Dave Emory’s entire lifetime of work is available on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books available on this site.)
COMMENT: We’ve done a number of posts about some recent murders which may or may not have been committed by white supremacist prison syndicates, which, as we have seen, work with various other groups. Some of the (occasionally) collaborating elements include prison guards and people with links to the intelligence community.
Some of America’s burgeoning for-profit prisons appear to be using them as enforcers.
Prison-based Islamists may also be working with some of them. (Some of the Islamist prison chaplains have been trained by the Saudi-financed Operation Green Quest.)
An article that is as frightening as it is prescient was penned by a former inmate in the corrections system who wrote anonymously.
Noting the antediluvian nature of contemporary correctional systems in this country, a former inmate who had interacted with some of the Aryan prison syndicates has noted not only their large numbers, but the fact that our prisons do not rehabilitate, tending to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the inmates’ difficulties.
In addition, we should note a number of considerations brought up here:
- Elements of the white supremacist movement appear to have achieved a degree of geographical and functional autonomy, as indicated by the reference to Mountain Home, Idaho.
- One should note the explosion in the U.S. prison population since 1980. That was when Ronald Reagan assumed office. His administration was, essentially, a front for the Underground Reich.
- Note also that Aryan Brotherhood elements quoted here discuss having been imprisoned for drug offenses. The Reagan administration was deeply complicit in the drug trade, at the same time as it introduced draconian sentencing for first time offenders.
- The Reagan administration also dramatically accelerated the shipping of jobs offshore, increasing the pressure on working people to supplement their incomes by selling drugs–not unlike what happened during the Great Depression with bootleg alcohol in the prohibition era.
- We have also seen a dramatic increase in “for-profit prisons,” giving the powers that be added incentive to “lock ’em up and throw away the key.”
- It is searingly ironic that many of the members of the Aryan prison syndicates hate black folks. The for-profit prisons are not all that unlike the slavery that was imposed on Africans in the U.S.
- The cocaine epidemic caused by the massive importation of drugs during the Reagan years also victimized the very African-Americans so despised by these Aryan syndicate members.
- As budgetary strains brought about by the “austerity” dogma and related phenomena like “sequester” increase, the pressure to release brutalized inmates will increase. This bodes very poorly for the future.
“Why I Fear the Aryan Brotherhood—and You Should, Too” by Anonymous; The Daily Beast; 4/1/2013.
EXCERPT: Law enforcement officers may have a real problem on their hands. They’re being tight-lipped about it, but it’s something they should have been aware of for decades. They had to see it coming.
Four people have been killed since the beginning of the year in a series of shootings that appear to be connected to the homegrown jihadists of the Aryan Brotherhood. Mike McLelland, the district attorney of Texas’s Kaufman County, and his wife, Cynthia Woodward, became the latest victims this past weekend. Before that, McLelland’s former colleague Mark Hasse was shot in January. Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements was gunned down in mid-March.
The Brotherhood, also known as The Brand, AB, and One-Two, was formed during the 1960s by a group of white convicts serving time at San Quentin. They allegedly were fed up with white prisoners being victimized by the two predominant gangs, the Black Gorilla Family (BGF) and the Mexican Mafia and decided to form a gang of their own for self-protection. While initially closely associated with Nazism ideologically, many adherents belong to the group for the identity and purpose it provides. The ironclad rule for entrée into the Brotherhood is simple: kill a black or a Hispanic prisoner. The other rule, which is just as ironclad, gave rise to their motto: “Blood In/Blood Out.”
Quitting isn’t an option. There’s only death. . . .
. . . . It was from Luke that I first heard of Mountain Home, Idaho, when he said, “If I coulda just made it back to Mountain Home, I’da been OK.” The trouble he was referring to was his last bank robbery for which he was now awaiting sentencing, where he and his crew had kidnapped a bank-branch manager and strapped 10 sticks of dynamite around her chest and wired it to a remote detonator. He was not some little desperate punk-assed note passer; the crew he worked with would, after months of planning, take over the whole bank and, in his words, “take all of the goddamn money.” They felt it was unprofessional to leave one dollar bill behind.
He was the only one of the four captured and flat out told the FBI that he “didn’t know shit.” When they threatened him with a longer sentence, according to him his response was “rush it and you won’t owe it.” I believed him, since these were among the most standup dudes I’d ever encountered.
I gradually learned (from men who had no need to embellish their deeds as some armchair neo-Nazi pseudo-tough guys are prone to do) of Mountain Home and other pockets of armed resistance situated in rural areas of three or four western states where federal authorities are reluctant to enter to enforce the law.
“They know we’re up in there,” I remember Luke saying, “but it ain’t worth riskin’ getting their asses blown off to come in and try to take us out. They want to go home too, and they know we ain’t fucking around. We ain’t trying to overthrow the government or nothing. We’re just fighting to protect our wives, kids and our way of life, and them coward motherfuckers know it. All we’re asking is to be left alone.” He conveniently forgot about all the banks he’d robbed to be able to afford all of the expensive, high-end toys he once possessed.
Unlike David Koresh and his sheeplike followers (and other sects based on religious fanaticism), these are battle-hardened and death-tested men (many of them, like Big Red, with extensive military experience) who are not set on dying for some kind of religious cause; their thing is that, when the situation calls for it, they’re killers. They’re not into dying—except to protect the honor of the Brotherhood.
And they’re also sincere in their belief that many members of law enforcement are kindred spirits, right-wingers who understand their hatreds, loss of hegemony, and rabid determination to protect whatever power the white man has left in America. And those who don’t buy into their hateful rhetoric they perceive as being weak-kneed sob sisters who will willingly mongrelize and sell out their proud white heritage. Truly, everyone who is not with them is against them.
I never spoke to this dude again for the next 18 months, until the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in downtown Oklahoma City about a week before I was slated to exit prison for the last time. Standing in front of the TV in the day room he turned to me and said, “This ain’t shit, just wait until we get started. They done took me from my family for over 30 years because of some of punk-assed drug-conspiracy bullshit, and eventually they’re going to have to pay … We’re going to make them pay.”
If these recent killings represent the Brotherhood’s twisted form of retribution, the fact that it has taken so long to begin is all the more chilling. To me this would demonstrate a hard-nosed determination that all citizens should find frightening. We shouldn’t be whistling past the graveyard on these killings.
These are men with a huge ax to grind. While few of them would argue they deserve no time behind bars for their crimes, virtually all of them feel the amount of time handed out under federal sentencing guidelines is far, far too punitive … way out of proportion; that punishments don’t fit the crimes, and some legal scholars actually agree.
America’s harsh judicial system, coupled with a growing national affinity for utilizing complete isolation at super-max prisons as a corrections tactic of first choice, in many cases turns men into monsters. And, truth be told, there is no such thing as truly locking away the gang leaders so they can no longer call the shots on the prison yard … or even on the streets.
Someone has to feed these case-hardened convicts three times a day, and who might you think carries this duty out? If you’re thinking it’s the guards, you’re wrong. They’re not about to be turned into waiters for men they often view as the scum of the earth no matter what. Instead, that duty falls to other prisoners known as “trustees.” And these trustees smuggle all of the messages the guards are not bribed (or threatened) into carrying back and forth. Hey, everyone’s got families, you know.
The true terrorist wins because of his or her willingness to die for what they believe in—history has taught us that over and over again. Many of the first men locked up when our nation embarked on a policy of for-profit mass incarceration near the end of the last century are now returning into society. And, as predicted by numerous professionals, they are sicker and more dangerous than when they went behind bars.
While the U.S. population grew 2.8 times since 1920, the U.S. prison population grew more than 20 times, and most dramatically since 1980. The fear among law enforcement is (or at least should be) is that now we have dozens upon dozens—if not hundreds (who knows, maybe even thousands)—of murderous chickens finally coming home to roost.
Thanks Dave. Now it is up to each of us to get this information out to as many people as possible.
Just FYI, if you’re a conservative Senator trying to live down your prostitution-scandalrelated shenanigans and you want to rebrand yourself as a tough, noble champion of virtue, proposing amendments that make you look like a callous sadistic monster probably isn’t the rebranding “theme” you want to go for.
On second thought, it looks like looking like a callous sadistic monster is the popular thing to do:
You have to wonder if we’ll ever figure out that the whole “turning the other cheek”/Golden Rule approach to public policy actually create better policies with better results for everyone. Forgiveness isn’t just a nifty slogan. It actually works. There’s really no excuse for being a monster.
The new “King Alfred” plan
I tried to post this under the Misc. archive “King Alfred” post section, but I don’t think there was a written post area for it at the time it was produced.
Senator Mark Kirk (R,IL.) has called for a “King Alfred” solution to “the black problem”:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/30/rep-rush-blasts-rep-kirks-elitist-white-boy-plan-to-jail-18000-black-men/
Rep. Bobby Rush (D‑IL) on Wednesday accused Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk ® of proposing an “elitist white boy solution” to gang violence with his plan for the mass arrests of 18,000 gang members in Chicago.
Earlier on Wednesday, Kirk had joined with fellow Sen. Dick Durbin (D‑IL) in calling on Illinois attorney general nominee Zachary Fardon to focus on street gangs and gun violence. But in an interview earlier this month, Kirk had gone even further with a plan to target members of the Gangster Disciples.
“My top priority is to arrest the Gangster Disciple gang, which is 18,000 people,” Kirk told WFLD. “I would like to a mass pickup of them and put them all in the Thomson Correctional Facility.”
The senator proposed that federal agencies — like the ATF, DEA and FBI — work together to charge members of the gang with “drug dealing” and “murdering people, which is what they do.”
Rush reacted to that plan on Wednesday by insisting it was a “sensational, headline-grabbing, empty, simplistic, unworkable approach.”
Rush told the Chicago Sun-Times that Kirk needed to “see the bigger picture” instead of proposing an “upper-middle-class, elitist white boy solution to a problem he knows nothing about.”
“I am really very upset with Mark,” he said.
In a follow-up statement, Rush explained that his colleague’s “current plan does not include the option to create jobs, provide affordable and safe housing, quality health care and improve schools in urban areas, BUT certainly a plan to incarcerate 18,000 black men is elitist.”
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REX-84 anybody...anybody? Kirk?
The more guns the merrier when you’re talking about a secret neo-nazi underground bunker with a 25 yard firing range:
It’s worth pointing out that the youngest of the three men arrested, 33-year-old Royce Gresham, appears to have been quoted in a 2007 article about the negative long-term consequences of the “lock ’em up!” mentality. Gresham is characterized at the time as “a 26-year-old car thief who had the misfortune to be randomly stopped at a sobriety checkpoint while on parole” and describes the terrifying situation non-violent prisoners experience. It’s an anecdote that raises the question: Was Gresham already a white-supremacist before he went to prison or is that one of the useful life skills he acquired on the inside:
Birds of a feather flock together. It makes crapping on everyone else so much easier:
With California on track to go up in flames from drought-induced wildfires it’s no surprise that state officials might be placing a high priority on maintaining the state’s firefighting capabilities. Still, there’s a bit of a “the ends don’t justify the means” issue with the state’s approach since the means involves intentionally keep people in prison in order to provide a large supply of cheap labor to fight wildfires:
While this is obviously quite cruel to California’s prisoners, note that, should this society ever actually start sending fracking CEOs to prison for casually poisoning California’s water supply with fracking pollutants and those CEOs end up fighting fires for the state of California, we could see a justice system that’s not only cruel but unusually ironic too.
Arizona just had another neo-Nazi shooting spree:
Beyond the obvious question of what caused this guy to go on a shooting spree, you have to wonder if he was the type of guy inclined to tattoo “Skinhead” and “88” on his face before he spent all those year in the neo-Nazi recruitment centers know as American prisons or after. Based on statements by an acquaintance of his, it might be the latter:
“He’s a violent guy...I think his time in prison contributed to that.”
What? No positive lessons in race relations and self-discovery? How unexpected.