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Israel helps Ukraine whitewash its Nazis

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2022

It’s OK with US (government). It (you) is paying to support them.

Asa Winstanley and Ali Abunimah

https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-helps-ukraine-whitewash-its-nazis/36911

A man in military uniform overlooks a desert
Wearing the “Wollfsangel” symbol used by Hitler’s fighters in World War II, Ukrainian Azov fighter Illia Samoilenko vists the Masada archelogical site in Israel. (AzovstalFam/Twitter)

Representatives of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion have been touring Israel to drum up support for the unit’s imprisoned fighters. They have been meeting with Israeli politicians and soldiers.

Azov intelligence officer Illia Samoilenko was released in a prisoner exchange with Russia in September.

He had been one of the hundreds of Azov fighters who surrendered in May at the end of the long Russian siege of the eastern city of Mariupol.

“Israel values freedom, values strength, Israel values honor. It’s the same things that we also value,” he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week.

Samoilenko also told The Times of Israel that “he sees Israel and Ukraine on the same side, the civilized battling the uncivilized in a struggle for the future of humanity,” the outlet summarized.

“We have prosperity, beautiful, prosperous, beautiful civilization, and they have medieval cavemen,” he said. It seems the “they” in this case are the Palestinians and the Russians, who Samoilenko regards as “uncivilized.”

Along for the Israeli tour with Samoilenko is Yulia Fedosiuk, the wife of an imprisoned Azov fighter and a far-right activist in her own right.

Both were on a charm offensive this week, as part of a wider push to whitewash Azov’s image in the West.

Three people in suits pose for a photo
Azov members Illia Samoilenko and Yulia Fedosiuk met with Naama Lazimi of Israel’s Labor Party. (AzovstalFam/Twitter)

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, it was widely acknowledged that the Azov Battalion promoted Nazi ideology.

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Yes, They Were Socialists: How the Nazis Waged War on Private Property

Posted by M. C. on July 6, 2022

The Nazi government took control of the economy, which is what one expects from socialism.

https://mises.org/wire/yes-they-were-socialists-how-nazis-waged-war-private-property

John Kennedy

When the average person thinks of the Nazis, what often comes to mind is World War II, the Holocaust, and rousing speeches of hate. However, the National Socialists also had economic and political policies, policies many just assume were either free market or New Deal–style public works projects like the Autobahn. But Nazi policy was not so cut-and-dried.

The Nazis were socialists, and it showed in many of the policies they implemented after coming to power in 1933. First, like the Soviets, the Nazis initiated a war on private property. Not surprisingly, property rights were severely curbed by National Socialism in the name of public welfare.

How did the National Socialists combat private property in Germany? The first step came shortly after the Nazis took control, when they abolished private property. Article 153 of the Weimar constitution guaranteed private property, with expropriation only to occur within the due process of the law, but this article was nullified by a decree on February 28, 1933. 

With this, the new National Socialist government had complete control of private property in Germany. While they did not take complete control of the lands like the Bolsheviks did in Russia in 1917, the Nazis issued quotas for industries and farms, and later they reorganized all industry into corporations run by members of the Nazi Party. 

The War on Business

Peter Temin wrote about this in Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning, stating:

Both governments reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups with a larger number of subgroups to create a private hierarchy for state control. The state could therefore direct a firm’s activities without acquiring direct ownership of enterprises. The pre-existing tendency to form cartels was encouraged to eliminate competition that would destabilize prices.

The Nazis, ironically, called this reorganization “privatization,” although the owners of these corporations were either removed from board positions and replaced by Nazi Party members or sold out and became Nazi Party members. They included IG Farben and the Junkers airplane factory. IG Farben was a chemical company founded in 1925 by Carl Bosch and Carl Duisberg, who were both Jewish, and had a capitalization of around a billion marks by 1926. By 1938, all of the company’s Jewish workers had been purged and the supervisory board replaced by Nazis (see Joseph Borkin’s book The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben).

IG Farben was a clear example of the reorganization of industry the Nazis undertook for their benefit. Sybille Steinbacher, a professor of Holocaust studies, wrote about the public-private partnership in her book Auschwitz, stating:

Otto Ambros and IG Farben director Fritz ter Meer held a board meeting in Berlin with Carl Krauch who was not only a member of the board of directors of IG Farben, but also a member of the circle of industrialists around Reichsfurhrer-SS known as Himmler’s “Circle of Friends.” 

After the Nazis took power, this kind of cooperation was common.

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Canada and the Banderites

Posted by M. C. on May 11, 2022

by Thierry Meyssan

On March 10, Canada managed to get some thirty countries to sign a second, very Orwellian declaration, welcoming – in the name of press freedom – the censorship in the West of Russia Today and the Sputnik agency, two Russian public media organizations.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article216785.html

This article is a follow-up to :
 1. “Russia wants to force the US to respect the UN Charter,” January 4, 2022.
 2. “Washington pursues RAND plan in Kazakhstan, then Transnistria,” January 11, 2022.
 3. “Washington refuses to hear Russia and China,” January 18, 2022.
 4. “Washington and London, deafened“, February 1, 2022.
 5. “Washington and London try to preserve their domination over Europe“, February 8, 2022.
 6. “Two interpretations of the Ukrainian affair”, 16 February 2022.
 7. “Washington sounds the alarm, while its allies withdraw”, 22 February 2022.
 8. “Russia declares war on the Straussians”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.
 9. “A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis”, 5 March 2022.
 10 “Israel stunned by Ukrainian neo-Nazis”, 8 March 2022.
 11. “Ukraine: the great manipulation“, March 22, 2022.
 12. “The New World Order being prepared under the pretext of war in Ukraine“, 29 March 2022.
 13. “The war propaganda changes its shape”, 5 April 2022.
 14. “The alliance of MI6, the CIA and the banditry“, 12 April 2022.
 15. “The end of Western domination“, April 19, 2022.
 16. “Ukraine: the Second World War never ended“, April 26, 2022.
 17. “Washington hopes to restore its hyper-power through war in Ukraine” May 3, 2022.

The first foreign fighters to arrive in Ukraine at the start of the war in February, 2022 were Canadians. The first foreign officer arrested by Russian forces on May 3 was a Canadian general. Clearly, Canada, although more than 6,000 kilometers away from Ukraine, has a hidden involvement in this conflict.

In this article, I will show that all Canadian Liberal governments have supported the Ukrainian Banderites since the beginning of the Second World War. They had it both ways during that war, fighting the Nazis, but supporting the Banderites. Worse still, the current Canadian government is composed of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, flanked by a Banderite deputy, Chrystia Freeland.

While the CIA’s connections to the Nazis during the Cold War were not revealed until 1975 with the Pike, Church and Rockfeller Congressional Commissions, and only ended with President Jimmy Carter, the Canadian Liberal Party’s ties to the Nazis continue. Canada is the only country in the world, outside of the Ukraine, to have a Banderite minister, and what’s more, she is the number two in its government.

Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King after his meeting with Führer Adolf Hitler in Berlin (June 29th, 1937).

In 1940, when the United Kingdom was at war but the United States was not, the Canadian Liberal government of William King created the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) to help anti-Bolshevik immigrants against the pro-Soviet Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC) and the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). Pro-Soviet libraries and synagogues were banned.

The Liberal Party of the Kingdom of Canada was not created to promote individualism against conservative ideas, but against the Republican idea [1].

During the Second World War, Prime Minister William King was well liked by his fellow citizens, but he was booed by his soldiers when he visited them in Europe. The Liberal Party always held anti-Russian positions, presenting them as anti-Soviet until 1991, and always interpreted Christianity as opposed to Judaism.

Also, at the end of the Second World War, Canada was the main refuge for Lyon Mackenzie (35,000 immigrants) and Baltic Nazis. Among them were Volodymyr Kubijovyč and “Michael Chomiak” whose real name was Mykhailo Khomiak, the editors of the main Nazi newspaper in Central Europe, Krakivs’ki Visti.

Michael Chomiak with Nazi dignitaries.

Chomiak, who worked under the direct control of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, never denied his collaborationist past. On the contrary, he always militated for the OUN(B). It is in this spirit that he raised his granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, the current Deputy Prime Minister of Canada.

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Watch “Were the NAZIS Right Wing?” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on March 14, 2022

https://youtu.be/x6os2q6eoSU

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After Long Day Of Burning Books, Progressive Unwinds By Calling People Nazis

Posted by M. C. on March 9, 2021

https://babylonbee.com/news/progressive-caps-off-busy-day-of-banning-books-and-fighting-free-speech-with-accusing-people-of-being-nazis

PORTLAND, OR—It’s been a busy day for progressive Stuart Garner. After spending most of the day fighting to have certain books banned and trying to stop unfettered free speech, he wound down by accusing those opposed to him of being Nazis.

“There’s just so much to do,” Garner said. “There are all these books no one should be allowed to read, and yet bookstores keep selling them. And then people say lots of dangerous, unregulated things, and it all needs to be taken offline. But of course, we have these Nazis against such things saying, ‘People should be able to buy whatever books they like and say what they think.’ Typical Nazi rhetoric.”

The situation has gotten so dire that Garner has sometimes turned to destruction of property and attacking people to get his way. “We have to stop all this problematic stuff by whatever means necessary. But you know what Nazis think of political violence. They hate it.”

Garner worries that there are too many Nazis out there — probably because they didn’t ban books and regulate speech quickly enough. He’s starting to wonder if the only way to fight them will be to round them up and reeducate them. “Of course I can hear those Nazis now,” he added. “‘You can’t round people up into camps.’ Those Nazis are the worst.”

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Don’t Have a Holy Cow, Man! – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 22, 2021

We can’t get the full details due to supposed security concerns—but we do know that ordinary Americans in the clutches of raging mobs are expected to take it for the greater good. AOC tweeted on December 2: “To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point.” That these events left some of them homeless, jobless, maimed or dead didn’t count. It was a price she was willing to let others pay. Earlier in the year we heard: “once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot.” The media, somehow, forgot to report water shortages in any of the 48 cities that got torched.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/01/tim-hartnett/dont-have-a-holy-cow-man/

By Tim Hartnett

The old gripe “is nothing sacred” looked worn out by 1987. That was when the National Endowment for the Arts finished handing Andres Serrano 20 grand for “Piss Christ.” He got the materials for his masterpiece from the gift department of a drug store then drank a 40 for the pissspiration. But that doesn’t prove life imitates art—Janet Cooke won the Pulitzer for fake news six years before that.

The NEA was launched by Lyndon Johnson—a chief executive well known for public displays of emission himself. If he had lived, LBJ probably would have ranked Serrano as an unequaled genius until Cardi-B came along. Federally funded artistes surely rate that prez, known for waving “jumbo” around, as a highly refined aesthete.

But if you thought the last vestiges of sanctimony swirled in the bowl a generation ago you’d be mistaken. A glance at the huffing and puffing in the January 15, Huffington Post is a good example. “Tucker Carlson Slammed for ‘Vile and Vicious” Attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” reads the headline. Carlson was having some chuckles at AOC for claiming she narrowly escaped death when the Capitol got stormed on the 6th. A rapidly spreading cult demands that all of its prophets’ words be taken as gospel—unbelievers will taste their wrath:

“Wednesday was an extremely traumatizing event and it is not an exaggeration to say that many many members of the House were nearly assassinated. It’s just not an exaggeration to say that at all,” she said.”

We can’t get the full details due to supposed security concerns—but we do know that ordinary Americans in the clutches of raging mobs are expected to take it for the greater good. AOC tweeted on December 2: “To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point.” That these events left some of them homeless, jobless, maimed or dead didn’t count. It was a price she was willing to let others pay. Earlier in the year we heard: “once someone doesn’t have access to clean water, they have no choice but to riot.” The media, somehow, forgot to report water shortages in any of the 48 cities that got torched.

When you write off half the country as “Nazis”—without any basis—who can’t be randomly attacked for the advancement of equity, diversity and ecology? The ungrateful working stiff remains fair game. It’s snorting at self-serving drama that’s the crime against humanity. That proscription is upheld by the faithful. Tweets and comments on the HuffPost article reveal a congregation that is seething. Wise guys are warned that poking fun at Democrats amounts to death threats.

Actual death threats, sent to others by AOC fans, leave media eyes rolling. Defending yourself from the random blows of the oppressed became unjustifiable aggression years ago. Now, laughing at a narcissistic performance is grounds for appearance before a Social justice Tribunal.

How long do we have before Twitter, Facebook, Google, Amazon and the rest of the Inquisition ration out the yuks in accordance with the new saintly order? Or are we already living it?

What unpretentious people actually find funny lays as low as the undead in daylight during our pious era. Woke vigilantes lurk everywhere, stalking humor with a stake for its heart. On top of that, in an epidemic of mass brain damage, audiences pretend that Hannah Gadsby, Samantha Bee and Chelsea Handler shows are not grating ordeals. Al Bundy is no longer around to critique them–possibly the greatest cultural loss of our times. Readership at HuffPost, Slate and Salon would place the shoe salesman in a noose next to Julius Streicher. If you’re not spending your days agonizing over what’s allowed to amuse you—or forcing yourself to enjoy entertainment from oppressed demographics—non-personhood may be your future.

When an unelected 16-year-old gets to rain fire and brimstone at a rapt UN audience—we sinners are expected bow in grievous awe—and never think of corporal punishment. Children who read the riot act to billions of adults are too young to be questioned or ridiculed—it’s the latest in generational privilege. So, Greta Thunberg becomes the equal of Joan of Arc, immolated for taking a sailboat ride. It’d be hilarious if we were allowed to laugh.

Getting tickled by Whoopi Goldberg recommending Jill Biden for Surgeon General puts the accused in double jeopardy. Not a shred of evidence exists that anyone on The View is capable of discussing a serious subject. But to remain un-excommunicated you must maintain the opposite opinion out loud. And then call the First Lady “Doc” for an advanced teaching degree secured with a thesis as original as a Joe speech. In Jill’s defense, assembly line mass production in the education industry doesn’t leave her playing doctor alone. If the equality movement isn’t careful we’ll end up with more castes and lowly serfs than feudal Europe and India combined. The very book Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, is frequently a complaint about underlings that don’t recognize the author’s high caste.

Suppose Jussie Smollett had been slick enough not to get caught? Only the saps would be safe—anyone shaking their head gets relegated to the KKK. Just trying to pin down the hokey details would amount to a second lynching. Nipping sensible questions in the bud is the most precious stratagem of rule by the intersectionalists. They’d have the ex-Empire actor in the martyr books with Blandina if the Osundairo brothers could have lived with the dishonor.

Taking people too big for their britches down a notch is among the top five reasons for staying alive. Some of the greatest at dishing it out have taken the axe, the noose and the flame for the sake of it. In the name of those martyrs we can never let the woker-than-thou off the hook. If they come for us at least we’ll die laughing.

The Best of Tim Hartnett Tim Hartnett [send him mail] was born in Alexandria, Va. He works as a contractor and sometime bartender in Northern Va. Past columns include “What is the Conservative Movement” and “The Clothes Make the G-Man.”

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Rand Paul Is Right about the Nazis and Socialism | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 18, 2020

https://mises.org/wire/rand-paul-right-about-nazis-and-socialism?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=ae1f73d0a3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_10_02_06_25_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-ae1f73d0a3-228343965

David Gordon

In “No, the Nazis Were Not Socialists,” which appeared online in Jacobin, the philosopher Scott Sehon makes a surprising claim. In the course of criticizing some remarks by Senator Rand Paul, Sehon says,

Paul seems to quote the mid-century economist Ludwig von Mises:

Under national socialism there was, as Mises put it, “a superficial system of private ownership…[sic] but the Nazis exerted unlimited, central control of all economic decisions.” With profit and production dictated by the state, industry worked the same as if the government had confiscated all the means of production, making economic prediction and calculation impossible.…

It turns out that Paul’s most clear assertion about Nazi control of the economy was, apparently, just something that the senator made up and falsely attributed to Ludwig von Mises.

Had Sehon looked into Mises’s views more carefully, he would have found that Mises did indeed believe that Nazism was a form of socialism, marked by state direction of the economy rather than collective ownership. In Omnipotent Government (p. 56), Mises says,

The German and the Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption….The German pattern differs from the Russian one in that it (seemingly and nominally) maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs but only shop managers (Betriebsführer)….The government, not the consumers, directs production. This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism. Some labels of capitalistic market economy are retained but they mean something entirely different from what they mean in a genuine market economy.

Sehon says that this view is false and cites an article I have not yet been able to gain access to that argues that business under the Nazis retained a large degree of autonomy. But in his well-received book The Wages of Destruction (2007), the historian Adam Tooze says this: “The German economy, like any modern economy, could not do without imports of food and raw materials. To pay for these it needed to export. And if this flow of goods was obstructed by protectionism and beggar-my-neighbour devaluations, this left Germany no option but to resort to ever greater state control of imports and exports, which in turn necessitated a range of other interventions” (p. 113). This is exactly Mises’s point. Interventionist measures in the free market such as price control fail to achieve their purpose. This leads the government to add more interventionist measures in an effort to remedy the situation, and continuing this process can quickly lead to socialism.

This is what happened under the Nazis. Businesses that were reluctant to follow the plans of the new order had to be forced into line. One law allowed the government to impose compulsory cartels. By 1936, the Four Year Plan, headed by Hermann Goering, had changed the nature of the German economy. “On 18 October [1936] Goering was given Hitler’s formal authorization as general plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan. On the following days he presented decrees empowering him to take responsibility for virtually every aspect of economic policy, including control of the business media” (Tooze 2007, pp. 223–24).

Sehon says that there were socialists in the Nazi party, principally Gregor Strasser and his brother Otto, but that their influence ended when Hitler purged this wing of the party in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. (By the way, Otto was more of a socialist than his brother Gregor, and the latter repudiated his brother’s views as too radical.) This is not entirely accurate. What it ignores is that Josef Goebbels, the influential minister of propaganda, held strongly socialist views despite his personal enmity for Strasser.

According to George Watson,

On 16 June 1941, five days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Goebbels exulted, in the privacy of his diary, in the victory over Bolshevism that he believed would quickly follow. There would be no restoration of the tsars, he remarked to himself, after Russia had been conquered. But Jewish Bolshevism would be uprooted in Russia and “real socialism” planted in its place – “Der echte Sozialismus“. Goebbels was a liar, to be sure, but no one can explain why he would lie to his diaries. And to the end of his days he believed that socialism was what National Socialism was about.

In his article, Sehon criticizes Watson extensively for relying on a book by Otto Wagener, a Nazi who was removed from his position of authority in 1932, but he does not mention Watson’s quotation from Goebbels’s diary.

Goebbels was by no means alone among the Nazis holding power in his radical opinions. Ferdinand Zimmerman, who worked as an important economic planner for the Nazis, had been before their rise to power a contributor under the pen name Ferdinand Fried to the journal Die Tat, edited by Hans Zehrer, and a leading member of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the Tatkreis. Fried strongly opposed capitalism, analyzing it in almost Marxist terms.

Wilhelm Roepke wrote a devastating contemporary criticism of Fried, now available in translation in his Against the Tide (Regnery, 1969). One of the best scholarly accounts of Fried’s views, which includes some discussion of his activities under the Nazi regime, is in Walter Struve’s Elites against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933  (Princeton University Press, 1973).

Sehon makes another misleading point in his article. He says,

Paul’s argument here goes from the undeniable premise that the Nazis had “socialist” as part of their name to the conclusion that the Nazis were, in fact, socialists. For that inference to work, Paul needs an intermediate premise like the following: If an organization has an adjective in their name, then the organization is correctly described by that adjective.

But if Senator Paul really believed this, then he would be forced to conclude that communist East Germany and present-day North Korea count as democracies, for the German Democratic Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea both have the adjective “Democratic” as part of their name.

Sehon is right that the word “socialist” does not by itself tell us much, but unfortunately it does not occur to him to investigate what the Nazis meant by this word and why they used it. Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.

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Germany admits far-right stigma

Posted by M. C. on February 23, 2020

Some feel the real reason for the rise in Nazi-like movements is the unbridled influx of Muslim immigrants and episodes like this in Germany:

Germany shocked by Cologne New Year gang assaults on women

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime”. The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he said.

which is similar to this in Sweden:

On the other hand, the number of Swedish women who say they have been the victims of sexual assault of some kind “in the past year” has been rising, along with the number of women who say they have changed their habits in some way (avoiding certain areas after dark and so forth). The absolute numbers are much lower than those in the U.S., but the trend is up. Also, for those who picture blond Swedish women being preyed upon by dark-skinned foreigners, it’s important to stress that most of the women who have been victims of sexual assaults are themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants.

For the BBC to admit that Muslims are guilty of anything untoward is a major revolution.

While antisemitism is repugnant, Merkle and the media have twisted Muslim rape into an antisemitism issue.

Follow the link below to view the article.
Germany admits far-right stigma
http://erietimes.pa.newsmemory.com/?publink=0f3891b0d

BERLIN — As Germany’s president expressed his sympathy and shock during a candlelight vigil for nine people killed by an immigrant-hating gunman, a woman called out from the crowd, demanding action, not words.

But the country’s leaders are struggling to figure out how to counter a recent rise in rightwing hate, 75 years after the Nazis were driven from power.

The shooting rampage Wednesday that began at a hookah bar in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau was Germany’s third deadly far-right attack in a matter of months and came at a time when the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has become the country’s first political party in decades to establish itself as a significant force on the extreme right.

In the wake of the latest spasm of violence, Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the “poison” of racism and hatred in Germany, and other politicians similarly condemned the shootings.

The rampage followed October’s anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue in Halle and the slaying in June of a regional politician who supported Merkel’s welcoming policy toward migrants. But Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, said the trend goes back further, noting a 2016 attack on a Munich mall against migrants and a years-long cross-country killing spree against foreigners by a group calling itself the National Socialist Underground.

“Since the NSU and the rampage in Munich through today, an extreme-right trail of blood has run through our country,” he said.

Extremism is no new phenomenon in modernday Germany, where the Red Army Faction and other radical-left groups waged a campaign of kidnappings and killings from the 1970s through the ‘90s, and where some of the key Sept. 11 plotters lived and schemed before heading to the U.S. to attend flight school ahead of the 2001 attacks.

Germany has strict laws prohibiting any glorification of the Nazis, with bans on symbols like the swastika and gestures like the stiff-armed salute, and denial of the Holocaust is illegal.

But security officials have frequently been accused of being “blind in the right eye,” for intentionally or inadvertently overlooking some far-right activity.

That was said to be the case with the NSU, which was able to kill 10 people, primarily immigrants, between 2000 and 2007 in attacks written off by investigators as organized crime. It was only after two NSU members died in 2011 in a botched robbery that the group’s activities were uncovered.

Mehmet Gurcan Daimaguler, an attorney who represented victims’ families at the trial of an NSU member, said German authorities need to give more than “lip service” to fighting racism.

“We haven’t really begun yet a real fight against neo-Nazis, and one of the reasons, for me, clearly is the victims,” he said. “The victims of Nazis are not members of the German middle class, but Muslims, migrants, LGBT people, immigrants. As long as the victim pool, so to say, was limited to minorities, it was not considered a real threat for society.”

Seehofer said that has changed, noting increased resources are being devoted to fighting far-right crime, including the addition of hundreds of new federal investigators and domestic intelligence agents. In addition, stricter laws have been passed, and the Cabinet approved a bill just this week, before the Hanau attacks, to crack down on hate speech and online extremism.

Under the bill, which is awaiting passage in parliament, internet companies would have to report a wide range of hate speech to police, and retweeting such material to a wide audience, or explicitly condoning it publicly, could be subject to prosecution.

“We are not blind in any eye,” Seehofer said.

Still, with national elections coming next year, politicians are grappling with strategies to confront AfD and blunt its appeal to disgruntled voters.

The AfD does not espouse violence, but many are accusing the party of producing a climate where right-wing extremism can flourish. The 7-year-old party now has members in all 16 state parliaments and is the largest opposition party nationally, though with less than 13 percent of the vote in the last election.

“One cannot see this crime in isolation,” said Norbert Roettgen, one of several members of Merkel’s party hoping to succeed her as chancellor when her term ends next year. “We need to fight the poison that is being dragged into our society by the AfD and others.”

Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader, accused Roettgen and others of trying to exploit the Hanau violence for political advantage. “Everything that we know is that it was a totally crazy person,” Gauland said.

The gunman, 43-yearold Tobias Rathjen, posted rambling writings and videos online ahead of the attacks, advocating genocide and espousing theories about mind control.

Gauland, who once got in trouble for downplaying the Nazi era as a speck of “bird poop” in German history, said Rathjen had probably never heard any of his speeches, and he rejected any connection between the bloodshed and his party’s anti-migrant platform, as did several other AfD leaders.

But Seehofer said the power of words cannot be discounted.

“I can’t deny that a statement that Nazism is a speck of bird poop in history provides this fertile soil,” Seehofer said. “There are also many other remarks that, in my view, mess up heads, and something bad comes from messedup heads far too often.”

Holger Muench, head of the BKA, Germany’s equivalent to the FBI, said the threat from mentally disturbed people has grown in recent years, as they latch on to ideas often found online and turn violent.

“The fact that there are mentally ill people in society, that is unchanged for the most part,” he said. “But the fact that there are mentally ill people with a world view that makes them a risk to serious acts of violence, that is changing.”

No evidence has emerged to link Rathjen to the AfD. But people in Hanau were quick to suggest at least an indirect connection.

Dieter Hog watched as the police descended upon Rathjen’s house after the shootings and said he didn’t know his neighbor or what might have motivated him. “But it might be the seed of Mr. Hoecke,” he said, referring to Bjoern Hoecke, an AfD leader who called Berlin’s memorial to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust a “monument of shame.”

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muslims-london

Open border celebration in Londonstan

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After Attending a Trump Rally, I Realized Democrats Are Not Ready For 2020

Posted by M. C. on February 15, 2020

https://gen.medium.com/ive-been-a-democrat-for-20-years-here-s-what-i-experienced-at-trump-s-rally-in-new-hampshire-c69ddaaf6d07

Karlyn Borysenko

I’ve been a Democrat for 20 years. But this experience made me realize how out-of-touch my party is with the country at large.

I think those of us on the left need to take a long look in the mirror and have an honest conversation about what’s going on.

If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting.

You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role knitters have played in our culture. I started noticing this about a year ago, particularly on Instagram. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call.

Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens.

You see, I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.

But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.

That turned out not to be the case. The more voices outside the left that I listened to, the more I realized that these were not bad people. They were not racists, nazis, or white supremacists. We had differences of opinions on social and economic issues, but a difference of opinion does not make your opponent inherently evil. And they could justify their opinions using arguments, rather than the shouting and ranting I saw coming from my side of the aisle.

I started to discover (or perhaps rediscover) the #WalkAway movement. I had heard about #WalkAway when MSNBC told me it was fake and a bunch of Russian bots. But then I started to meet real people who had been Democrats and made the decision to leave because they could not stand the way the left was behaving. I watched town halls they held with different minority communities (all available in their entirety on YouTube), and I saw sane, rational discussion from people of all different races, backgrounds, orientations, and experiences. I joined the Facebook group for the community and saw stories popping up daily of people sharing why they are leaving the Democratic Party. This wasn’t fake. These people are not Russian bots. Moreover, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There was not universal agreement in this group — some were Trump supporters, some weren’t — but they talked and shared their perspective without shouting or rage or trying to cancel each other.

I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half the country is overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?

And the biggest question of all was this: Did I hate Trump so much that I wanted to see my country fail just to spite him and everyone who voted for him?

Fast-forward to the New Hampshire primary, and we have all the politicians running around the state making their case. I’ve seen almost every Democratic candidate in person and noticed that their messages were almost universally one of doom and gloom, not only focusing on the obvious disagreements with Donald Trump, but also making sure to emphasize that the country is a horribly racist place.

Now, I do believe there are very real issues when it comes to race that we as a society have yet to reckon with. I believe that everyone from every background of every gender should have equal access to opportunities, and that no one is inherently more or less valuable or worthy than anyone else. And while the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to a tragedy precipitated by real racists and real nazis and real white supremacists, I started to see that those labels simply don’t apply to most people who support Trump.

But with all of this, I was still reticent to even consider attending a Trump event. I do not believe that Trump’s attitude is worthy of the highest office in the land. I abhor his Twitter. I am vehemently opposed to so many of his policies. But still, I wanted to see for myself.

I’m not going to lie, I was nervous, so I thought I would start my day in familiar territory: at an MSNBC live show that was taking place a few blocks away from the rally. I decided to wear my red hat that looks like a Trump hat but with one small difference — it says “Make Speech Free Again”—as my small protest against cancel culture. I even got a photo with MSNBC host Ari Melber while I was wearing it, just for kicks.

The funny thing about that hat is that it’s completely open to interpretation. When I wear it around left-leaning people, they think I’m talking about the right. When I wear it around right-leaning folks, they think I’m talking about the left. It’s a stark reminder of how much our own perspectives and biases play into how we view the world.

In chatting with the folks at the taping, I casually said that I was thinking about going over to the Trump rally. The first reaction they had was a genuine fear for my safety. I had never seen people I didn’t know so passionately urge me to avoid all those people. One woman told me that those people were the lowest of the low. Another man told me that he had gone to one of Trump’s rallies in the past and had been the target of harassment by large muscle-bound men. Another woman offered me her pepper spray. I assured them all that I thought I would be fine and that I would get the heck out of dodge if I got nervous.

What they didn’t know is that they weren’t the only ones I had heard from who were afraid. Some of my more right-leaning friends online expressed genuine fear at my going, but not because they were afraid of the attendees. They were afraid of people on the left violently attacking attendees. This was one day after a man had run his car through a Republican voter registration tent in Florida, and there was a genuine fear that there would be a repeat, or that antifa would bus people up from Boston for it. Just as I had assured those on the left, I told them I thought I would be fine, because we don’t really have antifa in New Hampshire.

But I’m not going to say it didn’t get to me a bit. When everyone around you is nervous for your safety, it’s hard not to question if they have a point. But it also made me more determined to see it through, because it was a stark reminder that both sides view each other exactly the same way. They are both afraid of the other side and what they are capable of. I couldn’t help but think that if they could just see the world through the lens of the other for a moment or two, it would be a stark revelation that they don’t know as much as they think they do.

It was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this.

So, I headed over an hour and a half before the doors were scheduled to open—which was four hours before Trump was set to take the stage—and the line already stretched a mile away from the entrance to the arena. As I waited, I chatted with the folks around me. And contrary to all the fears expressed, they were so nice. I was not harassed or intimidated, and I was never in fear of my safety even for a moment. These were average, everyday people. They were veterans, schoolteachers, and small business owners who had come from all over the place for the thrill of attending this rally. They were upbeat and excited. In chatting, I even let it slip that I was a Democrat. The reaction: “Good for you! Welcome!”

Once we got inside, the atmosphere was jubilant. It was more like attending a rock concert than a political rally. People were genuinely enjoying themselves. Some were even dancing to music being played over the loudspeakers. It was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this.

I had attended an event with all the Democratic contenders just two days prior in exactly the same arena, and the contrast was stark. First, Trump completely filled the arena all the way up to the top. Even with every major Democratic candidate in attendance the other night, and the campaigns giving away free tickets, the Democrats did not do that. With Trump, every single person was unified around a singular goal. With the Democrats, the audience booed over candidates they didn’t like and got into literal shouting matches with each other. With Trump, there was a genuinely optimistic view of the future. With the Democrats, it was doom and gloom. With Trump, there was a genuine feeling of pride of being an American. With the Democrats, they emphasized that the country was a racist place from top to bottom.

Now, Trump is always going to present the best case he can. And yes, he lies. This is provable. But the strength of this rally wasn’t about the facts and figures. It was a group of people who felt like they had someone in their corner, who would fight for them. Some people say, “Well, obviously they’re having a great time. They’re in a cult.” I don’t think that’s true. The reality is that many people I spoke to do disagree with Trump on things. They don’t always like his attitude. They wish he wouldn’t tweet so much. People who are in cults don’t question their leaders. The people I spoke with did, but the pros in their eyes far outweighed the cons. They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws, because they believe he has their back.

As I left the rally—walking past thousands of people who were watching it on a giant monitor outside the arena because they couldn’t get in—I knew there was no way Trump would lose in November. Absolutely no way. I truly believe that it doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate: Trump is going to trounce them. If you don’t believe me, attend one of his rallies and see for yourself. Don’t worry, they really won’t hurt you.

Today, I voted in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary for Pete Buttigieg. I genuinely feel that Pete would be great for this country, and maybe he’ll have his opportunity in the future. But tomorrow, I’ll be changing my voter registration from Democrat to Independent and walking away from the party I’ve spent the past 20 years in to sit in the middle for a while. There are extremes in both parties that I am uncomfortable with, but I also fundamentally believe that most people on both sides are good, decent human beings who want the best for the country and have dramatic disagreements on how to get there. But until we start seeing each other as human beings, there will be no bridging the divide. I refuse to be a part of the divisiveness any longer. I refuse to hate people I don’t know simply because they choose to vote for someone else. If we’re going to heal the country, we have to start taking steps toward one another rather than away.

I think the Democrats have an ass-kicking coming to them in November, and I think most of them will be utterly shocked when it happens, because they’re existing in an echo chamber that is not reflective of the broader reality. I hope it’s a wake-up call that causes them to take a long look in the mirror and really ask themselves how they got here. Maybe then they’ll start listening. I tend to doubt it, but I can hope.

Be seeing you

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Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on December 30, 2019

Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. He found “reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices”; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture’s program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).

https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr

David Gordon

Critics of Roosevelt’s New Deal often liken it to fascism. Roosevelt’s numerous defenders dismiss this charge as reactionary propaganda; but as Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes clear, it is perfectly true. Moreover, it was recognized to be true during the 1930s, by the New Deal’s supporters as well as its opponents.

When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, he received from Congress an extraordinary delegation of powers to cope with the Depression.

The broad-ranging powers granted to Roosevelt by Congress, before that body went into recess, were unprecedented in times of peace. Through this “delegation of powers,” Congress had, in effect, temporarily done away with itself as the legislative branch of government. The only remaining check on the executive was the Supreme Court. In Germany, a similar process allowed Hitler to assume legislative power after the Reichstag burned down in a suspected case of arson on February 28, 1933. (p. 18).

The Nazi press enthusiastically hailed the early New Deal measures: America, like the Reich, had decisively broken with the “uninhibited frenzy of market speculation.” The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, “stressed ‘Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,’ praising the president’s style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler’s own dictatorial Führerprinzip” (p. 190).

Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He “told American ambassador William Dodd that he was ‘in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan “The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual”‘” (pp. 19-20). A New Order in both countries had replaced an antiquated emphasis on rights.

Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt’s Looking Forward. He found “reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices”; and, in another review, this time of Henry Wallace’s New Frontiers, Il Duce found the Secretary of Agriculture’s program similar to his own corporativism (pp. 23-24).

Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'” (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini’s program to modernize Italy: “It’s the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious” (p. 32, quoting Tugwell).

Why did these contemporaries sees an affinity between Roosevelt and the two leading European dictators, while most people today view them as polar opposites? People read history backwards: they project the fierce antagonisms of World War II, when America battled the Axis, to an earlier period. At the time, what impressed many observers, including as we have seen the principal actors themselves, was a new style of leadership common to America, Germany, and Italy.

Once more we must avoid a common misconception. Because of the ruthless crimes of Hitler and his Italian ally, it is mistakenly assumed that the dictators were for the most part hated and feared by the people they ruled. Quite the contrary, they were in those pre-war years the objects of considerable adulation. A leader who embodied the spirit of the people had superseded the old bureaucratic apparatus of government.

While Hitler’s and Roosevelt’s nearly simultaneous ascension to power highlighted fundamental differences … contemporary observers noted that they shared an extraordinary ability to touch the soul of the people. Their speeches were personal, almost intimate. Both in their own way gave their audiences the impression that they were addressing not the crowd, but each listener as an individual. (p. 54)

But does not Schivelbusch’s thesis fall before an obvious objection? No doubt Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini were charismatic leaders; and all of them rejected laissez-faire in favor of the new gospel of a state-managed economy. But Roosevelt preserved civil liberties, while the dictators did not.

Schivelbusch does not deny the manifest differences between Roosevelt and the other leaders; but even if the New Deal was a “soft fascism”, the elements of compulsion were not lacking. The “Blue Eagle” campaign of the National Recovery Administration serves as his principal example. Businessmen who complied with the standards of the NRA received a poster that they could display prominently in their businesses. Though compliance was supposed to be voluntary, the head of the program, General Hugh Johnson, did not shrink from appealing to illegal mass boycotts to ensure the desired results.

“The public,” he [Johnson] added, “simply cannot tolerate non-compliance with their plan.” In a fine example of doublespeak, the argument maintained that cooperation with the president was completely voluntary but that exceptions would not be tolerated because the will of the people was behind FDR. As one historian [Andrew Wolvin] put it, the Blue Eagle campaign was “based on voluntary cooperation, but those who did not comply were to be forced into participation.” (p. 92)

Schivelbusch compares this use of mass psychology to the heavy psychological pressure used in Germany to force contributions to the Winter Relief Fund.

Both the New Deal and European fascism were marked by what Wilhelm Röpke aptly termed the “cult of the colossal.” The Tennessee Valley Authority was far more than a measure to bring electrical power to rural areas. It symbolized the power of government planning and the war on private business:

The TVA was the concrete-and-steel realization of the regulatory authority at the heart of the New Deal. In this sense, the massive dams in the Tennessee Valley were monuments to the New Deal, just as the New Cities in the Pontine Marshes were monuments to Fascism … But beyond that, TVA propaganda was also directed against an internal enemy: the capitalist excesses that had led to the Depression… (pp. 160, 162)

This outstanding study is all the more remarkable in that Schivelbusch displays little acquaintance with economics. Mises and Hayek are absent from his pages, and he grasps the significance of architecture much more than the errors of Keynes. Nevertheless, he has an instinct for the essential. He concludes the book by recalling John T. Flynn’s great book of 1944, As We Go Marching.

Flynn, comparing the New Deal with fascism, foresaw a problem that still faces us today.

But willingly or unwillingly, Flynn argued, the New Deal had put itself into the position of needing a state of permanent crisis or, indeed, permanent war to justify its social interventions. “It is born in crisis, lives on crises, and cannot survive the era of crisis…. Hitler’s story is the same.” … Flynn’s prognosis for the regime of his enemy Roosevelt sounds more apt today than when he made it in 1944 … “We must have enemies,” he wrote in As We Go Marching. “They will become an economic necessity for us.” (pp. 186, 191)

Originally published September 2006.

Be seeing you

While Donald Trump flirts with Russia, Eastern Europe ...

FDR with his “Uncle Joe”

 

 

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