Monday, April 19, 2021

It the far-right world, calling things by their right names is taboo


The April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing has been called the work of a “crazed loner,” Timothy McVeigh, with the assistance of another “crackpot," Terry Nichols. That’s just the way the Clinton Justice Department, the media and Republicans preferred it to be. It didn’t matter that The Turner Diaries was McVeigh’s “blue print” for an anti-government race war, or that a heavily redacted FBI investigation revealed that McVeigh sought assistance from neo-Nazis like Andreas Strassmeir and others at the white supremacist and paramilitary compound Elohim City in Oklahoma. The FBI reportedly intended to raid the compound before the bombing, but did not; is that where McVeigh hid his explosive-laden truck? The connection between McVeigh and the compound is real, and an informer reported that McVeigh was regarded as a “hero” and a “martyr” to the “cause” there. And what “cause” is that—as if we don’t know?

And yet any connection between the residents of Elohim City and the bombing is considered merely a “conspiracy theory” by most commentators. Why does this country put its head in the sand when it comes to right-wing domestic terrorism? We are finding out that far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys had in fact forged plans before January 6 to carry out a violent assault on the Capitol building to overturn the election. Yet despite this, Democrats in the House of Representatives are suddenly getting “cold feet” in conducting an independent investigation of the events leading up to the insurrection, which of course suits Republican lawmakers who may have “unknowingly” had a “hand” in assisting in the provision of useful information to some of these people in regard to the layout of the building and the location of suitable targets.

Of course the U.S. isn’t the only country with its head in the sand in regard to the far-right threat to democracy. Take Germany, for example, where many neo-Nazis feel the country is being threatened by those of “impure” blood. Nazi symbolism is “technically” banned in Germany, but that hasn’t stopped people from engaging in a close approximation of it, which most Germans—including law enforcement—believe is nothing more than the actions of a few “crackpots” despite the fact that neo-Nazis have been blamed for a number of racially-inspired killings in the country. The one that has received the most attention was the Hanau mass shooting last year, where 11 people were killed by a far-right extremist named Tobias Rathjen, who believed that Germans who supported allowing immigrants into the country were also fair game for death—such as prominent politician Walter Lubcke, who was assassinated by a neo-Nazi named Stephan Ernst in 2019; Rathjen had been known to complain about how Donald Trump was “stealing” his political and racist eugenics slogans.

The concerning thing about the Hanau massacre was how law enforcement reflected the failure of the country to take the far-right terrorist threat seriously. Rathjen had actually contacted authorities before his attack with manifestos that clearly revealed him as the kind of psychologically-warped individual who was a likely candidate for mass violence, yet no inquiries into his activities was done. The BBC reported that the neo-Nazi cell National Socialist Underground has been under the law enforcement radar for decades, failing to “connect” nearly a dozen racially-inspired murders to the group over the years. Germany’s main opposition party is now the far-right Alternative for Germany, which makes little effort to hide its racialist, “pure-Aryan” vision; one of its most prominent leaders, Bjorn Hocke, has repeatedly made statements that recall Nazi propaganda of yore—including a call for “remigration,” forcing all non-Europeans out of the country.

Is this country taking the far-right threat any more seriously? Not when you have an unabashed fascist who attracted 74 million votes in the last election. There was some noise in the media last week when the usual suspects, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, announced that they were establishing a new “caucus” that was even further to the right than the Freedom Caucus—the “America First Caucus,” whose intent is to enshrine “Anglo-Saxon” culture into cement, and work to return the country to the way it “looked” back in the “founding fathers” time. For some Republicans this was a bridge too far—but only after the revelation of the “America First Caucus Platform,” which received widespread condemnation, and Greene and Gosar rather hypocritically disowned it. The “platform” contains the following nuggets:

Mail-in voting, long recognized as subject to fraud, has become normalized. We will work towards an end to mail-in voting, implementation of national voter ID and substantive investigations into mass voter fraud perpetrated during the 2020 election.

We will work to divest power from the federal government and give it back to the states and the people to restore the balance of federalism. We believe in, and fight for, the principles of federalism and decentralization of political power; the government closest to the people is the best equipped to handle their concerns. At the federal level, this means exposing deep state actors, shrinking the regulatory state, and eliminating thousands of regulations and indeed entire bureaucracies.

At this point we should point out an example of the massive hypocrisy of the right. These people had no trouble with Trump acting like a fascist dictator who was above any law so long as he imposed their far-right and racist agenda on the country; the right only cites “federalism” and “decentralization” when it comes to laws they don’t like.

The manifesto continues with ideas on “infrastructure” that come straight out of Nazi Germany:

The America First Caucus will work towards an infrastructure that reflects the architectural, engineering and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture, whereby public infrastructure must be utilitarian as well as stunningly, classically beautiful, befitting a world power and source of freedom.

For some of us that is only worthy of eye-rolls, but apparently there are people who are all for that. The manifesto goes on to call for an end to all foreign aid, supports a foreign isolationist policy, end all future pandemic responses that “harm” American freedoms, end global trade and bring all manufacturing “back home,” “conserve” the environment only for the purpose of best economic and recreational use, promotes destruction of the environment in search of fossil fuels while ending “wasteful” green energy projects, save for radioactive nuclear energy. The manifesto also promotes “education” that opposes “progressive indoctrination and enrichment of an out-of-control elite oligarchy.” But of course most of the manifesto’s breath is spent on immigration:

America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions. History has shown that societal trust and political unity are threatened when foreign citizens are imported en-masse into a country, particularly without institutional support for assimilation and an expansive welfare state to bail them out should they fail to contribute positively to the country. While certain economic and financial interest groups benefit immensely from mass immigration, legal as well as illegal, and the aggregate output of the country increases, the reality of large segments of our society as well as the long-term existential future of America as a unique country with a unique culture and a unique identity being put at unnecessary risk is something our leaders can afford to ignore no longer.

As such, America’s legal immigration system should be curtailed to those that can contribute not only economically, but have demonstrated respect for this nation’s culture and rule of law. America’s borders must be defended, and illegal immigration must be stopped without exception.

I suspect that people like Greene and Gosar actually do, deep down, support all these ideas, but coming right out with something like this that is clearly straight out of the most paranoid racist's fantasies may be something that the country isn’t quite ready to confess even exists. Sure, some politicians might disown such Nazi talk, but what about "the people," especially those who support Trump? Frankly, how dare these Nazis presume to know the “cultural” adaptability of nonwhites who come to this country, looking for the “promise” of equality and freedom, and finding instead bonehead beliefs like this. Especially in regard to people from Mexico and Central America, whose “culture” has been infused with American “culture” and consumerism. Let’s be honest: it’s about how “pretty” one looks.

We need to call things by their right names. There has been plenty of publicity about the Black Lives Matter movement and concerns about prejudice against Asians in regard to “blame” for the COVID-19 and the massage parlor shootings, but nobody ever talks about racism and prejudice against Hispanics—in fact making demeaning and dehumanizing claims about them is an “acceptable” way to talk about them. I have mentioned an incident at a place I worked briefly where a white male was telling ugly jokes about “Mexicans” in a mixed company of whites and blacks; when I told him his “jokes” were racist, he asserted that nobody there (other than me)  thought that what he was saying was racist.

That shows us a country—both right-wing and “liberals”—that can’t face the fact of their own darkness, and demonstrates that for many, their attitudes toward certain “ethnic” groups is little differentiated from how the Nazis viewed the Jews, and those who can’t accept the fact that it was one of their own (Stephen Miller) who is the one has made that an undeniable fact are simply those who are self-serving hypocrites.


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