Jimmy Dore: Obama Voted against UN Resolution Condemning Nazism

This is very interesting. In this clip, the left-wing American comedian and his co-hosts discuss Barak Obama’s voted against a UN resolution last year condemning Nazism. The resolution was for ‘combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and other practices contributing to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’. America was one of only three countries which voted against it. One of the others was Palau Palau, which I think is a Polynesian island nation.

The reason Obama gave for voting against it was that while his administration condemned all forms of racism and ethnic and religious hatred, they objected to it because it contravened free speech. As Dore points out, the right to free speech does not cover crimes such as libel and incitement to criminal activity. And these crimes surely cover being a Nazi, who wishes to exterminate others simply because of their race.

Reporting the vote, the newspaper USA News stated it was because America was afraid Russia would use the resolution to launch attacks on its neighbours. Dore states he doesn’t know how that would work, but suspects it has something to do with the Nazis in the Ukraine. He also concludes the piece stating that this is an issue to watch, as there is something else going on there behind the scenes.

He also makes the point right at the beginning of the clip that this incident is very interesting, considering that everyone is now criticizing Donald ‘Donnie Tiny Hands’ Trump for his highly equivocal comments about the White supremacists, racists and Nazis in Charlottesville. Trump says that there are ‘fine people on both sides’. There obviously aren’t, as being a hate-twisted Nazi clearly definitely makes you not a ‘fine person’.

Dore has already made the point many times in his videos that for all his fine talk about egalitarianism, racial and religious tolerance, fairness and so on, Obama was as ruthlessly corporatist as his predecessors, giving generous handouts to the banks and other corporations, and privatizing vital public services like America’s school system. This was often against the wishes of parents, the local community, the teaching staff and local clergy. Afro-Americans were particularly concerned about the changes and the damage this would do to their children’s education.

Dore has also made the point that Obama took the two wars Bush had started, and expanded them into seven.

One reason Obama got away with this was probably because of his colour. The election of an Afro-American to the White House was hailed as showing that racism was dead in America, and that the country was now ‘post-racial’. The Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize even before he had actually done anything.

And yet under Obama, America became even more bitterly racist, and racially divided. Some of this was due to an extreme right-wing reaction, which saw Republicans and talk radio hosts claiming that the new president was filled with a burning hatred for Whites, and was a crypto-Communist-Nazi-Maoist-Muslim infiltrator, who was going to outlaw guns, put everyone in concentration camps, and kill more people than Mao or Stalin.

It’s possible that one reason why Obama did not vote for the UN’s condemnation of Nazism and its glorification is because Nazis and White supremacists in America have used the Second Amendment guaranteeing free speech to avoid prosecution for their own vile sputterings. Dore and The Young Turks have made the point that Obama delayed giving any money to the anti-racist, anti-Nazi group, Life After Hate, until the very end of his presidency because he was afraid of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh’s a long-time feature of America Conservative radio, who’s been fouling the airwaves with his vitriolic hatred of the organized working class, Socialism, ethnic minorities, feminism, climate change and liberals since the days of Ronald Reagan. It’s possible that Obama was afraid of him and those like him on this issue too. Some members of the Right, which automatically hate and despise the UN as anti-American anyway, would automatically seize on any support Obama gave to the resolution as showing his determination to exterminate the White race. Even though Israel, which America wholeheartedly supports, had also voted for it.

But the real reason is undoubtedly what USA News said it was: the Americans were afraid Russia would use the resolution to launch attacks on its neighbours. Which also include Ukraine. The Maidan Revolution, which overthrew the previous, pro-Russian Ukrainian president and installed the present nationalist, pro-Western regime, was a carefully staged coup, partly orchestrated by Victoria Nuland, the American ambassador, and the American embassy, as well as pro-democracy organisations like those of George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a quasi-governmental organization, which William Blum has shown in his books has taken over the CIA’s role of overthrowing awkward foreign government the Americans don’t like.

And the coalition now governing Ukraine includes real, unreconstructed Nazis, who are every bit as violent and vicious as those in the West. They proudly wear the uniforms of the auxiliary SS regiments in which many Ukrainian nationalists served during the Second World War. And the beat and persecute trade unionists, ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and real democrats.

Russian forces are in the Ukraine, but they are there very much to protect ethnic Russians from attack and persecution from the Ukrainian nationalists. It’s why they’ve stayed in the east of the country. If Putin was really set on reconquering Ukraine for a new, Soviet empire, he’d be in Kiev by now, rather than the Donbass.

I’m therefore very sure that this resolution was voted down by Obama, because of the threat it posed to American attempts to interfere with Ukraine, and contain or break Russia as a geopolitical power. And in so doing, Obama also gave a little more help to the Fascists that ran amok in Charlottesville the Friday before last.

Donald Trump Considering Removing American First Amendment Rights?

In this brief clip from The Ring Of Fire, host Farron Cousins discusses the statement of Reince Priebus, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, that the Orange Fascist is considering abolishing the First Amendment. That’s the part of the American constitution protecting freedom of the press, assembly and the separation of church and state. Donald Trump is debating removing those freedoms because he’s upset at the press’ criticism of him.

It’s astonishing that he’s considering doing what no other president has done.

Cousins makes the obvious point that while the Republicans like to sneer at those on the left as ‘special snowflakes’, this shows that Trump is actually one of them. So much so that his fragile ego can’t take criticism and so he’s literally thinking of attacking the American constitution itself.

Cousins states that Trump won’t be able to do this. It would require a constitutional convention, in which he would need a two-thirds majority. He also wonders where the guns rights lobby are in all this. They may not care about the First Amendment, but when there’s a whiff that the government might repeal the Second, they’re out in force. But Trump has no problems removing that amendment either. He made sure that the NRA stopped attendees from bringing guns to one of his rallies. And once Trump has removed the First Amendment, he will definitely come for the Second.

It’ll be interesting to see how the American right handles this obvious statement of real, near Fascist lunacy from Trump. Secular Talk a little while carried stories about the weird accusations thrown at Barack Obama from some of the right-wing Talk Radio hosts. The Republican right pilloried Obama as a dangerous racist and a Communist bent on genocide. Two right-wing radio hosts declared that Obama was going to become a dictator, who would kill more people than Moa or Stalin. One of Trump’s own aides is a bug-eyed lunatic, who thinks that Obama is an anti-White racist determined to wipe them all out. Quite apart from Alex Jones’ rants about how Obama wanted to incarcerate Americans in FEMA camps.

All that was rubbish. It never happened. And even when Obama was in power, it was obvious that it was all tosh except to the deranged conspiratorial fringe.

But this isn’t coming from Alex Jones and the Infowars paranoiacs. It’s coming from inside Trump’s own team. It states very clearly that Trump would like to be a dictator.

And as such, it’ll be very interesting to see how Republicans like Alex Jones, loudly shouting that they, and only they, are the guardians of the Constitution, handle this statement from the man they serve and promote as the upholder of American freedom.

Nazis Planned Armed March against Jews in Montana

The two videos below, from TYT Nation and the David Pakman Show discuss an armed march that the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, has announced will take place in the town of Whitefish, Montana against the Jewish community. The mother of the leader of the Alt-Right, Richard Spencer, lives there, and the Nazis are claiming that they will be marching to protest against her business being cheated by Jews. The organiser has stated that the march will be perfectly legal, due to Montana’s liberal laws regarding bearing arms openly, and so they intend to carry high-power rifles. He also predicted that 200 people would attend and that the march would be against ‘Jews, Jewish businesses, and those who support them.’ A local Montana newspaper, the Mazumian, stated that the Nazis had offered to call off the march, provided that certain demands were met.

Discussing the news, the show’s hosts Jeff Waldorf and Ron Placone state that they don’t know what the Nazis’ demands were, but they were probably that the Jews should leave town. Waldorf makes the point that he’s in favour of people’s right to march and demonstrate, but he’s not in favour of the Nazis’ march, for the same reason he’s not in favour of people marching armed against Blacks or Hispanics, or indeed, armed marches. Placone states that such a march would not be protected by the First Amendment anyway. He states that it is not a free speech issue, as the legislation would view it as an incitement to violence. Waldorf notes that the ACLU has defended the Klan’s right to hold peacefully marches on occasion. Waldorf states that he would despise a peaceful march by the Klan, but would accept that they have the right to hold it. However, this is far more menacing. It would be a large number of men attempting to intimidate what is likely to be a very small community in a small town.

Waldorf also states that the situation is made worse by some of the media coverage of the Nazis. He cites one mainstream news programme that referred to the Alt-Right as ‘dapper’, because they looked like ordinary people now, instead of the usual Nazi thugs. The programme seemed to assume that because they looked normal, they should be treated as normal people, despite their abhorrent views. The Alt-Right is simply the same old Nazism, but with a friendlier face.

Waldorf makes the point that this is entirely predictable. Every time hatred towards one group is permitted, such as Hispanics or Blacks, eventually it reaches the Jews. He notes that a number of Jewish journalists have been attacked and threatened, along with non-Jews. He says that he’s been called a Jew by the Alt-Right, which he finds funny as a staunch atheist who has no time for any religion, and that he has an Austrian ancestry going back to the Middle Ages. And even if he were a Jew, he still cannot understand why this would make any difference. He mocks all the stupid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about how the Jews supposedly run everything, and control banking – which, he notes, is itself an anti-Semitic stereotype. He notes that their anger at this supposed conspiracy means that anti-Semites are nonsensically angry at success. They also can’t be the master race, if the Jews are in charge. He also points out that they miss the fact that there are plenty of White non-Jews running things, including the banks.

Waldorf then makes the distinction between real and fake anti-Semitism. He observes that you will be called an anti-Semite if you protest against the government of Israel, its construction of illegal settlements and that it is an apartheid state. That’s not anti-Semitic, as Jews are separate from the Israeli government. It is, however, genuinely anti-Semitic to claim that Jews are involved in a vast conspiracy against White people.

David Pakman in his segment notes that the march is planned for either this coming week or the week after. The publisher of the Daily Stormer website is Andrew Anglin, and it is his lawyer, who has advised him about the legality of carrying weapons, and that they intend to bus in skinheads from the bay area.

Pakman and his co-host, Pat, state that there’s something actually very funny about the Nazis having to bring in thugs from the Bay area. Pat makes the point that this may have a bright side, in that news of the planned march may result in more countermarches. He gives the example of a planned march by the Klan, which was called off after it was announced shortly after Trump’s election. People responded to the news by organising a massive wave of opposition marches to the racist organisation. Pakman states that the FBI is aware of it, but believes that if carrying arms on the march is legal, there may not actually be much that can be done about it. Pakman makes the point that anti-Jewish sentiment tends to be ignored as it is believed that Jews in America are doing well. However, Jews have been and are the largest group of victims of religious hate crime. In 2014 60 per cent of all crimes were committed against Jews, compared with 14 per cent against Muslims. He is concerned that anti-Semitic hate is becoming increasingly acceptable. He also states that it’s peculiar that the march is being held in Montana, which has very little ethnic diversity. In 2016 there were only 6,000 Jews living in the entire state, 0.77 per cent of the population, compared to the national average of 2.2 per cent.

Pakman doesn’t know what the solution is, as a counterdemonstration, may be equally heavily armed, seems a recipe for disaster. Pat makes the point that they’re probably marching in Montana because of the absence of diversity – there are far more people who look like them, and few Jews, whereas it would be different in somewhere like New York. But Pakman also says that even Andrew Anglin has stated that the march is a joke.

This is a problem, which could only happen in America, where the Second Amendment defends citizen’s rights to own firearms, and where there is a very vocal and aggressive minority defending this right. In Britain the NF have been allowed to march, but the government cracked down very hard in the 1960s when it was revealed that the stormtroopers were organising paramilitary-style training events and were suspected of making bombs to kill Jews. Part of the evidence was a can of weedkiller found in the organisers shed, which had the word ‘weed’ crossed out and replaced with ‘Jew’.

I’ve no doubt that the march, if it goes ahead, will be extremely threatening to Jews and pro- or non-racist gentiles. Racist skinheads in both Britain and America have a reputation for extreme violence. And some of the right-wing gun nuts in America have also shown themselves willing to behave in a threatening manner towards their opponents. A little while ago The Young Turks ran a story about how a group of women demonstrating against pro-gun legislation were harassed by a group of men from the NRA. They surrounded the women carrying high powered assault rifles, and shouted ‘lock and load’. Pat Buchanan, who was a member of Reagan’s team back in the 1980s, and who also had a reputation for anti-Semitism, became notorious for doing the same stunt. Buchanan was so racist and right-wing, that when he won an election in New Hampshire during one of the presidential contests in the 1990s, Joe Queenan opened an edition of Radio 4’s Postcard from Gotham with a clip of a speech by Mussolini, which he joked was il Duce congratulating Buchanan on his electoral victory.

If this march is allowed to proceed, it will embolden Nazis in America and beyond, and we’ll see more armed marches by them and similar hate groups, like the Klan, until there is violence and bloodshed.

The Young Turks have said before about the rise in anti-Semitism following Trump’s attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, that as soon as that box is metaphorically opened, sooner or later it comes round to Jews. It’s probably because of this that the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish organisation that campaigns against anti-Semitism, has also defended Muslims against rising hatred. And Waldorf is exactly right when he distinguishes real anti-Semitism – like Spencer and his fellow goose-steppers – from perfectly legitimate criticism of Israel and its government’s murderous persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

But who knows – perhaps the Israel lobby will be delighted with such a march. They seem to have seized on similar attacks in Europe to try to encourage European Jews to leave their homelands and settle in Israel. And during the Third Reich Herzog and the other Zionist pioneers were all too glad to see German and European Jews persecuted and murdered, and hated the patriotic German Jewish organisations that stood up for their members’ rights to live in peace in Germany, their homeland. They cynically viewed the Nazis’ butchery of their people as simply another way of increasing emigration to Israel.

Gun Rights, the Second Amendment and Early 20th Century Preparations for Revolution in Britain

One of the major issues that concerns the Republicans, and particularly the extreme right-wing of that party, is gun rights. They point to the Second Amendment in the Constitution guaranteeing American citizens the right to bear arms, which they view as one of the key democratic freedoms in America. They see it as the article in the Constitution that enables Americans to fight back against a tyrannical government. Hence the hysterical rage amongst the NRA and people like the conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, at the mere mention of gun legislation. This is always greeted with cries of ‘They’re coming for our guns!’ and the defiant snarl that they’ll only be able to take the weapon, ‘from my cold, dead hand’.

I’ve also seen a quotation from George Orwell trotted out to support gun rights. I can’t remember the exact quotation, but it’s something like the household gun on the wall being the mark of the free worker. Now Orwell’s quote could be a remark on many things. In the 19th century the poaching laws introduced by the wealthy farmers during the Napoleonic Wars were bitterly resented, because many agricultural workers believed they had the right to poach rabbits on their employer’s land as part of the perks of the job. And this became more important as the economic situation deteriorated and poverty and starvation more common.

It was also an attitude shared by the Social Democratic Federation, an early British Socialist party, which was one of the organisations that formed the Labour party. The SDF was Marxist, although its founder, Hyndeman, had fallen out with Marx himself as he had not credited Marx with the party’s programme. Pelling in his ‘Short History of the Labour Party’ notes that in period running up to the First World War and the debate about rearmament, several members of the SDF, most notably Will Thorne, believed

in a form of conscription known as ‘the citizen army’, which was based on the idea that a revolution could best be effected when all members of the working class had some training in the use of arms. (p. 29).

Now I’ve no doubt that the idea of radical, working-class Marxists bearing arms ready to start the revolution is something that scares the right witless. Gun rights are all right for right-wing Whites, but when Blacks and the radical Left get them, it’s a major threat to decent American society. The Young Turks and Secular Talk have pointed out that the authorities in America suddenly became interested in limiting access to guns after the Black Panthers started walking around with them. The Panthers had read the Constitution, and found that nowhere in it did it say that only Whites could carry firearms. And so even before they started shooting people the American government got very alarmed, and started passing laws to limit gun ownership.

Back in the 1990s parts of the Survivalist movement grew so concerned about what they saw as the new Communist threat and the imminent collapse of society, that they started forming informal ‘militias’. Somehow I doubt very much that the same people, who formed and joined these, would be comfortable knowing that their opponents on the radical left back in the very beginning of the 20th century, shared their ideas and desire to acquire firearms training to overthrow a tyrannical government. The only difference being that it was a right-wing, economically conservative government that they viewed as oppressive. I can’t see them being terribly enthusiastic about that little episode of British history at all.

Secular Talk on the Frightening Racism of Donald Trump’s Supporters

In this clip from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses the poisonous racist views held by Trump’s supporters. Public Policy Polling did a survey of his supporters in South Carolina, which found that:

* 44% thought that Islam should be banned in the US.
* 40% wanted mosques closed.
* 60% wanted a national database of Muslims.
* 16% believed Whites were racially superior.
* 70% believed that the Confederate flag should have remained up on the state capitol building in Columbia.
* 38% wished the South had won the Civil War.

Kulinski points out how unconstitutional Trump’s supporters’ ideas about banning and registering Muslims are. He shows how ironic it is, coming from a party that wraps itself in the Constitution, especially when it comes to the Second Amendment and gun rights. Though, he says, they really don’t understand that. They don’t know about its historical context, and nor what the Second Amendment actually says. They’re for the Constitution, except when it suits them. Then they all love Fascist authoritarianism.

Secular Talk is an atheist show, and Kulinski makes it plain that he’s against all religions, including Christianity and Islam, but as ideologies. He is not against their supporters, provided they don’t infringe the rights of others. But he feels that Trump’s supporters are trying to shove Christianity down everyone else’s throat through the government, while depriving Muslims of their right to practice their religion.

He is properly frightened by the statistic showing that about 2 in 10 Trump supporters believe in White racial superiority. Trump has retweeted material from White supremacist sites twice, yet the mainstream media has not called him out on it.

As for their belief that the South should have won the American Civil War, he states plainly that this contradicts their claim to be patriotic Americans. Clearly they aren’t, as the Confederacy was a separatist movement, and if they had won it would have broken up America. And support for the Confederacy shows that some people still wish slavery had survived in the South.

He also discusses the way Trump’s supporters have been gulled by his aggressive, confident, arrogant personality. They think he will actually do something for them. He won’t. Trump has actually said that wages in America should remain low, a policy that would directly hurt his supporters, who are mainly middle class and lower income. He isn’t going to do anything for his supporters, except share their bitter racism. And in fact he’s going to hurt them more.

Now, I don’t share Kulinski’s atheism or his disdain for religion. But he’s right about the poisonous bigotry of Trump’s supporters. This is dangerous Fascism, which needs to be fought. Now.