Philip Sandifer's Blog, page 7

Army Dreamers

Hello all! Since we only ever moved Christine off the site to make room for Boys in Their Dresses, and since that project has faltered while she keeps absolutely killing it, I thought it would be a good idea to put her back on the site.

More personally, as you probably don’t know if you don’t read my Twitter, my family has recently made the decision to legally adopt Christine, having already helped her relocate away from her abusive family and to Ithaca so she could transition safely. Christine is currently looking for housing, which is exciting for a trans woman in the middle of a pandemic. She’s also disabled and working through some pretty serious trauma of the sort you might expect when your story is “an abusive family so bad you moved across several states and were adopted.” We’re trying to give her some space to heal so she can go back to school and become the amazing and badass woman that anyone who has read her work can blatantly tell she’s going to be. But, well, there’s only so much we can do.

You have all been incredible in supporting me and letting me have the career of my dreams here. And so I’m asking you, if you enjoy her work at all, to do the same for her. We figure she can scrape by if her Patreon gets to $300 a blog post. That’s just over double where she is right now, so it’s not a small thing. But, well, my daughter needs help, so I’m asking you to do what you’ve done for me so many times and help an amazingly talented woman have the life and financial stability she deserves.

You can support Christine’s work at her Patreon.

Thank you, 
El.

Note from Christine: the Patreon is up to $139, which is hopeful and close to the halfway mark but not anywhere close to $300. Times are tough on everyone right now, but if you could share my work and the link to my Patreon, that would mean an insurmountable amount to me.

Army Dreamers
Music video
German performance ("Mrs. Mopp")
Dutch performance
Friday Night, Saturday Morning

 

The senseless homicide, epistolary self-cuckoldry, and generational trauma in Never for Ever is a sort of horror writing from Bush. Her reverence for family and domesticity is clear throughout her work, and in how she lives — she stepped mostly out of public view for many years after the birth of her son. In Never for Ever, Bush explores what happens when families are torn apart by the infrastructure of modernity: weaponry, dissociation, social pressure, celebrity. Preliminary sketches of The Dreaming surface in the record’s soundscape of classical instruments and synthesizer innovations, underlined by trauma and madness. If Lionheart was Bush’s inward retreat in response to the world’s frightening instability, Never for Ever turns that lens outwards, exploring the impact of violence on families and survivors.

Bush has dabbled in folk music before, through engagements with parabolic theming, classical acoustic instrumentation, and straight-up rewrites of folk ballads. But “Army Dreamers” is a straight-up folk song, the apotheosis of Bush’s relationship with traditional British music. With a smattering of the distaff tragedy of a bereaved mother (“I’ve a bunch of purple flowers/to decorate to mammy’s hero”), whose enlisted son has perished while serving abroad (“four men in uniform/to carry home my little soldier”). Bush practically whispers the vocal, a hushed, mournful hiss with a mock Irish accent. The song’s hook, a “ck-ck” of Jay Bush loading guns sampled through a Fairlight CMI, gives the affair an understated yet harsh percussive flavor. The 3/4 rhythm of the guns is matched beat-for-beat by matched Paddy Bush’s mandolin, which begets a dirgeful, four-note figure (A, F… A, C…). Accompanying Paddy in the track’s roster of folk instruments is Stuart Elliott with a bodhrán, another beat grounding “Army Dreamers” in Irish folk music.

Bush’s Irish heritage surfaces tangentially throughout her career. The daughter of an Irish nurse, Bush has long dabbled in Great Britain’s folk music, with much quality time with her brothers spent listening to them playing folk songs (her family pastimes turned into a career: as an adult, Catherine still plays folk music with Paddy and Jay). Her debt to folk music has been repaid in full — The Kick Inside ends by rewriting a Child ballad, and “Violin” is goofy folk rock. The mandolin and bodhrán imbue “Army Dreamers” with an acoustic thickness, splinted together by a lugubrious waltz and sleepy B.V.’s (“he should have been a rock star” sound like it’s being sung by Eeyore). Its subject matter is no less dismal and rustic: a mother grieving her beloved soldier is a classical image of modern balladry, as is the proletarian culture and lack of opportunities faced by the mother and her son (“he should have been a rock star/but he never had the money for a guitar,” “he should have been a politician/but he never had a proper education”). There’s much to be said about Bush’s understanding of class through the lens of folk. Her treatment of the working class often yields mixed results — she’s a middle-class white woman who landed a record contract as a teenager. Bush’s understanding of poor people and the victims of colonialism is restrained in ways she seems unaware of. The matter of dabbling in Irish folk music and warfare in 1980 (when that thing called, hmm, what’s it called? Oh yeah, the Troubles) while hardly exploring the political conflicts of the matter comes across as ignorant.

Since we’re used to Bush being asleep to political infrastructure and class, we can at least turn to her complex politics of domesticity. While she doesn’t interrogate the structural causes of political violence, she’s still centering a song around the vulnerable people whose lives are destroyed by it. Never for Ever is populated by mothers and wives. Five of its eleven songs explicitly focus on maternal and uxorial figures, and that’s if we don’t count the broadly familial “All We Ever Look For.” Bush’s wives and mothers tend towards fatigue over their familial roles, experiencing emotions that contradict their outward actions or social operations. Bush’s mothers are an intrinsic good whose absence or loss is a tragedy, and whose losses are a social catastrophe. Key to the mother’s characterization in “Army Dreamers” is absence. She bemoans not merely her lost son, but his lost opportunities and the things she couldn’t provide for him. “What a waste of army dreamers,” muses Bush, in a ritual mourning of military casualties, which treats them as a cessation of dreams.

Most impressive is the way “Army Dreamers” treats the mother as an individual while also stressing her importance to her family. Stripped of her duties to her son, she is left with no more motherhood to perform. This suggests that while war is horrible, the people who are left behind have their own experiences of it. Men get sent off to die, and the women they leave behind are expected to grieve dutifully. Yet they’re prescribed a performative kind of grief — the actual effects of trauma are widely besmirched and ignored by the jingoistic reactionaries who send civilians off to die. Women are usually seen as broken when their soldiers fail to come home — this isn’t quite what Bush does. Is the mother broken? No, of course not. Has she had a vital part of her life snatched from her? Utterly.

There’s a touch of sentimentalism to this, if at least a grounded and humanitarian one. Violent deaths are often devastating because they cut short the lives of unsuspecting civilians who’ve been planning to go live their lives as usual the next day. Bush’s anti-militarism is hardly strident, but “Army Dreamers” has an edge to it even in its understatedness, blaming the services of “B.F.P.O” for overseas tragedies (although interestingly, her son’s death appears to be an accident — there’s little fanfare of death, no suggestion of the glory of battle). The horror of the death is largely its silence — all the things that couldn’t happen, no matter how much saying them would make them so.

The politics of the situation are left understated, as is typical for Bush, and yet with a light inimical rage, as if Bush is finally turning to the British establishment and shouting “look at what you’ve done!” While “Army Dreamers” is far from an indictment of the military-industrial complex (indeed, it has more to do with the British Army’s consumption of Irish civilians than anything else), its highlighting of war as futile is striking. “Give the kid the pick of pips/and give him all your stripes and ribbons/now he’s sitting in his hole/he might as well have buttons and bows” is a line of understated condemnation that spits on military emblems (pips are a British Army insignia) and consolidates trenches and graves. “B. F. P. O.,,” intone Bush’s backing vocalists again and again. In interviews, Bush backpedals from any perceived anti-militarist sentiments in her work (“I’m not slagging off the army…”), but her song tells a different story: nothing comes with B. F. P. O. except carnage.

In the song’s music video, Bush’s final collaboration with director Keef MacMillan (the two strong-willed auteurs could only collaborate together for so long), the visceral glimpses of departed loved ones that plague mourners gets captured in one devastatingly simple moment. Bush, a soldier stationed in a forest and surrounded by men in camo, turns to a tree to see her lost son. She runs to embrace him, and he’s gone before she reaches the tree. There’s a hard cut to Bush’s eyes flashing wide open. There it is: trauma and grief in a glance. Waking up, but still living the same dream.

Recorded in spring of 1980 at Abbey Road. Released with Never for Ever on 7 September 1980; issued as a single on 22 September 1980. Performed for television numerous times, including on programs in Germany and the Netherlands. Personnel: Kate Bush — vocals, production. Stuart Elliott — bodhrán. Brian Bath — acoustic guitar, backing vocals. Paddy Bush — mandolin, backing vocals. Alan Murphy — electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar, backing vocals. Duncan Mackay — Fairlight CMI. Jon Kelly — production, engineering. Photo: BTS picture from music video (cred. John Carder Bush).

Killing in the Name Of

Fascism isn't socialism.  This isn't the sort of thing that one should have to say, but apparently it is.

Politics has content as well as form.  It is not, as fascism always tries to make it, a game of aesthetics.  No matter how superficially similar fascist and antifascists may be - and I contend that, with a very little good-faith scrutiny, they are not actually very similar at all - there is a world of difference, so much difference on every level that equivalence of any kind is a gross falsehood, a catastrophic failure of understanding.  It is the content of political action which gives it meaning, not the form.  And the content always ultimately derives from the class content, which ultimately derives from the class basis.  The class content and basis of fascism, whatever the rhetoric, is bourgeois, based on the defence of capital either directly or via the defence of those divisions and oppressions which are both generated by and bolster the rule of capital.  They don’t need to be generated by or to bolster capital to be wrong, but they are and do.  The class content and basis of antifascism, by contrast, is found in defensive reaction against the fascists’ project to divide the working class along lines of race in the interests of capital.

This is ultimately both why people can pull the “the nazis were socialists” bullshit - “National Socialists!  It’s even in the name!” - and why they’re wrong.  The question of why the Nazis called themselves socialists, and why fascism generally often flirts with left-wing rhetoric and even some superficially left-wing ideas, is complex.  What isn’t complex is the question of whether fascism is or is not, ultimately, a phenomenon of the left.  The answer is no, because of its content, which is ultimately its class content, and which is ultimately determinable via an examination of what it actually does.  

Fascism as a governmental form was a form of response to a crisis of capital accumulation. Fascism as a movement - at least in its classical form - also tends to arise as a reaction to the rise of a challenge, or perceived challenge, to capitalism from the working class, and from socialism.  Part of its process of evolution as a mass movement tends to be a certain aping of left movements in an attempt to assimilate some of their popularity and membership while opposing them.  The Nazis arose in Germany on the crest of a wave of reactionary, nationalist counter-revolution against the German Revolution of 1918-23, which caused the Kaiser to abdicate and flee, and the German generals to capitulate to the Allies in the First World War.  The defeat of the revolution was a combination of sharp turning points and slow decay.  But socialism remained a hugely popular idea with the working masses of Germany throughout the 20s and 30s.  

The ostensibly socialist Social Democratic Party (SPD) was huge, with a vast network of workers’ clubs, magazines, papers, camps, youth organisations, etc.  The Nazis consciously mimicked their mass organisation, and the way they entered into the lives of workers through associations outside work, as part of their drive for power.  More fundamentally than this, the word ‘socialism’ had arguably almost come to mean ‘of workers’ in the Germany of this period.  To call yourself a ‘socialist’ party was an almost compulsory move for any party aspiring to mass appeal with workers, the working classes being very class conscious and proudly identifying themselves that way.  

Anton Drexler, the founder of the German Workers Party (forerunner of the NSDAP or Nazis) consciously wanted to win workers to nationalist, antisemitic politics - hence the name of his party.  This sort of thing was common in the ecology of the German reactionary far-right of thise period.  They were responding to a revolution of workers, sailors and soldiers with an attempt to win such people to far-right instead of far-left ideas.

This isn’t to say that it was all mere pretence or trickery.  There was a strong 'left' current (or rather current of left rhetoric) within Nazism at the start, as there often is in the early stages of fascist movements.  Such movements, while far-right, are also grassroots responses by non-members of the ruling class to crisis and revolution, every bit as much as are left movements.  Again, the distinction is to be found in the class character and class content of the movements.  Whereas the SPD and German Communist party drew their support from the working class, the far-right movements arose among the middle layers, the small business people, the state officials, police, etc.  The social cause of the arrival of such movements may be unitary but the responses are not, because the responses come from different social layers and express different worldviews born of different social positions. But reality is complex.  It is not made of neat boxes and categories that fit nicely onto simple charts.  To mistake the messiness of reality with some secret inner unity of manifestly divergent political trends is sheer disingenuousness. 

Messy reality will mean ideas are echoed across class divides.  A lot of the Stormtroopers in the early days shared what Michael Parenti called a “share the wealth mentality”.  Devoted as they were to smashing the left on the street, they nevertheless resented rich capitalists and bankers.  They came from that middle layer that is always the base of fascism, though the Stormtroopers also incorporated elements from the working class, the unemployed, etc.  Antisemitism was a vital ideological and rhetorical lever for the Nazis because the figure of the Jew - the imaginary inkblot villain who lived in their heads, that is - could represent both the perfidious communist who wanted to infiltrate and overthrow their society and the evil businessman and financier behind the capitalism that had treated them so unsatisfactorily.  In this way a populist pseudo-anticapitalism that connected with socialist politics could be used to pervert it and co-opt workers and resentful, anxious petty bourgeoisie.  (Real socialism has no truck with antisemitic fantasies; it bases its analysis on real material things like class, not unreal racial divisions.)  

There were strong ‘left’ ideological currents in National Socialism.  They did not amount to real socialism in practice because racism debarred them from inclusion.  That isn’t the ‘no true scotsman’ fallacy; racism is an inherently anti-left idea because racism divides the working class and actual left praxis - praxis with real left content - is always, by definition, based on attempting to bring the working class together across all divisions and empower the working class rather than disempowering it through disunity.  If it doesn’t aim at this, it is a nonsense to call it ‘left’ at all.  In what sense is it ‘left’ if it contravenes, in its actual content and practice, the most basis prerequisite of left politics?  The reactionary contention that fascism is left-wing because it contains left rhetoric is an exercise in politics as form, as label, as aesthetics.  Viewing politics as having content immediately dispels the illusion because the actual content of fascism is inimical to the actual content of socialism, names entirely to one side.  

The empirical proof of all this lies, again, in what actually happened, and most especially in the class content of what actually happened.  For instance, the leading ‘left’ theorists and leaders within ‘National Socialism’, the Strasser brothers, were purged, one killed and one exiled.  Rohm, the leader of the politically untrustworthy Stormtroopers, was also killed.  The Stormtroopers, whose ranks included recruits from the working class, and who harboured ideas about a radical alteration to the German state with a Nazi version of a workers’ militia replacing the old army, were suppressed and subordinated to the Army once the Nazis were in power.  The Night of the Long Knives - the violent internal Nazi coup/purge in which Rohm died - was all about reassuring the respectable reactionaries, capitalists and militarists in the German state - particularly the Army high command - that the Nazi government was ‘trustworthy’, i.e. not remotely likely to act on any of its old anti-capitalist, anti-establishment rhetoric.  In power, with such assurances having been issued and gratefully accepted, the Nazis proceeded to merge with and take over - with very little resistance - the German state.  

The Nazis ran Germany in the interests of big monopoly capital and established interests.  They banned unions, banned other political parties, persecuted the left, immediately began setting up a framework of racially discriminatory laws, put women back in the home, attacked scientific and cultural institutions open to LGBT+ people and issues, etc.  

Much is made by reactionaries of the fact that the Nazis were ‘statists’ who nationalised things, ostensibly proving them to have been left-wing.  Firstly, this is based on a crude misunderstanding of socialism, which equates it entirely with state ownership.  This is far from the entirety of socialism, though - significantly - it would’ve been a very widely shared understanding of socialism in Germany at that time, owing to the degeneration of the Marxism of the 2nd International and the influence of this thinking in the early-20th century German SPD.  But socialism, as even the SPD at that time would mostly acknowledge (in words at least), is ultimately not supposed to be about state ownership but about workers’ power, with some currents of socialism advocating state ownership as a way of achieving workers’ power if combined with workers’ democracy.  Other currents of left thinking of course reject the state entirely, or see the workers’ state as a more radically different kind of state based on workers’ councils.  Besides, as the scholar Germa Bel has shown, the Nazis were enthusiastic privatisers, to the point of being forerunners of neoliberalism.  

The truth is that the Nazis used any method at hand for rescuing, preserving, and expanding German capital.  They certainly did not abolish private ownership.  On the contrary, they were themselves capitalists.  Hitler received royalties for use of his own image and became enormously rich, essentially running his cult of personality as simultaneously political propaganda and a massive copyright/franchising business.  The Nazis were extensively funded by big business, especially heavy industry which stood to gain from government contracts for armaments as a result of Nazi expansionism and military build-up.  

And how can the existence of left currents within Nazism prove it is left-wing while the (presumably) undoubtable existence of right currents within Nazism does not prove it right-wing?  Is it somehow not valid to point to Hitler’s virulent hatred of the left - described in detail in page after page of Mein Kampf, in which he rages at Marxists, the USSR, the SPD, etc - as evidence of anti-socialism?  It is pure nonsense to declare the Nazis ‘left-wing’ by any sane evaluation of the actual material content - that is, the class content - of their politics.  The fact that they contained left currents is actually evidence against the idea, since that left politics was a) completely detached from an actual basis in working class politics, being far more based in petty bourgeois resentment of big capitalists and banks, and b) purged as the Nazis achieved power in concert with the reactionary capitalist state!

It is not only that fascism and socialism are objectively different in character, content, actions and aims.  Essentially, anyone can see that.  It is that the real test of the difference, the criterion which winnows the difference down to the quick, to its most fundamental conceptual level, is the test of the class content of fascism.  The essence of the socialist analysis or critique is always the class question.  Analysing fascism in this way makes sense not only of it in itself but of its complex, intertwined, but ultimately deeply divergent and hostile relationship to socialism.  The essence of the fascist worldview (as distinct from its actual content, which stems from its class character) is race; ideologically, fascism views everything through the prism of race.  Not only is this completely opposite to the socialist standpoint, because it divides the class socialism tries to unite and from which it tries to take its perspective, but it is also a conceptual dead end.  You cannot make sense of fascism using a racial prism and arrive at any viewpoint but the fascist one.  Fascism is conceptually tautologous.  This works very nicely for fostering the internal unity and coherency of thinking which Ian Kershaw identifies as key to Hitler’s psychology, but it allows us no escape from the fascist worldview.  Indeed, that’s the point!  

So unless we are prepared to adopt as correct, or at least valid, the ideological self-description of a political current responsible for the most systematically savage genocide in human history, an abyss of horror running like a crack down the spine of human existence, we must retreat from the racial view and view it as having been disproved ontologically by its own consequences.  Essentially, it must be false because the consequences of it not being false are too dreadful to countenance.  

Luckily, we also have the support of modern science, which comprehensively refutes the racial view.  

The only place left to turn - unless we want to huddle in one or another dark corner of befuddlement, where the liberal mind pessimistically despairs and offers increasingly hysterical reiterative descriptions of the incomprehensibility of it all as if they constitute an explanation, or the closest we can get to an explanation - is back to the class analysis that it is fascism’s most basic nature to attack.

 

IDSG Ep57 - The Boogaloo Discourse

Bowing to necessity, this week Daniel and Jack talk about the Boogaloo, the shortcomings of the current discussion around it, and the reality.

CONTENT WARNING

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Notes/Links:

Bundyville Podcast https://www.opb.org/news/article/bundyville-occupation-podcast/

Robert Evans; Jason Wilson: The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/

Robert Evans guests on Qanon Anonymous, on the Boogaloo Boys https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-qanon-anonymous-30956096/episode/episode-96-the-boogaloo-boys-feat-63994902/

IDSG Ep56 - Digital or Analog Analysis of Nazi Podcasts? (with Megan Squire)

This week, Daniel and Jack are honoured to be joined by Prof. Megan Squire, Antifascist data-miner.  Geeking-out ensues.  You're gonna love it.

CONTENT WARNING

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Megan's Twitter: @MeganSquire0

https://facstaff.elon.edu/msquire/

https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/fellows/megan-squire/

https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-antifa-data-mining/

IDSG, Ep55 - Matt Heimbach, Anti-Racist???

Spoilers: probably not.

Content Warning / Contains Clips

Direct Download

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Notes and Links:

Matt Heimbach SPLC. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/matthew-heimbach

SPLC article 'Two Prominent Neo-Nazis Recant, but Their Actions Sow Doubts' https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/05/14/two-prominent-neo-nazis-recant-their-actions-sow-doubts

Everything You Love Will Burn. https://www.amazon.com/Everything-You-Love-Will-Burn/dp/1568589948

Vice White Student Union documentary (from 2013). https://youtu.be/GJ_MHp8iqtQ

Matt Heimbach assaults woman at Trump rally 2016. https://youtu.be/-YeYZtXHo8E

Kelly Weill article on Night of Wrong Wives. https://www.thedailybeast.com/matthew-heimbachs-traditional-workers-party-implodes-over-love-triangle-turned-trailer-brawl

Matt Heimbach joins Light Upon Light. https://youtu.be/w4DGkvsJLP8

Light Upon Light Upon Light (independent blog critical of LuL.) https://lightuponlightuponlight.home.blog

Take A Walk On the Right Side podcast. https://anchor.fm/take-a-walk-on-the-right-side

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Relevant previous episodes:

Episode 8: The National Socialist Movement

Episode 28: The Siege Pill, Part 1

Episode 29: The Siege Pill, Part 2

Episode 3: Unite the Right, Part 1

Episode 4: Unite the Right, Part 2

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Jack's splenetic ramblings on J. K. Rowling, Part 1, Part 2, review of Fantastic Beasts 2

 

I Don't Speak German, Ep 54 - The Murder of George Floyd and the Right-Wing Instigators (in Blue)

In this edition of IDSG, recorded less than 48 hours ago at the time of publication but already looking like an artefact of a dimly-recalled epoch, we talk about the savage 'ropeless lynching' of George Floyd by police, the subsequent explosion of protest and repression that has rocked the US, and a little bit about Trump's escalatingly bloodthirsty fascistic rantings.  Daniel addresses the question of whether the violence has been stoked by fascist agents provocateurs.  Basically the answer is: yes, but they're in blue.

Content warning.

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Notes/Links:

'The Boogaloo Movement is Not What You Think' by Robert Evans and Jason Wilson: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/

Other links to follow.

IDSG Ep53 - Afterword to Episode 52

This time, we chat about our previous episode, '52: Genocide and The Right Stuff'.  Hopefully more interesting that it sounds. 

Content Warning.

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IDSG episodes 9, 16 and 17

IDSG Ep52 - Genocide and The Right Stuff

Special episode this week, as Daniel explodes the bullshit of the 'Right Stuff' / 'Daily Shoah' chuds.  Contains clips from Nazi podcasts.

Let us know how you like this new format.

Content Warning

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Show Notes:

Brenton Lengel Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrentonLengel

Nationalism Vs Antifascism Debate: https://t.co/Bo3sZfoEKl?amp=1

Lewontin's Fallacy at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin%27s_Fallacy

Matthew Q. Gebert identified by the SPLC. https://www.splcenter.org/gebert

Angry White Men covers the Daily Shoah episode from which the "Unironic Exterminationism" clip comes. https://angrywhitemen.org/2017/04/01/daily-shoah-promotes-suidlanders-event-and-interviews-self-proclaimed-ex-mercenary-who-wants-to-exterminate-blacks/

Magnus Hirschfield at Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Hirschfeld

Timeline.com, "How the Nazis Derailed the Medical Advances Around Sexual Reassignment Surgery." (Enoch reads this text in the episode.) https://timeline.com/how-the-nazis-derailed-the-medical-advances-around-sexual-reassignment-surgery-eb8d4f21c463

TDS446: The Adolf in the Room Full Video at Bitchute https://www.bitchute.com/video/imERn7oJEKb0/

Dario Gabbai Tells His Story. https://www.neveragain.com/genocide/dario-gabbai/

Excerpts from Goebbel's diary entries, March 1942 at Nizkor: http://nizkor.com/hweb/people/g/goebbels-joseph/goebbels-1948-excerpts-02.html#1942-mar-7

Holocaust Controversies, "Goebbels on Liquidation." http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/04/goebbels-on-liquidation.html

Holocaust Controversies, Index of Published Evidence of Gas Chambers at Auschwitz. http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/10/index-of-published-evidence-on.html

IDSG episodes 9, 16 and 17

IDSG Ep51 - Conspiracy

This time, Daniel and Jack consider the 2001 film Conspiracy, a dramatisation of the infamous Wannsee Conference, a wartime meeting of Third Reich officials on the subject of the 'final solution to the Jewish question'.

Content Warnings.

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Notes/Links:

Wannsee Conference Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

Speaking the unspeakable: the portrayal of the Wannsee Conference in the film Conspiracy by Alex J. Kay: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17504902.2019.1637492

Die Wannseekonferenz (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g

English translation of the Protocol: http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/news/uploads/WanseeProtocols.pdf

The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting by Mark Roseman: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Villa-Lake-Meeting-Wannsee-Solution/dp/0141003952

Hitler, vol. 2: Nemesis by Ian Kershaw: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitler-1936-1945-Nemesis-Allen-History/dp/0140272399/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VX5FLJJ3LS7I&dchild=1&keywords=kershaw+hitler+nemesis&qid=1589291029&s=books&sprefix=kershaw+hitler+ne%2Cstripbooks%2C159&sr=1-1

Hitler's American Model by James Q. Whitman: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States/dp/0691183066/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hitler%27s+american+model&qid=1589250377&s=books&sr=1-1

 

 

IDSG Ep50 - Michelle Malkin

New IDSG.

Jack returns to the podcast to chat with Daniel about Michelle Malkin, reactionary star since the War on Terror era, who recently started snuggling up to Nick Fuentes and the Groypers.  Plus a bit of chat about the old coronavirus and the recent protests, including the armed 'storming' of the capital statehouse in Michigan.

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Content warnings, as always.

Notes/Links:

Michigan Protests, "Operation Gridlock."

MLive, "Protesters angry with Gov. Whitmer’s stay-at-home order gridlock Michigan capitol." https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/protesters-angry-with-gov-whitmers-stay-at-home-order-gridlock-michigan-capitol.html

"But people are still allowed to protest, and thousands took the opportunity to do so in Lansing Wednesday as part of an “Operation Gridlock" protest. Organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and supported by the Michigan Freedom Fund and other conservative groups, the idea was to create a traffic jam in front of the Michigan Capitol to create gridlock.

“This is a statement to show people’s frustration,” said Meshawn Maddock, a member of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, ahead of the protest."

Mother Jones, "A DeVos-Linked Group Promoted the Right-Wing “Operation Gridlock” Tantrum in Michigan" https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/04/a-devos-linked-group-promoted-the-right-wing-operation-gridlock-tantrum-in-michigan/

"The whole charade was facilitated by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a conservative political group that doubles as a front for Michigan Trump Republicans, and promoted by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative group with ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire philanthropist power broker before she joined the Trump administration. The Detroit Free Press reported that the fund was listed as one of the protest’s hosts on Facebook. The organization also promoted the event on Facebook.

MLive, "Protesters brave the rain to send message to Michigan leaders as coronavirus state of emergency debate rages" https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/protesters-brave-the-rain-to-send-message-to-michigan-leaders-as-coronavirus-state-of-emergency-debate-rages.html

"Members of the Michigan Liberty Militia patrolled the grounds, armed with guns after being hired as “security detail” by the organizers. One of the members of the militia, Phil Robinson of Barry County, said the group brought nine people to serve on the detail.

“We are strictly here running security, making sure everybody has a right to peacefully assemble,” Robinson said. “That is our only mission here today we are not here as protesters or rally goers were strictly here, exercising our Second Amendment right and to make sure that everybody has a right to peacefully assemble.”"

Antifash Gordon thread on the Michigan Liberty Militia: https://twitter.com/AntiFashGordon/status/1255976396913930240?s=20sdsdfdfsdff

Michelle Malkin and "America First"

Goldsea, "Michelle Malkin: The Radical Right's Asian Pitbull." http://www.goldsea.com/Personalities/Malkin/malkin.html

Booknotes Transcript, December 8, 2002. "Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores." https://web.archive.org/web/20071013191746/http://booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1705

"MALKIN: Why did I write my book? Well, September 11 was obviously a galvanizing event for me, seeing the lapses in our immigration system that allowed the September 11 hijackers to come in, exploit our weak enforcement, work underground and live her comfortably. And that is a theme that I`ve been talking a lot about over my career in journalism, for more than a decade. I started out in Los Angeles, and it`s hard to ignore the negative consequences of lax immigration enforcement when you`re in the middle of it in Los Angeles. So over the years, you know, I`ve written a number of stories about so many aspects of the immigration system from top to bottom -- the front door, the back door, the side door.

And then there`s a personal aspect of it, too. I often talk about how I myself am the child of legal immigrants who came here from the Philippines. And one of the themes that I`ve always talked about is something that they`ve reminded me of almost every day since I was old enough to understand it, which is that entry into this country and residence in this country, and ultimately, citizenship in this country is an absolute privilege, and it ought not to be treated as some sort of natural right or entitlement. But over the years, our immigration system has -- has abandoned that principle. And that`s how we find ourselves with so many problems that we`re dealing today."

Malkin's website on "In Defense of Internment."

"In Defense of Internment provides a radical departure from the predominant literature of civil liberties absolutism. It offers a defense of the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II (three separate actions which are commonly lumped under the umbrella term “internment”). My book is also a defense of racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling (widely differing measures that are commonly lumped under the umbrella term “racial profiling”) now being taken or contemplated during today’s War on Terror.

I was compelled to write this book after watching ethnic activists, historians, and politicians repeatedly play the World War II internment card after the September 11 attacks. The Bush Administration’s critics have equated every reasonable measure to interrogate, track, detain, and deport potential terrorists with the “racist” and “unjustified” World War II internment policies of President Roosevelt. To make amends for this “shameful blot” on our history, both Japanese-American and Arab/Muslim-American activists argue against any and all uses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in shaping current homeland security policies. Misguided guilt about the past continues to hamper our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks."

Michelle Malkin AFPAC Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4nr02705MA

Transcript of Malkin's AFPAC Speech at VDARE: https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-at-afpac-the-charge-of-the-america-first-brigade

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls (but no e-girls—Right? Have I proved my bonafides?), I rise tonight in defiant opposition to Conservatism Inc. and in unwavering support of America First. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure and transparency, I must reveal to you that the number of donor class CEOs and philanthropists that are backing me is precisely zero. There is no Sheldon Groyperson pulling the strings. There are no Kek Brothers lurking in the background, waiting to whisk me away in a private jet. The grand total of subsidies that I have received from America First is zero dollars and zero cents. Because there is no America First Inc."

...

"The numbers, the exit polls, the stubbornly unmalleable voting preferences of the majority of amnestied and naturalized citizens, plus Birthright Citizenship beneficiaries in every major ethnic block all lead to one irrefutable reality. Mass migration isn’t just turning California and Virginia and Texas blue. It’s turning all of America blue and every American should be seeing red about it. This nation under God will be majority minority by 2045. And when I launched my book tour for Open Borders Incorporated in September, the immediate response from the Soros monkeys was that I was anti-Semitic for trafficking in the Great Replacement Theory that was also believed by the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter.

Already right out of the gate, before I even knew who Nick Fuentes was, before I knew who Groypers were, I was being tarred as an anti-Semite. It’s become a useless, meaningless term and everybody knows it. And that’s why they’re so desperate to tar all of us as that.

It’s anti-Semitic to mention George Soros’s billions. It’s anti-Semitic to criticize the Anti-Defamation League. It’s anti-Semitic to question whatever the precise number is of people who perished in World War II. It is anti-Semitic for me, being married to a 100% Ashkenazi Jew, to question dual loyalties of people who are working here as agents of a foreign country.

Oh, and it is an unacceptably anti-Semitic to point out the rank hypocrisy of people who are fiercely protective of an ethno-state and an immigration enforcement system that works–who turn around and call those of us who believe, whatever our backgrounds are, who only have one homeland that they’ve ever known, to call us—what is it now?–“white majoritarianism” I believe is the term.That’s me. Thank you.

Here is what we all know, those of us who understand demographic reality. There is no turning back. We know that. 1965, the Hart-Celler Act, the Refugee Act of 1980, the 1986 Reagan Amnesty, which again is being recycled and pushed right now in the halls of Congress and the White House, the 1990 Immigration Act that’s created H-1B, and the Diversity Visa Lottery, plus more than a dozen other mini-amnesties, extensions and waivers. There is no turning back."

"In Defense of Internment provides a radical departure from the predominant literature of civil liberties absolutism. It offers a defense of the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II (three separate actions which are commonly lumped under the umbrella term “internment”). My book is also a defense of racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling (widely differing measures that are commonly lumped under the umbrella term “racial profiling”) now being taken or contemplated during today’s War on Terror.

Red Ice, Michelle Malkin, "In Defense of America's European Roots." https://redice.tv/red-ice-tv/in-defense-of-americas-european-roots

Michelle Malkin: "The Defeatocrat's Cheer." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt_YcQlYxyY

David Neiwert archive at the Daily Kos. Essential to understand recent Boogaloo boy behavior. https://m.dailykos.com/blogs/David-Neiwert

And here's the video Jack mentions in the show: Rad Shiba, Covid-19 and the Left https://youtu.be/l2Gy1lox_QM

As ever, apologies for missed announcements.  Here are links to episodes 49 and 48.