Support California prisoners on hunger strike

"California holds nearly 12,000 people in extreme isolation at a cost of over $60 million per year. The cells have no windows, and no access to fresh air or sunlight. The United Nations condemns the use of solitary confinement for more than 15 days as torture, yet many people in California state prisons have been encaged in solitary for 10 to 40 years!
"In 2011, over 12,000 prisoners and their family and community members participated in statewide hunger strikes protesting the inhumane conditions in the SHU [Secure Housing Unit]. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) promised meaningful reform. In February 2013, prisoners announced that another hunger strike would begin July 8th because of CDCR's failure to fulfill that promise." (from the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website)

30,000 California prisoners joined the hunger strike on July 8th. Nineteen days later, despite retaliation by prison officials, over 700 hunger strikers continue this nonviolent resistance action. The hunger strikers' demands are clear and specific, for example: end collective punishment for individual rule violations, end long-term solitary confinement, stop requiring prisoners to inform on each other in return for better food or release from solitary, and provide all prisoners with adequate and nutritious food.

The California prisoners' fight is a matter of basic human decency. It's also strategically important, because the prison system in the United States is a major tool of political repression and social control, and thus a pivotal arena of political struggle.

There are a number of immediate ways to support the California prisoners hunger strike, from signing petitions to calling Governor Brown's office to organizing local demonstrations.

For more information about the strike and how to support it, see Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, California Prison Focus, and Solitary Watch.

For detailed background about the 2011 hunger strikes, see Karl Kersplebedeb's article, "The 2011 Hunger Strikes Remembered: Resistance Against Neocolonial Imprisonment and Torture." And for an extensive list of related websites, documents, and articles, see Kersplebedeb's "2013 Prisoners Strikes" page.

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About Three Way Fight

[This post has been moved to a separate page on the Three Way Fight site.]

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Matthijs Krul on Nazi settler colonialism

It's no secret that Nazi Germany set out to create a settler colonial empire in eastern Europe. But what role did this effort play in the larger Nazi project? How was it connected with Nazi economic, military, and racial policies -- including the annihilation of European Jews? Matthijs Krul's essay "What was Nazi Germany?" (in Parts I, II, and III) explores these questions in more detail than I have seen in other anti-fascist discussions. I don't completely agree with Krul's conclusions, but I think he offers an important piece of the picture, which has larger significance for understanding fascism more generally.

Krul is an independent Marxist who runs the blog Notes & Commentaries. "What was Nazi Germany?" appeared there in 2010, but I only discovered it this year.

Resettlement of German colonizers to annexed Polish territories. Bundesarchiv, R 49 Bild-0705 / CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons

As Krul recounts, Nazi settler-colonialist ambitions involved military conquest of Poland and large sections of the USSR, forced removal of non-Germans from these lands, and their replacement by German settlers. This vision was inspired partly by earlier genocidal conquests elsewhere -- notably Imperial Germany's war against the Herero in what is now Namibia, and the United States' conquest of Native America -- but unlike most previous examples directed settler conquest against Europe itself. (Krul doesn't mention it, but the British also practiced settler colonialism in Europe, specifically Ireland, centuries earlier. See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume One.)

Krul is hardly the first writer to discuss German Nazism in these terms, but he analyzes Nazi settler policies in more detail than I have seen previously. For example, he discusses Nazi laws that barred German women and first-born sons from inheriting farms -- and thereby created a large pool of potential settlers. More eastern settlers were to be recruited (or forcibly transplanted) from poorer German cities, other "Aryan" countries such as the Netherlands, and ethnic German communities in the Baltic countries and elsewhere. Some 200,000 eastern Germans were in fact relocated in this manner in 1940, although it is unclear from Krul's account how many of them made it out of transit camps onto farms.

Krul also explores the connections between settler colonial policies and the Nazis' economic and military program, drawing heavily on Adam Tooze's excellent book, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Krul outlines Germany's starkly uneven development in 1933, with advanced big industry offset by backward agriculture and small industry, coupled with steep inequality and a low standard of living for most people. As he notes, Nazi rearmament in the 1930s was at one and the same time (a) the main engine for economic growth, (b) preparation for colonial conquest, and (c) a source of tension with industrial capitalists. In 1936, Hitler's assistant Hermann Goering "took over control of the economic as well as the military spheres, since the contradiction between the needs of rearmament (import of raw materials, manpower to the army) and those of industry (restriction of imports, labor for industry) had become unresolvable without dictatorial intervention…" (II -- All citations here from Krul's essay indicate whether the quote is from Part I, II, or III.)

Contrary to the vulgar Marxist view that Nazism simply acted on behalf of big business, Krul outlines German capital's initial ambivalence and factional divisions in the face of Nazi plans, and argues that the Nazi dictatorship (for example, imposing state-controlled cartels on industry and agriculture) reflected the economic elite's weakness and inability to solve problems by the usual means. Tooze goes further in this regard, detailing numerous ways that Nazi state took policymaking power away from capitalists, even as it helped them restore profitability and power within the workplace. All of this echoes (and provides strong confirmation for) the argument Timothy Mason advanced 45 years ago in "The Primacy of Politics - Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany."

Krul also outlines the gradual unfolding of Nazi racial policies in relation to both the settlement program and the economic demands of a large-scale war of conquest. As he notes, "the final goal was not just to get rid of Jews and other undesirables and to win the war through production, but overall to 'cleanse' Eastern Europe altogether for German settlement" (III). Not only Jews, but non-Jewish Poles and others considered racially inferior were systematically worked to death. Nazi racial terrorism went through several stages -- from expropriation of property and forced migration, through greater and greater concentration under harsher and harsher conditions, to large-scale mechanized murder -- which correlated with the stages of the settlement program. Property looted from Jews was used to compensate German settlers who had been forcibly relocated, and Jews were squeezed into a smaller and smaller area of Poland as the land reserved for colonial settlement was increased.

It's clear that settler colonialism was a major part of the German Nazi program and is crucial for understanding many Nazi policies -- for example, why the Nazis killed some two million non-Jewish Poles. But it doesn't explain all major policies, and Krul overreaches when says that Nazi Germany was a settler state and a colonialist state "above all else" (III). Settler colonialism doesn't explain the ferocity of Nazi anti-Bolshevism, as embodied for example in Hitler's orders that the invasion of the USSR be fought as a war of "extermination" against Bolshevik commissars and the Communist intelligentsia. (See Lorna Waddington, Hitler's Crusade: Bolshevism and the Myth of the International Jewish Conspiracy, p. 170.)

Above all, settler colonialism doesn't explain the overriding centrality of Nazi antisemitism. Krul argues that, from the Nazis' perspective, the settler program required getting rid of Jews (and other "undesirables," such as Roma) to ensure the German people's purity and safety. This is no doubt true, but it begs the question of why the Nazis regarded the Jews as an existential threat in the first place. As the U.S. example demonstrates, settler colonialism doesn't inherently require anti-Jewish discrimination, let alone expulsion or mass murder. In fact, French settler colonialism in Algeria involved granting French citizenship to Jewish Algerians, raising them legally and socially above their Muslim compatriots.

Even if we somehow accept the idea that Nazi settlerism had to target Jews, this at most explains the Nazi killing of Jews in Germany and the areas slated for eastern colonial expansion. It doesn't explain why the Nazi state devoted scarce resources to rounding up and murdering some one million Jews from other parts of Europe -- the Balkans, Hungary, France, Italy, the Netherlands, etc. This part of the Final Solution only makes sense if we recognize that annihilation of the Jews was for the Nazis an end in itself that did not serve any other instrumental purpose.

But Nazi settler colonialism doesn't have to explain all that to be an important part of the story. As long as we don't treat settlerism as the overarching principle that covers all of the Nazi state's main features, exploring its meaning and implications can teach us a lot. For example, what can we learn about generic fascism by looking at Nazi settlerism in relation to Fascist Italy, which had its own settlerist program in Africa? And what were the implications of Nazi settlerism for Germany's (and Europe's) class and socio-economic structure?

Here I suggest relating Krul's analysis to arguments posed by two different authors in the book Confronting Fascism: Discussion Documents for a Militant Movement. J. Sakai (in "The Shock of Recognition") argues that Nazism "de-proletarianized Aryan society" by elevating "newly Aryanized men…into military & police service and into being supervisors, office workers, foremen, straw bosses and minor bureaucrats of every sort," and creating a "new proletariat that…was heavily made up of involuntary foreign & slave laborers, retirees, and -- despite Nazi ideology about women's 'natural' place in the kitchen and nursery -- women" (p. 121).

Taking a different approach from Sakai, Don Hamerquist (in "Fascism & Anti-Fascism") argues that while  "normal" capitalist development involves genocide "against pre-capitalist populations and against the social formations that obstruct the creation of a modern working class," German Nazism undertook "the genocidal obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes." Not only labor power, but workers themselves were "consumed in the process of production just like raw materials and fixed capital," which broke with capitalist principles (p. 28). There's a lot of room for useful dialog between both Hamerquist's and Sakai's arguments and Krul's settlerism analysis.

In addition, while working on this post I came across two other scholars who are writing about Nazi settler colonialism. Carroll P. Kakel III has published a book comparing The American West and the Nazi East, while Elizabeth Harvey's Women and the Nazi East examines women's role in the "Germanization" of Poland. I look forward to reading what these authors have to say and comparing their findings with Krul's.

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Far rightists divided over Hugo Chávez

Far rightists are of two minds about the legacy of Hugo Chávez, who died on March 5th after leading Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” for over fourteen years. Chávez was a left populist whose “anti-imperialist” friends and allies included not just Fidel Castro and Evo Morales but also Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Belorus’s neo-stalinist president Alexander Lukashenko. Some far rightists applaud this kind of left-right alliance, others don’t.

(For more on Chávez’s deeply flawed politics, see Bill Weinberg’s “Contradictory legacy of Hugo Chávez,” and Bromma’s “Notes on XXIst Century Socialism.”)

“Reasons to like Chavez”
Attitudes toward Chávez on a recent discussion thread on Stormfront, a leading neo-nazi discussion forum, were mostly but not entirely positive. The thread began with a 2010 video clip in which Chávez claimed that Israel was funding the Venezuelan opposition and that Mossad agents were trying to kill him. A Stormfront forum member favorably quoted several mainstream articles accusing Chávez of antisemitism (see note below), and offered the following “reasons to like Chavez”:

“-He increased the living standards of his countries poor brown masses, meaning less of them emigrating to Western nations.
 -He cut into the profits of the big Jew banks by encouraging barter trade… This was seen especially in his trade with Russia.
 -He undermined the crypto-Jews that control Venezuela greatly.
 -He was against Zionism, and helped those who also opposed Zionism. He also spoke out against the Jewish Power Structure.
 -He was a nationalist. Nationalist’s should support one another in this globalist Jew world, as long as interests do not conflict, irrespective of brand or race.”

Another commenter on the same thread wrote simply, "Have observed that jewish neo-cons hated this guy. That has to mean there's some good!" But not everybody agreed with this “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic. One person wrote that Chávez's opposition to Israel “proved nothing save for a common cause which is as toxic as any type of neo-con zionism.” And another commenter declared that “Chavez hated whites.”

Similar discussions can be found on other fascist discussion boards, such as Vanguard News Network Forum (a split off from William Pierce’s National Alliance) and aryanism.net. On Iron March Forums, one person disparaged Chávez’s “verbal bluster” and criticized “his support for Colombian FARC rebels who are a bunch of Marxist clowns,” but conceded that “he was a problem for globalism and capitalism. While I would not have seen him as an ally, I give him cred for that.” Another commenter on the same thread wrote, “Now while I would call him far from perfect he embraced his political myth (Simon Bolivar), gave the land back to the people (in a hap hazard way), fought of[f] the globalists and over all contributed to the quality of life of his citizens. While he was not perfect… he could have been a friend to states such as ours.”

"Put in power through the British embassy"
The Lyndon LaRouche network, whose idiosyncratic fascist ideology draws heavily on anti-British conspiracy theories, claimed that “Chavez was originally put in power in Venezuela through actions of the British embassy… Chavez in that sense was following in the footsteps of his hero, South American liberator Simon Bolivar, who was a wholly-owned asset of British intelligence’s Jeremy Bentham, until he broke with him at the very end of his life.” The LaRouchites conceded that Chávez “had positive and negative features” and “on occasion broke profile with this British imperial game” by promoting closer collaboration with other South American leaders. But LaRouchites considered his support for the FARC (supposedly “the world’s leading cocaine cartel”) especially damning.

Riding the Tiger, which embraces Julius Evola’s “Traditionalist” brand of far right ideology, praised Chávez as “a staunch opponent to neoliberal globalist imperialism” who “institut[ed] social programs to benefit the poor of his own country rather than line the pockets of the rich.” The article continued,

“Some traditionalist minded people may question our support for leftist governments like that of Venezuela and Cuba today, but such support is necessary, and opposition is nitpicking. As Chavez himself told a reporter in 1998, ‘I am not a communist, not a fascist. I am a Bolivarian, whose ideology exists as an ideology of liberty.’ Chavez was one of the few leaders who had the bravery to stand for an alternative to American neo-liberalism in South America. His government (as with any government) was not perfect and there certainly were errors made, and he certainly wasn’t a Traditionalist to be sure. His movement could be described as socialist or Third Positionist.”

"Common interests and a common enemy"
Two of the most in-depth (and widely quoted) rightist tributes following Chávez’s death have come from Counter-Currents Publishing, which promotes European New Right (ENR) ideology blended with explicit white nationalism and antisemitism. Counter-Currents’ Gregory Hood offered “Two Cheers for Chávez.” Hood wrote that he wouldn’t want to live in Chávez's Venezuela, citing rampant crime, corruption and other problems, but focused mainly on reasons to admire the deceased leader:

“Chávez’s ‘socialist’ revolution always contained powerful nationalist and even traditionalist overtones. ‘Bolivarianism’ emphasized Latin American unity, strength, and above all, sovereignty as an independent economic and political bloc against the new order of globalization. He attempted to mobilize the masses behind a patriotic identity, imbuing them with a sense of mission and national pride that transcended class. While Chávez’s opponents conspired with foreigners to overthrow him, Chávez broke with neoliberal orthodoxy to build what he called a ‘Third Way’ that would put Venezuela first.”

Hood also took it as a good sign that “the Tribe [i.e., Jews] was famously hostile to Chávez.” “For their part,” he noted approvingly, “pro-Chávez groups and newspapers have distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, called for the ‘expulsion’ of Zionist organizations from the country, and monitored the ‘subversive activity’ of Jewish organizations.”

Hood argued that “White Nationalists and Hugo Chávez share common interests and a common enemy: global capitalism,” and that white Americans specifically had good reason to align themselves with Chávez and his movement: “It is Wall Street and the capitalist elite – not so called ‘anti-Americans’ like the late Hugo Chávez – that are importing the non-white masses to serve as cheap labor and dispossess Western peoples from their homelands. Americans should sympathize with Third World anti-colonialists like Chávez, since our country too is now merely a colony of global capital.” He concluded that “Hugo Chávez was an ally in that fight [against the neoliberal financial order]. His Bolivarian Revolution is not something we would wish to emulate. But it does deserve our support and respect.”

Dugin's Eurasianism, for and against
Two days after publishing Hood’s essay, Counter-Currents published a much longer and even more glowing assessment of Chávez by Kerry Bolton. Leading off with a 1961 quote from red-brown alliance guru Francis Parker Yockey, Bolton emphasized two points: Chávez's kinship with Peronism on one hand and with the geopolitical thinking of ENR theorist Alexander Dugin on the other. Bolton described Chávez as “the first Latin American leader to fill the shoes of the great Juan Perón,” as a non-Marxist leftist who sought Latin American unity against U.S. imperialism (and who referred to himself as “really a Peronist” in a 2008 meeting with Argentine President Kirchner). Bolton emphasized Chávez’s intellectual debt to Peronist and antisemite Norberto Ceresole, who was for a time Chávez’s close advisor and who as recently as 2006 Chávez described as a “great friend” and “an intellectual deserving great respect.” “The influence certainly endured through Ceresole’s ideas on geopolitics [such as physical integration in Latin America], his opposition to Zionism and the influences of Judaism, and his conception of a civil-military state.”

Bolton also highlighted the Chávez-Dugin connection:

“In opposing the USA and globalization Chávez countered with an alternative that accorded with a growing body of political and academic opinion in Russia, based on ‘Eurasianism’ and the ‘Fourth Political Theory,’ the most well-known exponent of this in Russia being Professor Alexander Dugin of the Center for Conservative Studies, Moscow State University. The theory is broadly advocated by President Putin, and Chávez sought a close relationship with Russia as the axis for a global reorganization based on geopolitical blocs and alliances or what Dugin calls ‘vectors.’” In 2010, “Putin visited Venezuela to sign an energy accord. Chávez, who visited Russia many times, stated of the Putin visit: ‘We’re forging a new multipolar world and Russia plays a big part in that process.’”

Bolton’s conclusion emphasized Venezuela’s importance for the future of left-right alliance-building:

“Venezuela stands at the crossroads. The Bolivarian regime provides the nexus for the Latin American bloc that is forming in alliance with Russia and Iran against the ‘new world order.’ Its demise is crucial to the recapture of Latin America for the plutocrats and globalists and will delight World Zionism. Chávez was the pivotal figure in this new bloc. Will Venezuela produce another great leader, or will another arise from elsewhere in Latin America? Or will the region revert to colonial status behind the façade of ‘democracy,’ ‘human rights,’ and the market economy that is regarded as their necessary pillar?”

A direct counter to Bolton’s approach came from white nationalist Colin Liddell at AlternativeRight.com:

“It seems, though no one told anyone else about this, that there exists a Grand Invisible Alliance that will ultimately save us from our common enemy. This enemy is apparently the evil globalist clique that is bent on turning our planet into a multicultural materialistic Orwellian-Huxleyian hellhole, etc. etc. Although this enemy may or may not exist in the form speculated, I have serious reservations about the existence of this supposed Grand Alliance, of which the burly mulatto populist strongman of Venezuela was a leading light – along with Fidel Castro, President ‘I’m a Dinner Jacket’ of Iran, the ghost of Muammar Gaddafi, and Bigfoot.”

Liddell traced this alliance-building strategy to Alexander Dugin’s Eurasian theory, which he dismissed as “nothing more than a rehash of Soviet/Russian Imperialism and its Machiavellian tendency to seek strange bedfellows in any tent, mud hut, or igloo on the planet.” Liddell concluded, “An ally, remember, is someone who acts in concert with you and makes sacrifices for you. Chavez was none of these things; in fact, quite the reverse. A leader who redistributed wealth to the less-White sector of his nation’s population and is mourned by the ANC, is hardly a fitting coffin-fellow for White Nationalists.”

The disagreement between Liddell and Bolton represents an important strategic choice for far rightists. Anticommunism and racial animosity have historically discouraged many rightists from even considering an alliance with leftists, and these barriers remain strong. At the same time, European New Right and national bolshevist influence have been growing in recent years among U.S. and other English-speaking fascists, and are cross-pollinating with other rightist doctrines. This is a dangerous development that could strengthen the right’s ability to present itself as the main insurgent challenge to the existing order. Leftists — whatever we think of Hugo Chávez and his impact on Venezuela — would do well to pay close attention.

                    *                    *                    *

Note on Chávez and antisemitism
Many Jew-hating far rightists believe that Hugo Chávez was a fellow antisemite. In this, ironically, they rely largely on accusations against him by some mainstream Jewish groups. But many of these accusations are based on wrongly equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism or, in some cases, distorting Chávez’s public statements, as Chávez defenders on the left and even Venezuela's Jewish community leaders have pointed out. So far, I have not seen clear evidence that Chávez himself intentionally attacked or scapegoated Jews. However, some of Chávez’s supporters and close associates, such as Ceresole, have certainly done so, and Chávez (as far as I can determine) failed to criticize such bigotry from within his movement. He also used rhetoric that trivialized antisemitism (for example, equating Israel with Hitler) and — intentionally or unintentionally — played into anti-Jewish stereotypes and myths (for example, claiming without providing evidence that Israel was secretly bankrolling the Venezuelan opposition). For useful but flawed discussions of this issue, see Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez’s “United by Hate” and “A Necessary Critique,” and Max Ajl’s rebuttal.

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North American Anti-fascist speaking tour by Greek Antifa

Several Greek anti-fascists are in the middle of a speaking tour of North American cities. For the schedule, information about the speakers, and other details, go to antifaevents.wordpress.com.

The following is excerpted from the flyer for the March 10 event in Detroit:

"Fascism in Greece
As has been well documented in the media, the nation of Greece is in the throes of an economic
meltdown.  Austerity measures aimed at paying off an astronomical debt load have plunged the
economy into a death spiral, and sparked nationwide protests and strikes.  Unemployment is at 27
percent and climbing.

Much as the Nazis arose in Weimar Germany by exploiting similar economic conditions, Golden Dawn, an avowedly fascist political party, has been rapidly gaining power in Greece.  Once an
unimportant fringe group, Golden Dawn captured seven percent of the seats in parliament in the
most recent election.  Armed with government funding and the tacit cooperation of the police (many
of whom are Golden Dawn members), fascists have adopted a strategy of terrorizing Greece's
immigrant population while offering rudimentary social services restricted to Greek  citizens.

Ordinary Greeks are mobilizing to prevent the fascist takeover of their country.  Neighborhood
assemblies, immigrant solidarity groups, labor unions and other civil society organizations are
resisting both Golden Dawn and the destructive government policies that created the economic
collapse.  Greek activists Sofia Papagiannaki, Thanasis Xirotsopanos and Vangelis Nanos are here
to speak about fascism and resistance in their country."

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Rape, the state, and the far right in India

The December 16, 2012 gang rape/murder of a female student on a Delhi bus helped spark a major upsurge in anti-rape activism across India. This activism has continued despite a harsh police crackdown and has targeted not only India's epidemic of sexual violence against women but also, to a more limited extent, the entrenched patriarchal beliefs, practices, and institutions that foster it. Some critics, such as Soma Marik of the Forum Against Oppression of Women, Calcutta, have also highlighted the ways that both the state and the Hindu nationalist far right in India use rape as a weapon against specific groups of women. That's what I want to focus on in this post.

Writing some eight months before the recent anti-rape protests, Kavita Krishnan, national secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association (which is affiliated with the maoist CPI[ML]), argued that rape must be seen as "part of a larger web of violence and subjugation of women" and "we need to assert the nature of rape as a crime of power rather than a crime against innocence, chastity, or property" [i.e., women as sexual property of someone else]. She also pointed out that "safety" for women "is often tied up with the patriarchal ideology of masculine guardianship" and typically means restrictions on women's freedom of movement, although most rapes are committed by family members, friends, and neighbors -- not by strangers. Although the details vary, most of Krishnan's basic points apply not just to India but also to the United States and other patriarchal societies.

While emphasizing that "rape and other forms of sexual violence are an assertion of patriarchal dominance and power," Krishan also noted that "other centres of power -- caste, religion, and State -- also draw upon this form of patriarchal violence to assert their own dominance, and so we have rapes as part of caste and communal violence, and custodial rapes by police or army."

The Indian state is a major perpetrator of rape. In recent decades, Indian security forces have used rape extensively as part of counterinsurgency operations in regions such as Kashmir. A 1993 report by Asia Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, entitled "Rape in Kashmir: A Crime of War," found that "the use of rape [by Indian army and paramilitary forces] is common and routinely goes unpunished" (p. 3). The main targets have been women civilians who are suspected of sympathizing with the insurgents. In nearly all such cases, the government has rejected the evidence and tried to discredit the accusers, for example regarding the 1991 Kunan Poshpora incident, in which soldiers reportedly gang-raped at least 53 women in the Kashmiri village of Kunan Poshpora. In 2005, according to Wikileaks, almost one-fourth of the 1,296 Kashmiri detainees interviewed by the International Committee of the Red Cross said they had been sexually abused by Indian security forces (out of a total of 681 who reported some form of torture).

Looking more broadly, the following passage from the AW/PHR Kashmir report probably describes the situation today as well as it did in 1993:

"Rape by Indian police is common throughout India; the victims are generally poor women and those from vulnerable low-caste and tribal minority groups. In some cases, women are taken into custody as suspects in petty crime or on more serious charges; in others, women are detained as hostages for relatives wanted in criminal or political cases; in still others, women are detained simply so that the police can extort a bribe to secure their release. In all of these cases, women in the custody of security forces are at risk of rape. Rape has also been widely reported during counter-insurgency operations elsewhere in India, particularly in Assam and other areas of conflict in northeastern India. In both conflict and non-conflict situations, the central element of rape by the security forces is power. Soldiers and police use rape as a weapon: to punish, intimidate, coerce, humiliate and degrade" (p. 3).

The Asian Center for Human Rights has documented 45 cases of Indian women being raped by police officers while in custody between 2002 and 2010, according to Jason Overdorf in the Global Post. Given that rape is heavily under-reported even when the police are not involved, the real figure may be much higher.

Rape is commonly perpetrated not only by soldiers and police officers, but also by members of India's political class itself. According to the watchdog group National Election Watch (as cited by Overdorf), over the past five years 260 candidates from all the major political parties in India have faced charges for rape, sexual harassment, or other crimes against women. Two current members of the national parliament and six members of state legislatures are facing rape charges.

India's far right Hindu nationalist movement promotes rape in ways that are closely bound up with the movement's anti-Muslim politics and dream of a culturally pure hierarchical society. Hindu nationalists demand Hindu cultural and political dominance of India and have perpetrated some of the most horrific mass violence of recent decades, including the torture and murder of thousands of Muslims. The movement includes India's largest opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as well as the country's biggest labor union, biggest student organization, and many other groups. Most of these groups are part of a network centered on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an all-male cadre organization that aims to reshape Indian society along authoritarian corporatist lines. (See my "Hindu nationalism: an annotated bibliography of online resources.")

During the recent public outcry about rape, the BJP called for the death penalty in many rape cases while some of its leaders trivialized rape or engaged in victim-blaming. A more sophisticated response came from Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist political party in Maharashtra state, which handed out knives to thousands of women in Mumbai for self-defense, to show that "women are empowered and they can take care of themselves." Like the fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece offering self-defense classes for women, Shiv Sena's "symbolic gesture" (as they called it) appropriated an element of feminist politics in the service of a violent ethnic-chauvinist program.

But Shiv Sena's progressive-sounding response was unusual among Hindu nationalists, and it's probably no coincidence that Shiv Sena is the only major Hindu nationalist organization in India not affiliated with the RSS. By contrast, RSS head Mohan Bhagwat, who is arguably the most influential Hindu nationalist in the world, blamed rape on the decline of traditional patriarchal relations, as quoted by Devika Narayan:

"A husband and wife are involved in a contract under which the husband has said that you should take care of my house and I will take care of all your needs. I will keep you safe. So, the husband follows the contract terms. Till the time, the wife follows the contract, the husband stays with her, if the wife violates the contract, he can disown her. Crimes against women happening in urban India are shameful. But such crimes won't happen in Bharat [roughly: idealized traditional Hindu society] or the rural areas of the country. You go to villages and forests of the country and there will be no such incidents of gang-rape or sex crimes. Besides new legislation, Indian ethos and attitude towards women should be revisited in the context of ancient Indian values. Where Bharat becomes 'India' with the influence of western culture, these types of incidents happen."

Many critics, such as Narayan, have pointed out the utter fallacy of Bhagwat's claim that rape does not happen in traditional Indian villages, and have argued that sexual violence against women is in fact integral to the kind of patriarchal traditionalism that Bhagwat and his followers glorify. Yet Bhagwat's view was echoed by Ashok Singhal, of the Vishad Hindu Parishad (VHP), an RSS-affiliated cultural organization. Singhal claimed that the rise of sexual assault on women reflected the growth of a western lifestyle in Indian cities. "This western model is alarming. What is happening is we have imbibed the US. We have lost all the values we had in cities," notably virginity.

The Hindu nationalist movement doesn't just rationalize or hide rape -- it has actively promoted it on a large scale. Rape and other violence against women and girls have been central to a number of the anti-Muslim pogroms that Hindu nationalist groups have fomented or organized over the past twenty-plus years. The largest and most horrific example was the month-long Gujarat pogrom of 2002, when Hindu nationalist mobs killed at least 790 and probably more than 2,000 Muslims. Many women were raped, tortured, and then hacked to death or burned alive.

In an important analysis entitled "The Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra," historian Tanika Sarkar highlights three aspects of the Gujarat pogrom: "One, the woman's body was a site of almost inexhaustible violence, with infinitely plural and innovative forms of torture. Second, their sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery. Third, their children, born and unborn, shared the attacks and were killed before their eyes." The focus of this violence, Sarkar argues, reflected Hindu nationalists' fears of the supposedly super-fertile Muslim woman as well as "a more virile Muslim male body that lures away Hindu girls."

Sarkar also emphasizes that the pogrom followed "months of systematic planning," such as compiling lists of Muslim addresses, and pointed to Hindu nationalists' extensive "penetration of state and grass roots institutions -- from police to hospitals" in Gujarat. The Gujarat state government was controlled by the BJP, and state organs protected and sometimes actively participated in the pogrom. Narendra Modi, Gujarat chief minister and a leader within both the BJP and RSS, rode the pogrom's success to victory in the state elections a few months later, and is still in power today.

Both the Indian state and the Hindu nationalist movement have used rape to terrorize and control specific groups of women. But Hindu nationalism has gone much further -- both in its level of cruelty and in its use of rape to mobilize and build up supporters. As the International Initiative for Justice in Gujarat declared in its interim report about the 2002 pogrom, "We find chillingly unique the incitement to sexual violence as a means of proving the masculinity of the 'Hindu' man, as reflected in the political propaganda of the forces of Hindutva [Hindu nationalism] prior to, during and after the violence in February/March 2002..." (See also the Initiative's full 197-page report, "Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat.")

Yet the same report also noted, "The use of systematic rape and sexual violence as a strategy for terrorizing and brutalizing women in conflict situations echoes experiences of women in Bangladesh in 1971, and in countries such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Algeria. In Gujarat, as in all these other countries, women have been targeted as members of the 'other' community, as symbols of the community's honor and as the ones who sustain the community and reproduce the next generation. This has become an all too common aspect of larger political projects of genocide, crimes against humanity and subjugation."

All of these political projects feed on and feed back into the larger, global system of male power and violence against women -- violence that is often less visible and less "newsworthy" than what happened on that Delhi bus.

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A call for international solidarity: with Greek anti-fascism

From the Organizing Committee of the “19 January – Athens Antifascist City” (athensantifa19jan.wordpress.com):

"We appeal to the antifascists who have been alerted by the rise of the neonazi Golden Dawn and to those who stand in solidarity with the greek people. Our call for international solidarity has now grown into an international antifascist movement.

Demos outside greek embassies and consulates are now being organised in London (UK), Dublin and Derry (Ireland), Barcelona and Ossona (Catalunya), Lyon (France), Tampere (Finland), Chicago and New York (USA) and news for initiatives in other countries are streaming in.

We ask for more demos in solidarity with the greek movement, that is preparing for a big show of strength in Syntagma Square on the 19th of January. It is not just an international affair, it is part of a concerted effort to build a movement that will target rising fascism and racism in Europe and in the whole world.

We ask you:

1) to contact us and give us details for your activities on the day, through facebook, twitter or email: antiracismfascism@yahoo.gr

2) to send us photos and videos of support, holding plackards, stating your solidarity.

3) to send us statements of support that will be read from the platform the day of the demo and concert in Syntagma.

4) to take photos from your solidarity events and send it to us, in order to publicise the size and breadth of our movement."

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Red Skies at Night: new revolutionary journal

"Red Skies at Night is intended as a humble and limited contribution to the project of building a revolutionary left that can think and write as well as act and fight. We are interested in being one tool in developing a revolutionary communist pole by building comradely dialogue and debate between class struggle anarchists, anti-state communists, autonomist marxists, revolutionary feminists, critical leninists, and others about the questions facing us."

Red Skies at Night expects to print their first issue in about a month. They are looking for groups to help with distribution, submissions for Issue #2, and donations of funds to help keep the project afloat.

Check them out at 

www.redskiesatnight.weebly.com

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Tinley Park Five: Anti-fascists accept non-cooperating plea bargain

The Tinley Park Five are a group of anti-fascists who were arrested for allegedly assaulting a number of neo-nazi organizers in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, Illinois, on May 19, 2012. 

From the Tinley Park Five blog: 

"On January 4, 2013 all members of the Tinley Park Five accepted a non-cooperating plea bargain in which they each plead guilty to three felony counts of Armed Violence in exchange for “lenient” sentences and the guarantee of ‘day-for-day’ good behavior. Jason Sutherlin was sentenced to 6 years. Cody Lee Sutherlin and Dylan Sutherlin were sentenced to 5 years. Alex Stuck and John Tucker were sentenced to 3 1/2 years due to their youth and complete lack of criminal history. Each will be placed upon two years of supervised release upon release from prison.

"Before the plea was accepted, the State offered the Tinley Park Five one last chance to betray their comrades in exchange for their freedom. What a waste of time! As anarchist and antifascists, the Tinley Park Five are no more capable of selling out the struggle than their broken system is capable of reforming itself! They laughed at the offer and bravely accepted their fate."

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For background information, see the Tinley Park Five blog's "News" page, with links to articles on several other websites.

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Feds + Corporate America versus the Occupy movement

This post was originally titled "FBI versus the Occupy movement" but has been retitled based on a reader's comment below.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) recently released federal documents showing that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) coordinated not only with local police but also with universities, banks, private security firms, and other corporate bodies to monitor, disrupt, and suppress the Occupy movement. The PCJF obtained these documents through Freedom of Information Act requests and has made them available online together with commentary. Many mainstream and leftist media outlets have picked up the story, for example Naomi Wolf at the Guardian, Dennis Bernstein at Consortium News, and David Lindorff at Counterpunch.

PCJF Executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard declared, "These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

The PCJF notes that "FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country," and that the FBI "treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the agency acknowledges that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did 'not condone the use of violence' at occupy protests." At the same time, the FBI learned of a plan to assassinate Occupy movement leaders in Houston (which fortunately was not carried out), but the agency arrested nobody for this and did not warn those targeted.

In an interview with reporter Dennis Bernstein, Verheyden-Hilliard also highlighted the fact that this operation took place under President Obama. "People think if you shift the Democratic, Republican administration that somehow these abuses are not going to occur. But, of course, this is full license to have this type of activity going on under the Obama administration."

The operation involved FBI offices in at least ten states, from New York to Colorado and from Alaska to Florida, as well as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the DHS's fusion centers, and the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and Campus Liaison Program. PCJF reports, "The Memphis FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force met to discuss 'domestic terrorism' threats, including 'Aryan Nations, Occupy Wall Street, and Anonymous.'"

The released federal documents include a report by the little-known Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), which describes itself as "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector." A "handling notice" in the report warns that its contents are "meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…"

The DSAC, according to its website, was formed in 2005 and includes more than 200 companies, accounting for over one-third of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The DSAC's Leadership Board represents 29 major companies such as Walmart, General Electric, Walt Disney, Merck, United Airlines, and ConocoPhillips.  Over one-third of the board's members are from firms in banking and financial services -- the capitalist sector most directly targeted by the Occupy movement -- such as Citigroup, Barclays, and Ernst & Young.

In my previous post, I warned that counterinsurgency operations against the paramilitary far right can and will be used to bolster ruling-class power against the rest of us. The federal government's campaign against the Occupy movement underscores this point. Like the anti-rightist operations envisioned by the New America Foundation and other liberal think tanks, the anti-Occupy operation involved the same network of security agencies, the same framework of "fighting terrorism," and the same preemptive, interventionist approach. Above all, the campaign makes clear that -- whether directed against the left or the right -- the security services' fundamental role is to protect the capitalist elite.

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Liberal counterinsurgency versus the paramilitary right

In this article I'm going to discuss U.S. security forces' changing response to the paramilitary right. I will argue the following:

1. Although U.S. security forces have an important history of collaborating with or even sponsoring right-wing paramilitary groups in the United States, the past three decades have seen the rise of an insurgent far right that rejects the legitimacy of the U.S. government and has sometimes taken up arms against it.
2. Security forces have periodically cracked down on this insurgent right when it has engaged in open warfare against the state apparatus, but to a large extent their approach to the insurgent right has been reactive, inconsistent, and counterproductive from the standpoint of maintaining social control.
3. A liberal faction of the ruling class is promoting a smarter approach to combating the paramilitary right, one that is both more preemptive and more sensitive to rightist fears of state repression. This approach, which has been advanced most fully by the New America Foundation, represents an application of counterinsurgency strategy, a theory of repression that addresses popular grievances in order to bolster elite power more effectively.

Federal agencies have a long history of covert involvement in far right paramilitary organizations, but the nature of this involvement has changed dramatically as the politics of the U.S. far right have changed. During the 1960s, the FBI often refused to intervene as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists physically attacked civil right workers. Between 1969 and 1972, U.S. Army's Military Intelligence and the Chicago Police jointly operated a far right group called the League of Justice, which burglarized, bugged, and vandalized socialist and anti-war groups. In 1971-1972, the FBI sponsored the paramilitary Secret Army Organization, which targeted anti-war leftists with spying, vandalism, mail theft, assassination plots, shootings, and bombings. The SAO was based in San Diego and claimed branches in eleven states. Most notoriously, in 1979 an FBI informer and an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms helped to plan the Greensboro massacre, in which a coalition of Klansmen and neonazis murdered five members of the Communist Workers Party. (See Donner, Protectors of Privilege, pp. 146-50; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, pp. 181-2.)

Starting in the early 1980s, the political center of gravity within the far right shifted from a traditional focus on targeting leftists and people of color to a fascist ideology that identified the "Zionist Occupation Government" in Washington as the main enemy. Several Klan leaders re-emerged as neonazis, such as Tom Metzger, who founded White Aryan Resistance, and Louis Beam, who joined Aryan Nations and pioneered the concept of "leaderless resistance." Some far rightists called for a White revolution to overthrow the U.S. government, as portrayed in William Pierce's 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries, while others envisioned an independent Aryan enclave in the Pacific Northwest. In 1983, members of several far-right groups formed an underground paramilitary group known as The Order, which "declared war" on the U.S. government, robbed banks and armored cars, counterfeited money, assassinated Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, and engaged in armed combat with police. Other groups followed The Order's example.

The federal apparatus responded aggressively to this shift. Leonard Zeskind writes that "the Reagan administration's Justice Department…had previously demonstrated little interest in federal prosecutions of attacks by white supremacists on black people and other ordinary citizens," but The Order and related groups pushed them to respond more aggressively. "The FBI planted more confidential informants inside white supremacist groups, started tapping phones, and made arrests in a number of incipient criminal conspiracies" (Blood and Politics, pp. 145-6). By 1985, the federal government had killed The Order's leader in a shootout and sent most of its members to prison. Over the next few years, members of several other neonazi groups were arrested and prosecuted, although the biggest effort -- the 1988 Fort Smith trial of fourteen white supremacists on seditious conspiracy and other charges -- ended in acquittals.

Although many white supremacists rejected an underground strategy, the 1980s gave the movement a list of martyrs and cemented militant opposition to federal authority as an ideological pole on the far right. In the early 1990s, neonazis began to link up with hardline Christian rightists, libertarians, and Birchite anti-globalists in the germ of what would become the Patriot movement, the first U.S. mass movement since World War II in which fascist and non-fascist rightists worked together in coalition. Patriot groups did not necessarily embrace right-wing revolution or racial ideology, but they regarded the U.S. government as part of a plot by globalist elites to take away their freedom, and they advocated forming "citizen militias" to defend themselves against tyranny. Deadly and arguably murderous operations by federal officers fed the growth of the movement, especially the 1992 siege and arrest of white supremacist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (an operation that killed Weaver's wife and teenage son along with a U.S. marshal), and the April 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas (in which eighty members of the cult and four federal agents died).

By 1996 the Patriot movement included some 850 identified groups. An entire subculture, encompassing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of supporters, regarded the established state apparatus as evil and illegitimate. With tens of thousands of them organized in private armed units and a network of "common law courts" claiming to exercise government functions, the movement was creating a type of embryonic dual power in some areas. Although the majority of Patriot activists viewed this as a defensive stance, neonazis and others who advocated offensive actions against the state were a significant part of the mix.

At first, security forces did little to clamp down on the Patriot movement overtly. (Zeskind and others have pointed out that a predominantly black or brown movement spouting anti-government rhetoric and conducting paramilitary training would have been treated very differently.) But in April 1995, neonazi Timothy McVeigh and others blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, and Patriot militias were widely blamed for the attack. After that, the FBI pursued a wide-ranging crackdown. Here are a few examples from 1995-1998, drawn from a Patriot movement timeline compiled by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center, which works closely with the FBI:

• a tax protester arrested for placing a failed bomb behind the Reno, Nevada, IRS building
• three members of the Republic of Georgia militia charged with manufacturing shrapnel-packed bombs and training a team to assassinate politicians
• twelve members of the Arizona Viper Team arrested on federal conspiracy, weapons and explosives charges
• seven members of the Mountaineer Militia arrested in a plot to blow up the FBI's national fingerprint records center in West Virginia
• former Sons of Liberty and other tax protesters set fire to the IRS office in Colorado Springs
• eight members of a militia group arrested in connection with a plan to invade Fort Hood, Texas, and kill foreign troops mistakenly believed to be housed there
• three men, including one with ties to the separatist Republic of Texas, charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction after threatening President Clinton and other federal officials with biological weapons.

This crackdown contributed to the Patriot movement's collapse in the late 1990s. The movement remained stagnant for a decade, but has been growing fast again since President Obama's election in 2008 and is now believed to be larger than at its peak in the 1990s. Patriot movement groups continue to promote fears of a New World Order conspiracy and challenge the legitimacy of the existing state apparatus, and the movement continues to overlap with more hardline fascist currents.

The state apparatus seems to be conflicted about how to address the paramilitary right. Over the past decade, FBI reports have repeatedly identified right-wing violence as a serious threat, for example in 2004. In 2006, the FBI warned that neonazis were trying to infiltrate law enforcement agencies, and in 2007 they highlighted the threat from solo white supremacists (prefiguring, for example, Wade Michael Page's attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin earlier this year). But in 2009, when conservatives denounced the Department of Homeland Security for a report on the resurgence of "Rightwing Extremism," DHS repudiated the report and disbanded the unit that was studying non-Islamic domestic terrorism. Also in 2009, a report about the militia movement from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (one of the DHS-sponsored "fusion centers") met a similar fate.

Enter the New America Foundation, an elite-based think tank that addresses foreign policy, counterterrorism, and a range of other issues. In 2011 and 2012, their staffers and fellows warned in various media (such as a scholarly study, a panel presentation, and a heavily cited CNN op-ed) that home-grown "extremists" -- and especially rightists -- posed a terrorist threat as big as or bigger than Islamist groups. At the same time, NAF is critical of blundering government efforts that fuel the growth of the far right. In May 2012 they put out a detailed policy paper, by investigative journalist J.M. Berger, about an early 1990s undercover operation called PATCON, in which FBI agents created a dummy white supremacist group to gather intelligence about violent plots by far rightists within the budding Patriot movement. Among other criticisms, the policy paper argues that PATCON helped reinforce Patriot movement paranoia about government repression and agents provocateurs -- and compares this to the effect of scattershot police surveillance on American Muslim communities. In NAF's view, infiltration is still "an important tool," but it needs to be managed more responsibly and with more understanding of how it can damage targeted communities' "trust in government and willingness to cooperate with law enforcement" (p. 23). (Thanks to Nick Paretsky for pointing me to NAF's PATCON policy paper.)

To understand the significance of this report, a bit of background about the New America Foundation is important. First, NAF represents the liberal Eastern establishment wing of the ruling class. Almost two-thirds of the members of its board of directors hold positions in business (most frequently investments), while the rest are mostly academics or journalists. Over three-quarters of the directors hold Ivy League (mostly Harvard) degrees or work at an Ivy League university, and some forty percent of them are current or former members of the Council on Foreign Relations. NAF's board is chaired by Eric Schmidt (chair and former CEO of Google); other prominent board members include hedge fund manager Jonathan Soros (son of George Soros) and "end of history" political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Not surprisingly, some right-wing conspiracy theorists have pointed to NAF as a major node linking global capitalists, Marxist journalists, and the Obama administration in a sinister plot to manipulate public opinion.

Second, NAF is a strong proponent of counterinsurgency strategy (COIN). Kristian Williams has described COIN as a style of warfare that's characterized by "an emphasis on intelligence, security and peace-keeping operation, population control, propaganda, and efforts to gain the trust of the people" (p. 84). NAF argues that "the 'global war on terror' is better conceived as a global counterinsurgency campaign, which typically involves a 20% military approach and an 80% 'softer' approach that uses other levers and incentives." The foundation has promoted this shift with regard to Iraq, Pakistan, and -- perhaps most interestingly -- India: An October 2011 article by NAF's Sameer Lalwani criticized the Indian government's heavily militarized approach to combating the maoist Naxalite insurgency as "brutal and incomplete (by western standards)" and urged institutional overhauls to redress the "distribution of power controlled by the state and elite cadres." This approach is in the tradition of the CIA funding European social democrats in the 1950s in order to undercut support for Communism.

As many leftists have argued, COIN is as much a sophisticated approach to state repression as it is a form of warfare. Williams argues that "the two major developments in American policing since the 1960s -- militarization and community policing -- are actually two aspects of a domestic counterinsurgency program" (p. 90). In The New State Repression, Ken Lawrence highlighted security forces' shift from a reactive approach -- targeting groups after they've engaged in some kind of political protest -- to a preemptive approach, which assumes that even in periods of calm, opponents of the state are "out there plotting and organizing, so the police must go find them, infiltrate them, and plant provocateurs among them" (p. 6). Lawrence traced this "strategy of permanent repression" to the work of British counterinsurgency expert Frank Kitson in Kenya, northern Ireland, and elsewhere, which involved, for example, the creation of "pseudo gangs" as a tactic to confuse and weaken genuine opposition forces. Promoted and refined by both police and military forces in the U.S., domestic counterinsurgency strategy has also been embraced by the Canadian military, as noted by Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

Without using the term, NAF's PATCON policy paper invokes counterinsurgency strategy in several important ways. First, author J.M. Berger focuses on a specific FBI program from twenty years ago which -- unlike the bureau's better-known reactive measures -- took a preemptive, interventionist approach to the early Patriot movement, and that even created a pseudo-gang as part of this effort. In the Spring of 1991, FBI agents in Austin, Texas, created a phony neonazi organization called the Veterans Aryan Movement (VAM), which claimed to be following in The Order's footsteps: robbing banks and armored cars, stockpiling weapons, and building links with like-minded groups around the country. With this cover story, the VAM was well positioned to spy on genuine neonazis and other members of the Patriot movement that was just beginning to coalesce at this time. Officially, PATCON was supposed to investigate specific potential crimes, but in practice it was an open-ended intelligence-gathering operation. PATCON operatives reported lots of talk about violence by Patriot activists, but almost none of this information was used in prosecutions. At one point, PATCON operatives even withheld information from Army investigators about a theft of night vision goggles from Fort Hood, in order to protect their own operation. In July 1993 the FBI ended PATCON, ostensibly because it had failed to uncover actual criminal activity.

Also in line with counterinsurgency strategy, NAF's PATCON report emphasizes the need for security forces to bolster the state's legitimacy and, in Williams's words, "gain the trust of the people." The policy paper's full title is "PATCON: The FBI's Secret War Against the 'Patriot' Movement, and How Infiltration Tactics Relate to Radicalizing Influences." Berger, who first uncovered PATCON in 2007 as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests, describes how fear of infiltrators pervaded the Patriot movement during PATCON itself, and how public knowledge of the operation has fueled wide-ranging conspiracy theories about the federal government. (Although Berger's account is assuredly not the whole story, claims that PATCON included the Ruby Ridge and Waco operations and even the Oklahoma City bombing, or that it continued long after 1993, are unsubstantiated.)

Berger writes in the NAF policy paper, "The reality of the FBI's extensive infiltration of the Patriot movement helps reinforce a paranoid worldview in which the government becomes the perpetrator of crimes like the Oklahoma City bombing, thus exonerating true radical figures and providing a fresh (if usually false) grievance to fuel further radicalization" (p. 22). The report ends with a list of recommendations for assessing infiltration's "secondary effects" on targeted populations -- not to argue for abolishing police infiltration of political groups, but so that security forces can use the technique more carefully and effectively. (This emphasis on cultivating popular trust in government seems to reflect NAF's concern more than Berger's. It is lacking from Berger's other writings about PATCON, including his original 2007 report and his April 2012 article in Foreign Policy.)

Lastly, NAF's PATCON paper is concerned with improving infiltration techniques not only against rightists but against "potential extremists" more broadly. PATCON is presented as a case study of "the infiltration dilemma" alongside the NYPD's surveillance of Muslim communities in New York City. These two examples were paired more fully in a May 2012 NAF-sponsored panel on "Infiltration and Surveillance: Countering Homegrown Terrorism," in which Berger spoke about PATCON. Here the moderator asked panelists and audience members to set aside moral and legal issues and focus on the questions, when do infiltration techniques work and how well do they work?

The Council on Foreign Relations has also advanced some aspects of a counterinsurgency approach to the paramilitary right. A 2010 op-ed by CFR Fellow and counterterrorism analyst Lydia Khalil urged conservatives to stop minimizing "the serious and growing threat of homegrown right-wing extremism" and to identify rightist violence against government institutions as acts of terrorism. A 2011 CFR report by Jonathan McMasters on "Militant Extremists in the United States" argued the same points in more detail and advocated a preemptive, intelligence-gathering approach to counter rightist violence. Masters's report outlined the "domestic intelligence infrastructure" available to support such work, including the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security's Fusion Center program, and the widespread adoption of "intelligence-led policing" by local police departments. While noting civil liberties concerns, the report gave the last word to CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Richard Falkenrath, who advocates more "permissive" constraints on security forces. Neither Khalil nor McMasters addressed NAF's concern about the tension between gathering intelligence and cultivating popular support for the state, but in other ways the approaches are similar.

              *                  *                  *

From the standpoint of a ruling class trying to maintain social control, the New America Foundation's approach to rightist violence makes a lot of sense. If you are serious about combating "terrorism," then you need to deal with the homegrown paramilitary right, which has a persistent base of support and has made U.S. government institutions a target for some thirty years. Since paramilitary rightists may be organizing and planning even when they're not carrying out violent attacks, you want your security forces to get to know rightist networks from the inside instead of just reacting to the attacks after they happen. And given that heavy-handed police actions have repeatedly fueled widespread rightist fears about state repression, you need to take these fears into account if you want support for rightist paramilitary violence to shrink instead of grow.

Like many instances of counterinsurgency strategy, NAF's approach here is also well crafted to win backing from liberals and some leftists, who worry about the far right but also worry about police misconduct. In presenting the paramilitary right not just as a criminal network but as a political movement with real grievances, NAF is appropriating an argument that some opponents of the far right (including me) have been making for years. The following point by Kristian Williams applies to movements of the right as well as the left: "As a matter of realpolitik the authorities have to respond in some manner to popular demands; however, COIN allows them to do so in a way that at least preserves, and in the best case amplifies, their overall control. The purpose of counterinsurgency is to prevent any real shift in power" ("The other side of the COIN," p. 85).

We need to be clear that U.S. security forces exist ultimately to maintain ruling class control. They are not, and cannot be, defenders of democracy, and relying on them to combat supremacist movements is a dangerous mistake. While there is a long history of security forces using paramilitary rightists to carry out vigilante repression, there is also a long history of the U.S. government using fears of rightist violence to expand its powers of repression against everyone else. As Don Hamerquist has pointed out previously on Three Way Fight, "when did this country outlaw strikes, ban seditious organizing and speech, intern substantial populations in concentration camps, and develop a totalitarian mobilization of economic, social, and cultural resources for military goals? Obviously it was during WWII, the period of the official capitalist mobilization against fascism, barbarism and for 'civilization.'"

As Hamerquist argues, we need to "worry much more about the consequences of ruling class 'anti fascism,' than [about] ruling class propensities to impose fascism from above." Building on Walden Bello's warning that leftists need to combat not only neoliberalism but also "global social democracy" (an emerging ruling-class strategy that seeks to mitigate global inequality and environmental destruction in a technocratic capitalist framework), Hamerquist suggests that an authoritarian anti-fascism could become a lynchpin of global social democracy. "The fear of fascism will become the functional substitute for improved terms in the sale of labor power. And the likelihood is, I think, that there will be a fascism to fear." Nick Paretsky has already cited the New America Foundation as a prime example of ruling-class support for global social democracy. Now, in advocating a counterinsurgency response to the far right, NAF is taking this one step further.

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Report on Successful Minneapolis Antifa Action: Disruption of David Irving Speaking Event

The following report comes from some comrades in Minneapolis:

On November 16, 2012, David Irving, renowned Holocaust denier and Hitlerite disciple (though he prefers the phrase ‘controversial historian’) attempted to hold an event on his speaking tour, “Hitler and I,” at the Graves 601 Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. The Twin Cities, which has decades of successful antifascist and anti-racist organizing behind it, was ready for him. In a display of mass, disciplined, and coordinated action, we stood in defense of our fellow human beings.

Irving’s events have long been focused on four goals: the talks provide Irving with a venue at which to profit heavily from his work, both the books and movies he sells as well as from ticket sales for the event. Additionally, and of greater concern, these events legitimize fascism in the public eye, provide networking opportunities for local white supremacists and fascists, and provide infusions of cash to local fascist groups. The antifascists of Minneapolis and St. Paul recognize the real and present danger such events pose to our communities and loved ones, and organized to disrupt Irving’s event.

Having gotten past the lobby and up five floors of hotel elevators, we entered the room approximately 60 strong. While some antifascists videotaped attendees to help us identify local fascists, others seized the opportunity to destroy his books and dvds, depriving both him and his fascist sympathizers of much-needed funds for their violence and hatred.

Irving and his cronies are attempting to research members of the antifa crowd, posting their photos on his page, comparing to Facebook and other social and local media, and offering rewards. Their attempt to intimidate the people on the basis of their hateful property points out the common collusion of the fascists with law enforcement and the principle of capitalist profit. But not to worry: for the most part, their ‘intelligence’ is at the quality you’d expect of people often referred to as ‘boneheads,’ and has amused the local community, which long ago overcame its fear of fascists.

The photo below is from Irving's own site, and indicates the level of
disruption we achieved.

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Golden Dawn’s fascist ideology

Continuing Three Way Fight’s series on the Greek neonazi party Golden Dawn, in this post I offer a profile of Golden Dawn’s fascist ideology, based on online writings from the party and its affiliated organizations (Women’s Front, Youth Front, and Green Wing), which I have accessed using Google’s Translate function. Although some of the auto-translation results are garbled, many passages come through clearly and major points are often repeated in different ways, so I believe the following is reasonably accurate. (For Greek language sources, I have provided URLs in the “Sources” section below, rather than hyperlinks.)

Golden Dawn’s web offerings feature a familiar set of fascist ideological themes, including aggressive and expansionist nationalism, a vision of racial purity through purging alien groups and influences, a crude anti-elitism based on scapegoating Jews, patriarchal traditionalism, homophobia, closeness to nature, rejection of both capitalism and communism, and a call for a strong state role in the economy and society.

The party glorifies a militaristic approach to politics. GD’s Youth Front blog, for example, declares “The People’s Nationalism stands [for the] neglected Values of Honor, Duty, of ethics, of Blood, discipline, power of will and self-improvement for Life and finally the heroic lifestyle.” [1] And U.S. neonazi influences are evident. The Youth Front posted a glowing tribute to Robert Mathews, leader of The Order, who died in a 1984 shootout with U.S. federal agents. [2] The Women’s Front blog main page features a version of the “Fourteen Words” slogan coined by Order co-founder David Lane: “We must ensure the existence of our race and the future of our children!” [3]

Against globalization
Historian Roger Griffin has argued that fascist ideology centers on a vision of palingenesis, or collective rebirth out of a near-fatal crisis or decline. This fits Golden Dawn well, as the party’s name suggests. “Today the country is going through a deep crisis. [A] crisis of values and ethics. [A] crisis economic, cultural and national” – a crisis brought on mainly by globalization. “We do not believe in any globalization and believe that this is the way for the subjugation of all peoples of mankind in [the] global conspiracy that exists today.” [4] GD cites damaging effects of economic globalization including “the depopulation of the countryside, methodical destruction of agriculture, closure of sugar factories, textiles and dozens of other productive sectors related to agricultural production,” as well as the closing of hundreds of factories and decline of the shipping industry. Because “multinationals operate unchecked,” Greece has become dependent on imports for 80 percent of food consumed, and cheap imports “create fictitious and false needs.” [5]

GD also argues that “the system” has brought about “commercialization of the arts and cultural alienation of our people” through imposition of “outlandish American subculture” and (presumably worse) even Turkish culture. These changes are “aimed at discrediting the Greek civilization and [causing Greeks] to forget their manners, customs and traditions of our nation.” [5]

The part of globalization that upsets Golden Dawn the most is mass immigration, which they regard as an attack on Greece’s cultural and racial purity. “Millions of immigrants have invaded and continue to invade our country unchecked… so in a few years the Greeks [will be] a minority in our land…” The “international system of globalization” is forcing Greece “to become multinational and multicultural…. Crime is now rampant. Neglected infectious diseases reappear.” The party calls for immediately arresting and deporting “all illegal immigrants” and securing the country’s borders with antipersonnel mines. [5]

Anti-elitism and antisemitism
Golden Dawn says that Greece is “under occupation” – controlled by outside forces. “The local corrupt political establishment, hooked to power, executes all the commands of dependence and subordination selling out [the] country.” [5] According to GD, real power is held by global elites, who the party refers to more or less interchangeably as “multinationals,” “capitalists,” “plutocracy,” [6] “predatory banking system,” or “international moneylenders.” [7] These terms hint at the classic fascist distinction between “productive” industrial capital and “parasitic” finance capital, but from what I have seen Golden Dawn doesn’t seem to develop this argument clearly. In any case, at the center of the conspiracy is “the one and only ruler of nations: the world Jewry.” [8]

The GD Youth Front argues that Jews use globalization “to create people incapable, [with] no future, and to eventually destroy humanity. Materialism will prevail and any value will be erased permanently from the souls of men. The consumerism will reap people and any resistance will immediately [be] suppressed.” [1] On GD’s own website we are told that Zionism (Jewish nationalism) is trying “to exterminate the ‘eternal’ enemy (the Greeks)” and that the Jewish lobby in the U.S. is behind U.S. policy in the Eastern Mediterranean region, which aims at “segmentation of the Greek State and the disappearance of the Greek Nation.” Zionism, by accelerating globalization, “put the U.S. on a slippery road [of] confrontation… with all nations of the earth.” [9])

Beyond left and right
Golden Dawn claims that “the political theories of bourgeois democracy, liberalism, Marxism and capitalism …ultimately are creations of the Jews, who incite the New World Order.” [1] Thus political left and political right are two sides of the same coin. “The right and left solutions supposedly fight each other, [but] it’s just theater[:] two partners who perpetuate the dominance of cosmopolitan internationalist and anti-national and anti-people forces.” [6] GD rejects both capitalism and communism as “instruments of the Zionist world domination attempt.” [5] “The oligarchy of money and [Bolshevik] party tyranny [are] the same. Enemies of the Nation and the People.” [6] On one side, the free market is “only the vehicle [of] internationalist capital, banks and moneylenders.” Adam Smith’s “theory of the ‘invisible hand’” (the belief that free markets channel selfish behavior into social benefits) has been disproved, because on “one finger of the hand, [is a] shining gold ring with the star of David!”

On the other side, the idea of class struggle “is opposed to our vision for unity of the people in a community of shared blood. The Bolsheviks did not believe in the reality of race.” [10] “In contrast with the sweat and blood of the worker, the leftists [have] the privileged status of rottenness and corruption.” In addition, GD claims, the left actually aids the capitalists they claim to be fighting. “While we are nationalists, [we have] argued from the outset against the invasion of foreign workplaces, [while] the unfortunate Marxists rushed to side on the side of smuggled migrants, essentially serving the interests of capitalists…. Who was actually the beneficiary of the massive invasion of foreign manpower in our country? [It] was undoubtedly the class of capitalists…” [7]

Rebirth of the nation
Golden Dawn aims to restore the unity, purity, and independence of the Greek nation. This involves not only purging foreigners, getting rid of corrupt politicians, and freeing Greece from the control of international moneylenders. The “ultimate aim” is to form “a new society and a new type of man” through “a radical renewal of the obsolete and counterfeit social values.” To GD, “nationalism is the only absolute and true revolution because it seeks [a] new birth [of] ethical, spiritual, social and mental values.” [6]

Golden Dawn’s “policy line is that the national interest stands above anything else…” [4] This means subordinating the individual to the nation. “It is important to society, the whole community of the People, not the person…. A person can only be one person who completes the socialization through capability, as [a] harmonious composition of social and individual values. This superior type of person is a new kind of person who seeks to realize nationalism.” [6]

Golden Dawn nationalism celebrates Greek culture as an outgrowth of Greeks’ racial heritage. “Tradition, the History of Law of our Nation and the Idea of Hellenism are the supreme values through which we experience the world and approach the concept of culture.” “We believe in a new Greek culture based on [the] great and eternal tradition of our race. We believe in a Greek way of life against the vile and vulgar outlandish customs.” [4] “Our way is the way of natural law: because Nature herself stated that Greek blood will be the most complete, most crystallized and perfect expression of human culture!” [10] “Nobody can refute the eternal natural law, no one can refute the Law of Blood!” [7] In this framework, “racial mixing is unacceptable, and almost always leads to disorder, mental illness, due to the destructive combination of inherited mental gifts, resulting in the destruction of human nature.” [1]

Women's duty
Golden Dawn proclaims “the importance of family and the value of motherhood.” Having babies is women's duty to the nation, in that “More children means more Greek[s], more opportunities for progression and creativity, more power to prevent any foreign conspiracy.” [8] When the party advocates services for women, such as more childcare centers or “support for single mothers to prevent abortion,” it is mainly to support their function as mothers. Similarly, the head of Golden Dawn's Women's Front, Eugenia Christou, said, "We want women to be educated because those will nurture their children, who are the hope and future of this country." [11]

At the same time, GD argues that traditional roles are a source of strength and pride for Greek women, in contrast to global culture's consumerism, sexual exploitation, and racial dangers. Declaring that women should not be treated as a "pleasure vessel or object," Christou proclaimed, “In today’s society, dominated by the standards of prostitution, where the role of the mother has become obsolete and has been replaced by superficial values, Women of the Golden Dawn, dynamic and informed about the nature of the female sex, strongly assert a healthy standard.” [11] A GD Women's Front blog post about a women's self-defense course explains, "our members were taught how with simple movements [they] can protect themselves, as attacks against women by hordes of illegal immigrants have already become a daily occurrence…. The course is for Greeks only.” [12]

Nature and tradition
Like the original Nazi party before them, Golden Dawn emphasizes closeness to nature. The party has an environmentalist affiliate organization called Green Wing, whose blog features articles about recycling, organic farming, the blight of strip mall construction, and traditional ways of harvesting olives. [13] Green Wing frames such concerns in a nationalist context. “Man is and should be in direct contact with nature and the natural environment. The rupture of this bond [through] urbanization leads to a decline in[to] a vulgar way of life, this American, cosmopolitan lifestyle away from their ancestral homes and Nature.” [14]

Taking this a step further, Green Wing has also promoted eugenics. In 2007 their blog reprinted an article by J. Bauge-Prevost on “Biopolitics and Eugenics,” which argued that “The hereditary burdened people [such] as paranoid, the mentally retarded, the schizophrenic, epileptic, carriers of mutated genes, incurable alcoholics, advanced drug addicts and others should [be] sterilized.” The same article listed “homosexuality, the degenerate marriages, racial intermarriage, [and] wild consumerism” along with “the soiling of the environment” as threats to the white race. [15]

A strong state
Golden Dawn's website refers to their ideal of the purified and unified nation as “the People’s State” or “the secular state.” “For the People nationalism is not only a numerical unity of people but a qualitative synthesis of people with the same biological and spiritual heritage, which is the source of all creation and expresses its power in the People’s State[:] the only state that can express the people as an organic whole and spiritual living.” “In [the] secular state there is no social stratification based on income-economic classes. The popular classes are collaborating organic[ally], other groups of people with special abilities and production skills each. Just like in a living body. The different systems contribute harmoniously and in full cooperation for their survival.” [6]

The People’s or secular state will be “a fair state where everybody is equal before the law and where the law is respected by all.” [4] But this formal equality will allow true, natural inequality to express itself. “The People’s State of Nationalism [that] delivers social equality of opportunity is grounded in meritocracy and [does] not ignore the law of diversity and difference in nature. Respecting the spiritual, ethnic and racial inequality of men can build egalitarian society and law.” [6] Specifically, “the Armed Forces and the people of Culture and Education” represent “a natural aristocracy.” “In our state they will be the leaders and guides of the nation and not the cunning politicians or government-nouveau riche plutocrats.” [4] (The reference to the Armed Forces as natural leaders of Greece evokes the rightist military dictatorship of 1967-1974, whose former leaders helped inspire Nikolaos Michaloliakos to found the Golden Dawn party.)

Golden Dawn advocates a strong state role in the economy. “As there can be no strong economy without private initiative, so it can not exist without public sector. The strategic sectors of the economy [should be] controlled by the national state.” [5] Further, “the state should control private property so that it is not dangerous for the survival of the People or can manipulate [the People].” [6] They want to nationalize those banks that have received bailout funds and merge them into a strong national bank, whose income will be invested in domestic production to make Greece self-sufficient. They also want debt relief for low-income people and “specialized programs to support workers, Motherhood, vulnerable groups and youth.” But at the same time, Golden Dawn also calls for a “dramatic reduction of government expenditure,” to be achieved by reducing the salaries of MPs, expenditures on parliament and the presidency, and cutting funding for political parties and NGOs. [5]

Foreign policy
Golden Dawn calls for an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy. “We denounce the abandonment of Northern Epirus [part of Albania], the constant retreats in Cyprus, Macedonia, [and] Aegean Thrace...” [4] “Macedonia is our land since ancient Greek times…. Today, some parts of it remain outside the National Backbone and Greeks living there [are] methodically persecuted.” GD wants political autonomy for Northern Epirus and Greek citizenship for ethnic Greeks living there. They declare that “Cyprus is Greece” and call for the liberation of occupied Cyprus from Turkish rule. They also want to expand Greek territorial waters to 12 nautical miles,  “close the Turkish consulate and [deport] agents of Ankara.” [5]

              *         *         *

Golden Dawn’s website and blogs offer a relatively traditional form of fascist ideology, not that different from what was common in the 1920s and 1930s. Like many current-day fascists, GD has adapted old themes to fit new circumstances – thus the rejection of globalization and the scapegoating of immigrants. Golden Dawn has apparently not gone in for any of the more systematic reworkings of fascist ideology, such as Alain de Benoist’s ethno-pluralism, Julius Evola’s racial mysticism, Lyndon LaRouche’s esoteric conspiracy theories, or Troy Southgate’s national anarchism. GD is also not significantly influenced by national bolshevism, Strasserism, or any other avowedly anti-capitalist variants of fascism. Although one of their articles proclaims Golden Dawn’s “own real socialism,” all this amounts to is providing a Greek-only employment agency, emergency food distribution, and a blood bank. [7]

Golden Dawn advocates a rightist revolution against Greece’s established political and cultural order, but it bolsters capitalist economic power through its attacks on the left and large sections of the working class, and by channeling many people’s frustration and rage at the economic crisis into anti-immigrant bigotry and violence. I agree with clandestina that here “capitalism uses fascism, as it also has in the past,” but I’m skeptical of their claim that the rise of Golden Dawn (“a seemingly ‘militant’ fascist organization”) was simply part of a campaign manufactured by the ruling class. Yes, there are close ties between Golden Dawn and the police, but that doesn’t explain the genuine popular support for the party or address the question of possible divisions within the ruling class or the state.

Similarly, I agree with "9 Theses on the Golden Dawn..." that Golden Dawn stands with one foot “in increasing totalitarianism, mafia and violence” but not that its other foot is in “neoliberal rationalism.” Arguing that the free market is a tool of Jewish power and that “the state should control private property so that it is not dangerous for the survival of the People” is flatly at odds with neoliberalism. It seems more likely that Golden Dawn is aligned with sections of the Greek ruling class that are resisting neoliberal demands from the European Union and global capital.

SOURCES (titles translated from Greek):
[1] “Fighting the People’s Nationalism, fighting the natural order!” Resistance-Hellas, 5 January 2012, http://resistance-hellas.blogspot.com/2012/01/blog-post_05.html
[2] “Robert Jay Mathews,” Resistance-Hellas, 8 December 2011, http://resistance-hellas.blogspot.com/2011/12/robert-jay-mathews-16-1953-8-1984.html
[3] Golden Dawn Women’s Front main page, http://www.whitewomenfront.blogspot.com/
[4] “Front Youth,” Golden Dawn, http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/kinima/neolaia
[5] “Our positions,” Golden Dawn, http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/kinima/thesis
[6] “Identity,” Golden Dawn, http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/kinima
[7] E. Karakostas, “Our own real socialism!,” Golden Dawn, 14 October 2012, http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/enimerosi/view/o-dikos-mas-pragmatikos-sosialismos
[8] “Our Ideas,” Golden Dawn [former website], http://clubs.pathfinder.gr/kynaigeiros2/307050
[9] Apostle Karaiskos, “Zionism and Globalization,” Golden Dawn, 25 September 2012, http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/enimerosi/view/siwnismos-kai-pagkosmiopoihsh
[10] “The Meaning of Struggle,” Golden Dawn, 3 October 2012, http://www.xryshaygh.com/index.php/enimerosi/view/to-nohma-tou-agwnos
[11] “Women meeting fronts T.O. Upper Llosa,” Women’s Front, 2 August 2012, http://www.whitewomenfront.blogspot.com/2012/08/blog-post_2.html
[12] “Women’s Self Defense Lessons,” Women’s Front, 9 October 2012, http://www.whitewomenfront.blogspot.com/2012/10/blog-post_9.html
[13] Golden Dawn Green Wing, posts dated 21 March 2012, 14 April 2011, and 18 November 2011, http://www.oikologiko.blogspot.com/
[14] “Where Nature Meets Tradition,” Green Wing, 11 November 2011, http://www.oikologiko.blogspot.com/2011/11/blog-post.html
[15] “H Republic condemns innocent creatures lifelong torture,” Green Wing, 14 May 2007, http://oikologiko.blogspot.gr/2007/05/h.html. A critique and translation of this text is available on the Persona ParadoXia.blog at http://parvypalmou.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-neonazis-of-golden-dawn-chrysi-avgi.html

Golden Dawn-affiliated websites and blogs:
Golden Dawn (http://www.xryshaygh.com)
Youth Front (http://resistance-hellas.blogspot.com/)
Women’s Front (http://www.whitewomenfront.blogspot.com/)
Green Wing (http://www.oikologiko.blogspot.com/)

Related posts on Three Way Fight:
Golden Dawn violence and police collaboration, 12 October 2012
White nationalists praise Golden Dawn, 8 October 2012

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