#the only people who think so are the bloody neo fascists
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I don't think enough people are aware that fervent support only exists to conteract opposition
"Why are so many people openly supporting trans people lately???" Because trans rights are under attack and it's important to drown the misinformation and bigotry
"Why "black lives matter"??? Why not ALL lives??" Because Black people in North America are being stripped off their rights to life and safety and it's important to scream louder than the racists
"Why are so many people SO damn sexual?? Why do people need to flaunt their sexuality and kinks???" Because fundamentalists are spreading propaganda and committing psy-ops to make the population at large believe sex, sex work, sexuality, and sex education are evil and it's important to flaunt our cock and balls and cock-and-ball tortures as much as we can to show the world that freaks and freakiness will not be prayed away
"Why are people making SO much horrid and freaky and weird media?? Why not write happy stories????" Because our right to explore our traumas, fetishes, fantasies, intrusive thoughts, or just curiosities are being slowly stripped away by a fascist government that hates art and it's important to create as much fucked up, weird, freaky, degenerate art as we possibly can so we can show the neo-nazis we are fucking ungovernable
Do you think we'd be this fucking loud if we weren't trying to fight back???
Don't you see?? Don't you fucking see??? They want you to be white, cisgender, straight, god-fearing and Christian, they want you to have little god-fearing children and live a white-picketted fence life, they want you to wear modest clothing and keep your head down when you are mentally unwell, when you are abused and assaulted. They want you to politely call the Police Officers and report your degenerate neighbour, your Black neighbour, your whore neighbour, your trans neighbour.
You're tired of people being cringe? Being weird? Being sexual? Being loud about their rights? Oh?? You're anmoyed?? You "don't get it"???
Can you imagine how exhausting it is for us to have to always do this? Half the shit i create is 30% self indulgence, and 70% some form of protest, of spite, a big loud "no, you can't assimilate me, I'd rather fucking die than be marketable, I'd rather go out screaming bloody murder than be demure in the face of numerous faceless figures sitting on hand-carved mahogany with fancy robes who never even knew that my DeviantArt OC was a fallen angel with lime green wings and red horns but speak of me like they know who I am. I'll show you who I fucking am, and you will fucking hate it, and you'll have to learn to live in a world where millions of others just like me exist, and I'll give you no other option"
#queer rights#bipoc rights#sex work is work#personal#YELLING FROM THE TOP OF MY LUNGS I NEED NO AGREEMENT TO A LEGAL BLABBER TOS PAGE TO BE THE DEGENERATE I WAS PUT IN THIS WORLD TO BE
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Aside Glance: The Palpable Absence of the Dubiously Canonical
So you might have noticed throughout my writings that I have at the same time avoided directly talking about any of the expanded universe material while also occasionally alluding to it just enough to make it noticeable. At least, probably.
So to nobody’s surprise, let me say;
I don’t like the Homestuck Epilogues.
Before I dig into why, I wanna dig out what I think I actually do like about the Homestuck Epilogues. CW: for mentions of suicide, sexual violence, fascism, genocide, etc. Spoiler Warning for the Homestuck Epilogues, although if you haven’t read them by now, good; don’t. Keep reading for my thoughts on the Epilogues.
I do like that the Homestuck Epilogues say quite loudly and clearly that Fascism Is Terrible, and that Neo-Liberals are often Discount Fascists at best in terms of the material effects they have on the world that we have to share with them. They can often end up being interchangeable, and events can cause someone with a temperament predisposed toward Neo-liberalism down the path of bloody reactionary sentiment the way it did with Jane.
Homestuck has always been a pretty soundly anti-authoritarian work, and pretty aggressively contemporary work, so it makes sense that Homestuck^2 would reflect an internet culture rabidly obsessing about the politics of the Trump-Era United States, cast its villains as parallels to the Trump Administration, the grody religious movements it catered to, and the hyper-rich dingalings who benefited from it.
I do like that the Homestuck Epilogues develop the theme of criticizing the author and continues to call attention to its narrators, this time by explicitly casting them as villainous, and morally ambiguous/incomprehensible respectively. A central idea in Homestuck is the relationship between Author, Audience, and Characters, and the blending of the lines between them.
I like that it calls attention not just to the idea that a story’s narrator is an agent themselves, but also to the reality that the narrator may not have the best interests of either their readers, or their characters in mind. I like that the authorial powers of these characters are represented as overtly dangerous and evil when they are addressed at all.
I also like that the Homestuck Epilogues are rather brutally honest about the fact that sometimes, the people that you grew up with - your close friends - grow apart from you, and turn into kind of bad people. I’ve watched that happen in real time, and have had to stop hanging out with people because they just kind of... turned evil. That’s something that needs to be discussed more in fiction, and more honestly than the usual way. When the most visible example of like, someone you knew and loved turning into a bad person is like, Anakin Skywalker, maybe the world needs more stories about that.
So good, that’s what we’ve got for things I think were good to say. Well done.
What don’t I like about the Homestuck Epilogues?
In a word, I think, they are cruel. Relentlessly cruel. Even actively malicious.
Homestuck has, of course, always been rather mean-spirited and adversarial, pretty much since page one. And really, so has Andrew’s writing in general, since the days when he ran the site Team Special Olympics. His humor walks a fine line between and outrageous and genuinely offensive, as he dares you to say, “That’s fucked up!” so he can respond “it was just a joke, where’s your sense of humor?”
But the Epilogues transcend the usual sardonic envelope-pushing we can usually count on Andrew for, and instead opt to sink their teeth into the readers in an assault on the senses, and on the sensibilities. Reading the Epilogues is a brutal experience to endure emotionally, and in a lot of places, morally offensive.
And they are this way practically from the first page; our very first impression of the Homestuck Epilogues is a content warning that presents itself in such a way as to be almost unmistakably parodic. The stylization as an AO3 work, particularly in the context of Homestuck, where these sorts of overzealous content warning pages are associated with preachy jerks like Kankri, it comes across as a direct challenge to the viewer, and by a challenge, I really mean an attack. It is a mean-spirited joke at the expense of people who have a desire to curate their media experience - and then the authors have the gall to say that the one of the goals of the Epilogues is to challenge people to curate their media more.
Every time a character could conceivably make a bad decision, or become a more ill-conceived version of themselves, they somehow manage it, which becomes all the more unbearable because of the identification of character and audience that has been the case throughout all of Homestuck. If Homestuck introduces us to this entire cast and says, this is you, the Epilogues seem to follow up with and there is nothing good about you. Jade Harley somehow transforms into a grotesque caricature of a trans-woman, a girl who is sexually incontinent and predatory in a way that is directly tied to her having a dog penis - a state of being which the text variously slut-shames her for in Meat, or alternatively uses to blame her for ruining Dave and Karkat’s relationship in Candy.
John Egbert is severely depressed and dysfunctional, and this leads him either to go off and kill Lord English to chase the thrill of adventure and his own sense of purpose (in direct opposition to the all-but-explicitly-stated takeaway from Homestuck which Dave gives us, that the better option is to just leave the story alone altogether - explicitly the worst decision he could make according to the rules of Homestuck) or descend into decades of nihilistic solipsism while the world disintegrates around him.
Dirk’s worst natures take over him and transform him into a person who can only conceivably be satisfied either by becoming an arch-villain, or by murdering himself.
The Epilogues are aggressively cruel to Jake English, choosing to double down on the lack of emotional resolution he suffered from at the end of Homestuck, and squarely placing the blame for his own misery on his own shoulders, in a way which is pretty hard to read around, which is part and parcel of the general malice which Homestuck has historically treated mentally ill characters with. Nearly all the kids in Homestuck have suffered incomprehensible levels of mental and physical abuse, and the text expects them to simply overcome it sheerly by force of will. Sure, Jake is miserable but it’s his own fault, the text seems to say; if he’d just get his act together, like Dave, maybe he could get on with his life without being mind-broken by Dirk, or raped and whipped by Jane.
This isn’t even to delve into the flagship reveal of Homestuck 2, that Rose and Jade in the Candy Timeline have not only had a daughter of their own (without telling Kanaya), but that furthermore they have replicated their own trauma in her. Rose and Jade’s daughter has grown up completely emotionally alone, in the care of her Moms’ archenemy.
The point in all of this is not that the Epilogues have made everyone behave out of character or anything like that - I think it’s clear after a re-read especially that all of this is a conceivable direction that these characters could have taken. Rather, the Epilogues reliably choose to believe the worst of the characters of Homestuck in terms of their writing decisions. Everyone always makes the worst decision that they could make, or at the very least, nearly the worst. And because of the identification of reader and character, we can’t help but take away from that a sense that this is what the authors think of us as well.
And in case it wasn’t stated explicitly enough, a running theme throughout the Epilogues is that all this conflict and badness taking place is, to some extent or another, because we the audience are looking at it. As Andrew stated in relation to the Epilogues, there’s a kind of Happily Ever After possibility bubble around the characters that intrinsically collapses into conflict the moment we observe the events again - in other words, by participating in a story, we the audience members are somehow complicit in the characters’ suffering. Yet not all stories must be driven by conflict - and who triumphs and who fails in that conflict says a lot about what a story has to say about real life.
The Epilogues engage in a kind of voyeuristic cruelty, a kind of pessimism and cynicism, a kind of relentless ugliness that I have seldom seen, and to what end? The whole thing seems to me an attack on the audience.
Aside from general, abstracted claims toward authorial intent (which I think is there), I also want to say that, I can’t emotionally engage with the Epilogues, for a personal reason; as somebody who has struggled with almost daily suicidal ideation for most of my adult life, the way that the Epilogues deal with that subject goes from troubling to malicious and hostile in its treatment of Dirk’s suicide.
And staying personal, while I haven’t had to deal with some of the other sensitive topics that the Epilogues handle recklessly, handle them recklessly they do - Jake is serially raped by Jane, and in a way that he serves as a vehicle to move the plot forward, rather than with any kind of compassion for Jake’s condition. The possibility that Tavros Crocker might be being molested by Gamzee is brought up flippantly in one scene and played off as a joke.
The Homestuck Epilogues play at maturity through handling dark themes and sensitive topics, and reveal a profound immaturity in their authors because of the ways in which they are cruelly, insensitively handled over and over again.
I guess I’ll close with the least egregious thing. The Homestuck Epilogues just aren’t funny. Even at its bleakest, Homestuck has always been funny. In their relentless pursuit of cruelty, and the shared misery of their audience and characters, the Homestuck Epilogues forgo even this most basic element of Homestuck, which Andrew has always described as being basically a comedy.
Anyway; I will not be doing a thorough analysis of the Epilogues. I hate them too much and they suck.
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a study in light
Like Alice through the looking-glass, I had crossed the veil. (…) I got wipes and disinfectant out of the grocery bag. I washed my hands. I left the groceries out in the hall. I washed my hands. I changed clothes. I washed my hands. I picked up my phone to clean it. I washed my hands. I couldn’t breathe. I washed my hands. (…)
Today, as the end of lockdown looms over most of Western Europe, my inner turmoils rise up. I am caught between a rock and a hard place, or so it seems: the urge to go back to “normal’’ and the agonizing fear of being unable to predict exactly what is coming next.
These were the words I hoped to shape up as the conclusion of an incredibly naive piece I had written back in the spring, a mere forty days after the beginning of the first lockdown. Today is December 8th 2020. It’s been seven months since then, and nine months since the beginning of the crisis —and as of yet, if we really want to be honest with ourselves, we still have no idea what’s coming next.
I’m a writer. But first and foremost, I’m an observer by nature. As a little girl, I used to lie down for hours on end to stare into the ether until little silver, made-up stars blossomed in my field of vision. But I don’t believe those never-ending closed-sessions I held with the sky will ever equal the amount of time I’ve spent examining it, and the life around me during the last nine months.
I won’t be the only one, surely, still having troubles wrapping my mind around the strange times we’ve been living through. Nine months ago, I was working three part-time jobs, about to graduate from my Masters and still disturbingly undecided about the appropriate course my life was supposed to embark on next.
What’s next? What is next? What will it be? The question, and the possibilities for many different paths were heavily pressing on my door. And then, everything came to a halt. I remember writing down how quizzically relieved I almost felt. It was like the entire world had pressed pause, crystallized in my own personal anxiety-riddled wait. The world was holding its breath, and I, selfishly, felt like I could finally catch mine.
Eventually, lockdown ended with the last of the latecomer blossoms of spring, and life went on, but to find one’s footing has been quite the challenge since. The world, as I see it, has been like a newborn fawn struggling on its wobbly feet ever since, but yes; life went on anyway.
Summer did come, and went in what felt like the same breath, leaving a bittersweet taste in most mouths. Fall lazily took over, stretching like a cat over September, curling around October before falling asleep on November and now, as I peer outside the window, I can see how winter yawns and is starting to quietly settle in in December, one icy raindrop at a time.
Life went on, and borders and countries and businesses reopened. The beating drum of capitalism resumed of its own accord, leaving a bloody trail of havoc in its footsteps.
Life went on, but the crisis persisted. And so did all the horrors tied to it: death, fear, lies. People, those who see, those whose lives are directly or indirectly threatened, those whose eyes are wide open, even in the darkest hours of the night, those who have tried to warn us before. Those people are livid.
Others, unfortunately, have remained deaf. Others keep looking the other way. Others don’t mind the silence. And the ones who are supposed to protect us? The ones who think they’re above us? They’re repressing, oppressing, threatening, controlling and lying through their bared teeth. But most importantly, they’re failing. They are failing us.
Life went on, yes, but at what cost?
Today’s is a very different story from the spring’s, I feel.
Parts of Europe are coming out of a second “lockdown’’ as I speak. The United States of America are preparing for an unsteady transition between an unbelievably idiotic neo-fascist wannabe and the last hope for their democracy. South America is silently crumbling into pieces. Both continents single-handedly capitalize the highest numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases and Covid-related deaths. A promising but hair-rising, hasty vaccine (or actually several versions of it) is on the way. China is still decimating Uyghur people without batting an eye. One of the Covid-19 crisis’ side effects in Mali is the rise in child trafficking. India’s farmers are currently holding the largest labor strike in world history and no one talks about it. France’s legendary soft-power is being jeopardized as we speak by the government’s insistence on passing the global security bill, which is eliciting protests that have spread out throughout the country, and severe critics and serious worries, not only from the international press, but also from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Meanwhile, innocent citizens are being brutalized for no apparent reason. Shall I go on?
What is next, really?
Tonight was supposed to be a night of celebration, here in Lyon, the second French city I’ve established in, and the one I’ve been happy to call home for the last five years. It’s what we call the Fête des Lumières. Traditionally, its origins date back to the 17th century—1643 to be accurate, a year when the South of France was harshly struck by the plague. So that the town could have a chance to be spared, the councillors turned to the highest instance they knew (God) and agreed to pay tribute to the Virgin Mary. And on that very night, December 8th 1643, citizens prayed and lit up candles and made offerings in her name. The town was miraculously spared and thus consecrated to the Virgin Mary.
Year after year, the tradition persisted, and year after year, the people in town lit candles and kept them up all night on their windowsills. Along with it, came parades, and processions of all kinds, and around the 1980s, strings of tourists started to flood the city to admire what has become since one of the fourth festive gatherings in the whole world— or rather, to the casual Lyonnais resident like myself, a true capitalist nightmare. But let’s put aside the anti-capitalist discourse for half a second here.
Tonight, like each year, I look outside my window to gawk at my neighbours’ windowsills.
I spent most of fall running after strands of light, both metaphorical and literal. I keep thinking back to the same time last year, and all the years before that, nostalgia pinching at my ribs, as if to make sure this hasn’t been all an extremely elaborate nightmare (something my unbelievably creative brain is very much capable of).
I keep looking back over my shoulder, all the missed chances and the missed steps lining up in my rearview like a row of candlelight on a windowsill.
Could it have been any different? Was it all planned like this? Was it planned at all? Is there a chance for any of us to have been spared?
I feel more stuck than ever. Caught between a rock and a hard place, with no horizon in sight.
The world we live in sickens me to my core and I have no idea how to keep on going living in it.
I keep looking for light everywhere I go. A sign that things are, eventually, going to be okay. I keep chasing the light, running at dawn, walking down the docks at dusk. Capturing its artificial, ethereal glow on main streets where Christmas decorations have taken over. Spying it across the street from me, emanating faintly from the windows of neighbours I don’t know but who share the burden of their insomnia with me at ungodly hours. Scanning the eyes I encounter so rarely for it. Looking for it inside of myself and my own fading memories, memories of what feels like an entirely other life, made up of nights out, and live music, and cold drinks burning down my throat, and kind green eyes, and dancing on boats, and talks dragging on and on through the night and going to the theater and laughter, coffee to go, walks on the riverbanks and drunken nights stretching into mornings, and light, light, light, always light, and feeling light.
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cypulchre
replied to your post
“cypulchre replied to your photoset “zvaigzdelasas: …” The only...”
Uh...Nazis, or National Socialists did define themselves as such. The only conflation that I see as legitimate is identitarian nationalists with Nazis; that is, those who want an ethnostate & want to deport or eliminate those who don't fit in. Ironically, radical leftists playing identity politics are inseparable ideologically from nazis but for the characteristics, racial or otherwise, they prioritize.
citations 1 and 3 from the wiktionary article I’m quoting:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Nazi
https://books.google.com/books?id=XhDakMp55i0C&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false
even though “nazi” is an abbreviation of National Socialist, that specific abbreviation was not used by the Nazis themselves because of negative connotations, and explicitly used by anti-fascists because of those negative connotations.
I want to say this is like how داعش (dāʿish) is a shortening of الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام (ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām), which is disliked by ISIS because of how it sounds like Daes.
sidebar: I would add that ideologically they are separable, not just because you separated them and its probably not controversial to do so, but because the argument they can sound the same doesn’t respect how historically, identity politics used by the left have been for the specific objective of liberation and also were important to achieving that objective, additionally, that the prioritization of particular characteristics has a place, historically, and leftists’ engagement with that I don’t understand how can be meaningfully discussed without recognizing the existent institutions which prioritized whiteness.
As for deoxygenated leftists, first I'd say antifa. They are by and large autarkists initially, but they don't want anarchy ultimately; they want a centrally planned leftist state (socialist, & as a byproduct of being socialist, totalitarian). The Nazis and Soviets and Fascists & modern day China all had/ve centrally planned authoritarian states, all of which were murderous. Also, anyone playing identity politics & excusing eugenics takes on Nazi themes / initiatives.
from my experience “antifa” is not a coherent political group, it’s folks who are serious about being anti-fascist and have a broad range of tendencies: libertarians, anarchists, socialists, maoists, marxist-leninists, even anarcho-capitalists and accelerationists I know who identify as antifascist and participate in antifa activities. Of all the antifascists I know personally, there are one or two who are actually want a planned economy. It’s easy to pick them out and say “all antifa are just like this” but they really aren’t.
The relationship between socialism and authoritarianism is a very different conversation from “antifa communists will call anything left of stalin nazi,” but its not surprising that the conversation would go there. As it were, I don’t have an interest in defending any of the states you mentioned, even if I don’t agree with a lot of the particulars you stated. but I do weirdly agree with you that a lot of progressive sentiment contains underlying eugenicist themes that ought to be scrutinized.
The special irony with antifa is the communist / Marxist undercurrent in their logic. They don't trust militarized police or big business or anti-democratic measures, yet are all for lynch mobs, big government, and anti-democratic upheaval.
This is what I was worried about: It seems to me like you’re using different tendencies within a really big tent, and then saying the one most uncomfortable to you is an underlying theme to all of them. I don’t think this is a fair treatment at all, and honestly, doesn’t seem to reflect experience working with antifa - although I am familiar with your experience not working with antifa, and am curious to know how you know their motivations
If you have faith in democracy and believe in the rule of law; reform them -- don't destroy them. If you want justice and decide it's your right to extrajudicial justice, then you have no grounds for complaint when antipathetic forces argue for the same, albeit with different targets.
I get the feeling that you are framing things under a gerrymandered-enough abstraction of “extrajudicial” to make them appear the same when they really are not. especially since, like, in my country its actually judicially-precedented legal to physically attack people for hate speech if speech is considered fighting words,
but if someone doesn’t believe in the rule of laws dictated by a state, why are they suddenly exempt from what I imagine you to believe are universal human rights? If there’s no disagreement between you and me that we have certain rights to life, I don’t understand why it’s suddenly justified for those rights of mine to be violated.
otherwise tthis seems like a continuation of the same strawman from earlier, but if there’s any other arguments that I didn’t already address earlier please let me know.
Finally, when it comes to hate speech and libel, if a supposed Nazi has incited immediate violence, there are legal ramifications; he or she will be charged, and you needn't bloody your hands or undermine the system you hope to work for you and yours.
before i go any further, this is flatly untrue.
we’ve seen countless neo-nazis post their views on forums like /pol/, or whatever that frog-based one is before they went ahead and did mass shootings. if there’s blood on anybody’s hands, it’s those who had the power to but did not act to prevent these: its the very legal system you seem to have faith in.
there being legal ramifications doesn’t make them enforced, not just because nazis have been infiltrating the justice system for the past thirteen years but also, what police departments began as.
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TheAngryindian
07.06.2001
‘As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right’.
-Patrick Buchanan
[FOTO: Public memorial one day after the Breivik attacks. Credit: Johannes Grødem]
As sensible people try to find psychic balance after the deplorable attacks in Norway against cultural progressivism in Europe, it has become painfully clear to all that Christian fascism, xenophobia and right-wing violence have again become an undeniable part of everyday life in the west. As much as it hurts, White society must finally accept the fact that what occurred in Norway did not arise out of a vacuum. Only a flat-out bigot would try to deny that right-wing Christian terrorism does not has a long and sordid history of violent opposition to ethnic and religious minorities, left-wing politics and progressive social change. Despite what conservative apologists might say, their religion has not taught them anything about tolerance and peace.
The racist doctrine of White ‘ethnic’ supremacy has been lovingly nurtured in popular culture, spiritually endorsed by Jesus’ theologians and accepted by many within the White and non-White mainstream as an equitable politic in the 21st century. When wealthy Caucasian dandies like fashion designer John Galliano and pop icon to the forlorn, Morrissey, start playing around with far-right racialism, it is painfully obvious that being a dedicated follower of fascism has become more than respectable. It’s back in vogue. We can continue to bury our heads in the sand like the Obama administration and pretend that White racism on a global scale does not exist, or, we can pragmatically move forward by bravely addressing the ugliness that is staring us in the face.
Like it or not, White racist attitudes have been a prominent part of the European social fabric since antiquity. And it is foolhardy to overlook the reality that xenophobia is still used as a political tool by the European and Euro-settler upper-classes. Visible examples of pro-White, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic sentiment have been simmering in Western Europe ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Inspired by US President Ronald Reagan’s ceremonial state visit to honour the Nazi dead of Bitburg, Germany in 1985, Eastern European fascists simply brought their admiration for Adolf Hitler along with them to the now unified Bundesrepublik Deutschland. And guess what, no one cared.
In the UK, Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher deftly contributed to the rise of the right by making it perfectly understood that she felt White Britons were ‘tired of being swamped by immigrant cultures’ as Brick Lane slowly began to turn sepia. A conscious move on her part to make peripheral use of the National Front and the British Movement which began attacking Asians, Africans and Jews at will. And during that time, they were quietly protected by the veiled racialist sympathies of the British media and local law enforcement.
It sounds like a chapter pulled out of the Mussolini years but it isn’t. It is a matter of the international public record and it is rarely mentioned in connection with the role of fascism in modern Europe. The acceptable line of selective thinking argues ‘that was then and this is now’. Things have changed they tell us. But do not be fooled by what seems like progress. The rank unpleasantness the ‘Great Communicator’ and Baroness Thatcher gave birth to in the 1980’s is still with us. Only the superficial veneer is different. The current US President Barack Obama may be of African descent, but his portfolio as an American politician is no less Europocentric and no less racist than any of his predecessors. By and large, the most powerful Black man in history has done more than any other world leader on record to enforce the machiavellian processes of White Christian supremacy by any means necessary. And no one knows this better than self-aware African and Indigenous peoples.
Conservative White folks and other suckers suffering from acute Europhilia may be able to ignore the realities of this apathetic disdain, but people of colour and the poor are suffering loudly and in plain sight. It does not take more than a glance to see just how little his administration is concerned with how bad African people in America are doing under federal Black leadership. Although he is deep into his first term as Commander-in-Chief, Mr. Obama has yet to address institutional anti-African or anti-Indigenous racial discrimination, the widespread social crisis of racial profiling or the established inhumanity of overtly racist police departments or conservative judicial brutality against the poor. Now that it is achingly clear to the conscious that the incessantly repeated fear of an Obama-led era of Marxist-neo-Nazi-Wahabbist ‘reverse-discrimination’ against White Christian American world is patently ridiculous, what next? Will the racists and politically stupid now cease behaving like the goofy characters in ‘Springtime for Hitler’ or will they persist in their pursuit of a global Whites-only agenda? You know the answer to this question as well as I do.
So for brevity’s sake let us cut to the chase and admit to a few well-known social variables. Even if it happens to embarrass the Europeans who may be reading this commentary. The phenomenon of pro-European racism and exploitation of darker peoples is, and has been, a reality across the world since the classical Roman Empire. We can get into lengthy discussions about how and why later. But let us suffice it for now by saying that what we are dealing with in terms of the ‘new’ Christian fascism is in reality, a White man’s problem. Faulting the people of the Third and Fourth Worlds and social progressives for what has happened in Norway is like blaming Jews for the Odessa pogroms.
And truth be told this is exactly what is being done with the editorial reportage of Breivik’s bloody massacre of the innocent. The victims, mostly young socialist-leaning citizens and residents of Norway, are ultimately being blamed for what happened to them. And US media jester and devout Mormon Glenn Beck did just that when he equated the socialist victims of the Utøya attacks with the Hitler Youth cadres of the German Nazi era. And really, is anyone in the literate world really surprised by this, or the fact that this vicious Mormon bigot still has his job? The sad fact is that Glenn Beck and the other unrepentant Völkisch journalists like him in the US, UK and Israeli news media did exactly what they were expected and paid to do. In a conscious fit of blatant White supremacist damage control they all blamed the attacks on Islamic extremism, even after it became clear that the perpetrator was a Christian zealot hoping to spark an anti-Islamic ‘Holy War’ in the traditional lands of the Master Race and Palestine.
The ‘Truth’ Game
For once it would be refreshing if White society actually took responsibility for its own congenital insanities, but this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon. Expecting the dominating Europocentric racist world order to willingly come to grips with its own xenophobic hubris is foolish. Denial is central to the paradigm and White racism as an ideology has been spinning the same outrageous frequent liar programme across the globe for generations. The reality that people around the world are being starved, maimed and killed in the name of positive White control has always been soft-pecked and dismissed as inconsequential. Although racialist laws are considered morally reprehensible, Apartheid in South Africa was clearly defined as racial separation and it was still supported by all of the major democratic powers.
We can make believe that we are witnessing a sudden sea change in social and political attitudes, but this just isn’t credible. The writing, in large part due to the maddening and sickening violence of Anders Breivik, is on the proverbial wall and it is written in scarlet. You and I both know what is really going down in the world, to whom it is happening to and ultimately, who it is that benefits from the institution and maintenance of human-on-human brutality. And we are all cowards for knowing this and for allowing it to continue in a democracy. And Whites who work overtime to deny what has been going on in their name for centuries are the greatest cowards of all.
At some point one would hope that White people as a demographic would eventually come to their senses and stop playing games with the lives, minds and general welfare of others by facing up to the truth of their own belligerent behaviour. They could actually begin right now by admitting to themselves that the Christian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, is one of theirs. This hasn’t happened yet because the conservative lobby is doing everything possible to deny the obvious connections him and the rest of the White ‘race’. Some are even going so far as to deny that Breivik is actually ‘White’ since we now know that Breivik decided to undergo plastic surgery in the United States in order to look, ‘more Aryan’. Twisted identity politics maybe? Perhaps. But no matter how the conservative lobbies in the US, UK and Israeli may try to spin things, Anders Breivik in all his anti-Muslim, bathed in the blood of Jesus glory belongs to them lock, stock and bloody barrel.
Anyone who has watched the rise of the far-right in Europe and North America is not surprised by this omission of kinship. And this writer for one does not accept the juvenile arguments of the White Christian talking heads that are trying to convince us that no one could have seen this coming. You and I both know that this is indeed a lie. And further, we know that such protestations are more than just disingenuous. They are also telling in that any rush to vigorously defend Breivik’s Christian terrorism and racism at this moment only blatantly exposes the establishment’s unmistakable fondness for this sort of Europocentric extremism.
There is no excuse for this. How can there be after the ravages of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco? Pretending that they did not do their very best to burn their way across the subcontinent in pursuit of ‘purity’ is inherently dangerous and stupid, but who really remembers anymore? Who really cares? Not the educated, apathetic Judeo-Christian democratic populations of the exalted west. They have made a conscious choice to dismiss the lessons of any history they regard as a passing joke, including their own.
Considering the hard reality of the mass graves left over from the ethnocidal breakup of Yugoslavia, how can anyone in the progressive world sit quietly while it happens all over again? Remember that Yugoslavia was supposed to be the genocide everyone said was impossible.
Yet, it happened right in front of the United Nations and the world’s news cameras while the European and American far-right laughed at the world community. Why not? They were watching their fascist compatriots from World War Two, the Hrvatski Revolucionarni Pokret (or Ustaše) of Croatia come back to the world stage blessed and endorsed by the world’s superpowers as a legitimate government and military force. They also thought well of the Kosovar Albanian Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës or KLA, an extremely violent and xenophobic criminal faction that Yugoslavian government and intelligence authorities officially identified as a terrorist group on line with the Sicilian Mafia. NATO, along with several foreign observers and journalists in the country during the conflict, even went so far as to declare that the KLA were dead-serious about ‘cleaning-out’ Kosovo’s Serb population and expanding their criminal enterprises internationally.
Curiously, no one was interested in this news. And despite their murderous activity, the US state dept. and the other European powers who could have stopped them did not regard the KLA as terrorists while Slobodan Milosevic’s government certainly did. And when the KLA was finally removed from the official terrorism watchlist in 1998 by the US, UK and France, the capitalist powers began building business relationships with the major Kosovar caporegime as if nothing had happened. The victims are not remembered much less regarded any longer and the rest of the story is simply seen as the bygone history of an unpleasant time in the Balkans. Business as they say, is business.
As we can see, if the far-right were really considered a threat by the ruling classes they would have been stopped cold in the 1940’s. Instead, (and with considerable help from Pope Pius the XII and US intelligence) the Nazi’s simply moved to the Americas and continued on with their work. This goes a long way in explaining why even the organised, government sponsored madness that swept Europe under fascism has been largely forgotten aside from its unfortunate misuse as a political tool. We know this because when US Christian-Zionists began defining the European Holocaust as a gift sent to them from the Almighty, virtually no one objected. And as bizarre as this idea sounds, the fact remains that this outlandish belief is shared amongst a great number of ethnic Jews.
The Zionist Organization of America for instance not only defended but actively promoted the US evangelical shaman John Hagee when he began preaching that the genocides of the last century were necessary for Yahweh (יהוה) to bring back the state of Israel. Clearly, the Evangelical Christian desire for Armageddon, the Rapture and a holy ‘race war’ far outweigh any logical of moral considerations for social justice. The victims of White religious and capitalist violence are simply seen as acceptable exodus fodder, nothing more. They are either exploitable pawns or annoying hindrances standing in the way of God’s divine plan. Either way, they must and will be moved into positions of advantage for European uses. This is the vicious cycle Scotsman Adam Smith described with his ‘Vile Maxim of Mankind’, the willingness of the rich to take unfair advantage of the weak while actually believing that such an arrangement is ‘fair’. So much for the wonder that is capitalism.
Social xenophobia is bad enough, but denying that it isn’t a political and economic device when it is clearly evident in thought and deed is vulgar. This is why conservative media attempts to downplay what happened in Oslo and Utøya are patently absurd. They selectively ignore the political role of Judeo-Christian violence, slavery and ethnic repression in Europe and throughout its colonialist holdings during the Catholic-led Crusades immediately after the Reconquista in 1492. It also leaves out the horror-show that developed after those overseas colonies became independent and internally-colonialised the native populations they displaced or enslaved for their own benefit. This includes the direct involvement of German and US private industry, international banking and the Catholic Church who knowingly assisted in carrying out the ‘Final Solution’. Because of this moral negligence, belligerent fascism has returned with a vengeance. And seemingly, no one in authority is willing to stop it.
Especially not the first African leader of the whole free world. Like the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus Augustus or the native collaborators who proudly served with the South African Police during Apartheid, Mr. Obama has shown precious little mercy to other people of colour at home or abroad. Native Americans, Africans across the Diaspora and Spanish-speaking Indigenous immigrants are doing worse now than ever before. While at the same time, White conservatives gripe and grumble about Obama’s supposed war against European American and the White Christian heritage. This is of course absurd on a variety of levels, mostly because Mr. Obama has done more to uphold traditional standards of ‘Whiteness’ in the United States than any one else.
By the same token, the European conservatives that are complaining about him the most do not believe in the system nearly as strongly as he does. The ideal world these idiotic people claim to want is being given to them by the Obama administration on a platter. Arabs and Muslims are being militarily intimidated, Africans and being starved and racially profiled and immigrants, (who aren’t White) are being ejected from the US at record numbers. So what are they complaining about? Thanks to Mr. Obama and his financial backers, it is the people of non-White, non-Christian world that are paying for US capitalism’s rampant and unrestricted greed. Self-evidently, then, it stands to reason that the racist opposition to Barack Obama is just that, an issue of White racism, not of political differences.
The sordid hoaxes circulating about his non-connections to Weather Underground alumni Bill Ayers, the location and conditions surrounding his birth, his genealogy and his religious convictions are all about White fears of a Black and Brown planet. Their racism is so ingrained and so blinding that they cannot see how closely the Obama presidency actually mirrors their twisted vision of White American global supremacy. Politically, militarily and economically, the United States is without a doubt still the biggest bully on the block. This is the reality. And the Obama administration has done absolutely nothing but expand their capabilities while US citizens bear the brunt of the nation’s economic collapse. Without mercy, the Obama administration has pressed on with the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in search of its ‘enemies’, the very people, these ignorant arses say Barack Obama ‘really’ represents.
Their nonsensical theories also painstakingly leave out the fact that the Goldman Sachs Group and other wealthy capitalist contributors to his campaign were clearly making an investment for their own best interests, not for the working classes most of these White supremacist Neanderthals happen to hail from. Their gross ignorance of politics and history, even of their own country, makes it nearly impossible for them to comprehend what is really happening. Their fears that the election of Barack Obama is some sort of depraved Manchurian Candidate socialist coup d’état’ designed by Islamic mullahs to enslave America’s non-White population is based on absolute smoke. Just as is was during the Antebellum Era and Jim Crow, White folks, bigoted or not, live in morbid fear of an angry and massive backlash for all that has and continues to happen under European racialism and exploitation. But it is not the dark masses that encourage this derangement, it is the inner-human, the race-neutral consciousness
And because of this historical paranoia, Europeans have never felt totally secure anywhere, even within their own territorial domains. Anti-miscegenation laws, ‘Separate but Equal’ education restrictions and the application of indiscriminate White terrorist violence are symptoms of this fear. The mark of the racist is the stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge his or her own fears of the ‘Other’.
And if one is to take the late Algerian psychologist Franz Fanon seriously, Whites often react as explosively as they do precisely because they know how they would react if it was they who were faced with the same sort of oppressions non-Europeans are expected to endure quietly. White people for the most part walk the Earth as if they own it most anywhere and in relative safety. Nonetheless, those Whites that cannot or refuse accept even this are, as we have seen in Norway, prepared to go to extraordinary lengths in the name of White racial and cultural ‘security’. From false propaganda about the first African US president to violent acts directed against non-White people and left-wing political activists, White racism as a movement is willing to go that extra mile. It needs to be reckoned with as a danger to the greater society but until the powers that be decide to a ‘War on Racism’, expect the White Power movement to grow even more as the world’s economic health continues to deteriorate.
Xenophobia, Paranoia and Negligence
Almost from the moment Anders Breivik declared himself the hero of White Christian Europe, conservative opinion makers began doing ju-jutsu with the facts behind his ideological ideas and inspirations. Why is the far-right allowed to get away with this? Obviously because someone within the Europocentric power structure wills it and the psychologically downtrodden masses passively allow it to continue. It is clear that the more White control is challenged, the more White society is seen to overreact. This is indisputable. And it also gives us an important clue as to why Anders Breivik is being accorded such undue preferential treatment and extreme tolerance by the White, mainstream press. Very few conservative news agencies refer to him as a terrorist and most far-right media pundits now enthusiastically describe him as insane and ‘deeply disturbed’. We are told by his lawyer and other experts that he is not entirely responsible for his actions. At first this seems almost reasonable until you think for a moment about how Arab, Muslim and left-wing terrorist suspects and acts are handled by the establishment information paradigm as opposed to how White, far-right terrorist activity is dealt with.
Have Jose Padilla or Pfc. Bradley Manning received this sort of consideration or attention from the mainstream media? When was the last time you read a story or report discussing at length the mental stability of a known Muslim terrorist or noticed a veiled tolerance for their extremist religious convictions? And why is this not a legitimate question? Neo-Nazi, White supremacist and anti-immigrant factions operating in Europe, North America and Australia are by their own admission using violence and intimidation to get their politics across through a policy of fear. Yet, democratic governments in the west are only concerned about such groups when their actions cross the line into threatening their own legal authority or political existence.
Given the extensive record of far-right violence in the past as well as the present one would logically expect to find these entities at the very top of the list for anti-social threats, not at the very bottom. But this is the reality of the situation internationally, and American and European governments are entirely at fault for allowing and encouraging the existence of such organisations in the first place. Democratically-elected governments are supposed to defend their societies against threats to the progressive well-being of their constituents. But they cannot do that and covertly align themselves with the very same negative forces that almost destroyed the world at the same time and call themselves moral. We are forgetting what it means to be and how to remain human. And it is unambiguous that no one is a position of authority thinking in terms of raw political and economic power is willing to identify such movements as contrary to the social good.
The extant Europocentric paradigm operates on two distinct principles: first, it makes damn sure that the literate population only understands the world through a rhetorical mythology concerning the ‘Enlightened European’ and two, that the class-separated masses observe a closed-minded and emotional rejection against their own betterment. Under such jaundiced circumstances, White Christian violence and marginalisation against minorities, Muslims, socialists, atheists, homosexuals, anti-war protesters and non-submissive women can almost always be dismissed as justifiable. Particularly if you repeatedly and intentionally mischaracterize these issues as conservatives regularly do via their lapdogs in the mainstream corporate owned media.
Not a day goes by when the spokespersons for the powerful do not make light of the everyday concerns of real people. With the authority granted to them by the political and religious elite, the problems of historical and institutional White racism, Christian hegemony and capitalist domination are articulated as someone else’s problem. In this way the sole responsibility for doing anything about it is placed on the victims, not the perpetrators. The international discourse concerning social injustice is little more than a sad joke. Europeans are held accountable for nothing. And the United States, now led by a son of Africa, will belligerently defend the influence of White racism and politicised Judeophobia so long as it is beneficial to their imperialistic aims.
I don’t say this without credible evidence. When reports began circulating that the USA’s chief media jester Glenn Beck had the unmitigated gall to tell his dim-witted public that the people killed by Anders Breivik were left-wing ‘Hitler Youth’ wannabes, everyone just shrugged. By rights, Beck should have not only have lost his job but should have been swiftly drummed out of the industry for such callous insensitivity. But if you look closely you’ll notice some things you might not wish to see. For one, its hard not to notice that the usual Zionist jackals obsessed with ruining the lives and careers of honest journalists and bloggers have not gone after Glenn Beck. Even after his numerous verbal assaults against the ‘uniqueness’ of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis, Beck and people like him have yet to be seriously hindered by their hypocritical positions concerning gentile bias towards the world’s Jews.
In fact, it seems as if their radical Jewish support actually increases after such utterances of stupidity. Following his nonsensical remarks about Reformist Judaism being a different kind of ‘radical Islam’, support for Beck among hard-line Zionists in the US and Israel grew substantially. And let’s not forget that the head of the very Zionist Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, actually had the audacity to apologise to Beck after the popular ‘Two Minutes’ Hate’ chap suggested that capitalist George Soros, a Jew, helped ‘send other Jews to the death camps’.
Where is the Zionist lobby when the western world could really use them? As I have said before, Beck’s shameless, pro-gentile Zionism is simply Christian theological chauvinism in drag. It isn’t serious. But now that Beck has yet again crossed the line into territory that has permanently ruined the careers and personal lives of better mortals, where are the usual Zionist loudmouths and why haven’t they called for his symbolic flogging? Where are the ‘responsible’ talking heads of the mainstream media, the American Exceptionalist crowd and the Zionists now that Beck has identified the young victims of a rabidly fascist, anti-Islamic Christian terrorist as a left-wing gaggle of the ‘Hitler Youth’?
In a logical world, Israel’s zealous-minded supporters in the west would have a great deal of explaining to do. But as we have seen in the editorial aftermath of the Norway tragedy, the Zionist lobby not only approved of the Oslo and Utøya attacks but cheered the racism, Islamophobia and the terrorist proudly taking responsibility for the attacks. As writer J.J. Goldberg has accurately noted, radical as well as moderate Jewish conservatives have gratefully given their sympathy and support to Breivik mostly because of what they perceive as his uncompromising stance in support of their claim to Occupied Palestine.
After this, let there no longer be any doubt that international Zionism is perfectly willing to stand by a frenzied, racist Christian terrorist seeking to reestablish the decidedly Judeophobic medieval Order of the Knights Templars:
‘The debate exploded aboveground on Saturday in an opinion essay at Ynet (in Hebrew only) by Ziv Lenchner, a left-leaning Tel Aviv artist and one of Ynet’s large, bipartisan stable of columnists. It’s called “Dancing the Hora on Norwegian Blood.” He argues that the comment sections on news websites are a fair barometer of public sentiment (a questionable premise) and that the overwhelming response is schadenfreude, pleasure at Norway’s pain’.
Historically speaking, the Templars were a professional Catholic military organisation that violently occupied and looted Jerusalem during the Crusades by killing Jews, Muslims and non-European Christians in the name of the Mother Church. Their religious biases against the people who dared crucify ‘The Christ’ at Golgotha is beyond credible refute. But modern Zionists simply gloss over this specific by only recognising the Islamophobic and Europocentric aspects of the story. They do this in favour of the ‘White makes Right’ philosophy, a racialist gospel that assumes for itself a dominating role within any given setting no matter what the circumstances are. Proof of this can easily be found in any popular English of Hebrew-language web portal that is covering Breivik’s gross act. Without a doubt, Israelis and Israel-supporters that have bothered to comment at all on the attacks or the debate surrounding the attacks have clearly focused their attention on whether or not the victims of Oslo and Utøya ‘deserve’ any respect at all.
Don’t believe me, read the disturbing comments left by conservatives on the web for yourself via the anti-Zionist crew over @ Jews Sans Frontiers and a translation provided by one of their compatriots from the original Hebrew by way of Ynet:
1. And in the mosque there won’t be some ceremony?
2. It’s fun and warms the heart to see them crying!!!!
3. Go to hell. Haters of Jews/Israelis, anti-semites busy with the problems of others all day—here you got some too. [signed Zionist]
4. I have no identification with an anti-Semitic country that leads to the hatred of Israel. Not happy, not sorry.
5. All in all, what they asked for is what they got!!!!
6. [in Norwegian.] Serves you right, you Nazis.
7. He is a hero, kill all leftists, expel all Muslims.
8. European efficiency.
9. It’s only a matter of time until an Israeli rightwinger will do something similar.
10. My heart with the families of all the victims. I wish you will never know more sorrow and I wish all the wounded will heal as quickly as possible and will put this tragedy behind them. Condolences and sympathy from Israel. [Norwegian and English]
11. I have hope too… that you have many more days of mourning and tears.
12. Feel a little bit of what we feel here all the time, maybe now you’ll understand what it is, terror.
13. The ugly Israeli continues to talkback. Shame on you, you bunch of people who rejoice in the suffering of others dancing on the blood. It’s a shame that you even hold Israeli IDs.
As you can see, Norway is viewed by Zionist hard-liners as too pro-Palestinian for its own good. Once it became clear via his numerous online screeds that Anders Breivik as anti-Arab spree killer was acting on his anti-Islamic theological and political beliefs to combat Islam in Europe, he immediately gained their loyalty as a fellow fighter engaged in their struggle. Don’t be surprised by this. Especially since the discourse has evolved, if you will, into a Hasbara-driven controversy suggesting that any objective criticism of the pro-Breivik position amongst Zionists and Israel’s goyim supporters is actually veiled anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish prejudice in disguise.
The Dynamics of Denial
‘It is out of the question for the leader of the Western world to lay a wreath in a war cemetery where Nazi storm troopers are buried. … The stated purpose, reconciliation, is being drowned in a rising flood of long-buried passions from the death camp survivors, who feel as betrayed and abandoned as they did 40 years ago.’
– Washington Post, 23 April 1985
If you are confused at this juncture be not afraid, because that is exactly the point of all of this circular semantic diarrhoea. Remember if you will for a moment how all this began. The mainstream media in the west immediately began flooding the international news cycle with false and sensationalist headlines stating as fact that al Qaeda had finally penetrated Europe by attacking two targets in Norway. Although they had absolutely no evidence for this, their contemptible reportage on the story forced the public opinion broadly against Muslims whom they mistakenly held responsible for the double attacks.
The propaganda politruks working within mainstream media did their damndest to create the falsehood that militant Islam was making a serious bid to make itself known in Europe. Even the technical journal Wired published a story that assumed only Muslims could have been behind the attacks showing, rather embarrassingly, that the supposedly ‘liberal’ sectors of US society are not all that tolerant of religious differences. Apparently even ‘geeks’ can share the very same knee-jerk prejudices of the rabidly extreme anti-Muslim far-right.
What about the other overlooked fact that the establishment media’s knee-jerk ‘terrorist’ label was abandoned the split-second Anders Breivik was identified as the culprit? How does his act of religious indiscriminate violence differ qualitatively from other acts of theological xenophobia? Does Breivik’s ideological position in full support of White Power globally exclude him from being considered a terrorist? It is a reasonable question since independent investigators and journalists not swamped by corporate censorship have been finding connections between Breivik and known White supremacist organisations operating in Europe. Including ties to the Christian fundamentalist movement gaining social and political ground in the United States.
This isn’t a big secret. The US based New York Times, to its credit, did admit that Anders Breivik was extremely enthusiastic about the rise of the racist right-wing in the United States. But they noticeably stopped short of holding traditional American fascism responsible for its role for what happened in Oslo and Utøya. Not surprisingly, popular media attention in the US has been critically focused upon the entertainment aspects of this story instead of the serious speculation one would expect considering the importance of the issues at hand.
Earnest, investigative journalism concerning the conspicuous ideological and religious use of US, UK and Israeli cultural Islamophobia and political conservatism is difficult to find in the mainstream. As expected, the Christians have given themselves a pass. The religio-political movement founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, when one really thinks about it, is perhaps ultimately responsible for creating the sort of poisonous social climate that has made unconscionable far-right bastards like Anders Breivik possible. But do not expect to read anything about this is the western press which is still ideologically blaming Muslims in Europe for Breivik’s murderous rampage.
The artful dodging of responsibility for US Euro-settler Christian fascism’s international influence says a great deal about the level of cowardice shown by conservatives and White racists when faced with the morose reality of their twisted and hypocritical rhetoric. The American racists and Islamophobics cited by Anders Breivik in his detailed writings, (still available online for the time being) represent a hodgepodge of right-wing ideologues. But is it clear from reading his work that his main source of inspiration is centrally rooted in the United States and the US-led anti-Palestinian Zionist movement.
His list of popular anti-Muslim media propagandists includes such luminaries as Pamela Geller, (creator of the wildly ridiculous ‘birther’ myth suggesting that Barack Obama is Malcolm X’s illegitimate son) Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer and hard-line Israelis like Avigdor Lieberman and Caroline Glick. Each of these names figure prominently in his writings as definitive reference points for articulating his personal insecurities about non-White inclusiveness in European social life. A concern duly noted by US pundit and legendary pro-Europocentric bigot Pat Buchanan who succinctly put it this way, ‘Breivik may be right’ when he opined that the Norwegian Christian Berserker’s idea of a major military conflict between the Christian European world and Islam may actually be the next logical step forward for White survival.
Scared yet? If not you should be. While the fascist 1930’s are without question furiously nipping at our heels, the bright minds of the political, legal and journalistic establishment say their is nothing for us to worry about. Rest assured they tell us, the culture war against Muslims in Europe and North America is still on the table despite its idiocy. Especially if professional Islamophobic politicians like Irish Republican Army supporter Rep. Peter King and the very Catholic Rudolph Giuliani have anything to say about it. And if you can see past the glaring hypocrisy you’ll notice that their stated political beliefs and religious convictions are as weak as their antiquated, narrow-minded arguments. Please believe, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, democratic, religious or sane about conservative politics in the west.
Still not convinced that there is more to this tragedy than the conservatives are making things out to be? If that is the case, it would do well for the reader to consider the base ideas behind Breivik’s obsession with ‘Whiteness’ and his affection for Christian cultural and racial ‘purity’. Ideas often do have an ideological genealogy and unfortunately, many of the visible road signs along Breivik’s explosive path lead directly to the doorstep of the American and United Kingdom’s organised far-right. Although Breivik’s connections to the Scandinavian branch of the English Defence League and infamous Irish loyalist and Neo-Nazi supporter Jonathan ‘Mad Dog’ Adair (former brigadier of the notorious West Belfast UDA) have been positively confirmed, his emphatic allegiance to America’s brand of White supremacist thinking is being selectively ignored.
The US ideological component is interestingly rarely mentioned in relation to Brevik’s politics and you should be asking yourself why. Very few foreign observers would try to refute that the United States is currently the world leader in popular racism although most mainstream US citizens and residents will vociferously argue the reverse. No matter, American conservatives regularly and treacherously perpetuate the false myth of an organised left-wing/Islamic extremist alliance against the entire White world population all day long. The craziness is now so embedded that socially conservative politicians, pundits, clerics and politicians, both White and non-White, are finding it necessary to ride the wave of populist racism if they intend to stay socially relevant.
Europocentrism Revisited
This is a clear throwback to the melodramatic and quasi-religious whinings of traditional Euro-American White Power terrorist organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and the ‘respectable’ Bible-thumping bigots who populate the membership of John Birch Society. And Anders Breivik is known to have travelled, (and sought surgical services) to the United States where he hoped to make personal contact with professional Islamophobes such as the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ maven Pamela Geller, (who is doing everything possible to refute any link between them) American White supremacist Christian militia extremist groups like the Army of God and the belligerent members of the pro-corporatist Tea Party. If you have the stomach and the time for it, try reading some of Breivik’s published Christian Übermensch manifesto, his 1,500-page statement regarding his admiration for the Americans and the conservative Christian movement. In his own words he makes it plain that the US is his main inspiration and that he was certain American fascists would approve of his ideas:
‘A majority of Europeans love the U.S….just like a majority of Europeans support Israel’s fight against Jihad. But considering the fact that 80-90% of the media + politicians ‘officially’ support Cultural Communist views it’s only natural that the coverage is extremely biased’.
Now, where have we heard this line before? Taking his cues from the American fascist nut-cases he likes so much, Breivik parrots the groundless fib that liberal bias in the mainstream media distorts the ‘truth’ of White Christian superiority and the threat of Islamic infiltration. A charge that makes little sense considering that the US media industry is a field hopelessly overloaded with stiff, conservative-minded simpletons who do little but intentionally report misleading and contradictory information to serve the extant corporate interest. This is incontestable. Simply look at the ownership of the major news providers and see for yourself who actually ‘owns’ the media. Under such obviously parochial conditions the concept of ‘truth’, as one UK official candidly put it, ‘can be a dubious proposition’.
How US conservatives can spin the Norway incident into a ‘warning’ about the evils of Islam in the White world only makes sense when you consider the actions of American extremists at home. Anders Breivik may very well have gained some of his inspiration from the rogues gallery of American Christian terrorists that have made the news headlines in recent years:
Eric Robert Rudolph – The pro-Christian anti-abortion extremist responsible for numerous bomb attacks in the United States between 1996 and 1998 that killed two and injured at least 150 other people. He hoped that attacking the Olympic Centennial Park in Atlanta would lead to the end of the radical Marxist and homosexual ‘agenda’ in the US.
Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier – Hard-line Christian Identity followers and militia movement members who planned and executed the bomb 1995 attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
Byron Williams – Inspired by the conspiracy theories endorsed by right-wing conservatives such as Glenn Beck, this unemployed carpenter donned body protection, loaded his mother’s vehicle with automatic weapons (loaded with armor-piercing rounds) and headed off with the expressed intent of killing of progressives in liberal San Francisco. After he survived an extended fire-fight with the California Highway Patrol who stopped his car for erratic driving, Williams readily admitted that he wanted to start a revolution by ‘Killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU’.
George Sodini – A devout Christian upset with the Obama election and his belief that: ‘Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez….’ decided to take three loaded weapons into a Pennsylvania dance class and shoot wildly after he shut off the lights. He killed three women and severely wounded nine other people before killing himself.
James W. Von Brunn – A lifelong White supremacist and cold-blooded Judeophobe, Von Brunn led a lone armed assault against the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in 2009 that killed an African-American security guard. Later, when US President Barack Obama spoke of the need to ‘remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms’, he failed to mention that Von Brunn’s racism was not limited to Jews.
This is far from a complete list. I could have added minor White Power superstars like Christian terrorist Scott Roeder who murdered the well-respected Dr. George Tiller while he was in church, or the seditious ‘Hutaree Group’, a ‘Christian Warrior’ militia outfit accused of conspiring to commit acts of violence against their local law enforcement department. And of course there are the ‘patriotic’ anti-immigrant ‘Nativist’ goons of the Minuteman Project, Inc., the self-ordaining racial separatists of the Phineas Priesthood and the Council of Conservative Citizens who would prefer it if the planet was only populated by White Christian heterosexuals and women like Ann Coulter. I also left out the murders of radio chat-show host Alan Berg by the White Power terrorist group, The Order and of African immigrantMulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi ‘boneheads’ in Portland, Oregon. I even could go further by citing how the Ruby Ridge incident did much to help fertilize the notion that White racists in American deserve sympathy too and other underreported stories detailing the religious far-right’s reach in the United States. but in spite of all this documented violence you will be hard pressed to find major news services, in English, willing to do objective, investigative reporting on these issues.
Earlier this month I presented an editorial entitled, ‘Why the Time to Dismantle Edward Bernay’s Corporatist Propaganda Paradigm is Now… ’ laying forth a reasoned case for why the organised left should get off its befuddled arse and start aggressively challenging the legal and moral credibility of Rupert Murdoch and his fascist-friendly international media empire. Like any other sober political analyst paying attention to the rise of Europocentric paranoia and the gross inequalities of the never ending class-struggle, I fully expected Murdoch’s News Corp and the UK Tories to deny everything and take responsibility for absolutely nothing.
And true to form they did just that and were allowed to feign total ignorance to the inner workings of their own media organisation. Moreover, they provided a functional example for their American executives to follow as they actively downplay the severity of the wiretapping of 911 victim families phone calls in the US with mobile devices provided to them by News Corp employees.
Mainstream politicians, journalists and academics are consciously turning a blind eye to the rise of pro-White supremacist/Christian fascism in their nations while at the very same time they capitalise upon the social bad-jacketing of non-European ethnic and cultural groups. Occasionally this is intelligently discussed in fair terms, but the fact remains that the victims of discrimination in Europe and the Americas are the same ethnic and cultural groups that have been demonised in European and Euro-settler social tradition, religion and law for centuries.
This dynamic however is rarely discussed at length because to do so would be a self-convicting acknowledgement that xenophobia in the White world is an undeniable fact of life. Further, such an admission would empirically unshroud the reality that White racial perspectives and prejudices undoubtedly remain to be the primary reason why the world is in the shape it is.
The popular post-modernist argument that ‘all oppression is the same everywhere and in every circumstance’ is a Europocentric deception. It suggests a sociopolitical, educational and economic equality amongst all people that does not exist. It flatly denies the harsh realities of White Power, its hatreds, its inconsistencies and its long and sordid history of violence against those they declare to be feeble and powerless. It is also a blatant insult to the basic humanity of the victims who have generally been convinced that it is proper and noble to acquiesce quietly to their own disenfranchisement. This of course is not by accident. It is by calculated design. White society is not ignorant of the routine stresses that demoralise the hearts and minds of the non-European world. It simply masquerades institutional marginalisation and exploitation as the normative division between the better and the worse amongst human society.
And the problem is everywhere and anywhere you may care to look. Worldwide, the struggle between human dignity and the stubborn persistence of White racist advocacy, religious violence and economic robbery continues unabated by modern liberalism or common sense. Those of us who realise that our political, social and psychological under-development is the direct result of our struggle against racialism understand that have a great deal to do in terms of standing firm during these difficult times. We are not swayed by the pretty talk of the establishment or Barack Obama’s skin colour.
We live with the gross indignity of White racism and its by-products every day of our lives. What’s worse, every White person in the Americas is fully aware of this reality, but only a precious few are prepared to do more than simply wax philosophical about it.
There is a reason for this and it is important that we understand the issue fully for what it is. Peer pressure is a very powerful thing. And when decent White folks stand up to White racism they often place themselves at considerable social and physical risk. White people who are not shy about their anti-racism can experience rejection, insult and sometimes violent retaliations from family, lifelong friends and other Whites who object to their ‘cultural’ and/or racial dissent. This is sometimes so damaging emotionally that people who do indeed believe ethnic equality may decide to either stay ‘in the closet’ about their feelings or, they may even pretend to ‘go along’ with the traditional attitudes as a means of social survival. Even for ‘good’ White people, the risk of being socially marginalised as a ‘Nigger Lover’ is simply too much to deal with when it is easier to simply acquiesce to the mainstream and agree that White’s have an inherent God-given ‘right to rule’.
And whether White people in the US, UK or Israel want to accept it or not, they are all to an individual actually profiting from non-White social and political disenfranchisement and genocide. Forget about the hypocritical statements made by US Justice Robert Jackson as he sat in judgment of German Nazis while his own country was still eliminating Native Americans to steal their lands and brutalising African people for profit and sport. The fact is, White supremacist attitudes, Europocentric power and unearned White privilege are the end results of racist imposition and belligerence, not the assumed frailties of the chosen victims. White power is a lot like the Christian concept of the Devil in that it claims it does not exist, yet it informs everything that occurs in national, international and inter-cultural relations. And if you dare tell the truth, the way Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva did when he correctly pointed out that the international financial crisis is entirely the fault of the White people who really control what happens in the world, expect to be painted as a reverse-racist who despises ‘civilisation’ itself:
‘This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing. I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimized more than any other should pay for the crisis.’
– Lula da Silva
European conservatives took great offense to this but what could they really say? He was spot-on with his analysis and moreover, he was using the apologetics of White supremacy to effectively support his statement. The concept of White racial and cultural superiority isn’t his idea, its the most elemental argument presented by the ever-dominating White male power structure. It is also the primary fundamental hypocrisy of White racist philosophy. If the White man is the only cultural and ‘racial’ entity on Earth that has ever produced anything of consequence, this means that White society must also accept its central role in all that is wrong with the world they assert they alone have created.
Rational Alternatives to Manifest Destiny
The rise of the far-right is not simply a populist response to non-White immigration and modern religious and ethnic tolerance in the west. It is an engineered sociopolitical phenomenon created, financed and directed by the economic and social upper-classes of continental Europe and their corporate Euro-settler offshoots in the Americas and Australasia. And while ‘Old Europe’, (as former US Vice-President Richard Cheney rudely put it) is still a very important player internationally, the real bulk of actionable world power rests squarely within the intellectual domain of the United States which has occupied this exclusive position since the end of World War Two. Think beyond Bretton Woods, which is still important, and ask yourself why the literate world chooses to believe that the US is a bastion of democracy and human rights.
Are the educated around the world not cognizant of what is happening in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan? Of course we are. It is virtually impossible to avoid the ‘designated information’ streamed to the masses about the glorious mission to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to the Arab world. Are we ignorant of the overt oppression and covert repression of Indigenous peoples, the African population, Spanish-speaking immigrants, political dissenters and religious minorities in the Americas? No, we are not ignorant of these human rights abuses but we are willing to turn a blind eye because the perpetrators are White. As long as the victims are not White Christians or Ashkenazi claimants to the Holy Lands, all forms of injustice to the human dignity of those deemed unworthy of being regarded as ‘legitimate Europeans’ will be justified in deed, faith and the written word as sanctioned by the great Aryan deity of Providence.
This sad state of affairs is of course helpful to Judeo-Christian industrialists and bankers, but it is bad business for those whom they regularly rob, rape and pillage without mercy in the name of profit and Europocentric hegemony. This is why understanding the White nationalist duo-doctrine of American Exceptionalism and Christian fundamentalism is vital if one is to make any sense out of what has happened in Norway. While the United States did not invent White racist religiously-sanctioned philosophy or violence, it certainly has perfected its practise and political apologia like no other society in history. And the United States is unique amongst the Euro-settler nations in that its institutional practise of ethnic hierarchy, marginalisation and racial terrorism are regarded as normal, if not benevolent, for those who are subjected to it.
And understand this too if nothing else, Europe’s irrational intellectual belief in its own supremacy and cultural superlative will serve to be the factors that will bring about its eventual downfall. Like Apartheid is South Africa, White Power simply cannot last. Just do the math. Whether the situation is in Aotearoa (New Zealand) or Occupied Palestine, Europeans are not a racial majority anywhere outside of Europe, (except for maybe Argentina). Ignore the usual multicultural arguments for a moment and just deal with basic numbers. Racism in any form is a foolish and black-hearted practise, but White racism in particular is completely daft and totally unrealistic. If White folks were smart, they would be eagerly finding ways to work along with non-European folks rather than seeking ways to exploit them.
And despite the wacky suspicions of the insecure, people of colour, even after centuries of mistreatment and neglect, still do not hate White people simply because they are ‘White’. We hate the oppression and we hate the arrogance. If this were not the case, non-White feuds against Europeans would be a very regular occurrence all around the world. It simply isn’t happening. Outside of a few very well publicised incidents, non-Whites have been pretty forgiving. And although ‘normal’ people are finding ways to adjust to the new circumstances, the current trend we are witnessing of compulsive White racialism is clearly reactionary. It is a symptom of the White world’s psychological failure to come to grips with a decaying system of monolithic Europocentric authoritarian domination.
Not that the major press agencies, celebrity psychologists or mainstream politicians report on it much, but conservative folks are frankly just a pitiful rabble of sad, insecure little sods afraid of the world their prejudices made out of whole cloth. And on that basis alone they should not be feared. Just like the American, (and now Canadian and Australian) Ku Klux Klan, the violence exhibited by White conservatives only betrays them. It just proves just how afraid they really are of things that logically challenge their closed-minded perspective of the world.
Their childish fear of non-Whites, Catholics, homosexuals, Jews and anyone else who crosses them is unfortunate. Its also a clear and easily readable indicator of just how deep set and how self-immolating such hatred is for those that hold on to such ideas. Bigots of any colour are mentally ill, and Whites who practise race-ism are consciously vile. There is a very big difference between the two, disliking someone because of their ethnicity is bias, having the social power to actualise that bias is something else entirely.
Ignore the conscious liars and the loony songbirds of the conservative and neo-Confederate media lobby, Anders Behring Breivik, the devout Christian fascist terrorist who has openly admitted to planning and executing the recent attacks against organised leftists in Norway is one of theirs. They own this tragedy and we should not allow them any leeway to disassociate their politics or their intentional falsehoods from what has happened. And most importantly, we must not let Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp be exempted from blame for pressing the bigotry button the moment they found out that Oslo was burning in the name of the risen Christ.
Despite the obvious cognitive and social setbacks of racialist thinking, the important business of Europocentric, pro-Christian, ultra-conservative and neo-Confederate propaganda will roll along. Even in the face of extreme hypocrisy, White supremacist attitudes and terrorism can always be assured of a warm and welcoming reception from the people who bring us the news and from those who claim to serve us politically. This is a shame and people of goodwill must do more than just politely ignore such issues.
Racism is everyone’s problem. And the problem of White nationalism and racist violence will not go away unless we all, all of us, work earnesty to expose and ridicule these attitudes and the movements that fuel them. Violence is the refuge of the weak-minded, so let’s educate them, and ourselves, by taking the fight to another level. When we expose the roots of Eurpocentric ethnic bias we do more than just fight racism, we get to the heart of the unfair exploitation that threatens us all. Even the bigots.
After Vlakplaas, I think we all deserve better than this.
– TheAngryindian
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Don't you know that even mentioning that Antifas are violent makes you a nazi? All of the sudden Antifa is the defenders of the free world to both the left and right. Its really gross how people are so scared of being called racist that they can't even say the truth. This country is dead.
Trump placed some of the blame for the Charlottesville violence on the “alt-left” which outraged his critics and motivated them to defend violent left-wing thugs. They were quick to state that only one side was to blame for the violence and even went as far as excusing and even celebrating Antifa’s violence.
Don Lemon said that what the leftists did was “messy” but ultimately well-intentioned because they were standing up against fascists. CNN also excused the violence because it was “standing up against hate.” This is an all too familiar theme among the left.
Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon and CNN host Chris Cuomo, decided to go even one step further and compare Antifa to the brave Americans who stormed Normandy on D-Day. It’s beyond comprehension.
What was most surprising to me though was seeing Republicans defend the same people who want them wiped out. Mitt Romney argued violent leftists were morally righteous. “No, not the same. One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.”
Marco Rubio took a similar tone,“When entire movement built on anger and hatred towards people different than you, it justifies and ultimately leads to violence against them.” Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie claimed those who say violent words are committing an even more serious offense those who actually commit violence.
At first glance, self-described “anti-fascists” may appear as a pretty cool group. Antifa’s new Republican sympathizers might think these guys only target white supremacists and neo-Nazis. But that’s absolutely not the case. In fact, Antifa targets plenty of Republicans and conservatives and their objective is to destroy everything that Republicans love, such as our government, the flag, the Constitution, patriotism, the military, the police, capitalism, gainful employment - you name it, they in their own words are prepared to die to end it all and replace it with a communist society.
Refuse Fascism was among the left-wing groups at the Charlottesville rally and urged violence against the white nationalists. Another anarchist group that was there, CrimethInc, say “We must identify the forces underlying their laws and their order. Patriarchy, policing, capitalism, and the state. We have to work together to reimagine the world without them. We need to make this country ungovernable,” They declare. “We need to do what the German people should have done when Hitler was elected.”
Another far-left group there was the Workers World Party, a group of marxists who have declared their support for Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship in North Korea and have has consistently published propaganda-like screeds supporting Venezuela’s regime. The communist group “sent many of its members to beat up those who marched there,” according to a post recapping the group’s proud violence. The group took credit for organizing the vandals who toppled a city-owned Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina this week.
Workers’ World’s stated goals are classic Marxism, including igniting an international socialist revolution and “the shutdown of the Pentagon and the use of the war budget that is the funding for the Department of Defense.” They believe: “Those in the ruling establishment want to continue to dominate most of the world behind a veil of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’” and they conclude their messages in very North Korea style, “ “Long live the independent struggle of this new progressive movement against the fascists, the cops and the capitalist establishment!”
These are the nutjobs who are being defended and are being painted as ‘honorable anti-racist citizens’, most bizarrely by certain Republicans who are so afraid of being called racists their idea of condemning white nationalists means justifying violent attacks against them. Since when is it okay for somebody to assault somebody else because someone claims he’s a Nazi? Well ever since the left told us we’re racists if we oppose it. Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” or “Nazis” they are free to set fires, destroy property and beat civilians bloody, all with love in their hearts.
Republicans and Democrats can make a point of condemning the alt-right without justifying the continuous violence and rioting of ISIS-wanna-be thugs. It makes no sense to congratulate a group that wants to cause harm to you for simply having different views. Or as they would say, “Nazi” views. In their endless pursuit of press approval, Republicans like Mitt Romney showed how pathetic they are of the threat of left-wing violence. By equating them to the Americans of D-Day or saying they just stand up to hate, all we’re doing is encouraging more political violence. We need to condemn all political violence as both ends of the scale are just as violent, dangerous and repulsive as each other, which is exactly what Trump did and was called racist for it. How stupid can we be?
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You Are Not a Rebel
via The Baffler
by Laurie Penny
IN REAL LIFE, nobody has the decency to realize that they’re the bad guy until it’s too late. The worst thing about the historical record is that it is usually written after the fact. Just think, if we could only get our hands on advance copies of tomorrow’s historical bestsellers, we could work out once and for all how we fit into this cruel and anxious age we’re living through, and get a sneak peek at the ending to see who ends up dead, decked out with medals, or living incognito in South America. Sadly, that would hardly help those of us who are most dangerously confused. The people who most urgently need to consider which side of the moral ledger their story will be written on tend to read few books in which they are not the hero.
It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
Let us remember, then, that in the violent psychodrama going on in their own minds, modern reactionaries, almost to a man, think that they are the hero. They think they’re the plucky underdog. They continue to think this even with their tiny-fingered mascot bellowing over the White House lawns and their agenda ascendant around the world, and I know, I know it makes no sense. But dogma doesn’t have to. And one of the articles of faith uniting all our modern proto-fascists, crypto-fascists, baby-fascists, whining 4chan fascists, and the growing number of fascists for whom any sort of prefix is redundant is that they all think they are rebels.
The new far right has recognized the enduring appeal of adventurism and appropriated its rhetoric for reactionary ends. Propaganda hubs like The Rebel repackage far right ideas as edgy and avant-garde, reassuring recruits that they are hip outsiders in a mass of squares and normies. This is a time-worn trick. As George Orwell observed in a review of Mein Kampf, “whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger, and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”
This is what happens when we fetishize the romance of rebellion while making actual social change impossible.
Fighting for people who are less privileged than you to become even less privileged than you is hardly a revolutionary mission. CEOs do it all the time. Last year I was interviewed for a Vicedocumentary about the relationship between Gamergate and the new far right. I remember that to get the shot at the right level, I had to half-sit and half-stand on a fancy sideboard. While I was engaging my core muscles trying to balance, the affable hipster doing the interview asked, “But aren’t the guys a bit underground? Aren’t they a bit counter-culture?” I was so flabbergasted that I fell off my perch. Yes, I told him, they are underground, a bit. But even Vice magazine, which is woke enough as long as woke sells ads—another Viceeditor told me authoritatively a few years ago that “it’s not cool to be stupid anymore”—even they can surely see that simply being “underground” does not make something fit to dredge up. A lot of things run underground that would be better off staying there. Sewers, for instance.
This is what happens when we equate “anti-social” with “anti-establishment.” The far right think they’re the resistance. They think they’re Mel Gibson in Braveheart, when they’re actually just regular old Mel Gibson, screaming about bitches and whores and Jews and then wondering why no one answers their phone calls anymore. Well played, Rob Roy.
The Shitler Youth come in many flavors of plausible deniability, but none are quite so woefully iconic as everyone’s favorite ship of fools: the fake pirates of Defend Europe.
In case you hadn’t heard, a few months ago some white supremacists decided that the rescue boats trying to save desperate people from drowning in the Mediterranean were a threat to “European” way of life. (I will not dignify them with the term “activists,” because activists have meetings and have read things that aren’t spittle-flecked sexually paranoid internet retro-rants about white people being bred out of existence.) They decided to solve the problem by pursuing a merry life of adventure on the high seas. No, really. These rudderless twits went ahead and chartered a boat, with the initial, unabashedly evil intention of impeding the rescue ships, a plan which was quickly changed to “monitoring” said ships, as apparently nobody had any idea how to do actual sea battle, because whatever the copyright people told us, downloading a lot of free porn does not, by itself, make you a pirate.
They got a lot of press, of course, which was part of the idea—there’s no point being a rebel if you can’t get your picture in the paper. They even got Katie Hopkins, Britain’s own dollar-store Eva Braun, to come along for part of the ride, presumably as some sort of totem against shipwreck, because any self-respecting god of the ocean would spit Hopkins right back out again. Deliciously, before they had even managed to embark on their main voyage, they accidentally smuggled twenty-one Sri Lankan asylum seekers into Europe. Then their boat stalled in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. The founder of the Sea-Eye, the NGO ship that was sent to offer aid—the pouting stalwarts refused help—told the public that “to help a ship in distress is the duty of anyone who is at sea, without distinction to their origin, color, religion, or beliefs.” Hopefully the Sea-Eye was also stocked with burn cream.[*]
The very worst part about this entire episode is that an actual rescue ship was diverted to help these cretins, a rescue ship that could have been saving people who are really fleeing for their lives, rather than simply fleeing reality. I’m not going to permit myself to wish the baby-fascists had fucking drowned, but I do hope the stalled vessel gave these quisling Quixotes time to check out their own reflection in the surface of the sea and wonder whether being “underground” was quite so much fun anymore. I also hope that when they make the movie of this, every single one of them is played by Nicolas Cage in a variety of unconvincing wigs.
Claiming that anti-fascists are morally equivalent to fascists is a little like claiming that, as both take a toll on the body, cancer and chemotherapy are basically the same.
In the United States, radicalized extremists on the far right are also due for a rebrand, having been embarrassed on the international stage in Charlottesville by fellow travelers who took the street-fighting-Nazi live-action roleplay too far, marched around screaming about being replaced by Jews, and murdered someone. The Shitler Youth are now going through desperate conniptions trying to claim that anti-fascists are morally equivalent to fascists, that “all sides” are aggressive and forthright, which is a little like claiming that, as both take a toll on the body, cancer and chemotherapy are basically the same.
Shit got real, eh? One minute you’re a nice normal boy with hobbies and internet friends, and the next, your picture’s all over the place holding a torch and doing the Nuremberg uglyface and your parents won’t talk to you because everyone thinks you’re a militant racist, and they’re right. If I may talk directly to these self-deluding subterraneans: I’m sorry to be the one to point this out, but you have been radicalized. There’s a reason people call you Vanilla ISIS. ISIS think they’re rebels, too. Have a good hard look at these Defend Europe twits with their rickety armada. These are your people. They’re your compadres. You are paddling beside them in the shallow end of political discourse, screaming when anything living nibbles your toes.
This is what happens when we fetishize the romance of rebellion while making actual social change impossible. My guess is that the ruling class, the people whose agenda these people’s mean-spirited credulity serves, aren’t standing about with flaming torches screaming that they’re about to be replaced by Jews. They don’t spend their time harassing girls on the internet. They outsource that shit. To suckers. For free. Meanwhile, the ruling class is just writing the speeches and jerking the strings and watching gullible, self-anointed rebels make fools of themselves on television.
These are the very people whose names the Shitler Youth wear on their unbelievably ugly hats and t-shirts, which incidentally is exactly what happens when you let straight white guys who consider gold a neutral design your neo-fascist aesthetic. The one problem with calling these faux-rebels Nazis is that it suggests they know how to goddamned get dressed in the morning. The left are out-styling them as well as out-thinking them right now. The left! Some of us wear hemp! And t-shirts with weak science puns! And we let our flatmates cut our hair! And we spend half our time fighting each other over tiny ideological debates that started before we were born, and they still make us look good. They make us look good because they’ve swallowed the fake oppression story cooked up by propagandists on the right to recast their most reactionary opinions as risqué.
So let’s be clear: getting fired because you hate women is not an equivalent hardship to getting fired because you happen to be one. People who have been disowned by their parents for being gay or transgender aren’t going to have sympathy when your mum and dad find your stash of homophobic murder fantasies and change the locks. Getting attacked for being a racist is not the same as getting attacked because you are black. The definition of oppression is not “failure to see your disgusting opinions about the relative human value of other living breathing people reflected in society at large.” Being shamed, including in public, for holding intolerant, bigoted opinions is not an infringement of your free speech. You are not fighting oppression. You are, at best, fighting criticism. If that’s the hill you really want to die on, fine, but don’t kid yourself it’s the moral high ground. I repeat: You cannot be a rebel for the status quo. It would be physically easier to go and fuck yourself, and I suggest you try.
The fact that some people—the women, people of color, immigrants and queer people you want put back in their proper place—disapprove of you does not make you edgy. A bag of cotton wool is edgier than you lot. Fighting for things to go back to the way they were twenty or thirty or fifty years ago does not constitute a bold resistance movement. It constitutes the militant arm of the Daily Mail comments section. Fighting real oppression involves risk, and before you start, I’m talking about real risk, not some girl on the internet calling you a cowardly subliterate waste of human skin, like I just did.
This was gig-economy bigotry from the beginning, every bedroom hatemonger his own self-facilitating media node.
Of course, the fragile self-image of American nationalism has always been grounded in the idea of rebellion, in an aesthetic of protest and struggle for individual liberty powdering over the ugly worship of authoritarianism andhierarchy that was also baked in from the beginning. The United States has never truly stopped fighting its civil war, but the tropes and language of that war have been re-appropriated by net reactionaries in an effort to dress up their racism as rebellion, which by coincidence was part of what the war was about in the first place. That’s why there’s such attachment to the confederate or “rebel” flag among conservatives, even in states which fought for the Union; even in states which did not exist at the time. And this investment in maintaining a state of permanent rebellion is why net reactionaries have no idea what to do now they’re technically in power, like the confused golden retriever who finally catches that Ford Focus, except far less fluffy.
Mewling subluminaries have, for years, approached backyard fascism as a growth industry—why stop now? These enterprising intellectual bantamweights did not wait for the mechanisms of state and party to show them how to goose-step or gather seed money—this was gig-economy bigotry from the beginning, every bedroom hatemonger his own self-facilitating media node, like a sort of fascist Nathan Barley. The millennials among them have merely done what the television told us all to do as kids: find your passion and make it your career. It’s just a shame that their passion happens to be the creation of a white ethnostate with a stack of sexually frustrated video rants as a transitional demand.
So propping up the establishment does not sit well with their sense of themselves as brave, entrepreneurial outsiders battling the forces of something-or-other. Perhaps it feels strange to be told you have won when nothing in your own actual, material life has changed. Perhaps winning didn’t taste as good as the picture on the package. They were promised thrills and spills and danger and adventure and instead they’re on the haunted teacup ride through the wreckage of civil society and they’re feeling a bit sick but they’ve given the man their money, so they can’t get off.
And in any case this is not the sort of game you just win or lose. Politics doesn’t work like that, although in fairness, the sense that it does is one of several delusions they share with the political elites they claim to despise. Playing by those rules is a great way to make sure that the house always wins. What’s changed in the world in the months since their team supposedly won? The rich are still running things, they’re just a lot less shy about it. Living standards have gone nowhere but down. The planet is still sizzling towards climate collapse, and I know they think that’s not real, but you don’t have to believe in a train to get run down by it with everyone you care about while you stand in the middle of the tracks screaming about cucks and Jews like a prize prick.
One major thing, however, has changed, and that is that an awful lot of people who happen to be foreign, or female, or members of a different race or faith from these fools are suddenly living in fear of violence, violence the Shitler Youth and their crewmates helped whip up to make themselves feel like big damn heroes. Because they wanted to feel like they were fighting the power without actually having to challenge anyone who had it.
If you’ve a niggling suspicion I might be talking about you here, it’s time to take a look at your own reflection in whatever screen you’re reading off. If you want to cosplay as a revolutionary from a made-up time before brown people and liberated women existed, go and drink mead at a Ren fair like a normal person. If you just want to be famous on the internet, go and make some porn. If you can’t get over your fetish for fake oppression, go and hang out in a club where people wear expensive black rubber and get yourself consensually flogged by someone with legitimate rage to work through. But don’t call yourself a revolutionary just because you can’t stop running in circles.
[*] Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly suggested that the crew of the Defend Europe vessel had been rescued by the Sea-Eye. Although the Sea-Eye was temporarily diverted to travel toward the Defend Europe boat and offer aid, the latter crew refused help and the rescue ship carried on its operations. The fascists’ boat later restarted.
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No Joke - Natasha Lennard
Image: Detail from Sacks (2007) by Sara Greenberger Rafferty. Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery.
A popular fiction has it that Socrates was convicted of his various charges by a slim majority of Athenian judges. Then, when it came to sentencing, the prosecutor proposed death. Socrates instead proposed that he receive free meals for life in the city’s sacred hearth. In response, more judges voted to sentence him to death for his impertinence than had voted to convict him in the first place. Though this isn’t true, it would have been ironic if it were.
Socrates, we might say, died from “irony poisoning.” Not the flesh-and-blood man Socrates, of course — he was probably killed for teaching and befriending deposed tyrants — but the Socrates we know from Plato and Xenophon’s hagiographic renderings, who was apparently sentenced to death by hemlock for using irony to reveal philosophical truths to young Athenian men.
If only the term irony poisoning were used that way, for cases in which poison is dispatched against irony. Instead, the term has emerged in social media parlance to signify that irony, cultivated online, is itself the poison. Mimetic of the process it ostensibly denotes, “irony poisoning” began somewhat as a joke. It’s well summed up, as these things often are, in an Urban Dictionary entry: “Irony poisoning is when one’s worldview/Weltanschauung/reality tunnel is so dominated by irony and detachment-based-comedy that the joke becomes real and you start to do things that are immoral or wrong from a place of deep nihilistic cynicism.” An extreme case of “irony poisoning” turns the online shitposter into the committed violent racist, willing to carry out bloody deeds offline.
The adoption of the term “irony poisoning” lets centrist liberals do what centrist liberals do best: call for civility, earnestness, and Truth as the antidote to violent extremism
Had “irony poisoning” remained imprecise, self-referential Twitter jargon, there would be no reason to take issue with it. But it’s now being used in earnest to describe a real and troubling condition. It has been enthusiastically picked up by publications like the Guardian, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times, which embraced it as a revelatory explanation for the rise and spread of fascist communities online and the offline violence they facilitate. “We are making a plea to scholars, readers and Silicon Valley elites,” the Times journalists wrote, without apparent irony, “take irony poisoning seriously.” And we should, but not for the reasons they adduce. Rather, the term’s adoption reveals the flawed way mainstream liberal analysis wants to see and interpret fascism. It lets centrist liberals do what centrist liberals do best: call for civility, earnestness, and Truth as the antidote to violent extremism.
That’s not to say that the pattern that the “irony poisoning” thesis points to is not gravely real. Online communities awash in euphemistic alt-right neo-Nazi references as well as explicit racial slurs and Hitler memes have produced violent actors in the physical world. Charlottesville was organized as a meat-space meetup of white supremacists who had found each other online and adopted a cartoonish lexicon by which to recognize each other (Pepes, symbols of Odinism and so on) and culminated in white supremacists beating a black man with metal poles, and a neo-Nazi mowing his Dodge Charger into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one. Lane Davis, a prolific far-right troll on YouTube who called his parents “leftist pedophiles,” was thought to be nothing more than an outrage peddler until he stabbed his dad to death. The New York Times invoked irony poisoning in response to a case involving a German firefighter in a liberal town who bartered online in anti-refugee Facebook propaganda and Hitler jokes. He then attempted to set fire to a refugee group house.
These incidents of physical violence were no doubt stoked by a worldview shaped and encouraged in social media’s dark crevices, where race hate is often expressed and (further) normalized through memes and jokes. That is simply to say that our beliefs and behaviors are shaped and reinforced by the communities of which we are a part, and individual participation reinforces the group subjectivity in turn. Yet the framework of “irony poisoning” becomes dubious when applied as an actual explanation or pathology. By blaming irony as some sort of gateway drug to “real” race hate, it suggests that “real” far-right extremism develops through an extreme ironic detachment from reality and its moral standards. But in fact it is through routine attachment to networks in which white supremacy is an a priori moral norm in need of defense that fascist subjects are formed. Attachment, not detachment, is the problem.
For those of us interested in delivering effective blows to racist, fascistic formation, dismantling this liberal framework matters. I agree, we must take seriously the discursive violence expressed through veiled euphemisms and Pepe memes on Twitter, and the physical violence committed by those who speak that language. And we must take seriously that the flawed liberal response to these horrors is to blame irony.
The irony poisoning pathology belongs in the pantheon of bad explanations for the rise of fascism, which insist that a public is somehow unwittingly tricked into it: the idea that young, disaffected, white male social media users believe themselves to simply be playing a communal game of out-trolling each other but are in fact duped into a true fascistic frenzy. We see this framework play out in Jason Wilson’s piece on the phenomenon in the Guardian, in which he notes that seasoned neo-Nazis lure new recruits in with memes and racist jokes.
The media has picked up on contemporary white supremacist irony as if all previous iterations of fascism were somehow devoid of it. It’s perhaps calming to think that previous fascist constellations were transparent regimes of explicit race hate, easy to name and oppose. Nazi hats had skulls on them, for god’s sake, as British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb skewer in a sketch in which one Nazi asks another, “Hans, are we the baddies?” But historic fascist movements often bartered in irony and euphemism. Mussolini’s Black Shirts took up the slogan “Me Ne Frego,” which basically translates to “I don’t give a fuck” — a seeming cry of nihilistic detachment. But in context, the phrase meant “I don’t give a fuck if I die fighting for fascism.” The ironic expression was one of extreme attachment and sincere commitment, which makes individual nihilism possible. And as Malcolm Harris pointed out at in an interview with Elaine Parsons, author of Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan in Reconstruction, the Reconstruction Klan also weaponized “goofiness and so-called irony.” “All the Klannish affectations and accoutrements that seem so ridiculous today — the alliterative K’s, the costumes, the Magic: The Gathering titles like ‘Grand Wizard’ and ‘Exalted Cyclops’ — were ridiculous, and self-consciously so,” wrote Harris. “One of the functions of humor for the Klan, Parsons says, was to mark their transgressions as acceptable.” The funny white ghost costumes didn’t distract the American public into regarding Klan violence and the destruction of black life as acceptable and even desirable; rather it made it appear as normal and natural as laughter. The appeal to irony was not a trick, but an attempt to assert an already existing racist community, to invoke belonging and exclusion of the other.
In Germany in 1933, Wilhelm Reich, in analyzing how a society chooses fascism, rejected the all-too-easy notion of the duped masses. He insisted that we take seriously the fact that people, en masse, genuinely desired fascism. Ignorant masses weren’t manipulated into an authoritarian system they do not actually want. A Freudian acolyte, Reich posited a repressive hypothesis to account for fascist desire: The collective fascist subject was the result of societal sexual repression. His diagnosis was biologically essentialist and now appears wildly outdated, but his insistence on taking fascistic desire seriously remains all too lacking in today’s commentary on the rise of the far right.
This approach was further developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to account for fascist desire formation as a productive force rather than a by-product of repression. “No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism,” they wrote. Deleuze and Guattari focused on micro-fascisms — quotidian, repressive operations of politics and power organized under capitalism and modernity. The individualized and detached self, the over-codings of family unit normativity, the authoritarian tendency of careerism and competition, the desire for hierarchy and power, the police — all among paranoiac sites of micro-fascism. These stem from the practices of authoritarianism and domination and exploitation that form us, reflecting how we are coded to desire the domination and oppression of the nameable “other,” and none of us are free of them. We can’t just “decide” our way out of them through a renewed commitment to earnestness.
But not everyone becomes a neo-Nazi. That requires a nurturing and constant reaffirmation of that fascistic desire to oppress and live in an oppressive world. And to be sure, that pernicious affirmation of white supremacy is not in short supply. Long before the birth of the internet, Deleuze and Guattari stressed interactive, habitual way that fascist desire is determined: “Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions.” Fascist subject formation relies on habit, and collective habit at that; social media platforms are an “engineered setup” that accommodate and incentivize these routines. Social media is literally designed to offer metrics of affirmation, which are easily adapted to incubating fascist desire.
The alt-right euphemistic symbols of racism are meant to confuse outsiders and affirm insiders who can feel a sense of belonging by being in the know. They are not attempts to trick the otherwise unsusceptible into racist thinking. Making racist jokes and references are among the habits that sustain and grow neo-fascist online communities, but it’s not the “irony” in them that affords a sense of permission and ushers someone toward white supremacist violence; it is the community that fosters such speech. The ability for angry, entitled people to find each other and support each other’s racial animosities, to speak freely and spread their message without negative consequences provides the conditions for far-right extremism to flourish, not the ambiguities of ironic discourse.
The suggestion that young social media users could somehow stumble into these online communities, believing them to be populated by ironic and nihilistic jokesters as opposed to “real” racists does not add up. Participation presumes understanding what Wittgenstein called a “form of life,” the necessary background context by which interactions and expressions are made possible. In these communities, emboldened white supremacy is the form of life, and participating in them presumes that understanding. Participants can’t be “poisoned” by what they already know.
Consider the “OK” hand sign adopted by the alt-right, Proud Boys, Identity Evropa and their fellow neo-Nazi travelers. The use of the hand sign began as a hoax on a 4chan alt-right discussion board. “Operation O-KKK” was announced “to convince people on Twitter that the ‘OK’ hand sign has been co-opted by neo-Nazis.” The same “meme magic” — to borrow shitposter parlance — was used to “trick” liberals and leftists into believing that milk was a white power symbol. Members of the alt-right swarmed actor Shia LaBeouf’s He Will Not Divide Us video-stream installation in New York, chugging cartons of milk. But there is nothing magical or alchemical in giving objects and words new significance through use. That just how meaning works. And it works even faster through social media’s metabolism, which establishes popular phrases and new references several times a day at minimum.
Buzzfeed’s Joe Bernstein, who first reported on the fight over the “OK” sign, wrote, “Where it gets really fuzzy … is trying to determine when and if these symbols cross over from ironic usage.” But it’s pretty clear that the “ironic” usage was poisoned with real racism from the moment groups defined by their white supremacy decide to collectively communicate and represent themselves with it. It’s not that irony poisoned the symbol or anyone using it; it’s the fact that neo-fascists used it to signal each other and develop the habit together, strengthening group subjectivity. Outside the language game of racism, it’s still just means “OK.” Inside, it betokens emboldened white supremacist fascism and bonds that sustain it. Those who claimed to be no more than pranksters were not drawing “us vs. them” lines arbitrarily; their targets were, from the jump, “libtards” and “social justice warriors” who dared care about misogyny and white supremacy.
Not every alt-right shitposter is going to take up physical violence against immigrants and non-white people. But the ones who do were not led to violence by a morality-blurring world of white supremacist humor but a consensus reality built around racism as a given, which is then nurtured, collectively and algorithmically.
If desiring fascism is not something that happens out of reason, we cannot break it with reason alone — this is the liberal mistake that manifests as calls to debate fascists in order to reveal the flaws in their thinking, as if fascist desire was simply something that dissolves into dust when faced with a counterargument or exposed for what it is.
Having a platform is what allows fascist communities to nurture fascist desire in participants. Thus anti-fascists seek to disrupt far-right rallies, deny opportunities to fascist speakers, and expose and shutter those online fascist communities to create unpleasant, if not intolerable, consequences for those indulging or exploring fascist desire. The point is to break the fascist habit by denying the spaces where it is fostered.
It would suit liberal and conservative disavowals of antifa tactics if irony poisoning were really the problem at hand. Condemning irony is the same as insisting that sunlight is the best disinfectant for fascism. As Vicky Osterweil noted in this publication, “feckless liberals abdicate power in the hopes that it will somehow ‘reveal’ the true nature of fascism — think of Democrats relying on Trump to finally demonstrate his unfitness to rule rather than organizing an actual opposition — fascism consolidates representations of that unfitness as opportunities to demonstrate loyalty and belonging.” Behind the so-called irony of Pepe and Kek, there is no pure discursive sphere to be revealed, where fascism and race hate have no place to hide. I suppose there’s some irony — a tired, well worn irony — in the media suggesting that the problem with racist fascism under Trump is that it’s all too obscure.
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Neo-Nazi background hounds Sweden Democrats | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW
Moments after Jimmie Akesson, the 39-year-old leader of the populist Sweden Democrats (SD), takes the microphone in Malmo, the chants begin to ring out. “No racists on our streets!” There are cardboard banners saying “Shut up, you bloody racist, and “SD: Nazis 1988, Nazis 2018.”
Read more: Sweden: Alexandra Pascalidou meets her neo-Nazi tormentor
The overwhelming majority of those who have turned out to watch Akesson speak are what he would call “helt vanligt folk,” or “completely ordinary people.”
The anti-fascists out today are not alone in calling the party Nazis. Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has described the party as “a neo-fascist single-issue party” with “Nazi and racist roots.” And the party’s supporters admit the stigma is a problem.
“It can be difficult with some people,” said “UC” Nilsson, a 16-year-old supporter who has come along with fellow pupils from his upper secondary school. “You get a very hard backlash because some people don’t like the politics. But I think it’s good for Sweden: we can’t take so many immigrants,” he told DW.
Endorsing ‘cultural nationalism’
Ideologically, the Sweden Democrats party is if anything less extreme than Europe’s other populists, professing a “cultural nationalism” open to everyone, no matter where they are born or the color of their skin, but at the same time calling for heavily restricted immigration. The party wants Sweden to only take refugees from Denmark, Norway and Finland, and also favors a much stricter work permit system.
Read more: Refugee influx weighs on Swedish towns
What makes it stand out is that it does in fact have roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement.
Even Mattias Karlsson, the party’s parliamentary leader and ideological mastermind, concedes many founding members were drawn from the openly racist group Keep Sweden Swedish. “But this organization was disbanded in 1986, and SD was formed in 1988,” he stressed, “so SD is not a continuation of that organization.”
The party’s first treasurer, Gustaf Ekstrom, was a former member of the Waffen SS, and its first leader, Anders Klarstrom, had been active in the neo-Nazi Nordic Realm Party, the Nordiska Rikspartiet.
The question is whether these origins still taint the party, despite Akesson’s efforts to reform it since taking over as leader in 2005.
“We are really firm and non-compromising about these issues,” Karlsson told DW. “If there’s any sign of xenophobia and racism, we immediately expel those representatives.”
Julia Kronlid says voters are beginning to appreciate what the Sweden Democrats stand for
Julia Kronlid, the highest-ranking woman in the party’s leadership, says the stigma is less prevalent than when she “came out” as a supporter a decade ago.
“In church, when my husband and I said we were joining SD, people almost choked on their coffee,” she told DW. “But now they appreciate what I’ve done and some of them want to join the party.”
But Cecilia Bladh, another educated middle-class SD politician, complains local campaigners still risk being ostracized by their employers.
“I hope that will change, because if we have one-fifth of the Swedish population [behind us], maybe even one-fourth. It can’t continue like this,” she told DW. “Somewhere it needs to stop.”
Nazi roots haunt Sweden Democrats
Part of the reason that it hasn’t is that many members clearly are still racist.
Last week, the Expressen newspaper revealed that a local SD politician had written about “the Jewish plague” on a closed Facebook group, and argued that “Hitler was not wrong about the Jews.”
David Baas, the story’s author, says it is normal for SD activists to post such racist comments in closed forums and on the Russian social media site VK.
“They’ve got two faces: On their public Facebook profiles they don’t write these things, but on VK they write something very different,” he told DW.
Expressen, together with the anti-extremist magazine Expo, also revealed that at least eight current SD election candidates are former members of neo-Nazi groups, with one paying membership fees to the Nordic Resistance Movement as recently as 2016.
Andreas Olofsson, who is campaigning for the Sweden Democrats in Klippan, a former paper mill town an hour from Malmo, led the local branch of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Front (NSF) in the late 1990s.
“It was a very sad time for me,” Olofsson told DW. “I was young and stupid. I’m a completely different person now.”
Zero tolerance on racism?
The party claims to vet all candidates, but Olofsson’s past is common knowledge in the town, where it is also largely forgiven.
Jonathan Leman, the Expo researcher who worked on the investigations, said his findings were evidence that the zero-tolerance policy is “not rooted in the party.”
“They spend more time telling people like you that they have this policy than reaching out to parts of the party and making sure that it is taught and lived,” he told DW.
Ricky Lowenborg insists the Sweden Democrats are not Nazis
Back in Malmo, Ricky Lowenborg, an SD supporter with a faded neck tattoo and a football shirt, starts to lose patience with the chants drowning out Akesson’s speech.
“Nazis?” he barks, weaving through the crowd toward the protesters. “It’s the Social Democrats who are Nazis!”
Read more: How are Europe’s Social Democrats faring?
A policeman fixes him with a warning stare and he retreats. “My tax money goes to those scum there,” he mutters to DW as he returns. “That’s why I’m pissed.”
In the background, Akesson is talking about immigrants wanting “to build giant mosque complexes with huge minarets everywhere” and when Lowenborg hears that DW’s correspondent is from England he begins to talk about an alt-right Islamophobic film he’s seen.
“It’s really bad with the Muslims over there, I hear. All the Muslims are taking over.”
He checks himself. “We’re not Nazis,” he says firmly. “They think we’re Nazis, but we absolutely are not. I’m not a racist, I hope you write that. I’m married to a Filipina. I love foreign people.”
Read more: AfD in the Bundestag: Can Germany learn from Scandinavia’s far-right problem?
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D’Souza’s ‘Death of a Nation’ Shows Democrat ‘Plantation’ Still in Business
https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=7035
D’Souza’s ‘Death of a Nation’ Shows Democrat ‘Plantation’ Still in Business
Dinesh D’Souza, a filmmaker and author of several New York Times bestselling books, has debunked powerful political myths that are alive in our culture. In previous works, he has shown that the claim that the Republican Party is the party of racism is a lie. He has also shown that the notion that fascism and Nazism are ideologies of the “right,” rather than the “left,” is based on a false framing of history.
In his upcoming film and book, “Death of a Nation,” D’Souza delves into another piece of history, showing that the “plantation” system of the early Democratic Party lives on in systems of heavy taxation, government dependence, and identity politics.
“What the book does is it tells kind of a new story of how the plantation has defined the Democratic Party from the very beginning,” D’Souza said.
In his earlier movie, “Hillary’s America,” D’Souza showed the Democratic Party is the party of slavery, the southern Confederacy, the Klu Klux Klan, and segregation. He noted this is “undisputed, historically,” but the left re-brands this history by claiming the Democrats shifted over time to become the party of civil rights and support for minorities. D’Souza said his new book and film “debunk” this narrative.
The Democrat Plantation
The movie poster for “Death of a Nation.” (Courtesy of Dinesh D’Souza)
According to D’Souza, the plantation system of the Democratic Party has gone through five phases, starting with the plantations that used black slaves, leading to today’s plantation system where minorities are rendered dependent on Democrat policies, using wealth the party takes from American taxpayers.
The key shift from the slave system of the south into today’s plantation system started with Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States from 1837 to 1841 and a leader of the New York Democratic Party. “Van Buren figured out that in the south there are slaves, but in the north there are poor penniless immigrants pouring into America: the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and so on.”
According to D’Souza, Van Buren had a realization that while he couldn’t directly use the slave system elsewhere, he could “create a system in which these immigrants can be completely dependent on the Democratic Party.” The Democratic Party would give them food, job references, and occasional help finding apartments; and in exchange the immigrants would vote the Democrats into power to enable them to take money from the U.S. treasury so they could finance the programs.
Through this system, D’Souza said, “the northern political machines which dominated the Democratic Party really for more than a century were themselves modeled on the slave plantation, except they didn’t use black slaves—they used newly-arriving immigrants.”
Under this new plantation system, D’Souza said, the Democratic Party conspired to “rip off the taxpayer, or the working man,” in order to finance the programs the party used to buy its votes. Meanwhile, he said, “the immigrant got the small end of the stick, because the immigrants were helpless. They didn’t know what was going on. They just ran into this Tammany machine in New York, for example, and it controlled their lives.”
As the Democrat plantation system developed over time, it eventually formed today’s plantation system. D’Souza described this as a “multi-racial plantation, in which the Democrats are essentially trying to reduce every ethnic group into a dependent constituency.”
The Democrat social welfare programs financed by heavy taxation have largely targeted minority groups, he said, and have led to the often hopeless situations in today’s ghettos, barrios, and Native American reservations. He said, “all these places are very similar—they’re places where people are poor, where education is terrible, where nobody gets ahead, where families are in dissaray, where there’s a lot of violence, and where there’s a lot of despair and nihilism, and where the vast, vast majority of people keep voting Democratic.”
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The Lie of the ‘Fascist’ Right
D’Souza said the new film tells this story as well, but also includes elements from his recent book, “The Big Lie.” He said, “the core theme of the movie is to refute the race card and the fascism card. The race card is the Democrat idea that racism is now on the right, that’s it’s a phenomenon of the Republican Party and of Trump; and the fascism card is that fascism is on the right, and it’s now a phenomenon of Trump and the conservatives.”
“The movie takes on these two incendiary accusations,” he said, “and pins the racist and fascist tale not on the Republican elephant, but on the Democratic donkey.”
The notions that racism and fascism are elements of Republican Party, rather than the Democratic Party, he said, have been shaped heavily by the left’s control of academia and the media for close to two generations.
“They have done a lot to muddy these waters. They will say for example that because the Nazis were on one side of the war, and the Soviet Union was on the other side, it follows that since the communists were left wing, the Nazis have to be right wing. But this is bogus,” he said. “Communism and Nazism grew out of the same soil.
“They both were rooted in socialist economics, they both appealed not directly to the working class, but to a cadre of militants and revolutionaries, students, lawyers, journalists, ex-military guys: these were the core of Lenin’s revolutionary cadre, and they were also the core of both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s cadres.”
He noted that the main difference between communism and fascism is very minor: communism pushed for international socialism, and fascism pushed for national socialism. “That’s not a big difference. That’s smaller than the difference between say the Shia and the Sunnis in the Muslim world, and yet the Shia and the Sunnis have had bloody battles that go back for centuries. Sometimes groups that are quite similar ideologically have terrible wars based either on fine points of doctrine, or for competition for followers.”
Historically, even direct communist regimes such as the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party have switched between the ideas of “international socialism” and “national socialism,” depending on their varying objectives.
D’Souza said another part of the film focuses on debunking misinformation about former President Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, and on the violent clashes between Antifa and neo-nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, in Aug. 2017.
“The Democrats will say, ‘yes, Dinesh you’re right, the Democrats have this sort of history, but you’ve got to remember they changed. The party switched platforms, Nixon converted the southern racists into Republicans, and then look at Charlottesville—here you’ve got these neo-Nazis in Trump hats—so racism today is clearly on the right,” D’Souza said. “And it is this claim that we destroy in the movie.”
To debunk this claim, D’Souza said he focuses on the “myth of Nixon’s southern strategy,” and he also interviews neo-Nazi organizer Richard Spencer and shows that his ideologies are on the “left,” not the “right.” He adds that “both in the new book and the movie, we show the leftist roots of white supremacy, which is a very eye opening thing to watch.”
D’Souza also noted that another neo-Nazi organizer of the Charlottesville riots was Jason Kessler, who “has a history of leftist politics—he was an Obama supporter, and he was an Occupy Wall Street guy.” He noted that Kessler’s leftist history was well known, and was even stated on the Southern Poverty Law Center website. A Charlottesville newspaper did an exposé on Kessler that also detailed this background, noting that he even broke up with his girlfriend because she was too conservative, D’Souza said.
“All of this was out there, but the press didn’t touch it,” D’Souza said, “because they knew that to expose Kessler as a leftist was to undermine the whole beautiful story in which Charlottesville was proof that white supremacy is a Trump phenomenon.”
“Think about it this way: there’s no evidence that neo-nazis or KKK members voted for Trump. No-one has ever done an empirical survey that shows that,” D’Souza said. “So the only proof of something that is taken to be conventional wisdom is a few images drawn from Charlottesville of white nationalists wearing MAGA hats and cheering Trump. This anecdote, this handful of guys, is supposed to clinch the whole case. And that’s why counter examples are devastating, because the whole case hinges on so few examples.”
When it comes to the actual white supremacists and neo-nazis, D’Souza noted that many of them are atheist, and many are also admirers of black nationalism, and even praise people like Malcolm X. “They support this notion of ethnic identity politics,” D’Souza said. “And interestingly ethnic identity politics is not a phenomenon of the Republican Party, it’s a phenomenon of the Democratic Party. In fact, the Democratic Party is based on it.”
Making an Impact
A portrait photo of Dinesh D’Souza. (Courtesy of Dinesh D’Souza)
D’Souza has faced plenty of pushback over the years for his work, yet is known for maintaining a calm demeanor when debunking arguments from critics and clarifying his findings on history.
He was given a full pardon on May 31, 2018, by President Donald Trump for exceeding limits on campaign finance donations in the New York Senate campaign of Wendy Long in 2014 and making false statements to the Federal Elections Commission.
D’Souza and others believe he was selectively prosecuted, and that his sentence was politically motivated. The charges followed his 2013 film that was critical of former President Barack Obama, “2016: Obama’s America.”
When he received a full pardon from Trump, D’Souza said the feeling “was absolutely exhilarating. I felt like I got my American dream back. I certainly got my rights back.”
He noted that when he appeared on CNN for an interview following the pardon, he was told that it took powerful people including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Trump to get him pardoned, and was questioned whether that was a form of favoritism.
“And I said no,” D’Souza said. “Because it was very powerful people like Obama, Eric Holder, and Preet Bharara to get me in the first place.
“So yes, it did take some powerful people to get me off because they had to undo what earlier group of powerful people had done. That’s my take on the whole pardon business.”
D’Souza noted that for most of his career he has been an author and speaker, but that part of his passion for making movies is that he believes they can reach a much larger audience.
“Books appeal to the head, but movies appeal to the head and the heart. So this is a way to reach people. Movies are, not just in terms of the intellect but also in terms of feelings and experiences,” he said. “That’s why I’m excited to have both.”
The book version of “Death of a Nation” releases on July 31, and the film releases nationwide on Aug. 3.
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Here's why you should hug a Klansman
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“How can people hate me, when they don’t even know me?”
This is the question that drives the subject of a fantastic new documentary on Netflix called “Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race, and America,” directed by Matt Ornstein.
For the past 30 years, soul musician Daryl Davis has been traveling the country in search of an answer in the most dangerous way possible for a black man in America: by directly engaging with members the Ku Klux Klan.
He’s invited KKK members into his home, he’s had countless conversations, and as unlikely as it seems, now considers a number of them to be his friends.
Daryl might say that he’s not really even doing anything special besides treating his enemies with respect and kindness in the hopes of actually dissuading them from their hateful views.
Yet, that’s something almost no one else has the courage to do, even when the risks are considerably lower.
Disagreements are stressful and difficult, and the more horrifying someone else’s viewpoint is, the easier it is to dismiss the people who hold those beliefs as inhuman garbage who simply can’t be reasoned with. Social media has also made dehumanizing people considerably easier, as we all get to interact with people from around the world without ever seeing their faces or considering their feelings.
As a result, we live in an increasingly polarized time when a lot of people are saying that the only answer to hate and awful ideas is to meet them with even more hate, more anger, outrage, and even violence.
And it’s not just a problem when dealing with the worst ideas in human history like racial supremacy and fascism. Some people now take this approach for even trivial and academic disagreements.
Don’t like a speaker coming to campus? Silence them and prevent them from getting into the auditorium.
Don’t like what a Facebook friend has to say? Block them.
And of course, if you think someone you meet is a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi, the only thing left to do is punch them in the face.
Punching Doesn’t Work
But consider that most of human history is filled with people allowing their disagreements to turn into bloody, horrific warfare; it’s only our commitment to dealing with our adversaries peacefully through speech and conversation that has allowed us to become more civilized. So escalating conflicts into violence should be seen as the worst kind of social failure.
And besides, punching people who disagree with you doesn’t actually change their minds or anyone else’s, so we’re still left with the same deceptively difficult question before and after:
When people believe in wrongheaded or terrible things, how do we actually persuade them to stop believing the bad ideas, and get them to start believing in good ones instead?
Judging by social media, most people seem to believe that it’s possible to yell at people or insult and ridicule them until they change their minds. Unfortunately, as cathartic as it feels to let out your anger against awful people, this just isn’t an effective strategy to reduce the amount of people who hold awful ideas.
In fact, if you do this, your opponents (and even more people who are somewhat sympathetic to their views, or just see themselves as part of the same social group) might actually walk away even more strongly committed to their bad ideas than they were before.
The evidence from psychology is pretty clear on this.
We know from studies conducted by neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux that people’s amygdalas — the part of the brain that processes raw emotions — can actually bypass their rational minds and create a fight-or-flight response when they feel threatened or attacked. Psychologist Daniel Goleman called this an “Amygdala Hijack,” and it doesn’t just apply to physical threats.
People’s entire personal identity is often wrapped up in their political or philosophical beliefs, and a strong verbal attack against those beliefs actually creates a response in the brain of the target similar to a menacing lunge.
Even presenting facts or arguments that directly conflict with people’s core beliefs or identities can actually cause people to cling to those beliefs more tightly after they’ve been presented with contrary evidence. Political scientists like Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have been studying this phenomenon for over 10 years and call it the “Backfire Effect“.
And when the people whose minds we desperately need to change are racists and fascists (or socialists and communists, for that matter), a strategy that actually backfires and pushes more people towards those beliefs is the last thing we need.
Principles of Persuasion
The good news is that in addition to knowing what doesn’t work, we also know a lot about how to talk to people in ways that are actually persuasive — and the existing research strongly supports Daryl Davis’ approach.
In the psychologist Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, he describes what he calls the “Principles of Persuasion.”
One of these principles is called “reciprocity”, and it’s based on the idea that people feel obliged to treat you the way you treat them. So, if you treat them with kindness and humility, most people will offer you the same courtesy. On the other hand, if you treat them with contempt, well…..
Another principle Cialdini describes is the idea of “liking”.
It’s almost too obvious, but it turns out that if someone likes you personally and believes that you like them, it’s easier to convince them that your way of thinking is worth considering. One easy step towards being liked is to listen to others and find common ground through shared interests. This can be a bridge — or a shortcut — to getting other people to see you as a friend or part of their tribe.
You might think somebody like Daryl Davis would have nothing in common with a KKK member, but according to Daryl, if you “spend 5 minutes talking to someone and you’ll find something in common,” and if you “spend 10 minutes, and you’ll find something else in common.”
In the film, he connects with several people about music, and you can see these connections paying off — breaking down barriers and providing many Klan members with a rare (and in some cases only) opportunity to interact with a black man as a human being worth respecting instead of an enemy.
Even better, over time, forming these relationships has had an interesting side-effect.
In the last couple decades alone, over 200 of America’s most ardent white supremacists have left the Ku Klux Klan and hung up their robes and hoods for good.
Many of those robes now hang in Daryl’s closet.
And in a lot of cases, these individual conversions have much bigger consequences and end multi-generational cycles of bigotry. When a mother or a father leaves the darkness of the Klan, they’re also bringing their kids into the light with them. A few of these cases are profiled in “Accidental Courtesy”, and they’re indescribably moving.
Daryl Davis can be a model for how to change people’s minds and with everything that’s going on in the world today, we need successful models now more than ever.
Making Friends From Enemies
There’s another point to all of this that I think often goes unsaid.
Unlike Daryl, most of us aren’t actually interacting with KKK members or trying to change people’s minds away from truly evil ideologies, and yet we all fall to the temptation of yelling and name-calling, and using all those techniques of influence that have the opposite of our intended or desired effect.
It’s easy to allow outrage and emotion carry us off into treating other people as inhuman enemies to be crushed rather than human beings to be persuaded.
But if Daryl’s techniques can work to convince die-hard white supremacists that a black man — and perhaps eventually all black people — are worthy of respect, imagine how effective they can be when disagreements crop up with your friends, neighbors, and co-workers who don’t actually hate you or the things you stand for.
Who knows, if you have more genuine conversations with people outside your bubble, you might even find yourself changing a little bit for the better as well.
“Accidental Courtesy” teaches us that the way to deal with wrong or evil ideas isn’t shouting them down or starting a fight; it’s having the courage to do what Daryl did and making a friend out of an enemy.
Sean Malone
Sean Malone is the Director of Media at FEE. His films have been featured in the mainstream media and throughout the free-market educational community.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
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Here's why you should hug a Klansman
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“How can people hate me, when they don’t even know me?”
This is the question that drives the subject of a fantastic new documentary on Netflix called “Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race, and America,” directed by Matt Ornstein.
For the past 30 years, soul musician Daryl Davis has been traveling the country in search of an answer in the most dangerous way possible for a black man in America: by directly engaging with members the Ku Klux Klan.
He’s invited KKK members into his home, he’s had countless conversations, and as unlikely as it seems, now considers a number of them to be his friends.
Daryl might say that he’s not really even doing anything special besides treating his enemies with respect and kindness in the hopes of actually dissuading them from their hateful views.
Yet, that’s something almost no one else has the courage to do, even when the risks are considerably lower.
Disagreements are stressful and difficult, and the more horrifying someone else’s viewpoint is, the easier it is to dismiss the people who hold those beliefs as inhuman garbage who simply can’t be reasoned with. Social media has also made dehumanizing people considerably easier, as we all get to interact with people from around the world without ever seeing their faces or considering their feelings.
As a result, we live in an increasingly polarized time when a lot of people are saying that the only answer to hate and awful ideas is to meet them with even more hate, more anger, outrage, and even violence.
And it’s not just a problem when dealing with the worst ideas in human history like racial supremacy and fascism. Some people now take this approach for even trivial and academic disagreements.
Don’t like a speaker coming to campus? Silence them and prevent them from getting into the auditorium.
Don’t like what a Facebook friend has to say? Block them.
And of course, if you think someone you meet is a white supremacist or a neo-Nazi, the only thing left to do is punch them in the face.
Punching Doesn’t Work
But consider that most of human history is filled with people allowing their disagreements to turn into bloody, horrific warfare; it’s only our commitment to dealing with our adversaries peacefully through speech and conversation that has allowed us to become more civilized. So escalating conflicts into violence should be seen as the worst kind of social failure.
And besides, punching people who disagree with you doesn’t actually change their minds or anyone else’s, so we’re still left with the same deceptively difficult question before and after:
When people believe in wrongheaded or terrible things, how do we actually persuade them to stop believing the bad ideas, and get them to start believing in good ones instead?
Judging by social media, most people seem to believe that it’s possible to yell at people or insult and ridicule them until they change their minds. Unfortunately, as cathartic as it feels to let out your anger against awful people, this just isn’t an effective strategy to reduce the amount of people who hold awful ideas.
In fact, if you do this, your opponents (and even more people who are somewhat sympathetic to their views, or just see themselves as part of the same social group) might actually walk away even more strongly committed to their bad ideas than they were before.
The evidence from psychology is pretty clear on this.
We know from studies conducted by neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux that people’s amygdalas — the part of the brain that processes raw emotions — can actually bypass their rational minds and create a fight-or-flight response when they feel threatened or attacked. Psychologist Daniel Goleman called this an “Amygdala Hijack,” and it doesn’t just apply to physical threats.
People’s entire personal identity is often wrapped up in their political or philosophical beliefs, and a strong verbal attack against those beliefs actually creates a response in the brain of the target similar to a menacing lunge.
Even presenting facts or arguments that directly conflict with people’s core beliefs or identities can actually cause people to cling to those beliefs more tightly after they’ve been presented with contrary evidence. Political scientists like Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have been studying this phenomenon for over 10 years and call it the “Backfire Effect“.
And when the people whose minds we desperately need to change are racists and fascists (or socialists and communists, for that matter), a strategy that actually backfires and pushes more people towards those beliefs is the last thing we need.
Principles of Persuasion
The good news is that in addition to knowing what doesn’t work, we also know a lot about how to talk to people in ways that are actually persuasive — and the existing research strongly supports Daryl Davis’ approach.
In the psychologist Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, he describes what he calls the “Principles of Persuasion.”
One of these principles is called “reciprocity”, and it’s based on the idea that people feel obliged to treat you the way you treat them. So, if you treat them with kindness and humility, most people will offer you the same courtesy. On the other hand, if you treat them with contempt, well…..
Another principle Cialdini describes is the idea of “liking”.
It’s almost too obvious, but it turns out that if someone likes you personally and believes that you like them, it’s easier to convince them that your way of thinking is worth considering. One easy step towards being liked is to listen to others and find common ground through shared interests. This can be a bridge — or a shortcut — to getting other people to see you as a friend or part of their tribe.
You might think somebody like Daryl Davis would have nothing in common with a KKK member, but according to Daryl, if you “spend 5 minutes talking to someone and you’ll find something in common,” and if you “spend 10 minutes, and you’ll find something else in common.”
In the film, he connects with several people about music, and you can see these connections paying off — breaking down barriers and providing many Klan members with a rare (and in some cases only) opportunity to interact with a black man as a human being worth respecting instead of an enemy.
Even better, over time, forming these relationships has had an interesting side-effect.
In the last couple decades alone, over 200 of America’s most ardent white supremacists have left the Ku Klux Klan and hung up their robes and hoods for good.
Many of those robes now hang in Daryl’s closet.
And in a lot of cases, these individual conversions have much bigger consequences and end multi-generational cycles of bigotry. When a mother or a father leaves the darkness of the Klan, they’re also bringing their kids into the light with them. A few of these cases are profiled in “Accidental Courtesy”, and they’re indescribably moving.
Daryl Davis can be a model for how to change people’s minds and with everything that’s going on in the world today, we need successful models now more than ever.
Making Friends From Enemies
There’s another point to all of this that I think often goes unsaid.
Unlike Daryl, most of us aren’t actually interacting with KKK members or trying to change people’s minds away from truly evil ideologies, and yet we all fall to the temptation of yelling and name-calling, and using all those techniques of influence that have the opposite of our intended or desired effect.
It’s easy to allow outrage and emotion carry us off into treating other people as inhuman enemies to be crushed rather than human beings to be persuaded.
But if Daryl’s techniques can work to convince die-hard white supremacists that a black man — and perhaps eventually all black people — are worthy of respect, imagine how effective they can be when disagreements crop up with your friends, neighbors, and co-workers who don’t actually hate you or the things you stand for.
Who knows, if you have more genuine conversations with people outside your bubble, you might even find yourself changing a little bit for the better as well.
“Accidental Courtesy” teaches us that the way to deal with wrong or evil ideas isn’t shouting them down or starting a fight; it’s having the courage to do what Daryl did and making a friend out of an enemy.
Sean Malone
Sean Malone is the Director of Media at FEE. His films have been featured in the mainstream media and throughout the free-market educational community.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
0 notes
Text
BREAKING: Now We Know Where Trump Got His “George Washington Defense” – It’s Horrifying
Donald Trump’s “condemnation” of neo-Nazis is nothing more than a ruse, as he just borrowed a MAJOR neo-Nazi talking point when it comes to defending Confederate statues. On Tuesday, Trump outrageously suggested that the Resistance will be coming after George Washington statues next, a favorite line of contemporary American white nationalists.
The difference between George Washington and the Confederate leaders of the Civil War is that, while both owned slaves, Washington freed his slaves in his final will and was an incredible president while the Confederates led a bloody and inhumane rebellion against the United States in the NAME of slavery. But, of course, this is a level of nuance that Trump’s pea brain can’t understand.
So that’s why his comments on Tuesday were so illogical and irresponsible and fascist. He defended the white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville AND the leaders of the Confederacy, and he sickly equated these leaders as being just as worthy of praise as George Washington.
“Are we going to take down statues to George Washington?” Trump asked. “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”
“So this week it’s Robert E. Lee, I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down, I wonder: is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
“You’re changing history, you’re changing culture,” Trump continued. “If you look, they were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”
WTF. This is LITERALLY almost verbatim the same argument that was made in defense of Confederate statues on Tuesday morning by the disgusting flagship neo-Nazi website “The Daily Stormer.”
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“I guarantee you, they are going to go to Washington, and they are going to demand that the Washington Monument be torn down,” Andrew Anglin, the owner of “The Daily Stormer,” wrote on the site on Tuesday morning. “They might even try to pull it down. Because George Washington owned slaves. More importantly, he was a white man who built something.”
Well, folks, it looks like Trump is getting his news from “The Daily Stormer” these days. This is HORRIFYING and it speaks to the toxic white nationalist influence of Steve Bannon in Trump’s White House.
Impeachment is becoming increasingly dire, if that’s even possible at this point. Trump is leading America down an abominable path that leads only to more pain and societal chaos.
POLL: Did Trump borrow talking points from other news outlets?
What do you think? We want to hear from all our readers on this one. Please participate in our poll below!
These are among the darkest days the American people will ever face. And it’s in the Resistance’s hands to do something about it before it’s too late for us all.
We MUST keep protesting in the name of justice. There’ll be no resting until Trump is ousted for good.
Join us in our crusade to hold Trump to account. Please share this story far and wide on Facebook!
The post BREAKING: Now We Know Where Trump Got His “George Washington Defense” – It’s Horrifying appeared first on Learn Progress.
from BREAKING: Now We Know Where Trump Got His “George Washington Defense” – It’s Horrifying
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