Fascism

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 07, 2021 2:29 pm

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Why neoliberalism needs neofascists
Posted Sep 06, 2021 by Prabhat Patnaik

Originally published: Janata Weekly (August 29, 2021 ) |

It has been four decades since neoliberal globalization began to reshape the world order. During this time, its agenda has decimated labor rights, imposed rigid limits on fiscal deficits, given massive tax breaks and bailouts to big capital, sacrificed local production for multinational supply chains, and privatized public sector assets at throwaway prices.

The result today is a perverse regime defined by the free movement of capital, which moves relatively effortlessly across international borders, even as free movement of the people is ruthlessly controlled by a sharp increase in income inequality and a steady winnowing of democracy. No matter who comes to power, no matter what promises are made before elections, the same economic policies are followed. Since capital, especially finance, can leave a country en masse at extremely short notice—precipitating an acute financial crisis if its “confidence” in a country is undermined—governments are loath to upset the status quo; they pursue policies favorable to finance capital and indeed demanded by it. The sovereignty of the people, in short, is replaced by the sovereignty of global finance and the domestic corporations integrated with it.

This abridgment of democracy is usually justified by political and economic elites on the grounds that neoliberal economic policies usher in higher GDP growth—considered the summum bonum after which all policy should aim. And indeed, in many countries, especially in Asia, the neoliberal era has ushered in noticeably more rapid growth than under the earlier period of dirigisme. Such growth scarcely benefits the bulk of the people, of course: in fact, neoliberal policies are even more highly associated with the growth of income inequality than with the growth of GDP. (Even International Monetary Fund economists Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri concede this point in their 2016 article “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”) But neoliberals have sold a powerful response to this objection: a rise in income inequality should be considered an acceptable price to pay for more rapid growth, for it still might mean an absolute improvement in the conditions of the worst off. The fundamental ideological conceit of neoliberalism has been that growth will lift all boats, even if some boats rise much more than others.

There is perhaps no better counterexample to this claim than India, where neoliberal policies were introduced in 1991—spurring both a dramatic rise in inequality and, at the same time, an increase in certain measures of absolute poverty and a decimation of peasant agriculture. In 1982, after more than six decades of strong income taxation, the top 1 percent of earners accounted for just 6 percent of national income, according to Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty. By 2014 that figure had ballooned to 22 percent, the highest it had ever been in a century. Meanwhile, as economist Utsa Patnaik has shown in a recent report to the Indian Council of Social Science Research, poverty also went up. In rural India, where the norm for defining poverty has been lack of access to 2200 calories per person per day, the proportion of the poor in total population increased from 58 percent in 1993–94 to 68 percent in 2011–12 (the latest year for which large sample survey data are available). The same pattern held true in urban regions, where the norm has been 2100 calories per person per day: the proportion of the poor increased from 57 percent to 65 percent over the same time period.

Despite these and other cracks in the rising-tide argument that had become all too apparent by the turn of the century, the narrative that neoliberalism would benefit everyone retained a certain currency until the early 2000s, for at least two reasons. First, neoliberal globalization was said to have contributed to the astonishing reduction of poverty in China—the economist Pranab Bardhan has forcefully questioned this conventional story in these pages—and a significant segment of the global middle class did do well: its opportunities expanded thanks to the outsourcing of a range of activities from advanced countries and to a rise in the share of economic surplus, caused by languishing wages but increased productivity of the working class. Second, even those hurt by the neoliberal regime often nurtured the hope that persistent high growth would sooner or later “trickle down” to them—a hope fed incessantly by a media establishment dominated by the middle and upper classes.

This hope more decisively receded, however, as the high-growth phase of neoliberal capitalism ended in 2008 with the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, giving way to protracted crisis and stagnation in the world economy. As the old prop of trickle-down economics lost its credibility, a new prop was needed to sustain the neoliberal regime politically. The solution came in the form of an alliance between globally integrated corporate capital and local neofascist elements.

This dynamic has played out in countries around the world, from the rise of Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald Trump in the United States. To some observers, aspects of the Trump administration—his protectionist proposals, his support of Brexit—reflect a departure of neofascism from neoliberalism. But this analysis overstates the significance of Trump’s breaks from neoliberal orthodoxy at the same time that it neglects the distinctive link between neofascism and neoliberalism in the developing world. For evidence of the connection between neofascism and neoliberalism, we need look no further than the fact that no neofascist political formation has actually imposed controls over cross-border financial flows. Ultimately, it is only by implementing such controls—along with strong domestic welfare policies—that we can escape this alliance.



To assess the prospects for such a shift, it is essential to appreciate the distinctive features of the new fascism. Neofascist groups exist in all modern societies, but typically only as fringe elements. They take center stage in periods of crisis only with the backing of corporate capital, which provides access to massive financial resources and control over the corporate-owned media and other means of opinion-making.

A characteristic strategy of neofascism, like its classical predecessors, is to demonize the “other,” whether Muslims in India or racial and sexual minorities in the United States and Brazil. How exactly this occurs varies from country to country, of course. Such vilification can take multiple forms: it might make no mention of economic crisis at all, concentrating instead on the majority community’s need to get back its “self-respect” that has been allegedly damaged by the minority in the past. Or it might hold the minority responsible for economic woes, quite apart from its alleged role in damaging the majority community’s self-respect. Non-fascist governments are accused of “pandering” to this minority by playing the politics of “appeasement.”

In addition to its attacks on the “other,” neofascism also echoes classical fascism in attacking any and all its critics. It calls them “anti-national” by equating criticism of the government with treachery to the nation. It alleges all kinds of malfeasance in opposition parties (consider the prosecution of Lula in Brazil). It creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear in society—by putting people in jail without trial; by browbeating or weaponizing the judiciary; by abrogating constitutional rights of the people; by terrorizing opposition politicians to defect to the neofascist party in places where they lose elections; by unleashing gangs of thugs on the streets and on social media to attack opponents; by making fake charges against dissenters; by subverting the independence of state institutions; and so on. In all this neofascism is helped by a pliant and docile media. And through it all, it uses its ascendancy to help the corporate sector attack the rights of workers won through decades of struggle.

While all these elements draw on classical fascism, neofascism also departs from its historical predecessors in significant ways. Classical fascism emerged before capital had been globalized, in the sense that it more clearly bore the stamp of its national origin: it was engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry with capital from other advanced countries, a rivalry in which it enlisted the support of its own state. The fascist goal was to re-partition a world already partitioned into economic territories. The neofascism of today, by contrast, occupies a regime of globalized finance where inter-imperialist rivalry is muted by the phenomenon of the free flow of capital. Since globalized capital is intent on keeping the entire world open for its free movement, it discourages inter-imperialist rivalry and the fragmentation of the world into rival economic zones.

India provides a vivid illustration of the relation between neofascism and neoliberalism. For one thing, the neofascist Hindu supremacists that came to power in 2014 never had anything to do with India’s anti-colonial struggle (indeed, one of them even assassinated Mahatma Gandhi). Instead they are arch neoliberals, even more so than earlier neoliberal governments; their entire policy stance, even during the pandemic, is centred around keeping the fiscal deficit in check for fear of offending globalized finance, because of which India has been one of the countries offering the most niggardly government assistance to the people affected by the lockdown. India’s government today is also more eager than ever before to privatize public sector enterprises and to provide assistance to corporations, especially a few favored ones. And it has been more keen than any previous government to ensure corporate encroachment on peasant agriculture and petty production.

Indeed, since the earliest days of neoliberalism in India there has been a tragic spike in peasant suicides—more than 300,000 in the two and half decades following 1991. This is because of growing peasant indebtedness. Debt has exploded in the face of higher costs for privatized essential services and a steep drop in profits for peasant agriculture following the withdrawal of government price support in cash crops and a reduction of such support in food grains. The squeeze on peasant agriculture, a sector that employs almost half the total workforce, has been so drastic that the number of “cultivators” has shrunk by 15 million between two censuses, 1991 and 2011. Some became laborers and others migrated to cities in search of non-existent jobs, swelling an army of unemployed or underemployed workers that weakened the bargaining position of the relatively few unionized workers. The GDP growth rate has increased, but there has been a reduction—a halving in fact—in the rate of growth of employment, which has brought it even below the natural rate of growth of the workforce.

The massive peasant agitation currently rocking the country is aimed to roll back three farm laws enacted last year by Modi’s government that only further extend this neoliberal regime. The U.S. administration and the International Monetary Fund, while critical of the Indian government’s handling of the agitation, support the thrust of the three laws. Modi’s neofascism is thus quite unambiguous in its defence and promotion of the neoliberal agenda.



How stable is this global alliance between neoliberalism and neofascism? How long can we expect the prop of neofascist othering to shore up a crisis-afflicted neoliberalism? On the one hand, since global finance will not tolerate wars among major or even minor capitalist powers, one might think neofascism is here to stay. But on the other hand, neofascist regimes are themselves subject to the constraints imposed by the hegemony of globalized finance, and in one respect this limitation is fatally constraining: it vitiates neofascism’s ability to revive employment.

Classical fascism revived employment through government armaments expenditure financed significantly by borrowing—that is, by running a large fiscal deficit. It was through such efforts that Japan had been the first country to come out of the Great Depression in 1931 and Germany had been the first European country to generate a business upswing in 1933 under the Nazi government. As a result, there had even been a brief period, between the end of mass unemployment and the onset of the horrors of war, when the fascist governments had enjoyed sizeable mass support.

Contemporary neofascism, by contrast, is incapable of ending mass unemployment. It is not just that such a goal requires larger government expenditures, already an object of scorn among neoliberals; those expenditures must be financed by taxing capitalists or by a fiscal deficit—both ruled out under neoliberalism. According to neoliberal doctrine, taxing the capitalists, whether through a profits tax or a wealth tax, is supposed to adversely affect their “animal spirits,” as Keynes would put it—that is, the sum-total of attitudes that promote larger investment by the capitalists. A larger fiscal deficit, on the other hand, is frowned upon by finance, as it undermines the social legitimacy of the capitalists (especially of the financial interests who constitute what Keynes called “functionless investors”).

This situation poses a problem for neofascism’s grip on power. Its inability to alleviate the crisis of neoliberalism may lead to its defeat in elections (assuming it does not rig them or bypass them entirely): arguably this is what happened in the United States with Trump’s loss to Joe Biden. But even if neofascism loses in the short term, it will remain a strong contender for returning to power so long as successor governments revert to neoliberal business as usual, as has been the pattern for some time. In order to break this cycle, it is essential that a successor government should not simply resume the old neoliberal policies that produce growing inequality, growing poverty, and growing unemployment. There has to be a decisive shift toward a robust welfare state with revived public social services, public goods, and high employment—precisely the policies that the hegemony of global finance has thwarted.

Quantitatively, such a shift is perfectly feasible. In India, it has been estimated that to institute five universal and justiciable economic rights in the country—the right to food, the right to employment (or full wages if employment is not provided), the right to free health care through a National Health Service, the right to free, publicly funded education (at least up to the school-leaving stage), and the right to a living old-age pension and adequate disability benefit—would require an additional 10 percent of the GDP over what is already being spent under these rubrics. In practice, this would require raising additional resources amounting to 7 percent of the GDP, since the rise in GDP on account of these expenditures will automatically garner extra revenue anyway. (Jayati Ghosh and I discuss these calculations in our contribution to the recent volume We the People: Establishing Rights and Deepening Democracy edited by Nikhil Dey, Aruna Roy, and Rakshita Swamy.)

This 7 percent can be raised through just two taxes, levied only on the top 1 percent of the country’s population: a wealth tax of 2 percent, and an inheritance tax levied on the same group to the extent of just one-third of what is passed down each year. A wealth tax has also gained ground in public debates in the United States following proposals by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 election season; a few American billionaires even endorsed Warren’s proposal. There is, in short, a general understanding developing across the world that escaping the current conjuncture requires a move toward a strengthening of welfare state measures that have been rolled back during the ascendancy of neoliberalism.

Politically, this shift will be challenging, of course. Attempts to tax the rich will alienate investors and stoke fears of capital flight or insufficient financial inflows to cover the widening trade deficit that would ensue. Sooner or later, the answer must involve control over financial outflows. Such measures do not necessarily spell disaster for the developing world, however. Large, diversified economies can manage the consequences: the short-run difficulties of managing trade deficits—because of a drying up of financial inflows in the wake of such controls—can be overcome, over time, through a diversification of production with the aim of greater self-sufficiency. Small economies can manage by coming together to form local trade blocs. The real cause for concern will be if advanced countries, the “guardians” of globalization, impose trade sanctions and intervene in other ways against countries trying to escape neofascism by adopting such pro-people economic policies.

The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. To escape this state of affairs, world public opinion has to be mobilized decisively against neoliberalism, and the support of global democratic movements has to be garnered. Only then will this breeding ground for neofascism at last be undone.

https://mronline.org/2021/09/06/why-neo ... ofascists/

These suggestions for alleviating the conditions conducive to fascism are treacle. As are the Sanders and Warren suggestions, weak reformism, without expropriation of the means of production you ain't changing anything, that money will be replaced by more intense exploitation.

And by the way, I'm about sick of this exclusive ragging on billionaires. We got about 700 of them in this country, and about a million millionaires. And even an 'asset millionaire' is living damn good by the lights of workers. One gets the feeling that liberals think that if they make these 700 the scapegoats for all the evils of capitalism that all them millionaires are off the hook. A PR gimmick that fundamentally changes nothing.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Tue May 10, 2022 2:51 pm

chlamor wrote:
Wed Jan 01, 2020 6:31 pm
Fascism

Fascism is a real ideology, and an all too real political movement. It was born fairly recently, in the right-wing literature of now faded pre-Fascist Portuguese, Italian and Spanish writers toward the end of the 19th century. Their common threads were both a lament for the failed Imperial ambitions of their respective states - losers in the competition for Empire waged against far stronger nations - and a program to focus the power of the "nation" to renew that competition on a more even footing.

Sitting behind this theory is the ever present fear that failure to renew that competition will inevitably result in the decomposition of the current society, internally through class struggle, and externally through an ever less favorable balance of forces which will "enslave" the nation. Thus the common form of the initial political program of Fascism is to sound the alarm and arouse the nation - Arise Spain! ("Arriba Espagna!"), etc.

Often, this is practically reinforced by the identification of internal enemies whose isolation presents a convenient rallying cry (Jews, Reds, Moskals). Under-pinning the whole is the Fascist Theory of the State, borrowed from the bourgeois theories of the state but significantly elaborated. According to this theory, the State exists above class society as does a "national interest". The realization of that interest requires the mobilization of the entire society and its corollary, the suppression of the "petty squabbles" between classes, the elimination of the decrepit institutions which undermine the unity of the Nation (such as political parties, law, elections, etc.) and whatever decadent forms may weigh on that unity (in its populist form, this often includes a criticism of the bourgeoisie but from a national standpoint).

Whatever its local variations, the Fascist program always ends in the militarization of society. This however is a two edged sword. While mobilization focuses national resources, it also freezes them and starts a stop watch on the resolution of the national issues which brought Fascism to power. Almost always, this means war - the resolution of the class contradictions of the Nation at the expense of the classes of surrounding Nations.

In the 1930s, the Comintern described the whole as, "Fascism, Militarism and War". The slogan sounds vague but instead it is a very precise definition of the Nazi Trinity which is inevitably woven together. The Comintern also added one other criteria required for Fascist regimes.*

The appeal of the Fascists for certain segments of the society - the petite bourgeoisie, endangered shop keepers, expropriated small holders, petty officials, the lumpen proletariat, demobilized soldiers etc. is obvious, even if it requires an abnormal degree of desperation. Stronger or weaker concentrations of these form the foot soldiers of Fascism in every country.

But, none of these strata "owns" the State. To take state power requires the support and active participation of a significant part of the most reactionary section of finance capital. Without this, the Fascist State is impossible (and this also renders moot any populist slogans which the Fascists may entertain).

The question then is, why would the capitalists entertain the inefficiency, the riskiness, the ticking time bomb, and the reduction of personal prerogatives accompanying their association with the Fascists? The fact is that in normal conditions, the capitalists wouldn't. They need no partners to run the State. What is implied here is an abnormal desperation among the capitalists who have already exhausted all other means to resolve their competitive battles in the ordinary way.

Finally, there is an international aspect to all this. Historically, since finance capital is international, the creation of Fascist regimes as clients of external capitalists has always been a feature of Fascism. Thus, Franco's Spain became a client of NATO after WW2, Metaxas' Greece was a British client and several, mostly Latin American Fascist regimes were clients of the US.

Thus we get to my favorite quote of the Indian Congress Party that the political policy of the Imperialists was "Democracy at home; Fascism abroad". It's a great quote, but it isn't quite true. The decaying element of Fascism is not eliminated by the existence of foreign patrons, the transformation of local capitalists into compradors actually undermines the Fascist state and creates a potential opposition and, in the end, a new contradiction is introduced between the Ultra-nationalist program and the reality of the client state. Thus, even here, a certain degree of desperation and a plan for quick resolution are preconditions.

It is a mistake to see liberalism and Fascism as alternate "policies" for the bourgeoisie (and this is also central to the "radical's" narrative).

Militarism is a policy. War is a policy. Fascism ain't a policy. It is an alliance between the most reactionary portion of Capital and the rabid storm troopers of the Right. As such it is a means to an end - a political coalition - which only exists after all other means are exhausted. It requires the suspension of the political institutions of the bourgeois state with no obvious path by which they are recreated. The national bourgeoisie bets the whole bundle on lucky-seven and rolls...

Obviously, the agreement of a significant portion of the bourgeoisie is required in the end.


~ by Anaxarchos
**************************

Nazi Evil Behind Germany's Richest Companies
May 10, 3:02 p.m.

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Nazi Evil Behind Germany's Richest Companies

During the First World War, the German textile magnate Günter Quandt made millions by supplying military uniforms and equipment to the army of the German Empire. Shortly after that war, when the electrification boom began in the world, he seized control of one of the world's largest battery manufacturers. And after some time, he acquired the enterprises of the company, which was one of the main manufacturers of weapons and ammunition in Germany. But that was only the beginning. Quandt gained enormous wealth and power through his deals with the Nazis. (Currently, the Quandtov dynasty controls the BMW auto concern - Approx. InoSMI). Quandt's story, told in David de Jong's Nazi Billionaires: A Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties, evokes horror and fear.

It is well known that many dynastic German companies owe their position to Nazi sympathies and even willful participation in Nazi evil. De Jong investigated the story of the five biggest industrialists who financed Adolf Hitler's rise to power, were involved in horrendous crimes and received billions from their bloody investments. These are the aforementioned Quandt, the automaker Ferdinand Porsche, Richard Kaselowski from the OetkerGroup group of companies (the largest German corporation that supplied food to the active German army during World War II - Approx. InoSMI), financier August von Fink, and industrialist Frederick Flick. Yong's book details the crimes of these German magnates in favor of Nazism and the post-war operations to cover them up. It also tells

The first episodes of Quandt's collaboration with Nazism date back to the early 1920s. While Quandt was visiting the US at the time with his wife Magda, they were approached by one Kurt Lüdke, an ardent German nationalist raising funds for the fledgling, cash-strapped National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). Rejected by the anti-Semite Henry Ford, he hoped to convert Quandt to the side of the National Socialists. Quandt was evasive, but Magda leaned in favor of the Nazis. By the time the couple divorced in 1929 with a generous financial settlement for her, she was already in active contact with the German National Socialists. Magda literally swallowed Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" and joined the NSDAP, where she worked for her future husband, Joseph Goebbels, later head of the propaganda department of the Nazi Party. Quandt, who remained on friendly terms with Magda and Goebbels, fell under their influence. Like many in Germany after the First World War, he began to believe that only Jews and communists were responsible for all the country's ills.

The Second World War and the atrocities committed by Hitler would hardly have taken place without the millions that Quandt and other industrialists allocated to equip Hitler's stormtroopers, which ensured his victory in the elections in 1933. In turn, these plutocratic industrialists made huge profits when he started the war in Europe. Indeed, in the Nazi army there was an insatiable demand for uniforms, ammunition, fighters and batteries for torpedoes and missiles. The people who financed Hitler's rise to power were now selling him military equipment and weapons.

Quandt secured a seat on the board of directors of Daimler-Benz in 1933 and soon moved into arms production in addition to textiles. He became a key supplier to the German Air Force - the Luftwaffe. The Porsche auto engineer, who was part of the SS, immediately after the election of Hitler telegraphed the Fuhrer that he and his people were placing "their will and abilities at the disposal of the German people." His firms produced modern tanks, V-1 rockets and other weapons systems. In 1934, Hitler gave him a contract to develop the people's car, the Volkswagen. August von Fink, who acquired a financial empire that included the Merck Finck bank and the insurance companies Allianz and Munich Re, believed that "God sent the Fuhrer to save the German people." Kaselowski, married the widowed daughter-in-law of the founder of the Oetker Group and became the chief executive of the company, had a portrait of Hitler in his office. He gave signed copies of Mein Kampf to new employees. The company was the main supplier of food for the front. (His stepson, Rudolf August Eetker, who ran the company and made it a household name after Kaselovsky's death in an air raid in 1944, was a former SS officer and an ardent Nazi.) Frederick Flinck profited from the supply of the best grades of steel for the needs of the war industry, acquired several mines and heavy industries and was the leading manufacturer of machine guns in the Reich. The company was the main supplier of food for the front. (His stepson, Rudolf August Eetker, who ran the company and made it a household name after Kaselovsky's death in an air raid in 1944, was a former SS officer and an ardent Nazi.) Frederick Flinck profited from the supply of the best grades of steel for the needs of the war industry, acquired several mines and heavy industries and was the leading manufacturer of machine guns in the Reich. The company was the main supplier of food for the front. (His stepson, Rudolf August Eetker, who ran the company and made it a household name after Kaselovsky's death in an air raid in 1944, was a former SS officer and an ardent Nazi.) Frederick Flinck profited from the supply of the best grades of steel for the needs of the war industry, acquired several mines and heavy industries and was the leading manufacturer of machine guns in the Reich.

All five became rich during the "Aryanization" program, as the illegal takeover of Jewish-owned businesses from 1933 until the end of the war was called. Quandt expanded his conglomerate, appropriating many valuable Jewish businesses. Porsche bought shares in its Jewish co-founder and chief engineer, who was accused of "racial molestation" for dating a non-Jewish woman. Von Fink advocated "a gradual racial cleansing of the finance trade (banking), which is so heavily influenced by the Jewish element". He took over the management of the Berlin Dreyfus bank and some of the Rothschild business empires in Austria. Finck regularly robbed Jewish bankers, undervaluing their assets, but after the war he dared to claim that he had acted in good faith to protect Jews from the Nazis.

Flick's machine gun factory was one of the many businesses he took from the Jews. Rudolf August Eetker acquired a significant art collection. In 2013, as part of a public propaganda campaign, the Oetker Group published an apparently tailor-made, twisted story of its relationship with the Nazis. In 2017, the company even announced that it was hiring experts to examine the Oetker collection, ostensibly to return stolen art to its rightful owners.

All these German magnates used the slave labor of Jews and other prisoners. IG Farben, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, BMW, Krupp and other companies controlled by Quandt and Flick were the largest users of forced labor, which became available to German business at any request to the Reich authorities. The OetkerGroup made extensive use of slave labor in its factories. Porsche used thousands of French civilians and other prisoners in its Volkswagen production complex. From June 1941, as the war progressed, Germany lost 60,000 soldiers every month. They had to be filled. Due to the resulting labor shortage, already in early 1942, Nazi Germany launched the world's largest forced labor program. About 20 million people from 26 countries, the vast majority from Poland and the Soviet Union were forced to work in German factories and concentration camps. The American slave trade, which sold 12 million African slaves to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries, pales in comparison to such a monstrous undertaking.

At least 2.5 million prisoners and prisoners died from appalling working and living conditions. They were transferred from concentration camps to camps built right next to the factories, where they were beaten, starved and forced to work in extreme weather conditions. Working with dangerous and harmful materials without any protection, they were poisoned by lead and received severe burns. If the limb of such an unfortunate person fell into the mechanism, they pulled out the body, leaving it in the car. Pregnant women were forced to abandon their children at birth and return to work immediately after giving birth. But investigators of Nazi war crimes never focused their attention on this industrial slavery.

Powerful industrialists were accused of profiting from Nazi connections, but not of using slave labor, and most of them spent no more than a few years in prison. Josiah Dubois, lead lawyer in the IB Farben case at the Nuremberg Trials, even called their sentences "as lenient as chicken thieves usually get." The longest sentence handed down in IG Farben's trial, for example, was eight years in prison ( which he served in full) to Otto Ambros, head of the chemical weapons committee at the War Office and head of production at the Buna-Monowitz and Auschwitz concentration camps Flick received seven years in 1947, but was amnestied in 1950. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor The CIA has been following Quandt since 1941 and found that he shares "

Since the start of the Cold War in 1947, President Harry Truman's priorities have shifted from punishing Germany to securing her economic recovery. American occupation gave way to German self-rule. War crime suspects and Nazi sympathizers were handed over to German courts. The punishments were minor because the Germans did not want to judge their compatriots for what they themselves were essentially doing. The truth was sacrificed. While the Nazi industrialists were clearing their archives, the US organized a series of pardons in 1950-1951, including for Flick. There was a Korean war, so America needed Germany and its industry.

The five German dynasties mentioned in the book openly admitted: yes, they were enthusiastic Nazis, but ... they were forced to join the party. Kaselowski and Flick, for example, as members of Himmler's Circle of Friends, toured Dachau and contributed to its racist Lebensborn program by weaning "racially fit children" from their parents. Supervised personally by Himmler - Note by Inosmi). However, they all escaped heavy punishment. And their heirs did little to acknowledge the crimes behind their family clans' wealth.
De Jong counters this silence with his profound research.

(c) Janet Levy

https://inosmi.ru/20220510/natsizm-254094908.html - zinc
https://www.americantinker.com/articles ... anies.html - original in English

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7607255.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Tue May 17, 2022 5:45 pm

idea feeding
May 17, 18:04

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Chinese comrades know a lot about creative demotivators.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7621040.html

Google Translator

(pass it on...)
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Thu May 19, 2022 1:02 pm

"Nazism for export"
May 19, 2:10 p.m.

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"Nazism for export"

In recent months, the United States has been increasingly pumping various types of weapons into Ukraine in order to prolong the acute phase of the conflict for as long as possible. As they say, "until the last Ukrainian." But this is far from the only and, if viewed from a strategic position, not the most important item of American exports. Washington has been cultivating Nazi movements in Ukraine for many years and regularly supplies home-grown National Socialists to create a "new Reich" in the center of Europe.

It may be hard to believe right away, but in the country of BLM and aggressive tolerance, the Nazis feel quite comfortable. For example, organizations such as The American Front and The National Socialist Movement (NSM), also known as the American Nazi Party, have been operating in the United States for decades.

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Website of the US National Socialist Movement

The American Nazis do not hide their views and activities, they actively share photos, videos and "educational" literature, and also collect donations from like-minded people.

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Photos from NSM Meetings in Phoenix, Arizona and Longview, Texas in 2021

At first glance, the NSM can be called an insignificantly marginal group, which few people pay attention to. It does not have accounts on major American social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, which is not typical for an organization seeking to spread its ideology to the “masses”. However, the party has its own channel in Telergam, which involuntarily suggests the interest of American nationalists in the "Slavic" audience. And this is where the fun begins. The channel itself is not of particular interest, but it has a closed chat in which radicals from all over the world, including Ukraine, actively correspond.

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Fragment of the list of NSM chat participants in Telegram

You can see that there are a lot of citizens of Ukraine in the chat lists. In addition, many participants, including Americans, openly report their participation in hostilities on the side of Ukrainian nationalists. I want to emphasize that it was the nationalists, not the Armed Forces of Ukraine! In particular, we are talking about "Azov" and "Right Sector". The chat even supports the regiment's recruiting campaign.

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NSM Chat Post on Azov Volunteer Recruitment

In general, the attitude of this Nazi international to the conflict in Ukraine reflects quite eloquently the survey conducted by channel administrator Derek Von Doom.

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Poll on the NSM channel: "Whom do you support in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict?"

It is quite obvious that among the radicals, the Kyiv authorities do not enjoy either respect or support. With regard to V. Zelensky, there are allegations of an anti-Semitic nature. On the contrary, the Nazis see in Ukraine the same "new Reich", the core of which should be "Azov". "Fuhrer", apparently, should be A. Biletsky. This idea is expressed by some of the most active participants in the chat.

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Fragment of the Boneface message in the NSM chat

It was not by chance that I brought this message. Its author is someone "Bone face". Perhaps this is one of the key figures of the "US Nazi landing" in Ukraine. And not only at the moment. Under the name "Bone face" is a US citizen, a hereditary neo-fascist Kent McLellan, and he is now in Mariupol as part of Azov. But first things first.

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K. McLillan (2010)

Kent Ryan McLillan was born on April 22, 1990 in St. Cloud (Florida) in the family of an American neo-fascist Ken McLillan, leader of the rock band BRUTAL ATTACK. Under the influence of his father, he joined the right-wing radical ideology while still a high school student. And in high school, he already became a member of the racist organization The American Front (The American Front).

He was first arrested at the age of 18 in September 2008 for writing racist slogans on a church and restaurant in Crescent City. In 2010, he served time for vandalism and beating of immigrants. In May 2012, the FBI already detained McLillan and his accomplices from the American Front for preparing a terrorist act against national minorities in Florida.

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K.McClillan (2010)

From that moment on, Kent's life began to seriously change and he began to gradually turn into that same "Boneface". First, like most like-minded people, he began to cover his face and body with tattoos with Nazi and Aryan symbols. And secondly, the “young and promising young man”, apparently, was noticed by the special services and assigned him an important role in the power element of the coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014. So, one might say from the prison bench, McLellan went straight to the Maidan.

Most sources point to his joining the “Volunteer Ukrainian Corps of the Right Sector” (DUK PS) in 2014. Being a member of “Boneface”, he was directly involved in military actions and recruited volunteers in the USA and other countries. Then he joined the punitive operation in the Donbass in the ranks of Azov. However, McLillan's activity in organizing a forcible seizure of power in Kyiv began in 2013 as the leader of the mercenary group The Misanthropic Division. They organized a network of paramilitary fascist groups using dark web resources like IronMarch. By the way, it was in December 2013 that MacLillan opened an account on Twitter, which was a popular tool for coordinating revolutionaries at that time.

Returning to the United States in 2015, Boneface again went to a correctional facility in search of criminals who wanted to go to fight in the Donbass. Moreover, Kent was given as many as 4 years for the recruiting campaign, allegedly for drug trafficking. And, apparently for exemplary behavior, he was allowed to use the Internet, because in August 2016 on the same IronMarch, McLillan wrote that he continued his cooperation with the DUK PS on the recruitment of foreigners. Most likely, the tasks assigned to him to prepare a neo-Nazi group, Boneface completed by the fall of 2021.

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K.McLillan (2021)

Shortly before that, in July 2021, the FBI once again sent him to jail. But this time, apparently, for the final briefing. McLillan, who had changed almost beyond recognition, reported about this in a Telegram and said that he intended to go to Ukraine to “shoot at Novorossov”.

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A fragment of K. McLillan's correspondence in the NSM chat

According to my sources in the SBU, a group of American mercenaries arrived in Ukraine in November 2021 and returned to the United States in December to recruit additional forces. And already in January 2022, foreign neo-fascists finally joined the ranks of Azov. Apparently, they were supposed to take part in the offensive against the Donbass, which was planned for late February or early March. It didn't work out.

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K.McLillan announced his departure to Ukraine in January 2022.

So, at the moment, Kent "Boneface" McLellan is probably fighting somewhere in the vastness of Ukraine. Despite this, the neo-fascist conducts active information work on as many as five social networks (VKontakte, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube), as well as, of course, on Telegram. He really admits that his YouTube channel is run by friends from Azov.

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One of the administrators of the Boneface YouTube channel Tellingly

, none of the social networks is in a hurry to block pages with overtly nationalistic and provocative content, demonstration of prohibited paraphernalia, symbols and inciting hatred.

The main thesis that MacLillan constantly repeats in all his correspondence is that Azov is not fighting for either Zelensky, or NATO, or the EU. According to him, Azov is no longer so much a regiment as the idea of ​​a neo-Nazi “revival” of Ukraine.

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Fragment of K. McLillan's correspondence in the NSM chat

It should be said that the affairs of the mercenaries of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are not going well. In his messages, McLillan writes about the lack of water, ammunition and the betrayal of the Ukrainian command and Zelensky personally.

And recently, he received a slight injury to his face.

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Consequences of K. McLillan's injury

My contacts in Ukraine strongly recommend that every effort be made to capture Kent MacLillan. It will be extremely difficult, since his entourage, and he himself, most likely will not let him be taken alive. However, if successful, it could become an important source of information and living evidence of the export of American nationalism to Ukraine.

And I will continue to closely follow the adventures of the brave Nazi "Boneface".

(c) Vasily Prozorov

https://telegra.ph/NACIZM-NA-EHKSPORT-05-19 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7624041.html

Google Translator

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The New White Supremacist Consensus Part Two: Shootings in Buffalo Solidify the Consensus
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 18 May 2022

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Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron wore the black sun insignia used by Ukraine's neo-Nazi Azov Battalion

The latest mass shooter in Buffalo, New York was clearly a racist, and identified with Ukrainian and other neo-Nazis. But white supremacy has a stronger hold on European and U.S. society than is commonly acknowledged. The avowed racist is not the only problem.

The incidents of mindless, mass carnage in the United States have become so routine that they do not even make national headlines unless the incident has a potential attention-grabbing twist. One of those dramatic twists is when the victims of a mass-shooting are from a common social identity and the perpetrator appeals to be motivated by hatred of the targeted group. This is what makes the shooting in Buffalo stand out. The authorities could not hide the fact that it was a hate crime and the media saw a juicy story, if only for a day or two.

However, for those of us who are members of communities and peoples who are increasingly finding ourselves on the receiving end of state and private racially motivated violence, we have a life-or-death requirement to attempt to understand the complex political and socio-cultural elements that are producing this dangerous environment.. This understanding is not academic but represents a historical imperative for our communities and peoples in order for us to survive the end-days of global white supremacy.

It is important that we understand that the racist assault on the Black community in Buffalo did not occur in a socio-cultural or political vacuum. The premeditated murder of thirteen human beings, eleven of them Black, by a young white man wearing a sonnenrad or black sun, one of the symbols of white supremacy that the white supremacists wear in Ukraine, had a perverted logic perfectly consistent with the values of the U.S. settler-colonial project. And while the liberal, white supremacist settler corporate press tries to muddle-up the connection between the Buffalo shooter and Ukrainian white supremacists, we must make the connection, including the attempts to obscure the relationship by the media, and we must be clear on its political implications.

When Cristoforo Colombo, better known as Christopher Columbus, the original genocidal gangster, “discovered” a route for a sea bridge between the kingdom of Spain and what became the “Americas,” it ushered in a new historical epoch that would see levels of human degradation, violence, and depravity unlike any other era of the human experience on this planet. At the center of the cosmology of these strange people from Spain and later from other parts of what became Europe was an ideal of human difference, at first informed by religion but very soon intersected with a process of racialization that hierarchize race with so-called whites and white civilization at the top. That racial hierarchy, rationalized by some of Europe’s greatest philosophers from Locke and Immanuel Kant to Hegel, called into question or even excluded the non-European “others” as full human beings.

As Cedric Robinson argued , European racial consciousness did not emerge as some devious invention by capitalists to divide the working class. Instead, it represented a historically pre-conditioned consciousness of an incipient racialization in Europe that then as a result of the colonial encounter crystalized into a fully developed sense of race and racial hierarchy.

When Bartolome de La Casa made his famous argument that the Indigenous peoples who were being systematically destroyed by slavery were in fact human beings with souls and should not be subjected to inhumane treatment, the switch to enslaved Africans was seamless. Because even though the Indigenous were then seen as a lower form of human, they were eligible to be converted since they had a soul which meant they were at least partially human, but that consideration was not extended to the soulless Africans.

The military conquest of the lands of the Americas and the enslavement of the Indigenous and then the importation of slave labor from Africa created enormous wealth for Europe. Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein but particularly Walter Rodney in his masterpiece, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated how colonial subjugation and plunder created a vast material gulf between the conquered, enslaved, and colonized peoples and Europe that further reinforced the racialized idea of European and normalized white supremacy.

From the settlers who shot and killed their way across the lands that were incorporated into the colonial United States, to the brutality, rape and terror of plantation slavery to the lynching and burning of Black communities, the denial of the value of Black life and indeed all non-European life, has been an enduring feature of the Pan-European colonial and settler-colonial project. So, should Dylan Roof who murdered nine Black people in Charleston, North Carolina or the murders by Payton Gendron in Buffalo be seen as aberrant behavior?

That is not to say that all Europeans would condone the wanton violence of spraying bullets at non-Europeans out on a Saturday afternoon just trying to shop. Most would condemn those actions. But this is where the contradiction at the heart of European liberalism comes in.

Morally, what is the difference between the attack on Libya by NATO, an instrument of white supremacist state power that resulted in up to 50,000 African people dying and was largely supported by the public in the West, and the mass shootings of Roof and Payton Gendron?

The Buffalo shooter was clear about where his sentiments were when he prominently and self-consciously displayed the same symbol of white supremacy that the Azov regiments and other white supremacists’ organizations wear in Ukraine. Yet, Biden who traveled to Buffalo and most of the political class along with the neoliberal media have gone out of their way to erase and/or rehabilitate the existence of those elements in Ukrainian society and in the state that are avowed white supremacists like the shooter.

When the largely peaceful Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine against the democratically elected government of Victor Yanukovych made a violent turn in late 2013, it was widely acknowledged that it was the neo-fascists element, especially elements from Western Ukraine who assumed the frontlines against the government and turned toward violence. After the coup of February 2014 when four known ultra-right nationalists secured governmental ministries in the new government, along with literal neo-Nazis in the parliament and in the security forces, press reports responsibly covered those developments.

Reports also begin to circulate about Ukraine becoming a symbol and, indeed, the epicenter for a resurgent transnational white supremacist movement. Those concerns were reflected in reports from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and were the object of discussions in the U.S. Congress.

Yet, that history and all of those concerns were minimized when the propaganda objective was to win the public over to supporting an escalating proxy war with Russia. The incredible irresponsibility of this propaganda tactic was reflected when merchandise from Azov appeared on Amazon and the reporting on Ultra-right and neo-Nazis in Ukraine was “disappeared” except to denounce any reference to fascists in Ukraine brought up by social forces opposed to the war as Kremlin talking points.

In fact, while knowing the history and reality of the ultra-right and neo-Nazi elements in Ukrainian society and state, the corporate media made heroes out of elements like the neo-fascist Azov battalion. Is it then hard to understand why an impressionable teen would be attracted to those courageous fighters, especially when he also shares their racial animus?

But instead of engaging in some principled reporting on the shooting in Buffalo, the neoliberal press decides to politicize the event to favor the political objectives of the democrat party by attempting to connect the shooter to Donald Trump and the entire MAGA movement that they are trying to criminalize. Even though the shooter himself made the connection with the movement in Ukraine. Of course, some are falling for it, including the liberal/left that had become cheerleaders for Ukraine, even as Ukrainian president Zelensky shuts down left parties, the press and gives a green light to repressing, including the murder, of any opposition to his policies.

There will be No Proletarian Internationalism or World Revolution Until Northern Leftists Defeat White Supremacy

Zelensky talks about the need to “defend the West,” “Europeanness,” “Western values,” and the liberal/left does not recognize the inherent assumptions of white supremacy in those terms. But Payton Gendron did and is why he enlisted in Zelensky’s fight not in Ukraine but in the middle of an African American community.

An exaggeration?

History will determine that. But what some of us see is a racialized discourse operating just below the surface in which Europe and Europeaness that Ukrainians strive for is also connected to a racialized trope of Europe being ontologically civilized while the less-white Slavs are barbarians, prone to irrational violence, like the Russians who decided “out of nowhere” to just attack Ukraine!

We also understand that downplaying the threat of a resurgent white supremacist fascism in its most sophisticated form represented by Zelensky who has become that slick, right-wing politician with politics as racist as Trump but without the crudeness who many feared could emerge in the U.S. No one could have anticipated that person would emerge in Europe as the lovable face of fascism.

Buffalo closes the loop that connects crude white supremacy with its more polished and dangerous expression. Both of these versions represent a consensus that is committed to using force and violence to ensure that white power will not to be “replaced.” This new consensus has created the ideological foundation for the legitimation of a cross-class white supremacist defense of something called European values and the interests of Europe. The lack of concern for the consequences of the war and sanctions on the rest of the world confirms that this consensus and the interests it defends are in contradiction to the interests of the non-Western global majority.

For us, Buffalo is not a wake-up call but a declaration of war.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/new-w ... -consensus

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‘Neo-Nazism’ poisons Ukraine, Europe under US, West’s connivance
By Fan Lingzhi and Huang Lanlan
Published: May 17, 2022 10:01 PM Updated: May 18, 2022 08:55 PM

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Members of Azov Battalion hold flares during a protest in Kiev on March 1, 2016. Photo: AFP

In the past few decades, "neo-Nazism" deeply entangled with populism and racism, has been growing across Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, under the protection of so-called freedom, democracy and human rights of the West, becoming the poison of society and causing violence, hatred and turmoil.

At the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned how neo-Nazism has been rampant in Ukraine. "Unfortunately, this is happening in Ukraine," he said, noting that this situation will eventually affect Western countries' interests, media reported.

On Saturday, a racially motivated shooting which killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York, shocked the world. The killer also left behind a 180-page manifesto outlining the so-called The Great Replacement Theory which reeks of "Nazism."

Experts said that there is no difference between "neo-Nazism" and "Nazism" but there are serious differences between Russia and the West on the definition of "neo-Nazism" in the context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Several experts pointed out that the US is the culprit of the current chaos in Ukraine. The US has deliberately pushed "neo-Nazi" power, but is creating a backlash. "The most pessimistic outcome for the US may be a complete transformation from Tocqueville's America to Mein Kampf's Germany."

Defining "Neo-Nazism"

Discussions about neo-Nazism in Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine, have culminated with the outbreak of Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Zhang Yifei, associate research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times "There is no difference in essence between Nazism and neo-Nazism, and it is only a difference in time."

"The basic characteristics of Nazism are totalitarian, racism and mode of war. In contrast, the old Nazism had a cult of leaders, while neo-Nazism may embody a totalitarian cult. Nazism's view of race was primarily anti-Semitic, while neo-Nazism was embodied in 'white supremacy' and opposed to everyone else. Nazism encourages war, and neo-Nazism advocates violence."

He Zhigao, associate research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, held similar views. "Both are evil and extreme political trends and barbaric acts that we condemn and oppose," he said.

Some Western observers believe that many right-wing militias including Azov and Right Sector started to have a foothold in Ukraine after the Crimea crisis in 2014, and some Ukrainians even regard these militias with gratitude and admiration. But "the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term," warned scholar Josh Cohen, former project officer of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in a commentary published by Reuters in March 2018.

Reports showed that against the background of rising anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine, the far-right forces in Ukraine began to advocate glorifying the crimes of ultra-nationalists and suppressing the status of the Russian language.

Zhang Hong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that it's worth noting that Russia and the West disagree sharply on the definition of neo-Nazism.

In the context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia ascribes all anti-Russia stuff as neo-Nazism, he said, noting that it is more appropriate to use anti-globalization populism to define it in East Europe.

The existence of an extreme political thought or political organization is not to be feared; what is feared is that it becomes the mainstream of society, he said. According to him, the extremely xenophobic political forces in Russia are very few now.



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Migrants hold placards and shout slogans against racism and closed borders as well as against the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn in Athens on March 16, 2019. Photo: IC


Why Eastern Europe?

On May 9, Zelensky reportedly posted a photo of a Ukrainian soldier "with a Nazi insignia." The soldier was alleged to be wearing the "death's head," or "totenkopf," insignia, of the 3rd SS Panzer Division, a unit of elite Nazi soldiers, according to Russia Today (RT).

This was not surprising to American journalist Nebojsa Malich, who noted that in recent months, it is difficult to find a photograph from the Ukrainian (military) that does not have "this or that Nazi symbolism." Such symbols seem to have "penetrated every part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Malich noted in a conversation with RT, said news site Teller Report on May 10.

In Ukraine, assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other "impure" citizens are widespread, but local police and official legal authorities "do virtually nothing to prevent these neofascist acts or to prosecute them," said Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, in an interview by US journal The Nation in May 2018.

Fascist or neo-Nazi revivalism is under way today in many countries, from Europe to the US, but the Ukrainian version is particularly dangerous, Cohen said. "A large, growing, well-armed fascist movement has reappeared in a large European country that is the political epicenter of the new Cold War between the United States and Russia," he pointed out. And worse still, "Kiev is losing control over radical groups."

Why Eastern Europe? Why Ukraine? No matter how to define "Neo-Nazism," this region is always involved.

"Nazism does not belong to one certain country or a region, but caters to many people's dark side," Zhang Yifei told the Global Times. "When Eastern Europe was undergoing the color revolution, the countries were in great chaos, and the people would hope for a capable man to rectify the order, thinking the survival of their race is crucial, and violence is the most direct and efficient method."

In terms of why populism and right-wing concepts are more "popular" in Eastern Europe, Zhang Hong cited an example: Since Poland joined the EU, many Polish doctors, engineers and technicians went to Western Europe to become truck drivers or constructors, but their income doubled. "Western Europe is like a giant vacuum, sucking the development potential of Poland," he said.

"Due to its own technological and industrial disadvantages, Eastern Europe has been more impacted by Western European countries and emerging economies in the process of globalization. During the process of European integration after the Cold War, Poland sold most of its state-owned economy to Western European multinational companies, losing their economic and financial autonomy," Zhang Hong said, noting that this loss has led to the existence of populism in Eastern European countries. "They oppose the encroachment of non-whites on their economic interests. On the other hand, it is also because they are powerless to resist Western Europe."

"The EU under France and Germany engages in energy cooperation with Russia, and the 'Nord Stream 2' bypasses Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic countries, which means that these countries will lose transportation fees without bargaining power. So populism in Eastern European countries takes advantage of the power imbalance between old and new Europe," Zhang Hong said.

In He's view, there are multiple internal and external reasons. Some politicians use extreme populism or even neo-Nazism to gain support. Second, the unbalanced economic development has led to a decline in the income of some groups, who are more likely to be incited, stoking a stronger hatred toward the "winners" of globalized economy and culture.

"Moreover, the historic memory of being under the rule of the Soviet Union intensified these countries' worries on losing their sovereignty and cultural uniqueness, which further provides fertile ground for neo-Nazism to grow," He said.

Connivance of neo-Nazism

The situation is grim in Europe as a whole, as far-right forces had once managed to overpower most of Europe's law enforcement and judicial systems in recent years. That has encouraged the perpetrators of hate crimes to feel emboldened, wrote Turkish author Murat Sofuoğlu in an article published by TRT World in October 2018.

"Under the protection of so-called freedom, democracy, and human rights of the West, political parties with neo-Nazism tendencies are active in Western politics," He said. In recent years, the European economy has declined, unemployment has risen, and the stagnation of development in some countries has intensified more long-standing resentment.

Moreover, He said, with the influx of a large number of refugees, some elites used their frustration to attract low-income groups, low-educated groups and even young people to carefully plan resistance activities, further aggravating internal social conflicts in Europe, and providing neo-Nazism an opportunity.

Yet Europe is ambivalent about neo-Nazis. It has "too few efforts" to develop programs to prevent right-wing extremism," said Cemil Yilmaz, a Dutch-Turkish social psychologist. While the European political class is proactive in dealing with radicalization in minority groups, "the surging right-wing groups that are violent in nature have been ignored," TRT quoted Yilmaz as saying in October 2018.

Yilmaz noted that European media also plays a big role in the rise of far-right movements. "Most of the media professionals are white," who often want to discuss issues related to multiculturalism, ethnicity and identity in an aggressive and biased manner, he added.

He Zhigao said that some European elites and people are indeed more and more tolerant of neo-Nazism, and they are even happy to see neo-Nazism, through violence, to achieve unspeakable interests and policy proposals. "As 'Nazi' is a sensitive word, Europe often calls neo-Nazism a 'far-right force,' which has contributed to the arrogance of neo-Nazism."

"Far-right populism does not fully equal neo-Nazism," He noted.

Although Europe has clear legal order for neo-Nazism, neo-Nazism could often be able to circumvent the law, either in the name of patriotism, a legal name, or a hidden form, which assured neo-Nazism to poison European society and to harm people of other races.

Why is neo-Nazism rampant in Eastern Europe? Gideon Rachman, foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times (FT), pointed out that although the official US line is that it aims to help Ukraine "resist Russian aggression," there are also influential voices in Washington, London and other capitals who now "see an opportunity to push Russia off the world stage."

"That kind of thinking was reflected in the remarks last month by Lloyd Austin, the US Defense Secretary, that America was now seeking to 'weaken' Russia permanently," wrote Rachman in an FT's opinion piece on May 9.

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Battle lines form between white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" against anti-fascist counter-protesters at the entrance to Emancipation Park during the "Unite the Right" rally on August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Photo: AFP

Achieving a permanent weakening of Russia would clearly be a big geopolitical win for the West, wrote Rachman in his article "Ukraine and the shadow of the Nazis" published on FT. "It would reduce the security threat to Europe, diminish China's most important ally and give new credibility to President Joe Biden's insistence that 'America is back,'" Rachman noted.

"Who is to blame for the chaos in Ukraine today? It's the US, and the US intends to do so," Zhang Yifei told the Global Times.

Zhang pointed out that the US is a country with deep neo-Nazi soil. "There is an undercurrent of centralized power worship in American society, and once the US has a bad economy, it craves the emergence of leaders with extreme styles like Trump. At the same time, the US is inherently a racist country with 'white supremacy.' On the other hand, the military-industrial complex, especially arms dealers, provides a large number of jobs in the US," Zhang Yifei explained.

Zhang said that neither the Republicans nor Democrats have consensus on neo-Nazism, but they both want to instrumentalize the power of neo-Nazism.

Zhang noted that the US government's attitude toward Germany before World War II was actually exactly the same as the current US policy. "Why did the US indulge Adolf Hitler before World War II, and was even able to give loans to Hitler? Because it hoped that the Nazi forces attack the Soviet Union, and other communist countries. On the other hand, as long as there is a strong Nazi in Europe, Britain and France will not dare to disobey the US," he said.

However, the US calculation will eventually backfire. According to media disclosures, like many previous shootings, the May 14 shooting in Buffalo was carried out by a white supremacist.

"The US will certainly continue to invite trouble if it doesn't step back," Zhang pointed out, noting that more worryingly, the US' neo-Nazi soil is bound to produce a future political strongman. "Perhaps the most pessimistic ending is that the US is completely transformed from the America of Tocqueville to the Germany of Mein Kampf," Zhang said.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202205/1265888.shtml
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Sun May 22, 2022 5:37 pm

Fascism: Our Common Enemy
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 21, 2022
Christopher Black

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Actions have causes. That is a fundamental point of philosophy and of an understanding of the way the world is. Russia’s actions in Ukraine have causes, which necessitated those actions. Unbiased observers know what those causes are and why Russia’s special military operation was a necessary consequence. Russia laid the causes out clearly and what its actions in response would be some months ago; yet living in what is termed the “West,” that is in the nations that make up the NATO alliance, the causes are hidden from the people and Russia’s actions portrayed as gratuitous and “evil.”

This suppression of the facts, the distortions, the intense propaganda employed by the NATO governments and their handmaidens in the mass media to manipulate opinion and emotions also has causes which are not difficult to determine, the roots of which extend deep into the history of colonialism that arose in Europe as a consequence of the expansion of European technological and therefore military power in the 16th century; enabling them to travel long distances in their ships in search of markets and resources to exploit, riches to steal, and slaves to command.

The European egocentric and ignorant view of themselves as the superior beings of the world, which arose out of their ignorance of the world and the dogmatism of the Catholic Church, and the later promotion by the Protestants of the individual as all important, instead of the collective society, which denied the identity of each with all and with nature, created a society that regarded others as outside them, and so were not of them, but instead things to be used and exploited just as they have used and exploited the planet as a whole.

The rapid spread of European destruction, from the conquest of Mexico and the slaughter of millions there to the subjugations and exterminations of peoples all over North and Central and South America, Africa, India, reaching to Asia, Australia and the islands of all the seas, led first by Spain and Portugal, then Britain and France, The Netherlands, and other nations, from 1500 to the 1770’s, led to a cloud of misery descending onto the peoples who were unfortunate enough to have something they wanted.

The British colonial project resulted in the creation of the United States of America, founded by British colonists who regarded the individual as paramount and riches their goal in life; who regarded human life as nothing more than a tool for enrichment or an impediment to be eliminated. This society, as soon as it was created began its wars of conquest and slaughter across the continent and then in the 19th century attempted to take Canada, then Mexico and other regional states under its control.

After most of the world that could be colonised fell under colonial domination with the seizure of more colonies by Britain, Germany, France and Belgium from Africa to Indo-China, the United States turned on its rival imperialist powers, the first being Spain, whose colonies were seized by the USA in the Spanish-American War of 1898 which was begun on a pretext as is usually the case in American wars.

The stresses of the competition between the USA and among the European colonial powers as the 20th century dawned led to the Great War of 1914-18 in which western imperialism reached its heights as the USA emerged as the most powerful of the colonial-imperialist powers while Britain and France were bankrupted, even though Britain took over the German colonies in Africa.

In the 1930’s, with most of the planet now colonised by these powers and with Japan rising as a colonial power in Asia, with Italy trying to regain control over parts of Africa, and all of them having to face the new political reality of socialism with the creation of the Soviet Union which blocked the ability of western capital to exploit Russia and all the lands of Asia, social discontent as a world depression set in.

Markets had become saturated from over-production, production and distribution plummeted, communism became the defender of the working people and oppressed, threatening the rule of capital everywhere. A violent reaction set in. For the industrial-financial capital of the western powers war was the only way out of their dilemma, in their twisted logic, destruction in order to rebuild, mass murder of millions to save a degraded society. Fascism rose out of the discontent as a means to channel that discontent against the progressive forces of the people and in support of capital and any and all violence was acceptable to achieve their aims. Morality is something that comes from within; actions follow character. The combined west, its entire society, revealed in the 1930s and 1940s that it has no morality and never will have. They care for no one but themselves and are capable of anything to advance their will to power.

The vast wealth that was taken from the colonial possessions to support the ruling classes and to keep the working population from rebelling against their masters is well documented. The colonial possessions were essential to maintain their wealth and their power. Their loss proved time and again to be a disaster as was the case when Spain lost its colonies, when Britain lost India and its empire collapsed shortly thereafter. France fought ruthless wars to try to maintain its empire even after claiming to fight for liberty of the world’s peoples in the 1940s. But of course, France had its divisions in the SS when the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941.

The ruling classes of the imperial powers in the 30’s began a campaign to discredit socialism, and made plans to carve up the world among their select group whose members would share in the spoils. The rise of fascism in Italy, then Germany, France, Spain and in the USA and Britain during the 30’s was due to the decision to use any and all methods to secure their control over the world. Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, were given support in Europe by the industrial and financial capital. Japan was encouraged to attack Russia and China. Fascism was the reaction of the pending collapse of the west to try to save itself in a desperate and futile attempt that continues today.

This is perhaps a long way to get to my point, which is that the hatred, the bigotry, the propaganda now expressed against Russia as it defends itself against NATO aggression, and defends the peoples of the Donbass republics against the fascists placed in power in Ukraine by the NATO coup of 2014, is a continuation of the path of western history that extends back centuries; a path which has led the world to the destruction in a long list of regional wars and two world wars, and which threatens another today.

The road to war is a dead end for the West. It did not solve nor alleviate their situation in either of the world wars. And the defeat of fascist forces mainly by the Red Army in 1945 did not end fascism in the west. It just laid low, was unfashionable for a while, lurked in dark corners in Canada, the United States, Britain, France and Germany, in Australia and Japan and Latin America.

The west pretended for several decades that it was “democratic” but all the while undermined the sovereignty of nations, denied the right to self determination of peoples, did all it could to maintain their former colonial possessions under their yoke, and bamboozled their own citizens to maintain control. But now, with the economic decline of the west, due to many factors, including; the loss of cheap energy sources and impoverishment of their peoples through wars and theft, the rise of new nations as economic powers who cannot and will not be reduced to colonies, the bankruptcy of the United States that took place during the Vietnam War which led it to abandon the gold standard so it could just print money to pay its debts, the result of which we see in the inflationary spiral we now face, the financial-industrial elites of the west are again desperate to save themselves and once again, true to their character, are releasing the forces of fascism and militarism openly.

Many commentators claim the war in Ukraine, which has been going on since at least 2014, is an attempt by the USA and its allies to weaken Russia. But it is really a war by the desperate to stop their collapse, but which will only accelerate it. It has not weakened Russia, just as the pressures on China have not weakened it. It is the west that has been shown to be weak, ineffectual, morally bankrupt, lacking any leadership that has intelligence.

The more that becomes clear, the more desperate they become and so the hatred and hostility expressed becomes more intense. There is no doubt, they want to subjugate Russia for its resources and markets, and thereby control the world. Hitler had those dreams. The west supported him. They are supporting all the little Hitler’s in Ukraine and in their own countries now but the result for them will be the same.

The new wave of fascism cannot overcome the rock of progress and moral integrity, nor the will, of the people of Russia, of China, of Cuba, of Syria, Vietnam, Venezuela, Iran, of India and South Africa, of Egypt and Algeria, of the entire Middle East and Latin America, of Africa whose peoples are tired of colonialism and imperialism who see that the time of the West has come and gone as they rise to face the common challenges of the world. The struggle to defeat the fascists who control the west will be difficult and we face the risk of common destruction. But they will not succeed. They are not bleeding Russia dry in a war of attrition, as they like to claim. It is the USA and its allies that are being bled dry by their own decisions and actions. It is that which can make them dangerous for fascists are always dangerous. They must be stopped. They are our common enemy. Russia will stop them. We must support that struggle. Our own future and well being depends on it.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... mon-enemy/
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Tue May 31, 2022 2:40 pm

The Brown Internationale
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 28, 2022
Kai Biermann, Christian Fuchs, Astrid Geisler, Yassin Musharbash und Holger Stark

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German neo-Nazis who head abroad to fight. American masterminds who dream of a fascist revolution. A former Russian soldier who provides weapons training to right-wing extremists from across Europe. The new right wing is networked internationally – and is growing more dangerous.

The hate preacher lives in a run-down rear building in the heart of Denver, on the second floor through the courtyard to the right. The TV is on. We knock, hoping to ask him a few questions about the new, globalized Nazi movement. After all, he’s one of the masterminds behind it.

The door opens. “Come on in,” says James Mason.

His full beard is icy gray and he is wearing a white-and-blue pinstriped shirt and pleated trousers. On the bookshelf are numerous works with titles like “Blood & Honor” and, in German, “Der Gauleiter” and “Deutschland Erwache! (Germany Wake Up!)” A ticking cuckoo clock hangs on the wall, going off every half hour.

This aging gentleman of 68 years is a legend among neo-Nazis. Mason was just 14 when he joined the youth wing of the American Nazi Party, and he later went on to became one of the most important right-wing extremists in the United States. He romanticized Hitler just as he did serial killer Charles Manson, propagating violence and terror and spending some time in prison. In 1992, he published a book called “Siege.”

It includes sentences like: “Let us give some thought to what the next logical step might be toward opening the way to full, revolutionary conflagration in the United States.” Anything which contributes to “friction, chaos and anarchy” is helpful, he writes, from “random shootings” to “select and consecutive assassinations … in different parts of the country.”

The classic fascist groups and parties of the 20th century were hierarchical, with a leader at the top, chains of command and military structures. In “Siege,” though, James Mason presents a different concept: Ideally, people would organize in small cells. Or they would launch attacks completely on their own, because in some cases, two is one too many. “We must view and realize that all of White America is our army,” Mason writes.

There is a photo from 2019 showing James Mason together with 12 men. Mason is sitting on a chair in the center wearing a brown shirt and a swastika armband. The men are kneeling or standing around him, all wearing camouflage and skull masks. They are members of the Atomwaffen Division, gathered for a meeting in Las Vegas, with Mason there as a kind of guest of honor. Atomwaffen Division, in German, is their real name. The English translation would be “Atomic Weapons Division.” Founded in 2015, the neo-Nazi group is one of the most hardcore in the world, with AWD members in the U.S. suspected of having committed five murders. And it is heavily influenced by the idea of “leaderless resistance” propagated by James Mason.

“A wonderful, wonderful association,” Mason says in his living room. “Bravehearts.” The idea behind AWD, as the group is known for short, is to “take the fight to the enemy” – and not just in the U.S. AWD now has offshoots in a number of different countries, including Germany. “There was a lot of action in the Ukraine and … clear across Europe, and certainly here,” Mason says. “That’s pretty impressive, I have to admit.”

Almost a year ago, in spring 2020, Mason announced that the Atomwaffen Division was disbanding, but that was likely just a tactical move to alleviate the pressure of FBI investigations. “One name may be disbanded, it may be outlawed,” Mason says. “You pick up another, like changing your underwear, and it means nothing.”

You can tell he’s proud of his role as the movement’s intellectual leader. At the same time, though, he seems to choose his words with care to avoid saying anything that could be interpreted as an incitement to violence. Mason claims to no longer believe in the idea of right-wing terror. But, he adds, “so many just aren’t ready to give it up.”

Unfortunately, it seems that Mason might be right.

In the U.S., there is a successor organization to the AWD called the National Socialist Order. It appears to be made up in part of the same men, just wearing different underwear. Many neo-Nazis who are not involved in the AWD also look to Mason for guidance. In one memo, the FBI mentions a “Siege network,” which they describe as a global network of online channels and real-world groups that cooperate with each other in analog reality.

Globally oriented right-wing extremists: It sounds like a contradiction. Wasn’t it the left-wing extremist terror groups – like the Red Army Faction in Germany – that dreamed of a “worldwide front”? The RAF allied itself with the IRA in Northern Ireland, the Palestinian PLO and the FNL in North Vietnam. Their members received military training in camps in the Middle East. Jihadism is also based on the idea of a global community that knows no national boundaries. But neo-Nazis? Don’t they chant things like “Germany for the Germans!” or “Les Français d’abord!” – “The French first!”?

That used to be the case. But not anymore.

In recent years, “a new, leaderless transnational, apocalyptic and violent XRW (extreme right wing) movement has emerged and continued to evolve between 2015 and 2020,” write experts in a recent study conducted on behalf of the German Foreign Ministry.

A report from the European police agency Europol notes that the right-wing extremist scene in numerous European countries has internationalized.

And the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations Security Council has determined that between 2015 and 2020, there has been a steep rise in the number of right-wing terrorist attacks around the world – a spike of fully 320 percent.

Journalists from DIE ZEIT conducted reporting in six different countries for this story, examining files, conducting interviews and attending court hearings. Some of the characters in this account are key figures of international importance, while others are solitary misfits sitting in front of their computers. One operates a paramilitary training camp, another – a young German man – was almost ready to go to war. All of them, though, have one thing in common: They are part of something new, something that could perhaps be called the Brown Internationale.

The Allure of War

Felix Oberhuber walks fast and talks fast. It is the first time he is telling his story to someone who isn’t a family member or part of the neo-Nazi scene. His boots crunch on the icy lane, the Alps spread out on the horizon in front of him. Oberhuber is wearing a wool cap and a camouflage jacket, a stout 22-year-old who could be James Mason’s grandson. Until two years ago, he focused his efforts on connecting right-wing extremists from Germany and Ukraine, and the authorities still consider him a potential threat today. But he says he no longer wants to have anything to do with the scene. Because he lives in fear of his former comrades, we are not using his real name for this story.

When asked for evidence to prove his story, Oberhuber rolls up the sleeve of his military jacket to show a tattoo on his arm. “Misanthropic Division” it reads.

The MD is a paramilitary right-wing extremist group from Ukraine that follows the motto “Kill for Wotan.” Oberhuber was the leader of the group’s Germany chapter until 2019. He has more tattoos on his legs, including runes and a swastika. DIE ZEIT also spoke with his father, examined documents and asked around in his surroundings to verify his story.

Important right-wing extremist organizations, the year they were founded and the international ties they maintain

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Source: own research© ZEIT-GRAFIK: Anne Gerdes

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Nordic Resistance Movement The Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) is a grouping of violence-prone neo-Nazi groups active in Scandinavia. It is estimated to have around 300 members. The primary focus of NRM activities is Sweden, where the organization is also present as a political party. For years, NRM has maintained ties to the Russian Imperial Movement.

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Russian Imperial Movement The Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) is an ultra-nationalist group that dreams of the reincarnation of the Russian Empire and the return of the czars. RIM also has an armed wing, called the Imperial Legion, which was active in the Ukraine conflict on behalf of the pro-Russian separatists. In 2020, the group was included on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. Leader Denis Gariev operates a paramilitary training camp in St. Petersburg, where German right-wing extremists have also received instruction. RIM has close ties with right-wing groups in other countries, including the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

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The Base Founded in 2018 by Rinaldo Nazzaro, the FBI believes The Base aims to establish a “white, ethno-state” and that it encourages violence and attacks to accelerate the outbreak of a civil war, which the group believes is approaching. Several Base members in the U.S. have been accused of planning terrorist activities. Experts believe that The Base has cells in Canada, Australia, South Africa and European countries.

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Atomwaffen Division A neo-Nazi organization that was established in the U.S. in 2015, Atomwaffen Division ideology leans heavily on the book of essays called “Siege,” written by James Mason. AWD members have been accused in the U.S. of committing five murders. The group has followers in several European countries, including Germany, where public prosecutors have launched an investigation, DIE ZEIT has learned.

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Feuerkrieg Division A neo-Nazi group that is believed to have formed in late 2018, the Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) is an emulation of the Atomwaffen Division. It has members in numerous countries in Europe, including Germany. On the internet, FKD has called on members to commit violent acts on several occasions, especially against Jews and migrants. The year 2020 marked the first time a member of an FKD chat faced prosecution in Germany. The defendant was convicted of planning a seditious criminal act.

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National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) The National Democratic Party of Germany is a right-wing extremist political party founded in 1964. NPD members maintain contacts with numerous other right-wing extremist parties across Europe and with the Russian Imperial Movement and the Azov Battalion.

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III. Weg Translatable as the “Third Path,” the III. Weg was founded in 2013 as a right-wing extremist party. According to Swedish experts, the Nordic Resistance Movement looks at it as a model. The party has close ties to the Azov Movement and has sought recruits in Germany for a “sports camp” in Ukraine.

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Misanthropic Division A militant, right-wing extremist movement that was founded in 2013 in Ukraine, the Misanthropic Division dreams of the establishment of a national-socialist country and believes it is involved in a war for the survival of the “white race.” In the Ukraine conflict, the group fights against pro-Russian separatists and has recruited right-wing extremist volunteers from numerous foreign countries. An extremely violent group, the MD glamorizes historical national socialism.


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Azov Movement The Azov Movement is a right-wing faction that has developed out of the Azov Battalion in Ukraine. The battalion was established in 2014 to fight against pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, but has exhibited right-wing extremist characteristics from its inception. The Battalion has produced the right-wing Ukrainian party National Corps and the street group National Militia. Together, the battalion, the party and its followers make up the Azov Movement, which has focused tremendous effort in recent years on establishing an international network of right-wing extremist groups. It is also active in Germany.

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Identitarian Movement A group of neo-right activists, the Identitarian Movement is active in numerous European countries, including France, Austria and, since 2014, Germany. Intelligence agencies from the three countries consider the group to be a right-wing extremist organization and keep it under observation. Individual members of the Identitarian Movement have ties to the Azov Movement in Ukraine.


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Die Rechte (The Right) A small, neo-Nazi party, Die Rechte has existed since 2012 and has close ties to violence-prone, right-wing extremist groups in Germany known as Komaradschaften. A representative from the Azov Movement has attended Die Rechte events in Germany on several occasions.

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Oberhuber points to a copse of trees. “Me and my brother used to run around back there with plastic guns even as kids,” he says. As a teenager, he drank a lot and got high – and he developed an interest in TV documentaries about the Nazi era. By the time he turned 18, he was active in more than 35 right-wing extremist WhatsApp groups, where he would receive recommendations for things to read, like pamphlets about people who attacked foreigners. But also a book: “Siege” by James Mason. He radicalized, beat up foreigners and planned an attack on leftists with his comrades. “That was my first attempt to become active as a terrorist,” Oberhuber recalls. “I was fascinated by fighting.”

The attack didn’t pan out, largely because they were unable to obtain weapons. But Oberhuber continued to be fascinated by violence and stumbled across the Azov Battalion on the internet. Founded in 2014 in Ukraine, shortly after the war started on the country’s eastern border, the battalion was well known for accepting foreign mercenaries who want to join the fight against the pro-Russian separatists. Using WhatsApp, Oberhuber contacted a German neo-Nazi who he hoped could bring him to the front. The German turned out to be a functionary with the Misanthropic Division, which recruited fighters for the Azov Battalion in Ukraine from almost 20 countries. Oberhuber was electrified. It was precisely where he wanted to go.

How can a young German neo-Nazi develop a desire to join a complicated war between Ukrainian soldiers and Russian-controlled separatists located almost 2,000 kilometers from his home? In the past, says extremism expert Alexander Ritzmann, right-wing extremists were focused on the fight for their own country. Today, though, the focus has shifted – to the defense of the “white race.” It is a delusional concept, but one which neo-Nazis across the Western world find attractive.

There are foreigners now living in Europe who refuse to hide their Muslim faith – a threat to the “white race.”

In the U.S., the non-white share of the population is growing – a threat to the “white race.”

In Australia, men kiss men in public and women kiss women – a threat to the “white race.”

Defending the “white race” is the goal for which right-wing extremists in all countries are uniting.

In the 1970s, some militant leftists essentially became professional revolutionaries, moving from one Third World guerilla war to the next. Similarly, around 10 years ago, Islamists from across the Western world traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State. And in 2018, Oberhuber moved to the town of Weissenfels, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, into the apartment of a Misanthropic Division functionary. Another man from Belarus was already living there, a man wanted by the police. The three established a cell and started selling T-shirts and flags they got from Ukraine. Envoys from the Misanthropic Division would frequently visit Weissenfels and Oberhuber would join them on outings, one of them to a castle where Nazis lived until 1945. He had the feeling they were sizing him up. Was his dream about to come true?

When the MD functionary had to go to prison for armed robbery, the leadership in Kiev decided that Oberhuber should take over, according to his account. He developed a channel on Telegram and sprayed MD graffiti, hoping to prove “that I’m a hard worker, and hopefully then end up in a training camp and then on the front.” The Ukrainians sent a tattoo artist who gave Oberhuber the MD logo on his arm, a distinction not unlike a military decoration – and one given to only very few activists. He now belonged to the inner circle. But he still hadn’t made it to the front.

Experts believe that a total of around 150 German volunteers have headed for Ukraine to fight in the war. The German parliamentarian Martina Renner of the Left Party filed an official query with the German government and received her response last week: It noted that German officials can only identify by name “a number of people in the low two-figures.” Investigations have only been launched into four volunteers. Oberhuber says he himself knows three neo-Nazis who have returned from the front. Other former right-wing extremists told DIE ZEIT of neo-Nazis who joined the Azov Battalion primarily to receive weapons training. Just in case. For later.

In February 2020, U.S. Congressman Max Rose published an op-ed in the New York Times together with terrorism expert Ali Soufan. The war in Ukraine, the two wrote, had become for right-wing extremists what the Afghanistan war had been for jihadists in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, religious warriors from many countries traveled to Afghanistan to fight against the country’s secular rulers and their Soviet backers. One of them was Osama bin Laden, who created al-Qaida out of a group of hardcore fanatics. That war turned out to be a kind of Big Bang for 21st century Islamist terrorism.

In their op-ed, Rose and Soufan presented a few estimates. Almost twice as many foreign volunteers had joined the Ukraine war, they wrote, as had traveled to Afghanistan back in the 1980s. According to one study, the total is around 17,000, with more than 1,000 of them coming from Western countries. Not all of them are right-wing extremists, but many are. Which adds up to hundreds of potential returnees with battlefield experience. Hundreds of potential warriors for the international fight in defense of the “white race.”

And there are people doing their best to increase that number.

Olena Semenyaka is a young woman from Kiev who studied philosophy. She has dark brown hair, a petite figure and is frequently the only woman in pictures full of bearded, muscle-bound brutes. For Ukrainian right-wing extremists, Semenyaka essentially plays the role of poster girl. At first, she agreed to an interview with us, but then broke off all contact. In some photos, she is shown giving the Hitler salute, in others, she poses with a swastika.

An entire movement has developed around the Azov Battalion. The goal is to establish a global coalition of right-wing extremist groups, Semenyaka said in a 2019 interview with Time magazine. The movement doesn’t rely solely on the Misanthropic Division, as its paramilitary arm, for recruiting foreign neo-Nazis like Oberhuber.

Semenyaka has also been visiting right-wing extremist groups across Europe for years as a kind of marketing representative. According to DIE ZEIT’s reporting, she has visited Germany eight times – at the invitation of the right-wing extremist party Die Rechte, for example, or as a speaker to a group from the Identitarian Movement. At a festival organized by the neo-Nazi party “Der III. Weg” near Erfurt in 2018, she promoted a right-wing rock festival in Ukraine called Asgardsrei. “All of you are explicitly invited to Kiev!”

Asgardsrei is one of the largest events of its kind, and it is sometimes even possible to see Atomwaffen Division flags waving in the audience. Semenyaka has leveraged the black-metal festival to form a kind of congress, enabling right-wing extremists from Norway, Italy, Germany, the U.S. and elsewhere to get to know each other and exchange ideas. The new networks, experts warn, have long since become established.

Felix Oberhuber’s dream of joining the war in eastern Ukraine was never fulfilled. Perhaps the Misanthropic Division didn’t think he was suitable, or perhaps he didn’t present himself correctly. Today, in any case, he is happy that he stayed in Germany. “I was lucky,” he says. He lives with his wife and child in a small town – and once again, Ukraine is far away.

Inspired by the Jihad

Rinaldo Nazzaro responds quickly: “The Base is not a neo-Nazi organization or a terrorist group,” he writes just 63 minutes after receiving our questions via email. It is, he continues, “a social networking platform for individuals who are interested in survivalism and self-defense.”

It’s not the first time that Nazzaro has sought to trivialize his activities. But what appear to be his true thoughts can be read in a leaked chat protocol from The Base: “It’s illegal if you’re training in order to cause civil unrest,” he wrote. “If you’re training for survivalism and self-defense, you’re good to go.”

A 47-year-old with a full beard and a gaunt face, Nazzaro is from the U.S. state of New Jersey. He attended a private school as a teenager before majoring in philosophy in college. He dropped out before finishing his degree, though, and had an affiliation with the U.S. military, likely including a stint in Iraq. In 2002, he founded a security firm and touted his combat experience. Then, starting around 2017, he transformed himself into a right-wing propagandist, appearing under the pseudonyms Roman Wolf and Norman Spear. In summer 2018, he started The Base, a group for which James Mason’s book “Siege” is required reading.

In developing The Base, Nazzaro apparently took his cue from an organization that successfully made the jump to a globally active terror network long ago: al-Qaida, whose name can be translated as “the base.” Small, autonomous cells spread out among as many locations as possible. Paramilitary training is required.

“Afghanistan is (a) good example of unifying ideology harnessed militarily,” read a tweet posted by a Base account. The Base, one member boasted, is better than al-Qaida and Islamic State.

It is hardly a new phenomenon for neo-Nazis to emulate jihadists. Indeed, the two movements have been drawing inspiration from each other for years: Right-wing extremists study guerilla war instruction manuals assembled by Islamists and follow their directions for building bombs. Al-Qaida and Islamic State, meanwhile, encourage their followers to carry out attacks as “lone wolves,” echoing right-wing extremists. The neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, was fascinated by al-Qaida.

The Base was formed following an appeal by Nazzaro in an online forum and quickly attracted around 50 members. Some soon met up in the real world, organizing camps, target practice and producing propaganda videos in which they appeared in masks, displaying The Base’s runic symbol.

According to FBI files, The Base’s goal is to “unify militant white supremacists around the globe” and “incite a race war.”

Three members of the organization were arrested because according to the police they were planning to murder antifa activists. Investigators netted another three alleged members after they discussed attacking a gun rights rally in Virginia, possibly with the goal of provoking an escalation of tensions at the event.

DIE ZEIT has also learned that a young German joined the organization in the summer of 2019 under the alias “Dekkit.” Photos and chat messages show that he was traveling in the U.S. at the time, most likely to Silver Creek, a remote village in the state of Georgia, where the family of a member of The Base owns 40-acres. The FBI claims that the group held hate camps on the property, where the men received weapons training and even decapitated a goat in a pagan ritual.

“Dekkit spotted in America,” an American neo-Nazi wrote in a chat on Aug. 13, 2019, also posting a photo of the visitor. It shows a man in a military uniform half covered by a swastika flag. A skull mask covers his face, and on his head, he is wearing a baseball cap with The Base’s runic logo.

Several entries are known to have been posted by Dekkit in The Base’s encrypted chat room. “Almost died going through the Swamps today,” he reported in one. He wrote that his companion had sunk “straight up to the thighs in mud.” They even saw alligators and water snakes. It’s unclear exactly what Dekkit did at Silver Creek or whether he planned attacks or received any orders.

It appears that Dekkit has since returned to Germany – a potentially violent right-wing extremist looking for a place to belong. Upon his return, he added the letters “AW” to his alias, which is presumably a reference to the Atomwaffen Division.

Experts suspect that cells of The Base have long since formed outside the U.S., in countries like Britain, the Baltic states, Australia and South Africa. And in the Netherlands.

Last month, a detention hearing was held in a court in Rotterdam for two men in custody who have been accused of being members of The Base. They were linked to the court by video.

Fabio I., 19, is accused of having posted hate messages on the internet – “kill all non white (sic),” for example. Fabio I.’s lawyer says he’s not a member of The Base, and to prove it, he cited a message his client received in the chat: “You still haven’t been vetted and have no cell leader.” The message, though, could serve to prove that he was in contact with The Base, at the very least.

The second defendant is 20-year-old Steven. V., who is suspected of inciting an attack against Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. In a chat room that investigators believe belongs to The Base, he wrote that Rutte took one of three routes to the office each day on his bicycle and wasn’t accompanied by any security. “I’m not a terrorist,” Steven V. said during the court hearing. “I left the chat group months ago.”

The court ruled that Fabio I. and Steven V. should remain in pre-trial custody.

The Internet and Reality

The village of Tiefenbach is located on a steep slope in the Bavarian Forest. Fabian D. lived here in the basement apartment of his parents’ pastel-colored house until his arrest in February 2020. Investigators found a hard drive hidden behind the extractor hood. On it, they found a copy of “Siege,” the terrorism manual written by Mason.

Fabian D., a 23-year-old electronics technician, had never been a member of a far-right party. According to what is known, he never harbored ambitions of fighting in Ukraine, like Felix Oberhuber, or traveling to the U.S., as Dekkit did. Fabian D. simply sat at his computer playing computer games. On the internet, he stumbled across neo-Nazi groups from the Siege cosmos like the Atomwaffen Division, The Base and the Feuerkrieg Division, another right-wing terrorist network with around 40 members from 15 countries.

From his basement, Fabian D., 18, watched Atomwaffen Division propaganda films he found on the web. He studied the manifestos of right-wing extremist terrorists. And before long, he was no longer content just being a spectator: He wanted in on the action.

In spring 2019, he finally gained access to the Feuerkrieg Division’s chat group. Fabian D., who had no friends in real life and struggled with his weight, was able to create a new version of himself online. DIE ZEIT has reviewed more than 18,000 screen shots of the chats. In them, Fabian D. called himself “reinhard070304” or “Heydrich,” after the Nazi war criminal and Holocaust organizer Reinhard Heydrich, who was born on March 7, 1904. As a kind of virtual Heydrich, Fabian D. posted a photo presumably showing refugees in the small, eastern Bavarian town of Cham. The caption read: “Hm, to kill or not to kill is the question.”

Fabian D. also pursued his digital fantasies in the analog world. He would walk around in a German military clothing and even made an attempt to obtain weapons. In July 2019, he applied for a small arms license, which he then received 14 days later. And he had weapon parts sent to his grandmother’s address: a “decorative replica” of a Kalashnikov, plus an original case. Milling and drilling marks indicate that he had hopes of turning it into a live weapon.

Fabian D. also downloaded bomb-making instruction from the internet and ordered the kind of skull masks online that he saw in the propaganda videos. A selfie taken at the time shows him wearing a mask and a camouflage outfit, holding “Mein Kampf” in one hand and the model of a Kalashnikov in the other.

In January 2020, D. wrote to his comrades that he wanted to just become as famous as a “Saint.” In the Feuerkrieg Division chat group, “Saint” is code in the scene for right-wing terrorists like the alleged murderer of German politician Walter Lübcke, who was killed at his home in 2019, or the assassin in Christchurch, New Zealand, who perpetrated a terrorist attack against mosques in the city.

In “Siege,” Mason wrote that those who are determined to carry out attacks should choose their targets carefully. So Fabian D. asked in the chat group what targets might be appropriate? He wrote that he believed “places of worship” would be a good choice and that he wanted to use “tools” and be “more up close and personal.”

It is unclear whether the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic intelligence agency responsible for monitoring terrorism and political extremism, was tracking those conversations or whether it received a tip from abroad. In any case, the agency contacted the police and informed them there was a threat of an attack, perhaps on a synagogue or a mosque. Shortly afterward, a SWAT team arrested Fabian D. They found a blank-firing pistol in the driver’s door of his car that was loaded and ready to shoot, as well as a second one hidden under the passenger seat. He also had a camping knife, a hunting knife and a hatchet in his backpack. In the basement apartment in his parents’ home, police seized a steel helmet, a machete, a vest for carrying ammunition and a lock-picking kit. There was a letter from the German armed forces in his mailbox. Fabian D. had applied for a job in the IT department, and the letter contained a job offer.

When Fabian D. entered room E006 of the Nuremberg District Court in November 2020, he hid his face behind a thick binder. He was wearing a suit and had carefully parted his hair, which was trimmed close at the nape. A psychiatrist brought in to review the case said the defendant posed a “considerable danger.” The expert said D. had become so deeply involved in right-wing extremist ideology that it wouldn’t take much to motivate him to commit serious crimes. The court sentenced Fabian D. to two years in prison with no suspended sentence. His defense attorney has filed an appeal.

The case underscores just how difficult it is for the security authorities to track members of internationally networked, right-wing extremist organizations. They hardly leave any trail, they use aliases, they spend most of their time in shadowy corners of the internet and many of them could just be all talk and no bite. At least until they take up arms in real life. In the meantime, Germany’s Federal Prosecutor is now investigating suspected German supporters of the Siege network. He suspects that neo-Nazis have either founded a terrorist organization or have provided support for one: the Atomwaffen Division Deutschland. The trail leads to Bavaria and Berlin, into student circles and to an extreme right-wing vigilante group. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office did not provide comment when contacted.

Investigations are also underway into alleged plans to carry out attacks in Germany. In the Feuerkrieg Division chat, one participant boasted in the summer of 2019 that an “OP Walter Lübcke 2.0” was planned – a reference to the assassination of the conservative German politician. In Tiefenbach, Bavaria, Fabian D. then posted one of the Atomwaffen Division’s slogans: “The knives are getting sharpened.”

“Anyone on Earth can be ‘Atomwaffen Division,’” states one AWD strategy paper. “We can be your neighbor, mailman, secretary, best friend, etc. We are everywhere, and we are no one.” It almost sounds like a direct copy of Islamic State instructions, urging followers to self-recruit and strike on their own. One agitator with the Feuerkrieg Division called on followers to make their home “like a Guerillas Camp.”

Fabian D. was caught, but the other German participants in the Feuerkrieg chat group are still at large. Like Fabian D., they are also potential “lone wolves.” And they could pop up at AWD today, at Feuerkrieg Division tomorrow and at The Base a day after that.

James Mason was right: Group names no longer really matter. Nor does nationality. The new international terrorists don’t care what country you’re from. The only thing that matters is having the right convictions.

The Russian Connection

The Brown Internationale doesn’t always make it easy to recognize what is new. Take the symbols used by most of the groups. The runes, the swastikas and the ridiculous obsession with the Fraktur script all feels outdated. It’s more 1941 than 2021. But that impression is misleading. Their methods are modern and they are also open to new influences and alliances.

When Adolf Hitler gave the order to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, the goal was the “eradication of the Asian influence in the European cultural sphere.” The Nazis at the time despised Slavs as “sub-humans” who were to be dominated and exploited.

It’s tempting to think that Russians can’t possibly play a part in the scene, even today.

Denis Gariev, a 42-year-old wearing white socks and sandals, doesn’t look particularly threatening. He has a university degree in history, and he has a precise idea of his clientele. “They understand that they will need this something tomorrow because tomorrow it won’t matter what kind of car you have or what kind of startup you have launched,” he says, “because tomorrow they will come and kill everyone and what you are going to do, they will have to fight the enemy.”

His clientele are primarily Russian men between the ages of 20 and 45. But they also include French, Serbian and German nationals. They all travel to Gariev in St. Petersburg and take part in his various offerings, which include a course on war tactics, shooting, first aid, radio communications and topography. The class lasts seven days and costs the equivalent of 280 euros. Gariev says he had 500 bookings for the class last year alone. “If people come with conservative, patriotic ideas, they are welcome,” he says.

He’s standing in the basement of a seemingly ordinary apartment building located about an hour’s drive from the center of St. Petersburg. Outside, posters announce classes for wrestling and martial arts. Inside, one of Gariev’s 10 instructors walks down the hall in camouflage, a pistol in his holster. Orthodox icons adorn the walls and there’s a grenade launcher in the office. Gariev claims it’s just a model, and then goes on to discuss the enemy: the global alliance of leftists, gays and immigrants. He believes it will take a “last crusade” to save traditional Christian values from them. And he would like to see that crusade emerge out of Russia, a country that right-wing extremists from all over the world long ago ceased considering to be the home of “sub-humans.” It has indeed become a place they yearn for – a state they view as a bulwark against the West, against effeminacy and immigration.

In the basement is one of the sites of the paramilitary training program Gariev founded for his crusade – and it offers something that is rather enticing to neo-Nazis: the kind of training that other countries only allow for soldiers. And the Russian authorities don’t appear to object. Gariev is also the head of the military arm of an ultranationalist group called the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), whose members dream of resurrecting the czarist empire. His fighters are in action in Syria and Libya – both as regular soldiers in the Russian Army and as mercenaries. They also took part in the war in Ukraine.

If Felix Oberhuber of Germany had actually gone into battle for the Ukrainian Azov Battalion, it’s possible he would have been firing on people on the other side who got their training from Gariev. Most of the fighters from abroad who volunteer in the war in Ukraine do so on the Russian side.

They face off against each other as enemies, and yet they are part of the same movement. Indeed, the very fact that the movement can endure such contradictions is precisely what makes the Brown Internationale so dangerous.

In St. Petersburg, Gariev speaks openly about his role. “We are the only organization that has strong and professional ties with the right-wing movements all over the world,” he says.

In Germany, Gariev claims, RIM has contacts with members of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD). In April 2018, representatives of RIM appeared at a march by right-wing extremists in Dortmund, Germany.

There are also allegations that RIM incited nationalists in Spain to carry out attacks.

Eight time zones away from St. Petersburg, former neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach is sitting in a diner in the U.S. state of Tennessee. He came into contact with RIM five years ago through comrades in Europe.

Heimbach explains how two RIM activists came to visit him in Tennessee. How they rode roller coasters together at an amusement park and discussed an alliance between American neo-Nazis and Russian czarist fanatics over barbecue. How he saw them as “comrades” and drove with them to Washington, where they planted an RIM flag in front of the White House, took pictures and gloated over their propaganda coup. Later, a U.S. State Department official expressed suspicion that RIM had tried to recruit Americans.

And that wasn’t all. The official also said: “This group has innocent blood on its hands.”

The Nordic Resistance Movement is an alliance of neo-Nazi groups active throughout Scandinavia. It counts around 300 members, two of whom committed several attacks in Sweden involving explosives between November 2016 and January 2017: on a leftist bookstore and café and on a campground that also provided accommodations for refugees. Most recently, they planted a bomb near another refugee shelter. A member of the cleaning staff was seriously injured in the explosion.

The perpetrators were arrested and the investigators stumbled across a photo showing the two men training in St. Petersburg with Kalashnikovs in their hands. They had been with Denis Gariev just months before planning their attacks. Investigators believe the trip to Russia was “a key step in (their) radicalization.”

In early 2020, officials arrested an RIM recruiter in Stockholm. He had built up a cache of weapons.

In April 2020, the U.S. State Department classified RIM as a terrorist organization, the first foreign far-right group ever to be placed on the list.

In January 2021, when interviewed in his training basement, Gariev didn’t deny that he knew the two Swedes. He claims they “came here as tourists,” that he only showed them around and that they discussed Christianity together.

The American government now considers him to be a “specially designated global terrorist.” In response, he says that he knows why the Europeans and Americans are afraid of him and his organization. “They understand very well that we are a threat … because of our ideas.”

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/ ... nationale/
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 04, 2022 2:13 pm

Mein Kampf: Hitler’s Love Letter to Western Imperialism
JULY 3, 2022

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European Imperialist agree to annex Yugoslavia in the Munich meeting.

By Joe Emersberger – Jun 29, 2022

“Appeals to all civilized and reasonable people.”

Volume I of Hitler’s Mein Kampf [My Struggle] was published in 1925. Volume II was published in 1926. [1] It’s important to bear these dates in mind because, according to historian David Schmitz, in 1933, when Hitler first became Chancellor of Germany, US officialdom was “not distraught.” In fact, George A. Gordon, the US charge d’affaires in Berlin, told Washington that Hitler led a “moderate” faction of the Nazis, which “appeals to all civilized and reasonable people.” [2] In 2015, footage emerged of British Royal Family members giving Nazi salutes in 1933. Defending the footage, Buckingham Palace said that “No one at that time had any sense how it would evolve. To imply anything else is misleading and dishonest.” [3]

This is nonsense.

western governments were obviously capable of doing rudimentary intelligence work like reading Mein Kampf, which Hitler wrote while in prison after attempting a coup. So, what was it about Mein Kampf that might have put western imperialists at ease? The short answer is that Hitler also happened to be a western imperialist who was obsessed with annihilating Marxists.

His explicitly stated intention in Mein Kampf was, through mass murder, to eradicate Marxism in Germany and Eastern Europe. The primary goal was the destruction of Soviet Russia in order to transform Germany into a major European super-state: “This colossal Empire in the East is ripe for dissolution” he wrote. [4] After this goal was accomplished — and Marxism eradicated — Germany could then get to work seizing colonies outside Europe: “The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State.” [5]

Marxists were not a secondary target for Hitler

Hitler’s savage antisemitism was inextricably linked to his anti-Marxism. As an aspiring young artist in Vienna (he was born and raised in Austria) he said “my eyes were opened to two perils, the names of which I scarcely knew hitherto and had no notion whatsoever of their terrible significance for the existence of the German people. These two perils were Marxism and Judaism.” [6] Throughout the book he conflates Jewish people with Marxists, or else depicts Marxism as the deadliest weapon deployed by Jews in a quest for world domination:

On the day when Marxism is broken in Germany the chains that bind Germany will be smashed for ever. [7]

Marxism[’s] final objective was and is and will continue to be the destruction of all non-Jewish national States […] [8]

[…] the life-work of the Jew, Karl Marx. His Capital became intelligible to me now for the first time. And in the light of it I now exactly understood the fight of the Social-Democrats [9] against national economics, a fight which was to prepare the ground for the hegemony of a real international and stock-exchange capital. [10]


Hitler said that Bolshevism (Marxism as applied in Soviet Russia) was ultimately driven by “the aspiration of the Jewish people to become the despots of the world” and that it would triumph in Germany if it is not crushed in Russia: “The struggle against the Jewish Bolshevization of the world demands that we should declare our position towards Soviet Russia.” [11]

In Mein Kampf, it seems Hitler more frequently conflates Jews with Marxists (or social democrats) than with capitalists. His theory was that Jews first infiltrated powerful circles as financiers, then disarmed the hatred of the masses towards them by controlling the press. Lastly, Jews solidified their power by seizing control of anti-capitalist forces: “the Jew […] in a short while became the leader of their struggle against himself. […] And thus the Marxist doctrine was invented.” [12]

In Marxism, Hitler saw anti-racist and anti-elitist ideas that were a complete negation of his own, and a dire threat:

Such is the true essence of the Marxist Weltanschauung [worldview] […] The destruction of the concept of personality and of race removes the chief obstacle which barred the way to domination of the social body by its inferior elements, which are the Jews. […] in reality its aim is to enslave and thereby annihilate the non-Jewish races. [13]

The assumption that all races are alike leads to the assumption that nations and individuals are equal to one another. And international Marxism is nothing but the application — effected by the Jew, Karl Marx — of a general conception of life to a definite profession of political faith; […] he used his keen powers of prognosis to detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and concentrate them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would bring about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe. But all this was done in the service of his race. […] Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews. [14]


Referring to Marxism, Hitler asked “Is it possible to eradicate ideas by force of arms? Could a Weltanschauung be attacked by means of physical force?” He concluded that it could be, but only if the extermination campaign has the “moral support” that comes from working “in the service of a new idea or Weltanschauung which burns with a new flame.” [15]

It’s important to add that Hitler regarded most people, including his beloved German “Aryans,” as quite stupid. German schools, Hitler said, should have students spend less time reading and more time developing their physical fitness; basically producing “real men” who’d become soldiers, and producing the healthy women who would give birth to them. [16] Hitler’s book only once cautioned against getting carried away with the premise that most people were stupid: “Generally speaking, one should guard against considering the broad masses more stupid than they really are.” [17] He also said that orators were more effective propagandists than writers for reaching “the masses,” and that written propaganda should be very concise and dumbed down. [18] Hitler clearly wrote Mein Kampf (which is 600 pages long) for a trusted audience with whom he believed he could be fairly honest. [19]

Emphasis on stealing working class support from Marxists

In the last chapter of Volume I, Hitler stated that his growing movement “must try to recruit its followers mainly from the ranks of the working class. It must include members of the intellectual classes only in so far as such members have rightly understood and accepted without reserve the ideal towards which the movement is striving.” Hitler lashed out at industrialists who hurt the fight against the “internationalism” promoted by Marxists:

“A movement which sincerely endeavors to bring the German worker back into his folk-community, and rescue him from the folly of internationalism, must wage a vigorous campaign against certain notions that are prevalent among the industrialists. One of these notions is that according to the concept of the folk-community, the employee is obliged to surrender all his economic rights to the employer and, further, that the workers would come into conflict with the folk-community if they should attempt to defend their own just and vital interests. Those who try to propagate such a notion are deliberate liars.”

Hitler saw class solidarity as an abomination (a Judeo-Marxist abomination of course) that must be replaced with racial solidarity. He actually defined a state as a “racial organism” but feared that excessive inequality could undermine racial solidarity, and thereby thwart the eradication of Marxism. He declared that “the paramount purpose of the State is to preserve and improve the race; […] Those States which do not serve this purpose have no justification for their existence. They are monstrosities.” [20]

Hitler said that use of the color red in Nazi posters was deliberately intended as a provocation (“our intention being to irritate the Left”). He wrote that “ordinary bourgeois” were shocked to see Nazis use the “symbolic red of Bolshevism” and call each other “Party Comrade.” But Hitler and his inner circle were delighted with accusations that they were Marxists: “We used to roar with laughter at these silly faint-hearted bourgeois and their efforts to puzzle out our origin, our intentions and our aims.” [21]

In that same Chapter, he recounts with pride the initial exploits of the goons he formed to beat up “Reds” and enforce order during his speeches: the first Nazi “Storm Troops.” However, Hitler did not believe Nazi unions could compete with the trades unions that he saw as thoroughly controlled by Marxists:

The Marxist trade-unionist citadel may be governed to-day by mediocre leaders, but it cannot be taken by assault except through the dauntless energy and genius of a superior leader on the other side. [22]

In a rare display of modesty, Hitler said no such leader existed for this particular task, so he said it was best to wait until they had state power to establish Nazi trade unions (while of course also using state power to smash the “Marxist trade-unionist citadel”). Until they had state power, Hitler advised his followers to either leave the Marxist unions, or remain but disrupt them as much as possible.

Hitler’s racist pecking order and admiration of the British Empire

Though he hated Jewish people so much that he claimed to be repulsed by their very odor, he at least credited them with cunning, or intelligence as in the case of Karl Marx. [23] Africans on the other hand, Hitler likened to dogs:

From time to time our illustrated papers publish […] the news that in some quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that locality, a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera tenor or something else of that kind. […] the more cunning Jew sees in this fact a new proof to be utilized for the theory with which he wants to infect the public, namely that all men are equal. […] The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the will of the eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly gifted people to remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery while Hottentots and Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the intellectual professions. For here we have the product only of a drilling technique, just as in the case of the performing dog. [24]

Hitler also alleged that the “cunning Jew” was happy with an “influx of negroid blood” in France which was “infecting the white race with the blood of an inferior stock” in order to “destroy the foundations of its independent existence,” and turning that region bordering Germany “into a playground for hordes of African niggers.”

In another passage of the same chapter Hitler assailed the idea that merely speaking German and living in Germany could make anyone a German: “it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake could be made as to think that a Nigger or a Chinaman will become a German because he has learned the German language.”

What does it say about George Orwell that he could review this obscene book and still remark that “I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler”? [25] What does it say about Steve Wadhams of the CBC (in 2016!) praising Orwell’s “courage” for writing that? [26]

It’s also worth recalling that when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf the US was an apartheid state plagued with lynchings of African-Americans. [27] It was also militarily occupying Haiti, a majority black republic established by a sucessfull slave revolt in 1804 (and punished by European and US white supremacists ever since). How troubling could Hitler’s virulent racism have really been to US officialdom back then, or even now [28] as it ships weapons to neo-Nazis in Ukraine to fight a proxy war with Russia? [29] And of course Winston Churchill’s racism and brutality [30] were comparable to Hitler’s. [31]

Orwell’s review dubiously claimed that Mein Kampf contained an “implied intention of smashing England” after dealing with Russia. The book clearly conveyed Hitler’s wish to one day see Germany surpass Britain as an imperial power, but preferably by making it subordinate to Germany as an ally (as Britain is today to the US) not by destroying it — the fate he undeniably intended for Marxists, Jews and Slavs. In fact, Hitler often expressed admiration and, most importantly for him, racial solidarity with the British Empire.

Consider one of the reasons Hitler rejected the idea of an alliance with India’s independence movement just after World War I: “I as a German would far rather see India under British domination than under that of any other nation.” Moreover, he wrote that groups advocating an alliance showed that they had “learned nothing from the world war” of “Anglo-Saxon determination.” [32]

Reminiscing of World War I, Hitler said that

No sacrifice should have been considered too great if it was a necessary means of gaining England’s friendship. Colonial and naval ambitions should have been abandoned and attempts should not have been made to compete against British industries. […] This policy would have involved a period of temporary self-denial, for the sake of a great and powerful future. [33]

After the war, despite the ruin and humiliation Britain helped impose on Germany, Hitler continued to advocate for an alliance with Britain. He lamented, “Of course it is difficult for us to propose England as our possible ally in the future. Our Jewish Press has always been adept in concentrating hatred against England particularly.”

Lessons in movement-building?

Any movement, whether it be noble or evil, will grapple with similar kinds of growing pains and tactical dilemmas: internal power struggles driven by petty jealousy, difficulties merging with like minded groups, decisions about how careful to be admitting new members. Generally, when writing about movement-building tactics and propaganda, Hitler’s hateful fantasies and obsessions are toned down and he appears practical. His description of the first German Labor Party meeting he attended and is one of the few times he shows any sense of humor. He basically barged into a comfortable little club that had no interest in growing or really doing much of anything. [34] But he guessed correctly that he could take it over and do something with it.

Given the success he had building his movement, and its humble origins, there is no denying that he had good political instincts for the time and place in which he lived. He stressed intensity, action, and results. He brought in his army buddies (battle-hardened racist fanatics like himself) to make sure that happened, and to ensure he kept control. He said that calling his movement a “party” was a great way to scare away “dreamers” he thought were useless. [35]

However, Hitler was a genocidal maniac who succeeded for many years because he lived a world run by like-minded genocidal maniacs. To a large extent, far from bursting down walls, he was walking through doors left wide open by centuries of western imperialism. That’s ultimately the most important lesson to take from his book.

Notes

1.The two-volume edition from the Internet Archive is cited throughout. [web] ↩
2.David Schmitz, 1988. The United States and fascist Italy, 1922-1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 133, 140. [web] ↩
3.2015-07-18. Buckingham Palace defends footage of Queen’s Nazi salute. The Irish Examiner. [web] ↩
4.Vol II, Chapter 14. ↩
5.Vol I, Chapter 1. ↩
6.Vol I, Chapter 1. ↩
7.Vol II, Chapter 15. ↩
8.Vol I, Chapter 5. ↩
9.Originally the term Social-Democrat was used to refer to communists, but with the rise of explicitly communist parties the Social-Democratic party would become the compatible-left bulwark against communism. ↩
10.Vol I, Chapter 8. ↩
11.Vol II, Chapter 14. ↩
12.Vol I, Chapter 11. ↩
13.Vol I, Chapter 11. ↩
14.Vol II, Chapter 1. ↩
15.Vol I, Chapter 5. ↩
16.Vol II, Chapter 2. ↩
17.Vol I, Chapter 6, emphasis mine. ↩
18.Vol II, Chapter 6. ↩
19.See Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds (City Lights Books, 1997) for a discussion of how Hitler’s record in power exposed the phoniness of the pro-worker positions he took in Mein Kampf. ↩
20.Vol I, Chapter 4. ↩
21.Vol II, Chapter 7. ↩
22.Vol II, Chapter 12. ↩
23.Vol I Chapter 2. ↩
24.Vol II, Chapter 2. ↩
25.George Orwell, 1940-03-21. Review of Mein Kampf. The New English Weekly. [web] ↩
26.Steve Wadhams, 2016-04-24. 5 things George Orwell understood. CBC. [web] ↩
27.Ed Pilkington, 2020-06-16. Racial terror: 2,000 black Americans were lynched in Reconstruction era, report says. The Guardian. [web] ↩
28.Rosemary Rossi, 2022-03-12. MSNBC Guest Michael McFaul Apologizes for ‘Mistaken’ Comparison of Putin to Hitler on ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’. Yahoo! News. [web] ↩
29.Benjamin Norton, 2022-03-24. Ex US official admits Ukraine conflict is NATO ‘proxy war with Russia.’ Multipolarista. [web] ↩
30.Jonathan Hari, 2010-10-27. Not his finest hour: The dark side of Winston Churchill. The Independent. [web] ↩
31.Margaret Kimberley, 2020-06-17. Freedom Rider: Churchill, Columbus and Leopold Fall Down. Black Agenda Report. [web] ↩
32.Vol II, Chapter 14. ↩
33.Vol I, Chapter 4. ↩
34.Vol I, Chapter 9. ↩
35.Vol 1 Chapter 12. ↩

(Red Sails)

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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Mon Sep 19, 2022 2:14 pm

2022 Russian MFA Report regarding: Situation with the Glorification of Nazism, Spread of Neo-Nazism, Other Practices That Contribute To Fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

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By Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation — Sep 13, 2022

EXCERPTS – CANADA

(Unofficial Translation)

Canada is at the forefront of countries that continue attempts to falsify the history of the Second World War. Ottawa has not outlawed the glorification of Nazi criminals at the legislative level. At the same time, the monuments to all those who fought against the USSR on the side of Nazi Germany are treated here with special care and respect.

In Edmonton, Alberta, at the cemetery of St. Michael, there is a memorial in the form of a cross with the inscription “For those who fought for the Freedom of Ukraine” with plates full of acronyms of such units as the Sich Riflemen, the Galician Army of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-UPA) and the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army (formed from the former units of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division “Galicia”). On the premises of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Council in the same Edmonton there is a statue in honor of the founder of the OUN-UPA, deputy commander of the Nachtigall battalion, hauptmann of the Schutzmanschaft 201 SS battalion Roman Shukhevych, the mastermind of the massacres of Belarusians, Poles, Jews and Ukrainians during the WWII. Another example is Oakville, Ontario, where are two monuments at the Ukrainian cemetery of St. Vladimir – one is dedicated to the OUN-UPA soldiers, and the other – to the members of the Galicia punitive division defeated by the Red Army in the battle for Brody on July 13-22, 1944.

As a justification for the existence of such memorials, a number of Canadian media cite statements by pro-Banderist lobbyists who openly assert that “fighting on the side of the Germans does not mean being a Nazi,” especially given the Ukrainians who served under the Nazis “fought communism”.

After WWII, thousands of Nazi criminals and collaborators (up to 5000 according to some estimates) found refuge in Canada. The report “Accomplices in Nazi crimes. 96 veterans of the Latvian SS legion who are still alive” by the “Historical Memory” Foundation and the Fund for Support and Development of Jewish Culture, Traditions, Education and Science suggest that as of 2020 there were 16 former members of the Latvian SS legion living in Canada, who could be involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the WWII. There is also a local branch of the “Daugava Hawks” (Daugavas Vanagi) that was visited by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia Edgars Rinkēvičs on his official trip to Canada in 2017.

It is worth noting that the Canadian side expressed its interest and requested the Russian Federation to provide information on the persons named in the report to conduct pursuant to The Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes program its own examination of claims these individuals had committed those offenses. The Department of Justice Canada representatives assured that their agency along with the border and immigration services and police were working to ensure that those who had directly participated in committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide should not receive asylum in Canada.

However, the traditional attitude (or rather, inaction and connivance) of the Canadian authorities towards those responsible for the massacres of civilians on the territory of the USSR indicates the opposite. Members of the Nazi units are carefully hidden from justice and allowed to peacefully live out their lives. In this regard, there is an indicative example of the former member of the punitive Schutzmannschaft 118 SS battalion Vladimir Katriuk who is responsible for the executions in Belarusian Khatyn. He died on May 22, 2015, in his apiary in Quebec.

Due to his death in September 2021, justice never reached Helmut Oberlander who served in the Sonderkommando 10a SS unit and was directly involved in the extermination of 214 Soviet children in an orphanage in Yeysk in 1942, as well as of civilians in the Krasnodar Kray and the Rostov Region. Less-than-prompt Canadian judiciary system that for two decades had been seeking only the deportation of this Hitlerite henchman (instead of convicting him of genocide and crimes against humanity) was unable – or unwilling – to implement even such a modest measure.

In total, of 19 cases initiated by Jewish organizations to deprive Nazi criminals of citizenship, only one got to the end: 2 criminals fled, 11 died, and the rest of the cases were won by the defendants.

An active role in whitewashing the crimes of the Nazis during WWII is played by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) and numerous Ukro-Banderite structures operating under its umbrella. They promote ideas of aggressive nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the glorification of Nazi collaborators who fought for “independent Ukraine”. At the same time, they deny obvious facts of the direct participation of Bandera in the extermination of the civilian population, or in organizing pogroms of the Jews, in particular in Lvov in June 1941, and of the Poles during the “Volhynia massacres”.

Under pressure from the UCC, Canada at the official level equates communism and fascism, and the tragedy of the Holodomor is presented as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people without mentioning that other peoples of the Soviet Union also became the victims of the 1930s famine. The crimes of contemporary followers of Nazism in Ukraine are hushed up. And the picture of what is happening there now is deliberately distorted in favor of the ruling regime in Kyiv.

In Ottawa, there continues the construction of a monument to the victims of communism. The memorial is partly funded by the “Tribute to Liberty” organization’s “Pathways to Liberty” campaign selling virtual “bricks” that later appear on the organization’s website and in the newsletter. Each “brick” is dedicated to the alleged victim of communism and contains biographical information about that person. In July 2021, the General Committee of United Croats of Canada dedicated its purchased “bricks” to the Ustashe Ante Pavelić and Mile Budak. In the biographical section, the first was named Doctor of Law, and the second was a poet. Both names were subsequently removed from the “Tribute to Liberty” website. At the same time, this online resource retains a mention of another Ustasha – Ivan Oršanić.

Another five “bricks” were acquired by the “Nightly Order of Vitez” organization whose members participated in the persecution and deportation of Hungarian Jews, as well as in the looting of their property in 1944. Finally, the Edmonton branch of the League of Ukrainian Canadians bought five “bricks” in memory of Roman Shukhevych.

Canadian politicians openly demonstrate their support for Nazi ideology. On February 27, 2022, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland tweeted a photo in which she holds a black and red scarf with the UPA slogan “Glory to Ukraine”. Few hours after social media users began actively commenting on this post Freeland replaced the image with a new one without the slogan.

In October 2021, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called on Canada’s Department of National Defense to conduct an investigation after the far-right extremists – members of the Ukrainian armed units – posted on social media that they were trained by Canadian military personnel as part of Operation UNIFIER training mission. The relevant information was published in a report prepared by the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Experts documented that the Ukrainian military personnel claiming to have links with the Canadian armed forces were in fact members of the “Centuria”, “Azov” and “Right Sector” extremist groups. These organizations promote white supremacy nationalism, praise members of the SS units, and have been seen performing the Nazi salute.

In response to the allegations, the Canadian side stated that it didn’t check the background of the foreign military personnel it trained and that it is Ukraine responsible for the ties between the military and extremist movements.

A wide public outcry, especially among representatives of the Jewish community, was received by a case against Montreal resident Gabriel Sohier Chaput on the use of hate speech. The reason for the start of the proceedings was his article on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. It was rife with racist images and references to Jews, and the site itself was full of photos of Hitler and other images linked to Nazi ideology. In his defense, the defendant argued that the Daily Stormer was a “parody resource” and that the purpose of the article was to ridicule excessive political correctness. Nevertheless, the prosecution regarded his words about the need for “continuous Nazism” as a real call for the physical extermination of the Jews. In July 2022, the judge hearing the case after listening to the arguments of the prosecutor’s office concluded that the state prosecutors had failed to convincingly prove the real connection between Nazism and Holocaust. In his opinion, for that matter, an expert historian should have been heard in the courtroom. In turn, the defense tried to insist on the absence of such a connection explaining the extermination of the prisoners of the death camps solely for economic reasons and not by ideology. Such a blasphemous position of Canadian justice caused the indignation of the country’s Jewish community. In this regard, on July 11, 2022, the Canadian branch of the world Jewish organization B’nai Brith published on its website a message condemning the findings of the court and stating that Canadian justice should not deny the Holocaust or distort its history.

Against this background, the country has seen an increase in the activity of neo-Nazi groups and a rise in extremist ideology: Northern Guard, Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens, Quebec organization “La Meute”, as well as regional branches of the Soldiers of Odin and the PEGIDA movement (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes). In addition, there was noticed the activity of the extremist organization Jewish Defense League of Canada which appeared as an organization to protect against anti-Semitic residents of African and Latin American quarters of Canadian cities.

At the same time, over the past few years, the activities of such movements as “Storm Alliance” and the Canadian branch of the organization “Blood and Honor” (Canadian Blood and Honor) have come to naught.

In 2021, 16 extremist groups were added to the list of terrorist organizations, including “Proud Boys”, “Atomwaffen Division”, “The Base”, “Three percenters”, and “Aryan Strikeforce”. The “Proud Boys” was dissolved in May 2021. At the same time, its members published a statement via Telegram messenger, stating that they were not associated with terrorist-related activities or the ideas of white supremacy.

For many years Mr. Paul Fromm (head of the Canadian Association for Free Expression and Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform) has been amongst the most remarkable “brown plague” ideas’ promoters and proxies in Canada. He has a reputation as one of the most famous neo-Nazis in the country, using “freedom of speech” to cover up and justify the extremist activities of North American right-wing radicals. In December 2020, the VICE digital media reported that the Canada Revenue Agency approved the payment of wage subsidies to Mr. Paul Fromm’s organizations as part of a Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy Program aimed at supporting citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As in other countries, the Canadian far-right adopted neo-Nazi symbols, and anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic slogans. Demonstrations, including anti-government ones, are held in major cities across Canada on a regular basis. New supporters are actively recruited among the youth. Propaganda campaigns are carried out in social networks and the blogosphere. As a rule, neo-Nazis manage to mobilize up to 200-300 people to participate in their public actions.

In August 2019, it came to light that Army reservist Master Cpl. Patrik Mathews, a combat engineer trained as an explosives expert, recruited his comrades for the right-wing radical group “The Base” in Beausejour (Manitoba), and subsequently fled to the United States, where he, along with American accomplices, was arrested by the FBI.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police constantly monitors the activity of far-right and neo-Nazi groups. In 2022, its officers carried out several raids targeting Atomwaffen Division supporters. In particular, in March, RCMP in Ottawa raided the home of Patrick Gordon Macdonald, a key figure in the group, and in May they arrested a 19-year-old member of the organization in Windsor. Another search warrant was executed in June near Quebec. No detentions or arrests were made.

The US intelligence services have also been keeping an eye on the Canadian far-right extremist activities, given that certain representatives of these groups took part in the riots in a number of American cities.

Nevertheless, there is an advanced anti-fascist movement in Canada, comprising several dozen small disparate groups. Its activists are trying to stop any public far-right ventures. For example, on September 30, 2017, in the center of the Canadian capital, a peaceful anti-racism march was held. The NGO “Ottawa Against Fascism” was among the main organizers.

Unfortunately, Russophobia has become commonplace in Canadian life. One of its striking examples is the provocation that took place at Ottawa’s Canadian War Museum near the T-34 tank exhibit space during a traditional Victory Day commemorative event gathering the Russian-speaking community. In 2018, a UCC representative tried to disrupt the event by taking the stage with the Ukrainian flag and shouting anti-Russian slogans.

A week later, in an open letter to the director of the museum Dr. James Fleck published on Facebook, the UCC Ottawa branch expressed indignation at Canada’s State museum’s support of the “Soviet regime glorification”. As examples of the USSR’s “proof of guilt”, the authors cited a set of unjustified Russophobic accusatory clichés. The Victory Banner was mentioned as evidence of the “criminal Soviet regime” glorification, and the symbol of the defeat of Nazism was opposed to the picture of the yellow-blue Ukrainian state standard. Later, in the Toronto Sun newspaper’s column of the notorious Russophobe Marcus Kolga, an article about an “assaulted” Ukrainian and Russians “extremists” was published.

As a result, the museum management decided to ban the Russian community from holding events on the occasion of Victory Day on its premises. There was no response to the appeals of compatriots and the Russian Embassy in Canada requesting to reconsider the decision. This case is illustrative: in Canada, any provocative vagary can become a reason for restricting Russian speakers in their rights. It is typical for local authorities to immediately take an anti-Russian position, without fully understanding the situation.

The Canadian authorities treat the patriotic activities of the Russian-speaking diaspora with disapproval and even repression. There were dismissals of Canadian citizens of Russian origin, administrative checks, and interrogations by Canadian law enforcement officers. Members of the Coordinating Council of Organizations of Russian Compatriots (KSORS), who participated in the World Congress of Compatriots Living Abroad in October 2021 in Moscow, upon their return to Canada came to the attention of local intelligence services. Its relevant employees visited the Congress participants in order to find out the reasons for attending this event, as well as “plans for the future.” A fact of infringement of the right to work against a Russian-speaking community representative in Canada was recorded. A Russian citizen from Calgary reported that various IT companies repeatedly rejected his job applications because of his nationality and Russian citizenship.

Russian Embassy and Consulates in Canada regularly receive complaints from compatriots about insults and threats from the Ukrainian diaspora, and damage to their property. The most difficult situation can be witnessed in the areas of compact neighborhoods with residents from Russia and Ukraine (Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver). Citizens with Russian roots often receive e-mail and personal death threats and reprisals for their proactive stance or for having ties to Russia. Russian children in Canadian schools and university students are being bullied. Since March 2022, private Russian-language schools in Canada have been forced to switch to remote work.

There are instances of physical assault. In Toronto in March-April 2022, a number of cases of beatings of Russian-speaking citizens were registered. Three of them took place in Russian grocery stores, and two in Russian restaurants. A total of five attackers were arrested.

The aggression may be also provoked simply by using the Russian language, no matter the nationality. For example, three minors attacked a Moldavian citizen. Teenagers struck the woman on the ground after hearing her speak on the phone in Russian.

Ukrainian neo-Nazis in Montreal send letters to Canadian companies calling for the Russians to be fired. They use public intimidation tactics as well. They also compile lists of prominent US Russian-speaking lawyers.

There is serious administrative and public pressure on Russian-related businesses. Aggression against everything Russian forces the owners of private companies to remove all references to Russia and Russians. On March 10, 2022, due to imminent threats, the Russian Spoon bakery in Vancouver had to remove the word “Russian” from its signs.

The cultural sphere has been subject to restrictions. Some Canadian concert halls canceled the performances of young Russian virtuoso pianist Alexander Malofeev in Vancouver and Montreal. The Canada Council for the Arts refuses to fund projects with the participation of Russian or Belarusian cultural figures until “the Russian army leaves the territory of Ukraine”.

Following the Federal Government’s request, the Canadian media regulator officially banned “RT” and “RT France” broadcasting in Canada. Local cable TV providers at the same time excluded Russian TV channels from their broadcasting net. Hence, Canadian authorities proceeded with its policy of monopolizing the information field and depriving its citizens and Russian Canadians of accessing alternative sources of information, which infringe democratic principles and freedom of mass media.

The level of hate crimes is still very high in Canada. The report “Police-reported Crimes in Canada in 2021” (as of August 2, 2022) highlights that criminal hatred offenses have a 27 percent increase in comparison with the numbers in 2021.

The most vulnerable social group is Black Canadians (642 crimes). The report also shows the increase of religious hatred crimes: Catholics – 260 %, Muslims – 71 %, and Jewish – 47 % (478 crimes in total).

Anti-Semitism stained student communities of the Universities of York, McGill, Ryerson, and Toronto. Edmonton Journal (Alberta) was accused of deliberate hatred propaganda after publishing insulting caricatures.

Social media contained calls to boycott SMEs run by Israeli descendants. The Liberal Party leadership acknowledged Hassan Guillet’s (Quebecois politician) comments as a demonstration of ethnic intolerance. One put racist graffiti on Jewish community MPs’ electoral billboards. One attacked people and repeatedly declared anti-Semitic slogans. Numerous cases of vandalism happened, including the ones using Nazi symbols.

Upon acknowledging that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the world and in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau created the position of Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Anti-Semitism in November 2020. However, it did not put on halt such crimes. For example, a notorious act of vandalism in the synagogue of Westmount, Quebec, when a young man painted walls with the Nazi swastika, had broad repercussions in society.

It is noteworthy that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced accusations of racism himself during his election campaign in September 2019. The reason – published archive photos, where he appeared in blackface. He subsequently acknowledged his behavior as an act of “unconscious racism” and offered his apologies to minorities.

Other governmental officials also faced charges of xenophobia. The Senate of Canada doubly made a decision to dismiss Ontario Senator Lynn Beyak for hatred and racism propaganda. The first attempt was in March 2019, when she refused to delete citizens’ letters from her personal webpage on the Senate website. The letters expressed support for the Senator’s positive attitude towards a colonial system of residential schools for Indigenous peoples and contained racist comments towards the First Nations. The second one was in February 2020, as the politician did not fully comply with recommendations, including the ones to pass an educational course on combatting racism successfully.

Rapid COVID-19 spread has also resulted in a surge of xenophobia and racism in the country, according to Statistics Canada. The official statement of Chief Commissioner of Canadian Human Rights Commission Marie-Claude Landry (as of April 8, 2020) stated that the pandemic period witnessed a serious increase in racist insults and threats even direct physical violence against minorities.

Statistics Canada reported a sharp increase in the number of offenses against ethnic minorities with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forty-three thousand people’s census showed that every fifth (21 %) “colored” Canadian faces discrimination. The Africans (26 %), the Koreans (26 %), the Chinese (22 %) and the Filipinos (22 %) suffered more often than other ethnic groups.

The report “COVID Racism” (March 2021) states that 1 150 people were informed about anti-Asian racism starting March 10, 2020, until February 28, 2021. The main victims were vulnerable social groups (the seniors, the youth, and low-income groups). The incidents usually took place in public areas.

Sixty percent of victims were women. Initiated by the New Democratic Party of Canada the House of Commons unanimously adopted the resolution condemning racism against Asians.

One vandalized the Buddhist church in Montreal. Several sculptures and religious objects were destructed. The Montreal police considered it a hate crime.

Canadian entrepreneurs of Chinese origin in Vancouver had to dampen their business activity by 50-70 %. In GTA Chinese restaurant sales dropped by 30-80 %.

Indigenous peoples are still the most discriminated social group in Canada. Canadian mass media regularly reported cases of violence in 2020.

As of November 2020, 41 indigenous reservations had limited access to clean potable water. The General Auditor of Canada’s inspection revealed that federal financing quotas to provide some isolated communities with clean water lack 30 years of update.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) announced its serious preoccupation with the dire situation for Anishinaabe children in the northwestern part of Ontario. The water there is contaminated with mercury, and, as result, local people have chronic and very serious health problems, physical and mental. The Committee notes that children who suffer from dysphasia and have problems with education have convulsions.

The Canadian police killed 25 representatives of the First Nations in 2017-2020. The percentage of Indigenous peoples in prisons has reached 30 %, in Western provinces (Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan) – 54 %.

Nevertheless, a racialized approach is widespread among police, intelligence, and border service staff in Canada. It is applied not only to Indigenous peoples, but also at the same extent to African Canadians, other ethnic minorities, and Muslims. Police “street raids”, when officers stop suspects, interrogate them and check their documents, are usually spontaneous and with the “special” treatment of African Canadians.

The committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination underscored that African Canadians and Indigenous peoples are overrepresented on all the stages of justice administration (from arrest to imprisonment). The committee rationalized it firstly by widespread poverty and lack of social services provided for them.

The Committee on children’s rights also pointed out the high level of poverty among the First Nations and African Canadians.

Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples put a special emphasis on new legislation, eliminating some discriminatory consequences of previous legal provisions. Some of them implied that Indigenous women (and their descendants) married to non-status men lose their aboriginal status, while non-aboriginal women married to status indigenous men acquire such a status. He stated that some people still did not receive such a status due to discrimination against matrilineal descendants still in place.

In 2022, CRC also urged the Government of Canada to reconsider legislation to equalize men and women in transferring its Indigenous status to its grandchildren. Besides, the Committee experts made some additional proposals. To restore names in birth certificates, where they were erased or changed illegally. To take legal and administrative measures which would preserve rights for name, conservation of native culture, and language for Indigenous children. To provide children with education about their cultural identity.

CRC criticized the limited access of Indigenous parents to birth registration procedures.

Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples also pointed out an existing accommodation crisis among members of the Inuit and the First Nations communities. Their houses are overcrowded and need repair.

CRC expressed preoccupation that Indigenous women and girls under patronage or children’s guardianship system are more likely to become victims of people trafficking with the further aim at sexual exploitation.

CRC experts analyzed the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Final report. According to it, thousands of such cases have not been registered for decades.

The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) expressed concern about the high percentage of girls suffering from discrimination and sexual harassment in schools and the disproportionately large contingent of migrant, refugee, asylum seeker, and indigenous girls who continue to face difficulties in accessing quality education.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern about reports of unequal distribution of resources for education and insufficient funding of native language education programs. That is why some groups of children, especially African Canadians and indigenous peoples, do not have equal access to quality education, which in the future leads to socio-economic inequality between these groups of the population.

CRC criticized the structural nature of discrimination against indigenous children and children of African descent. Experts noted that the most problematic areas include education, healthcare, and ensuring a decent standard of living.

The National Aboriginal Circle Against Family Violence noted that in most communities in Canada, the provision of social services is funded by provincial or territorial authorities. However, in First Nations reservations, these services are usually funded by the Federal Government, which in many areas provides significantly fewer funds for relevant programs and services per capita than is the case with provincial and territorial authorities.

At the end of May 2021, the discovery of a mass grave of Indigenous peoples at an Indian residential school in Kamloops, BC, which operated from 1890-1978 (until 1969 under the control of the Catholic Church, and further under the control of the federal government), was an extremely resonant case.

The remains of 215 children aged three and over were found near the residential school. According to the chairman of the Indian community of the city Rosanne Casimir, all deaths are undocumented. Probably, because of their violent nature.

According to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, about 500 students were registered at the school. At the same time, 51 children died in it only in 1915-1963. In total, during the existence of the residential school system in Canada, more than 150,000 children have passed through them. Among them, more than 4,000, according to the Center’s estimates, have become victims of state policy towards indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, the real death toll, according to experts, may be much higher.

The system forcibly separated children from their families. The residential school students were forbidden not only to see their family members but even to use their native language in communication and adhere to their own traditions. At the same time, one of the main tasks of such a school was to develop the skills of primitive manual labor. Living conditions there were very poor: children suffered from malnutrition, lack of quality medical care, hard physical labor, and abuse. All of the above has caused a high mortality rate in such schools.

In memory of the children whose remains were found in Kamloops, on May 30, 2021, national flags were lowered at half-mast across Canada as a sign of mourning. In some cities, it lasted 215 hours – an hour for each deceased child.

In addition, during demonstrations in Canada a monument to the creator of the residential school system, Egerton Ryerson, was demolished in Toronto. The protesters painted the statue and its base with content, referring to the terrible find.

Just a month later, Canada announced the discovery of another, even larger (more than 750 people) burial on the territory of a similar educational institution in former Marieval Indian Residential School, Saskatchewan. After that, another action in memory of the dead children was organized by the Cowessess First Nation. The event began with a prayer and ended with a minute of silence.

Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau called the incident a “painful reminder of a dark and shameful page in the history of the country”.

According to the observations of the CRC following the consideration of the combined 5th and 6th periodic reports of Canada, to date, indigenous children and children of African descent continue to be overrepresented in the system of alternative education, including in the form of foster care. At the same time, they often find themselves cut off from other people of their ethnicity. Such children are more likely than others to become victims of violence and abuse. They also suffer from a lack of attention from educators.

As for regulatory and legal measures to counteract manifestations of racism and neo-Nazism in Canada, the principle of equality of all residents of the country regardless of race, social origin, and religion is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, 1988. Despite this fact, there is no formal ban on the activities of far-right movements in the country’s legislation. Article 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada declares responsibility for the dissemination of ideas of racial superiority (in particular, for calls for physical violence and deterioration of the situation of certain groups of the population) in the form of imprisonment for up to two years.

The first policy document in this area was Canada’s Action Plan against Racism adopted in 2005 by the liberal government of Paul Martin. It is an attempt to systematize the forms of racial intolerance recorded in Canada and the distribution of powers between federal ministries and departments in the implementation of measures to curb them.

In 2018, the Government of Justin Trudeau presented National Strategy on Countering Radicalization to Violence. The document provides an analysis of the political, religious, and ethnocultural factors leading to the escalation of extremism in society. Poverty, low levels of education, and limited access to healthcare are among the main challenges.

To implement the provisions of the Strategy, a Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence was established under the Ministry of Public Safety of Canada in 2017. This structure received significant financial support ($35 million in 2016 with a subsequent annual budget of $10 million). In addition, a special Fund for the Sustainability of Society has been established with resources for financing 22 scientific research directions in countering extremism in Canada (in 2019-2020, $7 million were allocated for these purposes).

In June 2019, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, announced the allocation of $45 million for the implementation of the Strategy to Combat Racism for 2019-2022. To fulfill the tasks specified in it, a special unit of the secretariat against racism was created on the basis of the Ministry. According to the Government, by 2021, 85 projects worth $15 million in funding have been provided under the strategy. In the fall of 2020, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced additional support for initiatives to combat racism amounting to $50 million for 2020-2022.

As for the relevant regulation at the regional level, the Law “On Combating Racism” exists only in Ontario (adopted in 2017 by the Provincial Legislature). In the “Anti-Racism Policy” presented in 2018 pursuant to the aforementioned law, the key preventive measures include strict observance of the principle of equality in hiring for representatives of all ethnic groups, holding training seminars, and the nomination of representatives from among the People of Color and indigenous population to senior positions of federal and provincial authorities.

In addition, the Government of Ontario adopted Anti-Black Racism Strategy, which provides the allocation of $47 million to help children and adolescents from Afro-Canadian families for “socialization”, improving the level of education, as well as the revision of correctional policy for young offenders.

Nevertheless, when Canada passed the Universal Periodic Review procedure within the framework of the UN Human Rights Council, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with reference to the Human Rights Commission of Canada, noted that there was little progress in solving many long-standing problems, including the situation with indigenous people and other vulnerable groups of the population.

Given the ambivalent attitude of the Canadian authorities towards countering manifestations of racism, it is not surprising that Canada’s position regarding the UN General Assembly resolution “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, submitted annually by Russia together with a wide range of co-sponsors. Recently, the delegation of Canada has abstained from voting on this document. In previous years, representatives of the country have repeatedly voted against the adoption of the resolution.

(Telegraph)

https://orinocotribune.com/2022-russian ... ation-xen/
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 21, 2022 2:36 pm

NEO – NAZISTS DEMOLISHED THE HEADQUARTERS OF NKPJ!

Dear comrades,
The New Communist Party of Yugoslavia informs you that Neo-Nazis organized a new attack on our Headquarters in Belgrade. They demolished our windows and wrote anticommunist and Neo-nazi slogans. Reactionary forces attacked our Headquarters 5 times last year. In the last few years it has become standard. But the last attack on our Party was the biggest.

In the last few years Neo-Nazis are very active and they constantly destroy a lot of antifascist monuments and other symbols of socialism in our country. The NKPJ is the most active Party in our country to defend socialist and anti-fascist symbols. Police and authorities did not want to do anything. Our Security Services and Police are very familiar with Neo-Nazi groups and they created a lot of them.

Anti-people Government and reactionary forces are disturbed by our political program. Pressure on our Party intensified in the last few years. Attack on our Party exists in the context of huge anti-communist hysteria in Serbia and contradiction in the world. The anticommunist campaign in Serbia goes hand in hand with the offensive against the workers'-people's rights and has been going on for many years. Many films, series, and “science
programs” are made to discredit the socialist construction that existed in our country. It is being shown every day. The media is portraying communists and revolutionaries as criminals and adventurers, and on the other hand, they portray collaborators as patriots and “saviors of the nation”. They want to show that the struggle for social justice is an absurdity, while treason is something to admire. By order of the EU, Serbia brought the law of rehabilitation law and 3000 collaborators during the Second World War were rehabilitated.

Reactionary forces in Serbia with last actions against our Party wanted to scare communists in our country. The members of NKPJ are followers of the partisans, who, led by the communists, defeated fascism and collaborationists who served the Nazi occupiers and slaughtered their own people. Communists are proud of that struggle, because after that glorious victory, a more just world was built, which was tailored to humanity, foresaw a
future worth living in, and spread brotherhood and unity among nations, not a policy of hatred and exploitation. NKPJ is sending a warning to the cowards who are hiding behind the Neo - Nazists that communists will not back down because of useless threats. Communists are people of a special kind who are not afraid of cowardly Neo - Nazis attacks. The Communists will unreservedly and ruthlessly fight to the last breath and drops of blood
for a world without exploitation, racism, fascism, chauvinism, interethnic hatred, and all other reactionary forms of government.

NKPJ asks our sister communist and workers' parties to organize demonstrations in front of the Serbian Embassy in the next two weeks or to send protest letters against the discrimination of NKPJ to The President of the Republic of Serbia by e-mail:
kontakt.predsednik@predsednik.rs

We thank you in advance for your solidarity!

For the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Belgrade,
General Secretary, 19.10.2022.
Аleksandar Banjanac

http://solidnet.org/.galleries/documents/FASCISM-1.pdf
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Re: Fascism

Post by blindpig » Fri Nov 04, 2022 2:26 pm

Image
Benito Mussolini marching into Rome. (Photo: picryl.com)

Lessons from the rise of Mussolini, 100 years on
Originally published: Red Flag on October 28, 2022 by Luca Tavan (more by Red Flag) | (Posted Nov 03, 2022)

One hundred years ago, in October 1922, Benito Mussolini’s paramilitary blackshirts marched on the Italian capital to demand the dissolution of the government of Prime Minister Luigi Facta. The March on Rome is the foundational myth of fascist power. Through this daring act, so the story goes, the strongman Mussolini installed himself as head of the Italian government.

Yet the march itself was a farce. Mussolini’s fascist forces numbered only a few thousand and, armed mostly with sticks, were scattered and bogged down in mud and rain. They were vastly outnumbered and outgunned by government troops in the capital. And Mussolini, the “man on horseback” himself, hid in a barricaded office near the Swiss border.

Despite the obvious weakness of the fascists, the government mounted only symbolic resistance to the coup. “Everybody knew perfectly well that the troops would refuse to take any forcible action whatever against the Fascisti, with whom they were in sympathy”, the British ambassador observed. Less than 24 hours later, King Victor Emanuele appointed Mussolini prime minister. When the new dictator’s troops finally reached Rome, they entered in a victory parade.

For all the theatrics of the March on Rome, Mussolini didn’t take power against the will of the ruling class, but with its blessing. The fascists’ road to power was paved by tolerance, the outright collaboration of the police and politicians, and lavish financial backing from industrialists. The Italian ruling class welcomed Mussolini because its members viewed the fascists as a solution to several years of crisis and class struggle that had put in question their own rule.

The First World War had turned the country into a tinderbox. Nearly 6 million Italians had been drafted, 600,000 killed and 700,000 permanently disabled. Peasant conscripts returned from the fronts radicalised. Factory workers chafed against the establishment of martial law in their workplaces. The 1917 Russian Revolution provided radicalising workers with a practical example to follow: topple the capitalist system to end the barbarity of war. During the movement’s height, the Biennio Rosso (Two Red Years) of 1919-20, workers launched a decisive struggle to wrest control over Italy from the ruling class. At the same time, peasants seized the land and began forcing massive concessions from large landowners. Civil war seemed imminent.

The social crisis also produced the right-wing radicalisation that gave birth to fascism. Benito Mussolini, a prominent figure in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), shocked his comrades by declaring in favour of the country’s entry into the war. A meeting of PSI members drove Mussolini out, spitting on him and calling him a traitor.

In November 1914, Mussolini founded a new right-wing daily newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), with the backing of Italian industrialists and French imperialism. In these pages, his new ideas took form. Il Popolo trumpeted support for the war and hostility to all forces, such as the socialist movement, that had the potential to disrupt it. Mussolini quickly began drawing the conclusion that democracy itself was holding the country back from achieving its destiny—he would eventually describe fascism as “supreme anti-democracy”.

The movement was a new form of reactionary politics. Instead of relying on sections of the ruling class and state, Mussolini created a mass popular movement in defence of the capitalist order. Fascism’s method was political violence; its ultimate objective was, as Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky described, “to smash the working class, destroy its organisations, and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery”. Mussolini brought together different disaffected layers of society to this end: bitter war-hardened veterans, middle-class youth who revelled in political violence and the despairing long-term unemployed. The project won him support from British government agents, who sponsored the fascist movement after Mussolini explained:

I will mobilise the mutilati [disabled ex-soldiers] in Milan, and they will break the heads of any pacifists who try to hold anti-war meetings in the streets.

In April 1919, the fascists launched their first major attack on the left, burning down the headquarters of the Socialist daily newspaper Avanti! (Forward!). Police stood aside as the fascist gang murdered three socialists. But while the workers’ and peasants’ movements were still on the offensive, and Italy was caught in “strike frenzy”, the fascists were hesitant to confront the workers’ movement in its metropolitan centres of power in the industrial north. They instead built their base in rural areas, such as the Po Valley, where landowners hired them to terrorise peasant organisations.

The wave of struggle reached its peak in September 1920, when half a million armed workers in the industrial north occupied their factories. Many workers saw this as the final struggle to expropriate their bosses and begin the construction of a socialist society. Speaking at a workers’ occupation of FIAT (the Italian Automobiles Factory of Turin), Antonio Gramsci, a revolutionary Marxist, underlined the historic nature of the events: “Social hierarchies have been smashed and historical values turned upside down”. The head of FIAT was so despondent that he offered to hand his factories over to the workers.

But the Italian Socialist Party blinked at the opportunity to lead a struggle for power. Its leadership was paralysed by divisions between revolutionaries who wanted to topple the capitalist system and reformists who wanted a share of power within it. In the end, they compromised with the bosses, extracting a few concessions and agreeing to end the occupations.

While the September factory struggles formally ended in a stalemate, the capitalists immediately sought revenge on the workers’ movement. As the French anarchist Daniel Guérin wrote, they “felt the chill of expropriation pass over them” and wasted no time re-establishing their dominance. In early 1921, unemployment rose dramatically and the strike rate plummeted. Capitalists banded together in new industrial and agricultural federations to coordinate their assault. They also started to give serious backing to the fascist movement. In spring, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti endorsed fascist candidates as part of a national bloc, helping 30 of them get elected. Large amounts of money began flowing to Mussolini’s organisation.

The fascists were carrying out an orgy of violence against the left. In six months, they ransacked 119 trades council branches, 107 cooperatives, 100 workers’ cultural centres and 28 union branches. Dozens of left-wing militants were murdered. The state rapidly ceded power to the blackshirts—as they marched through town after town, military arsenals were handed to them.

Given the profound threat that fascist violence posed to the organisations of the workers’ movement, it is remarkable that neither of the main left parties waged a consistent fight against Mussolini’s gangs.

The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was formed at the beginning of 1921 by activists repulsed by the Socialist Party’s repeated betrayals. The undisputed head of the PCI was Amadeo Bordiga, an energetic and charismatic revolutionary who had organised the opposition to the Socialist Party’s reformist leadership. Bordiga rightly condemned the electoral obsession of the Socialist Party, which subordinated workers’ struggle to winning seats in parliament. But he went too far, dismissing any distinction between capitalist democracy and fascist dictatorship, and systematically underplaying the threat fascists posed to democratic rights, arguing that they would be no different to any other capitalist government:

Fascism incorporates the counter-revolutionary struggle of all the allied bourgeois forces, and, for this reason, it is by no means necessarily compelled to destroy the democratic institutions. From our Marxist point of view, this situation is by no means paradoxical, because we know that the democratic system is only a collection of deceptive guarantees, behind which the ruling class conducts its battle against the working class.

At other times, he implied that the victory of fascist dictatorship would actually be an advance for the workers’ movement because it would destroy illusions in capitalist democracy. “So the fascists want to burn down the parliamentary circus? We’d love to see the day”, he wrote in July 1922, just months before Mussolini’s victory. “The main danger is, and remains, that everyone agrees that the apple cart isn’t overturned, and that a legal and parliamentary solution is found.” This perspective ignored the fact that democratic rights are vital for the workers’ movement. The right to form unions and political organisations, which are the basis for developing workers’ social power, was precisely what the fascists wanted to destroy.

The response of the Socialist Party, which still commanded the loyalty of most organised workers, was equally dismal. It was still divided between “maximalists” who mouthed revolutionary rhetoric, and reformist parliamentarians and union leaders. The reformists set the tone of the party’s response to fascism, arguing that the institutions of the capitalist state would defend democracy and protect the working class from fascist attacks. Reformist leader Giacomo Matteotti spoke in parliament urging passivity:

Stay home! Do not respond to provocations. Even silence, even cowardice, are sometimes heroic.

There was, however, one popular organisation that understood the need to unite masses of people in practical resistance to the physical threat of fascism: the Arditi del Popolo (The People’s Daring Ones). This organisation arose out of associations of the war veterans, who had returned to Italy from the front deeply politically polarised. While some joined the fascists, many turned to the left, and pledged to use their military experience to obstruct the advance of the blackshirts.

In July 1921, the organisation held its first national rally in Rome. Three thousand armed Arditi led a march of 50,000 striking workers from different political and union organisations. The demonstration called for the disarming of the fascists. In August 1922, they repelled an armed attack by 20,000 fascists on the left-wing stronghold of Parma. As an Arditi leader later recalled:

Working-class people took to the streets—as bold as the waters of a river which is bursting its banks. With their shovels, pick-axes, iron bars and all sorts of tools, they helped the Arditi del Popolo to dig up the cobblestones and tram tracks, to dig trenches, and to erect barricades using carts, benches, timber, iron girders and anything else they could get their hands on. Men, women, old people, young people from all parties and from no party at all were all there, united in a single iron will: resist and fight.

Just ten weeks after his forces were defeated in Parma, however, Mussolini was in power. He later admitted that, had the tactics used by the left in Parma been replicated across the country, the success of his movement would have been thrown into question.

Despite its initial strength, the Arditi del Popolo was quickly isolated. This was primarily because the main workers’ parties disgracefully abandoned it. While many rank-and-file Communist Party members naturally understood the importance of defending democratic rights, and gravitated toward the Arditi, the party leaders around Bordiga had other ideas. They declared:

We can only deplore the fact that Communists have been in contact with the people in Rome who initiated the Arditi del Popolo, offering to work with them and follow their instructions. If such actions are repeated, the most severe measures will be taken.

Bordiga had a sterile and sectarian approach to revolutionary politics. Rather than attempting to convince masses of workers of the necessity of revolution by fighting alongside them, he believed it was necessary to build a party of the “pure and hard” that strictly separated itself from every other institution and waited patiently for the masses to come and join it.

The PSI, on the other hand, clung to the idea that appealing to “legality” would save it, and signed a disgusting “peace pact” with Mussolini. This meant disavowing any support for the actions of the Arditi. Ultimately, the tragedy of Mussolini’s rise is not only that the working class was defeated, but that it was beaten without a real fight. There was no lack of will to confront the barbarity of the fascists, but workers were misled and disoriented by the leaders of their organisations.

The ruling class thought that it could use the fascists as a battering ram against the workers’ movement, and then incorporate them into the political system. The Liberal prime minister believed that, in power, Mussolini would behave like any other conservative politician. But Mussolini’s project radicalised as he consolidated control over the state. Political assassinations of socialists and other dissenters increased. Within three years, Mussolini had banned all political opposition, dissolved the trade unions and consolidated the world’s first fascist regime.

A century on from the March on Rome, new fascist and far-right forces are assembling. Again, the global ruling classes are showing that they are perfectly willing to deal with them as long as it’s good for business. The red carpet has been rolled out for Giorgia Meloni, a fascist Mussolini admirer, to form a new government in Italy. Far-right regimes have been normalised from India to Brazil.

The experience of Mussolini’s rise holds important lessons for socialists. Perhaps the greatest lesson, obscured by most conventional accounts of the March on Rome, is that Mussolini could have been stopped. Had the workers’ movement been united to confront the fascists, as it did in Parma, one of the darkest and most brutal chapters of European history might have been avoided.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/03/lessons ... -years-on/

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German left slams authorities for covering up crimes of National Socialist Underground
Collusion between far-right criminal networks and state security services in Germany has been exposed in multiple cases, triggering widespread protests

November 01, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch

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An anti-fascist mobilization demanding justice for the victims of NSU crimes. (Photo: via JungeWelt)

Leftists and other anti-fascist sections across Germany have slammed the authorities and security forces of the State of Hesse for covering up the criminal activities of the notorious neo-Nazi terrorist group, National Socialist Underground (NSU). On October 28, FragDenStaat, a platform working to ensure freedom of information, and ZDF Magazin Royale’s Jan Böhmermann published files on the activities of the NSU that had been kept classified by the Hessian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution (LfV).

On October 29, the federal and Hessian leadership of Die Linke (The Left) applauded the people and the platforms that released the NSU files, and slammed the authorities for covering up the crimes by classifying the report on NSU activities.

The NSU is an underground neo-Nazi terrorist group active in Germany, which was exposed in 2011. It has been accused of carrying out around at least nine xenophobic murders, the killing of a police woman, several bombings and bank robberies, and threatening leftists and other human rights activists. In 2019, four NSU terrorists were convicted by the Munich Higher Regional Court on 10 counts of murder and for running a terrorist organization. By that time, it had come to light that officers from the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and the police were aware of the crimes committed by the NSU, and were in some way complicit in many of these crimes. The revelations triggered widespread outrage and protests from anti-fascist groups, left-wing parties, and liberal sections and politicians across Germany, who demanded a detailed state inquiry into the NSU crimes and the complicity of the state security forces.

According to a JungeWelt report on October 31, the NSU files had originally been classified as “secret” for 120 years, but this period was reduced to 30 years after the murder of the Walter Lübcke, from the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), in Kassel by a neo-Nazi.

The credibility of the security forces in Germany has already been severely dented with several exposés on the collusion between them and far-right and neo-Nazi networks. In July 2021, 20 active and former officers from the special operations unit of the Frankfurt police were found sharing far-right symbols and hate messages in their group chats. This once again exposed the level of far-right entrenchment in the German security forces. Earlier, the federal authorities had disbanded the 2nd company of Bundeswehr’s Special Forces Command (KSK) for colluding with and covering up right-wing extremist activities.

Frankfurt, in Hesse, has been identified by several observers as a hotspot of right-wing extremist activity in Germany. It was earlier found that certain threatening emails received by notable rights activists and left-wing politicians in Frankfurt from the NSU were traced back to a police computer in Frankfurt. The decision by the CDU-Greens coalition government in Hesse to classify NSU documents on the murder of Halit Yozgat, who was shot by NSU terrorists in Kassel in 2006, has also been met with widespread protests. While a mass petition for the publication of the NSU files with around 130,000 signatures was submitted earlier to the State authorities, the government in Hesse led by the CDU and Alliance 90/The Greens did not approve it.

On October 29, while addressing the convention of the Hesse committee of Die Linke, federal party leader Janine Wissler welcomed the publication of the Hessian NSU files and accused the Hessian State government of ‘’secrecy instead of enlightenment.”

“For years, many people have fought for this report on the NSU, which was initially classified as secret by the Hessian State Office for Constitutional Protection for 120 years (until 2134), to be published. Already, the downgrading of secrecy of parts of the report, so that its existence was made publicly known and cited in witness hearings of the investigative committee and in our final report, was 2017 a months-long battle. We have made petitions in the State House that the report be published in full, 130,000 people have signed a petition. It failed because of the reluctance of the state government. Good that this part of the files is now accessible,” she said.

Torben Müller from the Socialist German Workers Youth (SDAJ) had earlier told Peoples Dispatch, “Till this day, the German state is unable to give us the answers who the NSU really was, but we know it wasn’t only the three known people. The NSU was supported by people of the far-right and also by the state. It’s an open secret that the far right groups that were founded in the 1990s only exist by the money of the state. There is no week in Germany without the discovery of a new fascist group in state organizations, police or army.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/11/01/ ... derground/
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