Fascists are the Tools of the State

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 24, 2015 3:51 pm

David Icke Freedom or Fascism Full Version


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt809StpqIM
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Jul 29, 2015 10:28 am

On Terrorism and the State

Gianfranco Sanguinetti

All acts of terrorism, all the attacks that have struck and that strike the imagination of men and women, have been and are either offensive or defensive actions. Experience has long since shown that, if they are part of a strategic offensive, they are always doomed to failure. On the other hand, experience has also shown that, if they are part of a defensive strategy, such actions can hope for some success, which is nevertheless momentary and precarious. The attacks by the Palestinians and the Irish, for example, are acts of offensive terrorism, while the bombing of the Piazza Fontana and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, for example, are defensive acts.

However, it is not only the strategy that differs depending on whether the act in question is an instance of offensive or defensive terrorism, but also the strategists. The desperate and those suffering from illusions have recourse to offensive terrorism, while it is always and only States that have recourse to defensive terrorism, either because they have been thrust into some serious social crisis, as the Italian State has been, or because they fear such a crisis, as does the German State.

The defensive terrorism of the States is practiced directly or indirectly by them, that is, with their own weapons or with those of others. If the States have recourse to direct terrorism, it is directed against their own populations, as was the case with the massacres at the Piazza Fontana, on the Italicus or at Brescia.[1] If, on the other hand, the States decide they must have recourse to indirect terrorism, such acts must appear to have been directed against them, as was the case in the Moro affair.

The attacks directly realized by detached units or by the unofficial [or “parallel”] services of the State are not customarily claimed by anyone, but are imputed or attributed to this or that convenient “guilty party,” such as Pinelli or Valpreda.[2] Experience has proved that this aspect is the weakest point of this type of terrorism and that determines the extreme fragility of the political usage one wants to make of it. The results of this same experience show that the strategists of the State’s unofficial services seek to give their own acts much greater credibility or at least less improbability, either by directly claiming them in the name of the initials of this or that ghostly group, or even by getting them claimed by an existing clandestine group, whose militants are apparently or believe themselves to be strangers to the designs of the State apparatus.

All the secret terrorist groups are organized and directed by a clandestine hierarchy that is composed of the militants of clandestinity themselves, who perfectly reflect the division of labor and the roles proper to the current social organization: those on high decide on what is to be done and those below execute orders. Ideology and military discipline protect the true summit from all the risks and the rank-and-file from all suspicions. Any secret service [intelligence agency] can invent for itself a set of “revolutionary” initials and carry out a certain number of attacks for which the press will make good publicity and from which the secret service in question will find it easy to form a small group of naïve militants, whom it can direct with the greatest ease. But in case a small terrorist group spontaneously constitutes itself, there is nothing easier in the world for the detached units of the State to do than infiltrate it and then, thanks to the means at their disposal and the extreme freedom of maneuvering that they enjoy, to substitute themselves for it, either by well-chosen arrests made at opportune moments or by the assassination of the original leaders, which, as a general rule, takes place during an armed conflict with the “forces of order,” informed in advance of such an encounter by the infiltrated agents.

From that moment on, the unofficial services of the State can dispose as they please of a perfectly effective organization, composed of naïve or fanatical militants who only ask to be led. The small original terrorist group, born from the illusions of its militants concerning the possibilities of launching an effective strategic offensive, changes strategists and becomes nothing other than a defensive appendage of the State, which maneuvers it with the greatest agility and assurance, according to its own necessities of the moment or those that it believes are its own necessities.

From the [bombing of the] Piazza Fontana to the kidnapping of Moro, the only things that have changed are the contingent objectives that this defensive terrorism has achieved, but the goal of the defensive can never change. And the goal from 12 December 1969 to 16 March 1978, and today, as well, has in fact remained the same: to make the entire population, which had not supported the State or had been struggling against it, believe that it at least has an enemy in common with the State and that the State will defend the population on the condition that no one questions it. The population, which is generally hostile to terrorism, and not without reason, must then agree that, at least in this instance, it needs the State, to which it must delegate the most extensive powers so that the State can vigorously confront the arduous task of the common defense against an enemy that is obscure, mysterious, perfidious, merciless and, in a word, illusory. Faced with a terrorism that is always presented as the absolute evil, evil in itself and by itself, all the other evils, which are much more real, become secondary and must even be forgotten. Because the struggle against terrorism [perfectly] coincides with the common interest, it is already the general good, and the State that generously leads that struggle is the good itself and by itself. Without the cruelty of the devil, the infinite kindness of God cannot appear and be properly appreciated.

The State, extremely weakened by all the attacks it has suffered every day for 10 years – attacks on its economy made by the proletariat, on the one hand, and attacks on its power and prestige made by the ineptitude of its managers, on the other –, can thus silence both them by solemnly tasking itself with staging the spectacle of the collective and sacrosanct defense [of all] against the monster of terrorism and, in the name of this pious mission, it can take from all of its subjects a supplementary portion of their already limited freedom and thus reinforce the police-related control of the entire population. “We are at war,” and war against an enemy that is so powerful that any other discord or conflict is an act of sabotage or desertion. It is only to protest against terrorism that one has the right to the recourse of the general strike. Terrorism and “emergency,” a state of emergency and perpetual “vigilance,” become the only problems, at least the only ones with which it is permitted and necessary for people to be occupied. All the rest doesn’t exist or becomes forgotten, and in any case is shut up, banished, repressed into the social unconscious because of the seriousness of the question of “public order.” And confronted with the universal duty of its defense, everyone is invited to become an informer, to be base and to become fearful. For the first time in history, cowardice becomes a sublime quality, fear is always justified, and the only form of “courage” that is not contemptible is the one that approves and supports all the lies, abuses and infamies of the State. Since the current crisis doesn’t spare any country in the world, there are no geographical boundaries between peace, war, freedom or truth. These borders pass through every country, and each State arms itself and declares war on the truth.


Continues at: http://www.notbored.org/on-terrorism.html



American Dream » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:37 pm wrote:
FRATERNAL BONDS

Two ancient, mysterious, international fraternities kept the loosely-linked Gladio programs from flying apart. The Knights of Malta played a formative role after the war (see box), but the order of Freemasonry and its most notorious lodge in Italy, known as Propaganda Due (pronounced ``doo-ay'' ), or P-2, was far more influential. In the late 1960s, its ``Most Venerable Master'' was Licio Gelli, a Knight of Malta who fought for Franco with Mussolini's Black Shirts. At the end of World War II, Gelli faced execution by Italian partisans for his Nazi collaboration, but escaped by joining the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. 23 In the 1950s, he was recruited by SIFAR.

After some years of self-imposed exile in Argentine fascist circles,24 he saw his calling in Italy as a Mason. Quickly rising to its top post, he began fraternizing in 1969 with Gen. Alexander Haig, then assistant to Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's national security chief. Gelli became the main intermediary between the CIA and SID's De Lorenzo, also a Mason and Knight. Gelli's first order from the White House was reportedly to recruit 400 more top Italian and NATO officials. 25

To help ferret out dissidents, Gelli and De Lorenzo began compiling personal dossiers on thousands of people, including legislators and clerics. 26 Within a few years, scandal erupted when an inquiry found 157,000 such files in SID, all available to the Ministers of Defense and Interior. 27 Parliament ordered 34,000 files burned, but by then the CIA had obtained duplicates for its archives. 28

Provocateurs on the Right

In 1968, the Americans started formal commando training for the gladiators at the clandestine Sardinian ``NATO'' base. Within a few years, 4,000 graduates had been placed in strategic posts. At least 139 arms caches, including some at carabinieri barracks, were at their disposal. 29 To induce young men to join such a risky venture, the CIA paid high salaries and promised that if they were killed, their children would be educated at U.S. expense. 30

Tensions began to reach critical mass that same year. While dissidents took to the streets all over the world, in Italy, takeovers of universities and strikes for higher wages and pensions were overshadowed by a series of bloody political crimes. The number of terrorist acts reached 147 in 1968, rising to 398 the next year, and to an incredible peak of 2,498 in 1978 before tapering off, largely because of a new law encouraging informers ( penitenti ). 31 Until 1974, the indiscriminate bombers of the right constituted the main force behind political violence.

The first major explosion occurred in 1969 in Milan's Piazza Fontana; it killed 18 people and injured 90. In this and numerous other massacres, anarchists proved handy scapegoats for fascist provocateurs seeking to blame the left. Responding to a phone tip after the Milan massacre, police arrested 150 alleged anarchists and even put some on trial. But two years later, new evidence led to the indictment of several neofascists and SID officers. Three innocent anarchists were convicted, but later absolved, while those responsible for the attack emerged unpunished by Italian justice. 32

Conclusive Gladio links to political violence were found after a plane exploded in flight near Venice in November 1973. Venetian judge Carlo Mastelloni determined that the Argo-16 aircraft was used to shuttle trainees and munitions between the U.S. base in Sardinia and Gladio sites in northeast Italy.33 The apogee of right-wing terror came in 1974 with two massacres. One, a bombing at an antifascist rally in Brescia, killed eight and injured 102. The other was an explosion on the Italicus train near Bologna, killing 12 and wounding 105. At this point, President Giovanni Leone, with little exaggeration, summed up the situation: "With 10,000 armed civilians running around, as usual, I'm president of shit." 34

At Brescia, the initial call to police also blamed anarchists, but the malefactor later turned out to be a secret agent in the Parallel SID. 35 A similar connection was also alleged in the Italicus case. Two fascists who were eventually convicted were members of a clandestine police group called the Black Dragons, according to the left-wing paper, Lotta Continua. 36 Their sentences were also overturned. Although in these and other cases, many leftists were arrested and tried, fascists or neofascists were often the culprits, in league with Gladio groups and the Italian secret services. Reflecting the degree to which these forces controlled the government through the Parallel SID, nearly all the rightists implicated in these atrocities were later freed.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 30, 2015 12:27 pm

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby slimmouse » Wed Sep 30, 2015 12:53 pm

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that we are all tools of the state, (whatever label the state cares to foist upon us), until we understand the fact.

FTS.

This is a long thread and apologies if someone pointed out the obvious earlier.

I can be slow on the uptake sometimes.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 02, 2015 10:02 am

23 February 2014

CONCENTRATION CAMPS: the return of totalitarianism


“No prince was ever at a loss for plausible reasons to cloak a breach of faith”
“Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them,
it is far safer to be feared than loved”

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“…dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against – against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men”
Karl Schmitt, Political Theology, 1922

“The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy
brings us close to the heart of fascism.”

Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004

“A nation cannot develop and become strong without a sense of urgency and a sense of crisis.”
Long Yongtu, China’s chief WTO negotiator
Financial Times, 17 November 1999

“Capitalism itself works in cycles of crisis production and crisis management. For global capital these ‘crises’ are actually its cyclical opportunities for radical restructuring. Capital doesn’t just manage crises, it directs them. Capitalism itself is the root crisis that is destroying humanity and the planet.”(Clandestina network, Joseph Matthews, Iain Boal, George Caffentzis, Silvia Federici et al., Europe at the frontline of the great enclosure. An opportunity to get real in the promised wasteland, October 2009).


Politics means the “other” must become the enemy

The concentration camp is a penal system in itself. It is an extra-judicial penal system because of the objective innocence of the detained (people are held only because they exist – without rights), and of the extra-legal status of the institutional existence of the camps (they function not as a prison, nor as a police station, nor as a hostel, they are not described in the law…). These two elements place the concentration camp system as a whole outside the realm of rational State-institutional calculation, and in a universe wholly different from a rights-based utilitarian regime. Despite their uselessness, even their cynically admitted anti-utility (they don’t produce labor, don’t reform characters, nor cure diseases), the camps are the key to sustaining totalitarian rule, for the camp system infuses society with an undefined fear that is essential both to maintaining the totalitarian regime’s hold over society at large and to inspiring ‘its nuclear troops -cops, guards, officers- with fanaticism’.

Until some years ago, the social movement in Greece had to organize campaigns just to make visible the immigrant detention centers in the country: They were calculated about 80 in 2005, both formal (in military barracks or depots), and informal (usually in police stations). Nowadays, “concentration camps for immigrants” have became a flag notion in the dominant fascist rhetoric of the government. They are the symbolic place where the “unnecessary ones”, people without rights (an expanding concept) are being discarded. They are a black hole of fear and hate: Fear of being dumped there, hate for those who are already in there. The dominant regime manages social relations through the structure of a military camp. The “troops of sovereignty”, whether the legal state security forces or the fascist “assault squads”, are being trained on the naked bodies of those stripped of every human quality. Large-scale police operations are being conducted as military clearing operations. Hate spreads. Mixed with despair, it creates the kind of citizen that capitalism, the Party of Death, prefers to govern.

With the depreciation of life becoming the norm, the need for totalitarianism appears natural. Violence in everyday media iconography turns the perception of life into a Quentin Tarantino movie. Now we know: The images from concentration camps in Greece were not leaked in order to denounce brutality but in order to advertise it, just like the torture images from Guantanamo were publicized to assure patriots that the army was doing its job. When the destruction of personal human identity is being officially established through torture and contempt, hate spreads and pervades everyday life.

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” (Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 1958)

Disciplining through destroying the value of the human

The December 2008 riots were followed by a “counterinsurgency” on behalf of the State. This countermovement began in the spring of 2009, as a direct response to the struggles following the assault against the Bulgarian cleaner and trade-unionist Konstandina Kuneva, and it was implemented through the attacks on immigrants and refugees. Immigrants and refugees actually became an issue for the first time: Let us not forget that already in 2007 there 257 migrants had lost their lives trying to cross the Aegean, and the ProAsyl report had documented the systematic torture of immigrants by the Greek port police. Yet nobody had paid attention until then. In 2009, the “invisible” suddenly became “too visible” and were presented as the greatest threat to society. The joint attack by fascists and riot police against sans papiers immigrants who had squatted the empty and abandoned building of the Court of Appeal, as well as a series of meetings of the Minister of Public Order with the fascist so-called “citizens committees” were a foretaste of what would follow:

Aghios Panteleimonas is a poor neighborhood at the center of the city of Athens where thousands of immigrants, mainly from Afghanistan, were left to live out on the streets – with no hygiene nor shelter. Tension built up with the locals. Amongst the locals were also immigrants from Albania, who after years of exploitation had managed to buy appartments and were witnessing the dramatic fall in the price of land in the area because of this chaotic situation. Some of the “old” immigrants even backed fascist “vigilantes”, disguised as “citizen committees” and joined them in attacking the “new” immigrants (see the Norwegian documentary The battle for Attica square). Gradually, and through a systematic coordination by certain fascists, Aghios Panteleimonas became the cradle for both the internal enemy and the fascist attack squads. Fascist squads were born from the mafias exploiting immigrants and from the multipurpose trafficking networks, which in the previous years had been created and maintained through the illegal status of the immigrants – often under the direct control and participation, and always with the tolerance, of the police.


Continues at: https://clandestinenglish.wordpress.com ... tarianism/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 05, 2015 11:50 am

Remembering the 1979 Greensboro Massacre


AMY GOODMAN: This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre. Today we speak with two of the survivors. But first, let’s go back to that fateful day, 25 years ago.

VIRGIL GRIFFIN: We can take our country back from the Communist Party, we can take it back from the niggers. It’s time for us to band together. If we have to git in the streets and fight in blood up to our knees, by God, it’s time to git ready to fight! Give them what they want! Fight for this country! [chanting] [shouting]

PROTESTER: They had it planned!

PROTESTERS: Help us! Help us!

PROTESTER: The Klan and the state got together and planned this. That’s why they were not [inaudible]. Do you hear me? The state protects the Klan and this makes it clear. They came through and they opened fire. They opened fire on us! And we fired back to protect ourselves.

PROTESTER: The Klan or whoever it was jumped out and just started shooting in the direction of the thickest concentration of people. They seemed to be aiming at particular people. There were several police in the area who did nothing until after these murderers left. Police came in, immediately started arresting people who were trying to help those who had fallen. Nelson Johnson was taken into custody, kicked in the head by the police. He was bleeding from the arm as he was trying to help people. The police did this, directly or indirectly. They set it up.

PROTESTER: This will never happen again! We will never [inaudible]. He didn’t have a gun on him. Oh, God! [inaudible][sobbing]

AMY GOODMAN: Images and sounds of the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, brought to us courtesy of Jim Waters, one of camera people that day, put together a piece called "The Guns of November 3." This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Greensboro Massacre. Last weekend, as many as 700 people marched to Greensboro City Hall following the route of the planned 1979 march. They finished the march that never was completed 25 years ago. The survivors of the Greensboro Massacre are forming the country’s first Truth and Reconciliation Commission, based on the South African model. We’re joined by Reverend Nelson Johnson, survivor of the Greensboro Massacre, one of the organizers of the anti-Klan rally of 1979, now the executive director of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro. Also in our studio here in New York, Sally Bermanzohn, one of the survivors also of the massacre in which her husband Paul was critically wounded. She is now Associate Professor of Politics at Brooklyn College where she teaches classes on politics, race, and gender, and she has authored the book Through Survivors’ Eyes: The Sixties Through the Greensboro Massacre. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Sally Bermanzohn, the beginning of the video-audio clip that we just played, we heard a man, you know, talking about going after African Americans, using the n-word. Who was he?

SALLY BERMANZOHN: His name was Virgil Griffin. He is still a leader of a Klan and he was in the lead car that came in and attacked our march.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that man that we saw addressing a crowd —

SALLY BERMANZOHN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: That you had footage of.

SALLY BERMANZOHN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Came then and attacked the protest. Why the protest? Let me put that question to Reverend Nelson Johnson, since you were one of the organizers of it. Why did you protest that day on November 3? Where were you trying to get to, from where to where?

REV. NELSON JOHNSON: Essentially the same place we should be trying to get to now. That we were actually doing labor organizing and racial justice organizing and the Klan — and that way of thinking, whether it’s named Klan or not, resisted that in one of the most virulent forms of trying to create fear and promote falsehood and engender confusion through the threat and the use of force has been the Klan. It was so very important and is so very important that people who stand for justice resist this. So the short answer is that it was absolutely necessary to have some expression of opposition to racism as manifest by the Klan in order to continue with the work of labor organizing in the textile industry and in order to continue with the work of uniting people from different racial backgrounds. Those questions were necessary and that was at the base of the reason for the march in 1979.

AMY GOODMAN: Sally, so explain how it went down that day on November 3. What time did you gather?

SALLY BERMANZOHN: We gathered — the march was supposed to start at noon. At 11:23, while we were just gathering, before the march began, this caravan drove up and opened fire.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you know anything was going to happen?

SALLY BERMANZOHN: No, we had no idea. We had a legal police permit. The police were supposed to be there to protect the march like they do for every other march. There were no police around. Actually, there were police who were following the caravan in, who knew its every move as it approached us and they knew that it had guns, they had watched them all morning. They were in direct contact with the headquarters, police headquarters. They followed this death squad as it approached us, as it pulled out guns and opened fire and killed five people. So, there actually were police there, although they were not in uniform and they did nothing, nothing to protect the demonstrators, even though that was their obligation.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened to your husband, Paul?

SALLY BERMANZOHN: He was shot in the head and the arm. He is still partially paralyzed from that. He had five hours of surgery that night. We really were very — it was wonderful that he survived. It was a surprise that he survived.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Nelson Johnson, did you recognize people who were shooting you?

REV. NELSON JOHNSON: I did not. I later came to understand that one of the men who was driving the lead vehicle had been at a press conference that we held, and he was the agent of the Greensboro Police Department who was also a Klansman and an informant for the F.B.I., and he was the person to whom the Greensboro Police Department gave the parade permit either before or at about the same time that it was given to us, and that is a long story that I won’t get you into, but it was hard for us to get the parade permit and all the clearances, and there were never any reason given other than people were out of town and things that just doesn’t work for a government. That’s not the way a government works.

AMY GOODMAN: Reverend Johnson, what happened to you that day?

REV. NELSON JOHNSON: Well, I actually was very close to Sally Bermanzohn, and a Nazi member charged me with a knife and fortunately someone threw me a stick and I was defending myself. So, I got cut above the hands and stabbed through the arm as the person was trying to cut my mid section.

AMY GOODMAN: In the video footage, we see the police going after you, is that right?

REV. NELSON JOHNSON: Well, because I negotiated the parade permit with the police, I perhaps more than anyone else, was pretty clear that the whole arrangement that we made with the police had been betrayed. And I stood up to say that there isn’t any way this could happen without the police and the police then came and demanded that I be quiet and when I refused to do so, they arrested me and threw me to the ground and the man who became the police chief had his foot on my neck and I was bleeding pretty profusely at the time from the knife wound. So, that may be some of what you’re referring to.


http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/18/ ... assacre_25



American Dream » Thu Aug 21, 2014 9:41 pm wrote:This aspect of the bloody massacre in Greensboro described above is extremely important:

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Frazier Glenn Miller, Nazi violence, and the state

In the 1980s, Frazier Glenn Miller was one of the most prominent white supremacist leaders in the United States. Lately he's been in the news again -- sometimes identified as Miller, sometimes as Frazier Glenn Cross -- charged with shooting dead three people at two Jewish centers in the Kansas City metro area on April 13.

Miller’s story -- even the fact that he goes by two different last names -- dramatizes the profound shift in government security forces' relationship with the the U.S. far right over the past few decades. This issue has received little or no attention since Miller's April 13th arrest.

Miller is a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret who was kicked out of the Army in 1979 for distributing racist propaganda. As a member of the National Socialist Party of America, Miller helped to organize a coalition of Klansmen and Nazis in North Carolina called the United Racist Front, which carried out the Greensboro massacre on November 3, 1979. That day, a caravan of URF men drove to an anti-Klan rally organized by the Communist Workers Party, unloaded their guns, and shot five people to death. URF members were twice acquitted for the massacre by all-white juries. Miller was present at the scene and later declared, "I am more proud of the 88 seconds I spent in Greensboro on November 3, 1979, than I am of the twenty years I spent in the U.S. Army" (Martin Durham, White Rage, p. 44). He was never indicted for his role in the killings.

The Greensboro massacre was a pivotal event for the U.S. far right in two ways. On one hand, it was a high water mark of far right violence carried out with the involvement or sponsorship of government security services. An agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was part of the URF and in later court testimony about the massacre "characterized his role as an undercover agent as one that gave people with a known propensity for illegal activity the ‘opportunity to violate the law.'" (This was under a Democratic administration, by the way.)

The URF also included a man who was an informant for both the FBI and the local police. As Joanne Wypijewski reported in a 2005 article for Mother Jones, "At the time of the killings, the police special agent in charge of the Klan informant was at the back of the [URF] caravan, having trailed it to the site. He did not intervene, or radio for help, or trip a siren, or pursue the killers as nine of their vehicles got away. Arrests occurred only because two police officers broke ranks and apprehended a van."

I've seen several news reports since Miller's recent arrest that note his involvement in the Greensboro killings, but none that mention the role of federal agencies. (For more on the federal security services' history of involvement with the paramilitary far right, see my 2012 post, "Liberal counterinsurgency versus the paramilitary right."

The Greensboro massacre was also pivotal because it broke the suspicion and animosity that for decades had kept Klansmen and Nazis at odds with each other. After this event, collaboration, cross-over, and interchange between the two branches of the far right became much more common. As a result, the movement's ideological center of gravity shifted from segregationism to fascism -- away from restoring the old racial order, to new dreams of creating a new whites-only homeland or overthrowing the U.S. government entirely.

Glenn Miller was in the thick of this change. A few months after Greensboro, he formed the Carolina (later Confederate) Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which in 1985 changed its name to the White Patriot Party. The WPP advocated an independent Southern White Republic. Leonard Zeskind reports that its activists "typically wore camouflage uniforms, regularly engaged in paramilitary-style training, and some illegally acquired weapons from nearby military bases…. [B]y 1986 Miller's White Patriot Party had over 1,000 members in North Carolina alone. Some reports indicated that 150 members had once been Special Forces soldiers."


http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2014/ ... e-and.html
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Nov 09, 2015 4:59 am

BLUE BY DAY, WHITE BY NIGHT
Organized White Supremacist Groups in Law Enforcement Agencies and the Military

From “White Lies White Power/The Fight Against White Supremacy & Reactionary Violence

In the 70’s, the KKK and other racists were trying to regroup. A major political realignment was taking place in the South, and elsewhere in the country. Whites from areas that had been solidly Democratic since Lincoln, were finding a home in the Republican Party just as newly enfranchised Blacks had begun to vote Democratic. Possibly the vanguard of this racist defection from the Democrats occurred in New York City in the 60’s, where the police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, united openly with the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell to overturn a civilian “police complaint review board,” through a referendum that won overwhelming support in white ethnic neighborhoods. This was a precursor of Nixon’s “silent majority” and “southern strategy” to incorporate George Wallace’s supporters into the Republican electorate. But the Republicans were an odd amalgam of established pro-big business economic conservatives, racists, and hard core old and new right ideologues. A stratum of racists with anti-establishment or “populist” leanings were uncomfortable with this mix and wanted to rebuild the Klan on more modern, but still openly racialist lines, as a voice of white grievance and reaction rather than of white satisfaction with the new status quo.

This group included a number with backgrounds in the military, particularly military intelligence or other state counter-insurgency programs such as Bill Wilkinson (in Naval Intelligence) and David Duke (with USAID in Laos), and their local lieutenants like Louis Beam of Texas, Tom Metzger of California, and Virgil Griffin and Glenn Miller of North Carolina (all former soldiers or Marines).

These new-age Klansmen shared an ideology that abandoned the old red-neck hooded image for a combination of three-piece suits and para-military camouflage. They continued to draw on police and military forces for their recruits. A Klan klavern loyal to David Duke was organized by Metzger supporters at a Marine base in California in the late ‘70’s, resulting in violent confrontations with Black servicemen. The military dealt with this by scattering its members to other bases around the country, thus simply planting the seeds for Klan organizing in Texas, North Carolina and elsewhere, laying the basis for the infamous Greensboro killing by the United Racist Front of Klan and nazis.

Although a split has developed in the racist ranks – David Duke and others opting for the appearance of legitimacy in the political “mainstream” of electoral activity, while Tom Metzger, Beam and others adopted a stance as racist revolutionists opposed to the establishment – they have all carried out their activities with a surprising degree of impunity. As in the case of the Klan-nazi killings in Greensboro, even where federal authorities have chosen to prosecute, the racists have often won acquittal, due to poor handling of their cases by the prosecutors and sympathy for their racism among jurors. Most of the major court setbacks for the Klan and nazis in the last 10 years have come from civil suits, not criminal prosecutions (except for the break-up of the Order, a neo-nazi underground, and the local trials of numerous nazi skinhead gangs for their racist, anti-semitic violence).

But throughout the past decade and a half, there have been a series of exposures of KKK-type groups operating inside police and correctional agencies, the military, and even fire departments. The armed might of the state was used to protect the Klan’s “right” to organize its campaigns of racial hatred under the guise of “free speech.” In the same period, the KKK returned the favor by organizing to “support the local police” in cases of racist brutality and killings by police. And several neo-nazi leaders, notably Tom Metzger, have continued to carry out their activities with impunity from or even protection by the state. We’ll look at each of these issues in turn.

KLAN-NAZI OPERATIONS INSIDE THE POLICE AND OTHER UNIFORMED SERVICES

KKK operations inside police agencies are by their nature clandestine in the current period. Unlike the '50’s, when sheriffs were open proponents of white supremacy, law enforcement today is supposed to be color-blind, and departments are no longer uniformly white. Yet a troubling number of cases of neo-nazi infiltration of or organizing in such agencies have come to light. It is hard to believe that these cases, numerous as they are, represent every single manifestation of the problem. If what has become public knowledge is instead only the tip of the iceberg, the problem of organized racism in police ranks is massive indeed.

A listing of some military units, prisons and police departments affected, and of some incidents since the late '70’s, will begin to show the magnitude of the problem:

1976, Camp Pendleton, CA: A den of David Duke’s Knights of the KKK (led in the state by Tom Metzger) is exposed at the Marine base. The Corps disperses the members to other locations after racial fighting erupts.

1976, Ventura, CA: A KKK gathering in a local bar is exposed and photographed. Several local police officers are identified among the participants.

1977-78, Napanoch, NY: A KKK klavern is exposed among prison guards and inmates at a NY state prison. Earl Schoonmaker, a civilian instructor at the prison, and guard Glen Wilkinson, incorporated the Independent Northern Klans in the state. Guard brutality leads to a rebellion by the prisoners.

1979, Sacramento CA: Pistol targets depicting a fleeing Black man are placed on the State Police firing range and on several police lockers. The targets award points for hitting various parts of the Black man’s anatomy.

1979, Childersburg, AL: Police Officer William Rayfield, a Klan member, is indicted for, but acquitted of, civil rights violations for shots fired into Black leaders’ homes.

1979, Euless, TX: Klan members from Ft. Hood army base, dressed in combat fatigues, stand guard with weapons over a nearby Klan rally.

1979, U.S.S. Concord, Independence, and America: Klan groups of Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire form on several navy vessels, holding a cross burning on the America, wearing robes on the Independence and provoking racial incidents on the Concord, based in Norfolk, VA. Wilkinson, a former member of Naval Intelligence, is later exposed as a long time FBI informant.

1980, San Diego, CA: The police department, through a reserve officer assigned undercover to the KKK, provides funds, radio equipment, and help in gathering ballot signatures to qualify Klan leader Tom Metzger for a run for Congress. (Metzger won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election). Later, the agency destroys all their files and gives the FBI a chronology actually prepared by Metzger himself. The undercover reservist, abandoned by the department after he is exposed, later won a civil lawsuit against the police.

1980, New Britain, CT: Auxiliary cop Gary Picotanno is exposed as the local Grand Dragon of the Invisible Empire of the KKK. He obtains a gun permit because of his police auxiliary status.

1980, Houston, TX: White prison inmates, fighting a court integration order detailing the racist and brutal operations of the Texas prisons, form a group called “Advocates of the Ku Klux Klan,” with the support of the local Klan and sympathetic white prison guards and officials. Klan robes are found in a guard’s locker.

1981, Frankfurt, Germany: The U.S. Army hires Gene Neill, a convicted drug smuggler and gun runner, after his early release from prison. Neill, who has become an open member of the Invisible Empire KKK, writes a regular column for its newspaper, The Klansman. Styling himself an “evangelist,” he is assigned by the chaplain’s office of the Army’s V Corps to preach to the troops.

1981, Fort Monroe, VA: Five members of the 560th Military Police Company are reassigned when their membership in the KKK becomes public.

1982, Signal Hill, CA: Four cops from the local agency near Long Beach, which is under fire for beatings and killings of Black people, are suspended for wearing t-shirts showing a gallows, a hangman’s noose, and the words, “Signal Hill, Stairway to Heaven.” The officers bought the shirts at a camp-out of cops sponsored by the Southern California Memorial Peace Officers Association. The shirts were sold by an ex-cop from another department to more than two dozen officers from various agencies. The Signal Hill chief protects the identity of the other officers and departments involved.

1982, Pritchard, AL: Off-duty police Sgt. Bob Morris is seen putting up KKK placards on a city street. (He’s fired from the force for “conduct unbecoming an officer”).

1982, Meriden, CT: Joseph Hard, the public leader of the KKK in Connecticut, is identified as a state prison guard, just before a “National White Christian Solidarity Day” rally he organized, featuring Bill Wilkinson. Pressure from the anti-klan movement forces the state to fire him for organizing white guards and prisoners into the Klan.

1983, North Carolina: White supremacists organize among white inmates and prison guards. Glenn Miller’s Confederate Knights of the KKK burn a cross outside the home of Bobby Person, a Black prison guard who was trying to win a promotion and became the target of harassment.

1983, Richmond, CA: The Cowboys, an organized white supremacist group inside the Richmond police force, is exposed after two of its members are involved in the killing of at least two Black men. At one point, the Cowboys even wore cowboy hats and boots while on patrol. The group circulates a flyer showing a white hunter grinning over a dead deer with the caption, “choke hold, good for killing big bucks,” after a Black man is strangled to death by four guards inside the Richmond jail.

1983, Chicago, IL: In an effort to defeat Black mayoral candidate Harold Washington, the cops form “Police for Epton” (the white Republican). They wear plain white buttons or buttons with a circled watermelon with a slash through it. The white cops circulate racist flyers, and concoct a plan for massive arrests in Black neighborhoods on the eve of the election, which is derailed at the last minute after being exposed by the Black press.

1983, Los Angeles, CA: An uproar develops over spying by the Public Disorder Intelligence Division, (the L.A.P.D.’s “red squad,” which maintained surveillance and dossiers on many of the leading civic and political figures in the city, including opponents of police brutality). With the approval of superior officers, a lieutenant in the unit takes files home that were supposed to be destroyed under court order. He funnels materials to the domestic espionage apparatus of the Western Goals Foundation, an extremist right wing outfit run by the head of the John Birch Society, with ties to the racist, anti-semitic World Anti-Communist League.

1984, Battle Creek, MI: Larry Guy, Black leader of the Coalition to End Police Brutality and Racism, is the target of a series of Gestapo raids by the police, and grand jury indictments. Guy, who had earlier exposed links between the local cops and the Klan, including a 1980 cross-burning at a Coalition member’s home, is arrested along with his son. Then another cross is burned on the lawn of another Coalition member.

1985, Louisville, KY: Alex Young, a 13 year veteran with the Jefferson County police, long active with the Klan, is fired after admitting that he had “probably” accessed the National Criminal Information Computer on behalf of the KKK on non-police business. Young, who had widely distributed Klan propaganda to people who knew he was a cop, is exposed when a Black family that had been victimized by a racist arson brings suit. Young is forced to reveal the identities of police members of a Klan chapter he had formed in the department, called COPS (Confederate Officers Patriot Squad), but a court order keeps their names secret from the public.

1986, St. Pauls, NC: Active duty Marines from Camp Lejeune and soldiers from Fort Bragg engage in para-military training with the KKK and the White Patriot Party, an armed racist group.

1986, Chicago, IL: Black FBI Agent Donald Rochon sues the Bureau. He is the target of harassment and death threats from white agents in the field office. His wife receives KKK type material and threats. (Rochon ultimately wins $1 million in a settlement of the suit he brings against the agency. Ironically, when with the L.A.P.D., Rochon had infiltrated, spied on and disrupted Black community groups opposing racist police brutality such as the killing of Eula Love).

1987, Canton, OH: Jewish police officer Steve Silver finds a poster of Adolph Hitler stuck on the wall of the locker room in the police department.

1987, Los Angeles, CA: Assistant Chief Robert Vernon, a fundamentalist minister, is disclosed to be recruiting hundreds of “born again” Christians from the department to his church. Vernon earns a substantial second income selling right-wing Christian books and tapes, and all his staff people at the p.d. are “born again.” Vernon is later caught accessing the department’s computer to provide information about Michael Zinzun, a former Black Panther running for office in Pasadena, to a right-wing candidate supported by his wife.

1988, Youngstown, PA: Former Police Chief David Gardner is indicted for providing armed security to white supremacist James Wickstrom, head of the Posse Comitatus, as part of a scheme to produce counterfeit U.S. currency to finance the racist movement.

1988, Des Moines, IA: Racist and sexist incidents of harassment within the P.D. provoke a series of lawsuits. In one case, two white cops tried to terrorize a Black officer by donning white robes over their uniforms.

1988, Ogden, UT: The Ogden police hire Richard Masker, a spokesman for the racist League of Pace Amendment Advocates and the Aryan Nations, to lecture them about the far-right movement. In 1983, Masker was fired from a job with the city of Corvallis, OR for sending Hitler birthday cards to local Jews.

1989, San Bernardino, CA: Black officers seeking promotion become the target of harassment. They find threatening racist letters, signed by the Brotherhood of the Aryan Police Officers Association, in their lockers inside a secured area of their police station.

1989, Exeter, NH: A part-time officer with the local cops is fired for alleged involvement with the KKK. Thomas Herman was exposed when he ran for a seat on the local Board of Selectmen. (He was defeated).

1989, Los Angeles, CA: Two white sheriff’s deputies are suspended after burning a cross inside the County Jail with a home-made blowtorch to intimidate Black inmates. Reinstated by Sheriff Sherman Block, one of them, Deputy Brian Kazmierski, later shoots and kills a Mexican national. In 1989-90, allegations surface of organized white supremacist groupings in the Sheriff’s Department, at the Lynwood station (the Vikings), the Peter Pitchess Jail facility (the Wayside Whities) and possibly East L.A. (the Cavemen). Based on evidence related to the Vikings, a federal judge issues an injunction against the department, requiring them to obey their own written guidelines on the use of force.

1990, Boise, ID: Two Army Rangers from Ft. Lewis are called to testify at the trial of their associate Bob Winslow, an ex-Ranger discharged in February from Fort Lewis, who then joined the Aryan Nations. Winslow and two others are convicted of plotting to bomb a gay bar, Jewish temple, and Korean businesses in Seattle, WA.

1990, Oak Harbor, WA: Three Navy men are arrested for burning a cross in the wake of the civil trial of racist Tom Metzger for the death of an Ethiopian refugee. The three are attached to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. (Whidbey Island is where racist leader Bob Mathews was killed in a shootout, and has been a site of a pilgrimage by neo-nazis who support Mathews’ strategy for exterminationist race war).

1990, Fort Worth, TX: Sgt. Tim Hall is dismissed from the Tarrant County sheriff’s department after it is revealed that he is secretly “J. D. Calhoun,” the kleagle or chief recruiter of the local Klan. Hall’s exposure leads to the firing of two other sheriff’s department employees and 6 of his fellow military police at Carswell AF base. Hall later tries to get a job with a department in Century, Florida, but is forced out after Dallas papers report on his background. Hall had previously been with the police in Santa Rosa, CA.

1990, Cambridge, MA: Tech Sgt. Hank Stram of the Air National Guard is arrested with a cache of more than 500 weapons, 50,000 rounds of ammunition, a mortar, an anti-tank gun, a rocket launcher, a swastika poster and nazi and survivalist propaganda.

1991: In Los Angeles and San Francisco, CA and in Blakely, Georgia, Klan activity is uncovered inside the fire department. In S.F., there is harassment of Black firefighters; in L.A., a fire captain dons a Klan type hood to intimidate a Black woman employee, and most of the Black firefighters quit the union when it supports the captain; in Georgia, local Black residents win a settlement in a law suit brought after the fire chief’s affiliation to the Klan is disclosed by anti-klan organizers.

1991, Los Angeles, CA: In the wake of the beating of Rodney King by police from the L.A.P.D.’s Foothill Division, it is disclosed that an organized Klan faction was operating at the Foothill station. At least two Black officers, a man and a woman, had been harassed and received Klan calling cards in locked areas of the station. Following disclosures that a para-military Klan faction with close ties to Tom Metzger has been attempting to recruit L.A. cops, Chief Daryl Gates assigns the Anti-Terrorist Division to investigate, but as of this writing, no results have been made public. The Commission investigating the police in the wake of the King beating turns up police computer transmissions referring to klavern meetings, and numerous racist, sexist and anti-gay comments between officers and dispatchers.

1991, Ft. Bragg, NC: Sgt. Mike Tubbs, Warrant Officer Jeff Jennett and two civilians are arrested for stealing and stockpiling military weapons. Tubbs was brought back from Saudi Arabia to face charges. The four were part of a group called Knights of the New Order with plans to attack Blacks and Jews.

1991, Indianapolis, IN: Officer Wayne Sharp, a member of the Nazi party who had attended Nazi meetings in Illinois and Virginia, and founded a party cell in his home town, shot and killed a Black shoplifting suspect. In 1981, Sharp had killed a Black burglary suspect and been briefly suspended. He has been involved in other shooting incidents as well during his 18-year career on the force. It was disclosed that as local leader of the Nazis, he had sent letters to Jewish organizations.

1991, Beverly Hills, CA: Scott Dafoe, an off-duty white cop and three body-building buddies from NY are charged with the brutal gay-bashing of a Latino man outside a West Hollywood restaurant.

1991, Alameda, CA: Four white police officers are suspended after a check of mobile data transmissions turns up “jokes” about killing a nigger and wearing Klan robes. They are eventually let off with a slap on the wrist. It is later disclosed that the city destroyed the tapes rather than turn them over in a lawsuit by two bars charging the cops with bias.

1991, San Francisco, CA: The chaplain of the S.F.P.D. is exposed as an activist in the anti-abortion movement who has led prayer revivals for Operation Rescue.

1991, Northridge, CA: Then L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates agrees to attend a rally sponsored by Students for America, the youth group of Pat Robertson’s Christian crusade. The chapter had also been involved in local Populist Party organizing. (The Populists are a nazi-front group which ran David Duke for president).

1992, Los Angeles, CA: Garland Hardeman, a Black cop who had been ostracized and verbally abused by fellow officers since testifying about racism in the LAPD to the Christopher Commission, finds a chalk outline in front of his locker like those at homicide scenes, with the indication of two bullets to the head. A police spokesman says it “is too early to characterize it as a threat.”

1992, Merriville, IN: The chief of police and a deputy are suspended after making racist slurs.

1992, Savannah, GA: Three soldiers from Ft. Stewart are arrested for the racially motivated killing of a Black man. Residents believe that a white supremacist ring may be operating on the base.

1992, Chicago, IL: A fire-fighter and his brother are arrested for shooting at their Puerto Rican neighbor. Nazi paraphernalia and massive quantities of weapons, ammunition and explosives are found in their home.

1992, Lanett, AL: A review board upholds the city’s dismissal of two officers who taunted a prisoner with racial slurs and made him wear a Klan hood.

1992, Denver, CO: Two sheriff’s deputies. one white and one Latino, dress up in Klan robes in an attempt to intimidate Black inmates at the jail. In another incident, a cop flashes a KKK hand sign at Chicanas on their way to protest a Klan rally. Meanwhile, the army issues a ban to prevent active duty personnel from attending the rally.

1992, Grovetown, GA: Scott Lowe, the former fire chief, who had been exposed as the grand titan of the Christian Knights Klan, is arrested for having burned a cross in 1987 outside a Black family’s home.

1992, Boynton Beach, FL: Officer Dave Demarest, fired from the force for flaunting a swastika tattoo at a Jewish woman officer and several other cops, seeks reinstatement by claiming that racism and nazism were widespread and accepted in the department. He presents a photo of two officers dressed as Nazis which had been posted in the deputy chief’s office.

1992, Ft. Benning, GA: Police arrest Klan leader Bill Riccio and several Confederate Hammer Skins and Aryan National Front members for possession of military weapons and explosives at an Aryan Fest racist rock concert. Further arrests of military personnel are expected at the base.

1993, Dallas, TX: The Christian fundamentalist sheriff opens a special, plush section of the jail reserved for “born-again” Christian inmates, and off-limits to the press and lawyers for other inmates. Even after the sheriff is removed for other illegalities, his successor, also a fundamentalist Christian, continues the practice.

1993, Washington DC: In separate incidents, gangs of sailors are involved in a gay bashing and the murder of a gay sailor, apparently in response to efforts to lift the ban on openly gay or lesbian service-members.

1993, Paterson, NJ: A cop is busted for dealing in illegal weapons with a undercover officer in a sting operation. An extensive weapons cache, nazi paraphenalia and white supremacist material is found in his home.

1993, Somalia: The existence of a network of neo-nazis inside the Canadian military and Special Forces, linked to the Canadian associates of Metzger’s WAR organization, is exposed by the execution style slaying of a Somali by a member of Canadian forces included in Clinton’s “humanitarian” invasion of Somalia. A series of trials of the white supremacists involved in the murder and in racist para-military training ensue, embarrassing the Canadian government.

1994, Los Angeles CA: A Jewish officer for a suburban police department wins an out of court settlement for a lawsuit he brought charging anti-semitic harassment within the department, carried out with the apparent approval of superior officers.

1994, Los Angeles CA: Bobby Marshall, a Black cop who talked to the Christopher Commission about Klan and racist activity in the L.A.P.D., and author of a forth-coming book, “Inside the Blue Klux Klan,” is convicted in a third trial on what he alleges are frame-up charges of involvement in a robbery ring. The only evidence is the testimony of a convict offered a deal by police and prosecutors to finger Marshall.

This string of incidents makes it clear that organized, violence-prone white supremacists, who make up a small element of society at large, are much better represented in the ranks of law enforcement and the military. This is no accident. The ideology of law enforcement, the “us against them” mentality which guides their daily lives and contacts with the public, makes police susceptible to white racist preachings. The police – even if polite, respectful and individually not personal racists – carry out a commitment to suppress threats to the hierarchy of the state and society which leaves Black people and other people of color on the bottom. Organized white supremacists within the police forces find fertile soil for the argument that democratic and egalitarian values and concern for human and civil rights, hem them in needlessly. The Klan portrays such procedural safeguards as only so much hypocrisy that interferes with cops’ ability to protect themselves and to get tough on crime.

COPS PROTECT THE KLAN; KLAN RETURNS THE FAVOR

One aspect of the relationship between the police and organized white supremacists is massive police protection for white supremacists’ organizing drives under the guise of maintaining freedom of speech. Time after time, particularly in the early 80’s when the KKK was on an upswing, using public hooded rallies to promote their cause and to lay the basis for further night-riding, police forces around the country have come out in force to enable the Ku-Kluxers to carry out their strategy, and to suppress or intimidate opposition to the Klan in the community.

In city after city, police and National Guardsmen sometimes numbering in the thousands, were mobilized as phalanxes around handfuls or several dozen neo-nazis or Klansmen. Police attempted to intimidate and sometimes brutalized anti-klan demonstrators. On many occasions, in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, GA, Austin, TX and elsewhere, pitched battles broke out between community residents outraged by the klan and police enforcing the white supremacists’ line of march. Some anti-klan groups that work closely with the police put the blame for these incidents on hot-heads in the anti-klan movement. This echoes the line of the police, and the KKK itself. In fact, the violence that erupts at Klan rallies is in the first instance the fault and responsibility of the Klansmen and neo-nazis themselves, who violate the rights and humanity of their victims with their hateful slogans, and who use the public rallies to build the base for their clandestine terror. Everywhere the Klan has organized publicly, racist violence and terror, such as cross-burnings, shootings and assaults have quickly followed.

In the particular rallies that have erupted in violence, police over-zealous in “protecting” the Klan by trying to intimidate and suppress anti-Klan protests have often played an important role. Police who have pushed and bullied anti-Klan protesters, declared counter-protesters to be unlawfully assembling, or cordoned off whole sectors of downtowns to separate neo-nazis from anti-racist demonstrators have brought the ire of the counter-demonstrators on themselves. Police have often been brutal in the arrests they make in these situations, making it seem that their sympathies and affinities lie with the Klansmen they are protecting. This pattern was repeated twice in 1992 in Simi Valley, CA by local police and Ventura sheriff’s deputies. White supremacists had been attempting to capitalize on the notoriety generated by the acquittal there of the cops who beat Rodney King by rallying to “support the police.” Despite a call by anti-racist groups, the Simi Valley police chief and the Ventura County sheriff never publicly repudiated this racist “support.” Meanwhile, a Black former deputy has filed suit for damages against the Ventura department for failing to stop racist harassment of him, and for allowing Klan activity among deputies, including the sale of knives inscribed “K.K.K.”

For their part, klansmen and other organized white supremacists have often made one of their top priorities defense and support of the police, particularly in cases where the cops are under attack for racist killings or shootings. In Miami FL, for example, after racist police violence resulted in a Black rebellion in the '80’s, Bill Wilkinson rushed in to hold a Klan rally to support the police. (It should be noted that Clinton’s Attorney General, Janet Reno, failed to get a conviction in this case as local county prosecutor, and subsequently refused to prosecute most Miami cops in racist brutality cases).

In Los Angeles in 1983, the local Klan Wizard, Frank Silva, launched a “support the police” campaign after a cop was killed in a shooting incident with a Black man married to a white woman. Silva’s campaign culminated in the burning of three crosses by the Klan and the nazis that he billed as a religious memorial to Lt. Verna and other fallen cops. Silva and his supporters struck a deal with cops from the Foothill Division to disperse counter-demonstrators from the Jewish Defense League, and allow the cross-burning to go forward, with an L.A.P.D. helicopter flying overhead, and then for the racists to be arrested. But this cross-burning gives the lie to the Klan’s alleged support of the police. Among the participants were Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), Stan Witek, head of the L.A. Nazi Party, David Tate and Richard Butler of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations.

According to testimony in a successful civil suit, Metzger was involved in the russian-roulette interrogation of a police infiltrator of WAR. Witek was convicted of assault on an Amtrak cop when he smashed him with a standing ashtray after a demonstration while Witek was on trial for the cross burning. Tate, who became a fugitive from federal charges while facing trial for the cross-burning, eventually was captured and convicted of killing a Missouri state trooper. The cross-burning, which supposedly memorialized fallen police officers, turned out to be the cementing of a KKK-Nazi-Aryan Nation alliance that gave birth to the Order, a clandestine neo-nazi armed group that killed a talk show host, robbed a Brink’s truck and banks, and plotted the assassination of judges and other public and political figures. "Police supporter" Silva himself became a federal fugitive and is now doing time for his criminal involvement in the Order conspiracy, as are several of his cross-burning co-defendants

NAZI-KLAN IMPUNITY FROM PROSECUTION

The 1983 L.A. cross-burning is instructive in regards to another aspect of the relationship between law enforcement and the white supremacists: the ability of the nazis and KKK to get away with murder. Although more than 15 racists were arrested at the time of the cross-burning, only four did any time for the cross-burning itself.

The then-district attorney, a Republican appointee, refused to prosecute after the original arrests were made, saying that the police arrest reports were faulty. The city attorney then filed misdemeanor charges against the participants. The case dragged slowly through the courts, until a Municipal judge suddenly dismissed the charges, buying the neo-nazis’ argument that the cross-burning was a protected act under their constitutional rights to free speech and free exercise of religion. The city attorney’s office appealed the dismissal. Eventually, an appellate court overturned the lower judge, and the city attorney was allowed to refile. By this time, however, several of the defendants had vanished. Four had become federal fugitives, exposed as members of the Order and wanted for crimes ranging from bank robbery to counterfeiting to murder. Had they been prosecuted effectively and convicted and jailed for the cross-burning, several lives might have been spared.

The story does not end there, however. The second time they were brought to court, the city attorney in the case needed surveillance and bodyguards because of racist threats related to the Order. The defendants demanded to be tried on felonies (most of the counts could be treated as either misdemeanors or felonies), thus bumping the case back up to the District Attorney and starting things from scratch again.

This strategy of the racists proved successful when, after another long series of hearings, a judge again threw the charges out of court before an actual trial could begin. Prosecutors again appealed, and again the charges were eventually reinstated by a higher court. This time, in the interim, cross-burner Tom Metzger, one of the few remaining defendants after the Order fugitives were severed from the case, was found liable, along with his son John, in a civil trial in Portland OR for the nazi bonehead killing of an Ethiopian refugee, Mulugeta Seraw. (John Metzger had in fact participated in and been taken into custody at the L.A. cross-burning in 1983, but as a minor at the time had been released to his mother without even juvenile charges being filed.) Again, one can only speculate who might still be alive today if the Metzgers, father and son, had been held to account for the cross burning when it first happened. The younger Metzger was later a leader of the White Student Union and the WARSkins.

More than eight and a half years after their act of racist terror Metzger and a few co-defendants, including Witek, were finally convicted. A prosecution which failed to expose the race-war strategy espoused by Metzger allowed him to distance himself from the others, and he received the lightest sentence after getting a hung jury on several counts. The D.A. decided not to refile on the undecided charges, and Metzger was sentenced to only six months. He was released by a judge after less than half the sentence because of the illness of his wife (which proved terminal). Within days after his release and the burial of his wife, Metzger was involved in organizing for a neo-nazi, anti-immigrant mobilization on the border with Mexico. Subsequently, Metzger violated the terms of his probation by illegally entering Canada and consorting with white racists there. He was expelled by the Canadians, yet the L.A. county D.A. and judge never violated his parole or returned him to jail to serve the rest of his sentence. In 1994, Metzger was appealing his conviction, and stands a chance of overturning it.

As noted earlier, Metzger also enjoyed a charmed life with the San Diego police. Despite the intelligence reports submitted by Doug Seymour, a police reservist assigned to infiltrate Metzger’s Klan and White American Political Association operations, which documented criminal activities by members of Metzger’s group that included allegations of the beheading of Mexican migrant workers, the S.D.P.D. never brought any charges against Metzger. Instead, they let agent Seymour twist in the wind until his cover was blown, and he had a breakdown after being interrogated at gunpoint in Metzger’s house. Seymour eventually won a civil lawsuit against the San Diego police in the case.

Another nazi with a charmed life in the L.A. cross burning case was Richard Butler, head of the Aryan Nations, based in a para-military compound in Idaho, which has been the breeding ground for a series of neo-nazi combatants who were eventually captured and convicted of killings and bombings. Yet Butler himself always walks away, just as he has thus far from the L.A. cross-burning. A bench warrant was issued because Butler refused to return to L.A. for trial, yet even after the conviction of his cohorts, he has not been extradited because the L.A. charges are only misdemeanors. Butler also was indicted on federal charges while the L.A. case was pending. He was one of 13 leading white supremacists tried for seditious conspiracy for plotting attacks on federal judges, counterfeiting and other crimes to advance the white supremacist movement. But the prosecution, held in Ft. Smith, AR, was mishandled, just like the Greensboro killing case. The white supremacists were acquitted of all charges. At least two of the jurors became romantically involved with the defendants after the trial.

SUMMING UP

In regard to several key parameters, the relationship between the cops and the Klan is problematic for a democratic society. The organizing of white supremacists within police and military forces, the involvement of the FBI and of (former) intelligence operatives at the highest levels of Klan organizations, the apparent impunity enjoyed by many key white supremacists, all point toward troubling conclusions. At a minimum, these realities make the case that we cannot rely on the cops and the courts to deal with the nazis and the KKK.

We cannot ban the Klan, and laws designed to do so are more likely to be used by the state against liberatory forces than against white supremacists. Even imprisonment, while well deserved for many of the white supremacists’ crimes, is not a solution, given the existence of racist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood that function among white prisoners, and the fact of Klan organizing among prison guards.

The solution to the problem of racist organizing and terror must lie in anti-racist organizing, in building support for the victims of bigoted violence and building alliances among such communities that support self-determination and social justice. Anti-klan organizers in particular must maintain a healthy skepticism of, and distance from, the law enforcement apparatus to maintain credibility with the communities that are at least as victimized by police brutality and repression, and by economic discrimination and exploitation, as they are by the neo-nazis. We must oppose racism and brutality in the police, militarism in U.S. foreign and domestic policies, and economic domination by the multinational corporations and banks, along with our opposition to the stone racists of the Nazis and the Klan.


Excerpted from: http://ara-la.tumblr.com/post/117781155 ... e-by-night
American Dream
 
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Jan 14, 2016 11:21 pm

Golden Dawn on Trial

The criminal trials against Golden Dawn are crucial to defeating fascism in Greece.


What is the relation of Golden Dawn to various state apparatuses? It is said that they have a very strong base in the police force.

These aren’t rumors or speculations, we know very well that Golden Dawn has a massive electoral support of over 50 percent in the police force. The policemen are listed on separate voters’ lists and have their own ballot boxes in the departments where they are serving so we have a clear idea of what they vote.

Regarding the army, I think the relations are similar. Many Golden Dawn members are in the military and in the rank of officer. Kasidiaris’s brother for example is an officer in the army; he is a GD member and he is involved in a violent incident against an immigrant in Thessaloniki. Also many retired ex-officers are supporters or members of Golden Dawn. For example Deputy General Epitideios is elected in the European Parliament as a Golden Dawn MP.



A mural dedicated to the slain leftist musician Pavlos Fyssas.
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Jan 25, 2016 9:04 pm

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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 25, 2016 6:26 pm

Right-Wing Extremism Is Thriving in Canada

By Rachel Browne

February 19, 2016


Daniel Gallant first tried to kill himself when he was 12 years old, a way to escape the trauma of being raised in a home filled with sexual and physical abuse. When that didn't work, he ran away and spent the rest of his teenage years in the care of child services in British Columbia, psychiatric wards, and in juvenile detention for theft.

At 18, Gallant was living on the harsh streets of east Vancouver, squatting in abandoned buildings and doing whatever he could to feed his addiction to alcohol and drugs.

His deep frustration with himself and everything around him played right into the hands of a group of skinheads and neo-Nazis he met one day while he was smoking a joint on Granville Street. Right away, Gallant felt like he belonged with the hodgepodge of men from the Klu Klux Klan, Heritage Front, and World Church of the Creator, all driven by the belief in a superior white race.

"They gave me an outline for who to blame for my life and for the state of the world," said Gallant in an interview.

He proved his devotion and worth to the group by assaulting at least one person everyday. His record was beating up nine people in a single day.

"The attacks were fueled by hatred for other races," recalled Gallant, who has since abandoned the movement and counsels other extremists looking to reform. "One time, I went after a black guy who I had seen at a bar with his buddy. I towered over him and we started fighting. I was kicking him and yelling racial slurs at him."


Continues at: https://news.vice.com/article/right-win ... vicenewsfb





American Dream » Wed Mar 18, 2015 8:39 pm wrote:
INTERVIEW: 'RACE TRAITOR' AUTHOR ELISA HATEGAN

Wednesday, 18 March 2015

This week, the former member of the Canadian White supremacist group Heritage Front who went on to help bring it down announced that she was stepping away from political activity. And what activity it has been! Before she made the announcement, we were able to get in touch with her about her book on her life, Race Traitor: The True Story of Canadian Intelligence Service’s Greatest Cover-Up, that we encourage everyone to pick up!

One People's Project


In the 1990s, a young Romanian immigrant Elisa Hategan was a prominent figure within neo-Nazi circles in Canada as a member of the racist Heritage Front and with her work with Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. She was a speaker at rallies, a writer of several articles and she has also appeared on television programs like The Montel Williams Show. When things started to take a dark turn with the Heritage Front however, and she began to rethink her own perspectives about who she is and what direction she was going in, she not only left her old group, she provided enough information to anti-racist activists and government agencies to bring the Heritage Front down. Problem is, when you are providing help to a government agency that is working against you, that tends to make things that much worse. Over a decade after she left the hate behind, she has written a book about her life and experiences, Race Traitor: The True Story of Canadian Intelligence Service’s Greatest Cover-Up.

You did something unique in writing this book. You didn't just write about how you got out of the white power scene, you also talked about how the government was complicit in its growth for whatever ends. Why do you think you are maybe the only one that has ever talked about this, despite how much it seems to happen?

I think that, for better or worse, I am simply a product of being in the right place at the right time to witness not only the growth of the most organized, violent white supremacist group Canada has ever seen, but also its downfall. And ironically, both that exponential growth and downfall came as a direct result of the activities of Canada’s own intelligence agency, CSIS.

There was nothing intrinsically special about me other than my gender and my young age. I was a stupid, wounded little girl. But being the only girl inside the Heritage Front core group, a vulnerable sixteen-year old Romanian immigrant from an abusive household, allowed me the opportunity to be taken into the fold and into their trust. For over two years I was very close to the leadership of the Heritage Front and to Ernst Zundel, who used me for free labour inside the Toronto house from where he distributed Holocaust-revisionist propaganda all over the world. Being that I was a runaway kid who needed their protection, it was easy for them to trust me. They treated me as their own kid, encouraged me to give speeches at rallies and paraded me around each time there was a media interview as the “softer face of the Heritage Front.” It was easy for HF co-leader Grant Bristow, who was later revealed to be a CSIS agent, to confide in me and teach me the psychological terror tactics that he had used to terrorize people in the anti-racist community. He took me for granted; he never saw me as a threat.

The reason this book is unique is because there just haven’t been that many individuals who have witnessed what I have, and took the risk to become whistleblowers. Of course, there are tons of people who are undoubtedly aware of the role intelligence agencies often play in the building-up of terrorist groups, but don’t get the opportunity to witness first-hand how such a process actually works. I felt it was very important - crucial actually - that beyond describing the step-by-step process of radicalization and indoctrination that a vulnerable young person might experience into an extremist group, to go higher. To reveal that often times, intelligence forces and police departments are complicit in fostering and even facilitating hate group activity.

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Continues at: http://www.onepeoplesproject.com/index. ... sa-hategan
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby jakell » Thu Feb 25, 2016 6:32 pm

Why do you keep pasting the same articles over and over again AD?
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 29, 2016 10:43 pm

Cops are Gangsters


The interrelationship of u.s. capitalists and gangsters has a long history. Before permanent police forces even existed in the u.s., mercenary gangs were authorized to clear the way for settler land theft, and to enforce slave “law and order” for the capitalists and their governments. Gangs of “Indian hunters” such as the Pit River Rangers and the Oregon Militia were given official bounties for each Native person killed. California alone paid millions of dollars out of public funds to these murder squads. Slave patrols of white vigilante thugs were rewarded by plantation capitalists for capturing and “chastizing” escaped slaves. These early genocidal gangster mercenaries were the precursors of modern cops.

When radical labor insurgency erupted in the u.s. starting in the 19th century, leading industrialists relied on private police forces like the Pinkerton Coal and Iron Police to repress workers. These freelance mercenaries worked side by side with government cops and the military, acting with complete impunity. It didn’t matter that they didn’t have official badges. They used their own bombs, snipers, blackmail, arson and machine guns, and they reported directly to the capitalists who hired them.

In the 1980’s, the CIA collaborated with urban gangs to flood Black communities with crack cocaine and automatic weapons. The profits generated from this illegal trade were used to fund similarly illegal counterinsurgency gangs in Latin America. This kind of activity is routine. Criminal organizations, mercenaries and death squads have been employed by u.s. capitalists to repress the Left in dozens of places, from the New York waterfront to the streets of San Salvador.

Official gangs
Where do modern u.s. cops fit into this broader landscape of gangsters working for and with the ruling class?

First of all, police are institutionalized, “official” gangs. This reflects the fact that they are meant to act for the whole ruling class, rather than just a single capitalist group. Cops are sponsored and endorsed by the state; employed to keep the population under long-term control and to combat other gangsters who get too independent.

Instead of being paid as contractors, or through bounties, modern police get a regular government paycheck. But this doesn’t in any way indicate that street cops are mere government functionaries carrying out a list of instructions passed down through the political bureaucracy. While police may be paid as employees, they actually function as a confederation of loosely controlled gangs, with a broad mandate to terrorize civilians. Cops are given a free hand in enforcing “order.” They are also encouraged to create insular, thuggish, semi-militarized cliques that breed a lumpen culture with its own hunger for power. Like other organized crime groupings, they have their own strict internal codes of ethics and conduct that override and exist outside the law.

Cop influence extends outward into broader social layers, generating networks of informants, groupies, wannabes, hangers-on, cheerleaders and private donors. Cop-lovers attend rowdy cop parties, sign up as eager auxiliaries (like George Zimmerman), sponsor foundations to benefit cops, bring them donuts and plaster pro-cop stickers on their cars. These networks of civilian loyalty exist independent of the state, and are in fact generally contradictory to official state control. They have nothing to do with cops being civil servants. Rather, these support networks are drawn to cops’ independent street power. They are similar to the civilian networks that gather around other criminal confederations like the the Cosa Nostra and the Yakuza.

Intended to terrorize
When the capitalist state establishes and supports official police forces, it intentionally gives them wide leeway to function as semi-autonomous gangs. This has proven to be an effective formula that permits the ruling class to maintain a layer of separation and denial between themselves and the gangster violence they unleash. Capitalists pretend to have clean hands, even acting shocked by criminal cop behaviors. If public outcry becomes strong, their politicians re-shuffle top police leaders or initiate drawn-out bureaucratic investigations, making a superficial show of reining in police abuse. Nevertheless, it is fundamental to the ruling class’s repressive strategy that street cops operate with broad independence and impunity.

Cop violence is specifically intended to operate outside the law as well as inside. Police criminality isn’t a problem for the ruling class—it’s a solution. Cops are doing dirty work that regular state functionaries can’t do. Institutionalized, state-backed gangsterism is an effective tool of social dominance: it causes generalized fear and submission, while it also can be targetted at specific enemies. The ruling class recognizes that mad-dogging, upredictable sadism and deadly brutality are indispensible parts of the gangster arsenal, and considers their use by cops to be both inevitable and, with some limits, desirable.

From the cops’ point of view, impunity for criminal acts is a basic guarantee, an integral part of their vocation and their identity. They have little patience for politicians’ anxieties about public opinion, or capitalists’ desire to maintain ideological legitimacy. Cops strain to be let off the leash completely. Their lumpen instinct is to dominate the population through unchecked terror.

Cops push back hard against any attempts by civilian managers to establish day to day operational control. Police gangsters usually have the upper hand too, because they are indispensable to the ruling class and intimidating in their own right. Police have the power to make or break elected politicians. That’s why New York City Police Commmissioner William Bratton, currently the u.s.’s biggest celebrity cop, gets away with dictating policy to his supposed boss Mayor DeBlasio and publicly insulting the City Council. (His disrespectful comments play well with his underlings, although overall he is considered too compromising by regular NYPD cops.)

A parasitic way of life
Like other gangster forces, cops recruit heavily from the ranks of high school bullies, sadists and losers. Military drop-outs and children of cops also gravitate towards policing. All these people have a good idea of what they’re getting into. They want to become cops precisely because they get paid and rewarded for intimidating, assaulting and shooting people. San Antonio cop Daryl Carle could be the poster child. He bragged on Facebook that he loves his “job” because he can “kill people and not go to jail.” His bosses did think that was a little indiscreet of him. But nevertheless he’s still out there on street patrol with a badge and a gun.

As thugs, cops love the thrill of combat—as long as it’s one-sided in their favor. Listening to the media mythology about a so-called “war on police,” you might think that cops must take a lot of casualties. But actually, over the course of the police slaughter and torture that rolled across the u.s. last year, fewer than 40 cops were killed by suspects. Most of those deaths happened while responding to domestic disputes. As a point of comparison, hundreds of cops commit suicide every year in the u.s. By any statistical measure, being a cop is less dangerous than being a construction laborer or long-haul truck driver.

Then again, being a cop isn’t just a job; it’s a lumpen way of life.

Detective Louis Scarcella was an alpha cop in Brooklyn starting in the 1980s. He was involved in literally hundreds of murder investigations there. Scarcella, who was praised as one of New York’s top homicide detectives, is now suspected of obtaining fifty or more murder convictions using false evidence. At least six of these convictions relied on testimony from a single “eyewitness”—a desperate crack addict who appeared over and over in Scarcella’s cases, despite the fact that she kept contradicting herself. The entire “criminal justice system” looked the other way as Scarcella fabricated confessions, “lost” vital evidence, and pressured inmates to finger his hand-picked suspects in return for time out of jail, prostitutes and crack cocaine. Nobody even bothered to look for the real killers. Due to recent revelations by the media, a few of Scarcella’s victims are having their convictions thrown out; a handful of men (and one woman) are being released after more than 20 years in prison. Others are still incarcerated. Scarcella, meanwhile, has been enjoying a happy, taxpayer-funded retirement since 1999.

A recent Guardian investigation explored how routine it is for the most brutal cops to be protected, honored and promoted in Chicago. “A crew of detectives…used electric shock, suffocation and mock executions to coerce confessions of more than 120 men from the 1970’s through the early 90s.” The ringleader, Jon Burge, was convicted years later on trivial charges (obstruction of justice and perjury). He served only three and a half years in prison, and is still collecting his pension. The other cops involved in these crimes have never been charged at all. Another alpha Chicago cop, Francis Valadez, was honored several times and eventually promoted to Commander, even though he’s accused of coercing six murder confessions, plus battery and assault. In one case he tortured an injured man for 36 hours to obtain a confession that was later proved false by DNA testing. His resume also includes the fatal shootings of four people–so far. His most recent killing, in August, was of Rafael Cruz Jr., an unarmed man fleeing in his car. According to the Guardian, “Valadez has garnered 131 awards across three decades on the force.”

Cops are determined to dominate every situation they encounter. They insist on immediate obedience, whether warranted or not; legal or not. Attempts by civilians to protest their treatment or assert their rights are routinely answered with intimidation and violence. This carries over into cops’ private lives too. They walk around with feelings of entitlement and superiority even when they’re not on duty. Cops flash their badges and draw their weapons during traffic incidents and barroom brawls; they terrorize their personal enemies; they often beat up their families and their “beloved” K-9 dogs. They demand special privileges and civilian submission at all times.

Every day there’s new proof that u.s. police kill, rape and brutalize with impunity. Cops are also notoriously corrupt. Nightclubs, casinos and restaurants bribe them to get special treatment. Tow companies pay them off to generate more tows. Drug dealers and crime syndicates put cops on their payrolls as shields from arrest and prosecution.

Groups of cops run protection, arms and narcotics rackets; they rob banks and carry out murder for hire and human traficking. Many have dual gang loyalties. For instance, Texas “Cop of the Year” Noe Juarez turned out to be working for Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s most vicious drug syndicates. He got them assault rifles, police scanners and access to police databases in the u.s., among other things. In the 1990’s, more than 70 supposed “anti-gang” police in L.A. were implicated during an investigation that uncovered assassinations, theft of massive amounts of impounded cocaine, routine use of false testimony and a level of brutality unusual even for the LAPD. It turned out that several of the cops were actually Bloods associates, who joined the police to get the upper hand over rival gangsters.

Corruption and outside illegal moonlighting can obviously undermine a police force if it gets too far out of hand. But a certain amount of individual criminal initiative is expected and admired. It’s normal lumpen behavior. Cops aren’t supposed to be choir boys; they’re gangsters.

Increasingly, u.s. police are encouraged to grab property, cars, electronics and jewelry from the civilians caught up in their investigations—even those who are completely innocent. Cops hold seminars to learn which items are easiest to resell, and how to “legally” get away with ripping off “little goodies,” as one enthusiastic DA calls them. In 2012, $4.3 billion worth of so-called “civil assets” were seized by police; seizures have gone up rapidly since then. Much of the loot from this “for-profit policing” goes right back into police department coffers to spend on anything they want. Some of it is handed directly to individual cops as bonuses.

Two tiny police forces in Florida—Bal Harbour Police and Glades County Sheriff’s Office—were recently discovered to have laundered over $55 million belonging to narco gangs. Under the pretext that they were conducting an “undercover investigation” into how illegal drug money got turned into legal assets, these enterprising cops accepted millions in money-laundering “commissions” from a range of criminal groups. Flush with unaccountable cash, the cops bought fancy cars, guns and computers, partied at high end resorts, and withdrew over $831,000 in cash out of a slush fund. They didn’t arrest a single “money launderer.”

Cops lie about pretty much everything. That goes with the badge. Scarcella, Burge, and Valadez are no isolated examples. It’s completely routine for cops to plant evidence, frame innocent people using false testimony, coerce confessions through torture and doctor their reports. The other gangster cops cover for them unconditionally under a strict code of silence. If civilians happen to inconveniently catch a cop in a lie, nothing serious happens to them anyway, no matter how dire the consequences for innocent people.

In the early days of the u.s., police were virtually all white settler thugs. Most of them still are. A key function that police carry out for their political sponsors—and for themselves—is to repress whatever rebellions and freelance organized street gangs emerge among oppressed peoples. Cops are eager to do this. Their own goal in carrying out repression has nothing to do with safety or security for civilians. They’re not even mainly concerned with helping their capitalist patrons. Instead, their aggressive presence in ghettos, barrios and reservations is an opportunity to advance their “careers” and to enforce their own violent gang supremacy. Within oppressed communities, cops look at rebels and street gangs as turf rivals, to be dominated and eliminated as competitors.

The police are riddled with (and sometimes led by) extreme white supremacist sub-cliques. For example, the “Lynwood Station Vikings” was just one of a series of “elite” racist sub-gangs that have emerged inside the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department over the years. Fully-blooded Vikings (including some top department officers) had “998” tattood on their ankles, referring proudly to the code for “officer-involved shooting.” Membership in this gang-within-a-gang was by invitation only. But all the cops knew about it. The walls of Lynwood Station were openly decorated with racist cartoons of Black men as well as a map of the police district drawn in the shape of Africa. Efforts to discipline the Vikings were heavily discouraged by top LASD brass, even in the face of negative publicity and numerous costly civil rights lawsuits.

Historically, membership in police gangs has served as an access point into white privilege in the u.s. For instance, immigrant Irish—a nationality that was originally considered “non-white”—took advantage of police affiliation as part of a process of “graduating” to whiteness. By participating in officially-sanctioned armed gangs to enforce ruling class “law and order”—especially, repressing people of color—Irish cops proved their loyalty to u.s. capitalism, augmented their social prestige and helped their communities move up the racial heirarchy.

Although the FBI has taken the lead in organizing the repression of political dissent in the u.s., they often count on street cops as their rank and file enforcers. The larger urban police forces have their own counterinsurgency forces, too. It was LAPD cops—350 of them—that fired round after round into the Los Angeles headquarters of the Black Panthers in 1969, (trying unsuccessfully) to murder everybody inside. It was the Philadelphia Police department that attacked a MOVE house in 1985 with automatic weapons and firebombs, killing six adults and five children, and burning down more than 50 homes in the Black community.

Cops are predators. They intimidate, bludgeon, shoot and terrorize their way into a position of power, material comfort, prestige and privilege. Their “job” is actually a hustle; a disguised protection racket through which public money is used to oppress the public; we get to pay our own oppressors. On top of that, police use their gangster power to generate opportunities for endless corruption and sadistic gratification. But what about the good cops? The idealistic, friendly ones who just want to help their community?


Excerpted from: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/cops-are-gangsters/
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:04 am

http://nightslantern.ca/mbpoem.htm


"Bones," a poem by Marilyn Buck


i

Clacking keys announce your presence
a stalker that needs no silence
your eyes sweep the hall
searching out encounters

my bones tell me who you are

your eyes sight in on me
you bark my name
an obscenity in your mouth
my eyes meet yours
you recoil ...
too late

my bones unearth your history


ii

you press against the corner
the hunter in his blind
listening
your tongue cuts loose
Buck!
You speak Spanish, Buck!

an accusation
I know what you're saying!
Ana Luz laughs: ¿Es ilegal hablar de la
comida?


Ah, you speak Spanish, Mr. Kane.
one woman wonders if you are Latino
your black hair, your moustache ...

your eyes flash
an M-16 in shadowed forests
No! No! No!
I'm an American!
But I've been there

Where, Mr. Kane?

compañeros bones murmur
from beneath tropical forest floors
si, estaba aquí
yes, he was here



iii

you hunker in the darkened cell
rifling meager possessions
I stop in the door
you start
Get out! No! Halt!
Are those books yours?
There's a map ...

I stand still
is this a trap?
... the island where I was
Tiger Island, la isla de la tigre


bones clatter in my chest

you said you were in traffic control
San Salvador? Honduras?
an island off El Salvador!
Hunter Kane steps from shadows
trophy in his grin
yes, but not there
advisor in the countryside
you know ...


my bones snap
the sound of .223s slap flesh
"jungle" boots dance in blood

yes, I know
death stench settles on my bones
when you stride prison halls

but you do not know
my bones are not mine alone
we are wherever you are

not always prisoners




Winter 1997 © marilyn buck


Previous publication in BLU Magazine, v. 2, n. 7, 2000; Prosodia X, 2001,
Rescue the Word, and the Prison Activist Resource Center
[access:< http://www.prisonactivist.org/archive/p ... index.html >]





Marilyn Buck is a poet, writer and US political prisoner. She was awarded the PEN American Prison Writing Poetry prize, 2001, and an honourable mention the same year for an essay. A Gerald and Maas request to video her reading her poems for the Red Cloth Series (chainlessway) 2009, was denied by the warden. "Bones" is posted with permission of Marilyn Buck. - jbg







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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 10, 2016 2:17 pm

2012 suppressed news

Countering the Far-right in Greece
By J. B. Gerald

How is Europe to deal with all those displaced by U.S. / NATO wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria ? What responsibility does Greece have for the refugees of the West’s new world order ? Forced into debt, Greece is additionally burdened by several hundred thousand displaced people seeking refuge. Of these about fifty thousand are officially noted as “refugees” by the UN Refugee Agency.

A recent poll shows popularity of the extreme-right political party, “Golden Dawn,” has risen from 7% (435,000 votes) at the last election to 13.5%. With the same formula as the "Jobbik" Party in Hungary, or Geert Wilders' "Party for Freedom" in the Netherlands, “Golden Dawn” appeals to the majority's racial, religious, language identity, and rises through making vulnerable groups scapegoats for political gain. Once started, this mechanism extends as additional groups are sacrificed to deflect populist anger. Historically the parties are a danger to refugee, immigrant, Roma, Jewish, Muslim and LGT communities, and find power to effect their policies through parliamentary alliances with establishment conservatives. In Austria the far-right now includes "Team Stronach," recently founded by the Austrian/Canadian auto-parts magnate. As the crushing austerity programs are forced on Greece, a nationalist extreme right gains power to serve the enforcers. The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) describes "Golden Dawn" as a “neo-Nazi, racist and xenophobic political party.”

To protest "Golden Dawn," Mouvement Antiracist Européen / European Grassroots Antiracist Movement (EGAM), has called for a march in Athens, December 15th at 3 PM, from the Greek Parliament to the Acropolis. EGAM (egam-eu.blogspot.ca/) attempts to mobilize decency beyond ideologies in a European society suffering from anti-communism, Disneyland, the Heimat syndrome, and austerity programs. In France EGAM has organized for Roma pride. Last May thousands internationally, signed its petition "We are all Greek Jews" (still open to signature at http://weareallgreekjews.eu ). But to understand what decency is up against, consider what "Golden Dawn" is:

In WWII, EAM (the Communist Party and aligned resistance) freed Greece from occupation. The Allies formed an army of royalists and the right wing to fight against EAM, and won after resistance groups fought each other. The resulting ‘democracy’ was taken over by NATO supported Greek special forces, and a military junta ruled from 1967 to 1974. Return to democracy allowed superficial stabilization. In the 1980’s "Golden Dawn" was initially sponsored by the imprisoned leaders of the military junta. Covert military organizations were officially dissolved in 1988, but their chain of command, loyalties, and m.o., were not reliant on Greek officialdom. Could remnants of these have been activated to "control" the influx of refugees ?

NATO operations in Greece have shown some parallels to descriptions of the CIA's Operation “Gladio” throughout Europe, which left covert paramilitary units in each country at the end of WWII to fight Communist takeovers. These were used to counter the democratic election of Communist candidates. With proven application in Italy, operational tactics included destabilization, assassination, false flag operations, terrorizing voters, mobs with a purpose, individual murders, car burnings, chaos, which shifted the voting public to the right. “Gladio” elements were based in right wing fringe parties, police, military and intelligence networks. To quote Wikipedia on Gladio in Italy:

According to The Guardian [Ed Vulliamy, Dec. 5, 1990],"General Geraldo Serravalle, a former head of 'Office R', told the terrorism commission that at a crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper echelons 'had the idea of attacking the communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil war.' Later, he put it more bluntly: 'They were saying this: ''Why wait for the invaders when we can make a preemptive attack now on the communists who would support the invader?''' The idea is now emerging of a Gladio web made up of semi-autonomous cadres which – although answerable to their secret service masters and ultimately to the NATO-CIA command – could initiate what they regarded as anti-communist operations by themselves, needing only sanction and funds from the existing 'official' Gladio column."


http://nightslantern.ca/jbggreece.htm
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Re: Fascists are the Tools of the State

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 10, 2016 5:31 pm

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