Monday, June 30, 2008

Neo-Nazi Jailed for Terror, Pedophile Offences

Nazi Pedophile Martyn Gilleard
afp.google.com

LONDON (AFP) — A court on Wednesday ordered a 16 year jail term against a neo-Nazi who made nail bombs designed to attack black, South Asian and Jewish people.

A judge in Leeds told Martyn Gilleard, who was found guilty by a jury of terror offences Tuesday, that he believed he intended to cause "havoc" with the devices, which were found under a bed at his home. Police made the discovery in October last year when they went to the property in Goole, near Hull, as part of a child pornography inquiry.

There they found about 39,000 indecent images of children as well as large quantities of extreme right-wing literature from the violent far-right group Combat 18.

Military paraphernalia was discovered, such as ammunition, gunpowder, fuses, weapons, camouflage clothing, balaclavas, survival guides, the home-made bombs and a notebook with anti-Semitic and other racist views. A Nazi swastika and Combat 18 logo was also found on a high-visibility jacket at his workplace.

Sentencing him to 11 years for terrorism offences and five years for the child pornography charges, Judge John Milford said Gilleard may not have formulated any specific targets and appeared to be a "lone wolf".
But he added: "It's clear to me you have a deep-seated hatred of persons who are black, Asian and Jewish. You believe that the time has come to stop the talking and to engage in direct action against them.

"I'm satisfied that they were mosques or some other place where black or Asian people were gathered together or demonstrations by those of the left who were opposed to your white supremacist views."

Gilleard, 31, admitted he was a member of far-right groups, including the National Front, the British People's Party and the White Nationalist Party, and told police he sympathised with white supremacists.

But the forklift truck driver claimed the nail bombs were not intended for serious violence and he only made them because he was bored.

Police on Tuesday said Gilleard was an "extremely dangerous individual" and "a terrorist, a man prepared to use violence to divide, or perhaps even attack, our communities."

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hhomovS_Mg2VLGl1WgBTn8ZC7m1A

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Bankrolling Terror - The German Company Behind Mugabe's Cash

Allan Hall, Berlin
www.theage.com.au
June 28, 2008

" ... During the Nazi regime [Giesecke & Devrient's] directors had close links with the party, which landed it profitable contracts printing share certificates for such heavyweight firms as Daimler and Junkers, the latter of which used its wartime share issues to build planes to bomb Britain. In 1941, Heinrich Himmler visited the directors and asked them to print counterfeit money with which to flood Britain. ... "

A GERMAN firm that grew rich under the Nazis is underwriting the terror in Zimbabwe by printing the banknotes Robert Mugabe needs to pay for his machinery of repression.

The German firm Giesecke & Devrient, whose motto is "Virtue Through Work", agreed to do what numerous other banknote companies have refused - to print Zimbabwe's currency.

Gorden Moyo, of the opposition group Bulawayo Agenda, said: "It is the most important weapon in the terror arsenal of Robert Mugabe. Hundreds of thousands of new notes arrive weekly in Zimbabwe and pay the security forces which put down dissent."

The company, which has a turnover of a billion pounds a year, is discreet about its clients, wanting neither to confirm or deny its contract.

"With the production of notes we undertake a sovereign task and take no positions as regards to individual customers," said spokesman Heiko Witzke. He stressed that the company adheres to all laws relating to international business and pointed out that the EU has no commercial sanctions in place against Zimbabwe.

Giesecke & Devrient is the world's second-largest printer of banknotes, with offices in 53 countries. The company's office in Dulles, Virginia, supplies the US federal government with some of its banknote needs with a small contract worth around $A415,000 annually.

In Zimbabwe, the firm provides banknotes for half the nation's currency.

The government in Berlin said it had no legal grounds to impose sanctions on the company.

During the Nazi regime its directors had close links with the party, which landed it profitable contracts printing share certificates for such heavyweight firms as Daimler and Junkers, the latter of which used its wartime share issues to build planes to bomb Britain. In 1941, Heinrich Himmler visited the directors and asked them to print counterfeit money with which to flood Britain.

The company turned to Hermann Goering, air force chief and a sworn enemy of Himmler, for help; he intervened and Himmler enlisted the services of concentration camp prisoners to make the fake notes instead.

During World War II, Giesecke & Devrient used slave labour in its plants and in 2000 signed up to the fund launched by German industry to compensate forced labourers.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/bankrolling-terror--the-german-company-behind-dictators-cash-20080627-2y3y.html

'Old Lady' Stadium with a Nazi Past

afp.google.com
June 28, 2008

VIENNA (AFP) — It may be called rather fetchingly the 'Old Lady' but the stadium for Sunday's Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain has a dark past - it was formerly a site for Nazi propaganda and racial experiments.

The Ernst Happel stadium, originally named Prater stadium after the area of Vienna in which it is located, opened in 1931 for the second Workers' Olympiad after 23 months of construction.

A "utopia made of steel, glass and concrete," the sleek structure by German architect Otto Ernst Schweizer was then considered the most modern stadium in Europe.

Ernst Happel Stadium in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, known as the Prater Stadium (Praterstadion) prior to 1992. The stadium was renamed in honour of Ernst Happel following his death in 1992. It will host the Euro 2008 final on 29 June.
For more, see: http://www.worldsportsarenas.com/


The venue, which was home to the celebrated Austrian Wunderteam of the 1930s, originally held 60,000. It was later increased to 90,000 in the 1950s, before standing places were abolished.

Renovated in 1986, the stadium was renamed after legendary Austrian coach Ernst Happel in 1993 and is now a protected landmark. The "Old Lady," which underwent further restoration in preparation for the Euro at a cost of 36.9 million euros (58.2 million dollars), also served a more sinister purpose during the 1930s.

On May 1, 1934, marching schoolchildren paid tribute to Austro-fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss at the stadium, in a pompous Labour Day spectacle during which he proclaimed a new constitution, effectively turning Austria into an authoritarian state.

Four years later, on April 3, 1938, the stadium hosted the so-called Anschluss Spiel, or "annexation match," following Austria's occupation by Adolf Hitler's Germany on March 12. Staged by Nazi propagandists as a reconciliation between two parts of the Reich that belonged together, the game - one week before an April 10 referendum, in which Austrians would overwhelmingly vote to join the Third Reich - nevertheless saw Austria defeat Germany 2-0, before an array of Nazi high officials.

A year later on September 10-11, 1939, the stadium took on a new role as the German Gestapo locked up over 1,000 Jewish men there on the grounds that the prisons were full.

Josef Wastl, the then-director of the anthropology department at Vienna's Natural History Museum, examined some 440 detainees, taking measurements of their bodies and features for an "Anthropology of Jews" report, with photos, hair samples and plaster masks of their faces. The prisoners were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp on September 30 and business resumed as usual on the following day, as the stadium once again played host to a football game.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g-mM0I5e5s8ms5K_I-UEHra8AjAg

Bush Replaced REX84 With New Martial Law EO

Ted Twietmeyer
www.thepeoplesvoice.org

Once In Control - Martial Law Will Stay

In May 2007, Bush signed executive new orders NSDP51 and HSDP20 to replace REX84. The older order REX84 was an older directive to establish martial law in the event of a national emergency. Everything done in government is done for a reason, and these two new orders are no exception.

These new directives surprised and alarmed many real conservatives and true patriots at the time. These two orders established that the White House administration would take over all local governments under a national state of emergency, instead of Homeland Security.

In May 2007, The Washington Post apparently saw nothing wrong with it and placed the story back on page 13 (a fitting unlucky number for it), according to a CSPAN television interview with well known author and writer Jerome Corsi:
Page 13 of Washington Post from May 2007 reports that Bush claims he will run the "Shadow Government"

A contradiction appears to exist here. It cites a nuclear attack or a decapitating event in Washington as the reason for this, according to security analysts. If all the leaders and the administration in Washington are dead from a nuclear attack, who will be left to take over leading the nation under executive orders NSDP51 and HSPD20?Who would be left to sign the martial law orders? This implies that martial law must be activated BEFORE an attack takes place while the administration is out of town, which clearly implies a false-flag operation by traitors of the worst kind. The administration was in Florida on 9-11, too.

As of this writing in April 2008, we are coming up on a year since these two directives was written and signed. There have been many rumors of false-flag attacks being prepared for 2008. Are these repeated rumors designed to destroy the credibility of whistle blowers, so when the real event is announced by a whistle-blower no one will listen? This question doesn't appear to have been asked by anyone, but it must be. This many not be unlike the proverbial story of the boy who cried wolf. But in this case the wolf isn't coming - he's already inside. Now it's a question of when the wolf will make his move.

Hitler took power through completely legal means. Laws were previously established in plain view of the German people before he made his dictatorial power grab. We appear are witnessing the very same thing happening today some seventy years later. Apparently no one on Capitol Hill has learned a thing from history as it repeats itself. They also have clearly forgotten Bush's words in December 1999 - "This job would be a heck of a lot easier if this were a dictatorship...just so long as I'm the dictator”. He meant what he said, he's acting exactly like one and it's happening right now.

America's case for a repeat of a Hitler type power grab is clearly underway. First there was the infamous 1200 page Patriot Act that appeared a few days after 9-11 but almost no one on Capitol Hill took time to read, but almost everyone signed off on it anyway. Some on Capitol Hill have said that soldiers with machine guns were in the hallways on Capitol Hill the night the Patriot Act was signed, and many felt intimidated they must sign it without reading it. If true, then it implies that martial law may have already been declared in secret. Soldiers in hallways have no place on Capitol Hill in civilian government. Again, another sign of a dictatorship IN ACTION.

Technically, Congress could nullify the Patriot Act overnight by claiming it was signed under duress.

There have been other draconian follow-on homeland security type acts which simply were given less intimidating names. All are good examples of political BS at work.

Are NSDP51 and HSPD20 the last of them all? Most likely they are not. We have no idea how many other orders have been signed in secret, such as the torture orders which were leaked to the media. When confronted about the torture order, Bush simply has shrugged his shoulders about in total disregard and boldly claimed he signed off on it.

Like paving stones, all the pieces have come together in plain sight to pave the highway to a completely legal totalitarian police state, with all of America to be controlled by the White House. But is this legal? Bush has abused his executive order powers countless times like previous presidents. Executive orders were originally created by Congress to establish relatively harmless laws without the need for Congressional approval, such as new legal holidays. Congress can revoke that privilege at any time that is, up until the time when martial law is declared. Military troops will send Congress home making them powerless. At that point we shall have passed the point of no return. That is, if we haven't already.

A look at the history of numerous third world countries around the globe proves one common thread exists once the military takes control of its home country, it usually doesn't return control to civilian authorities once a war or threat to security is over. And today America has been reduced to the status of a third world country as well. American manufacturing is now almost totally defense industry-driven, which makes the return of government to civilian hands after war ends even less likely in the foreseeable future.

With a 100 year war boldly proclaimed by the administration, civilian control will never be returned to Congress - for at least FIVE GENERATIONS.

Martial law will require the full support of US military personnel to enforce it. Foreign troops are called into enforce martial law will still require both direct and indirect support from US military personnel, or a military-military civil war could ensue. But in the end, that may be what's needed to end the madness.

Here is the REAL acid test - will military personnel voluntarily turn America into a police state virtually overnight? Will these same military personnel do nothing while they watch their friends and loved ones crushed under absolute law and absolute terror? Bread lines and soup kitchens will return, but most likely only within the confines of American POW camps on American soil. This will force people to voluntarily turn themselves in to eat. Perhaps a "guns-for-food" type program will be established to encourage the American people to disarm themselves, even though the door kickers will be sent out anyway.

In military history it's well known that if you control the food supply, you control the people. Few people know that a secure area inside Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, AR has a sign declaring that secured area belongs to Homeland Security. Wal-Mart will become the food distributor for America under a rationing program. There is no other larger food store chain that can provide the required logistics that store can. In the 1990's, the military quietly did walk-throughs of all the major food store chains around the country taking notes. Somewhere there is a document detailing what the plans are. Certainly at the very least, it will entail securing ALL the grocery stores of any size. Small corner grocery stores will be cleaned out in a day or two, and would be of no interest to the military.

To believe such horrors could never happen in America, when it's now down on its knees already economically would be pure stupidity at the very least. Those in real estate swore for decades that real estate prices would always go up, too. Now these same people are panicking and on they are on their knees, too. So much for greed, as they have earned their reward. But what about innocent, hard working people that have always lived within their incomes? Do they deserve to suffer as well?

We live in a time when absolutely anything is possible. A military coup is now required to prevent declaration of martial law, kick the foreign troops out of America and restore true civilian government. Dangerous centralized dictatorship laws must also be nullified and this time, the lesson learned once and for all.

No civilian militia can restore American law at this point. They would only be labeled as terrorists and dealt with under new laws already in place. We have reached the point where restoration to civilian law and government checks/balances can only come from the inside.

But time is quickly running out.

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2008/04/17/p24815

April 17, 2008 By Ted Twietmeyer http://www.data4science.net | tedtw@frontiernet.net

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Visual Arts: Grappling with Fascism's Genetic Obsessions

" ... The current exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man," continues in this tradition. It grapples fearlessly with a gargantuan theme - the rise of fascism in Europe ... "

Grappling with fascism's genetic obsessions

A new National Gallery show explores the scientific seedbed in which many Nazi notions took root.

SARAH MILROY
Globe & Mail
June 14, 2008

OTTAWA -- The term "blockbuster" tends to give off a bad smell in critical circles, conjuring up visions of Monet water-lily umbrellas, coffee mugs à la Degas and crowds, crowds, crowds. In Canada, two men have been largely responsible for lifting us above this commercialized morass: Jean Clair, the Paris-based writer, curator and former director of the Musée National Picasso, and his Canadian colleague Pierre Théberge, now in his final year at the helm at Ottawa's National Gallery of Canada.

Their association goes back to 1967, when Jean Clair was in his salad days, serving briefly as a curator at the NGC. (His legal name is Gérard Régnier; he had created his nom de plume in 1961 for the publication of his first novel, as a genuflection to French filmmaker René Clair.) Théberge was also working at the gallery as a fledgling curator at the time, and the two shared a creative flair for showmanship unusual in the museum world.

As their careers ascended, so did the scale of their ambitions. When Théberge moved to the directorship of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1986, Jean Clair helped to orchestrate a number of its most memorable and meaty shows, among them The Twenties: Age of the Metropolis, and Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe. After Théberge's move to the NGC in 1998, the collaboration continued, with Jean Clair producing the 2004 exhibition The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown.

The current exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man," continues in this tradition. It grapples fearlessly with a gargantuan theme - the rise of fascism in Europe - with an eclectic reach and an amiable air of non-conformity. Like Jean Clair's earlier shows, it feels pulled from the oven before it's been fully baked - some of the themes are not clearly developed enough - but it leaves you with lots to think about and a sheaf of new images floating in your head. As an experiment in popular education, it must be counted a success. ...

Story continues

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/06/national-gallery-of-canada-exhibit.html

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Re Bush's Hugely Ironic Statement on Nazi Appeasement

Prescott Bush, Fritz Thyssen's investment partner in the Third Reich

From: "'Experience' isn't best criteria for picking leader"
By Ed Tant
Online Athens

... When Bush made headlines recently during a speech in Israel decrying the pre-World War II isolationism of "an American senator," Obama, senator for Illinois, was quick to fire back, linking Bush and McCain to the "failed policies of fearmongering" that have characterized the two Bush terms in the White House.

What needed to be said, though, was that the senator that Bush accused of "appeasement" was a member of Bush's own party, the Republican William Borah of Idaho, who in 1939 is said to have uttered the words, "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided," as Germany invaded Poland.

What also needed to be said was what writer Robert Parry outlined in a May 18 article at consortiumnews.com: "The Bush family went way beyond appeasement of Adolf Hitler to aiding and abetting the Nazis."

Parry's piece says, "Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany. That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Hitler declared war on the United States following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act." ...

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/052408/opinion_20080524001.shtml

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Auschwitz Heir William Farish Commissions a Statue

Also see: "Florida: Farish Family (Aushwitz Heirs) Inn Named to National Register of Historic Places"

Karen Kasper and the small version of her A.P. Indy sculpture

Inside Track: Tribute to a Champion
Photo: courtesy of Karen Kasper
By Claire Novak
June 10, 2008

In the back of the courtyard at the Lane’s End stallion barn, a new equine figure has been given permanent residence. It is a life-sized bronze of the farm’s greatest stallion, A.P. Indy, commissioned by co-breeder William S. Farish.

Sixteen years ago, the Belmont Stakes (gr. I) results issue of The Blood-Horse featured a cover shot of A.P. Indy in full stride as he bested 10 others under jockey Eddie Delahoussaye for trainer Neil Drysdale. The statue features the respected Thoroughbred in another pose—a stance exhibiting his conformation, reflecting his remarkable career as a stallion—as crafted by Lexington sculptress Karen Kasper. ...

http://www.bloodhorse.com/NOW/News/RacingNews/45663.aspx?w_id=BH45663

Friday, June 13, 2008

The Original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the Temple of Doom

As Indiana Jones returns to our screens, John Preston looks at the Nazi archaeologist who inspired Spielberg's hero, and finds a story more bizarre than anything the director could have dreamt of

www.telegraph.co.uk
22/05/2008

Very little is certain in the short life of Otto Rahn. But one of the few things one can with any confidence say about him is that he looked nothing like Harrison Ford. Yet Rahn, small and weasel-faced, with a hesitant, toothy smile and hair like a neatly contoured oil slick, undoubtedly served as inspiration for Ford's most famous role, Indiana Jones.

On joining the SS: 'A man has to eat. What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?'

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ's blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn's obsession ended up costing him his life.

However, Rahn is such a strange figure, and his story so bizarre, that simply seeing him as the unlikely progenitor of Indiana Jones is to do him a disservice. Here was a man who entered into a terrible Faustian pact: he was given every resource imaginable to realise his dream. There was just one catch: in return, he had to find something that - if it ever existed - had not been seen for almost 2,000 years.

What we can say for sure is that Rahn was born in 1904 and at an early age became fascinated with the Holy Grail. At university he was inspired by the example of another German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann. Largely as a result of immersing himself in the Iliad, Schliemann had found what he believed to be the ruins of Troy on the western coast of Turkey.

Rahn decided that he was going to go one better: he would use the 13th-century epic Parsifal as his guide to finding the Holy Grail. Why did he think Parsifal would lead him to his goal? This is a tricky one - and, as with anything to do with the Holy Grail, one should never underestimate the power of wishful thinking.

Otto Rahn

But Rahn was also a serious scholar and the more he pored over Parsifal, the more he became convinced that the Cathars, the medieval Christian sect, held the secret to the Grail's whereabouts. In 1244, shortly before the Cathars were massacred by a Catholic crusade, three Cathar knights had apparently slipped over the wall of Montsegur Castle in the Languedoc area of France. With them, hidden in a hessian bag, was a cup reputed to be the Holy Grail.

Rahn arrived at Montsegur in the summer of 1931. He didn't find the Grail, but he did find a complex of caves nearby that the Cathars had used as a kind of subterranean cathedral. If he'd been of a less optimistic bent, he might have shrugged his narrow shoulders and gone home. Rahn, however, wasn't the going-home type. Certain he was on the right track, he wrote a book called Crusade Against the Grail in which he described his quest.

It was at this point that Rahn met his Mephistopheles. One day in 1933 he received a mysterious telegram offering him 1,000 reichsmarks a month to write the sequel to Crusade Against the Grail. The telegram was unsigned, but he was instructed to go to an address in Berlin - 7 Prinz Albrechtstrasse.

When he arrived, he was understandably surprised to be greeted by the grinning figure of Heinrich Himmler, the head of Hitler's SS. Not only had Himmler read Crusade Against the Grail; he'd virtually committed the thing to memory. For the first time in his life Rahn met someone even more obsessed with finding the Grail than he was. Indeed, so confident was Himmler of finding the Grail that he'd already prepared a castle - Wewelsburg in Westphalia - for its arrival. In the basement, surrounded by busts of prominent Nazis, was an empty plinth where the Grail would go.

All Rahn had to do was find it. He seems to have been blithely unaware of what he was letting himself in for. Initially, Rahn saw no reason to join the SS, but when it was intimated to him that Himmler would be pleased if he did, he duly signed up. A few weeks later a friend ran into him wearing the black uniform of an SS Sturmbannführer and asked him what on earth he was doing.

'A man has to eat,' Rahn replied sheepishly. 'What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?'

Rahn now had the full backing of the SS. But he also had no excuse not to come up with the goods. He wrote another book, with the none too catchy title of Lucifer's Court: A Heretic's Journey in Search of the Light Bringers, which detailed his further efforts to find the Grail.

Perhaps it's too much to expect a professional Grail-hunter to have a fancy prose style. Even so, his books read as if he were encased in heavy armour while he was writing them. 'Look, I will tell you a secret,' he wrote in Lucifer's Court. 'The time has come for the groom to crown his bride; guess where the crown lies. Towards midnight, because the light is clear in the darkness.'

There was more in a similar vein - a lot more. To the untrained ear, this has a note of desperate flannel about it. However, Himmler loved the book and ordered 5,000 copies to be bound in the finest leather and distributed to the Nazi elite. By now it must have dawned on Rahn that he was swimming with some extremely nasty sharks. It must also have dawned on him that he was trapped - especially when he read the proofs of Lucifer's Court and found that one blatantly anti-Semitic passage had been inserted by someone else.

According to Jeremy Morgan, whose uncle, Herman Kirchmeir, was a friend of Rahn's, the two men shared an interest in Parsifal and the Grail. 'They used to go climbing together, exploring caves and so forth. I used to hear about him as a child. The feeling in my family was that Rahn was an honourable man who had got himself into this terrible bind. He wasn't anti-Semitic, but he'd taken the SS's money because he needed funding for his archaeological projects. Then, having done so, he couldn't get out.'

What gives Rahn's dilemma peculiar piquancy is that there's evidence to suggest that he was Jewish himself - although it's not clear if he was aware of it. He was also gay. Bravely, if naively, Rahn began to move in anti-Nazi circles. Nigel Graddon, author of a new biography of Rahn, Otto Rahn and the Quest for the Holy Grail: the Amazing Life of the Real Indiana Jones, believes that Himmler's disenchantment with Rahn was a result of his failure to find the Grail.

'Basically, he came back empty-handed,' he says. 'That was his biggest offence. It's true that Rahn did voice anti-Nazi sentiments, but he was always pretty discreet about it. What would have been far more of a problem to Himmler was that Rahn was openly homosexual. In the early days, Himmler had been prepared to turn a blind eye to it. But as time went on, his tolerance wore thin.'

In 1937, Rahn was punished for a drunken homosexual scrape by being assigned to a three-month tour of duty as a guard at Dachau concentration camp. What he saw there appalled him. Clearly in a state of anguish he wrote to a friend, 'I have much sorrow in my country… impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in a nation that my native country has become.'

He also wrote to Himmler resigning from the SS. This, too, was as naive as it was brave - the SS being the sort of organisation you only resigned from feet-first. Although Himmler accepted Rahn's resignation, he had no intention of letting him escape. What happened next is unclear. There are stories that Rahn was threatened with having his homosexuality exposed, also that he had links with British Intelligence.

Told that SS hitmen were out to get him, Rahn was apparently offered the option of committing suicide. One evening in March 1939, he climbed up a snow-covered slope in the Tyrol mountains and lay down to die. He is believed to have swallowed poison, although no cause of death was ever given. The following day Rahn's body was found, frozen solid. He was 34.

'I always understood that he had chosen his favourite spot to die in,' says Morgan. 'He was lying down looking up at the mountains, rather as if this might lead his soul to some Arthurian heaven.'

And there the story might have ended - except that Hollywood has conferred a strange kind of immortality on Otto Rahn. But it's not only Hollywood; on the internet, his memory continues to be bathed in a richly speculative glow, fanned by ever more outlandish theories about his fate.

Predictably, there are stories that Rahn was murdered, or that he didn't die at all in the Tyrol - this was just a clever bluff to fool the Nazis. Instead, he apparently survived, changed his first name to Rudolf and went on to become the German ambassador in Italy. Graddon believes that, 'There is too much fog swirling around his headstone. We simply don't know what happened to him, and as a result all kinds of rumours have sprung up.'

As for the Grail, that too lives on, with claimants and contenders continuing to turn up in the most unlikely places. The most recent sighting was in 2004 when it was supposed to have been found in the late Lord Lichfield's back-garden in Staffordshire. As the estate manager said at the time, 'The Grail is like Everest: you climb it because it's there.' Or not there, of course.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/05/22/sv_rahn125.xml

"Conservative" Voice Web Site Claims Liberals are "Nazis"

By Alex Constantine

"If I were king, you would be fast against the wall." - Radiohead

This afternoon, I found this article at the "Conservative" Voice site that claims the Left is some sort of front for Nazism. It was written by one Benyamin Solomon - I did a Google search and discovered there are no articles on the Net written by a "Benyamin Solomon." In fact, no such author exists. Very curious, I thought, and returned to the "Conservative" Voice site and clicked on other articles by "Benyamin." The reader can do the same here:

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/32661.html

I found the author's profile. Come to find out that his name isn't "Benyamin Solomon" at all. It's Aaron Epelbaum.

And he's all of 17 years old.

Who are the real Nazis
June 13, 2008 10:59 AM EST

The political left has portrayed President Bush as a Nazi and drew up false parallels between America under President Bush and Germany under Adolf Hitler. They cite what he said about Iraq including the claim that Saddam had WMDs, which turned out to be false. Back then, there really seemed to be a lot of evidence coming out that he did have WMDs. ...

"Conservatives" are on top of it, aren't they? In his profile, young, innocent mind controlled Aaron writes: "about me: I will refute leftists including liberals and the PC system, which is controlled by the left till the very end. The left can't get along with facts."

Poor, confused lad - someone needs a dictionary ...

Dear Little Aaron: Nazis hate Lefists more than anything in the world - not Jews and gays and "useless eaters," exclusively. In fact, the Nazis started killing Leftists before they turned on the Jews of Europe. You talk exactly like a Nazi dupe, and we Leftists think of you and your programmers as ignorant, hateful, genocidal asswipes who are systematically manipulating your country into open fascist rule.

You see, Aaron, we only want you to grow up thinking humanely and rationally - and you have a long way to go, you poor, young, innocent, willfully ignorant, nazified puddle-stain of fascist puke.

Video: McCain Advocates Social Security Privatization

" ... [Joe] Lieberman falsely claimed, '[McCain] is not for the private accounts to take the place of social security ... He's for what Bill Clinton used to call "Social Security-plus."' (Social Security-plus would create new private retirement accounts on top of traditional Social Security.)

"That is simply not what McCain supports. McCain supports the privatization of the Social Security. Period.

"Watch for yourself. This is McCain speaking on November 18, 2004 in New Hampshire, answering an audience member's question about Social Security privatization."

http://www.liberaloasis.com/2008/03/mccain_backs_social_security_p.php

The Lost bin Laden Video

Osama Bin Laden and September 11
Pakistan Daily
28 MAY 2008

Not many people know that, after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden issued a statement on tape that he had nothing to do with the attacks on America and that such actions were against the teachings of Islam. Americans were prevented from accessing this information because we were told that Osama could possibly have an embedded "secret code" in the tape that would alert other terrorists cells to "activate" and target other American cities.

Here is the transcript of what you were not allowed to hear from Osama bin Laden's own mouth

"I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks." ...

Story continues

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Arming Our Own Enemies in Iraq

www.salon.com

Bush officials claim that Iran has supplied grenade launchers to Iraqi militants -- but the real source of the weapons is U.S. negligence.
By Gareth Porter

Jun. 06, 2008 | In recent months, Gen. David Petraeus charged that Iran has supplied powerful rocket-propelled grenade launchers to Shiite militias in Iraq. But according to the U.S. government's own reports, there is no evidence to support that charge. In fact, the vast majority of RPGs in the hands of Shiite militants have come from either U.S.-purchased weapons intended for Iraq's new security forces, or from Saddam Hussein's old stockpiles, which the U.S. failed to secure when it took control of the country.

The Bush administration has long sought to create the impression that Iran has been playing a major military role in Iraq by supplying arms to Shiite militias, including the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's powerful Mahdi army. But to date, U.S. military officials have offered scant or even dubious evidence of Iranian military involvement in Iraq -- and Petraeus' allegation about the RPGs is a clear-cut case of unsubstantiated charges.

Last October, and again in late December, Petraeus stated emphatically there was "absolutely no question" that Iran provided RPG-29s, a sophisticated anti-tank weapon, to Iraqi Shiite militiamen. He even called the RPG-29 an Iranian "signature weapon."

What Petraeus failed to mention, however, is that RPG-29s are manufactured by Russia, not Iran, and those that have shown up in Iraq apparently came from Syria. The Syrian government bought large numbers of RPG-29s from Russia in 1999 and 2000, many of which ended up being used by Hezbollah in the war against Israel in 2006, according to Israeli and Lebanese media reports. Even some U.S. military officials were quoted in the media in May 2006 as saying that they believed RPG-29s had been smuggled into Iraq from Syria.

Moreover, as Air Force Col. Scott Maw of the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNF-I) Strategic Communications Office told me in a telephone interview last week, "very few" RPG-29s have actually been found in Iraq. An examination of U.S. military press releases on weapons caches found in Shiite areas reveals no mention of RPG-29s. Additionally, the U.S. military has never displayed a captured one to reporters.

In a highly publicized February 2007 slide show, U.S. military briefers did include a picture of what was identified as a round to be fired by an Iranian-made RPG-7AT-1 launcher, a less advanced weapon than the RPG-29, although it did not depict the launcher itself. But the U.S. military has found no evidence of an Iranian pipeline of RPG-7s to Iraqi Shiite militants, either.

In more than two dozen MNF-I news releases on Iraqi Shiite weapons since early 2007, more than 200 RPGs are listed. Not a single one was identified as Iranian-made. That was not because of a lack of effort by the U.S. military, however, to determine whether captured weapons were of Iranian origin. Lt. Col. Steve Stover, the spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division, which is deployed in and around Baghdad, confirmed that explosives experts examine the findings at each cache site to determine the origin of the weapons. "Normally we say whether they are Iranian-manufactured or not," Stover said in a telephone interview.

Col. Maw said that the number of these weapons found in militants' possession is rising rapidly -- now more than 400 -- due to many discoveries being made by Iraqi Security Forces in recent months. "Very few of them are of recent manufacture," he said, suggesting that they came from Saddam Hussein's old stockpiles.

The U.S. command is so eager to highlight any weapons that can be linked to Iran that one MNF-I press release from last September singled out the discovery of four Iranian hand grenades. But that find hardly supported the Iranian-weapons narrative, because the grenades were found in an area frequented by Sunni militants associated with al-Qaida. (There is no reason to believe that Iran would arm extremist Sunni fighters, who consider both Iran and the Shiites as their arch enemies.)

In the early stages of the war, when the Bush administration was being criticized for its failure to prevent the looting of the Saddam Hussein regime's arms depots, Bush officials downplayed the importance of the weapons that disappeared. In October 2004, an unnamed senior administration official was quoted by CNN as saying that the weapons were "stuff you can buy anywhere."

Among the pilfered Iraqi weapons were thousands of RPG-7s, which soon turned up on Iraq's thriving black market. Malcolm Nance, an Arabic-speaking 20-year veteran of military and civilian U.S. intelligence, recalls being offered more than 20 RPG-7 rocket launchers and dozens of RPG rounds in a single trip to an arms bazaar in Sadr City in September 2003. According to Nance, RPG-7s were also on sale in black markets at another location in Baghdad and in at least seven other Iraqi cities.

In a telephone interview, Nance, who is now a counterterrorism consultant to Homeland Security and the Army's Special Operations Command, among other government agencies, recalled that the Iraqi RPG-7s were "so ubiquitous" that they were selling for a mere $50 each for the launcher and $5 each for an RPG missile.

Sunni fighters got large numbers of Saddam's RPG-7 stocks, as discovered by U.S. troops who were frequently attacked by them in the early stages of the insurgency. But the Mahdi army has also been able to purchase them easily over the past four years.

Equally troubling is the near certainty that Soviet-made RPGs purchased by the Pentagon in 2004 and turned over to Iraq's Ministry of Interior have fallen into the hands of the Mahdi army. Beginning in 2004, the Pentagon sent at least 7,500 Soviet-made RPG-7s and 4,500 Soviet-made under-barrel grenade launchers to Baghdad to be distributed to Iraqi Security Forces, along with hundreds of thousands of sidearms, according to a September 2007 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. U.S. authorities hired civilian contractors to distribute the U.S.-purchased weapons, but had no system to account for them once they left U.S.-controlled warehouses in Iraq. As the New York Times reported last November, the Iraqi businessman contracted to distribute Pentagon-funded weapons from one depot was widely known to be stealing them from the warehouse by the truckload.

Only 499 of the 2,389 Soviet-made RPGs that were provided to the new Iraqi security forces could actually be accounted for through serial numbers, according to a report by the Defense Department Inspector General's Office in November -- and that was because they were still in the warehouse. No one knows how many of the other 1,900 RPGs entered the Iraqi arms market. Inspector General Claude Kicklighter told the Senate Appropriations Committee in March that there is an ongoing investigation into "pilferage of storage facilities" for the arms in Baghdad.

According to Col. Maw, MNF-I makes no effort to determine which, if any, of the Soviet-made RPGs came from the U.S.-financed weapons stocks. The munitions specialists responsible for assessing the weapons on site are unaware of the U.S.-financed RPGs from 2004, he said, so they would have no way of distinguishing them from other Soviet-made RPGs.

The Mahdi army had abundant opportunities to gain access to the U.S.-supplied weapons. During 2005 and 2006, the Shiite militants successfully infiltrated the Iraqi police as well as parts of the Iraqi military and government. The police in Sadr City were effectively controlled by the Mahdi army, and the militants had also penetrated several Iraqi army units stationed there. In Basra, the Mahdi army was part of a consortium of Shiite militias that used their control over a key police office to get access to various kinds of weapons.

The military official responsible for the decision to rush ahead with massive arms transfers to the Iraqi Security Forces in 2004 and 2005 -- despite the absence of a dependable tracking system and the wide reach of the Shiite militias -- was the man in charge of training and equipping those Iraqi forces: Gen. David Petraeus.

-- By Gareth Porter

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/06/grenade_launchers/print.html

Strutting Fascism And Swaggering Militarism

By Gaither Stewart
11 June, 2008
Countercurrents.org

“We work for the moral and traditional
values which Socialists neglect and despise….”

- Benito Mussolini

(Rome) It’s their strutting. That detestable image of the strutting that links them, the strutting and prancing Fascists and their swaggering and parading military cousins, up front for their conveniently concealed corporatist controllers. A strutting and swaggering couple they are, Fascism and the entrenched class of war. Their distorted visions of gallantry and nation come so naturally to both. The spick and span generals, employers of mercenaries and killers, chin in, chest out, and their majors and their colonels (especially the generals in the offices and the majors in the tents), thick chests covered with ribbons and medals and rows of multicolored decorations—awarded for killing. And the political Fascists! Defiant chins thrust forward, hard fists clinched, swaggering and prancing and strutting across the stages of piazzas nations and continents—in support of the killing.

For God’s sakes let’s don’t waste time on the propaganda of “supporting our troops over there!” Or defense of America’s values! Or the future of our children! Or the war on terrorism! Let’s don’t waste words on that. As if in their strutting and blustering they had a monopoly on care for our sons! Let the generals and the industrial-military complex and our new administration (hopefully) support our boys “over there” in the only way that really counts—by bringing them home.

But here let’s zero in on strutting Fascism in its dreams of glory and on its corporate partners and their dreams of a New World Order. Let’s call a spade a spade. I have in mind the word Fascism that we progressive writers often use as an epithet. Or sprinkled here and there in our labels of proto-Fascist, crypto-Fascist, neo-Fascist and today, in Italy, post-Fascist. An old word whose essence, whose very quintessence, has remained largely the same while the word itself has acquired such negative connotations that Fascists themselves deny their heritage, as recently the neo-Mayor of Rome, the neo-Fascist Gianni Alemanno, who in an interview with the English press denied he was ever a Fascist, recalling the disciple Peter denying he ever knew his master, Jesus.

Since their emergence in Italy Fascists have liked to claim that they too are of the Left. Specious claim. Bizarre conclusion. We have to keep in mind that that is a Fascist claim. It has little to do with social or political or even theoretical reality. That Fascism like Socialism was a mass movement by no means makes it Left. Historical Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany set out as mass movements because they were in political competition with leftist movements. As such Nazi-Fascism was obligated to appeal to the masses, to the collective, to that extent becoming social. In that sense Fascism began as a mass collectivist movement, but only up to the historical point when it mutated into the Corporatism that Mussolini claimed as its true name.

Once in power Fascism then shows its true face: it allies with and mutates into Corporatism, becomes elitist and regiments the masses. In power it is no longer a collectivist movement. That Power of any shade or color often goes wrong is a truism. But that does not mean that all mass movements-systems-ideologies are the same. The fact is that Fascism andNazism arose chiefly in opposition to Communism. Fascism in practice will always be of the Right, Socialism-Communism of the Left.

After the fall of Soviet Communism two decades ago some European intellectuals and political scientists proclaimed the end of ideologies, that the terms Left and Right no longer made sense and were old-fashioned, that they were actually the same. This is dangerous speculation and lie. The words for the two political poles were in vogue from the French Revolution up until the onset of the American counter-revolution not many years ago when American conservatives declared them politically incorrect. Though the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States contain qualities of both Left and Right, a little of this, a little of that—with the result that both parties are the same—no political movement with a genuine ideology is or can be both Left and Right, a negative which in turn confirms the validity of the dichotomy.

Until the French Revolution society was divided vertically, with Power at the top, which filtered down through the hierarchy to the voiceless peasant-slave. The great social division has always been between property holders—today’s capitalists—and the landless—today’s working class, or simply between the rich and the poor. The Revolution instituted a more democratic horizontal Left-Right division, intended to limit and control Power. Reaction is Power’s nostalgia for return to the old system, which is what happens in Fascism-Corporatism: return to a vertical society. Just as the property holders and the landless, today’s capitalists-corporations on one hand and workers on the other, so also Left and Right, are and always will be by definition in opposition.

Right, or in this case Fascism, believes in the superiority of its cultural heritage and the past of nation, people, race and traditions, in defense of which it relies on militarism. An extreme right-winger rejects equality, wants as little change as possible, is skeptical about political systems and international rules and is committed to a society of hierarchy and meritocracy.

The Left, reformist or revolutionary, stands for emancipation from the past and for change. Yet it is nonsense that advocacy of change automatically places one on the Left. In the case of Italy, Fascism’s brief exploitation of the Futurist movement in the arts in order to execute its revolution did not make it Left. Fascism too wanted to re-make society, but by glorifying and worshipping the past. In fact, a kind of Sicilianism—change everything so that nothing changes.

Though some attitudes, positions and values are interchangeable, there is a limit. War obviously belongs to the Right. War is a typically Fascist manifestation emerging from its worship of militarism and expansionism. War is no minor political slipup, as American Democrats should know by now. Historically war is all determinant. War has already destroyed the foundations of the American republic and undermined American democracy itself. The position on war of America’s Democratic Party today is a Right position, as is its position on social justice. Right positions inevitably cause increased social injustice, social clash and war. Likewise the pro-war position of European Social Democracy at the outbreak of World War I led directly to its political decline, the birth of Fascism-Nazism, to the predominance on the Left of the Bolsheviks, and indirectly to the birth of Socialism in one country and Stalinism.

Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004), a major Italian political philosopher, determined that the major distinction between Left and Right is the relationship of each with equality. Though not every social-political view can be classified as Right or Left, as a rule Left tends toward everything that strives for equality among men; Right tends toward inequality. In practice the more one rejects equality, the more Right one is. Or, more forcefully, Right favors forms of the hierarchies dividing men. The distinction on the question of equality is clear, uncompromising and on target. It’s one or the other—Left or Right. They are not interchangeable. Despite Fascism’s claims that it too is “Socialist” and despite Hitler’s appropriation of the word in National Socialism, and despite Left’s frequent electoral claims that it too is middle of the road, both ideologies, if they are genuine, are one or the other. Neither Left nor Right can be middle of road.

Some political philosophers in Europe and the USA describe the basic divisions between the Left and Right with the comfortable categories of Progressive and Conservative. In my opinion those common words are not satisfactory. Right can be progressive on certain limited themes, while the broad Left to achieve and maintain political power becomes conservative as seen in the Left of America’s Democratic Party or in much of contemporary European Socialism. To repeat, both Nazism and Stalinism used the word Socialist freely and in the end created parodies of socialist states.

Today, Left considers the Center a disguised Right; the Right believes the Center is a cover for the Left. In the political confusion of contemporary Italy, both the neo-Fascist Right and the Socialist Left have moved gradually toward Center positions. The Center, or the Third Way, is often a cover for one or the other positions. That Third Way is often labeled a “conservative revolution,” as if social ambivalence could prevail over genuine Left or genuine Right. In the long run also the Center is obligated to assume positions reflecting either Left or Right.

So it is one or the other, Left or Right. Even though one does not eliminate the other, one or the other predominates in a given society in a given moment. Times change but the basic dichotomy remains.

The most blatant example of ignoring the Left-Right political reality is the USA, the world’s most powerful country controlled by a one-party system, which in effect ignores the words Left and Right. America’s Republican and Democratic parties stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the Right, bolstered by religious extremists, secret militias and the flag-waving false patriots. Though the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States contain a little of this, a little of that—with the result that both parties are practically the same—no political movement with a genuine ideology is and can be both Left and Right. Some positions and values can be exchanged and integrated in diverse systems, but there is a limit.

No one genuinely on the Left (in the Democratic Party, Liberals or Social Democrats) can defend Anglo-American conservatism or the liberalism-conservatism-Corporatism-Militarism-Fascism alliance. One forgets that there are limits as to what politics can accomplish. The open spaces the US political system leaves vacant are have been occupied by the all-powerful, elitist, anti-human, militant and militaristic industrial-military complex of the modern corporatist state. In sum, the combination creates the authoritarian system. It is that extra-political vacuum (where there should be a Left!) which creates space for the populism and demagoguery of Fascism. America’s two interdependent parties have exchanged political and social values like merchandise. The result is that the one-party system based on the great euphemism of democracy—now a façade, fake and mendacious—stands as the banner and standard of the great American Counter-Revolution.

Historical Fascism

If one behaves like a swaggering Fascist, speaks like a super nationalistic Fascist, acts like a Fascist bully, he must be a Fascist. We feel a certain solace in just pronouncing the epithet, “fucking Fascists!”

Yet the word Fascism has not always been politically derogatory. Not by a long shot. Within a decade early last century the word Fascism came to be applied to a cluster of similar nationalist-militaristic movements in Europe, the most important of which were the original Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, or National Socialism. In a wave of revolutionary nationalism, Fascism first emerged in an Italy ravaged by World War I. The swaggering strutting nationalistic movement of Mussolinian Fascism had no precise forerunners from the 19th century, as did Socialism and Communism, but it was soon admired and imitated by like-minded movements across Europe and in the USA.

William Dudley Pelly’s Nazi-supported Silver Shirts organized in the 1930s in the town of Asheville, NC where I grew up was the most influential, most violent, most anti-Semitic of native American Fascist organizations, with allegedly some two million members and with whom today’s Right still has ideological bonds. America’s Fascists favored Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in WWII. Religion and intense hatred of minorities bond Christian Identity and rightwing extremists with the former Silver Shirt movement. TV evangelists of the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have followed the same format—hate of Communism, Jews, gays, abortion, welfare, unions—in favor of the corporate-clerical state.

With the rise of the power of corporations came also the rise of the modern military-police profession cast in a new role. As did former monarchs, modern corporations and their stockholders need the military-police control mechanism in order to ascertain that the populace never rises up in protest. Their marriage is the heart of Fascism. Fascism in practice is thus the protective shield for Corporatism. For every Corporate-Fascist state inevitably erects a police state to regulate and finally enslave its people. The most striking historical examples were the Italy and Germany last century. Today it is the USA and its proxy puppet governments around the world.

The term Fascism derives from the Italian fascio, or Latin fasces, in reference to the bundle of rods that symbolized the authority of the Republic of ancient Rome. The term was used occasionally in the late 19th century for new radical movements combining strong nationalism, aggressive activism and violence and “authoritarianism”, another term coined by early Italian Fascists, signs of which have reappeared today in contemporary Berlusconian Italy.

Revolutionary Italian nationalists after WWI used the word fascio for the movement that in 1921 became the Fascist Party. Wearing a black shirt, the color of Fascism, Benito Mussolini recruited a fascio di combattimento, or combat group. Mussolini did not found Italian Fascism but he insinuated himself into its leadership and became its supreme Leader, Il Duce. His combat fasces and the drums of authoritarianism created an atmosphere in which Fascist dictatorship was wildly perceived as the only salvation of strife-ridden Italy, a strategy eerily echoed today in Berlusconian Italy. Mussolini became modern Europe's first Fascist leader, Italy's prime minister and dictator from 1922 to 1943.

In the widespread post-World War I disenchantment and in Europe, Mussolini's revolutionary spirit and his Fascist model were contagious and spread over Europe and to the USA. Based on a corporatist and totalitarian vision of the state, Fascism then as today has considered itself a third way between capitalism and Socialism-Communism.

Benito Mussolini offered this authoritative definition of Fascism:

“Fascism is a great mobilization of material and moral forces. What does it propose? We say the following without false modesty: To govern the nation. With what program? With a program necessary to guarantee the moral and material grandeur of the Italian people. Let’s speak clearly: It’s of no import if our concrete program is somewhat convergent with that of the Socialists as far as the technical, administrative and political reorganization of our country is concerned. We work for the moral and traditional values which Socialists neglect and despise….”

Corporatism was so much the heart of Italian Fascism that Mussolini insisted that Fascism should in fact be called Corporatism because it is a merger of the nationalist-military state and corporate power. His words struck a chord in the hearts of European and American capitalists in the 1930s and 40s, just as they still do today. For if one bothers to look the traits of Fascism are highly visible in Corporatism. What are corporations anyway? Corporations are legally named persons, fictitious persons that have gained more rights than individual human beings.

By nature corporations are thirsty for power. They are insatiable. Growth and more power are their mottos. As corporations acquire more power, they and their lobbies come to control also the puppet government and thus the real people of flesh and blood whose rights cannot but deteriorate. The goals of corporations, their raison d’etre and the twin pillars of their existence, are growth and greater and greater profits. In the capitalist state the “government of the people” becomes a fiction and morphs into corporate rule. In that sense US liberalism has considerable overlap with Fascism. The word Corporatism fits well the social-political setup in the USA and most of Europe today and in that sense is an heir of Fascism.

Mussolini, I believe, would feel quite comfortable in the NATO-European Union-USA-European arena today. The merger of the military-industrial complex and the political world in the USA is the most contemporary example of the concept of Corporatism-Fascism. In their penetrating, pervasive and increasingly authoritarian interventions in socio-economic life today’s governments in America and Europe are in fact examples of Fascism in action. Moreover, it should be noted here that while Fascism in its Mussolinian origins was nationalist, today it is global. Globalization is no less than Mussolini’ Fascism-Corporatism in action on a world scale.

It’s no wonder that from its inception Fascism violently opposed Socialism and Communism. Anti-Communism and anti-Socialism have been the US corporate-political policy since the rise of workers movements in the middle of the 19th century. The original Fascism itself was born in part as a reaction to the Russian Revolution, in part in opposition to the rise of the ideal of liberal democracy. From the start Fascism everywhere combined ideological aspects of the extreme Right such as nationalism, militarism, expansionism and meritocracy (the latter is much in vogue today in Berlusconian Italy) and idealist elements borrowed from workers movements such as the primacy of labor, social and unionist revolution. The very word Nazi derived from the name of Hitler’s National Socialist Party, reflecting its emergence from and support by the petty bourgeoisie. And still today, Italian neo-Fascists describe their movement as social and named their post-Mussolinian political party, the Italian Social Movement.

Antonio Gramsci, the political thinker, philosopher and co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, in an article “Little Fascists” (Piccoli fascisti) in Ordine Nuovo, January 2, 1921, linked the Fascism of his time to the petty bourgeoisie, at the time called the shopkeepers’ class, perhaps closest to the American liberal upper middle classes today.

“In this its last political incarnation which is ‘fascism’, the petty bourgeoisie has revealed its real nature as a servant of capitalism and landed property. But it has also shown that it is fundamentally incapable of playing any historic role: the people of monkeys fill the news, does not create history, leaves traces in the newspapers, does not offer materials for books. The petty bourgeoisie, after having ruined Parliament, is now ruining the bourgeois state: it substitutes private violence for the authority of law….”

In one of Gramsci’s famous quotes Fascism was described as an attempt to resolve production and trade issues with “machines guns and revolver shots.
“Productive forces have been ruined and wasted in the imperialistic war: twenty million men in the flower of youth and energy have been killed; the thousands of links that united world markets have been violently destroyed; the relations between countryside and city, between metropolises and colonies, have been turned upside down; the streams of emigration that periodically re-established unbalance between an excess of population and the potentiality of the means of production in single nations have been profoundly upset and no longer function normally….Yet there exists a small layer of population in all countries—the petty and middle bourgeoisie—that believes it can resolve these gigantic problems with machine guns and revolver shots, and this small layer fuels fascism, supplies manpower to fascism.”

The roots of Fascism are European, linked to the birth of mass society after WWI, especially in those nations in transformation, which were conditioned by political and economic weakness as were Italy and Germany defeated in the Great War. Labeled by Thomas Mann the “moral sickness of Europe” of the epoch, Fascism found particularly fertile ground in Italy and Germany. Fascism is not based on any one class. It draws support from all. It is the result of wayward moral conscience and drunken decadence produced by the horrors of war and it affected most countries that participated in the conflict—that is much of the world.

Yet, as Gramsci noted, the petty bourgeoisie provided Fascism’s most ardent supporters. This relationship of Fascism-middle class is essential, central, in order to grasp the nature of Fascism at all latitudes. It was the common denominator between Italy and Germany. This relationship distinguishes Fascism from similar regimes and movements elsewhere which though often called Fascist are only marginally so. This relationship also explains the mass support Italian Fascism and German Nazism acquired, the reputation as mass movements, for regimes that in power could only develop based on a police state, terror and a monopoly of mass propaganda.

Fascism As Corporatism

There is some truth to the claim that liberalism created Fascism. The Italian petty bourgeoisie created Mussolinian Fascism and still today, 2008, the same petty bourgeoisie in Rome’s borgate, the vast poorer and workers’ districts, are the backbone of Italy’s neo-Fascism and Berlusconian populism. In Mussolini’s time, the wealthy upper classes abetted and encouraged Fascism’s emergence, confident that it could control it. To a certain extent and for a certain time it did. Until Fascism in power showed its true face and controlled the controllers. Yet Mussolini insisted on the name of Corporatism instead of Fascism. Today, capitalism is both partner and controller of American Corporate Fascism as were capitalists in Europe and the USA in the 1920s and 30s.

Even a superficial analysis of the state created by the Corporate Fascism-middle class symbiosis of three-quarters of a century ago shows clear analogies with the American form of Corporatism today. Though not yet widely identified as such, Fascism is already in place in power in this great and powerful Corporatist state. American Corporatism has created the bases of its police state as Corporatism did in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The state relies on terrorism to create the threat from external enemies created by the state itself. Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag in Berlin for which Communists were blamed was Nazi Germany’s Twin Towers. The American corporatist state uses establishment media and acquiescent intellectuals for its mass propaganda a la Goebbels to maintain the false consciousness and the Americanism image. The subservient media and compliant intellectuals serve to create the myths of the elusive American dream and the mythical American way of life of comfort and ease—in sum, Americanism—and to assure the consent of the masses in the interests of wealth, power, and privilege.

Fascism is thus a product of capitalist society, an anti-proletarian reaction to protect the social relations reigning in capitalist production. Fascism is the falange Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi speaks of today to break workers movements in the interests of capital. Mussolinian Fascism and German Nazism organized the nation spiritually by intense radical demagogic propaganda, military build-up, the creation of a mass social base and centralized government. In a similar fashion the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan governments of the 1980s marked the revival of the process of Corporatism, the crushing of any illusions of a welfare state in the USA and the weakening of the foundations of social democracy in Great Britain.

Once firmly in power Fascism always carries out a palace revolution in order to further regiment the masses while leaving capital free to dispose of plus value as it desires. In this sense the corporate state crushes class struggle and guarantees the monopoly organization of capital. During the acme of his power in the early 1930s Mussolini repeatedly claimed that within a few years all of Europe would be Fascist. Though I am little inclined to dwell on affinities between Mussolini and Lenin, still, in the 20th century the great ideological movements were in competition for the souls of the masses. Mussolini believed firmly in the fascistization of the world as Lenin did in world Socialist revolution. In that respect Fascism was counter-revolutionary and reactionary despite its claims that it was social and revolutionary.

One question remains: the difference between Fascism and Nazism. Can one distinguish between them qualitatively, recognizing however the same essence in each? Or are they perhaps different movements also in essence? Mussolini believed they were different. Subsequent history has also differentiated between them. The Polish Pope John Paul II said at the end of his life that Nazism was the supreme evil of the century. Though history in general tends to consider Fascism a variation of other authoritarian regimes, one might add, closest to the USA today, I prefer to leave them together, wrapped in each other’s arms, one comforting the other.

In contrast to Socialism, both Fascism and Nazism were from the start extremely nationalistic, attempts to perpetuate the heredity of a people, a nation, a race. Socialism-Communism, despite its failures to live up to that promise, was internationalist by nature; in the long run Soviet Communism became nationalistic, even though that mutation came be blamed on the capitalist encirclement. That encirclement was real, not a scarecrow as is terrorism and security today. It really happened. Fascism on the other hand goes far beyond traditional nationalism. It perceives of the nation not as the hereditary container of values but also as a future of power. For Fascism, history is not perceived as loyalty to values but as history’s continuing re-creation over and over again, which requires for its fulfillment the crushing of anything standing in its way. Hitler himself recognized Italian Fascism as the first movement that fought against Marxism and Communism, in his view, from a non-reactionary point of view.

In the USA the choice of individualism and the privation of a solid and stable workers movement capable of political power in the name of social justice are dissonant with social development and social justice. In Europe the diverse histories of workers movements had close relationships and inter-connections with the rise of the nation states. Therefore the flagrant divergence of the model of the federal state projected by the USA from that of Europe. Therefore the pernicious halo around the now fictitious American dream and Americanism, which provide the permanent foundations for an enduring Corporatist-Fascist state.

Based in Rome, Gaither Stewart, journalist and writer, well known for his dispatches and essays from Europe, is Cyrano’s Journal’s Senior Editor & Special European Correspondent.

http://www.countercurrents.org/stewart110608.htm

Video: Hagee Mass-Marketed Hitler's Favorite Conspiracy Theory

www.huffingtonpost.com
June 12, 2008

... In March 2003, on three consecutive Sundays at his San Antonio-based Cornerstone Church, Pastor John Hagee gave a series of three sermons heavily loaded with anti-Jewish memes, stereotypes, slurs and conspiracy theories, one of which was almost identical to what was perhaps Adolf Hitler's favorite conspiracy theory, which alleged that an international Jewish banking cabal, led by the The Jewish Rothschild banking family, controls the fates of entire nation, even the progression of world events and history, through the manipulation of global money markets.

John Hagee Ministries packaged the three sermon series, given March 9, 16 and 23 of 2003, shortly before and after the US invasion of Iraq, into a set titled "Iraq: The Final War" and mass marketed it. The series was at least sold through Hagee's Cornerstone Church bi-monthly magazine and also via the Internet, off John Hagee's Cornerstone Church/John Hagee Ministries website. But the three sermon series may also have gone out on broadcast stations and networks, carrying Hagee's sermons, to tens of millions of households worldwide.

Thus, the man Senator Joseph Lieberman had praised to such a high degree at CUFI 2007, by likening Pastor John Hagee to "Moses," had also, in 2003, earned a profit by retailing what was essentially a commercial product promoting one of the most notorious anti-Jewish conspiracy theories known to modern history, possibly Adolf Hitler's favorite anti-Jewish conspiracy theory -- which served as a background 'justification' for the Holocaust. The alleged conspiracy theory favored by Hagee and Hitler alike ? -- "Jewish Bankers manipulating international finance control the world."

Below: following a 10-minute documentary, by the author, shows that Hagee's "international satanic Jewish banker" conspiracy theory is almost identical to the one espoused and sanctioned by Hitler and also aired in the most notorious anti-Jewish propaganda film ever made, the Goebbels-supervised film "The Eternal Jew." ]

In the last sermon of Hagee's March 2003 series, entitled "The Final Warning, The Coming Crash and The New World Order" and given on March 23, Pastor Hagee declared that an "unseen government" was behind America's economic problems, then Hagee identified the culprits; the first he cited were the members of the European-based Rothschild banking family, whom Adolf Hitler and his propagandists had also targeted in the buildup of Nazi demonization of Jews that preceded the "Final Solution."

Hitler deployed that conspiracy theory -- remarkably similar to Pastor Hagee's, in a chillingly prophetic speech -- on January 30, 1939, which Hitler gave to the German Reichstag. The alleged conspiracy of international Jewish bankers was forcing Germany into war, claimed Hitler, and if they succeeded in instigating the next world war the result would not be the defeat of Germany but 'the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe."

In his march 23, 2003 sermon given at Pastor John Hagee's San Antonio, Texas Cornerstone Church, Hagee first wheeled out the outlines of the alleged satanic, "Illuminati" banking conspiracy, which as a conspiracy theory falls into a class of conspiricism that is not uniformly anti-Jewish. But then Pastor Hagee invoked another, nakedly anti-Semitic class of conspiracy theory by naming specific Jews as alleged conspirators: Alan Greenspan and the European-based Rothschild banking family.

At approximately 16:01 into the body of his sermon pastor Hagee stated:

Out of European history then comes a group of people who are, who call themselves the Illuminati. They were a group of Satanists. The word Illuminati comes from the word illuminate which means to enlighten. The Bible says Satan is an angel of light. Satan is an angel of light. The Illuminati were a super secret organization of international financial power brokers in Europe, who had as their goal a worldwide economic power, and they would rule the world through economic wealth.
22:00 into the sermon, Hagee continued fleshing out the alleged conspiracy:

Now here are the four things that have to happen before the New World Order can come to power. One, there must be the destruction of the economic system, the monetary system.
It may be shocking to you but I believe that America's economic problems are not created by market conditions, they are planned and orchestrated to devalue and to destroy the value of the dollar.

It was done by an unseen government that I'll discuss later in this message.

Then, at 24:01, Hagee named some of the conspirators who he claimed controlled the world:

Our economic destiny is controlled by the Federal Reserve system that is now headed by Alan Greenspan. Think about this. It is not a government institution. It is controlled by a group of Class A stockholders including the Rothschilds of Europe and the David Rockerfellers of America...

So get this one thought : The value of your dollar is controlled by an organization that is not controlled by America.

The Nazi propaganda film "The Eternal Jew," personally produced by Joseph Goebbels also ascribed to The Rothschild family a central role in an extremely similar, alleged international Jewish banking conspiracy:

"The house of Rothschild is just one example of the use of this tactic by the Jews to spread their net of financial influence over the working man. The house of Warburg follows the same tactic as do other Jewish banking families.
By the beginning of the 20th Century the Jews are sitting at all junctions of the world's money markets.

They're an international power though they make up only 1% of the population of the Earth.

Their capital enables them to terrorize world exchanges, world opinion, and world politics."

Pastor John Hagee may have even broadcast and mass-marketed his "International Satanic Jewish Banking Conspiracy" theory to tens of millions of homes worldwide. Hagee's Cornerstone Church sermons are routinely televised and the many TV stations, radio station and broadcast networks that carry Hagee's shows, of Hagee's weekly Cornerstone Church sermons, reportedly in 2008 can reach up to 100 million households worldwide.

Hagee's citation of what was extremely close to one of Hitler's own favorite conspiracy theories that the Fuehrer had wielded to such vicious and deadly effect against Germany's and Europe's Jews was not the aspect of Hagee's "Iraq: The Final War" sermon series that might seem bizarre coming from a noisily declared philo-Semite and lover of Israel such as Hagee. In his first sermon in the March 2003 triptych, Hagee declared that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq would inevitably destabilize the Middle East and lead to a massive, Russian-led Arab and Muslim attack on Israel.

Hagee appeared in favor of that possibility and in one of the sermons, entitled "The Final Dictator," Pastor Hagee went on to explicitly associate Jews with the devil and with criminally psychopathic tendencies by suggesting the Antichrist which Hagee clamed would soon arrive on the world stage would "make Hitler look like a choirboy" by "slaughtering" 1/3 of the Earth's population. That anti-Christ, Hagee predicted, will be German, a "blasphemer," gay and "partly Jewish -- as was Hitler, as was Marx." ...

Story continues

Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts

By DAVID STOUT
NYT
June 13, 2008

WASHINGTON — Foreign terrorism suspects held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba have constitutional rights to challenge their detention there in United States courts, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, on Thursday in a historic decision on the balance between personal liberties and national security.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

The ruling came in the latest battle between the executive branch, Congress and the courts over how to cope with dangers to the country in the post-9/11 world. Although there have been enough rulings addressing that issue to confuse all but the most diligent scholars, this latest decision, in Boumediene v. Bush, No. 06-1195, may be studied for years to come.

In a harsh rebuke of the Bush administration, the justices rejected the administration’s argument that the individual protections provided by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 were more than adequate. ...

Story continues

Spielberg Used Neo-Nazis in Saving Private Ryan

" ... Members of a neo-Nazi organization have joined a British group of war re-enactors... The Second Battle Group ... has appeared in movies like Steven Spielberg’s 'Saving Private Ryan.' ... ”

BBC: WWII Re-Enactors Share Nazi Views
postchronicle.com
by Staff

Members of a neo-Nazi organization have joined a British group of war re-enactors who specialize in playing World War II Germans, the BBC reports.

A film crew for the BBC show "Panorama" got tape of members of the Second Battle Group complaining about Muslims and blacks. Some claim to be members of Blood and Honor, a group that has adopted Nazi racial ideology.

The Second Battle Group, formed almost 30 years ago, has appeared in movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” The group’s Web site says it aims “to portray the fighting German Waffen SS soldier of WWII as accurately as possible.”

The BBC crew followed the group during a recent show in Kent, The (London) Telegraph reported. One man was filmed saying he would join the Waffen SS if it existed now.

“I believe we should be sorting these Muslims out," he said.

Another man, a German, used a racial epithet for blacks and said, “Our blood is no longer fresh.” (c) UPI

http://www.postchronicle.com/news/breakingnews/article_21299735.shtml

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Harvard Psychiatric Researcher Dr. Biederman Performed Medical Experiments on Children - Violations of Federal Law

by Mike Adams
NaturalNews
June 10, 2008

Harvard University's Dr. Joseph Biederman has been a loyal soldier in the battleground for chemical control over children's minds. A highly-influential researcher at Harvard University, Dr. Biederman spearheaded a 4000% increase in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder from 1994 to 2003, resulting in billions of dollars in revenues for drug companies and millions of children being put on mind-altering medications. Now, thanks to an investigation by the office of Sen. Charles Grassley and a damning report published in the New York Times, it has been revealed that Dr. Biederman lied about the amount of money he received from drug companies -- a figure that may exceed $1.6 million.

In the conflict-of-interest documents submitted to Harvard Medical School, Dr. Biederman vastly underreported funds received from multiple drug companies. In one instance, he reported a payment from Johnson & Johnson of just $3,500 when, in reality, company records show J&J paid him $58,169 in one year alone (2001). Before this story went public, Dr. Biederman sought to modify his conflict-of-interest records, and when pressed by Sen. Grassley's investigators, he made retroactive changes showing an additional $1.6 he had previously failed to disclose. These disclosure might never have happened if Sen. Grassley's investigators had not started asking questions about the financial links between drug companies and Dr. Biederman.

Psychiatric doctor violates federal law

Failing to disclose such large sums of money in conflict-of-interest forms is a violation of federal law, and if the National Institutes of Health (NIH) applies existing rules and regulations in responding to these charges, it could deny all future grants to the organization that provided additional funding to Dr. Biederman: Massachusetts General Hospital, which administered $287 million in grants in 2005. The NIH requires researchers to report earnings over $10,000 per year on conflict-of-interest forms.

But rather than being arrested for criminal behavior, Dr. Biederman and another colleague caught in the same financial scandal have been "referred to a university conflict committee for review," reports the New York Times. ...

What this latest scandal reveals is just how corrupt and dishonest today's psychiatric industry has become. When top researchers are largely funded by drug companies -- and they consistently lie about their financial ties to those companies -- it is clear that integrity and honesty have been abandoned in favor of disease mongering, drug pushing and corporate profits.

The psychiatric industry, in particular, has repeatedly relied on scientific fraud, financial corruption and grave intellectual dishonesty to ensnare a nation of children with dangerous prescription medications that have turned out to cause diabetes, weight gain, suicides and violent behavior. Even though these drugs are harming children, psychiatric researchers like Dr. Biederman continue pushing fictitious diseases like "bipolar disorder" and "ADHD" in an effort to engineer demand for Big Pharma's high-profit pills. In return, Big Pharma pays money to Dr. Biederman and other corrupt, intellectually dishonest researchers who keep beating the drum for more pills, increasingly labeling every living human being as suffering from mental health disorders that demand chemical "treatment."

As part of his drug-pushing efforts, Dr. Biederman has openly advocated non-approved uses of mind-altering drugs on children, encouraging doctors to prescribe pills for various so-called "disorders" even though no FDA approval has ever been granted for using those mind-altering medicines on children. This didn't stop Dr. Biederman, though, from openly pushing for the widespread prescribing of drugs for such "off-label" conditions, including their use on infants and very young children. Thanks in large part to Dr. Biederman's apparently financially-motivated efforts, sales of drugs used to treat "bipolar disorder" doubled from 2003 to 2006.

Recruiting Four-Year Olds for Medical Experiments

Dr. Biederman isn't merely on the take from drug companies, he's also actively engaged in using children as young as four years old for medical experiments. His current recruitment efforts attempt to round up four- to six-year olds and dose them with Astrazeneca's Seroquel drug to see what might happen to their brains.

This kind of testing of powerful psychotropic drugs on four-year olds is being pursued, of course, to try to convince doctors that young children need mind-altering drugs just like adults, thereby creating new, lucrative markets for the drug companies that sell such drugs. But rather than proving that four-year olds suffer from "brain chemistry disorders" that need chemical treatment, what Dr. Biederman has really demonstrated is that psychiatric researchers suffer from their own form of madness -- a kind of mental disorder that allows them to perform chemical experiments on very young children, all while accepting millions of dollars from drug companies as payment for their disease mongering efforts.

This was, perhaps, the same kind of madness that allowed Bayer's researchers to perform medical experiments on captured Jews in Nazi German's concentration camps. It is a historical fact that drug companies have routinely used children, blacks, minorities and women for their medical experiments, usually in an effort to create "new marketing opportunities" so they could sell more dangerous prescription medications. See the NaturalNews historical timeline of medical experiments on humans here: http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html

... I'm willing to wager large sums of money that none of the organizations involved in this scandal will take any real, decisive action to have Dr. Biederman fired or blacklisted from the industry. His "work" (if you can call it that) is too important to the profits of the drug companies that wield powerful influence over the key players in this industry. Most likely, Dr. Biederman will simply be told, "Don't get caught again" and allowed to continue running medical experiments on children, exploiting the bodies of young children for Big Pharma's gain.

... There are three key organizations that you can contact to write a letter of outrage about Dr. Biederman's deceptive behavior and criminal actions against children. They are:

Harvard Medical School
http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/contact.asp

Direct your e-mails or letters to the Standing Committee on Conflicts of Interest and Commitments

Mass. General Hospital
http://www.massgeneral.org/contact.html

This is the hospital that has awarded Dr. Biederman with grant money.

National Institutes of Health
http://www.nih.gov/about/contact.htm

This is the huge government-run grant-giving organization that uses taxpayer dollars to fund such medical experiments on children. When you write the NIH, demand that they stop providing funding to psychiatric researchers who conduct medical experiments on children.

http://www.naturalnews.com/023408.html