Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
Listen: MP3
Introduction: As the title indicates, this program updates previous topics of discussion and presents information not previously introduced. Updating FTR #791, the program notes the death of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of prominent Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. The younger Gurlitt was found to be in possession of a vast trove of artworks, valued at at $1.35 billion by some accounts.
A Wall Street Journal article maintains that the elder Gurlitt was to be the director of Hitler’s Fuehrermuseum. Never built, the art for that intended institution comprised much of the art alleged by authors Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams to be at the center of the deal between Allen Dulles and Martin Bormann.
Cornelius Gurlitt left his art trove–valued at around one $1.35 billion–to a Bern, Switzerland art museum. Switzerland was and is, of course, a major repository for much of the Bormann flight capital. One can but wonder if this museum has connections with the Bormann group.
Notice, also, that Gurlitt had a second residence in Salzburg, Austria. As discussed in FTR #791, the German authorities had no record of Cornelius Gurlitt. In a country where every citizen must register with the police of his or her residential area, this is unthinkable and indicative of some high-level chicanery.
Recent news has offered up a grimly instructive juxtaposition. As Glenn Greenwald and his associates in the Snowden “op” garnered journalistic prizes, Frazier Glenn Miller, a veteran neo-Nazi and associate of The Order [allegedly] killed three at a Jewish community center in Kansas.
As we have seen in FTR #754 and several posts, Greenwald was a fellow-traveler of some of murderous Nazi and white supremacist groups. In addition to defending Matthew Hale against solicitation of murder charges, Greenwald ran interference for the “leaderless resistance strategy.”
Leaderless resistance is an operational doctrine through which individual Nazis and white supremacists perform acts of violence against their perceived enemies, individually, or in very small groups. Acting in accordance with doctrine espoused by luminaries and leaderls in their movement, they avoid infiltration by law enforcement by virtue of their “lone wolf” operational strategy. What Miller [allegedly] did is precisely the sort of thing advocated by the “Leaderless Resistance” strategy.
The Turner Diaries and Hunter, published by Greenwald’s client, the National Alliance
Serpent’s Walk: Forecasts a Nazi takeover of U.S. in mid-twenty-first century, after WMD terrorist attacks.
The advocates of this sort of thing, such as Citizen Greenwald’s client The National Alliance (publisher of The Turner Diaries,” which provided the operational template for Miller’s benefactors The Order) have been shielded (to an extent) from civil suits holding them to account for their murderous advocacy.
We can give thanks to Greenwald.
National Alliance’s books are specifically intended as instructional vehicles. Hunter is dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, who was close to Miller. The shootings of which Miller is accused were on Franklin’s birthday. Although not legally liable for such killings, Greenwald does bear political, moral, philosophical and “karmic” responsibility. The sycophants and fools who celebrate him enjoy similar status.
Miller is also an admirer of Ron Paul, the Presidential candidate of choice for Greenwald’s benefactor Eddie “the Friendly Spook” Snowden. The “Paulistinian Libertarian Organization” is at the foundation of the Greenwald/Snowden milieu.
Much of the balance of the program highlights the growing control of American media outlets by doctrinaire fascist organizations with a heritage evolving from World War II.
With our media already demonstrating a compulsion to fundamentally misrepresent events in an overtly ideologized fashion (as we are seeing with regard to the Ukraine situation), the inroads of Muslim Brotherhood, SS-linked Bertelsmann and elements linked with the Unification Church is something to be feared.
Program Highlights Include:
- The creation of a giant publishing outfit, merging Bertelsmann and Penguin into a corporate entity that will be controlled by Bertelsmann.
- Bertelsmann has also acquired full control of BMG, expanding their participation in the music business.
- Review of the Nazi and SS heritage of Bertelsmann.
- The Unification Church background of the publisher of the revived Newsweek. Note that the Unification Church controls UPI and The Washington Times.
- A number of articles about Al-Jazeera’s effective control by the Muslim Brotherhood.
- The resignation of Egyptian Al-Jazeera staff after being ordered to give favorable coverage to the Brotherhood during the overthrow of Morsi.
- Qatar, the government of which runs Al-Jazeera, actively subsidized the Morsi regime.
- Egyptian journalists expelled Al-Jazeera reporters from a professional gathering, because of the network’s overt Brotherhood bias.
- Al-Jazeera’s billeting of exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members in hotels in Qatar.
- Discussion of BMW withholding ads from The Atlantic whenever the magazine would review a book about the Holocaust or World War II.
- Control over the Bavarian Motor Works firm by the heirs of Joseph Goebbels.
1. Updating FTR #791, the program notes the death of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of prominent Nazi art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. The younger Gurlitt was found to be in possession of a vast trove of artworks, valued at at $1.35 billion by some accounts.
A Wall Street Journal article maintains that the elder Gurlitt was to be the director of Hitler’s Fuehrermuseum. Never built, the art for that intended institution comprised much of the art alleged by authors Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams to be at the center of the deal between Allen Dulles and Martin Bormann.
Cornelius Gurlitt, the octogenarian son of one of Adolf Hitler’s major art dealers, died in his Munich home on Tuesday morning, leaving the fate of his roughly 1,400 artworks unclear.
Legal questions now swarm surrounding how–and even if–looted works in the collection can now be restituted to Holocaust victims and their heirs.
Mr. Gurlitt, 81 years old, stepped from complete obscurity into world-wide prominence last fall after German media reports surfaced that Bavarian tax authorities had confiscated in early 2012 what is regarded as the largest-ever trove of Nazi-looted art in private hands.
The fact that the find remained unreported for nearly two years and the government’s refusal to put pressure on Mr. Gurlitt to return any looted artwork to heirs of their original owners drew international criticism of Germany from the U.S., France and Israel.
Mr. Gurlitt died in the presence of his doctor and caretakers, a few weeks after requesting that he return home from a Bavarian hospital where he had undergone intensive heart surgery, his spokesman said on Tuesday afternoon. The collector, who was never married and had no children, leaves no direct heir or known next of kin.
The trove included many unremarkable works on paper but also several valuable paintings. One of those, an Henri Matisse portrait that Matisse dealers say could fetch up to $20 million at auction, is being chased by the heirs of the late French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, including Anne Sinclair, a prominent journalist and ex-wife of former International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
That painting and several other artworks were looted from Holocaust victims during World War II. It is unclear how the works ended up in the collection of Mr. Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, a successful Nazi-era dealer whom Hitler had tapped to lead his unrealized Führermuseum in Linz, Austria after the war.
German authorities came under fire from major Jewish leaders, including Ronald Lauder and Israeli and American officials because the trove, though confiscated in early 2012, the was kept secret for two years–even from the Bavarian justice minister–in violation of international norms on art restitution.
At the time, Bavarian tax authorities justified the decision to keep the works’ existence a secret because of their continuing investigation into Mr. Gurlitt’s finances. The Augusburg prosecutor’s office in charge of the investigation didn’t answer calls seeking comment.
Although that investigation will lapse now that Mr. Gurlitt is dead, fresh hurdles abound, mainly surrounding a simple question: who has inherited Mr. Gurlitt’s estate?
Christopher Marinello, a lawyer for the Rosenberg heirs, says the family will continue pursuing the case, but that “we’ll have to wait for the estate process to run its course.”
It is unclear, though, whom Mr. Marinello should even contact or who will be handling the estate process.
Given Mr. Gurlitt’s perpetually frail state of health, a German court appointed Munich-based lawyer Christoph Edel as his legal guardian late last year. But Mr. Edel’s position was “voided as soon as Mr. Gurlitt died,” his spokesman, Stephan Holzinger, told The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Holzinger says he doesn’t even know if Mr. Gurlitt has a will and that his own contract will only continue for “the next few days.”
“The only guy who could give orders in [restituting art] was Mr. Edel, but now his job has ended,” said Mr. Holzinger. “The job right now is to find out what’s in the will–if there is a will.”
The lack of certainty about a finished will may in part be due to the tensions that have plagued Mr. Gurlitt’s own legal team since it came together earlier this year.
In January, The Journal reported that Mr. Gurlitt was willing to negotiate the return of works of art within the collection, but Mr. Gurlitt’s lawyer, Hannes Hartung, was fired soon afterward
Several families, including the Rosenberg heirs, complained that Mr. Hartung was unwilling to rule out a demand for monetary compensation for returning Nazi-looted art.
Last month tax authorities announced they would return Mr. Gurlitt’s artwork. Through his legal guardian, Mr. Gurlitt responded to international complaints by giving the government-appointed task force that had already been examining the provenance authority to spend a year researching it and helping arrange restitution for works that it determined were looted.
But even that task force is uncertain now with whom it should coordinate since Mr. Gurlitt is dead.
“We want to fulfill our duty to research this work as seriously as before,” said task force spokesman Matthias Henkel. “We are still working on determining with whom to speak now.”
2. Cornelius Gurlitt left his art trove–valued at around one $1.35 billion–to a Bern, Switzerland art museum. Switzerland was and is, of course, a major repository for much of the Bormann flight capital. One can but wonder if this museum has connections with the Bormann group.
Notice, also, that Gurlitt had a second residence in Salzburg, Austria. As discussed in FTR #791, the German authorities had no record of Cornelius Gurlitt. In a country where every citizen must register with the police of his or her residential area, this is unthinkable and indicative of some high-level chicanery.
“ ‘Nazi Art’ Hoarder Gurlitt Makes Swiss Museum Sole Heir”; BBC News; 5/7/2014.
German Nazi-era art hoarder Cornelius Gurlitt, who died on Tuesday, has made the Bern Art Museum in Switzerland his “sole heir”.
The reclusive son of Adolf Hitler’s art dealer is estimated to have amassed a collection worth up to a billion euros.
The museum said the news struck “like a bolt from the blue”, given that it had had no relationship with Mr Gurlitt.
The collection was the subject of a long legal dispute over works that may have been taken illegally by the Nazis.
The Bern Art Museum said that it was delighted at the news that it had been made Mr Gurlitt’s “unrestricted and unfettered sole heir”, but added that the bequest also posed some questions.
“The Board of Trustees and directors of Kunstmuseum Bern are surprised and delighted, but at the same time do not wish to conceal the fact that this magnificent bequest brings with it a considerable burden of responsibility and a wealth of questions of the most difficult and sensitive kind, and questions in particular of a legal and ethical nature”, it said in a statement.
Mr Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, was ordered to deal in works that had been seized from Jews, or which the Nazis considered “degenerate” and had removed from German museums.
The priceless collection was confiscated in 2012 by Bavarian authorities from the apartment of his son.
After initially refusing to give up the paintings, Mr Gurlitt changed his position, agreeing to co-operate with the German authorities on establishing the paintings’ provenance, and returning them if they were shown to be stolen.
‘Wild speculation’
Mr Gurlitt, who had no close relatives, wrote the will within the last few weeks shortly before undergoing heart surgery, according to his spokesman, Stephan Holzinger.“It now falls to the probate court to determine if the will is valid and whether a contract of inheritance exists,” he told the BBC earlier on Wednesday.
“I can understand that there is now wild speculation, but I don’t want to comment on that at this stage.”
The German government said earlier that the collector’s death would not affect the investigation into ownerships claims on the paintings.
Mr Gurlitt’s collection only came to light after a routine check found he was carrying wads of cash on a train from Switzerland, triggering a tax inquiry.
Investigators found more than 1,400 works in his flat in Munich in February 2012 — though they only revealed the discovery in late 2013 — and a further 60 in his house near Salzburg, Austria, earlier this year.
Among them were works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Emil Nolde and Max Liebermann.
The collection is estimated to be worth up to a billion euros (£850m; $1.35bn).
Under German law, Cornelius Gurlitt was not compelled to return any paintings because the incidents happened more than 30 years ago.
3a. Recent news has offered up a grimly instructive juxtaposition. As Glenn Greenwald and his associates in the Snowden “op” garnered journalistic prizes, Frazier Glenn Miller, a veteran neo-Nazi and associate of The Order [allegedly] killed three at a Jewish community center in Kansas.
As we have seen in FTR #754 and several posts, Greenwald was a fellow-traveler of some of murderous Nazi and white supremacist groups. In addition to defending Matthew Hale against solicitation of murder charges, Greenwald ran interference for the “leaderless resistance strategy.”
Leaderless resistance is an operational doctrine through which individual Nazis and white supremacists perform acts of violence against their perceived enemies, individually, or in very small groups. Acting in accordance with doctrine espoused by luminaries and leaderls in their movement, they avoid infiltration by law enforcement by virtue of their “lone wolf” operational strategy.
What Miller [allegedly] did is precisely the sort of thing advocated by the “Leaderless Resistance” strategy.
The advocates of this sort of thing, such as Citizen Greenwald’s client The National Alliance (publisher of The Turner Diaries,” which provided the operational template for Miller’s benefactors The Order) have been shielded (to an extent) from civil suits holding them to account for their murderous advocacy.
We can give thanks to Greenwald.
National Alliance’s books are specifically intended as instructional vehicles. Hunter is dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, who was close to Miller. The shootings of which Miller is accused were on Franklin’s birthday.
Although not legally liable for such killings, Greenwald does bear political, moral, philosophical and “karmic” responsibility. The sycophants and fools who celebrate him enjoy similar status.
Miller is also an admirer of Ron Paul, the Presidential candidate of choice for Greenwald’s benefactor Eddie “the Friendly Spook” Snowden. The “Paulistinian Libertarian Organization” is at the foundation of the Greenwald/Snowden milieu.
Idle thought number 219–“old German families” in Latin America helped finance The Order, which gave money to Miller (among others). Matthews’ group certainly robbed armored cars and gained financial support in so doing.
In that regard, we wonder to what extent The Order may actually have been a vehicle for laundering funds from those “old German families in Latin America?”
3b. 1988: Neo-Nazi Group Founds Publishing House, Publishes Book to Inspire White Assassins; History Commons
. . . .William Pierce, the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance (see 1970–1974) and the author of the inflammatory and highly influential white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries (see 1978), oversees the creation of a publishing firm for the Alliance, National Vanguard Books. It will publish a number of works, most prominently a reprint of The Turner Diaries and Pierce’s second novel, Hunter, which tells the story of a white assassin who kills minorities, particularly interracial couples. He dedicates Hunter to Joseph Paul Franklin, convicted of the sniper murders of two African-American men (see 1980). Pierce will later tell his biographer that he wrote Hunter as a deliberate motivational tool for assassins, saying, “From the beginning with Hunter, I had this idea of how fiction can work as a teaching tool in mind.” In 2002, the Center for New Community will write, “Like The Turner Diaries, the book has inspired several real-life acts of racist terror” (see January 4, 2002 and After). In 1991, National Vanguard will expand into releasing audiotapes, which by December 1992 will spawn a radio show, American Dissident Voices. In 1993, it will begin publishing comic books targeted at children and teenagers. . . .
3c. Brotherhood and Murder by Thomas Martinez; Google Books; p. 234.
. . . .The performer also said ” . . . Some very old German families [in South America] were giving Bob [Matthews, leader of The Order] some money.” . . .
. . . For example, as long ago as 1978, Manfred Roeder, who headed the remnants of the German Nazi Party, traveled to Brazil, where he met with Josef Mengele and other Nazi leaders. Immediately afterward, Roeder traveled to the United States, where–according to the ADL–he met with Dr. William Pierce, among others. . . .”
. . . . In recent years, Mr. Miller has also been a devoted pen pal to incarcerated white supremacists, among them Joseph Paul Franklin, a convicted murderer who was executed in Missouri in November. Ms. Beirich, of the law center, said that Mr. Miller was very close to Mr. Franklin, whose birthday was Sunday, the day of the shooting. . . .
3e. “Frazier Glenn Miller”; Southern Poverty Law Center.
Date of Birth:
1940
Location:
Springfield, Mo.
Ideology:
Ku Klux KlanFrazier Glenn Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, is the former “grand dragon” of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which he founded and ran in the 1980s before being sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for operating an illegal paramilitary organization and using intimidation tactics against African Americans. After subsequently forming another Klan group, the White Patriot Party, he was found in criminal contempt and sentenced to six months in prison for violating the court settlement. He went underground while his conviction was under appeal but was caught by the FBI with a weapons cache in Missouri. He served three years in federal prison after being indicted on weapons charges and for plotting robberies and the assassination of SPLC founder Morris Dees. As part of a plea bargain, testified against other Klan leaders in a 1988 sedition trial. On April 13, 2014, Miller was arrested in the shooting deaths of three people at a Jewish community center and nearby retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas.
Criminal History:
In 1986, Miller was convicted on a federal contempt of court charge after violating the terms of a consent order that settled a lawsuit filed against him and his Klan group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was sentenced to a year in prison, with six months suspended. However, he disappeared while out on bond awaiting an appeal and was later caught in Missouri along with four other Klansmen and a cache of weapons.In 1987, he pleaded guilty to a weapons charge and to mailing a threat through the mail. He had been indicted along with four other white supremacists for conspiring to acquire stolen military weapons, and for planning robberies and the assassination of SPLC founder Morris Dees. In an agreement with federal prosecutors, he received a five-year prison sentence in exchange for his testimony against 14 white supremacist leaders in a sedition trial. He served three years of that sentence.
...
Background:
Frazier Glenn Miller is the founder and former leader of both the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, both of which were operated as paramilitary organizations in the 1980s.Miller quit high school as a senior to join the U.S. Army. In 1979, he retired from the Army as a master sergeant after 20 years of active duty, including two tours in Vietnam and 13 years as a member of the elite Green Berets.
Miller claims he read a racist newspaper for the first time in the early 1970s when his father gave him a copy of The Thunderbolt, published by Ed Fields of the racist, anti-Semitic National States’ Rights Party. According to Miller, within two minutes of browsing through the tabloid, he knew he “had found a home within the American White Movement. I was ecstatic.” He joined the National States’ Rights Party in 1973, but soon left because, he later testified, it was “made up mostly of elderly people who were not that active.”
He then joined the National Socialist Party of America, a Nazi group whose members attacked and killed marchers associated with the Communist Workers Party in Greensboro, N.C., in 1979. The following year, due to his involvement with the Nazi group, the Greensboro shootout, and death threats against him and his family, his wife left him and moved with their children to Chicago.
Miller was forced to retire from the Army due to his Klan-related activities. He enrolled in Johnston Technical College in Smithfield, N.C., and also bought a 25-acre farm in Angier, N.C., near Raleigh. It was there, in late 1980, that he formed the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and began to amass illegal weapons and conduct military training with the help of active-duty soldiers. Miller wanted to model the Carolina Knights on Hitler’s Nazi Party. “I would try to emulate Hitler’s methods of attracting members and supporters,” he wrote in his autobiography. “In the years to come, for example, I placed great emphasis on staging marches and rallies. It had been successful with Hitler.”
Miller represented a new, militant breed of Klan leaders in the 1980s, preferring fatigues over the traditional Klan robe and training his troops in military tactics. He was not averse to publicity and began holding rallies and marches on a near-weekly basis up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. He announced his goal was to create a Carolina Free State, which would be an “all-white nation within the bounds of North and South Carolina.” He said his enemies were “niggers” and Jews. He boasted of having supporters at Fort Bragg, the nearby Army base that was home to a large contingent of U.S. special forces.
In 1983, after a black prison guard, Bobby Person, filed a discrimination suit against the North Carolina prison system, members of the Carolina Knights began to intimidate the plaintiff. They also harassed, threatened and intimidated other African Americans in the area. The SPLC, led by Morris Dees, sued Miller and his group in June 1984 – demanding they stop their campaign of intimidation and cease all paramilitary activity.
The SPLC lawyers did not know it at the time, but Miller had ties to The Order, a white nationalist terrorist organization whose members assassinated Denver talk show host Alan Berg just 13 days after the SPLC filed suit. The leader of the group, Robert Mathews, had given Miller $200,000 in cash that was part of the $3.8 million stolen during an armored car robbery. It was later revealed that Dees was at the top of The Order’s hit list. Miller testified in the 1988 trial of other white supremacists that Mathews told him “they were thinking about killing” Dees.
In January 1985, the SPLC reached a consent agreement with Miller that prevented the Knights from operating as a paramilitary group and from harassing, intimidating, threatening or harming any black person or white person who associated with black persons. A month later, however, Miller announced the formation of a new Klan group, the White Patriot Party. His goal was the same: the “unification of white people.” He vowed to operate peacefully – unless the federal government infringed on his rights, in which case he would resort to “underground revolutionary tactics … with the armed resources at our disposal.”
It took less than a year for Miller and the White Patriot Party to violate the consent order. The SPLC obtained photographic evidence of active-duty Marines helping train his members. In a July 1986 trial, in which Dees acted as a special prosecutor to assist federal prosecutors, Miller was found guilty of criminal contempt. One witness testified he had procured weapons and explosives, including 13 armor-penetrating anti-tank rockets, from military personnel on behalf of Miller, after the settlement. He also said he received a duffel bag full of cash as payment to conduct training intended to help “create a paramilitary guerrilla unit for later use in establishing a White Southland.” Miller was sentenced to a year in prison, with six months of that term suspended. He was also ordered to disassociate himself from the White Patriot Party and avoid contact with white supremacists.
In October of that year, while out on bond awaiting an appeal of his conviction, Miller wrote to North Carolina’s governor, asking for an appointment to the Governor’s Task Force on Racial, Religious and Ethnic Violence and Intimidation. He said he would be willing to publicly discourage racial violence and act as a liaison to “the many White groups in North Carolina.”
But, in 1987, while still out on bond, Miller disappeared and went underground. He mailed a “Declaration of War” to supporters, exhorting “Aryan warriors of The Order” to kill “our enemies,” and established a point system for each kill. The targets were: “Niggers (1), White race traitors (10), Jews (10), Judges (50) Morris Seligman Dees (888).” He signed the statement “Glenn Miller, loyal member of ‘The Order.’”
The FBI caught up with Miller and four other Klansmen in Springfield, Mo., where he was tear-gassed out of a mobile home. Authorities found hand grenades, automatic weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, the explosive C‑4, and $14,000 in cash. He and the others were indicted for conspiracy to acquire stolen military weapons, explosives and equipment, and for planning robberies and the assassination of Dees. Miller pleaded guilty to a weapons charge and to sending a threat through the mail. He served three years in federal prison, mostly in Otisville, N.Y. As part of his plea deal, he agreed to testify against 14 leading white supremacists in a sedition trial.
...
Miller has ties to Kevin W. Harpham, a neo-Nazi who was convicted of attempting to bomb a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Wash., in 2011. Although Harpham pleaded guilty, Miller was convinced that Harpham’s lawyers deceitfully convinced him that he would be found guilty regardless of his innocence. Throughout his trial proceedings, Miller was a regular pen pal with Harpham, who was sentenced to 32 years in prison.
In a 2010 radio interview, Frazier Glenn Miller, the man suspected of killing three people Sunday at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement center in Kansas, said he was interested in the tea party, voiced support for then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and spoke approvingly of Ron Paul, the Texas Republican congressman and presidential candidate. In late April 2010, Miller, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, was a guest on The David Pakman Show, a nationally syndicated left-of-center radio and television program. At the time, Miller was running for US Senate as an independent in his home state of Missouri with the slogan “It’s the Jews, Stupid,” and Pakman pressed Miller on his extreme views. . . .
. . . . Not surprisingly, Miller denigrated most American politicians, but cited one positively: “If I had my way [all US senators] would be in jail right now for treason, if not hung from a sturdy oak tree…Ron Paul is the only independent politician, representative in Washington.” . . . .
4a. In numerous posts and programs, we have discussed another of the National Alliance books–Serpent’s Walk. In that text, the Third Reich and the SS go underground, grow their wealth, buy into the opinion-forming media, and–after the U.S. is devastated by a series of terrorist attacks using WMD’s–they take over the country.
In the context of Serpent’s Walk, we have discussed the advance of Bertelsmann in the corporate media world.
The former supplier of books for the SS is wielding larger influence. Bertelsmann will dominate a new Random House/Penguin merged unit, which will control 25% of the world’s publishing business.
Formerly headed by SS man Heinrich Mohn, Bertelsmann shows every indication of maintaining its Nazi character and obscuring them at the same time. Its official house historian published books blaming World War II on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. imperialism and Jewish control of the U.S. news media.
With Bertelsmann continuing its efforts in the music business and other Underground Reich media entities like Al Jazeera gaining in the American media market, we expect the scenario presented in Serpent’s Walk will come to pass.
“Random House and Penguin Merger Creates Global Giant” by Eric Pfanner and Amy Chozick; The New York Times; 10/29/2012.
The book publishing industry is starting to get smaller in order to get stronger.
The announcement on Monday that Random House and Penguin would merge narrows the business to a handful of big publishers, and could set off a long-expected round of consolidation as the industry adapts to the digital marketplace.
John Makinson, the chief executive of Penguin who will serve as chairman of the new company, said that with consolidation inevitable, “we decided it was better to get in early rather than be a follower.”
In announcing the agreement, the European owners of Random House and Penguin — Bertelsmann and Pearson, respectively — said Bertelsmann would control 53 percent of the combined entity and Pearson 47 percent. In a statement, Bertelsmann said the deal would most likely conclude in the second half of 2013, after approval from regulators.
The merger will create the largest consumer book publisher in the world, with a global market share of more than 25 percent and a book list that includes contemporary best-sellers like Random House’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” and Penguin’s backlist of classics from authors like George Orwell. . . .
4c. “Bertelsmann’s Revisionist” by Hersch Fischler and John Friedman; The Nation; 11/8/99.
. . . . Rewriting history, he [Bertelsmann house historian Dirk Bavendamm] stated that Roosevelt, not Hitler had caused World War II. He also wrote that American Jews controlled most of the media,’ and he claimed they gave a false picture of Hitler. Did the book impress [Heinrich’s son Reinhard] Mohn, then the majority shareholder of Bertelsmann? The firm hired Bavendamm as its house historian, and in 1984 he completed a historical study, 150 Years of Bertelsmann: The Founders and Their Time—with a foreword by Mohn.
A year later, Bavendamm edited the firm’s official history, which set forth the untrue story that the firm had resisted the Nazis and had been closed down by them. Mohn also asked Bavendamm to write the authorized history of the Mohn family, published in 1986 under the title Bertelsmann, Mohn, Scippel: Three Families—One Company. In a second book, Roosevelt’s War (published in 1993, reissued in 1998), Bavendamm accuses the U.S. President of enacting a plan to start World War II. In the same book he suggests that Hitler’s threats in early 1939 against European Jewry were a reaction to Roosevelt’s strategy against Germany.
After the revelations about Bertelsmann’s Nazi past appeared, the company announced that it had asked ‘the historian and publicist Dr. Dirk Bavendamm to look at the new information and begin to reinvestigate the role the publishing house played in those days’ and defended his work. . .
4c. Bertelsmann is also forging ahead in the music industry:
Bertelsmann, the 178-year-old German media giant that has been trying to remake itself for the digital age, announced on Friday that it would take control of BMG Rights Management, the music company it restarted in 2008, in a deal that values BMG at $1.4 billion.
Bertelsmann said it would buy the 51 percent of BMG that it did not own from its partner in the venture, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. The companies did not disclose financial terms, but a person with direct knowledge of the deal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the purchase price was $700 million to $800 million, including the assumption of debt.
The deal signals a full return to the music business for Bertelsmann, whose other media properties include Random House and the magazine publisher Gruner & Jahr. After building the first incarnation of BMG, which stood for Bertelsmann Music Group, into a global powerhouse in the 1980s and ’90s, Bertelsmann sold most of its music holdings through a series of deals with Sony and Universal in the mid-2000s.
“We are bringing the music home to our group,” Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.
BMG was revived in 2008, and the next year, K.K.R. made the first of its $270 million of investments in the company. BMG has made a string of acquisitions in music publishing, the side of the business that deals with copyrights for songwriting, and built a catalog of more than one million songs by artists like Johnny Cash, Carly Simon and Frank Ocean and Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. . . . .
5. David Jang, whose business enterprises control both Newsweek and The International Business Times, has a background in the Unification Church, formerly headed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.
An intelligent analysis of the apparent methodology of The Community, the Christian organization Jang now operates, suggests the possibility that that organization MIGHT actually be a clandestine Moonie front–it uses some tactics similar to Unification Church practices. The evidence was NOT sufficiently strong to convince a Japanese court of that allegation in a lawsuit filed against The Community.
In FTR #291, we examined the Unification Church as an extension of the Japanese Patriotic Societies, that brought fascism to Japan through a program of political assassination and propaganda.
“Who’s Behind Newsweek?” by Ben Dooley; Mother Jones; May/June 2014.
Two days after Barack Obama won reelection, I met a young Chinese woman, whom I will call Anne, in the basement café at the San Francisco Public Library. Anne worked part time and gave a large portion of her earnings to a group she called “the Community,” a Christian sect led by a charismatic Korean pastor named David Jang. After joining the group in her late teens, Anne had spent more than seven years working in its ministries—organizations and businesses run by Jang’s disciples. With short hair and large glasses, Anne was now in her late 20s but looked younger. She said she rarely had enough money for small luxuries like coffee. We chatted with a mutual friend while we waited for her husband, Caleb, who also worked for a ministry: the International Business Times [2], the flagship publication of an eponymous online news company that would, nine months later, become the new owner of Newsweek [3] magazine.
Caleb was running late because he was translating Obama’s victory speech into Chinese for IBT, which publishes 11 editions in seven languages.. . .
. . . . [David] Jang also has a history with Moon’s Unification Church. In 2013, a Japanese court resolved an almost six-year-long libel case that Christian Today, a Jang-founded website, filed against Makoto Yamaya, a Salvation Army major. Yamaya had claimed the Community was part of the Unification Church and that Christian Today had mind-controlled its employees; the court found that these charges had no basis. But it also found that Jang joined a Unification Church student group as a young man, eventually rising to the rank of executive director of another church-affiliated student organization. He then went on to a church-run theological institute, and helped manage the transition when it became Sun Moon University in 1993, subsequently leaving the church. Four former members tell me that Jang often spoke of his time in Moon’s church, including his marriage by Moon in a 1975 mass wedding, an event also affirmed by the Japanese court. . . .
6. In past articles, we have noted the close relationship between the Al Jazeera network and the Muslim Brotherhood. (The Brotherhood is an Islamic fascist organization allied with the Axis in World War II and nurtured in the postwar period by Western intelligence services and Persian Gulf oil kingdoms as anti-communist and anti-Israeli proxy warriors.)
Based in Qatar (which is utilizing I.G. Farben’s Fischer/Tropsch process), the network is growing its presence in the United States.
In addition to its purchase of Al Gore’s “Current TV” and resulting entry into the U.S. cable TV market, Al Jazeera has been broadcasting for some time on the Pacifica Radio network, which caters to the so-called progressive community.
(In past posts, we have noted that Al Jazeera/Muslim Brotherhood’s benighted presence in American media, along with that of Bertelsmann, corresponds to a tee to the Serpent’s Walk scenario we have discussed for many years.)
One place where Al Jazeera’s influence is NOT waxing is Egypt. (See text excerpts below.) In addition to the fact that many of their journalists have resigned in protest over the network’s blatant pro-Brotherhood bias, the Egyptian army has been arresting some of its staff in the crackdown on Morsi’s supporters.
In addition, Al Jazeera correspondents have been barred from news conferences by fellow journalists, because of the network’s pro-Brotherhood stance.
In an update, we note that the Egyptian government continues to be at loggerheads with the network.
Gulf media is reporting that 22 members of the Al-Jazeera Egyptian bureau have resigned in protest over what they say were instructions from the management to “favor the Muslim Brotherhood.” According to a Gulf News report: The news channel Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr saw 22 members of staff resign on Monday in Egypt over what they alleged was coverage that was out of sync with real events in Egypt.
Anchor Karem Mahmoud announced that the staff had resigned in protest against what he called ‘biased coverage’ of the events in Egypt by the Qatari broadcaster.
Mahmoud said that the resignations had been brought about by a perceived lack of commitment and Al Jazeera professionalism in media coverage, adding that ‘the management in Doha provokes sedition among the Egyptian people and has an agenda against Egypt and other Arab countries.’
Mahmoud added that the management used to instruct each staff member to favour the Muslim Brotherhood.
He said that ‘there are instructions to us to telecast certain news’.
Haggag Salama, a correspondent of the network in Luxor, had resigned on Sunday accusing it of ‘airing lies and misleading viewers’.
He announced his resignation in a phone-in interview with Dream 2 channel.
Meanwhile, four Egyptian members of editorial staff at Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha resigned in protest against what they termed a ‘biased editorial policy’ pertaining to the events in Egypt, Ala’a Al Aioti, a news producer, told Gulf News by phone . . .
In 2009, Egyptian authorities were reported to be in the process of revoking Al-Jazeera’s license to broadcast and that the network was planning to close its bureau office in Cairo.
Leaked US State Department cables indicate that Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar and funded by the Qatari government, operates as an arm of Qatari foreign policy which has recently been strongly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood and the recently deposed Mohamed Morsi. . . .
6b. Note that the government of Qatar subsidized the Morsi regime. It is no surprise, therefore, that Al-Jazeera, also subsidized by the Qatari government, manifested a strong pro-Brotherhood/pro/Morsi bias.
Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg has published an article titled “Why Does Al Jazeera Love a Hateful Islamic Extremist?” that summarizes recent developments adverse for Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi. The article begins:
So, it hasn’t been the best week for Al Jazeera, the television network owned by Qatar’s despotic ruling family, for the same reason that it hasn’t been a great week for the despotic ruling family itself: the ouster of Egypt’s president, Mohamed Mursi, the bumpkin fundamentalist.
Qatar pumped a lot of money into Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood government, and for what? The Qatari royal family should sue the Brotherhood for malfeasance. So much hope was riding on Mursi’s experiment in political Islam. Although Qatar spreads risk around a bit — it has provided millions of dollars to Islamists in Syria and to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas (now there’s an investment in the future) — Mursi represented its main chance to advance the cause of Islamic fundamentalism.
And now, to add insult to financial injury, Saudi Arabia just promised post-Mursi Egypt $5 billion, and the United Arab Emirates, another of Qatar’s main rivals, has kicked in $3 billion.
As for Al Jazeera, which is scheduled to introduce its American network next month in place of Al Gore’s hapless Current TV, well, let’s put it this way: It will certainly be more popular among Americans than it is among Egyptians. Which isn’t saying much.
Journalists Protest
The millions of Egyptians who rose up against Mursi’s rule also aired their feelings about Al Jazeera’s breathless pro-Muslim Brotherhood coverage. The harsh criticism directed at the network prompted Egyptian reporters to expel Al Jazeera reporters from a recent news conference, and led several journalists to quit Al Jazeera’s Egypt operation, apparently to protest its obvious bias.
One of the correspondents who quit, Haggag Salama, accused his ex-bosses of ‘airing lies and misleading viewers.’ The journalist Abdel Latif el-Menawy is reported to have called Al Jazeera a ‘propaganda channel’ for the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s possible that some of the journalists who quit did so as a matter of self-preservation; the Egyptian military is behaving in predictably heavy-handed ways toward journalists it doesn’t like. But it’s also entirely plausible that they quit because they couldn’t abide Qatari government interference in their reporting. . . .
The Washington Post has featured a story titled “Al Jazeera Faces Criticism In Egypt Over Its Coverage Of Muslim Brotherhood” which looks at criticism of Al Jazeera over its relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood. The story begins:
“Ever since the military’s ouster of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in July, Al Jazeera, the pioneering Arab-language news broadcaster, hasn’t shrunk from calling his removal something the American government won’t: a coup.
That highly loaded declaration, as well as its relentless and, critics say, sympathetic coverage of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood movement, has turned Al Jazeera into a virtual enemy of the state in Egypt. Its journalists have been harassed and banned, and five remain in custody, including three who were arrested last week for allegedly harming national security. Al Jazeera’s local TV studios in Egypt, though not its transnational satellite transmissions, have been shut down, forcing its few remaining Egyptian journalists to work from makeshift facilities, such as a Cairo hotel room. . . .
. . . . Since then, Egyptian authorities and Al Jazeera’s critics — including some of the network’s own employees — have accused it of being a mouthpiece for Morsi and the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Al Jazeera has given a lot support to the Muslim Brotherhood. There’s no doubt about that,’ said Hugh Miles, a freelance journalist in Cairo and the author of ‘Al-Jazeera: The Inside Story of the Arab News Channel That Is Challenging the West.’ . . .”
. . . . The GMBDW reported earlier this week that Egypt had summoned the Qatari Ambassador to the Egyptian foreign ministry in order to object to Qatari criticism of the crackdown on the Brotherhood as well as to Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera’s coverage of events.
The GMBDW reported in September 2013 on the ongoing conflicts regarding Al-Jazeera’s coverage of events in Egypt. In July 2012, the GMBDW had reported on the resignation of the 22 members of the Al-Jazeera Egyptian bureau in protest over what they say were instructions from the management to “favor the Muslim Brotherhood.” In 2009, Egyptian authorities were reported to be in the process of revoking Al-Jazeera’s license to broadcast and that the network was planning to close its bureau office in Cairo.
Leaked US State Department cables indicate that Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar and funded by the Qatari government, operates as an arm of Qatari foreign policy which has recently been strongly supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood and the recently deposed Mohamed Morsi. Our predecessor publication extensively covered the role of Qatar as a supporter of the Global Muslim Brotherhood and was the first to report on the strong ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas of Wadah Khanfar, the former Director-General of Al-Jazeera who resigned in 2011 after serving for eight years. . . . .
6d. After the coup in Egypt, Al Jazeera has been paying for hotel rooms for exiled Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members, who had fled to Qatar.
. . . . Cast out by — or, perhaps, saved from— the harshest political crackdown in recent Egyptian history, a handful of Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist leaders found refuge here in the Qatari capital, while others traveled to Istanbul, London and Geneva.
The exiles’ community is small, disorganized and ideologically diverse, ranging from relatively moderate Islamist politicians to hard-line Salafists — groups that less than two years ago competed against each other in Egypt’s parliamentary and presidential elections.
Now, as they push back against the July coup that toppled their country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, they are on the same team.
At the same time, an exile leadership is starting to take shape here among the shimmering high-rises of Doha. Several of the exiles live temporarily in hotel suites paid for by Qatar’s state-run Arabic satellite network Al Jazeera — and it is in those suites and hotel lobbies that the future of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and, more broadly, the strategy and ideology of political Islam in the country may well be charted. . . .
7a. In a series of comments on a blog, there was an exchange about BMW withholding ads when The Atlantic reviewed a book about the Holocaust or WWII. BMW is owned by the Quandt firm, headed for years by Joseph Goebbels’ son-in-law.
7b. In addition to detailing that fascism wasn’t some kind of freak occurrence, we’ve noted the spawning of the Bormann capital network from the political and economic forces underpinning Nazi Germany. Controlling the German core corporations as well as powerful interests around the world, the Bormann group is preeminent on the world economic landscape.
Noting that BMW is controlled by the heirs of Joseph Goebbels (whose stepchild inherited the Quandt industrial empire), the Bloomberg story notes that Mercedes-Benz also has significant capital participation by the Quandts.
In the spring of 1945, Harald Quandt, a 23-year-old officer in the German Luftwaffe, was being held as a prisoner of war by Allied forces in the Libyan port city of Benghazi when he received a farewell letter from his mother, Magda Goebbels — the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
The hand-written note confirmed the devastating news he had heard weeks earlier: His mother had committed suicide with her husband on May 1, after slipping their six children cyanide capsules in Adolf Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin. . . .
. . . Quandt was released from captivity in 1947. Seven years later, he and his half-brother Herbert — Harald was the only remaining child from Magda Goebbels’ first marriage — would inherit the industrial empire built by their father, Guenther Quandt, which had produced Mauser firearms and anti-aircraft missiles for the Third Reich’s war machine. Among their most valuable assets at the time was a stake in car manufacturer Daimler AG. (DAI) They bought a part of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) a few years later.
While the half-brothers passed away decades ago, their legacy has endured. Herbert’s widow, Johanna Quandt, 86, and their children Susanne Klatten and Stefan Quandt, have remained in the public eye as BMW’s dominant shareholders. The billionaire daughters of Harald Quandt — Katarina Geller-Herr, 61, Gabriele Quandt, 60, Anette-Angelika May-Thies, 58, and 50-year-old Colleen-Bettina Rosenblat-Mo — have kept a lower profile.
The four sisters inherited about 1.5 billion deutsche marks ($760 million) after the death of their mother, Inge, in 1978, according to the family’s sanctioned biography, “Die Quandts.” They manage their wealth through the Harald Quandt Holding GmbH, a Bad Homburg, Germany-based family investment company and trust named after their father. Fritz Becker, the chief executive officer of the family entities, said the siblings realized average annual returns above 7 percent from its founding in 1981 through 1996. Since then, the returns have averaged 7.6 percent.
“The family wants to stay private and that is an acceptable situation for me,” said Becker in an interview at his Bad Homburg office. “We invest our money globally and if it’s $1 billion, $500 million or $3 billion, who cares?” (Italics added.) . . .
7c. In FTR #155, we presented Paul Manning’s research indicating that the Bormann network features the heirs of key Third Reich officials and military officers, hierarchically structured along lines deriving from the power structure of the Third Reich itself.
The Quandt story excerpted below provides significant depth to Manning’s reportage on the Bormann group and the Underground Reich.
We also noted (in AFA #3) that Quandt served as the corporate cover for Eichmann deputy Alois Brunner’s postwar work for the Gehlen spy outfit. (The August, 1944 document detailing the Third Reich’s plans to go underground provided for German heavy industry to give accused war criminals jobs to help them survive.)
Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile by Paul Manning; pp. 26–27.
. . . . A smaller conference in the afternoon was presided over by Dr. Bosse of the German Armaments Ministry. It was attended only by representatives of Hecko, Krupp, and Rochling. Dr. Bosse restated Bormann’s belief that the war was all but lost, but that it would be continued by Germany until certain goals to insure the economic resurgence of Germany after the war had been achieved. He added that German industrialists must be prepared to finance the continuation of the Nazi Party, which would be forced to go underground, just as had the Maquis in France. (Italics added.) . . .
. . . . From this day, German industrial firms of all rank were to begin placing their funds—and, wherever possible, key manpower—abroad, especially in neutral countries. Dr. Bosse advised that ‘two main banks can be used for the export of funds for firms who have made no prior arrangements; the Basler Handelsbank and Schweizerische Kreditanstalt of Zurich.’ He also stated, ‘There are a number of agencies in Switzerland which for a five percent commission will buy property in Switzerland for German firms, using Swiss cloaks.’
“Dr. Bosse closed the meeting, observing that ‘after the defeat of Germany, the Nazi Party recognizes that certain of its best known leaders will be condemned as war criminals. However, in cooperation with the industrialists, it is arranging to place its less conspicuous but most important members with various German factories as technical experts or members of its research and designing offices. (Italics added.) . . .
Doggart allegedly mentioned to a confidential FBI source that he’d set a deadline of April 15 to carry out the attack in accordance with the plans of a private militia group he’d been working with, according to information in the plea agreement. Doggart said that on that date, the militia, identified only as “OAF,” was “gonna start a civil war”:
Details are starting to emerge about the man that killed nine members of a prayer group at one of the oldest African American churches in the US. Surprise! He’s basically a Nazi:
Note that Roof’s assertion that “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go,” is basically the same argument Frazier Glenn Miller made in court last week in defense of his shooting of a Jewish Community Center. So that gives us a little more insight into the kind of guy Roof grew up into.
Part of what makes this incident extra tragic is that, if there’s one ray of hope shining in the US at this point for a better future, it’s that the younger generations appear to be developing an immunity to the racism mind-virus that’s infected so much of humanity throughout history. Obviously that’s not always the case, but a rejection of racism ideas appears to be a real, lasting trend. And why wouldn’t it? Once racism stopped getting officially or unofficially sanctioned by society, there’s no reason to assume kids growing up in a highly multiethnic society are going to grow up into a bunch of racists. So, in a twisted way, the shooting in Charleston is a sign of progress...so much progress that the bigots are basically driven to acts of homicidal suicide.
At the same time, the very fact that so many people are rejecting America’s racist traditions is exactly the kind of thing that’s going to cause the remaining racists to freak out and go on shooting sprees. So domestic terrorism of this nature could end up becoming more common as the racist worldviews that used to be prevalent in the US fade into history.
That’s all why we probably shouldn’t be too surprised if shootings like this actually increase in frequency in coming years. And that’s why it’s going to be important to keep in mind that Roof doesn’t just appear to be the type of person that many would characterize as a twisted loser. His whole worldview is losing a generational battle for hearts and minds, he must know it, and that’s obviously going to fill him with a deep sense of both anger and despair.
So you have to wonder how much of Roof’s murder spree reflected an anger at the African American community specifically vs how much it reflects a combination of both anger at society at large for increasingly rejecting the hate he inherited and despair from the knowledge that his desired Hateocracy is unlikely to come to fruition any time soon. Anger is no doubt a very powerful motivator, but as any parent with an out of control toddler can tell you, there’s nothing quite like anger and despair. It’s one of those traits many humans never outgrow.
@Pterrafractyl–
Indeed. One of the things to remember about this incident is the fact that this type of behavior is PRECISELY the action advocated by the books of the National Alliance.
“Hunter” specifically advocates that “lone wolf” operatives undertake to kill “racial enemies,” so-called race mixers, in particular.
The book is dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, with whom Frazier was friendly.
What Glenn Greenwald did was to obtain legal decisions that will insulate the crafters of this type of document against civil damages.
This is NOT a question of outlawing free speech. When the ACLU defended the American Nazi Party against an injunction against marching in Skokie, Illinois (a Chicago suburb with a considerable Jewish population), it did so on the grounds of constitutionally protected free speech.
Pre-Greenwald, advocating violence along the lines of what National Vanguard Books (the NA’s publishing arm) does was still legal.
However, IF someone was advocating violence against minorities, “racial enemies,” etc. and someone can be demonstrated to have acted on the basis of such exhortations, the author of the exhortation to violence could be held responsible for the consequences of their actions.
The consequences were considerable legal damages.
This is good law. It doesn’t say you can’t say such things, however if you do, and that causes harm or death to others, you ARE RESPONSIBLE.
If someone leaves a rake on their property with the teeth facing upward and someone steps on it and is injured, the property owner bears civil liability for their actions.
That is the legal principle under which the National Aliiance, et al were being sued.
Greenwald ran interference for them. That son-of-a-bitch bears partial responsibility for what happened in Kansas (Frazier) and what happened in South Carolina.
His (Greenwald’s) actions are truly evil and he did it all for FREE!
Again, I wonder if his partner at the time, an Austrian-born lawyer named Werner Achatz may have been more than just a romantic/sexual companion?
I wonder if he was some kind of handler or case officer?
This case goes directly to the heart of what Citizen Greenwald did and places the evil of his actions in bas relief.
BTW–have you found anything about the guy Boulware, who shot up the police station in Dallas?
I wonder if he was one of these “Sovereign Citizen” types?
Keep Up the Good Work!
Dave
@Dave: Regarding James Boulware and the shooting of the Dallas police station, based on reports there aren’t any clear indications that the guy was a white supremacists. He appears to have been quite interested in the typical generic anti-government conspiracy theories that you find held amongst many white supremacist circles but nothing that plenty of non-racists might also subscribe to. And he appears to have voiced a rather low opinion of religions, calling out both Jews and Christians to his family, but there’s no indication of whether that was part of a generic rejection of religion or some sort of specific sectarian hatred. The general view that emerges of the guy is that he was was a mentally unhinged individual with a history of violence, including a 2013 threat to kill his family members and shoot up churches and schools that was also slurping up plenty of anti-government rhetoric from somewhere.
So if more info comes out indicating the guy was a neo-Nazi it won’t be particularly surprising given his mental state, but at this point he mostly appears to be just a violence-prone unstable individual that was more of a ticking time-bomb out for revenge against the police for the loss of custody of his son than a wannabe revolutionary like Dylann Roof. He seems more like a mix between Jared Loughner and Joseph Stack.
It’s also going to be very interesting to see just how “leaderless” Roof’s ambitions were given the new information trickling out about the guy. For instance, according to his roommate, Roof was hoping his attack would start a civil war and he’s been planning it for the last 6 months:
So whether or not Roof was planning his terror attack entirely on his own or with assistance, he definitely wasn’t the only one to know about it. And he certainly wasn’t hiding his white supremacist views. As another friend made clear in a recent interview, when Roof recently contacted him after five years they used to hang out in high school all he wanted to talk about was the need for someone to “do something” about black people “taking over the world”:
So Roof’s Facebook page made him look like a “disaffected white supremacist” and one of the first things he talks about with an old friend from five years ago is about the need to do something about black people. If he was trying to not get caught he wasn’t very good at it! And yet, based on his high school friends’ statements, Roof wasn’t like this at all in high school, although we can’t forget the claims from another high school student that Roof was known for spouting racist jokes.
On top of all that, “He apparently told people that he was involved in groups, racist groups,”:
So Roof was, in his own words, involved with hate groups and those patches on his jacket were the kind of things sold at white power events.
That’s part of why it’s going to be very interesting to learn about the extent of Roof’s influences were and the far-right contacts he had in the lead up to this attack. Given Roof’s open, enthusiastic embrace of the white supremacy movement, and given the steady drip of useful idiots willing to kill others and themselves for any sort of Serpent’s Walk-style of “Leaderless Resistance” movement to succeed, you have to wonder if he was actively recruited for this. After all, the whole point strategy appears to revolve around the simple tactic of:
1. Have one person after another commit a horrible act in the name of white supremacy or whatever.
2. When the government inevitably responds to this trend with increased gun control laws or whatever, make as much noise as possible about government oppression and the need to start a race war.
3. Rinse and repeat until the desired civil war gets underway.
And as long as you have a steady flow of useful idiots that do thus on their own, like the man that tried to start a revolution by shooting up the Tides foundation and ACLU after listening to too much Michael Savage, the strategy can continue. But any lull in the attacks weakens the strategy since the tempo of terror is a key component of getting the desired response.
So while it could easily be the case that Roof was just drawn to this kind of act on his own, it’s worth keeping in mind that, given the shockingly high rate of mass murder sprees over the last 6 years, maintaining that high rate of domestic terror could actually become an increasingly important factor for the neo-Nazi underground. As Gary Brecher pointed out last year, when ISIS gets a useless recruit, they turn him into a useful idiot suicide bomber, and Roof sure didn’t seem like a charismatic rising-star in the white power movement. So you have to wonder if he made himself “useful” on his own, or had some more active, direct help.
So Dylann Roof left a manifesto. It’s pretty much a standard white nationalist rant about why various races suck (except he seems like like East Asians) and why slavery wasn’t so bad and a race war is long overdue. It’s like a blend of the kind of openly hardcore white supremacist stuff you might find on stormfront.com, but blended with the kind of language found in more “respectable” white nationalist publications like vdare.com or American Renaissance. There’s also an explanation for how Roof came to his white supremacist “awakening”: it sounds like he started binge-reading the websites of groups like the Council for Conservative Citizens in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting, and it was all downhill from there:
This is probably a good time to remind ourselves that the Council of Conservative citizens hasn’t just been inspiring folks like Dyllan Roof over the years. It’s got a much larger audience:
Yes, those were indeed troublesome ties to the CCC for the GOP back in 1999. And, as the SPLC taught in in 2004, those are the kinds of ties that don’t sever easily:
That statement at the end by CCC member, and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour pretty much summarizes the strange space occupied by groups like the CCC, where the neo-Nazis and “respectable” mainstream politicians:
And that’s part of why it’s going to be so grimly fascinating to see how the mainstream right-wing media and politicians handle the outcry over the terrorism in Charleston: Condemning Roof’s actions is easy. And casual condemnations of the most extreme elements of Roof’s worldview, like his advocacy of slavery, is also going to be politically risk-free. But the far more thorough condemning Roof’s, including his simpleton analysis of history and reality that sees the “white race” as somehow being on the verge of losing everything to hordes of minority invaders, would the political equivalent of burning a bridge that the GOP’s plutocrats have been building and maintaining with the white nationalists for decades. Roof may have been an murderous nut job, but if you removed the racial epithets and calls for a white insurrection that reimposes slavery from his manifesto, Roof’s diagnoses for what’s wrong with America starts to sound awfully close to what many in the right-wing media are spewing every day.
So, who knows, maybe Roof will end up doing the US a favor: By committing an act so over the top evil in the name of white nationalism and then leaving a manifesto that makes it pretty damn clear that the ideas that led him to do such a thing aren’t wildly different from what passes as mainstream right-wing rhetoric across the media today, perhaps a bit of self-reflection within the right-wing mediasphere is on the way. At least, let’s hope that’s the case, but there’s probably going to be a lot of resistance to that kind of positive path forward.
The Guardian took a look at the history of campaign donations by Earl Holt, president of the Council of Conservative Citizens which Dylann Roof cited as his initial source of knowledge about black-on-white crimes. The Guardian also found a number of interesting comments made by Mr. Holt over the years and let’s just say that if any of the many GOP candidates Mr. Holt has donated to over the haven’t already returned his donations, they’ll be returning that money now:
And yes, you read that right, While Mr. Holt decried Dylann Roof’s act of violence, the CCC does assert that Roof had “legitimate grievances”:
So the GOP is running from the CCC, and the CCC is running from Roof, but the CCC is also standing by the worldview Roof articulated, especially regarding black-on-white crime, and is basically begging society to engage in a debate over whether or not its views on black-on-white crimes are valid and backed by sound data and analysis. That’s going to complicate the GOP’s flight from the CCC rather significantly given that the CCC’s views on these topics are probably pretty much in line with the GOP and mainstream right-wing media.
So denunciations of Roof are guaranteed by everyone. And denunciations of the CCC appear to be the GOP’s blanket response. But what about denunciations of the CCC’s worldview, especially regarding black-on-white crime? How’s that going to play out?
That’s going to be a rather critical question going forward, because if there really is a wide swath of American society that largely agrees with the CCC’s views, at least its views regarding black-on-white crime, that’s important. It’s important to acknowledge, confront, and correct. And, as should be very apparent given the history of the GOP, its relationship to the CCC, and its larger history of engaging in using dog-whistle politics for decades now, A LOT of Americans really do share the CCC’s view that white Americans are experiencing an epidemic of black-on-white crimes, in part due to the efforts of groups like the CCC and the mainstream right-wing media, but in part due to society at large not too long ago:
So that happened. A mere 23 years ago. And it wasn’t just Republicans that seemed to view the African American community as some sort of alien invasion requiring a military response. Politicians from both parties joined in the fray. That was just what America was like back in the 90’s: if you wanted to get elected to office, you pushed ‘tough on crime’ policies which were obviously focused on the black community. And it applied to both parties. In other words, the lethal policing tactics that have garnered so much public attention and scrutiny in over the last year, have largely been a reflection of criminal policies the majority of Americans have called for and endorsed for decades. They’ve mostly just been following orders. Public orders.
Of course, times have changed, as evidence by the fact that Bill Clinton has called his own “tough on crime” policies a mistake and Hillary’s platform calls for a reversal of some of those very same policies. But, as evidences by the number of GOP politicians racing to give back their CCC donations, times haven’t changed enough.
And that’s why it’s actually pretty important that the US basically take the CCC’s bait and explore the bases of its “legitimate grievances”. When the CCC asserts that Roof had “legitimate grievances”, the CCC isn’t just talking about Roof’s grievances. Its referring to perceptions about the black community that were so widely held in America that catering to those “legitimate grievances” was how politicians from both parties got elected less than two decades ago. And for a substantial portion of the electorate, dog-whistling to the CCC’s worldview is how some politicians still try to get elected today. It’s a legitimately egregious situation.