Unclear Holocaust: From the Anti-Banality Union

From the Anti-Banality Union [ABU]:

UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011)
Detourned by The Anti-Banality Union. 65 mins. U.SS.A.
Amerikan with some Arabic.

Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, gleaned from over fifty major studio event-movies and detourned into one relentless orgy of representational genocide. It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics.

“A Terrorist film collective hijacks the U.S. propaganda apparatus and detonates it over New York. Everything is obliterated and the world celebrates. Through fifty studio event-movies abstracted of all demokratic variation, we see the Cinema as it really is; an unequivocal annihilation, the auto-genocidal mass fantasy of a megalomaniacally depressed First World. Every screen is lifted and bares the obscene underside of all these images. Movements of character and narrative burst into pure and mechanically perfect propulsions of a psychotic camera from which all this violence emanates. The Mise-En-Scene becomes an inventory of the dominant visual-auditory arsenal, enumerating and measuring the power of every weapon available to the Spectacle. Utilizing them all with paradigmatic rigor, the Hollywood-Military complex launches an endless pre-emptive attack on its own shadow, the Terrorist. And, as in all encounters between doubles, the former ends up joyously suiciding itself.” -A.B.U. Communique #1

“When I first heard of Unclear Holocaust, the debut project of nebulous situationist art collective The Anti-Banality Union, my initial impression was that these impious troublemakers would fully deserve the inevitable fatwa that will be vexed upon them. However, after viewing part of the work, which reconstitutes scenes from over 50 Hollywood New York City disaster porn films into a more or less coherent narrative, I am pleased to report it is a rather damning yet thoughtful–and dare I say hilarious and enjoyable?–reminder of how bad Hollywood had pushed this scenario. (In cinematic terms, what is 9/11, after all, other than all three* Die Hard movies–exploding tower, exploding airplane, exploding New York City–rolled into one?) “The Spectacle of Terrorism forces the Terrorism of Spectacle upon us…” the ABU wrote me in this mysterious, Frankfurt School-inspired communique. I’m reminded of the remarks Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw shared on 9/11 the other day:

‘Perhaps the whole point of 9/11 was that it could never be represented on the cinema screen. The diabolic, situationist genius of the kamikaze attacks was that they were themselves a kind of counter-cinema, a spectacle very possibly inspired by the art-form, but rendering obsolete any comparable fictions it had to offer. The 9/11 attacks smashed Hollywood’s monopoly on myth-making and image production, and inspiring as they did only horror and revenge, aimed a devastating blow at imagination, and maybe for a while enfeebled the reputation of cinema and all the arts.’

Thankfully for the ABU, Hollywood pulled its shit together and made Nicolas Cage apocalypse thriller Knowing, providing Unclear Holocaust about half its runtime.” -ScreenSlate.com

-?!

p.s. Expect ‘Police Mortality’.

Important documentary: The Power Principle

An important documentary by Scott Noble. The Power Principle exposes the hidden agenda driving American foreign policy over the last seven decades and its gruesome consequences.

Historian Michael Parenti calls the film “A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.”

In an interview for Soldiers for the Cause, a veterans group supporting the Occupy movement, filmmaker Noble outlines the theses advanced in his documentary:

• The Cold War was not just a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States; the real struggle was between American corporations and the Third World.
• Top policy planners in the US and other Western nations were acutely aware that the Soviet Union had a conservative foreign policy. You can see this in numerous declassified documents.
• Nevertheless, the American government engaged in what can only be described as a campaign of terrorism against the American people, constantly invoking the “Soviet Menace” to justify military spending and war.
• The United States does not have a free press.
• The Pentagon is a Keynsian Mechanism.
• The American government was responsible for genocide during the Cold War.
• The Empire is similar to the mafia.
• Corporate interests are inextricably wed with military policy.
• American imperialism is not of recent vintage.
• Elites deceive themselves as well as the public.
• The US is not exceptional. It is behaving pretty much as powerful states always have.
• Western elites supported fascism prior to, during and after WWII.
• A WWIII scenario is almost inevitable unless the American public wakes up – and fast.

For more information see the film’s website.

And now, the documentary:

The Power Principle – I: Empire

The program notes:

An Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l”; Globalization: Consequences.

1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists; Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.

The Power Principle – II: Propaganda

The program notes:

The Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda: Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”; Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World; Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a racket”.

Fear-based conditioning – The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.

The Power Principle – III: Apocalypse

The program notes:

Mutually Assured Destruction; MAD men – Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men – Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the “danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”; the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”.

Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO; Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet Union; A third way?

EuroRacism: Greece violence, Danish questions

When racism has reared its ugly head in Europe in years past, the targets have all too often been immigrants or the continent’s wandering peoples, the Roma, Sinti, Tinkers, and Travelers often collectively grouped together as Gypsies.

One people previously targeted is conspicuously absent from the list, Jews.

In both Germany and France in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Jews were the favorite targets, most conspicuously the Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who maintained a distinctive style of dress and stuck to their native language, Yiddish.

But since the Second World War and the still-vivid memories of the Holocaust, Jews have been replaced by Muslims, who like the Ostjuden of yore typically maintain the language and dress of the nations from which they came.

The lethal spark that leads from a largely passive racism to violence has always been economic disaster, and with the collapse of the European economy, the old pattern is reemerging.

Today’s report focuses on violence in Greece and Eastern Europe, and some disturbing patterns beginning to emerge in a country to the north.

Anti-immigrant violence erupts in Greece

No country has been harder hit by the crash than Greece, where ancient animosities sparked by a long history of occupation by Islamic Turkey mix with the resentments of a beleaguered working class to form a deadly mix.

Greece, along with Italy, is a major gateway for undocumented immigrants from the Islamic world, and the country has been receiving unrelenting prfessure from the European Union to tighten its border controls — one area of government conspicuously spared the lash of the austerians.

Golden Dawn, the neofascist which saw a surge in support prior to the last round of parliamentary voting, has been at the forefront of rousing racist sentiments.

Violence follows in wake of stabbing

From the Greek Arabic newspaper AlYunaniya:

Violent episodes have erupted as extreme far-right Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi) members have clashed with police during an anti-immigrant protest in the western port of Patras in front of the abandoned factory of Peiraiki Patraiki used by illegal immigrants for shelter.

Events came after the funeral of 30 year old Thanassis Lazanas who was murdered by three young Afghans on Saturday, according to Patrastimes.gr

Approximately 150 members of the Golden Dawn, who reportedly, joined an anti-immigrant protest rally with organized by residents of Patras for Thanasis Lazanas. Dressed in black with helmets and holding batons and flags members of Golden Dawn lined against the police forces outside the old factory in an attempt to storm the abandoned factory with the immigrants. Residents asked the police not to stop them and let them storm the factory to evict migrants. Shortly after 8 pm the fighting broke out with  police responding with tear gas. Protesters attempted to invade the building at least three times, according to To Vima.

The murder of the 30 year old man as residents of Patras say was the straw that broke the camel on the situation that has developed in the large number of illegal immigrants. There is a growing concern by the citizens of Patras, that an increased number of illegal immigrants will loiter around the new port, according to Ta Nea.  They are afraid that crime may increase in their neighborhoods and therefore they had decided to set up a citizens patrol in the area since last December.

In an announcement by the official website of Golden Dawn, which came during the incidents, said: “The police and riot police instead of applying the law and  clear the area of illegal immigrants, they have attacked residents in Patras with tear gas, and have  arrested residents of Patras and members of Golden Dawn “.

Read the rest.

More from A. Papapostolou of Greek Reporter:

Police say the clashes followed a peaceful demonstration by hundreds of local residents outside an old factory inhabited by migrants seeking to stow away on Italy-bound ferries.

Dozens of Golden Dawn supporters who held a separate march threw stones at riot police guarding the migrants, and police responded with tear gas.

Read the rest.

Ekathemerini has more details:

Authorities in Patra held an emergency meeting on Wednesday to discuss ways of tackling the presence of hundreds of illegal immigrants in the city, following violent clashes between police and supporters of Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn).

Five people were arrested, eight policemen injured, one police bus and two motorcycles were damaged during the fighting on Tuesday night.

Dozens of locals had gathered outside a disused factory near the port area used as makeshift accommodation by undocumented migrants to protest the fatal stabbing last week of a 30-year-old local man. Three Afghan migrants are suspected of attacking the victim after a disagreement.

However, the protest was broken up by dozens of supporters of the far-right party who clashed repeatedly with riot police.

Read the rest.

And Keep Talking Greece has more:

Hand-to-hand fighting. Scenes of incredible ferocity as supporters of Chrysi Avgi attacked policemen with rafters, iron sticks, stones and fire bombs in Patras on Tuesday night. Unprecedented was the incident in which one protester stole a police motorcycle and fled to unknown direction.

According to local news portal dete.gr , the motorcycled units of police had rushed to the spot where the incidents were taking place. There they got surrounded by a group wearing helmets who pushed them down off the motorcycles and started to beat them.

Accoridng to police, some 350 Chrysi Avgi supporters who came also from other cities, were among the protesting residents.

According to local media, angry residents of Patras and supporters of extreme-right party Chrysi Avgi tried to storm an abandoned factory illegally occupied by immigrants. The protest started after a 30-year-old resident was stabbed to death by three Afghans.

The incidents lasted until 2 o’ clock in the morning with the angry mob attempting twice to storm the factory. Once with a bulldozer…

The port city in north-western Peloponnese experiences a huge immigrants problem as Patras is the country’s exit to Italy. Residents have been complaining since a long time about the issue that is combined with high crime rate, saying that they are even afraid to go on the street due to the increased number of immigrants.

Read the rest.

From the Greek Streets has posted two videos from the incident.

The first, shot earlier in the afternoon, depicts the clash between police and anti-immigrant protesters, who can be heard chanting “Foreigners out of Greece” before the melee begins:

The second, shot later, shows the Golden Dawner making off with the police cycle:

And an earlier attack on Afghan immigrants

While we haven’t found specifics of the fatal stabbing that led to last night’s violence, we did discover another incident involving Afghans, in which the immigrants were victims of an assault by Golden Dawn members one of whom was subsequently elected to parliament.

From Ekathemerini:

A court in Greece on Wednesday postponed for the sixth time the trial of three Greeks, including a neo-Nazi parliament candidate, accused of beating up three Afghan immigrants in Athens a year ago.

The defence requested the delay in order to obtain testimony from a

‘Banking with Hitler,’ a highly disturbing reminder

A superb 1998 documentary by Paul Elston for BBC’s Timewatch narrated by Arthur Kent, Banking with Hitler offers a timely reminder of the essential amorality of banks.

More than 370 Swiss banks opened their vaults to the Nazis during World War II, and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau was outraged, and launched an investigation that revealed the cooperation of many Wall Street and London banks as well.

Even more shocking was the role of a Swiss-based institution, the Bank of International Settlements [BIS], created by London and Berlin and headed by an American, was the critical funding mechanism for Hitler’s regime — with the cooperation between the banksters’ financial Axis and the Nazi-dominated war-making Axis continued with the full knowledge of the British and American governments.

BIS president Thomas McKittrick, whose ostensible loyalties lay with Washington, was in fact a close friend of Nazi financial wizards, and regularly partied them at the height of the war. The BIS laundered the Nazis’ wealth, looted from conquered nations and the seized assets of European Jews.

Bank of England head Montague Norman fiercely resisted any efforts to rein in the BIS because the bank was making tidy profits off the Nazi’s looted riches

The Norwegian government in exile demanded that the BIS be shut down, but the move was fiercely and successfully resisted by Britain at the famous Bretton Woods conference, despite Morgenthau’s opposition. But British economist John Maynard Keynes led the resistance to a shutdown, saying the bank would be needed to rebuild Europe after the war.

Another center of resistance was Chase bank, the ancestor of JP Morgan Chase, drawing the attention of Morgenthau’s investigators, who discovered the bank had cooperated closely with the Nazi regime through its Paris branch, which remained open throughout the war. Chase also cooperated with the Nazis in seizing the assets of Jewish clients on behalf of the Nazi occupation regime.

British banks also remained open in occupied Paris, cooperating with the Nazis.

Morgenthau’s investigators found evidence of pro-Nazi sympathizers in many of America’s biggest banks, but his investigations were shut down after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he left office in bitter disappointment. McKittrick, the BIS boss, went on to work for Chase, as did one of the leading Nazi bankers.

As for Morgenthau’s staff, many were targeted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC], their lives, reputations, and careers destroyed.

The moral: Banks don’t have morals, and they’re quite willing to work with mass murderers as long as there’s a buck to be made.

Breivik, Europe, racism, and the New Right’s rise

We’ve been deeply concerned for some time about the resurgence of racism in Europe [for extended analyses, see here and here].

The rantings of self-confessed mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik as his trial begins in Oslo for the 22 July 2011 massacres Norway offer a stunning reminder of the thread of racism that lies at the heart of all extreme right wing movements across the globe.

The last time racist extremism surged to the fore in Europe was in the years of the 20th Century’s Great Depression, and the targets of the Nazis were Jews, the Roma and Sinti peoples [“Gypsies”], and Slavs.

The Sinti and Roma were targeted for total annihilation along with Jews.

In the 21st Century collapse, Jews have been replaced by Muslims, while Europe’s wandering peoples have again been singled out and the Slavs are rarely mentioned.

Both former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched mass arrests of Sinti and Roma and expelled them from their borders.

Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff drew the parallel:

Europe’s security services neglect Far Right

This should come as no surprise.

Way back in 1966, when we were reporting on radical politics for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, we interviewed a member of the Minutemen extremist group who worked at a secure government nuclear facility, where he’d been vetted for atomic-level secrets.

The Minutemen actually published a guidebook by founder Robert Bolivar DePugh [subsequently arrested and jailed for diddling young boys], which included instruction on assassination techniques suitable for deployment against government officials.

Had the guy been a communist, he’d have never been cleared, but the far Right was neglected by security agencies because they were deemed to pose no threat.

Now the same sort of selective blindness is happening in Europe, reports one human right group.

From Nikolaj Nielsen of EUobserver:

Security services in Europe have neglected the kind of right-wing extremism which inspired Norway’s Anders Behring Breivik to commit mass murder, a UK-based rights group has warned.

“Post-911, all major authorities have themselves in the EU focused on the direct threat of Islamic terrorism while they took their eye off the ball on the radicalisation of Europeans,” Daniel Hodges, a campaigner for Hope Not Hate, a London-based NGO, told EUobserver on Monday (16 April).

“EU authorities have been lagging on radicalisation in Europe. They’ve been slow to grasp the power of the Internet and social media that encourages and helps co-ordinate the activities of the groups,” he added.

Hope Not Hate in a report out on Sunday said the ‘counter-jihad’ movement has become the new face of the far right in Europe and North America. The survey identifies some 300 disparate groups and individuals behind the trend.

Read the rest.

Greece’s racist fascists out from under their rocks

The latest example of a neofascist party to rise in Europe is Greece’s Golden Dawn, which espouses a policy of ethnic cleansing and has adopted explicitly Nazi elements into symbology.

Here’s one example you can purchase at their website, the Golden Dawn hoodie:

Here’s Evangelos Venizelos, head of the Greek “socialist” party [PASOK] commenting on the rise of Golden dawn, via Greek Reporter’s Marianna Tsatsou:

He said that the Greek Political party Golden Dawn “longs for fascism and nazism of the past.”

Golden Dawn and other similar chauvinist parties became popular with Greeks, due to the great number of illegal immigrants coming to Greece everyday. In the centre of Athens, residents and businessmen are terrified by their actions.

When citizen’s listen to Golden Dawn’s officials saying that “we need Greece with only Greeks living in it,” a proportion of them feel safe so they choose to vote for them.

Read the rest.

The issue, of course, is immigrants, and the party is already having an impact, as the New York Times’ Rachel Donadio and Dimitris Bounias report:

[E]ven if Golden Dawn fails to enter Parliament, it has already had an impact on the broader political debate. In response to the fears over immigration and rising crime, Greece’s two leading parties — the Socialist Party and the center-right New Democracy Party — have also tapped into nationalist sentiment and are tacking hard right in a campaign in which immigration has become as central as the economy.

Experts say the group is thriving where the Greek state seems absent, the most virulent sign of how the economic collapse has empowered fringe groups while eroding the political mainstream, a situation that some Greek news outlets have begun comparing to Weimar Germany.

“Greek society at this point is a laboratory of extreme-right-wing evolution,” said Nicos Demertzis, a political scientist at the University of Athens. “We are going through an unprecedented financial crisis; we are a fragmented society without strong civil associations” and with “generalized corruption in all the administration levels.”

With what critics say is a poorly policed border with Turkey, Greece is seen as an entry point for illegal immigrants, some of them asylum seekers but most intent on moving to more promising economic terrain in Northern and Western Europe. But many of the immigrants remain in Greece or are returned there after being deported from other countries in Europe. This has stoked fears here of an onslaught of illegal immigrants, who economists say bear little or no responsibility for Greece’s economic troubles but who make easy scapegoats for politicians across the spectrum.

Read the rest.

More from Foreign Policy’s Allison Good:

Golden Dawn joins the ranks of dozens of nationalist-populist fringe parties all over Europe whose enflamed euroskeptic reactions to the “cuts to wages and pensions imposed in order to secure aid from the EU and the IMF” have resulted in political shakeups. The Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) , led by Geert Wilders, won 24 of the 150 parliamentary seats in the 2010 general election, and came in second in the Netherlands in the 2009 European Parliament elections.

Golden Dawn also espouses a particularly anti-German sentiment:

“It’s right to hate Germany, because it is still the leader of the banksters and the European Union,” Mr. Michaloliakos, the group’s leader, said, using a derogatory term for bankers.

Of course, Golden Dawn is still transitioning from a street-fighting group  into a political party, but it remains to be seen whether it can  become a well-oiled machine like France’s National Front, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, is still campaigning for the presidency. Even so, its increasing popularity is evidence of a dangerous trend that only promises to worsen.

Read the rest.

Interesting choice of words: You can hate Germany, but only because of the power of German banks. And note that he doesn’t say it’s alright to hate Germans.

As the party’s symbols make clear, there’s another Germany, now vanished, that they very much like. And note their official logo, which strongly resembles the flag of that other Germany, right down to the choice of colors [black and white on a red background] and the strongly angular central figure.

Another famous logo

Golden Dawn logo

 

 

 

 

Another warning on the spread of racism

This time from a European monitoring group.

Areti Kotseli of Greek Reporter:

The RED (Rights Equality and Diversity) Annual Report for Europe 2011 sounds the alarm for Greece who seems to be , along with Spain, the most acute example of racist violence cases.

The bigger increase in crime cases against immigrants in Greece and Spain is partly attributed to the fact that “these countries present the highest unemployment rates among young people,” explains Miltos Pavlou in the findings of the report.

The report findings underline the inconsistency between the political correctness of the EU and the previous European legislation for the protection of minorities’ rights on one hand, and the rise of xenophobic rhetoric and racist violence in the Member States on the other.

“The EU seems to be cut out from national governments,” Miltos Pavlou, RED Network Coordinator, points out. In almost all EU countries of the RED Network, problems concerning the implementation of national legislation prohibiting discrimination and combating racist and hate crime are reported. The situation is deteriorating even in countries which didn’t exhibit such problems in the past,” he added. A special emphasis is put on the Roma children being segregated in education in most EU countries and immigrants.

Read the rest.

The January annual report of the European Commission on Human Rights takes note of the persecution of Roma and Sinti peoples and the Travelers, who have been singled out for prosecution in Britain:

As a result of persisting serious challenges in the field of securing the enjoyment by Roma and Travellers of their human rights throughout

The Roma: Europe’s most despised minority

We’ve reported repeatedly on the plight of Europe’s Roma, Sinti, and Traveler peoples — collectively often called Gypsies.

Both the governments of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi relied on whipping up anti-Roma sentiment to distract voters from their roles in creating the economic woes sweeping their countries.

And we have especially disturbing reports from Germany and Eastern Europe, while we close with some of the finest musicianship you’ll ever hear.

Pandering to the political base

We’ve noted the irony implicit in Sarko’s racism: Sárközy is a common family name among the Roma of Hungary, the land of the French President’s father.

While Berlusconi is gone, Sarkozy remains committed to xenophobia, targeting both Muslims and the Roma. Most recently, he’s declared that “we have too many foreigners,” a bit of baiting that plays well with his conservative base.

So would Sarkozy’s leading rival in the upcoming presidential election mean better times for the Roma?

Hardly.

Antoine Lerougetel of World Socialist Web Site reported on the stark reality on 24 February:

In a February 12 interview on Canal Plus TV, François Hollande, Socialist Party candidate for president in the upcoming elections, proposed as a “solution” to the presence in France of Roma European Union (EU) citizens “the creation of camps … to accommodate them”.

The association of a “solution” in relation to specific racial groups with special camps can only bring to mind the period of Nazi rule in Europe, during which not only Jews and homosexuals, but also Roma and gypsies were rounded up and sent to extermination camps. This was not lost on many French people.

Hollande called for the establishment of “European rules to avoid our experiencing this constant to and fro [of the Roma]. Let there be camps that we can decide on, that is, to avoid these people settling just anywhere … [to] enable these people to go back to Romania … and not then return to France”.

Put more concretely, the Roma would be rounded up, and after their improvised encampments were broken up, they would be sent back to Romania, the same policy the present right-wing government of President Nicolas Sarkozy is pursuing.

Read the rest.

International Roma Day riots

Sunday was International Roma Day, an annual event created in 1990 and recognized by an increasing number of governments around the globe.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even had her own announcement to mark Friday’s events.

But in Belgrade, the day was just another excuse for violence by the Serbian racist right.

From EurActiv:

International Roma Day coincided with racist clashes in Belgrade over the relocation of Roma from a shanty town in central Belgrade to state-sponsored container camp in a suburb.

Residents of suburban Resnik protested over the relocation of Roma to their community, where they would live in containers provided by the government. Local authorities said that if the government doesn’t drop the plans, they would organise a blockade of a nearby railway.

Serbian police said 12 officers and two protestors were hurt in the clashes in Resnik on 8 April. About 20 protestors were arrested by police who were guarding the construction site.

Belgrade Mayor Dragan Đilas called the protest “racist”. “The same law applies for all and there will be no negotiations between Belgrade and the citizens of Resnik who refuse the relocation of Roma in their community,” he was quoted as saying.

As protests occurred in Resnik, celebrations were held to mark International Roma Day, organised by the Serbian Parliament in Belgrade.

Deputy Prime Minister Božidar Đelic’, who is also coordinator of the Decade of Roma Inclusion, said the government had decided to remove shanty towns from the capital and provide residents with new accommodation.

Read the rest.

Germany’s sentiment recalls a bitter past

For Europe’s Roma and Sinti peoples, being targets of murderous violence has a long history.

But nothing compares to the campaign launched by Hitler’s Germany, a program of systematized slaughter in parallel with the Nazi murder campaign against Jews and the mentally ill.

While the Holocaust against Jews is widely remembered, that’s not the case with what the Roma call O Porrajmos, the devouring. Yet the intent was the same, to annihilate people from the face of a continent.

And while prejudice against Jews is widely and rightly condemned in Germany, rebuked whenever it appears, such is not the case with hatred expressed against the Sinti and Roma — an attitude still prevalent among a large minority of the German population.

From Deutsche Welle’s Andrea Grunau:

According to polls conducted by conflict researcher Wilhelm Heitmeyer, some 44 percent of the German population believe that Sinti and Roma have a tendency to criminal conduct. Four out of 10 say it is a problem for them to have Sinti and Roma nearby. And yet, say Heitmeyer and other researchers, the respondents are not likely to know any members of the minority they dislike so much.

That’s typical for what scientists call antiziganism, or anti-Romanyism. It is an attitude not based on individual experience, says Berlin political scientist Markus End, but on projections by the surrounding population. “You can have antiziganist beliefs without ever having had any personal contact with people who you perceive as being ‘gypsies.’ ” For centuries, Sinti and Roma have been stereotyped as homeless, lazy, or criminal, clichés repeated by the media today.

>snip<

The German government’s anti-discrimination agency admits that “racist slogans against Sinti and Roma are still common in Germany.” Jugendschutz.net, an initiative lobbying for the protection of children’s rights online, has analyzed antiziganism on the internet and found that often, platforms like Facebook and YouTube are used to spread racist rants and murder threats.

German rightwing extremists actively agitate against Romanis online. Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, says he is particularly worried about a neo-Nazi forum where members openly call for a “special treatment” for Romanis. This term was used by the Nazis to conceal their real intention of murdering minorities.

Read the rest.

And Roma Buzz has more on Germany’s Roma and Sinti population, including a surprising number:

There are an estimated 120,000 Sinti and Roma in Germany, with some 70,000 of them having the German passport. This makes them the largest ethnic minority group in the country.

Sinti and Roma are originally from Northwest-India. Some 600 to 800 years ago, they migrated to Europe in groups. The Sinti, a sub-group of the Romanis, came to German-speaking regions, to what is today Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The groups who moved to eastern and southeastern Europe call themselves Romani and came to Germany about a hundred years ago.

For centuries, Sinti and Roma were victims of persecution, which culminated under Nazi rule, when more than 500,000 people were

A day that will live in infamy, 20 January 1942

Today marks the 70 anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, a gathering at a bucolic villa in suburban Berlin chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and attended by representatives of the German government. The purpose: Ironing potential bureaucratic kinks that could interfere with implementation of the Final Solution.

The meeting took place in Villa Wannsee, a pleasant estate confiscated by the SS from a Jewish businessman. It still stands today, much as when we photographed it on 24 August 2006.

24 August 2006, Nikon D70, 1/500 sec, 18mm, f3.5

From Spiegel:

Germany somberly marked the 70th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference on Friday, with the country’s president saying the meeting that laid out plans for the Holocaust still caused “anger and shame.”

At the same villa on the shore of Berlin’s Wannsee lake where the original meeting took place, now a museum, President Christian Wulff told an audience that even though many years have passed, Germany should never be allowed to forget its responsibility for the genocide of some 6 million European Jews. “Therefore it is important and a national task to keep the memory alive,” he said.

On Jan. 20, 1942, high-level members of the Nazi party and other bureaucrats met at the villa to orchestrate large-scale plans for the extermination of Jews. At the time, hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered, but many historians believe that the conference was the point at which Adolf Hitler’s plans for their industrialized killing were laid out explicitly for his top officials.

These men included Nazi party members and members of the SS, the party’s military force, which was to oversee the plans.

“This place and the name ‘Wannsee’ has become a symbol for the bureaucratically organized decision between life worth living and life not worth living, for state-organized extermination, for the planned and official systematic killing of Europe’s Jews,” Wulff said.

Inside the Villa, we discovered a graphic that summarizes the ethos at the heart of virulent racism, the “despoilation” of “our” women by the sinister, alien other. Substitute an African American for the for the Jewish caricature, and the crude artwork could have come from a KKK flyer from the 1920s.

24 August 2006, Nikon D70, 35mm, 1/125 sec, f4.2

Oh, those initials in to the right of the caricature?

Yep, it’s that A.H.

The War on Citizenship: Going global

There’s a new disturbing trend happening, and it’s most malicious manifestation is happening right here in the United States.

The goal is to strip inconvenient folks of their citizenship.

Here’s U.S. Representative Charlie Dent, R-Pennsylvania, describing the legislation he’s introduced along with Pennsylvania colleague Jason Altmire. The companion measure in the upper house is sponsored by Senators Joe Leiberman [Connecticut independent] and Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican being challenged by Elizabeth Warren.

Here’s the text of the bill:

A BILL

To add engaging in or supporting hostilities against the United States to the list of acts for which United States nationals would lose their nationality.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ‘Enemy Expatriation Act’.

SEC. 2. LOSS OF NATIONALITY.

(a) In General- Section 349 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1481) is amended–

(1) in subsection (a)–

(A) in each of paragraphs (1) through (6), by striking ‘or’ at the end;

(B) in paragraph (7), by striking the period at the end and inserting ‘; or’; and

(C) by adding at the end the following:

‘(8) engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.’; and

(2) by adding at the end the following:

‘(c) For purposes of this section, the term ‘hostilities’ means any conflict subject to the laws of war.’.

(b) Technical Amendment- Section 351(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1483(a)) is amended by striking ‘(6) and (7)’ and inserting ‘(6), (7), and (8)’.

Note first the name of the legislation the bill would amend: “Loss of nationality by native-born or naturalized citizen; voluntary action; burden of proof; presumptions.”

Also note that to lose citizenship under the existing law requires the government to make its case only by a “preponderance of the evidence,” a much lower standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” required for conviction in a criminal case.

In other words, you could lose your citizenship even if the government prosecuted you in criminal court and you were found not guilty.

And what, precisely, is meant by “materially supporting”?

Citizenship under attack in France, too

Not only is it becoming harder to win French citizenship, but there’s a move afoot to end dual citizenship

From FRANCE 24:

Foreigners seeking French nationality face tougher requirements as of January 1, when new rules drawn up by Interior Minister Claude Guéant come into force.

Candidates will be tested on French culture and history, and will have to prove their French language skills are equivalent to those of a 15-year-old mother tongue speaker. They will also be required to sign a new charter establishing their rights and responsibilities.

“Becoming French is not a mere administrative step. It is a decision that requires a lot of thought”, reads the charter, drafted by France’s High Council for Integration (HCI). In a more obscure passage, the charter suggests that by taking on French citizenship, “applicants will no longer be able to claim allegiance

The lingering, lethal ghost of eugenics

One of the most noxious movements of the 20th Century was eugenics, the doctrine that humans should be treated as livestock, with frequent cullings of the herd to eliminate the “bad stock” from the gene pool.

One nation took the lead in the pursuit of eliminationism, and that was the United States. So effective were American eugenics that the inspired an Austrian-born former German Reischswehr corporal back in the 1920′s, when he lamented that Germany’s law weren’t nearly so “progressive.”

And lest we forget, until that German corporal took power, the place that led the world in eugenics was California, where sterilizations of the “feeble-minded” became a matter of routine.

While sterilizations were the rule until Hitler came along, quiet killings happened here in the U.S., especially of newborns.

In Germany, before the killings started, sterilizations were performed on mental patients, the depressed, alcoholics, “habiutual criminals,” and an assortment of other conditions deemed unworthy of the Aryan gene pool — with the Afro-Germanic offspring of French African colonial occupation troops and German women being the first to go under the knife.

But the cutting didn’t stop with Hitler’s demise, and continues into the present.

Mass sterilization in Peru

The sterilization campaign which claimed the most victims in the post-Hitler era happened in Latin America, and only ended eleven years ago.

From a story by Simon Tegel of The Independent:

Peru’s Attorney General last month reopened an investigation into the alleged forced sterilisations during the government of Alberto Fujimori, President from 1990 to 2000, who is currently serving a 25-year prison term for embezzlement and directing death squads during the crackdown against the Maoist Shining Path.

The investigation will look at the entire issue of forced sterilisations while focusing on one sample case, of Mamerita Mestanza, a 33-year-old, Quechua-speaking mother-of-seven, from the Andean region of Cajamarca. She died in 1998 from complications from sterilisation surgery that health officials allegedly harassed her into accepting.

According to human rights groups, there may have been as many as 300,000 victims, overwhelmingly women, the majority of them poor and often indigenous, Quechua-speakers with limited Spanish. “They were the weakest and most vulnerable,” says Ms Vigo, whose case remains the only one to have reached the courts in Peru.

According to the New York-based Centre for Reproductive Rights, Fujimori’s Peru is one of only two instances of forced sterilisations being adopted as state policy since the Third Reich.

Read the rest.

And in Europe, the usual suspects

The other example of post-Hitler forced sterilization cited by the Center for Reproductive Rights [CRR] is European, and its targets are a favorite latter-day target of European racial hysteria, the Roma, one of the groups of European itinerants known grouped together collectively as Gypsies.

And, lest we forget, the Roma was targets of Hitler’s other holocaust, with trainloads brought into the death camps from throughout Europe.

From the CRR website:

A three-month fact-finding in late 2002 by the Center for Reproductive Rights and Poradna pre obcianske a ludské práva (Centre for Civil and Human Rights), a Slovak human rights organization, reveals that not only do coerced and forced sterilization practices continue in Slovakia, so too does the widespread abuse and discrimination against Romani women in the country’s maternal health services. We conducted extensive interviews with more than 230 women in almost 40 Romani settlements throughout eastern Slovakia, the region with the highest concentration of Roma.

The interviews revealed numerous instances of coerced, forced and suspected sterilization of Romani women, along with physical and verbal abuse, racially discriminatory standards of care, misinformation in health matters, and denial of access to medical records.

The situation of Roma in Slovakia represents one of the worst throughout all of Europe. As the countries of Eastern and Central Europe transition into market economies and integrate into the European Union, their commitments to international and regional law and policy must be strengthened and demonstrated. Slovakia’s entry into the community of nations requires that it adheres to human rights law and investigates, without delay, the violations being committed within its borders.

Read the rest.

But we found one other instance, and spread throughout much of the Western world.

Targeting transsexuals

From Ann Tornkvist of Global Post:

More than two decades later, [sterilization victim Aleksa] Lundberg is a dramatic voice in a larger struggle against authority — the Swedish legal requirement that people who want to officially change their sex with the government must be sterilized first. The law also forbids the freezing of sperm or eggs before corrective surgery, which effectively means transgender Swedes are barred from having biological children.

“Forcible sterilization” has been quietly practiced for decades in countries typically cast as progressive on LGBT rights: France, the Netherlands, Australia and a number of U.S. states still require it. Italy and Germany have just recently overturned similar legislation.

Although Swedish leaders have been talking for months about repealing the sterilization law that Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt called a “dark chapter in Swedish history,” it remains on the books. The conservative Christian Democrats have doggedly opposed the repeal, arguing that sex reassignment surgery is a threat to traditional social roles. Transgender advocates like Lundberg say they are fed up with being the last of the LGBTs to win their rights.

“It infuriates me that a group of people think they have a right to tell another group of people what they can and cannot do,” Lundberg says.

Read the rest.

We find it especially curious that it’s the ardent Christians who are so eager to sterilize transsexuals. Aren’t they the same folks who loathe contraception?

But then eugenics and Christianity have accommodated each other before.

The deeper pattern is one that’s all too familiar, the targeting of scapegoats designated as the causes of social or moral disorder. And that’s something that only gets worse in tough economic times when people are encouraged to blame anyone but the real crooks, robbers, and confidence artists responsible for the very things that make folks so angry.

Pam Geller hates those Norwegian mischlings

Mischling, or ethnically mixed, was a term of art in Nazi Germany, enshrined in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which defined the legal definition of Aryan and classified those of mixed German-Jewish heritage as mischlings.

Well, now it seems that Pam Geller, the American zionist blogger who whipped up a hate-storm over what she dubbed “the Ground Zero Mosque,” has demonized Norwegian mischlings, in this case young Norsk people with some trace of Arabic ancestry.

Lee Fang, who blogs at Think Progress, has the goods:

Popular hate blogger Pam Geller has received scrutiny in recent days as the public became aware that the right-wing terrorist in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, had praised her blog and thoroughly cited her writing in his political manifesto. After a number of blogs made the connection, as well as the New York Times, the Atlantic, and other major outlets, Geller became incensed and began lashing outat her critics.

In a post defending herself yesterday, Geller — who has called Obama “President Jihad” and claimed that Arab language classes are a plot to subvert the United States — reached a new low. Geller justifies Breivik’s attack on the Norwegian Labour Party summer youth camp because she says the camp is part of an anti-Israel “indoctrination training center.” She says the victims would have grown up to become “future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole.”

To get her point across, Geller posts a picture of the youth camp children Breivik targeted. The picture was taken on the Utøya island camp about 24 hours before Breivik killed over 30 children, so it is likely Geller is mocking many of the victims. Under the picture, Geller writes: “Note the faces which are more MIddle [sic] Eastern or mixed than pure Norwegian.”

Read the rest.

Fang’s updated post notes that Geller subsequently pulled the offensive and very self-revealing caption, but he links to a screenshot of the original here.

We’ll leave the editorializing to you.

Another Euro terror attack, this time Germany

And the targets of Monday’s attack were people targeted for annihilation by Adolf Hitler: Sinti and Roma  [Gypsy] families living in Leverkusen, Germany.

Following directly on the heels on last week’s carnage in Norway, Monday’s arson attack has received little or no coverage we’ve been able to find in American news media.

And once again, the terrorists are white males.

From the German English-language news site The Local:

Police investigating an arson attack on an apartment housing Roma and Sinti families in Leverkusen were continuing Tuesday morning to probe the possibility that neo-Nazis may have been behind the attack.

Police and state prosecutors in nearby Cologne in North Rhine-Westphalia are investigating a xenophobic motive to the attack, in which nine people had to flee a ground-floor apartment after assailants hurled several fire bombs through the windows around 12:25 am Monday.

All nine people in the apartment escaped unharmed but the apartment was totally burnt out by the blaze and only the intervention of the fire brigade stopped it destroying the rest of the building.

The attack came amid a heightened atmosphere surrounding far-right violence in the wake of the massacre of at least 76 people on Friday by a Norwegian nationalist.

Witnesses saw two young men wearing dark clothing fleeing the scene in a dark Volkwagen car, possibly a Golf or Polo, with number plates from the NRW city of Neuss, police reported. Daily Bild reported that the fleeing suspected had shaved heads.

A police spokesman confirmed to The Local on Tuesday morning that investigators were continuing to probe the possibility that right-wing extremists were behind the attack, though all avenues were being examined.

Read the rest.

Given that many neo-Nazis are called skinheads because of the shaved heads, we think it’s likely they’ll prove to have been the attackers.

Now consider this from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, from its account of the Nazi’s little-known genocidal campaign against the Sinti and Roma peoples of Europe:

It is not known precisely how many Roma were killed in the Holocaust. While exact figures or percentages cannot be ascertained, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed around 25 percent of all European Roma. Of slightly less than one million Roma believed to have been living in Europe before the war, the Germans and their Axis partners killed up to 220,000.

After the war, discrimination against Roma continued throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany determined that all measures taken against Roma before 1943 were legitimate official measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of policy driven by racial prejudice. This decision effectively closed the door to restitution for thousands of Roma victims, who had been incarcerated, forcibly sterilized, and deported out of Germany for no specific crime. The postwar Bavarian criminal police took over the research files of the Nazi regime, including the registry of Roma who had resided in the Greater German Reich.

Only in late 1979 did the West German Federal Parliament identify the Nazi persecution of Roma as being racially motivated, creating eligibility for most Roma to apply for compensation for their suffering and loss under the Nazi regime. By this time, many of those who became eligible had already died.

Read the rest.

The account is partially inaccurate in that Sinti, another group also called gypsies, were also targets of the Nazi killing machine. The same methods used to slaughter Jews, shooting squads and death camps, were also used in the annihilation of Sinti and Roma.

The Roma have their own term for the Holocaust they experienced. They call it the Porrajmos,“the Devouring.”

And persecution of Sinti and Roma has an ancient European pedigree, as Jennifer Rosenberg notes:

Decrees, laws, and mandates often allowed the killing of Gypsies. For instance, in 1725 King Frederick William I of Prussia ordered all Gypsies over 18 years of age to be hanged. A practice of “Gypsy hunting”was quite common – a game hunt very similar to fox hunting. Even as late as 1835, there was a Gypsy hunt in Jutland (Denmark) that “brought in a bag of over 260 men, women and children.”

And, as we’ve noted before, the persecution continues to this day, notably in France and Italy.

Memories of a terrifying, literal blast from the past

I’ll lay the usual third-person editorial “we” aside for this post, because what I’m about to write is intensely personal.

Have you ever had the shit scared out of you?

I don’t mean this in the metaphorical sense, but in the literal meaning of being so thoroughly terrified that my bowels opened up, spewing out in a single violent surge everything contained in my viscera.

It happened to me one night in October, 1962, at the peak of the crisis that brought the world closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any time before or since.

We know it now as “the Cuban missile crisis,” the confrontation between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev over the placement of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba.

The United States was encircling the Soviet Union with nuclear-armed bombers and missiles in Europe and Turkey, and the Soviets responded by accepting an invitation from Cuba — attacked two years earlier by the CIA-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs — to install nuclear missiles 90 miles from the American shoreline.

More missiles were on the way, and Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island, and for a few endless days, most Americans believed that millions of us would die in an apocalypse of biblical proportions, “the fire next time.”

I was born in 1946 in the very first wave of what would become the Baby Boom, and I grew up in a world filled with images of nuclear explosions conducted above ground at the Nevada Test Site and in the South Pacific.

Films of atomic blasts appeared regularly in the newsreels I watched during Saturday matinees at the Plaza Theater in Abilene, Kansas, and on nightly news broadcasts on the television Dad brought home when I was five.

Still photos in Life magazine brought the images home, delivered in our mailbox in the dominant picture magazine of the day, and at least once a month, the scream of air raid sirens brought life to halt and sent chills down my spine.

As a young child I was mesmerized by what everyone called The Bomb, knowing that this incredible, monstrous creation hung like a sword of Damocles over my future and the lives of everyone I loved.

When, at age 10, we moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, I found myself living 45 miles away from the nation’s first nuclear missile field, headquartered at Frances E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. And at watched as missile silos were dug into the earth just a few miles from home.

A cousin, Harry Yesley, was a uranium prospector, and I used to join him as he searched for veins of pitchblende and thorite. I owned my first Geiger Counter when I was ten.

Obsessed with the bomb, I learned the likely nearby targets, the fallout patterns, all the necessary precautions to take in the event of an attack.

And then, when I was ten, I saw a brief film on The Ed Sullivan Show that consolidated all my deepest fears [H/T to Disinformation]:

I’d forgotten about the film until I discovered it this morning in my daily web rounds, and watching it 55 years later evoked the same sense of despair I felt them. [For more on the film see here, here, and here.]

But the fear I felt after seeing the film was nothing like the abject terror that came six years later.

A fishing trip gone horribly wrong

As the Cuban Missile Crisis played itself out, I glued myself to the television, watching every bulletin, including this 22 October presidential address to the country:

By the 26th, sabers were rattling louder than ever before, and Dad, bless him, was distraught at the terror he saw in my eyes. That’s when he decided we needed to go on a fishing trip.

The happiest times of an often troubled childhood were spent with Dad, exploring the back country and fishing the lakes and streams of Colorado and Wyoming.

Back in 1962, our favorite destination was Glendo, Wyoming, where a massive dam on the Platte River had created a reservoir where we never failed to catch our limits of Rainbow Trout, trolling our lines off the sides of our 14-foot Feathercraft aluminum boat.

So we bundled up our gear and loaded up the camper Dad and I had built on the back of a white Chevrolet pickup, hitched up the boat, then headed north on Interstate 25, a route that took us directly past the entrance to Frances E. Warren Air Force Base.

Sitting behind the wheel, I spotted a line of Air Force blue cars and trucks headed rapidly into the base gate. I’d have turned on the radio, except that Dad

NY Times tells DC pols: Stop pandering to Israel

You know the Israeli dominance of American politics is reaching new heights of absurdity when even the New York Times tells editorializes about the egregious way GOP presidential candidates pander to Tel Aviv.

But that’s just what they did today, in an editorial that singles out GOP White House seekers [and a pair of Democrats, including Sen. Harry Reid] for their attacks and heated rhetoric on Barack Obama’s call for a two-state solution.

An excerpt:

Pandering on Israel in the hopes of winning Jewish support is hardly a new phenomenon in American politics, but there is something unusually dishonest about this fusillade. Most Republicans know full well that Mr. Obama is not calling on Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders. He said those borders, which define the West Bank and Gaza, would be the starting point for talks about land swaps.

Do the president’s critics even agree on the need for a Palestinian state next to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says he does? It is not clear that several of the Republicans would go as far as the prime minister, who at least noted that Mr. Obama does not want to return to the 1967 lines. But even those who do should admit that two-state proposals have always been along the lines sketched out by the president.

At this point, it’s helpful to look to those WikiLeaks State Department cables for another President slavishly adored by those same GOP hacks.

Consider this from a 2 December 2005 CONFIDENTIAL dispatch from Ambassador Richard H. Jones in Tel Aviv, posted at the Aftenposten web site:

U.S. policy remains firmly anchored in President Bush´s historic vision — first enunciated in June 2002 — of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. The USG remains committed to the performance-based road map under the auspices of the Quartet (the U.S., Russia, UN and EU) as the means for achieving the President´s vision. The Israeli and Palestinian sides have endorsed the road map — both with reservations — but need to take additional steps. Israel must continue to work with Palestinian leaders to improve the daily lives of Palestinians, while avoiding any activity that prejudices final status negotiations. As the President has noted, this means that Israel must remove unauthorized West Bank outposts and stop settlement expansion.

So Obama hasn’t said anything Bush hadn’t already said, yet the Republicans fly into panic mode.

We suspect this is because, in part, the American Zionist community is panicked over the turn of events in the Middle East and North Africa, and especially Egypt, which has begun a major reconsideration of its policies toward Israel, starting with word that it may charge more for the natural gas that Israel so desperately needs, then announcing that, as of tomorrow, they will end their blockade of Gaza.

But both parties in Washington remain subservient to Tel Aviv, in part because of the power of political campaign funds and AIPAC, and in part because of Israel’s willingness to embrace the Christian Zionist right, including folks such as the repugnant Rev. James Hagee, whose highly energized base is quick to smear anyone who threatens their dream of a world in which all Jews in up in Israel so they can convert to Christianity or be slaughtered to make way for the Second Coming.

Netanyahu, who chided Obama, is quite willing to embrace Hagee, a fellow who said Hitler was a “half-breed Jew” who was  sent by God, declares that Jews don’t have souls, and predicts  the Antichrist will be an apostate Jew or at least part Jewish.

What a world!

Israel’s Clout: The Onion, British union fire back

We’ve witnessed first hand the power of “The Lobby,” the well-organized campaign of Ziocons to silence any criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of Palestinians.

So we had to laugh at a deft bit of satire posted by The Onion Friday under the headline “Government Official Who Makes Perfectly Valid, Well-Reasoned Point Against Israel Forced To Resign”:

WASHINGTON—State Department diplomat Nelson Milstrand, who appeared on CNN last week and offered an informed, thoughtful analysis implying that Israel could perhaps exercise more restraint toward Palestinian moderates in disputed territories, was asked to resign Tuesday. “The United States deeply regrets any harm Mr. Milstrand’s careful, even-tempered, and factually accurate remarks may have caused our democratic partner in the Middle East,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in an unequivocal condemnation of the veteran foreign-service officer’s perfectly reasonable statements. “U.S. policy toward Israel continues to be one of unconditional support and fawning sycophancy.” Milstrand, 63, will reportedly appear at an AIPAC conference to offer a full apology as soon as his trial concludes and his divorce is finalized.

Perhaps the most effective strategy of the Ziocons has been their relentless campaign to equate criticism of Israel’s actions with antisemitism.

Never mind that the Palestinians are a Semitic people, or that while some critics of Israel are racists, many more are simply folks who are rightly concerned that Israeli politics are themselves increasingly infused by a virulent form of racism.

The notion of transforming critics of Israel into latter-day Nazi’s was refined by Nathan Sharansky in his 3-D doctrine [previously], and has been relentlessly deployed to silence critics, as in the case of the advertising boycott [previously]  of the Berkeley Daily Planet, where it was specifically invoked by Jim Sinkinson in letters to the paper’s advertisers. [For our Daily Planet stories on the campaign, see here.]

Now, finally, we are seeing some action in Great Britain, where the 30 May congress of the 120,000-member University and College Union will be taking up a resolution to reject the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s “working definition of antisemitism.”

Here’s the text:

Congress notes with concern that the so-called ‘EUMC working definition of antisemitism’, while not adopted by the EU or the UK government and having no official status, is being used by bodies such as the NUS and local student unions in relation to activities on campus.

Congress believes that the EUMC definition confuses criticism of Israeli government policy and actions with genuine antisemitism, and is being used to silence debate about Israel and Palestine on campus.

Congress resolves:

1. that UCU will make no use of the EUMC definition (e.g. in educating members or dealing with internal complaints)
2. that UCU will dissociate itself from the EUMC definition in any public discussion on the matter in which UCU is involved
3. that UCU will campaign for open debate on campus concerning Israel’s past history and current policy, while continuing to combat all forms of racial or religious discrimination.

H/T to Jews sans frontieres.

The sad reality is that the Ziocons are emulating the strategies of that master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and court a potential global backlash as their list of enemies they seek to demonize and delegitimize through a campaign based on a double standard grows ever-longer and encompasses more and more reasonable people whose motives are not racism but simple humanitarian concern.

Yesterday, we posted a headline from a Simon Wiesenthal Center opposing President Barack Obama’s insistence that Israel withdraw to the 1967 borders, boundaries the center described as “Auschwitz borders.”

We would argue that the center is engaging in its own 3-D politics, given that the Palestinians could rightly claim that they’re the ones stricken with concentration camp boundaries, as exemplified in this West Bank map from the BBC, via Informed Comment:

Compare with this map, depicting the Nazi dismemberment of Poland [pre-invasion borders in yellow], via Scrapbookpages:

Those are the real “Auschwitz borders.”

Intolerance Watch: Preying on hated minorities

Virulent racism invariably accompanies the rise of the radical right, which uses xenophobia as a diversion for redirecting anger at the financial inequities of political systems onto largely helpless minorities.

With the ongoing global financial collapse, the resurgence of xenophobia should come as no surprise.

Today’s roundup starts with incidents close to home, then looks at a couple of recent developments in Europe.

Xenophobes target Maine Islamic center

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the killing of Osama bin Laden has resulted in a new outburst of hatred directed at the American Muslim community.

From Islamophobia Watch:

Portland Police are investigating anti-Islam graffiti painted onto the Maine Muslim Community Center on Anderson Street.

The graffiti included: “Osama today, Islam tomorow (sic),” “Long live the West” and “Free Cyprus”.

The letters were written in maroon paint on the mosque’s gray cement block wall. The graffiti was written sometime between late Sunday night and about 7:15 a.m. today, when it was discovered by Portland Housing Authority workers on Anderson Street.

A crew from Graffiti Busters was called in this morning to remove the graffiti, and it had finished the task by 10:45 a.m.

Officials with the community center said they recently completed purchase of the building, where they’ve been since 2007, for $1 million. They said they’re disappointed by the graffiti and concerned about the impact it will have on children.

Read the rest.

Troubles closer to home, this time in Davis

Davis is a California company town, with the company in question being the local campus of the University of California.

Here’s a report from Angela Swartz, associate editor of The Aggie, the local cmapus paper:

In a recent letter to The Davis Enterprise, the Oeste Manor Neighborhood Association sought to raise awareness about a series of crimes against the Davis Islamic Center. The mosque was allegedly vandalized several times, as recently as January.

Elizabeth Saft, chairwoman of the association, said she wrote the letter out of concern for the center and was puzzled as to why so many of the cases remain unsolved.

“We patrol the area quite a bit,” said Lt. Paul Doroshov of the Davis Police Department. “But there’s only so much we can do. I think the main thing the center can do is raise awareness about the issue through the media, as this is a crime by a group of people with no sensitivity.”

“It’s possible the crimes are related to the center, but it’s more likely the location [on Russell] and they have occurred late at night with intoxicated individuals,” Doroshov said.

Othman Alsaoud, president of the Davis Islamic Center, said the center received a stream of hate mail and one threat letter. The letters

Endorsing slaughter in the name of the nation

There’s been considerable amount of discussion in the blogosphere about this exchange between Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon revealed in the newly released White House tapes:

“The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger said. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

“I know,” Nixon responded. “We can’t blow up the world because of it.”

Kissinger was even forced to apologize, though his remarks centered on the “inappropriateness” of that gas chamber reference.

But it’s not the first time a prominent figure has made callous references to mass slaughter of Jewish people as an acceptable loss to achieve political objectives. And even more stunning comment, one made much more publicly, in a 7 December 1938 speech by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, delivered at a time when Germany’s genocidal horrors lay well in the future:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.

Ben Gurion’s remarks were delivered three weeks after prominent members of the British Jewish community appealed to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to launch a rescue effort to bring Jewish children from Germany to Europe, the basis of what became the famous Kindertransport.

One prominent thinker from the same heritage as Kissinger and Ben-Gurion saw the dangers in belief systems which could so casually dispense with the lives of so many.

Albert Einstein, who declined the offer of the presidency of Israel in 1952, had another take on Zionism, which he described in a speech in the same year that Ben-Gurion was glibly writing off the lives of half of Europe’s Jewish children

In an address delivered in New York on 17 April 1938, eight months before Ben-Gurion’s remarks, Einstein said:

I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from practical consideration, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain — especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.

U.S. stands alone against U.N. anti-Nazi measure

Here’s another significant story the American mainstream media ignored.

The U.S. stood alone against the rest of the world during a United Nations vote held 18 December on a resolution this week that condemned the resurgence of Nazism and movements glorifying the movement which conquered most of Europe and slaughtered millions.

In one of the more ironic moments of recent times, Israel, Iran, Syria , and Libya —  voted for the motion, while the United States was the sole opposing vote. The final vote was 127 nations voting for the resolution and 54 abstaining — including France, Germany, and the Baltic nations.

In a press release issued earlier this month, the United Nations Department of Public Information summarized the resolution, saying it would

express deep concern about the glorification of the Nazi movement and former members of the Waffen SS organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials and holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, the Nazi movement and neo-Nazism, as well as by declaring or attempting to declare such members and those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition and collaborated with the Nazi movement participants in national liberation movements.  It would also express concern at recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during the Second World War, as well as to unlawfully exhume or remove the remains of such persons.  It would note with concern the increase in racist incidents in several countries and the rise of skinhead groups, which have been responsible for many of these incidents, as well as the resurgence of racist and xenophobic violence targeting members of ethnic, religious or cultural communities and national minorities.

The Assembly would stress that such practices do injustice to the memory of the victims of crimes against humanity committed in the Second World War, while at the same time fueling racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, and contribute to the multiplication of extremist political parties, movements and groups, including neo-Nazis and skinhead groups.  In that regard, it would call for increased political and legal vigilance, and call upon States to take more effective measures in accordance with international human rights law to combat those phenomena and the extremist movements, which pose a real threat to democratic values.

Deeper political issues were involved, needless to say.  Neonazi movements are on the rise in the Baltics, and back in the days of the Cold War, the U.S. relied heavily on Baltic expatriate groups to promote internal dissent in what were then Soviet satellite states.

Of course, the U.S. also relied heavily on former SS and Wehrmacht brass both for its space program [as did the U.S.S.R.] and in promoting anti-Soviet subversion and propaganda campaigns. The U.S. even helped some of the worst Nazi war criminals to evade justice, including Klaus Barbie [“the Butcher of Lyon”] and Josef Mengele [the notorious Auschwitz doctor who performed lethal medical experiments on twins].

And then there was SS rocketeer Werner von Braun, the leaders of the U.S. space program until his sordid past was exposed. Our previous post on the good Herr Doktor still gets a few hits every day.

Interesting, isn’t it, that we can’t find any stories in the U.S. media about the U.N. vote?

As for why the issue was timely, see this RT video from back in March:

The passionate voice of an Auschwitz survivor

Damned by ardent Zionists as a self-hating Jew, Dr. Hajo Meyer is one of the last living survivors of Auschwitz. Born in Bielefeld, Germany, he watched as the Nazi campaign against German Jews unfolded, and was kicked out of school after Kristallnacht. Eventually sent to Auschwitz — his arm still bears the distinctive tattoo — he has been an eloquent voice on behalf of Palestinian rights and compares their treatment by the Israeli government to that he received at the hands of his fellow Germans so many years before.

There’s a brief interview with Meyer here.

Eugenics, and America’s ‘master race’ laws

“Their idea of utopia was that no one would exist who didn’t look like themselves,” explains Edwin R. Black, author of War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race [2003].

While most folks probably assume that the Nazi plan to create a blond, blue-eyed “Aryan” master race was a uniquely German phenomenon, the reality is that Hitler simply embraced a program developed in the United States, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, and other grant-making institution.

Most of the German researchers who would go on to implement first the Nazi sterilization programs and later, the gassing first of mental patients and then Jews and Gypsies, were first sponsored by the American grant-givers.

Soon after his rise to the chancellorship, Hitler expressed regrets that he couldn’t implement programs already in place in the United States and set changing Germany’s laws.

Indeed, California would set the world record for forced sterilizations until Hitler unleashed his own doctors — many of whom had received American institutional grants — who would spearhead his war against the weak, modeling his own statutes on those already in operation in the U.S.

The dread of those dubbed “mental defectives” even led some mainstream American scientists to propose a “final solution” in the form of gas chambers, an idea subsequently adopted in Germany.

The implementation of eugenics programs here followed a rise of anti-immigrant hysteria focused on Southern Italians, Eastern European Jews, and Latinos, an ominous fact in light of the rising anti-immigrant hysteria now impacting our country.

But the eugenicists weren’t out simply to purge the globe of “mental defectives” and “inferior races.” They also targeted the deaf, the blind, the disabled, the alcoholic, the depressed, and the poor. As Black notes, eugenicists “believed you weren’t born into poverty; poverty was born into you.”

Some U.S. states passed laws barring marriages with the eugenically undesirable and dissolving existing marriages. Their goal was the creation of a eugenics certificate which would be necessary before marriage.

We would also note that the some of the same foundations which saw eugenics as a social panacea are the same ones now promoting genetic modification as a panacea for the world’s ills, which should at least give us some pause for reflection.

Here’s a talk Black gave in Nashville soon after the publication of his book.

What’s of particular relevance here is the emergence of what Black calls “genelining,” the re-emergence of eugenics in the globalized corporate realm, with genetic testing for “pre-existing” conditions determining everything rom who gets health insurance to hiring decisions [one railroad already pre-screens applications for a supposed predisposition to carpal tunnel syndrome].

Finally, here’s a talk about eugenics in another West Coast state from University of Washington historian Joanne Woiak, Ph.D.

Coverage of the latest Vatican flap misses the point

From David Gibson, who covers the religion beat for Politics Daily, comes a rebuttal of a German-born pope who has risen to the defense of a predecessor once dubbed “Hitler’s Pope”:

Coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s new book-length interview has focused almost exclusively on his remarks about using condoms to prevents AIDS, but Jewish leaders are voicing objections to his unqualified praised for his war-time predecessor, Pius XII, whose record during the Holocaust is a perennial source of frictions between the Vatican and the Jewish community.

“For his part, [Pius XII] did all that he could to save people,” Benedict tells German journalist Peter Seewald in the book, titled “Light of the World: The Pope, the Church and the Signs of the Times,” which is to be formally released at the Vatican on Tuesday. The pontiff, who was raised in Nazi Germany, adds that Pius “was one of the great righteous men and that he saved more Jews than anyone else.”

Jewish leaders and some historians have long argued that Pius, a career church diplomat who became pope in 1939 and died in 1958, did not speak out as strongly as he could when he realized that Adolph Hitler was systematically exterminating Jews and that he did not do as much as he could to save Jews in Italy.

The Jewish community is certainly correct. Eugenio Pacelli not only didn’t speak out on the Holocaust of Jews and Gypsies, but his relationship with the Nazis ran far deeper.

Under Pacelli’s papacy, the Vatican set up the infamous ratlines that enabled folks like the infamous Josef Mengele [the infamous “Angel of Death” (Todesengel) of Auschwitz] and Adolf Eichmann to fell to South America.

The ultimate Cold Warrior, Pacelli hated communists more than fascists, and under his guidance as the Vatican’s secretary of state, the church was the first government to sign a diplomatic agreement with the Nazi regime.

While the Catholic Church was strongly opposed to communism and socialism, Pacelli combined his anti-communism with antisemitism, a connection fused by the revolution in Munich in 1919, when Marxists seized control of the government only to be put down by the Social Democratic government of Berlin, which enlisted the paramilitaries of the Freikorps — later the backbone of the Nazi’s brownshirts — to slaughter the Bolsheviks.

Pacelli, who was papal Nuncio [ambassador] to the Bavarian government at the time, wrote a letter describing the events at the Bavarian royal palace, reported by John Cornwell in his book Hitler’s Pope:

The scene that presented itself at the palace was indescribable. The confusion totally chaotic, the filth completely nauseating; soldiers and armed workers coming and going; the building, once the home of a king, resounding with screams, vile language, profanities. Absolute hell. An army of employees were dashing to and fro, giving out orders, waving bits of paper, and in the midst of all this, a gang of young women, of dubious appearance, Jews like all the rest of them, hanging around in all the offices with provocative demeanor and suggestive smiles. The boss of this female gang was Levien’s mistress, a young Russian woman, a Jew and a divorcee, who was in charge. And it was to her that the nunciature was obliged to pay homage in order to proceed. This Levien is a young man, about 30 or 35, also Russian and a Jew. Pale, dirty, with vacant eyes, hoarse voice, vulgar, repulsive, with a face that is both intelligent and sly.

Another action Pacelli didn’t take was the employment of the most powerful tool in the papal arsenal, excommunication. Hitler was raised as a Catholic and pointedly never severed his ties to the church, though he was anything but a practicing Catholic.

There’s no question that excommunication would have gone far to raise questions about Hitler within Germany, given that what resistance remained during the war years was largely centered on the aristocracy, which included many practicing Catholics.

But Pacelli never took that move.

And, as Cornwell also writes, Pacelli seemed to loathe black people as well:

Not long after this, Pacelli campaigned to have black French troops removed from the Rhineland, convinced that they were raping women and abusing children — even though an independent inquiry sponsored by the U.S. Congress, of which Pacelli was aware, proved this allegation false. Twenty-three years later, when the Allies were about to enter Rome, he asked the British envoy to the Vatican to request of the British Foreign Office that no Allied colored troops would be among the small number that might be garrisoned in Rome after the occupation.

There were sexual relationships between the French colonial troops and German women, but they were consensual. And the resulting children, dubbed “the Rhineland bastards” by the Nazis, were the first victims of Nazi racial violence once Hitler attained power. He ordered them all sterilized, without one word of objection from the Vatican.