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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Updating and further developing previous areas of inquiry, this program begins with analysis of the armed occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge by the armed followers of Ammon Bundy. The son of anti-government icon Cliven Bundy, the junior member of the family is pursuing a political agenda crafted by powerful corporations and their associated political and media elites.
For all of their self-promoted grass roots bona fides, the Bundyites are actually putting into practice the ideology of the Wise Use movement and, more recently, the Koch Brothers. Eclipsed since its heyday in the George W. Bush administration, the Wise Use movement targets government-owned land for use by corporate developers, such as timber, fossil-fuel and mining interests.
Lionized by Fox News and its media attack dogs, Cliven Bundy’s cache eroded following his open airing of his racist views. It should come as no surprise that Fox should have championed Bundy, because Sean Hannity and the network is heavily influenced by Koch-funded institutions. Cliven Bundy apologist Sean Hannity has enjoyed advertising support from the Heritage Foundation and the Tea Party Patriots, both funded by the Koch Brothers.
We note in the context of the Bundy militia and the technocratic fascism highlighted in previous programs, that both the technocrats and the Bundyites manifest the ethic that David Golumbia describes: ” . . . the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it . . . members of democratic polities have no choice but to accept them having that role.”
Veteran listeners should not be surprised to learn that Fred C. Koch, father of David and Charles, admirer of Mussolini and a founder of the John Birch Society built a large oil refinery for Hitler.
On the subject of Hitler himself, the investigative hypthesis presented in FTR #‘s 791 and 864 that Hitler may have survived the war and escaped from Germany has been buttressed by former CIA officer Robert Baer, author of Sleeping with the Devil, among other books.
The circumstances that brought Hitler to power are being partially recapitulated by political turmoil swirling around the recent influx of large numbers of Middle Eastern refugees. In Cologne and other German cities, as well as Helsinki, large numbers of women were sexually abused by Middle Eastern men, many of whom were recent emigres from the Middle East. Amid allegations that some of the attacks may have been planned, an anti-immigrant backlash from fascist street cadres recalled the Kristallnacht pogrom for some observers.
A major chapter in global post-war fascism closed with the death of P‑2 Grand Master Licio Gelli, a prime-mover in Italian, Vatican, Latin American and U.S. politics for decades.
Program Highlights Include:
- Review of the alleged roles of Martin Bormann and Allen Dulles in arranging the escape of Hitler.
- Licio Gelli’s manipulation of the Vatican Bank.
- Gelli’s influence in the dirty war in Argentina through the country’s P‑2 lodge branch.
- The connections between the Italian P‑2 and Klaus Barbie’s “Bridegrooms of Death” coca-fascisti.
- Links between the P‑2 milieu and the 9/11 attacks.
1. We begin with discussion of the ideological continuity between the occupation of an animal refuge in Oregon by Ammon Bundy and paramilitary supporters and the Wise Use movement. Minted by GOP conservatives seeking to utilize government-owned land in the West for development, the Wise Use movement has had an uneasy but distinct symbiotic resonance with the militia movement.
For background on the militia movement, we recommend L‑3 “The Militia Movement: Enemy or Pawn of the State?”.
“The Ideological Roots of the Oregon Standoff” by Alan Feuer; The New York Times; 1/10/2016.
It is tempting to dismiss the antigovernment gunmen who took control of an animal refuge in Oregon on Jan. 2 as fanatics working at the fringes of American politics. But if the methods used by the rancher Ammon Bundy to seize the federal property were radical, the ideological roots of the operation were somewhat more mainstream.
By storming the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and vowing to return it — by force of arms, if necessary — to the people of Harney County, Mr. Bundy and his men were echoing the teachings, if not the tactics, of the Wise Use movement: a conservative land-use doctrine that has been a part of the national discourse for nearly 30 years.
A successor to the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s (itself a successor to the anti-national parks Boomers project of the early 1900s), Wise Use answers the question of who should own the West by granting moral primacy to natural resource companies and to logging and ranching families like the Bundys, some of which have worked the land since the pioneer expansion.
Though composed of many activists and scores of organizations, Wise Use found its voice in the late 1980s when a timber industry adviser named Ron Arnold published “The Wise Use Agenda.” The manifesto offered an expansive plan to gut environmental regulation, increase private ownership of public land and compel the federal government to open its holdings to mining, oil and logging companies and to the unrestricted use of off-road vehicles.
Mr. Arnold adopted the phrase “wise use” from Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the United States Forest Service (who said that “conservation is the wise use of resources”). In 1988 he held a conference, bringing together the likes of Exxon and the National Cattlemen’s Association, with the goal of seeding the West with grass-roots groups that could wrest control of federal land and give a local flavor to his Reaganite aims.
“Arnold sent organizers into distressed rural communities to set up front groups with environmentally friendly sounding names that whipped up hostility against the government,” said Tarso Ramos, the executive director of Political Research Associates, a research group that studies right-wing movements. What resulted, Mr. Ramos said, was a “coalition of natural-resource companies, property developers and conservative activists working with a network of community organizations.”
This coalition achieved success in pushing its agenda. By the early 1990s, politicians friendly to the Wise Use cause had introduced or passed legislation in nearly 30 states giving local governments and citizens expanded powers to lay claim to federal land. Among those politicians was Representative Helen Chenoweth-Hage, an Idaho Republican, who became notorious for mocking the Endangered Species Act by holding what she called “endangered salmon bakes.” There was also Gale A. Norton, the interior secretary under President George W. Bush, who once worked as a lawyer for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has billed itself as “the litigation arm of Wise Use.”
“The Wise Use crowd got very close to the centers of power,” Mr. Ramos said.
It also got close to the militia movement, experts say. In 1994, the National Federal Lands Conference, a Wise Use group that maintained that county governments should control federal land, published an article in its newsletter that bore the title “Why There Is a Need for the Militia in America.” Around the same time, Wise Use rallies often featured pamphlets from groups like the Militia of Montana, said David Helvarg, the author of the “War Against the Greens.” Nor was it a coincidence said James McCarthy, a professor of geography at Clark University, that militia members in camouflage fatigues conducted armed exercises in the very federal forests in New Mexico that the Wise Use movement was trying at the time to pry away from Washington’s control.
“There were many people who were active simultaneously in the Wise Use and militia movements and who saw them as different manifestations,” Mr. McCarthy said. “However, it is also true that many Wise Use activists were uncomfortable with the militia coming into their fold.”
In an email titled, “Wise Use and property rights activists vs. Wackos,” Mr. Arnold denied that his movement was connected to men like Ammon Bundy, who stood down the government two years ago in a similar engagement over cattle-grazing rights at his father’s ranch in Nevada. “I don’t see any Wise Use-ish ‘doctrine’ in anything that’s been called ‘patriot militia,’” Mr. Arnold wrote.
And yet the question stands as to why vigilantes with AR-15 rifles have repeatedly confronted the government on behalf of local landowners in the West–a classic Wise Use principle, if not a Wise Use tactic. This spring, gunmen from the Oath Keepers militia group helped the owners of an Oregon gold mine chase away federal agents who were trying to enforce a stop-work order: A few months later, another Oath Keeper tactical team stopped the government from shutting down a mine in a national forest in Montana.
Part of the answer is that, in a region where the ground itself is largely owned by agencies in Washington, the Wise Use and militia movements share “the same seething resentment at federal over-reach,” said Jeffrey St. Clair, a journalist who has written about environmental politics in the West for 30 years. If the Wise Use movement did not condone or support militias, it created an intellectual framework for militia operations and has, on occasion, lent the groups ideological ballast. “In some way,” Mr. St. Clair said, “the patriot movement is glomming onto the Wise Use movement as something that has a political presence and a real-world power” that the patriot movement “has never had.”
After the Bush years, the Wise Use movement lost much of its vibrancy, and even Mr. Arnold acknowledged that it is little known today. But the relationship between activists in suits and angry men with guns continues. Last year, Michele Fiore, a Republican assemblywoman in Nevada, introduced a bill to prohibit the federal government from owning or managing land in Nevada without the state’s consent. Ms. Fiore, as it happens, is also a strong supporter of the Bundys. A month after her bill was introduced, she debated Chris Hayes on MSNBC, live from the standoff at the Bundy family ranch. . . .
2. Next, we highlight the Koch brothers lucrative support for the goals of the wise use movement, and their support for “The Loudest Voice” in the room–Fox News. Until he “jumped the shark” with an overtly racist comment about African-Americans, Cliven Bundy enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Fox News.
Right-wing media have been rushing to distance themselves from the Nevada rancher they’ve spent weeks championing after Cliven Bundy revealed his racist worldview, but two of Bundy’s biggest cheerleaders — Sean Hannity and Fox News — have vested corporate, financial, and political interests in the promotion of Cliven Bundy’s anti-government land ownership agenda.
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy became Fox News’ favorite folk hero after he refused to comply with court orders directing him to remove his trespassing cattle from public land. Hannity and many other right-wing media rallied around Bundy and his armed supporters as they threatened violence against federal law enforcement officials attempting to impound Bundy’s cattle and collect the $1 million he owes in fines and fees after decades of noncompliance with the law.
Bundy has said he doesn’t recognize the existence of the federal government nor its authority over the land and has attacked the federal ownership of lands as subverting Nevada’s “state sovereignty.”
Hannity has promoted Bundy’s anti-government rhetoric, arguing that the federal government owns far too much land and pushing Bundy’s claim that not only does the federal government not have land-ownership authority but that they don’t need or use the land they claim to own. On the April 23 edition of his show, Hannity attacked the government for owning too much land, agreeing with Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano that they do not have the constitutional authority to own any of the land. Throughout the land battle, Hannity continuously argued that the government is irresponsibly fighting for land they have no intended use for — such as building hospitals, schools, or roads — and should focus their efforts elsewhere to rapists, murderers, criminals, and pedophiles.
Bundy and Hannity’s promotion of state ownership of federal lands gives airtime to an issue that conservatives have long been campaigning for but have had difficulty getting voters excited about — an issue in line with the land interests of the Koch brothers. Slate reported on April 23 that the Fox News corporate, financial, and political interests being served by Hannity’s promotion of Bundy lie in the network’s connection to the Koch brothers:
Bundy’s anti-federal agenda is closely aligned with that of Charles and David Koch, major Republican donors who have been pushing for states to gain control over federal lands — so they can be sold or leased to people like the Koch brothers in deals.
Fox News Network and Sean Hannity have a particular interest in the promotion and realization of such Koch interests because their funding depends on it — Hannity receives major funding and large ad buys from Koch-affiliated Heritage and Tea Party Patriots.
Hannity’s Koch-affiliated funders have a long history of promoting the privatization of public lands and condemning the federal ownership of land. Tea Party groups have supported local efforts to transfer federal lands. Heritage has advocated shrinking the U.S. government’s control by selling its physical assets such as “huge swaths of land (especially out west).” Heritage was also a loyal promoter of the Federal Land Freedom Act of 2013, advocating for the transfer of federal land management to state regulators for energy resource development.
Giving airtime to an issue that is obscure but significant to his conservative funders makes perfect sense for Hannity. Politico reported that Heritage began sponsoring Hannity in 2008 and in 2013 Hannity began advertising for the Tea Party Patriots, “lending his name to fundraising drives, hosting its leaders on his radio and Fox News shows, and even using the Fox airwaves to promote the Tea Party Patriots website.”
The Koch brothers have been covertly funding right-wing organizations such as Heritage Action and the Tea Party Patriots through the non-profit business league Freedom Partners whose tax code status as a trade association allows the organization to conceal its donors. Freedom Partners is one of the largest donors of conservative groups and its board has deep ties to the Koch brothers with many of its members being longtime employees of Koch Industries and the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
The Koch-funded Freedom Partners made grants of $236 million in 2011; among many conservative groups its recipients include Heritage as well as the Tea Party Patriots. Heritage Action received $500,000 in 2011 from the Koch brothers through Freedom Partners and additional funds from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. In 2012, the Tea Party Patriots received $200,000 from Freedom Partners.
The legislative efforts of such groups to transfer control of federal lands to states are “nothing more than corporate-backed messaging tools” initiated by conservative groups like the Koch-affiliates. Such efforts are rooted in the interests of the Kochs and other conservative groups to use the land in whichever way is most profitable to them such as mining, drilling, and other resource extraction.
3. We next re-examine one of the most important analytical articles in a long time, David Golumbia’s article in Uncomputing.org about technocrats and their fundamentally undemocratic outlook. The technocrats, the Wise Use movement and the Bundyites are part and parcel to the same basic philosophy and ideology.
The technocrats described by David Golumbia are arrogating to themselves the free exercise of information and technology; the Bundyites are arrogating to themselves the use of government owned land. Both manifest the ethic that Golumbia describes: ” . . . the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it . . . members of democratic polities have no choice but to accept them having that role.”
We note in passing that Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano–mentioned in the previous article as supportive of the Koch/Bundy agenda–was an honored guest at the Students for Liberty conference. Edward Snowden was also a guest at that event, having been “skyped” in to the event. (For more on this phenomenon, see–among other programs–FTR #852.
“Tor, Technocracy, Democracy” by David Golumbia; Uncomputing.org; 4/23/2015.
What might be described as the thesis statement of this very important piece reads: “Such technocratic beliefs are widespread in our world today, especially in the enclaves of digital enthusiasts, whether or not they are part of the giant corporate-digital leviathan. Hackers (“civic,” “ethical,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hacktivists, WikiLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anonymous “members,” even Edward Snowden himself walk hand-in-hand with Facebook and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to contribute to the political world, but that the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the political world is broken, they appear to think (rightly, at least in part), and the solution to that, they think (wrongly, at least for the most part), is for programmers to take political matters into their own hands. . . First, [Tor co-creator] Dingledine claimed that Tor must be supported because it follows directly from a fundamental “right to privacy.” Yet when pressed—and not that hard—he admits that what he means by “right to privacy” is not what any human rights body or “particular legal regime” has meant by it. Instead of talking about how human rights are protected, he asserts that human rights are natural rights and that these natural rights create natural law that is properly enforced by entities above and outside of democratic polities. Where the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 is very clear that states and bodies like the UN to which states belong are the exclusive guarantors of human rights, whatever the origin of those rights, Dingledine asserts that a small group of software developers can assign to themselves that role, and that members of democratic polities have no choice but to accept them having that role. . . Further, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to natural rights is today most often associated with the political right, for a variety of reasons (ur-neocon Leo Strauss was one of the most prominent 20th century proponents of these views). We aren’t supposed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s supposed to be above the left/right distinction. But it isn’t. . . .”
4. Jane Mayer has a new book out on the Kochs which, among other things, recounts how Fred C. Koch (father of David and Charles), built an oil refinery in Nazi Germany in combination with William Rhodes Davis, “The Mystery Man.”
The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.
The book, “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.
But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.
The episode is not mentioned in an online historypublished by Koch Industries, the company that Mr. Koch later founded and passed on to his sons.
Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, said company officials had declined to participate in Ms. Mayer’s book and had not yet read it.
“If the content of the book is reflective of Ms. Mayer’s previous reporting of the Koch family, Koch Industries or Charles’s and David’s political involvement, then we expect to have deep disagreements and strong objections to her interpretation of the facts and their sourcing,” Mr. Spain said.
Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents the Kochs and other families as the hidden and self-interested hands behind the rise and growth of the modern conservative movement. Philanthropists and political donors who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into think tanks, political organizations and scholarships, they helped win acceptance for anti-government and anti-tax policies that would protect their businesses and personal fortunes, she writes, all under the guise of promoting the public interest.
The Kochs, the Scaifes, the Bradleys and the DeVos family of Michigan “were among a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how the Americans thought and voted,” the book says.
Many of the families owned businesses that clashed with environmental or workplace regulators, come under federal or state investigation, or waged battles over their tax bills with the Internal Revenue Service, Ms. Mayer reports. The Kochs’ vast political network, a major force in Republican politics today, was “originally designed as a means of off-loading the costs of the Koch Industries environmental and regulatory fights onto others” by persuading other rich business owners to contribute to Koch-controlled political groups, Ms. Mayer writes, citing an associate of the two brothers.
Mr. Scaife, who died in 2014, donated upward of a billion dollars to conservative causes, according to “Dark Money,” which cites his own unpublished memoirs. Mr. Scaife was driven in part, Ms. Mayer writes, by a tax loophole that granted him his inheritance tax free through a trust, so long as the trust donated its net income to charity for 20 years. “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?” Mr. Scaife wrote.
In Ms. Mayer’s telling, the Kochs helped bankroll — through a skein of nonprofit organizations with minimal public disclosure — decades of victories in state capitals and in Washington, often leaving no fingerprints. She credits groups financed by the Kochs and their allies with providing support for the Tea Party movement, along with the public relations strategies used to shrink public support for the Affordable Care Act and for President Obama’s proposals to mitigate climate change.
The Koch network also provided funding to fine-tune budget proposals from Representative Paul D. Ryan, such as cuts to Social Security, so they would be more palatable to voters, according to the book. The Kochs were so influential among conservative lawmakers, Ms. Mayer reports, that in 2011, Representative John A. Boehner, then the House speaker, visited David Koch to ask for his help in resolving a debt ceiling stalemate.
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• Ex-CIA agent Bob Baer does not believe Hitler’s death story is conclusive• Baer, a spy for 21 years, said Hitler could have easily faked his death
• Newly declassified FBI documents suggest he could have got to Tenerife
• Other documents claim the Nazi leader made it to Argentina by submarine.A CIA agent with more than 21-years’ field experience claims newly declassified evidence suggests that Adolf Hitler faked his own death before escaping to the Canary Islands by air before continuing to Argentina.
Bob Baer, who spent his lifetime involved in counter-intelligence and espionage said the official version of history with Hitler killing himself in his Berlin bunker does not stand up to official scrutiny.
He claims that newly released FBI files suggest that investigators at the time were also suspicious about whether the Nazi dictator had shot himself in the head.
According to the “Hunting Hitler” documentary on History Channel, there was no eyewitness report of Hitler’s suicide or of anyone discovering his body inside his bunker.
The team, following snippets of evidence, said it was plausible that Hitler could have faked his own death and escaped through the Templehof airport on the day after he was last seen in public. One of the aircraft which left during the mass Nazi exodus is believed to have contained his luggage.
During the controversial documentary series, Baer claims: ‘The narrative the government gives us is a lie. if you look at the FBI files it throws open the investigation.
‘What we are doing is re-examining history, history that we thought was settled that Hitler died in the bunker but the deeper we get into it, it’s clear to me we don’t have any facts for it.’
One of the declassified documents expresses concern that Hitler’s body had not been recovered and the complete lack of evidence of his death.
The controversial theory claims that Hitler flew to the Canary Island and boarded a U‑Boat which transported him to a Nazi-friendly area of Argentina.
6a. The German minister of justice has hinted publicly that he thinks the sexual assaults were planned.
“German Minister Hints Sexual Assaults Were Planned”; Euractive.com; 1/11/2016.
Attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve have prompted more than 600 criminal complaints, and a German minister said the sexual assaults may have been planned or coordinated.
The attacks, mostly targeting women and ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have prompted a highly-charged debate in Germany about its welcoming stance for refugees and migrants, more than one million of whom arrived last year.
The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted German Minister of Justice Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated.
The debate on migration will be further fuelled by the acknowledgement by the authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia that a man shot dead as he tried to enter a Paris police station last week was an asylum seeker with seven identities who lived in Germany.
In Cologne, police said on Sunday (9 January) that 516 criminal complaints had been filed by individuals or groups in relation to assaults on New Year’s Eve, while police in Hamburg said 133 similar charges had been lodged with the north German city.
Frankfurt also registered complaints, although far fewer.
The investigation in Cologne is focused largely on asylum seekers or illegal migrants from North Africa, police said. They arrested one 19-year-old Moroccan man on Saturday evening.
In Cologne, where a 100-strong force of officers continued their investigations, around 40% of the complaints included sexual offences, including two rapes.
Dwindling trust
The attacks, which prompted violent far-right protests on Saturday, threatens to further erode confidence in Merkel, and could stoke support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of three key state elections in March.
Merkel’s popularity has declined, as she refused to place a limit on the influx of refugees.
A survey sponsored by state broadcaster ARD showed that while 75% of those asked were very happy with Merkel’s work in April last year, only 58% were pleased now.
Almost three quarters of those polled said migration was the most important issue for the government to deal with in 2016.
The Cologne attacks also heated up the debate on immigration in neighbouring Austria.
“What happened in Cologne is unbelievable and unacceptable,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner, a member of the conservative People’s Party that is junior coalition partner to the Social Democrats, told newspaper Oesterreich.
There had been a handful of similar incidents in the border city of Salzburg. “Such offenders should be deported,” she said, backing a similar suggestion by Merkel.
Swiss media contained numerous stories about sexual assaults on women by foreigners, fuelling tensions ahead of a referendum next month that would trigger the automatic deportation of foreigners convicted of some crimes.
In Germany, on Monday (11 January), a regional parliamentary commission will quiz police and others about the events on New Year’s Eve in Cologne.
The anti-Islamic nationalist group PEGIDA, whose supporters threw bottles and fire crackers at a march in Cologne on Saturday before being dispersed by riot police, will later hold a rally in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
...
6b. “Seeding the clouds” for the perfect storm, Islamist elements may have deliberately pre-planned the multiple sexual assaults in Europe, seeking to provoke precisely the kind of reaction that they got. Note that unarmed, black-clad militia groups calling themselves the Soldiers of Odin have sprung up in some Finnish cities. Note that Carl Lundstrom, who financed the Pirate Bay website that hosted WikiLeaks, also financed the Sweden Democrats, the anti-immigrant party poised to benefit from incidents such as the New Year’s Eve attacks in European cities.
“. . . . The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted German Minister of Justice Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated. . . .“
In Helsinki, authorities were tipped off about plans for the sexual assaults in advance.
“Unprecedented Sex Harassment in Helsinki at New Year, Finnish Police Report” by Richard Orange; The Telegraph; 1/08/2016.
Asylum seekers who met in central Helsinki to celebrate New Years’s Eve “had similar plans” to commit sexual assault and other crimes as those who targeted women in the Germany city of Cologne, Finnish Police have reported.
Three Iraqi asylum seekers have been arrested for committing sexual assaults during the celebrations in the city’s Senate Square, where some 20,000 had gathered.
Security personnel reported “widespead sexual harrassment” during the celebrations, police added, with women complaining that asylum seekers had groped their breasts and kissed them without permission.
“This phenomenon is new in Finnish sexual crime history,” Ilkka Koskimaki, the deputy chief of police in Helsinki, told the Telegraph. ”We have never before had this kind of sexual harrassment happening at New Year’s Eve.”
He said that the police had received tip-offs from staff at the asylum reception centres.
“Our information from these reception centres were that disturbances or other crimes would happen in the city centre. We were prepared for fights and sexual harrassment and thefts.”
He said that police had established a “very massive presence” to control the estimated 1,000 Iraqi asylum seekers who had gathered in the tunnels surrounding the central railway station by 11pm, many of whom appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Mr Koskimaki said that sexual assults in parks and on the streets had been unknown in Finland before a record 32,000 asylum seekers arrived in 2015, making the 14 cases last year “big news in the city”.
“We had unfortunately some very brutal cases in autumn,” he said. “I don’t know so well other cultures, but I have recognised that the thinking of some of them is very different. Some of them maybe think that it is allowed to be aggressive and touch ladies on the street.”
Jamel Saltne, a Finnish-speaking Iraqi, said that from what he had seen on Arabic social media, police had wrongly portrayed events.
“What happened was not the result of an action planned in advance,” he told the Telegraph. “It was totally expected that young men would go to the centre of the capital as that is the best place to celebrate New Year’s Eve.”
“I’m not accusing the police of racism, but maybe they have received complaints intended to smear people.”
...
Unarmed militia groups calling themselves “Soldiers of Odin”, wearing black jackets and hats marked “S.O.O”, have sprung up in several towns in Finland where asylum seekers are housed, claiming they want to protect citizens from “Islamic intruders”.
Petteri Orpo, Finnish interior minister, condemned the groups in an interview with national broadcaster YLE on Thursday.
“There are extremist features to carrying out street patrols. It does not increase security,” he said.
6c. Manifesting what we called “The Perfect Storm [Machiavelli 3.0],” German fascists in Leipzig responded to the rapes and molestations with “Kristallnacht II,” with Muslims the target of rage, instead of Jews.
* Anti-refugee rioters went on a rampage in the German town of Leipzig, trashing doner kebab fast food restaurants
* 250 hooligans — part of the local branch of PEGIDA known as LEGIDA — set cars on fire and vandalised shops
* Mayor Burkhard Jung condemned the ‘naked violence that took place’ and has described ‘terror on the streets’
* Scenes of smashed windows in the city are reminiscent of the anti-Semitic Kristallnacht attacks in 1938The mayor of a German city has spoken of ‘terror on the streets’ of his city after far-right thugs ran riot in scenes reminiscent of the anti-Semitic Kristallnacht attacks in 1938.
Burkhard Jung, mayor of Leipzig, has condemned the ‘naked violence that took place’ after doner kebab fast food restaurants were destroyed, cars were set ablaze and shop windows were smashed by around 250 hooligans of LEGIDA — the local branch of PEGIDA, an anti-migrant, anti-EU organization — on Monday night.
The rampage in Leipzig evoked memories of the wave of violence against Jews that erupted across Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9, 1938.
On Monday, hundreds of anti-refugee rioters caused chaos in Leipzig after a demonstration where they called for asylum seekers to be deported and their nation’s borders closed.
The right-wingers broke away from a largely peaceful march in the eastern city to trash the suburb of Connewitz.
At one point the demonstrators, who threw fireworks at police, attempted to build a barricade in a main street with signs and torn up paving stones before they were dispersed.
Firemen had to tackle a blaze in the attic of one building set alight by a wayward rocket fired by the rioters. A bus carrying leftist pro-asylum demonstrators was also attacked and seriously damaged.
’It was naked violence that took place here, nothing more,’ Jung said. ‘That has been established and there must be consequences.’
Police said they have identified and arrested 211 of the crowd of right-wing hooligans, many of them with criminal records for violence.
‘This was a serious breach of the peace,’ said a police spokesman, confirming that several police officers were injured in the clashes triggered by simmering anger over the New Year’s Eve mass sex attacks against women in Cologne and several other German cities.
‘Rape Refugees stay away’ was one of the banners carried during the march, the wording above a silhouette of women running from knife-wielding attackers, one of whom resembled a caricature from Aladdin.
When daylight broke in Leipzig, scenes were similar to those that followed Kristallnacht — the name referring to the shards of glass left strewn across cities in the aftermath of the bloody pogroms.
In Leipzig, hundreds of families were persecuted and more than 500 men were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp.
A Kristallnacht memorial in the city is now cleaned each year to ‘make the Nazi crimes visible’ across Europe.
The anniversary of the night in November was due to coincide with a weekly demonstration by LEGIDA and the right-wing movement had planned to walk past the site of a synagogue that was burned to the ground during Kristallnacht.
However, the city ruled that until the end of the year, the LEGIDA could not march through the city, only rally.
Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said; ‘Now all of a sudden we are facing the challenge that refugees are coming to Europe and we are vulnerable, as we see, because we do not yet have the order, the control, that we would like to have.’
She also said the euro was ‘directly linked’ to freedom of movement in Europe, adding: ‘Nobody should act as though you can have a common currency without being able to cross borders reasonably easily.’
Merkel said that if countries did not allow their borders to be crossed without much difficulty, the European single market would ‘suffer acutely’ — meaning that Germany, at the centre of the European Union and its largest economy, should fight to defend freedom of movement.
And tonight, Germany feared a new march of the far right following the riots in Leipzig, which added to long-held concerns from German intelligence services that the far right groups are organising into terrorist cell structures.
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The violence in Leipzig followed on from weekend attacks in Cologne by a vigiliante mob which used the social networking site Facebook to marshall young men — rockers, bodybuilders and club bouncers — to go on a ‘manhunt’ for immigrants.
Two Pakistani men were hospitalized and a third Syrian man was lightly injured before a stiff police presence on the streets thwarted further attacks.
It is unclear what their condition is although the police are looking to press charges of ‘serious bodily harm’ against their attackers who kicked, beat and abused them verbally.
The Express said the Facebook vigilante groups had promised an ‘orderly clean up’ of the old town centre in their ‘manhunt.’
Police confirmed one Syrian man was also hurt in an attack on Sunday, which took place just 20 minutes after the first, but is believed to have been carried out by a separate group of five men.
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7. Concluding with the obituary of one of the world’s most prominent fascists, we highlight P‑2 chief Licio Gelli and some of the many bases he touched during his life. “I was born under fascism, I studied with fascism, I fought for fascism, I am a fascist and I will die a fascist.”
Licio Gelli, a buccaneering Italian financier and self-professed fascist who was implicated in terrorist crimes, scandals and a secret society that, with him as its grandmaster, was accused of plotting a right-wing coup, died on Tuesday at his villa in Arezzo, Italy. He was 96.
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His death was reported by the nation’s news media, and his funeral on Thursday, attended mostly by family and friends, was covered by Italian television.
Mr. Gelli never wavered in his convictions. In a 2008 television interview, he declared, “I was born under fascism, I studied with fascism, I fought for fascism, I am a fascist and I will die a fascist.”
His near-mythic ignominy evoked popular fictional conspiracy tales, like Dan Brown’s novel “The Da Vinci Code” and the movie “The Godfather Part III,” and he personified what Italians encapsulate as “dietrologia” — the reflexive, widely held suspicion that behind any official government narrative lurks a more sinister explanation.
But if Mr. Gelli was a scoundrel to many Italians, to others he held out the promise of stability in turbulent times, when the Communist Party was advancing at the polls and the economy was declining.
He exerted much of his influence as leader of a cabalistic breakaway Masonic lodge, known as Propaganda Due, or P2, which the Freemasons had officially dissolved. The authorities said hundreds of government, business and military leaders had joined the lodge, defying Italy’s ban on secret societies.
Investigators linked the group to plots to destabilize the Italian state, to blame leftists for unrest, and to foment a right-wing coup during the “years of lead,” when Italy was besieged by terrorist attacks.
The group was suspected of trying to discredit Communists by thwarting the rescue of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 by leftist Red Brigades guerrillas. P2 was believed to have had a hand in the horrific bombing of a Bologna train station in 1980 that left 85 dead and that was generally attributed to another neo-fascist group.
And it was investigated in 1982 in the death of Roberto Calvi, a lodge member who was called “God’s banker” because of his financial ties to the Vatican’s bank. Mr. Calvi’s body was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London — a suicide, the authorities ruled.
Mr. Gelli was convicted of bank fraud and obstruction of justice. He mysteriously escaped from prison or house arrest twice and served the remainder of his term in his villa, a 30-room redoubt near a 15th-century church in the Tuscan hills.
There he was found to have a gold thumb when nearly $2 million in bullion was discovered in 1998 in the terrace garden, hidden in terra cotta flower pots beneath begonias and geraniums.
In “God’s Banker,” his 1983 biography of Mr. Calvi, Rupert Cornwell wrote, “Italy, it must be recorded with honesty, albeit bemusement, has produced few more remarkable individuals this century than Licio Gelli.”
Mr. Gelli (pronounced jelly) was born on April 21, 1919, in Pistoia, north of Florence, in Tuscany. He married the former Wanda Vannaci. She died in 1993, and their three children, Raffaello, Maria Rosa and Maurizio, survive him, as does his second wife, the former Gabriella Vasile. (Another daughter died in an automobile accident.)
Mr. Gelli joined Benito Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts in fighting for Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. He served as an Italian liaison to Nazi Germany during World War II, then switched sides to support Communist partisans in his native Pistoia Province.
After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he became a confidant of the dictator Juan Perón. Returning to Italy, he became successful as a financier and self-made industrialist manufacturing mattresses.
Mr. Gelli emerged into the public eye in 1981 as Italian investigators were focusing on Mr. Calvi, who had presided over the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank, and on Michele Sindona, another banker who had been accused in the failure of the Franklin National Bank in the United States. (Mr. Sindona was later convicted of murder and was himself murdered, by poisoning, in prison.)
Searching for the names of businessmen who had illegally exported cash, the investigators found instead — in a leather suitcase in Mr. Gelli’s mattress factory — evidence of what amounted to a right-wing shadow government composed of 962 power brokers led by Mr. Gelli. The group, they said, sought to “exert anonymous and surreptitious control” of the country.
The roster included Mr. Calvi and Mr. Sindona, whom the authorities described as puppets of Mr. Gelli, enlisted to help impose what the group called a “Plan for Democratic Rebirth.”
When so many government ministers and other officials were revealed to be members of the lodge, Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani’s government fell. His successor declared that Italy was facing a “moral emergency.”
Mr. Gelli was arrested in Geneva in 1982 on charges of passport fraud. The authorities said he had gone there to withdraw millions of dollars from his Swiss accounts.
A year later, just as he was about to be extradited to Italy to face charges involving the Bologna bombing, the bank failure and financing right-wing terrorism, he escaped from a Swiss prison hospital with a guard’s help and fled to South America. He returned to Switzerland in 1987 and was extradited to Italy under extraordinary security.
Mr. Gelli was absolved of any association with the Bologna bombing but sentenced to five years in prison for obstructing the investigation and 18 and a half years for his role in the Banco Ambrosiano fraud. (His Swiss accounts had been linked to more than $1 billion that the bank was missing.) He later received a 17-year sentence on obstruction charges in a political conspiracy case involving 15 other P2 members.
Mr. Gelli was a “man of Neronic wealth and ways,” as the writer Nick Tosches described him in “Power on Earth,” his 1986 biography of Mr. Sindona. But Mr. Gelli’s lawyer, Raphael Giorgetti, suggested on Thursday that his client had merely been a “scapegoat” for the government’s own failings.
Most of the lodge members escaped punishment. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who was president of the Vatican’s bank, was indicted as an accessory in the Banco Ambrosiano collapse. Citing diplomatic immunity, the Vatican refused to comply with an Italian arrest warrant for the archbishop, but it paid more than $200 million to Banco Ambrosiano’s creditors.
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LOL! The Soldiers of Odin anti-immigrant vigilante groups that are patrol the streets of a growing number of cities in Finland just acquired a new vigilante group that’s patrolling the streets for them, and quite effectively it would seem based on reports of how the Soldiers scatter from their new rivals’ when these new vigilantes simply show up in the same area. They must be mighty
soldiersLoldiers:“As for whether they plan to try to keep joining their more dangerous looking counterparts, the Loldiers say that they’ll come back around when people need to be cheered up.”
Holy crap. Tampere as a group of clown superheroes that patrol the streets and keep far-right thugs at bay with song and horrible rhymes. That’s pretty kick ass. It just goes to show that not all clowns are scary. Most, but not all.
Sadly, Tampere might be two clowns short of a posse going forward. It turns out that the Loldiers of Odin can get away with clowning around when they’re mocking the Soldiers of Odin. But when they attempted their anti-fascist clowning at a general anti-immigrant parade that had approval by authorities to march, the Loldiers were arrested:
So it appears that the Tampere police will allow you to engage in vigilante clowning, but only against other vigilantes. Good to know. It will be interesting to see if those rules apply in other cities. Let the clowning commence! Except for evil clowning. Anti-vigilante evil clowning activities are something society could do without, much like far-right vigilante street patrols. Clown responsibly.
Here’s a bit of good news from the Bundy Brigade’s standoff in Oregon: a few of the remaining militants have begun to trickle out after Ammon Bundy issued his plea from jail, via his lawyer, to leave the refuge peacefully.
And, of course, the bad news: Those that are choosing to remain are repeatedly reiterating their desire to fight to the death:
Yep, David Fry, the militant’s computer guy who raised a number of eyebrows with his #Pray4ISIS and #HiterWasRight types of social media postings (which he asserts done were in jest), is apparently planning on dying there. ISIS would presumably approve.
Fry clearly isn’t the only one there still willing to die, especially the guy that yelled, “This is history in the making. There are no laws in this United States now. This is a free-for-all Armageddon. Any military or law enforcement or feds that stand and don’t abide by their oath are the enemy. If they stop you from getting here, kill them!” He’s definitely ready to die, but he’s also issuing a rather chilling threat: Any military or law enforcement or feds “that stand and don’t abide by their oath” should be killed. It’s a reminder that even if the remaining standoff ends, violently or non-violently, the mind virus that’s infected these individuals won’t end with them. The sovereign citizen-esque ideology that views every government employee who isn’t working for the county sheriff as worthy of being shot or hanged will still linger on, which is part of why the Bundy Brigade’s other computer-related shenanigans are so disturbing: In addition to the harassment and intimidation inflicted on the federal employees living in Burns, Oregon, the Bundy Brigade was already observed by reporters rummaging through government computers and files and gathering information of federal employees:
“After Finicum realized he shouldn’t have allowed OPB to access the room, he quickly picked up lists of names and Social Security numbers by the computers, and hid government employee ID cards that were previously in plain sight.”
And that all took place before the first reports of David Fry’s presence at refuge. Who knows what information they were able to obtain on these individuals once Fry showed up. A group that’s already threatened you isn’t the type of group you want rummaging through your employer’s files.
But Fry’s presence there is also a reminder that the sovereign-citizen/“we just make up the laws and violently enforce it” ideology promoted by the Bundy Brigade actually shares quite a bit in common with another ideology that’s been heavily promoted ever since the Snowden Affair first hit: the Cypherpunk ideology, where the “natural law”, as interpreted by each individual, include an absolute right to digital privacy for everyone under all circumstance. That natural law is the only real law and through the use of technology, like strong encryption, those natural laws can be codified into reality. And should be codified into reality, regardless of the democratic process:
“Such technocratic beliefs are widespread in our world today, especially in the enclaves of digital enthusiasts, whether or not they are part of the giant corporate-digital leviathan. Hackers (“civic,” “ethical,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hacktivists, WikiLeaks fans, Anonymous “members,” even Edward Snowden himself walk hand-in-hand with Facebook and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to contribute to the political world, but that the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the political world is broken, they appear to think (rightly, at least in part), and the solution to that, they think (wrongly, at least for the most part), is for programmers to take political matters into their own hands.”
That’s a pretty good description of the Cypherpunks. “Natural law” grants them all the political legitimacy they need. Kind of like the sovereign citizens.
Regarding Licio Gelli: The two paragraphs from the article “Licio Gelli, Italian Financier and Cabal Leader, Dies at 96″ by Sam Roberts; The New York Times; 12/18/2015. would suggest the possibility to consider that his sponsorship in his business ventures tied to the Underground Reich:
“Mr. Gelli joined Benito Mussolini’s fascist Blackshirts in fighting for Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. He served as an Italian liaison to Nazi Germany during World War II, then switched sides to support Communist partisans in his native Pistoia Province.
After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he became a confidant of the dictator Juan Perón. Returning to Italy, he became successful as a financier and self-made industrialist manufacturing mattresses.”
Also, the sponsorship of Exxon with the Wise use movement mentioned in the article “The Ideological Roots of the Oregon Standoff” by Alan Feuer; The New York Times; 1/10/2016 would suggest the possibility of Underground Reich influence. In Paul Manning’s Book “Martin Bormann Nazi in Exile” © 1981 it indicated that their organization had more stock in the company than the Rockefeller Family”
“Mr. Arnold adopted the phrase “wise use” from Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the United States Forest Service (who said that “conservation is the wise use of resources”). In 1988 he held a conference, bringing together the likes of Exxon and the National Cattlemen’s Association, with the goal of seeding the West with grass-roots groups that could wrest control of federal land and give a local flavor to his Reaganite aims.”
The quasi-far-right Daily Caller recently had a piece by one of its associate editors, Scott Greer, that largely excuses attacks on immigrants and refugees as largely the fault of Europe’s political class for not assuaging growing domestic fears of violence from immigrants and refugees. The piece also referred to the PEGIDA movement in Germany as “so-called ‘extremists’ ” and takes a ‘well, what do you expect?’ spin on the situation. That gives you a sense of how the increasingly organized street violence by the European far right is being reported by quasi-mainstream American far-right media.
With that in mind, here’s an article on the recent violence spree that prompted the particular Daily Caller piece: following the death of a Swedish worker at a refugee center after she was stabbed by a 15 year old refugee, a large group of Swedish ‘vigilantes’ (neo-Nazis and football hooligans) specifically targeted teenage refugees and immigrants for random beatings on the streets of Stockholm. And in case it wasn’t clear they were targeting teens, they also passed out fliers during their assault spree declaring that children were their explicit targets to give them “the punishment they deserve”:
“These criminal immigrants have robbed and molested Swedes for a long time.”
That’s the explanation of the the Swedish Resistance Movement. It’s a rather odd excuse for a violence spree coming from a neo-Nazi group given that neo-Nazi groups are themselves rather prone towards terrorizing societies, although pretty typical too. It’s also an indication of how far the mainstreaming of the dehumanization of “others” and collective punishment is coming along.