Showing posts with label KKK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KKK. Show all posts
Sunday, May 03, 2026
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
St. Augustine Movement
Muriatic Acid Poured to get Coloreds Out of the Pool. June 1964.Photo (Courtesy) http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/02/perceptions-2.html
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St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest city founded by Europeans in the United States and a major tourist destination. In 1963 and 1964 it also played a key role in the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[1][2]
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St. Augustine, Florida is the oldest city founded by Europeans in the United States and a major tourist destination. In 1963 and 1964 it also played a key role in the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[1][2]
Despite the 1954 Supreme Court act in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that the "separate but equal" legal status of public schools made those schools inherently unequal, St. Augustine still had only six black children admitted into white schools. The homes of two of the families of these children were burned by local segregationists while other families were forced to move out of the county because the parents were fired from their jobs.
In 1963 a sit-in protest at the local Woolworth's lunch counter ended in the arrest and imprisonment of 16 young black protesters and seven juveniles. Four of the children, two of whom were 16 year old girls, were sent to “reform” school and retained for six months. The St. Augustine Four, as they came to be known, JoeAnn Anderson, Audrey Nell Edwards, Willie Carl Singleton and Samuel White, had their case publicized as an egregious injustice by Jackie Robinson, the national NAACP, the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper and others.[3] Finally, a special action of the governor and cabinet of Florida freed them in January 1964[4]
In September 1963, the Ku Klux Klan staged a rally of several hundred Klansmen on the outskirts of town. They seized NAACP leader and local dentist Robert Hayling and three other NAACP activists (Clyde Jenkins, James Jackson and James Hauser) whom they beat with fists, chains, and clubs.[5] The four men were rescued by Highway Patrol officers. St. Johns County Sheriff L. O. Davis arrested four white men for the beating and also arrested the four unarmed blacks for "assaulting" the large crowd of armed Klansmen. Charges against the Klansmen were dismissed, but Hayling was convicted of "criminal assault" against the KKK mob.[3][6]
In the spring of 1964, Dr. Hayling put out a call to northern college students to come to St. Augustine for spring break, not to go to the beach, but to take part in civil rights activities. Accompanying them were four prominent Boston women: three wives of Episcopal bishops, and the fourth the wife of the vice president of the John Hancock Insurance Company. It was front page news on April 1, 1964 when one of them, Mrs. Mary Parkman Peabody, the 72 year old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was arrested in an integrated group at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, north of town.[7]
That event brought the movement in St. Augustine to international attention. Over the next few months, the city got more publicity than it ever had in its many centuries of existence. The massive non-violent direct action campaign was led by Hayling, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) staff including: Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, C. T. Vivian, Fred Shuttlesworth, Willie Bolden, J. T. Johnson, Dorothy Cotton and others. Civil rights activists made St. Augustine the stage for a moral drama enacted before a world audience.[8]
From May until July 1964 protesters endured abuse, beatings, and verbal assaults without any retaliation. By absorbing the violence and hate instead of striking back the protesters gained national sympathy and were a key factor in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The movement engaged in nightly marches down King Street. The protesters were met by white segregationists who violently assaulted them. Hundreds of the marchers were arrested and incarcerated. The jail was filled, so subsequent detainees were kept in an uncovered stockade in the hot sun.[5][9]
When attempts were made to integrate the beaches of Anastasia Island, demonstrators were beaten and driven into the water by segregationists. Some of the protesters could not swim and had to be saved from possible drowning by other demonstrators. [10]
St. Augustine was the only place in Florida where Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested, on June 11, 1964 on the steps of the Monson motel restaurant. He wrote a "Letter from the St. Augustine Jail" to his old friend, Rabbi Israel Dresner, in New Jersey, urging him to recruit rabbis to come to St. Augustine and take part in the movement. The result was the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history on June 18, 1964 at the Monson motel.[3]
The demonstrations came to a climax when a group of black and white protesters jumped into the swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge. In response to the protest the manager of the motel, James Brock, who was the president of the Florida Hotel & Motel Association, was photographed pouring acid into the pool to get the protesters out.[3] Photographs of this, and of a policeman jumping into the pool to arrest them, were broadcast around the world and became some of the most famous images of the entire civil rights movement. The motel and pool were demolished in March 2003, despite five years of protests, thus eliminating one of the nation's important landmarks of the Civil Rights Movement.[11] A Hilton Hotel was built on the site.
References
1.^ Civil Rights Movement Veterans. "St. Augustine FL, Movement — 1963". http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim63b.htm#1963staug.
2.^ Civil Rights Movement Veterans. "St. Augustine FL, Movement — 1964". http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis64.htm#1964staug.
3.^ a b c d Branch, Taylor (1998). Pillar of Fire. Simon & Schuster.
4.^ United States Commission on Civil Rights, 1965. Law Enforcement: A Report on Equal Protection in the South. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, p. 47.
5.^ a b St. Augustine Movement - M.L. King Research & Education Institute, Stanford University
6.^ Duncan, Gwendolyn (2004), "Dr. Robert B. Hayling", Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/info/staug1.htm
7.^ Lincolnville Historic District - National Park Service
8.^ St. Augustine FL Movement — 1964 ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans
9.^ Garrow, David (1986). Bearing the Cross. Morrow.
10.^ Bryce, Shirley (2004), "St. Augustine Movement 1963-1964", Civil Rights Movement Veterans, http://www.crmvet.org/info/staug.htm
11.^ St. Augustine Record: March 18, 2003-Demolition begins on Monson Inn by Ken Lewis
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Sunday, August 16, 2009
Fascist America: Are We There Yet?
By Sara Robinson
August 6, 2009 - 1:23am ET
August 6, 2009 - 1:23am ET
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as
Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?
And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.
And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.
What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."
Elsewhere, he refines this further as
"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
.
Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.
From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.
In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.
As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.
In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."
And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."
That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.
When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.
The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.
The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.
Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?
2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?
3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.
The Road Ahead
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.
What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.
Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)
It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.
Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.
We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.
How do we pull back? That's my next post.
Tip o' the hat to Chip Berlet and Steven Martin for their research help and encouragement.
And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry. As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.
And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not there right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what's changing now, and what's at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.
What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."
Elsewhere, he refines this further as
"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
.
Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.
From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.
In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who are blamed for their current misery.
Fascism only grows in the disturbed soil of a mature democracy in crisis. Paxton suggests that the Ku Klux Klan, which formed in reaction to post-Civil War Reconstruction, may in fact be the first authentically fascist movement in modern times. Almost every major country in Europe sprouted a proto-fascist movement in the wretched years following WWI (when the Klan enjoyed a major resurgence here as well) -- but most of them stalled either at this first stage, or the next one.
As Rick Perlstein documented in his two books on Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, modern American conservatism was built on these same themes. From "Morning in America" to the Rapture-ready religious right to the white nationalism promoted by the GOP through various gradients of racist groups, it's easy to trace how American proto-fascism offered redemption from the upheavals of the 1960s by promising to restore the innocence of a traditional, white, Christian, male-dominated America. This vision has been so thoroughly embraced that the entire Republican party now openly defines itself along these lines. At this late stage, it's blatantly racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage. Worse: it doesn't have a moment's shame about any of it. No apologies, to anyone. These same narrative threads have woven their way through every fascist movement in history.
In the second stage, fascist movements take root, turn into real political parties, and seize their seat at the table of power. Interestingly, in every case Paxton cites, the political base came from the rural, less-educated parts of the country; and almost all of them came to power very specifically by offering themselves as informal goon squads organized to intimidate farmworkers on behalf of the large landowners. The KKK disenfranchised black sharecroppers and set itself up as the enforcement wing of Jim Crow. The Italian Squadristi and the German Brownshirts made their bones breaking up farmers' strikes. And these days, GOP-sanctioned anti-immigrant groups make life hell for Hispanic agricultural workers in the US. As violence against random Hispanics (citizens and otherwise) increases, the right-wing goon squads are getting basic training that, if the pattern holds, they may eventually use to intimidate the rest of us.
Paxton wrote that succeeding at the second stage "depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner." He further noted that Hitler and Mussolini both took power under these same circumstances: "deadlock of constitutional government (produced in part by the polarization that the fascists abetted); conservative leaders who felt threatened by the loss of their capacity to keep the population under control at a moment of massive popular mobilization; an advancing Left; and conservative leaders who refused to work with that Left and who felt unable to continue to govern against the Left without further reinforcement."
And more ominously: "The most important variables...are the conservative elites' willingness to work with the fascists (along with a reciprocal flexibility on the part of the fascist leaders) and the depth of the crisis that induces them to cooperate."
That description sounds eerily like the dire straits our Congressional Republicans find themselves in right now. Though the GOP has been humiliated, rejected, and reduced to rump status by a series of epic national catastrophes mostly of its own making, its leadership can't even imagine governing cooperatively with the newly mobilized and ascendant Democrats. Lacking legitimate routes back to power, their last hope is to invest the hardcore remainder of their base with an undeserved legitimacy, recruit them as shock troops, and overthrow American democracy by force. If they can't win elections or policy fights, they're more than willing to take it to the streets, and seize power by bullying Americans into silence and complicity.
When that unholy alliance is made, the third stage -- the transition to full-fledged government fascism -- begins.
The third stage: being there
All through the Bush years, progressive right-wing watchers refused to call it "fascism" because, though we kept looking, we never saw clear signs of a deliberate, committed institutional partnership forming between America's conservative elites and its emerging homegrown brownshirt horde. We caught tantalizing signs of brief flirtations -- passing political alliances, money passing hands, far-right moonbat talking points flying out of the mouths of "mainstream" conservative leaders. But it was all circumstantial, and fairly transitory. The two sides kept a discreet distance from each other, at least in public. What went on behind closed doors, we could only guess. They certainly didn't act like a married couple.
Now, the guessing game is over. We know beyond doubt that the Teabag movement was created out of whole cloth by astroturf groups like Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, with massive media help from FOX News. We see the Birther fracas -- the kind of urban myth-making that should have never made it out of the pages of the National Enquirer -- being openly ratified by Congressional Republicans. We've seen Armey's own professionally-produced field manual that carefully instructs conservative goon squads in the fine art of disrupting the democratic governing process -- and the film of public officials being terrorized and threatened to the point where some of them required armed escorts to leave the building. We've seen Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner applauding and promoting a video of the disruptions and looking forward to "a long, hot August for Democrats in Congress."
This is the sign we were waiting for -- the one that tells us that yes, kids: we are there now. America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.
This is the catalyzing moment at which honest-to-Hitler fascism begins. It's also our very last chance to stop it.
The fail-safe point
According to Paxton, the forging of this third-stage alliance is the make-or-break moment -- and the worst part of it is that by the time you've arrived at that point, it's probably too late to stop it. From here, it escalates, as minor thuggery turns into beatings, killings, and systematic tagging of certain groups for elimination, all directed by people at the very top of the power structure. After Labor Day, when Democratic senators and representatives go back to Washington, the mobs now being created to harass them will remain to run the same tactics -- escalated and perfected with each new use -- against anyone in town whose color, religion, or politics they don't like. In some places, they're already making notes and taking names.
Where's the danger line? Paxton offers three quick questions that point us straight at it:
1. Are [neo- or protofascisms] becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene?
2. Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities?
3. Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge?
By my reckoning, we're three for three. That's too close. Way too close.
The Road Ahead
History tells us that once this alliance catalyzes and makes a successful bid for power, there's no way off this ride. As Dave Neiwert wrote in his recent book, The Eliminationists, "if we can only identify fascism in its mature form—the goose-stepping brownshirts, the full-fledged use of violence and intimidation tactics, the mass rallies—then it will be far too late to stop it." Paxton (who presciently warned that "An authentic popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black") agrees that if a corporate/brownshirt alliance gets a toehold -- as ours is now scrambling to do -- it can very quickly rise to power and destroy the last vestiges of democratic government. Once they start racking up wins, the country will be doomed to take the whole ugly trip through the last two stages, with no turnoffs or pit stops between now and the end.
What awaits us? In stage four, as the duo assumes full control of the country, power struggles emerge between the brownshirt-bred party faithful and the institutions of the conservative elites -- church, military, professions, and business. The character of the regime is determined by who gets the upper hand. If the party members (who gained power through street thuggery) win, an authoritarian police state may well follow. If the conservatives can get them back under control, a more traditional theocracy, corporatocracy, or military regime can re-emerge over time. But in neither case will the results resemble the democracy that this alliance overthrew.
Paxton characterizes stage five as "radicalization or entropy." Radicalization is likely if the new regime scores a big military victory, which consolidates its power and whets its appetite for expansion and large-scale social engineering. (See: Germany) In the absence of a radicalizing event, entropy may set in, as the state gets lost in its own purposes and degenerates into incoherence. (See: Italy)
It's so easy right now to look at the melee on the right and discount it as pure political theater of the most absurdly ridiculous kind. It's a freaking puppet show. These people can't be serious. Sure, they're angry -- but they're also a minority, out of power and reduced to throwing tantrums. Grown-ups need to worry about them about as much as you'd worry about a furious five-year-old threatening to hold her breath until she turned blue.
Unfortunately, all the noise and bluster actually obscures the danger. These people are as serious as a lynch mob, and have already taken the first steps toward becoming one. And they're going to walk taller and louder and prouder now that their bumbling efforts at civil disobedience are being committed with the full sanction and support of the country's most powerful people, who are cynically using them in a last-ditch effort to save their own places of profit and prestige.
We've arrived. We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.
How do we pull back? That's my next post.
Tip o' the hat to Chip Berlet and Steven Martin for their research help and encouragement.
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Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Albert Pike
Albert Pike (1809-1891) born on Dec 29. US lawyer, historian, general. Masonic author. Brig General, (Confederate Army), died in 1891. Well-known Masonic author (Morals and Dogma) and composer of the ritual for the concordant body, the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction, he was elected Sovereign Grand Commander of that body in 1859, an office he held until his death. Appointed Grand Orator of the Grand Lodge of Arkansas on November 7, 1864, from 1853 onward he was, at various times, chairman of numerous committees and boards, as well as Grand Representative of four jurisdictions. The Main founder of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
Albert Pike created the 33rd degree of Masonry. Confessed LUCIFERIAN and founder of the K.K.K. The Ku Klux Klan is an organization which prided itself ( and still does) in the torture and murder of men for the color of their skin. This is Demonic in itself. So we have a confessed LUCIFERIAN (666) who created the 33rd degree of masonry and founded the KKK. K is the eleventh number of the Alphabet. In other words the KKK can be represented as 11, 11, 11. 11+11+11=33. The same occult numbers of the World Trade Center attack is represented here by a confessed Luciferian. Albert Pike addressing the 23 Supreme Councils of the world on July 14, 1889:- "To you, Sovereign Grand Instructors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: 'the Masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the LUCIFERIAN Doctrine. . ."
"Magic is the science of the ancient magi.... ``Magic unites in one and the same science, whatsoever Philosophy can possess that is most certain, and Religion of the Infallible and the Eternal. It perfectly ... reconciles these two terms ... faith and reason ... those who accept [magic] as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them the masters of all inferior beings and of all errant spirits; that is to say, will make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World....'' Albert Pike Morals and Dogma
."Magic is the science of the ancient magi.... ``Magic unites in one and the same science, whatsoever Philosophy can possess that is most certain, and Religion of the Infallible and the Eternal. It perfectly ... reconciles these two terms ... faith and reason ... those who accept [magic] as a rule may give their will a sovereign power that will make them the masters of all inferior beings and of all errant spirits; that is to say, will make them the Arbiters and Kings of the World....'' Albert Pike Morals and Dogma
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Sunday, August 10, 2008
White supremacists say an Obama win may offer them a boost
August 10, 2008
They're not exactly rooting for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., but prominent white supremacists anticipate a boost to their cause if he becomes president. His election, they say, would trigger a backlash -- whites rising up, a revolution of sorts -- that they think is long overdue
He'd be a "visual aid," says former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, in trying to bring others around to the group's view that whites have lost control of America. Obama's election, says another, would jar whites into action, writing letters and handing out pamphlets rather than sitting around complaining.
While most Americans have little or no direct contact with white supremacists, organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center keep close tabs. The law center estimates some 200,000 people nationwide are active in such groups. These observers think the prospect of a white revolution is fantasy.
White supremacists -- many call themselves nationalists or White activists, with a capital W -- have had limited political success: Duke served in the Louisiana Legislature. And the public has periodically been unsettled by their events, such as the effort by uniformed Nazis to march through Skokie, Ill., the annual Aryan Nations meetings in Idaho and elsewhere or the FBI's clashes with armed white supremacists in several Western compounds.
Source: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080810/NEWS15/808100442
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
'REDNECK SHOP' CREATES DISPUTE IN S.C.
'Redneck Shop' Creates Dispute in S.C.
Mar 10 01:50 PM US/Eastern
By KATRINA A. GOGGINS
Associated Press Writer
LAURENS, S.C. (AP) - A black civil rights activist is fighting to close a store that sells KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. David Kennedy is confident he can make it happen. After all, he says he owns the building.
Source: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VANB000&show_article=1&image=large
P.S. Stories such as this that make me think that candidate Obama is confused, and doesn't really intend to be president; With stores catering to the redneck, Obama 'should protect his neck'.
How much are they paying him to put on this charade, this farce of a presidential 'race'? 10, maybe 20 million? Is it really worth it? Look around, you're not really liked; Jim Crow is alive and well, down over yonder!
So you win Mississippi? This is really an ananomaly; From where I stand the animosity for non-rednecks is thick, you can cut it with a knife. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
And I ain't whistling (Mason) Dixie!
Arsenio.
Mar 10 01:50 PM US/Eastern
By KATRINA A. GOGGINS
Associated Press Writer
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LAURENS, S.C. (AP) - A black civil rights activist is fighting to close a store that sells KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. David Kennedy is confident he can make it happen. After all, he says he owns the building.
Since 1996, the Redneck Shop has operated in an old movie theater that, according to court records, was transferred in 1997 to Kennedy and the Baptist church he leads.
"Our ownership puts an end to that history as far as violence and hatred, racism being practiced in that place and also the recruiting of the Klan," Kennedy said. "This is the same place that we had to go up into the balcony to go to the movies before the Klan took it. So there's a lot of history there."
But legal documents also indicate that the man who runs the store, 62- year-old John Howard, is entitled to operate his business in the building until he dies. Now the dispute may go to court.
Kennedy, 54, has led protests outside the store since it opened but said he's never been able to close it because of the agreement that Howard can run the shop for life.
The reverend envisions the building as a potential future home for his New Beginnings Missionary Baptist Church, which now meets in a double- wide trailer.
Kennedy claims he can't even visit his own property because Howard won't let him in when he appears in the door. But that didn't happen during a recent visit with an Associated Press reporter and photographer.
"Reverend Kennedy, where you been hiding?" Howard shouted when the door opened.
Inside the store, hooded Klan robes hang on the same rack as the racist T-shirts. Pictures of men, women and children in Klan clothing and pamphlets tell a partial history of the organization.
Howard used to own the whole building. When his store first opened, he said, people threw rocks at his windows, spit in his doorway and picketed. A month later, a man intentionally crashed his van through the front windows.
"If anything turns people off, they shouldn't come in here. It's not a thing in here that's against the law," Howard said, adding that he was once the KKK's grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina.
To blacks, Kennedy said, the store is a reminder of this region's painful past, which includes the lynching of his great, great uncle by a white mob.
The town of Laurens, about 30 miles southeast of Greenville, was named after 18th century slave trader Henry Laurens.
Some street addresses are still marked with the letter "C" that once designated black homes as "colored." Racial tension was heightened in recent years when two white female teachers were sentenced for having sex with male students—all of them black.
Kennedy has a long history of fighting racial injustice. He protested when a South Carolina county refused to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and he helped lobby to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome.
When people in the region allege racism, he rallies attention to the cause. A walk through the neighborhood where he was born shows that he seems a stranger to no one.
"Hey Rev," one man says as he strolls by.
"Pump it up," Kennedy responds with the phrase he uses at his protests.
Mary Redd, who lives across from the house where Kennedy was born, said blacks know to contact the pastor with their problems.
"And he helps them out," added neighbor Deborah Cheeks.
Kennedy said progress has always been slow to come to Laurens.
"There are two powers in the world: the mind and the sword," he said. "In the long run, the sword is defeated by the mind. I want to destroy the concept of hatred."
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VANB000&show_article=1&image=large
P.S. Stories such as this that make me think that candidate Obama is confused, and doesn't really intend to be president; With stores catering to the redneck, Obama 'should protect his neck'.
How much are they paying him to put on this charade, this farce of a presidential 'race'? 10, maybe 20 million? Is it really worth it? Look around, you're not really liked; Jim Crow is alive and well, down over yonder!
So you win Mississippi? This is really an ananomaly; From where I stand the animosity for non-rednecks is thick, you can cut it with a knife. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
And I ain't whistling (Mason) Dixie!
Arsenio.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
PBS EXPOSES PAST OF 3 WHITE ENCLAVES
PBS's 'Banished' Exposes the Tainted Past of Three White Enclaves
In Areas That Expelled Blacks a Century Ago, Willful Blindness -- and Hope
By Ellen Maguire
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, February 19, 2008; Page C02
"I don't hate white people," says Marco Williams, director of the documentary "Banished," which examines three Southern towns where African American citizens were violently expelled more than a century ago. "But it's not exactly easy to sit across from a Ku Klux Klan member and discuss cross burning."
Williams, who calls his filmmaking a "personal mission," visits the nearly all-white towns, calmly asking uncomfortable questions ("Where did you think the black people had gone?"). He shows old newspaper photographs of lynchings and watches quietly as the current citizens, and some descendants of the banished, confront their difficult history to varying degrees.
His goal in making the film (airing tonight on MPT)? To find a steppingstone to reconciliation.
Harrison, Ark., which bills itself as one of the "Best Small Towns in America," was the site of an expulsion in 1905. Today, Thomas Robb, 61, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, makes his home nearby.
In the film, Williams listens as Robb defends cross burning as "cross lighting, an old Scottish tradition." Bob Scott, a retiree, says he moved to Harrison for the "lack of blacks." And Layne Wheeler, of the Harrison Chamber of Commerce, deems the Confederate flag flying outside her office window a harmless nod to history.
"My role playing helped reveal the idiocy or hypocrisy of a situation," Williams says.
Why, though, would the citizens of Harrison speak so candidly to Williams? "I make a habit of never lying, ever," Scott, 80, says by phone from Arkansas.
Wheeler, 47, believes it is vital to acknowledge her town's past. She says Williams depicted Harrison fairly, although she downplays the influence of Robb. And she is quick to mention that the flag has been changed to "a different version of the Confederate flag, not the symbol of the hate groups" -- and that a six-year-old community task force on race relations is developing a driving tour of the former African American neighborhood.
For his part, Robb, who compares a Klan hood to a businessman's tie ("It's just tradition," he says), believes the film is "an attempt by an elitist crowd" to force integration on Harrison and "to create white guilt."
"I am not responsible for the acts of my forefathers, good or bad," he says, adding that someone told him "we'll probably get a lot of new membership."
In another segment, one that Williams believes typifies "the complexity of the problems between blacks and whites," he follows two brothers, James and Charles Brown, descendants of a family banished from Pierce City, Mo., in 1901, as they navigate a bureaucratic maze while attempting to exhume their great-grandfather's body from an unmarked grave -- and only afterward request that the town pay their expenses. (Williams also visits Forsyth County in Georgia.)
"Whites are caught up in process," Williams says, "and blacks don't trust whites. Both sides are injured and confused."
"Banished" was inspired by the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin, who describes "an archipelago of white or virtually all-white counties along the Mason-Dixon Line and into the Midwest." The film raises the issue of reparations for the descendants of the banished, whose forefathers often lost their homes and possessions.
"Unlike reparations for slavery, land is something we can all relate to," Williams says. "It's the crux of so many battles and wars."
In conversation at his office at New York University, where he teaches documentary film production, Williams suggests that a federal fund, created by a national reparations tax, could help descendants of the banished buy back stolen land at market prices from landowners willing to sell. He praises other kinds of remedy, "an apology, a monument, a scholarship," emphasizing reconciliation and the chance to create reinvigorated, diverse communities.
A similar impulse for reconciliation sparked Williams's career. Williams was a 24-year-old senior at Harvard University when he first heard his father's name. Over the following decade, while Williams studied for two master's degrees at UCLA, he documented his family's four fatherless generations and his own attempts to meet his father. The result: "In Search of Our Fathers," an examination of African American family life that was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.
Williams lives on the Lower East Side, blocks from where he grew up as the only child of a single mother. "The adage that you can't go home again is hardly true," he says.
He has made 10 films about race relations, including "Two Towns of Jasper" (with co-director Whitney Dow, a filmmaking partner), set in Jasper, Tex., the site of a racially motivated murder of an African American in 1998. The documentary -- which was made with two directors, one white and one black, and two crews, one white and one black -- won a Peabody Award in 2004.
The personal cost of his work? "Anger and resentment and hurt that often comes in the guise of great disappointment in white people for being so unconscious," he says, his voice dropping to nearly inaudible. "Why can't white people be proactive about learning about race in America?" he says, elaborating: "True to racial form, when I show the film, blacks say, 'Oh, yes, and what about this town or that town' and whites are shocked."
Yet he is adamant about the necessity to remain compassionate. "To be angry and make demands solely will not invite your enemy to meet you partway."
"To be a black man in America means that I live in a world that is skewed, that is fraught with destructiveness and violence," he says. "As filmmakers, if we turn the mirror 15 or 30 degrees, we can see what's possible."
Banished (90 minutes) airs tonight at 10 on Channel 22.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/18/AR2008021802005.html
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