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FTR #‘s 1061, 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1066, 1067 and 1068: Socialists for Trump and Hitler (The “Assistance”), Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8

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FTR #1061: This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1062: This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1063: This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1064: This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1065: This pro­gram was record­ed in  one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1066: This pro­gram was record­ed in  one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1067: This pro­gram was record­ed in  one, 60-minute seg­ment

FTR #1068: This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment

Intro­duc­tion: We have won­dered about the ascent of Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez as a polit­i­cal ani­mal. We won­dered whether she might be a “ringer,” ele­vat­ed and pro­mot­ed by the far right and, per­haps, ele­ments of the CIA, because she is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT from their stand­point. In fact, she is straight from the Ama­zon (ahem) mail order cat­a­log: an out­spo­ken Lati­na who fits neat­ly into the anti-Latin big­otry insti­tu­tion­al­ized in Trump’s GOP, brands as a social­ist (per­fect for the Karl Roves and Trumps of this world), has stat­ed her inten­tion to work against Demo­c­ra­t­ic incum­bents with whose pol­i­cy posi­tions she dis­agrees, and demon­strat­ed a lack of eco­nom­ic sophis­ti­ca­tion in her com­ments about Ama­zon’s failed New York City Deal and in the pre­sen­ta­tion of the Green New Deal.

The ascent of AOC was effect­ed in large mea­sure by two over­lap­ping organizations–Justice Democ­rats and Brand New Congress–both co-found­ed by Saikat Chakrabar­ti, and Indi­an-Amer­i­can, Har­vard-edu­cat­ed, Wall Street and Sil­i­con Val­ley mul­ti-mil­lion­aire, and fan of major Axis col­lab­o­ra­tor Sub­has Chan­dra Bose. Brand New Con­gress was co-found­ed by a Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia-edu­cat­ed Turk­ish Amer­i­can, Cenk Uygur, who has a his­to­ry of deny­ing the Turk­ish geno­cide against the Arme­ni­ans, as we shall see. (Like Har­vard, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia is an Ivy League School.)

The rad­i­cal Demo­c­ra­t­ic new­com­ers are pre­cip­i­tat­ing a war with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, ignor­ing the fact that the Democ­rats retook Con­gress as a result of vic­to­ries by mod­er­ate can­di­dates in dis­tricts tak­en by Trump in 2016.

Chakrabar­ti is fun­da­men­tal to the rise of Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez. Chakrabar­ti was AOC’s cam­paign man­ag­er and is her cur­rent chief of staff. Both Jus­tice Democ­rats and Brand New Con­gress donat­ed a total of $900,000 to a con­sult­ing firm also head­ed by Chakrabar­ti. Until recent­ly, AOC sat on the board of one of them.

AOC’s polit­i­cal ascent itself, has a seedy under­bel­ly (more about that in a future  pro­gram.)

In a recent YouTube post defend­ing AOC’s mer­cu­r­ial social media activ­i­ty, Chakrabar­ti appeared with a T‑Shirt fea­tur­ing a pic­ture of Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, an Indi­an nation­al­ist who allied him­self with both Nazi Ger­many and Impe­r­i­al Japan. He has a habit of wear­ing Sub­has Chan­dra Bose garb.

Some of Bose’s many pro­found rela­tion­ships and oper­a­tional deeds in con­nec­tion with the Axis and the Sec­ond World War:

  1. In addi­tion to net­work­ing with Hein­rich Himm­ler, as pic­tured above, left, he met with Adolf Hitler and was praised by Der Fuhrer. ” . . . . You are for­tu­nate hav­ing been born in a coun­try of glo­ri­ous cul­tur­al tra­di­tions and a colos­sal man­pow­er. I am impressed by the burn­ing pas­sion with which you and your Neta­ji [Bose] seek to lib­er­ate your coun­try from for­eign dom­i­na­tion. Your Neta­ji’s sta­tus is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 mil­lion Ger­mans, he is the leader of 400 mil­lion Indi­ans. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater gen­er­al than myself. I salute him, and Ger­many salutes him. It is the duty of all Indi­ans to accept him as their führer and obey him implic­it­ly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guid­ance will lead India very soon to free­dom.”
  2. Bose net­worked with SS chief Hein­rich Himm­ler and, ulti­mate­ly, his Euro­pean fight­ing forces were fold­ed into the Waf­fen SS” . . . . The Indi­an Legion (Ger­man: Indis­che Legion), offi­cial­ly the Free India Legion (Ger­man: Legion Freies Indi­en) or Infantry Reg­i­ment 950 (Indi­an) (Ger­man: Infan­terie-Reg­i­ment 950 (indis­ches), I.R. 950) and lat­er the Indi­an Vol­un­teer Legion of the Waf­fen-SS (Ger­man: Indis­che Frei­willi­gen Legion der Waf­fen-SS), was a mil­i­tary unit raised dur­ing the Sec­ond World War in Nazi Ger­many. Intend­ed to serve as a lib­er­a­tion force for British-ruled India, it was made up of Indi­an pris­on­ers of war and expa­tri­ates in Europe. Because of its ori­gins in the Indi­an inde­pen­dence move­ment, it was known also as the “Tiger Legion”, and the “Azad Hind Fauj”. Ini­tial­ly raised as part of the Ger­man Army, it was part of the Waf­fen-SS from August 1944. Indi­an inde­pen­dence leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose ini­ti­at­ed the legion’s for­ma­tion, as part of his efforts to win Indi­a’s inde­pen­dence by wag­ing war against Britain, when he came to Berlin in 1941 seek­ing Ger­man aid. . . .”
  3. Bose net­worked with Mus­soli­ni, Prime Min­is­ter Hide­ki Tojo and even Emper­or Hiro­hi­to him­self dur­ing the course of his align­ment with the Axis: ” . . . . Hav­ing met with Hitler, Ital­ian Fas­cist Duce Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, and Japan­ese Pre­mier Gen­er­al Hide­ki Tojo, Bose was, at one time or anoth­er, backed by all three of the major Axis pow­ers. . . . Like Il Duce and the Führer before him, Bose now claimed the mul­ti­ple titles and offices of head of state, prime min­is­ter, min­is­ter of war, and head of the for­eign office. On the 23rd, the new chief exec­u­tive offi­cer made a state vis­it to Japan’s Emper­or Hiro­hi­to dur­ing the Greater East Asia Con­fer­ence in Tokyo . . . .”
  4. Bose also wrote for the jour­nal of pan-Ger­man­ist philoso­pher Karl Haushofer. Kevin Coogan notes the phi­los­o­phy of Karl Haushofer, an ear­ly influ­ence on Hitler and Third Reich geo-pol­i­tics, exem­pli­fy­ing some of the his­tor­i­cal gen­e­sis of the Nazi/Hindu nation­al­ist link. ” . . . . In the 1930’s, Indi­an nation­al­ist leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose [whose Indi­an nation­al Army lat­er received mil­i­tary sup­port in World War II from both Ger­many and Japan] was a cor­re­spon­dent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopoli­tik. [Haushofer­’s pub­li­ca­tion.] . . . .”
  5. In addi­tion to Haushofer,  Bose net­worked with oth­er the­o­ret­i­cal lumi­nar­ies of fas­cism and insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als involved with clan­des­tine oper­a­tions and intel­li­gence mat­ters, includ­ing: The Japan­ese Black Drag­on Soci­ety and its patri­arch Mit­su­ru Toya­ma, Abwehr head Wil­helm Canaris, Haj Amin El-Hus­sei­ni (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Major Gen­er­al in the Waf­fen SS, the fore­most orga­niz­er of Mus­lim com­bat units for the Nazis and the first leader of the Pales­tin­ian Nation­al Move­ment) and Nazi Pro­pa­gan­da Min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels.
  6. In con­nec­tion with his work for Goebbels, it is worth not­ing that Bose’s Axis pro­pa­gan­da broad­casts were coun­tered with George Orwell’s broad­casts for the Allies: ” . . . . . Bose set up the Free India Cen­ter in Berlin and began radio broad­casts from Nauen, Ger­many, to his far-off home­land on Feb­ru­ary 19, 1942. Bose’s British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion rival and coun­ter­part, author Eric Blair (aka George Orwell of Ani­mal Farm and 1984 fame), led the Allied pro­pa­gan­da team that fought Bose over the radio. . . . ”

It should be not­ed that Bose was not one of the Hin­dut­va fas­cists, who belonged to the RSS and the close­ly-allied Hin­du Mahasab­ha. He was, how­ev­er, an Axis-allied fas­cist mil­i­tary leader, like some oth­er nation­al­ists in colo­nial ter­ri­to­ries, who sought alliance with the armies of Nazi Ger­many, Impe­r­i­al Japan and, to a less­er extent, fas­cist Italy as vehi­cles for oust­ing their colo­nial mas­ters.

Bose appears to have faked his 1945 death in a plane crash. If so, the prob­a­bil­i­ty is high that he con­tin­ued his polit­i­cal work under­ground, very pos­si­bly in con­nec­tion with some of the Axis ele­ments with which he was asso­ci­at­ed dur­ing the war, and/or ele­ments of CIA or oth­er intel­li­gence ser­vices. ” . . . . Although Neta­ji (Great Leader) Bose was report­ed killed in an air crash in August 1945 . . . . many believed then and con­tin­ue to believe now that, helped by his Japan­ese allies, he faked his death . . . . and returned to India many years lat­er . . . . In his inquiry report, com­plet­ed in 2006, Jus­tice Mukher­jee was cat­e­goric. He con­clud­ed: ‘Neta­ji Bose is dead [a safe bet as he would have been 109]. He did not die in the plane crash as alleged and the ash­es in the Japan­ese tem­ple in Tokyo [main­tained by the Indi­an gov­ern­ment since 1945] are not of Neta­ji.’ . . .”

Cenk Uygur–the Ivy-League edu­cat­ed co-founder (with Chakrabar­ti) of Brand New Con­gress, has a his­to­ry of deny­ing the Turk­ish geno­cide of Arme­ni­ans dur­ing World War I: ” . . . . . . . . Hence, once you real­ly exam­ine the his­to­ry of the time it becomes appar­ent that the alle­ga­tions of an Armen­ian Geno­cide are unfound­ed. So the ques­tion aris­es of why the Arme­ni­ans would both­er to con­jure up such sto­ries . . . . . . . every non-Armen­ian schol­ar in the field believes it is an open ques­tion whether this event was a geno­cide. Is it the claim of the arti­cle that all of these peo­ple are taint­ed by the ten­ta­cles of the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment? If not, then why is it not point­ed out that no one out­side of the ‘Armen­ian posi­tion’ believes it is a geno­cide? . . . ”

We note that, in addi­tion to man­i­fest­ing mate­r­i­al sup­port­ive of the World War II Axis and deny­ing geno­cide, the Chakrabarti/Uygur team has engi­neered much that fits neat­ly into the GOP strat­e­gy. The “war” they plan on “lean­ing into” with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty ben­e­fits Trump/GOP/Karl Rove and might just as well have been script­ed by them. ” . . . . it is the Jus­tice Democ­rats who see Oca­sio-Cortez as just the open­ing act in an aston­ish­ing­ly ambi­tious plan to do noth­ing less than re-imag­ine lib­er­al pol­i­tics in America—and do it by what­ev­er means nec­es­sary. . . . If that requires knock­ing out well-known elect­ed offi­cials and replac­ing them with more rad­i­cal new­com­ers, so be it. And if it ends up rip­ping apart the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in the process—well, that might be the idea.  ‘There is going to be a war with­in the par­ty. We are going to lean into it,’ said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .” 

With “Sub­has Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti and “What Armen­ian Geno­cide?” Uygur pro­mot­ing her polit­i­cal ascent, we should note how much of what she says is per­fect for Team Trump. AOC has intoned that jobs should be pro­vid­ed for peo­ple “unwill­ing to work,” that cap­i­tal­ism was “irre­deemable” and adorned the fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant con­cept of a “Green New Deal” with a pro­gres­sive wish list that pro­vid­ed pro­pa­gan­da fod­der for Team Trump.

Brad Parscale is head­ing Trump’s 2020 reelec­tion team and, in so doing, has reassem­bled the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca team from 2016. AOC has long been pro­lif­ic in her use of social media and online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We won­der if AOC may have been iden­ti­fied, pro­filed and data-based by an AI-assist­ed data min­ing oper­a­tion along the lines of what Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca engi­neered on behalf of Trump dur­ing the 2016 cam­paign?

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Bernie Sanders’ chief 2016 cam­paign strate­gist Tad Devine’s net­work­ing with Trump’s 2016 cam­paign man­ag­er and prob­a­ble spook Paul Man­afort on the ear­ly stages of the Maid­an “op;” the promi­nent role in the Sanders Insti­tute and AOC’s advi­so­ry team of Jef­frey Sachs, whose HIID team of advis­ers (with gov­ern­ment fund­ing) sent Rus­sia back to the Stone Age, eco­nom­i­cal­ly; the “hand­off” to Jef­frey Sachs and his HIID of Rus­sia and oth­er for­mer Sovi­et Republics by the Gehlen/GOP Nazis man­i­fest­ing through the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion; Sachs’ role in craft­ing the oli­garch sys­tem that bedev­ils the for­mer Sovi­et mem­ber states to this day; review of Sanders Insti­tute mem­ber Tul­si Gab­bard’s links to Naren­dra Mod­i’s Hin­dut­va fas­cists and the Hare Krish­na fas­cist mind con­trol cult; Tul­si Gab­bard’s fund­ing from a group seen by crit­ics as a Hin­dut­va-sup­port­ing enti­ty in the U.S.; Tul­si Gab­bard’s posi­tion on the advi­so­ry board of Koch-Broth­ers fund­ed think tank that over­laps the Neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment; GOP’s strat­e­gy of using “oppor­tu­ni­ty zones” des­ig­nat­ed in the Trump Tax Bill as a cam­paign strat­e­gy; AOC’s pos­si­ble use in the GOP cam­paign strat­e­gy using “oppor­tu­ni­ty zones;” AOC’s clum­sy use of “Sub­has Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti and “What Armen­ian Geno­cide? “Uygur’s PACs, as well as a con­sult­ing firm run by Chakrabar­ti; review of the Anan­da Mar­ga cult, found­ed and run by Bose’s nephew, room­mate and polit­i­cal pro­tege Sarkar; Ama­zon’s Jeff Bezos’ fam­i­ly her­itage with DARPA and the CIA’s Oper­a­tion Peter Pan; dis­cus­sion of H.L. Hunt Grand­daugh­ter Leah Hunt-Hen­drix’s sig­nif­i­cant role in fund­ing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s left; Hunt-Hen­drix’s asso­ci­a­tion with Glo­ria Steinem, whose CIA her­itage we have dis­cussed in the past; the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Chakrabar­ti may be man­i­fest­ing Sub­has Chan­dra Bose garb as part of his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism, por­tray­ing the Axis as anti-colo­nial lib­er­a­tors; rumi­na­tion about the ele­va­tion of Bernie Sanders, AOC et al as part of an Under­ground Reich gam­bit to use anti-com­mu­nism to enslave Amer­i­ca.

1.  We have won­dered about the ascen­sion of Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez as a polit­i­cal ani­mal. We won­dered whether she might be a “ringer,” ele­vat­ed and pro­mot­ed by the far right and, per­haps, ele­ments of the CIA, because she is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT from their stand­point. In fact, she is straight from the Ama­zon (ahem) mail order cat­a­log. An out­spo­ken Lati­na who fits the anti-Latin big­otry insti­tu­tion­al­ized in Trump’s GOP, brands as a social­ist (per­fect for the Karl Roves and Trumps of this world), has stat­ed her inten­tion to work against Demo­c­ra­t­ic incum­bents and demon­strat­ed a lack of eco­nom­ic sophis­ti­ca­tion in her com­ments about Ama­zon’s failed New York City Deal.The ascen­sion of AOC was effect­ed in large mea­sure by two over­lap­ping organizations–Justice Democ­rats and Brand New Congress–both co-found­ed by Saikat Chakrabar­ti, and Indi­an-Amer­i­can, Har­vard-edu­cat­ed, Wall Street and Sil­i­con Val­ley mul­ti-mil­lion­aire. Brand New Con­gress was co-found­ed by a Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia-edu­cat­ed Turk­ish Amer­i­can, Cenk Uygur. (Like Har­vard, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia is an Ivy League School.

In a recent twit­ter video post defend­ing AOC’s mer­cu­r­ial social media activ­i­ty, Chakrabar­ti appeared with a T‑Shirt fea­tur­ing a pic­ture of Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, an Indi­an nation­al­ist who allied him­self with both Nazi Ger­many and Impe­r­i­al Japan. IF Chakrabar­ti were what he claims to be, he would not be wear­ing a Sub­has Chan­dra Bose T‑shirt.

“Meet Saikat Chakrabar­ti, the Ben­gali-Amer­i­can chief of staff of the feisty New York Con­gress­woman Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez” by Ananya Das­gup­ta; The Ben­gal Sto­ry; 1/18/2019.

. . . .  I noticed some­thing inter­est­ing with­in her Insta­gram posts. A video of a scruffy-look­ing young man, wear­ing a moss green t‑shirt with Neta­ji Sub­has Chan­dra Bose’s face embossed on it.  . . . . In today’s world, who finds sig­nif­i­cance in Bose? Let alone find it through a sar­to­r­i­al state­ment in the Unit­ed States. Meet Saikat Chakrabar­ti, the chief of staff of Oca­sio-Cortez. .  .  .

. . . .  Like mil­lions of oth­ers, he spent years in Sil­i­con Val­ley. Even co-found­ing a web design tool named Mock­ing­bird and work­ing on the prod­uct team of pay­ment proces­sor Stripe. In between, he walked the cor­ri­dors of Wall Street for a while. But unlike many, he left all that behind to join the Bernie Sanders cam­paign. . . .

. . . . While work­ing on the Sanders cam­paign, Chakrabar­ti met Alexan­dra Rojas and Corbin Trent. Togeth­er they co-found­ed Jus­tice Democ­rats, a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee whose one-line intro­duc­tion says, “Our time – it’s time to ush­er in a new gen­er­a­tion of diverse work­ing class lead­ers into the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty.” . . .

. . . . Jus­tice Democ­rats and Brand New Con­gress, a sim­i­lar com­mit­tee also co-found­ed by Chakrabar­ti, worked togeth­er to recruit can­di­dates by engag­ing with the mass­es. . . .

. . . . Out of the thou­sands of appli­ca­tions they received, Chakrabarti’s team sup­port­ed 12 can­di­dates for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Pri­maries. The suc­cess sto­ry of this cam­paign was the one of Oca­sio-Cortez – the only one who was elect­ed to the US Con­gress. Chakrabar­ti became her cam­paign man­ag­er and even­tu­al­ly her chief of staff. . .

2a. Karl Rove, Trump and com­pa­ny must be absolute­ly delighted–and may have designed–the fol­low­ing: ” . . . . it is the Jus­tice Democ­rats who see Oca­sio-Cortez as just the open­ing act in an aston­ish­ing­ly ambi­tious plan to do noth­ing less than re-imag­ine lib­er­al pol­i­tics in America—and do it by what­ev­er means nec­es­sary. . . . If that requires knock­ing out well-known elect­ed offi­cials and replac­ing them with more rad­i­cal new­com­ers, so be it. And if it ends up rip­ping apart the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in the process—well, that might be the idea.  ‘There is going to be a war with­in the par­ty. We are going to lean into it,’ said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .”

“There Is Going to Be a War With­in the Par­ty. We Are Going to Lean Into It.’”; By David Freed­lan­der; Politi­co; 2/04/2019.

The Jus­tice Democ­rats helped get Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez elect­ed. Who are they after next? . . .

. . . . Although it’s Oca­sio-Cortez who gets all the head­lines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Con­gress in the first place with­out the group Chakrabar­ti found­ed: Jus­tice Democ­rats, a new, cen­tral play­er in the ongo­ing war for the soul of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty. It was the Jus­tice Democ­rats who recruit­ed her in a quixot­ic cam­paign ear­ly on, pro­vid­ing a neo­phyte can­di­date with enough infra­struc­ture to take down a par­ty leader. And it is the Jus­tice Democ­rats who see Oca­sio-Cortez as just the open­ing act in an aston­ish­ing­ly ambi­tious plan to do noth­ing less than re-imag­ine lib­er­al pol­i­tics in America—and do it by what­ev­er means nec­es­sary. . . .

. . . . If that requires knock­ing out well-known elect­ed offi­cials and replac­ing them with more rad­i­cal new­com­ers, so be it. And if it ends up rip­ping apart the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty in the process—well, that might be the idea.  “There is going to be a war with­in the par­ty. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .

. . . . The group start­ed meet­ing up even before the 2016 pri­ma­ry was over, and its mem­bers began look­ing ahead to the 2018 midterms—figuring that any Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent would need a very dif­fer­ent Con­gress to get any­thing done. Along with Cenk Uygur, the pro­gres­sive activist and founder of the lib­er­al media com­pa­ny The Young Turks, they start­ed a group called Brand New Con­gress. . . .

2b. The “war with­in the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty” that AOC/“Subhas Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti and “What Armen­ian Geno­cide?” Uygur have promised is gain­ing steam.

“House Cam­paign Arm and Lib­er­al Wing at Odds Over Shield­ing Cen­trists” by Catie Edmond­son; The New York Times; 4/8/2019 [West­ern Edi­tion.]

The House Demo­c­ra­t­ic cam­paign arm is near­ing open war­fare with the party’s ris­ing lib­er­al wing as polit­i­cal oper­a­tives close to Speak­er Nan­cy Pelosi try to shut down pri­ma­ry chal­lenges before what is like­ly to be a hard-fought cam­paign next year to pre­serve the party’s shaky major­i­ty. . . .

. . . . Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez, Demo­c­rat of New York, who owes her seat to a suc­cess­ful pri­ma­ry chal­lenge, went so far as to encour­age her 3.8 mil­lion Twit­ter fol­low­ers to “pause” their dona­tions to the cam­paign com­mit­tee in protest. . . .

. . . . The open hos­til­i­ties are just the lat­est in the ris­ing ten­sions between an expe­ri­enced par­ty estab­lish­ment focus­ing on what is pos­si­ble in the short run and a group of young lib­er­als chaf­ing at such restraint. House Democ­rats have divid­ed over sin­gle-pay­er “Medicare for all” ver­sus incre­men­tal leg­is­la­tion to bol­ster the Afford­able Care Act and over Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal ver­sus less ambi­tious cli­mate change poli­cies. Lib­er­al Democ­rats and more mod­er­ate new­com­ers from Repub­li­can-lean­ing dis­tricts have fought over Repub­li­can pro­ce­dur­al motions. . . .

. . . . Ms. Bustos’s rule pro­hibits Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­sul­tants and ven­dors work­ing for a pri­ma­ry chal­lenger to an incum­bent from receiv­ing work from the com­mit­tee. It comes as ardent lib­er­al orga­ni­za­tions like Jus­tice Democ­rats, embold­ened by a pair of high-pro­file wins in 2018 — Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ayan­na Press­ley of Mass­a­chu­setts and Ms. Oca­sio-Cortez — are aggres­sive­ly gear­ing up to chal­lenge cen­trist or old-line Democ­rats with lib­er­al can­di­dates. . . .

. . . . “We reject the D.C.C.C.’s attempt to hoard pow­er, which will only serve to keep that tal­ent pool — and Con­gress itself — dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white and male,” María Urbina, the nation­al polit­i­cal direc­tor for Indi­vis­i­ble, a pro­gres­sive grass-roots group, said of the cam­paign com­mit­tee. . . .

. . . . Many of the can­di­dates wooed in the last cam­paign cycle by Jus­tice Democ­rats would have run in dis­tricts that lean Repub­li­can. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­gres­sion­al Cam­paign Com­mit­tee had to work hard to beat those chal­lenges back, wor­ried that a tri­umph by Jus­tice Democ­rats in the pri­ma­ry would have cost the par­ty a pos­si­ble vic­to­ry in the gen­er­al elec­tion.

2c. The impor­tance of Chakrabar­ti to AOC’s polit­i­cal for­tunes is illus­trat­ed by the rela­tion­ship between two PACs and a Con­sult­ing firm: ” . . . . At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez’s cam­paign com­mit­tee and two PACs paid almost $900,000 to a con­sult­ing com­pa­ny for cam­paign ser­vices, pro­vid­ing few details on what the mon­ey was for or who ulti­mate­ly received it. The unortho­dox arrange­ment — she sat on the board of one of the PACs, both of which were co-found­ed by the per­son who is now her chief-of-staff [Saikat Chakrabar­ti], who also ran the con­sult­ing com­pa­ny — appears to have tak­en advan­tage of gaps in the law, includ­ing the low lev­el of detail that cam­paigns and PACs are required to pro­vide about their spend­ing. . . . The nub of the charge is that Oca­sio-Cortez and the two PACs — Brand New Con­gress and Jus­tice Democ­rats — vio­lat­ed fed­er­al elec­tion law in pay­ing $885,735 to the com­pa­ny, Brand New Con­gress LLC. . . .”

“Ocasio-Cortez’s Cam­paign Financ­ing Has Crit­ics Cry­ing Hypocrisy” by Bill Alli­son [Bloomberg]; Yahoo News; 3/8/2019.

Demo­c­ra­t­ic fire­brand Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez rode into office rail­ing against the influ­ence of big mon­ey and hid­den donors in U.S. elec­tions. Yet the polit­i­cal oper­a­tion that helped elect her to Con­gress was itself less than trans­par­ent — expos­ing her to attacks from con­ser­v­a­tive foes.

The New York con­gress­woman raised a hefty $2 mil­lion for her 2018 elec­tion while refus­ing to take mon­ey from busi­ness-relat­ed polit­i­cal action com­mit­tees. Of that, 61 per­cent came from indi­vid­u­als giv­ing less than $200 — the high­est rate of small-dol­lar fund­ing among cur­rent U.S. House mem­bers.

At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez’s cam­paign com­mit­tee and two PACs paid almost $900,000 to a con­sult­ing com­pa­ny for cam­paign ser­vices, pro­vid­ing few details on what the mon­ey was for or who ulti­mate­ly received it.

The unortho­dox arrange­ment — she sat on the board of one of the PACs, both of which were co-found­ed by the per­son who is now her chief-of-staff, who also ran the con­sult­ing com­pa­ny — appears to have tak­en advan­tage of gaps in the law, includ­ing the low lev­el of detail that cam­paigns and PACs are required to pro­vide about their spend­ing.

The intri­cate ties and the lack of trans­paren­cy have opened her to charges of hypocrisy and prompt­ed com­plaints to the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion by con­ser­v­a­tive groups, though the alle­ga­tions may amount to lit­tle more than paper­work vio­la­tions.

Oca­sio-Cortez, in a tweet, called the com­plaints “bogus,” and said “This is how the mis­in­for­ma­tion machine works, folks.”

David Mitrani, a lawyer for Oca­sio-Cortez, the PACs and the com­pa­ny, in a state­ment said any impli­ca­tion “that these enti­ties in any way oper­at­ed with less than full trans­paren­cy or in some way to skirt the law, are absolute­ly and unequiv­o­cal­ly false.” . . . .

. . . . The com­plaint get­ting the most atten­tion was brought March 4 by the Nation­al Legal and Pol­i­cy Cen­ter, a right-lean­ing non­prof­it focus­ing on ethics issues. The nub of the charge is that Oca­sio-Cortez and the two PACs — Brand New Con­gress and Jus­tice Democ­rats — vio­lat­ed fed­er­al elec­tion law in pay­ing $885,735 to the com­pa­ny, Brand New Con­gress LLC. The PACs raised that mon­ey from indi­vid­ual donors.

The com­plaint says the arrange­ment hid the true pur­pose, and actu­al recip­i­ents, of the mon­ey. . . .

2c. Next, we review Data Pro­pria, the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca off­shoot cre­at­ed by Brad Parscale’s com­pa­ny Cloud Com­merce.

The GOP hired the ser­vices of Data Pro­pria for the 2018 mid-terms. Data Pro­pria employs four ex-Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca employ­ees, includ­ing Cam­bridge Analytica’s chief data sci­en­tist. Cam­bridge Analytica’s for­mer head of prod­uct, Matt Oczkows­ki, leads Data Propia. Oczkows­ki led the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca team that worked for Trump’s 2016 cam­paign, and was report­ed­ly over­heard brag­ging to a prospec­tive client about how he’s already work­ing on Trump’s 2020 cam­paign (which he sub­se­quent­ly denied). Brad Parscale ran the Trump 2016 campaign’s exten­sive dig­i­tal oper­a­tions that includ­ed exten­sive micro-tar­get­ing of indi­vid­u­als out­side of the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca efforts.

Matt Oczkows­ki is now the run­ning Parscale Dig­i­tal in addi­tion to Data Pro­pria. Parscale Dig­i­tal is the rebrand­ed ver­sion of Parscale’s old mar­ket­ing com­pa­ny. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, Parscale sold his shares in Parscale Dig­i­tal in August 2017, at the same time he pur­chased $9 mil­lion in stock for Cloud Com­merce and took a seat on its board. August of 2017 is also the same month Parscale Dig­i­tal was sold to Cloud Com­merce. Thus, Parscale is a co-own­er of Cloud Com­merce which the own­er of Parscale Dig­i­tal. Now Matt Oczkows­ki, the for­mer head of prod­uct for Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, is run­ning Parscale Dig­i­tal.

AOC has long been pro­lif­ic in her use of social media and online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We won­der if AOC may have been iden­ti­fied, pro­filed and data-based by an AI-assist­ed data min­ing oper­a­tion along the lines of what Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca engi­neered on behalf of Trump dur­ing the 2016 cam­paign?

“Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca Alum To Run Anoth­er San Anto­nio-Based Firm” by Paul Flahive; Texas Pub­lic Radio; 02/05/2019

Parscale Dig­i­tal, a San Anto­nio-based dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm best known for its name­sake and for­mer own­er Brad Parscale, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s 2020 cam­paign chair­man, is now being run by a for­mer exec­u­tive at Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca.

Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, the now defunct data analy­sis com­pa­ny known for work­ing on Pres­i­dent Trump’s 2016 cam­paign, declared bank­rupt­cy in 2018 after news broke that data from more than 80 mil­lion Face­book users was shared with it.

Matt Oczkows­ki was head of prod­uct for Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca before form­ing Data Pro­pria in San Anto­nio with at least three oth­er Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca alums, includ­ing its chief data sci­en­tist, David Wilkin­son.

Oczkows­ki will take on the dual role run­ning Parscale and Data Pro­pria, which are both owned by Cloud­Com­merce.

Brad Parscale sits on the board of par­ent com­pa­ny Cloud Com­merce.

Cloud­Com­merce Pres­i­dent Andrew Van Noy announced the change Jan. 25. in an email obtained by TPR.

“Matt will con­tin­ue to lead the Data Pro­pria team and will now focus on stream­lin­ing the offer­ings and build­ing out the teams between the two brands,” he said.

Accord­ing to the email from Van Noy, Oczkows­ki will serve in an inter­im capac­i­ty.

Parscale Dig­i­tal has been with­out a leader since for­mer pres­i­dent Adam Brecht left the posi­tion in June 2018 after just a few months.

Data Pro­pria report­ed­ly assist­ed the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee with midterm race polling last year and is work­ing on Trump’s 2020 cam­paign.

Brad Parscale sold his half of Giles Parscale, which would become Parscale Dig­i­tal, in August 2017. At the time he took $9 mil­lion in Cloud­Com­merce stock and a seat on the board for his com­pa­ny assets.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Cloud­Com­merce didn’t respond to repeat­ed requests for com­ment.

Accord­ing to fil­ings with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion, Brad Parscale was invoiced more than $729,000 by Parscale Dig­i­tal for work done for the cam­paign manager’s polit­i­cal­ly ori­ent­ed con­sult­ing firm, Flori­da-based Parscale Strat­e­gy LLC.

Don­ald J. Trump For Pres­i­dent, Inc paid Parscale Strat­e­gy LLC more than $3.4 mil­lion in 2018 for dig­i­tal con­sult­ing and online adver­tis­ing, accord­ing to the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion. . . .

3. Bose formed the Free Indi­an Legion, ini­tial­ly allied with the Wehrma­cht, and then with the Waf­fen SS, as well as the armies of Impe­r­i­al Japan. In addi­tion to net­work­ing with Hein­rich Himm­ler, as pic­tured at left, he met with Adolf Hitler and was praised by Der Fuhrer. ” . . . . You are for­tu­nate hav­ing been born in a coun­try of glo­ri­ous cul­tur­al tra­di­tions and a colos­sal man­pow­er. I am impressed by the burn­ing pas­sion with which you and your Neta­ji [Bose] seek to lib­er­ate your coun­try from for­eign dom­i­na­tion. Your Neta­ji’s sta­tus is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 mil­lion Ger­mans, he is the leader of 400 mil­lion Indi­ans. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater gen­er­al than myself. I salute him, and Ger­many salutes him. It is the duty of all Indi­ans to accept him as their führer and obey him implic­it­ly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guid­ance will lead India very soon to free­dom.” . . . .

Sub­has Chan­dra Bose Meets Hitler

“Hin­du Nationalist’s His­tor­i­cal Links to Fas­cism and Nazism” by Palash R. Ghosh; Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Times; 3/6/2012.

. . . . Dur­ing a speech giv­en to Indi­an mil­i­tary offi­cers and Indi­an nation­al­ist Sub­hash Chan­dra Bose in Dres­den, Ger­many, in 1943, Hitler him­self report­ed­ly said: “You are for­tu­nate hav­ing been born in a coun­try of glo­ri­ous cul­tur­al tra­di­tions and a colos­sal man­pow­er. I am impressed by the burn­ing pas­sion with which you and your Neta­ji [Bose] seek to lib­er­ate your coun­try from for­eign dom­i­na­tion. Your Neta­ji’s sta­tus is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 mil­lion Ger­mans, he is the leader of 400 mil­lion Indi­ans. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater gen­er­al than myself. I salute him, and Ger­many salutes him. It is the duty of all Indi­ans to accept him as their führer and obey him implic­it­ly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guid­ance will lead India very soon to free­dom.” . . . .

4a. Bose formed the Free Indi­an Legion, ini­tial­ly allied with the Wehrma­cht, and then with the Waf­fen SS, as well as the armies of Impe­r­i­al Japan.

Indi­an Legion;” wikipedia.com

Sub­has Chan­dra Bose (left) with Hein­rich Himm­ler.

. . . . The Indi­an Legion (Ger­man: Indis­che Legion), offi­cial­ly the Free India Legion (Ger­man: Legion Freies Indi­en) or Infantry Reg­i­ment 950 (Indi­an) (Ger­man: Infan­terie-Reg­i­ment 950 (indis­ches), I.R. 950) and lat­er the Indi­an Vol­un­teer Legion of the Waf­fen-SS (Ger­man: Indis­che Frei­willi­gen Legion der Waf­fen-SS), was a mil­i­tary unit raised dur­ing the Sec­ond World War in Nazi Ger­many. Intend­ed to serve as a lib­er­a­tion force for British-ruled India, it was made up of Indi­an pris­on­ers of war and expa­tri­ates in Europe. Because of its ori­gins in the Indi­an inde­pen­dence move­ment, it was known also as the “Tiger Legion”, and the “Azad Hind Fauj”. Ini­tial­ly raised as part of the Ger­man Army, it was part of the Waf­fen-SS from August 1944. Indi­an inde­pen­dence leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose ini­ti­at­ed the legion’s for­ma­tion, as part of his efforts to win Indi­a’s inde­pen­dence by wag­ing war against Britain, when he came to Berlin in 1941 seek­ing Ger­man aid.  . .

4b. Bose also net­worked with Mus­soli­ni, as well as Emper­or Hiro­hi­to and Gen­er­al Tojo of Japan.

“Sub­has Chan­dra Bose: Cham­pi­on of Indi­an Nation­al­ism” by Blaine Tay­lor; War­fare His­to­ry Net­work; 11/11/2018.

. . . . Known to his many fol­low­ers as the Neta­ji (Respect­ed Leader) of the Azad Hind (Free India) move­ment, Bose was called “the dar­ling of the Axis” by his biog­ra­ph­er Mar­shall J. Getz in Sub­has Chan­dra Bose (2004) . . . .

Hav­ing met with Hitler, Ital­ian Fas­cist Duce Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, and Japan­ese Pre­mier Gen­er­al Hide­ki Tojo, Bose was, at one time or anoth­er, backed by all three of the major Axis pow­ers. By 1943, he also held a trio of titles. . . .

. . . . In March 1941, Bose reached Berlin via Moscow and offered the Nazis an out­right mil­i­tary alliance against the Unit­ed King­dom. Far from fear­ing a Ger­man mil­i­tary inva­sion of India that both Hitler and Field Mar­shal Erwin Rom­mel were plan­ning, Bose want­ed to include the Impe­r­i­al Japan­ese Army as well.

For their part, the British were wary of a joint Ger­man-Sovi­et inva­sion of both Afghanistan and the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent. Mean­while, the Afri­ka Korps was cap­tur­ing thou­sands of Indi­an pris­on­ers of war who had been fight­ing for Britain dur­ing 1941–1942, from which Bose envi­sioned the future ILA that would free their coun­try from the hat­ed British yoke. . . .

. . . . They would end World War II as mem­bers of Reichs­fuhrer Hein­rich Himmler’s Waf­fen (Armed) SS, a supreme irony for the “tur­ban-wear­ing, brown-skinned men” in the ultra-racist Nazi Ger­many, accord­ing to author Christo­pher Ailsby’s book, Hitler’s Rene­gades: For­eign Nation­als in the Ser­vice of the Third Reich.

Bose set up the Free India Cen­ter in Berlin and began radio broad­casts from Nauen, Ger­many, to his far-off home­land on Feb­ru­ary 19, 1942.

Bose’s British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion rival and coun­ter­part, author Eric Blair (aka George Orwell of Ani­mal Farm and 1984 fame), led the Allied pro­pa­gan­da team that fought Bose over the radio. On March 1, 1942, Free India declared war on the Unit­ed King­dom.

On May 4, Bose met with Ital­ian For­eign Min­is­ter Count Galeaz­zo Ciano in Rome and Il Duce him­self on May 5, but still Berlin vetoed over­all Axis sup­port for his move­ment even after Mus­soli­ni ful­ly com­mit­ted Fas­cist Italy. . . .

. . . . It was the Japan­ese who came to his polit­i­cal res­cue in Feb­ru­ary 1943. The armies of Impe­r­i­al Japan, the so-called Float­ing King­dom, had been wel­comed with open arms by the scat­tered Indi­an pop­u­la­tion enclaves through­out South­east Asia dur­ing their march of con­quest ear­ly in 1942.

Just as in North Africa ear­li­er, on Feb­ru­ary 19 ful­ly 45,000 Indi­an sol­diers of the British Army sur­ren­dered to the Japan­ese and were pressed into ser­vice with the Japan­ese ver­sion of the Indi­an Nation­al Army. Its ini­tial com­man­der, Mohan Singh, was fired by the Japan­ese, how­ev­er, and his force dis­solved on Decem­ber 29.

Cre­at­ing the Indi­an Nation­al Army: “On to Del­hi!”

For his part, hav­ing had lit­tle luck with the Ger­man and Ital­ian fas­cists, Sub­has Chan­dra Bose was smug­gled out of the Third Reich in a Ger­man U‑boat bound for the Far East. In Tokyo, Bose shook hands with Gen­er­al Tojo and got yet anoth­er lease on polit­i­cal life.

Nom­i­nal leader of the new Japan­ese Indi­an Nation­al Army that had a Nip­ponese field mar­shal as chief of staff, Bose hailed Impe­r­i­al Japan as the lib­er­a­tor of both Asia and India. . . .

. . . . Bose was for­mal­ly declared pres­i­dent of Azad Hind (Free India) on Octo­ber 21, 1943. His core belief was that World War II gave India the chance to lib­er­ate itself. Like Il Duce and the Führer before him, Bose now claimed the mul­ti­ple titles and offices of head of state, prime min­is­ter, min­is­ter of war, and head of the for­eign office. On the 23rd, the new chief exec­u­tive offi­cer made a state vis­it to Japan’s Emper­or Hiro­hi­to dur­ing the Greater East Asia Con­fer­ence in Tokyo, while Pre­mier Tojo ced­ed the islands of Andaman and Nico­bar to Bose’s new regime. . . .

5. Bose also wrote for the jour­nal of  ear­ly Nazi and pan-Ger­man­ist philoso­pher Karl Haushofer:  Kevin Coogan notes the phi­los­o­phy of Karl Haushofer, an ear­ly influ­ence on Hitler and Third Reich geo-pol­i­tics, exem­pli­fy­ing some of the his­tor­i­cal gen­e­sis of the Nazi/Hindu nation­al­ist link. ” . . . . In the 1930’s, Indi­an nation­al­ist leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose [whose Indi­an nation­al Army lat­er received mil­i­tary sup­port in World War II from both Ger­many and Japan] was a cor­re­spon­dent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopoli­tik. [Haushofer­’s pub­li­ca­tion.] . . .”

 Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al by Kevin Coogan; Autono­me­dia Inc.; Copy­right 1999 [SC]; ISBN 1–57027-039–2; pp. 68–69.

. . . . In its strug­gle to break British dom­i­nance, Ger­man mil­i­tary intel­li­gence also looked to nation­al­ist inde­pen­dence move­ments in the Mid­dle East, Asia, and Ire­land. After World War I, Haushofer con­tin­ued to sup­port these anti-British groups. In the 1930’s, Indi­an nation­al­ist leader Sub­has Chan­dra Bose [whose Indi­an nation­al Army lat­er received mil­i­tary sup­port in World War II from both Ger­many and Japan] was a cor­re­spon­dent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopoli­tik. [Haushofer­’s pub­li­ca­tion.]

6. Cenk Uygur has a well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ry of deny­ing the Armen­ian geno­cide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire: ” . . . . “. . . . Hence, once you real­ly exam­ine the his­to­ry of the time it becomes appar­ent that the alle­ga­tions of an Armen­ian Geno­cide are unfound­ed. So the ques­tion aris­es of why the Arme­ni­ans would both­er to con­jure up such sto­ries. . . .”

“After Years of Deny­ing the Armen­ian Geno­cide, Cenk Uygur Now Admits HGe Does­n’t Know Enough about it To Say;” Why Evo­lu­tion Is True; 4/26/2014.

...Curi­ous­ly, one of the Armen­ian Geno­cide deniers has been Cenk Uygur. It may be rel­e­vant that he was born in Turkey, though his fam­i­ly moved to Amer­i­ca when he was young. In 1991, while at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, Uygur wrote an arti­cle for The Dai­ly Penn­syl­van­ian (the stu­dent news­pa­per) called “His­tor­i­cal Fact or False­hood“,  which is straight-out geno­cide denial­ism, imput­ing false claims of geno­cide to Armen­ian demands for land and mon­ey. An excerpt:

“. . . . Hence, once you real­ly exam­ine the his­to­ry of the time it becomes appar­ent that the alle­ga­tions of an Armen­ian Geno­cide are unfound­ed. So the ques­tion aris­es of why the Arme­ni­ans would both­er to con­jure up such sto­ries, and even go as far as, com­mit­ting approx­i­mate­ly 200 acts of ter­ror­ism since 1973 to fur­ther their cause, result­ing in count­less deaths and injuries to gov­ern­ment offi­cials and civil­ians. The answer is that they want their demands met. Their demands are that they receive close to one-half of the land of the Repub­lic of Turkey for a new Greater Arme­nia, and that every Armen­ian claim­ing to be injured by the alleged geno­cide be com­pen­sat­ed with cash repa­ra­tions. That is why every year they push the U.S. Con­gress to pass a bill declar­ing the Armen­ian Geno­cide a his­tor­i­cal fact. For­tu­nate­ly, every year it is defeat­ed because of the courage of peo­ple such as the 69 pro­fes­sors who wrote in to explain the truth of the mat­ter. . . .”

In a let­ter to Salon in 1999, he again argued that there was no evi­dence for that geno­cide:

“. . . every non-Armen­ian schol­ar in the field believes it is an open ques­tion whether this event was a geno­cide. Is it the claim of the arti­cle that all of these peo­ple are taint­ed by the ten­ta­cles of the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment? If not, then why is it not point­ed out that no one out­side of the “Armen­ian posi­tion” believes it is a geno­cide? Why is it assumed that the “Turk­ish stud­ies side” has the bur­den of proof in over­turn­ing the ver­dict of Turk­ish guilt? It is because of the under­ly­ing assump­tion that despite what these peo­ple in “Turk­ish stud­ies” say, there must have been a geno­cide. . . .”

This is an embar­rass­ing posi­tion for some­one to take who’s an Amer­i­can pro­gres­sive, and over the years Uygur has tak­en a lot of flak for it. When an eth­nic minor­i­ty is “cleansed”, and you’re sup­posed to be sup­port­ive of minori­ties, it doesn’t look good for you, or your online news show, to ignore one of the great­est mas­sacres of the 20th cen­tu­ry.  Yet ignore it Uygur did, refus­ing to men­tion it on the 100th anniver­sary of Bloody Sun­day last year, ignor­ing it this year, and ignor­ing the ques­tions about it he was asked in a red­dit “Ask me Any­thing” inter­view. Appar­ent­ly “Any­thing” doesn’t include geno­cide.

7. Next, we excerpt FTR #614, “Oleagi­nous Diplomacy–“Who Still Talks Nowa­days of the Exter­mi­na­tion of the Arme­ni­ans?”

The pro­gram begins with dis­cus­sion of the influ­ence of the Armen­ian geno­cide on Hitler’s think­ing, the pro­gram notes how he used the Armen­ian mas­sacres as a prece­dent for his own geno­ci­dal actions.

The Splen­did Blond Beast: Mon­ey, Law and Geno­cide in the 20th Cen­tu­ry; Christo­pher Simp­son; Com­mon Courage Press [SC]; Copy­right by Christo­pher Simp­son; ISBN 1–56751-062–0; p. 76.

. . . . . Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s geno­cide of Arme­ni­ans and of the fail­ure of the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to respond ade­quate­ly to it. As ear­ly as June 1931, Hitler com­ment­ed in an inter­view that the ‘exter­mi­na­tion of the Arme­ni­ans’ had led him to ‘the con­clu­sion that mass­es of men are mere bio­log­i­cal plas­ticine’ over which Aryans would even­tu­al­ly tri­umph. He returned to this theme in a for­mal talk to his com­mand­ing gen­er­als on the eve of their inva­sion of Poland in 1939: ‘Our strength is in our quick­ness and our bru­tal­i­ty,’ he exclaimed. ‘Genghis Khan had mil­lions of women and chil­dren killed by his own will and with a gay heart. His­to­ry sees only in him a great state builder. . . . Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill with­out pity or mer­cy all men, women, and chil­dren of the Pol­ish race or lan­guage. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowa­days of the exter­mi­na­tion of the Armen­ian?’ On at least three oth­er occa­sions, Hitler point­ed to the bru­tal­i­ty of Turkey’s regime and its will­ing­ness to strike with­out mer­cy as a wor­thy mod­el for his own gov­ern­ment. . . .

8. The Armen­ian geno­cide was cov­ered-up because of a famil­iar dynamic—the real­i­ty of “petro-pol­i­tics” or, quot­ing the title of the pro­gram, “oleagi­nous diplo­ma­cy.” Adju­di­ca­tion of the slaugh­ter of the Arme­ni­ans was eclipsed by the desire of the vic­to­ri­ous pow­ers in World War I to con­trol the enor­mous oil resources becom­ing avail­able in the dis­solv­ing Ottoman Empire. Turk­ish patri­arch Kemal Attaturk exer­cised great cun­ning and savvy in manip­u­lat­ing the vic­tors off against each oth­er, in order to effect the acquit­tal of the per­pe­tra­tors of the Armen­ian geno­cide. In addi­tion to the open­ly big­ot­ed Mark L. Bris­tol, one of the prin­ci­pals who brought about the cov­er-up of the Armen­ian geno­cide was Allen Dulles, who was estab­lish­ing a per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al prece­dent. Dulles not only was deeply involved in the oleagi­nous diplo­ma­cy that divvied up the Ottoman Empire and cov­ered-up the Armen­ian geno­cide, but played a cen­tral role in help­ing to finance Nazi Ger­many, cov­er­ing up the Nazi geno­cide and aid­ing the Nazi flight cap­i­tal pro­gram after the war. (For more about this, see—among oth­er programs—FTR# 361, 578.)

The Splen­did Blond Beast: Mon­ey, Law and Geno­cide in the 20th Cen­tu­ry; Christo­pher Simp­son; Com­mon Courage Press [SC]; Copy­right by Christo­pher Simp­son; ISBN 1–56751-062–0; pp. 32–37.

. . . . Impor­tant­ly, Britain, France, and the Unit­ed States were at that time vying with one anoth­er to divide up the vast oil and min­er­al wealth of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. Kemal skill­ful­ly played the three pow­ers against each oth­er and insist­ed on amnesty for the Itti­hadists as part of the price for his sup­port in the divi­sion of the defunct empire. Though often over­looked today, the Ottoman hold­ings were of extra­or­di­nary val­ue, per­haps the rich­est impe­r­i­al trea­sure since the Euro­pean seizure of the New World four cen­turies ear­li­er. The empire had been erod­ing for decades, but by the time of the Turk­ish defeat in World War I, it still includ­ed most of what is today Turkey, Iraq, Sau­di Ara­bia, Syr­ia, Lebanon, Israel, Jor­dan, and the oil sheik­doms of the Per­sian Gulf. The Euro­pean gov­ern­ments sensed that the time had come to seize this rich prize. . . . The U.S. High Com­mis­sion­er to Turkey was Admi­ral Mark L. Bris­tol, a man with a rep­u­ta­tion as a big­ot and a deter­mined advo­cate of U.S. alliance with Mustafa Kemal. ‘The Arme­ni­ans,’ Bris­tol wrote, ‘are a race like the Jews—they have lit­tle or no nation­al spir­it and poor moral char­ac­ter.’ It was bet­ter for the Unit­ed States, he con­tend­ed, to jet­ti­son sup­port for the Armen­ian repub­lic as soon as pos­si­ble, sta­bi­lize U.S. rela­tions with the emerg­ing Turk­ish gov­ern­ment, and to enlist Kemal’s sup­port in gain­ing access to the oil­fields of the for­mer Ottoman Empire. Bris­tol’s argu­ment found a recep­tive audi­ence in the new Hard­ing admin­is­tra­tion in Wash­ing­ton, whose affin­i­ty for oil inter­ests even­tu­al­ly blos­somed into the famous Teapot Dome bribery scan­dal. . . . As High Com­mis­sion­er to Turkey, Bris­tol had con­sid­er­ably more pow­er than might be enjoyed by any con­ven­tion­al ambas­sador. As the civ­il war unfold­ed inside Turkey, Bris­tol barred news­pa­per reporters from access to areas where renewed mas­sacres of Arme­ni­ans were tak­ing place, pur­port­ed­ly to avoid incit­ing fur­ther atroc­i­ties against civil­ians. His cor­re­spon­dent at the State Depart­ment in Wash­ing­ton was Allen Dulles. After the Paris con­fer­ence, Dulles had served briefly as chief of staff to Bris­tol, then moved on to Wash­ing­ton to become chief of the State Depart­men­t’s Near East desk just as ‘oleagi­nous diplo­ma­cy’ was reach­ing its hey­day. . . .

9a. In FTR #953, we looked at some of Bernie Sanders’ “inter­est­ing” rela­tion­ships and pol­i­cy posi­tions, this against the back­ground of the decades-long GOP strat­e­gy mar­ry­ing elec­toral pol­i­tics and covert oper­a­tions. The lat­est polit­i­cal out­crop­ping of Sanders’ polit­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion is The Sanders Insti­tute. In addi­tion to Tul­si Gab­bard, whom we dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 941, 942 and 945, Team Sanders fea­tures Jef­frey Sacks, a key finan­cial advis­er to Boris Yeltsin and among the archi­tects of the eco­nom­ic deba­cle that fol­lowed the imple­men­ta­tion of poli­cies favored by Sachs and Com­pa­ny.

A polit­i­cal ani­mal of Sachs’ neo-Lib­er­al stripe is an odd inclu­sion in the Sanders Pan­theon. We have not­ed oth­ers:

  1. Rove financed Sanders cam­paign through the Amer­i­can Cross­roads super-PAC. ” . . . Amer­i­can Crossroads—founded by for­mer Bush advis­er Karl Rove—and sev­er­al oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive-backed super PACs have spent the last month inten­tion­al­ly fuel­ing the Bern, but their zeal has more to do with an effort to weak­en Hillary Clin­ton, whom they still see as the like­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee and hard­er to defeat in the gen­er­al elec­tion. . . . Cross­roads is one of sev­er­al groups that has released ads that have been aimed at brand­ing Sanders as the only true pro­gres­sive in the race—a strat­e­gy the Ver­mont senator’s cam­paign also embraces. . . .”
  2. Gra­ham E. Fuller says that he was ” . . . . gal­va­nized at watch­ing the spec­ta­cle of Bernie Sanders pro­claim­ing issues in his cam­paign that had been vir­tu­al­ly off lim­its for polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion for decades: gap between rich and poor, rapa­cious inter­na­tion­al trade deals, a fair wage, free uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion, the call for US bal­ance (gasp!) in han­dling the Arab-Israeli, issue, etc. The great thing about Bernie — even if he prob­a­bly won’t get nom­i­nat­ed — is that he has pushed hawk­ish, friend-of-Wall-Street Hillary to the left. . . .”
  3. Fuller’s actu­al views are the oppo­site of Sanders pol­i­cy points: “. . . Fuller comes from that fac­tion of CIA Cold War­riors who believed (and still appar­ently believe) that fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam, even in its rad­i­cal jiha­di form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the sim­ple rea­son that fun­da­men­tal­ist Islam is con­ser­v­a­tive, against social jus­tice, against social­ism and redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, and in favor of hier­ar­chi­cal socio-eco­nom­ic struc­tures. Social­ism is the com­mon ene­my to both cap­i­tal­ist Amer­ica and to Wah­habi Islam, accord­ing to Fuller. . . ‘There is no main­stream Islam­ic organization...with rad­i­cal social views,’ he wrote. Clas­si­cal Islam­ic the­ory envis­ages the role of the state as lim­ited to facil­i­tat­ing the well-being of mar­kets and mer­chants rather than con­trol­ling them. Islamists have always pow­er­fully object­ed to social­ism and communism....Islam has nev­er had prob­lems with the idea that wealth is uneven­ly dis­trib­uted.’ . . . .”
  4. Faisal Gill, a for­mer oper­a­tions direc­tor for Norquist’s Islam­ic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute and offi­cial with George W. Bush’s Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty is now the head of Ver­mon­t’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, a post he has used to join Bernie Sanders and Tul­si Gab­bard to pro­mote Kei­th Elli­son as head of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Com­mit­tee. Elli­son is now the deputy chair of the DNC, the post for­mer­ly held by Gab­bard. ” . . . . Yet some offi­cials remain con­cerned that Gill appar­ent­ly enjoys the polit­i­cal pro­tec­tion of Norquist, the archi­tect of the 1994 Repub­li­can elec­tion sweep that brought Geor­gia Repub­li­can Newt Gin­grich to pow­er as House speak­er. Norquist speaks of ‘crush­ing’ his polit­i­cal oppo­nents and dis­miss­es those who don’t agree with his anti-tax, anti-gov­ern­ment agen­da as ‘Bol­she­viks.’ His pow­er derives from a for­mi­da­ble coali­tion of evan­gel­i­cal, busi­ness and oth­er con­ser­v­a­tive groups that he con­trols to push favored GOP issues, as well as from his close rela­tion­ship with White House polit­i­cal chief Karl Rove. . . .”

The pro­gram also notes a num­ber of oth­er things about the Sanders cam­paign:

  1. He was pro­mot­ing open pri­maries for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, which would enable Karl Rove and the Repub­li­cans to choose the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­nee.
  2. Sanders was a Pres­i­den­tial elec­tor for the Social­ist Work­ers Party, embrac­ing a stance which would have made him ter­mi­nal­ly vul­ner­a­ble had he got­ten the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion. ” . . . . In 1980, Sanders served as an elec­tor for the Social­ist Work­ers Par­ty, which was found­ed on the prin­ci­ples of Leon Trot­sky. Accord­ing to the New York Times, that par­ty called for abol­ish­ing the mil­i­tary bud­get. It also called for “sol­i­dar­i­ty” with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grena­da, and Cuba; this was in the mid­dle of the Iran­ian hostage cri­sis. . . .”
  3. The SWP was a vehi­cle for infil­tra­tion and the acqui­si­tion of a “left cov­er” by Nazis and spooks, includ­ing Lee Har­vey Oswald.
  4. The Third Reich saw Leon Trot­sky’s method­ol­o­gy as wor­thy of emu­la­tion. (The SWP is a Trot­skyite polit­i­cal par­ty.) ” . . . . ‘You should read his books,’ he [Hitler] barked. ‘We can learn a lot from him.’ . . .”
  5. To what extent have the GOP and the over­lap­ping Under­ground Reich focused on Sanders (with­out his knowl­edge) as a vehi­cle for infil­trat­ing the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty? In FTR #‘s 941, 942 and 945, we not­ed the numer­ous fas­cist con­nec­tions of Tul­si Gab­bard, one of the dri­ving forces behind Sanders’ ascent. To what extent has the Trot­skyite tem­plate served as a vehi­cle for Gab­bard, and, per­haps, Elli­son to infil­trate the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty?
  6. The Sanders Insti­tute has as its mem­bers, among oth­ers: Jef­frey Sachs, Cor­nel West and Tul­si Gab­bard.

9b. Gab­bard’s 2020 Pres­i­den­tial run has received fund­ing from an orga­ni­za­tion crit­ics say is asso­ci­at­ed with the Hin­dut­va fas­cist milieu in India: ” . . . . Gab­bard, who is Hin­du, has con­nec­tions to India, the world’s most pop­u­lous Hin­du nation, includ­ing to the country’s Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment, which is con­sid­ered fascis­tic by observers like Rajeev Rav­isankar, a PhD stu­dent in media stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon and observ­er of Indi­an pol­i­tics. ‘The Hin­du nation­al­ist, or Hin­dut­va, move­ment is one of the largest glob­al right-wing move­ments in the world,’ Rav­isankar told Sludge in an email. ‘It direct­ly drew inspi­ra­tion from Euro­pean fas­cism and has devel­oped a vast net­work in post-inde­pen­dence India.’ Accord­ing to Rav­isankar and oth­er crit­ics, like pro­gres­sive Hin­du orga­ni­za­tion Sad­hana, Hin­du nation­al­ists in the U.S. have a polit­i­cal voice in the Hin­du Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion . . . .”

“Tul­si Gab­bard Took Thou­sands From Mem­bers of Right-Wing Hin­du Group” by Eoin Hig­gins; Sludge; 12/26/2018.

Crit­ics say that the Hin­du Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion is “a per­ni­cious orga­ni­za­tion” with ties to the Indi­an right wing move­ment.

Tul­si Gab­bard, the Iraq War vet­er­an who rep­re­sents Hawaii’s 2nd Dis­trict in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, is wide­ly believed to be close to announc­ing a run for pres­i­dent. Gab­bard hopes to cap­i­tal­ize on her ties to pop­u­lar Ver­mont Sen­a­tor Bernie Sanders, who may him­self be con­sid­er­ing a run for the White House; she’s already made moves to secure tal­ent in advance of a run.

Despite her pop­u­lar­i­ty with some lib­er­al Democ­rats, how­ev­er, Gabbard’s con­nec­tions to right-wing groups both at home and abroad have raised eye­brows. Whether it’s the affec­tion shown her by Steve Ban­non, who set up Gabbard’s meet­ing with Don­ald Trump before the president’s inau­gu­ra­tion, or the congresswoman’s asso­ci­a­tions with auto­crats like Pres­i­dent Bashar al-Assad of Syr­ia and Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu of Israel, Gabbard’s views on for­eign pol­i­cy remain prob­lem­at­ic for some on the left.

Gab­bard and her office did not answer a request for com­ment.

Gab­bard, who is Hin­du, has con­nec­tions to India, the world’s most pop­u­lous Hin­du nation, includ­ing to the country’s Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment, which is con­sid­ered fascis­tic by observers like Rajeev Rav­isankar, a PhD stu­dent in media stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon and observ­er of Indi­an pol­i­tics.

“The Hin­du nation­al­ist, or Hin­dut­va, move­ment is one of the largest glob­al right-wing move­ments in the world,” Rav­isankar told Sludge in an email. “It direct­ly drew inspi­ra­tion from Euro­pean fas­cism and has devel­oped a vast net­work in post-inde­pen­dence India.”

Accord­ing to Rav­isankar and oth­er crit­ics, like pro­gres­sive Hin­du orga­ni­za­tion Sad­hana, Hin­du nation­al­ists in the U.S. have a polit­i­cal voice in the Hin­du Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion, an orga­ni­za­tion found­ed in 2013 by Dr. Mihir Meghani, Aseem and Suhag Shuk­la, and three oth­er indi­vid­u­als. The orga­ni­za­tion has received crit­i­cism over the past 15 years for its ties to right-wing Indi­an politi­cians and what some see as geno­cide denial. Observers on Capi­tol Hill say the Foun­da­tion has recent­ly become more vocal in their sup­port for India’s Hin­du nation­al­ist Prime Min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi.

“HAF’s alacrity in pro­tect­ing Hin­dut­va orga­ni­za­tions from any kind of inter­na­tion­al cen­sure for vio­lence against minori­ties in India stands in stark con­trast to its vig­or­ous efforts to high­light the plight of Hin­du minori­ties in coun­tries around the world,” the Coali­tion Against Genocide’s Dr. Shaik Ubaid and Dr. Raja Swamy said in a state­ment dat­ed April 7, 2014. “Far from being an orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­ted to pro­mot­ing human dig­ni­ty and plu­ral­ism, HAF stands exposed as a foe of human rights, work­ing to defend the Hin­dut­va move­ment from much need­ed pub­lic scruti­ny in the US.”

The Foun­da­tion, for its part, con­sid­ers the Coali­tion a Hindu­pho­bic orga­ni­za­tion and, in a Dec. 15, 2013, state­ment, Samir Kalra, now the organization’s senior direc­tor, referred to the Coali­tion as “rad­i­cal extrem­ists.”

Gab­bard has been the ben­e­fi­cia­ry of the largesse of the Foundation’s board mem­bers and offi­cers. In the 2017–2018 cycle, the Con­gress­woman received a max­i­mum $2,700 dona­tion from Shuk­la, and three dona­tions total­ing $1500 from her hus­band and foun­da­tion Board Mem­ber, Aseem; a total of $10,800 over four dona­tions from Board Mem­ber Rav­ij Pan­dit and his wife, Priya; and two dona­tions total­ing $4,400 from Trea­sur­er Rishi Bhuta­da. Meghani, HAF’s Chair­man, was Gabbard’s biggest donor, max­ing out to the cam­paign in two dona­tions for $5,400 and deliv­er­ing anoth­er $10,000 to the Con­gress­woman through her Time to Unite Lead and Serve with Integri­ty (TULSI) lead­er­ship PAC.

“The polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion his­to­ry of our Board mem­bers and offi­cers is pub­licly avail­able, and you’ll find they’ve con­tributed to a vari­ety of can­di­dates over the years at sim­i­lar lev­els,” said Senior Direc­tor Shuk­la in an email to Sludge. “Indeed as the first Hin­du Amer­i­can elect­ed to Con­gress, Rep. Gab­bard nat­u­ral­ly enjoys the sup­port of many Hin­du Amer­i­cans.” Rav­isankar described the Foun­da­tion as “a per­ni­cious orga­ni­za­tion that has posi­tioned itself as a main­stream advo­ca­cy out­fit sim­ply rep­re­sent­ing Hin­dus in the US.” “HAF is bet­ter sit­u­at­ed as part of the broad­er right-wing Hin­du polit­i­cal sphere,” Rav­isankar added.

Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi’s gov­er­nor­ship of the Gujarat province from 2001 to 2014 includ­ed being in charge dur­ing anti-Mus­lim riots in 2002 that claimed between 1,044 and 2,000 lives. Modi has been accused of, at best, refus­ing to inter­vene and, at worst, of encour­ag­ing the vio­lence.

The Foundation’s sup­port for Gabbard—over $24,000 in 2017–2018—is a not insub­stan­tial amount, even in con­text of Gabbard’s total $1,394,524 haul for the cycle. And that sup­port has been rec­i­p­ro­cat­ed by the Con­gress­woman; an intern­ship pro­gram fun­nels stu­dents from the organization’s offices in Wash­ing­ton to Gabbard’s offices in the Capi­tol, Gab­bard reg­u­lar­ly attends events spon­sored by the Foun­da­tion, and both Gab­bard and the orga­ni­za­tion joined forces to wel­come Modi to the US in Sep­tem­ber 2014. That Decem­ber, at Modi’s invi­ta­tion, Gab­bard trav­eled to India and met with right wing lead­ers in the coun­try. . . .

UPDATE (Dec. 27): Shuk­la said in an email to Sludge that the Hin­du Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion denies any asso­ci­a­tions with groups based in India.

9c. Gab­bard is also an advi­sor to a Koch-fund­ed aca­d­e­m­ic think tank that over­laps the Neo-Con­fed­er­ate move­ment: ” . . . . Rep. Tul­si Gab­bard, who announced her can­di­da­cy for the 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in Jan­u­ary, is one of 12 advi­sors of a for­eign pol­i­cy cen­ter at the Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca. The Cen­ter for the Study of States­man­ship (CSS) was found­ed in 2017 with a $2.65 mil­lion grant from the Charles Koch Foun­da­tion . . . . The Charles Koch Foun­da­tion has fund­ed aca­d­e­mics who have neo-Con­fed­er­ate ties or views, includ­ing Mar­shall DeRosa of Flori­da Atlantic Uni­ver­si­ty. CSS’s found­ing direc­tor, pol­i­tics pro­fes­sor Claes G. Ryn, appears to be part of this trend. Ryn has appeared on the pod­cast of Tom Woods, a found­ing mem­ber of the League of the South . . . . He has writ­ten for the web­site of Lew Rock­well, the founder of the neo-Con­fed­er­ate Mis­es Insti­tute and a League of the South char­ter mem­ber. And Ryn’s insti­tute has pub­lished DeRosa’s work. DeRosa was once a ‘fac­ul­ty mem­ber’ at the League of the South Insti­tute, where he taught cours­es on sub­jects includ­ing on top­ics includ­ing ‘Why seces­sion was, and is, con­sti­tu­tion­al’ and ‘How the ‘Four­teenth Amend­ment’ was nev­er con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly passed by Con­gress nor rat­i­fied by the States.’ . . . .”

“Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep. Tul­si Gab­bard Advis­es Koch-Fund­ed Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­ter” by Alex Kotch; Sludge; 2/27/2019.

The Cen­ter’s Direc­tor Has Ties to a Neo-Con­fed­er­ate Group

A Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date is an advi­sor to an aca­d­e­m­ic cen­ter fund­ed by the Repub­li­can Party’s most noto­ri­ous donor, Charles Koch.

Hawaii Rep. Tul­si Gab­bard, who announced her can­di­da­cy for the 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in Jan­u­ary, is one of 12 advi­sors of a for­eign pol­i­cy cen­ter at the Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Amer­i­ca. The Cen­ter for the Study of States­man­ship (CSS) was found­ed in 2017 with a $2.65 mil­lion grant from the Charles Koch Foun­da­tion, which gives tens of mil­lions of dol­lars to Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties each year, usu­al­ly to fund ide­o­log­i­cal, free-mar­ket aca­d­e­m­ic pro­grams.

The posi­tion is not list­ed on Gabbard’s 2017 finan­cial dis­clo­sure, the most recent avail­able. The cen­ter, which “con­sid­ers how Amer­i­can con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism, with its empha­sis on lim­it­ed and decen­tral­ized pow­er, virtue, and delib­er­a­tion, relates to states­man­ship in for­eign and domes­tic affairs,” brings in pro­fes­sors and vis­it­ing fel­lows, spon­sors con­fer­ences, sem­i­nars, and lec­tures.

Gab­bard, a mil­i­tary vet­er­an, has often opposed U.S. engage­ment in over­seas con­flicts, includ­ing in war-torn Syr­ia, so she is not out of place among anti-inter­ven­tion­ists. “Hav­ing expe­ri­enced first-hand the true cost of war,” states her 2020 cam­paign web­site, Gab­bard “made a per­son­al vow to find a way to ensure that our coun­try doesn’t con­tin­ue repeat­ing the mis­takes of the past, send­ing our troops into war with­out a clear mis­sion, strat­e­gy, or pur­pose.” But for a Democrat—especially a 2016 Bernie Sanders sur­ro­gate who has pro­gres­sive views on cam­paign finance reform and sin­gle-pay­er health care—to accept a posi­tion at a think tank fund­ed by Koch and staffed with sev­er­al Koch-linked indi­vid­u­als is unusu­al.

Gab­bard spokesper­son Lau­ren McIl­vaine told Sludge, “As a sol­dier and vet­er­an of two Mid­dle East deploy­ments, Con­gress­woman Tul­si Gab­bard has been a lead­ing voice for end­ing cost­ly, coun­ter­pro­duc­tive regime change wars, work­ing to end the new Cold War and nuclear arms race, and tak­ing the tril­lions of dol­lars being spent on these wars and using them to serve the needs of our peo­ple on things like health­care, afford­able hous­ing, and infra­struc­ture. The mis­sion of CSS is aligned with the work that she has ded­i­cat­ed her­self to, which is why she agreed to serve on their Coun­cil of Advi­sors.”

The Kochto­pus
Over the last few decades, Charles Koch, who runs the indus­tri­al con­glom­er­ate Koch Indus­tries, and his broth­er David cre­at­ed a large and pow­er­ful con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal net­work with funds that rival those of the Repub­li­can Par­ty estab­lish­ment. The Kochs and their wealthy con­ser­v­a­tive allies have spent hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on the last sev­er­al fed­er­al elec­tions, often using inde­pen­dent polit­i­cal spend­ing groups to run ads and ground oper­a­tions to boost right-wing Repub­li­can can­di­dates.
Gab­bard “has been a strong pro­po­nent for end­ing Cit­i­zens Unit­ed and the cor­rup­tive influ­ence of spe­cial inter­est mon­ey in pol­i­tics,” said McIl­vaine.

Elec­toral pol­i­tics is just the final step in the Koch influ­ence oper­a­tion. The Kochs’ effort to trans­form Amer­i­ca begins with fund­ing high­er edu­ca­tion, typ­i­cal­ly giv­ing large amounts of mon­ey to finance or cre­ate free-mar­ket edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams at Amer­i­can col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties, such as George Mason, Flori­da State, Ken­tucky, and West Vir­ginia.

Accord­ing to long-time Koch deputy Richard Fink, invest­ing in “intel­lec­tu­al raw mate­ri­als,” or uni­ver­si­ty research, is the core of the Kochs’ “Struc­ture of Social Change” strat­e­gy. From uni­ver­si­ties, the Koch polit­i­cal oper­a­tion seeks not only “intel­lec­tu­al raw mate­ri­als” but also a pipeline of young con­ser­v­a­tive grad­u­ates to join its net­work.

The next step in the social change process is fund­ing con­ser­v­a­tive think tanks that cre­ate pol­i­cy pro­pos­als in line with the Kochs’ lib­er­tar­i­an, free-mar­ket ide­ol­o­gy, which Koch-fund­ed polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy groups pro­mote and use to impact elec­tions. Then, the net­work uses direct polit­i­cal spend­ing to help elect right-wing Repub­li­cans who will push these poli­cies, such as tax cuts and envi­ron­men­tal dereg­u­la­tion, that boost Koch Indus­tries’ prof­its. After decades of busi­ness and polit­i­cal advo­ca­cy, Charles and David Koch are each worth $52 bil­lion.

Ralph Wil­son, co-founder of the activist group UnKoch My Cam­pus and now an inde­pen­dent researcher, told Sludge, “Gabbard’s involve­ment [with CSS] shows just how suc­cess­ful­ly the Koch net­work has duped pub­lic fig­ures into legit­imiz­ing their dan­ger­ous ide­ol­o­gy and polit­i­cal agen­da.”

…..Gab­bard a dupe? If Gab­bard is a dupe, her involve­ment with the CSS would not be omit­ted. Omit­ting such a posi­tion demon­strates care­ful delib­er­a­tion designed to con­ceal the true motives behind her osten­si­bly pro­gres­sive façade……

Koch Links at CSS

Some CSS advi­sors have addi­tion­al ties to the Koch net­work. Around the same time that CSS was found­ed, CSS advi­sor Mon­i­ca Duffy Toft cre­at­ed a sim­i­lar cen­ter at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty, the Cen­ter for Strate­gic Stud­ies, with a $3 mil­lion grant from the Charles Koch Foun­da­tion. Advi­sor John B. Hen­ry is the chair­man and CEO of the Com­mit­tee for the Repub­lic, an anti-impe­ri­al­ist group co-found­ed by long­time Koch ally C. Boy­den Gray. Gray and Koch are both major donors to George Mason University’s law school. Gray is also on the board of the Fed­er­al­ist Soci­ety, a net­work of con­ser­v­a­tive judges to which the Charles Koch Foun­da­tion is a major donor. The group’s exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, Leonard Leo, who stew­ard­ed an anony­mous $20 mil­lion grant to George Mason University’s law school that was giv­en in con­junc­tion with $10 mil­lion from the Charles Koch Foun­da­tion, is on the board of trustees of Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty and the board of vis­i­tors of its busi­ness school.

Lob­by­ist Bill Wichter­man, a for­mer George W. Bush advi­sor who is cur­rent­ly reg­is­tered to lob­by for com­pa­nies includ­ing IBM and Qual­comm, is anoth­er CSS advi­sor. Wichter­man pre­vi­ous­ly lob­bied for defense con­trac­tor Northrop Grum­man and helped the Judi­cial Cri­sis Net­work, which receives fund­ing from Koch-linked groups, shep­herd Don­ald Trump’s first Supreme Court nom­i­nee, Neil Gor­such, through the nom­i­na­tion process.

For­mer Ohio Rep. Den­nis Kucinich, who is gen­er­al­ly viewed as a left-wing Demo­c­rat but has defend­ed Trump on Fox News on sev­er­al occa­sions, is anoth­er advi­sor to the cen­ter.

The Charles Koch Foun­da­tion has giv­en heav­i­ly to Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty in the last sev­er­al years. In 2013, it grant­ed the school $1 mil­lion so it could launch its School of Busi­ness and Eco­nom­ics, prompt­ing 50 Catholic edu­ca­tors to write a let­ter in protest. “You send a con­fus­ing mes­sage to Catholic stu­dents and oth­er faith­ful Catholics that the Koch broth­ers’ anti-gov­ern­ment, Tea Par­ty ide­ol­o­gy has the bless­ing of a uni­ver­si­ty sanc­tioned by Catholic bish­ops,” read the let­ter. In 2016, Koch’s foun­da­tion com­mit­ted $10 mil­lion more to the busi­ness school.

Neo-Con­fed­er­ate Ties

The Charles Koch Foun­da­tion has fund­ed aca­d­e­mics who have neo-Con­fed­er­ate ties or views, includ­ing Mar­shall DeRosa of Flori­da Atlantic Uni­ver­si­ty. CSS’s found­ing direc­tor, pol­i­tics pro­fes­sor Claes G. Ryn, appears to be part of this trend. Ryn has appeared on the pod­cast of Tom Woods, a found­ing mem­ber of the League of the South, which, in its cur­rent form, the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter con­sid­ers a neo-Con­fed­er­ate hate group. He has writ­ten for the web­site of Lew Rock­well, the founder of the neo-Con­fed­er­ate Mis­es Insti­tute and a League of the South char­ter mem­ber. And Ryn’s insti­tute has pub­lished DeRosa’s work. DeRosa was once a “fac­ul­ty mem­ber” at the League of the South Insti­tute, where he taught cours­es on sub­jects includ­ing on top­ics includ­ing “Why seces­sion was, and is, con­sti­tu­tion­al” and “How the ‘Four­teenth Amend­ment’ was nev­er con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly passed by Con­gress nor rat­i­fied by the States.”

Kucinich joins Rock­well on the advi­so­ry board of the lib­er­tar­i­an Ron Paul Insti­tute; Ryn is a mem­ber of the institute’s aca­d­e­m­ic board. Paul once pub­lished a racist newslet­ter and lat­er defend­ed the Con­fed­er­a­cy.

“This is anoth­er exam­ple of the Charles Koch Foun­da­tion boost­ing the careers of fringe oper­a­tives with deep ties to neo-Con­fed­er­ate and white suprema­cist ide­ol­o­gy,” said Wil­son. “This is tak­ing place on a cam­pus attempt­ing to advance Koch’s free-mar­ket ide­ol­o­gy with Catholic the­ol­o­gy as a moral frame­work for ‘human flour­ish­ing.’”

Gab­bard her­self has alleged alliances with big­ot­ed forces. As Sludge pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed, Gab­bard has ties to anti-Mus­lim Hin­du nation­al­ists and accept­ed cam­paign dona­tions from mem­bers of a Hin­du nation­al­ist group. . . .

10. Tul­si Gab­bard is a mem­ber of the Hare Krish­na cult, as are:

  1. Her hus­band.
  2. Her in-laws.
  3. Her par­ents.
  4. Her con­gres­sion­al staff.

Hare Krish­na cultist Tul­si Gab­bard and Hin­dut­va fas­cist Naren­dra Modi

Tul­si Gab­bard and Bernie Sanders

Gab­bard is high­ly regard­ed by Modi admir­er Steve Ban­non as well.

This pro­gram fur­ther details the Aryan/Hindu phi­los­o­phy that inspired ele­ments of eso­teric Nazism.

Key points of interest/analysis include mate­r­i­al fromThe Hare Krish­na Move­ment: The Postcharis­mat­ic Fate of A Reli­gious Trans­plant edit­ed by Edwin F. Bryant and Maria L. Ekstrand; Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Press [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Press; ISBN 0–231-12256‑X.:

  1. Hare Krish­na founder and chief guru Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi Prab­hu­pa­da pro­vid­ed com­men­tary on Hin­du reli­gious text “. . . . and often sug­gest­ed that they had not actu­al­ly been writ­ten by him­self, but that God, Krish­na, had revealed them to him. . . .” This was in order to “ . . . .under­line the absolute posi­tion, super­hu­man qual­i­ties, and over­all impor­tance of the guru. [Basi­cal­ly, “guru” as “fuhrer”–D.E.] . . . .”
  2.  Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi was fun­da­men­tal­ly opposed to democ­ra­cy. “So monar­chy or dic­ta­tor­ship is wel­come. . . . Per­son­al­ly, I like this posi­tion, dic­ta­tor­ship. Per­son­al­ly, I like this.”
  3. Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi felt that Hin­duism was in a “fall­en state” and that only his discipline/teachings could restore it to its prop­er place. In our dis­cus­sions with Peter Lev­en­da, we have not­ed that fas­cism man­i­fests a long­ing for a bygone time–one that nev­er real­ly exist­ed.
  4. Fas­cist philoso­phies fre­quent­ly invoke a by-gone, myth­i­cal “gold­en age,” which the fas­cist cadre in ques­tion will restore, after the cor­rupt­ing forces have been neu­tral­ized. ” . . . . He too believed that in bygone ages a divine and sci­en­tif­ic social sys­tem had exist­ed in India, and like Bhak­tisid­dhan­ta Saraswati, he too found­ed a move­ment whose express mis­sion was to reestab­lish what he often referred to as the “per­fec­tion­al form of human civ­i­liza­tion,” var­nashram dhar­ma. . . .” Note that “for­eign­ers” or what would be termed in our soci­ety today “immi­grants,” “migrants,” “Mex­i­cans,”  or “Mus­lims” are blamed for this degen­er­a­tion. ” . . . . . . . . Indi­an civ­i­liza­tion on the basis of the four varnas and ashrams dete­ri­o­rat­ed because of her depen­den­cy on for­eign­ers, or those who did not fol­low the civ­i­liza­tion of var­nasham. . . .”
  5. Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi val­ued the tra­di­tion­al posi­tion of the Ksha­triya war­rior caste, to which the Nazi SS con­sid­ered them­selves as suc­ces­sors, accord­ing to Kevin Coogan’s bril­liant analy­sis (in Dream­er of the Day: Fran­cis Park­er Yock­ey and the Post­war Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al.) “. . . . the ksha­triyas should be taught how to fight also. There will be mil­i­tary train­ing. There will be  train­ing how to kill. Ksha­triya stu­dents in the ISKCON var­nashram col­lege were to prac­tice killing: ‘Just like Ksha­triyas, they have to learn how to kill.’ . . . . There is no sin­gle instance where Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi speaks about ksha­triya train­ing with­out men­tion­ing killing. . . . ‘Learn to kill. No non­vi­o­lence. Learn to kill. Here also, as soon you’ll find, the Ksha­triya, a thief, a rogue, unwant­ed ele­ment in the soci­ety, kill him. That’s all. Fin­ish. Kill him. Bas. Fin­ished. . . .” It is not that because the Ksha­triyas were killing by bows and arrows for­mer­ly you have to con­tin­ue that. That is anoth­er fool­ish­ness. If you have got . . . If you can kill eas­i­ly by guns, take that gun. All the roy­al princes were trained up how to kill. . . . A Ksha­triya, he is expert in the mil­i­tary sci­ence, how to kill. So the killing art is there. You can­not make it null and void by advo­cat­ing non­vi­o­lence. No, That is required. Vio­lence is also a part of the soci­ety. . . .”
  6. Tul­si Gab­bard’s polit­i­cal vec­tor may be eval­u­at­ed against the back­ground of Bhak­tivedan­ta Swami’s prog­nos­ti­ca­tion that the Hare Krish­na cult could infil­trate and take over a key polit­i­cal par­ty and/or gov­ern­ment in a democ­ra­cy. Recall that he viewed democ­ra­cy with utmost con­tempt. ” . . . . Bhak­tivedan­ta also thought that he and his move­ment could take over some gov­ern­ment and rule some part of the world: ‘How­ev­er in Kali-yuga, demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ment can be cap­tured by Krish­na con­scious peo­ple. If this can be done, the gen­er­al pop­u­lace can be made very hap­py.’ . . . .”
  7. Bhak­tivedan­ta Swami’s teach­ings dove­tail superbly with Nazi occult phi­los­o­phy. ” . . . . Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi, how­ev­er, speaks exten­sive­ly about ‘the Aryans’–at least twen­ty-five of his pur­ports and over a hun­dred lec­tures and con­ver­sa­tions con­tain lengthy elab­o­ra­tions on the top­ic. He places all those whom he calls ‘non-Aryan’ in a cat­e­go­ry sim­i­lar to his ‘unwant­ed pop­u­la­tion,’ thus divid­ing humans into two groups: a large group of var­na sankara  and non-Aryans on one side, and a small group of Aryans,  ie those who fol­low var­nashram, on the oth­er: ‘Those who tra­di­tion­al­ly fol­low these prin­ci­ples are called Aryans, or pro­gres­sive human beings.’ ‘The Vedic way of life,’ he writes, ‘is the pro­gres­sive march of civ­i­liza­tion of the Aryans.’ ‘In the his­to­ry of the human race, the Aryan fam­i­ly is con­sid­ered to be the most ele­vat­ed com­mu­ni­ty in the world.’ . . . . In more than one fifth of his state­ments he clear­ly describes or defines them in racial terms: The Aryan fam­i­ly is dis­trib­uted all over the world and is known as Indo-Aryan. The Aryans are white. But here, this side, due to cli­mat­ic influ­ence, they are a lit­tle tan. Indi­ans are tan but they are not black. But Aryans are all white. And the non-Aryans, they are called black. Yes . . .”
  8. Bhak­tivedan­ta Swami’s phi­los­o­phy saw Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans as part of, and exten­sions of, the Aryan race: ” . . . . So we all belong to the Aryan fam­i­ly. His­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence is there, Indo-Euro­pean fam­i­ly. So Aryan stock was on the cen­tral Asia. Some of them migrat­ed to India. Some of them migrat­ed to Europe. And from Europe you have come. So we belong to the Aryan fam­i­ly, but we have lost our knowl­edge. So we have become non-Aryan, prac­ti­cal­ly. You French peo­ple, you are also Aryan fam­i­ly, but the cul­ture is lost now. So this Krish­na con­scious­ness move­ment is actu­al­ly reviv­ing the orig­i­nal Aryan cul­ture. Bhara­ta. We are all inhab­i­tants of Bharatavar­sha, but as we lost our cul­ture, it became divid­ed.  So on the whole, the con­clu­sion is that the Aryans spread in Europe also, and the Amer­i­cans, they also spread from Europe. So the intel­li­gent class of human being, they belong to the Aryans. Aryan fam­i­ly. Just like Hitler claimed that he belonged to the Aryan fam­i­ly. Of course, they belonged to the Aryan fam­i­lies. . . .”
  9. It should  come as  no sur­prise that Bhak­tivedan­ta was pro-Hitler, view­ing the Fuehrer as “a gen­tle­man,” who had to kill the Jews because they were “financ­ing” against him. “. . . . So these Eng­lish peo­ple, they were very expert in mak­ing pro­pa­gan­da. They killed Hitler by pro­pa­gan­da. I don’t think Hitler was so bad [a] man. Hitler knew it [the atom­ic bomb] . . . .  He was gen­tle­man. He said that ‘I can smash the whole world, but I do not use that weapon.’ The Ger­mans already dis­cov­ered. But out of human­i­ty they did not use it. . . . The activ­i­ties of such men are cer­tain­ly very great . . . There­fore Hitler killed these Jews. They were financ­ing against Ger­many. Oth­er­wise he had no enmi­ty with the Jews. . . . There­fore Hitler decid­ed, ‘Kill all the Jews.’ . . . .”
  10.  An in-depth view of Bhak­tivedan­ta Swami’s view of “shu­dras” reveals the deep racist/fascistic views of social class/caste. Described var­i­ous­ly as “black” or “com­mon,” shu­dras are the focus of deep ide­o­log­i­cal con­tempt. This should be seen against the back­ground of the Aryan racial phi­los­o­phy of Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi. “. . . . ordi­nary peo­ple; the labor­er class; once-born; the low­est class of men; non-Aryan; work­er; the black man; he must find out a mas­ter; one who has no edu­ca­tion; almost ani­mal; just like a dog; he becomes dis­turbed; one who is depen­dent on oth­ers; they are igno­rant ras­cals; unclean; equal to the ani­mal; no train­ing; fools, ras­cals. . .  Accord­ing to his under­stand­ing, peo­ple of black or dark skin col­or, as well as native Amer­i­cans, are shu­dras, are third-class, degrad­ed, and less intel­li­gent: ‘Shu­dras have no brain. In Amer­i­ca also, the whole Amer­i­ca once belonged to the Red  Indi­ans. Why they could not improve? The land was there. Why these for­eign­ers, the Euro­peans, came and improved? So Shu­dras can­not do this. They can­not make any cor­rec­tion. . . . A first-class Rolls Royce car, and who is sit­ting there? A third class negro. This is going on. You’ll find these things in Europe and Amer­i­ca. This is going on. A first-class car and a third-class negro. . . .”
  11. Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi did not feel that the black Amer­i­can slaves should be freed. ” . . . . Just like in Amer­i­ca. The blacks were slaves. They were under con­trol. And since you have giv­en them equal rights they are dis­turb­ing, most dis­turb­ing, always cre­at­ing a fear­ful sit­u­a­tion, uncul­tured  and drunk­ards. What train­ing they have got? . . .  That is best, to keep them under con­trol as slaves but give them suf­fi­cient food, suf­fi­cient cloth, not more than that. Then they will be sat­is­fied. . . . ‘So the Kiratas, they  were always slaves of the Aryans. The Aryan peo­ple used to keep slaves, but they were treat­ing slaves very nice­ly.’ And that the Kiratas were Africans, he had explained many times: ‘Kira­ta means the black, the Africans.’ . . . .”
  12. Bhak­tivedan­ta Swa­mi had some “choice” things to say about women: ” . . . . Gen­er­al­ly all women desire mate­r­i­al enjoy­ment.Women in gen­er­al should not be trust­ed. Women are gen­er­al­ly not very intel­li­gent. It appears that women is a stum­bling block [sic] for self-real­iza­tion. . . . Although rape is not legal­ly allowed, it is a fact that a woman likes a man who is very expert at rape. When a hus­band­less woman is attacked by an aggres­sive man, she takes his action to be mer­cy. Gen­er­al­ly when a woman is attacked by a man—whether her hus­band or some oth­er man—she enjoys the attack, being too lusty. . . .”

12. In FTR #‘s 1008, 1022 and 1023, we exam­ined how prob­a­ble U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cer and 2016 Trump cam­paign man­ag­er Paul Man­afort net­worked with  the Haps­burg Group and asso­ciates of Vik­tor Yanukovych to effect the tran­si­tion of Ukraine from the Russ­ian orbit to the West­ern sphere of influ­ence.

Tad Devine–Bernie Sanders’ chief strate­gist in his 2016 campaign–worked with Man­afort.

“The Deep Cyn­i­cism of Bernie Sanders’ Chief Strate­gist” by Dana Mill­bank; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 8/1/2018.

Tad Devine, dur­ing his run as chief strate­gist for the Bernie Sanders pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, railed against the cor­rupt­ing influ­ence of mon­ey in pol­i­tics. . . .

. . . . Thanks to Robert S. Mueller III’s pros­e­cu­tion of Paul Man­afort, the for­mer Trump cam­paign chair­man and some­time busi­ness asso­ciate of Devine, we now have an unusu­al glimpse into the role the Demo­c­ra­t­ic ad man had in elect­ing and pre­serv­ing the pow­er of Ukraine’s Vik­tor Yanukovych, a crooked pro-Putin auto­crat. Though Amer­i­can polit­i­cal con­sul­tants rou­tine­ly rake in cash from for­eign lead­ers — even shady ones — Devine’s seam­less piv­ot from advo­cate for anti­de­mo­c­ra­t­ic thug to cham­pi­on of a prin­ci­pled demo­c­ra­t­ic reformer shows extra­or­di­nary flex­i­bil­i­ty. . . .

13a. Con­ceived by Allen Dulles, the CFF was over­seen by Richard Nixon. Its chief spokesper­son was Ronald Rea­gan. The State Depart­ment offi­cial respon­si­ble for bring­ing “fas­cist free­dom fight­ers” like the OUN/B into the Unit­ed States was William Casey (Ronald Rea­gan’s cam­paign man­ag­er in the 1980 Pres­i­den­tial race and lat­er Rea­gan’s CIA direc­tor.) The Nazi wing of the GOP was installed as a per­ma­nent branch of the Repub­li­can Part when George H.W. Bush was the head of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee.

The OUN/B was a key ele­ment of the GOP’s eth­nic out­reach orga­ni­za­tion. It is note­wor­thy that the orga­ni­za­tions that were rep­re­sent­ed in the GOP sub­group were all affil­i­at­ed with the SS dur­ing World War II. Pri­or to the com­mence­ment of hos­til­i­ties, the SS formed effec­tive liai­son with the Hun­gar­i­an Arrow Cross, the Roman­ian Iron Guard, the Bul­gar­i­an Nation­al Front and the OUN/B, among oth­er orga­ni­za­tions. This rela­tion­ship was cement­ed and strength­ened dur­ing the war and remained oper­a­tional when these ele­ments jumped to U.S. intel­li­gence and, through that rela­tion­ship, to the Repub­li­can Par­ty. (This tape excerpt is from the Sep­tem­ber 6, 1992 install­ment of AFA #37. The text is excerpt­ed from “The Repub­li­can Par­ty and Fas­cists: The Old Nazis and the New Right” by Russ Bel­lant, pub­lished in Covert Action Infor­ma­tion Bul­letin Issue #33.

13b. It is impor­tant to note that, in effect serv­ing as an advance ele­ment or Fifth Col­umn for the neo-Lib­er­al poli­cies presided over by Yeltsin and craft­ed by Sachs & Com­pa­ny, the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion served as an exten­sion of The Cru­sade For Free­dom and the pro­jec­tion of the ABN milieu into the GOP. This was the polit­i­cal pre­de­ces­sor to the Yeltsin poli­cies.

 Dom­i­nat­ing the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, the ABN milieu was pro­ject­ed back into East­ern Europe and the for­mer Sovi­et Union by the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion, heav­i­ly over­lapped with Las­z­lo Pasz­tor and the GOP Nazis dat­ing from the Cru­sade For Free­dom.

Heav­i­ly over­lap­ping the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion of Paul Weyrich, the GOP “eth­nics” and the OUN/B, in par­tic­u­lar, played a lead­ing role in the polit­i­cal tutor­ing of Boris Yeltsin’s IRG orga­ni­za­tion. Ulti­mate­ly, Yeltsin’s forces were instru­men­tal in break­ing up the U.S.S.R.

We note that the head of the lib­er­a­tion sub-group of the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion was Hun­gar­i­an Arrow Cross vet­er­an Las­z­lo Pasz­tor, the head of the GOP “eth­nics.” (This audio excerpt is from AFA #36. The text is from “The Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion Goes East” by Russ Bel­lant and Louis Wolf, from Covert Action Infor­ma­tion Bul­letin Issue #35.

“The Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion Goes East” by Russ Bel­lant and Louis Wolf; Covert Action Infor­ma­tion Bul­letin #35; Fall/1990.

With the rapid pace of polit­i­cal change sweep­ing East­ern Europe and the Union of Sovi­et Social­ist Republics, many oppor­tu­ni­ties have emerged for west­ern inter­ests to inter­vene in the pol­i­tics of  that region. In some cas­es, such a vac­u­um has been cre­at­ed that vir­tu­al strangers to the area sev­er­al years ago are now able to active­ly par­tic­i­pate in chang­ing those soci­eties from with­in.

These inter­ven­tions are not only being prac­ticed by main­stream orga­ni­za­tions. The involve­ment of the Unit­ed States Far Right brings with it the poten­tial revival of fas­cist orga­ni­za­tions in the East. One U.S. group, the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion, has been plahy­ing a role in East­ern Euro­pean and Sovi­et pol­i­tics and has ties to Boris Yeltsin and the Inter-Region­al Deputies Group (IRG) in the U.S.S.R.

The Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion (FCF) was found­ed in 1974 by Paul Weyrich as the Com­mit­tee for the Sur­vival of a Free Con­gress. Weyrich, who had start­ed the Her­itage Foun­da­tion the year before, was heav­i­ly fund­ed by the Coors fam­i­ly for both orga­ni­za­tions.

Weyrich has kept one foot in the right wing of the Repub­li­can Par­ty while dal­ly­ing with the racist Right and the extreme Chris­t­ian Right. In 1976, for instance, he and a hand­ful of oth­er New Rights (William Rush­er, Mor­ton Black­well, Richard Viguerie) attempt­ed to take over the seg­re­ga­tion­ist  Amer­i­can Inde­pen­dent Par­ty (AIP), formed by George Wal­lace in 1968. The AIP was an amal­gam of Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Soci­ety ele­ments. . . .

. . . . The IRG was estab­lished by Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin and oth­ers in the sum­mer of 1989. By the end of that year, a train­ing school had been estab­lished for can­di­dates to put for­ward the IRG pro­gram. Their elec­toral suc­cess this year pro­pelled Yeltsin to the lead­er­ship of the Russ­ian Sovi­et Social­ist Repub­lic. He imme­di­ate­ly began forg­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive rela­tion­ships with the deeply reac­tionary lead­ers of the Lithuan­ian Sajud­is par­ty. The IRG has also served as a source of right-wing pres­sure on Gor­bachev to dis­man­tle social­ism and the Sovi­et Union itself.

One of the key dan­gers in this agen­da is the polit­i­cal vac­u­um it cre­ates, allow­ing ultra-nation­al­ist forces in a num­ber of republics to take pow­er. Such nation­al­ist and fas­cist ele­ments are already evi­dent in Lithua­nia and the Ukraine. In the lat­ter repub­lic, the pro-Nazi Orga­ni­za­tion of Ukrain­ian Nation­al­ists (OUN) has gained influ­ence in sev­er­al par­ties and has mobi­lized large demon­stra­tions that hon­or OUN lead­ers who abet­ted Hitler’s war on the East­ern Front. Sim­i­lar­ly, sev­er­al deputies Sajud­is deputies served in Ger­man mil­i­tary units in 1944, and Sajud­is has made dec­la­ra­tions against eth­nic Rus­sians liv­ing in Lithua­nia. Accord­ing to some reports, Poles have also been den­i­grat­ed.

It should also be not­ed that the “rad­i­cal reformer” Boris Yeltsin has dal­lied with Pamy­at, the fore­most Russ­ian fas­cist group to emerge in the last sev­er­al years. Pamy­at’s vir­u­lent anti-Semi­tism com­pares to the crude pro­pa­gan­da of the ear­ly Ger­man Nazi Par­ty in the 1920’s.

The FCF is not entire­ly dis­con­nect­ed from the his­to­ry of the OUN. The Trea­sur­er of the FCF board is George­town Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor Charles Moser. Moser is also serves on the edi­to­r­i­al advi­so­ry board of the Ukrain­ian Quar­ter­ly, pub­lished by the Ukrain­ian Con­gress Com­mit­tee of Amer­i­ca, a group dom­i­nat­ed by the OUN. The Ukrain­ian Quar­ter­ly has praised mil­i­tary units of the Ger­man SS and oth­er­wise jus­ti­fied the OUN alliance with the Third Reich which reflects the fact that the OUN was polit­i­cal­ly and mil­i­tar­i­ly allied with Hitler and the Nazi occu­pa­tion of the Ukraine.

The OUN, an inter­na­tion­al semi-secret cadre orga­ni­za­tion head­quar­tered in Bavaria, has received finan­cial assis­tance from the late Franz Joseph Strauss, the right­ist head of the Bavar­i­an state. Strauss also had a work­ing rela­tion­ship with Weyrich. . . .

. . . . Final­ly, FCF’s insin­u­a­tion into the pol­i­tics of the East must be judged by their selec­tion of Las­z­lo Pasz­tor to head their Lib­er­a­tion Sup­port Alliance, “which seeks to lib­er­ate peo­ples in Cen­tral and East­ern Euro­pean Nations.”

Pasz­tor’s involve­ment in East Euro­pean pol­i­tics began in World War II when he joined the youth orga­ni­za­tion of the Arrow Cross, the Nazi par­ty of Hun­gary.

When the Arrow Cross was installed in pow­er by a Ger­man com­man­do oper­a­tion, Pasz­tor was sent to Berlin to help facil­i­tate the liai­son between the Arrow Cross and Hitler.

Pasz­tor was tried and served two years in jail for his Arrow Cross activ­i­ties after an anti­com­mu­nist gov­ern­ment was elect­ed in 1945. He even­tu­al­ly came to the U.S. and estab­lished the eth­nic arm of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Com­mit­tee for Richard Nixon. He brought oth­er Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors from the East­ern front into the GOP. Some were lat­er found to have par­tic­i­pat­ed in mass mur­der dur­ing the war.

The dor­mant Arrow Cross has sur­faced again in Hun­gary, where there have been attempts to lift the ban on the orga­ni­za­tion. Pasz­tor spent sev­er­al months in Hun­gary. When Weyrich lat­er con­duct­ed train­ing there, he was pro­vid­ed a list of Pasz­tor’s con­tacts inside the coun­try. Weyrich reports that he con­duct­ed train­ing for the recent­ly formed and now gov­ern­ing New Demo­c­ra­t­ic Forum.

Pasz­tor claims to have assist­ed some of his friends in Hun­gary in get­ting NED funds through his advi­so­ry posi­tion with NED. In 1989 he spoke at the Her­itage Foun­da­tion under the spon­sor­ship of the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multi­na­tion­al umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion of emi­gre fas­cists and Nazis found­ed in alliance with Hitler in 1943. It is led by the OUN. Pasz­tor spoke for the “Hun­gar­i­an Orga­ni­za­tion” of ABN, which is the Arrow Cross. . . . .

13c. After the ABN–acting through the GOP and Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion, achieved its goal of frag­ment­ing the Sovi­et Union, it hand­ed the eco­nom­ic ball off to Bernie Sanders eco­nom­ic advis­er Jef­frey Sachs, who sent Rus­sia back to the Stone Age and was, arguably, the major archi­tect of the oli­garch sys­tem that bedev­ils not only Rus­sia but oth­er for­mer Sovi­et republics to this day.

“The Long, Strange Career of Jef­frey Sachs” by Doug Hen­wood; Left Busi­ness Observ­er; August of 2005.

. . . . Sachs was an advi­sor to the Yeltsin gov­ern­ment in Rus­sia from 1991 to 1994, and also advised Poland, Slove­nia, and Esto­nia as they were begin­ning their tran­si­tions to cap­i­tal­ism. The last three are mixed suc­cess­es — on the sur­face, Poland looks like a suc­cess to some, but with the tran­si­tion came high­er unem­ploy­ment, falling real wages, and aim­less cycles of polit­i­cal dis­con­tent. Rus­sia, though, was a thor­ough dis­as­ter, one of the worst col­laps­es in human his­to­ry. Liv­ing stan­dards fell and the pop­u­la­tion shrank, an almost unprece­dent­ed event in a coun­try not at war.

[U2 Singer] Bono’s new best friend refus­es to accept any blame for the dis­as­ter, offer­ing the defense that the Rus­sians did­n’t take his advice, and the West did­n’t come through with the big aid pack­age he insist­ed was nec­es­sary. Appar­ent­ly this is an well-prac­ticed strat­e­gy. A 1992 Euromoney pro­file notes: “Sachs is reluc­tant to acknowl­edge mis­takes, defin­ing them in terms of regret when gov­ern­ments do not take his advice.” In that case, he blamed Poland for not pri­va­tiz­ing fast enough. Con­trast­ing with Sach­s’s regrets over advice not tak­en, sev­er­al gov­ern­ments he’s con­sult­ed with have since char­ac­ter­ized the mate­r­i­al pro­duced by him and his asso­ciates as irrel­e­vant, or, as a Sloven­ian offi­cial put it at the time, “simplistic...kindergarten stuff.”

But the out­come illus­trates pre­cise­ly the dan­ger of hav­ing the likes of Sachs para­chute in bear­ing the time­less truths of neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics. Any­one who knew Rus­sia knew that any rapid pri­va­ti­za­tion would imme­di­ate­ly lead to the cre­ation of a new cor­rupt elite through mas­sive theft of state prop­er­ty. Any­one who knew Wash­ing­ton knew that no big aid pack­age was ever going to come through; adding to usu­al U.S. cheap­ness, a lot of hard­lin­ers want­ed to see Rus­sia ground into the dirt. In the words of for­mer World Bank econ­o­mist David Eller­man, who fre­quent­ly col­lid­ed with Sach­s’s work in Slove­nia and has fol­lowed him intent­ly ever since, “Only the mix­ture of Amer­i­can tri­umphal­ism and the aca­d­e­m­ic arro­gance of neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics could pro­duce such a lethal dose of gall.”  . . .  .

Dur­ing what offi­cial­dom called the tran­si­tion, there were divi­sions between those who want­ed to reform the exist­ing social­ist sys­tem and exper­i­ment with hybrid forms of own­er­ship, and what Eller­man calls the “clean post­so­cial­ist rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies,” many of them with Amer­i­can eco­nom­ics PhDs, who dis­missed the reform­ers as taint­ed nomen­klatu­ra and want­ed imme­di­ate pri­va­ti­za­tion. Adding to the pres­tige of the rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies were their trust­ed for­eign advi­sors, like those from the Har­vard Insti­tute for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (HIID), led by Jef­frey Sachs and part­ly fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment. . . .

. . . . HIID even­tu­al­ly col­lapsed in scan­dal, when it was revealed that the prin­ci­pals of its Russ­ian project, Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, along with their wives (who hap­pened to be mutu­al fund man­agers), had been buy­ing Russ­ian stocks and dick­er­ing for the priv­i­lege of get­ting the coun­try’s first mutu­al fund license, while dis­pens­ing advice to the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. (Shleifer was one of the trin­i­ty of so-called Har­vard Wun­derkinder who were to Rus­sia what the Chica­go Boys were to Pinochet’s Chile; the oth­er two were Lawrence Sum­mers — and Sachs.) The U.S. gov­ern­ment sued, and Har­vard shut­tered the insti­tute. Sachs, who was not involved in the scan­dal, decamped to Colum­bia  . . . . Sachs admits to no respon­si­bil­i­ty for the Russ­ian cat­a­stro­phe. When I inter­viewed him in Novem­ber 2002, I asked him to com­ment on the (incon­tro­vert­ible) fact that he’s viewed by scores of mil­lions of Rus­sians, as one jour­nal­ist has put it, as either an emis­sary of Satan or of the CIA. He answered that he found this ques­tion “dis­gust­ing,” “per­verse,” and like noth­ing he’s ever been asked before. The glob­al elite leads a very insu­lat­ed life. . . . 

14a. Jef­frey Sachs is now advis­ing AOC.

“For­eign Pol­i­cy Is at a Point of Com­plete Cri­sis’: A Q & A with Jef­frey Sachs” by Atossa Arax­ia Abra­hami­an; The Nation; 10/12/2018.  

. . . . JS: I am sup­port­ing Alexan­dria [Oca­sio-Cortez]. I’ve been work­ing with the Con­gres­sion­al Pro­gres­sive Cau­cus for quite a while on this People’s Bud­get, and want to con­tin­ue to devel­op that. I can make a con­tri­bu­tion of get­ting the num­bers in place and show­ing that this is com­plete­ly fea­si­ble and it’s com­plete­ly what the Amer­i­can peo­ple would actu­al­ly like. . . .

14b. In the course of rolling out the “Green New Deal,” Team AOC unthink­ing­ly includ­ed a pro­vi­sion of pay­ing peo­ple “unwill­ing to work,” and fum­bled their response to crit­ics: ” . . . . First her team false­ly claimed it was doc­tored by the GOP, then said it was part of a draft ver­sion that was mis­tak­en­ly released. . . .”

This sort of thing is per­fect for the pro­pa­gan­dis­tic pur­pos­es of the far right. Did a Cam­bridge-Ana­lyt­i­ca-like AI pro­gram iden­ti­fy her ear­ly in her online and social media activ­i­ty? Is she a ringer for the far right and Team Trump?

“Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez Got Dragged For Sug­gest­ing Peo­ple Who Are ‘Unwill­ing to Work’ Should Get Paid. Advo­cates Say That’s The Point” by Paul McLeod; Buz­zFeed News; 2/15/2019.

Rep. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez could­n’t dis­tance her­self fast enough last week from a promise on her web­site that the Green New Deal would take care of peo­ple who are “unwill­ing to work.” First her team false­ly claimed it was doc­tored by the GOP, then said it was part of a draft ver­sion that was mis­tak­en­ly released.

But advo­cates for the ambi­tious pro­gram, known as uni­ver­sal basic income (UBI), say pay­ing every­one isn’t a typo or a bug — it’s the whole point. Their vision of a coun­try that takes care of everyone’s basic needs is gain­ing trac­tion from social­ist gath­er­ings in Brook­lyn to the Sil­i­con Val­ley tech futur­ist set.

But with three sim­ple words, Oca­sio-Cortez exposed just how dif­fi­cult the idea will be to sell to the pub­lic.

Crit­ics turned “unwill­ing to work” into the plan’s unof­fi­cial and unwant­ed tagline. It was repeat­ed ad nau­se­um in con­ser­v­a­tive media cir­cles. The trol­ly site unwillingtowork.org encour­ages you to join the unwill­ing and be hand­ed a new high-pay­ing job, or “paid pas­sions” as the page announces they will now be called.

The reac­tion was not a sur­prise to uni­ver­sal basic income advo­cates, who say Repub­li­cans have always fought wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion pro­grams. But they saw a chance for Democ­rats to dou­ble down.

“This idea that some­how peo­ple who are unwill­ing to work are bad or lazy is a hor­ri­ble idea. Because when­ev­er there’s a job offer and some­body doesn’t want it, what you have is a dis­pute about wages and work­ing con­di­tions,” said Karl Widerquist, a pro­fes­sor at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty in Qatar. “We need to change the dis­cus­sion, reframe it, go on offense.”

Instead of try­ing to flip the switch from lazy work­ers to cheap employ­ers, Democ­rats ran for the hills. The drafters of the Green New Deal dis­missed the word­ing as an edit­ing error in an ear­ly draft. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff said it was not in regard to uni­ver­sal basic income but pen­sions for coal min­ers. Even defend­ers of the Green New Deal’s oth­er huge­ly ambi­tious pro­pos­als dis­missed uni­ver­sal basic income.

“I think it’s a non­starter. It’s not just a polit­i­cal bar­ri­er, it’s sub­stan­tive­ly dumb to pay peo­ple who are unwill­ing to work. It’s offen­sive to most Amer­i­cans who are work­ing real­ly hard,” said Rep. Ro

Khan­na, an ardent sup­port­er of the Green New Deal. . . .

14d. Ms. Oca­sio-Cortez has an unfor­tu­nate habit of mak­ing state­ments that are absolute­ly per­fect from the stand­point of Team Trump/Fox News/Karl Rove et al.

“Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez: ‘Cap­i­tal­ism Is Irre­deemable’” by Michael Burke; The Hill; 3/01/2019.

Rep. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) on Sat­ur­day called cap­i­tal­ism “irre­deemable.”

“Cap­i­tal­ism is an ide­ol­o­gy of cap­i­tal — the most impor­tant thing is the con­cen­tra­tion of cap­i­tal and to seek and max­i­mize prof­it,” she said dur­ing an inter­view at the South by South­west con­fer­ence in Austin, Texas, accord­ing to Bloomberg News.

“To me, cap­i­tal­ism is irre­deemable,” she added, argu­ing that cap­i­tal­is­m’s goals come at a cost to peo­ple and the envi­ron­ment, Bloomberg report­ed. . . . .

14e. A “New Green Deal” is req­ui­site to pre­vent a plan­e­tary and species-wide cat­a­stro­phe. The “New Green Deal” as craft­ed by Team AOC (includ­ing Sub­has Chan­dra Chakrabar­ti) dilutes the dire neces­si­ty of the envi­ron­men­tal pro­gram with oth­er, impor­tant issues too com­plex and chal­leng­ing in, and of, them­selves to be includ­ed in a hasti­ly-con­sid­ered blan­ket agen­da.

“What’s Green? What’s the Deal? [Edi­to­r­i­al];” The New York Times; 2/24/2019 [West­ern Edi­tion].

. . . . Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that roll­out was any­thing but smooth, due large­ly to the bungling of Ms. Oca­sio-Cortez’s staff, which post­ed on her web­site a set of pugna­cious and poor­ly writ­ten talk­ing points (lat­er dis­avowed) that scared even mod­er­ate Democ­rats. . . . The talk­ing points made oth­er dubi­ous promis­es, includ­ing jobs even for Amer­i­cans “unwill­ing” to work. The imme­di­ate result of this ama­teur­ish mess was to hand Mr. Trump and oth­er cli­mate change deniers irre­sistible polit­i­cal talk­ing points. . . .

. . . . Whether such mea­sures will sat­is­fy the activists who have gath­ered around Ms. Oca­sio-Cortez is anoth­er mat­ter. After all, her talk­ing points, as well as the  res­o­lu­tion itself, speak also of pro­vid­ing high­er edu­ca­tion for all Amer­i­cans; uni­ver­sal health care; afford­able hous­ing; reme­dies for “sys­temic injus­tices” among the poor, the elder­ly and peo­ple of col­or; and a fed­er­al job guar­an­tee insur­ing “a fam­i­ly-sus­tain­ing wage, ade­quate fam­i­ly and med­ical leave, paid vaca­tions and retire­ment secu­ri­ty.”

Which rais­es a ques­tion: Is the Green New Deal aimed at the cli­mate cri­sis? Or is address­ing the cli­mate cri­sis a cov­er for a wish-list of pro­gres­sive poli­cies and a not-so-sub­tle effort to move the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty to the left? At least some candidates—Amy Klobuchar of Min­neso­ta among them—seem to think so. Read lit­er­al­ly, the res­o­lu­tion wants not only to achieve a car­bon-neu­tral ener­gy sys­tem but also to trans­form the econ­o­my itself. As Mr. Markey can tell you from past expe­ri­ence, the first goal is going to be hard enough. Tack­ling cli­mate change in a bi way is like­ly to be trans­for­ma­tive. We should get on with it.

16a. Bezos’ father, who jump-start­ed his son’s busi­ness career with a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars, came to the U.S. through Oper­a­tion Peter Pan.

“The World’s Rich­est Man, Jeff Bezos, Just Donat­ed $33 Mil­lion to Edu­cate Dream­ers in Hon­or of His Immi­grant Father” by Julie Bort; Busi­ness Insid­er; 1/12/2018.

....“My dad came to the US when he was 16 as part of Oper­a­tion Pedro Pan,” Jeff Bezos in a state­ment explain­ing the dona­tion. “He land­ed in this coun­try alone and unable to speak Eng­lish. With a lot of grit and deter­mi­na­tion — and the help of some remark­able orga­ni­za­tions in Delaware — my dad became an out­stand­ing cit­i­zen, and he con­tin­ues to give back to the coun­try that he feels blessed him in so many ways. MacKen­zie and I are hon­ored to be able to help today’s Dream­ers by fund­ing these schol­ar­ships.” . . .

16c. Oper­a­tion Peter Pan was a CIA oper­a­tion ini­ti­at­ed by Anto­nio Veciana and Mau­rice Bish­op, aka David Atlee Phillips.

“The CIA, Cuba and Oper­a­tion Peter Pan” by Nel­son P. Valdes and Saul Lan­dau; Coun­ter­punch; 12/16/2011.

On Novem­ber 19, 2011 NPR broad­cast “Chil­dren Of Cuba Remem­ber: Their Flight To Amer­i­ca.” Reporter Greg Allen claimed the 1960–62 jour­ney from Cuba to the Unit­ed States of 14,000 plus Cuban chil­dren “was made pos­si­ble because of a deal a priest in the Mia­mi dio­cese [Father Bryan Walsh] … worked out with the US State Depart­ment. The agree­ment allowed him to sign visa waivers for chil­dren 16 or under.” Allen then inter­viewed sev­er­al right-of-cen­ter Cuban Amer­i­cans to offer “objec­tive” per­spec­tive on the facts sur­round­ing Oper­a­tion Peter Pan.

Curi­ous­ly, Allen omit­ted the CIA from his report, although ample evi­dence shows the Agency in the ear­ly 1960s con­spired with the Church to spir­it kids out of Cuba.

Once inside the nur­tur­ing bor­ders of the great­est coun­try in the world “Pedro Pan kids have done well,” Allen con­clud­ed, with­out explain­ing what “well” means. Now adult Pedro Pan kids remain “firm­ly opposed to any nor­mal­iza­tion of rela­tions with the Cas­tro regime, the regime that was respon­si­ble for break­ing up their fam­i­lies and forc­ing them from their home­land.”

NPR staff might have dis­cov­ered a more com­plex and sin­is­ter sto­ry – had they looked. The CIA refus­es to release Peter Pan doc­u­ments, but abun­dant tes­ti­mo­ny shows the Agency forg­ing doc­u­ments and spread­ing lies, with Father Walsh and the region­al Catholic hier­ar­chy. Their goal: sep­a­rate elite chil­dren from par­ents (a Cuban brain drain) and gen­er­ate polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty.

One Oper­a­tion Peter Pan con­spir­a­tor, Anto­nio Veciana, now liv­ing in Mia­mi, told us how Mau­rice Bish­op (aka CIA offi­cial David Atlee Phillips) recruit­ed him in 1960 “to wage psy­cho­log­i­cal war — to desta­bi­lize the gov­ern­ment.” Veciana described how the Agency forged a law to make afflu­ent Cubans believe the rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment planned to usurp parental con­trol. Bishop’s agents in Cuba spread this rumor, backed by a forged sim­u­la­tion of the sup­posed law, to mem­bers of the pro­fes­sion­al and prop­er­tied class­es. The forgery “declared that par­ents would lose con­trol of their kids to the state.”

Veciana recount­ed how “CIA agents claimed they’d stolen the doc­u­ment from the Cuban gov­ern­ment.” This false doc­u­ment “cre­at­ed tremen­dous pan­ic.” On Octo­ber 26, 1960, CIA-con­trolled Swan island radio sta­tion, south of Cuba, broad­cast break­ing “news.” Cuba’s gov­ern­ment, the radio assert­ed, planned to remove chil­dren from par­ents so as to indoc­tri­nate them. Radio Swan report­ed anoth­er lie: the Cuban under­ground had obtained a copy of the forth­com­ing “law.”

Min­i­mal research would have revealed that Leopold­ina and Ramón Grau Alsi­na, niece and nephew of for­mer Cuban Pres­i­dent Ramón Grau San Martín, had con­fessed to Cuban secu­ri­ty offi­cials after being arrest­ed in 1965 to hav­ing print­ed the false law in Havana, cir­cu­lat­ed it clan­des­tine­ly and then lied to par­ents.

Arti­cle 3 of the apoc­ryphal doc­u­ment stat­ed: “When this law comes into effect, the cus­tody of per­sons under 20 years of age will be exer­cised by the state via per­sons or orga­ni­za­tions to which this pow­er has been del­e­gat­ed.” Priests and CIA agents both recruit­ed kids and per­suad­ed par­ents to “trust us. The US gov­ern­ment will care for them.”

The cler­gy cir­cu­lat­ed the pho­ny doc­u­ment among their Cuban upper mid­dle-class flock. Catholic school offi­cials feared Castro’s rapid­ly expand­ing pub­lic instruc­tion pro­gram would under­mine their vir­tu­al edu­ca­tion­al monop­oly among mon­eyed sec­tors.

In March 1960, Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er ordered the CIA to over­throw the Cuban gov­ern­ment. Agency plot­ters designed Peter Pan to run along­side polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da and eco­nom­ic stran­gu­la­tion poli­cies. These par­al­lel tracks would weak­en Castro’s gov­ern­ment while US train­ers pre­pared a Cuban-exile inva­sion force, which, in turn, would coor­di­nate with CIA-backed urban ter­ror­ists and guer­ril­las.

Oper­a­tion Peter Pan (recall the Dis­ney film?) used Cuban kids and par­ents to fur­ther their goal: over­throw­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment. NPR’s claim of “no evi­dence” of CIA involve­ment would have dis­solved had they asked Veciana or ques­tioned why the CIA still refus­es to release its 1500 plus doc­u­ments on that Oper­a­tion  — while de-clas­si­fy­ing archives on the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Mis­sile Cri­sis?

Writer Alvaro Fer­nan­dez’ father Angel Fer­nan­dez Varela, recruit­ed by the CIA in Havana, taught at the Jesuit run Cole­gio Belen. Before he died in Mia­mi, wrote Alvaro, Angel told his fam­i­ly “he had been one of those respon­si­ble for draft­ing the false law that gave rise to the hys­te­ria.”

NPR’s report doesn’t ask: who obtained the kids’ visas, air­plane tick­ets and con­tacts abroad and why did KLM and Pan Amer­i­can Air­lines issue Peter Pan kids free tick­ets?

Nor does NPR Allen fol­low up. The US gov­ern­ment didn’t main­tain con­tact between par­ents and chil­dren, nor grant visas to most of the par­ents that remained in Cuba. The UN High Com­mis­sion­er tried to reunite par­ents and chil­dren, but Wash­ing­ton didn’t back him.

Veciana helped facil­i­tate this dirty trick, but lat­er mused: “After­ward I won­dered: was this the right thing to do? Because we did cre­ate pan­ic about the gov­ern­ment, but we also sep­a­rat­ed lots of kids from their par­ents.”

In fact, Cuba has won acco­lades for its treat­ment of chil­dren. “In Cuba, there are no chil­dren on the streets, no chil­dren out of school, no chil­dren with­out access to health ser­vices or cul­ture, and there are no unpro­tect­ed chil­dren with­out oppor­tu­ni­ties for devel­op­ment,” said Jose Juan Ortiz, UNICEF rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Cuba.

Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the CIA attrib­uted its own objec­tive to the Cuban gov­ern­ment: sep­a­rat­ing chil­dren from their par­ents. Maybe, if NPR staff thought iron­i­cal­ly they would’ve done a more accu­rate report on Oper­a­tion Peter Pan.

.

16d. The “Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones” des­ig­nat­ed by the GOP in their tax bill may evolve into a cam­paign theme with AOC posi­tioned as “anti-busi­ness” through her stance on the NYC/Amazon deal.

“Tucked Into the Tax Bill, A Plan to Help Dis­tressed Amer­i­ca” by Jim Tanker­s­ley; New York Times; 1/29/2018.

A lit­tle-noticed sec­tion in the $1.5 tril­lion tax cut that Pres­i­dent Trump signed into law late last month is draw­ing atten­tion from ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, state gov­ern­ment offi­cials and may­ors across Amer­i­ca.

The pro­vi­sion, on Page 130 of the tax over­haul, is an attempt to grap­ple with a yawn­ing hole in the recov­ery from the Great Reces­sion: the fact that, in huge swaths of the coun­try, the eco­nom­ic recov­ery has yet to arrive.

The law cre­ates “Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones,” which will use tax incen­tives to draw long-term invest­ment to parts of Amer­i­ca that con­tin­ue to strug­gle with high pover­ty and slug­gish job and busi­ness growth. The pro­vi­sion is the first new sub­stan­tial fed­er­al attempt to aid those com­mu­ni­ties in more than a decade. And it comes as a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of eco­nom­ic growth has been con­cen­trat­ed in so-called super­star met­ro­pol­i­tan areas like Los Ange­les and New York.

If the zones suc­ceed, they could help revi­tal­ize neigh­bor­hoods and towns that are starved for invest­ment.

They could also deliv­er a wind­fall, in the form of avoid­ed cap­i­tal gains tax­es, for cor­po­ra­tions and financiers who invest in the Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones.

Yet risks remain, includ­ing whether investors will steer dol­lars toward areas that real­ly need invest­ment.

The zones were includ­ed in the tax law by Sen­a­tor Tim Scott, a South Car­oli­na Repub­li­can who was born into pover­ty in North Charleston, and based on a bill he co-spon­sored in 2017 with sev­er­al Democ­rats. The effort to cre­ate the zones was pushed by an upstart Wash­ing­ton think tank, the Eco­nom­ic Inno­va­tion Group, and its patron, the tech mogul Sean Park­er, of Nap­ster and Face­book fame, who enlist­ed Mr. Scott and oth­ers to spon­sor the leg­is­la­tion.

“I had to explain it sev­er­al times to folks,” said Mr. Scott, whose co-spon­sors on a pre­vi­ous iter­a­tion of an oppor­tu­ni­ty zone bill includ­ed Sen­a­tor Cory Book­er, Demo­c­rat of New Jer­sey, and House law­mak­ers from both par­ties. “I came out of one of these com­mu­ni­ties, so I believe that there’s untapped poten­tial in every state in the nation.”

Mr. Scott said that he had dis­cussed the plan with Mr. Trump and that the pres­i­dent had lat­er spo­ken approv­ing­ly of it. But in the rush to pass the bill over the course of a few fren­zied weeks, the idea was nev­er debat­ed on the floor of the House or Sen­ate. It was nev­er pro­mot­ed by Repub­li­can lead­ers or the White House.

“This is a lit­tle bil­lion-and-a-half dol­lar part” of the law, Kevin Has­sett, the chair­man of Mr. Trump’s Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advis­ers, said in an inter­view. “But if it’s suc­cess­ful, we’ll look back 10 years from now and say this was one of the most impor­tant parts of the tax bill, and one we didn’t talk near­ly enough about.”

Mr. Has­sett has a long­time inter­est in pro­vid­ing tax incen­tives for eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment in dis­tressed areas. He said he first began dis­cussing oppor­tu­ni­ty zones with Mr. Park­er sev­er­al years ago at a meet­ing in Mr. Parker’s Green­wich Vil­lage home. Before join­ing the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Mr. Has­sett wrote sev­er­al white papers to help ele­vate the idea as part of an exten­sive, mul­ti­year effort by the Eco­nom­ic Inno­va­tion Group to win sup­port.

Mr. Has­sett said he was nev­er paid for any of that work. His inter­est, he said, stems from grow­ing up near Turn­ers Falls, Mass., which has strug­gled since the clos­ing of its long­time paper mills.

Mr. Park­er, who made his for­tune as the first pres­i­dent of Face­book, was look­ing for a way to steer investors to parts of Amer­i­ca that have been starved for eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty in the wake of the Great Reces­sion.

One in six Amer­i­cans lives in what the Eco­nom­ic Inno­va­tion Group calls a “dis­tressed com­mu­ni­ty,” where medi­an house­hold incomes remain far below the nation­al lev­el, which is $59,000 a year, and the pover­ty rate is well above the nation­al aver­age. Those com­mu­ni­ties are urban, rur­al and sub­ur­ban. On aver­age, the com­mu­ni­ties lost 6 per­cent of their jobs and a sim­i­lar share of their busi­ness estab­lish­ments from 2011 to 2015, accord­ing to cen­sus data.

The nation­al econ­o­my grew and added jobs dur­ing that peri­od, but that growth was dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly in large cities. Met­ro­pol­i­tan areas with at least one mil­lion res­i­dents pro­vid­ed just under half of America’s jobs in 2010. But from 2010 through 2016, those met­ro­pol­i­tan areas account­ed for near­ly three-quar­ters of the country’s net job cre­ation, accord­ing to new research by the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Pol­i­cy Pro­gram at the Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion in Wash­ing­ton.

Rur­al areas account­ed for just 3 per­cent of the job growth in that time. From 2010 to 2014, accord­ing to the inno­va­tion group’s research, rur­al areas saw more busi­ness­es close than open.

Eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment pro­fes­sion­als in those areas have strug­gled to attract the atten­tion of com­pa­nies and ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, who chan­nel most of their mon­ey to major cities. To bring those investors into dis­tressed com­mu­ni­ties “you have to hit them in their sweet spot, and their sweet spot is, they pay a lot of cap­i­tal gains tax­es,” said Don­ald Hin­kle-Brown, pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive of Rein­vest­ment Fund, a com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment group.

The new tax law pro­vi­sion plays to that sweet spot. It instructs gov­er­nors in each state and ter­ri­to­ry, along with the may­or of the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, to des­ig­nate Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones from a pool of low-income, high-pover­ty cen­sus tracts, sub­ject to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion by the Trea­sury sec­re­tary. States can­not nom­i­nate all their qual­i­fy­ing tracts for that sta­tus — they are lim­it­ed to only a quar­ter of eli­gi­ble tracts. Investors, like banks or hedge funds, then cre­ate Oppor­tu­ni­ty Funds to seed either new busi­ness­es in those areas, expan­sions of exist­ing ones or real estate devel­op­ment.

The peo­ple who invest in Oppor­tu­ni­ty Funds are able to min­i­mize their tax bur­den through pref­er­en­tial treat­ment of cap­i­tal gains.

More than $2 tril­lion in unre­al­ized cap­i­tal gains are sit­ting on indi­vid­ual and cor­po­rate bal­ance sheets across Amer­i­ca, accord­ing to the Eco­nom­ic Inno­va­tion Group, the result of prof­itable invest­ments in stocks and mutu­al funds. Nor­mal­ly, the pro­ceeds from the sale of those assets would be taxed as a cap­i­tal gain, at a max­i­mum fed­er­al rate of 20 per­cent plus a 3.8 per­cent sur­tax. The new law offers investors an alter­na­tive: to roll those unre­al­ized gains into an Oppor­tu­ni­ty Fund, and defer fed­er­al tax­es on the prof­it, at least tem­porar­i­ly.

That defer­ral grows into cap­i­tal gains tax relief the longer the invest­ment is held. An investor who retains an invest­ment for sev­en years will pay only 85 per­cent of the cap­i­tal gains tax­es that would have been due on the orig­i­nal invest­ment. If the invest­ment is held beyond 10 years, the investor per­ma­nent­ly avoids cap­i­tal gains tax­es on any pro­ceeds from the Oppor­tu­ni­ty Fund invest­ment.

“This becomes its own asset class, and it could be a very large asset class,” Mr. Park­er said in an inter­view, refer­ring to Oppor­tu­ni­ty Funds.

Investors are already start­ing to take notice. A two-hour ses­sion on Oppor­tu­ni­ty Funds drew a stand­ing-room-only crowd last week at the Win­ter Inno­va­tion Sum­mit in Salt Lake City, said Patrick McKen­na, found­ing part­ner of the ven­ture cap­i­tal firm High Ridge Glob­al. Mr. McKen­na has invest­ed in dis­tressed com­mu­ni­ties such as Bal­ti­more and over the last year has tried to steer Sil­i­con Val­ley dol­lars to strug­gling areas such as Youngstown, Ohio, out of a belief those areas con­tain untapped poten­tial for growth and pros­per­i­ty.

Civic lead­ers are begin­ning to pitch state eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment offi­cials on des­ig­nat­ing tracts of their com­mu­ni­ties as Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones. “It’s very excit­ing,” said Michael Tubbs, the may­or of Stock­ton, Calif., which the Eco­nom­ic Inno­va­tion Group ranks as the eighth-most dis­tressed large city in Amer­i­ca. “It makes com­mu­ni­ties like Stock­ton more attrac­tive for invest­ment.”

Turn­ing dis­tressed com­mu­ni­ties into attrac­tive invest­ments, how­ev­er, is not a guar­an­tee. One cri­tique of the plan is that it might not lever­age much invest­ment in areas that real­ly need it — be they Stock­ton, or Youngstown, or any oth­er dis­tressed com­mu­ni­ty. Research sug­gests many pre­vi­ous fed­er­al attempts to increase invest­ment in par­tic­u­lar regions, such as Clin­ton-era Enter­prise Zones, were large­ly inef­fec­tive. A more suc­cess­ful effort was the New Mar­kets Tax Cred­it, a pro­gram that still exists and sim­i­lar­ly gives incen­tives to invest in dis­tressed areas but that is rel­a­tive­ly lim­it­ed in scope.

Pro­po­nents say the new Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones are designed to be more effec­tive than ear­li­er pro­grams, and like­ly to gen­er­ate far more invest­ment than con­gres­sion­al score­keep­ers pre­dict­ed in assess­ing the tax bill. The Joint Com­mit­tee on Tax­a­tion pre­dict­ed the pro­vi­sion would reduce tax rev­enues by $1.6 bil­lion over 10 years, sug­gest­ing a mod­est amount of addi­tion­al cap­i­tal gains invest­ment.

State eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment offi­cials wor­ry that if they des­ig­nate the wrong areas as Oppor­tu­ni­ty Zones, they could end up sub­si­diz­ing invest­ments that were in the pipeline any­way.

“Job one is get­ting the areas cor­rect and real­ly lev­er­ing this, in the intent of the pro­gram,” said Stephanie Copeland, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Col­orado Office of Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment and Inter­na­tion­al Trade. “Not just mak­ing ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists more mon­ey.”

Mr. Park­er said he planned to edu­cate fund man­agers on how to best cap­i­tal­ize on the pos­si­bil­i­ties in dis­tressed areas.

“Even­tu­al­ly,” he said, “I think it’s impor­tant that I put my mon­ey where my mouth is by invest­ing in Oppor­tu­ni­ty Funds myself.” He said that he expect­ed it would take a year or two for the funds to catch on, but that the results would exceed expec­ta­tions once they did.

18. One of the main financiers of the left wing of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is Leah Hunt-Hen­drix, H.L. Hunt’s grand­daugh­ter. A dri­ving force behind Indi­vis­i­ble, she also  found­ed the Sol­idaire net­work.

“Cash, Speed, and Trust” by Lau­ren Smi­ley; San Fran­cis­co Mag­a­zine (modernluxury.com) 8/24/2017.

. . . . For the Sol­idaire net­work and its founder—a 34-year-old oil heiress and new­com­er to San Fran­cis­co named Leah Hunt-Hendrix—the Kras­ner pri­ma­ry proved that rel­a­tive­ly small amounts of mon­ey can have a big impact if giv­en to an on-the-ground orga­ni­za­tion with deep local ties. Sol­idaire has 150 mem­bers across the coun­try, many of them young inher­i­tors of wealth like Hunt-Hen­drix. But ever since Hunt-Hen­drix moved west from New York in late 2015, the net­work has been buoyed by self-made Sil­i­con Val­ley recruits, includ­ing Insta­gram cofounder Mike Krieger and his phil­an­thropist wife, Kait­lyn Krieger; Google vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct Jonathan Alfer­ness; and Col­or of Change cofounder and for­mer tech entre­pre­neur James Ruck­er. . . .

. . . . Sol­idaire has up to 20 over­lap­ping mem­bers with the Democ­ra­cy Alliance, Soros’s secre­tive nation­al net­work of super-donors com­mit­ted to giv­ing at least $200,000 a year to lib­er­al caus­es. . . .

. . . . In an op-ed pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary by Politi­co, Hunt-Hen­drix crit­i­cized the Demo­c­ra­t­ic estab­lish­ment for its cau­tion and feal­ty to mon­eyed inter­ests. Sol­idaire doesn’t just want Demo­c­ra­t­ic wins, Hunt-Hen­drix says. It wants “sys­temic change”—a rad­i­cal restruc­tur­ing of the eco­nom­ic sys­tem that Solidaire’s mem­bers have so rich­ly ben­e­fit­ed from.. . .

. . . . Hunt-Hen­drix set off to study pol­i­tics at Duke and then went on to a PhD pro­gram at Prince­ton, where Cor­nel West was one of her advis­ers. Study­ing in the Mid­dle East dur­ing grad school, Hunt-Hen­drix was invig­o­rat­ed by the week­ly Pales­tin­ian protests of the West Bank wall from 2006 to 2009. “That’s when she changed,” Hunt recalls. “That’s when Leah saw what could hap­pen when peo­ple rose up.” (At the same time, Hunt was her­self grow­ing more rad­i­cal­ized: She was arrest­ed for the first time in her life, on the lawn of the Bush White House, in a 2008 Iraq war protest.) . . . .

In an op-ed pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary by Politi­co, Hunt-Hen­drix crit­i­cized the Demo­c­ra­t­ic estab­lish­ment for its cau­tion and feal­ty to mon­eyed inter­ests. Sol­idaire doesn’t just want Demo­c­ra­t­ic wins, Hunt-Hen­drix says. It wants “sys­temic change”—a rad­i­cal restruc­tur­ing of the eco­nom­ic sys­tem that Solidaire’s mem­bers have so rich­ly ben­e­fit­ed from. . . .

19. Leah Hunt-Hen­drix’s moth­er is close to Glo­ria Steinem.

“The Man Who Wants to Save Your Mar­riage” by Jes­si­ca Weis­berg; Pacif­ic Stan­dard; 3/16/2015.

. . . . [La Kel­ly] Hunt, who was induct­ed into the Women’s Hall of Fame for her phil­an­thropic work, counts the fem­i­nist Glo­ria Steinem among her clos­est friends. . . .

20a. Supos­ed­ly killed in a plane crash at the end of the war, many sus­pect­ed that Bose had faked his death in order to go under­ground.

If true, this rais­es the ques­tion of pos­si­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion between Bose and his nephew and pro­tege Sarkar. In 1955. Sarkar found­ed Anan­da Mar­ga, an inter­na­tion­al Yoga orga­ni­za­tion with a mil­lion plus fol­low­ers around the world.

Some ele­ments of the orga­ni­za­tion have been involved in vio­lent inci­dents, chiefly against the West Ben­gali gov­ern­ment and com­mu­nist ele­ments, as well as oppos­ing Indi­ra  Gand­hi.

The group’s sym­bol involves a ris­ing sun and a swasti­ka. The swasti­ka is an ancient hin­du sym­bol. The ris­ing sun, of course is a sym­bol of the Japan­ese empire. While the use of the sym­bols MAY be inno­cent, they might also indi­cate a degree of con­ti­nu­ity between some ele­ments of the Anan­da Mar­ga orga­ni­za­tion and the Axis with which Sarkar’s uncle was affil­i­at­ed.

If Bose did indeed sur­vive the war, it rais­es the ques­tion about his rela­tion­ship to Sarkar and the Anan­da Mar­ga group. Might some ele­ments have con­tin­ued Bose’s armed ide­o­log­i­cal strug­gle?

Anan­da Mar­ga is dis­cussed in AFA#7, at con­sid­er­able length.

Sub­has Chan­dra Bose: The After­life of Indi­a’s Fas­cist Leader” by Hugh Pur­cell; His­to­ry Today: Vol­ume 60; Issue 11.

 On Sep­tem­ber 16th, 1985, in a dilap­i­dat­ed house in Faiz­abad, for­mer­ly the cap­i­tal of Oudh province in India, a reclu­sive holy man known as Bhag­wan­ji or Gum­na­mi Baba (‘the saint with no name’) breathed his last. Locals had long sus­pect­ed that he was none oth­er than Sub­has Chan­dra Bose (1897–1945), the Indi­an qua­si-Fas­cist leader who in the 1930s had advo­cat­ed a vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion against the British Empire to gain total inde­pen­dence for India.The Sec­ond World War had enabled him to prac­tise what he preached and his Indi­an Nation­al Army had fought with the Japan­ese in Bur­ma attempt­ing to dri­ve the British out of the sub­con­ti­nent.

Although Neta­ji (Great Leader) Bose was report­ed killed in an air crash in August 1945 . . . . many believed then and con­tin­ue to believe now that, helped by his Japan­ese allies, he faked his death . . . . and returned to India many years lat­er to lead the secret life of a her­mit. Sur­pris­ing­ly for a poor sad­hu (mys­tic) the ‘saint with no name’ left behind many trunks of pos­ses­sions and in 1986, real­is­ing that these might solve the mys­tery once and for all, Bose’s niece Lali­ta obtained a high court order for an inven­to­ry to be made of their con­tents. Among the 2,673 items indexed, Lali­ta claimed she saw let­ters in her uncle’s hand­writ­ing and fam­i­ly pho­tographs. Gum­na­mi Baba’s belong­ings were re-packed in 23 box­es and sent to the Dis­trict Trea­sury. . . .

. . . In his inquiry report, com­plet­ed in 2006, Jus­tice Mukher­jee was cat­e­goric. He con­clud­ed: ‘Neta­ji Bose is dead [a safe bet as he would have been 109]. He did not die in the plane crash as alleged and the ash­es in the Japan­ese tem­ple in Tokyo [main­tained by the Indi­an gov­ern­ment since 1945] are not of Neta­ji.’ He was more nar­row­ly legal­is­tic about the Faiz­abad con­nec­tion:

In the absence of any clinch­ing evi­dence to prove that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba was Neta­ji the ques­tion whether he died in Faiz­abad on Sep­tem­ber 16th,1985, as tes­ti­fied by some of the wit­ness­es, need not be answered.

Nev­er­the­less, caught off guard in a TV inter­view in Jan­u­ary 2010, Mukher­jee can clear­ly be heard say­ing that he thinks Bhag­wan­ji and Bose may well be the same per­son. . . .

. . . When the sto­ry of Bose’s death in 1945 reached Viceroy Wavell he said: ‘I sus­pect it very much. It is just what should be giv­en out if he meant to go “under­ground”.’ In 1946 Gand­hi claimed that ‘inner voic­es’ were telling him ‘Sub­has is still alive and bid­ing his time some­where’. Bose cer­tain­ly had form as an escap­er. He spent his life mov­ing eas­i­ly, some­times secret­ly, from coun­try to coun­try. In 1941 he escaped from British house arrest in Cal­cut­ta and reached Afghanistan from where, aid­ed by the Ital­ian ambas­sador and dis­guised as an Ital­ian busi­ness­man ‘Orlan­do Maz­zo­ta’, he trav­elled up through cen­tral Asia to Moscow and from there to Berlin. Soon Britons and Indi­ans could hear his pro­pa­gan­da broad­casts stir­ring up revolt against the British Empire and boast­ing about his Indi­an Legion, a body of sol­diers trained by and intend­ed to fight along­side the Ger­man Wehrma­cht.

In 1943, dis­cour­aged by Hitler’s lack­lus­tre sup­port for Indi­an inde­pen­dence and aware that the the­atre of war where he need­ed to pit his troops was now the Far East, he trav­elled half-way round the world under water by first Ger­man and then Japan­ese sub­ma­rine to Japan. Admired there, he received offi­cial sup­port and set up his 50,000-strong Azad Hind Fauj or Indi­an Nation­al Army (INA), recruit­ed large­ly from Indi­an sol­diers of the British Empire Army who had been cap­tured by the Japan­ese in their suc­cess­ful offen­sive of 1942. . . .

20b. We flesh out our pre­sen­ta­tion of the career and insti­tu­tion­al attach­ments of Bose with an excerpt from AFA #7.

In mate­r­i­al from Kem­pei Tai: The Japan­ese Secret Ser­vice Then and Now by Richard Dea­con and Spies and Trai­tors of World War II by Kurt Singer, we looked at Bose’s links to intel­li­gence ser­vices, clan­des­tine net­works and their oper­a­tors and some of the oth­er fas­cist “nation­al­ist lead­ers.”

Some of these con­nec­tions include:

  1. Bose’s links to the Black Drag­on Soci­ety (the most impor­tant of the Patri­ot­ic and Ultra­na­tion­al­ist Soci­eties that brought fas­cism to Japan) and Mit­su­ru Toya­ma, its leader.
  2. Admi­ral Wil­helm Canaris, head of the Abwehr.
  3. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem–founder of the Pales­tin­ian Nation­al Move­ment, Major Gen­er­al in the Waf­fen SS, and a key Ger­man geopo­lit­i­cal oper­a­tive.
  4. Third Reich pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels.

20c. Anan­da Mar­ga founder Sarkar had a strong belief in his uncle and for­mer house­mate Sub­has Chan­dra Bose.  Both believed in armed strug­gle in order to achieve their aims.

Vio­lence and New Reli­gious Move­ments; James R. Lewis

. . . . Sarkar was inter­est­ed in the Indi­an strug­gle for home rule and had a mater­nal fam­i­ly tie to Indi­an inde­pen­dence fight­er Neta­ji Sub­has Chan­dra Bose (1897–1945), who was his uncle. One of Sarkar’s most impor­tant books on social phi­los­o­phy Prob­lems of the Day (1959) is ded­i­cat­ed to Bose with the fol­low­ing inscrip­tion “To the great hero Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, whom I did love, and whom I do love even now.” Like Bose, Sarkar was a believ­er in armed strug­gle, and he fash­ioned the ide­ol­o­gy of his move­ment accord­ing­ly. . .

20d. Both Bose and Anan­da Mar­ga share the say­ing “Lib­er­a­tion of Self and Ser­vice to Human­i­ty.”

“What Is the Link Between PROUT and Anan­da Mar­ga?”

. . . . In 1959, Sarkar, who is also known as Shrii Shrii Anan­damur­ti, extend­ed the scope of Anan­da Mar­ga phi­los­o­phy to encom­pass cer­tain socio-eco­nom­ic prin­ci­ples, which have become known as Prout – an acronym for Pro­gres­sive Uti­liza­tion The­o­ry. This the­o­ry blends spir­i­tu­al with social­is­tic ide­al­ism – a for­mu­la famil­iar in East­ern India, where promi­nent nation­al­ists such as Vivekanan­da and Sub­has Chan­dra Bose also made use of the present Anan­da Mar­ga slo­gan – “Lib­er­a­tion of Self and Ser­vice to Human­i­ty”. . . .

20e. Next, the pro­gram reviews more infor­ma­tion from AFA #7, exam­in­ing Anan­da Mar­ga in the con­text of  a pos­si­ble  “Boseian” or “Boseist” post-war under­ground. The excerpt con­sists of read­ing from two San Jose Mer­cury News  arti­cles: “Anan­da Mar­ga: A Dead­ly Mix of Yoga, Vio­lence” by Bernard Bow­er; San Jose Mer­cury News; 8/15/1982 and “Cult Guru Inspires Devo­tion” by Bernard Bow­er; San Jose Mer­cury News; 8/15/1982.

Osten­si­bly a yoga orga­ni­za­tion, Anan­da Mar­ga has a cred­i­ble his­to­ry of vio­lence, includ­ing acts direct­ed at Indi­an com­mu­nists. (Com­mu­nist par­ties have a his­to­ry of promi­nence in some Indi­an regions.)

21. In Ftr #‘s 1018, 1019 and 1020, we exam­ined Baba Ramdev, whose yoga and supplement/food oper­a­tions have bol­stered Naren­dra Mod­i’s regime in India. We won­der if yoga has been select­ed as a “cov­er” by select fas­cist and/or Nazi groups? If so, is Anan­da Mar­ga one of them?

A sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to con­tem­po­rary Yoga dis­ci­pline was made by a Dan­ish Nazi sym­pa­thiz­er named Niels Bukh. ” . . . . Dozens of mod­ern ash­tan­ga yoga pos­tures are sim­i­lar or iden­ti­cal to those found in a gym­nas­tic rou­tine intro­duced to India by the British in the first decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry and orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped by a Dan­ish fit­ness instruc­tor named Niels Bukh, who lat­er became noto­ri­ous for his pro-Nazi sym­pa­thies. . . .”

The Yoga influ­ence on Nazism and Hin­dut­va fas­cism should NOT be mis­con­strued as cast­ing asper­sions on the dis­ci­pline or its many adher­ents with the onus of total­i­tar­i­an ide­ol­o­gy.

  “Baba Ramdev’s Holy War” by Robert F. Worth; The New York Times Mag­a­zine; 7/29/2017.

. . . . This nar­ra­tive about yoga’s ancient roots has become a sacra­ment for Hin­du nation­al­ists, and it is echoed in the West. But it is most­ly myth, an ide­al­ized ori­gin sto­ry of the kind so many would-be nation-builders, from ancient Rome to the Zion­ists, have fos­tered about them­selves. The old­est Hin­du scrip­tures con­tain almost no men­tion of phys­i­cal pos­tures. Even the Yoga Sutras, the so-called bible of yoga, include only a few short vers­es sug­gest­ing com­fort­able pos­tures for sit­ting. Many of the pos­tures prac­ticed in yoga today appear to have emerged in the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies. Dozens of mod­ern ash­tan­ga yoga pos­tures are sim­i­lar or iden­ti­cal to those found in a gym­nas­tic rou­tine intro­duced to India by the British in the first decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry and orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped by a Dan­ish fit­ness instruc­tor named Niels Bukh, who lat­er became noto­ri­ous for his pro-Nazi sym­pa­thies. Bukh, need­less to say, has been con­ve­nient­ly for­got­ten by both Indi­ans and the yoga-lov­ing celebri­ties of Hol­ly­wood. . . .

23. More about Niels Bukh: ” . . . . His sys­tem of exer­cise became high­ly pop­u­lar in Ger­many, and in 1933 Bukh pub­licly expressed his alle­giance to the Nation­al Social­ist cause and its aim of improv­ing the health of the Aryan race through gym­nas­tics. . . .”

  “Niels Bukh;” Wikipedia.com

. . . . His 1924 book “Grundgym­nas­tik eller prim­i­tiv gym­nas­tik” (Basic or prim­i­tive gym­nas­tics) was a man­u­al in his method, which was lat­er adopt­ed by orga­ni­za­tions such as the YMCA. His­to­ri­an Mark Sin­gle­ton has argued that through the YMCA and their gym­nas­tics train­ing in British India, Bukh’s exer­cis­es influ­enced Tiru­malai Krish­na­macharya’s style of Yoga[2][3][4] In 1931 his gym­nas­tics team toured the world, vis­it­ing Japan where his sys­tem became high­ly influ­en­tial. His sys­tem of exer­cise became high­ly pop­u­lar in Ger­many, and in 1933 Bukh pub­licly expressed his alle­giance to the Nation­al Social­ist cause and its aim of improv­ing the health of the Aryan race through gym­nas­tics. This made Bukh unpop­u­lar in Den­mark, espe­cial­ly after the Ger­man occu­pa­tion of Den­mark in 1940. . . .

24. Yoga’s pop­u­lar­i­ty in Weimar Ger­many trans­lat­ed into an affin­i­ty for the dis­ci­pline expressed by Nazi SS chief Hein­rich Himm­ler, who also saw the phys­i­cal reg­i­men as an exten­sion of the ancient “Aryan” past of India. That myth­i­cal Aryan past also became part of SS and Nazi atavis­tic occult ide­ol­o­gy. ” . . . yoga was rec­om­mend­ed to death camp guards in Nazi Ger­many. But that’s exact­ly what his­to­ri­an and yoga expert Math­ias Tietke found as he researched his new book, ‘Yoga In Nation­al Social­ism’. . . .”

  “Nazi Lead­ers Fas­ci­nat­ed by Yoga” [Yoga Jour­nal Edi­tors]; Yoga Jour­nal; 2/24/2012.

Yoga is many things to many people—for some it is a spir­i­tu­al prac­tice while oth­ers con­sid­er it a phys­i­cal exer­cise. But for most, what comes to mind when they think of yoga are scenes of peace and tranquility—at the least the search for peace and tran­quil­i­ty.

It’s hard to imag­ine, then, that yoga was rec­om­mend­ed to death camp guards in Nazi Ger­many. But that’s exact­ly what his­to­ri­an and yoga expert Math­ias Tietke found as he researched his new book, Yoga In Nation­al Social­ism.

“It is asso­ci­at­ed with men­tal equi­lib­ri­um, the search for wis­dom and inner peace and is not con­sid­ered to be about force or per­se­cu­tion,” Tietke told The Dai­ly Mail. “Nev­er the less, there is also this side to the his­to­ry of yoga.”

It’s a very dark his­to­ry.

Tietke’s research shows that not only were there S.S. lead­ers who were fas­ci­nat­ed with yoga, they even used yoga’s his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy to jus­ti­fy the Holo­caust. S.S. Cap­tain Jakob Wil­helm Hauer wrote “yoga can inter­nal­ly arm us to pre­pare us for the forth­com­ing bat­tles,” while Com­man­der Hein­rich Himm­ler actu­al­ly con­sid­ered the Bha­gavad Gita as a blue­print for cru­el­ty. He iden­ti­fied with the atti­tude of “unscrupu­lous killing for one’s ‘high­er pur­pose,’ ” wrote Tietke.

25. More about the SS/Yoga con­nec­tion: ” . . . . It was seized on by race experts in the par­ty as being the pur­suit of ‘Ayran’ peo­ple. Jakob Wil­helm Hauer, an S.S. cap­tain and yoga expert, who influ­enced his chief Himm­ler and con­vinced him that ‘yoga can inter­nal­ly arm us and pre­pare us for the forth­com­ing bat­tles.’ . . . . Himm­ler, obsessed as he was with hocus-pocus race the­o­ries and mys­ti­cism relat­ing to his S.S. ‘super­men,’ car­ried around a Ger­man copy of the Bha­gavad Gita with him wher­ev­er he went. He regard­ed the ancient San­skrit epic as being a blue­print for cru­el­ty and ter­ror, using it, said Tietke, to ulti­mate­ly jus­ti­fy the Holo­caust. He wrote; ‘He iden­ti­fied him­self and the SS with the old Indi­an Ksha­triya caste and its pub­li­cized atti­tude of unscrupu­lous killing for one’s ‘high­er pur­pose.’ . . . . ”

This dove­tails with the SS mythology/ideology, which saw the SS as the embod­i­ment and ful­fill­ment of the “Aryan” race.

  ” ‘Ve Hav Vays of Mak­ing You Relax’: How SS Rec­om­mend­ed Yoga to Death Camp Guards as a Good Way to De-Stress” by Alan Hall; Dai­ly Mail Online [UK]; 2/22/2012.

A Ger­man his­to­ri­an has dis­cov­ered how the SS in Nazi Ger­many rec­om­mend­ed its mem­bers — includ­ing death camp guards — prac­tice yoga to enrich their ‘mind, bod­ies and spir­its.’

The first ever book prob­ing the Third Reich’s fas­ci­na­tion with the ancient dis­ci­pline — intend­ed to attain ‘per­fect spir­i­tu­al insight and tran­quil­i­ty’ — was pub­lished this week, enti­tled Yoga In Nation­al Social­ism by his­to­ri­an and yoga expert Math­ias Tietke.

It shows how S.S. over­lord Hein­rich Himm­ler was fas­ci­nat­ed with the dis­ci­pline and per­vert­ed it and its ancient roots into a phi­los­o­phy to jus­ti­fy the Holo­caust. . . .

. . . . Tietke ploughed through thou­sands of Third Reich doc­u­ments to chron­i­cle the his­to­ry of this most peace­ful of pur­suits in the time of the sav­agery of Nazism.

As well as the book he is plan­ning an exhi­bi­tion in Berlin lat­er this year in the Gestapo muse­um called the Topog­ra­phy of Ter­ror.

The Nazi inter­est in yoga lay in its roots in the 19th cen­tu­ry when India mys­ti­cism was a favourite pur­suit of the mid­dle and upper class­es and a great influ­ence on roman­tic poets and philoso­phers.

Dur­ing the Wiemar Repub­lic, as the Nazis gained strength, yoga enjoyed a boom among a peo­ple weary of war, infla­tion, unem­ploy­ment and mis­ery.

More than 50 yoga books were pub­lished in the 1920’s in Berlin alone. And, as the Nazis cor­rupt­ed most things they touched, so it was with yoga.

It was seized on by race experts in the par­ty as being the pur­suit of ‘Ayran’ peo­ple. Jakob Wil­helm Hauer, an S.S. cap­tain and yoga expert, who influ­enced his chief Himm­ler and con­vinced him that ‘yoga can inter­nal­ly arm us and pre­pare us for the forth­com­ing bat­tles.’

In 1937, four years after the Nazis attained pow­er, the coun­try’s first yoga cen­tre opened up in Berlin and oper­at­ed until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943.

The teacher who ran it had dis­ci­ples in 50 Ger­man towns and cities. Himm­ler, obsessed as he was with hocus-pocus race the­o­ries and mys­ti­cism relat­ing to his S.S. ‘super­men,’ car­ried around a Ger­man copy of the Bha­gavad Gita with him wher­ev­er he went.

He regard­ed the ancient San­skrit epic as being a blue­print for cru­el­ty and ter­ror, using it, said Tietke, to ulti­mate­ly jus­ti­fy the Holo­caust.

He wrote; “He iden­ti­fied him­self and the SS with the old Indi­an Ksha­triya caste and its pub­li­cised atti­tude of unscrupu­lous killing for one’s ‘high­er pur­pose.’ ”

Tietke says Himm­ler’s atti­tude to ‘kar­ma’ was nev­er bet­ter dis­played than at the secret speech he made to senior S.S. men at Poz­nan in 1943 when he spoke of the noble, vir­tu­ous work his butch­ers were per­form­ing in elim­i­nat­ing the Jews of Europe and Rus­sia.

Himm­ler was also inter­est­ed in oth­er ear­ly Indi­an reli­gious writ­ings of India, includ­ing the Rigve­da which con­tains the mythol­o­gy of the Hin­du gods.  “These cel­e­brat­ed the racism of the Aryan immi­grat­ing from cen­tral Asia to India, killing and dri­ving out des­ig­nat­ed ‘infe­ri­or’ oppo­nents,” said Tietke.

28. In his book–one of the most impor­tant in recent memory–Yasha Levine sets forth vital, rev­e­la­to­ry infor­ma­tion about the devel­op­ment and func­tion­ing of the Inter­net.

Born of the same DARPA project that spawned Agent Orange, the Inter­net was nev­er intend­ed to be some­thing good. Its gen­er­a­tive func­tion and pur­pose is counter-insur­gency. In this land­mark vol­ume, Levine makes numer­ous points, includ­ing:

  1. The har­vest­ing of data by intel­li­gence ser­vices is PRECISELY what the Inter­net was designed to do in the first place.
  2. The har­vest­ing of data engaged in by the major tech cor­po­ra­tions is an exten­sion of the data gathering/surveillance that was–and is–the rai­son d’e­tre for the Inter­net in the first place.
  3. The big tech com­pa­nies all col­lab­o­rate with the var­i­ous intel­li­gence agen­cies they pub­licly scorn and seek to osten­si­bly dis­tance them­selves from.
  4. Edward Snow­den, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, Jacob Appel­baum and Wik­iLeaks are com­plic­it in the data har­vest­ing and sur­veil­lance.
  5. Snow­den and oth­er pri­va­cy activists are dou­ble agents, con­scious­ly chan­nel­ing peo­ple fear­ful of hav­ing their com­mu­ni­ca­tions mon­i­tored into tech­nolo­gies that will facil­i­tate that sur­veil­lance!

Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC]; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; p. 7.

 . . . . In the 1960s, Amer­i­ca was a glob­al pow­er over­see­ing an increas­ing­ly volatile world: con­flicts and region­al insur­gen­cies against US-allied gov­ern­ments from South Amer­i­ca to South­east Asia and the Mid­dle East. These were not tra­di­tion­al wars that involved big armies but guer­ril­la cam­paigns and local rebel­lions, fre­quent­ly fought in regions where Amer­i­cans had lit­tle pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence. Who were these peo­ple? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In mil­i­tary cir­cles, it was believed  that these ques­tions were of vital impor­tance to Amer­i­ca’s paci­fi­ca­tion efforts, and some argued that the only effec­tive way to answer them was to devel­op and lever­age com­put­er-aid­ed infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy.

The Inter­net came out of this effort: an attempt to build com­put­er sys­tems that could col­lect and share intel­li­gence, watch the world in real time, and study and ana­lyze peo­ple and polit­i­cal move­ments with the ulti­mate goal of pre­dict­ing and pre­vent­ing social upheaval. . . .

29. More about the devel­op­ment of the Inter­net as an infor­ma­tion weapon in the con­text of coun­terin­sur­gency:

 Sur­veil­lance Val­ley by Yasha Levine; Pub­lic Affairs Books [HC]; Copy­right 2018 by Yasha Levine; ISBN 978–1‑61039–802‑2; p. 15.

 . . . . Ranch Hand got going in 1962 and last­ed until the war end­ed more than a decade lat­er. In that time, Amer­i­can C‑123 trans­port planes doused an area equal in size to half of South Viet­nam with twen­ty mil­lion gal­lons of tox­ic chem­i­cal defo­liants. Agent Orange was for­ti­fied with oth­er col­ors of the rain­bow: Agent White, Agent Pink, Agent Pur­ple, Agent Blue. The chem­i­cals, pro­duced by Amer­i­can com­pa­nies like Dow and Mon­san­to, turned whole swaths of lush jun­gle into bar­ren moon­scapes, caus­ing death and hor­ri­ble suf­fer­ing for hun­dreds of thou­sands.

Oper­a­tion Ranch Hand was mer­ci­less, and in clear vio­la­tion of the Gene­va Con­ven­tions. It remains one of the most shame­ful episodes of the Viet­nam War. Yet the defo­li­a­tion project is notable for more than just its unimag­in­able cru­el­ty. The gov­ern­ment body at its lead was a Depart­ment of Defense out­fit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Born in 1958 as a cash pro­gram to pro­tect the Unit­ed  States from a Sovi­et  nuclear threat from space, it launched sev­er­al ground­break­ing ini­tia­tives tasked with devel­op­ing advanced weapons and mil­i­tary tech­nolo­gies. Among them were project Agile and Com­mand and Con­trol Research, two over­lap­ping ARPA ini­tia­tives that cre­at­ed the Inter­net. . . .

29. In the ear­ly 1960’s, there was a plot afoot on the part of Nazi ele­ments to use anti-Com­mu­nism to enslave Amer­i­ca. Might some of the ele­ments we have seen in this series have coa­lesced in such a con­text? One can­not use anti-Com­mu­nism to enslave Amer­i­ca with­out Com­mu­nists. Is this why we see far-right and explic­it­ly fas­cist ele­ments grouped around Bernie Sanders and AOC?

Gen­er­al Walk­er and the Mur­der of Pres­i­dent Kennedy by Jef­frey H. Cau­field, M.D.; More­land Press [HC]; Copy­right 2015 Jef­frey H. Cau­field; ISBN-13: 978–0‑9915637–0‑8; pp. 86–87.

. . . . Gar­ri­son did not pro­vide an expla­na­tion for all of the [David Fer­rie] note’s sub­ject mat­ter. How­ev­er, he did know the mean­ing of “fly­ing Barag­o­na in the Beech.” “Beech” refers to the mod­el of Fer­rie’s air­plane, a Beechcraft. Barag­o­na was a Nazi from Fort Sill. . . .

. . . . Gar­ri­son also obtained a tran­script of a let­ter writ­ten by Fer­rie to Barag­o­na. Next to Barag­o­na’s name, Gar­ri­son wrote: “Note Barag­o­na is impor­tant.” The let­ter had been sent to Gar­ri­son by Glenn Pinch­back, and a car­bon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a con­gress­man from Geor­gia. (Pinch­back worked in the Oper­a­tions Com­mand at Fort Sill, where he inter­cept­ed mail.) In the let­ter, Fer­rie shared his dream of the re-uni­fi­ca­tion of Ger­many and liv­ing in a world where all the cur­ren­cy was in Deutschmarks. Pinch­back­’s sum­ma­tion of the let­ter described a “Neo-Nazi plot to enslave Amer­i­ca in the name of anti-Com­mu­nism,” and “a neo-Nazi plot gar­gan­tu­an in scope.” The Fer­rie let­ter spoke of the need to kill all the Kennedys and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. . . . Pinch­back also report­ed­ly obtained a let­ter from David Fer­rie to Barag­o­na con­fess­ing his role in the assas­si­na­tion of Robert Gehrig, who was a Nazi and Fort Sill sol­dier. . . .”

30. We won­der if Sub­has Chan­dra Bose will be a focal point for pro-Axis his­tor­i­cal revi­sion­ism, posi­tion­ing the fas­cists of World War II  as “anti-colo­nial­ist” lib­er­a­tors?

An adu­la­to­ry arti­cle in the Insti­tute for His­tor­i­cal Review (pub­lished by the Holo­caust revi­sion­ist and pro-Nazi Lib­er­ty Lob­by) hails Bose, not Mahat­ma Gand­hi, as the true lib­er­a­tor of India.

Inter­est­ing­ly, and  per­haps sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the writer–Ranjan Borra–has a back­ground as a writer for the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church run and owned Wash­ing­ton Times. In FTR #970–among oth­er programs–we exam­ined the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church as an exten­sion of the Japan­ese Patri­ot­ic and Ultra­na­tion­al­ist Soci­eties, the most impor­tant of which was the Black Drag­on Soci­ety, with which Sub­has Chan­dra Bose net­worked.

Also inter­est­ing, and pos­si­bly sig­nif­i­cant is the fact that the hearsay alle­ga­tion that Bose–not Gandhi–was respon­si­ble for the lib­er­a­tion of India is attrib­uted to a Ben­gali politi­cian named P.B. Chakrabar­ty. The last name dif­fers by one  let­ter from Ben­gali-Amer­i­can and Bose wor­ship­per Saikat Chakrabar­ti. For all we know, this may be a very com­mon Ben­gali last name.

We do won­der, how­ev­er:

Is there any famil­ial rela­tion? Did Saikat’s fam­i­ly change the  spelling of the name? Are there dif­fer­ences in trans­la­tion and/or translit­er­a­tion from Ben­gali?

“Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, the Indi­an Nation­al Army and the War of India’s Lib­er­a­tion” by Ran­jan Bor­ra; The Insti­tute for His­tor­i­cal Review; Win­ter 1982 (Vol. 3, No. 4), pages 407–439.

. . . . Ran­jan Bor­ra . . . . con­tributed arti­cles on Asian polit­i­cal affairs to var­i­ous peri­od­i­cals, includ­ing the dai­ly Wash­ing­ton Times news­pa­per. . . .

 

 

 

 

 

Discussion

4 comments for “FTR #‘s 1061, 1062, 1063, 1064, 1065, 1066, 1067 and 1068: Socialists for Trump and Hitler (The “Assistance”), Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8”

  1. Here’s some­thing poten­tial­ly note­wor­thy in Saikat Chakrabar­ti’s back­ground regard­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Chakrabar­ti has ties to Peter Thiel:
    Accord­ing to Chakrabar­ti’s LinkedIn pro­file, he joined Stripe, the online pay­ment com­pa­ny, as a “Found­ing Engi­neer” in Feb­ru­ary of 2011 and worked there until May 2013. He built up the prod­uct team at Stripe dur­ing this peri­od accord­ing to the Politi­co pro­file on Chakrabar­ti, so he was clear­ly a very impor­tant per­son at the com­pa­ny at this ear­ly stage.

    Here’s the pos­si­ble Thiel con­nec­tion: Stripe was start­ed in 2010 by Patrick and John Col­li­son in 2010. Accord­ing to the fol­low­ing arti­cle on the begin­nings of the com­pa­ny, the broth­ers start­ed work­ing on Stripe in ear­ly 2010, spent about six months devel­op­ing the core idea, and at that point they real­ized they were on to some­thing big but need­ed insti­tu­tion­al back­ing. The broth­ers went to Y Com­bi­na­tor to raise their cap­i­tal. Y Com­bi­na­tor is a ‘start­up accel­er­a­tor’ that Patrick had already used to start an ear­li­er com­pa­ny, Auc­tomat­ic. Y‑Combinator only invest­ed $20,000-$30,000.

    Accord­ing to the arti­cle, it was that next sum­mer (the sum­mer of 2011) that the Col­li­son broth­ers met with Peter Thiel after Thiel spoke at a Y‑Combinator din­ner. Thiel, who co-found­ed Pay­Pal with Elon Musk, had a num­ber of insights into the online pay­ment mar­ket­place and offered to invest in Stripe. Thiel brought in Elon Musk, Sequia Cap­i­tal, and Andreeseen Horowitz as investors and they raised $2 mil­lion.

    So Chakrabar­ti joins Stripe in Feb­ru­ary of 2011 and in the sum­mer of 2011 they meet Thiel who brings in a num­ber of new investors. But as we’re going to see, that meet­ing with Thiel and the new invest­ments must have hap­pened well before the sum­mer of 2011 because there is a Tech Crunch arti­cle from the end of March 2011 talk­ing about Thiel and the rest of the new investors rais­ing $2 mil­lion for Stripe. And in the actu­al inter­view that fol­low­ing arti­cle is based on, Patrick Col­li­son makes it sound like Strip got its $2 mil­lion invest­ment in the fall of 2010. It rais­es the ques­tion of whether or not Chakrabar­ti was brought on board after Thiel and the rest of his team of investors got involved. And if Chakrabar­ti’s involve­ment with Stripe only hap­pened after Thiel invest­ed, that rais­es the ques­tion of whether or not Chakrabar­ti already knew Thiel before join­ing Stripe. And whether or not he knew Thiel before join­ing Stripe, there’s still the ques­tion of what his rela­tion­ship with Thiel is after join­ing Stripe and before jump­ing into left-wing pol­i­tics.

    As we’re also going to see, the fol­low­ing arti­cle is based on an inter­view that Patrick Col­li­son. It’s a lit­tle over an hour. And at ~36 min­utes into that inter­view, Patrick recounts that ear­ly fundrais­ing and he puts a time frame of them get­ting fund­ing from these investors at the end of the sum­mer of 2010 and then spend­ing the peri­od from August 2010-Sep­tem­ber 2011 build­ing the ini­tial Stripe prod­uct. So based on that chronol­o­gy, the hir­ing of Chakrabar­ti as the head of prod­uct devel­op­ment would have hap­pened after this team of investors got involved:

    The Start­up Grind

    The Col­li­son Broth­ers and Sto­ry Behind The Found­ing Of Stripe

    Derek Ander­sen | Feb 9, 2012

    In 2012, we updat­ed this piece to reflect Bloomberg’s lat­est report that Stripe had just raised an $18MM round with Sequoia at a $100MM val­u­a­tion.

    On July 28th, 2015 Stripe announced even big­ger news: a strate­gic part­ner­ship and invest­ment from Visa that will help Visa pro­vide a bet­ter online and mobile expe­ri­ences, while Stripe will ben­e­fit from Visa’s tech­ni­cal tools, like tok­eniza­tion used to anon­i­mize user trans­ac­tions, and glob­al reach.

    “Stripe aims to give devel­op­ers the tools they need to cre­ate the most secure and nov­el buy­ing expe­ri­ences,” said Patrick Col­li­son, CEO and co-founder of Stripe. “Our part­ner­ship with Visa will accel­er­ate our abil­i­ty to expand to mar­kets around the world, and give devel­op­ers even more con­trol over the end-to-end expe­ri­ence. We’re very excit­ed about the poten­tial.

    But this adven­ture has hum­ble begin­nings. Read on for Start­up Grind’s orig­i­nal Stripe found­ing sto­ry, with your founders and pro­tag­o­nists, Patrick and John Col­li­son, and check out our inter­views with Patrick Col­li­son over three years of build­ing his com­pa­ny Stripe.

    Begin­ning the Entre­pre­neur­ial Jour­ney

    In 2005 at the age of 16, Patrick Col­li­son was the recip­i­ent of the 41st Young Sci­en­tist of the Year for his work with Lisp. His broth­er and co-founder John Col­li­son scored the high­est-ever score received by a stu­dent for the Irish Leav­ing Cer­tifi­cate. Before Patrick’s last year of High School he left ear­ly to attend MIT.

    Dur­ing his first quar­ter of fresh­man year, Patrick found­ed Auc­tomat­ic and joined Y Com­bi­na­tor as a Win­ter 2007 com­pa­ny. Its path would not last long. At the age of 19 and ten months after incor­po­rat­ing, the com­pa­ny was bought by Live Cur­rent Media for $5MM where Patrick became the Direc­tor of Prod­uct Engi­neer­ing in 2008. Mean­while younger broth­er John attend­ed Har­vard the fall of 2009.

    In ear­ly 2010 John and Patrick began work­ing on Stripe togeth­er. At the time Patrick was work­ing on sev­er­al side projects and they debat­ed why it was so dif­fi­cult to accept pay­ments on the web. They sought to solve the prob­lem and see if it was pos­si­ble to make it sim­ple — real­ly sim­ple. The next 6‑months they played with it, showed it to friends, and saw how peo­ple inter­act­ed with it, iter­at­ing along the way.

    With­in 2‑weeks of build­ing the pro­to­type they had their first trans­ac­tions with a Y Com­bi­na­tor com­pa­ny called 280 North. Even­tu­al­ly its founder Ross Bouch­er (their first cus­tomer) would join Stripe as one of the first employ­ees.

    In the begin­ning they weren’t sure how big the mar­ket was or if they could pro­vide the user expe­ri­ence that they want­ed. They also didn’t have the answers to whether or not they could ful­ly address issues like fraud, non-US pay­ments, and solv­ing sim­i­lar prob­lems that Pay­pal does but in user-friend­ly way.

    Stripe orig­i­nal­ly part­nered with a pay­ments com­pa­ny but after they start­ed tak­ing it seri­ous­ly they real­ized that the only way to con­trol the entire expe­ri­ence the way they want­ed to was to con­trol all aspects of the process. They brought every­thing in house.

    After 6‑months they deter­mined they were onto some­thing big and that they could cre­ate the user expe­ri­ence that they want­ed. Both John and Patrick start­ed work­ing on it full-time in the fall of 2010. The com­pa­ny was still boot­strapped, but the founders were start­ing to real­ize that as a pay­ment start­up they would need insti­tu­tion­al cred­i­bil­i­ty that an investor could pro­vide. Accord­ing to them they “didn’t look great on paper.” (To each his own stan­dards but in my book they qual­i­fied as extreme­ly legit. Note first two para­graphs above) John became the Pres­i­dent and Patrick the CEO.

    Grow­ing Stripe through Word of Mouth

    The team’s friends in turn invit­ed their friends. “Ini­tial­ly it very much spread through a word of mouth process. That was sur­pris­ing to us because it’s a pay­ment sys­tem not a social net­work so it’s not some­thing you’d think would have any viral­i­ty what­so­ev­er. But it became clear that every­thing else was so bad and so painful to work with that peo­ple actu­al­ly were sell­ing this to their friends,” Patrick recent­ly said in a TechZ­ing inter­view.

    Fund­ing Fin­Tech at Y Com­bi­na­tor

    Their first fund­ing came from Y Com­bi­na­tor. Patrick knew Paul Gra­ham through his involve­ment with Lisp and Auc­tomat­ic, and once they told him about what they were doing, he offered to fund it. Con­sid­er­ing he made hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on Patrick’s pre­vi­ous com­pa­ny, it had to be a no brain­er. His Auc­tomat­ic co-founder is also YC Part­ner Harj Tag­gar.

    What’s inter­est­ing is that unlike 99% of YC com­pa­nies, Stripe didn’t actu­al­ly go through the stan­dard start­up boot­camp process. Patrick had already been through it once and didn’t feel the need to do it again. The amount YC invest­ed was in the $20k-$30k range. That next sum­mer they met with Peter Thiel after he spoke at a YC din­ner, and the founder of Pay­Pal offered his insights into the Pay­ments mar­ket and his learn­ings from Pay­Pal. After their meet­ing he offered to invest. They raised $2MM and added oth­er usu­al Sil­i­con Val­ley sus­pects like Michael Moritz and Sequoia Cap­i­tal, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel.

    “Elon and Peter have been very insight­ful,” Patrick says. “They have sharp opin­ions on what Pay­Pal did right and wrong. They have deep appre­ci­a­tion for how dif­fi­cult it is to get there. They fought this bat­tle for many years and it’s real­ly help­ful to have some­one who can talk about the future in 15-years, but also some­one who can empathize and sym­pa­thize with the day-to-day con­sid­er­a­tions. I don’t think there are that many peo­ple who can strad­dle both sides of that. “

    ...

    ———-

    “The Col­li­son Broth­ers and Sto­ry Behind The Found­ing Of Stripe” by Derek Ander­sen; The Start­up Grind; 02/09/2012

    “After 6‑months they deter­mined they were onto some­thing big and that they could cre­ate the user expe­ri­ence that they want­ed. Both John and Patrick start­ed work­ing on it full-time in the fall of 2010. The com­pa­ny was still boot­strapped, but the founders were start­ing to real­ize that as a pay­ment start­up they would need insti­tu­tion­al cred­i­bil­i­ty that an investor could pro­vide. Accord­ing to them they “didn’t look great on paper.” (To each his own stan­dards but in my book they qual­i­fied as extreme­ly legit. Note first two para­graphs above) John became the Pres­i­dent and Patrick the CEO.”

    So in the Fall of 2010, the Col­li­son broth­ers real­ized they were on to some­thing big but need­ed invest­ment. Y‑Combinator pro­vides an ini­tial $20k-$30k. But it was after they met Thiel at a Y‑Combinator din­ner that Thiel the com­pa­ny raised $2 mil­lion. Accord­ing to the arti­cle, this hap­pened “that next sum­mer”, which would have been the sum­mer of 2011:

    ...
    Fund­ing Fin­Tech at Y Com­bi­na­tor

    Their first fund­ing came from Y Com­bi­na­tor. Patrick knew Paul Gra­ham through his involve­ment with Lisp and Auc­tomat­ic, and once they told him about what they were doing, he offered to fund it. Con­sid­er­ing he made hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on Patrick’s pre­vi­ous com­pa­ny, it had to be a no brain­er. His Auc­tomat­ic co-founder is also YC Part­ner Harj Tag­gar.

    What’s inter­est­ing is that unlike 99% of YC com­pa­nies, Stripe didn’t actu­al­ly go through the stan­dard start­up boot­camp process. Patrick had already been through it once and didn’t feel the need to do it again. The amount YC invest­ed was in the $20k-$30k range. That next sum­mer they met with Peter Thiel after he spoke at a YC din­ner, and the founder of Pay­Pal offered his insights into the Pay­ments mar­ket and his learn­ings from Pay­Pal. After their meet­ing he offered to invest. They raised $2MM and added oth­er usu­al Sil­i­con Val­ley sus­pects like Michael Moritz and Sequoia Cap­i­tal, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel.

    “Elon and Peter have been very insight­ful,” Patrick says. “They have sharp opin­ions on what Pay­Pal did right and wrong. They have deep appre­ci­a­tion for how dif­fi­cult it is to get there. They fought this bat­tle for many years and it’s real­ly help­ful to have some­one who can talk about the future in 15-years, but also some­one who can empathize and sym­pa­thize with the day-to-day con­sid­er­a­tions. I don’t think there are that many peo­ple who can strad­dle both sides of that. “
    ...

    But accord­ing to the full inter­view that the arti­cle was based on, the time­line is some­what dif­fer­ent. Col­li­son describes the ini­tial invest­ments from Thiel as hap­pen­ing in August of 2010 and then the com­pa­ny spent the next 14 months work­ing on the prod­uct:

    The Start­up Grind

    Start­up Grind Hosts Patrick Col­li­son of Stripe, 6 Months In — Full Inter­view

    Fran­cis­co Cruz
    Feb 19, 2012

    ...

    Grow­ing and Scal­ing Stripe

    [00:35:46.5] Patrick Col­li­son: Friends told oth­er friends, this kind of stuff. We couldn’t have them use Stripe because I mean the prob­lem is I told you how the account pay­ment process actu­al­ly hap­pened in the bank, and so we sort of con­vinced our­selves that there might be some­thing inter­est­ing here, but now we had to actu­al­ly go try and build the infra­struc­ture and make it work. And so we decid­ed at the end of that sum­mer that we would go and take this seri­ous­ly and we would go and build that infra­struc­ture and fig­ure out what­ev­er it is that we need to learn and actu­al­ly launch it prop­er­ly. So we took some invest­ment and Y Com­bi­na­tor, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia and There­sean Hard­woods invest­ed in our c brand. .

    [00:36:26.9] Any­body we’ve heard of?

    [00:36:27.6] Patrick Col­li­son: Then we basi­cal­ly spent the next four­teen months build­ing the infra­struc­ture that could actu­al­ly make this work. Some­thing from like August 2010 to the end of Sep­tem­ber 2011, it was build­ing infra­struc­ture. We final­ly launched it to the pub­lic I think it was 30th Sep­tem­ber 2011. Just over six months ago.

    [00:36:51.8] Walk­ing back to that point I’m rais­ing, tell us how those types of con­ver­sa­tions start. You already know Paul, he invest­ed in you. Some of these were prob­a­bly your pre­vi­ous investors. Like you go and you meet with Peter Thiel and what hap­pens. Is it... walk us through your first meet­ing with Peter Thiel.

    [00:37:08.6] Patrick Col­li­son: I remem­ber being very crit­i­cal of Pay­Pal and then halfway through the meet­ing, maybe not quite the best idea,

    [00:37:24.9] Wrong tac­tic.

    [00:37:24.9] Patrick Col­li­son: Most­ly I remem­ber him think­ing that a lot of the things we were doing that I thought were a bad idea, and him think­ing they were a good idea, and sort of vice a ver­sa. And that being pret­ty inter­est­ing and so at the time we want­ed to have this forc­ing func­tion that would encour­age us to make the prod­uct real­ly good. So we charged 5% plus 30 cents for every trans­ac­tion, just like way more than M & L charges to process online pay­ments and so our think­ing was, we don’t want any­one to use us because of the costs. So rather than try to be even com­pet­i­tive why don’t we just price it way high­er than every­one else, and until peo­ple are will­ing to use us, like pay that large pre­mi­um for the prod­uct that wasn’t suf­fi­cient­ly bet­ter. We did­n’t real­ly think of it as a viable long term strat­e­gy and I remem­ber Peter argu­ing that it quite pos­si­bly could be. That could be a real­ly inter­est­ing busi­ness mod­el.

    [00:38:24.5] Basi­cal­ly you would pro­vide a bet­ter cus­tomer ser­vice, bet­ter expe­ri­ence and you could charge a pre­mi­um for it.

    [00:38:29.3] Patrick Col­li­son: Like a fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent busi­ness mod­el com­pared to every oth­er inter­net com­pa­ny. I guess I always remem­ber Peter being like smart and deci­sive with­in two hours of meet­ing he had agreed to invest. We had tons of oth­er meet­ings and lots of oth­er peo­ple told us that this is not even pos­si­ble. Or there were a mil­lion rea­sons why we would fail, where­as Peter pret­ty liked it and ok I will invest. That I think real­ly changed our pro­jec­tor.

    ...

    ———-

    “Start­up Grind Hosts Patrick Col­li­son of Stripe, 6 Months In — Full Inter­view” by Fran­cis­co Cruz; The Start­up Grind; 02/19/2012

    “[00:36:27.6] Patrick Col­li­son: Then we basi­cal­ly spent the next four­teen months build­ing the infra­struc­ture that could actu­al­ly make this work. Some­thing from like August 2010 to the end of Sep­tem­ber 2011, it was build­ing infra­struc­ture. We final­ly launched it to the pub­lic I think it was 30th Sep­tem­ber 2011. Just over six months ago.

    Based on the inter­view tran­script, it sounds like that 14 month peri­od of build­ing the Stripe infra­struc­ture start­ed in August of 2010 and took place after they raised their cap­i­tal. So that’s a lit­tle mys­te­ri­ous. But then it gets weird­er: Accord­ing to the fol­low­ing arti­cle from March 28, 2011, the $2 mil­lion was raised by that point, but Stripe at that point would­n’t com­ment on whether or not the financ­ing hap­pened at all. So we can be con­fi­dent that the $2 mil­lion invest­ment was made before the end of March 2011, but we don’t know when exact­ly it hap­pened in part because Stripe would­n’t even con­firm it hap­pened at all at that point:

    Tech Crunch

    Stealth Pay­ment Start­up Stripe Backed By Pay­Pal Founders

    Michael Arring­ton
    03/28/2011

    There isn’t much infor­ma­tion out there about Stripe, a new pay­ments start­up cofound­ed by broth­ers Patrick Col­li­son and John Col­li­son (last seen sell­ing their start­up Auc­tomat­ic to Live Cur­rent Media for $5 mil­lion).

    It’s an online busi­ness to busi­ness and busi­ness to con­sumer pay­ments provider, we’ve con­firmed. “How is it dif­fer­ent than Pay­Pal or Google Check­out?” I asked some­one who’s seen the prod­uct. Their answer – “It doesn’t suck.”

    Devel­op­ers have a lot of trou­ble get­ting the var­i­ous pay­ments parts to work prop­er­ly – from get­ting a mer­chant account to mak­ing the soft­ware work prop­er­ly on your web­site. And then there is fee goug­ing. Stripe is said to make the process very, very easy for devel­op­ers.

    Appar­ent­ly Stripe real­ly doesn’t suck, because the com­pa­ny has tak­en approx­i­mate­ly $2 mil­lion in a ven­ture round from Pay­Pal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Cap­i­tal, Andreesen Horowitz and SV Angel. Stripe was val­ued at around $20 mil­lion in the round, we’ve heard but haven’t con­firmed. The com­pa­ny wouldn’t com­ment on whether or not the financ­ing occurred at all.

    ...

    ———-

    “Stealth Pay­ment Start­up Stripe Backed By Pay­Pal Founders” by Michael Arring­ton; Tech Crunch; 03/28/2011

    “Appar­ent­ly Stripe real­ly doesn’t suck, because the com­pa­ny has tak­en approx­i­mate­ly $2 mil­lion in a ven­ture round from Pay­Pal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Cap­i­tal, Andreesen Horowitz and SV Angel. Stripe was val­ued at around $20 mil­lion in the round, we’ve heard but haven’t con­firmed. The com­pa­ny wouldn’t com­ment on whether or not the financ­ing occurred at all.”

    We’re left with a range of time when this invest­ment led by Peter Thiel hap­pened: some time between August of 2010 and March of 2011. And Chakrabar­ti joined Stripe in Feb­ru­ary 2011. So the avail­able evi­dence strong­ly sug­gests Chakrabar­ti was one of the first peo­ple brought on board after this $2 mil­lion invest­ment.

    But regard­less of when exact­ly it hap­pened, the fact that Chakrabar­ti was appar­ent­ly a key employ­ee in this ear­ly phased of Strip sug­gests that Chakrabar­ti like­ly got to know Peter Thiel as a result of work­ing there if he did­n’t already know him. And giv­en Thiel’s role as a key financier of far right pol­i­tics in the US and Chakrabar­ti’s clear enthu­si­asm for Sub­has Chan­dra Bose, the ques­tion of what kind of rela­tion­ship Chakrabar­ti had with Thiel in the lead up to his deci­sion to drop every­thing and jump into left-wing pol­i­tics is a pret­ty rel­e­vant ques­tion.

    Also keep in mind that if it does turn out to be the case that Chakrabar­ti has ties to Thiel, he would­n’t be the only wealthy Sil­i­con Val­ley vet­er­an with ties to Thiel to jump into left-wing pol­i­tics in recent years. Recall that Reid Hoff­man, one of the ear­ly Pay­Pal employ­ees who went on to co-found LinkedIn, financed that ‘exper­i­ment’ by New Knowl­edge to run a net­work of twit­ter bots in the 2017 Alaba­ma Sen­ate race that posed as a Russ­ian bot net­work in order to gen­er­ate head­lines about Rus­sia try­ing to med­dle in that race. New Knowl­edge was one of the com­pa­nies that wrote the Sen­ate Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee’s report on the role Russ­ian dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tions played in the 2016 elec­tion. Also recall that Hoff­man has some rather dis­turb­ing right-wing views, like an oppo­si­tion to gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion, the New Deal, and a desire to see the Uber-style gig-econ­o­my mod­el vast­ly expand­ed. So it would also be inter­est­ing to know what kind of his­to­ry Chakrabar­ti might have with Hoff­man.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 25, 2019, 10:45 pm
  2. @Pterrafractyl–

    Although not deci­sive, this is sub­stan­tive­ly inter­est­ing and sug­ges­tive.

    Recall that Thiel has Ger­man roots, pos­si­ble I.G. Far­ben her­itage, Sul­li­van & Cromwell employ­ment (as dis­cussed in FTR #718.) https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-718-in-your-facebook-a-virtual-panoptican/

    In Sep­tem­ber of 1942, Chakrabar­ti’s appar­ent idol–Subhas Chan­dra Bose–founded the Deutsche-Indis­che Gesellschaft, which is the largest Ger­man bilat­er­al orga­ni­za­tion in the Fed­er­al Repub­lic and spe­cial­izes in facil­i­tat­ing Ger­man pro­fessi­nals in Indi­a’s IT sec­tor.

    That orga­ni­za­tion is now head­ed by Surya Kumar Bose, SC’s grand­nephew, who moved to Ger­many at the sug­ges­tion of Alexan­der Werth, the trans­la­tor for S.C. Bose’s Euro­pean fight­ing forces, which were ulti­mate­ly fold­ed into the Waf­fen SS.

    S.K. Bose and Werth then col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­er World War II asso­ciates of Sub­has Chan­dra Bose to con­coct a glow­ing biog­ra­phy of “The Duce of Ben­gal.”

    https://spitfirelist.com/news/supplement-to-the-socialists-for-trump-and-hitler-the-assistance-series-walkin-the-cobra-in-india/

    One won­ders if this con­cate­na­tion may play a role in any Thiel-Chakrabar­ti col­lab­o­ra­tion in the polit­i­cal field?

    Keep up the great work!

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 26, 2019, 2:54 pm
  3. Feds prob­ing AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabar­ti after sud­den res­ig­na­tion
    By Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine August 3, 2019 | 9:40pm | Updat­ed

    https://nypost.com/2019/08/03/feds-probing-aocs-chief-of-staff-saikat-chakrabarti-after-sudden-resignation/

    Posted by Roberto Maldonado | August 4, 2019, 7:18 pm
  4. @Roberto Mal­don­a­do–

    I will be updat­ing Chakrabar­ti in the next show, to be record­ed this week.

    He comes from Bridge­wa­ter Asso­ciates, the largest hedge fund in the world and a sig­nif­i­cant cap­i­tal backer of Palan­tir.

    James Comey was their chief legal coun­sel, before he became head of the FBI and helped Trump in office.

    AOC’s resume and the tan­gle of enti­ties set up by “Sub­has Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti absolute­ly stink.

    I will be link­ing this con­cate­na­tion to what I believe to be an “Immi­grant Psy‑O.”

    “Sub­has Chan­dra” Chakrabar­ti may well be linked to Thiel through the online pay­ment com­pa­ny Stripe. Cov­ered this some time ago and will review it in one of the next shows.

    My take on AOC ini­tial­ly was that she was an unwit­ting tool, iden­ti­fied by social media-scour­ing AI’s ear­ly on in her prospec­tive ascent.

    Now I am not so sure. She might be an oper­a­tive.

    Cer­tain­ly, she is work­ing tire­less­ly to brand the Democ­rats as the Ille­gal Immi­grant Par­ty, which will not sit well with vot­ers.

    Guys like the El Paso shoot­er are fol­low­ing along a well-estab­lished path.

    Trump did not pave the road–he, too, is trav­el­ing that path, hav­ing joined it on an on-ramp (the Chris­t­ian West GOP.)

    Oh well.

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | August 5, 2019, 5:27 pm

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