The Northern Student Movement

Look Back Machine
=By= Andy Paiscik

Robert Kenedy speaks to CORE rally

College students were an integral part of the popular upheaval of the 1960’s. Beginning with the lunch counter sit-ins one month into the decade and continuing on through 1969 and beyond, college students around the country rallied to the cause of justice and freedom. The two best known student organizations of that time were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for Student a Democratic Society (SDS). Another important group, though less well known, was the Northern Student Movement (NSM) and it was founded in Connecticut on the campus of Yale University.

Tens of thousands of young Americans were inspired by the lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina and spread throughout the South. The lie that many knew was a lie — that the United States is based on freedom, justice and equality – was exposed by the incredible bravery of young black people. It was as though a dam had broken and a tidal wave of people, led by college students, were suddenly passionately committed to making the world a better place and not so concerned about forging comfortable careers for themselves.

Students at Yale University were no exception and some of them got together in the Fall of 1961 to form the NSM. One of the two projects they initiated was support of SNCC, which by then had branched out from the lunch counter sit-ins to spearheading the Freedom Rides, a concerted effort to end segregation and discrimination on the nation’s bus and train systems. The other project the NSM undertook was to challenge racial discrimination in the North. To that end, the group organized an action a month after it was formed with the New Haven chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) to protest local housing discrimination.

Like SNCC, the NSM had struck a chord and there were soon dozens of chapters on campuses throughout the Northeast. Initially, its membership was primarily white, though it worked closely with organizations like CORE whose memberships were mainly or exclusively black. Within several years, NSM had recruited a large number of blacks from both college campuses and from the communities where it established programs. NSM also began publishing a publication, Freedom North, with articles about its work and that of the Black Freedom Movement as a whole.

Peter Countryman, a Yale undergraduate from Chicago, was elected as the group’s first executive director. Only 19 at the time, Countryman had already been active in civil rights work through the New England Student Christian Movement. He was instrumental in establishing a tutoring program in which students and recent graduates from Yale and other local colleges worked with young people enrolled in New Haven’s public schools. The effort proved a success and NSM established similar programs in several dozen cities in the Northeast. By 1963, the group had enlisted over 2,000 students from a number of colleges to tutor an estimated 3,500 children. Countryman eventually left New Haven to spearhead NSM’s tutoring program in Philadelphia.

In June of 1963, NSM members primarily from Trinity College established a tutorial program in Hartford with a staff of 25 and over 200 volunteers. The tutoring sessions were held in churches and other public facilities in or near the communities where the tutees lived and were so popular that the Hartford chapter grew to be one of the NSM’s largest. Soon the group was holding classes on Black history and the arts and regular forums on police brutality and civil rights activities in the South. The NSM publicized these activities and news of the Freedom Movement through a newspaper, the North End Voice, which members distributed throughout Hartford. Simultaneously, NSM members in Hartford established the North End Community Action Project (NECAP) that organized sit-ins and other protests against discriminatory hiring practices around the city.

As the Freedom Rides continued through 1962 and into 1963, NSM members from college campuses in Connecticut travelled to the South to participate. They were also actively involved in a voter registration drive that SNCC launched in Mississippi in 1963 as well as, a year later, in Freedom Summer. One who participated in voter registration, Yale graduate student Bruce Payne, was shot and wounded in Mississippi by opponents of the campaign.

More students from Yale took part in these projects than from any other school and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was among many who took note. King visited Yale several times during this period including once at the invitation of Yale’s chaplain William Sloane Coffin, a supporter of the NSM who a few years late became one of the leading figures in the movement against US aggression in Southeast Asia. After one of his visits, King wrote to Coffin of the work being led by the NSM that he was “really heartened by the movement in the right direction I sense at Yale.”

In addition to New Haven and Hartford, the NSM had vibrant chapters on many campuses and in many cities, including New York, Detroit and Philadelphia. In 1963, the group moved its main office from New Haven to New York City and Peter Countryman was succeeded as executive director by William Strickland, an African-American graduate of Harvard who joined the NSM in his native Boston. After Freedom Summer, the group, while continuing to steadfastly support SNCC’s work in the South, shifted more of its attention to the problems of blacks in the North.

By 1965, many in the NSM had grown critical of what they saw as the limitations of a movement predicated on “civil rights.” Blacks in the organization, like blacks in SNCC and the soon-to-emerge Black Panther Party, heeded the call of Malcolm X for black self-determination, a broader and more revolutionary demand than civil rights. They began to see themselves, in addition to being a part of a movement for black liberation within the borders of the United States, as part of a global upsurge of primarily people of color against colonialism and imperialism. They began to call for Black Power and saw the need to transform the NSM and SNCC into all-black groups to better achieve that goal. Advocates of Black Power recognized the accomplishments and dedication of white members while stating that it was for blacks to determine what their communities needed. Rather than providing services like the tutoring programs that were decided by and initiated by whites, whites were asked to leave the NSM and SNCC and challenged to organize the broader white community to support black liberation.

Much as happened on a larger scale in SNCC, there were tensions around these changes within the NSM. Close friendships ended and there was anger and resentment in some quarters. Though understandable, the bitterness that some whites felt was in large part a reflection of a movement that was still very young and somewhat immature. Race, after all, is perhaps the most complicated question confronting those of all colors dedicated to building a just society. For whites, it is essential to understand that it is for black people to decide what is best for black people. Blacks, especially blacks from the poorer and working classes, and not whites, must be in leadership of the Black Freedom Movement and significantly represented in the leadership of whatever larger multi-racial movement we are able to build.<

There’s nothing easy about this, either in theory or practice. It was (and is) especially difficult for young whites from schools like Yale to learn and accept. Many have, after all, been taught all their lives that it is their destiny and their right to rule. Without disregarding the pain some people experienced, the move by the NSM and SNCC to black self-determination was a necessary one.

The NSM continued to do important work for most of the rest of the 1960’s, organizing students and non-students alike. Many joined the much-larger SNCC, which by 1966 was establishing itself in the North. Others, upon leaving campuses, joined the Black Panthers, including in one-time NSM strongholds Hartford and New Haven, as well as Bridgeport. As US aggression in Indochina escalated and the movement against it exploded, many whites who had been in the NSM immersed themselves in anti-war work. That effort was important, necessary and, in the end, successful, though in many ways that fact has been whitewashed from history. Perhaps ironically, though, the massive growth of the anti-war movement in the late 1960’s diverted whites from taking up the challenge of their black comrades in NSM to organize the greater white community to support black liberation. Though we are on higher ground than 50 years ago, that challenge remains.

Andy Paiscik is a Bridgeport native, long-time activist and award-winning author who writes for Counterpunch, Z, and many other publications and websites.

Source
Lead Graphic: Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy speaking to a mixed race crowd outside the Justice Department; sign for Congress of Racial Equality is prominently displayed. From: Library of Congress digital id ppmsca.04295.

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We are Sacrifice Zones: North Dakota Fracking Fuels Violence Against Women

FRACKING HUMANS
=By= Amy Goodman interviews Kandi Mossett

$N. Dakota fracking waste$

“What we’re dealing with is a death by a thousand cuts,” says North Dakota indigenous leader Kandi Mossett of the impact of the booming fracking and oil-drilling industry in her home state. “We’ve had violence against women increase by 168 percent, particularly in the area of rape,” Mossett says. “We have 14-, 15- and 16-year-old girls that are willingly going into man camps [for oil workers] and selling themselves.” She says the full impact of toxins from oil drilling won’t be felt for another 20 years. “I’m so worried that at this COP21 my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter won’t have a say, but she will be experiencing the worst impacts. It just doesn’t make any sense to me that this is the 21st COP and we are considered sacrifice zones in my community.”

DemocracyNow! December 11, 2015.

TRANSCRIPT

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you face particularly in North Dakota? Can you talk about the issue of, for example, fracking?

KANDI MOSSETT: Right. I mean, prior to fracking, we had seven coal-fired power plants, so we’re all dealing with mercury contamination and cancers from that. And then enter fracking around 2007, and what we’re dealing with is a death by a thousand cuts. We have people that are literally on the front lines being killed by all of the semi traffic, by the increase in violence against women. Ever since we’ve had the oil industry enter, we’ve had these jobs that were created, but there were 11,000 jobs created and over 10,000 people that came into our state. And we’ve had violence against women increase by 168 percent, particularly in the area of rape. We have 14-, 15- and 16-year-old girls that are willingly going into man camps and selling themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Man camps?

KANDI MOSSETT: We call them that because there are literally thousands of men living in these hovels. They’re like FEMA trailers or RV parks or wherever they can find space, that used to be a wheat field or a sunflower field, is now an oil-fracking operation. And so we’ve seen an increase greatly of crime and violence, drug abuse. I have buried two young girls, my friends, this last year, who got addicted to the heroin, because we now have organized crime. As far as the environmental toxins, we won’t even feel the effects for 20 years. And I’m so worried that at this COP21 my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter won’t have a say, but she will be experiencing the worst impacts. And it just doesn’t make any sense to me that this is the 21st COP and we are considered sacrifice zones in my community.

AMY GOODMAN: Kandi, you, yourself, are a cancer survivor?

KANDI MOSSETT: Yes. When I was going to school, when I was in college, I was diagnosed with a stage IV sarcoma tumor, which—I shouldn’t even be here today. When they diagnosed me, I had to wait for nearly a month so they could figure out what it was. And when they did, they said I was lucky that it wasn’t attached to my muscle or my bone. And so, I went through five surgeries. I have a huge scar as a result of that, and I always have to be worried that it could come back. But I’m here, and I do have friends that aren’t here, that didn’t survive their cancers, that are fighting cancer right now. And it’s obvious to me that it’s inextricably linked between health, climate and environment. And we’re dealing with it on the front lines.

AMY GOODMAN: Kandi, I want to ask you—there is a large indigenous civil society presence here.

KANDI MOSSETT: There is.

AMY GOODMAN: What kind of hope does that give you? What has the kind of organizing you’ve been doing here over the last two weeks mean? And who have you been organizing with?

KANDI MOSSETT: I’ve been spending a lot of my time on the outside. As the Indigenous Environmental Network, we have to have an inside-outside strategy. We feel like we have to be in here, because there’s a quote that goes around: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” And we’ve sort of felt like we need to be at the table, although we’re starting to get to the point where we want to denounce the entire COP process and not even validate it by participating, because every year for 21 years people have said, “It’s going to be a great agreement, we’re really excited for it,” and then, at the end, everybody feels this way—frustrated with the final text.

And so, what we’ve been doing is organizing nonviolent direct actions. We’ve been going out into the streets of Paris. We’ve been meeting with our Parisian brothers and sisters. And brothers and sisters of the Global North and South have been coming together to stand in solidarity with people from around the world to say, “We don’t care what’s in your text and written in black and white on paper. We’re going to take back the power in our communities by educating people outside with the reality of life, Mother Nature. We’re going to be outside feeling the sun on our face and the wind on our cheeks.” That is where it matters, not in this sterile place where there’s boxes that were built, where people were displaced here to make this COP21 happen. We’re going to be outside reconnecting with our Mother Earth, because when we care for her, she cares for us.

Kandi Mossett is an indigenous activist from North Dakota and an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network.Bio

Source
Article: DemocracyNow!

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Ignorance and Indoctrination of Westerners Kills Millions

By ANDRE VLTCHEK

Congolese children with amputated hands, a common practice “to intimidate the natives” during King Leopold’s rule of the Belgian Congo. The act of colonization converted all inhabitants of the Congo and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa into slaves. Under King Leopold II, the state of Belgium murdered 10 million Africans in Congo, academics have yet to call this genocide.

Again and again it is clearly demonstrated that Western culture, which the paramount psychologist Carl Jung used to call “pathology”, couldn’t be trusted.

Cortés disambarks in Veracruz, beginning the fateful Spanish conquest of Mexico. The Europeans would bring diseases of the body and the soul, and their own superstitions. But above all, a refined and ruthless style of domination. (Mural by Diego Rivera. )

They also demonstrated utmost ignorance and the highest level of indoctrination.

For centuries, citizens of France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and other Western nations stared at the warships leaving their shores, sailing towards Asia, Latin America and Africa … Mouths open wide; they were pretending that they did not really know what horrors these ships were going to spread. When the ships returned, packed with slaves and unimaginable booty, they shut down their brains, claimed ignorance once again, attributing the thriving of their cities and states solely to some “Western ingenuity, enterprising spirit and hard work,” but definitely not to terror, rape and appalling plunder of the world.

What Germans did, gazing at the chimneys of the concentration camps that were regurgitating thick smoke from the victims of Holocaust and then claiming that “they did not know”, was exactly what all Europeans did for centuries and millennia, when their troops and “investments” into all sorts of Crusades, were looting and brutalizing everyone on the surface of our Planet.

Throughout history, holocausts have been carried out, again and again, all over Africa, in the Middle East, in Latin America, Caribbean, sub-Continent, and Asia Pacific, even in Oceania.

Westerners never lifted a finger to stop crimes that their states had been committing! As long as they were getting fat, why should they? Their servile and cowardly intellectuals are still refusing, with some tiny exceptions that do not constitute even 1 percent, to depict gruesome destruction, humiliation and torment of “the others”. Western philosophers are locked at the sclerotic institutions called universities, whoring for tenures, instead of describing the world in all its sickening dismay. The media and artists are not faring any better.

The role of Christianity has been vast and monstrous. In a foreseeable future I will dedicate an essay that will describe its responsibility for the global genocide, as well as a slender but provocative philosophic book on the same topic, co-authored with one of the leading Christian theologians. Christianity (even its non-religious forms called “secularism” or “atheism”) has been spreading intolerance, bigoted dogmas, exclusivism and complexes of superiority. It offered justification; it even inspired the crusades, colonial expansionism, mass murder as well as destruction of entire local cultures.

And yet, the same bandit nations, the same cowardly but sadistic culture, the same perverse religion, are still clinging to power, still torturing and murdering the millions.

S I D E B A R
COMPILED BY THE EDITORS

The Congo: One of the great—and ongoing —genocides, virtually forgotten by the mass media. Belgium’s depraved King Leopold II started it in earnest, but the “modern, civilized nations of Europe” and their progeny, the US, enforce it to this day.

For more than a century Africa has been ravaged, raped and exploited and dominated by foreign powers, chiefly European, but in the postwar the United States joined the club with its usual alacrity. America, always in denial about its brutal brand of imperialism, has introduced a new dimension of hypocrisy in the manipulation of Africa’s destiny. Her influence, always nefarious, remains vast and is rapidly increasing again. Every form of crime has been practiced, demonstrated and instituted by the colonizers and neo-imperialists, including the active training of large cadres of native enforcers and puppet rulers, whose reign and debasement still plagues the continent—on top of widespread political corruption and direct military intervention.

BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE BAR BELOW

[learn_more]

A Legacy of Pain: King Leopold II

Leopold and his thuggish administrators quickly set up a regime of terror to dominate the natives. Mutilation and brutal executions were common, practiced both on the “transgressors” and their innocent families. The men in the photo are holding severed hands of recent victims of punishment.

Update: President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has announced that General Bosco Ntaganda should be arrested and face a military tribunal in the DRCongo instead being made to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands. (Washington Post, 4/11/2012) .

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he term, “colonialism” means “domination of a superior power over a weaker one” and suitably describes the exploitation and indoctrination that occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1885 until World War II. Most of the civil wars that continue to plague East Africa as well the systemized rape of women, torture, and dismemberment regularly practiced by rebel militia groups and even the standing armies in the DR Congo today were initially introduced as effective domination strategies by the most powerful countries in Europe beginning in the late 1900’s as a way to “introduce and maintain order”.

It all began with the birth of “African Colonialism” at the Berlin Conference of 1885. At this formal gathering, representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, as well the small country of Belgium sat down together to divide up and section off all of the land south of Sub-Saharan Africa except for the lands previously awarded to the countries of Ethiopia and Liberia.

Belgium was a relatively new monarchy at the time having only just established its independence from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1830. Great Britain and France clearly were in need of raw materials and trade alliances with which to support their countries’ growing domestic industries while Italy had joined together with Germany in 1871 forming an imposing alliance. The “Congo Conference” was hosted by Germany and the resulting General Act of the Berlin Conference was established to regulate trade and settlement practices within the colonies. In order to do this a committee of European leaders agreed to impose new borders onto existing tribal kingdoms – many times separating centuries- old ethnic groups in the process and distorting territorial boundaries that had previously served to divide feuding clans.

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ach country pledged to launch immediate settlement plans, man and staff their colonial governments, and headed out to take control of their new possessions; completing this task in 10 short years between 1880 and 1890. And as for the claims and the rights of the peoples and ethnic groups already living on these lands, you ask? Well their rights and claims were never considered at all. The residents of these lands were deemed to be incapable of ruling themselves and so as part of the colonization agreement each nation pledged to “end the slave trade, bring God to the local residents, and establish order throughout the colonies” but it was clear as one Ugandan colleague so eloquently stated that their purpose in coming was “not to elevate but to dominate”.

Leopold’s Congolese slaves, employed in backbreaking rubber production.

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]o one person managed to do so with as much cruelty or avarice as King Leopold II of Belgium. It is important that the reader understand that by the conclusion of the Berlin Conference Leopold had been granted exclusive rights to the region of the world now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo- not his country, his government, nor his people. The Congo Free State as he called it belonged to him and him alone. He set to work organizing his colony for one purpose only – to increase his personal wealth. He hired the services of none other than Henry Morton Stanley of, “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame, to sign treaties with the kings of the most important tribes in the Congo in order to present undeniable evidence that they had accepted his sovereign authority over them and their people. He then concentrated on building a private army that would enforce his rules throughout the Congo Free State which he named the Force Publique.

Congolese worker sits looking down at five hands that have been laid out in front of him, one hand had been amputated from each one of his five daughters as punishment for not meeting his rubber quota.

He presented commissions to a wide range veteran officers and mercenaries from around the world. His officers had to be white Europeans while his enlisted men, dressed in blue uniforms and red fezzes were selected from among other African tribal groups in North Congo, Zanzibar, and other countries around West Africa like Ghana and Cameroon. Leopold only hired seasoned military officers, who had actually fought in battle and he assembled a force of war- hardened troops accustomed to killing and punishing to accomplish their goals.

Congo rubber slaves.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Force Publique resurrected a well- known set of military strategies based on the art of intimidation and subjugation. These procedures had been commonly used in European warfare when a smaller force sought to intimidate civilians living in the area into submission in order to eliminate the possibility of a whole -scale rebellion against them. The smaller force deliberately employed terrifying procedures and specific forms of psychological torture known to be so repugnant to their enemies that they would immediately “cease and desist” preventing any further threat of retaliation. These soldiers were deliberately trained to carry out the most atrocious acts imaginable towards the Congolese people in order to remove any semblance of self-efficacy or control and to destroy any confidence the villagers’ once had in their ability to strike back.

Leopold would have given Hitler a run for his money. His sociopathic disdain for human suffering mirrored a civilization whose technological pride obscured its moral bankruptcy.

Leopold would have given Hitler a run for his money. His sociopathic disdain for human and animal suffering mirrored a civilization whose technological pride obscured its deeply ingrained moral bankruptcy. Like most in his breed of criminals, he stood out as a slaughterer of animals, especially elephants. His agents were the first massive killers of this persecuted species. May he rot in hell for an eternity.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]astly, the Force Publique used what was most valuable to their victims such as the threat of harm to wives and children to further control Leopold’s workers. These strategies had first been designed for use in European conflicts where troops had found themselves outnumbered in enemy territory but now they would be customized and reworked by the Force Public in order to allow them to effectively manage large groups of enslaved laborers. “Colonial regulations” were applied with impunity against a people whom the soldiers had already determined were inferior and replaceable. Despite all of their advanced weaponry and superior military strength the Force Publique did not have the tactical advantage and they knew it. They were a small number of men residing in a foreign country surrounded by a superior force of combatants capable of waging war on them at any time. They had heard reports that some of the villages in the outer bush practiced Cannibalism and that information further intimidated them. So they took the offensive and systematically broke the “spirit of the people” around them in order to protect themselves from the threat of rebellion and to ensure that Leopold’s obsessive demands would be carried out to the letter. Do these tactics sound familiar then? They should. These are the same techniques used by any number of rebel militia forces in the Ugandan Civil War, the First and Second Congo Wars, Darfur, and in the War for Independence in Rwanda. Kony and his Lord’s Liberation Army did not create these methods but they certainly have applied them successfully.

All of East Africa has mastered subjugation procedures especially well and use them whenever they need to render a group of civilians submissive and compliant. Congolese warlords use them as effectively today as the Force Publique did over a century ago. Leopold’s first economic endeavor was the accumulation of ivory. His marksmen, in their quest for wealth, slaughtered thousands of male and female elephants just to hack off their tusks. The ivory itself would be eventually fashioned into jewelry and other decorative objects such as pipes, billiard balls, and piano keys. There are reports that his hunters trapped and slaughtered upwards of two hundred elephants at a time leaving their carcasses to swell and rot in the intense, tropical sun. The train that Stanley had built had not been completed so Leopold needed a way to transport his ivory tusks to the coast. He began using local tribesmen as porters to hand-carry these tusks along dangerous pathways that had been cut through the thick rain forests in order to deliver them to his seaport where they would be loaded on ships and taken back to Belgium. If a man became sick or overcome with exhaustion on the trip he would be left to die on the path while his friends were forced to move on without him. Leopold demanded that his ivory shipments be transported in the dry and wet seasons causing his porters to die from a host of life-threatening maladies such as mud slides, snake bites, malaria, blood infections, and wild animal attacks. At the dawn of the 20th century the vulcanization of rubber helped establish the bicycle and automobile industry. There was an immense need for raw rubber from which to make things such as tires, hot water bottles, and raincoats. Leopold intended to capitalize on his second opportunity to increase his wealth. The enormous region of the Congo Free State was covered by a vast tropical rainforest that contained rubber trees. These trees could be harvested by laborers for the sap they contained. Leopold found himself doubly blessed with an unlimited supply of raw rubber to export and an enormous work force of tribesmen that could be used to collect the sap. He ordered his native populations into the rain forests and if they objected he killed them and/or maimed their wives and children sometimes putting entire villages to the torch.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ithin a decade Leopold’s rubber extraction operation became a especially lucrative business so much so that the French in their colonies in the northwest Congo, the Portuguese in Angola, and the Germans in Cameroon developed similar rubber extraction enterprises based on Leopold’s use of enslaved labor. Leopold was such a severe taskmaster that even his own troops were subject to stringent quota systems. Each soldier was made to account for the use of every bullet fired by submitting one hand from the villager he had killed as proof. Many soldiers were unable to account for all of their spent bullets and so feared that their salaries would be docked for these omissions. They solved this problem by cutting off the hands of live villagers instead, then turning those in to balance their accounts. Over time mutilations became the accepted mode of punishment for even minor infractions. Hands and feet were cut off in retribution for real as well as imagined offenses or because the workers had not met their rubber quotas for the month. One of the most painful photographs I have ever seen from that period was of a Congolese worker who sits looking down at five hands that have been laid out in front of him, one hand had been amputated from each one of his five daughters as punishment for not meeting his rubber quota. One of the reasons the Force Publique became so outrageous in the number of people it killed was the fact that it never lacked for more laborers; if one man died, another could replace him. It has been reported that when Leopold was finally made to sell the Congo Free State to the Belgian government, a mere 10 years later between 10 and 13 million people were dead from murder, mutilation, starvation, exhaustion, or disease. The deliberate use of mutilation to subdue a larger group should also sound familiar. The use of torture, mutilation and rape is currently being used by rebel armies, [western-controlled] guerrillas, and terrorists throughout East Africa. “There is nothing that crushes the human spirit so irrevocably as having to endure a piece of your body being hacked off,” stated one of my dear Ugandan friends. “I would like to see just how well Mandela (referring to Nelson Mandela) would have carried on after they hacked his nose and lips off! These are primal fears that overwhelm the simple people who have have been subjected to such atrocities. Things like that change you forever and you would do anything at all to stop it. Those soldiers know this and still they do it to innocent men, women, and children. Damn them! May they never be forgiven!” And as one of my other sources confided, “What better way to crush a woman for good than to impregnate her with the enemy’s child?”

What should scare us even more is the reason these atrocities were committed in the first place. If I could get Kony to speak truthfully about why he harms the people of his Acholi villages, I am sure that he would not mention emotions such as hatred or revenge- he only ever acted out of fear. He struck first just as the Force Publique did a century ago. He knows that he does not have a sufficient number of men to fend off an attack by all of the people living in an area at once so he prevents that from happening by systematically crushing them before the group realizes that it had the power to retaliate all along. But the subjugation techniques so well developed and applied by the Force Publique never really went away. They were preserved in detailed accounts passed down from grandfather to son to grandson around the village campfires in the evening. The horrendous tortures and brutal massacres of the Congolese people were never really forgotten and eventually were remembered best by the young men; the ones who most recently resurrected the violence and intimidation in order to wage their own unique brand of civil war. I truly wish I could reassure you that once King Leopold II had been removed from power and the Belgian government took control conditions improved for the people of the Belgian Congo but that did not happen. Although the name of the colony changed—the lives of the people did not. But that explanation will have to wait until my next post —Kat Nickerson Kingston RI USA

For those of you who would like to know more about this topic read King Leopold’s Ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa By Adam Hochschild, ©1998, Pan MacMillan ISBN – 0-330-49233-0 [/learn_more]

S I D E B A R ENDS HERE / ARTICLE BY A. VLTCHEK RESUMES

Their gangrenous sisters, capitalism and nihilism, are brainwashing people all over the world, while driving them into dark valleys of despair.

It is because their weapons of mass destruction are the deadliest, their propaganda the most advanced, their opposition the most indoctrinated and their opposition almost non-existent!

“Syria managed to shock the world by refusing to surrender, by fighting with unimaginable heroism against all odds. Half of its people are on the move, millions of refugees are flooding all shores, but the country is standing tall, injured and bleeding but standing, nevertheless…”

War after war, genocide after genocide, the Westerners are still playing dumb! They refuse to acknowledge whet they are doing to the world.

When over 100 French people died during a bizarre recent string of attacks in Paris (who was behind them? West’s allies – jihadists, or maybe their own establishment?), Europeans began mourning their own victims – and pointing fingers at “the others”. People all over the world, either too scared to say “no” or too brainwashed as well, began expressing solidarity with the French nation.

Part of “The Jungle”, a terrible refugee camp near the French city of Calais, went ablaze. Refugees got attacked all over Europe, as “retaliation”. But retaliation for what? After all, refugees were only escaping their countries that were ruined and plundered by both Europe and the United States!

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (German: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes), is a 1972 West German epic film written and directed by Werner Herzog focusing on true events pertaining to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, in this case the Peruvian/Amazonian region. Few artists have recreated the conditions of the 16th century and psychology of the ambitious, nearly insane European conquerors as accurately and meditatively as Herzog. Aguirre remains a warning about mad, obsessive colonialism.

But this is not how a common European was instructed to see the world.

The common European and North American is much more submissive to the regime, than a common inhabitant of any other part of the world. He or she learns what is required to be learned, listens attentively what the media/propaganda people digest and serve. Debates are almost always within the permitted framework.

“Western philosophers are locked at the sclerotic institutions called universities, whoring for tenures, instead of describing the world in all its sickening dismay. The media and artists are not doing any better…”

A common citizen of a Western country devours hours of bizarre entertainment daily (including “news entertainment”). They watch dozens of propaganda films and clips, every year. He or she can hardly make any distinction between reality and fiction, anymore. Such a citizen is willing to sacrifice billions of men, women and children all over the world just for their own material benefits and wellbeing.

All s/he knows, all s/he feels is (somehow abstractly) is that they are somehow “superior” to the rest of humanity; that their culture is exceptional and predestined to rule the world. All s/he senses is that s/he has the right to consume and to use all the natural resources of the world, and that their government can decide which country outside the Western realm should be allow to stand and which would be forced to fall.

Millions of human lives lost in the Middle East, tens of millions of men, women and children murdered by imperialism in Africa? Who cares? Who bloody cares? Westerner eats, copulates, sometimes works and then he either tries to enjoy his life, or he fights for much better benefits… for himself, or for herself. Rest of the world is there to provide or to subsidize such benefits; that is all.

The dumber they, the Westerners, are, the more self-assured and arrogant their worldview. You see people like this in a pub, but you also see them controlling all international organizations, even the UN agencies. Those big, beefy, tall Germans, Scandinavians, North Americans, Brits – speaking with air of a stone superiority to those “agile Asians, clumsy Africans and insecure Arabs”! Telling them what to do, how to run their societies. Absolutely no shame! You would never hear them lamenting: “We fucked up the world. We raped the planet. We are still doing it…” Never.

No apologies, no remorse, no grand plan for how to reverse the flow, how to return at least some part of what had been stolen and how to stop murdering.

Of course, everywhere you go, you read stuff like “May Peace Prevail on Earth!”

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]es, over 100 people died in Paris. Right before that, almost 50 died in Beirut, Lebanon. While thousands are dying in Yemen, every month… While 17,000 already vanished in Iran – victims of West-sponsored terrorism… While hundreds of thousands have been dying in Libya and Syria… While millions have been dying in Somalia and Iraq… While some 10 millions already died in a looted and raped DRC (the Democratic Republic of Congo) … All of them victims of Western assaults and banditry or of Western-sponsored terrorism directly!

All those Mujahedeen, al-Qaida, al-Nusra, ISIS… That entire Wahhabi fundamentalism created first by the British and later North American imperialism. All that vile, toxic stuff that had been armed, and financed and serviced by the Europeans, as well as Saudis, Turks and other great allies of the West.

And why was that stinky stuff so diligently armed and financed? So it could ruin and destroy progressive, socialist Islam, from Egypt to Iran to Indonesia! So it could destroy the Soviet Union and any Marxist roots in Afghanistan! So it could murder millions of progressive people in those proud and independent nations. So the West could rule, unopposed, grabbing all it wants, deciding who will be governing where!

Now Russia stands against the terror with its fighter jets. Its bombers are flying sorties for survival of this humanity. Just recently, Russia already paid a tremendous price, and we all know what it was. But it is used to paying unimaginable prices, for the survival of our planet. 25 million human lives in just one war, in order to defeat Nazism. Or great chunk of economic output of the USSR, “just” in order to defeat Western imperialism and colonialism.

China sent military advisers, and is standing by, rock solid, shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia.

Syria managed to shock the world by refusing to surrender, by fighting with unimaginable heroism against all odds. Half of its people are on the move, millions of refugees are flooding all shores, but the country is standing tall, injured and bleeding but standing, nevertheless.

And so is Latin America, despite all those vicious attacks from the West. Standing, damn it, standing towering and proud!

And those ignorant, selfish, brutal hordes in the West see nothing. They repeat propaganda injected into their heads, providing slight variations to it, calling it freedom of expression!

After the “Paris attacks”, Western propaganda is in high gear once again. Its apparatchiks were clearly “prepared and ready”. Future direct attacks against Syria are already “justified” well in advance. Not against ISIS (although that would be the official pretext), but against President al-Assad and his government which is, despite everything, supported by the majority of Syrian people. Attacks against Syria will not be called “Western terrorism”, but something like a “heroic revenge”.

Can this planet be entrusted to those who watch crap on their television screens, day after day – both Hollywood propaganda production, and news propaganda briefings?

Can anything that comes from the West be taken seriously, after centuries of lies and murder?

Who is killing whom, lately? Who is behind what?

I will stick to what I know. And what I know is who is actually killing millions in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

I will not speculate about some “insider job” of the Empire, although I have some strong suspicions; of course I do! For now I will only stick to facts that I can prove.

And the facts are simple and horrendous: the Empire has been murdering tens of millions of people on our planet. The Empire, and that self-perpetuated ignorance, fundamentalism and blindness of its indoctrinated citizens!

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
“http://www.telesurtv.net/english/bloggers/Ignorance-and-Indoctrination-of-Westerners-Kills-Millions-20151116-0001.html”. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

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The Alamo: America’s Shrine to White Supremacy

The Republic of Texas was an outgrowth of the colony founded under the leadership of Stephen F. Austin which brought slavery onto Mexican soil in 1821

by Lee Ballinger

This week Ozzy Osbourne will tape a History Channel show in San Antonio where he will apologize for urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph in 1982. But why apologize?

Phil Collins, the former drummer with Genesis who went on to be one of the biggest pop stars of the 1980s (“In The Air Tonight,” “Invisible Touch”) was in San Antonio on June 26, 2014 for a press conference at the Alamo. Collins announced that he was donating his vast collection of artifacts related to the 1836 Battle of the Alamo to the museum which sits on the Alamo grounds, just up the street from San Antonio’s famed Riverwalk.

Collins, who traces his Texas obsession to recreating the Battle of the Alamo with figurines as a kid in his English backyard, has been visiting the site periodically since 1973. He has written a book, The Alamo and Beyond, which is a coffee-table tome with photos and essays he’s written about each of the two hundred items in the collection. Collins has also written a forward to a book on music about the Alamo.

Collins claims he may have actually been at the Battle of the Alamo 178 years ago. Perhaps it’s that psychic backstory which causes him to speak, ad nauseum, about only the details of the 1836 battle in which Mexican troops annihilated a force of two hundred men of the Republic of Texas army. Yet Collins says he supports a full interpretation of the Alamo’s entire history. So let’s go there.

The Mexican troops who attacked the Alamo are always described in the history books as the aggressors, so the first thing to clarify is that the Alamo was in Mexico. The so-called “Texians” who were in the fort representing the Republic of Texas were part of an attempt by U.S. slave states to expand the scope of slavery westward.

The Republic of Texas was an outgrowth of the colony founded under the leadership of Stephen F. Austin which brought slavery onto Mexican soil in 1821 (today Austin has a university named after him). In 1825, twenty five per cent of the 1,800 people in Austin’s colony were slaves and by 1836 there were 5,000 slaves in Texas. James S. Mayfield, Secretary of State for the Republic of Texas, said that “the true policy and prosperity of this country [Texas] depends on the maintenance of slavery.”

Toward that end, during the siege of the Alamo, delegates met at a Republic of Texas constitutional convention in Washington-on-the-Brazos. The Alamo defenders fought and died for that constitution, which declared in Sections 6, 9 and 10:

“All free white persons who emigrate to the republic…shall be entitled to all the privileges of citizenship.’

“All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude… Congress (of Texas) shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from the United State of America from bringing their slaves into the Republic with them…nor shall Congress have the power to emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder be allowed to emancipate his or her slave or slaves…no free person of African descent either in whole or in part shall be permitted to reside permanently in the Republic without the consent of Congress.”

Yet Phil Collins was pleased as planter’s punch to be inducted as an honorary member of the Sons of the Republic of Texas in 2008. He said that he was inspired by “The idea of these men and women, your ancestors, having a choice and staying to fight for what they believed to be just and right.”

Collins’ words would have been more appropriate if they had been addressed to the descendants of the Mexican troops who were resisting the slavers at the Alamo. Early in the nineteenth century slavery was abolished in Mexico and fugitive slaves from Texas or any other place were welcomed.

One of Phil Collins’ Alamo heroes is Jim Bowie, famed for the development of a long-bladed knife which became known as the “Bowie knife.” Less well-known is that shortly after the War of 1812, Bowie went into business as a slave trader and was a partner in a Louisiana sugar plantation. Bowie later moved to Texas where he was a leader of one of the most extreme group of expansionists.

The fever dreams of the Texians didn’t die at the Alamo. On March 1, 1837 the United States formally recognized the Republic of Texas, which joined the U.S. as a slave state in 1845. This was just in time to be a key part of the Mexican-American War, which resulted in the annexation of one third of Mexico’s territory. In 1861, Texas was the seventh state to secede and join the Confederacy.

In Phil Collins’ native England, hundreds of warships and hundreds of thousands of guns were manufactured for the Confederate Army. According to writer David Keys, this lengthened the Civil War by two years at a cost of 400,000 American lives. Only 183 men died at the Alamo. Phil Collins never mentions the disparity. Instead he says “You know, I’ve never been to Gettysburg. But we know what happened there, and you go to pay respects.” In other words, there were no real issues in the Civil War. It was more like a football game where some fans root for the South, some for the North.

Like many celebrities, Phil Collins is a pathetic ignoramus, a monochromatic cultural icon.

Like many celebrities, Phil Collins is a pathetic been childish ignoramus, and an unapologetic reactionary with a comic book understanding of history.

The war between Mexico and Texas-based reactionaries continues today. Phil Collins’ host at the San Antonio press conference was his friend Jerry Patterson, the outgoing pro-fracking Texas Land Commissioner who finished last in the 2014 Republican lieutenant governor primary despite the endorsement of Ron Paul. In that campaign, Patterson’s immigration platform was: No amnesty, militarization of the border, and a guest worker program to provide business with cheap labor.

Hollywood's bias in favor of the South, the Confederacy and similar ideologies is a curious phenomenon, considering that the studio system was long dominated by Jewish tycoons of humble origins.

Hollywood’s romanticization of the South, the Confederacy and similar ideologies is a curious phenomenon, considering that the studio system was long dominated by Jewish tycoons of humble origins.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]ecades worth of demeaning stereotypes of Mexicans have helped to convince a section of the public to support such measures. For example, the 1983 hit song “Illegal Alien” by Genesis, co-written by Phil Collins. The song’s singer (Collins) describes how his sister is willing to grant sexual favors to border guards in order to secure safe crossing for her brother. This is played for yucks, even though the reality of women on the border is an ongoing wave of rapes and murders. In the song’s video, Collins and the rest of the band portray themselves as lazy, drunken Mexicans.

This ties in neatly with the way that those inseparable twins, the Alamo and the Confederacy, continue to get good press in America. For instance, a July press conference featuring South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier reflected the same politics as Phil Collins’ press conference at the Alamo. South Carolina opens its 2014 season at home against Texas A&M, whom the Gamecocks have never played before. The winner will get a trophy named after South Carolina native and Alamo defender James Bonham.

was in Mexico.”

“I’m sure Bonham did some good things,” Spurrier said. What might those be? James Bonham was the older brother of Milledge Luke Bonham, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army who served as Governor of South Carolina from 1862 to 1864. Earlier, the elder Bonham served as an aide to Governor James Hamilton Jr. during the Nullification Crisis of 1832, a direct precursor to Southern secession. It’s no surprise that James Bonham died fighting for slavery at the Alamo.

Conditioned by everyone from John Wayne to Phil Collins, by everything from movies to children’s books to the constant hype about the state of Texas, 2.5 million tourists visit the Alamo every year. They have no idea what it represents. Republican Governor Rick Perry knows, which in 2012 led him to endorse a petition drive calling for the secession of Texas from the Union, the result of which would be the end of any lingering protections for women, children, immigrants, and workers. The petition generated much boastful talk about states rights and living as an island in North America. How long could people live on such an island? Texas already ranks last in health care services. Yet 125,000 Texans saw fit to sign the petition. Phil’s friend Jerry Patterson opposed secession, saying it would be better instead to expel New York, California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts from the United States.

Such clown politics continue to defile the American body politic while providing useful cover for the Democrats, who have nothing better to offer in Texas or anywhere else. In the background, Phil Collins sits at his drum kit, counting off the beat and playing out of time.

Rock and Rap Confidential author of the forthcoming book Love and War: My First Thirty Years of Writing. He can be reached at: Rockrap@aol.com

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The Pornography of Hatred

PREAMBLE

With each of the last three mass shootings involving individuals acting under the influence of racist ideology, the following article is a timely study of the effect hate speech—particularly on the Internet and social media—has on our lives, and what can be done about it.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: Terminal line, literally, for countless victims of industrialized racism and bigotry.

Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland): Terminal line, literally, for countless victims of industrialized racism and bigotry. Even 70 years after the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, the place remains ugly and forbidding.

There is danger in the pandering of hatred that goes beyond the freedom of expression. Is there a right to profit from supplying the seeds of destruction to those who have the need to blame others for the poverty of their existence? Bar owners who continue to serve drunks can be held responsible for the deaths of those later killed in traffic collisions, but to what extend should those who peddle the rhetoric of hatred, bigotry, and violence be held responsible for the consequences of their merchandising?

These were some of the questions that confronted us in 1980 when I represented a survivor of Auschwitz against those who denied the Holocaust. Alleging an “Injurious Denial of an Established Fact,” I argued that someone should not be able to grasp a blatant lie in one’s hand and slap another person in the face with it. The matter was resolved when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled: “this Court does take judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland during the summer of 1944 . . . . It is simply a fact.”

The defendants were the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) and its parent company, the Liberty Lobby—which was a conglomerate of radical right-wing organizations that marketed individualized packages of hatred to those with particular proclivities. The IHR was attempting to move onto college campuses by circulating a slick “scholarly journal” that offered pseudoscientific theories denying the existence of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. We were successful at blunting its collegiate campaign; however, 35 years later, these and similar organizations—now making full use of the Internet—continue to promulgate lies for profit. The danger of these lies threatens everyone, not just those targeted by the propaganda of violent hatred.

Freedom of Speech

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ames Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, considered the First Amendment to be the most important, since without the freedom of speech all others are forfeit. The ink was hardly dry on the document before Congress enacted the Sedition Act in 1798 to punish “scandalous and malicious writings” about the president or the government which caused them to be held in “contempt or disrepute.” The Act expired with the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and President Adams later considered the Act to be the greatest mistake of his administration. Opposition by Jefferson and others, who encouraged nullification of the Act, planted the seeds of disunion that later led to the Civil War.

A product of the second anti-communist hysteria, the Smith Act trials in the 1940s and early 1950s severely disabled the US Communist party. They were an example of anti-Sedition law eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The free speech guarantees, however, remain subject to the vagaries of prevailing political winds. (In photo, CPUSA official Benjamin Davis

A product of the second wave of anti-communist hysteria and witch hunts, the Smith Act trials in the 1940s and early 1950s severely disabled the US Communist party. They were an example of anti-Sedition law eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The free speech guarantees, however, remain subject to the vagaries of prevailing political winds. (In photo, CPUSA official Benjamin Davis is mugged by supporters before entering court.)

The Supreme Court never had a chance to review the Sedition Act, but it later held that the First Amendment protected all speech, except “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words—those which by their very utterances inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” In a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) case in 1969, the Court allowed racist and hate-filled speech, unless it was directed “to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” More recently, in 1992, the Court struck down an ordinance that criminalized racist and hate-filled nonverbal speech, such as cross burnings, as contravening the First Amendment. The Court focused on the mode of expression, rather than the content. Hate speech is protected unless it leads to imminent violence.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ll of this legal activity concerned itself with the criminalization of speech, both verbal and nonverbal; however, civil litigation against hate speech brought by those who are offended or affected by the speech has a different legal history. Henry Ford, the automobile magnate, was a notorious anti-Semite who directed his newspaper to attack an agricultural cooperative movement as defrauding American farmers on behalf of an international Jewish conspiracy. He was personally sued for libel by the movement’s leader, and two years of litigation ensued, during which it became apparent that Ford would be unable to prove the truth of his allegations. To avoid having to testify in the trial, Ford issued a generalized apology to the entire Jewish people that had been secretly prepared by the head of the American Jewish Committee. Ford was able to escape civil liability and, undeterred, went on to publish his collection of articles in an anti-Semitic pamphlet, The International Jew, which is still available on the Internet. He also funded the printing and distribution of 500,000 copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent incitement to racial and religious hatred.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 imposed civil liability on employers for tolerating “hate speech” by their employees, if it created a “hostile or offensive work environment.” As a result, many universities adopted “speech codes” regulating the speech of students and faculty. In an attempt to avoid a hostile educational environment, university speech codes can also create a lack of tolerance for a diversity of opinion. Speech codes can cause nonconforming students to self-censor educationally valuable participation in discussions. It is a delicate balance, and some of the codes have been struck down as being an unwarranted infringement of First Amendment rights.

Among the first exceptions to free speech was the “lewd and obscene,” usually referred to as pornography. Originally prohibited altogether, the portrayal of sexual subjects for the purpose of sexual arousal is no longer a crime—as long as it does not depict children, and minors are not exposed to it. There are parallels between pornography and hate speech in that, while offensive to many, if not most, people, they are allowable in order to preserve the greater good of free expression. In both cases, potentially harmful material is distributed for profit in order to satisfy the prurient and unhealthy interests of the consumer.

Free speech—even that which is repugnant to most people—is so important that the American Civil Liberties Union has defended the right of the KKK to distribute racist literature promulgated to preserve the purity of “white blood.” Among the most alarming hate speech is the growing popularity of white power, racist, and anti-Semitic music. Primarily presented in the genres of rock and country, the music employs explicit lyrics to appeal to the unique prejudices of its listeners. While country hate music is primarily directed against the federal government and blacks—white power music targets Jews, homosexuals, immigrants, and anyone not considered to be “white.” National Socialism heavy-metal music promotes white supremacy, racial separation, anti-Semitism, and Nazi paganism. In the vernacular of hatred, nonwhites are “mud people,” and Jews are the “devil’s spawn.”

Internet Hate Speech

Carto in his senior years.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith the advent of the Internet and social media, hate groups have extended the range and ferocity of their attacks. The radical right-wing organizations we confronted in the 1980s now have colorful and dynamic web pages to attract visitors and new members. The Institute for Historical Review maintains a website and page on Facebook, where it is “liked” by 674 friends. Willis Carto—who founded the Liberty Lobby and IHR and later lost control to staff members during a palace coup—has rebounded with The Barnes Review, which peddles hate literature on the Internet in competition with his former organizations. In addition he launched the American Free Press, which promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and publishes online articles by Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and other conservative writers.

Internet websites and social media were in the news following the three most recent mass shootings. On social media, Chris Harper-Mercer, a college student, described himself as a conservative Republican with a disdain of organized religion. He expressed an admiration of the on-air murderer of two television employees in Virginia, and he posted a photograph of himself with a rifle on Facebook. Regarding the Virginia shooter, Harper-Mercer wrote, “Seems the more people you kill the more you’re in the limelight.” His gmail address was IronCross, a seeming reference to Nazi Germany, and he was found to have shared Nazi videos on the Internet. Harper-Mercer, clad in body armor, carried six guns onto a college campus in Southern Oregon on October 1st, where he confronted students and faculty in classrooms. Forcing students to state their religion, he killed those who responded “Christian,” saying “you’re going to see God in just about one second.” Eight students and their professor were murdered and nine wounded before Harper-Mercer committed suicide.

Dylann Roof

Hoping to start a “race war,” Dylann Roof, massacred nine African Americans as they attended services in a historic black church in South Carolina in June 2015. The twenty-one-year-old had created a website, the Last Rhodesian, on which he promoted racial apartheid. He researched his views on the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC)—formerly known as the White Citizen’s Council—the Nation’s largest white nationalist group. He also posted comments on the neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer. Roof was indoctrinated to believe that “Niggers are stupid and violent,” and “someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world.” Roof demonstrated his bravery by firing (and repeatedly reloading) his semi-automatic handgun into his helpless victims as they were praying.

Another racist predator, John Russell Houser randomly sprayed patrons with bullets in a Louisiana movie theatre in July 2015, murdering two people and wounded nine—before killing himself. Houser had adopted the Nazi flag as a symbol of his resistance to the government, and he supported KKK Grand Wizard David Duke. Writing on a neo-Nazi political website, Houser emphasized the “power of the lone wolf.” On other websites, he expressed anti-Semitic thoughts and supported white power. He wrote that “Hitler is loved for the results of his pragmatism” and discussed the “role of Blacks in building and maintaining this alliance of evil that literally grips the globe.” On another, he commented, “It is a shame Tim McVeigh [the Oklahoma City bomber] is not going to be with us to enjoy the hilarity of turning the tables with an IRON HAND.”

The Greatest Terrorist Threat to Americans

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ight-wing “lone wolf” terrorist attacks by single individuals are now the greatest terrorist threat to the people of the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors Nazi and white supremacist websites, such as Stormfront, has documented that more than 100 people have been killed by individuals actively involved with Stormfront in the past five years. A recent wave of arsons at black churches has the FBI investigating them as hate crimes, and President Obama has stated that right-wing extremists pose the greatest danger to the United States. West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center documents that since 9-11, 50 people have been killed in the United States by Islamic extremists, while 254 people have been murdered by right-wing or sovereign-citizen extremists—five times as many. Mostly disrupted, there have been only six terrorism-related plots by Islamic extremists in the United States each year since 9-11, while there has been an average of 337 planned attacks each year by right-wing extremists—more than 56 times as many!

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has determined that the current economic and political climate is fueling a resurgence in radicalization and recruitment of domestic right-wing terrorists. The Department warns that returning military veterans (facing difficulties reintegrating into a worsening economy) “possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists. DHS . . . is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.”

As the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) adopted its new name and later influenced Roof, it refocused its efforts from fighting school integration to raging against interracial marriage and illegal immigration. Contributing to mainstream Republican presidential candidates, including Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, the CCC opposes “all efforts to mix the races,” and believes that “God is the author of racism.” It urges the control of immigration to force “countries like Mexico [to] stop dumping their murderers, rapists, those carrying AIDS and other communicable diseases and gang members on America’s door step.”

Political Hate Speech

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n an environment of unrestrained speech, there is a danger that politically hostile hate language will not be sufficiently moderated by voices of reason and caution, and that political dialogue will be moved in a direction that is harmful to freedom. It is not difficult to reflect upon the circumstances in Germany that gave rise to the Nazi movement and the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. It is easy to make comparisons to the gaggle of Republican candidates, each seeking to outdo the other in proclaiming that he or she is strong enough to confront the immigration problem and to reassert the military might of the United States to defeat Islamic terrorism.

Trump—brute cunning and opportunism, plus a natural "leader complex."

Trump—brute cunning and narcissism, not to mention boundless opportunism, and a natural “leader complex.”

Looking more closely at just one of the candidates—the current leader in the presidential primary race—Donald Trump is the epitome of what could go wrong with politically promoting a “strong man” to deal with America’s problems. A website, Women for Trump, gushes that “Trump reminds us of something we haven’t seen in a long time; strong, Alpha males in politics. Many . . . have forgotten what a MAN is.”

Trump inherited a real estate empire created by his father, Frederick Christ Trump, who was arrested at a KKK rally in 1927. In 1979, Fred Trump was sued for refusing to rent to African Americans and for forcing blacks to vacate his premises. The civil-rights case was settled with a consent decree; however, the Justice Department later reported that Trump agents continued to create a “substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” Trump junior has described Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, and has called for the erection of a great wall on the southern border to keep out illegal immigrants.

The United States has already built more than 700 miles of walls and deploys a comprehensive—and expensive—system of cameras, sensors, and drones along the southern border. Corporate America, which presently operates private prisons for corralling illegal immigrants, is lobbying to increase the privatization of border security. Can fascism—complete corporate control of the government—be far distant under the administration of a President “the Donald” Trump?

The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site criticized by other white supremacists as overly promoting Nazism, endorsed Trump for president saying he is “willing to say what most Americans think.”

One would imagine that with his vanity comb-over, red face, twisted mouth, and outlandish statements, Trump would be an irrelevant and marginally entertaining spectacle in the campaign. Whether his status as a front-runner is because of, or in spite of, his bigoted statements about people of color and misogynistic references to women, Republican candidates are being pushed toward the extreme right—along with the entire electoral dialogue. One must remember that Hitler came into power as the result of a popular election concerned with similar issues.

Despite the artificial inflation of the stock market and glowing job reports reflecting part-time and marginal employment, Americans—small business owners, as well as workers—are hurting. The middle class is being eliminated, along with its moderating influence on social issues. Economically distraught Americans are looking for political leadership, but like Germans in the 1930s, voters in the 2016 election are being offered scapegoats and are being led down the road to national disaster and genocide.

The Ten Stages of Genocide

Hitler was a creature of the international bourgeoisie. Fascism is normally the Frankenstein invoked by the ruling capitalist classes when threatened by social upheavals. Even many nobles in Britain were openly sympathetic to his regime.

Hitler was a creature of the international bourgeoisie. Fascism is normally the monster invoked by the ruling capitalist classes when threatened by social upheavals. Many nobles in Britain and big industrialists in America and around the world were openly sympathetic to his movement and philosophy.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hirty-five years ago, we fought a legal battle against those who denied the Holocaust. We were successful in our efforts; however, denial of the existence of the Nazi campaign of genocide against European Jewry continues today as the final stage of that genocide. Writing in 1996, Gregory Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, advised Congress that genocide takes place in ten stages, the last of which is that “The perpetrators . . . deny that they committed any crimes.”

Looking at the these various stages, we can see the current buildup of hatred towards people of color, particularly immigrants, and non-Christians, primarily Muslims. Much like Hitler in the 1930s, American politicians are seeking to blame others for their own failure to govern. They want to direct national resources towards militarization to corral and punish those they blame for their political failures, instead of confronting the economic and environmental crises that threaten the Nation and the future of its children.

America is well beyond the first stage, in which people are divided into “us and them.” Although an African American now occupies the White House, Ben Carson, a black conservative Republican candidate, easily said that no Muslim should ever be elected president. Trump believes there is a “Muslim problem in the world,” and he seemed to condone “getting rid” of all Muslims. Trump also promises the mass expulsion of all eleven million undocumented immigrants, whom he says are a part of the “dumping ground for the rest of the world.” By referring to immigrants as rapists and murders, Trump is threading onto the grounds of the second and third stages of genocide in which “symbols are forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups” and the humanity of a group is denied. Others who erroneously insist that all Muslims intend to impose their system of Sharia law onto the United States, are seeking to stigmatize and label all Muslims.

The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site criticized by other white supremacists as overly promoting Nazism, endorsed Trump for president saying he is “willing to say what most Americans think.”

Other stages include symbolization in which names or other symbols are used to classify hated groups; discrimination in which law, custom, and political power is used to deny the rights of a discriminated-against group; and dehumanization in which the humanity of the hated group is denied. Although Hitler often referred to Jews as Judenscheisse (Jewshit), it was the manner in which he relentlessly blamed the “Jew” that made the word itself despicable in the minds of Germans. Today in America, our politicians may not use crude slang, but as they continually rage against immigrants and Muslims, and it is clear they intend the words in the most derogatory manner possible.

There is evidence the government is involved in the fourth stage—the organization of “special army units or militias.” In January 2006, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a $385 million contract to a former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, to provide detention centers in the United States to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S.” Moreover, it is ominous that the government has created a system of privately-operated detention centers for the housing of undocumented immigrants and their children—where detainees currently work for slave wages. This process of organized detention—concentration—is especially alarming if one imagines the force and violence that would be required to round up and deport eleven million people.

America already occupies the sixth stage in which hate groups “broadcast polarizing propaganda.” The foundations are being laid for the seventh and eighth stages in which “victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity,” and the populace is indoctrinated with “fear of the victim group.”

All that may be left is the ninth stage—extermination—in which the killers “do not believe their victims to be fully human.” Applying the best corporate practices, how much more cost effective would it be to work detainees to death and to efficiently exterminate them—particularly children who are too young to work—rather than to bother with the expense of deportation? Perhaps factories could be built next to the detention facilities to take advantage of dollar-a-day labor that the government requires private contractors to pay to undocumented detainees?

Looking beyond the spurious political matters of immigrants and Muslims, there is the very real and critical issues of economic failure, climate change, and environmental degradation—all of which threatens the ability of the Nation to feed its people. Faced with the ongoing loss of Western crop land to drought and the lack of irrigation and drinking water, how long will it take for groups to militantly organize against each other to control the precious food and water supplies?

Following elimination of the middle class, the division of society between the wealthy and the rest may drive the extinction of masses of people without reference to religion or race. The few who possess the wealth and power may simply believe elimination of excess “eaters” is a matter of the survival of the fittest and the simplest way to deal with the crisis.

What Can Be Done?

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ecognizing that hate speech is destructive—not only to freedom, but to the political ability to compromise, collaborate, and to solve serious economic and environmental problems—what can be done to moderate the effect of such speech? Consistent with First Amendment protection, there are several ways to approach the problem.

First, we must recognize there is a difference between civil and criminal legal solutions, with the Constitution only prohibiting the government from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech.” Other countries do not offer such protection, or otherwise do not extend its coverage to hate speech. European countries, especially those which suffered under the heel of Nazism, explicitly criminalize Holocaust denial and other forms of hate speech. For example, one of the defendants in our civil case in 1980 was a Swedish national who was criminally prosecuted in Sweden for using the same language we found offensive in our civil lawsuit. Inasmuch as civil actions brought by plaintiffs personally harmed by hate speech should not violate the First Amendment, they are a legal remedy that can be relied on to combat hate speech directed at individuals, especially words which are violent, untrue, and libelous.

Secondly, continuing to equate hate speech with pornography, we find that the United States has achieved a certain balance in regulating pornography and violence on the radio, television, and in other forms of mass entertainment. Radio and televisions stations that broadcast obscene, indecent, or profane material may have their licenses revoked by the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC defines profane material as “language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.” Radio “shock jock” Howard Stern was fired from public radio after his broadcaster was fined $495,000 for allowing Stern to air an explicit discussion of anal sex and the use of the N-word.

In February 2015, the FCC voted to regulate Internet providers as public utilities. Although primarily intended to ensure net neutrality, it appears the FCC may have the power to regulate those forms of speech which are generally agreed to constitute exceptions to the First Amendment. Just as hard-core pornography, graphic violence, and vile hate speech can be controlled over the public airwaves, defining the Internet as a public utility provides a basis for similar regulation of the Internet and social media. Everyone who watches television and listens to the radio is well aware that nudity, profanity, and violence is currently allowed during programming. If that level of regulation is acceptable to most people in a free society, then the curtailment of the most violent and dangerous hate speech on the Internet may be constitutionally acceptable.

Such steps are mere palliatives, however, and a long-term cure for the disease of hatred and bigotry must result from a fundamental shift in the manner in which we, as free people, govern ourselves. Restoration of the middle class—and the wisdom it brings to public discourse—can only result from effective representative democracy. As long at those who are elected to manage the government are more responsive to corporations and special interest groups than to those who cast the ballots, the United States government will continue down the path towards fascism and genocide.

What must take place is a mass, nonpartisan, and nonviolent movement by the ordinary people of the United States to achieve a government that is responsive to their interests and that cares for their needs. One thing every American should have in common is that it is the People, rather than corporations, who must control their own government.

The United States Voters’ Rights Amendment (usvra.us) is a comprehensive voters’ Bill of Rights with multiple sections to remedy all of the ills of the current electoral process at once. Enactment of the Amendment would transform the United States government into finally becoming a truly representative democracy. Ratification would be a major step towards ensuring equality of opportunity and freedom and, ultimately, the reduction and elimination of racial, social, and religious hatred and bigotry. Millennials, the inspiring generation of young people now coming of age in America have the most to lose, which is why they must lead the march, but we all have a responsibility to pave the way.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William John Cox is a retired public interest lawyer and author of the United States Voters' Rights Amendment. His memoir, "The Holocaust Case: Defeat of Denial" was published in July 2015.

http://www.williamjohncox.com

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