your political stance. Shaped by cold war politics, of First-World guilt, due to US imperial domination, you bought into a narrative, like a large section of the left in the West and East, that the US is always the greatest criminal and therefore one must defend the other side.

By no means do I support the US in their role in the bloodshed and turmoil of the past years in Syria. But that certainly does not lead me to support Russia and its ally Bashar Al-Assad. The greater power’s position on a conflict alone cannot determine whose cause is just. We must listen to the people. We need to address this paradigm of the “people”, who are “Syrians”? For it is precisely here that you have allowed ideology to take priority over your sense of justice, and this is what surprises me most about you, Eva. But for a moment, let us take a step back, I will speak about the Egyptian revolution, which I lived through and participated in, not to make a one-to-one comparison but to put this conversation into a much-needed context.

In Egypt, in all stages prior to, during, and after the revolutionary period of 2011-2013, a majority of people backed the status quo. They would say, “Mubarak wasn’t a good president but at least he brought stability,” “Better Mubarak than whom we don’t know.” Many Egyptians did not believe reports of torture at the hands of the police and military, they claimed images of military violence against the revolution’s protests were photoshopped, they too claimed we were traitors, funded by the West, merely because we opposed “our glorious military.” In various phases of the revolution, our biggest threats were not the secret police’s wide net of informants and agents but “honorable citizens” who believed they were serving their fatherland by handing us over to the police, neighbors reporting on neighbors, family members on family members. Patriotism, after all, sinks deep into the psyche. Many Egyptians are still in prisons today or have faced death due to these “honorable citizens.” I am certain that some of our accusers didn’t truly believe what they were saying but held such opinions because they so desperately wanted to be able to believe in a government that would respect and protect them, a government that would do what was best for the nation. We know from experience while protesting, imprisoned in police stations, in custody of the state security, or before the courts of justice that in Egypt, sadly, today as before the revolution, the “elected” leaders’ care only for the longevity of their power, not the population they “represent.”

I am certain that there are countless Syrians in a similar predicament - especially in regime-held areas - who are afraid to say what they truly believe because they do not have the luxury of that choice. Some believe the regime because their experience of the past years is so much worse than what they lived before it; others, out of fear of the unknown, prefer the evil of the Assad regime to evils they don’t know. Yet, most importantly, there are millions who oppose this regime, and they have risked their lives for the sake of a better future for generations to come. But to them you do not listen, because--as you explained to me in one of our last exchange of messages in the summer of 2014--“The ones who stayed in Syria are largely those who don't support this ‘revolution’ and the ones who left, vice versa.” When I replied to your claims by talking about the Syrians I know who had come to visit Cairo from Syria in 2011, all of whom went back, you ended that exchange abruptly, saying, “I am not going to waste a whole lot of time. However, if you were to go to Syria and talk with average Syrians, you'd find a different picture.” That is the last time I had a political exchange with you, because you made clear to me that you did not even consider my opinions because I had to speak to Syrians “in Syria” to have a valid opinion. In line with such an argument, you wrote off everyone who had left Syria as a lying idealist. You dismissed the opinion of a majority of the five million political refugees, Eva, on the basis of your “on the ground reporting” in the bosom of the offices of a murderous government officials. While ushered through the corridors of the Syrian regime, you wrote off the views and opinions of Syrians threatened with arrest, torture, or death for living in the areas the regime had withdrawn from and was bombing.

I wonder what would have happened if the Egyptian revolution had turned violent to the extent Syria has, if the Egyptian military junta had not sacrificed Mubarak for the sake of the longevity of the regime itself, and if Russia had come to the aid of the Egyptian regime, while the US opposed it. Would you have been “reporting” on the Egyptian revolution, would you have turned me and Egypt’s revolutionaries into US-backed, jihadist-loving, Gulf funded terrorists? The only journalists who did that in Egypt were part of the Egyptian propaganda establishment. The question is valid because Bashar al-Assad whom you claim to be a “legitimately elected president” holds a very similar track record to Mubarak and Sisi. Egypt and Syria’s military regimes were founded in similar times in the 1950s and 60s, were both backed by the USSR, which helped each establish an effective police state with competing reputations for the torture apparatuses that they run. The comparison between Syria and Egypt is valid because, had the Egyptian revolution gone the way of Syria’s, Egypt’s revolutionaries would also have found themselves fighting on the same side as many Islamists.

Despite your years among those opposing oppression in this region, you have not learned realpolitik--that you cannot always choose those you fight alongside. Despite the Qatar-funded, Islamist agenda of Hamas, you defended them when they opposed the Western-armed and backed Israeli occupation and murder of Palestinians. I remember how adamant the Syrian activists visiting Cairo from Syria in 2011 were to clarify that their struggle was non-violent. This was a distinction we never made in Egypt and in retrospect I can see why they did that as at that point: the Syrian and Egyptian scenarios differed vastly. The Syrian uprising quickly became militarized, a playing field for global interests, US and Russian but also Iranian and Turkish, Saudi, and Gulfi. Like in Egypt, we know that soon after the uprising began the Assad regime released fundamentalists from prisons en masse - thus supporting the growth of Islamist forces in an attempt to undermine the civilian-run revolution. Despite this clear risk of militarization, Syrian activists rose up against a military regime that, much like in Egypt, has robbed the nation, exploited the poor on behalf of its inner circle, and for years locked up and tortured its opposition - including Palestinians in Tel al-Zaatar in ’76 and in Yarmouk camp today. Once people have risked everything for revolution there is no turning back, even if you find yourself battling side by side with militias you do not identify with, you do not support, trust, or even want to exist. In a situation of war you do no have the privilege of choosing those who fight your enemy. You didn’t always in Gaza in 2009 and Syrians didn’t in 2012 as the foreign-backed militias gained strength and began to attack and weaken their powerful initiatives of self-organization in areas Assad had withdrawn from all over the country. You are right in claiming that these so-called “moderate,” often US-funded, often al-Qaida-affiliated Islamists are not to be cheered; they have pillaged, they have stockpiled food while civilians go hungry, they have threatened, arrested, and killed their critics. But you do not note that the Syrian regime and its allies strategically prioritize targeting less-Islamist dominated territories (like Eastern Aleppo) before Raqqa. For the counter-revolution the civilian revolution poses the bigger threat and must be wiped out first.

Why have you never report about the battles of Syrian revolutionaries against the Islamist forces amongst them? One of the reasons so many of the non-militant revolutionary initiatives were short-lived is because they fought a battle on two fronts, against the regime and against militant Islamist groups. Many of those who have stopped fighting in either armed or non-armed struggle, and left Syria due to the nature of these militias, are precisely those you accuse of being Western-backed activists. And yet you ignore the fact that despite the terrible rise in power of the Islamists there are still Syrian revolutionaries who have remained, some who until recently took the risk to protest openly the presence of the Islamists in their midst. In Ma’arat Numan, in the countryside of Idlib, the biggest remaining opposition area, locals protested for 214 days straight against the presence of the Qaida-affiliated Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly Nusra Front) as well as the policies of Assad December 4th was only the last time that the Assad/Russian bombs targeted their market, killing dozens. In Ma’arat Numan they protest, elsewhere civilian activists have paid with their lives for doing so.

Why have you never reported on the horrors of Assad’s torture chambers, Eva? Because a majority of Syrians anyone will meet today have themselves passed or know of someone who since the start of the revolution has passed through these torture dens. If one denies the arrest and disappearance of hundreds of thousands, and the structural torture in Assad’s prisons, then there was no reason for a revolt to begin with. You are claiming that millions of Syrians are merely imagining the risk of death for the sake of a political opinion.

Finally, how can you simply neglect to report the killing spree Assad and his allies have been on since the start of the uprising?

In response to these questions, you claim that the mainstream media are lying to us. I am no fan of commercial media outlets, but there are also plenty of non-mainstream media outlets - like the ones where you publish- and countless Syrian journalists and citizen journalists reporting “on the ground.” You are claiming that every journalist - except for a select few who propagate the Assad regime’s information - are liars. I have lived under military dictatorship in Egypt my entire life, but you are telling me to trust no one but the military dictator.

Finally, I want to return to the issue of images. In recent times we have seen more and more photoshopping of images, I am certain it happens on all sides, propaganda is nothing new. We live in an era in which our screens are infiltrated with images, we can no longer base our decisions solely on the images produced by your hated mainstream media nor by the Assad regime’s propaganda. In December at the height of the siege and bombing campaign on Eastern Aleppo we did not see so many images. I wonder, is it surprising that there are no journalists embedded with the Iranian militias? Or that there are no videographers to document retribution killings at the checkpoints? But more importantly, why must more images be produced - of blood, of human remains, of bombed homes - when the world has been silent about the atrocities in Syria all these years? Finally, why must we see images in order to believe?

In a world gone mad, literally drunk on images, we must have a radical capacity to question the images we choose to form our worldview. This radical criticism entails making decisions based on the structural logic of the forces involved. For six years the regime and its allies have been arresting, torturing, and bombing hospitals and schools and residential areas, structurally starving besieged communities as retribution against a population that stood up for itself and opposed this brutality. The Assad regime and its greater allies - Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah - and shadowy friends - China, Israel, and recently Egypt - as well as the powers with their own non-Assad-aligned interest in Syria - the USA, Saudi Arabia, Europe, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Gulf states, and the UN - all stand accused in the demolition of the life of Syrians. If you turn away for a moment from the burning frontlines, you will see that each of these sees their own goldmine in Syria - regional demographics through population re-settlement, control over natural resources or trade interests or sectarian geopolitics. No longer is there only one single imperialism to oppose. We must reclaim the terminology of “anti-imperialism,” using it to assess any forces that practice a military strategy based on imperial logic. All of these powers are far from having an interest in human beings. And finally, as people who criticize and oppose the agendas of these forces, we must realize that choosing only one side to stand against makes possible a strategy of divide and conquer. You and I, Eva, once stood on the same side of the wall; today we stand opposing each other. This is one of the greatest successes of the powers involved in this game: to pit not only Syrians against Syrians, but Palestinians against Palestinians, protesters against protesters.

Today I stand with the besieged citizens of Idlib and the small but powerful spirit of the Syrian revolution still existent in corners all over Syria, not next to a smiling army officer.

[American Dream]

https://libcom.org/blog/syrian-conflict ... e-23022018

The Syrian conflict is an indictment of the nation-state system: The Assad Regime


Members of the US Peace Council meeting with Assad

As the Syrian conflict drags on, the world watches with horror as all involved countries ruthlessly pursue their own interests at the expense of the Syrian people. This first post will focus on the Assad regime.

There's no better way to stamp out faith in the supposed benevolence of the world's nation-states than by learning about the Syrian conflict. The sheer level of cynicism by the major players in the conflict is simply staggering, enough to give even the most jaded onlookers pause. And what the conflict reveals, above all else, is that all sides in the world's larger conflicts between nations are morally bankrupt. The bottom line is that there are no good guys. Every country involved has become party to unspeakable atrocities. In all, the conflict makes a great case for why the nation-state system cannot work.

Of all the “bad guys” in Syria, nobody has received more coverage than Syria's ruler, Bashar al-Assad. To many on the left, the media's hand wringing about Assad's atrocities is just so much grating hypocrisy. Assad's crimes have not been dissimilar to the crimes of close US allies, most notably Saudi Arabia, whose crimes go almost totally unmentioned in the mainstream media. Unfortunately, there are those so embittered by this hypocrisy that they now view Assad as a force for good in the Syrian conflict. The reality is, that while the media's denunciations of Assad are hypocritical, Assad is the head of a government, and like any government whose existence is threatened—and the balance of forces allows them to— does not hesitate to resort to the most hideous forms of violence in order to maintain power.

For starters, what revisionist leftists seem to forget is that far from being a scion of the Ba'athist party's supposed commitment to “Arab-Socialism”, Assad implemented neo-liberal reforms soon after taking power in 2000. Adhering to reforms suggested by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Assad sold off government assets, deregulated the banking industry, and lowered tariffs on imported goods. Privatized government services like telecommunications were bought at bargain prices by Ba'ath party insiders who abused their new monopolies. Goods from Turkey soon flooded the unprotected market exacerbating unemployment. As unemployment soared, a severe drought compounded economic problems.1

The spark that lit the fire in Syria occurred in March 2011, at the height of the so-called “Arab Spring” when police arrested teenagers in the southern, largely Sunni, city of Daraa for writing anti-government graffiti on the walls of a school. Typical for the behavior of the Syrian regime, the teenagers were tortured. The treatment of one of the teenagers, Yacoub, gives an insight into the brutality of the regime. “Over the course of weeks, the police in Daraa completely brutalized Yacoub. They forced him to sleep naked on a freezing wet mattress, they strung him up on the wall and left him in stress positions for hours, and they electrocuted him with metal prods.” The torture was routine for such a crime, however, this time the Syrian police had gone too far.

Anger in Deraa at the torture of the teenagers spilled over, and demonstrators took to the streets to denounce the regime. Police responded with tear gas and sniper fire, but the anger could not be contained, and protests soon spread throughout the country. Police responded with more gunfire, and then gunfire at the funerals of those killed during the protests, and then still more gunfire at the funerals for those killed at the funerals. Protesters not killed faced arrest, torture, and execution.

Despite the heinous violence, many Syrians continued to back Assad. Supporters ranged from business elites to working class people belonging to non-Sunni religious and ethnic groups who believed government propaganda that the opposition was dominated by Sunni extremist organizations.2 With the help of Iran, these supporters would be organized into militias modeled on the Iranian Basij. Nicknamed “shabiha” (mafia) by Syrians and referred to as “popular committees” by the Syrian regime, these militias would come to be responsible for some of the worst violence in the early months of the uprising.3

By the summer of 2011, peaceful protest had begun morphing into armed uprising. Though much of the initial uprising was secular in nature, tensions between the country's Sunnis and other ethnic and religious groupings were rapidly deteriorating. It's important to note that the Alawite of Shia Islam is represented by the Syrian ruling class well out of proportion to the number of Alawites living in Syria. Though Alawites made up just around 7-13% of the pre-war population, they held, and continue to hold, many of the top positions in the government, and Assad's family is itself Alawite. In comparison, Sunni make up 70% of the population and are underrepresented in government. From the beginning of the uprising, Assad played up sectarian fears in order to rally the support of the Alawite community. And indeed there can be no denying that the success of the uprising would materially be bad news to the country's Alawites. As Patrick Cockburn noted at the time, “Even supposing an anti-sectarian opposition, democracy in Syria means a loss of power for the Alawites and their allies and a gain for the Sunni”. 4

By early 2012, Cockburn reports Sunni and Alawite death squads operating the city of Homs, with the Syrian army fueling tensions by indiscriminately shelling Sunni neighborhoods. Suicide bombers, presumably trained by what we now call Islamic State, began being used as weapons against Syrian security forces. 5

As Sunni areas became harder to control, the Syrian government responded with increasing sectarian violence. In May 2012, after vicious artillery bombardment, shabiha were sent into the majority Sunni town of Houla, on the outskirts of Homs where they massacred 108 people, including 49 children.6 As Sunnis grew increasingly resentful of Syria's ethnic and religious minorities, the coalition of armed secular groups, known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), began to lose popular support as its militias turned to criminality and violent struggles for influence within the FSA. By the end of 2012, a host of jihadi groups who to varying degrees viewed all non-Sunni as heretics, began to dominate the uprising.

Conclusion
When faced with a threat to its authority, the Syrian government used extreme violence to quell protests. Unfortunately, as peaceful protest turned to armed rebellion, reactionary sectarian groups came to dominate the opposition. Revisionists on both sides who overlook these facts are simply fooling themselves into thinking that either the Assad regime, or jihadi groups are a force for good in Syria. In future posts I hope to further explore how the the Syrian conflict can be viewed as an indictment of the nation-state system.

[American Dream]

http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/sy ... olidarity/

Syria and the Problem of Left Solidarity

by Donya Alinejad & Saskia Baas




Since January, Syria has seen escalations in violence and civilian casualties in two conflict areas. Afrin, the Kurdish-held enclave along the Turkish border, has seen increased fighting since the Turkish military entered the area by force on January 19th this year. To date, the fighting has left an estimated 112 civilians dead. Meanwhile, in Eastern Ghouta, only a few hours’ drive away from Afrin, the Syrian military is finishing off final pockets of resistance through a brutal extermination campaign in which civilians are systematically targeted. Decisively reinforced by Russian air and Iranian ground forces, the bloodshed is reminiscent of the assault on Aleppo just over a year ago, during which more than 30,000 Syrians were killed. The civilian death toll in Eastern Ghouta has risen to include 1,070 civilians over the past three months.

As the tragedy in Afrin develops, North American and European leftist platforms have been disseminating calls by Kurdish armed groups for solidarity with victims of military violence in Syria’s northern district of Afrin. Such solidarity is much needed and deserved, but so is international solidarity with civilians elsewhere in Syria. Instead, the Western Left has largely remained silent in the face of the unimpeded massacre in Eastern Ghouta. The striking hypocrisy forces us to re-examine how our concept of international solidarity applies to the unarmed victims of this war.




The problem with selective solidarity

Western observers across the political spectrum have long struggled to grasp the Syrian conflict’s complicated history and relate to the country’s shifting revolutionary landscape. The response by mainstream liberals in the U.K. and U.S. has been the cynical use of moments of public outrage over Assad’s crimes for the perusal of the American geo-political goal of limiting Russian and Iranian regional control. In opposition to this, a significant part of the Western Left has eschewed all criticism of Syrian, Iranian, and Russian leadership in the name of resisting U.S. empire. This has drawn them into elaborate media campaigns to erase any signs of the revolution against Assad. We witness the concerning effects of this among Western Leftist activists, whose selective engagement with the crises in Syria result in almost exclusive expressions of solidarity with the Kurdish revolutionary movement.

Recent events have made the painful limitations of this selective approach particularly apparent. As we take up the rightful defense of Afrin against the Turkish military’s assault on Syrian Kurds, the mass slaughter of civilians simultaneously occurs in other parts of Syria. The situation in Afrin is urgent, but in Idlib and Ghouta it has been urgent for years.

Before the outbreak of revolution in Syria, the Assad regime had cracked down on Kurdish protests, notably in Al Qamishli in 2004 and 2005, where extreme military force and mass arrests were used. And forty years of Baathist rule made consistent attempts to erode Kurdish identity through Arabization policies, to the point where the mere act of giving a child a Kurdish name would create risks of arrests and enforced disappearances.

But when popular protests spread across Syria during 2011, they re-activated revolutionary ideals both in Kurdish areas and areas with primarily Sunni-Arab populations. This time, the Syrian regime’s response to these revolutions was two-pronged: on the one hand Arab calls for reforms were quelled with brutal violence; on the other hand the Kurdish revolution was handled through co-optation. In this way, Assad pre-empted an Arab-Kurdish uprising that would threaten the regime’s control, marking a tactical shift from the excessive violence that Kurdish uprisings had been met with in the past.

The contrast between this prior heavy-handed oppression and the relative space that the “Democratic Federation of Northern Syria” (or “Rojava”) has more recently been granted must be understood as part of Assad’s efforts to keep Kurdish armed resistance against his regime pacified, and isolate the Kurdish struggle from other movements within Syria. Far from being a break with the previous anti-Kurdish bigotry, this signals a continuation of Assad’s long-running approach of maintaining power by pragmatically stoking sectarianism along ethnic and religious lines.

In earlier years of the revolution, Arab-Kurdish alliances were built in nascent forms. But during the armed conflict in northern Syria more recently, Turkey succeeded in rallying Arab opposition forces, including the Free Syrian Army (FSA), to fight the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This was despite both groups having resisted Daesh together before this turning point in 2016. In addition to Turkish involvement, various other parts of the armed rebellion continue to be kept afloat through direct support from certain Western powers and Gulf States. The increased dependence on foreign military support has exacerbated both the fragmentation of these groups and their divergence from the ideals and tactics of the pro-democratic, non-sectarian demonstrations that took place in 2011. It also continues to undermine the local initiatives that emerge, particularly in areas not under Assad or Daesh control.

Despite shared grievances against the Assad regime and a common interest in rising up against it, Kurdish and Arab revolutionary movements have been split by domestic and foreign state influences. To any supporter of anti-dictatorial popular movements, this situation must register as tragic. For those of us in Europe and North America interested in building left wing solidarity that engages with Syrian revolutionary struggles, the task is to do justice to this history. This means acknowledging the shared origins and destinies of Syria’s multiple revolutions. Not least because the self-determination of the Kurdish people in Syria will not be guaranteed by any precarious, war-time alignment, but is inherently tied up in the dynamics of the Syrian people’s revolution. Our solidarity must therefore be principled, avoiding preferential support that indirectly bolsters authoritarian divide-and-conquer tactics, one of the hallmarks of counter-revolutionary regimes in the region, especially Assad’s.



Facing ourselves

Crude notions of anti-imperialism have for too long yielded dubious analyses of Syria and the Middle East. The contribution of the Left has often been dominated by an unsophisticated ‘campism’ wherein the enemy of our enemy should not be criticized. This has taken startling and contradictory forms: a recent petition calls for the leaders of Russia, Iran, and the U.S. to “ensure that the sovereignty of Syrian borders is not breached by Turkey.” The petition was signed by, among others, Noam Chomsky, Michael Hardt and David Graeber. Staggeringly, the petition appeals to the key perpetrators of war crimes in Syria for help in the protection of Afrin.

There are a multitude of ways we might explain such a turn, among them a Euro/American-centrism wherein the Left’s positions simply mirror and are dictated by those of their liberal opponents, the Western left’s long-running ideological links to the PKK, Left sectarianism, refusal to update expired Cold War categories, incidental ignorance and laziness, and the relative sophistication of the YPG/J’s communication networks and media branding with Western audiences. We end up engaging with Syria as no more than a distant war in which our task as the Left is merely to discuss and select the correct armed faction to support. But this filters out the less spectacular but equally courageous initiatives for self-organization still going on in various parts of the country and among its refugee diaspora; compelling cases such as the recent women’s campaign against forced disappearances. In ignoring these, we surrender our key principles of upholding the value of human lives in the face of militarism, state interests, and divisive borders.

Our internationalism must cultivate a willingness to grasp the complexity of Syrian polity, society, and culture as it unfolds in everyday life under the current circumstances of extraordinary duress. Rather than a lapse into apolitical humanitarianism, defending the lives of those brutalized by violence is based on an international solidarity that registers survival in this context as struggle. Similarly, our welcoming and hospitality to those who fled Syria in recent years must not smother them into politically pacified victimhood. We must seek out and listen to what a variety of Leftist Syrian political activists and intellectuals have to say about Syria. Their migration experiences and diasporic self-organization are part of the story of the Syrian revolution, an inexhaustibly rich resource for understanding and learning from the realities of this important contemporary struggle. It is a struggle that lives on in many of them and contains intimate knowledge of the notions of racial and ethnic discrimination, prison state, political disenfranchisement, and neoliberal policies we also fight against. The vast contextual differences make articulating the common ground all the more profound.

In short, let us stop approaching Syria in the way a colonial power approaches its subject’s civil war, calculating which intervention(s) of force to back and then vehemently spreading the chosen party’s war propaganda. Let us focus, instead, on building a socialism that modestly but consistently puts into practice the radical internationalist idea that we inhabit the same world as all those who struggle for a dignified human existence.



Donya Alinejad is an anthropologist of migration and media who has conducted research on Iranian and Turkish diasporas. She is a Postdoctoral research fellow at Utrecht University.

Saskia Baas is a social scientist and holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. She has done extensive research on armed revolutionary movements in Sudan and Syria.

[American Dream]

Who is Ben Norton?

One of my main aims in writing this blog over the last few years has been to expose (and, hopefully, counter) the growth of what I now call the alt-left or "querfront" (cross-front) - the convergence between fascist and leftist positions that actively corrodes the left.

When I started blogging, one of the manifestations of this would be a kind of "philo-Islamism" among some leftists, in which Islamism, understood as a form of "resistance" to American-led imperialism, was seen as a viable ally for the left, despite its deeply reactionary, right-wing nature. Since around 2011, left/fascist convergence has more often taken an almost opposite path: enthusiastic repetition of the "war on terror" rhetoric spouted in the previous decade by the vulgar acolytes of Samuel Huntingdon. Now, many "anti-imperialists" justify the slaughter of Syrian civilians because they are "terrorists" or "al-Qaeda headchoppers", and it is increasingly hard to tell these leftists apart from the far right Islamophobes they were so recently the sworn enemies of.


Stop the War leaders, Nazis and Daily Mail Islamophobes find an area of agreement over the White Helmets

More at: http://brockley.blogspot.com/2018/03/wh ... .html#more

[American Dream]

This just in:

Everything you ever wanted to know about tankies, but were afraid to ask



One of the stranger developments of the past five years has been the resurrection of the word tankie. It's time for an explainer.


What does tankie mean?

On October 27th 1956, Peter Fryer, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and correspondent for its paper the Weekly Worker, arrived in Hungary. This was four days into an uprising of workers calling for worker controlled socialism. Factories had been taken over nationally by workers councils, in a demonstration of workers self-organisation that was unprecedented at the time, and the first strike on its scale in an Eastern-bloc country. On the 4th of November, Russian T54 tanks rolled into Budapest to suppress the uprising. Street fighting continued until the 10th November, although the workers councils held out for two months.

Fryer returned to the UK horrified by the Soviet repression he had seen, but his attempt to write about it for the Daily Worker was suppressed - the editors were sticking to the official USSR line that the entire uprising was a fascist counter-revolutionary plot and refused to publish anything contradicting that narrative. When Fryer wrote up his experiences anyway, he was expelled from the CPGB. Hungary 1956 split Communist parties across the world; many who had supported the USSR up until this point became disillusioned and split or left individually, while those who stayed loyal to the USSR earned the epithet 'tankies'.

After 1956, the USSR was to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, then Afghanistan in 1979...



What about Syria, Iran, North Korea?

A central line of communist and anarchist thought and praxis has been internationalism, and an opposition to war in all its forms. This caused the split in the Second International in 1914 when German Social Democrats voted for war credits. However putting this into practice has turns out to be a lot more complicated.

With the war in Syria, opposition to US intervention, shared by all communists (though not necessarily social democrats), has been marred by support from some organisations for the Syrian government and Bashar Assad and Russia despite the of bombing civilians, on the basis that areas such as Eastern Ghouta are held by Islamist militias and that the 400,000 civilians trapped there are being used as 'human shields'.


The CPGB-ML

This is further complicated by Rojava, supported by both some Marxist Leninists and some anarchists, due to the Marxist-Leninist orientation of the PKK, the Libertarian Municipalist ideas recently adopted by the PKK's leader Ocalan, the TEV-DEM system of administrative councils, and the right to national self-determination of the Kurds. On the other hand, both some Marxist Leninists and some anarchist and anti-state Marxists have been fiercely critical of Rojava, due to collaboration militarily with the US against ISIS (and most recently with Assad against Turkey). On libcom.org we've continued to allow publishing of texts both critical and supportive of Rojava, and regularly get attacked for being NATO shills for both, whether it's the US against Assad or Turkey against Rojava.

With Iran, despite the religious nature of the regime and the fact that all communist parties are banned, when strikes and street protests broke out at the end of December 2017, there was an immediate reluctance to recognise the grassroots nature of the actions, due to the possibility that the US might use the protests as an excuse for 'regime change'. Some commentators went as far as to suggest the protests had been almost immediately hijacked by the CIA, Mossad, or Saudi Arabia.

The cases of Iran and Assad show that in these discussions, the internal contradictions of a country can be completely ignored, with the central question always being "is the country aligned against the US or not?" - on the one hand celebrating Assad's attacks against Islamists, on the other celebrating Iran's religious state against the Haft-Tappeh sugar workers or leftist students.

Our position is that regardless of the actions of the Iranian or Syrian state, we completely oppose foreign intervention, whether US, Russia, or Turkey, on the base that foreign intervention always makes things worse. But to oppose intervention does not require a denial of the internal contradictions of those states or the reality of working class resistance to them.

The same applies to North Korea - we reject under any circumstances US intervention in North Korea, hawks in the US talking about a nuclear weapons programme gloss over the US bombing Japan twice in 1945, let alone the use of depleted uranium shells against civilian areas in Iraq. But to reject sanctions and intervention can rely on a principled anti-militarism and internationalism, solidarity with the North Korean working class, not with Kim Jong Un personally. As we would support the Gwangju uprising in South Korea in 1980, we would support workers struggle in North Korea too.

Read more: https://libcom.org/blog/everything-you- ... k-08032018

[American Dream]

Conspis, from Galloway to Annie Machon make hay out of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2 ... ter-yulia/

[MacCruiskeen]

^^Since you posted that piece approvingly, AD (and it's from one your favourite & most-quoted blogs), would you please explain to the RI Discussion Board exactly what "Conspis" means?

Thank you.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^Since you posted that piece approvingly, AD (and it's from one your favourite & most-quoted blogs), would you please explain to the RI Discussion Board exactly what "Conspis" means?

Thank you.

Maybe someone who is not blocked by American Dream (if there is anyone on this former Discussion Board who is not blocked by American Dream) can draw this question to his attention. Thanks.

[MacCruiskeen]

^^bump

[LolaB]

[quote="American Dream » 09 Mar 2018 15:48"][quote]Conspis, from Galloway to Annie Machon make hay out of poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia./quote]

So, what is Conspis, or what does it mean AD?
Curious minds want to know.

[American Dream]

Whatever it is, if it includes Galloway and Machon, it probably not very good...

[American Dream]

http://datacide-magazine.com/5096-2/

Alexander Reid Ross: Against the Fascist Creep (Book Review)

Alexander Reid Ross
Against the Fascist Creep
AK Press, Chico, Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore, 2017
ISBN 978-1-84935-244-4



In the introduction, Alexander Reid Ross, who is a lecturer in geography at Portland State, explains what he means by ‘fascist creep’: it ‘refers to the porous borders between fascism and the radical right, through which fascism is able to “creep” into mainstream discourse. However, the “fascist creep” is also a double-edged term, because it refers more specifically to the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism in the first place’.

Summing up different theories about fascism, he concludes: ‘fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual alingenesis (“rebirth”) of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and cultural tradition’.

In the 390-page book he sets out to document this ‘creep’ from its beginnings to its current manifestations, from classical fascism to third positionism, national bolshevism, and autonomous nationalism. He also makes meaningful distinctions between the ‘radical right’, fringe ‘conservatives’, and neo-fascists or neo-Nazis without obscuring their many overlaps.

One of the difficult things to grasp about fascism is its fundamentally contradictory nature if one is looking at it in terms of a coherent program, philosophy, or ideology. This is something that has not been denied but rather celebrated by different fascist spokesmen, from Benito Mussolini to Armin Mohler, who emphasised that fascism rather than being bothered about its discrepancies in theory was more concerned with ‘style’. Often there is little ‘content’ besides the mainstays of self-aggrandisement of a leader or a (racial or national) collective, and the casting out of ‘foreign’ elements out of the supposedly organic body of the nation.

Fascism and national socialism have been seen by the left as a homogeneous block and were interpreted as a counter-revolutionary weapon that the bourgeoisie would employ in times of crisis against the organisations of the working class. Their ‘socialist’ rhetoric was seen as purely demagogic, their storm troopers simply as foot soldiers of capitalism and not as an independent mass movement.

While many fascist groups have historically been (and continue to be) more than willing to be used as a counter-revolutionary terrorist force, it’s wrong to see them as nothing but stooges of high finance or the secret state. Indeed, as Ross is documenting convincingly (hereby following the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell), classical fascism was from very early on drawing some inspiration from the historic left.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for example, commonly seen as ‘anarchist’, has been appropriated by some fascists – not just within the fringe-fad of ‘national anarchism’, but at the very cradle of French fascism, the Cercle Proudhon, an important ‘think tank’ founded in 1911.

Some of the most important leaders of French fascism of the inter-war years came from left-wing backgrounds, as did Mussolini. Although this was hardly the case in German fascism, the Nazis indulged in social demagoguery, which in turn caused the Communist Party to adopt a nationalist program in 1930 – a prime example of the ‘fascist creep’.

The NSDAP came to power in Germany in 1933 and managed to consolidate its power in a very short time. The final stage of this consolidation was the so-called Night of the Long Knives, when the faction lead by Hitler murdered numerous potential competitors within the far right, amongst them the leadership of the SA, the ‘socialist’ Nazi leader Gregor Strasser, the former Chancellor von Schleicher and the radical conservative ideologist Edgar Julius Jung. Some of these ‘revolutionary’ nationalists had seen Hitler as a traitor to the ‘socialist’ aspirations of the movement and called for a ‘second revolution’. The Night of the Long Knives is an important date for those neo-fascists who see themselves in the tradition of Strasserism or National Bolshevism.

One can see the time of triumph for classical fascism in the years leading up to the second World War and the initial phase of the war. The defeat of the Axis in 1945 marked the end of the fascist epoch. Fascism had turned into, in the words of Ross, an ‘unmitigated disaster’.

To preserve their ideas in the post war period was a task of some ‘thinkers’ who took fascism into the occult realm. Tested by reality, fascism had failed, and only some die-hard bigots still clung to the idiotic ideas of the inter-war times.
Time for new idiotic ideas!

Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, and Francis Parker Yockey became the new idols of a small group of fascists who imagined themselves to be some sort of elite. Evola preached a ‘super-fascism’, Devi imagined Adolf Hitler to have been an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, Yockey tried to rally the post-war fascists under the program of his ‘Imperium’ and attempted to keep the currents of Oswald Mosley and Otto Strasser together.

The success of these figures was rather mixed, and their reach was limited to extremist sects and nutters. Most old Nazis managed to get off free and unpunished for their crimes by adapting to the Western consensus, many of them staffing the political, judicial, and economic functions in the Federal Republic. More recently, Evola in particular (but to some degree also Devi and Yockey) became fashionable in tiny circles of the neo-folk and martial industrial subcultural scenes.

In the ‘60s, the extreme right found itself in a neo-Nazi cul-de-sac until a new generation appeared attempting to ‘start all over again’ calling themselves the ‘New Right’. Rather than trying to conquer the streets and/or parliament, the ‘New Right’ proposed to work on a project of cultural hegemony, a framework they famously borrowed from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (without any of his content).

The trick of the ‘New Right’ was to present itself as ‘anti-racist’, demanding the right for different cultures to create their different homelands according to different traditions. However this seemingly tolerant attitude only masked the fundamental intolerance of homogeneous communities which essentially prohibit the presence of foreigners, the cross-fertilisation of cultures, and the absence of real individual difference.

Moving things to the present, Ross goes on to lay out the history of the post-war far-right in great detail dedicating a chapter each to the ‘radical right’, the Third Positionists, National Bolshevism, and autonomous nationalism. These developments tend to reclaim the ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-capitalist’ heritage of older forms of fascism, and thus borrow aspects of ideology – and ‘style’ for that matter – usually identified as left-wing ideas or aesthetics.

Other recent forms of the ‘creep’ between right and left can be spotted in the anti-globalisation movements and Occupy as well as in certain forms of anti-imperialism.

The book ends with a description of the current ‘new synthesis’ of the traditional radical right, the ‘alt-right’, and neo-fascism under the header of Trumpism, which has been able to create a contradictory but powerfully broad front spanning from evangelicals, anti-abortionists, pro-gunners, the Tea Party, and large parts of the GOP via Fox News, Breitbart and other media outlets, to men’s rights activists, the ‘alt-right’, the Ku-Klux-Klan, and various forms of neo-fascists.

Generally speaking there is an anti-fascist consensus on the left. But as Ross convincingly shows, this doesn’t protect sections of the left from being susceptible to the ‘fascist creep’. Often this even goes unnoticed. For this reason, this book is recommended reading as it gives a broad overview as well as countless details about the topic, its history, and its current manifestations.

However, a few mistakes did sneak in. When mentioning an ‘Arthur Rosenberg’ as a Nazi ideologist, Ross most certainly means Alfred Rosenberg, the author of Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, who was later condemned to death and executed as one of the main Nazi war criminals. Arthur Rosenberg was a Marxist politician and historian (p.75).

Also neo-Nazi terrorist Odfried Hepp was certainly not the founder of the German Federal Criminal Police Office, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) (p. 139). This is a completely absurd assertion, considering that the BKA was founded years before Hepp was even born. Ross’s source is an article in Lobster which merely claims that Hepp was an agent provocateur of the BKA – basing this (probably false) claim on a ‘fascinating but not conclusive article from the German press’. Ouch.

Finally, the German term ‘Querfront’ is not translated correctly. Ross translates it as ‘broad national front’, but this is incorrect. Querfront specifically means the collaboration of elements of the far right and elements of the far left, an overlapping of the fringes – exactly ‘the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism in the first place’ which Ross writes about in his introduction.

Such rare inaccuracies and the occasional barrage of names and connections aside, the book is rich in useful data and background information about the various entry points of the ‘fascist creep’. It is important to note that fascist ideas don’t enter the left via a ‘meeting of the extremes’ (as the proponents of a ‘totalitarianism theory’ would claim), but rather via many different ideological and cultural connections. One such connection that is present but underexposed in the book is the phenomena of the left-wing anti-Semitism and knee-jerk anti-Imperialism, which lead to supposedly left-wing groups – who often have a self-understanding as ‘anti-fascist’ – adopting positions that are completely compatible with neo-fascist political views. One example is the demented view that the tiny state of Israel actually controls governmental policies of the US via an all-powerful Jewish lobby. This is nothing more than a different formulation of the paranoid neo-Nazi fantasy of a ‘Zionist Occupation Government’. Likewise, support for Assad or Iran seems to be equally shared by certain groups of both spectrums, just as in previous decades both neo-fascists and far left anti-imperialists trained for armed struggle in camps of the same Palestinian guerrilla organisations.

Against the Fascist Creep provides ample material that needs to be urgently discussed. In the current climate of rightward-lurching political discourses and the (sub-)cultural acceptance of reactionary views, we need a clear understanding of the possible overlaps of supposedly left ideas with those of the different shades of the far-right. However, anti-fascism alone cannot substitute for a thorough understanding of capitalism, which produces exactly these unstable ideologies that cross-fertilise each other. For this we have to turn to a proper critique of political economy.

[seemslikeadream]

Growing Neo-Nazi Group Atomwaffen Implicated in 5 Murders

FBI Seems Uninterested in White, Homegrown Hate Group

Sacramento Nazi
A neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento gets violent. Photo credit: Kevin Cortopassi / Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Reporter A.C. Thompson details his investigation of Atomwaffen, a growing neo-Nazi and murderous white supremacist group with heavily armed members in about 20 American cities.

Founded and run by young, white males, the group has expanded in the wake of the protests last year in Charlottesville, VA. One member, Samuel Woodward, is charged in Orange County, CA, with the January 2018 murder of 19-year-old Blaze Bernstein — a gay, Jewish college student.

Related: What Five ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Cases Tell Us About FBI Tactics

Related: Spotlight on the FBI: The Bureau’s Checkered Past and Present

Thompson’s team at the website ProPublica obtained and reviewed some 250,000 chat messages exchanged by Atomwaffen (German for “nuclear weapons”) supporters, including hateful, anti-Semitic comments about Bernstein’s murder. Thompson notes that Atomwaffen is not aligned with Trump. The group’s guru is James Mason — who joined the American Nazi Party in the 1960s and wrote Siege, which is considered Atomwaffen’s manifesto.

In the space of a few months, people associated with the group have been charged in five murders; another member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives in a possible plot to blow up a nuclear facility near Miami.

Despite this — and threats by a Las Vegas member to target the power grid in the West — Thompson says the FBI shows little interest in Atomwaffen, and there’s no indication that the FBI is deploying undercover agents or using the techniques that have become commonplace in domestic terrorism investigations that target Muslim Americans.

You can read the ProPublica report here.

https://www.propublica.org/article/atom ... hate-group

Click HERE to Download Mp3

Full Text Transcript:

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to time constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like. Should you spot any errors, we’d be grateful if you would notify us.

Peter B. Collins: Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. In San Francisco, I’m Peter B. Collins. Today I’m joined by A.C. Thompson, an investigative journalist for ProPublica, who explains his recent report about the neo-Nazi white-supremacist group called Atomwaffen Division. They’ve got 18 to 20 cells across the country and people associated with the group have been charged in five murders over the past year. Another group member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives and there are other serious issues, as well.
ProPublica was able to get a hold of some 250,000 chat messages exchanged between Atomwaffen members. I think you’ll find this fascinating and a little scary, particularly, when A.C. Thompson tells us that the FBI doesn’t seem to be very interested in Atomwaffen. And, so far, he has no indication that the FBI has penetrated this dangerous militant group.
Investigative journalist A.C. Thompson from ProPublica joins me today on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. He and colleagues have been investigating a group called Atomwaffen, a notorious white-supremacist group and one of its leaders is now implicated in a murder case here in California. A.C. Thompson, thanks for joining me today.
A.C. Thompson: Thanks for having me on.
Peter B. Collins I first connected with you back in 2006, A.C., when you and Trevor Paglen wrote the book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights, and I’ve been following your work ever since. You and the people at ProPublica do a lot of great investigative work. This recent story really is an eye-opener about this group that operates in, perhaps, 18 or 20 cities. It’s loosely organized. The formal name is Atomwaffen Division. Atomwaffen is the German term for “nuclear weapons.” This has been off my radar until I saw your story published on February 23rd. How did you first learn about Atomwaffen, A.C.?
A.C. Thompson: You know, they came to my attention because the group was putting up posters on college campuses all over the country. This was a year, year and a half ago. They were, I would say, out of the new wave of white-supremacist groups that have emerged, these were the most extreme propaganda materials. They were just openly Nazi. They were incredibly inflammatory. And college students around the country were freaking out, understandably, that this stuff was showing up on their campuses. I had had an eye on the group ever since then. When the opportunity came to get inside the group, myself and my team took it.
Peter B. Collins: You have a really powerful insight into their communications network. You obtained hundreds of pages, it sounds like, of… based on 250,000 messages that were exchanged. And they use a system that is related to video gamers; so they’re not on Snapchat, or Instagram, or any of the more popular mainstream social media sites. But you say that they’re using Discord, which is a chat scene for video gamers?
A.C. Thompson: Yeah, exactly. It’s an app and a technology that were designed for video gamers who are playing immersive online massive multiplayer games, so that they can communicate, either by text or by voice, as they’re playing. But this technology has been massively co-opted by the white-supremacist movement. We saw it being used by the organizers of the Charlottesville rally last summer. We’ve seen it used by lots of different white-supremacist groups. In fact, at times to share bomb-making recipes and materials. For Atomwaffen, it was the key communications platform for them.
Their members, and we counted more than 100 different usernames in there… We believe there’s about 80 different members would use it to make basic plans to talk about what members of the group should be reading, to make plans for their training camps, for weapons and hand-to-hand combat, and to enforce a sense of discipline. The more crucial conversations, or the more… conversations you might get in trouble with law enforcement about, happen on a different channel and that’s called Wire. It’s an encrypting messaging service and those messages disappear after a certain amount of time. So they’re even harder to track.
Then finally, the third way that the group communicates with its most sensitive material, is purely face-to-face. But by reading these 250,000 messages, and figuring out who the characters were in these conversations and working very hard to identify them, we were able to get a really good sense of the group’s aims, its intentions, and where it believes that it’s going.
Peter B. Collins: In January, a murder was committed in Orange County, California. The suspect in the case is a member of Atomwaffen named Samuel Woodward. And the victim is a 19-year-old man named Blaze Bernstein. And for those of us old enough to remember Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein, were quite a combination. It’s an interesting irony to see these names surface in this combination. What do we know about the murder of Blaze Bernstein and to what extent do the chats confirm that Samuel Woodward was the killer?
A.C. Thompson: Early on, when the news came out about Blaze Bernstein’s murder, there was not very much evidence, not very much information. When the police went and arrested Samuel Woodward, people in my profession, journalists, started poking around and they started raising questions. Hey, was this guy a white supremacist? What is his story? There’s some stuff that’s online from him that looks pretty concerning. What we were able to do is, working with people with deep knowledge of the Atomwaffen group, is to confirm that he was a key member of the group. That he was a key leader within the California operation of the group… to confirm that he had been at their training events. And that he had practiced firearms training and hand-to-hand combat.
We were, eventually, able to get his specific messages that he had posted both before and after the murder.
Peter B. Collins: We’ll point out that the victim was a 19 year-old Jewish gay student at the University of Pennsylvania. You report that he and Woodward apparently knew each other from high school. Is that right?
A.C. Thompson: That’s our understanding, is that they knew each other from high school. How they came to, possibly, meet up in that park in Orange County is not clear. What’s clear is Samuel Woodward is a person who was, or is, deeply committed to Nazism. He is the kind of young man that is taking an extreme ideology and taking it as far as it can possibly go. In his mind, Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator who ruled over Spain for more than 30 years, was not enough of a Fascist. He, from reading his chat messages, seems to be ambivalent about characters like Mussolini… but Hitler, he’s a very, very big Hitler fan.
He’s also somebody who seems to gravitate towards the most violent sort of neo-Nazi formation. There’s messages that he posts where he discusses a contemporary Nazi terror group involved in many murders and bombings in Germany. He says, “Oh, those guys are pretty cool.” Those are the kind of leaders and groups that he gravitated towards. In terms of the views that he espouses online, in these chats, they’re incredibly misogynistic. They are incredibly racist. They are incredibly anti-Semitic… and deeply homophobic.
It’s a big toxic stew that you get from him.
Peter B. Collins: You also indicate that the popularity of Atomwaffen, virtually, I don’t want to use the term exploded… but it seemed to increase quite aggressively after the scene in Charlottesville last year.
A.C. Thompson: Yeah, and that’s a really interesting and, I think, it’s an important note here. After the protests, the counter-protests, and the killing, and the violence in Charlottesville, there were a lot of young white supremacists who said, “Hey, we’re the victims here. The victim is not Heather Heyer who was murdered. The victims are not the people who were run over with the car or the other people who were abused. We are the victims. We were unable to hold our rally to get together and support white supremacy and these Confederate statues. The police didn’t help us. The counter-protestors were mean to us and we’re the victims. What we need to do is go underground. We’re not going to do these protests anymore. We’re not going to march around in public or any of that kind of stuff. We’re going to go underground and we’re going to wage a guerrilla war against the government.”
A lot of those people that had that sort of sense gravitated and went over to Atomwaffen because that is their explicit mission. They are not people that believe that any sort of political process is viable. They believe in armed struggle, and guerilla warfare, and terrorism. Yes, they got a big bump after that and we can see that in the logs, new people coming in.
Peter B. Collin: A.C., we know that David Duke, the former Klan leader, was outspoken in his support of Trump, when Trump, basically, offered equivalency for the white supremacists and the counter-protesters who were there in Charlottesville. Was there any commentary in these chats, that you saw, where they praised Trump for, basically, making white supremacy popular again, legitimate again, and also his commentary post-Charlottesville?
A.C. Thompson: You know, that’s an interesting thing about these guys… if you look at other sectors of the New White Supremacist Movement, a lot of them have a lot of support for Trump. There’s a lot of sense that they have overlapping world views. These guys do not believe that at all. They are not interested in Trump. They don’t like Trump. They would never support him because he has a Jewish son-in-law and because his daughter has converted to Judaism. These guys, they don’t care about Trump, I mean, they just think he’s another tool of, basically, what they view as a Zionist-controlled world government. So they don’t care what he says or does. What they want to do is topple his government and any other American government.
Peter B. Collins: A.C., we will link to your article in the show summary at whowhatwhy.org for this podcast, but you profile about five different members of this neo-Nazi group. What struck me is they’re all so young. I mean, the average age appears to be 20 or 22. In my experience, those who embrace the Aryan Nation and these white-supremacist neo-Nazi groups have, generally, done prison time. That’s where they get their PhD in hate and in white supremacy group organizing. But it doesn’t appear that any of these people has a criminal record and, you note, that their manifesto is a book called Siege, written by a gentleman named James Mason, who appears to be aging and has been around as an American Nazi since the 1960s. Tell us about Mason and the extent to which he is a source of inspiration for Atomwaffen Division.
A.C. Thompson: Yeah, James Mason is both a scary and fascinating character. He was a guy who joined the American Nazi Party back in the ’60s when he was 14 years old. He was deeply devoted to the leader of that group, whose name was George Lincoln Rockwell. After that movement imploded… Rockwell was assassinated by a distraught former member… Mason got deeper and deeper into the belief that a social movement, a political movement, was not the way to go. That the way to go was some sort of terror-based asymmetrical warfare. He looked around at what was happening at this time, and by this time we’re talking about the ’70s and early ’80s. His influences were the radical left. He was inspired by the Vietcong and he said, “Look, the Vietnamese guerrillas were able to beat back the US Army, the US empire. That’s pretty inspiring. I don’t like people of color, but, wow, those guys are impressive.”
He looked around, at the Weather Underground, and at other hardcore leftist movements of the ’60s and ’70s and said, “Look, with just a few people, these groups were able to, at times, paralyze major American cities. This is the sort of thinking and these are the sort of actions that we need to take.” He openly advocated for assassination, for political terrorism, for setting up a White Liberation Front that was very, very inspired by lefty politics. But the White Liberation Front would defend the rights of white folks, and wage a guerrilla struggle, against the US Government on behalf of what he viewed as an oppressed white populace.
The Atomwaffen Division have brought this guy out of obscurity, brought him out of the footnotes of 20th Century extremism, and made him central to their ideology. Because he is this sort of elder statesman, and a person with a sort of teleological worldview, he has a complete world view out there that they treat as basically divine revelation. This is their calling card and this is, I would say, their touchstone… their way forward is through his ideas and through armed struggle.
Peter B. Collins: Is there a vision for a white Aryan Nation state here in North America? Is there a vision for trying to take down our government and just produce a level of chaos, anarchy? What is the mission statement, if you will, of Atomwaffen?
A.C. Thompson: That’s a great question. You know, if you throw it back to the ’80s and ’90s, the idea that was percolating around the white-extremist circles, at that point, was like, “Hey, we’ll have a whites-only homeland somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. We will separate ourselves from diverse multicultural America. We will have, basically, our white homeland.” That sort of got taken up in the current era as a notion of America becoming a white ethno-state where people who are not white would be purged from it. That’s the Richard Spencer ideal. But when you look at Atomwaffen and what they want to do, it’s actually different. They think the notion of creating a white homeland, or a white reservation, is ridiculous. They think the idea of transforming America, the diverse, the multicultural, the nation of immigrants, into a white ethno-state is ridiculous.
What they want to do is bring everything down. At a certain level, they are nihilists. They want to bring everything down. They want to see cataclysmic apocalyptic civil war, conflict, unrest, and the eventual collapse of the US Government. They believe only through that sort of collapse can they then build the whites-only fascist regime that they dream of, but it means the total destruction of America first.
Peter B. Collins: There is a subgenre of rock-and-roll called National Socialist Black Metal. In fact, I used that as a search term at Spotify and it returned a number of groups, including one listening group that had a playlist and said that there were 20 people who were members of it. You identified a group called Burzum and their music is available on Spotify. Let’s listen to a little jam here called War. [singing 00:19:18].
According to my screen, at Spotify, this little love song called “War” has been listened to 560,000 times, A.C. That’s more than the membership of Atomwaffen. There appears to be a subculture and I haven’t even begun a search at YouTube, perhaps you have. Are there inspirational videos featuring James Mason or featuring some of these young people who are the core leaders of Atomwaffen?
A.C. Thompson: Yeah, so that’s a really interesting question. Just in the past few days, YouTube has taken down the Atomwaffen channel. They had their own channel that they posted their propaganda videos on and did recruiting on. They have taken that down, but they still maintain another channel on YouTube called Siege TV, Siege being the name of James Mason’s book… and it’s all lectures, and speeches, and propaganda based on his ideas. They’re still using that as a way to disseminate their ideas. It’s fascinating to me… the group has its own website, atomwaffendivision.org, and another website called Siege Culture, for the ideas of James Mason. It’s just really interesting to me that they can operate in such a public way, when they’ve been tied to five different murders and a bomb plot.
Peter B. Collins: When you contact the FBI, what do they say about Atomwaffen? Let me put this as a double question and you can chew on this a little bit: We know that over the past year, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s research have been focusing on what they call “black identity extremists.” Many people see this as a not-so-subtle attempt to take out Black Lives Matter, which, to date, has been a nonviolent group that is working toward change… but I don’t believe that they promote hate or any of the elements that we see in Atomwaffen. Yet, we know the FBI is devoting resources to these alleged “black identity extremists.” I don’t know that they are giving equivalent focus to Atomwaffen. What do you know, A.C.?
A.C. Thompson: This is my concern… my concern is that I believe the law enforcement community from the locals, to the state investigators, to the FBI, are generally several years behind, when it comes to tracking these groups. When I look at the intel bulletins that they are putting out and I look at the research they’re doing, a lot of it is talking about stuff from ’80s and ’90s. It’s just not relevant now. It’s been hard, I think, for them to track this massive explosion in activity over the last two years.
What I would say is, I do not believe that the FBI has eyes inside Atomwaffen. I do not believe that they have been able to, or have wanted to, effectively investigate the group. I think it’s a little surprising because this is a group that… when they first come on the scene back in the middle of last year, it’s because one of their members murders two of their other members… and federal agents find that the founder of the group has been compiling radiological material and bomb-making material. That he’s got a framed picture of Tim McVeigh next to a picture of the Fuhrer in his bedroom. The allegations, at that time, by a former member were that this guy, the founder of the group, was planning to blow up a nuclear power plant.
That’s the middle of last year. Since that time, I do not believe that the federal government has effectively infiltrated this group. And I do not believe that they have… I know for sure they haven’t disrupted the group.
Peter B. Collins: A.C., I find this distressing because I have devoted a lot of coverage in recent years to the FBI’s domestic practices related to so-called domestic terrorism suspects. There are over 800 cases. And Trevor Aaronson, who now writes at The Intercept, has done an incredible job of trying to keep track of all these. But he… if we thumbnail it, he says that only about a dozen of these cases are free of the taint of a paid informant, an undercover operative, who suggests the crime provides the means and then produces a bust while cameras are rolling as this suspect, who often is manipulated, pulls the trigger, or grabs the cellphone, whatever it happens to be.
We’re told this is to protect us from international terrorist groups. I’m deeply offended that we’ve seen a lot of unconstitutional behavior by law enforcement. But it’s even more outrageous when these groups are operating, generally, in plain view. You’re able to penetrate them and report on them. And it doesn’t appear that the FBI has the same interest in these suspects… because they’re white and because they’re not Muslim. What’s your comment on that?
A.C. Thompson: Yeah, I mean, I have a few thoughts on that. The first one is… here’s a remarkable, remarkable thing… When the first big incident happened that I was talking about in May of last year, in Florida… and this is a scenario where there’s a double homicide, there’s bombs involved… It’s an incredibly crazy scene. The federal agents involved in that case allowed the founder of Atomwaffen to leave the site where the bomb — his house — where the explosives were, where there were weapons, where there were fuses, where there was radiological material… there was cesium and another radiological element… and just take off.
Peter B. Collins: You’re speaking about John Cameron Denton, right?
A.C. Thompson: No, this is the original founder, his name is Brandon Russell. He’s the founder of the group. He gets caught at his house with bombs, with a clear sort of extremist world view, with high explosives… the sort of explosives that brought down the Oklahoma City Federal Building… and radioactive material… and, plus, there’s two dead bodies in his house, both of them neo-Nazis. The agents involved in that matter said, “Hey, Brandon, yeah, you can take off. We’ll circle back to you when we need to talk to you some more.”
Brandon met up with another neo-Nazi, got in a car, went and bought rifles and ammunition, packed his skull masks so that people wouldn’t know who he was if he wanted to go undercover, and just took off. It wasn’t for a couple days that law enforcement decided to bring him back into custody. I do not believe that that would happen under similar circumstances if Brandon’s name was Muhammad and he was not like a young white guy. I just don’t think it would happen. If he was a suspected Islamic terrorist, I do not think that would happen. I think, what you were saying is so interesting to me, is… A reporter asked me about this yesterday and the reporter said, “Hey, you know when you look at that deal in Florida, where the founder of this group had bomb-making material… Do you think he really wanted to blow stuff up or what?”
I said, “Hey, do you know what almost always happens in counter-terrorism cases? What almost always happens is there’s some crazy provocateur who’s working for the FBI, who encourages the group to become more radical and more extreme and finally to plot to blow something up. Then, as you said, they get arrested and that’s the end of it.” In the case of Atomwaffen, the founder of the group, without any inspiration or collaboration from a provocateur working for the Federal Government, took it upon himself to make a bunch of explosives and gather up radioactive material. Do I think he was planning to bomb something? Yes, I absolutely do. He’s currently doing a five-year stint in federal prison around all of this… but the question remains, at that point: If you are the federal government and you’ve got a dude who absolutely embraces and worships terrorists and neo-Nazis and has an extreme, extreme version of the neo-Nazi world view…
would you think, at that point, “Hey, we should probably get inside this group and make sure they don’t kill anybody or blow anything up”? I think you should, and I do not believe that that has happened.
Peter B. Collins: Wow. I’m just digesting this, A.C., because, you know, I have been a sharp critic of the FBI since COINTELPRO in the 1970s, but I do believe that there are a lot of good people who work at the FBI, who have a strong law enforcement ethic, who do believe in constitutional law enforcement… but this just strikes me as so dangerous and the basis for it is race. I’m not going to call it racism, but, clearly, if a group of black individuals had these kinds of chats, expressing hate toward white people, and they were armed and a leader had been arrested, I mean, this would be covered massively and the government would be strutting and showing us how effective they’ve been at infiltrating and busting this group.
But to have this very separate track for obviously dangerous white-supremacist groups… this is stunning.
A.C. Thompson: Yeah, I think it’s very concerning and, I would say, I absolutely agree with you. I have known many very smart, very committed, very decent, FBI agents and federal prosecutors. I believe there are many people at the Bureau and the DOJ that would be very unhappy to hear this. If they were aware of what was going on, would really want to dive in and chase these guys. I believe there may now be some more interest on the part of the Bureau in looking at this organization and some others in this milieu, but I think that there has been a lack of focus on this group.
To make it more clear, you have the double homicide — the bomb plot — back in May of last year. In December, of last year, you have a 17-year-old young man, who we believe was a young recruit to the group, who is in direct communication and was in the process of becoming a full-fledged member of the group, who allegedly murders his ex-girlfriend’s parents in Virginia because they don’t want their daughter dating a Nazi. Then you come into the beginning of this year and you have Samuel Woodward allegedly murdering Blaze Bernstein… and all of his buddies, within the group, getting together in their chats and saying that they think this is great and they are happy that a gay Jewish young man is dead.
To me, I feel like this is the sort of thing that, back in the middle of last year, we would have liked to have seen some real investigation.
Peter B. Collins: Well, and A.C., your article really is the basis for a series of investigations and indictments. Let me just add to the list that you just gave us. Michael Lloyd Hubsky, 29-year-old Las Vegas resident who calls himself the Komissar… He’s got a concealed weapons permit. He also is a licensed security guard and he, in these chats, bragged about how he has a map of the US power grid, west coast only, classified map… had someone with special permissions get it. Now, this is what the Joint Terrorism Task Force and these fusion centers that are part of the vertically integrated law enforcement system that has been erected since 9/11… and this guy, Hubsky, should be a suspect right now. And is he at large?
A.C. Thompson: Is he at large? I believe he’s at large. I believe he’s not been taken into custody. I believe he is still working at his job. He’s the sort of person that… yeah, I think, if you are a counter-terror investigator, he’s a guy you’d want to go see, absolutely.
Peter B. Collins: A.C. as we wrap up here, could you share with our listeners some of the more extreme text messages of the 250,000 that you have sifted through, so people can get an idea of how they communicate, what their attitudes are, and, really, just how dangerous these people are to the public in general?
A.C. Thompson: Sure. I mean, I’ll tell you one of the things that was just stunning to me when I read it was… Sam Woodward, the man accused of killing Blaze Bernstein, went on a whole thread that he was discussing… where he said, “You know, sexual relations between people of different races, that’s totally awful, unless of course you’re using it as… unless you’re raping women of color and using that as a tool of war, as part of an ethnic cleansing play in the same way the Serbs did in the Balkan Wars of the last century. And in the same way that the Serbs did in raping and abusing Bosnian Muslim women.”
I mean, this is the sort of worldview that you get out of these people; like rape is a good thing, rape should be used as a tool of war, and the only sort of way that people of different ethnicities, different races, should interact is in a violent and hateful way. There was another thread that the leader, the current leader, of the group who calls himself Rape and whose true name is John Cameron Denton was on… where he was saying he was looking forward to decapitating race mixers. That that was a good idea that he had in his mind. That was something he was looking forward to in the coming race war.
This sort of gives you an idea of just how malevolent these people are.
Peter B. Collins: Well, A.C., this is a very important story and I fear that because of the reaction to the Parkland school shooting in Florida and all the zany tweets that come out of Trump every day, that the mainstream media in this country has not focused on this. I hope that they will dig into your story and really cover this properly, because these are very dangerous people who represent the worst of the worst. To see law enforcement really slacking on this particular front is really shocking and, I think, needs to be addressed.
A.C. Thompson: Thank you. I have the same hope as well. I’m hoping both that my colleagues in the media continue to chase this story and that, perhaps, somebody in the federal law enforcement bureaucracy will begin to really drill down on this.
Peter B. Collins: A.C. Thompson from ProPublica worked on this story with Ali Winston and Jake Hanrahan. It was published on February 23rd at propublica.org. A.C., always a pleasure. Thanks for joining me today.
A.C. Thompson: Thank you so much.
Peter B. Collins: Thanks for listening to this WhoWhatWhy podcast featuring investigative journalist A.C. Thompson of ProPublica. Your comments and feedback are welcome and we encourage your financial support for WhoWhatWhy‘s investigative journalist. Send your comments to Peter at peterbcollins.com.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/03/12/growi ... 5-murders/

[American Dream]

Facebook does its part:

Facebook’s Fear Machine: How The Social Network Enables Racist News

Hate-based news is spreading throughout the social networking site at an ever-increasing rate.

By Jürgen Klöckner



Every day, as part of her job, Johanna Wild delves deeply into the nastiest reaches of Facebook.

For her Munich-based startup Crowdalyzer, she analyzes the misinformation and hate-based news that Facebook users read, comment on and share. Wanting to understand how the followers of different parties tick, Wild spent a week living in their world. To do this, she sequestered herself in Facebook groups where fake news is known to spread.

One of those pages is “Freie Medien” (in English, Free Media), where Facebook fans of Germany’s liberal-conservative political party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), are known to share conspiracy theories. There you’ll find posts claiming shampoo ingredients are “Trojan horses with dangerous invaders,” or that the United Nations allows food products to slowly be poisoned.

“I was living in a parallel world that filled me with hate and made me feel like there’s one simple solution to all of the big problems in this world,” she said.

And, when the experiment was over, Wild realized, “That’s a world that takes a lot of effort to get back out of.”

How we got here: Facebook’s algorithm changes

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has frequently downplayed concerns about fake news, in January promised to give the site’s more than two billion users “more meaningful interactions” with a revamped newsfeed.

The customized newsfeed that all users now see when they open up Facebook works in a radically different way. Users are seeing more personal information from friends and family members, as well as the news they find important enough to comment on and share.

It is one of the most fundamental changes to the world’s largest social networking site since it was founded in 2004, and one that Zuckerberg said he hopes will better people’s lives.

“The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being,” he said. “We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos ― even if they’re entertaining or informative ― may not be as good.”

Meanwhile, Facebook is selling the measure to brands ― many of whom have seen a dramatic decrease in engagement since the changes began to roll out ― as a major quality initiative.

“We want to define what quality news looks like and give it a boost,” Facebook manager Campbell Brown promised at a mid-February publisher conference.

But if Facebook prioritizes posts from friends and relatives ― and if those people regularly share misinformed or racist views ― the new algorithm would only bolster a dangerous echo chamber.

And by giving preference to the posts that get the most reactions from users, Facebook could amplify fear and hate, a reality that contradicts comments that Zuckerberg made last year.

“It’s important that Facebook is a place where people with different views can share their ideas,” he said. “Debate is part of a healthy society. But when someone tries to silence others or attacks them based on who they are or what they believe, that hurts us all and is unacceptable. There is no place for hate in our community.”

HuffPost’s research shows how Facebook’s plan to boost quality backfired

A HuffPost Germany analysis shows that, despite Zuckerberg’s comments, content that triggers emotions like hate, anger, and fear are gaining in significance in Germany. The finding is the result of extensive research by HuffPost using data from the website “10000 Flies”.

The company measures interactions triggered by articles on social media and lists the most successful articles every day. “Interactions” refers to likes, reactions, shares and comments on Facebook, as well as tweets, retweets and likes on Twitter, although they make up a comparatively low part of the interactions.

The analysis focused on the 20 most successful posts of each respective day. January 2018 and July and January 2017 were compared in order to trace the development of the posts on a random basis for a year.

A total of 1860 posts were included in the analysis. That’s 620 posts for each month. The central question for the analysis: What proportion of the 20 most successful articles has content that plays on and amplifies emotions such as hate, anger, indignation, and fear?

One thing is certain: The posts that trigger negative emotions vary from user to user. Nevertheless, when looking at the comments below the articles, it can be said that articles covering the topics of refugees and crimes in particular trigger strong negative emotions among readers.

Emotional posts are gaining in significance

Articles that stir emotions like hate and fear played a more important role in January 2018 than in July and January 2017. The number of interactions with such posts was higher in this past January than in the two other months that were compared. They are more often among the most successful articles on social media and also make it into the top 20 more often.

Dubious niche media outlets were also increasingly able to compete with major public media by means of highly polarizing topics and are seeing high growth rates for the interactions.

For example, articles about German refugee policies and stories about crimes by suspects with migrant backgrounds dominated.

“Far from bringing enlightenment, social media have been spreading poison,” “The Economist” wrote in a November 2017 cover story about Facebook as a “threat to democracy”.

Tristan Harris, formerly a Design Ethicist at Google, is also coming down hard on social media, especially Facebook: “Social media can amplify people’s worst traits,” he said in a February Wired article.

Fear-based articles generate an especially large amount of interaction

The research also showed that fear-based articles on social media are gaining in significance.

Not only has the proportion of these articles in the top 20 increased, but so have users’ interactions with these articles. While the number of interactions in January 2017 was 3.3 million, it was already 3.7 million a year later.

After Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency in the fall of 2016, media researchers at Columbia University discovered that the posts by six platforms that supported his election with misinformation alone were shared more than 340 million times on Facebook.

“The number of fear-based articles has increased bit by bit among the articles with the most interactions,” said Jens Schröder, founder and co-operator of “10000 Flies.”

Many of these articles are being generated from niche media sites that have greatly benefited from the new algorithm. Almost all of the ones we studied grew significantly in January 2018 in terms of both reach and popularity, surpassing more prominent mainstream publications like Der Spiegel or Bild.

For example, the social media reach of the right-wing news site “Epoch Times” rose by almost 15 percent, even though the site does not even rank among the top 50 most-read news sites in Germany. The conspiracy theory site “Journalistenwatch” recorded a gain of almost 90 percent in the same period. The right-wing conservative newspaper “Junge Freiheit” climbed 56 percent.

Without social media, sites such as the “Epoch Times” would not be able to compete with well-established news sites, but different rules apply on Facebook.

“Due to the extreme activity of the right-wing filter bubble, this ‘alternative media’ looks much bigger and more popular than it actually is when you look at overall media consumption and not just at interactions on social networks,” Schröder said. “That’s probably one of the reasons why right-wingers tend to overestimate the size of their social circles. After all, they only make up 15 percent of the German population and don’t represent ‘das Volk’ [the German people].”

Fear-based articles are increasingly making it to the top of the ranking

With the outsized influence of right-wing media came an increase in the visibility of fear-based news. In January alone, fear-based and often misleading stories held the top place in the “10000 Flies” ranking, including many stories about refugee crimes, a favorite topic of right-wing sites.

On Jan. 9, social media was running hot because of a film about refugees which had aired on the German children’s public television channel KiKa. KiKa first showed the documentary in November 2017, but it gained steam in January after posts from right-wing blogs attacking the film went viral on Facebook.

Three articles about the alleged KiKa scandal made it into the top 20 of the “10000 Flies” ranking that day, including two in the top three.

Furthermore, reports about allegedly criminal refugees and the news that German federal ministries were preparing for the arrival of 300,000 refugees following their relatives to Germany made it into the ranking.

The Kika story was far from an outlier. In January 2017, 36 percent of the articles in the top 20 of the “10000 Flies” ranking were fear-based articles. This figure rose to 38 percent in July and jumped to an astounding 50 percent in January 2018.

On Jan. 27, 2018, an article titled, ”Government Pays Harem 7500 Euros per Month,” was the month’s most successful post, according to “10000 Flies.”

In the article by the right-wing populist conspiracy site “Anonymous.ru,” the case of a single mother with nine children who, according to a district office decision, allegedly receives 7500 euros per month, is misrepresented.

After doing some research, the websites “Mimikama” and “Tag24” revealed that the family receives significantly less, actually about 3,000 euros. However, the correction received a lot less attention on social media than the original story.

It’s important to note that January 2018 was actually a relatively weak news month in Germany. With the exception of the formation of the grand coalition, there was no dominating topic.

Refugees bear the brunt of Facebook vitriol

Murder, manslaughter, disasters. These are the topics that were extremely successful on social media in January 2018. In January, a total of 109 articles in the top 20 of the “10000 Flies” ranking were about crimes, and a refugee was involved in every other crime. Compared to other months, this ratio has changed only marginally.

Articles such as “Regensburg: Two 17-year-old Afghans brutally beat police officers” from the the Epoch Times headed the “10000 Flies” ranking on Jan 14. Another article from Die Welt, “Refugee said to have abused 4-year-old daughter of his foster family,” topped the ranking on Jan. 21.

This results in a distortion that does not reflect reality. In Germany, the proportion of immigrants involved in criminal offenses in 2016 was 14.5 percent.

Figures for 2017 will not be released until spring. However, it should not be assumed that the proportion will be significantly higher than in the previous year.

A parallel world?

Facebook seems to have become a place that no longer reflects the reality of life of the majority of its users and of the general public. Extreme, xenophobic, and racist content multiplies there, while other types of content usually founder.

While it may seem like Facebook is creating a parallel world, Schröder notes that it’s actually made up of a small but very active number of people.

“It remains to be seen whether the ‘parallel world’ will continue to exist forever,” Schröder said, noting that extremist content always has its “constant ups and downs.”

“Right now we’re definitely in an ‘up’ phase,” he said.

[American Dream]

Debating the pro-Assad “Left”
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON MARCH 14, 2018

Inconvenient facts
But, anyway, here’s where the actual facts on the ground get a little more inconvenient for the “left” Assad supporters. Starting under Obama, but even more so under Trump, US imperialism did start to intervene on a larger scale, including starting to send troops. And how did they intervene? Whom did those US troops work with? Remember? It was the PYD – the Kurds! And right from the very start, the PYD had at the very least a non-aggression pact with Assad. Right from the very start, they were repressing any anti-Assad groups or forces in Rojafa/Afrin.

The purpose of US imperialism for aiding the Kurds was several fold: One was to crush the Islamic State. Equally important was to limit the influence of Iran and Hezbollah, which they and their ally Israel saw as a threat. They also want to limit the influence of Russian imperialism, especially in the east, where Syria has a little bit of oil.

Then we get to 2017-18. Even greater US involvement in support of the Kurds. In order to do what? Attack the Islamic State. And what’s happened since? Turkish imperialism has invaded in the west, where the US had helped the Kurds take power away from the Islamic State. Since then, the Kurdish forces have moved into open alliance with Assad, inviting him to send troops into that region that they control.

The main point in this narrative, though, which the “left” Assad supporters completely ignore, just as do the Arabists and one other element that I’ll get to in a minute, is the massive human suffering. About 500,000 Syrians killed, the overwhelming majority by the Syrian and Russian Air Force. Hospitals, public markets, residential neighborhoods relentlessly bombed. That is going on right now in Ghouta. Anybody can do a google or YouTube or Twitter search and see film after film, photo after photo, of the massive human suffering. There is also the use of chlorine and sarin gas by Assad’s regime. (As to the claims that it is the Islamic fundamentalists who are responsible: Every single one of the narratives making those claims have been decisively refuted. But what is really significant as far as the methods of the “left” Assad supporters is their response to Assad’s use of sarin in Khan Sheikhoun. There were three “alternative” claims as to what happened, starting with Putin the next day. Each one of these claims successively totally contradicted the previous one.

Each one of them was seized by the “left” Assad supporters without a thought to that simple contortion of simple logic. It really shows their methods.)

What socialists should really stress is solidarity with the people of Syria. Every single independent grouping, from human rights groups to groups like Doctors Without Borders to UN agencies that in the past have condemned US imperialist actions as well as Israeli actions in Gaza – all of them point to Assad and Putin as being responsible for the war crimes in Syria. That include not only the murderous air campaign, but also the sieges, such as the ongoing one in Ghouta, where people are being starved into submission. Yet those crimes against humanity are ignored by the “left” Assad supporters. Either ignored or outright denied.


Assad is supported in his administration
by the fascist Syrian Social Nationalist Party,
whose symbol is a redrawn swastika.

The “left” Assad supporters have a close ally: The chauvinist, racist, and at times outright fascist forces. From the Italian fascist Northern League to Greece’s Golden Dawn, to the British National Party – they all openly support Assad. So does the US’s David Duke as well as the fascist/racist Traditional Workers Party here. Almost all of them, if not all, have been guests of Assad. They are joined, by the way, by Alexander Dugin, the father and theoretical leader of Russian fascism. Dugin, by the way, is also closely linked with the Putin regime, which is also supported by almost all these other fascist forces.

These “left” forces, in adopting the simplistic conspiracy theory approach, in ignoring or outright denying established fact, in putting forward “alternative facts”, is mimicking what happened in the left during the ‘30s and ‘40s, when Stalinism became dominant. Then, too, they denied all reports of Stalin’s crimes as, in effect, fake news. Then, too, they had their people who traveled to the Soviet Union as guests of Stalin and returned with reports of a workers’ paradise there. Now, we have “left” representatives from Kucinich and Gabbard to Vanessa Beely (who is hardly really a left in general) to lifetime socialists like Jeff Mackler and socialist and “peace” groups doing the same. What we have is the “red-brown alliance” being born – the alliance between the “left” and outright racists and fascists. And the nexus points are both Putin and Assad, both of whom count on outright fascists as their supporters in their respective home countries (Dugin and the Night Wolves among others in Russia, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in Syria).

Along with this goes an intellectual dumbing down that mimics what is happening in US society in general. Rather than seriously looking at the class forces involved, they both search for any “facts”, anything they can find no matter the source, to “prove” their point of view. In this, they are like those who deny the fact of human caused global warming. That, too, is all a big plot you see.

Finally, as to the question about supporting the slogan “US imperialism out of Syria” – yes, but ONLY if we also add a call for ALL imperialist forces to get out, especially Russian and Iranian imperialisms (as well as Turkish imperialism and also, now Israeli imperialism). But I stress Russian and Iranian imperialism because these two forces are the main actors in Syria and are the ones causing the most killing and suffering. We real socialists are, after all, internationalists and our Number One concern should be allying with the working class in any country in the world, including Syria.
That is what “workers of the world, unite!” means, after all, isn’t it?

John Reimann

Added point:
I forgot one other point, and that is the hypocrisy of the “left” Assad supporters, who hide behind “opposition” to US imperialism. They screamed bloody murder when US imperialism bombed the al Shayrat air field. That was the airfield used when Syrian planes dropped sarin gas on Khan Sheikhoun, and the US “attack” on it was largely symbolic as they warned Assad in advance. It was so light that the air field was up and running within 24 hours.

These same “opponents” to US imperialism had been totally silent just a couple of weeks earlier, when US forces bombed a mosque in Syria, killing about 40 or 50 men, women and children. And again, more recently, when US forces committed war crime after war crime in their bombing and shelling of Raqqa (as well, by the way, of the same in Mosul, Iraq). Why the silence? Because in those cases the war crimes were done in support of Assad. These “opponents” of US imperialism don’t really oppose US imperialism; they support Russian imperialism!

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/03/14 ... ssad-left/