Tag: nazis

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Nazi-so Proud Boys — In the wake of Kenosha

Nazi-so Proud Boys

In the wake of Kenosha

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 20th, 2021

Yesterday, in the wake of the Rittenhouse verdict, NPR reported, “In another channel, a member [of the Proud Boys] stated that political violence must continue. “The left wont stop until their bodied [sic] get stacked up like cord wood,” he wrote.

The good news is he won’t be posting that particular threat for another month now. The Proud Boys have a hard and fast (so to speak) rule: “[N]o heterosexual brother of the Fraternity shall masturbate more than one time in any calendar month.” He’s shot his wad and can go have a nice lie-down now.

A lot of people are worried that the fool judge in Kenosha whose biased antics led to this miscarriage of justice has in effect legitimized vigilante murder. Rittenhouse himself is a poster boy for why vigilantism is an incredibly stupid idea, Batman notwithstanding. He’s young, stupid, impetuous, and vicious. He deliberately took a weapon designed to murder into a protest that was none of his concern, looking for trouble, and he found it. Two people dead, one seriously injured—the only significant casualties in the “trouble” he supposedly was there to stop.

The judge disgraced himself, as did the police who let the heavily armed punk walk away after slaughtering two people. Back in the 60s and 70s, we called cops like that “pigs” and we had less egregious grounds to do so. Cops may have been vicious and overbearing in those days, but at least they didn’t get pet wannabee Nazis to go out and do their shooting for them. They were bastards, some of them, but they weren’t cowards. The Kenosha pork chops lived up to their billing the evening after the verdict: “A woman was taken into custody by police and fined $767.50 on Friday night after writing an anti-racist message in chalk on the steps of the courthouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin.” Ah, Kenosha in winter! Everything is so white! One of the cops took it personally, radioing in that the woman had called the cops cowards. Well, perhaps she had. Still not illegal.

And yes, “the left” (defined in this case as people who aren’t Nazis or members of the KKK) will be looking over their shoulders while at demonstrations, wondering when the next juvenile hero of the Reich will be aiming from under a sewer lid or from behind police vehicles,

Here’s how I fear it’s going to play out. The Proud Boys and other similar outfits will show up heavily armed at any and all protests, even ones petitioning for something like requesting a re-vote by the town council on closing the public library. You know—leftist shit like that. The bumblebees of the extreme right will brandish their weapons and shout threats, hoping to scare the protesters into running away. Most won’t, because they have self respect and respect for their Constitutional Rights. Some have the insight required to realize that armed kooks like these are more likely to fire on you if you’re running away. To them, it isn’t crowd control, it’s a hunt, and fleeing targets raise the predator instinct.

Tensions will rise. The Proud Boys need to show the world they mean business. Protesters will start to mock them. Some may even wear targets on their jackets.

Inevitably, someone will get shot. It may be deliberate, or it may be an accident. I would give even odds either way. Chaos will ensure. Depending on where it happens and the quality of the local police force, they will either move in and prevent more deaths, or make the situation even worse, like the Kenosha pigs did. Again, even odds.

Protests will be widespread after that. Anything up to and including a national strike, and violent attacks against headquarters of the various hate groups. Republicans, already deeply ensnared in Trump’s Nazi net, will support the hate groups with varying degrees of enthusiasm. It’s entirely possible that Paul Gosar will get his way and public officials will start being assassinated. And sorry, Paul, it won’t just be Democrats: by the time we’ve reached this stage, non-Nazis will have armed themselves.

The nature of the Proud Boys and their like will entice normally quite peaceful people to take up arms. There’s a lesson I was taught firmly as a schoolboy in London and which I believe to this day: The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. If the Proud Boys want to instigate a war, they will be fighting the vast majority of the American people, and if the entire nest is wiped out, I’ll shed no tears.

But unfortunately, this war would be one with no borders, no lines, a nationwide street rumble with weapons of mass destruction. It would be a massive bloodletting, and there would be no real victory even if the far right were effectively wiped out, because the costs would exceed the benefit in every way imaginable. America still has emotional scars from the last civil war; this would be far worse.

So everyone, chill the fuck out. Proud Boys, back the fuck off. You can’t win this one, not by open violence against Americans exercising their rights.

Watch how this plays out. This is more along the lines of what I think, rather than what I fear. I’m sure that idiot judge is reading the papers now and hopefully gaining a realization of what he has wrought. As for Rittenhouse, it’s not going to go well for him, because being the mascot for insane right wing thugs doesn’t go well. Two moral and intellectual Titans of the House, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, are going to literally arm-wrestle over which one will invite Rittenhouse to be an intern for him. Gaetz must be tired of little girls, and Gosar likes them crazy. Would you want to intern for either of those two?

Rittenhouse will probably end up on a slow, desperate downward spiral in life like George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin, wound up on. When last heard from after a long string of incidents bordering on scandals and showing increasingly sleazy behavior, he’s now desperately suing the Martin family, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg for, I don’t know, being mean to him or something. $365 million in all. Care to bet on his chances of winning? He doesn’t even have the same lawyer who got him to skate on the Martin shooting—that guy’s being charged with interfering in a child rape case. Stay classy, y’all!

We are going to have more vigilantism, simply because America has far too many nuts with guns. But it will be part of the fantastic background hum of school shooting, mass murders at concerts and movies, and the general wide slaughter of people that is the gun manufacturer’s gift to America.

No civil war. No race war. No gun battles in every city and town.

Provided enough people keep their head. Because there is one thing that is better than a dead Nazi, and that’s a live society.

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What the hell is wrong with cops? — Police are losing support—deservedly

September 14th 2020

The other day, two sheriff’s deputies were gunned down in Compton, apparently while just sitting peaceably in their vehicle. Both are in critical condition. One was a rookie, the other a mother of a six year old. A heinous crime by any standard.

A couple of hours later, the Sheriff’s Department tweeted: “To the protesters blocking the entrance & exit of the HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOM yelling ‘We hope they die’ referring to 2 LA Sheriff’s ambushed today in #Compton: DO NOT BLOCK EMERGENCY ENTRIES & EXITS TO THE HOSPITAL. People’s lives are at stake when ambulances can’t get through,” It was a horrific accusation, utterly appalling, and it stirred up the most volatile and stupid right winger in the country, who tweeted from the West Wing, “Animals that must be hit hard!”

Presumably that would be the residents of Compton. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess who Trump is calling animals, and his Central Park Five behavior makes it clear he doesn’t care which animals are guilty of what, just so long as he can get a few of them executed.

There’s just one problem. The crowd at the ER, the chanting, blocking emergency vehicles—none of that happened. There were cameras there. None of it occurred. The Sheriff’s Department lied. They invented it, in hopes presumably of raising some sympathy for themselves and murderous rage against people in Compton.

It’s the sort of behavior you expect from Nazis, not Police.

Horrific fires have slashed through much of the west, destroying at least a half a dozen towns and killing at least 35 people. The fires are still burning: where I live the air quality is frightening, and a neighbor made the unnerving observation that if a fire broke out nearby, the smoke would hide it.

According to the Daily Beast, “A sheriff’s deputy in Clackamas County, Oregon, was suspended Saturday after video showed him propagating baseless rumors that anti-fascist activists had started the wildfires now devastating the state.

“Video shows the deputy—an unidentified bald man calling himself Mark—saying, “Antifa motherf–kers are out causing hell, and there’s a lot of lives at stake and there’s a lot of people’s property at stake because these guys got some vendetta.” He also warns of “antifa or other crazy left-wing people” attacking firefighters.”

No, Antifa isn’t starting the fires, and there’s no sane reason to assume they are. No firefighters were attacked. The conspiracy theory came from Qanon, who apparently base it on nothing more than the fact that the present fire siege has largely spared Western Canada, which apparently doesn’t have a problem with fascists, and thus no need for antifa. But Qanon are utter filth who don’t mind using a massive tragedy for political gain.

And they have police broadcasting this filth because the police want to believe this sort of filth. Liberals must die!

It’s the sort of behavior you expect from Nazis, not Police.

In Phoenix Arizona, a fantastically cruel arrest happened in August of last year, just now making the news due to a following lawsuit. According the the Guardian, “Roniah Trotter, 17, said a policeman grabbed her and held her face down on the sidewalk while trying to arrest her, placing his knee on her back. By the time officers allowed her to get off the ground, she had suffered second-degree burns across her shoulder and arm, her medical records show. There were record-breaking 113F (45C) temperatures that day.”

She suffered permanent scars to her face. She never was charged, apparently because all she was guilty of was being black in the proximity of a minor disturbance. Scarred for life. For no reason at all.

It’s the sort of behavior you expect from Nazis, not Police.

There are a lot of reasons why, in a time when public criticism of police tactics is growing, police are responding in exactly the wrong way. Their jobs are more dangerous, due not only to the increasing deprivation of the American people, but to the proliferation of gun nuts and the rise of Trumpian insanity, coalescing around Qanon, which is a sort of labor union for mental cases.

But part of it is the “Thin Blue Line” mentality which protects bent and twisted cops. Not just corrupt cops, but sick motherfuckers who want to follow in the footsteps of Hitler.

Former neo-Nazi Frank Meeink is on record saying, “I know that there are neo-Nazis who I used to run with who are now cops,” he told The Daily Beast. “And that’s just in my crew. Imagine how many neo-Nazis and white nationalists have been becoming cops? Three of the people in my crew alone became cops.”

The FBI has for some time been warning of infiltration by white supremacists into police forces all across the country. A lot of them hide their extremist leaning until they are vested and nearly impossible to fire, coddled by police unions who will stop at nothing to protect police from the public.

We know what sort of behavior to expect from Nazis. Anyone who thinks Hitler’s animus was aimed solely at Jews needs to read the book “A New Order”–the one Trump famously kept by his bedside for years. Hitler envisioned eliminating all but the 5% of humanity he adjudged to be “pure blooded” Further, even the right DNA wouldn’t protect you if he didn’t like your politics. German citizens who were socialists, intellectuals, communists and trade unionists were the first to be herded into the camps.

Nazis are Nazis are Nazis. They haven’t changed.

Imagine getting pulled over by some Nazi Pig in a cop costume for failing to come to a complete stop. That’s all you’ve done wrong. But he’s noticed your Bernie Sanders bumper sticker, and in his mind, you’re already “resisting arrest” and “reaching for a knife.”

It’s the sort of behavior we expect from Nazis.

It should never be the sort of behavior we expect from Police.

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It Can’t Happen Here — Of Course It Can. It Just Did.

By on Monday, June 18, 2018

June 18th 2018

Is there anyone reading this who approves of taking children from undocumented immigrants and throwing them in concentration camps? If so, please stop reading now, and go throw yourself into the intake of a running jet engine, or try flossing with a running chainsaw. I don’t much care what happens to you, as long as I don’t have to put up with you. Go. Now.

“It Can’t Happen Here” is, of course, the title of a 1935 satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis. It was a time of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, when American plutocrats openly admired fascism and strove to push America in the same direction as Germany and Italy. Both the Presidents Bush and Trump are descendants of the 1930s proto-Nazis who thought Hitler offered a better way.

It was also a time when Americans viewed themselves as independent and freer than any people on the face of the Earth* (well, the 35% of Americans who could own property if they wanted, eat at any restaurant, or run for office). It was a time when the notion that big business was a friend to Americans and would treat them fairly was rapidly losing ground, and both fascism and communism were gaining ground amongst working Americans with promises of decent income and respect.

Lewis understood that in times of deep national crisis, Americans could be their own worst enemy, more than willing, desperate to follow the siren songs of every demagogue that came down the path. And of course, quite a few did.

As horrible as the current situation is, I do see one ray of hope. I’ve never seen the American public so outraged, and it includes segments of the population that I believed had simply abandoned all ethics and decency in order to follow Trump. Wide swatches of the fundamentalist Christian movement, which had just last month been 80% pro-Trump, are not only breaking with Trump over the incredible cruelty of his immigration policy. Two governors, in Massachusetts and Colorado, have respectively pulled their National Guard or mandated they not participate in the ‘jail the children’ movement. Every single living first lady, including Melania, have condemned this.

Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, America’s tag-team of five-and-dime fascists, openly chortled over how effective truly vicious cruelty could be in dealing with the relatively trivial problem of immigrants sneaking in. Jeff Sessions, America’s most despicable Southern-fried pixie, described the Trump policy as “zero-tolerance policy that leads to the high rate of family separations as a method to deter immigrants.”

Steal their children and throw them in the camps. His answer to the immigration problem is to turn American into a place no decent, sane person would ever want to visit. It’s an effective policy; immigration to Germany plummeted in the late 30s.

Trump tried to play all sides of the issue, first declaring that throwing children in concentration camps would continue until he got his silly wall. Then he said it was a Democratic Law that was causing it, and his hands were tied. (Apparently he forgot that the policy—not law, policy—of jailing the kids began just six weeks ago). Most recently, he sent his forlorn flack, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen out to explain that America wasn’t throwing children in camps. They shipped the Gestapo head in all the way from New Orleans, where she presumably was setting fire to kittens, to fill in for Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who apparently couldn’t take another day of discussing the matter with the press.

Sanders is the most shameless and souless liar in America, and it would be nice to assume that she finally reached the bottom, ethically and spiritually. Hell, maybe she has. She wouldn’t be the first fundie this week to go, “Hey, Trump ain’t no Jesus! He’s a dirtbag!”

Trump today declared America would not become a “migrant camp.” Silly bastard doesn’t realize the United States have ALWAYS been a migrant camp. Nearly all of us are from somewhere else. Trump’s grandfather was from Germany, and opened a whore house in Canada. Then came to America to inflict his predatory capitalism on Americans. A fine family tradition.

I wonder how many members of the Trump administration have asked themselves, “Suppose it was my kids? How would I feel if they were forcibly taken from me, and tossed into a camp where they were not to be told how long they would be there, or if they would ever see their parents again? If the children cried, nobody could comfort them or even touch them. Apparently the administration isn’t even keeping track of what kids belong to what parents.  Have they discarded the notion that some of these kids might survive the camps?

An audiotape came out today that had one of the concentration camp guards mocking a childrenfor crying. Said guard sounds like someone who needs to be run over by a bus. Slowly. Repeatedly. While an orchestra plays. He can conduct, if he wants.

But Sanders probably just didn’t want to put up with those uppity reporters. I’m quite certain Trump is looking for internment facilities for the media, CNN in particular.

Or maybe she realized the Trump administration is doomed, and is just mailing it in now.

Doesn’t matter. Once she’s out of the White House, she’ll spend the rest of her life trying not to be recognized whenever she goes outside. That seems a reasonable fate.

Meanwhile, Trumpkins need to beware. Autocrats like Trump always end up turning on their own, and before America finally rids itself of him, he’ll have a fair bit of opportunity to do just that. Just ask Jeff Sessions. (OK, Sessions richly deserves abuse. But still).

Trumpkins, the next children Trump throws into the maw of his vicious Gulag monument to his ego might be yours. History makes that a near certainty. Especially if Americans wait too long, and this dissolute monster consolidates his power.

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