A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

[American Dream]

Please, let's keep posts to the scope of this thread- and start a new thread, if needed...

[seemslikeadream]

i'm just follow what you have done in the past...or have we turned over a new leaf? ..at a very convenient time


and for your information
i think it is on topic...very on topic...completely on topic

[jakell]

As usual, I can only really comment on the UK end of things.

In my experience British Nationalists are not that interested in entwining themselves with Middle Eastern matters, no matter what occasional stunts you see from the EDL et al, it just falls flat in the longer term.
I don't know about the European situation, but I would expect it to be more like the UK than America. We have our own Nationalisms that make the situation more complex.

There is always the matter of White Nationalism moving to fill the space formerly occupied by British Nationalism, but from what I can see this has not been going to plan and the vacuum is as yet unfilled

[seemslikeadream]

in case you think I'm off topic AD I've bolded the words for you

Israel Cranks Up the PR Machine
It’s deploying all its resources to fight the growing world movement against the occupation.

Max Blumenthal October 16, 2013 | This article appeared in the November 4, 2013 edition of The Nation.


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, October 6, 2013. (Reuters/Gali Tibbon/Pool)
 
In the post-Oslo era, as the strategy that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle refers to as “peace without peace” captured the Israeli consensus, human rights activists ratcheted up grassroots efforts to challenge the occupation of Palestine and Israel’s prevailing structure of ethno-religious discrimination. Popularly known as BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israeli institutions involved in occupation has generated shock waves in international pro-Israel circles and within the top levels of Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus. The government-linked Reut Institute has designated BDS as a key national security threat and produced a blueprint for sabotaging Palestine solidarity networks around the world.

While paranoia mounts inside Israeli policy circles about the rising tide of nonviolent global resistance, Netanyahu has grown obsessed with Israel’s withering image in the West. Under his guidance, the term “delegitimization” has become a household word signifying BDS and nearly everything done in the name of exposing Israel’s violations of international law. And thanks to Netanyahu’s instigation, Barack Obama has become the first American president to explicitly pledge to battle the pressure campaign.

Groping for a convenient solution to its public relations problems, the Israeli government has turned to hasbara. The literal meaning of this Hebrew word is “explanation,” but when put into practice, most informed observers recognize it as propaganda. The more the State of Israel relies on force to manage the occupation, the more it feels compelled to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encounter hasbara, the more likely they are to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation and repression that define its treatment of the Palestinians.

Under the leadership of Netanyahu—a professional explainer himself, who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime-time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class—the Israeli government has invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara now falls on a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, led until 2013 by Yuli Edelstein, a right-wing settler and government minister who has called Arabs a “despicable nation.” (Edelstein is now speaker of the Knesset.)

Edelstein’s ministry boasts an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claims to include thousands of bloggers, tweeters and Facebook commenters who are fed the latest talking points and then flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who express skepticism about official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians. These efforts have been complemented by the office of the prime minister, the IDF spokesperson’s unit, and the ministry of tourism and culture, each of which hosts newly created hasbara units. Even the Jewish Agency, a state-funded para-governmental organization primarily engaged in absorbing and settling new Jewish immigrants, employs a full-time social media operative named Avi Mayer, who spends his days on Twitter attacking Palestine solidarity activists with usually baseless claims of anti-Semitism and deception.

Whether they like it or not, every Jewish Israeli citizen is a potential recruit for the national hasbara brigade. While Tel Aviv University sends hasbara delegations to campuses across Europe and the United States, the National Union of Israeli Students offers Israeli college students $2,000 to spread propaganda “from the comfort of home.” El Al Airlines deploys its flight attendants in American cities to make the case for Israel during specially allotted paid vacation days. Meanwhile, back at Ben Gurion International Airport, large billboards posted by the Ministry of Public Diplomacy instruct Israelis to “be good diplomats” when they travel abroad. By corralling an entire population into promoting Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the state strengthens a culture that treats dissent and critical inquiry with instinctive hostility.

Watch: Israel's New Racism, Max Blumenthal and David Sheen's documentary video uncovering the persecution of African Migrants in the holy land


In 2005, the American reality TV program The Apprentice reappeared in Israel as The Ambassador, a hit show featuring hundreds of Israeli citizens engaging in heated hasbara competitions before a national audience and a panel of judges that included top army generals and journalists. At stake were cash prizes, a chance to speak in international parliaments and the adulation of their fellow citizens. At a 2010 conference of liberal intellectuals in Herzliya sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the think tank of the German Green Party, I encountered the winner of the second season of The Ambassador. She was pretty in a classically telegenic way, slender and extremely poised. The 30-year-old woman in a gray pantsuit was Melody Sucharewicz, but to many Israelis who viewed her as a celebrity, she was simply known as “Melody.” Since her victory, Sucharewicz has spoken about Israel’s “quest for peace” at the United Nations and secured a plum position at the Peres Center for Peace.

During a question-and-answer session at the conference, Sucharewicz leapt to defend Israel against even mild criticism from various panelists, including the renowned Israeli historian Tom Segev. For five minutes she delivered a breathless, semi-coherent rant, as though she were in a contest to spin as many current events in Israel’s favor as possible. Finally, the moderator asked Sucharewicz to conclude her remarks with a question. “Of course you want me to stop talking,” she snapped at him. “You will never let a woman speak long enough to express herself.” Having shamed the moderator into submission, Sucharewicz plowed ahead for five more minutes of hasbara.

When I interviewed her in the hallway afterward, I found her unflappable. To my question about the wave of anti-democratic laws flooding the Knesset, she responded, “Israel is not perfect. They can only strive to be more perfect…. I wouldn’t go as far as saying there is pure discrimination.” On issues ranging from civilian casualties in the 2008–09 attack on Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) to the bulldozing of Bedouin villages in Israel’s Negev region, Sucharewicz always returned to one point: Israel is not perfect, but it is constantly improving.

The same year that The Ambassador hit Israeli airwaves, the government focused on rebranding Israel as a cosmopolitan, technologically advanced party playpen for Western visitors, especially sex-hungry, upwardly mobile men between 18 and 35. A series of edgy commercials promoting tourism highlighted the new Brand Israel campaign. The first of the ads, released in 2006, depicted two randy young men sitting shirtless on the Tel Aviv beach while a parade of scantily clad Israeli women appear before them:


Max Blumenthal
A Response to Eric Alterman (World)
A continuing conversation about Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

Max Blumenthal
Man #1 (staring at a nubile young woman rubbing lotion on her thighs): Holy shit, man!

Man #2: Holy fuck!

Man #1(glancing at the bouncing breasts of a bikini-clad blonde jogging in his direction): Holy Jesus! Oh! Come to papa!

A brunette bikini model drops a paddle ball near the men and gives them a sultry look.

Man #1 (overcome with passion): Oooooh!

Slogan appears on-screen: “Israel: No Wonder They Call It the Holy Land.”

With $90 million from the municipality of Tel Aviv to promote the city as a gay paradise, and with free trips provided by the tourism ministry for gay Israelis willing to “conduct public diplomacy activities abroad,” the Brand Israel campaign has increasingly centered on what many international gay activists call “pinkwashing,” or using the country’s relatively progressive gay rights record to conceal its human rights abuses. The campaign has included sending openly gay Israeli soldiers to speak on college campuses, screening pro-Israel films at gay rights festivals, and even sending a bizarre float into the 2011 San Francisco Gay Pride parade featuring a blow-up doll of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being sodomized by a nuclear missile.

Among the most aggressive promoters of Israel’s supposedly queer-friendly culture was Michael Lucas, one of the world’s wealthiest gay porn producers. A fervent supporter of Israeli airstrikes on Iran and a vehement Islamophobe (“I hate Muslims absolutely”), Lucas leveraged his fortune to found a company promoting gay tourism to Israel. “I find it absolutely maddening that gay people, who are the number one target of Islam, are so ignorant of the facts,” he told an interviewer from the far-right US journal FrontPage Magazine. “They are romanticizing the same Palestinians that hang gay people on cranes, but demonizing Israel, which is a safe haven for gay people.” Lucas’s most heavily promoted porno film, Men of Israel, which became a vehicle for his gay tours, featured two actors having sex inside a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948.

Incorrectly claiming that the village had been depopulated hundreds of years before, Lucas wrote in a press release, “We went to an abandoned village just north of Jerusalem. It was a beautiful, ancient township that had been deserted centuries ago…however, that did not stop our guys from mounting each other and trying to repopulate it. Biology may not be the lesson of the day, but these men shot their seeds all over the village.” After the filming concluded in the “abandoned” village, Lucas and his cast were received by a news crew from Israel’s Channel 1, which covered the porn shoot as a boon to Israeli public relations.

In June 2011, when activists around the world convened in Greece for the attempted launch of the second Gaza Freedom Flotilla—one year after the Israeli military attack on the Mavi Marmara that killed nine activists—the Israeli government released a YouTube video designed to tar the flotilla organizers as homophobes. The video depicted a gay activist who called himself “Marc3Pax” talking about how the organizers had refused to allow him on board because of concerns expressed by their supposed partners among the anti-gay Hamas. Marc3Pax closed the video by warning gay viewers that joining the Palestine solidarity movement meant “getting in bed” with bearded jihadis who hate homosexuals.

Sensing that the video was a hoax, US-based writers Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of the Palestinian news and opinion website Electronic Intifada quickly unmasked the star of the video as an Israeli actor and nightclub promoter named Omer Gershon. When I investigated the video’s origins, I learned that the first person to promote it on Twitter was a character named “Guy Seemann.” At first, I could not believe that an actual person named Guy Seemann was disseminating a gay hoax video. I soon discovered that Seemann was not only real, but that he was a low-level operative working in the office of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The Marc3Pax hoax was followed by another dunderheaded and downright weird video designed to undermine the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Produced by a Tel Aviv–based production company with links to the prime minister’s office, it’s titled “Sex With the Psychologist.” It features an attractive and extremely bothered young woman reacting to Rorschach inkblots displayed by a leering, gray-haired psychologist. As the woman descends into varying stages of agitation, shots of her thighs flash on the screen. “All you want to do is live in peace,” she complains in South African–accented English, “but you keep trying to embarrass her and attack her and harass her.” Her words are interrupted by jarring montages of knives and clashes on the deck of the Mavi Marmara. “Doctor, why are you showing me these pictures?” she protests. “Stop telling me lies and presenting me only one side of the story…. Leave her alone, stop provoking her!… What do you want? For her to disappear off the map?”

The woman was apparently a metaphorical representation of Israel as it wishes to be seen: peaceful, cosmopolitan and erotic, but also traumatized, vulnerable, and driven to neurosis by marauding terrorists and Jew-hating activists—an innocent victim in need of rescue. At the video’s end, the woman storms out of the psychologist’s office and a message appears on-screen: “Don’t support another violent flotilla.”


The lurid hasbara of Brand Israel was directly inspired by corporate PR, and no single figure has devoted more energy at refining its techniques of damage control than Frank Luntz. Luntz earned acclaim—and notoriety—in 1996 when he crafted a memo for Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House, called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” The memo advised Gingrich to promote the GOP agenda with positive words like “moral,” “lead” and “prosperity,” while hammering Democrats with terms like “abuse of power,” “corrupt” and “intolerant.” Luntz went on to garner lucrative contracts from Enron, ExxonMobil and, most recently, the financial industry, which hired him to help undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement. Luntz’s bestselling vocabulary guide, Words That Work, was originally titled Killer Words.

Given his history of helping corporate crooks talk their way out of crises, perhaps it was appropriate that Luntz was contracted by the Israel Project, an international pro-Israel activism outfit with ties to the country’s foreign ministry, to craft its official hasbara handbook. In the 116-page guide, fine-tuned for the sensibilities of an audience high on passion and low on information, Luntz outlines strategies for promoting Israel in the media and on campus. Throughout the document, Luntz urges pro-Israel activists to lead attacks on adversaries by “start[ing] with empathy for both sides first.” He advises Israel advocates to feign humility and concern for Palestinian children before opening up a relentless focus on the “Iran-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.”

In an unusual—and probably unintentional—moment of candor, Luntz warns that if Israel remains in a perpetual state of war with no plan to resolve its crisis, “Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their president’s clout on helping Israel.” To hold off the looming storm, Luntz advises Israel supporters to “remind people—again and again—that Israel wants peace.” For him and professional hasbarists like Sucharewicz, the word “peace” is, of course, nothing more than a rhetorical device.

* * *

While the Israeli government deployed a steady barrage of sophistry and diversionary tactics to guard its image, the military-intelligence apparatus resorted increasingly to repression to silence its internal critics. One of the most effective was Yonatan Shapira, an air force pilot who in September 2003, at the height of the second intifada, organized twenty-seven active-duty and veteran pilots to sign a public letter of refusal to fly any more missions that endangered civilians in the territories. After leaving the military, Shapira joined the BDS movement, incurring the wrath of the Israeli right-wing media as well as a threatening interrogation by the country’s internal security service, the Shin Bet.

In September 2009, Israeli authorities detained Palestinian human rights activist Mohammed Othman when he returned from a trip to Norway, where he had lobbied Norwegian officials to support BDS and the grassroots campaign against Israel’s separation wall. Othman was released months later, but only following a sustained campaign by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to publicize his status as a political prisoner. In December 2009, Israel detained Jamal Juma, a leading member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, designating him as a dangerous “security prisoner” before releasing him without charges weeks later.

Among the dozens of Israeli activists caught in the Shin Bet’s dragnet was Leehee Rothschild, a 29-year-old human rights activist who was a constant presence at unarmed Palestinian demonstrations against the occupation in the West Bank, and who had recently joined a small group of pro-BDS Israeli activists and academics called Boycott Within. In March 2012, a year after police raided her apartment and rummaged through her belongings, Rothschild was detained by the Shin Bet while returning home from a trip to Europe, during which she had participated in a series of educational BDS events. At Ben Gurion International Airport, she was interrogated by “Shavit,” the director of the Shin Bet’s “extreme left and right department,” who suggested that his agency was listening to her phone calls, reading her e-mails and had bugged her apartment. When she was released, Rothschild wrote, “[Shavit] said that for now, I’ve stayed within the law, but once I broke it, I’d better remember that they are watching me, and that they view me as a leader, so I could be held responsible for leading other people into illegal acts.”

The mounting panic over BDS fed directly into a Knesset effort to criminalize the boycott of Israeli products. In March 2011, a bill was introduced by the Likud Party’s Ze’ev Elkin, a right-wing populist from the party’s cadre of thirty- and fortysomething upstarts, and passed a committee vote, sending it to the Knesset floor for a final vote. The bill represented a streamlined version of a previous proposal that would have punished boycotters with actual jail time, while deporting noncitizens who called for boycotts of Israel in their own country. In its new, diluted form, the bill explicitly punished speech considered harmful to the Jewish state, allowing any Israeli who felt his or her business had been damaged by another Israeli’s call for a boycott—no evidence required—to sue the perpetrator in civil court. The bill read: “It is forbidden to initiate a boycott against the State of Israel, to encourage participation in it or to provide assistance or information in order to promote it.”

Anat Matar was one of the first Israeli citizens to publicly promote a boycott. A professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and the mother of prominent left-wing journalist Hagai Matar, Anat quickly became a hate figure for Knesset right-wingers, who demanded that she be ousted from her tenured academic post. In a speech before Tel Aviv University’s 2010 graduation ceremony, the super-hasbara super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz accused Matar and two other pro-BDS Israeli academics, Rachel Giora and Shlomo Sand, of “impos[ing] their ideology on students,” and urged “patriotic” students and faculty members to “stand up to propagandizing professors…in appropriate forums outside of the classroom where different rules govern.” Matar told me that 250 of her academic colleagues were inspired by Dershowitz to sign a public letter condemning her in vitriolic terms.

Matar told me that despite the mounting intimidation, she was not the real target of the anti-boycott legislation. “If the law passes, it’s not only me who gets hurt,” she said. “And if I’m fired, that’s actually the least important thing. The most important is what will happen with the NGOs like Adalah [the legal center for Arab minority rights], with [the occupation monitoring group] Yesh Din, with B’Tselem. If I’m fired, it’s a personal inconvenience—but if that happens, it’s much more than a sweeping attack on a lunatic from academia. I really don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t see any way out of this.”

[Searcher08]

Tony Greenstein, eh?
Neturei Karta, eh?

Fair enough.

I think the role of... Hasbara in a European context is quite important in this.
Hasbara activists have even had a presence on R.I. - and threatened it in an on-going campaign.
I even posted links on it in the thread in the Firepit.

Do you specifically include fighting Hasbara... within anti-Fascist activities, AD?
Personally, I think they absolutely ARE.

What specifically is your clearly stated, unambiguous position on them?

I do certainly think opposition to the racist, settler colonialist policies of the Israeli State is important- and certainly do support strategies such as BDS.

More to the point of this thread, I think support and opposition to those policies is interfacing with White Nationalists/"Ultra Nationalists" across Europe in very interesting ways. I'm certainly willing to discuss that on this thread- and in a parallel way- the emerging role of Islamophobia in that context.

That said, I think Semper raises a fair point which is that Gilad/Greenstein issues have the potential to light our world on fire. I would be willing to revisit some of those issues- under duress- but only on a separate thread, and only insofar as we could keep it contained to a productive dialogue. In that, your skills and years of focus on communication issues might come in handy...

BRIEF ASIDE:
I am baffled why you raised them?!!

Remember, GA and therefore GA / TG discussion is PROSCRIBED - Jeff does not want it.

The dialogue that you speak of was attempted before - and it ended up nearly killing R.I. - you know that. It was also done on MondoWeiss and similar things happened there.
You might be surprised to hear it but I think our board is NOT in the condition to do that.
I REALLY STRONGLY urge and advise against it.

(I think that a forum is not the place where something like that could bear useful fruit - I think that is going into a physical 'Open Space Technology' combined with Rosenberg NVC training for the participants)

[jakell]

Going back to the article mentioned above concerning N.K.

It seemed to make something of the fact that they met with the NF. This might sound ominous to non UK folks (as all data here seems to be considered equal), but the NF are an insignificant pimple, and this is nowhere near as noteworthy as if they had contact with the BNP or EDF, and even the BNP are fast becoming a pimple.

Just another snippet to give context.

[American Dream]

Tony Greenstein, eh?
Neturei Karta, eh?

Fair enough.

I think the role of... Hasbara in a European context is quite important in this.
Hasbara activists have even had a presence on R.I. - and threatened it in an on-going campaign.
I even posted links on it in the thread in the Firepit.

Do you specifically include fighting Hasbara... within anti-Fascist activities, AD?
Personally, I think they absolutely ARE.

What specifically is your clearly stated, unambiguous position on them?

I do certainly think opposition to the racist, settler colonialist policies of the Israeli State is important- and certainly do support strategies such as BDS.

More to the point of this thread, I think support and opposition to those policies is interfacing with White Nationalists/"Ultra Nationalists" across Europe in very interesting ways. I'm certainly willing to discuss that on this thread- and in a parallel way- the emerging role of Islamophobia in that context.

That said, I think Semper raises a fair point which is that Gilad/Greenstein issues have the potential to light our world on fire. I would be willing to revisit some of those issues- under duress- but only on a separate thread, and only insofar as we could keep it contained to a productive dialogue. In that, your skills and years of focus on communication issues might come in handy...

BRIEF ASIDE:
I am baffled why you raised them?!!

Remember, GA and therefore GA / TG discussion is PROSCRIBED - Jeff does not want it.

The dialogue that you speak of was attempted before - and it ended up nearly killing R.I. - you know that. It was also done on MondoWeiss and similar things happened there.
You might be surprised to hear it but I think our board is NOT in the condition to do that.
I REALLY STRONGLY urge and advise against it.

(I think that a forum is not the place where something like that could bear useful fruit - I think that is going into a physical 'Open Space Technology' combined with Rosenberg NVC training for the participants)

Points well taken. I actually stumbled upon that post while trying to get up to speed about Larry O'Hara. Mostly, I was just shocked because I saw that information about Neturei Karta and I thought it informed material that had been presented previously.

That said, I think you and Semper make valid points about this. I'm still wondering though, if and how a thread about board dynamics might be helpful...

[American Dream]

Very, very creepy- I just stumbled upon this:


http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/176867

Neturei Karta Demonstrate in Support of Hungarian Anti-Semite

Small group of radical anti-Zionist sect stand in solidarity with Jobbik party head during controversial London rally.

First Publish: 1/29/2014, 5:23 PM


Neturei Karta demonstration (file)

When Gábor Vona, the leader Hungary's far-right Jobbik party, made his controversial visit and public address in London on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, he faced protests by anti-racism and anti-fascist campaigners, who said he should never have been allowed into the UK in the first place.

But Vona also received support during his visit - including from Neturei Karta, a radical Jewish anti-Zionist sect.

Pictures of several Jewish men wearing traditional hassidic garb protesting in support of Vona and his Jobbik party were first circulated by the BBC - although the British media outlet initially erroneously claimed the group were protesting against his visit.

The confusion likely stemmed from the apparently bizarre spectacle of supposedly religious Jews supporting a figure who has been compared to Adolf Hitler for his party's extreme xenophobia.

Jobbik has been branded anti-Semitic and racist for its views targeting the country's Jewish and Roma minorities, and blamed for an increase in racism and anti-Semitism in the Eastern European state. The party notably makes use of several Nazi symbols, including the Árpád stripes, which were initially used by the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross, which collaborated with Nazi Germany and was instrumental in the deportation and murder of 400,000 Hungarian Jews.

In 2009, Jobbik MP Krisztina Morvai sent an open letter to Israel’s ambassador to Hungary, in which she detailed her joy at the deaths of Israeli soldiers killed by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

"The only way to talk to people like you is by assuming the style of Hamas. I wish all of you lice-infested, dirty murderers will receive Hamas’ ‘kisses'," she wrote.

But Jobbik's hatred for the State of Israel is precisely the reason why Neturei Karta turned up in support. Angered by the implication that it was opposed to the far-right party, Neturei Karta lodged a complaint with the BBC, accusing it of "distorting our message", after which the picture was removed.

On its Facebook page, the radical sect - which numbers no more than a few hundred and has been disowned by all mainstream Jewish sects - posted a status clarifying that its members were indeed there to support Jobbik.


Neturei Karta demonstration in support of far-right Jobbik party screenshot

"Members of Neturei Karta were demonstrating against the strident and aggressive actions of the Zionists against Jobbick [sic] and Mr. Vona," it said, referring to anti-racism groups opposed to the visit. "The Rabbis of NK were carrying a banner with a clear message: 'Authentic Jewry is Against Zionist Aggression'."

"The BBC ignored the banner and totally distorting [sic] our message. They stated that the Rabbis were there to demonstrate against Mr. Vona and Jobbick. That is totally false.

"I have lodged a complaint with the BBC and await the outcome."

Those familiar with Neturei Karta point out that its stance is far from surprising, since the sect's relationship with extremist groups - from the far-right to Islamists and the far-left - is nothing new.

"Neturei Karta has always been an important partner for far-Left and Islamist groups in the UK, who have cited the support of Neturei Karta as a fig-leaf defence against accusations of anti-Semitism," stated Stand for Peace, a UK-based anti-extremism group.

"In 2006, the sect’s UK branch leader Ahron Cohen stated that the Holocaust dead 'deserved it'. Similarly, Cohen was present at Iran’s Holocaust Denial conference in 2006 – paid for by the Iranian foreign ministry –[where] he was warmly greeted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President and infamous supporter of terrorism. One fellow speaker at Iran’s conference included David Duke, former 'imperial wizard' of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan."

"In June 2012, Neturei Karta’s UK leader Aharon Cohen addressed a group at St George’s Tavern in London, according to anti-fascist organisation Searchlight. The group, led by ex-National Front member Troy Southgate, declares itself 'opposed to liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism.'

"Holocaust denier Lady Michele Renouf, a champion of David Irving, was one of the 30 attendees. The “New Right” is a neo-nazi organisation, run by a former National Front activist, Troy Southgate. It is the successor organisation to his “National Revolutionary Faction”, which Southgate describes as:

"…a hardline revolutionary organisation based on an underground cell-structure similar to that used by both the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and the IRA…[...]"

Neturei Karta opposes the existence of the State of Israel based on the assumption that an independent Jewish state prior to the coming of the Jewish Messiah is sacrilegious. It has regularly aligned itself with extremist Islamist groups, including Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations.

Just yesterday, a Neturei Karta member was sentenced to four and a half years in an Israeli jail for volunteering to spy for Iran and "kill a Zionist".

[seemslikeadream]

you stumble on a whole lot of things....as your last two posts suggest...just an observation

why does it not bother you more that there are real fascists running this country?

who have control over your life?

A Reading Guide on the Billionaire Koch Brothers


David H. Koch (Photo by Bill Greene/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Today, ProPublica’s Kim Barker and Theodoric Meyer examine the Kochs’ network of “dark money” groups that spend money on politics and the role of Sean Noble, a former congressional aide, in shaping it. Read their investigation, or browse below for more of the best reporting on the Koch brothers.

Did we miss any? Leave a link in the comments or tweet us with #KochReads.

Covert Operations, The New Yorker, August 2010 Jane Mayer’s profile on the Koch brothers details the libertarian movement that they’ve built and the extent of their influence on politics. From funding climate change denial to opposition of the Obama administration’s policies, Mayer describes how the brothers’ political views “dovetail with [their] corporate interests.”

Koch-Backed Political Coalition, Designed to Shield Donors, Raised $400 Million in 2012, The Washington Post, January 2014 The Washington Post outlines the structure and internal operations of the Koch network in the 2012 elections, including their strategies to protect donor identities and obscure the flow of money.

Koch World 2014, Politico, January 2014 Politico details the Kochs’ plans to roll out “a new, more integrated approach to politics” in 2014. Having learned from their 2012 election letdown, the Kochs are expanding and reorganizing to improve in key areas, including “greater investments in grassroots organizing, better use of voter data and more effective appeals to young and Hispanic voters.”

Largest Dark-Money Donor Groups Share Funds, Hide Links, OpenSecrets, September 2013Tax filings show how dark money groups tied to the Koch brothers have been using “shadow money mailboxes” to obfuscate the identity of their donors. By first funneling donations through subsidiary limited-liability companies, the groups have been able to make it harder to figure out how the money is flowing.

A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning, The New York Times, October 2013Several groups with ties to the Koch brothers helped fund the 2013 congressional battle over Obamacare and the resulting government shutdown. “The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law,” the Times reported. The groups paid for television ads and distributed scripts for people to call members of Congress.

A Word from our Sponsor, The New Yorker, May 2013 The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer charts a public TV station’s treatment of two documentaries that portrayed David Koch in a negative light. Concerned that one of their major funders would back out, the station offered Koch a chance to respond to the first documentary and aired it along with his comment. The second documentary never aired. Filmmakers said it was because the station began “to fear the reaction [their] film would provoke.”

Kochworld, Texas Observer, October 2012 In Corpus Christi’s Hillcrest, where Koch Industries enjoys tax incentives and lax environmental regulations, health problems abound. Despite having faced federal indictments for polluting Corpus Christi’s air and waterways, the Kochs have continued to make millions off of their refineries and have plans to expand. Meanwhile, Hillcrest residents living in the shadow of the Koch refineries are “mired in illness and poverty.”

Inside the Koch Brothers’ Secret Seminar (Audio), Mother Jones, September 2011 In 2011, Mother Jones obtained recordings from the top-secret meeting that the Koch brothers hold twice a year for their wealthy donors. In the recording, the brothers name 32 individuals and families who’d donated over a million dollars — contributions that had previously been secret.

Karl Rove Vs. the Koch Brothers, Politico, October 2011 Up until 2010,Karl Rove and the Koch brothers worked together in spending millions on conservative endeavors. But by 2011, they were at loggerheads as Rove’s advocacy groups pushed for an increase in the debt ceiling as Koch groups opposed raising it. In this article, Politico compares strategies used by Rove and the Kochs to gain political advantages.

[jakell]

I for one would be more interested in hearing from someone who has experience of the American Far Right.
Seeing lots of stale and uncollated data about my own familiar neck of the woods is not instructive, and certainly not to others.

Of course, inaccurate information can be useful to someone who merely wants to build a narrative to certain specifications** rather than one based upon present facts.

**Not suggesting Machiavellian purposes, it could just as easily be lazy undisciplined fantasy.

[seemslikeadream]

I for one would be more interested in hearing from someone who has experience of the American Far Right.
Seeing lots of stale and uncollated data about my own familiar neck of the woods is not instructive, and certainly not to others.

Of course, inaccurate information can be useful to someone who merely wants to build a narrative to certain specifications** rather than one based upon present facts.

**Not suggesting Machiavellian purposes, it could just as easily be lazy undisciplined fantasy.

This is a really good website ..they've been watching our very own fascists ... for years

Would Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip be able to survive without massive support from Christian Zionists in the United States? This is the question this web page is exploring.


http://www.theocracywatch.org

Right-Wing "Nonprofit" Religious Groups and Koch Brothers Team Up to Target Voters

The Koch Brothers Have Given Millions to Anti-Choice Organizations

The Koch Brothers and the John Birch Society: Wrecking America One (tax free) Think Tank at a Time

[jakell]

I for one would be more interested in hearing from someone who has experience of the American Far Right.
Seeing lots of stale and uncollated data about my own familiar neck of the woods is not instructive, and certainly not to others.

Of course, inaccurate information can be useful to someone who merely wants to build a narrative to certain specifications** rather than one based upon present facts.

**Not suggesting Machiavellian purposes, it could just as easily be lazy undisciplined fantasy.

This is a really good website ..they've been watching our very own fascists ... for years

Would Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip be able to survive without massive support from Christian Zionists in the United States? This is the question this web page is exploring.


http://www.theocracywatch.org

This is something we don't really have in the UK (and the continent is similar), and that is a religious right. There have been some attempts to increase this, but the thing is that British Nationalism is based on a long continuous history and is based around indigenous peoples, whereas in America, quite a few movements seem to have been started from scratch.

I am mostly interested in 'white nationalism' which is mainly an American import and has an uneasy relationship with BN, and in some ways they are incompatible, One difference is that in the UK, there is a far less concentration on the Jews.
I would think that a similar relationship occurs on the continent too as they all have long histories.

Thanks for the link.

[seemslikeadream]

Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries, was one of the founding members of The John Birch Society ...btw

Tom Perkins Says Rich Should Get More Votes in Elections

Tom Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist who provoked a firestorm by comparing the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany to the way rich people are treated in the United States, on Thursday offered a provocative idea about how to “change the world.” During an interview with an editor of Fortune magazine, Perkins said that only U.S. taxpayers should be able to vote in elections.

Perkins’ latest comments came three weeks after a letter he wrote to the Wall Street Journal provoked a furor. “Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’” said Perkins. “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

Kristallnacht, also referred to as “Night of the Broken Glass,” was an overnight pogrom in 1938 against Jews in Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, during which at least 91 people were killed and 30,000 more were sent to concentration camps. Historians consider Kristallnacht to be a turning point in the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews, during what become known as the Holocaust, in which an estimated six million Jews were killed.

Tom Perkins Is Wrong – Germany’s 1 Percent Were Hitler’s Allies, Not his Victims

By: Hrafnkell Haraldssonmore from Hrafnkell Haraldsson
Monday, January, 27th, 2014, 8:12 am

Venture capitalist Thomas Perkins, not to be confused with the equally befuddled, dishonest, and hyperbolic Religious Right figure, compared, in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, America’s 1 percent to the Jews of Nazi Germany:

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’
In a time when the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, when the unemployed are denied unemployment benefits and the sick are denied medical care and everyone is denied a job, Perkins wrote of “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent,” He claimed, “In the Nazi area it was racial demonization, now it is class demonization.”



Perkins concluded that, “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

From this, you would expect the 1 percent to be thrown into concentration camps almost immediately. But nothing could be further from the truth, and the parallels with Nazi thinking are nonexistent. Perkins, not to put too fine a point on it, lied through his teeth.

Actually, Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party were eager to climb into bed with the German 1 percent, other than rich Jews, of course, whose money could simply be confiscated later. In fact, it has been argued that without support from rich German industrialists, Hitler would never have risen to power in 1933. And not only did Hitler have financial supporters in Germany but in the United States.



Hitler’s confident and friend Ernst Hanfstaengl recalled later how in the early days of the Nazi movement, he brought Hitler into contact with “national-minded wealthy business men” and “national-minded Bavarian industrialists.” He notes also that Hitler was involved with the Bruckmanns, whom he described as “big publishers in Munich” and that Elsa Bruckmann “made something of a protégé of Hitler.” The Bechstein family, the piano makers, also took an interest in Hitler. The Party was also subsidized by the Germany army in Bavaria, which was looking for allies against the communists.

Another close acquaintance of Hitler, his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, wrote that when Hitler left Landsberg prison he had not even “a farthing” in his pocket but that one of his “most ardent supporters, a wealthy member of famous aristocratic family and the wife of a highly respected businessman, arranged a personal office for him and furnished it with furniture of her own…”

Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, wrote in his memoirs that “Hitler addressed captains of industry for the first time in 1926 in my home town of Essen.” By the end of the 1920s, Hitler was not only receiving the support of German monarchists and the German aristocracy (“these were people from the right sort of society” as Hanfstaengl related – the 1 percent in other words), but started receiving, in Hanfstaengl’s words, “quite large subsidies” from German industrialists in the Ruhr like Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf. Fritz Thyssen later claimed in his memoirs that he “donated 100,000 gold marks to the NSDAP in October 1923.”

Accoding to Dietrich, Hitler “was a frequent guest at his [Kirdorf's] house in Mülheim-Saarn near Duisberg.” Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder, related in her memoirs an important incident related to Kirdorf:

He [Hitler] often spoke of the financial bonds in which the Party invested earlier, and were signed by him. Often somebody had to be found in the last moment to redeem them. He liked to quote this example:
I signed a Loan Note for the Party for 40,000 RM. Money I was expected had not been received, the Party coffers were empty and the redemption date on the note was coming nearer without any hope of my getting the money together. I was considering shooting myself, since there seemed no alternative. Four days before the redemption date I informed Frau Bruckmann of my unfortunate plight. She phoned Emil Kirdorf and sent me to see him. I told Kirdorf of my plans and won him over at once to the cause. He placed the money at my disposal and thus enabled me to liquidate the debt on time.
This is a story Hitler also related to Joseph Göbbels, who noted it in his diary on 15 November 1936.

From 1931 – and this is two years before Hitler came to power – 5 pfennigs out of every ton of coal sold by Rhine-Westfalen Coal Syndicate, went to the NSDAP. Wikipedia notes that Kirdorf “was personally awarded by Adolf Hitler the Order of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany‘s highest distinctions, on his 90th birthday in 1937, for his support to the Nazi Party in the late 1920s.”

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team notes that,

At a meeting of leading German industrialists with Hjalmar Schacht, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, held on the 20 February 1933, IGF contributed 400,000 reichsmarks to the Nazi Party, the largest single amount in the total sum of 3 million reichsmarks raised at this meeting by German industrialists for the Nazi Party’s election campaign.
According to Antony C. Sutton, this money went into Hitler’s political “slush fund” and “It was this secret fund which financed the Nazi seizure of control in March 1933.*

Not all Nazis were so willing to deal with the wealthy. Hitler and Otto Straßer, for example, different how how to deal with these people when the Nazis came to power (Kirdorf left the Nazi Party in 1928 on account of Straßer but rejoined in 1934 after Straßer was killed on Hitler’s orders).

Thomas Friedrich relates that Straßer asked Hitler “what he would do with Krupp and similar companies in the event of his assuming power. Would everything remain unchanged in terms of ownership, profits and management?” “But of course,” Hitler is said to have replied. “Do you think I’m mad enough to destroy the economy?” Straßer was dismayed, writes Friedrich. “If Hitler was planning to retain the capitalist system, he could hardly speak of ‘socialism’…Hitler retorted that the term ‘socialism’ was intrinsically bad’ and repeated his view that companies could be nationalized only if they failed to act in the national interest. ‘As long as this does not happen, it would simply be a crime to destroy the national economy.’”

Before the 1932 elections, Hitler met with the Industrial Club at the Park Hotel in Düsseldorf and told them his economic policies were not a threat to them. Henry Ashby Turner writes that “From all indications, neither Hitler nor any other Nazis mounted any sustained follow-up from those who had been present at his Industry Club speech or otherwise to enlist them for their purposes.” Dietrich agrees, saying that the ice was broken but that contributions were “insignificant in amount.”

But what counts here is the efforts to which Hitler went to court, rather than, as Thomas Perkins claims, kill rich Germans.

Ashby-Turner claims that these rich industrialists were never a huge source of funding for the Nazi Party but whether they were or they weren’t, that they gave any money at to Hitler, and that he courted their support, and that after 1933 big business back Hitler to the hilt, paints a very different picture than that presented by Perkins, who would have us believe that the 1 percent should be equated with Germany’s Jews (the old anti-Semitic claim that the “Jews own everything”).

If anything, what emerges is a picture of Hitler and industrialists that reminds us of nothing so much as the Republican Party’s relationship with the mainstream media and the Tea Party’s own relationship with big business. Hitler publicly condemned industrialists as Jewish interests just as the GOP publicly condemns the mainstream media as leftist tools, but secretly relied on them, just as the GOP relies on the mainstream media to spread conservative propaganda and the Tea Party relies on Big Business to fund their supposed “grass roots” activities.

In no way can the 1 percent be compared to Hitler’s Jewish victims. They can, however, be compared to Hitler’s 1 percent, who saw in the Nazi leader an ally against the radical left, the same alliance of ultra-nationalist right wing forces that exists today between the GOP and America’s rich against the radical populist, and working-class left. One is reminded of Sarah Palin’s “blood libel” scandal, and Thomas Perkins should apologize to Hitler’s Jewish victims and to the American people.

* From Sutton: The I.G. Farben transfer slip dated February 27, 1933 is found on Nuremberg Military Tribunal document NI-391-395, the “Original transfer slip dated March 19, 1933 from Accumulatoren-Fabrik to Delbrück, Shickler Bank in Berlin, with instructions to pay 25,000 RM to the ‘Nationale Treuhand’ fund administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolph Hess to elect Hitler in March 1933″ is found on Nuremberg Military Tribunal document NI-391-395, and “The transfer slip, dated March 2, 1933, from German General Eletric to Delbrück, Schickler Bank in Berlin, with instructions to pay 60,000 RM to the ‘Nationale Treuhand’ fund (administered by Hjalmar Schacht and Rudolph Hess) used to elect Hitler in March 1933 is found on Nuremberg Military Tribunal document No. 391-395.”

[Searcher08]

Thank you for that - I love the excruciatingly meticulous detail and personal integrity that Antony Sutton brought to his financial transaction and technology transfer research. I wish he had lived a lot longer... definitely established massive money and information flows between Wall Street and Third Reich.

[American Dream]

Links in the original:


http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress. ... ggestions/

Anti-Repression, Anti-Fascist Strategizing Suggestions

Posted on October 16, 2012 by mamos206

With the rise of the Golden Dawn fascist group in Greece, and their attempts to build a base here in the U.S. (link) , anti-fascist strategies are becoming more and more crucial.

Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the police continue to “out- source” political repression to private groups (fascists, gangs, white supremacist populists, private security forces, etc.) as budget crises deepen.

This weekend, after anti-colonial marchers were arrested, San Francisco papers published their photos and someone put up posters calling for violence against Bay Area anarchists. All of this could be part of a trend in this direction, and this blog post is an attempt to prompt a discussion about how to deal with these forms of repression and violence.

I’m not suggesting the posters themselves are a secret plot by the state, and I am not suggesting that they are produced by fascists or by gangs. It seems they represent some sort of political beef emerging out of Occupy Oakland that is related to racial and class divisions within Oakland and within Occupy Oakland. I am not there, and I don’t know the context, so I won’t hazard a guess. If anyone wants to clarify in the comments below what is really going on, I welcome any corrections.

I do know that the papers publishing photos of arrested activists opens up the possibility of vigilante attacks from various political tendencies, or private repression in the form of people being fired from jobs, blacklisted, tracked by private security agencies, etc. So we need to think about how to deal with this from a variety of angles. How can we get to the point where we are deeply connected with our neighbors, our coworkers, etc. where we support each other on a daily basis, so they will support us in situations like this? I do think that we are making progress toward this goal in Seattle, and the Who You Callin’ Illegal group emerging to support our comrade Dede against deportation is a good example. But we still have a long way to go. I also know I am not saying anything new here – most radicals want to build communities that are this strong; it is simply a question of how to do it.

When I was in the Philippines recently, I spoke with activists who face much more severe repression than we face here - from the state, from private security forces, and from vigilantes and gangs that serve corporate interests. They rely on fellow workers, fellow poor people, and fellow peasants to back them up. They are part of the communities they are organizing in, they are not separate- so people understand an attack on them to be an attack on the whole community. This is a result of decades of patient organizing where they have earned people’s respect and trust.

Recently, some revolutionaries have made criticisms of slow patient base-building work (what’s often called “community organizing” or “labor organizing”), pointing out that political developments might happen much faster in this time of crisis, and revolutionaries need to be flexible enough to put specific organizing work on hold temporarily in order to intervene in mass ruptures and upsurges like Occupy, ruptures which are impossible to predict ahead of time, no matter how good our theories are. I agree with this. However, if you aren’t doing any community building and day-to-day organizing, when you do intervene in a rupture, it’s easier for the state to isolate and crush you once that rupture subsides.

I think this debate between ruptures and base building is largely a function of our existing radical circles being so small that we don’t have time to do both. As we grow, this will become less of an issue – it is also a good argument to prioritize growing. I also want to highlight that this is not an anarchist vs. Marxist issue. At least in Seattle, both anarchists and Marixsts do community base buidling, and both intervened aggressively in the Decolonize/ Occupy movement, alongside lots of people who don’t identify with either philosophy.

In my view, our goal should be to build mass-based communities, networks, and organizations that can intervene together in ruptures, go through the experience together, and grow. Also, we should get to the point where we can consolidate mass communities, networks, and organizations out of ruptures – so that ruptures create communities that are not isolated and cliquish, that are open to the rest of the working class and oppressed people. Again, I know most radicals want to do something like this - only a handful of radicals are actually against being social. The question is how to do it better.

As we think about that, I’d also like to share some resources that might help us strategize about how to deal with privatized repression and rising vigilante threats. Not only is this crucial for building a revolution, but it may be necessary to make sure we can stay alive long enough to see the revolution.

1) on the privatization of repression, check out Barack, Badiou, and Bilal Al Hasan by Don Hamerquist. This article argues that the US is increasingly governing via gangs, vigilantes, and private mercenaries in the Middle East, developing forms of counter-insurgency that could spread to other zones of conflict around the world. While I don’t agree with all his points in this article, the core point relevant for this discussion is Don’s necessary focus on how state forms are changing in the current moment.

As anti-authoritarians, we tend to focus on the state apparatus as the biggest oppressor, partly to compensate for the statism of past communist movements. We do need to oppose the state.

However, we need to recognize that state forms change over time, prompted by contradictions within the capitalist economy and clashes of class forces, and that the ruling class governs through a whole other set of apparatuses outside of their formal state institutions. As states become “hollowed out”, they might increasingly rely on private forms of repression. We need to oppose hierarchy and repression everywhere, not just in the state apparatus.

2) On that note, check out the website of John Robb, one of the ruling class’s most intelligent counter-insurgency experts. He advocates privatization of repression because he thinks the US military and police are unable to deal with “open source”, decentralized revolutionary movements that can outthink and outmaneuver slow state bureaucracies.

I’d highly recommend reading his book Brave New War which summarizes the most cutting edge theories of guerilla warfare from movements around the world and then makes a case to the US rulers for how they can defeat these through new forms of privatized repression that mirror them.

In other words, he acknowledges that decentralized movements can outpace, outsmart, and outmaneuver clunky and slow state bureaucracies, so he is trying to convince the capitalists to organize their counter insurgency efforts in similarly decentralized forms – guerilla cells for the global capitalists.

Robb argues that movements like Occupy represent “nonviolent” guerilla movements and open source protests.

Sometimes it’s unclear whether he’s cheering on these protests or calling for open source warfare against them in order to defeat them. In either case, this is some bizarre and brilliant ruling class strategizing that we need to pay attention to so we don’t get caught off guard by followers of Robb who want to co-opt and/or kill us.

3) Privatization of repression has already started to happen in parts of the US through the police dividing and conquering gangs against each other – because they can only kill a limited number of Black people without prompting uprisings, they rely on gangs to do the rest of their work for them. The police sometimes operate as the largest gang in the city, and they sometimes position themselves as a force to destabilize any peace efforts between gangs, in order to keep Black neighborhoods divided and conquered.

For example, when the Bloods and Crips tried to form an alliance in 1992 against the LA police, the police allegedly confiscated a Crip O.G.’s car and did a drive by out of his car in a Blood neighborhood to re-start the war. This sort of divide and conquer strategy, coupled with deindustrializing inner cities and the rapid expansion of public and private prisons, is partially how the state neutralized the Black Power movement over the past 40 years. This is documented in the movie “Bastards of the Party” by Athens Park Blood O.G. Cle ”Bone” Sloan

4) I am not a Trotskyist and disagree with Trotsky on many things, but I happen to think that some of his strategic thinking on how to oppose Nazism in the 30s is highly relevant to the situation in Greece today and possibly in the US in the future. Here is a summary of his work.

I haven’t read his original book yet, I just ordered a copy of it, so I’m just going off this piece because it is free online. But based on what I read here, if anarchists in Greece today were to apply his strategy, they would invite Syriza and the socialists to form a united front coalition against Golden Dawn, and to confront them directly in the streets, instead of through parliamentary maneuvers. The socialists are running for office through Syriza, thinking that the state apparatus will keep them safe, but it won’t – the police often side with the fascists. If the fascists grow, they will kill immigrants, anarchists, socialists, union members, LGBTQ people, an anyone else in their way. Perhaps the anarchists and anti-state communsits could try to convince the socialists that they need to think outside of the state in order to stay safe.

Together, Syriza and the anarchists might have the physical force necessary to stop the fascists, but alone they are weaker. If the anarchists try to go it alone without Syriza’s support they could all be murdered by the fascists and the cops. Trotsky would probably say that only together can they prevent the rise of fascism, but it needs to be an alliance on radical terms, not something that relies on petitioning the state for protection from the fascists.

My only caveat with this is that a lot of Trotskyists seem to push this toward a Popular front – telling the anarchists they need to tone down their message in order to reach out to working people who still support reformist groups, electoral politics, etc. This is reminiscent of the Communist Party’s Popular Front, where they said fascism is the bigger enemy than imperialism, and revolutionaries should stop being militant in order to unite with the liberals (Democrats, etc.) against the Nazis. The Communist Party even red-baited radicals who lead strikes during World War II . We need to oppose this Popular Front logic, because it led to opportunistic outcomes, like subordinating the Black liberation struggle in the US , telling Black people to wait to rise up against US white supremacy in order to secure American national unity in World War II vs. the Nazis. We need to argue firmly against anyone who wants to repeat this today.

Instead, what Trotsky is advocating is a united front – each group maintains its politics, the radicals don’t subordinate or hide ours, we simply enter into a tactical alliance of mutual protection that operates at the street level, not the electoral level. The goal would be to mobilize all workers and oppressed people to defend each other, even if they have reformist politics. Again, this is similar to what we are trying to do now with the anti-deportation organizing in Seattle.

I’m not sure what a united front against fascism would look like in the US context since there is no analogous large social democratic force, and no large anarchist/ communist force here. Luckily, fascism has also not grown as rapidly here as in Greece. All 3 could grow simultaneously in future movements, so we need to keep thinking about this.

My last reservation with applying Trotsky’s strategy is that we need to account for how some of the fascists are an insurgent right-wing movement from below. They are competing with the Left and the anarchists to express the anger that many people feel against the capitalist system. Any force that gets too close with electoral reformism could get discredited as this reformism leads to new rounds of austerity and capitalist crisis. This could happen to Syriza too. All the other socialist electoral parties have ended up imposing austerity and subordination to imperialism and global capital. If Leftists get too close to these parties and do not criticize them, the fascists can say “look, the Left failed to fight austerity, we are the only force left capable of doing it, so side with us”.

I don’t know what Trotsky’s answer would be to this – but I do think that any adaptation of his united front against fascism should be a loose tactical alliance in which the radicals can maintain our distance from the state and from statist parties, while pledging mutual defense of all working class, feminist, LGBTQ, and people of color grassroots institutions and communities against fascist attacks, even if we do not have the same politics.

In a Seattle context, we may disagree with groups like Freedom Socialist Party, the ISO, the NAACP, or the unions. But if their offices were attacked by fascists, I hope we’d rally to their aid, and I hope they’d rally in turn if our communities were attacked.

5) Building of my concern about right-wing insurgent fascism, I would also highly recommend the book Confronting Fascism by Don Hamerquist, J. Sakai, and folks from Anti Racist Action.

It explores possibilities of insurgent / revolutionary fascism and its relationship to the legacy of colonial settlerism, and the possibility of this settlerism breaking down in the current economic crisis, opening up right-wing and left-wing revolutionary potentials among white workers.

Excerpts are available here

This builds on anti-fascist strategies developed by the Sojourner Truth Organization in the 70s, archived here and summarized in the book Truth and Revolution that just came out.

I hope we can strategize how to deal with these new forms of fascism, anti-radical vigilantism, and privatized repression. We should keep all of this in mind when we debate things like the strengths and weaknesses of specific uses of the Black Block tactic by radicals. The privatization of repression, the rise of insurgent fascism in the wake of failed reformist strategies, and the need for broad-based united fronts of mutual security are all factors we should consider in these tactical debates.