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Hitler Youth

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COMMENT: This soci­ety has been sow­ing the Nazi and fas­cist winds for a long time. Fail­ing to come to terms with the Nazi and fas­cist sym­pa­thies of Amer­i­can indus­tri­al­ists who financed Hitler, the incor­po­ra­tion of the Nazi SS into the CIA via the Gehlen org, and the incor­po­ra­tion of East­ern and Cen­tral Euro­pean SS-allied fas­cists into the GOP has borne its inevitable fruit.

Now it will be reap­ing the Nazi whirl­wind.

An extreme­ly pop­u­lar chil­dren’s lip-synch­ing app called Tik­Tok has incor­po­rat­ed mur­der­ous­ly racist invec­tive against peo­ple of col­or and Jews, in addi­tion to shar­ing overt­ly Nazi pro­pa­gan­da.

Even as offi­cial­dom and the media down­play or out­right dis­miss the Junior Prom pho­to from Bara­boo High School, we should expect things to become dra­mat­i­cal­ly worse.

Time grows short. Tik Tok!

1. “Tik­Tok Has a Nazi Prob­lem” by Joseph Cox; Vice Moth­er­board; 2/18/2018.

Users on mega pop­u­lar children’s lip-synch­ing app Tik­Tok are shar­ing calls for vio­lence against peo­ple of colour and Jews, as well as cre­at­ing and shar­ing neo-Nazi pro­pa­gan­da, Moth­er­board has found.

Some accounts ver­ba­tim read “kill all n*****,” “all jews must die,” and “killn******.” (The words are uncen­sored on the app, which is a sort of meld­ing of Vine and Insta­gram that allows users to cre­ate short videos synced to music.)

Moth­er­board found the con­tent on the Chi­nese-made app, which is used by hun­dreds of mil­lions peo­ple, many includ­ing teenagers and chil­dren in the Unit­ed States, with­in min­utes of start­ing a basic search.

“We’ve nev­er talked to Tik Tok, but clear­ly we need to,” Hei­di Beirich, direc­tor of the intel­li­gence project at the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (SPLC), told Moth­er­board in an email. “They need the site to be cleaned up—and now.”

The news sig­nals social media plat­forms’ con­tin­ued reck­on­ing with hate speech. But even with Face­book mis­han­dling its approach to white nation­al­ism, and Dis­cord pro­vid­ing a haven for seri­ous neo-Nazi groups, Tik­Tok is doing a par­tic­u­lar­ly bad job at mod­er­at­ing white suprema­cists on its plat­form.

The hate speech mate­r­i­al on Tik­Tok is var­ied. Some accounts sig­naled sup­port for Atom­waf­fen, a vio­lent neo-Nazi group linked to the mur­ders of sev­er­al Jew­ish peo­ple across the Unit­ed States. One account Moth­er­board found was called “Race War Now.” The user pro­file pho­to of anoth­er account was of an offen­sive car­i­ca­ture of a Jew­ish per­son, depict­ing a greedy rat.

One video con­tained a suc­ces­sion of users mak­ing Nazi salutes. Anoth­er video includ­ed the mes­sage, “I have a solu­tion; a final solu­tion,” refer­ring to the Holo­caust.

Hash­tags include 1488, a num­ber impor­tant to neo-Nazis, and Sieg Heil, the infa­mous Nazi slo­gan.

One Tik­Tok video Moth­er­board found, which encour­ages view­ers to read Siege, a book pop­u­lar with neo-Nazis, includ­ed the hash­tag #FreeDy­lan­nRoof. Roof was giv­en nine con­sec­u­tive life sen­tences for the mas­sacre of nine African Amer­i­cans at the his­tor­i­cal­ly Black Emanuel African Methodist Epis­co­pal Church in Charleston, South Car­oli­na in 2015.

“It’s just out­ra­geous and dan­ger­ous, giv­en how many young peo­ple, like Dylann Roof, have been rad­i­cal­ized online and then shift­ed to vio­lence,” Beirich said.

Tik­Tok merged with the app Musical.ly in August, after ByteDance pur­chased the lat­ter in 2017. The app has gar­nered wide praise both from its army of users and media out­lets; the New York Times recent­ly described Tik­Tok as “the only good app,” and the Verge called it “joy­ful.”

When con­tact­ed by Moth­er­board, Tik­Tok did not pro­vide a state­ment in time for pub­li­ca­tion.

Beirich said what Moth­er­board found “is hor­ri­fy­ing. That is espe­cial­ly true since this ser­vice tar­gets chil­dren and I can’t think of worse things to be putting in front of them.” Some of the peo­ple in and shar­ing the offen­sive videos appear to be chil­dren. Some of the accounts say that the posts are a “joke” or “iron­ic,” but as Moth­er­board has report­ed mul­ti­ple times, these “jokes” can and do rad­i­cal­ize real peo­ple and nonethe­less harm already mar­gin­al­ized groups.

Car­o­line Sin­ders, research fel­low with Dig­i­tal HKS, who has stud­ied online extrem­ism, told Moth­er­board in an online chat, “I don’t think it mat­ters even if some­thing is a humor­ous joke in meme cul­ture, I think it’s impor­tant to a cen­ter a platform’s poli­cies on harass­ment and hate speech.”

“‘killallni****s’ isn’t a joke; I would argue it is a form of hate speech,” she added.

Some accounts do com­plain about being report­ed by oth­er users. One user who com­plained as such host­ed a video of some­one in a Klu-Klux Klan style cloaks.

At the time of writ­ing, TikTok’s terms of use state that “Tik­Tok is an inclu­sive com­mu­ni­ty. It is not ok to attack or incite vio­lence against oth­er users.”

Moth­er­board has pre­vi­ous­ly found oth­er con­tent mod­er­a­tion issues with Tik­Tok. Ear­li­er this month, Moth­er­board found peo­ple were solic­it­ing nude images of young users on the plat­form.

ByteDance recent­ly said it would increase the num­ber of con­tent mod­er­a­tors on Tik­Tok from 6,000 to 10,000 peo­ple.

Cor­rec­tion: This arti­cle pre­vi­ous­ly said Tik­Tok merged with an app called Music.ly. The cor­rect name is Musical.ly. Moth­er­board regrets the error.

2.   “Wis­con­sin School­boys in Nazi Salute Pho­to ‘Shout­ed White Pow­er after Trump Elect­ed’, For­mer Stu­dent Claims” by Tom Embury-Den­nis [The Inde­pen­dent]Yahoo News; 11/13/2018.

For­mer stu­dents at a Wis­con­sin school caught up in a Nazi salute storm have spo­ken out about a trou­bled his­to­ry of racism and intol­er­ance among stu­dents, and a will­ing­ness among staff to turn a blind eye.

Police announced on Mon­day they were inves­ti­gat­ing after a pho­to emerged on social media show­ing dozens of pupils — most­ly 16 and 17 — from Bara­boo High School appar­ent­ly per­form­ing the “Sieg Heil” greet­ing dur­ing their junior prom.

One for­mer stu­dent at the school in Bara­boo, a town of around 12,000 peo­ple, said she knew some of the boys in the pho­to and that their behav­iour was “def­i­nite­ly not sur­pris­ing”.

“Some of the boys in this pho­to are noto­ri­ous at our school for this kind of behav­iour,” said the 19-year-old, who grad­u­at­ed ear­li­er this year and wished to remain anony­mous. “The day after Don­ald Trump was elect­ed, some of the boys in the pho­to were shout­ing “white pow­er” in the hall­ways and telling the ESL (Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage) stu­dents to go back to their own coun­tries.

“I went to a school offi­cial, the only one that would meet with me, and I was told to tough­en up, that there was noth­ing he could do because it was the boy’s first amend­ment right and he wasn’t harm­ing any­one.

“He then pro­ceed­ed to tell me to watch videos of Black Lives Mat­ter pro­tes­tors being hos­tile to police. I was stunned, and upset, and didn’t pur­sue it fur­ther because of the response I got when ask­ing for help.”

She con­tin­ued: “Basi­cal­ly, these boys use their priv­i­lege in hor­ri­ble ways, know­ing there will be no harsh con­se­quences for their actions.”

The image of the teenagers per­form­ing the Nazi salute first sur­faced on Twit­ter after it was shared by an account named “Wel­come to Bara­boo”. The post – now delet­ed – was cap­tioned: “We even got the black kid to throw it up.”

A for­mer stu­dent who grad­u­at­ed in 2016 told The Inde­pen­dent the Twit­ter account which post­ed the image was used to satirise the school and tra­di­tion­al­ly con­trolled by one or two senior stu­dents – includ­ing by him in his final year.

But this year, “essen­tial­ly the entire senior class was giv­en admin­is­tra­tive access to the page”, allow­ing any­one to post on the social media plat­form.

The fact the pho­to was tak­en on the steps of the coun­ty cour­t­house, he said, was “almost sym­bol­ic of the sys­temic prob­lem” Bara­boo is fac­ing.

Oth­er cur­rent and for­mer stu­dents shared their sto­ries of the school with jour­nal­ist Jules Suz­dalt­sev after he post­ed the pho­to on Twit­ter.

“The use of the n‑word was pret­ty com­mon among white stu­dents,” one said, while anoth­er who grad­u­at­ed this year said their four years at the school was “full of hear­ing the n‑word shout­ed down the hall and deal­ing with homo­pho­bia”.

In the pho­to, the huge major­i­ty of the group appear to be white, and all but a few appear to per­form­ing the salute.

Only one teenag­er in the pic­ture is nei­ther per­form­ing the salute, nor laugh­ing. He told Mr Suz­dalt­sev he felt “uncom­fort­able” when the pic­ture was tak­en and was unable to leave as it hap­pened too fast. He said the pho­tog­ra­ph­er asked the stu­dents to make the sign.

“I knew what my morals were and it was not to salute some­thing I firm­ly didn’t believe in,” he said. “I attend BHS (Bara­boo High School), these class­mates have bul­lied me since enter­ing mid­dle school, I have strug­gled with it my entire life and noth­ing has changed.”

Bara­boo High School and the com­pa­ny alleged­ly hired to take the pho­to­graph have been con­tact­ed for com­ment.

“Unfor­tu­nate­ly, based on what these stu­dents see com­ing from the White House, some of them may believe what they have done is accept­able,” Jon Erben­bach, a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Wis­con­sin sen­a­tor, said about the pho­to.

“It is absolute­ly not. Lead­ers, from the pres­i­dent on down, need to con­demn racism in all its forms and work toward a world where we learn from the mis­takes of his­to­ry.”

Discussion

5 comments for “Hitler Youth”

  1. This Guardian arti­cle shows that, accord­ing to the ADL, anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents in the US have recent­ly surged to the high­est lev­el in two decades includ­ing 457 cas­es in K‑12 schools in 2017, a 94% increase from the pre­vi­ous year.

    It reports that a group of Cal­i­for­nia junior high stu­dents were caught form­ing a swasti­ka with their bod­ies on school grounds and exchang­ing racist and vio­lent mes­sages on a group chat, admin­is­tra­tors said.

    Of the 28 stu­dents in the chat, 12 received a “dis­ci­pli­nary con­se­quence” due to their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the texts or involve­ment in the swasti­ka inci­dent.

    The local ADL for Ven­tu­ra, San­ta Bar­bara and San Luis Obis­po coun­ties respond­ed to five anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents in 2016, fol­lowed by 19 in 2017 and 21 in the last year, Sil­ver­man said. Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty is a “hotbed for white suprema­cists and the ‘alt-right’ move­ment”, she added.
    The Ojai con­tro­ver­sy fol­lows numer­ous reports across the coun­try of increased school bul­ly­ing echo­ing the hate­ful rhetoric of Don­ald Trump, and a rise in harass­ment, abuse and offen­sive lan­guage by stu­dents on Insta­gram, Face­book and oth­er dig­i­tal plat­forms.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/15/students-swastika-bodies-junior-high-school-california?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

    Junior high school stu­dents caught form­ing swasti­ka with their bod­ies
    Cal­i­for­nia youths trad­ed racist and vio­lent mes­sages in coun­ty called ‘hotbed for white suprema­cists’
    Sam Levin in Oak­land @SamTLevin Email
    Tue 15 Jan 2019 17.01 EST
    Last mod­i­fied on Wed 16 Jan 2019 13.38 EST

    Nine Cal­i­for­nia junior high stu­dents were caught form­ing a swasti­ka with their bod­ies on school grounds dur­ing lunch.

    Admin­is­tra­tors said the images appeared in a group chat that was active in Novem­ber and Decem­ber and fea­tured “racist, sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate and threat­en­ing com­men­tary”, includ­ing one student’s call “to bring knives to school”. The pho­tos and texts have not been released.

    The scan­dal at Matil­i­ja junior high school, which cul­mi­nat­ed in an emo­tion­al meet­ing with par­ents and school offi­cials Mon­day night, has sparked intense debate in a region that has expe­ri­enced a sharp increase in report­ed anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents.

    The mid­dle school in Ojai, a small city 80 miles north-west of Los Ange­les, told par­ents in a let­ter in Decem­ber that offi­cials had dis­cov­ered pho­tos show­ing “nine stu­dents lay­ing on the field togeth­er to form the shape of a swasti­ka dur­ing lunch”.

    Admin­is­tra­tors said the images appeared in a group chat that was active in Novem­ber and Decem­ber and fea­tured “racist, sex­u­al­ly inap­pro­pri­ate and threat­en­ing com­men­tary”, includ­ing one student’s call “to bring knives to school”. The pho­tos and texts have not been released.

    Cyn­di Sil­ver­man, region­al direc­tor of the Anti-Defama­tion League (ADL), who has been work­ing with Ojai school offi­cials, told the Guardian that there were 28 stu­dents on the group chat, which fea­tured a wide range of hate­ful con­tent: “There were a num­ber of texts that were anti-LGBTQ, anti­se­mit­ic, anti-black, anti-Lati­no.”

    Anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents in the US have recent­ly surged to the high­est lev­el in two decades, accord­ing to the ADL, which doc­u­ment­ed 457 cas­es in K‑12 schools in 2017, a 94% increase from the pre­vi­ous year.

    The local ADL for Ven­tu­ra, San­ta Bar­bara and San Luis Obis­po coun­ties respond­ed to five anti­se­mit­ic inci­dents in 2016, fol­lowed by 19 in 2017 and 21 in the last year, Sil­ver­man said. Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty is a “hotbed for white suprema­cists and the ‘alt-right’ move­ment”, she added.
    The Ojai con­tro­ver­sy fol­lows numer­ous reports across the coun­try of increased school bul­ly­ing echo­ing the hate­ful rhetoric of Don­ald Trump, and a rise in harass­ment, abuse and offen­sive lan­guage by stu­dents on Insta­gram, Face­book and oth­er dig­i­tal plat­forms.

    Of the 28 stu­dents in the chat, 12 received a “dis­ci­pli­nary con­se­quence” due to their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the texts or involve­ment in the swasti­ka inci­dent, the super­in­ten­dent, Andy Cantwell, said in an email Tues­day.

    The Matil­i­ja stu­dent body is 60.6% white, 31.9% His­pan­ic or Lati­no, 1.9% Asian and .7% black. Police inves­ti­gat­ed and said there were no crim­i­nal vio­la­tions, and the school told par­ents there was no “active threat” to stu­dents.

    The inci­dent, how­ev­er, inspired oth­ers to come for­ward with their own sto­ries, said Sil­ver­man, who mod­er­at­ed this week’s pub­lic forum with the school and fam­i­lies. One moth­er who spoke at the meet­ing said that her son, whose father is Jew­ish, had received a threat­en­ing anti­se­mit­ic text mes­sage that ref­er­enced the Holo­caust, accord­ing to Sil­ver­man. Anoth­er speak­er, a young man of col­or, talked about expe­ri­enc­ing racism and being “jumped”, she said.

    An assis­tant super­in­ten­dent also said at the meet­ing that the dis­trict had seen an increase in stu­dents with anx­i­ety and depres­sion, accord­ing to a reporter with the Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty Star.

    Some at the meet­ing voiced con­cerns about the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of the par­ents of the stu­dents in the chat. Sil­ver­man said she felt the prob­lem was wider than indi­vid­ual fam­i­lies: “Biased behav­ior is learned from your envi­ron­ment. We have to look at the whole com­mu­ni­ty at this point and the broad­er coun­try … before we blame par­ents. We’re all respon­si­ble.”

    The local ADL has respond­ed to recent cas­es involv­ing graf­fi­ti with Nazi imagery and a swasti­ka at a syn­a­gogue, as well as stu­dents in a dif­fer­ent dis­trict caught mak­ing vio­lent misog­y­nis­tic com­ments in an online chat, she said. One par­tic­u­lar­ly shock­ing case involved a five-year-old mak­ing vio­lent anti­se­mit­ic state­ments to anoth­er child, she added.

    In 2014, a col­lege stu­dent in San­ta Bar­bara went on a mur­der­ous ram­page after express­ing vio­lent and misog­y­nis­tic views.

    Bri­an­na Mof­fitt, direc­tor of edu­ca­tion and com­mu­ni­ty out­reach with the local ADL, said the Ojai case rip­pled across the region: “It’s height­en­ing everyone’s aware­ness that we have hate in our com­mu­ni­ty. Some of these things are being taught and being learned in our com­mu­ni­ty.”

    Mof­fitt said she hoped the case would encour­age oth­er school dis­tricts to be more proac­tive in address­ing bias and hate speech.

    Cantwell, the super­in­ten­dent, said: “As a dis­trict we are devel­op­ing strate­gies to pro­mote anti-bias and cul­tur­al­ly respon­sive learn­ing envi­ron­ments,” adding that anti­semitism was a “nation­al prob­lem”. “We ask the Ojai com­mu­ni­ty to con­tin­ue to join us in send­ing the mes­sage to all young peo­ple that this is wrong,” he said.

    Posted by Mary Benton | January 16, 2019, 5:41 pm
  2. Today this record­ed inci­dent is now blow­ing up on cor­po­rate social media (Twit­ter), where Cov­ing­ton Catholic High School stu­dents from Ken­tucky wear­ing MAGA hats are mock­ing a Native Amer­i­can vet­er­an hold­ing an annu­al cer­e­mo­ny hon­or­ing Native Amer­i­can vet­er­ans in the Arling­ton Nation­al Ceme­tery.

    https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/19/maga-hat-wearing-high-schoolers-harass-native-american-vietnam-vet-indigenous-peoples-march

    https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/maga-hat-wearing-teens-seeing-harassing-native-american-vietnam-veteran_us_5c435a09e4b0a8dbe171e2c6

    https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/426160-haaland-condemns-students-behavior-toward-native-elder-at

    https://twitter.com/shaunking/status/1086686777732186112

    As the author is this site has not­ed, natives have been giv­en a lot of promis­es for self-gov­er­nance which nev­er came true, so are still the pri­ma­ry group in the USA that would be invalu­able in a civ­il war/balkanization effort in order to desta­bi­lize the coun­try.

    The CSA tried to get them on their side with “If you help us win the war, you can have your land + some north­ern land”

    And the Nazi hope was that they would help weak­en the coun­try to the point the war would be less deves­tat­ing for Ger­many and thus win the war. It basi­cal­ly went like “if you help destroy the usa from the inside, we’ll give you all your land back”.

    While it is ter­ri­ble what has hap­pened with this, all of this should be not­ed with what Dave has been doc­u­ment­ing in past FTR’s.

    And some­one who is clear­ly a sup­port­er of the cur­rent Pres­i­dent doing it will tar­nish the image of the USA.

    Posted by Neo | January 19, 2019, 4:58 pm
  3. So appar­ent­ly there were Black Hebrew Israelites in this group and they were involved in this and they have released a video that the Alt-Right is using to say it was staged and that the stu­dents did noth­ing wrong. This is being used to attack the Main­stream Media of the USA.

    https://www32.zippyshare.com/v/2QOhVnB4/file.html

    For any­one who is read­ing this, Black Hebrew Israelites are from the Anti-Semit­ic Fas­cist Racist group Nation of Islam. They believe that they are the real Jews and that the Jew­ish peo­ple are FAKE JEWS.

    Posted by Neo | January 20, 2019, 12:37 am
  4. @NEO–

    The orig­i­nal inci­dent was more com­pli­cat­ed than orig­i­nal­ly report­ed, a haz­ard of today’s social media/internet/mobile tech­nol­o­gy cul­ture.

    Best.

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | January 21, 2019, 3:16 pm
  5. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covington-catholic-black-paint/

    @Dave Emory

    It is but it has sig­nif­i­cance.

    One the school has a his­to­ry of sim­i­lar actions.
    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/covington-catholic-black-paint/

    2nd. This was brought about by peo­ple from the Nation of Islam.

    3rd. After this hap­pened they hired a PR firm for to han­dle this.
    https://archive.fo/UUUmS

    Two of the peo­ple who cre­at­ed this PR Firm gave mon­ey to Brett Guthrie who was vice chair of the Ener­gy and Com­merce Com­mit­tee’s Sub­com­mit­tee on Health
    https://www.prwatch.org/news/2017/02/13212/republicans-are-fundraising-americas-healthcare-misery

    Anoth­er one worked on Bush and Rom­ney’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign
    https://ballotpedia.org/Scott_Jennings

    And accord­ing to Gov­ern­ment Doc­u­ments they have worked with the Japan­ese Gov­ern­ment for 12,000 dol­lars per month
    https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6507-Registration-Statement-20180112–1.pdf

    More info on who they worked with
    https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/DCI_Group
    https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Akin,_Gump,_Strauss,_Hauer_%26_Feld

    Posted by Neo | January 22, 2019, 12:37 am

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