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sharedarticlesworld-blog · 5 years

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Carol Prunhuber: "Venezuela is a war between the state and the population."

In Venezuela, the rule of law died. This is as strong a truth as the death of 157 people in the 2017 protests -according to unofficial figures-, whose cases today rumble and go unpunished, while the regime hides them under the carpet of a badly called consecrated revolution for 20 years. The same happens in countries with warlike conflicts.

"Venezuela is the Syria of Latin America," says Carol Prunhuber.

The specialized journalist relates a history of crimes, murders, torture, military trials of civilians, arbitrary arrests and acts of corruption, which was triggered by the protests of 2014, and which weighs on the shoulders of Nicolás Maduro and his military and paramilitary forces.

Over time, the number of victims has increased. Prunhuber, a journalist and expert in the conflicts in Kurdistan, compiled the testimonies of the victims in Sangre y asfalto, a kind of atrocious newspaper that vindicates the struggle against authoritarianism in Venezuela.

Comparisons with countries like Syria or Iraq sound terrifying, but the sound is revealed in the 23,047 violent deaths with which 2018 closed, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence. Syria, for its part, ended that period with a total of 19,799 deaths.

"Venezuela lives a war every day, the war of the State against the population," Prunhuber said in an interview with El Estímulo.

The journalist, who during the 1980s dedicated herself to denouncing the international silence surrounding the genocide of the Kurdish people - which culminated in the publication of the book The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd - cannot fail to recall the testimonies of these protests in Iran and compare them with the current situation in the country of the Bolivarian revolution.

"It's different because the Kurds are armed. They have been fighting their leaders for years. The similarity is that they are people who are oppressed by the regimes. Where their wars are, they are considered a second-class population, while the first-class are with the government and the second-class have no access to anything.

This second-class citizenship also includes the families and close friends of the victims, whose voices Prunhuber picks up. Also, in the book, he used testimonies published in social networks and the press, plus interviews with two journalists.

His first meeting with the parents of those murdered by the repressive forces of the State was during the presentation of Sangre y asfalto in Madrid on April 4, two years after the demonstrations.

"We're never going to get the brush of justice because the government continues to dance on the blood of the boys," said Israel Cañizales, whose son, Armando, was shot in the trachea when he protested in Las Mercedes, Caracas, in 2017.

The man denounced that the regime has turned a blind eye to the crimes. In 100 percent of the cases, the culprits have not been identified, the hearings have been postponed on multiple occasions, and the culprits have not been tried.

"These people have become spokespersons for the suffering of an entire nation, there you have the real testimony of what is happening in the country," says the writer.

"It is for them that she wanted to safeguard the memory, to gather the cries and tears in a document so that they would not disappear, so that the executioners would not change history," she said.

The text also includes nearly 200 color photographs provided by photojournalists.

Prunhuber accuses a blind left that prefers not to read and not to be informed so as not to know, of the text "Verdades alternativas de Almudena Grandes" (Alternative Truths of Almudena Grandes), written lightly on March 31 in his El País column. "It is necessary to speak to them".

The former journalist of El Nacional and the French agency Gamma TV, followed closely the events of 2014 in Florida, United States.

Realizing the repetition of the events three years later, he decided to collect the testimonies and archive them for later use. "I was indignant, I was shocked by the chronicles of ordinary people suffering, I who had been with the Kurdish guerrillas in Kurdistan could not believe that something similar was happening in my country.

After two years of research and compilation of material, the journalist assures that the book comes at a time when the Venezuelan opposition has taken a turn in the fight against the Maduro regime, with interim president Juan Guaidó at the head of the leadership. Although Prunhuber doesn't believe in coincidences, he says the book was supposed to come out in September 2018, but it was delayed.

Is his book a vindication of the youth movement and even of student leaders? It is a tribute to the whole country, but without a doubt also to the youth who are the engine of dissidence.

Guaidó is the result of that youth, leader of the student movement of 2007 and his book comes out at the moment when it has become the head of the opposition. Yes. Guaidó is part of that generation that are effectively the leaders of the movement. That generation that has never left the street, in which many were born and grew up with chavismo and died in it, too. Now a large mass of people from popular sectors that are the majority of the country has been added to that protest, which makes it more important. Guaidó what he doesn't have is baggage, but he does have courage, expertise, charisma, intelligence and a back full of pellets from that era. It was always said that this generation was the one that was going to change the country and it is doing it.

Is this shift what has changed the international community's view of Venezuela?

He (Guaidó) and Almagro's work have helped a lot internationally. It has been very hard because Chavismo has been in charge of keeping alive in the region the myth of the left over U.S. imperialism; the U.S. boot and the interventions. But what is affecting change is the danger of immigration to the rest of Latin America and Europe.

We are the Syria of Latin America. Suddenly, Venezuela becomes an exporter of an immense mass of people and that affects the bordering countries and affects the balance of Latin America. Disaster is spreading. The same thing is happening as it did decades ago with drug trafficking. Also the political change in Latin American governments, which became right-wing or conservative, has allowed us to gain international support. And, of course, Trump. I don't support him, but he has tightened the screws that Barack Obama could not.

Is there a war in Venezuela?

In Venezuela there is a war, a war of the State against the population. But in this case, the Venezuelan is an unarmed people and has not taken up arms to overthrow any regime. What we have are sticks of cardboard and stones, a situation of unusual helplessness, and we follow the Constitution to the letter. The Kurds, on the other hand, which are 40 million people who do not have a state, are armed. But who is going to arm themselves in Venezuela if they are all malnourished?

Is the country suffering the consequences of the regime's links with extremist leaders in the Middle East?

In 2008, when I published the story of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, the Kurdish leader assassinated in Vienna, Maduro was on his honeymoon with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that is why I speak of Iran in the book. I was then surprised by Iran's presence in Venezuela. I knew that Hugo Chavez was going further. That's when the fear of Hezbollah's presence in the country began. The expansion that Iran established or even the direct links that Tareck El Aissami has both in Syria and Lebanon with Islamic terrorists, who were given Venezuelan passports. There is an intriguing Middle East much deeper than we see. With Chavez and 21st century socialism the door was opened to Islamic terrorism in Latin America, which has ramifications we don't understand.

Is that interventionism?

We are an occupied territory, an occupation invited by a regime. We are occupied by Cuba, Russia, the ELN, Hezbollah and now Chinese soldiers are arriving. We will have Chinese boots too. It's been going on for years.

It is not a very hopeful panorama, do you have hopes?

We can't lose hope. The situation is difficult and very dark, but that doesn't mean that we don't have to continue. However, I don't know what the solution is. Remembering the Kurdish experience, when there was the attack with chemical bombs against the population. People, out of fear, left in a mass exodus. Bernard Kouchner, then Minister of Health and Humanitarian Aid, as well as founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, introduced the doctrine of the right to humanitarian interference into the United Nations. This consisted of authorizing the use of force when there was a people massacred by their state, when it was a question of protecting national sovereignty and when there was an attack on national peace. The doctrine can be used without a majority vote of the Security Council. In Venezuela it is a possibility because there is a danger of international peace, a problem of sovereignty because we are occupied and a population massacred by its State.

Original Source: http://elestimulo.com/blog/carol-prunhuber-venezuela-es-una-guerra-entre-el-estado-contra-la-poblacion/

#venezuela #dictatorship #writing #cent #ddhh

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Israelis Just Keep Killing People, Stealing Land

By Uri Avnery, Antiwar.com, July 20, 2018

One can look at events in Gaza through the left or through the right eye. One can condemn them as inhuman, cruel and mistaken, or justify them as necessary and unavoidable.

But there is one adjective that is beyond question: They are stupid.

If the late Barbara Tuchman were still alive, she might be tempted to add another chapter to her groundbreaking opus “The March of Folly”: a chapter titled “Eyeless in Gaza”.

The latest episode in this epic started a few months ago, when independent activists in the Gaza Strip called for a march to the Israeli border, which Hamas supported. It was called “The Great March of Return”, a symbolic gesture for the more than a million Arab residents who fled or were evicted from their homes in the land that became the State of Israel.

The Israeli authorities pretended to take this seriously. A frightening picture was painted for the Israeli public: 1.8 million Arabs, men, women and children, would throw themselves on the border fence, break through in many places, and storm Israel’s cities and villages. Terrifying.

Israeli sharpshooters were posted along the border and ordered to shoot anyone who looked like a “ringleader”. On several succeeding Fridays (the weekly Muslim holy day) more than 150 unarmed protesters, including many children, were shot dead, and many hundreds more severely wounded by gunfire, apart from those hurt by tear gas.

The Israeli argument was that the victims were shot while trying to “storm the fences”. Actually, not a single such attempt was photographed, though hundreds of photographers were posted on both sides of the fence.

Facing a worldwide protest, the army changed its orders and now only rarely kills unarmed protesters. The Palestinians also changed their tactics: the main effort now is to fly children’s kites with burning tails and set Israeli fields near the Strip on fire.

Since the wind almost always blows from the West to the East, that is an easy way to hurt Israel. Children can do it, and do. Now the Minister of Education demands that the air force bomb the children. The Chief of Staff refuses, arguing that this is “against the values of the Israeli army”.

At present, half of our newspapers and TV newscasts are concerned with Gaza. Everybody seems to agree that sooner or later a full-fledged war will break out there.

The main feature of this exercise is its utter stupidity.

Every military action must have a political aim. As the German military thinker, Carl von Clausewitz, famously said: “War is but a continuation of politics by other means.”

The Strip is 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide. It is one of the most overcrowded places on earth. Nominally it belongs to the largely theoretical State of Palestine, like the West Bank, which is Israeli occupied. The Strip is in fact governed by the radical Muslim Hamas party.

In the past, masses of Palestinian workers from Gaza streamed into Israel every day. But since Hamas assumed power in the Strip, the Israeli government has imposed an almost total blockade on land and sea. The Egyptian dictatorship, a close ally of Israel and a deadly enemy of radical Islam, cooperates with Israel.

So what does Israel want? The preferred solution is to sink the entire strip and its population into the sea. Failing that, what can be done?

The last thing Israel wants is to annex the Strip with its huge population, which cannot be driven out.

The real policy is to make life in Gaza so miserable, that the Gazans themselves will rise and throw the Hamas authorities out. With this in mind, the water supply is reduced to two hours a day, electricity the same. Employment hovers around 50%, wages beneath the minimum. It is a picture of total misery.

Since everything that reaches Gaza must come through Israel (or Egypt), supplies are often cut off completely for days as “punishment”.

Alas, history shows that such methods seldom succeed. They only deepen the enmity. So what can be done?

The answer is incredibly simple: sit down, talk and come to an agreement.

Yes, but how can you sit down with a mortal enemy, whose official ideology totally rejects a Jewish State?

Islam recognizes something called a “Hudna”, which is a lasting armistice. This can go on for many decades and is (religiously) kept.

For several years now, Hamas has been almost openly hinting that it is ready for a long Hudna. Egypt has volunteered to mediate. Our government has totally ignored the offer. A Hudna with the enemy? Out of the question! God forbid! Would be terribly unpopular politically!

But it would be the sensible thing to do. Stop all hostile acts from both sides, say for 50 years. Abolish the blockade. Build a real harbor in Gaza city. Allow free trade under some kind of military inspection. Same for an airport. Allow workers to find employment in Israel, instead of importing workers from China and Romania. Turn Gaza into a second Singapore. Allow free travel between Gaza and the West Bank by a bridge or an extraterritorial highway. Help to restore unity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Why not? The very idea is rejected by an ordinary Israeli on sight.

A deal with Hamas? Impossible!!! Hamas wants to destroy Israel. Everybody knows that.

I hear this many times, and always wonder about the stupidity of people who repeat this.

How does a group of a few hundred thousand “destroy” one of the world’s most heavily armed states, a state that possesses nuclear bombs and submarines to deliver them? How? With kites? How can Hamas pose a mortal danger?

Why doesn’t Hamas stop hostilities by itself? Hamas has competitors, which are even more radical. It does not dare to show any sign of weakness.

Some decades ago the Arab world, on the initiative of Saudi Arabia, offered Israel peace under several conditions, all of them acceptable. Successive Israel governments have not only not accepted it, they have ignored it altogether.

There was some logic in this. The Israeli government wants to annex the West Bank. It wants to get the Arab population out, and replace them with Jewish settlers. It conducts this policy slowly, cautiously, but consistently.

It is a cruel policy, a detestable policy, yet it has some logic in it. If you really want to achieve this abominable aim, the methods may be adequate. But this does not apply to the Gaza Strip, which no one wants to annex. There, the methods are sheer folly.

This does not mean that the overall Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is any more wise. It is not.

Binyamin Netanyahu and his hand-picked stupid ministers have no policy. Or so it seems. In fact they do have an undeclared one: creeping annexation of the West Bank.

This is now going on at a quicker pace than before. The daily news gives the impression that the entire government machine is now concentrating on this project.

This will lead directly to an apartheid-style state, where a large Jewish minority will dominate an Arab majority.

For how long? One generation? Two? Three?

It has been said that a clever person is able to extricate himself from a trap into which a wise person would not have fallen in the first place.

Stupid people do not extricate themselves. They are not even aware of the trap.

#Gaza #Hamas #Gaza border #Israeli settlements

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khalilhumam · 4 years

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Who is a terrorist, actually?

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/who-is-a-terrorist-actually/

Who is a terrorist, actually?

By Daniel L. Byman

When I write about the threat of white supremacist terrorism, I often receive complaints from readers that I am focusing on the wrong problem and that my articles are ill-informed and misleading (I’m putting the complaints politely). Instead of focusing on white supremacists, they argue, I should instead write about the “real” terrorists like antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Their opinions are backed up by statements from the police and Trump administration officials and images of burning cities. The terrorism label, for them, is a way of distinguishing who is in the wrong. Brian Jenkins, a leading scholar of terrorism, observed in 1981: “Terrorism is what the bad guys do.”

When it comes to Black Lives Matter, there’s no credible case for labeling it a terrorist organization. One analysis of the Black Lives Matter protests found that 93 percent were peaceful, and some of the violent incidents at the rallies were simply opportunistic vandalism.

Most of the protest leaders have tried to stop looting and other violence, recognizing this is counterproductive as well as wrong. Moreover, Black Lives Matter is an open movement with a host of organizations participating along with self-proclaimed supporters rather than a tight group with a defined membership. Thus, labeling the movement as a whole as violent is false.

But not all violence is terrorism, either. In many instances, even those who do actively promote and use violence don’t merit the label “terrorist.”

So what about individuals and groups that have been credibly linked to violence in Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities? Where does antifa fit in? Or right-wing militia-type groups like Patriot Prayer? How about individuals such as the shooter at the Kenosha, Wisconsin, protests? Should we call all of these people terrorists?

The answer is not as straightforward as you might think.

What does “terrorism” mean?

It’s easy to dodge this question and conclude that there is no real agreement on the definition of terrorism. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter, as the old saying goes — an argument one still hears walking the halls of the United Nations. As my colleague Chris Meserole and I have pointed out, even close US allies don’t agree with the United States — or even with one another — as to which groups are terrorists.

However, serious analysts such as Bruce Hoffman and Boaz Ganor, as well as US statutes and various government agencies have all tried to define terrorism. Important for all these efforts is an attempt to put aside the question of the justness of the cause — whether someone is the “bad guy” — and focus on the goals and actions of the perpetrator. So one can favor a cause (national liberation, say) but still label the violence used to achieve it as terrorism. Conversely, one can oppose a cause without considering those advocating for it to be terrorists.

Serious terrorism definitions have several factors in common, most of which are self-evident, but a few require a bit more explanation.

First, terrorism involves violence or the threat of it: Marches, protests, and similar peaceful activities do not meet the criteria. Stone-throwing or other low-level forms of violence, including street brawls and physical assaults, could technically be counted, but it’s best to maintain a high bar when using the terrorism label. Otherwise, major terror attacks like the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — in which a gunman killed 11 people in the deadliest attack on Jews on American soil — get diluted by numerous non-lethal events.

Second, terrorism is inherently political. The target and motivation need to be linked to a broader cause or ideology. It need not be a wholly rational or achievable cause. But having such a cause is what distinguishes terrorism from crime, personal passion, or other common reasons for violence.

Third, terrorism is perpetrated by non-state actors. That’s a political science term that basically means anyone who’s not acting as the agent of a recognized government. Soldiers and police officers, for instance, are state actors. Members of paramilitary groups, militias, private corporations, and non-governmental organizations are all non-state actors.

To be clear: There is no moral difference between a state agent such as a soldier planting a bomb in a marketplace and killing dozens of civilians versus this same action being done by a non-state actor, but it is important for our definitions.

The United States also tries to carve out “clandestine agents” of the state — such as when Libyan intelligence officers bombed Pan Am 103 in 1988, killing 270 people — as part of its terrorism definition, which further muddies the waters.

A fourth criterion — and one that is highly relevant to this discussion — is that terrorism is “designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target,” in Bruce Hoffman’s words. The purpose of the violence, accordingly, is not just (or even primarily) to hurt, kill, or destroy the immediate target, but rather to convey a message.

It is this psychological effect that gives terrorism its power, inspiring fear in individuals far from the blast zone, fomenting civil wars, reshaping foreign policy by producing an over-reaction, and otherwise having far more impact than the death toll and destruction of the initial attack itself.

Part of the psychological effect is also a high degree of intentionality. Shootings at an anti-racism rally may scare others in another city, but for it to count as terrorism the shootings needed to be intended to have a broader effect — the purpose of violence at the rally, in other words, is to shape opinion far outside the city in question. It’s not enough for the violence to inadvertently scare (“terrorize”) people far away from it. Rather, such fear must be the goal.

There’s another commonly used criterion that involves who is being targeted by the violence: Many terrorism definitions require that the targets be civilians or noncombatants. If an attack targets military forces on the battlefield in the middle of a war, for instance, it might not be considered terrorism, but rather a regular military or guerrilla operation.

But this gets complicated really quickly: What if it’s an attack on military forces, but it takes place far outside a war zone? What if there’s no war at all, and the soldiers are just stationed at a military base somewhere?

Take, for example, al-Qaeda’s suicide bombing of USS Cole, a US Navy guided-missile destroyer, while the ship was refueling off the coast of Yemen. The attack killed 17 sailors, but did so outside a designated war zone. Whether that incident counts as a terrorist attack could vary depending on how this criterion is applied.

And what about police officers? They’re not soldiers, but nor are they pure civilians like shoppers at a Walmart, for example. This adds to the fuzziness.

Terrorism definitions are muddy, and there is legitimate disagreement as to which deeds qualify. However, some factors, especially the intentional psychological effect, are important when considering how to categorize recent unrest and violence in the US.

Examining the facts — not the rhetoric

Let’s apply these definitional criteria to the individuals and groups in question here.

The marches, counter-marches, and most of the violence surrounding them in Portland and other cities are certainly political (with the exception of some of the opportunistic looting and property destruction), and involve non-state actors: two boxes checked. After that, however, things get more fraught.

As mentioned above, there is no evidence Black Lives Matter either advocates for or engages in violence. So right there, it’s disqualified for the terrorism label.

The violent label better fits some supporters of antifa, which is short for “anti-fascist” and is not a group but rather a loose network of like-minded individuals. Some self-proclaimed members, often anarchists, vandalize property, and many go to rallies to fight with (they would say defend against) white supremacists and others they label as fascists.

The Anti-Defamation League notes that a lot of antifa activity occurs online, often in the form of harassing right-wing extremists and white supremacists and doxxing them — outing them to their employers and communities.

But the League also says: “While some antifa use their fists, other violent tactics include throwing projectiles, including bricks, crowbars, homemade slingshots, metal chains, water bottles, and balloons filled with urine and feces.” Because of this violence, they deserve to be rejected and condemned (and, when they use violence, arrested).

However, this threat is blown way out of proportion. Claims that antifa is devilishly cunning or crazily violent are common, leading to many conspiracy theories — President Trump claims, for example, that they have weaponized soup cans. It’s gotten so outlandish that jokingly comparing antifa’s dastardly antics with those used by the Roadrunner to trick Wile E. Coyote in the Looney Tunes cartoons has become a meme on Twitter.

But antifa in the United States was not linked to deadly violence until August 29, when self-proclaimed antifa member Michael Reinoehl allegedly shot a right-wing activist who was a member of Patriot Prayer. (In 2018, an antifa supporter attacked an ICE facility armed with a rifle and was shot to death.)

However, even when they use violence, antifa’s targets are local — they do not seem to be intentionally trying to cause a broader psychological effect.

Reinoehl, for example, claimed he was simply providing “security” at Black Lives Matter protests (on his own initiative, it seems) and said that he shot the Patriot Prayer member in self-defense, believing he and a friend were about to be stabbed. In an interview with Vice before he was killed by police seeking to arrest him, Reinoehl claimed, “I could have sat there and watched them kill a friend of mine of color. But I wasn’t going to do that.” The ICE facility attacker may have been suicidal, and reports so far suggest his focus was just on that particular facility. In neither case were they seeking a broader psychological effect.

Elevating this violence to terrorism, as President Trump has called for, exaggerates its scope and scale. As Colin Clarke and Michael Kenney argue, “Though sucker-punching someone in the face is certainly violent, it’s not terrorism.” If antifa transitions and Reinoehl-type shooters become more regular or are embraced by more within the network, then the terrorism question should be reconsidered. This is especially so if future violence is intended to have a far-reaching psychological effect.

However, the amorphous nature of the movement makes any designation difficult in practice as it is not clear where antifa begins and ends and who, if anyone, is responsible for its violent activities beyond the individuals in question.

Patriot Prayer is a group with a political cause — it’s pro-Trump and anti-left — and it engages in violence. Patriot Prayer has connections to law enforcement and white supremacists and to the hate group Proud Boys but insists it rejects racism. Its members often go to rallies, armed, seeking conflict with members of antifa.

So far, though, these clashes have not been lethal, a supporter of the group has threatened opponents with “bullets put into your head.” Although terrorism includes the threat of violence as well as violence itself, given the level of vitriol on the internet today, such threats don’t justify calling the entire group a terrorist group.

Like with antifa, when Patriot Prayer members are violent, their goals and targets do not seem intended to create a broad psychological effect. On Facebook, Patriot Prayer describes itself as “encouraging the country to fight for freedom at a local level using faith in God to guide us in the right direction.” Its focus is local and its members are largely about fighting the other side in the streets. So for Patriot Prayer, the terrorism label similarly doesn’t work.

Finally, there’s Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with murder in the fatal shooting of at least two people during a night of protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in late August.

Rittenhouse was at least loosely tied to a political cause, casting himself as a defender of law and order against violence associated with marches protesting the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back seven times by a police officer. Rittenhouse in his social media posts described himself as pro-police and claimed to a Daily Caller reporter that he traveled to Kenosha to protect businesses and help anyone who was hurt.

Available evidence suggests no intentionality on Rittenhouse’s part to cause a broader psychological effect. He seems to simply have seen himself as doing his part to help out law enforcement — even though he was armed with a powerful assault-style weapon and not a trained law enforcement official.

Why does the terrorism label matter, beyond semantics?

Part of it is simply a question of demonization. Taking away the “terrorism” label forces us to think more clearly and critically about why the groups or individuals are acting as they are.

More important, though, it affects which agencies and government authorities are invoked to deal with these groups and individuals. Protests, even violent ones, are traditionally a matter for the police and, if they need backup, the National Guard. Terrorism, in contrast, involves the FBI and other national security agencies.

In a post-9/11 world, terrorism is considered a grave threat that must be crushed. When President Trump uses the term terrorism as a label for largely peaceful protesters, he is abusing the word and making an overreaction more likely.

The cities affected by the protests and the nation as a whole should condemn and try to stop any violence while encouraging peaceful demonstrations. However, using the terrorism label obscures more than it clarifies, creating a misleading impression of the demonstrations and the proper response.

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thezenithkingdom-blog · 5 years

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The Shake -Up

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, it is said and rightly so I started to feel the pressure of Governance in mere two months of taking over as Head of State. I had responsibility of maintaining the peace and protect the rights of citizens. I was finding that there is no personal time once you take up a constitutional office and appreciated the members of cabinet and Prime Minister more. Tuesday, there was a a regular meeting of the cabinet which I was presiding over, all ministers of cabinet, important Secretaries of departments, Chief of Staff of Armed Forces. The room was large palatial conference room, with marble granite and gold carvings on the wall. I was seated at rectangular table, dressed in navy blue suit as were all other members of cabinet. When the Additional Secretary of Home, came rushing in and hurried to Secretary of Home, speaking in his ears. At which he stood up and informed the meeting that for the first time, five bombs have gone off near important public places, and this was terrorist attack on Kingdom of Zenith as per initial intelligence available. For a second I was unable to think, a lot of thoughts flooded my mind, the dead, the injured the affected,

“How many casualties ?” I asked firmly, everyone’s attention to me. “ Your Majesty we, have yet to verify …..” “How many casualties are there ?” “ Over 100 Your Majesty” The Additional Secretary announced, overstepping his boss. “Next time I ask a question, I need straight answer, now sound red alert across country, seal all airports, land routes and sea routes. Nobody gets in or out. I want Armed forces to stage flag march in entire affected region. Declare emergency in the province.” “ Yes Sir! “ The Joint Chiefs of Armed Forces said. “Find the bloody culprits, by any means necessary.” I stood up and left. My Military Attache’ followed me and I asked him to dial the intelligence chief and him that I will meet them instantly. The Director General of Domestic Surveillance Department [DSD] was reaching my palace. ,an internal intelligence agency of Zenith. Shrouded in secrecy, the DSD is used to garner intelligence from within Zenith and also execute counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism tasks. The county did not have an active External Intelligence agency and which needed to change. That was the first thought that struck me. We did have Military Intelligence but not a genital purpose agency like CIA or Mossad. The as in few hours, there were extremist claiming responsibility for this activity located beyond the eastern borders in Kazakhstan, Muslim Brotherhood. Though this particular organisation was banned by Kazakhstan yet it continues to create problems to all non-muslims targets. Israel was the first country to offer help and I was quick to accept it. Please send in your best. Israeli aircrafts have permission to land in Zenith. In what followed was a series of meeting and security briefs. The Royal Zenith Police (RZP) was securing fevering important government facility. My Prime Minister was constantly giving instructions to Police And Law Enforcement Agencies. I had ordered Royal Zenith Army to lockdown all major escape and entry routes. NOTAM was issued, which translates to Notice To Air Men which is de facto airspace closure notice. No Flights were allowed to fly over Zenith. A C 130J Super Hercules with People from Mossad and Israeli Defence Force landed in the Uralsk Airport From where they were brought to capital in special Gulf-stream jet. The Team began investigations along with DSD of Zenith. And Soon Raids were carried out, 27 men of islamic decent were arrested, twelve were shot during encounter with Royal Zenith Police. In next few days what followed was a hard Mossad style interrogation which revealed the mastermind to be hidden in Uzbekistan.

I personally summoned the Ambassador of Uzbekistan and gave him a Diplomatic démarche. Démarches are delivered to the appropriate official of the government or organization. Démarches generally seek to persuade, inform, or gather information from a foreign government.

Governments may also use a démarche to protest or object to actions by a foreign government. As The arrests lead to fast track convictions, messages of condolence and. Support started pouring in. Since the victims were Christian, Vatican or Holy Sea was first to send strong worded condemnation of this act. Followed by US, UK , Germany, France, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Italy and India. The next thing which happened was a special meeting with head of Royal Zenith Army, Royal Zenith Air Force, Royal Zenith Navy, Royal Zenith Police and DSD heads along with Heads of Mossad, Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel) and Directorate of Military Intelligence(Zenith) The need for two organisations was felt. A Counter Terrorism Organisation, and an External Intelligence Department. The Cabinet was called in emergency meeting. And it was decided by consensus to establish a Foreign Intelligence Agency based on Mossad. One Agency For SIGINT (Signals Intelligence ) and ELINT ( Electronic Intelligence ) would be set up based on NSA/ Unit 8200 which is a as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps.

Wide a Cabinet order which immediately was passed as Royal Decree which established General Directorate for External Security ( GDES )on 22nd July 2019.

GDES will be responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations, and counterterrorism. GDES is separate from Zenith’s other institutions. Because no law defines its purpose, objectives, roles, missions, powers or budget and because it is exempt from the constitutional laws of the Kingdom of Zenith, rather it will function under Royal Decree. Its Director General answers directly to the Prime Minister & Will be Intelligence Advisor to the King and brief him daily or as required. Annual budget would be around 8 billion USD. Mossad from Israel would provide all logistics, technical and intel support to set up the GDES and provide training to personnel that would be operating in GDES. The Domestic Surveillance Department was renamed as General Directorate of Internal Security ( GDIS) was was given responsibility are safeguarding state security, exposing terrorist rings, interrogating terror suspects, providing intelligence for counter-terrorism operations in the Zenith, counter-espionage, personal protection of senior public officials, securing important infrastructure and government buildings, and safeguarding Zenith Airlines and overseas Embassies. Israeli Security Agency from Israel would provide all logistics, technical and intel support to set up the GDIS and provide training to personnel that would be operating in GDIS. Further the Royal Decree also created General Directorate of Signals Intelligence (GDSI ) and would be responsible for foreign and domestic signals intelligence, support to military operations, GDES, GDIS , cyber warfare, and information security. Unit 8200 from Israel would provide all logistics, technical and intel support to set up the GDSI and provide training to personnel that would be operating in GDSI. Subordinate to GDSI will be Information Bureau , responsible for collecting OSINT intelligence. The unit will monitor and collect military intelligence–related information from television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. The Royal Zenith Air Force will purchase five Gulfstream G550-based IAI EL/W-2085 which is an airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) multi-band radar system developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) . Its primary objective is to provide intelligence to maintain air superiority and conduct surveillance. Extensive modifications were made to the Gulfstream's fuselage such as the addition of protruding composite radomes, to house the radar arrays in conformal body modifications. The new aircraft use the EL/W-2085 dual-band sensor suite.

These Will be under command of GDSI and not the Air Force. The Royal Zenith Air Force for its AWAC needs will procure Five GlobalEye which is a multi-role airborne early warning & control (AEW&C) solution from Swedish defence and security company Saab. GlobalEye consists of a suite of sensors using Saab's Erieye ER (Extended Range) radar and mission system, installed in the Bombardier Global 6000 long-range business jet.

A single terrorist event shook up the country from its core and forced us the policymakers to create institutions to safeguard the interest of country, citizens and to defat all forces against Kingdom of Zenith.

#fiction #zenith #solo

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tanadrin · 7 years

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Would you be able to explain the context behind Margaret Thatcher's negotiations with the IRA (which, if I understand, was a crucial step in the path to a ceasefire), because I accept that it happened but, as an American with a limited understanding of Thatcher, it strikes me as a really, really strange thing. Certainly, I can't imagine any American right-wingers doing anything but ordering more crackdowns, though maybe this is more reflective of modern, more than American, right-wing politics

My knowledge of the Thatcher government is a lot weaker than my knowledge of modern American anti-terrorism policy, but you’re not wrong that the latter is unusually shortsighted. Imagine trying to convince Britain in the 80s that the IRA was blowing up stuff in London because “they hate our freedoms,” and you have roughly a picture of how pants-on-head ridiculous the current American understanding of the phenomenology of terrorism is.

But I will say this: Britain tried strategies just as stupid and shortsighted to control Ireland, and they tried them for a lot, lot longer. The long, pre-Catholic-Emancipation, pre-Act-of-Union history of the island can be skipped, even though it’s a source for a lot of the imagery that still causes bad blood between different groups in Northern Ireland (e.g., the imagery of the Williamite War, which is steeped in the massacre of Irish civilians but is beloved by Unionists). Irish nationalism (as opposed to factional support for pretenders to the British throne) took off in the 19th century, helped by nationalist movements across Europe, and the charmingly civilized equivalent of 19th century terrorism (attacking police barracks in rural Ireland, burning down the giant country homes that were a symbol of Irish Catholic dispossession, after kicking the inhabitants out) were met with harsh British reprisals. The Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence, which the IRB and IRA fancied were proper wars conducted between two states (thus, they could legitimately target the apparatus of the enemy state, like their military and police), the British treated like modern America would treat nail bombs in a shopping mall, if America reacted to that sort of thing by sending the police to a football pitch in Baghdad and opening fire on the crowd.

Things went downhill from there (cf. Black and Tans), and the resulting backlash among the general population is why we have the Republic of Ireland today. Nothing radicalizes people to support terrorism like atrocity, and the British policy in Ireland was the same as its policies in any other colony. They weren’t uniquely bad (French in Algeria, Germans in Africa, Americans in America have all done just as bad or worse), but this is an instructive example uniquely accessible to us because it took place in western Europe, and everyone involved spoke English.

Crucially, none of this was ancient history in the 1960s, when the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland started nonviolently agitating for an end to discrimination against Catholics. Their model was the American Civil Rights Movement, and they might have had much the same trajectory. The British, having learned from the mistakes of the past, were less eager to use heavy-handed tactics in--hahah, no, just kidding again. They shot 28 unarmed people in 1972, producing the modern wave of terrorism and reprisal known as the Troubles, with the same colonial mindset by the British government (or elements of the British government) leading to the Protestant terrorist groups getting tacit approval and support from people in British intelligence. This proceeded to drag on for another quarter-century before the British public got sick enough of it to force a change in tactics.

In this context, Thatcher having some back-channel communication with the IRA is kinda understandable from a “this has been dragging on for decades and we’ve made zero progress” sort of view, especially given that the wider British public did not share the fervent zeal of British elites for holding on to various bits of their ancient empire, and certainly not the tolerance of the Protestant leadership in northern Ireland for civilian casualties. (There’s actually a really strong analogy to be made, politically and tactically, between the IRA of the Troubles, the ANC/MK, Northern Ireland pre-GFA, and apartheid; this is uncomfortable for a lot of people because is blurs the distinction between terrorists and good guys, how that perception is altered by whether the power they’re fighting against is a U.S. ally, and how easy it is to recast the Irish independence struggle even in the 1920s as basically a relatively civilized terrorist campaign. Which really just goes to show how useless “terrorist” is as a taxonomic distinction, but I digress.)

It’s notable, though, that she never made this public while she was in charge, and indeed, probably couldn’t have. It’s also notable that this is basically just informal contact with no substantive resolution of differences, or indeed even token concessions. British policy in Northern Ireland did not fundamentally change until the 90s. It’s notable that the GFA was in many ways a rehash of the Sunningdale Agreement in the 70s, and the uncomfortable lesson here might be it took decades of insistent violence by a minority in order to force negotiations. And, indeed, it’s worse than that: only because Britain’s attitude toward culturally distinct overseas regions changed (i.e., it was no longer a political liability not to insist on the greatness of British empire), resulting in increasing apathy by the government toward this small, unproductive, war-torn patch of ground, did the national government finally drag the Unionists to the negotiating table kicking and screaming. If the Unionists had had their way, no change in the political structure of Northern Ireland would have taken place, and there still would be no mechanism to ensure the minority had a role in government.

I’d like to think the U.S. can critically rethink its foreign policy before 2027, but I’m not hopeful. The Irish peace process had incentives going for it that don’t exist when it comes to America reappraising its approach to the war on terror, and the fact that terrorism in the west is the result of dysfunctions of foreign policy, and not domestic policy (or even domestic policy in overseas regions of the country) means there’s much less ability or incentive to bring everyone to the negotiating table and work this out like civilized human beings.

(Any errors in the above political analysis of the history of Ireland are entirely my own. I got fairly interested in modern Irish history while I lived there, but I don’t claim to be an expert.)

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thisdaynews · 4 years

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The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-massacre-that-spawned-the-alt-right/

The Massacre That Spawned the Alt-Right

“Death to the Klan!” On Saturday, November 3, 1979, that chant swept over Morningside Homes, a mostly black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina, as dozens of protesters—some donning blue hard hats for protection—hammered placards onto signposts and danced in the morning sun.

The American left had largely given up on communism by then, but these demonstrators were full-on Maoists. Their ranks included professionals with degrees from places like Harvard and Duke. And they were descending on Greensboro, a city where sit-ins helped launch the civil rights movement in 1960, to ignite another revolution. They danced to a guitar player singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set to build the Party.” Their children dressed in tan military shirts and red berets. They even brought an effigy of a Klansman, dressed in a white sheet and hood, which kids from the neighborhood joined in punching.

Story Continued Below

The communists planned to begin their march at noon, moving from the housing project to a local shopping center. But just after 11:20, a caravan filled with real Klansmen and Nazis surprised them, snaking through the neighborhood’s narrow byways. As the protesters stood their ground, a man in a white T-shirt leaned out the passenger window of a canary-yellow pickup truck, and yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ‘em!” The station wagon behind him carried four Nazis. Seven more vehicles followed, carrying nearly 30 more men, including an Imperial Wizard of the Klan.

What happened next took just 88 seconds, but still reverberates 40 years later. In a confrontation where white supremacists began firing pistols, rifles and shotguns, and with television cameras rolling but police nowhere to be found, five communists were shot dead in broad daylight. Ten others were injured, some left to lie bleeding in the streets.

But that November morning became momentous for more than the grotesque video footage that still lives on the Internet: The Greensboro Massacre, as it became known, was the coming-out bloodbath for the white nationalist movement that is upending our politics today.

Before Greensboro, America’s most lurid extremistslargely operated in separate, mutually distrustful spheres. Greensboro was the place where the farthest-right groups of white supremacy learned to kill together. After November 3, 1979, it was suddenly possible to imagine Confederate flags flying alongside swastikas in Charlottesville. Or a teenager like Dylann Roof hoarding Nazi drawings as well as a Klan hood in his bedroom while he plotted mass murder.

Today, white nationalism is closer to the mainstream of American politics than ever before. The far right’s fears about “replacement” of the white race and outsider “invasions” have become standard tropes at conservative media outlets, and its anger is routinely stoked by the president of the United States. At the same time, right-wing violence is on the rise: Far-right terrorists accounted for the overwhelming majority of extremist murders in the U.S. last year, according to a January report by the Anti-Defamation League.

The seeds for this iteration of white supremacy were planted 40 years ago in Greensboro, when the white wedding of Klansmen and Nazis launched a new, pan-right extremism—a toxic brew of virulent racism, anti-government rhetoric, apocalyptic fearmongering and paramilitary tactics. And this extremism has proven more durable than anyone then could imagine.

***

Segregationists of the Greatest Generation,who fought German soldiers on the battlefields of World War II, would have thought it beyond preposterous for the Klan and Nazis to make common cause. Adolf Hitler drew inspiration from Jim Crow, but American southerners strongly supported going to war against Nazi Germany. In 1946, a list of American Nazi Party members, obtained by the U.S. Army, showed that just two percent lived in the South. Nazis were dedicated to the violent overthrow of the government, as part of their program of genocidal fascism. Through the 1950s, most neo-Confederates considered themselves patriotic Americans and had faith in the U.S. political system, even as they believed in and practiced white supremacy.

But many southern traditionalists experienced the upheavals of the next two decades as a series of betrayals. By the mid-1970s, federal courts had embraced civil rights, and civic and business leaders were dismantling legal segregation. Manufacturing, textile and tobacco jobs were vanishing. Politicians on the cosmopolitan left and corporate right were abandoning blue-collar voters. Vietnam veterans were coming home unappreciated and embittered. In addition, the FBI, after years of pursuing black nationalists, began infiltrating and undermining local Ku Klux Klans through a program, largely forgotten today, called COINTELPRO-White Hate. To be sure, only a small fraction of angry southerners turned to terror groups. But the Klan’s membership grew in the ’70s, and so did its public support. Gallup reported in 1979 that 11 percent of white Americans viewed the KKK favorably, up from just six percent in 1965. And with that rebound came something more: Those who were susceptible to recruitment were far more likely than their parents or grandparents to see the U.S. government itself as an alien force bent on destroying the white way of life.

Meanwhile,American Nazis were expanding their public presence. Some younger would-be fuhrers began trading armbands for sport coats and toning down their rhetoric in media appearances in order to seem more palatable.Other Nazi leaders, like William Pierce, head of the white separatist National Alliance, started looking for partners and muscle, hoping to turn far-right fanatics from vigilantes to insurrectionists. In 1978, Pierce publishedThe Turner Diaries, a futurist fantasy-cum-blueprint for all-out race war. In Pierce’s novel, oppressed whites join forces to create an underground organization that bombs New York and murders thousands of black and Jewish people, among many other horrific acts; the book’s protagonist ultimately flies a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon.The Turner Diarieswas a huge hit with the far right, and has influenced a wide spectrum of racists—and inspired notorious hate crimes—ever since.

It wasn’t just avowed racists who gravitated to new extremes. In the weird, unusually rootless time between Watergate and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, America’s faith in public institutions collapsed, cynicism soared and belief in a wide range of conspiracy theories and cults, from UFOs to the Unification Church, sprouted in popularity. But those rooted in racial resentment took hold in especially bitter soil. White supremacists of all stripes came to believe they faced annihilation, and they prepared to fight it on the home front. The country, in other words, was primed for a fusion of the ultra-right.

***

The story of the Greensboro Massacrereally begins with an episode that occurred in the summer of 1979, in a tiny, working-class city 60 miles to the southwest, called China Grove.

Klan leaders in North Carolina had spent the first half of the year stepping up their recruitment efforts by appealing to the heritage of white supremacy. The Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, for example, staged a historical exhibit at the Forsyth County Library—and in an early sign of what was to come, a group of Nazis showed up to ogle the items on view, surprising the media.

On July 8, the same North Carolina Klan faction tried to screenThe Birth of a Nation,the 1915 racist epic that depicts heroic figures in white hoods trying to beat back the scourge of Reconstruction at the turn of the century, at the China Grove Community Center. But before they could show the movie, more than a hundred protesters, led by communists from Durham and Greensboro, marched on the building, chanting “Death to the Klan!” and “Decease the rotten beast.” Many carried pipes and chains.

The Grand Dragon of the Federated Knights, a pot-bellied mason named Joe Grady, stood on the porch outside the building with some 20 men in robes and white-power t-shirts, rifles drawn, while members of the China Grove police force struggled to create a human buffer. Grady’s men were eager to fire on the crowd, but a policeman who walked up to him whispered that if they did, the officers trying to keep the peace were the ones who would get hurt. Grady reluctantly agreed to move into the musty bingo hall, where women and children who had been watching the approaching crowdwere hiding. Once the Klansmen retreated, a cheer rose up from the protesters, who burned a pair of Confederate flags.

Afterwards, once the crowd was gone and the screening cancelled, Grady re-emerged to face the news cameras. Grabbing a shred of burned flag, he vowed, “There will be revenge for this.” But while Grady put on a brave face for the remaining television cameras, in the eyes of his hooded peers, he had committed a cardinal sin. He had allowed himself to look weak.

By that point, the Klan’s resurgence was already triggering confrontations around the country. In Decatur, Alabama, in May 1979, more than a hundred armed Klansmen blocked a civil rights march. Later, that August, rock-throwing protesters pelted Klansmen at an anti-immigration meeting in Castro Valley, California. None of those episodes led to lethal retaliatory violence, however. China Grove was different because it got the attention of a young Nazi named Harold Covington.

Born about 20 miles east of Greensboro, Covington had attended an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, where he proudly called himself the “school fascist.” Jowly and glib, Covington traveled to South Africa where he built a minor reputation as a soldier-for-hire who’d taken up arms to defend apartheid. By the time he resettled in North Carolina and launched a losing but surprisingly well-run campaign for Raleigh city council, Covington had become an articulate, publicity-seeking ideologue, with a sideline writing campy novels—a kind of L. Ron Hubbard of the racist resistance.

With a sense of himself as a global figure, Covington regarded most Klansmen he met as boorish. The backlash to China Grove convinced him they were also in disarray.And Covington saw no one in the back-country klaverns of North Carolina capable of stepping into the void. Long before he would become a YouTube provocateur by posting white-power videos online, Covington decided to herd them into a single white-power army himself.

In a preview of 8Chan, the message-board website that would become a haven for white nationalists in the 2010s, he began bringing together various strains of supremacists, or as he put it, “normalizing relations.” His early attempts didn’t go well. The few Klan members he was able to woo were largely fabulists who made up stories to make themselves seem more violent than they really were. Deciding he needed to get a better cut, Covington organized a racist retreat on September 22 at a borrowed farm outside Louisburg, about 30 miles northeast of Raleigh, and sent word through the bars, garages and diners where “his people” hung out that they were all invited.

With the media dutifully attending what promised to be a freakshow, no detail was too small for Covington to stage-manage. Kids milled around a barbecue pit where a whole hog roasted, while parents doused a huge cross in kerosene. Nazis wore uniforms budgeted at $25 for tailored pants, $10 for boots and $2 for arm bands. The sound system alternated bluegrass tunes and “The Ride of the Valkyries.” A cute blonde in a “White Power” t-shirt sauntered with a Doberman and a rifle for photographers. In a crib, a baby wore a small shirt that read “Future Klansman.” For extra inspiration, a noose hung from a tree.

Late in the afternoon, a caravan of 20 Klansmen pulled into the farm led by a gaunt mechanic with a plunging jawline named Virgil Griffin. Griffin carried the title of Imperial Wizard of a backwoods klavern known as the Invisible Empire in Mount Holly, close to the South Carolina border. But he was also something of a joke on the national stage. His rallies, unlike Covington’s barbecue, were often threadbare affairs that dissolved into chaos. At one event, he’d been shouted down by protesters singing the theme song from “The Mickey Mouse Club,” according to an account from a community journalist, Elizabeth Wheaton, who covered radical politics around Greensboro.

If Covington looked in the mirror and saw a worldwide revolutionary, Griffin viewed himself as a backwoods patriot. After the China Grove debacle, he concluded that local Klans needed better leadership and more action, and believed he could provide both. Covington was only too happy to help feed such ambitions, elaborately making the Imperial Wizard feel like an honored guest among the other extremists—who also included the Klansmen who had peeled off from the Grady’s Federated Knights after China Grove, and a Nazi-curious crew from Winston-Salem.

The extremists nattered about where to buy guns and how to deal with the summer heat—Klan robes were sweatier than Nazi uniforms. And they found common ground.

“You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” a Klansman told the Associated Press, which published a report about the event called “North Carolina United Racist Front Forms.” Then he added: “But people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get together.”

***

What Virgil Griffin didn’t knowwas that one of his closest allies was keeping the cops informed about this new alliance.

Unlike the years after 9/11 when American law enforcement took its focus off white nationalism to fight Islamist terror, the 1960s and ’70s were a period of robust intelligence-gathering in the supremacist underground. One of North Carolina’s most charismatic Klansmen, a car salesman named Bob Jones who recruited 12,000 members to his state chapter, was undone by an aide whose information led to him being dragged before Congress and held in contempt. In the case of Griffin, law enforcement’s material came from a chain-smoking handyman named Eddie Dawson.

Born in New Jersey, Dawson cut an odd figure for a Southern Klansman. He spoke with a twitchy northern accent and had an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood actor William Holden. Having drifted down to Greensboro in the early ’60s—a time when black activists were staging sit-ins at segregated lunch counters—he managed to get invited to a meeting of the Klan, and quickly established himself as an enthusiastic recruit. In one career-building episode, he took an armed joy ride through a poor black neighborhood that he peppered with rifle fire.

Dawson, however, blamed the KKK for letting him get sentenced to nine months in jail after he was convicted of assault with intent to kill for the joy ride. He was still bitter when an FBI agent approached him at a coffee shop after he got out in 1969, and offered to pay him $25 every time he told the Bureau about a Klan meeting. Dawson shook hands on the deal.

His time with the FBI ended the way most of his relationships did—unhappily. But Dawson resumed his double life a few weeks after Covington’s barbecue, when leaflets began appearing around Greensboro that announced a “Death to the Klan” march. The posters were the work of a group called the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO), which was filled with professionals who had elite-school degrees, identified as Maoists, and used revolutionary rhetoric to match. They had attempted to organize local textile workers, then tried direct action by taking part in the anti-KKK protest at China Grove. Now, they were itching for another, more visible confrontation with the Klan.

The leftists had plausible reasons for choosing to organize and demonstrate in North Carolina. At the end of the ’70s, the state ranked 49th in the U.S. in blue-collar wages and dead last in the percentage of workers who were unionized. But neither Duke educations nor medical training nor Maoist ideology prepared them to comprehend the culture of electricians, loggers or sheet-metal workers—jobs held by some of the men who would ride the caravan into Greensboro—beyond seeing them as either recruitable proletarians or irredeemable racists. The communists used language even more incendiary than the words on their flyers. On October 11, for instance, they issued a press release saying the KKK “must be physically beaten back, eradicated, exterminated, wiped off the face of the earth.” And they took exactly the wrong message from China Grove: that the Klan would be too cowardly to mount any resistance to them.

Instead, WVO’s leaflet lit a flame under Griffin and the Klan. It also alarmed the police in Greensboro. Soon, a detective who knew Dawson’s FBI past was talking with him about disrupting local meetings of communists, which made perfect sense. After all, the KKK rated communists about the same as black people. But Dawson had another angle, too: He could help the police investigate the Klan. With a highly-developed sense of grievance that often left him feeling under-appreciated and under-used, he saw a chance to become the one who was pulling the strings—both as an informant and as an instigator—as confrontations heated up.

On Saturday, October 20, when Griffin marched his Invisible Empire through the fairgrounds in Lincoln County, about 100 miles southwest of Greensboro, and told a crowd of 150 that if they cared about their children, they would “kill a hundred niggers and leave them dead in the street.” At a members-only meeting afterward, he introduced Dawson to talk about the planned WVO march. Towering over the 5-foot-6 Griffin, Dawson started out by warning that the communists were recruiting busloads of black college students to flood into Greensboro. Asked whether it would be a good idea to bring guns, he demurred. “I’m not your father,” he replied. “But if you carry a gun, you better have damned bond money.”

The vote among those in the audience was unanimous: They’d go to Greensboro to make their presence felt. The following weekend, as word spread, white supremacist groups met in at least three different locations around North Carolina and agreed to head there, too.

Dawson earned $50 by telling the Greensboro PD about the October 20 meeting. And he let them know Griffin was planning to come to town and looking for allies. But Dawson neglected to mention his own starring role, or the fact he subsequently drove around Morningside Homes in his Cadillac late at night, pasting leaflets over the “Death to the Klan!” posters. His replacements featured a dark figure hanging from a noose and the phrase, “It’s time for some old-fashioned American Justice.”

The Nazi camp, meanwhile, was getting just as frothy. At a November 1 event that Covington staged for the media in the garage of a sheet-metal worker named Roland Wayne Wood, a dozen of his recruits mugged through a made-for-TV roast of the disgraced China Grove wizard, Joe Grady.

Once the cameras departed, the united racists got down to the business of how they planned to crash the communists’ party in Greensboro. One suggested throwing eggs. Another went further, saying he had a pipe bomb that would be effective if thrown into a crowd. At 11:00 p.m., the group gathered around a television to watch themselves on the local news, only to become infuriated when a press conference held by the WVO’s members got more airtime. As the screen showed one of the march leaders calling the KKK “scum,” Jerry Paul Smith, the Klansman with the pipe bomb, took his gun and pointed it at the TV.

Police reports would later quote Wood as saying that he heard Smith mutter, “Kill the communist.”

***

On the morning of November 3,Dawson called his Greensboro Police contact to say that three dozen supremacists from around the state, including Virgil Griffin, were assembling at a house owned by one of Dawson’s Klan pals, a few miles from the Morningside Homes march site.

A little later, Dawson called again to warn that the place was chock full of firearms. But that information never made its way to the shift commander, who wrapped up a daily briefing at about 10:30 that morning by reminding his men the parade permit listed a start time of noon. The officers could get breakfast, he said, so long as they were on the route by 11:30.

As the Klansmen and Nazis made their way along Interstate 85 into Greensboro, a Greensboro Police detective spotted the caravan and called in to ask if tactical units were in place. His supervisor, showing no special concern, replied that there was still “another fourteen minutes by my watch” for breakfast.

The leftists planned to line up their crew at 11:00, then begin marching at noon. But at 11:22, a frightening transmission came over a CB radio: Klansmen were talking about closing in. Before the protesters could react, cars with Confederate-flag license plates began approaching. There were no cops in sight.

Dawson, who was leading the convoy, would later tell police and reporters that he merely wanted to put a scare into the Maoists before driving on to the spot at the shopping center where the march would end. It was Dawson who yelled, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ’em!”

But then Griffin’s white LTD screeched and swerved, nearly hitting a marcher. The caravan came to a stop. The communists went from singing to swinging, banging their placards on the cars. Members of the convoy poured out, punching through the melee, grabbing weapons. Dawson told his driver to get the hell out of there—and since they were in the first car of the caravan, they were able to split.

The WVO had packed a few weapons, but were seriously outgunned. One of the WVO leaders, a physician named Jim Waller, lunged for a 12-gauge shotgun he’d stashed in a car, but a Klansman flew toward him before he could fire. The two rolled in the grass, fighting nose-to-nose over the weapon until others started piling on top of them and the pump mechanism snapped. Waller screamed as the pump-action crushed the bones in his shooting hand.

Amidst the chaos, other white supremacists lined up their shots. A Nazi named Jack Fowler opened the trunk of a blue Ford Fairlane and, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, handed out rifles and shotguns. David Matthews, from Griffin’s Klan, stood behind the door of a van and nailed his first target, a bookish pediatrician named Mike Nathan. Then Matthews took down an organizer named Jim Wrenn, who was crawling on his belly. Bill Sampson, a former Harvard Divinity student, tried to give Wrenn rifle cover but took two fatal shots in the heart.

Roland Wayne Wood observed Waller writhing from his crushed hand. Coolly aiming his shotgun, the Nazi delivered a blast into the physician’s right side. Matthews, the Klan member, finished the job with another blast into Waller’s back.

The convoy sped away, with Matthews’ van the last to leave the scene. Climbing aboard, Matthews let the rest of squad know: “I got three of ’em.” Moments later, police intercepted the van, but didn’t get to Morningside Homes until the shooting was over.

***

Eighty-eight seconds of gunfirein Greensboro marked the worst violence in the South since the 1960s. And for the men who shot their enemies dead, November 3, 1979, was just the beginning of a new era of notoriety and collaboration. The botched trials and political response that followed ensured that white nationalism would grow to become more dangerous than ever today.

The legal system took three whacks at the Greensboro conspirators. First, police rounded up 14 Klansmen and Nazis, and the state of North Carolina charged most of them with first-degree murder and felony riot. Prosecutors lined up eyewitnesses, videotapes, weapons and FBI ballistics analysis. But they couldn’t convince the surviving revolutionaries—who were stubbornly convinced the cops had conspired to leave them unprotected—to cooperate.

At trial, the Klansmen and Nazis wrapped themselves in the American flag and argued self-defense. “They acted like men to aid someone in distress,” Wood’s lawyer claimed. “They would not have been worthy of anyone’s respect if they had done otherwise.” He added that his client just wanted to sing, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

On November 17, 1980, an all-white jury found the Klansmen and Nazis not guilty. “Anytime you defeat communism,” said Jerry Pridmore, one of the men acquitted, “it’s a victory for America.”

The U.S. Justice Department then charged nine Klansmen and Nazis, this time including Griffin and Dawson, with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the Greensboro victims. In April 1984, the federal jury, also all-white, refused to conclude the defendants had violated the law by acting out of racial rather than political hatred. It too delivered not-guilty verdicts across the board.

Finally, the victims filed a $48-million lawsuit against 87 defendants, including the city of Greensboro, the state of North Carolina, the Justice Department and the FBI. Wood, now on trial for the third time, felt confident enough to give a Nazi salute when sworn to testify.

In June 1985, the civil jury delivered a landmark yet twisted verdict: They found eight defendants liable for wrongful death: Dawson, five Klan and Nazi shooters, the Greensboro police detective who received advance word about the attack from Dawson and the lieutenant who was the GPD event commander at the massacre. But the jury applied that decision only in the case of Michael Nathan, the one murder victim who wasn’t a WVO member at the time of the shootings. To avoid appeals, the city of Greensboro settled for $351,000, sending a check to Nathan’s widow, who split it among the survivors.

Strike three.

The supremacists who emerged from the Greensboro trials understood they were free. Free not just to stay out of prison, or to keep burning rags and kvetching about the price of jackboots. Free to work together to stockpile weapons, terrorize neighborhoods and commit violence up to and including murder—so long as their opponents were communists.

“The Klan and Nazis felt emboldened,” says Patricia Clark, a veteran Klan watcher who served on the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which local citizens set up in the mid-2000s to investigate the massacre. “They thought they won the fight.”

By 1980, membership in Klan-Nazi fusion groups began to outnumber that of old-school Klans. And as horizons of hate broadened and merged, alliances deepened around the country. As just one example, four months after Greensboro, the California Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rallied in the city of Oceanside and beat counter-protesters with baseball bats. The marchers brayed a version of “Sixteen Tons,” the old coal-mining song. Their rewritten lyrics celebrated the Greensboro killings and ended, “If the Nazis don’t get you, a Klansman will.”

The increasing unity of far-right factions was more than tactical. By transfusing “blood and soil” into American racism, it led to what historian John Drabble called in a 2007 study “the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan.” That was bad news for hustlers like Eddie Dawson. Dawson managed to dodge Klan retribution for informing. But he soon found it much harder to profit from playing different extremists against one another. Greensboro turned Dawson into a relic—and the hardening ideology of right-wing terror networks that followed made them harder for the FBI to penetrate.

Meanwhile, new doors swung wide open for fanatics like Frazier Glenn Miller, a Covington acolyte and former Green Beret who rode in the Greensboro caravan. Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980. And by merging Klan and Nazi symbolism while instilling paramilitary discipline in his followers, he quickly built the strongest white-power group in the state.

As an emboldened white-power movement spread, Miller connected its dots. The Greensboro veteran held public marches, harassed local black residents and amassed huge caches of explosives. In 1987, he issued a revolutionary “Declaration of War” filled with calls for assassinations. He coordinated with The Order, a violent extremist group inspired byThe Turner Diaries. And he sought allies through voluminous racist literature and eventually on the Internet, where he extolled the mass shooting by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. Miller returned to racist murder in 2014, when he targeted a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kansas, and killed three people. That landed him on death row, where he sits today.

Greensboro’s aftershocks held their most important lessons for mainstream opportunists. By the end of the 1970s, southern nationalists had spent more than a decade trying to re-code their racism to make it more palatable. As master political consultant Lee Atwater put it: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights.”

Republican politicians soon realized they could go even farther. After Greensboro, it became clear that, as historian Kathleen Belew has written, extremists “increasingly used anticommunism as an alibi for racial violence.” And by targeting the far right’s dual paranoias—federal authority and socialism—GOP operatives were able to harness its nativism while hanging onto the votes of establishment conservatives.

Over the next 30 years, Republicans racked up spectacular gains in state legislative seats, governorships and U.S. Senate elections across the South by hammering cultural issues that the far right recognized as approving winks. A decade after Greensboro, establishment candidates were already posing in front of rebel flags and openly courting “white heritage” groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The GOP advanced most in counties where the Klan had been active in the ’60s, according to a 2014 study by political scientists from Notre Dame, Brandeis and Yale.

During the administration of President Barack Obama, the new generation of conservative politicians had the extremists’ backs. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report forecasting a rise in racist violence. Republicans objected so vociferously that DHS rescinded the projection and silenced its domestic terrorism unit. Mike Pompeo, then a congressman from Kansas, said it was “dangerous” to track homegrown violence.

By that point it was hard to tell who was co-opting whom on the right. Republicans were playing to the fringe without worrying where their most incitable elements might channel their anger.

And you know what happened next: Jonah turned the whale inside out. Donald Trump’s bald invocations of racial and working-class grievances made him a hero to the ultras; “MAGA” is the most common word in Twitter user profiles among members of the alt-right, according to a study by J.M Berger of the research network VOX-Pol. From Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso, right-wing attacks have surged. The latest evidence: The FBI made almost 100 arrests related to domestic terrorism by July of this year, more than in all of 2018, according to agency director Christopher Wray, who told Congress the majority of cases involved “white supremacist violence.”

In Greensboro, private citizens tried to find a way forward by empaneling a Truth & Reconciliation Commission—the first in U.S. history. But today’s political landscape, where the language and resentments of white nationalism have taken deeper root than ever, raises the question: What happens when there is no reconciliation in truth?

Twenty-six years after the massacre, Virgil Griffin surprised everyone at the Greensboro Commission by showing up and taking questions.

Asked why no Klansman was killed in the shootings, he answered: “Maybe God guided the bullets.”

#Alt-Right #Foreign #Politics #Spawned

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currentbdnews · 6 years

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https://ift.tt/2kmUBVA. senator, ex-presidential candidate John McCain has diedhttps://ift.tt/eA8V8J U.S. senator, ex-presidential candidate John McCain has died For update news visit All Bd Newspaper

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp with jut-jawed defiance and later turned his rebellious streak into a 35-year political career that took him to Congress and the Republican presidential nomination, died Saturday after battling brain cancer for more than a year. He was 81.

McCain, with his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, was a fearless and outspoken voice on policy and politics to the end, unswerving in his defence of democratic values and unflinching in his criticism of his fellow Republican, President Donald Trump. He was elected to the Senate from Arizona six times but twice thwarted in seeking the presidency.

An upstart presidential bid in 2000 didn’t last long. Eight years later, he fought back from the brink of defeat to win the GOP nomination, only to be overpowered by Democrat Barack Obama. McCain chose a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate in that race, and turned Sarah Palin into a national political figure.

I love you forever – my beloved father @SenJohnMcCain pic.twitter.com/Y50tVQvlVe

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) August 26, 2018

After losing to Obama in an electoral landslide, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign in which his reputation as a maverick had faded. In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, McCain energetically advanced his ideas and punched back hard at critics — Trump not least among them.

The scion of a decorated military family, McCain embraced his role as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, pushing for aggressive U.S. military intervention overseas and eager to contribute to “defeating the forces of radical Islam that want to destroy America.”

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: “That I made a major contribution to the defence of the nation.”

Sen. John McCain stops cancer treatment as remarkable life nears end

One dramatic vote he cast in the twilight of his career in 2017 will not soon be forgotten, either: As the decisive “no” on Senate GOP legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, McCain became the unlikely saviour of Obama’s trademark legislative achievement.

Taking a long look back in his valedictory memoir, “The Restless Wave,” McCain wrote of the world he inhabited: “I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace. … I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.”

Throughout his long tenure in Congress, McCain played his role with trademark verve, at one hearing dismissing a protester by calling out, “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”

But it was just as notable when he held his sharp tongue, in service of a party or political gain.

Most remarkably, he stuck by Trump as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee even when Trump questioned his status as a war hero by saying: “I like people who weren’t captured.” McCain declared the comment offensive to veterans, but urged the men “put it behind us and move forward.”

His breaking point with Trump was the release a month before the election of a lewd audio in which Trump said he could kiss and grab women. McCain withdrew his support and said he’d write in “some good conservative Republican who’s qualified to be president.”

By the time McCain cast his vote against the GOP health bill, six months into Trump’s presidency, the two men were openly at odds. Trump railed against McCain publicly over the vote, and McCain remarked that he no longer listened to what Trump had to say because “there’s no point in it.”

By then, McCain had disclosed his brain cancer diagnosis and returned to Arizona to seek treatment. His vote to kill the GOP’s years-long Obamacare repeal drive — an issue McCain himself had campaigned on — came not long after the diagnosis, a surprising capstone to his legislative career.

In his final months, McCain did not go quietly, frequently jabbing at Trump and his policies from the remove of his Hidden Valley family retreat in Arizona. He opposed the president’s nominee for CIA director because of her past role in overseeing torture, scolded Trump for alienating U.S. allies at an international summit, labeled the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy “an affront to the decency of the American people” and denounced the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki as a “tragic mistake” in which the president put on “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”

On Aug. 13, Trump signed into law a $716 billion defence policy bill named in honour of the senator. Trump signed the John S. McCain National Defence Authorization Act in a ceremony at a military base in New York — without one mention of McCain.

John Sidney McCain III was born in 1936 in the Panana Canal zone, where his father was stationed in the military.

He followed his father and grandfather, the Navy’s first father-and-son set of four-star admirals, to the Naval Academy, where he enrolled in what he described a “four-year course of insubordination and rebellion.” His family yawned at the performance. A predilection for what McCain described as “quick tempers, adventurous spirits, and love for the country’s uniform” was encoded in his family DNA.

On October 1967, McCain was on his 23rd bombing round over North Vietnam when he was shot out of the sky and taken prisoner.

Year upon year of solitary confinement, deprivation, beatings and other acts of torture left McCain so despairing that at one point he weakly attempted suicide. But he also later wrote that his captors had spared him the worst of the abuse inflicted on POWs because his father was a famous admiral. “I knew that my father’s identity was directly related to my survival,” he wrote in one of his books.

When McCain’s Vietnamese captors offered him early release as a propaganda ploy, McCain refused to play along, insisting that those captured first should be the first set free.

In his darkest hour in Vietnam, McCain’s will had been broken and he signed a confession that said, “I am a black criminal and I have performed deeds of an air pirate.”

Even then, though, McCain refused to make an audio recording of his confession and used stilted written language to signal he had signed it under duress. And, to the end of his captivity, he continued to exasperate his captors with his defiance.

Throughout, McCain played to the bleachers, shouting obscenities at guards to bolster the spirits of fellow captives. Appointed by the POWs to act as camp entertainment officer, chaplain and communications chief, McCain imparted comic relief, literary tutorials, news of the day, even religious sustenance.

Bud Day, a former cellmate and Medal of Honor winner, said McCain’s POW experience “took some great iron and turned him into steel.”

McCain returned home from his years as a POW on crutches and never regained full mobility in his arms and leg.

He once said he’d “never known a prisoner of war who felt he could fully explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it.” Still he described the time as formative and “a bit of a turning point in me appreciating the value of serving a cause greater than your self-interest.”

But it did not tame his wild side, and his first marriage, to Carol Shepp, was a casualty of what he called “my greatest moral failing.” The marriage to Shepp, who had been in a crippling car accident while McCain was imprisoned, ended amiably. McCain admitted the breakup was caused by “my own selfishness and immaturity.”

One month after his divorce, McCain in 1981 married Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor in Arizona.

In one day, McCain signed his Navy discharge papers and flew west with his new wife to a new life. By 1982, he’d been elected to the House and four years later to an open Senate seat. He and Cindy had four children, to add to three from his first marriage. Their youngest was adopted from Bangladesh.

McCain cultivated a conservative voting record and a reputation as a tightwad with taxpayer dollars. But just months into his Senate career, he made what he called “the worst mistake” of his life. He participated in two meetings with bank regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, a friend, campaign contributor and savings and loan financier later convicted of securities fraud.

As the industry collapsed, McCain was tagged as one of the Keating Five — senators who, to varying degrees, were accused of trying to get regulators to ease up on Keating. McCain was cited by the Senate Ethics Committee for “poor judgment.”

To have his honour questioned, he said, was in some ways worse than the torture he endured in Vietnam.

In the 1990s, McCain shouldered another wrenching issue, the long effort to account for American soldiers still missing from the war and to normalize relations with Vietnam.

“People don’t remember how ugly the POW-MIA issue was,” former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey, a fellow Vietnam veteran, later recalled in crediting McCain for standing up to significant opposition. “I heard people scream in his face, holding him responsible for the deaths of POWs.”

Over a xx-year Senate tenure (took office 1987), McCain became a standard-bearer for reforming campaign donations. He denounced pork-barrel spending for legislators’ pet projects and cultivated a reputation as a deficit hawk and an independent voice. His experience as a POW made him a leading voice against the use of torture. He achieved his biggest legislative successes when making alliances with Democrats.

But faced with a tough GOP challenge for his Senate seat in 2010, McCain disowned chapters in his past and turned to the right on a number of hot-button issues, including gays in the military and climate change. And when the Supreme Court in 2010 overturned the campaign finance restrictions that he’d work so hard to enact, McCain seemed resigned.

“It is what it is,” he said.

After surviving that election, though, McCain took on conservatives in his party over the federal debt and Democrats over foreign policy. McCain never softened on his opposition to the U.S. use of torture, even in the recalibrations of the post-9-11 world. When the Senate in 2014 released a report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques at secret overseas facilities after the 9-11 attacks, McCain said the issue wasn’t “about our enemies. It’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.”

During his final years in the Senate, McCain was perhaps the loudest advocate for U.S. military involvement overseas – in Iraq, Syria, Libya and more. That often made him a critic of first Obama and then Trump, and placed him further out of step with the growing isolationism within the GOP.

In October 2017, McCain unleashed some his most blistering criticism of Trump’s “America first” foreign policy approach — without mentioning the president by name — in describing a “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.”

Few politicians matched McCain’s success as an author. His 1999 release “Faith Of My Fathers” was a million seller that was highly praised and helped launch his run for president in 2000. His most recent bestseller and planned farewell, “The Restless Wave,” came out in May 2018.

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marilynngmesalo · 6 years

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U.S. senator, ex-presidential candidate John McCain has died

U.S. senator, ex-presidential candidate John McCain has died https://ift.tt/eA8V8J U.S. senator, ex-presidential candidate John McCain has died

I love you forever – my beloved father @SenJohnMcCain pic.twitter.com/Y50tVQvlVe

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) August 26, 2018

Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: “That I made a major contribution to the defence of the nation.”

Sen. John McCain stops cancer treatment as remarkable life nears end

Throughout his long tenure in Congress, McCain played his role with trademark verve, at one hearing dismissing a protester by calling out, “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”

But it was just as notable when he held his sharp tongue, in service of a party or political gain.

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