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Your links to subjects that may be of interest to the left in general – Week 1 December 14, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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Starkadder made the point recently that:

Maybe it’s time we set aside specific threads for collecting links on subjects that may of interest to the left in general? Things like water charges, Irish trade unions, Israel-Palestine, etc.

I think that’s a great idea. It’s more focussed than What You Want to Say, more of a resource. So I’ll post that up every week and see how it goes from there. We do have a resources tab above and perhaps we could populate it with material from these threads?

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1. Starkadder - December 15, 2016

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Violence, Hate and Misunderstanding? Richard Seymour and Mother Jones both take a dive into the world of internet trolls and the Alt-Right:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n24/richard-seymour/schadenfreude-with-bite

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/trump-white-nationalists-hate-racism-power

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/22/white-nationalists-alt-right-nazi-language-trump

We should never forget that in Italy, Germany, and Spain in the early 1940s, what we now call “members of the Alt-Right” would have been referred to simply as “The Government”.

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2. GW - December 15, 2016

Tagged: European Fascist Spectrum & the Deep State.

Thomas Meaney and Saskia Schäfer have written a pretty good summary of the continuing National Socialist Underground trial in Germany, the details of which have only been published in German before, to my knowledge.

The trial is of the surviving member of a neo-Nazi cell, responsible for a number of murders and attempted murders between 1999 and 2011.

In terms of the public interest, the trial hinges around the extent and the nature of the involvement of the BfV (roughly an equivalent of MI5) in the group and the surrounding neo-Nazi scene. A flavour of the article:

By distributing cash to their informants, the BfV has hoped to create a paper trail that maps out connections between the far right across Germany. But in practice, this dispersal of money has also nurtured rightwing groups, providing them with a level of funding they would not have been able to obtain from their genuine followers. “There’s no question [that the] BfV overdid the financing of informants during the early 1990s,” said Hajo Funke, a professor of politics at the Free University of Berlin, who is the author of a book on the NSU.

Before he was imprisoned in 2014, Tino Brandt, the man who first welcomed Zschäpe, Böhnhardt and Mundlos into the rightwing extremist scene in Jena, openly boasted to German public television that the state had given him 200,000 Deutsche Marks (roughly €100,000) in the early 1990s to print flyers and organise concerts and demonstrations. For his fellow neo-Nazis in Thuringia, Brandt’s work as a paid informant was an open secret. He never gave the state useful information, but his funds made organisational growth and the recruitment of young neo-Nazis possible. (Brandt himself was never tried for his connections to the NSU and far-right violence, but was sentenced to five-and-a-half-years in prison on 66 counts of child sexual abuse and child prostitution.)

Again it is a question of a spectrum of racist, xenophobic & nationalist violence. The NSU was the visible and perhaps most deadly tip of the iceberg, but under the water fascist spectrum violence is becoming ‘normal’.

The German ministry of the interior counted around 14,000 far-right-related crimes in 2015, about 30% more than in the previous year. By April 2016, police counted three attacks per day against housing facilities for asylum seekers. Last year, a small group – one woman and two men – threw a molotov cocktail into a Zimbabwean child’s bedroom at an asylum centre in Lower Saxony. The savage anti-immigrant climate of the 1990s is making a return.

“The National Socialist Underground still has members out there,” said Petra Pau. “The question is only how many.”

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3. RosencrantzisDead - December 18, 2016

I present the below without comment save that consideration should be given to this as a subject for ‘This Weekend I Will Mostly Be Listening To..’;

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