2a. While Amer­i­cans were engag­ing in hol­i­day-relat­ed activ­i­ties or watch­ing foot­ball in Decem­ber of 2015, Con­gress passed an omnibus spend­ing bill that con­tains a rid­er strip­ping out oppo­si­tion to fund­ing Nazi units in Ukraine. This gives a green light to arm­ing the vol­un­teer bat­tal­ions such as the Azov (some of whose mem­bers’ hel­mets are pic­tured) or Lukhansk‑1.Giv­en that the Third Reich-col­lab­o­ra­tionist OUN/B has long had sup­port from West­ern intel­li­gence and found inclu­sion in first, the GOP and, ulti­mate­ly, the Maid­an regime in Ukraine, this is not surprising.(It is impos­si­ble with­in the scope of this post to cov­er our volu­mi­nous cov­er­age of the Ukraine cri­sis. Pre­vi­ous pro­grams on the sub­ject are: FTR #‘s 777, 778, 779, 780, 781, 782, 783, 784, 794, 800, 803, 804, 808, 811, 817, 818, 824, 826, 

829, 832, 833, 837, 849, 850, 853, 857, 860, 872, 875, 876, 877. Listeners/readers are encour­aged to exam­ine these pro­grams and/or their descrip­tions in detail, in order to flesh out their under­stand­ing.)

“Con­gress Has Removed a Ban on Fund­ing Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spend­ing Bill” by James Car­den; The Nation; 1/13/2016.

Under pres­sure from the Pen­ta­gon, Con­gress has stripped the spend­ing bill of an amend­ment that pre­vented funds from falling into the hands of Ukrain­ian neo-fas­cist groups.

In mid-Decem­ber 2015, Con­gress passed a 2,000-plus-page omnibus spend­ing bill for fis­cal year 2016. Both par­ties were quick to declare vic­tory after the pas­sage of the $1.8 tril­lion pack­age. White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters “we feel good about the out­come, pri­mar­ily because we got a com­pro­mise bud­get agree­ment that fought off a wide vari­ety of ide­o­log­i­cal rid­ers.” The office of House Speak­er Paul J. Ryan tout­ed the bill’s “64 bil­lion for over­seas con­tin­gency oper­a­tions” for, among oth­er things, assist­ing ” Euro­pean coun­tries fac­ing Russ­ian aggres­sion.”

It would be safe to assume that one of the Euro­pean coun­tries which would stand to ben­e­fit from the omnibus measure—designed, in part, to com­bat “Russ­ian aggression”—would be Ukraine, which has already, accord­ing to the White House, received $2 bil­lion in loan guar­an­tees and near­ly $760 mil­lion in “secu­rity, pro­gram­matic, and tech­ni­cal assis­tance” since Feb­ru­ary 2014.

Yet some have expressed con­cern that some of this aid has made its way into the hands of neo-Nazi groups, such as the Azov Bat­tal­ion. Last sum­mer the Dai­ly Beast pub­lished an inter­view by the jour­nal­ists Will Cath­cart and Joseph Epstein in which a mem­ber of the Azov bat­tal­ion spoke about “his battalion’s expe­ri­ence with U.S. train­ers and U.S. vol­un­teers quite fond­ly, even men­tion­ing U.S. vol­un­teers engi­neers and medics that are still cur­rently assist­ing them.”

And so, in July of last year, Con­gress­men John Cony­ers of Michi­gan and Ted Yoho of Flori­da drew up an amend­ment to the House Defense Appro­pri­a­tions bill (HR 2685) that “lim­its arms, train­ing, and oth­er assis­tance to the neo-Nazi Ukrain­ian mili­tia, the Azov Bat­tal­ion.” It passed by a unan­i­mous vote in the House.

And yet by the time Novem­ber came around and the con­fer­ence debate over the year-end appro­pri­a­tions bill was under­way, the Cony­ers-Yoho mea­sure appeared to be in jeop­ardy. And indeed it was. An offi­cial famil­iar with the debate told The Nation that the House Defense Appro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee came under pres­sure from the Pen­ta­gon to remove the Cony­ers-Yoho amend­ment from the text of the bill.

The Pentagon’s objec­tion to the Cony­ers-Yoho amend­ment rests on the claim that it is redun­dant because sim­i­lar legislation—known as the Leahy law—already exists that would pre­vent the fund­ing of Azov. This, as it turns out, is untrue. The Leahy law cov­ers only those groups for which the “Sec­re­tary of State has cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion that such unit has com­mit­ted a gross vio­la­tion of human rights.” Yet the State Depart­ment has nev­er claimed to have such infor­ma­tion about Azov, so fund­ing to the group can­not be blocked by the Leahy law. The con­gres­sional source I spoke to point­ed out that “even if Azov is already cov­ered by Leahy, then no there was no need to strip it out of final bill.” Indeed, the Leahy law can­not block fund­ing to groups, no mat­ter how nox­ious their ide­ol­ogy, in the absence of “cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion” that they have com­mit­ted human-rights vio­la­tions. The Cony­ers-Yoho amend­ment was designed to rem­edy that short­com­ing.

Con­sid­er­ing the fact that the US Army has been train­ing Ukrain­ian armed forces and nation­al guard troops, the Cony­ers-Yoho amend­ment made a great deal of sense; block­ing the avowed­ly neo-Nazi Azov bat­tal­ion from receiv­ing US assis­tance would fur­ther what Pres­i­dent Oba­ma often refers to as “our inter­ests and val­ues.”

...

Whether White House spokesman Josh Earnest was refer­ring, in part, to the Cony­ers-Yoho amend­ment as one of those “ide­o­log­i­cal rid­ers” the admin­is­tra­tion fought to defeat is unclear. What is clear is that by strip­ping out the anti-neo-Nazi pro­vi­sion, Con­gress and the admin­is­tra­tion have paved the way for US fund­ing to end up in the hands of the most nox­ious ele­ments cir­cu­lat­ing with­in Ukraine today.

2b. Address­ing the Knes­set (Israel’s par­lia­ment), Ukrain­ian pres­i­dent Petro Poroshenko recent­ly gave a pro-for­ma apol­o­gy for the par­tic­i­pa­tion of Ukraini­ans in the Holo­caust. The fact that he escaped sig­nif­i­cant crit­i­cized in Israel (or any­where else for that mat­ter) for lay­ing a wreath in trib­ute to the OUN/B at Babi Yar speaks loud­ly for the over­whelm­ing hypocrisy con­cern­ing the true nature of the Ukrain­ian gov­ern­ment and the forces that brought it into being.

It would be impos­si­ble to exag­ger­ate the role of the OUN/B suc­ces­sor orga­ni­za­tions in Ukraine’s “new” gov­ern­ment, with Svo­bo­da and Pravy Sek­tor deeply involved with that benight­ed coun­try’s mil­i­tary and intel­li­gence estab­lish­ments. Fur­ther­more, the post-Maid­an polit­i­cal land­scape has fea­tured OUN/B par­tic­i­pants such as Roman Svarych (per­son­al sec­re­tary to Ukraine’s World War II col­lab­o­ra­tionist gov­ern­ment chief Jaroslav Stet­sko) serv­ing as an advi­sor to Poroshenko, after hav­ing served as Ukrain­ian min­is­ter of jus­tice under the Yuschenko regime and both Tim­o­shenko gov­ern­ments.

Poroshenko’s gov­ern­ment passed a law crim­i­nal­iz­ing the accu­rate telling of World War II his­to­ry in Ukraine and his gov­ern­ment and intel­li­gence ser­vice have insti­tu­tion­al­ized the fun­da­men­tal revi­sion of Ukraine’s his­to­ry in that con­flict.

A video of a Ukrain­ian oppo­si­tion law­maker salut­ing Adolf Hitler made its way online this week­end, only days after his country’s Pres­i­dent apol­o­gized for Ukrain­ian col­lab­o­ra­tors’ role in the Holo­caust dur­ing a state vis­it to Israel.

In the video, Arty­om Vitko, the for­mer com­man­der of the gov­ern­ment backed Luhansk‑1 Bat­tal­ion and now a mem­ber of the Rad­i­cal Par­ty of Oleh Lyashko, can be seen sit­ting in the back of a car wear­ing cam­ou­flage fatigues and singing along to a song by a Russ­ian neo-Nazi band extolling the virtues of the Nazi dic­ta­tor.

“Adolf Hitler, togeth­er with us, Adolf Hitler, in each of us, and an eagle with iron wings will help us at the right time,” Vitko sang, salut­ing the cam­era with his water bot­tle as the car’s sound sys­tem blared “Heil Hitler.”

Vitko’s pro-Nazi sen­ti­ments emerged imme­di­ately on the heels of par­ty leader Oleh Lyashko denun­ci­a­tion of Pres­i­dent Petro Poroshenko for for his recent com­ments apol­o­giz­ing or Ukrain­ian com­plic­ity in the Holo­caust.

Speak­ing before the Knes­set last week, Poroshenko said that “we must remem­ber the neg­a­tive events in his­tory, in which col­lab­o­ra­tors helped the Nazis with the Final Solu­tion.”

“When Ukraine was estab­lished [in 1991], we asked for for­give­ness, and I am doing it now, in the Knes­set, before the chil­dren and grand­chil­dren of the vic­tims of the Holo­caust... I am doing it before all cit­i­zens of Israel,” he added.

“This kind of humil­i­a­tion of Ukraini­ans has not been record­ed in our his­tory yet. Dur­ing a vis­it to Israel, Pres­i­dent Poroshenko apol­o­gized for the ‘Ukrain­ian par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Holo­caust,’” Lyashko post­ed on Face­book on Thurs­day.

“This is exact­ly sit­u­a­tion if we would accuse Geor­gians and Jews in the Holodomor, appeal­ing to the atroc­i­ties of Dzhugashvili, Beria, Kaganovich, etc,” he said, refer­ring to a mas­sive famine that result­ed from the forced col­lec­tiviza­tion of farms in the Sovi­et Union dur­ing the 1930s.

The Holodomor, as it is known in Ukraine, killed mil­lions and is seen by many in that coun­try as a geno­cide on par with the Holo­caust.

“The Knes­set has not rec­og­nized the Holodomor as the geno­cide of the Ukrain­ian peo­ple. That is a goal for Ukrain­ian author­i­ties vis­it­ing the Holy Land rather than belit­tling Ukraini­ans [and] pro­claim­ing infe­ri­or­ity of his peo­ple on the inter­na­tional lev­el,” Lyashko added.

...

“I would say that this is the rea­son Poroshenko is Pres­i­dent and not Lyashko. Lyashko is a pop­ulist only say­ing what he thinks peo­ple want to hear,” said Ukrain­ian Chief Rab­bi Yaakov Dov Ble­ich.

The Jew­ish com­mu­nity, Ble­ich said, dis­agrees with the pop­ulist politician’s def­i­n­i­tion of humil­i­a­tion, see­ing dis­grace as when “one can­not face up to his­to­ry.”

“Pride is to look back, and learn from mis­takes. No one accused the Ukrain­ian peo­ple of caus­ing or cre­at­ing the Holo­caust. How­ever, the fact is that there were Ukraini­ans who par­tic­i­pated in the mur­der and per­se­cu­tion of Jews. They are wor­thy of con­dem­na­tion.”

“The sight of a mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian Par­lia­ment singing a song prais­ing Hitler, under­scores the extreme­ly deep prob­lem in today’s Ukrain­ian democ­racy regard­ing the ongo­ing efforts in that coun­try (and else­where through­out post-Com­mu­nist East­ern Europe, espe­cially in Lithua­nia, Latvia, Esto­nia and Hun­gary) to rewrite the nar­ra­tive of World War II and the Holo­caust,” said Dr. Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter.

“The fact that the Ukrain­ian author­i­ties hon­or groups which active­ly par­tic­i­pated in the mur­der of Jews dur­ing the Holo­caust and glo­rify their lead­ers sends a mes­sage that dele­git­imizes the accu­rate his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive, and paves the way for dis­gust­ing scenes like this one. The Ukrain­ian lead­er­ship should not feign sur­prise or aston­ish­ment, they’re the ones at least par­tially respon­si­ble.”

Ear­lier this year Ukraine’s par­lia­ment has extend­ed offi­cial recog­ni­tion to a nation­al­ist mili­tia that col­lab­o­rated with the Ger­mans dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. [That is the UPA, which also worked with Frank Wis­ner’s OPC after the war, in con­junc­tion with the Gehlen “Org.” It is now a crime in Ukraine to crit­i­cize either the UPA or the OUN/B.–D.E.]

How­ever, many Ukrain­ian Jews have appeared rather san­guine, explain­ing that they believe that such moves are more like­ly the result of a need to build up a nation­al ethos and raise up heroes dur­ing a time of con­flict rather than a cel­e­bra­tion of such fig­ures’ anti-Semit­ic atti­tudes. Despite that, such moves have been wide­ly panned by Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tions wor­ried about the long term effects of the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of anti-Semi­tes.

Asked about the deci­sion to hon­or such groups, Pres­i­dent Poroshenko told the Post that the gov­ern­ment was pay­ing trib­ute to those who fought for nation­al inde­pen­dence.

“Let’s not try to find the black cat in the black room, espe­cially if there is noth­ing there,” he said.

2c. Svo­bo­da mem­ber and Maid­an forces com­man­der Andriy Paru­biy has been named speak­er of the Ukrain­ian Par­lia­ment.

“Rada Appoints Andriy Paru­biy Its Speak­er” [AFP]; The Kiev Post; 4/14/2016.

The Ukrain­ian Verk­hov­na Rada has relieved Andriy Paru­biy of his duties as first deputy par­lia­men­tary chair­man and appoint­ed him its chair­man.

The res­o­lu­tion on appoint­ing Paru­biy Rada chair­man was sup­port­ed by 284 par­lia­men­tar­i­ans at the morn­ing ses­sion on April 14.

2d. Israelis and Ukrain­ian Jews are “shocked, shocked” that a Nazi could get elect­ed major in a Ukrain­ian town or that a mem­ber of the Ukrain­ian par­lia­ment could sing songs prais­ing Hitler. They should­n’t be.

Note the ref­er­ence in the arti­cle below to the four­teen words, mint­ed by Amer­i­can Nazi David Lane, who drove the get­away car in the mur­der of Den­ver talk show host Alan Berg.

“Local Jews in Shock after Ukrain­ian City of Kono­top Elects neo-Nazi May­or” by Sam Sokol; The Jerusalem Post; 12/21/2015.

Two months after local elec­tions were held across Ukraine, res­i­dents of the small north­ern city of Kono­top are express­ing shock and dis­may over the behav­ior of new­ly cho­sen May­or Artem Semenikhin of the neo-Nazi Svo­boda par­ty.

Accord­ing to reports, Semenikhin dri­ves around in a car bear­ing the num­ber 14/88, a numero­log­i­cal ref­er­ence to the phras­es “we must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white chil­dren” and “Heil Hitler”; replaced the pic­ture of Pres­i­dent Petro Poroshenko in his office with a por­trait of Ukrain­ian nation­al leader and Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tor Stepan Ban­dera; and refused to fly the city’s offi­cial flag at the open­ing meet­ing of the city coun­cil because he object­ed to the star of David embla­zoned on it. The flag also fea­tures a Mus­lim cres­cent and a cross.

Svo­boda, known as the Social-Nation­al Par­ty of Ukraine until 2004, has been accused of being a neo-Nazi par­ty by Ukrain­ian Jews and while par­ty lead­ers have a his­tory of mak­ing anti-Semit­ic remarks, their rhetoric has toned down con­sid­er­ably over the past years as they attempt­ed to go main­stream.

While it man­aged to enter main­stream pol­i­tics and gain 36 out of 450 seats in the Rada, Ukraine’s par­lia­ment, the party’s sup­port seemed to evap­o­rate fol­low­ing the 2014 Ukrain­ian rev­o­lu­tion, in which it played a cen­tral role. It cur­rently holds six seats in the leg­is­la­ture.

The par­ty man­aged to improve its stand­ing dur­ing recent munic­i­pal elec­tions, how­ever, obtain­ing some 10 per­cent of the vote in Kiev and gar­ner­ing sec­ond place in the west­ern city of Lviv. For the most part, how­ever, Svo­boda is far from the major wor­ry for Ukrain­ian Jews that it was only two years ago.

“It is a sad, but a real­ity when anti-Semi­tes are being elect­ed in local gov­ern­ing bod­ies, even may­ors pro­mot­ing hate and intol­er­ance.

Kono­top is a clear case,” said Eduard Dolin­sky of the Ukrain­ian Jew­ish Com­mit­tee.

For the Jews of Kono­top, how­ever, wor­ries per­sist, with Ilya Bezruchko, the Ukrain­ian rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the US-based Nation­al Coali­tion Sup­port­ing Eurasian Jew­ry, say­ing he believed res­i­dents, who gen­er­ally get along well with local Jews, vot­ed for Semenikhin because he pro­jected an image of some­one who could bring change and reform a cor­rupt sys­tem.

How­ever, Semenikhin him­self has a his­tory of fraud, hav­ing been arrest­ed for pos­ing as an elec­tric­ity com­pany work­er in order to extract pay­ments from busi­nesses in Kiev in 2012, Bezruchko charged.

Bezruchko, whose late grand­fa­ther was the head of the com­mu­nity and whose moth­er cur­rently works for the city coun­cil, said Semenikhin and his assis­tant have left angry com­ments on his Face­book page in response to crit­i­cal arti­cles that the Jew­ish activist had post­ed on his blog.

He claimed that some­one close to the may­or claimed that he would be hos­pi­tal­ized if he returned to the city from Kiev, where he cur­rently lives, and that the may­or him­self post­ed to say that his moth­er was cor­rupt and should be fired from her job.

“The reac­tion of [the] com­mu­nity is shock. Peo­ple are shocked it could hap­pen in [a] city and nobody believed it could hap­pen here but it hap­pened some­how,” com­mu­nity activist Igor Nechayev told The Jerusalem Post by phone Mon­day.

While there have been a cou­ple of instances of anti-Semit­ic graf­fiti over the past decade and one occa­sion­ally hears ref­er­ences to con­spir­acy the­o­ries iden­ti­fy­ing Ukrain­ian polit­i­cal lead­ers as Jews, for the most part, rela­tions between the Jew­ish com­mu­nity and their non-Jew­ish neigh­bors are cor­dial, he said.

How­ever, while the may­or attempts to make sure his state­ments nev­er cross over into out­right anti-Semi­tism, many things he says can be inter­preted in such a way, he con­tin­ued. As an exam­ple, he referred to a recent state­ment by Semenikhin in which the may­or refused to apol­o­gize for anti-Jew­ish actions tak­en by far-right nation­al­ists in World War II, inti­mat­ing that it was because those respon­si­ble for the Holodomor famine of the 1930s were large­ly Jew­ish.

The Holodomor was a man­made famine that came about dur­ing the col­lec­tiviza­tion of agri­cul­ture in the Sovi­et Union and which led to the starv­ing deaths of mil­lions. Ukraini­ans con­sider it a geno­cide.

“The com­mu­nity is dis­cussing the sit­u­a­tion and they under­stand that the may­or is bal­anc­ing between anti-Semi­tism— – he isn’t cross­ing a red­line with state­ments but say­ing bor­der things that can be under­stood as anti-Semit­ic,” he explained.

...

Speak­ing to the Post, Vyach­eslav Likhachev, an anti-Semi­tism researcher affil­i­ated with the Vaad of Ukraine and the Euro-Asian Jew­ish Con­gress, said “Ukraini­ans are afraid of the Russ­ian threat, not the threat of nation­al rad­i­cal­ism,” and that “Semenikhin has suc­cess­fully cre­ated him­self an image of a defend­er of Ukrain­ian inde­pen­dence, and vot­ers were able to sup­port him, not pay­ing atten­tion to the rad­i­cal­ism of his views.

Unfor­tu­nately, Likhachev said the cur­rent Ukrain­ian leg­is­la­tion does not allow to for­bid [sic] those with right-wing views to take part in the elec­tion, or to remove them from the elect­ed posi­tions.

“The spe­cial anti-com­mu­nist and anti-Nazi law says about ban­ning the sym­bols of the Nation­al Social­ist (Nazi) of the total­i­tar­ian regime, which includes sym­bols of the Nazi Par­ty and the state sym­bols of the Third Reich only,” he said. It is impos­si­ble to inter­preted in legal terms sym­bols like 14/88.”

3a. When Croatia’s new gov­ern­ment was assem­bled back in Decem­ber, the out­go­ing prime min­is­ter, Zoran Milanovic, had a rather frank way of char­ac­ter­iz­ing the new gov­ern­ment:  crim­i­nal and pro-Ustachi:

Ex-PM Blasts New Author­i­ties as “Crim­i­nal, pro-Ustasha” [B92, Tan­jug]; B92; 12/28/2015.

Zoran Milanovic said on Mon­day he was con­cerned that “peo­ple from a crim­i­nal, spy­ing, and pro-Ustasha coali­tion” are com­ing to pow­er in Croa­t­ia.

The leader of the SDP, who until today served as Croatia’s prime min­is­ter, spoke as his par­ty joined the oppo­si­tion, and as the Croa­t­ian par­lia­ment elect­ed its new pres­i­dent — while prime min­is­ter-elect Tihomir Oreskovic said he was con­vinced he would put togeth­er a new gov­ern­ment with­in 30 days.

Last week, post elec­tion nego­ti­a­tions between SDP and an inde­pen­dent list dubbed “Most” (“Bridge”) broke down just as it seemed an agree­ment would be reached to make the Most leader, Bozo Petrov, Croatia’s next prime min­is­ter. Instead, Petrov struck a deal with the HDZ-led Patri­otic Coali­tion, giv­ing Oreskovic the chance to form the country’s next cab­i­net.

“There are some things in life we can­not choose,” Milanovic told reporters on Mon­day, adding that “this gov­ern­ment is the choice of the Most list — one they will have to live with.”

Milanovic accused Zagreb May­or Milan Bandic of being “respon­si­ble” for the out­come of the post-elec­tion talks, and described him as a man accused of seri­ous crimes.

Accord­ing to the for­mer prime min­is­ter, Croa­tia has reached “the nadir, in the demo­c­ra­tic sense.”

“This is not a return to the old — this sit­u­a­tion is worse than the old,” he said, adding, “no mal­ice or irony intend­ed, we have a prob­lem.”

“Ours is a small coun­try, we are not rich, and the way we are rep­re­sented abroad is very impor­tant — whether or not as polit­i­cally strong per­sons, and when that is lack­ing they know there are no clear demo­c­ra­tic process­es in the coun­try, and that some­body else is mak­ing the deci­sions,” Milanovic stat­ed.

As for the Most coali­tion, Milanovic said:

“That’s their choice, they will have to live with it, get up and pray to God or to what­ever they believe in. The coali­tion they chose, which was unfor­tu­nately put togeth­er by Bandic, who is accused, and by for­mer chiefs of secret ser­vices, con­tains trans­par­ently Ustasha ele­ments.”

The Ustasha regime was in pow­er in the Nazi-allied Inde­pen­dent State of Croa­tia (NDH) dur­ing the Sec­ond World War.

Milanovic also said that his par­ty will “con­tinue to fight and not give up” while in oppo­si­tion, and that the country’s new author­i­ties are being formed “thanks to (par­lia­ment) rep­re­sen­ta­tives’ fear of repeat­ed par­lia­men­tary elec­tions.”

...

3b. More indi­ca­tions that the Ustachi are com­ing up above-ground in Croa­t­ia:

“What Were the Ustasa for Min­is­ter Hasan­be­gov­ic?” by Hrvo­je Sim­ice­vic; Balkan Tran­si­tional Jus­tice; 2/12/2016.

 It is hard to see how Croatia’s cul­ture min­is­ter can be called an ‘anti-Fas­cist’, giv­en the evi­dence of his unam­bigu­ous nature of his links to the far-right over many years.

In the text pub­lished for a pro-Fas­cist bul­letin in his stu­dent days in 1996, Croatia’s new Cul­ture Min­is­ter wrote about the wartime Fas­cist Ustasa fight­ers as “vic­tims” and “mar­tyrs”.

Zlatko Hasan­be­govic unam­bigu­ously glo­ri­fied the Ustasa and advo­cated the estab­lish­ment of the Greater Croa­tia in the month­ly mag­a­zine, “The Inde­pen­dent State of Croa­tia,” pub­lished in the 1990s.

He was pho­tographed in it with Mladen Schwartz, Velimir Bujanec, and the son-in-law of for­mer Fas­cist dic­ta­tor and Ustasa leader Ante Pavel­ic. In one pho­to­graph he wears an Ustasa cap.

The then edi­tor-in-chief of the month­ly, Srecko Psenic­nik, was the son-in-law of Ante Pavel­ic, and Pres­i­dent of the Croa­t­ian Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment, HOP, a pro-Ustasa par­ty found­ed by Pavel­ic.

In 1996, Hasan­be­govic wrote at least two arti­cles for the month­ly that prop­a­gated Pavelic’s work and ideas and sys­tem­at­i­cally denied the crimes com­mit­ted by the Pavelic’s pup­pet state, The Inde­pen­dent State of Croa­tia, NDH.

As a his­tory stu­dent at the Fac­ulty of Social Sci­ences and Human­i­ties, Hasan­be­govic wrote about the his­tory of Mus­lims in Croa­tia, empha­siz­ing their polit­i­cal and social renais­sance dur­ing the reign of Pavel­ic and under the NDH.

In a short com­men­tary, illus­trated by a pho­to­graph of the open­ing of the mosque in Zagreb fea­tur­ing Pavel­ic in the com­pany of Mus­lim dig­ni­taries from the Ustasa move­ment, Hasan­be­govic crit­i­cized the sep­a­ra­tion of Bosnia and Herze­gov­ina from Croa­t­ia.

He said the advo­cates of this pol­icy were “abus­ing the hon­ourable sym­bols and names of Ustasa heroes whose bones… are now turn­ing in their graves from the shame and mis­ery inflict­ed upon them fifty years lat­er by their so-called fol­low­ers”.

As an alter­na­tive to those fake fol­low­ers, Hasan­be­govic offers the Ustasa “heroes and mar­tyrs” who, like the author, are dri­ven by a desire to cre­ate a Greater Croa­tia as envi­sioned by Pavel­ic.

“In the name of those true heroes… who gave their lives for our Home­land… we, the true Croa­t­ian nation­al­ists… the deceived and defeat­ed Mus­lims and Catholics, should expose those hyp­ocrites and moral freaks for who they real­ly are, and show the peo­ple the way out of this dark tun­nel towards peace and uni­ty and reli­gious tol­er­ance which can only hap­pen in a tru­ly free and uni­fied Home­land, stretch­ing from the Mura, Dra­va and Dri­na rivers to the Adri­atic,” he wrote.

The Min­is­ter is list­ed as an asso­ciate writer for the NDH pub­li­ca­tion from April to Novem­ber 1996, but fea­tured as an author already in the Feb­ru­ary edi­tion of the NDH as well as, in the first edi­tion print­ed in Croa­tia after being issued abroad for many years.

Psenic­nik, pres­i­dent of the HOP, had man­aged to trans­fer pub­li­ca­tion of the NDH from Cana­da to Croa­tia, and reg­is­ter the HOP as a legit­i­mate par­ty in Croa­tia, despite its polit­i­cal plat­form affil­i­at­ing it to the Ustasa move­ment and to the acts of ter­ror­ism.

The par­ty is still active in Croa­tia and it still pro­motes the polit­i­cal agen­da of Pavel­ic. Its activ­ity is not sub­stan­tial, but accord­ing to the lat­est data, it has 650 mem­bers.

In his most recent appear­ances, Hasan­be­govic has denied his pre­vi­ous involve­ment with HOP. How­ever, in one of the pho­tographs fea­tured in the NDH month­ly, he is described as a “young HOP mem­ber”. In oth­er pho­tographs, he is described as a mem­ber of a par­ty called the Young Croa­t­ian Right­ists, head­ed at the time by Velimir Bujanec.

He was also pho­tographed in the com­pany of Mladen Schwa­trz, a right-wing polit­i­cal activist who in the 1990s advo­cated a Fas­cist regime in Croa­tia. What­ever the for­mal nature of his con­nec­tions to Pavelic’s and Bujanec’s par­ties, the fact is that Hasan­be­govic had inten­sive social con­tacts with some of their most promi­nent mem­bers and attend­ed events orga­nized by the rad­i­cal right.

The pho­tographs in the month­ly cor­rob­o­rate this. They show Hasan­be­govic protest­ing against the 1995 Day­ton Agree­ment on Bosnia, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Bleiburg com­mem­o­ra­tion, and pos­ing on the Split prom­e­nade wear­ing an Ustasa cap.

At Bleiburg, he was pho­tographed with the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of HOP and with Psenic­nik, author of the text accom­pa­ny­ing the pho­tographs. In a report from Bleiburg, illus­trated by this and oth­er pho­tos with numer­ous Ustasa insignia, Psenic­nik open­ly glo­ri­fies the Ustasha move­ment.

In Split, Hasan­be­govic pos­es with five young men all described as “young nation­al­ists” in the cap­tion. Among them is Bujanec, who in the fea­tured inter­view pro­claims: “The future is ours”, just before the par­lia­men­tary elec­tions in Octo­ber 1995.

In all three pho­tos, Hasan­be­govic is in the com­pany of Bujanec, a man who would lat­er become a mem­ber of the HOP youth frac­tion, a board rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the NDH mag­a­zine and their pub­lic rela­tions offi­cer.

At that time, Bujanec, who now hosts the TV show Buji­ca, was one of the many mem­bers of the Croa­t­ian Par­ty of Right, HSP, and of the Young Croa­t­ian Right­ists who sub­se­quently joined the HOP. Pavelic’s son-in-law, Psenic­nik, wrote in NDH that there were many rea­sons for their mas­sive trans­fer to HOP, but the key rea­son was dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the fact that Pavelic’s pho­tos had been removed from all the HSP’s offices.

....

The recent­ly appoint­ed min­is­ter spent a con­sid­er­able part of his polit­i­cal life in extrem­ist polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions and has nev­er dis­tanced him­self from this past. Instead, he has direct­ed his efforts towards deny­ing that his state­ments rep­re­sent rel­a­tiviza­tion of World War II, claim­ing that all of his state­ments have been tak­en out of con­text.

The con­text, how­ever, is that Hasan­be­govic was a con­trib­u­tor to the month­ly mag­a­zine called “Inde­pen­dent State of Croa­tia”, that he glo­ri­fied the Ustasa under the edi­to­r­ial author­ity of Pavelic’s son-in-law, that he called the Ustasas “heroes and mar­tyrs”, and that he posed in an Ustasha cap.

When recent­ly asked about the con­tro­ver­sies about Hasan­be­govic, Prime Min­is­ter Oreskovic stat­ed that Hasan­be­govic was an anti-Fas­cist and reit­er­ated this state­ment more recent­ly when he said that Hasan­be­govic was in fact a “devot­ed anti-Fas­cist”. After the most recent rev­e­la­tions, we are eager to hear once again what the Prime Min­is­ter has to say.

3c.  Croa­t­ian “Soc­cer Ustachi” con­tin­ue to man­i­fest.

“Croatia’s ‘Banal’ Fas­cism on Dis­play at Israel Match” Sven Mile­kic; Balkan Tran­si­tional Jus­tice; 3/25/2016.

The Ustasa chant heard at Wednesday’s match, which the PM attend­ed and the media ignored, is the result of the long-term ‘nor­mal­i­sa­tion’ of once out­lawed fas­cist sym­bols.

After Wednesday’s foot­ball game between Croa­tia and Israel in east­ern city of Osi­jek, the Fas­cist chant “Za dom sprem­ni” (“Ready for the Home­land”) once more echoed in the stands.

Sup­port­ers of the World War II Nazi pup­pet state, the Inde­pen­dent State of Croa­tia, NDH — whose Ustasa death squads took part in the Nazi Holo­caust and mur­dered tens of thou­sands of Jews, Serbs and Roma — made the chant infa­mous.

How­ever, although Prime Min­is­ter Tihomir Oreskovic was present at the game, he did not respond.

The gov­ern­ment only respond­ed a day after in a short press release in which it con­demned the use of sym­bols and slo­gans of total­i­tar­ian regimes, with­out clear­ly men­tion­ing the game or the actu­al event.

The anchor of Croa­tia Radio-Tele­vi­sion, HRT, which broad­casted the game, also ignored the chants.

The main­stream dai­ly news­pa­per Jutarn­ji list head­lined the report with “Slavo­nia [region of Osi­jek] Again Didn’t Dis­ap­point” — only briefly report­ing the chants.

Ogn­jen Kraus, pres­i­dent of the Jew­ish com­mu­nity in Zagreb, told BIRN that such behav­iour was the “result of the pol­i­tics in Croa­t­ia.”

“What espe­cially wor­ries me that this is hap­pen­ing dur­ing the game, with­out draw­ing any reac­tion from those who were there, head­ed by the organ­iser [the Croa­t­ian Foot­ball Asso­ci­a­tion, HNS] and Prime Min­is­ter who just sat there,” he said.

Kraus added that if such things are not tack­led head on, it allows “Usta­so-phil­ia to kick-in”.

He men­tioned the case in which the vice-chair of par­lia­ment and mem­ber of the gov­ern­ing major­ity, Ivan Tepes, par­tic­i­pated in Jan­u­ary in a 5,000-strong protest when “Za dom sprem­ni”could be “loud­ly heard and no one react­ed”.

Ahead of the last elec­tions, last Novem­ber, Tepes, head of the right-wing Croa­t­ian Par­ty of Rights “Ante Starce­vic”, said the chant should not been banned because some sol­diers used it dur­ing the inde­pen­dence war of the 1990s.

Some 3,200 peo­ple peti­tioned Pres­i­dent Kolin­da Grabar Kitarovic last August to make it the offi­cial chant of the Croa­t­ian army.

San­ja Tabakovic Zori­cic, head of the Shoah Acad­emy in the Jew­ish com­mu­nity, said this was “a trend last­ing for years” and that the system’s reac­tion was wrong.

“Now, when we have a soci­ety in which no one hes­i­tates to pro­mote pro-Fas­cist stand­points, I real­ly don’t see any­thing weird that some chant “Za dom sprem­ni,” she said.

She said that it would have sur­prised her had the politi­cians present in Osi­jek left the game, “as in civ­i­lized soci­eties”. The fact that they did not only proves that the scan­dal “doesn’t dis­turb them”.

Only some 8,500 out of 39,000 Jews sur­vived the Holo­caust com­mit­ted by Ustasa and Nazi Ger­many on the ter­ri­tory of the NDH, which includ­ed most of present-day Croa­tia and Bosnia.

Croatia’s new gov­ern­ment, of the con­tro­ver­sial Cul­ture Min­is­ter, Zlatko Hasan­be­govic, mean­while took a deci­sion to spon­sor an event com­mem­o­rat­ing retreat­ing Ustasa killed in 1945 at Bleiburg in Aus­tria.

“Za dom sprem­ni” has been heard at games played the Croa­t­ian nation­al foot­ball team before.

The last time was at the game with Nor­way in March 2015. FIFA lat­er penalised the HNS with a 55,000 euros fine and ordered one game to be played with­out fans.

At the game with­out fans, played in the coastal city of Split in June, a Nazi swasti­ka was vis­i­ble on the pitch, after which the Croa­t­ian team was deduct­ed one point, while the HNS had to pay 100,000 euro and play anoth­er two match­es with­out fans.

Croa­t­ian foot­ball fans have provoca­tively used swastikas before, form­ing one with their bod­ies at a game in Livorno in Italy, for exam­ple.

At a match against Ser­bia in March 2013, Croa­t­ian fans chant­ed “Kill the Serb,” for which the HNS received a fine of 42,000 euros.

Dario Brentin, from the Uni­ver­sity of Graz in Aus­tria, research­ing sport, nation­al­ism and mem­ory pol­i­tics in Croa­tia, told BIRN that the inci­dent at the match with Israel offered “proof of the process of banal­i­sa­tion of total­i­tar­ian sym­bols, expressed by chant­ing ‘Za dom sprem­ni’.

“I’m not con­vinced all peo­ple that chant it at games are all sym­pa­thiz­ers with the Ustasa who believe in Ustasa ideas,” he said.

“It’s a com­plex social process that leads to a sit­u­a­tion in which it’s com­pletely irrel­e­vant what it [chant] means or doesn’t,” he added. It is “com­monly seen as sign patri­otic act”, he not­ed.

Accord­ing to Brentin, the pub­lic dis­course in Croa­tia has cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion in which it is seen as “com­pletely nor­mal part of rout­ing in sports”.

He not­ed the case of the Croa­t­ian foot­ball play­er Josip Joe Simu­nic in Novem­ber 2013.

Imme­di­ately after a foot­ball match with Ice­land, Simu­nic led some 20,000 fans in chant­ing “Za dom sprem­ni”.

He was not con­demned by his man­ager or by the HNS for that, but only by a part of media, while the pub­lic divid­ed into two groups – those who con­demned and those who sup­ported him.

The coun­ty attor­ney office lat­er fined him some 3,300 euros, which the mag­is­trates court lat­er low­ered to 660 euros, for “caus­ing pub­lic dis­or­der” but not for hate speech.

After a process before dis­ci­pli­nary bod­ies, FIFA gave Simu­nic a ten-game sus­pen­sion, pre­vent­ing him from attend­ing his last World Cup in Brazil in 2014.

Brentin sug­gested that even if the cur­rent HNS lead­er­ship urged fans not to sup­port the team in this way, “no one would lis­ten, nor would it change any­thing”, since such atti­tudes can “only be changed through edu­ca­tion”.

“Espe­cially in pop­u­lar cul­ture, Marko Perkovic Thomp­son [nation­al­is­tic singer who uses the chant in his songs] and sup­port­ing the nation­al foot­ball team are two social ele­ments that per­pet­u­ate ‘Za dom sprem­ni’ as a patri­otic chant,” he said.

Brentin con­cluded that both the Croa­t­ian media and the polit­i­cal elites clear­ly avoid con­demn­ing such inci­dents because they come from a “sim­i­lar ide­o­log­i­cal fam­i­ly”. . . .

3c. The pro­gram reviews Joe Simu­nic’s lead­ing of the Croa­t­ian crowd in the “Za Dom Sprem­ni” chant–the Croa­t­ian “Sieg Heil,” in effect.

4a. We review analy­sis of the Cru­sade For Freedom–the covert oper­a­tion that brought Third Reich alum­ni into the coun­try and also sup­port­ed their gueril­la war­fare in East­ern Europe, con­duct­ed up until the ear­ly 1950’s. Con­ceived by Allen Dulles, over­seen by Richard Nixon, pub­licly rep­re­sent­ed by Ronald Rea­gan and real­ized in con­sid­er­able mea­sure by William Casey, the CFF ulti­mate­ly evolved into a Nazi wing of the GOP.

The Secret War Against the Jews; by John Lof­tus and Mark Aarons; Copy­right 1994 by Mark Aarons; St. Martin’s Press; [HC] ISBN 0–312-11057‑X; pp. 122–123.

. . . . Frus­tra­tion over Truman’s 1948 elec­tion vic­to­ry over Dewey (which they blamed on the “Jew­ish vote”) impelled Dulles and his pro­tégé Richard Nixon to work toward the real­iza­tion of the fas­cist free­dom fight­er pres­ence in the Repub­li­can Party’s eth­nic out­reach orga­ni­za­tion. As a young con­gress­man, Nixon had been Allen Dulles’s con­fi­dant. They both blamed Gov­er­nor Dewey’s razor-thin loss to Tru­man in the 1948 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion on the Jew­ish vote. When he became Eisenhower’s vice pres­i­dent in 1952, Nixon was deter­mined to build his own eth­nic base. . . .

. . . . Vice Pres­i­dent Nixon’s secret polit­i­cal war of Nazis against Jews in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics was nev­er inves­ti­gat­ed at the time. The for­eign lan­guage-speak­ing Croa­t­ians and oth­er Fas­cist émi­gré groups had a ready-made net­work for con­tact­ing and mobi­liz­ing the East­ern Euro­pean eth­nic bloc. There is a very high cor­re­la­tion between CIA domes­tic sub­si­dies to Fas­cist ‘free­dom fight­ers’ dur­ing the 1950’s and the lead­er­ship of the Repub­li­can Party’s eth­nic cam­paign groups. The motive for the under-the-table financ­ing was clear: Nixon used Nazis to off­set the Jew­ish vote for the Democ­rats. . . .

. . . . In 1952, Nixon had formed an Eth­nic Divi­sion with­in the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Dis­placed fas­cists, hop­ing to be returned to pow­er by an Eisen­how­er-Nixon ‘lib­er­a­tion’ pol­i­cy signed on with the com­mit­tee. In 1953, when Repub­li­cans were in office, the immi­gra­tion laws were changed to admit Nazis, even mem­bers of the SS. They flood­ed into the coun­try. Nixon him­self over­saw the new immi­gra­tion pro­gram. As Vice Pres­i­dent, he even received East­ern Euro­pean Fas­cists in the White House. . .

4b. More about the com­po­si­tion of the cast of the CFF: Note that the ascen­sion of the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion was essen­tial­ly the ascen­sion of the Naz­i­fied GOP, embod­ied in the CFF milieu. Rea­gan (spokesman for CFF) was Pres­i­dent; George H.W. Bush (for whom CIA head­quar­ters is named) was the Vice Pres­i­dent; William Casey (who han­dled the State Depart­ment machi­na­tions to bring these peo­ple into the Unit­ed States) was Rea­gan’s cam­paign man­ag­er and lat­er his CIA direc­tor.

The Secret War Against the Jews; by John Lof­tus and Mark Aarons; Copy­right 1994 by Mark Aarons; St. Martin’s Press; [HC] ISBN 0–312-11057‑X; p. 605.

. . . . As a young movie actor in the ear­ly 1950s, Rea­gan was employed as the pub­lic spokesper­son for an OPC front named the ‘Cru­sade for Free­dom.’ Rea­gan may not have known it, but 99 per­cent for the Crusade’s funds came from clan­des­tine accounts, which were then laun­dered through the Cru­sade to var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions such as Radio Lib­er­ty, which employed Dulles’s Fas­cists. Bill Casey, who lat­er became CIA direc­tor under Ronald Rea­gan, also worked in Ger­many after World War II on Dulles’ Nazi ‘free­dom fight­ers’ pro­gram. When he returned to New York, Casey head­ed up anoth­er OPC front, the Inter­na­tion­al Res­cue Com­mit­tee, which spon­sored the immi­gra­tion of these Fas­cists to the Unit­ed States. Casey’s com­mit­tee replaced the Inter­na­tion­al Red Cross as the spon­sor for Dulles’s recruits. Con­fi­den­tial inter­views, for­mer mem­bers, OPC; for­mer mem­bers, British for­eign and Com­mon­wealth Office. . . .

. . . . .It was Bush who ful­filled Nixon’s promise to make the ‘eth­nic emi­gres’ a per­ma­nent part of Repub­li­can pol­i­tics. In 1972, Nixon’s State Depart­ment spokesman con­firmed to his Aus­tralian coun­ter­part that the eth­nic groups were very use­ful to get out the vote in sev­er­al key states. Bush’s tenure as head of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee exact­ly coin­cid­ed with Las­z­lo Pasztor’s 1972 dri­ve to trans­form the Her­itage Groups Coun­cil into the party’s offi­cial eth­nic arm. The groups Pasz­tor chose as Bush’s cam­paign allies were the émi­gré Fas­cists whom Dulles had brought to the Unit­ed States. . . . 

“Revealed: the Neo-Nazi Man­i­festo Tar­get­ing Sin­gle Moth­ers and Men­tally Ill that AfD Doesn’t Want You to See” Tony Pater­son; The Inde­pen­dent; 3/18/2016.

Alter­na­tive Fur Deutsch­land has been attract­ing vot­ers as though it were a main­stream par­ty. But a leak of its poli­cies — includ­ing tar­get­ing the men­tally ill and sin­gle moth­ers — has exposed the scale of its extrem­ism

A leaked elec­tion man­i­festo has revealed that Germany’s vote-win­ning new anti-immi­grant par­ty has plans for dra­con­ian laws which would dis­crim­i­nate against hand­i­capped chil­dren, sin­gle moth­ers, and the men­tally ill – and oblige his­tory teach­ers to end a per­ceived “over-empha­sis” on the Nazi era in schools.

The rad­i­cal pro­pos­als are con­tained in an elec­tion man­i­festo pro­duced by the right-wing pop­ulist Alter­na­tive für Deutsch­land (AfD) par­ty, which made sweep­ing gains in three state elec­tions last week­end in a show of pub­lic oppo­si­tion to Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel’s open-door refugee pol­i­cy.

The AfD’s suc­cess meant that the par­ty is now rep­re­sented in eight of Germany’s 16 state par­lia­ments. A poll pub­lished by YouGov showed that more than 70 per cent of Ger­mans now believe that the AfD is firm­ly on course to win seats in Germany’s nation­al Bun­destag par­lia­ment next year, when it will con­test a gen­eral elec­tion for the first time.

The pre­vi­ously secret draft nation­al man­i­festo, which is due to be approved by a full AfD par­ty con­gress at the end of April, has been pub­lished by the not-for-prof­it Ger­man research group Correctiv.org. It shows that the AfD is far more than the sin­gle issue anti-immi­gra­tion par­ty por­trayed in recent cam­paign­ing.

The party’s man­i­festo makes it clear that the AfD wants a return to what it calls “nation­al” val­ues in Ger­many. It says it “sees the tra­di­tional fam­ily” as the only mod­el which can reverse the country’s declin­ing birth rate. To this end the par­ty pledges to take steps to ban abor­tion and make divorce more dif­fi­cult. By con­trast, Ger­man fam­i­lies which pro­duce chil­dren should be reward­ed with finan­cial incen­tives, it says.

It regards sin­gle-par­ent moth­ers as a bur­den upon tax­pay­ers and a dis­in­cen­tive to healthy fam­ily life, and says it would end the pro­vi­sion of state ben­e­fits for them. “The AfD is against the state financ­ing the self-cho­sen sin­gle par­ent life mod­el,” the man­i­festo says. It also advo­cates an end to the fund­ing of state-run kinder­gartens, and favours young chil­dren remain­ing at home to be looked after by a par­ent.

Fur­ther social­ly dis­ad­van­taged tar­gets include the men­tally ill. The par­ty argues: “Ther­a­py-resis­tant alco­holics, drug addicts and psy­cho­log­i­cally ill per­pe­tra­tors should not be kept in psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tals but be put under lock and key.” 

The AfD also sug­gests that hand­i­capped chil­dren should not be includ­ed “at all costs” as pupils in reg­u­lar schools because, it claims, their pres­ence can impede oth­er pupils’ progress. It wants the age of crim­i­nal respon­si­bil­ity to be reduced from 14 to 12. The par­ty also favours dra­mat­i­cally cut­ting state ben­e­fits and intro­duc­ing a flat 20 per cent tax rate, which would pri­mar­ily ben­e­fit the wealthy.

The AfD’s pro­pos­als for his­tory teach­ing in schools are equal­ly rad­i­cal. The par­ty aims to end what it describes as the “cur­rent lim­i­ta­tion” of his­tory teach­ing to “the peri­od of Nation­al Social­ism”. Instead it pro­poses a “wider con­sid­er­a­tion of his­tory” which includes more “pos­i­tive aspects” of Germany’s past.

AfD elec­tion man­i­festos pub­lished in the run-up to last weekend’s state elec­tions also con­tained pro­pos­als to com­pel muse­ums and the­atres to strength­en their iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with “Ger­man” as opposed to “for­eign” cul­ture.

The Social Demo­c­rat Par­ty leader Sig­mar Gabriel argues the AfD’s ideas and lan­guage are “a fatal reminder of the vocab­u­lary used in the 1920 and 1930s”, in a ref­er­ence to the peri­od dur­ing which the Nazi Par­ty came to pow­er in Ger­many. He added: “The AfD is try­ing to estab­lish a nation­al­is­tic soci­ety based on the idea of exclud­ing peo­ple.”

Beat­rix von Storch, a lead­ing AfD politi­cian who helped to draft the man­i­festo, has argued that the AfD should move beyond its oppo­si­tion to the euro and asy­lum-seek­ers, to con­cen­trate instead on oppos­ing Islam.

The man­i­festo says the state should set “lim­its” on the prac­tice of the Mus­lim faith. Minarets should be banned along with the wear­ing of the bur­ka and niqab in pub­lic. Mus­lim organ­i­sa­tions should have tax ben­e­fits cut. Male cir­cum­ci­sion should be out­lawed and a ban be imposed on the slaugh­ter of ani­mals with­out anaes­thet­ic.

Com­men­ta­tors and politi­cians in Germany’s main­stream par­ties have accused the AfD of resort­ing to lan­guage and ter­mi­nol­ogy once used by Hitler’s Nation­al Social­ists. How­ever the AfD has yet to defend its leaked man­i­festo in pub­lic.

Frauke Petry, the AfD’s leader, who recent­ly sparked out­rage after she insist­ed that firearms should be used to deter migrants at Germany’s bor­ders, was at the cen­tre of a row on Fri­day after appar­ently refus­ing to appear on a break­fast chat show on Germany’s ZDF pub­lic tele­vi­sion chan­nel. She had been due to answer ques­tions posed by an award-win­ning Iraqi-born jour­nal­ist, Dun­ja Hay­ali.

...

5b. It is a bad sign for the future of a soci­ety when­ever the far-right starts surg­ing, as is the case with the sud­den suc­cess of the AfD in Germany’s region­al elec­tions. The future is actu­ally look­ing extra omi­nous in Ger­many fol­low­ing those results–it wasn’t old­er vot­ers or pen­sion­ers ral­ly­ing around the AfD. It was the youth:

“. . . . AfD was cho­sen by 26 per cent of votes aged 18 to 24 in Sax­ony-Anhalt, com­pared with 16 per cent for the CDU and 11 per cent for both the Greens and SPD. For those aged 25 to 44 it was a sim­i­lar sto­ry, with 29 per cent choos­ing the AfD against 23 per cent for the CDU and 9 per cent for SPD. The only age group which stuck with Mrs Merkel’s par­ty was the over-60s — 35 per cent vot­ed CDU and 18 per cent AfD. . . . ”

Yeah, that’s not a great sign for Germany’s future. Or Europe’s future. Of course, if the euro­zone hadn’t already become a mech­a­nism for neolib­eral aus­ter­ity on autopi­lot and one of the key dri­ving forces fuel­ing trends like high youth unem­ploy­ment and gen­eral despair, the sit­u­a­tion would be even worse by not being so awful to begin with. Still, as awful as Europe’s lead­er­ship has gen­er­ally been over the last decade, it can get a lot worse.

“Dis­il­lu­sioned Ger­man Youth Dri­ve Rise of Anti-Immi­grant Par­ty” by David Char­ter; The Aus­tralian; 3/16/2016.

The surge of Germany’s new pop­ulist anti-immi­grant par­ty has been fuelled by thou­sands of young vot­ers, many of whom have nev­er cast a bal­lot before, accord­ing to a research insti­tute in Berlin.

In a wor­ry­ing trend for the estab­lished par­ties, Alter­na­tive for Ger­many (AfD) was the top choice of vot­ers aged between 18 and 44 in the east­ern state of Sax­ony-Anhalt, where the par­ty won one in four votes to trans­form the polit­i­cal land­scape.

AfD has har­nessed dis­con­tent with Angela Merkel’s gen­er­ous refugee pol­icy, but it was the left-of-cen­tre Social Demo­c­ra­tic par­ty which lost the most vot­ers to the hard right, accord­ing to analy­sis by Infrat­est dimap, on behalf of the broad­cast­ers ARD.

The SPD, in a coali­tion gov­ern­ment with Mrs Merkel’s Chris­t­ian Demo­c­ra­tic Union (CDU), is seen as out of touch with grass­roots sup­port­ers.

Vot­ers desert­ed all the estab­lished par­ties to back AfD, which was launched in 2013 and last year switched its focus from call­ing for a break-up of the euro to cam­paign­ing for Germany’s bor­ders to be closed, after the arrival of 1.1 mil­lion migrants.

By far the biggest group of AfD vot­ers were those who had nev­er vot­ed before, the analy­sis showed. They believed politi­cians were liars and that vot­ing would make no dif­fer­ence; a com­mon theme among the young male pop­u­la­tion of Sax­ony-Anhalt, which has the third-high­est unem­ploy­ment rate of all 16 Ger­man states.

...

Asked how sim­i­lar her par­ty was to the Nation­al Front in France, and the Free­dom Par­ty in Aus­tria, Ms Petry said she did not wish to engage in “a debate on labels”.

The par­ty attract­ed wide­spread crit­i­cism after Ms Petry said in Jan­u­ary that bor­der police should, as a last resort, shoot migrants ille­gally cross­ing the Ger­man bor­der.

AfD was cho­sen by 26 per cent of votes aged 18 to 24 in Sax­ony-Anhalt, com­pared with 16 per cent for the CDU and 11 per cent for both the Greens and SPD. For those aged 25 to 44 it was a sim­i­lar sto­ry, with 29 per cent choos­ing the AfD against 23 per cent for the CDU and 9 per cent for SPD. The only age group which stuck with Mrs Merkel’s par­ty was the over-60s — 35 per cent vot­ed CDU and 18 per cent AfD.

Women were much more like­ly to sup­port the CDU, while AfD was the most pop­u­lar among men, win­ning 29 per cent of the male vote in the state.

AfD was equal­ly pop­u­lar with work­ers and the unem­ployed, while the CDU was most favoured by pen­sion­ers.

7a. Fol­low­ing Microsoft’s pan­icked removed of “Tay,” its new arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence twit­ter bot that was con­verted into a neo-Nazi short­ly after being exposed to the world, one of the unfor­tu­nate new ques­tions in tech­nol­ogy is now “which piece of hard­ware goes neo-Nazi next?” Giv­en that state of affairs, should your print ran­domly start­ed spew­ing out adver­tise­ments for The Dai­ly Stormer, it prob­a­bly didn’t become a neo-Nazi print­er, although a neo-Nazi is prob­a­bly using it:

“ . . . . This inci­dent shows, once again, that the appar­ently bright future of the so-called Inter­net of Things has a dark side too: hack­ers can creep out babies tak­ing advan­tage of inse­cure baby mon­i­tors, expose kids’ iden­ti­ties thanks to inter­net-con­nect­ed toys that col­lect and leave their data exposed online, or send a hate­ful white suprema­cist fly­er all over the coun­try with two lines of code. . . .”

Well, at least the Weev hasn’t got­ten around to hack­ing baby mon­i­tors and children’s toys to spew outwhite suprema­cist pro­pa­ganda to impres­sion­able young minds, although it sounds like it’s just a mat­ter of time giv­en the ease of hack­ing such devices and the Weev’s insa­tion­able appetite for Nazi trolling. So if you’d like to avoid expos­ing your kids to an unin­vited “imag­i­nary friend” liv­ing in your toys and house­hold prod­ucts (a friend who doesn’t seem to approve of your kid’s non-white friends), you’ll prob­a­bly want to ensure your inter­net-con­nect­ed devices aren’t one of the super eas­ily hack­able brands. There’s no short­age of rea­sons for secur­ing your inter­net-con­nect­ed devices, but you can now add “pre­vent­ing the Weev from Nazi trolling my fam­ily” to the list.

“A Hack­er Made ‘Thou­sands’ of Inter­net-Con­nect­ed Print­ers Spit Out Racist Fly­ers” by Loren­zo Franceschi-Bic­chierai; Vice Moth­er­board; 3/27/2016.

The noto­ri­ous hack­er and troll Andrew Auern­heimer, also known as “Weev,” just proved that the Inter­net of Things can be abused to spread hate­ful pro­pa­ganda. On Thurs­day, Auern­heimer used two lines of code to scan the entire inter­net for inse­cure print­ers and made them auto­mat­i­cally spill out a racist and anti-semit­ic fly­er.

Hours lat­er, sev­eral peo­ple start­edreport­ing the inci­dent on social media, and even­tu­ally a few local news out­lets picked up on the sto­ry when col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties all over the Unit­ed States found that their net­work print­ers were spilling out Auernheimer’s fly­er.

Auern­heimer detailed this “brief exper­i­ment,” as he called it, in a blog post on Fri­day. Lat­er, in a chat, he said that he made over 20,000 print­ers put out the fly­er, and defend­ed his actions.

“I did not hack any print­ers,” he told me in a online chat. “I sent them mes­sages, because they were con­fig­ured to receive mes­sages from the pub­lic.”

The hack­er explained that all he did was cre­ate a script that would scan the whole inter­net to find print­ers that had port 9100, a com­mon port used by net­work print­ers, open. Then, the script made them print the fly­er.

“It’s a big inter­net, I didn’t have to ‘dis­cover’ the print­ers were vul­ner­a­ble, I knew there were going to be a whole lot of them on the inter­net,” he added. “That’s like an obvi­ous fact, of any device, if you search for it some­where on the inter­net you’re going to find it. There were less than I expect­ed there to be real­ly. Still a lot though!”

This inci­dent shows, once again, that the appar­ently bright future of the so-called Inter­net of Things has a dark side too: hack­ers can creep out babies tak­ing advan­tage of inse­cure baby mon­i­tors, expose kids’ iden­ti­ties thanks to inter­net-con­nect­ed toys that col­lect and leave their data exposed online, or send a hate­ful white suprema­cist fly­er all over the coun­try with two lines of code.

Auern­heimer him­self said this “exper­i­ment” is “a les­son in how pos­i­tively hilar­i­ous the [Inter­net of Things] will be in the future.”

Sev­eral col­lege author­i­ties are report­edly inves­ti­gat­ing these inci­dents, appar­ently along with the FBI as well. (The FBI did not respond to a request for com­ment.)

Despite that, Auern­heimer, who was con­victed of hack­ing crimes in 2012, told me that he’s not wor­ried. . . .

7b. When Andrew ‘weev’ Auern­hiemer gave an inter­view from Beirut back in Novem­ber, he assert­ed that he was col­lect­ing $2000 per month in dona­tions through Bit­coin, explain­ing the Bit­coin is use­ful because many sup­port­ers don’t want to be linked to him by a paper tri­al.  Twit­ter blocked tweets by Auern­heimer.

As Pter­rafractyl has observed: “Note that the way Twitter’s “pro­moted tweets” work is you only have to pay (like $0.50) every time some­one clicks on or retweets your pro­moted tweets. And you can also tar­get it to spe­cific groups. If the ‘weev”s intend­ed audi­ence was just oth­er neo-Nazis and fel­low trav­el­ers on twit­ter it may have a great way to raise more bit­coins.

But if you read his descrip­tion of the whole thing it he was specif­i­cally tar­get­ing peo­ple that would be reviled by his ’14 words’ world­view. So it was pret­ty suc­cess­ful from a trolling stand­point and because he was tar­get­ing the peo­ple the least like­ly to retweet his tweets it prob­a­bly cost him next to noth­ing.

But it will be inter­est­ing to see if he tries it again because the non-neo-Nazi seg­ment of the twit­ter­sphere could have just retweet­ed all of that garbage back and forth as an inten­tional play to spend all of his bit­coins for him. At the time, if the ‘weev’ is sit­ting on a much larg­er pile of white suprema­cist-fund­ed bit­coins than he lets on, the next phase of his cam­paign could involve inten­tion­ally try­ing to cause a mass ‘let’s bank­rupt the weev’ retweet counter-cam­paign as an inten­tional, albeit more expen­sive, method of pro­mot­ing neo-Nazi ideas.

So you have to won­der how much mon­ey he’s real­ly tak­ing in from secret donors each month to risk a poten­tially expen­sive stunt like this. But now that he’s demon­strated that you can pull off a twit­ter trolling stunt on the cheap, you also have to won­der how many more cheap trolling attempts of this nature we’re going to see going for­ward from the ‘weev’ or any­one else. Espe­cially since, the more this hap­pens, the more peo­ple are going to know that every time they retweet a troll’s words, that troll pays Twit­ter.

To retweet (the neo-Nazi’s words and cost him some mon­ey) or not to retweet (the neo-Nazi’s words and avoid pro­mot­ing his garbage). That is the (deeply unfor­tu­nate) ques­tion.”
“Twit­ter blocks Pro­moted Tweets by Noto­ri­ous White Suprema­cist” by Alex Hern; The Guardian; 5/7/2015.

Com­pany acts to pre­vent fur­ther abuse by white nation­al­ist and inter­net troll after he pro­moted two offen­sive tweets using Twitter’s ad plat­form

Twit­ter has banned pro­moted tweets that were being used to push white suprema­cist mes­sages on the web­site. The tweets were sent and pro­moted through the company’s adver­tis­ing tools by Andrew ‘weev’ Auern­heimer, a for­mer pres­i­dent of the trolling group known as the “Gay Nig­ger Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca”.

Among the tweets pro­moted by Auern­heimer was one that read: “Whites need to stand up for one anoth­er and defend our­selves from vio­lence and dis­crim­i­na­tion. Our race is dying.” A sec­ond pro­moted tweet read: “White pride, world wide. Do you know the 14 words?” – a ref­er­ence to the white nation­al­ist cre­do: “We must secure the exis­tence of our peo­ple and a future for white chil­dren.”

But a fur­ther attempt to pro­mote the first tweet a day lat­er led to a rejec­tion from Twit­ter, which cit­ed a ban on ads deal­ing with hate con­tent, sen­si­tive top­ics and vio­lence.

Auernheimer’s asso­ci­a­tion with white suprema­cist move­ments was fre­quently writ­ten off as anoth­er form of provo­ca­tion from the noto­ri­ous troll, but after serv­ing a jail sen­tence for his role in hack­ing AT&T’s iPad billing sys­tem, he stepped up his involve­ment. In Octo­ber 2014, he gave an inter­view to white suprema­cist site Dai­ly Stormer in which he revealed a large chest tat­too of a swasti­ka, and spoke about his his­tory as “a long­time crit­ic of Judaism, black cul­ture, immi­gra­tion to West­ern nations, and the media’s con­stant stream of anti-white pro­pa­ganda”. The site this week approv­ingly report­ed on his pro­mo­tion of white pride on Twit­ter.

6c. Even after his jour­nal­is­tic beat­i­fi­ca­tion by the drool­ing syco­phants of the so-called “pro­gres­sive” sec­tor, Green­wald con­tin­ues to rub elbows with Nazis, chum­ming around with Andrew Auern­heimer, a “white-hat” hack­er who is a Nazi, alleged­ly con­vert­ed fol­low­ing a prison term. Note that–from his own rantings–his con­ver­sion to the Nazi world­view took place before his incar­cer­a­tion: ” . . . I’ve been a long-time crit­ic of Judaism, black cul­ture, immi­gra­tion to West­ern nations, and the media’s con­stant stream of anti-white pro­pa­ganda. . . .”

Note, also, his anti-immi­grant point of view–an ele­ment of com­mon­al­i­ty that runs through­out many of the points of analy­sis in this pro­gram.

“iPad Hack­er Released From Jail, Par­ties with Glenn Green­wald, Pub­lishes Neo-Nazi Screeds” by Bob Cesca; The Dai­ly Ban­ter; 10/09/2014.

 Way back in 2010, a so-called “white hat” hack­er named Andrew Auern­heimer, known online as “Weev,” exploit­ed a secu­rity loop­hole on Apple’s iPad and acquired the names of 114,000 AT&T cus­tomers who sub­scribed to the iPad 3G data ser­vice. Fol­low­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion, Weev, who had “stolen” (his words) the user data was pros­e­cuted and con­victed. To his cred­it, Weev informed AT&T of the secu­rity flaw and the com­pany quick­ly but­toned it up. But back in April of this year, Weev’s con­vic­tion was over­turned because he was evi­dently tried in the wrong state (New Jer­sey). He was sub­se­quently released from Pennsylvania’s Allen­wood Fed­eral Cor­rec­tional Com­plex on April 11, 2014. The indict­ment remains, but the con­vic­tion no longer stands.

Dur­ing his time in jail, Weev appar­ently became a neo-Nazi, com­plete with a tat­too not unlike Edward Norton’s tat­too in Amer­i­can His­tory X — a giant swasti­ka on his right pec­toral. After his release, he post­ed a series of racist and anti-Semit­ic remarks on a web­site called The Dai­ly Stormer, a white-suprema­cist site not to be con­fused with The Dai­ly Caller, The Dai­ly Beast or The Dai­ly Ban­ter. Via Gawk­er, here are some choice pas­sages:

I’ve been a long-time crit­ic of Judaism, black cul­ture, immi­gra­tion to West­ern nations, and the media’s con­stant stream of anti-white pro­pa­ganda. [Note this state­ment. It would seem to indi­cate that Auern­heimer’s con­ver­sion took place a long time before he went to prison. Note, also, the anti-immi­grant theme.] Judge Wigen­ton was as black as they come. The pros­e­cu­tor, Zach Intrater, was a Brook­lyn Jew from an old mon­ey New York fam­i­ly.[...]

The whole time a yarmulke-cov­ered audi­ence of Jew­ry stared at me from the pews of the court­room. My pros­e­cu­tor invit­ed his whole syn­a­gogue to spec­tate.[...]

They took con­trol of our sys­tems of finance and law. They hyper­in­flated our cur­rency. They cor­rupted our daugh­ters and demand­ed they sub­ject them­selves to sex work to feed their fam­i­lies. These are a peo­ple that have made them­selves a prob­lem in every nation they occu­py, includ­ing ours. What’s sad­dest is that we are the enablers of this prob­lem. The Jews abused our com­pas­sion to build an empire of wicked­ness the likes the world has nev­er seen.

No gray area there. Weev clear­ly hates Jews, African-Amer­i­cans and any­one he per­ceives as “anti-white.”

Oh, and in addi­tion to his con­ver­sion to the neo-Nazi cause as well as his seem­ingly pro­lific online hate speech, Weev attend­ed a par­ty in New York soon after get­ting out of jail. The par­ty was held by none oth­er than Glenn Green­wald and Lau­ra Poitras to coin­cide with the cer­e­mony in which the duo received the Polk Award for their report­ing on Edward Snow­den and the Nation­al Secu­rity Agency.

Unless he crashed the par­ty, he was obvi­ously an invit­ed guest. But for a moment let’s assume Green­wald didn’t know Weev was invit­ed. Long before the par­ty, Green­wald had pre­vi­ously defend­ed Weev in The Guardian back in March, 2013, months before the author/reporter rose to inter­na­tional acclaim. Indeed, Green­wald named Weev as a “hack­tivist” who was being wrong­fully per­se­cuted by U.S. author­i­ties. . . .

7a. Tak­ing a look at the future of fas­cism, Tay, a “bot” cre­at­ed by Microsoft to respond to users of Twit­ter was tak­en offline after users taught it to–in effect–become a Nazi bot. It is note­wor­thy that Tay can only respond on the basis of what she is taught. In the future, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly accom­plished and will­ful peo­ple like “weev” may be able to do more. Inevitably, Under­ground Reich ele­ments will craft a Nazi AI that will be able to do MUCH, MUCH more!

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its mil­len­ni­al-mim­ic­k­ing chat­bot, into a vat of molten steel. The com­pa­ny has ter­mi­nat­ed her after the bot start­ed tweet­ing abuse at peo­ple and went full neo-Nazi, declar­ing that “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

@TheBigBrebowski ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016

 Some of this appears to be “inno­cent” inso­far as Tay is not gen­er­at­ing these respons­es. Rather, if you tell her “repeat after me” she will par­rot back what­ev­er you say, allow­ing you to put words into her mouth. How­ev­er, some of the respons­es wereorgan­ic. The Guardianquotes one where, after being asked “is Ricky Ger­vais an athe­ist?”, Tay respond­ed, “ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism.” . . .

But like all teenagers, she seems to be angry with her moth­er.

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its mil­len­ni­al-mim­ic­k­ing chat­bot, into a vat of molten steel. The com­pa­ny has ter­mi­nat­ed her after the bot start­ed tweet­ing abuse at peo­ple and went full neo-Nazi, declar­ing that “Hitler was right I hate the jews.”

@TheBigBrebowski ricky ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from adolf hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016

Some of this appears to be “inno­cent” inso­far as Tay is not gen­er­at­ing these respons­es. Rather, if you tell her “repeat after me” she will par­rot back what­ev­er you say, allow­ing you to put words into her mouth. How­ev­er, some of the respons­es wereorgan­ic. The Guardianquotes one where, after being asked “is Ricky Ger­vais an athe­ist?”, Tay respond­ed, “Ricky Ger­vais learned total­i­tar­i­an­ism from Adolf Hitler, the inven­tor of athe­ism.”

In addi­tion to turn­ing the bot off, Microsoft has delet­ed many of the offend­ing tweets. But this isn’t an action to be tak­en light­ly; Red­mond would do well to remem­ber that it was humans attempt­ing to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompt­ing the sys­tem to attack Rus­sia in order to elim­i­nate its ene­mies. We’d bet­ter hope that Tay does­n’t sim­i­lar­ly retal­i­ate. . . .

7b. As not­ed in a Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics arti­cle: ” . . . When the next pow­er­ful AI comes along, it will see its first look at the world by look­ing at our faces. And if we stare it in the eyes and shout “we’re AWFUL lol,” the lol might be the one part it doesn’t under­stand. . . .”