November Bits and Bites: Left Overs

On the eve of our fourth birthday, we thought we would post a few items that we never got the chance to use, but which we still think our readers might like to see.

Call it spring cleaning. In the fall. And it is going to be disjointed as hell.

November Bits and Bites: The Return of the Trenerry

First, before the main course. One of the four tools who decided it would be fun to assault people while handing out Blood & Honour fliers in Edmonton was sentenced today:

Brown-skinned white supremacist gets probation for hateful words

By Tony Blais ,Edmonton Sun

First posted: Thursday, November 24, 2011 12:41 PM MS

A brown-skinned white supremacist who hurled racist slurs and sang Nazi songs at a Whyte Avenue bar was placed on probation for two years on Thursday.

Keith Virgil Decu, 32, was also ordered to perform 100 hours of community service and banned from going to the Whyte Avenue area after pleading guilty in Provincial Court to a reduced charge of causing a disturbance.

Crown prosecutor Ashley Finlayson told court it was an “abhorrent” crime, but said Decu played a much lesser role than his white supremacist co-accused in the racist rampage along Whyte Avenue on Feb. 12.

“It was clear he was a follower and not significantly involved, “ said Finlayson, although the prosecutor pointed out Decu “joined in” the Nazi songs being sung in the Strathcona Hotel bar and “called people niggers.”

Blood & Honour Canada News: David Goodman and James Brooks Sentenced

Paul Fromm (far left) pictured with Kyle McKee, Natalie S., Lee
Ebel, and other members/associates of Blood & Honour in Calgary

Hey, remember last March shortly before the epic failure (which, in Paulie's mind, makes it an unqualified success) that was Blood & Honour's "White Pride Day" march? Four members/associates of Blood & Honour in Edmonton had been handing out flyers promoting the event, after which they decided to have a little fun, by which we mean harassing people and attacking people, including women.

One, James Brooks, claimed the story was blown out of proportion and that he was just misunderstood:

Guilty by association is always the case. A horrible night in which I am now deemed something that I am not by a night of drunken stupidity by me and some newly acquainted individuals, of whom I decided to partake in drink with. Then we have the twisted facts and over embellished stories by the media and others there due to what was said.

Those responsible were caught. Today two, including Brooks, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to lengthy jail terms:

Two men connected to white supremacist group sent to jail for racist assaults in Edmonton

By Elise Stolte, Edmonton Journal October 1, 2011

EDMONTON — Two young men who handed out pamphlets for the white supremacist group Blood and Honour were sentenced Friday for their parts in a series of racially motivated assaults in Edmonton last February.

David Roger Goodman, 19, pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of criminal harassment, two counts of assault and causing a disturbance. He was sentenced to 15 months plus a year of probation to get counselling for a drinking problem.

James Andrew Brooks, 26, pleaded guilty in July to two counts of criminal harassment, causing a disturbance, assault and assault with a weapon. The court ordered a pre-sentence report, then Judge L.G. Anderson sentenced Brooks to 13 months in prison in a separate proceeding Friday.

Wow. Nice Job Todd Babiak. More on Edmonton Bonehead Assault Case.

We were sent a link on Facebook that posted a screenshot of a recent "Edmonton Journal" article regarding the alleged hate crime that occurred in Edmonton last month:


After a brief search, we found the article in question online. Suffice it to say Mr. Babiak does a fantastic job exposing the bankrupt views of these people:

Hate-crime incidents unlikely to build neo-Nazi popularityRacist philosophy can't do any better than remain on fringe 

By Todd Babiak, Edmonton Journal March 12, 2011 EDMONTON - This week, the Edmonton police hate crimes unit charged four men with assault and other offences. 

The men were distributing flyers for a white nationalist organization called Blood and Honour, which will hold a rally in Calgary later this month. 

 One of the accused, Keith Virgil Decu, claims to be a druid on a metaphysical chat group and lists German neo-pagan spirituality and cooking as interests and activities on his Facebook page. Another of the accused, James Brooks, is an artist. On his Facebook page he claims the charges stem from a "horrible night" of "drunken stupidity."  

Brooks, when we spoke on the phone this week said he was "a well-established artist." 

His tone was exceedingly formal. 

"I guess I'm someone you'd call a revolutionary, visionary artist. I like to push the boundaries. But my art has nothing to do with what happened that night." 

Brooks plays the lead role in a forthcoming low-budget film, Blue Eyed Devil, directed by Edson-based filmmaker kelvin Zawadiuk, about a violent neo-Nazi. 

"James is a really intelligent guy, really charismatic," Zawadiuk said. "He has a real screen presence and he was perfect for this, a skinhead character. It's an ode to the 1970s and 1980s exploitation movies, a character study, a man descending into madness. It's just meant to terrify you." 

Travis Watzenberg, from Blood and Honour, confirmed that Brooks and the other accused aren't members of his organization.  

"We're the figureheads and speakers of the movement," he wrote, in an e-mail, "the intellectual types if you will. Blood and Honour is more of a philosophical group. I don't think these guys were deliberately trying to make us look bad but they've succeeded in doing so." 

There is an online photograph of another of the accused, Jason Anderson, posing with a punching bag, a Nazi flag and two pitbulls, but other than that it sounds like those involved with white power would be more comfortable in a chandelier-lit salon, sipping Liebfraumilch, watching kinky art films and reading quotations from Mein Kampf than punching people outside nightclubs. 

Some historians find the roots of German nationalism during the Renaissance, when the dominant Italians mocked them for their lack of sophistication. Its eventual peak, as Nazism, was also a reaction to feelings of humiliation and inferiority after the First World War. Hitler was a frustrated artist, a romantic idealist, a loser with a desperate desire to win. 

Leaders of contemporary white nationalism have borrowed from Hitler's reading list -misreadings of Arthur de Gobineau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler -and they've expanded it to include their own versions of decline: immigration, multiculturalism, pluralism, demographic trends and race-mixing. These men are, like their spiritual leader, unhappy and underemployed, the authors of absurd, self-pitying terms like "reverse racism." 

The fact is, if you're a healthy white man and you can't succeed in Alberta, in 2011, there's only one person to blame. 

In Canada, we protect everyone's right to sit in salons and philosophize, to publish books and make movies about the superiority of the poor, picked-on white race. The philosophy will be as weak, as limiting and destructive as it ever was, as it is for all racial nationalists -white, black, Asian, aboriginal or Arab -for religious or even ideological purity. 

When hate remains in the realm of free expression, we're all better off for it. No one is going to rid the world of these ideas. They belong in the marketplace. The trouble is, no matter how inconvenient it may be for the classy intellectual neo-Nazis, it's an inherently violent philosophy. From time to time, young men with trouble finding girlfriends or jobs or hot cars are bound to start believing the speeches. 

"We do strongly advocate for freedom of speech," said Const. Ken Smith of the Edmonton police hate crimes unit. "We have no trouble with people having white nationalist views."
Despite the four men charged with hate crimes this week, Smith does not sound worried. 

"These guys clearly see this is not a popular societal opinion," he said. "It's a unique issue. You don't see one person, not one, standing up and saying, 'I know why he did that.' No one's with them." 

The revulsion we feel at seeing a swastika is more powerful than any arguments a white supremacist can make at a rally. Zawadiuk is on to something: we are terrified, and bewildered. It remains important for us to express, freely and respectfully, that we do have trouble with white nationalist views. 

tbabiak@edmontonjournal.com

While we really enjoyed his article (which seems to use some of what ARC had written as source material, at least in part), Bernie Miller (who is using the pseudonym "Travis Watzenberg" below) appears somewhat troubled by it:


Well, at least we enjoyed reading it.

Bonehead Admits Assault; Claim Self-defence

Well it looks like "14aryan88"has admitted that the incident involving four Edmonton boneheads assaulting bystanders unprovoked did in fact occur, despite claims by Brooks to the contrary. Except that he's saying that none of them have anything to do with Blood & Honour. And that they were attacked first and are the real victims:


Sorry if this rings just a little bit hollow to us. For example, where did said shovel come from? When we hit the town bar hopping, as a general rule we don't take garden tools with us.

It's at this point that we figure we should introduce our readers to "14aryan88" formerly of the White Nationalist Legion, but which was absorbed by Calgary's Blood & Honour movement:

Brooks Proclaims Innocence and More on Anderson

Guilty by association is always the case. A horrible night in which I am now deemed something that I am not by a night of drunken stupidity by me and some newly acquainted individuals, of whom I decided to partake in drink with. Then we have the twisted facts and over embellished stories by the media and others there due to what was said.

So says James Brooks, one of the four men accused of being involved in what has been described as a hate crime on February 12. Brooks evidently posted this on his Facebook profile yesterday and a mutual friend sent it to us.

Apparently it was all a big misunderstanding. Brooks was never a member of Blood & Honour. In fact, he barely knew any of the other three who were involved in the crime.

More on that later.

In the meantime, shall we introduce our readers to one of the other accused in the crime? Yes, I do believe we shall:

Accused Named In Suspected Edmonton Hate Crime: James Brooks One of the Accused

Not to long ago, we learned that the White Nationalist Legion, which seemed little more than an Internet group, had folded itself into the larger Blood & Honour movement as represented by the former Aryan Guard in Calgary. We knew a few of the names of the people involved, including Bernie Miller, Kosak, and James Brooks. And now, due to their gross stupidity, we suspect we now know a few more names now:

Crimes motivated by hate, police say

CBC News Posted: Mar 8, 2011 1:55 PM MT

The hate crimes unit of Edmonton Police has laid numerous charges against four men who allegedly assaulted two men and a woman and made hateful comments against lesbian or gay and non-white people on Whyte Avenue last month.

March 2011 Bits and Bites: The "Where Are They Now?" Edition

As we continue to creep up on March 19 when the planned bonehead rally may or may not occur (what, with McKee in jail and all) we thought we would take a moment to look back at one bonehead who had fallen off our radar for a while and another who we wish would fall into a hole.

That latter person is Richard Martin. Big, dumb, and ugly has managed to find his way to Calgary and is presumably living with his life partner Andrew Benson. That is until he inevitably screws up and ends up back behind bars himself.

Who Is Who in The Remains of the Aryan Guard and of W.E.B.

Considering the collapse of the Aryan Guard in late 2009, we thought we might begin our first article of 2010 with a very brief overview of who the key personalities are now and where they fit in to the two main groups in Calgary's changing bonehead scene.

First, the remnants of the Aryan Guard.

The year 2009 ended with the Aryan Guard in a bit of a free fall. The remaining founding member, Kyle McKee, was under arrest for attempted murder and weapons charges. The original members had left or had become inactive (such as Dallas Price and RN to name a few) leaving a few young teens left. There was also a schism which resulted in the formation of a splinter group going by the name Western European Bloodlines (W.E.B.).

Not long after the pipe bombing, the last remaining active Aryan Guard members (among them Bill Noble) disbanded the gang. However no sooner than the announcement that the Aryan Guard was no more was made, the decision was reversed and new leadership of the gang was made public. Bill Noble stated that he was no longer an Aryan Guard member, though he remains an administrator on the Aryan Guard forum. His "wife" Amy Fraser quit as forum administrator and asked for her account to be suspended. Two new administrators were introduced, "Aphrodite" and "Hans Krieger":


While he would like us to address him as Hans Krieger, we'd rather call him by the name his mama gave him:

Pictures

Selected pictures taken of the events on March 21:

Paul Fromm marching with neo-Nazis while sporting a smart, red man purse.