DOCUMENTING HATE - A Win Against Hate

"Once Defiant, All Four White Supremacists Charged in Charlottesville Violence Plead Guilty" by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica 5/6/2019

Guilty pleas last week by two prominent members of the Rise Above Movement [RAM] came after pledges to fight federal charges and claims that those jailed were political prisoners punished for their controversial views.

This story was co-published with Frontline PBS.

Last year, when federal authorities arrested and charged four members or associates of a white supremacist gang for their roles in the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the men and their supporters struck a defiant tone.

The men proclaimed their innocence, and their backers described them in social media posts as “patriots” and “political prisoners.”  The gang, known as the Rise Above Movement and based in Southern California, set up an anonymous tip line for people to share evidence that might exonerate the imprisoned members, and it established a legal defense fund, with donations taken via PayPal and bitcoin.

But in the following months, the men, one after the other, have pleaded guilty.  Last Friday saw the final two guilty pleas, including one from Ben Daley, 26, one of the group’s leaders.  He was joined by Michael Miselis, 30, a former Northrop Grumman aerospace engineer.  The men pleaded guilty to conspiracy to riot.

“These avowed white supremacists traveled to Charlottesville to incite and commit acts of violence, not to engage in peaceful First Amendment expression,” U.S. Attorney Thomas T. Cullen said in announcing the guilty pleas.  “Although the First Amendment protects an organization’s right to express abhorrent political views, it does not authorize senseless violence in furtherance of a political agenda.”

The Rise Above Movement and its role in the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and at rallies in other cities was the subject of reporting by ProPublica and Frontline, work the authorities have credited in taking action against the men.  Federal prosecutors in California are pursuing charges against four other RAM members, including its founder, Robert Rundo.

The plea documents filed during Friday’s court proceedings in Charlottesville lay out a detailed narrative of what the authorities say were RAM’s repeated acts of violence two years ago.

The narrative chronicles RAM’s combat training and the visual evidence capturing its members attacking protesters, including in Charlottesville, where, the authorities spell out, they “collectively pushed, punched, kicked, choked, head-butted, and otherwise assaulted several individuals, resulting in a riot.”

In pleading guilty, the authorities said, Daley and Miselis admitted their actions were not in self-defense.

In the contemporary white supremacist scene, RAM had positioned itself as the violent vanguard of the movement, a successor to the volatile and hyper-aggressive skinhead gangs that were prevalent during the 1980s and 1990s.  Since its formation in 2016, the group has recruited several members of the Hammerskin Nation, the largest skinhead gang in the country, which has been tied to numerous killings, including the massacre of six Sikh worshippers at a temple outside Milwaukee.

Though RAM has eschewed the skinhead style — combat boots and bomber jackets — in favor of a more mainstream look, its members have embraced the bloody tactics of the Nazi skinhead gangs.

Miselis, a onetime engineering student at UCLA, was fired from his job at Northrop Grumman after ProPublica and Frontline exposed his membership in RAM.  In a companywide email, then-CEO Wesley Bush said he was “deeply saddened yesterday to see news reports alleging that one of our employees engaged in violence as part of the Charlottesville protests.”  Miselis held a government-issued security clearance while at Northrop, a major defense contractor, though the company has so far declined to say what projects Miselis was assigned to.

Rundo, who was living in Orange County at the time of his arrest, has also portrayed the federal prosecutions as a miscarriage of justice.  “The rioting charges brought against us have not been used in 70 years,” Rundo said in a jailhouse interview posted on YouTube in February.  “This has little to do with rioting and all to do with censorship and silencing anyone that they deem too radical by today’s standards.”

In the interview, Rundo blamed the media for demonizing RAM and described the group as a self-improvement club for white men.

Rundo has pleaded not guilty, and he could be headed to trial.

The RAM prosecutions have become something of a cause celebre for the racist right.  Augustus Invictus, a fringe political figure and attorney, has set up a legal defense fund to solicit donations for the RAM members facing charges.  “The federal government has taken an absolute political hard line against the right wing,” Invictus said in a 53-minute YouTube video discussing the case.  The video has generated more than 22,000 views and nearly 700 comments, most of them sympathetic to RAM and many of them racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.

One of RAM’s most infamous supporters is Robert Bowers, the Pennsylvania man accused of murdering 11 congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh last October.  Shortly before the massacre, Bowers posted a message decrying the RAM prosecutions on Gab, a far-right social media platform.  Bowers has pleaded not guilty in the unfolding case.

SIEG HAIL - Trump and His Brownshirts

REMINDER:  America IF Trump Wins

HISTORY - WWII Women Code Crackers

"Hacking the Nazis:  The secret story of the women who broke Hitler's codes" by Nick Heath, TechRepublic

Ruth Bourne, aged 18, wearing her Wrens uniform.

Of the 10,000-plus staff at the Government Code and Cypher School during World War II, two-thirds were female.  Three veteran servicewomen explain what life was like as part of the code-breaking operation during World War II.

"I was given one sentence, 'We are breaking German codes, end of story'."

It was Ruth Bourne's first job out of college, when, like thousands of other young British women during World War II, she was recruited to aid the Allied cipher-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park.

Today, the mansion in the heart of the southeast English countryside is famous for being where the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing cracked the Nazi's Enigma code.

Because Turing's individual achievements were so momentous, it's sometimes forgotten that more than 10,000 other people worked at the Government Code and Cypher School, of whom more than two-thirds were female.  These servicewomen played a pivotal role in an operation that decrypted millions of German messages and which is credited with significantly shortening the war.

The vital importance of preempting German plans led to a huge push to create machines that could crack ciphers at superhuman speeds.  These efforts produced Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer.

However, the reality of running these electromechanical machines, setting rotors and plugging boards day in day out, was often less than thrilling, with the 18-year-old Bourne envying the girls who test-piloted aircraft fresh off the production line.

"That was exciting but standing in front of a machine for eight hours was not," she said.

As mundane as her daily routine was, it was vital in deciphering coded messages sent by the German army, navy and air force and helping the Allied forces turn the tide of war.

The problem facing Britain and its allies early in the war was that the Enigma machine used to encrypt Nazi military traffic could scramble a message in 158 million million million ways, and each day the settings used would be changed.  On top of that, on an average day at Bletchley Park code-breakers were tasked with breaking between 2,000 and 6,000 messages of German, Italian, Japanese and Chinese origin.  There were far too many to check by hand.

The code-breaking needed to be automated, and it fell to British mathematician and father of the computer Alan Turing, with the help of the British Tabulating Machine Company, to devise the machine for the job.

His solution was the Bombe, an electromechanical machine designed to emulate the workings of 36 Enigmas.

Bourne was a member of the Women's Royal Naval Service, known as the Wrens, who were charged with preparing the machines each day, turning the drums on the front and plugging up the boards at the back according to settings laid out in a menu.  These settings were derived from cribs, which were best guesses at fragments of plain text—for example, standard openings such as weather reports—from the enciphered messages.

If correct, these cribs would reveal some of the Enigma settings used to encode the message and provide a starting point for devising the remaining settings.  The Bombe could check the possible ways the Enigma could have been set up incredibly rapidly, dismissing incorrect settings one at a time.

If the crib and initial settings were good, then the Bombe could return the information needed to crack the code within minutes.

"I joined just around D-Day and at that time the traffic was tremendous.  We were breaking thousands of messages," Bourne said.

"We knew that every 24 hours the code was changed and that was why time and accuracy were of the absolute essence.  You were really pressured."

Like Bourne, many of the Navy Wrens operating the Bombs were teenagers not long out of school, who found themselves working a punishing schedule, with very little margin for error.

Bourne said, "You didn't have to be rocket scientists but what you had to be was 125 percent accurate.  You worked in pairs and you and your checker would plug up the back of your machine, which was extremely complicated.  You had to brush out the wires on your drums so there wouldn't be short circuits, make sure the plugs at the back of the machine were pushed in and straight, and you had to be on the go for the eight-hour shift, as you were standing for the whole time."

There was little respite during a shift for the Bombe operators, even during meal times.

"You had half an hour off for a meal," said Bourne.  "The Bombs were in a building with high brick walls, barbed wire and sentries, you had to get out from there, run to your canteen, grab your meal and run back and then your checker, who'd been operating while you were away, could go and get her meal.  It was very intense and very concentrated. We were young and learned quickly."

The high-point of the day was getting a "Job Up" message, as it meant that their machine had broken a code, but she was always conscious one mistake could wreck their chances.

Bourne said, "You were a link in the chain and you couldn't be the weakest link.  If you'd made a mistake on your machine—you hadn't pushed a drum on properly or you'd put a plug in incorrectly—and the machine wouldn't work, you would get a reprimand, 'If you had been more accurate, we might have brought the job up'."

Adding to the stress were the working conditions.  Bombe operators worked round the clock, with teams spending one week working 8am to 4pm, the next 4pm until midnight and then midnight to 8am after that.

"The main pressure was the changing of the shifts, because you were always jetlagged.  Your body clock was all over the place.  I found it very hard to sleep during the daytime as there were not really proper blackout curtains, they were very flimsy and thin," said Bourne.

Outside this serious work, however, Bourne and her fellow Wrens were pretty normal teenagers, with similar preoccupations to those of young people today.

"We had two lives really," Bourne said.  "One where you were in your workstation and you knew your Bombe machine was ticking over and you brought a job up.  But outside that it was being a normal girly in the Wrens.  'Who were you dating tonight?  Where have you been?  Are you going dancing in Covent Garden?'  That kind of thing."

GERMANY - Legacy of the Nazi-Era

aka "Legacy of Satin's Disciple"

"Germany continues to grapple with Nazi-era legacy" PBS Newshour 1/12/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Nearly seventy years after the end of World War II, the German government is intensifying its efforts to educate young Germans about Nazi war crimes and continues to pursue prosecution for those who committed them.  William Brangham reports from Ludwigsburg, Germany.

WILLIAM BRANGHAM:  From the outside, it looks like a beautiful old estate, but this is no private residence.  Inside, investigators for the German Federal Government are poring through decades old records, searching for the last remaining Nazi war criminals who might have escaped justice.

This is part of a much broader national effort underway in Germany to wrestle with the legacy of the holocaust… it includes the construction of memorials and museums at a record pace --- the revamping of the nation’s curriculum so that all German school kids get a fuller understanding of the Nazi era.

But perhaps few are as crucial to this effort as this man.  His name is Kurt Schrimm, and he runs the central office in Germany that’s still trying to bring former Nazis to justice.

HISTORY - From Americans Who Were in Hitler's Berlin

"Americans with a Front Row Seat to the Rise of Hitler" PBS Newshour 6/20/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Never before has the story been told of a group of Americans who lived in Berlin as Hitler and his Nazi party clawed their way to ultimate power. Margaret Warner speaks with former Newsweek journalist and author Andrew Nagorski about his new book, "Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power."

IMMIGRATION - Alabama, Still a Red-Neck State

LEO: OK you look Hispanic. Show me your papers.

DRIVER: My family is from India.

LEO: You're brown-skinned, show me your papers. Alabama driver's license will do.

DRIVER: But I'm not from Alabama, just here on business. (driving a rent-a-car)

LEO: Just show me your driver's license. (hands over Origin driver's license)

LEO: Humm... this looks suspicious.

DRIVER: It's just dog-eared, old.

LEO: Show me your birth certificate or immigration papers.

DRIVER: I'm a U.S. citizen, born in Origin, and do YOU carry your birth certificate....

LEO: (draws weapon) Refusing to comply! You're under arrest, smart-ass!

"Alabama's Immigration Law: Radical or Within Reason?"
PBS Newshour 8/24/2011

NORWAY - Ghost of Nazi Germany?

One has only to think back to the rise of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party) in 1919, and the results of gaining power, to be alarmed by what is happen in today's Europe. Let us hope this does not repeat.


"Oslo Suspect Wrote of Fear of Islam and Plan for War" by STEVEN ERLANGER and SCOTT SHANE, New York Times 7/23/2011

Excerpt

The Norwegian man charged Saturday with a pair of attacks in Oslo that killed at least 92 people left behind a detailed manifesto outlining his preparations and calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination, according to Norwegian and American officials familiar with the investigation.

As stunned Norwegians grappled with the deadliest attack in the country since World War II, a portrait began to emerge of the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, 32. The police identified him as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

“We are not sure whether he was alone or had help,” a police official, Roger Andresen, said at a televised news conference. “What we know is that he is right wing and a Christian fundamentalist.”

In the 1,500-page manifesto, posted on the Web hours before the attacks, Mr. Breivik recorded a day-by-day diary of months of planning for the attacks, and claimed to be part of a small group that intended to “seize political and military control of Western European countries and implement a cultural conservative political agenda.”

He predicted a conflagration that would kill or injure more than a million people, adding, “The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come.”

The manifesto was signed Andrew Berwick, an Anglicized version of his name. A former American government official briefed on the case said investigators believed the manifesto was Mr. Breivik’s work.

The manifesto, entitled “2083: A European Declaration of Independence,” equates liberalism and multiculturalism with “cultural Marxism,” which the document says is destroying European Christian civilization.

The document also describes a secret meeting in London in April 2002 to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. It says the meeting was attended by nine representatives of eight European countries, evidently including Mr. Breivik, with an additional three members unable to attend, including a “European-American.”

"Norway Attacks Put Spotlight on Rise of Right-Wing Sentiment in Europe" by NICHOLAS KULISH, New York Times 7/23/2011

Excerpt

The attacks in Oslo on Friday have riveted new attention on right-wing extremists not just in Norway but across Europe, where opposition to Muslim immigrants, globalization, the power of the European Union and the drive toward multiculturalism has proven a potent political force and, in a few cases, a spur to violence.

The success of populist parties appealing to a sense of lost national identity has brought criticism of minorities, immigrants and in particular Muslims out of the beer halls and Internet chat rooms and into mainstream politics. While the parties themselves generally do not condone violence, some experts say a climate of hatred in the political discourse has encouraged violent individuals.

“I’m not surprised when things like the bombing in Norway happen, because you will always find people who feel more radical means are necessary,” said Joerg Forbrig, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who has studied far-right issues in Europe. “It literally is something that can happen in a number of places and there are broader problems behind it.”

Personal Opinion: This is what happens when a person has a weak personal identity. So weak that they feel threatened by difference; different religions, ethnic groups, political views, etc.

They do not realize that this attitude is an exact mirror of the terrorists that threaten all societies.

IMMIGRATION - Another "Show Me Your Papers" State

"Alabama governor signs tough new immigration law" by the CNN Wire Staff, CNN 6/9/2011

Excerpt

Alabama's governor has signed what he billed as tough illegal immigration legislation, requiring police to check the status of anyone they suspect may be in the country illegally when stopped for another reason.

The bill, due to come into effect on September 1, was signed into law by Republican Gov. Robert Bentley on Thursday.

Its passage makes Alabama the latest in a series of states, including Georgia and Arizona, to weigh controversial new laws aimed at tackling illegal immigration.

Civil rights groups and the Mexican government have been quick to condemn the move.

According to a factsheet presented by Alabama House Republicans, the bill will require law enforcement officers "to attempt to determine the immigration status of a person who they suspect is an unauthorized alien of this country".

The legislation also makes it a criminal offense to provide transport or housing to an illegal immigrant. The state will have to check the citizenship of students and any business that knowingly employs an illegal immigrant will also be penalized.

Ah, yes. Another "show me your papers" Nazi State.

AMERICA - More Light on a Sad Truth

This report shines more light on a known issue. A sad chapter in our American history and shows the ethical cost of the Cold War.

"Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says" by ERIC LICHTBLAU, New York Times 11/13/2010

Excerpt

A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis.

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

POLITICS - Pertinent Quote That Applies to America Today

......... after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Goering, President of the Reichstag, Nazi Party, and Luftwaffe Commander in Chief