Posts Tagged ‘Vitezi Rend’

Trump Advisor Sebastian Gorka Wanted for Firearms Offences in Hungary

January 27, 2018

Remember Sebastian Gorka, who was one of Trump’s key advisers in government, before the Orange Buffoon lost his rag and sacked him, like he’s done to so many others? Gorka was of Hungarian extraction, and had strong links to the Hungarian Far Right. He wore the insignia of the Vitezi Rend, the Hungarian chivalric order set up by Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian dictator, who led the country into a pact with Nazi Germany and assisted them with the Holocaust and deportations of Jews in his country. Gorka has also been personally active in a number of Hungarian Far Right organisations, and was one of the founders of one of them.

Turns out Gorka’s a wanted man. In this clip from the David Pakman Show, host David Pakman and his producer discuss the news that Gorka is wanted for firearms offences in Hungary going back before he became a member of Trump’s cabinet. Gorka has responded to this by making a non-denial. He Tweeted that the warrant was put out after he moved to America, adding ‘moron’ for good, insulting effect. But as they point out, this isn’t actually a denial that he is wanted for these crimes. Pakman also draws parallels of moving to America from South America, where he grew up. It’s perfectly possible that Gorka committed the offences after he emigrated to the US. Just because his primary residence is now the USA, does not mean he hasn’t been back to his family’s old homeland from time to time. Just as it doesn’t mean that because someone lives in California they have never been out of that state.

Pakman and his producer also point out that this also has dire implications for Trump’s claims that he’s hard on immigration and stands for law and order. Well, no, clearly he doesn’t. He claimed he was going to be super-hard on vetting his staff. He clearly wasn’t, otherwise Gorka’s arrest warrant would have been flagged, noted, and he wouldn’t have got the job. On the other hand, perhaps he was, and the Generalissimo of Reality TV didn’t care. Pakman also contrasts Gorka with the Mexican and Hispanic immigrants, who enter America to do physical work, like labouring. This wasn’t the case of a normal immigrant, who actually does something useful, like put in windows, fix the plumbing or mow the lawn. No, Gorka was a criminal immigrant, whom Trump took into the White House itself.

The last minute or so of the clip is a piece of advertising for their sponsors. I’m sorry for this, but I realise that shows like Pakman will only survive by advertising, and need sponsorship. Because Google is desperately trying to close down any left-wing news sites on the spurious grounds of combatting fake news.

As far as Gorka’s unsavoury activities and connections go, I honestly don’t think that Trump cares. He’s surrounded himself with all kinds of deeply unpleasant characters with extreme right-wing views, like Richard Spencer and the Alt Right. A century ago Gorka’s own ethnicity would have been problem for American nativists. Back in the 1920 right-wing American ethnic nationalists really didn’t like immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, like Poles and Hungarians, because they were considered racially inferior. Hitler in his Table Talk remarks that Hungarians are ‘men of the Steppe’, which is sort-of true in that the Magyars had been steppe nomads before the entered the Pannonian March in the 9th/10th century. And the Nazis despised the Poles and other Slavs as racial inferiors. Millions of Poles and related peoples were imported into Nazi Germany to work as slave labour. However, the Nazis strictly outlawed any sexual contact between Germans and Poles as a threat to Aryan racial purity. And if you look at some of the diagrams showing the differences between peoples in Nazi texts, like the handbook given out to the Hitler Youth, they portray the Poles and the other Slavs – Russians, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and so on – as having very Asiatic features similar to those of the Chinese and other east Asian peoples.

This racist contempt for the Slavonic peoples was reversed after the War, when the Nazis turned their attention to Black and Asian nationalist movements, and non-White immigration. The Shoah had made anti-Semitism absolutely unacceptable to most people, although in Britain and America groups like the National Front, BNP and the American Nazi Party were still goose stepping around in Nazi uniforms as late as the 1970s. Then the White Nationalists decided that Magyars and particularly Slavs, weren’t subhuman after all, and started actively recruiting them. Hence the re-emergence in these countries of anti-Semitism, now allied with a vicious Islamophobia, amongst a plethora of Far Right parties. And Sebastian Gorka’s inclusion in Trump’s cabinet of horrors, along with other prominent leaders and spokespeople for the racist Right.

Hungarian workers, like the other varied immigrant groups in America and the new, Hispanic immigrants Trump and his supporters despise, contributed greatly to building the American economy. One of the heroes of working class folklore amongst the steelworkers of Pittsburgh, was Hungarian. He became a larger than life figure, similar to Paul Bunyan in the logging camps of the West, and was reputedly able to paddle and splash in superheated molten metal. This came at a time when working people had strong unions, which could demand respect and insist on their rights. All of which has been destroyed by pernicious Reaganomics and the neo-liberal assault on the working and lower middle classes that has followed it.

We need more working class heroes like the immigrant workers, Irish, Chinese, Italian, Slav, Hungarian, and oppressed domestic indigenous groups like Afro-Americans, who physically built America, toiling on its roads, railways and factories. And as Pakman points out, the Hispanic immigrants have proved themselves invaluable in doing dirty jobs no-one else wants to do. In fact, after one town kicked them all out, it then found it had a labour shortage and appealed for them to come back.

What we don’t need, is more far Right racists like Gorka and his domestic counterparts in the Alt-Right, Klan and various Nazi parties.

Tony Greenstein: Richard Spencer, Founder of the Alt-Right, Declares Himself ‘White Zionist’

August 18, 2017

Tony Greenstein, a Jewish socialist and anti-Zionist, as well as opponent of all other forms of racism, has put up a very interesting piece on his blog commenting on Richard Spencer’s declaration that he is ‘a White Zionist’. Spencer is the leader and founder of the ‘Alt-Right’ movement, which takes its name from the website he founded. He is a racist and White supremacist, and one of the organisers of the Nazi march in Charlottesville last weekend, which saw the stormtroopers surround the hall in which a multicultural, multi-racial meeting against the racists was being held. The Nazis also surrounded a synagogue, chanting ‘Sieg heil!’ The rabbi and one of the officials smuggled the Torah Scroll out of the building because they were afraid these thugs would desecrate it.

The whole march was like something from the Third Reich, with the Nazis carrying torches, bearing shields with Nazi insignia, and chanting ‘Blood and Soil’, one of the Nazi slogans, and ‘the Jews shall not replace us’. There have been documentaries on the Beeb over here about how, amongst their other atrocities against the Jews, the Nazis also invaded synagogues and brutalized the rabbis and congregation during Krystalnacht. That was the evening when the Nazis smashed the glass front windows of Jewish businesses.

Greenstein notes that apart from Spencer, Trump’s administration has included other anti-Semites and racists. Such as Steve Bannon, the former head of the racist and White supremacist Breitbart News, Steven Miller, who formulated Trump’s immigration policy and was mentored by Bannon, and the infamous Sebastian Gorka.

Gorka’s one of the founders of the New Democratic Coalition in Hungary, which includes Jobbik, an openly racist, anti-Semitic party. He has also given his support to the Hungarian Guard, Jobbik’s anti-Semitic militia, and has the Vitezi Rend, a medal for a chivalric order created by the Hungarian dictator, Admiral Horthy, who presided over the deportation of his country’s Jews to the death camps.

But Spencer also claims to respect Israel and has talked about having an alliance with the Jews. When Rabbi Matt Rosenberg of Texas A&M Hillel challenged Spencer to learn the Torah with him, which was God’s revelation of radical inclusion and love, Spencer threw it back at him. Would he be so supportive of such radical inclusion if the entire Middle East could move to Israel? He then went on to state that he respects the Jewish people because they didn’t assimilate to the nations around them, and that is what he wants for America, his country.

Greenstein has also included two articles about Spencer and his views on Israel, one of the Israeli paper Haaretz and the other from Y-Net. The Y Net article states that Israel isn’t shocked by the presence of anti-Semites in the White House, as an upsurge in anti-Semitism is good for Israel.

The article states

As the Jews in Israel long for immigrants with a certain affiliation to their people, and as Zionism—like any other ideology—needs constant justification, we have a secret hope in our hearts that a moderate anti-Semitic wave, along with a deterioration in the economic situation in their countries of residence, will make Diaspora Jews realize that they belong with us. Is proof even necessary? No one will protest the assertion that the rise in anti-Semitism in France gave us some satisfaction, in the sense of “we warned you, didn’t we?” Late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not hesitate to make such a declaration, angering the French government and many Jews who see themselves as unconditional French citizens. Thousands of Jews from France who see Israel as a lifeboat, as an insurance policy, purchased apartments here and raised real estate prices in the coastal cities. That’s good. It proves Zionism was right. Furthermore, no one can deny that the economic crisis in the Soviet empire, coupled with the nesting anti-Semitism there, were the cause of the immigration to Israel of about 1 million Jews and their non-Jewish relatives, most of whom have no affiliation to Jewish culture. Neither can anyone contradict the embarrassing fact that Israel worked to lock the gates to the US, the opening of which may have directed many of these Jews and their relatives there, and perhaps even most of them.

The article also states that the comfortable existence of American Jews raises the question of whether the foundation of Israel was worth it. Israel’s existence has not made Israel a normal state, and has not combated anti-Semitism but has partly served to increase it through the state’s maltreatment of the Palestinians. The article concludes

In order to remove these malignant doubts, it would be good to have some anti-Semitism in America. Not serious anti-Semitism, not pogroms, not persecutions that will empty America from its Jews, as we need them there, but just a taste of this pungent stuff, so that we can restore our faith in Zionism.

http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-neo-nazi-organiser-of.html

This is very much the same view as Greenstein’s own: that Zionists are perfectly happy allying and stirring up anti-Semitism, as they believe it will ultimately benefit Israel by causing Jews to migrate there.

It was statements like this, which got Livingstone suspended from the Labour party, when he told the historical truth that Hitler had forged a brief alliance with the Zionists to send Jews to Israel from Germany.

And it is because of this, entirely correct assessment of the Zionists’ attitude towards anti-Semitism, and their utilitarian view of the brutalization and persecution of diaspora Jews, that Mr. Greenstein himself has repeatedly been vilified as ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘self-hating’.