The Little Führer

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 04, 2017 8:21 pm

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 05, 2017 12:00 am

Trumped --Updated: The Calls for a Coup Begin

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UPDATE: A Coup?

Just a few hours after publishing this piece I stumbled upon some stunning statements made by Rosa Brooks, an Obama lackey that worked out of the Pentagon during his first term. The Washington Times notes:

"A former Defense Department official under the Obama administration has raised the specter of a military coup to remove President Donald Trump from power.

"In an editorial penned for Foreign Policy, senior Pentagon policy official Rosa Brooks publicly suggested a military insurrection against the Trump administration may be the only option to oust one of the most divisive presidents in American history.

" 'Donald Trump’s first week as president has made it all too clear: Yes, he is as crazy as everyone feared,' Ms. Brooks wrote. '[One] possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.'..

"In the editorial, Ms. Brooks noted that Mr. Trump’s 'thin-skinned, erratic, and unconstrained' approach to defense matters of defense could put top U.S. military leaders in a position where they would be forced to execute orders that may be 'dangerously unhinged' from a basic understanding of national security.

" 'The prospect of American military leaders responding to a presidential order with open defiance is frightening — but so, too, is the prospect of military obedience to an insane order,' Ms. Brooks wrote."

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Rosa Brooks

These are absolutely stunning comments. And they appeared in Foreign Policy magazine originally, one of the principal organs of elite foreign policy debate.


More at: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2017/02/t ... begin.html
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sun Feb 05, 2017 9:32 am

Quebec City: Mosque Massacre by Far-Right Trump Supporter

Many are asking themselves how is it possible that this could happen here. However, racism and hatred for the ‘other’ outside of Christianity is not something new in Canada. This country is founded on the genocide of indigenous people, and their ghettoization into reservations. Contrary to what we learn in school, the colonizers of so-called Quebec also participated in this mass genocide. Quebec society has its share of racism through the ages, whether it be with the new form of slavery of the mass incarceration of black and indigenous people, the residential schools, the exploitation of migrant works without papers, or the islamophobic Charter of Values. Of course, the rise in right-wing nationalist ideology in the last years has had a large impact on the murders that happened in Quebec, but we can’t forgot that this way of thinking existed even before someone like Trump took power in the US, or a politician like Marine Le Pen is polled to win 30% of the vote in the coming elections in France.

It’s not surprising that the xenophobic act that took place last Sunday happened in the capital of Quebec. Several racist groups have been diffusing their despicable ideology in broad-daylight for several years, with impunity. Groups like Atalante Québec or Soldats d’Odins (Soldiers of Odin) and several others can try to hide behind their false banner of “only denouncing radical Islam”, but we’re not falling for this manipulation. We know very well that these are people who act according to a racist logic. How can a group like Atalante say that it’s not racist while they organize a conference with neo-fascist Italian groups like Casapound who claim the legacy of Mussolini. Quebec City also has its share of “radio poubelles” (a term used for right-wing populist radio stations) listened to each day by thousands. The hosts of these shows can always wash their hands by saying that they don’t call for murder, but they contribute in a large way to the normalization of racism and islamophobia. Let’s be clear: these people also have blood on their hands and their discourses of hate must absolutely be confronted with all means necessary. Whether it be the pieing of people like Mathieu Bock-Côté, disrupting all their conferences, or by never allowing a racist demonstration to take the streets in peace.

The response to the extreme right must be determined and relentless, this people must be afraid to publicly poster their discourses of hate. We must not wait for any change coming from the political class that also contributes to the atmosphere of racism: through the normalization of hate towards muslims, the maintenance of inherently racist borders and policing , and the ongoing colonial violence that Canada is founded on. The struggle against the rise of fascism and the world that needs it will only come from ourselves and without the intermediary of any representatives – to fight organized fascists out of the streets at every opportunity and to attack everything that gives them legitimacy. We must make our anti-fascism radical by continuing to fight against the racist foundations of our society – colonial government and industrial civilization, nationalism, police, prisons, and borders.

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https://itsgoingdown.org/mosque-massacr ... far-right/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 06, 2017 8:43 am

http://www.garthmullins.com/2017/02/ant ... acist.html

Anti-immigrant politics spark racist violence


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After a white mob runs amok in Vancouver's Chinatown and Japantown in 1907


Just 48 hours after U.S. President Donald Trump started making good on his promised Muslim ban, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Abdelkrim Hassane, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti, Azzedine Soufiane and Ibrahima Barry were killed as they prayed.

A young, white male is accused of pulling the trigger. But the immigrant scapegoating and Islamophobia of Trump, French Front Nationale leader Marine Le Pen and the like provided the ammunition.

As news of the shooting broke, the far right celebrated and hate crimes rippled across Montreal. A Texas mosque burned that same weekend. Violent racists are emboldened.

A 2016 Quebec visit by Le Pen seemed to bring out the white supremacist troll in the alleged shooter, who liked chess and far-right politicians on Facebook.

Trump’s ban is supposedly about stopping terrorism. But, as in the U.S., Canada’s mass shooters tend to be white and born here. White shooters have perpetrated a dozen school and campus incidents, the killing of Mounties in Moncton, N.B., and the massacre of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

Racist proposals like the Quebec Charter of Values, the Barbaric Cultural Practices tip line, then-prime minister Stephen Harper’s niqab ban and Kellie Leitch’s “Canadian values” test embolden white extremists.

And it’s been going on for a long time. In 1887, and again in 1907, white Vancouverites attacked immigrant communities, following racist speeches and rallies. Canada enacted a head tax, then banned Chinese immigration altogether. Hate speech, anti-immigration laws and racist violence go hand in hand.
Today, the Safe Third Country Agreement prevents refugees who first landed in America from seeking asylum here. And Canada’s refugee quota is unchanged in the wake of Trump’s crackdown.

A U.S. escape route has been closed tor thousands fleeing persecution, families are being torn apart and many are being deported back to uncertain fates.

The courts are putting the brakes on elements of the ban but Trump rages against the judges. On the borders, some officials simply refuse to enforce court rulings, causing confusion and a breakdown of the rule of law.

The current wave of white supremacist violence will not be quelled with the tweets of politicians or state surveillance powers like Bill C-51.

Rather, we need to build a broad anti-fascist movement. It’s already started. Thousands have flooded airports in protest since Trump’s ban was declared. Academics are boycotting U.S. conferences. And there have been solidarity actions with Canadian Muslim communities since the shooting.

If there’s any time in our lives to stand up, it’s now.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 06, 2017 12:03 pm

‘Trump is setting us free:’ White supremacists celebrate reports that Trump will dial down scrutiny

“This is absolutely a signal of favor to us.”

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By Laurel Raymond and Alan Pyke


Online neo-Nazi and white supremacist forums have been unmistakably jubilant lately, as web chatter moved from celebrating President Donald Trump’s electoral victory to celebrating individual cabinet appointments and policy proposals.

On Thursday, internet racists celebrated another perceived victory: Reports that President Trump will soon remove white nationalist groups from a federal effort to study and neutralize extremist radicalization, and rebrand the program to focus solely on groups associating themselves with Islam.

“Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”


The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program partners government agencies with community organizations in hopes of preventing people from being radicalized into various types of terror and hate groups. Its primary focus has always been in Muslim communities, but the Obama administration designed it to also encompass the American far-right groups that propagandize to people like Dylann Roof.

News of Trump’s plan to reverse that symbolic recognition of right-wing threats prompted a wave of celebration in white nationalist circles.

“Donald Trump wants to remove us from undue federal scrutiny by removing ‘white supremacists’ from the definition of ‘extremism,’” the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer (which takes its name from a Nazi propaganda publication) wrote in a post on the site. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”

This interpretation overstates the scope of Reuter’s report somewhat. The meme-filled Daily Stormer post alleges that changing the CVE program and renaming it to focus solely on “Islamic extremism,” as Trump puts it, would also extend to to calling off FBI scrutiny and taking white supremacists and neo-Nazis off of extremist databases. That would actually require separate action from Trump.

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CREDIT: Screenshot

But in Trump’s move to take even some measure of scrutiny off of far-right extremism, The Daily Stormer sees a direct parroting of their own writing and a reward for the far-right’s role in getting Trump elected.

“It’s fair to say that if the Trump team is not listening to us directly (I assume they are), they are thinking along very similar lines. We helped get Trump get [sic] elected, and the fact of the matter is, without Alt-Right meme magick, it simply wouldn’t have happened,” the post continues. “This is absolutely a signal of favor to us.”

Another neo-Nazi site that associates itself with the so-called “alt-right,” Infostormer, celebrated the news and took it as a sign of support. “We may truly have underestimated President Trump’s covert support of our Cause (at least in some form), but after this proposal, I am fully ready to offer myself in service of this glorious regime” the post reads.

This celebratory coverage of the news spread widely through white nationalist forums and chat rooms.

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CREDIT: Screenshot

Commenters at Stormfront rejoiced.

“Amazing my government no longer targets me as an enemy,” wrote one. “It’s now officially understood at the the highest levels that we are soooo much better than the kidnapper terrorist pedophile left,” wrote another.


Continues at: https://thinkprogress.org/trump-is-sett ... 6039e12fad
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 06, 2017 4:39 pm

For a United, Working Class Defense of Muslim Communities

by First of May Anarchist Alliance, Feb 5th 2017

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Trump, his white nationalist advisers and their fascist supporters are openly attacking Muslim communities. Trump’s authoritarian ban on refugees from Syria and on travelers, immigrants, students and refugees from a total of seven majority Muslim nations is a direct assault on Muslim communities, immigrant communities, people of color and the entire working class. With Trump’s targeted assault from the top, fascists on the ground in Texas burned a Muslim Mosque. In Quebec City, Canada, a white fascist stormed into a mosque, killing six and wounding many more. The shooter was a known admirer of Trump, French far-Right leader Marine Le Pen and an assortment of other racist, anti-immigrant and white nationalist groups.

Opposition to Trump’s racist travel ban was immediate and broad. People in their thousands came into the streets and demonstrated against the ban at airports and in cities from New York to Detroit to Columbus to Chicago to LA to Seattle and dozens of cities/airports in between. Demonstrations continue and are multi-racial and multi-national, involving Muslims from many communities and with solidarity from Latinx communities, Black communities, immigrant communities and working people of all races and nationalities. Various liberal leaders and many with ties to the Democratic Party attempt to lead the demonstrations and be in charge, but the truth is that ordinary people, working people are coming out and building the opposition: young and old, women and men, Muslim and non-Muslim, Black, white, Latinx, Arab, Asian, all of us together opposing the ban and standing in defense of Muslim communities and immigrant communities.

Trump and his supporters are attacking very basic rights, and people are fighting to defend those rights: the right to worship, the right to be yourself, the right to travel, the right to be with family, the right to survive by fleeing war and bombing, the right to an education, the right to be safe. All of us, including anarchists and revolutionaries, should join in the fight to defend these basic rights and to oppose government and fascist attacks on these rights and on Muslim communities. Now we need community self-defense and united working class defense; the multi-racial and multi-national working classes must join our forces, must unite our forces in defense of Muslim communities.

We know that attacks on Muslims are part of the broader attacks on Latinx communities, immigrant communities, indigenous people, women, LGBTQ communities, people with disabilities, “cities,” prisoners, students and all of us. While Trump plans to follow through on his campaign promises of upsetting Washington politics – what he called “draining the swamp” – he is in fact working to realign politics and policies that will continue the broad attacks on working people. He hopes to keep working people focused on fighting each other; he hopes to keep everyday white folks focused on fighting to protect white supremacy and capitalism. Much of this is facilitated by promoting the facade of white nationalism, in which white identity and imperial borders actively define the excluded and the enemy, domestically and abroad. The specter of both the alien at home and possible war abroad work hand in hand in producing targets for racist and xenophobic violence. This racist and authoritarian reaction has been at the center of Trump’s program from the beginning, and the attacks he has ushered in have made this painfully obvious. Millions of people voted for Trump seeing him as someone to “shake up the establishment”. But Trump’s program is another variant of rule by the bosses and billionaires, even if some of the ruling class is bothered by his seemingly chaotic approach. The dangers, as seen in the Mosque attacks, is that racist and fascist violence is being carried out from below, by everyday people. Working people are faced with the need to defend both against the attacks of the State and a racist and fascist base.

Anarchists and revolutionaries have been on the frontlines, but must continue to join the fight to oppose racism and discrimination and to build multi-racial, working class defense of all of our communities. Trump wants to take us back to American Apartheid. We are not going back. The liberals and the Democratic Party have no answers to Trump and the rise of a fascist movement. We are not going back to their failed policies and empty promises. The only way forward now is straight ahead, on our own, uniting our forces. No one is coming to save us; we have to do that ourselves. The whole system has to go.

NO BAN, NO WALL, NO BORDERS, NO STATES!


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“Popular Self-Defense Against Racism and Islamophobia”
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 06, 2017 9:47 pm

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2017 ... trump.html


The loneliness of Donald Trump

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President Trump's first fortnight in power has taught us three lessons.

The first lesson is that Trump is an economic nationalist. He was serious when he talked, on the campaign trail, about scrapping free trade deals and keeping American companies from migrating to Mexico and Asia. He was serious about building new infrastructure, like roads and bridges and his notorious border wall, that will create jobs and stimulate the economy.

Last year Boris Kagarlitsky argued that Trump represented the declining manufacturing sector of the American capitalist class, and was opposed by the financial sector of the country's capitalist class, as well by new high tech industries. Trump's first fortnight in power suggests that Kagarlitsky was right.

Wall Street, which had hoped Trump's denunciations of neo-liberal capitalism were unserious, has begun to admit it was wrong. The financial sector and high tech sectors benefit from the relatively free movement of labour as well as capital; they have been unimpressed by Trump's talk of tariffs, and also by his attempts to ban the citizens of seven mainly Muslim nations from entering America. It is no coincidence that tech companies are joining forces to challenge Trump's ban.

Trump's economic nationalism makes him careless about alienating traditional allies like Australia, and reckless in his dealings with China.

The second lesson Trump has taught us is that he wants to conquer and reshape the American state.

Before Trump was elected, observers disagreed over whether or not he would be content to govern within the limits the American constitution traditionally gives to presidents, or whether he was interested in ending the separation of powers between congress, the courts, and the presidency and concentrating power in the White House. We can now see that Trump is keen to control the innermost parts of the American state, and contemptuous of the limits that have traditionally been placed on presidential power.

Trump has pushed members of his family and his political advisers into parts of the 'deep state', like the National Security Council, that have traditionally been off limits to political appointees. He has sacked an Attorney General who questioned the legality of his ban on visitors from seven Muslim majority nations, and has condemned a federal judge who considered the ban unconstitutional. He has attacked congressmen like John McCain, after they queried his authoritarian style.

Some critics of Trump's reach for power point at Stephen Bannon, the former boss of Breitbart News who has been making himself comfortable in the White House over the last fortnight. Bannon's politics have been characterised as fascist, but he isn't necessarily responsible for Trump's authoritarianism. America's new president has spent his life as a corporate dictator, sacking staff and buying and selling companies at will; it is perhaps not surprising that he is still acting like a dictator.

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The third lesson Trump has taught us, albeit unwittingly, is that he is isolated, and unlikely to succeed in turning America towards economic nationalism and conquering the state. Trump's chthonic nationalism and his contempt for the rule of law have convinced many observers that he is a fascist. But Trump lacks the support of the most powerful parts of America's capitalist class, and he lacks the organised and menacing street army that has traditionally helped fascists take and consolidate power.

In capitalist countries, the ruling class traditionally only turns to fascism when it sees its own power threatened by another class. The German capitalists turned to Hitler because they were traumatised by the Great Depression and terrified that the country's massive Communist Party would take power and seize their factories in the name of the working class.

America is not suffering a Great Depression, although isolated parts of the country, like the Trump-voting coal counties of Kentucky, are suffering an apparently endless economic decline, and no mass radical movement threatens the assets of its elite. A large majority of Republican lawmakers will baulk at Trump's economic nationalism, and will be unimpressed by his attempts to undermine the powers of congress and the courts.

Trump could try to overcome the opposition of the courts and of mainstream Republicans if he had a streetfighting army behind him. If he had such an army he might call on its members to intimidate judges who defy him, to flood airports and make sure that his ban on Muslims is maintained, and to blockade any state legislature that opposes him.

But although Trump won millions of devoted supporters during his election campaign, he has not tried to turn these supporters into brownshirts. He may fulminate against 'so-called judges' and other enemies in his tweets, and his followers may angrily retweet him, but indignation is no substitute for force. It is Trump's opponents who have created, in an extraordinarily brief time, a large and impressively mobile protest movement. Trump is, at present, a lonely figure: a general without an army.
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 8:03 am

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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 4:46 pm

Donald Trump Keeps Pushing Alex Jones’ Conspiracy Theories

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Yesterday, President Trump told yet another blatant falsehood, alleging that the media has covered up several terrorist attacks, a bogus claim that became even more laughable when the White House released a list of widely-covered attacks in a humiliating attempt to substantiate Trump’s assertion.

Trump, it seems, got the conspiracy theory that the media won’t report on terrorist attacks from InfoWars, the far-right conspiracy theory outlet headed by Alex Jones.

As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post noted, InfoWars has posted several stories accusing the media of supposedly whitewashing, hiding and covering up terrorist attacks.

While running for president, Trump appeared on Jones’ program where he lavished praise on the bizarre conspiracy theorist, telling Jones: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. I think we’ll be speaking a lot.”

Jones is far from the only conspiracy theorist embraced by Trump, but he is among the most influential.

Here are just five additional instances where Trump, himself a pathological liar and unhinged conspiracy theorist, pushed Jones’ wild and baseless claims:

Read at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/dona ... -theories/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 10:30 pm

Make America Ungovernable

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/mak ... e_20170205

Article by Chris Hedges
February 5, 2017


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Donald Trump’s regime is rapidly reconfiguring the United States into an authoritarian state. All forms of dissent will soon be criminalized. Civil liberties will no longer exist. Corporate exploitation, through the abolition of regulations and laws, will be unimpeded. Global warming will accelerate. A repugnant nationalism, amplified by government propaganda, will promote bigotry and racism. Hate crimes will explode. New wars will be launched or expanded.

And, as this happens, those Americans who remain passive will be complicit.

“We don’t have much time,” Kali Akuno, the co-director of Cooperation Jackson and an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, told me when I reached him by phone in Jackson, Miss. “We are talking two to three months before this whole [reactionary] initiative is firmly consolidated. And that’s with massive resistance.”

Flurries of executive orders and memorandums are being issued to demolish the anemic remnants of our bankrupt democracy. Those being placed in power—such as Betsy DeVos, who if confirmed as secretary of education will defund our system of public education and expand schools run by the Christian right, and Scott Pruitt, who if confirmed as head of the Environmental Protection Agency will dismantle it—are agents of destruction. In the eyes of the Christian fascists, generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists around Trump, the laws, the courts and legislative bodies exist only to silence opponents and swell corporate profits. It is impossible to know how long this transformation will take—it may be longer than the two or three months Akuno fears—but unless we mobilize quickly to stop the Trump regime the end result is certain.

“The forces around Trump have a plan to roll this [attack on democracy] out,” said Akuno, who was the coordinator of special projects and external funding for the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson. “They have a strategy. They have a timeline. They know whom they need to divide and whom they need to recruit. They are consolidating their base. Those who try and chalk this up to Trump’s pathology miss the intentionality, the strategic aims and the objectives. We will do ourselves a great disservice if we underestimate this regime and where it is going.”

Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief counselor, was behind the ban on Muslims entering the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries—a ban you can expect to see extended if the Trump administration is successful in removing a stay issued by a district court. He was behind the order to the Department of Homeland Security to draw up lists of Muslim organizations and individuals in the United States that, in the language of the executive action, have been “radicalized” and have “provided material support to terrorism-related organizations in countries that pose a threat to the United States.”

Such lists will be used to criminalize Muslim leaders and the institutions and organizations they built. Then, once the Muslims are dealt with domestically, there will be new Homeland Security lists that will allow the government to target the press, activists, labor leaders, dissident intellectuals and the left. It is the beginning of a fascist version of Leon Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.”

“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon told writer Ronald Radosh in 2013. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

The Trump regime’s demented project of social engineering, which will come wrapped in a Christianized fascism, can be implemented only if it quickly seizes control of the bureaucratic mechanisms, an action that Max Weber pointed out is the prerequisite for exercising power in industrial and technocratic societies. Once what the historian Guglielmo Ferrero calls the “silken threads” of habit, tradition and legality are gone, the “iron chains” of dictatorship will impose social cohesion.

“This problem is not going to be solved in the 2018 elections,” warned Akuno, the author of the organizing handbook “Let Your Motto Be Resistance” and the former executive director of the New Orleans-based People’s Hurricane Relief Fund. “That hope is an illusion. The democratic apparatus will be completely gutted by then. We have to look beyond Trump. We have to look at the consolidation on the state level of these reactionary forces. They are near the threshold of being able to call for a constitutional convention because of the number of governorships and state legislatures where they hold both chambers. They can totally reorder the Constitution, if they even continue to abide by it, which they may not. We are facing a serious crisis. I don’t think people grasp the depth of this because they are focused on the president and not the broader strategy of these reactionary forces.”

“We have to encourage a broad noncompliance strategy of ungovernablity,” Akuno said. “Not complying. Not consenting. We have to struggle on every front. We have to expect that the courts will not protect us. We are going to get less and less protection from the police. The slightest act of civil disobedience will mean jail. We have to mentally prepare for that. We have to build serious organizations, drawing upon the examples of forces that fought authoritarian regimes in Latin America and Europe. Either we submit to not having any protection as workers, women, queers, blacks, Latinos or indigenous or we fight back. These forces [arrayed against us] are not willing to compromise. I hope it does not come to violence, but we know the proclivities of the society and the forces that run it.”

If nonviolent protest is met with violence, we must never respond with violence. The use of violence, including property destruction, and taunting the police are gifts to the security and surveillance state. It allows the state to demonize and isolate a mass movement. It drives away the bulk of the population. Violence against the state is used by the authorities to justify greater forms of control and repression. The corporate state understands and welcomes the language of force. This is a game the government will always win and we will always lose. If we are perceived as a flag-burning, rock-throwing, angry mob that embraces violence, we will be easily crushed.

We can succeed only if we win the hearts and minds of the wider public and ultimately many of those within the structures of power, including the police. When violence is used against nonviolent protesters demanding basic forms of justice it exposes the weakness of the state. It delegitimizes those in power. It prompts a passive population to respond with active support for the protesters. It creates internal divisions within the structures of power that, as I witnessed during the revolutions in Eastern Europe, paralyze and defeat those in authority. Martin Luther King Jr. held marches in Birmingham, Ala., rather than Albany, Ga., because he knew Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor would overreact and discredit the city’s racist structures.

The Trump regime is populated with blind fanatics. They believe in one truth, which is whatever they proclaim at the moment (any such declaration may contradict what they said a few hours before). They are possessed with one idea—conflict. They venerate a demented hypermasculinity that includes a sacralization of violence, misogyny, a disdain for empathy, and the self-appointed right to engage in bouts of frenzied rage. These characteristics, they believe, are a sign of masculinity. The highest aesthetic is militarism, violence and war. Without conflict, without enemies real or imagined, their ideological structures and racism collapse into a heap of contradictions and absurdities. They will attempt to thwart nonviolent, nationwide resistance with force. And they will attempt to stoke counterviolence, including through the use of agents provocateurs, as a response. If we speak back to them in the language of violence, we will fail. We will be transformed into the monsters we seek to defeat.

Bannon and his followers on the “alt-right,” self-declared intellectuals, ferret out facts and formulas that buttress their peculiar worldview and discard truths that contradict their messianic delusions. They mouth a few clichés and quote a few philosophers to justify bigotry, chauvinism and governmental repression. It is propaganda masquerading as ideology. These pseudo-intellectuals are singularly incurious. They are linguistically, culturally and historically illiterate about the Muslim world, and about most other foreign cultures, yet blithely write off one-fifth of the world’s population—Muslims—as irredeemable.

The inability of white supremacists like Trump and Bannon to recognize the humanity of others springs from their spiritual impoverishment. They mistake bigotry for honesty and ignorance for innocence. They cannot separate fantasy from reality. Such people are, as author James Baldwin said, “moral monsters.”

Evil, for them, is embodied in the dehumanized other. Once the human personification of evil is eradicated, evil itself is supposed to disappear. Except, of course, that as soon as one group of human beings is annihilated, another human embodiment of evil rises to take its place. The Nazis began with Jews. Our fanatics are beginning with Muslims. History has shown where they will go from here.

“The nationalist is by definition an ignoramus,” the Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis said. “Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are, his, that’s to say national, that’s to say the values of the nation he belongs to, ethical and political; he is not interested in others, they are no concern of his, hell—it’s other people (other nations, another tribe). They don’t even need investigating. The nationalist sees other people in his own images—as nationalists.”

Like all utopian dreamers they believe their authoritarianism is being implemented for our benefit. They are like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who oversaw the burning of Giordano Bruno at the stake and who argued that eradicating heretics does them a favor because it saves them from their own damnation. It is impossible to have a rational dialogue with people who view reality through the binary lens of black and white—us and them. They do not recognize the right of dissent. Dissent is at best obstruction and probably treason. Fanatics, in power, always become inquisitors.

The acts of resistance—including the massive street protests the day after the inauguration and later the demonstrations that grew out of the ban on Muslims, the Department of Energy’s refusal to give the Trump administration a list of employees that worked on climate change, acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ refusal to enforce the travel ban and hundreds of State Department staff members’ signing of a memo opposing the immigration restrictions—terrify those around Trump. These reactionaries do not trust the old elites and their bureaucrats and courtiers, including the press, which Bannon has called “the opposition party.”

Akuno, who supports the appeal for nationwide general strikes, cautioned that such a call might be premature “because unions don’t know if a general strike is called how many members would comply, given how many voted for Trump.” He also noted that because the Trump regime is carrying out assaults on so many fronts, resistance will tax the resources of the left.

“This shotgun assault effectively divides the left,” he said. “Do I defend Chicago if, as Trump says, he puts tanks in the streets or do I go to Standing Rock if I am black? These are the kinds of choices we will be forced to make.”

“We are going to have to bring this society to a standstill,” he said. “We are going to have to disrupt the flow of commerce. We are going to have to disrupt the nodal points of distribution. We will not only have to figure out how to get on the highways, but disrupt Amazon.com and UPS. We have to get workers there, even though they are not unionized, to see these acts as in their long-term interests. And we have to build strong, fortified bases locally and link them together.”

Trump loyalists are counting on enough support from the police, the military, private contractors and the organs of internal security such as Homeland Security and the FBI, along with newly empowered white vigilante groups, to physically crush those who defy them. They will attempt to use fear and even terror to paralyze the population into acquiescence.

“It is not accidental that the Trump regime immediately went after the water protectors at Standing Rock,” Akuno said. “Standing Rock forced the wider society to look at itself, its history and its origins. It raised serious questions. Do we want human civilization to survive? Are we willing to destroy ourselves for short-term profit? Standing Rock exposed the U.S. colonial project and challenged capitalist logic. It showed us that we have to make a choice between oil and water. It asked us which will take priority for human beings.”

We have the power to make the country ungovernable. But we do not have much time. The regime will make it harder and harder to organize, get into the streets and carry out the nationwide strikes, including within the federal bureaucracy. Resistance alone, however, is not enough. It must be accompanied by an alternative vision of a socialist and anti-capitalist society. It must reject the Democratic Party’s attempt to ride anti-Trump sentiment back into power. The enemy is, in the end, not Trump or Bannon, but the corporate state. If we do not dismantle corporate power we will never stop fascism’s seduction of the white working class and unemployed.

“The evil which you fear becomes a certainty by what you do,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his play “Egmont.”

Now is the time not to cooperate. Now is the time to shut down the systems of power. Now is the time to resist. It is our last chance. The fanatics are moving with lightning speed. So should we.


http://navigatingthestorm.blogspot.com/ ... nable.html
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 11:23 pm

Republican congressman says white terrorists are different

Rep. Duffy characterized a shooting at a mosque in Canada as “a one off.”


During a CNN appearance on Tuesday, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) asserted that “there’s a difference” between attacks carried out by Muslim extremists and attacks carried out by white supremacists or other attackers who aren’t Muslim.

...Duffy’s comments overlook the fact that a person in America is seven times more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim attacker. In Duffy’s home state of Wisconsin in August 2012, a white supremacist killed six during a mass shooting in at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek. But Duffy didn’t mention that. He also ignored the role Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric played in a proliferation of hate incidents across the country since the election.

During a CNN appearance in July, Duffy — a former Real World cast member who has represented northwest Wisconsin in Congress since 2011 — acknowledged the Trump phenomenon for what it is: identity politics for white men.


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More at: https://thinkprogress.org/republican-co ... .4bycsle4i
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 8:31 am

The World According to Bannon

Steve Bannon’s vision of civilizational crisis and violent renewal has deep roots in the American political tradition.

by Alexander Livingston


In 1885, Josiah Strong infused national decline with millennial significance in his hugely popular Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis. Prophesying the imminent “final competition of the races” for global supremacy, the Social Gospel leader advocated global imperial expansion as the sole way to save the Anglo-Saxon race in America. Unfortunately, Strong lamented, the forces of secularization, immigration, and Mammonism had weakened the national character and left the Anglo-Saxon unfit to confront this urgent challenge. Our Country was a jeremiad calling the nation back to its Christian values, which could combat the forces of domestic corruption and “rise to a higher level of sacrifice” demanded by the coming race apocalypse.

But no figure better captured the republican melancholia of Gilded Age political thought — handwringing about civic virtue lost, criticism of corrupting greed, fear of immigration and “race contamination,” fantasies of global empire, romanticization of sacrificial renewal — than the promulgator of Big Stick diplomacy, Theodore Roosevelt.

In Roosevelt’s eyes, the United States was a global representative of Anglo-Saxon civilization. But it was threatened from abroad (by competing imperial powers and cultural contamination) and decaying from within (thanks to commercialism, immigration, “race mixing,” and humanitarian sentimentalism).

Warfare was the answer.


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Theodore Roosevelt outfitted in his military uniform in October 1898.


https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/bann ... tion-zero/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 11:36 am

"A Trump administration obviously poses serious threats not only to pluralism but also to democracy in the more substantive sense. But his means of threatening democracy are features of the system, rather than contraventions of it. Trump’s rapid-fire series of executive orders—from the Muslim Ban to financial deregulation—do undermine substantive democracy, but not because they upset a delicate balance of power between branches of government or partisan political forces. The “bipartisan consensus” cast as the moral backbone of democracy has vested in the presidency war-making and surveillance powers hidden from public scrutiny, unchecked by democratic debate or accountability. From the War on Terror to the deportation pipeline, to domestic spying, to Wall Street’s guaranteed seat at the economic advising table, Trump inherits a branch of government already well-equipped by his predecessors to undermine democracy. As is already apparent, the President and his crack squad of billionaires and white nationalists will undoubtedly turn these tools to devastating effect. However our critique of Trump, and our determined political resistance to Trumpism, should not rest on venerating an ideal democracy we have never really achieved."

— Thea Riofrancos, Democracy Without the People
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 4:30 pm

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RALLY AGAINST THE NATIONALIST FRONT AND TRADITIONALIST WORKERS PARTY IN KENTUCKY

The Nationalist Front is a new confederation of neo-Nazi, KKK, and Alt Right groups that is trying to capitalize on a Trump presidency. Made up of some of the more obvious sectors of the white nationalist movement like the National Socialist Movement, the groups who, until recently, was well known for emblazoning a swastika over the America flag. The Traditionalist Workers Party, the political wing of Matthew Heimbach’s Traditionalist Youth Network, is one of the most well-known groups in the new confederation, and they have been successful at pulling both from the Alt Right community and the more traditional rural white supremacist organizations like the White Knights. Matthew Heimbach and TWP recently presented at the Right Stuff planned Atlanta Forum, which was coordinated as a Southern Nationalist event by the people behind the Rebel Yell podcast.

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TWP and those in the Nationalist Front are known for their street actions, and now that Trump is threatening to lower federal scrutiny on white supremacist organizations in favor of targeting Muslims, they now think that they can make a show of strength in the South. They recently announced a rally for April 29th in Pikeville, Kentucky, a town with scarcely over 6,000 people. This is historically the kind of area where they hope to recruit from, but only if they are able to reframe the narrative on their own terms and come without opposition. They are messaging the event as taking a “stand for white working families,” part of the fascist populism that TWP is known for, arguing that they stand for the white working class against leftist immigration, free trade, and internationalism.


https://antifascistnews.net/2017/02/09/ ... -kentucky/
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Re: The Little Führer

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 11, 2017 2:05 pm

On July 4, 2013, Anglin started what would become his main project, The Daily Stormer. The site took its name from Der Stürmer, an astoundingly vile and pornographic Nazi newspaper started by Julius Streicher and specializing in attacking Jews. Streicher was later hanged for war crimes at Nuremberg.

The new site, created from the ashes of Total Fascism, specialized in punchy, image-heavy stories that often rely heavily on quoted material. It used hyperbolic headlines — “All Intelligent People in History Disliked the Jews,” for instance, or “SS Auschwitz Guard Dies Days Before Scheduled Lynching by Kikes” — to grab readers’ attention, build up participation and shift people’s thinking.

Anglin relied heavily on the daily news, although it was news poisoned by his particular views, to drive his message home. “You make a very simple message, where you hit the same points over and over and over again and you repeat them,” he explained in a podcast on his site last year. “That’s been my style. That’s why I do the news. Because it can be new information all the time while still repeating the same points over and over again. … It’s about creating a gigantic spectacle — a media spectacle, which desensitizes people to these ideas.”

One of those who seems to have been “desensitized” to ideas like genocide and race war was Dylann Storm Roof, the young man who murdered nine black churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015 in a bid to start a race war. Posting under the moniker of AryanBlood1488 (the numbers are references to white supremacist slogans), Roof wrote about black-on-white crime — a central topic on The Daily Stormer and Roof’s self-described motive for mass murder.


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See more at : Eye of the Stormer, February 9, 2017.
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