The Leo Frank Case, anti-semitism and anti-anti-semitism

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  1. https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-adl-and-kkk-born-of-the-same-murder-100-years-ago/?fbclid=IwAR1cBRT9ZRY15bKH3_us3bddC7Ug4GH00HUvzH0inrnmGOX29XMAm_yiLYo
  2. https://forward.com/culture/books/375506/musical-sparks-fresh-tensions-with-blacks-over-infamous-leo-frank-case/

The importance of the Leo Frank case is not just historical. It seems to have marked a turning point. With the founding of the Anti-Defamation League in 1913 Jews in America stopped being simply white people (mostly) and became, as it were, Jews. The evidence that Frank was guilty of murder seems very strong, and he was indeed convicted and sentenced to hang, by a jury including a number of prominent American Jews. But this is not accepted, or is at least pushed under the carpet as “irrelevant”, by the Anti-Defamation League, by Frank’s wealthy Jewish supporters of the time and more or less by the subsequent “historical record”. His supporters’ initial attempts to play the anti-Negro racist card in Atlanta, against all the odds, were not working and it became necessary to detect anti-Semitism behind accusations against Frank. This did not save Frank: his sentence was commuted but he was lynched by what are now called the “deplorables”. The lynching was meant as a lesson to interfering Yankees but, it seems, also reflected genuine moral outrage. Frank nevertheless went on to become “a martyr” and the Anti-Defamation-League commenced a successful career as a lobby willing and able to find anti-Semitism behind many different phenomena.

Anti-Semitism had a long history in Europe, but not in the USA, as I understand it, until the Frank case. If there was some anti-Semitism in the U.S. it was vastly overshadowed by the black vs white and Yankee vs Southerner divides.

It was therefore left to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, with their eccentric views on a number of subjects (“The Black People of America are the real Children of Israel and those who claim to be Jews are in error [Revelations 2:9, 3:9”] to shoulder the burden of documenting the case against the Anti-Defamation League and Frank. And the volume they have produced is extremely well documented, objective, professional and secular, with the exception of the metaphysically tinged preface.

It would be an interesting subject to document what role. if any, America’s Anti-Defamation League, played in the rise of Nazism in Germany. Both sides of the continually snowballing international furore unleashed by the Frank case seem more interested in the (re)actions of the other side than in the question of whether or not Leo Frank was guilty of murder.

One can get a better idea of what is involved in this issue by reading Zionist materials than one can by reading the mainstream Western press.

Perhaps a historical approach combining a dispassionate study of how anti-Semitism and anti-anti-Semitism became established in the United States will provide some relief from the constant focus on the illegal and unacceptable actions of Israel in combination with a fear of being accusable of what lobbies such as the ADL have succeeded in characterizing as “anti-Semitism”. The resulting irrationality is to nobody’s benefit, including Jews, Israelis and anyone who deserves to be treated with sympathy and understanding

W.H.

Alternativ fuer Deutschland: Germany’s Left and Right Change Sides on the issues of War and Peace

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The results of last weekend’s elections in the German state of Hesse have been getting quite a run in mainstream media.  The sharp losses suffered by both parties in the Grand Coalition, the Socialists (SPD) and Merkel’s center-right CDU, finally delivered the decisive push that spells the end the reign of the iron lady in Berlin. Not immediately, but in the very foreseeable future, depending on who is elected to replace her at the head of her party in December.

Otherwise commentators have called attention to the beneficiaries of the waning strength at the center: the Greens on the Left, and more particularly the Alternativ fuer Deutschland (AfD) on the Right.  While the Greens are a long known quantity in German politics by their participation in the coalitions governing several Laender, the AfD is a relative newcomer and analysts noted with anxiety that the latest election returns now put AfD deputies in all of the German federal states, making it finally a nationwide party and eventual claimant to ministerial portfolios following the next German elections which might come already in 2019.

What we hear about the AfD in mainstream media tends to be condescending, at best, scornful more commonly. The party’s rise is attributed to one issue: its anti-immigration policy.  It is dismissed as xenophobic and nationalistic. Its members are assumed to be “deplorables,” if we may borrow Hilary Clinton’s pungent characterization of their assumed moral equivalents in the USA.

Mainstream occasionally reminds us that the homeland of the AfD is the territory of the former GDR. And it is taken as axiomatic that xenophobia and nationalism would have festered there because of the region’s Communist past, so unlike the open and sophisticated society of West Germany.

In the essay which I present here, I will demonstrate that the AfD’s present and likely future successes in German politics come from realities of life in East Germany that are quite unsuspected by global audiences, namely a long-borne resentment at their colonization by their Western compatriots following the annexation of the GDR, by their second class citizen status 28 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  For this association between the sufferings of Ossies at the hands of West German elites and their newfound political voice in what is called the “extreme right” I owe a debt of gratitude to Russian television, and to be specific, to two editions of the flagship Sunday news round-up of channel Rossiya-1 hosted by Dimitri Kiselyov, Vesti Nedeli, on 7 and 14 October.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqr_AQi0eHg, at 1h20min to 1 h 28 min   and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWWON9Z6DOw&has_verified=1  from 0:54 to 1h13 min

* * * *

The point made by Kiselyov and his correspondents in the field is that following its “annexation” in 1990, the new bosses in the West purged East Germany of all its leaders, not merely the cadres of the Communist Party that governed the country or the Stasi secret police that spied on the citizenry and reported to Moscow, but all the professionals including the university professors, sporting administrators, army officer corps.  The lustration process put them out on the street, and also deprived their children of opportunities in education and careers bearing as they did the marks of offspring of “enemies of the people.”

The East German elites were replaced at the top of local society by carpetbaggers from the West, very often second or third rate opportunists.  At the same time, the most qualified Ossies moved out, often abroad, to pursue employment opportunities in the UK or the United States.

In parallel, East Germany underwent de-industrialization. With very few exceptions such as the Karl Zeiss enterprise in Jena, East German factories were shuttered and no new manufacturers of scale appeared.  East Germany became little more than an incremental consumer market for the West.   Consequently its economic indices remain at just 73% of Western levels, and this is set to decline to just 66% by 2045.

All of this is very valuable to bear in mind when we consider the radicalization of East Germany and its rejection of the main parties from the West, as expressed today in strong and growing support for the Alternativ fuer Deutschland.  According to Kiselyov, latest polls indicate 27% of voters in the East now back the AfD. This is unquestionably the highest level of backing anywhere in Germany today.

Meanwhile, the Ossie origins of the AfD contribute greatly to the rest of its party platform outside of opposition to immigrants. We hear much less about this in mainstream media except when they speculate on the chances of its entering into a coalition with the main traditional parties of Germany and try to match up policies.  We find here not merely Euro-skepticism, but opposition to NATO, plus calls for ending sanctions on Russia.  These last points we normally associate with the Left of the political spectrum, but they are in keeping with the predisposition of a large part of the population in what was the GDR to trade with and have normal relations with Russia as they did in the distant past. In this context, the Ossie who is the federal Chancellor is at odds with the population from which she came.

I have called these policies, and especially the opposition to NATO, typically Leftist because they were precisely that in the German past.  The Entspannungspolitik, or Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt was a case in point.  However, power sharing in the Grand Coalition with the CDU has pulled the party from its moorings in exchange for the spoils of power.  When several of the former assistants to Brandt and his advisor on the East, Egon Bahr, tried to relaunch Détente a couple of years ago, it found almost no support, as I saw from inside attending what was supposed to be the launch.  The SPD was firmly in the hands of the Martin Schulz wing and like-minded Atlanticists, globalists.  So it is today.

To be sure, to the Left of the SPD we find Die Linke, another party with roots in the former GDR. Die Linke’s brilliant Bundestag deputy Sahra Wagenknecht regularly weighs in against NATO, against the sanctions on Russia, etc.  However, Wagenknecht is enmeshed in a party riven by internal disputes – over pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian factions, over personalities – to the point where it is politically ineffective and has been unable to profit from the weakness of the centrist parties.

Also to the Left of center we find the Greens. However, on international affairs, the German Greens are among the fiercest Cold Warriors on the Continent.

And so those who are condemned by today’s governing elites in Germany as the dregs of society, as fascist leaning, and so forth, namely the AfD, are by default Germany’s otherwise missing anti-war movement.

* * * *

It bears mention that the anti-war sentiments of Germans led in the 1980s to large scale demonstrations against the installation in Germany, in Europe of nuclear armed US Pershing missiles meant to counter Russia’s SS20 intermediate range missiles of that era.  There was heft and determination, and their actions keeping the threats of these weapons in the news surely contributed to the conclusion in 1987 of the Treaty that is now under threat of revocation by Trump in the coming month.

I had been despondent contemplating the disarray of the Left and absence of any kind of antiwar movement which might challenge some coming reintroduction of US nuclear tipped intermediate range missiles into the European heartland in the near future.

However, the vitality of the AfD suggests that it could well make political grist from any such US plans just as it has prospered from the calamity of open borders to immigration that Angela Merkel so foolishly caused. If so, our political compass will be spun around entirely.

31 October 2018

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2018

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Unity for Assange’s Plight Is Necessary To Build a Movement for Democracy

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains in solitary confinement inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum in 2012 against the threat of extradition to the United States for his publishing activities. In recent months, Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno, under pressure from the U.S. began threatening to evict this political refugee.

In response to this dire situation, people across the political spectrum began to form solidarity through #Unify4J, an online platform to organize a social media movement in support of Assange. Among those include prominent Trump’s supporters. In the midst of Trump administration’s draconian measures on immigrants and empowerment of white supremacist groups, the idea of working with Trump’s key allies triggered reaction among the left. Recently, Classconscious.org, an outlet spearheading global civic action for Assange’s freedom, scrutinized the idea of uniting with ultra-right forces that back Trump and urged the movement to draw a line.

Strife around the same issue arose from the former associate and early proponents of WikiLeaks. Barrett Brown, an award-winning journalist, previously imprisoned for charges relating to a Stratfor hack, has been one of the strong voices in support of the whistleblowing site. He described how he has long stood up for the organization’s mission of transparency at great risk to himself, yet in recent months he became upset about what he perceived to be Assange’s alliance with fascists and radical right supremacist groups.

Brown, who recently launched the project Pursuance, an open source software that allows individuals to share information and organize, has ramped up criticism toward Assange in his most vulnerable time. This created the conflict with the Courage Foundation, an organization that provides assistance for whistleblowers. Courage was co-founded by Assange and it has both WikiLeaks and Brown as beneficiaries. According to the article on the Daily Beast, three of Courage’s trustees reportedly instructed Courage’s respected director Naomi Colvin to cut off Brown as some kind of retaliation against his hostile remarks toward Assange. This led to the unfortunate resignation of Colvin, who was forced to walk out from the organization as a matter of principle for her opposition to exclude anyone based on political speech.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former member of Iceland’s Parliament, who now joined the board of Pursuance, responded to this alleged retaliation against Brown. Jónsdóttir, who worked for WikiLeaks in the 2010 publication of the Collateral Murder video, recently tweeted her thoughts on her old colleague: “It’s beyond sad to watch the hubris of one man being able to do so much damage and alienate people who risked everything for the cause. WikiLeaks is now far closer to alt right groups then digital rights groups, by choice of its overlord.”

The divisiveness that has grown among progressives around the advocacy of WikiLeaks brings extreme alarm. It weakens any kind of efforts to resist government and corporate oppression. Finding a way to overcome this force becomes now important, not only for Assange’s freedom, but also for creating a viable movement for democracy.

Innovation on the Internet

So, where does this divisiveness really come from? Since its mainstream recognition in 2010, WikiLeaks was accused of many things in different places and by various groups of people. WikiLeaks once tweeted: “In Russia, Julian Assange is a MI6 agent; In US, a Russian agent; In Iran, a Mossad agent; In Saudi, an Iranian agent; In Libya, a CIA agent. World wide establishments accuse those who expose them of being the enemy of the people.” The latest accusation became ‘WikiLeaks, as an agent of fascism!’

The latest accusation became ‘WikiLeaks, as an agent of fascism!’ Yet, the organization cannot be pigeonholed into these labels. Needless to say, none of these characterizations are accurate. WikiLeaks is a 100% publicly funded transnational journalistic organization that is not bound to any nation, corporation or political parties. This borderless existence comes to challenge our preconceived notion of journalism based on a model that operates within the confinement of the nation-state. WikiLeaks can be best looked at as an innovation of journalism on the Internet. Just as many inventions of the past, it brought disruption to the system and became controversial. Think of Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press. The spread of the printing press made it possible for people to read the Bible and democratization of knowledge enabled by his technology has brought the decline of Church’s authority.

In a similar way, Assange together with mathematicians, activists and journalists all around the world, invented a new form of journalism that is much more effective in revealing corruption of governments and institutions. With a pristine record of accuracy, it published more classified information than all media combined, exposing human right abuses, government spying, torture and war crimes on a scale that was unprecedented.

Birth of this global Fourth Estate was a game changer. It radically altered the media landscape. Just as scientists and inventors of the past who were imprisoned for their unconventional beliefs and discoveries, Assange has been persecuted for the breakthrough of this innovation. In the 17th century, Galileo’s thought that provided the evidence about the Earth revolving around the Sun was met with condemnation by the orthodoxy of the Church. In these contemporary times, WikiLeaks and its idea of transparency for the powerful seem to have become a heresy that is regarded as a punishable offense by the state.

Ethos of cypherpunks

Without understanding the essence of this new invention, people’s attitudes toward WikiLeaks swing back and forth. Whether it is capitalism or socialism, Democrats or Republicans, many demand WikiLeaks to demonstrate its allegiance to their political ideology and support their preferred candidate. They conflate the invention with the inventor, becoming obsessed with Assange.

One publication put him in a category of a leftist, while another turns him into a right winger. People speculate and get overly attached to Assange’s political views. Ultimately, the opinion of this inventor does not and should not matter. In the same way that people don’t have to know who invented electricity to have a light or a combustion engine to drive a car, everyone can benefit from this new journalism and use it to enrich society at large.

Yet, for those who still feel the need to know, Assange’s thoughts are not shaped by a conventional political dichotomy of left and right. The ideas that conceived WikiLeaks originated from the philosophy of cypherpunks, an electronic mailing list that advocates privacy through the use of strong cryptography.

The motto of this loosely tied network that became active since the late 1980’s is depicted with the expression “cypherpunks write code”. Adam Back, a cryptographer who was cited in Bitcoin’s white paper described it as a particular mindset to make changes through creating alternatives, rather than engaging in typical political efforts of petitions and protests. Back noted how pressuring politicians and promoting issues through the press tends to be slow and creates an uphill battle. He pointed out how instead of appealing to authority for change, people can simply “deploy technology and help people do what they consider to be their legal right”, and then society will later catch up to reflect these values.

Assange describing himself as part of cypherpunks that came from a different tradition than libertarians in California, articulated their unique efforts to balance power between the individual and the state. He said, “By writing our own software and disseminating it far and wide we liberated cryptography, democratized it and spread it through the frontiers of the new internet.” Being true to this ethos of cypherpunks, Assange deployed the technology of a secure drop box that runs on Tor, a free software that routes Internet traffic to enable the anonymous submission of material.

Liberating the First Amendment

The creation of WikiLeaks brought a major upgrade to the existing model of free speech. In the U.S. where tradition of freedom of speech began, in its inception, the First Amendment right was not able to fully embody its potent creative power. The idea of democracy, a government established under the rule of people, expressed in the preamble of the Constitution “we the people” remained an ideal. A move toward its fulfillment came from below by those who opposed the ratification of the 1787 Constitution that lacked the guarantee of individual liberties. The anti-federalists demanded that the Bill of Rights was necessary in order to restrict governmental power and their efforts made it possible for freedom of expression to be codified into law.

The First Amendment reads;

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Establishment of Bill of Rights as a vital part of checks and balances of power was revolutionary. Yet these rights that were meant to provide protection of individuals from government’s overarching power were granted and regulated by central authority. In the structure of the constitutional republic, the unaccounted power of the Founding Fathers was kept unchecked. This created a loophole that makes the system vulnerable to commercial interests. Big business gained power by exploiting this weakness in security of the system and hijacked the government. Transnational corporations that have no allegiance to any country began using national governments and their system of representative democracy as instruments to control the populace and advance their own agendas.

With privatization of public airwaves and consolidation of media, an oligarchic class put the First Amendment under its proprietary control, restricting user access and setting terms and conditions for their use. In this dictatorial form of governance, journalists and editors are installed as an arbitrator of truth to manage and monitor public opinion. Through a creed of objectivity, they justify censoring any dissenting thoughts that challenge government official lines crafted by the corporate masters. This was evidenced by the 2013 documentary film Mediastan that exposed the former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s cozy relationship with the US government, the military and the CIA.

It was in this context of corporate dictatorship that Assange used cryptography as a nonviolent democratic weapon to revolt. From its onset, the US Constitution framed by white property owners with their imperfection manifested in slavery, genocide of natives and denial of women’s rights corrupted the source code of equality written in the Declaration of Independence. Now, over 200 years later, Australian born computer programmer and journalist aimed to restore this original code of democracy through building a publishing platform online that is run on free software.

With the creation of WikiLeaks, Assange liberated the First Amendment from this archaic system of national governance. Significance of this invention is that it decentralized the function of free press, extending the First Amendment protection that has been exclusively preserved for the profession of journalists to ordinary people. Now, through this innovative anonymous submission system, anyone in the world with Internet connection can communicate with people around the globe about the fraud and wrongdoing of any governments or institutions. Without fear of retaliation, people can now transcend boundaries of nation-state to form association with one another and redress their grievances.

With scientific journalism at its core, this new media of the Internet replaced the source of legitimacy from the profession’s creed of objectivity to the actual documents themselves that are authenticated. Access to full achieves in a searchable format empowered everyday people all over the world. They can now engage in their own history as it is happening and use information to create social change.

Claiming creative power within

The US government under Obama began a war against the First Amendment, trying to stop this WikiLeaks’ mission to bring free speech to the world. In this battle now being carried on by the new President Trump, Assange, as a lightning rod got inflamed with mainstream media hype of Russia Gate, demonizing the organization’s role in the 2016 US election. Without any solid evidence, Democrats throw around opinions, blaming Assange for the victory of Trump. They accuse the organization as collaborating with a fascist, when in fact the release of John Podesta emails exposed the Democratic establishment as actively aiding Trump candidacy with their strategy to elevate “pied piper” GOP candidates.

Some of Assange’s former allies also got caught up with the heat that fixates public gaze on his personality. By expressing disdain toward Assange’s flaws and what appeared to be their personal grudges against him that should be reconciled individually, they plunge themselves into the orgy of identity politics. While they are fully entitled to their opinion and criticism about his character, the timing and the way it was voiced when he can’t respond is concerning. This only adds fuel to the establishment’s character assassination of this political prisoner, who was placed under surveillance cameras and intense media scrutiny to the level that no one in the world are made to endure.

In facing the struggles of the racial injustice in the civil rights era, Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the similar force of divisiveness that could destroy the movement. In a sermon delivered in 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama, King identified it as hatred and described how it “distorts the personality of the hater.” He noted how this hatred has created “something of a civil war” inside people that divides them against one another. He reminded all about a redemptive power of love that could “save our world and our civilization”:

“Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.”

Just like cypherpunks who tap into the creative power within to bring change, this veteran leader of a civil rights movement knew that in order to abolish unjust laws of racism, we must first become that change by embodying universal brotherhood within ourselves. He understood that the blacks’ fight against their oppressors to claim their rights lock all into a perpetuating power struggle and how the levers of control that they use to try to defeat opponents will be used against them to deny their rights. For this, King insisted all to adopt the principle of “love your enemies” and lay down a sharp sword that cut through both ways.

Reign of the heart

This radical love that embraces even one’s opponents is the heart that accepts all existence, giving all a right to express themselves equally. This heart that does not favor certain opinions as good and judge others as bad is the cornerstone of our democracy. The function of the First Amendment is to connect us to this silent pulse of the heart, placing it at a center of society to preserve the liberty of all people.

In the interview conducted by an award winning filmmaker John Pilger, renowned political analyst Noam Chomsky once said, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all”. Democracy dies when we deny speech of those whom we oppose and our collective heart suffocates, with each individual not being able to speak freely. Tyranny triumphs the rule of law when we can’t breathe through diverse opinions and perspectives to inspire one another to form a court of public opinion.

WikiLeaks enabled the true function of the First Amendment. As a countenance of democracy, this revolutionary journalism protects people against suppression of speech by allowing all voices including views that are unpopular and marginalized. This can illuminate what liberals consider WikiLeaks’ troubling appearance of associating with Trump Jr. and speaking up for conspiracy theorists like a Infowars radio host Alex Jones, when he got censored by Silicon Valley tech giants.

In the article “No, Julian Assange Is Not a Fascist”, Gary Lord who writes political commentary has cut though the corporate media headlines that twist WikiLeaks’ professional contact with President Trump’s son. By presenting their Twitter direct messages in a full context, he dismantled the widely held myth that Assange supports Trump and WikiLeaks helped his campaign. What is revealed in these exchanges was WikiLeaks asking Trump’s son to help them publish his father’s tax returns (which was ignored), while refusing inquiries of both Cambridge Analytica and Trump Jr., regarding the upcoming publications. Lord summed up the nature of their interaction as WikiLeaks just doing the things that any good journalistic organization would do.

In Trump cabinet’s aggressive pursuit to criminalize journalism, Assange is now seized in the embassy, deprived of sunlight and health care, being cut off from the outside world. As the fate of press freedom looks grim, cynicism and apathy spread with many of his colleagues in mainstream media turning away from his predicament and spectators lamenting this tragedy from afar. The fact is, it is not Assange who has created damage and alienated people as critics say. Rather, it is our lack of understanding of true meaning of free speech that brings damage to efforts of those who risked everything for democracy and has condemned Assange to profound solitude.

Efforts to free Julian Assange challenges us all to uphold this right to free speech, with moral courage to love our enemies. When politics wins, democracy loses. Only through our united front built upon our feeling of truth, can we bring the reign of the heart that can dismantle the levers of control and realize universal ideals that all men and women are created equal.

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is an essayist and author of WikiLeaks, the Global Fourth Estate: History Is Happening (Libertarian Books, 2018). Find her on twitter @nozomimagine.