Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by tapitsbo » Tue Jun 30, 2015 9:36 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Thu Jun 25, 2015 3:15 pm wrote:Inside the League is the foundational text, but I strongly co-sign the Visup series, which really fleshes things out.
Because of how intricately & extensively networked WACL players were, they've also come up in many of their other subsequent series, too.
It really was a functional Fascist International for awhile there...hard to understate the importance or impact.
by Elvis » Wed Jul 01, 2015 4:00 am
by American Dream » Wed Jul 01, 2015 7:46 am
Dylann Roof is believed to have murdered the church congregants for the purpose of starting a race war. In doing so, he embodied this ideology, one so insidious and pervasive among white supremacists that Roof may not have recognized its fingerprints on the websites that seem to have radicalized him. Known today as Christian Identity, its lineage stretches back to Victorian England, as a form of pseudo-anthropology that taught that white Europeans, not Jews, were the true chosen people. In America, this theology became decidedly racist and anti-Semitic through the 1920s and ’30s, and ultimately more militant toward the end of World War II.
Its most vocal proponent was radio minister Wesley Swift, whose Christian Identity sermons reached thousands of listeners and were taped and distributed to white supremacists across the United States in the 1960s. On a weekly basis, Swift taught Biblical lessons that would shock any conventional Christian: Eve engaged in not one conjugal relation in the Garden of Eden (with Adam), but two (the second with the Serpent); those who call themselves Jews are not really the chosen people but offspring of that second relationship—literally children of the Devil; these demonic offspring have engaged in a multi-century, cosmic conspiracy against white Europeans; they do so by manipulating sub-human minority groups (especially blacks) against whites, and all of this will culminate in Armageddon—a holy race war. Roof may have accepted the basic humanity of Jews, but his manifesto did speak about “Jewish agitation of the black race” and the need to exterminate the Jewish identity.
Scholars have missed the implications of this ideology, and the role it played in countless acts of terrorism within the United States going back five decades. Samuel Holloway Bowers, leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi from 1964 to 1969, was a Swift acolyte. His organization, which executed the Mississippi Burning murders, engaged in more acts of racial violence than any other hate group in America. Close behind was the National States Rights Party, with Christian Identity zealots staffing almost every senior position. Co-founder Jesse Benjamin (“J.B.”) Stoner, who orchestrated bombings of black churches and Jewish institutions from 1958 through 1963, would tour the Jim Crow south with his friend, Christian Identity minister Charles “Connie” Lynch, inflaming white audiences into vigilante mobs who attacked blacks.
Police lead suspected shooter Dylann Roof into the courthouse in Shelby, North Carolina, June 18, 2015. Roof, a 21-year-old with a criminal record, is accused of killing nine people at a Bible-study meeting in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in an attack U.S. officials are investigating as a hate crime. JASON MICZEK/REUTERS
Stoner’s brand of violence, and his militant anti-Semitism, alienated even some members of the Ku Klux Klan. Soon Bowers and Stoner realized that by aligning their agenda with the secular, anti-integrationist goals of rank-and-file southern nationalists, they could pursue their holy race war—provided that they hid their true motivations. “The typical Mississippi redneck doesn’t have sense enough to know what he is doing,” Bowers once told FBI informant Delmar Dennis. “I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan.” In private, he outlined that plan to Dennis: to create a “race war ... by engendering hatred among whites in the same manner as it was being fomented by leftist radicals among blacks.”
If the racist foot-soldiers who terrorized blacks on behalf of Sam Bowers may not have known they were serving a dark religious agenda, then that ideology may be even more opaque to the modern white supremacists. After Swift died in 1970, his ideology persisted, as a toxic adhesive, molding itself to anti-government and ethno-chauvinist causes. Several former Swift acolytes became leaders of anti-tax and nativist movements. Like Bowers, these believers hijacked their groups to maximize their reach and numbers, while obscuring their true purpose. Former Christian Identity leaders even inspired new and rival religious movements. But they all shared one thing in common: a dogged faith, and a determination to help foment a race war.
By the 1990s, according to Scott Shepherd, a former and repentant KKK Grand Dragon, the race war ideology permeated the white supremacist movement on an almost-subconscious level. Thousands of skinheads began tattooing themselves with the term “RAHOWA”—short for “racial holy war” even when they did not share any deep religious convictions. Even loners and isolated cells of supremacists are now indoctrinated with this idea, thanks to the power of social media and white power music.
--Stuart Wexler
by Searcher08 » Wed Jul 01, 2015 8:04 am
Elvis » Wed Jul 01, 2015 8:00 am wrote:Why can't these people spell "hippie"? And I'm supposed to take them seriously?
by American Dream » Wed Jul 01, 2015 8:20 am
While rarely acknowledged, it seems that much of the ideology of the modern-day patriot movement was derived by various former high-ranking military officers, more than a few of them with a background in intelligence, who became obsessed with the "communist conspiracy" in the wake of the Second World War. One of the earliest and most adamant proponents of such things was General Albert Wedemeyer. As was noted in one of my installments concerning the American Security Council, General Wedemeyer had spent extensive time in Germany in the 1930s where he developed close ties to both the military and the Nazi party. Wedemeyer is widely suspected as the leaker of the "Rainbow 5" documents that revealed US military plans prior to the nation's entry into the Second World War.
In the post-WWII era Wedemeyer was still expressing admiration for the Nazi regime while warning of the Judaic-communist conspiracy."Wedemeyer's career deserves scrutiny. He was part of a military circle that was anti-Jewish. A few years after the war, Wedemeyer wrote a letter to his close friend, retired Col. Truman Smith, that Zionists, the British and communists made America's entry into the war certain. Later, Wedemeyer stated that 'most of the people associated with communism in the early days were Jewish.'
"He further claimed that Roosevelt's Jewish advisers did everything possible to spread venom and hatred against the Nazis. He stated that during his attendance at the German War College in 1936, his eyes were opened to the number of Jews in the American government by reading the Die Frankfurter Zietung and Die Berliner. The Nazis control both papers.
"In 1937, Wedemeyer linked the shortage of food in Germany to the Jewish question. Using the embassy's attaché stationery, Wedemeyer wrote to friends dismissing the food shortage as caused by poor weather and crop failures. He claimed the Jews in other countries have bought up the enormous quantities of foodstuffs and intentionally diverted the shipments from Germany.
"As late as 1958, Wedemeyer was still voicing pro-Nazi opinions. He ignored the Nazis racial ideology, describing Lebensraum as merely a national movements to win living space. Wedemeyer used the same historical analogues as the Nazi propagandist, comparing the German invasions and expansions eastward with the American expansion westward..."
"Wedemeyer opposed creating the State of Israel, as did Black and other members of his circle of friends. After retiring, Wedemeyer became a writer for the John Birch Society and a member of the American Security Council."
(The Nazi Hydra in America, Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins, pg. 243-244)
General Wedemeyer
Another former military man deeply involved in spreading communist conspiracy theories in the wake of WWII General Bonner Fellers, a psychological warfare officer. In an interview with journalist Cheri Seymour, William Potter Gale (a former military intelligence officer who founded the Posse Comitatus) recounted a story told to him by Fellers concerning secret arrangements made between FDR, the Soviet Union and the British during WWII:"Gale leaned back, eyes narrowing. 'When General Fellers was in the Middle East, he submitted a plan to the War Department and to the White House that would have ended World War II in 1942 with Germany. His plan was to provide B-24's, which had just come into mass production in the United States, to air bases in Turkey and the Middle East, which were already secured with 400,000 displaced Allied troops.
The German Army had its full ground strength situated 2,000 miles into the Ukraine, with only one supply line, against the communist, the Red Army. And the Germans had no plans – all our military intelligence confirm this – the Germans had no intention of invading Britain!
"'Germany had not one troop in the northern coast of Europe as far as ground strength was concerned. And, all that we had to do was bomb out that one supply line with B-24s... The Germans were fully committed against the communists in the Ukraine with a supply line 2,000 miles long! Germany would have had to surrender, and the war would have ended in 1942.'
"His eyes became coldly brilliant. 'And, that was General Fellers' plan. And when that plan hit the War Department, the fur flew. General Fellers was relieved the next day as military advisor to the Middle East. And that's why he was sent to the Southwest Pacific.
"'Well, I said, what's wrong with winning the war like that, against Germany? Fellers said, "Oh, they had broken my code and Winston Churchill had said before the House of Commons that he would not allow General Fellers to come to the European theatre even with the OSS." He did not want him to have anything to do with it. He had broken General Fellers' code and intercepted that message and put the heat on the White House.
"'I couldn't figure all this out. And then General Feller said, "Well, what they don't know is that I broke their code, too. And I know what they did. I have the evidence that Churchill and Roosevelt made a deal with the communists, the Soviet Union, to give Germany to the communists in exchange for leaving the Middle East as a sphere of British influence after the war ends."' He fell silent, gazing sightlessly out the window."
(Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pgs. 44-45)
General Bonner Fellers
This is hardly the extent of Fellers' contributions to Patriot movement ideology. We shall return to him again in a future installment in this series, so keep the general in mind.
Another military intelligence officer who played an enormous role in the spread of communist conspiracy theories was Colonel John Beaty."The book, Iron Curtain over America, first published in 1951, scared the military community half to death. Its author, Colonel John Beaty, had written or collaborated on a dozen books, many of which were used in hundreds of colleges and universities. His education (M.A., University of Virginia; Ph.D., Columbia University; post-graduate study, University of Montpellier, France), his travels in Europe and Asia, and his five years with the Military Intelligence Service during World War II created the background for his research."
(ibid, pg. 217)
Iron Curtain over America was enormously influential amongst the Patriot movement in the years following its publication and is still considered a classic in certain branches of the conspiratorial right, most especially the Jewish conspiracy strands, to this day."And in 1951, a former intelligence officer published the most the viscerally anti-Semitic books since the war, a work enthusiastically endorsed and promoted by three generals and an admiral: The Iron Curtain over America, still offered by neo-Nazi groups a half century later as an indispensable primer on the Jews. The Iron Curtain described a conspiracy to dominate the world in which the 'Judaized Khazars' behind Bolshevikism had infiltrated the U.S. government and fostered the war not to end dictatorship, but to kill Aryans and 'annihilate[e]... Germany, the historical bulwark of Christian Europe."
(The Funding of Scientific Racism, William M. Turner, pg. 29)
Beaty was, to the best of this researcher's knowledge, the first author in the wake of WWII to revive the highly controversial notion that modern Jews are not descendant from ancient Israel, but are Khazars who converted to Judaism in either the eighth or ninth century A.D. Beaty would argue that the Khazar Jews were behind the spread of communism and that they were stealthy taking over the United States."Lamenting the inhumane treatment of Germany after World War II by a 'Communist influenced America,' Beaty drew parallels between communism and Judaism, and ultimately outlined the great conspiracy; the right-wing notion that America have been infiltrated by communist/Jewish aliens, and was now ruled by a Zionist/Communist Occupied Government (Z.O.G.).
"The ancient tribe of people known as the Khazars from Russia were the descendants of the 'infiltrators' whom Beaty claimed immigrated to the United States and ultimately became Z.O.G..."
(The Committee of the States, Cheri Seymour, pg. 221)
And there you have the likely origins of "Z.O.G.," a notion conceived by a "former" military intelligence officer and promoted by the top brass. As the years went on the anti-Semitic elements of the "communist conspiracy" were gradually downplayed by the more "mainline" elements of the Patriot movement in favor of less controversial targets, such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati. But rest assured, a Protocols of the Elders of Zion-type slant was prevalent in virtually all of the early strands of such notions.
by American Dream » Fri Jul 10, 2015 8:12 am
From Rhodesia to Charleston: Looking for Who is Responsible for ‘Lone Wolf’ Racial Terrorism
Dylann Roof from jail.
The twenty-four hour news cycle often produces strong flashes when it transcribes hot news stories, coming in brief moments before the full picture has been painted. A shooting at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people declared official casualties of the church. Reports say that the shooter began as a parishioner joined in Bible study before picking up heavy artillery and opening fire.
At first this came as a big surprise, and certainly a break from the recent barrage of police murders that have marked the last months of coverage. This stood out as a return to a type of interpersonal violence that is easy to condemn and classify across the political spectrum. Confusion erupted and we saw that commentators were slow to cite race as the cause and to classify the deaths as an act of racial terrorism. The shooting in Charleston, which appears to many people on first glance as a completely random act of violence, is one that fits perfectly in an American tradition that has seen incidents like these without any evidence of slowing. It was not until eyewitness reports come in did the rhetoric begin to change, that its racial connection was solidified. One survivor reported that when confronted the shooter said,” I have to do it. You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. You have to go.” Now that his self-described “Manifesto” is in hand it is incredibly clear what this was: an act of racial warfare.
The document he produced can easily be dismissed as the rantings of a deranged young man, which, in some ways, it is, yet that misses one of the key insights that comes across in his work. The thought process and ideas he cites were not original to him and were instead adopted directly from publications and organizations that have constructed narratives about black populations in the United States. No substantive analysis is being done on the text, which is a common occurrence in American law enforcement as it brings out our desire to avoid adding reason and logic to events that seem to defy explanation. The first part of this is the immediate assumption of mental illness, which then relieves them of having to search for any logically sound reasoning. Mental illness is commonly used to completely reject normal engagement, which is partially why so many media outlets have denied this as an act of terrorism. Simply put: crazy people do crazy things, but terrorism, on the other hand is ideological. The second primary reason is that in it he takes a positive view towards racism, saying essentially that racist ideas are “correct.” This comes directly up against the understood notion in the liberal establishment that racism as a conscious concept has been completely overcome and that any example of racist ideas no longer need to be engaged because they are self-refuting. This is something that the radical left often shares as movements have long dispelled and challenged racist myths, yet this does not mean that a substantial population are not still promoting conscious racism in influential ways.
Racism as a public ideology has gained pariah status while racial inequity has seeped into the very fabric of the American state and economic system. White privilege has been the target of movements seeking to abolish the racial caste system that was fermented to protect Chattel slavery and kept us through eras of Jim Crow and mass incarceration. As this racial hierarchy is challenged there remains a vanguardist minority that seeks to re-establish White Supremacy as a formal system. Today, a certain subset of the organized racist-right maintains a pseudo-academic and pseudo-scientific veneer that hides open bigotry as a motivating factor and has created a series of ideas and philosophical foundations to argue their racialized points. These ideas remain on the fringe, but can seep into the culture in a number of ways. While the radical White Nationalist community does not maintain a popular public face, they have been influential in crossover political topics like immigration. They have been successful in influencing the debates in favor of discussions around America’s racial heritage in ways that other contemporary “hot button” issues just would not. The fringes of the right, from paleoconservatives to Constitutionalists, tax resisters to militia men, all have had historic connections to the vanguardist racist-right, and we see these ideas represented in flash moments in crossover points like the Ron Paul campaign or the battle in Nevada over ranching property rights. The strongest example of their influence, however, is with how they radicalize people in more profound and individualized ways.
Dylann Roof’s Manifesto, published on his website The Last Rhodesian, is both incoherent and lacking in deep thought, but shows moments where his thought process strays from his own delusions. The vast majority of the bumbling document discusses things like the Trayvon Martin murder, the ANC election during the 1990s in South Africa, and support for segregation. He discusses, at length, what is phrased as “black on white crime,” a rhetorical favorite for racialist groups who are attempting to create a narrative about a supposed plague of racialized violence against whites. This is still a surface idea that derives from his most central concept: that blacks are a genetically inferior subspecies.
“Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional. How could our faces, skin, hair, and body structure all be different, but our brains be exactly the same? This is the nonsense we are led to believe. Negroes have lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior. If a scientist publishes a paper on the differences between the races in Western Europe or Americans, he can expect to lose his job. There are personality traits within human families, and within different breeds of cats or dogs, so why not within the races?”
”
The behavior he rants about is seen as only a consequence of intelligence. Criminality, sexual control, the ability towards delayed gratification, the ability to maintain families and careers are all a subset of what he sees as the mental inferiority of black people as an ethnic category. This is taken straight out of the artificial debate over race and IQ, a concept that has been suggested since the earliest days of slavery when the white plantation class manipulated new scientific understandings to give a social excuse for their cruelty. This played out as “racial hygiene” and Eugenics, the idea that we can affect genetic outcomes by limiting the breeding of supposed “inferiors,” all of which is central to the institutional violence seen in places like the early American south. This debate was relaunched with right-wing money in post-WWII American scientific climate, where the language and aesthetics shifted after Nazism was so roundly associated with mechanistic genocide. The Pioneer Fund was created to support research that would designate blacks as genetically inferior to whites. The Pioneer Fund provided funding to studies on twins and adopted racially mixed siblings in an effort to first determine that intelligence and other dominant mental faculties were predominately genetic and, second, to prove that in the same social conditions, black s and whites will perform with different effectiveness. With this we have seen controversial and questionable studies that, though the scientific community almost roundly rejects their conclusions, continue to be retread by those looking to justify their racial anger. Arthur Jensen did this famously for decades, and in recent years people like J. Phillip Rushton and Richard Lynn used their positions as tenured faculty to push a version of evolutionary psychology that sees population groups as being more or less intelligence based on their geographic region. As marginal as we think these ideas are, they have occasional breaches into the mainstream. In 1994, Charles Murray, a generally popular conservative now with the American Enterprise Institute, co-authored The Bell Curve, which, among other things, determined that intelligence is largely genetic and will dictate socio-economic positioning. Within this racial differences in intelligence is given real credibility, so much so that it has been the foundation of racist publications from that point forward. More recently, Nicholas Waid’s book A Troublesome Inheritance does its best to determine that race is not a social construct and instead dictates things like personality types, familial structures, and social progress. And, of course, for these white authors, black people remain stunted at the bottom of their evolutionary ladder.
Some of the dominant institutions on the right maintaining the genetically inspired racial myths come with American Renaissance and, as we have seen in the news recently, the Council of Conservative Citizens. American Renaissance has been having their regular conferences since 1990 where they bring on fringe academics to talk about topics like race and IQ, all tinged with value-laden language and dog-whistle epithets. In recent years the dialogue has shifted someone to a more philosophical tone where calls for a “white homeland” are commonplace. This is the definition of the “suit and tie” racist crowd where open racial slurs are almost non-existent, where Nazi and Klan symbolism is disallowed, and innocuous names and subject titles make it appear as a boring academic conference rather than a call for racial holy war. American Renaissance has been paramount in propagating a term coined by conservative columnist Steve Sailer, Human Biological Diversity (HBD). This harmless sounding euphemism is a code word for the idea that certain population groups, namely racial groups, simply have biological difference between them. What difference is discussed more than all others? Intelligence.
This has led to a pseudo-academic blogosphere discussing these alleged racial differences in language that often disassociates itself from criticism. As Holocaust Denial did in the 1980s-90s, HBD has the ability to cross over into subcultures simply because it uses academic-sounding language that people rarely have the tools to refute. When you combine that with a growing sense of distrust in our dominant scientific and health institutions with a general decline in education and of left ideological explanations for our current social catastrophe, it is easy to see why a dissident movement is forming around ideas that most previously would have seen as insane. As we move further towards economic and ecological collapse, more extreme versions of these dissident movements begin to pop up. With Neo-Reactionaries and the Dark Enlightenment we are witnessing a desire to return to a world that knows no democracy and equality, that sees tradition, authority, stratification, and top-down control as natural and preferred. These may seem like ideas best left to the dark side of Internet message board, but in counter-cultural, big-tech, and new intellectual movements, these far-right ideas are seeing resurgence. Race and intelligence are seen as one of the most central components of their arguments, proving that democracy is a failure because not all people are simply capable of running society.
One of the key elements that separate these groups from racists of the past is their use of slight variants in the theory; in this instance it is the “Asian hypothesis.” This essentially notes that East Asians, on average, score higher on IQ tests even then whites, which has led to many Asian bloggers to support HBD claims. This allows HBD fanatics to buck the “white supremacist” claim while still closely allying whites as the upper-levels of the stratification with Sub-Saharan Africans and Australian Aborigines rounding out the bottom. This logic is, again, one that has to be learned and is not present in unaffiliated racists, except those whose ideas where shaped by this community. This is why, when Roof addresses the Asian community in his writing, it takes on a special significance.
“I have great respent(sic) for the East Asian races. Even if we were to go extinct they could carry something on. They are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race. I am not opposed at all to allies with the Northeast Asian races.”
The organization that Roof has specifically linked to, the Council of Conservative Citizens, was formed in the 1980s by Gordon Baum on the mailing lists of the “white citizen’s councils” that fought segregation. They held onto Republican rhetoric, associating themselves with the edges of the GOP while openly touting White Nationalist ideas rooted in HBD. In recent years the association with Republican party leaders has gone public as major politics were seen to speak as their conference Between 2000 and 2004 38 major elected officials have spoken at CofCC at conferences, including people like Mike Huckabee, Haley Barbour and Trent Lot. In recent years the fallout has pushed CofCC further to the right, now banned from participating in conferences like CPAC. Alongside these featured politicians were talks on Jewish banking control, the beauty of Chattel slavery, and the “white genocide” that is happening through immigration and miscegenation.
The romantization that Roof had with the racist right was not only with the mainstreaming CofCC but also with more ingrained racist institutions like the seminal white nationalist forum Stormfront. Created by former Klan leader Don Black, it has existed as a sort of hub for the more radical elements of the far right movement. According to the SPLC, almost 100 murders from the last six years can be traced back to Stormfront. As they try to update their image by banning images of the Third Reich and open racial slurs, the truth remains that the discourse that remains there is still tied to vulgar violence.
The issue of this as a “lone wolf” attack has led a lot of people confused. The term in this context comes from an essay from White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger as an option for violent action outside of an organizational structure. This has become incredibly important as we are seeing militant racist organizations like skinhead gangs or variants of the KKK decline sharply, yet we see violent actions remain constant. In the SPLC’s study of domestic right-wing terrorism over the last six years, they concluded that a full 74% of attacks where from a single person, and 90% either alone or in pairs. While the organized violent actors may be on the decline, the side that has only been increasing is the growing undercurrent of publications and blogs promoting the scientific racism of the future.
What happens is that incidents like these can blind us to whom the real actors are. Is there an active Klan group orchestrating these attacks? Was it a skinhead faction bent on making a name for themselves? Roof himself notes that neither one of these are at play any longer, so he needs to take the reigns. The voice of the future of these movements is one that never would publicly advocate violence of this kind, and may even honestly believe it to be the antithesis of successful racial organizing. Yet in the hands of an increasingly disaffected population it is like a grenade waiting to find a target. Roof was raised on the intellectual racially oriented movement work that created a theory of social-biology, not the open violence of something like Aryan Nations. Our work in the anti-fascist/anti-racist movement has, traditionally, been focused towards open Neo-Nazis in the north and the KKK in the south, but as these become the players of the past we have yet to adapt to the new face of hate. In the future, it will be discourse that logically leads to acts of “lone wolf” violence, yet it is the rhetoric itself that creates an ideological underpinning and support where the only logical response is murder. If we are to create anti-fascist movements that can actually confront the real threat of openly racist violence then it has to look at the seemingly disconnected source that builds the logic and justification for the trigger pulled later.
by tapitsbo » Fri Jul 10, 2015 12:46 pm
by elfismiles » Mon Sep 21, 2015 1:58 pm
FBI agents arrest friend of accused Charleston church shooter
Published time: 18 Sep, 2015 03:38
A father carries his son on his back as they listen to gospel music being sung during a vigil outside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, June 20, 2015. © Carlo Allegri / Reuters
The FBI has arrested a friend of accused Charleston, South Carolina church shooter Dylann Roof, the young white man who shot and killed nine Africa-Americans in the historic house of worship.
The arrest comes one month after Joseph “Joey” Meek, 21, learned that he was being investigated for shooting-related felonies, including making false statements and hiding knowledge of a crime.
Meek was arrested by federal agents while he was at work on Thursday, his girlfriend told The State newspaper.
Prior to the arrest, he reportedly called Lindsey Fry, who lives with Meek and his family in a trailer in Red Bank, to inform her.
“He just said, ‘They want to talk to me, but I think I’m going to jail,’” Fry told the newspaper.
It was not immediately clear over what charges Meek has been arrested, but he was informed by federal officials in a letter on August 6 that he was “a potential target” of the criminal investigation. According to a letter from the US Attorney’s Office in Columbia, the possible crimes he might be wanted for included misprision (hiding knowledge of a crime) and false statements.
Meek was given until August 21 to respond to the US Attorney’s Office, The State reported.
If found guilty, Meek could be sentenced to a total of eight years in prison – up to three years for concealing information and another five years for making false statements.
Meek’s arrest comes less than a week after The Washington Post’s lengthy and detailed report on him, his life in Red Bank as well as his relationship to Dylann Roof and the June 17 shooting at a Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Dylann Roof © Jason Miczek
Dylann Roof © Jason Miczek / Reuters
A former classmate of Roof, Meek told The State earlier this week that he believes he committed no crimes. Speaking to reporters, Meek said that he should not have trusted Roof when he suddenly asked for a place to stay. Roof was sporadically sheltered in Meek’s trailer, along with his family and girlfriend, until killing nine people at the church.
Meek told reporters earlier this week that his friends would often stay over and this is why he did not suspect anything when Roof knocked on his door.
Shortly after the shooting, Meek spoke to numerous media outlets saying that he told police everything he knew about Roof, describing his clothes and car plates. Meek also told The State earlier this week that once he recognized Roof on surveillance shots, he reported it to FBI.
Back in June, Meek did recall that while being drunk days before the shooting, Roof vowed to “spark up the race war again”.
“Would you believe your friend if they said something like that when they were drunk?” Meek told the Washington Post. “You can’t tell me you would. I didn’t believe it. I brushed it off.”
READ MORE: Charleston shooter charged with federal hate crimes
Speaking to The State, Meek’s girlfriend Fry also said that no one in the trailer took Roof’s statements seriously, since he only made them when he was drunk. It also appeared that Roof had a “daily cocaine habit,” the report said.
Despite not taking seriously what Meek thought was drunken bluster, he did hide Roof’s handgun. However, he returned it the next day on Fry’s urging.
Roof himself faces state and federal murder charges. If convicted, he could be sentenced to the death penalty.
http://www.rt.com/usa/315798-fbi-friend ... n-shooter/
by Twyla LaSarc » Mon Sep 21, 2015 5:41 pm
by American Dream » Wed Nov 11, 2015 8:37 pm
American Dream » Sun Jun 28, 2015 5:54 pm wrote:
UPDATE 6/28/15:
It would seem that Dylann Storm Roof name checked the writings of yet another individual closely linked to the old Posse Comitatus/Aryan Brotherhood network noted above in his manifesto. Raw Story reports:"Dylann Roof refers to Harold Covington’s white separatist group, the Northwest Front, in his alleged manifesto. The rightwing sci-fi writer distances himself from the shooting, but his followers speculate if his work influenced Roof’s actions..
"The racist manifesto and photos apparently posted by Roof makes mention of the Northwest Front, created by Covington, a former member of the American Nazi party who traveled to South Africa and Rhodesia in order to agitate for white power. In the accompanying photos, Roof wore patches with Rhodesian and apartheid-era South African flags on them...
"The Roof killings are not the first time Covington’s name has come up in connection with an allegedly racist murder. Covington was part of a group of white supremacists in the 1970s who massacred black people at a rally in Greensboro (Covington didn’t kill anyone and wasn’t in attendance on the day of the violence). He was also at one time close with Frazier Glenn Miller, who is charged with killing a one woman, a 69-year-old Jewish man and that man’s 14-year-old grandson in front of their temple last year..."
The American Nazi Party has been linked to deep intrigues, as I noted before here.
Covington's one time close friend Frazier Glenn Miller was also enlisted as an FBI informant for a time. Covington, who like many of the white supremacists considered in this article, is a former military man. During the mid-1970s he turned up in South Africa and later Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where he claimed to have worked as a mercenary. There is no evidence for this claim but he did indeed play a role in creating the Rhodesian White People's Party as well as a group called South African Friends of the Movement. The above-mentioned World Anti-Communist League (WACL) and American Security Council (ASC) had extensive dealings with the governments of Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia during this time, but I have been unable to link either of Covington's groups to either international lobby group. But certainly they would be in keeping with the types of groups the WACL and ASC aligned themselves with in that part of the world.
Its also interesting to note that several of Covington's former allies in the white supremacist underground accused Covington of being a CIA asset shortly after the Greensboro massacre (which he was present for, along with Frazier Glenn Miller). Despite being sought by the FBI for questioning for his role in the massacre he was able to return to North Carolina unfettered. Much more on Covington and these allegations can be found here.
an image from the aftermath
of Greensboro
Posted by Recluse
http://visupview.blogspot.com/2015/06/t ... l-and.html
by American Dream » Thu Nov 12, 2015 7:31 pm
One degree of separation: Alleged race war plotters and the Virginia Flaggers?f
Accused race war plotter Danny Halderman at Hollywood Cemetery celebrating his Confederate Heritage.
Over the weekend, three men in Virginia were arrested for allegedly trying to obtain weapons to carry out a race war. It's pretty scary stuff to say the least. There are many who leaped to make excuses after Dylann Roof was arrested for allegedly murdering nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina earlier this year.
by American Dream » Fri Nov 13, 2015 6:27 pm
by American Dream » Tue Nov 17, 2015 11:45 am
Tragic and Full of Revolutionary Hope: From One South to Another
by Casey James Aldridge
What America witnessed on June 17, 2015 was a white supremacist act of terror. That act revealed two things, at once tragic and full of revolutionary hope: a tale of two churches, and a tale of empty pews.
I. CHARLESTON: A TALE OF TWO CHURCHES
It took nearly two days for the pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Columbia to identify Dylann Roof as a member. Still, the setting of Roof’s terrorism—Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston—gave headlines a religious dimension from the outset. By any rational analysis of the massacre of the Emanuel Nine, Roof’s attack was explicitly racial. This is made clear by the testimony of survivor and witness Kristen Washington,(1) and the uncovering of Roof’s manifesto.(2) The killer openly espoused white supremacist ideals in his writings, words, and actions. But we ought not ignore the religious component and what it means for radical theology and Black liberation in the South.
Roof’s is the Christianity of white supremacy, employed as moral justification for slavery, segregation, and racist Southern strategies. It is the Christianity of empire, Rome’s appropriation of an anti-imperialist myth.
Charleston is the epitome of the South. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in 1860. Roof and South Carolina are caricatures of what liberal America generalizes as the South: a monolithically reactionary region that the Left may as well ignore. This “writing off” of the South is unfortunate and misguided; as a stronghold of patriarchy, racism and poverty, the South’s disaffected are justified in their discontent.
This dissociation from the South reflects something else though—the unwillingness or inability of the Left to make inroads into theistic (usually but not exclusively Christian) masses in the South. After all, no complete picture of South Carolina can be painted in absence of the Bible Belt, and no understanding of Charleston without its epithet as ‘Holy City.’ Lest we forget, Roof targeted a Black church. Any analysis that claims this as “proof” of religious persecution of Christians is asinine. It isn’t Christianity under assault; it’s Black life and Black worship. Most are familiar with the firebombing of the Birmingham church where four girls were killed in 1963, but white supremacists have always targeted places of worship, notably in the string of arsons at Black churches in the 1990s,(3) and more recently in arsons across Southern states in the weeks after Roof’s attack. Black churches are paradoxically seen as unlikely to violently resist white supremacists – by principle or by lack of means – and at the same time as places of monumental significance to a long history of Black resistance.
Emanuel AME is one such congregation with a proud history of anti-racist rebellion. Emanuel was the faith home of abolitionist Denmark Vesey. Vesey attempted to ignite a mass slave revolt in Charleston on the same day as Roof’s attack in 1822, but was caught and executed just days later on July 2.(4) It is easy, from time to time, to regard Denmark Vesey and his comrades as relics of the past. Abolitionists who struggled against North American slavery carried themselves with a courage and political vision ahead of their time. I suspect Roof targeted Emanuel on June 17 aware of the significance of his target location and date. But the murder of the Nine resurrected Vesey. In his decision to target that church on the day of Vesey’s rebellion, Vesey has returned to revolutionary vocabulary. Suddenly and fervently, the Southern anti-racist movement reared its head again, burning flags, defacing monuments, and organizing.
by American Dream » Mon Jan 18, 2016 12:33 pm
Mississippi Burning Killings: Religious Terrorism?
JOURNEY TO JUSTICE
Stuart Wexler
In the 1960s, Sam Bowers headed the most violent white supremacist group in the U.S., the White Knights of the KKK.
Samuel Holloway Bowers, the first Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi and the mastermind behind the slayings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, 50 years ago, did not fit the caricature of a backwards racist. College educated as an engineer at the University of Southern California and at Tulane University, associates described him as an ideologically driven strategist.
"He is very intelligent. I have no question about that," Thomas Tarrants, once the self-described chief terrorist for Bowers, told journalist Patsy Sims for her book The Klan. "And I believe he was like I was, indoctrinated, brainwashed... Absorbed into an ideology that took on the awe of a holy cause and blinded his mind to everything else. I think Sam believes what he is doing is right and has the sanction of God."
Tarrants later renounced racism and is currently an ordained, evangelical minister. But at one time he saw himself as occupying the same unique space as Bowers in the counter-revolution against integration and desegregation: that of a holy warrior. As Bowers described it, in 1994, to theologian Charles Marsh:"There are two really powerful figures in the world: the priest and the preacher. I think I came here as a priest, though not a preacher. A priest is interested in visible, public power relations; this is what makes him powerful as a warrior. A preacher is an evangelist; he will tell people what to do. But the priest will arrange the means and operations to implement this into concrete action. When the priest sees the heretic, he can do only one thing: he eliminates him."
Scholars, if they pay any attention to it at all, have been confused by Bowers' open professions that religion drove his activities. Religion, to many historians, was simply a cover for white supremacists of all stripes to retroactively justify their racial animus — epitomized by the ritual burning of the cross. Even as a rare exceptions to this mindset among scholars, Marsh still viewed Bowers through the prism of mainstream Christianity, where religion is one motivating force behind Bowers activities, but where Bowers used creative interpretations and rationalizations of the Bible to justify his actions. Anyone who accepts communism — which for Bowers included almost anyone in or who supported the civil rights movement — had embraced a Godless ideology and relinquished God's grace. In this rendering, Bowers is still a reactionary, vigilante racist, but one who attempts to sincerely reconcile his actions with his conventional, Christian faith.
But new research suggests religion not only drove Bowers' violent activities, but that it influenced his tactics, in ways that were opaque not simply to outside observers, but even to rank-and-file members within the White Knights, the group Bowers led from 1964 through 1968. Bowers made a point of hiding his true motivations, according to Delmar Dennis, a high-ranking White Knight who became the FBI's most important informant on the group. "The typical Mississippi redneck doesn't have sense enough to know what he is doing," Dennis described Bowers as saying to him privately, "I have to use him for my own cause and direct his every action to fit my plan."
The historical record now makes it clear Bowers' plan involved a goal for a holy race war, one the Klan leader hoped to provoke himself. Marsh, and other experts on Bowers, recognize that as of 1967, Bowers had embraced a radical interpretation of Christianity — referred to as Christian Identity theology or the Christian Identity Movement — that devalued minorities as sub-human, and that saw Jews as Satanic conspirators against Anglo-Saxon whites. What many have failed to see was that, in the hands of a militant like Bowers, this theology became the driving force behind his strategy and tactics, as surely as the goal of creating a transnational, Islamic caliphate drove Osama Bin Laden. Unlike Bin Laden, Bowers had to hide this ideology from most of his conventionally Christian Klan members, and "use" them to "fit" his plan. Moreover, the record indicates Bowers likely embraced this theology early in his tenure as the head of White Knights, possibly before he became its leader. Evidence suggests Bowers possibly planned the "Mississippi Burning" killings with this religious worldview as his guide. Viewed through the lens of religious terrorism, the killings of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, become even more dark and twisted than they appeared at the time. Bowers plans appear to be more ominous than simply trying to thwart the Freedom Summer set to begin shortly after the three civil rights activists disappeared.
********************
That Sam Bowers was a devoutly religious Christian for the duration of his tenure as the leader of the White Knights is without question. In his excellent book, God's Long Summer, Marsh traces Bowers' interest in religion to his military experience during World War II, one that was bolstered in 1955 after Bowers experienced a moment of mystical intensity" when "God spoke to him." As the leader of the White Knights, which formed circa 1963-1964, Bowers always carried a Bible, always began every meeting with a prayer, and, even as he commanded a group the FBI believed to be the most violent Klan organization in the nation, always insisted "a Solemn, determined Spirit of Christian Reverence must be stimulated in all members" of the White Knights.
But what seems like a fundamental contradiction to anyone familiar with the nonviolent teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament was, to Bowers, something consistent with the worldview of a rapidly growing and militant Christian sect: the Christian Identity Movement. It now appears possible this radical offshoot of Christianity may have gained purchase with Bowers by 1964, the year he took command of the newly formed White Knights, and may well have played a key role in motivating and shaping the contours of the Mississippi Burning killings.
When at its peak of influence from the late 1940s through the 1960s, the heart of the Christian Identity Movement was, geographically, in Southern California. But it had originally begun in the 19th century in Victorian England, and was called British Israelism. At its core, the Christian Identity Movement argued Anglo-Saxons, and not Semitic Jews, were the true chosen people of the Bible. The idea gained currency in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. The timing of its spread from the eastern to western United States in the 1920s and 1930s pushed the movement in a notably racist and anti-Semitic direction. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was perhaps the largest fraternal organization in the United States, with a national reach and membership in the millions, in part because of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment that extended, in no small part, to the recent wave of Jewish immigrants. One of the most vocal, early supporters of the Christian Identity Movement was W.J. Cameron, a media figure who worked closely with Henry Ford on his nationally syndicated Dearborn Independent, and who used the publication to spread virulently anti-Semitic ideas.
Hence by World War II, some in the American Christian Identity Movement embraced a darker version of its Anglo-centric theology. Anglo-Saxons were not simply God's chosen people in this version: Jews were literally Satan's spawn. Under a new interpretation of the Book of Genesis, shaped primarily by the Rev. Gerald Smith, Anglo-Saxons were the offspring of Adam and Eve, through the bloodline of Seth; contemporary Jews, on the other hand, were the offspring of Eve and the Serpent (e.g. Satan) through the bloodline of Cain. The popular perception that Jews were the Chosen People, and that Jesus Christ was Jewish, was a lie of cosmic proportions, part of a literal, Satanic conspiracy to subvert God's will. Known as the "two-seed theory" this new interpretation of the creation story became the foundation of a militant variation of Christian Identity theology, one that also held other nonwhites — Africans and Asians — descended from the "beasts of the field," the animals who roamed the world before Adam and Eve. These other groups, referred to as "humanoids" or "mud people" by those in two-seed Christian Identity theology, were manipulated by Jews in the service of Satan.
The alternate interpretation of humanity's beginning also implied an alternate interpretation of the final days of humanity's judgment by God, what conventional Christians refer to as "The End Times." Like many millennial Christians in modern America, Christian Identity adherents believe the second coming of Jesus Christ will be marked by a period of tribulation — plagues and other calamities — and ultimately a spiritual war between the forces of Satan, led by the anti-Christ, and the forces of God; God will triumph, and Jesus Christ will return for his 1,000 year reign in the Kingdom of God. But in the radical version of Christian Identity theology, this end-times conflict will be a holy race war where Anglo-Saxon whites do battle against Jews and the "mud people." The outcome will be a racially pure world or a racially pure America. Unlike the end-times view popular in fundamentalist, evangelical circles, those who adhere to this more militant version of Christian Identity do not believe in a rapture — a time, before the tribulation, when God will spare believers of his plagues by removing them from the secular world. Instead, most radical Christian Identity believers argue God's "elect" must take an active part in bringing about and participating in this spiritual war, serving as soldiers for God. For this reason, they frequently stockpile weapons and food in preparation for the End Times. More relevant to the discussion of Bowers and the Mississippi Burning murders, they also are willing to engage in provocative acts of violence in hopes of hastening the End Times.
Wesley Swift's Christian Identity sermons were popular among Klansmen in Mississippi.
by American Dream » Sat Feb 27, 2016 8:59 am
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