Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

[seemslikeadream]

The Radical Out of Touch Republicans Offer a Proto-Fascist, a Christian Theocrat, and an Ayn Rand Neoliberal as Leading Candidates
Most everything the media says about the "GOP establishment lane" is wrong. It does not really exist.

Almost all of the 2016 Republican presidential primary candidates share the following beliefs:

1. That the United States should bomb and kill many thousands of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere in order to supposedly stop the spread of ISIS and other terrorist organizations.

2. Torturing suspected terrorists—even though such acts are both immoral and ineffective in retrieving actionable intelligence information—is acceptable.

3. “God’s law” should supersede the United States Constitution.

4. They are anti-science and do not believe that global warming is a real, scientifically proven, empirical fact.

5. Tax cuts for the 1 percent and the American oligarchs should be expanded and protected while the social safety net and workers’ rights are further limited.

6. The Affordable Care Act should be reversed, and action that will result in millions of Americans being left without insurance and forced to seek aid and assistance from private charities.

7. Muslim Americans should be tracked by a national database as suspected “terrorists.”

8. Basic government functions should be privatized and protecting “the commons” should be made the responsibility of profit motivated corporations.

9. Women should be denied the basic human right of making their own reproductive health choices.

10. They are “law and order” racial authoritarians who support police thuggery and brutality against black and brown Americans, the poor and other marginalized groups

[backtoiam]

I am seriously losing track of all these labels. They change so fast. It is almost to the point that you need a spread sheet for all these labels. Ya know? What is a progressive, and a liberal, and a democrat, and a conservative, and all this bunk?

The "Semantic Arrows", just as they were designed to do, have worn my ass out....I'm so tired of this shit...

[American Dream]

Here is more:


https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2016/02 ... l-anselmo/

In March 1995, during a Pantera show in Montreal, the then 26-year-old Anselmo told the crowd that while “Pantera are not a racist band” and that he and his bandmates had friends “of all colours and all kinds”, he had a problem with rap artists “pissing all over white culture”. Furthermore, Anselmo continued, pleas from the African-American community to end ‘Black on Black crime’ should be interpreted as “it’s okay to kill white people”: white people, the singer insisted, needed to take more pride in who they are.

“Tonight,” Anselmo concluded, “is a white thing.”

The singer later apologised for his rant, and the “harmful words that may have racially offended our audience”, but the controversy dogged him for years. In recent years, in his more reflective moments, Anselmo – a thoughtful man, for all his bullish, anti-intellectual John Doe bravado – was not slow to acknowledge the power of symbolism and speech to propagate hatred and division. In a 2015 interview with the Hard Rock Haven website the singer admitted that “with hindsight” he wouldn’t have incorporated a Confederate flag in the cover artwork of Superjoint Ritual’s debut album, and conceded that some of the lyrical content on the band’s second album A Lethal Dose Of American Hatred (which on Stealing A Page Or Two From Armed And Radical Pagans railed against “the coward Muḥammad” and “Jewish elitists”) was “regrettable.”

This has seemed to finally created a public debate among fans of metal – a genre which has its very own subgenre of explicitly neo-Nazi bands (NSBM) – about exactly what they are going to tolerate.

Machine Head’s Robb Flynn made a very poignant video addressing Anselmo’s behavior which is well worth a watch.


https://youtu.be/fCBKzWg4WYo


Shortly thereafter, and seeing his career sinking before his eyes, Anselmo made an incredibly unreflective apology, saying alcohol was the cause of the Hitler salute, and begging his fans to “gimme another chance.”



Sometime people should be given another chance; we’ve seen boneheads leave the White Power scene and become anti-racist activists. But why should Anselmo get yet another chance? What is this – his fourth, fifth, sixth… tenth, twentieth time?

The Dutch music festival FortaRock has pulled Anselmo’s current band, Down, from their upcoming line up. This is a good start.

The metal community has given Anselmo many, many chances: it’s time to stop talking about forgiveness and start talking about giving him No Platform. No shows, no interviews, no radio play, no nothing.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Anselmo - yeah he says this shit to generate some air time/publicity - he's just a has been.

[American Dream]

Speaking of Ted fucking Nugent...

Ted Nugent posts anti-Semitic image against gun control


The anti-Semitic post by Ted Nugent.


Right-wing rocker Ted Nugent posted an anti-Semitic message Monday charging that Jews are trying to take away his precious guns.

The wacko rocker and National Rifle Association board member posted an image on Facebook of prominent politicians like Michael Bloomberg, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Charles Schumer, Rahm Emmanuel and others, each beside an Israeli flag under the banner "So who is really behind gun control?"

“Know these punks. They hate freedom, they hate good over evil, they would deny us the basic human right to self defense & to KEEP & BEAR ARMS while many of them have tax paid hired ARMED security! Know them well. Tell every1 you know how evil they are. Let us raise maximum hell to shut them down!" Nugent wrote.

http://m.nydailynews.com/news/national/ ... -1.2524561

[American Dream]

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/t ... ders-nazis

Ted Nugent Defends Anti-Semitic Facebook Rant By Calling Jewish Leaders 'Nazis'

It seems that NRA board member Ted Nugent is quite upset that anyone would dare criticize his anti-Semitic Facebook memes, writing on his Facebook page last night that he is simply trying to honor victims of the Holocaust by stopping the next one.

"What sort of racist prejudiced POS could possibly not know that Jews for guncontrol are nazis in disguise?" Nugent said. "'NEVER AGAIN!' Anyone? Anyone?? RUFKM!"


...Nugent's fans quickly rose to his defense, and the right-wing activist and musician proceeded to "like" several anti-Semitic comments on his thread

[American Dream]

Nugent, an outspoken Second Amendment advocate, posted a photo on Facebook earlier this week calling Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), “Jew York City Mayor Mikey Bloomberg,” former senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, among many others, “punks” who would “deny us the basic human right to self defense and to keep and bear arms while many of them have paid hired armed security.”

The Israeli flag appears over or next to each of the 12 faces in the photo, which is the same one that has been shared many times in white suprema­cist cir­cles, according to the Anti-Defamation League....

Nugent later posted a photo of Nazis rounding up Jews during the Holocaust and described gun-control advocates as “soulless sheep to slaughter.”

And there's more.



--Ted Nugent is an anti-semitic asshole

http://boingboing.net/2016/02/12/ted-nu ... mitic.html

[American Dream]

I definitely need to better understand neofolk fascism and folk-punk neo-nazism. I don't think I've ever grokked the breakdown between non-fascists and fascists in those genres. Not exactly my cup of tea but I know folk-punk is pretty popular with young activists.

This- including the links- helps shine a light on the creepy, shadowy shit behind such scenes:

NEOFASCIST: HEATHEN HARVEST, NEOFOLK, AND FASCIST SUBCULTURAL ENTRYISM

The post-industrial, black metal, and neofolk music scene has been defined by fascist plausible deniability. The earliest days of the black metal scene were defined by iconoclastic misanthropic malaise, a generalized anger against everyone and everything. The scene was mired with early days of violence, but also embarrassing interviews from early bands about their obsessions with death and “evil.” This culminated in the murder of Euronymous by Varg Vikernes of Burzum, as well as the dozens of church burnings. The burnings themselves were both begging for some kind of high-schoolesque rebellion as well as a resistance against the past Christianization of Scandinavia, namely in Norway. Virknes eventually came out as a racial Odinist and white nationalist, with the church burnings being an act of religious war both against a “universalist/non-ethnic” religion and against an ethos that says “turn the other cheek.”


Michael Moynihan

The black metal community was largely defined later by fellow far-rightist Michael Moynihan, who wrote the book Lords of Chaos about the early years. The book, largely built on interviews with the band, see the movement as being the manifestation of an Odinic demonic spirit welling up in them. This draws on an idea from Carl Jung that people have archetypical spirits in their collective unconscious based on race, with white “Aryans” having the spirit of Nordic gods inside of them. This is the foundation of racial heathenry and is an idea that both animated much of Nazi occultism and the contemporary ethnic Asatru and Odinic sects.

While National Socialist Black Metal is certainly a phenomenon, racism is not the permanent state of the black metal community. Instead, there are very real problematic elements in terms of violence and nihilism, some of which taking an elitist and masculanist obsession, but the vast majority of bands do not share nationalist sympathies openly. What people tend to pick up on is instead that they share many themes with genres like neofolk and martial industrial, both of which have strong ties to the far-right.

Continues at: http://antifascistnews.net/2016/02/13/n ... -entryism/

[American Dream]

The Denver punk scene and the shifting face of Fascist organizing

http://rockymountainantifa.blogspot.com ... e.html?m=1

[jakell]

This seems a good demonstration of what 'Total Annihilation' have started to dislike about the antifa scene, a claustrophobic micro-fussing that goes against what they got into music for in the first place.
Of course, I'm speculating here, but it is based on my own experiences playing in bands.

Another mention of that Scottish event here too, actually hinting at a date this time. I hadn't realised it was so far away. the previous article talked like it was almost imminent.

[jakell]

Anti-fascistNews.net recently published an article about web magazine Heathen Harvest. Sadly, it rings true:

In almost every interview on the site they will begin referencing racial and neo-fascist themes. Often times questions reference the perennial traditionalism of [openly fascist political philosopher] Julius Evola , books like Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, or racial paganism....

Their podcast, The Forest Passage, drops much of the pretense and takes us directly back to the racism of the Alt Right. In Podcast #12, they open with jokes like calling our current period the “current year,” a joke from the rabidly racist and anti-Semitic podcast The Daily Shoah. They go on to deride “liberals” for their universalizing morality, they admire nationalism instead of “globalism,” and certainly side with the idea that elites should be running society…. In this episode one of the hosts discusses Germany’s choice to let in Syrian refugees, which they say is “destroying” Europe. They present contemporary politics as “Nationalism vs. Globalism,” presenting the common straw-man argument from fascists that to be against nationalism is to be in favor of global corporate capitalism.

http://antifascistnews.net/2016/02/13/n ... -entryism/

Had to check the link to see what sort of site 'Heathen Harvest' is. As it's a music site it seems to belong more on your 'lines' thread'.
If antifascistnews are referencing an overwhelming and sudden change in their orientation, then we are looking at something similar to RedIceRadio which I think deserved more discussion. Gradual change (in whatever direction) is to be expected, but sudden change sort of points to external forces, or at least tends to stand out.

I'm not that convinced about there being a big problem with the themes they discuss in their podcast**, some of those described here seem to overlap with current general themes anyway. I was amused by them referencing Spengler's 'Decline of the West' as belonging among fascist material, a rather glaring error that suggest that the whoever wrote this piece is not that knoweldgeable.

**I might have a listen to it now, just to see.

Thought I'd bring this to this thread as it fits in with the recent music focus.
After listening to the podcast, I discovered that antifascistnews' description of it is incredibly way off.

It's pretty loose and seems mainly two guys, one North American and one who sounds Scandinavian shooting the shit, it's so loose I didn't even catch their names and no introductions were made (the latter guy's name sounds amusingly like 'Yessir'). Anyway, I tried to find some intersections with the above description and the only real 'hits' were

23:30 Some musings about how some 'fanzines' are developing more of an ideological backbone (I may talk on a different thread about my experiences in the fanzine/music scene)

24:20 How this 'ideological backbone' seems to revolve around ideas of globalism vs national identity. note, this interview doesn't actually discuss or promote these ideologies, just mentions them, contrary to what antifascistnews suggests

29:30 How a lot of the criticisms of the ideology expressed in Black metal music appears to be virtue signalling (who knows? this is an opinion about an opinion about an opinion)

46:00 A discussion about antifa (this guy seem so removed from that particular clusterfuck that he calls them 'anteefa'), and how their attitude to their events seems distorted. He particularly references a 'Death in June' one.

52:30 Remarks that the fussing about black metal ideology in the fanzine sphere seems to be more of an American that European phenomenenon. (links to the above snippet in some ways)
That some of the off-colour remarks are backlash against virtue signalling (like a lot of black/death metal was a backlash against Christian values/morality).
Questions that the Black metal scene is homogenous enough for antifa's (et al) broad criticisms to be valid.

These are about the only relevant points I could pull out of the hour and a half podcast. The vast majority seems to suggest that they don't give a fig about the antifa stuff and the ideological tussles

[American Dream]

It's sad but true that when Jeff Wells was more actively involved with this place, characters like the above would be dealt with much more clearly and consistently in the light of principles consonant with those of the original post.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It's sad but true that when Jeff Wells was more actively involved with this place, characters like the above would be dealt with much more clearly and consistently in the light of principles consonant with those of the original post.

Oh, for those glorious days, yeah?

Back when you and Jeff would ride, side by side, laying down the Banhammer upon any and all who would take your posts seriously enough to actually engage with them.

I'd ask you to keep your fanfic historical revisionism to yourself, but damn it, I want to hear more. TELL US. TELL US OF THE TIMES BEFORE BEFORE.

[82_28]

The Denver punk scene and the shifting face of Fascist organizing

http://rockymountainantifa.blogspot.com ... e.html?m=1

Oh god, they're back! It never goes away does it? There have to be a shit ton of disgruntled old skinheads in that city that have just exponentiated. They lost their perch it appeared when I moved to Seattle in the late 90s. Me and Twyla (sorry we couldn't hang out one last time ) have stories. One involves her sister who moved that way because of the white power scene. And I have my stories about skins that I have told here numerous times. In the 90s they came out of nowhere. Bummer.

[American Dream]

Twyla has definitely told about her sister running around on shadowy business, but I didn't know that it was connected to Denver.

Any thoughts on why/how Denver in particular became a hotspot for boneheads and other far right racists?

Maybe you've already posted your thoughts on that somewhere...