#usa

San Franciscos Niedergang : Warum ich ausgerechnet hier an einen Witz aus DDR-Zeiten denken musste
▻https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/open-source/san-francisco-innovativ-schoen-arm-li.388253

L’auteur de ce récit de voyage constate une dégradation des conditions de vie en Californie comparable à la situation en #URSS autour de 1990.

16.09.2023 von Rumen Milkow - Unser Autor hat sich San Francisco einmal genauer angesehen und festgestellt: Die lange Wartezeit bei der Passbehörde ist hier das kleinere Übel.

Der bekannte Song „Are you going to San Francisco“ von John Phillips von The Mamas & The Papas aus den Sechzigern, bekannt in der Version von Scott McKenzie, besagt, dass man unbedingt Blumen im Haar haben sollte, wenn man nach San Francisco kommt, wo man einige „sanfte Menschen“ treffen würde.

Wir hatten keine Blumen im Haar und die einzigen, die wir zu den frühen Stunden in den Straßen Downtown San Francisco antrafen, waren gebrochene Menschen, Drogenabhängige und Obdachlose, und das in großer Stückzahl. Überall roch es nach Urin, Kot und Erbrochenem.

Die Bürgersteige ganzer Straßenzüge waren mit Zelten vollgestellt. Im letzten Jahr soll es sogar eine richtige Zeltstadt vor dem Rathaus gegeben haben, wie ich später erfuhr.
Menschen leben in Zelten

Dass ich ausgerechnet in San Francisco an einen Witz aus DDR-Zeiten denken würde, der mir sogleich im Hals stecken blieb, hätte ich mir nie träumen lassen. In dem Witz kommt Erich Honecker zurück von einem Staatsbesuch in der Mongolei, von dem er die Erkenntnis mitbringt, dass man außerhalb der Hauptstadt auch in Zelten wohnen kann. Der Witz war auf das DDR-Wohnungsbauprogramm gemünzt, das ins Stocken geraten war.

Mit den Zelten waren die in der Mongolei bis heute üblichen Jurten gemeint. Die Straßen von San Francisco im Jahr 2023 sind nicht von Großfamilien mit Jurten bevölkert, sondern von Obdachlosen in Zelten. Viele haben auch nur einen Schlafsack.

Meine Frau kommt aus Kalifornien, weswegen ich im Sommer zwei Monate dort war. Die Hauptstadt Kaliforniens, Sacramento, ist eine Stunde von Grass Valley entfernt, dem Heimatort meiner Frau. Grass Valley ist eine Kleinstadt im Nordosten Kaliforniens am Fuße der Sierra Nevada mit 13.000 Einwohnern.

Braucht man einen Pass, so wie meine Frau, kann man ihn nicht in Grass Valley beantragen und auch nicht in Sacramento, sondern muss ins drei Stunden entfernte San Francisco fahren. Diese Praxis ist durchaus üblich in den USA. Manche müssen sogar in einen anderen Bundesstaat fahren, um an einen Reisepass zu gelangen.

Die Wartezeit für einen neuen Pass betrug in San Francisco bereits vor Corona 9 bis 13 Wochen. Jetzt dürfte sie eher 13 Wochen plus X betragen. Nicht nur in Berlin hapert es mit der Personalausstattung der Behörden.

Da meine Frau im Ausland lebt und wir wenige Tage später nach Berlin zurückfliegen wollten, bestand berechtigte Hoffnung, dass man dies als ausreichende Gründe akzeptieren würde, um in den Genuss eines Express-Services zu kommen. Ob man ihr auch wirklich innerhalb eines Tages einen neuen Pass ausstellen würde, das konnte ihr zuvor niemand bei der Passbehörde sagen. So machten wir uns auf den Weg nach San Francisco, um es herauszufinden.

Diebstähle und Einbrüche an der Tagesordnung

Zu früher Morgenstunde fanden wir zunächst ausschließlich Menschen, die in gewisser Weise „sanft“ waren, wie in dem bekannten Song beschrieben, allerdings eher im Sinne von abgestumpft und betäubt. Ein Grund dafür ist die Droge Fenthanyl, die nicht nur in San Francisco ein großes Problem ist, auch weil mit ihrer Beschaffung Diebstähle und Einbrüche verbunden sind.

Viele Geschäfte in San Francisco stehen deswegen heute leer, oft sind die Eingänge und Scheiben mit Holzplatten verbarrikadiert. Schilder an Fensterscheiben von Autos weisen darauf hin, dass sich ein Einbruch nicht lohne, weil sich keine Wertsachen im Wageninneren befänden.

Auch in den selbstfahrenden Autos, die immer mehr Menschen alleine, also ohne Fahrer, durch eine dystopische Kulisse befördern, dürfte kaum etwas zu holen sein, sieht man von den unzähligen Kameras auf dem Fahrzeugdach ab. Ich musste an Filme wie „Soylent Green“ und „Idiocracy“ denken. In beiden Filmen werden Straßen einer amerikanischen Großstadt von verwahrlosten Menschen bevölkert.

Die Nähe zum Silicon Valley mit Hightech-Unternehmen wie Apple, Google und Facebook hat die Preise für Mietwohnungen und Häuser in der Stadt in den vergangenen Jahren explodieren lassen. Rund 35.000 Menschen gelten in San Francisco und der Bay-Area aktuell als obdachlos.

Öffentliche Plätze fallen durch das Fehlen von Bänken auf, was Obdachlosen einen dauerhaften Aufenthalt erschweren soll. In nicht wenigen Haltestellen öffentlicher Verkehrsmittel, denen in aller Regel die Glasscheiben fehlen, haben sie sich mit ihren Schlafsäcken niedergelassen.

Die Wohnungskrise ist außer Kontrolle geraten, Familien mit einem Einkommen von 120.000 Dollar gelten offiziell als arm. Diese Ziffer hat das amerikanische Ministerium für Wohnungsbau festgelegt, sie ist die höchste im ganzen Land. Politiker und Hilfsvereine fordern deswegen nun sogar Bürger auf, Obdachlose bei sich aufzunehmen.

Wirtschaftlich stärkster Bundesstaat

Ein Problem, das auch in Berlin nicht ganz unbekannt ist, wenngleich nicht in diesem Ausmaß. Auch in der deutschen Hauptstadt gibt es hin und wieder Zelte von Obdachlosen. In aller Regel werden die Leute, die darin leben, von Ordnungsamt und Polizei rasch zum Abbau ihrer Unterkunft bewegt. Auch Berlin zieht viele Obdachlose aus dem Rest des Landes und aus dem Ausland an.

Ähnliches gilt auch für San Francisco, wobei hier das milde kalifornische Klima hinzukommt. Ein weiterer Unterschied ist, dass San Francisco eine nicht unbedeutende Stadt im wirtschaftlich stärksten Bundesstaat der USA ist, der immerhin 14 Prozent zum Gesamtbruttoinlandsprodukt der Vereinigten Staaten beiträgt und darüber hinaus, wäre er ein Nationalstaat, die fünftgrößte Volkswirtschaft der Welt darstellt, vor Großbritannien, Frankreich und Indien.

Es war ein sonniger Tag Ende Juli, an dem wir kurz nach sieben Uhr morgens in San Francisco ankamen. Eine knappe Stunde später tauchten die ersten Menschen, die aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach noch eine Wohnung hatten, auf den Straßen von Downtown San Francisco auf, die zuvor praktisch ausschließlich von Obdachlosen und Suchtkranken bevölkert waren.

Es waren vor allem Mitarbeiter der Stadt, unter anderem der Passbehörde, zu der wir wollten, die sich auf dem Weg zur Arbeit einen Kaffee holten. In Downtown San Francisco gibt es heute nur noch wenige Cafés, und an ihren Eingängen patrouillieren in aller Regel Mitarbeiter der Firma „Urban Alchemy“, die darauf achten, dass keine Obdachlosen in das Café gelangen.

Meine Frage, ob sie von der Stadt oder von einer Privatfirma bezahlt werden, konnten die Mitarbeiter nicht recht beantworten. Unklar ist auch, ob die Mitarbeiter von „Urban Alchemy“ wirklich für Ruhe und Ordnung sorgen, nicht nur in San Francisco, sondern auch in Los Angeles und Sausalito in Kalifornien und Austin in Texas. Denn es gibt Kritik an der „gemeinnützigen Organisation“, die sich vor allem aus ehemaligen Häftlingen rekrutiert und „non profit“ sein soll.

Obwohl offiziell kein Sicherheitsdienst, zeigt eine Suche auf LinkedIn Mitarbeiter von „Urban Alchemy“, die sich selbst als solche bezeichnen. Es war kurz nach 9.30 Uhr, als meine Frau ihren Antrag auf einen neuen Pass bei der Behörde, bei der es einen regen Andrang gab, abgeben konnte. Um 15 Uhr am Nachmittag sollten wir wiederkommen.

Auch in Berlin muss man auf seinen Pass warten, wenngleich nicht so lange wie in San Francisco. Dort sind es nur sechs bis acht Wochen. Und man braucht ebenfalls zwei Termine, die oft nicht ganz einfach zu ergattern sind. Einen Termin, um den Pass zu beantragen. Den anderen, um ihn abzuholen.

Ob der Pass meiner Frau wirklich am Nachmittag fertig sein würde, konnte uns immer noch niemand garantieren. Dass man ihren Antrag entgegengenommen hatte, nahmen wir als gutes Omen. Da wir jetzt frei und nichts weiteres geplant hatten, gingen wir runter zur Market Street, der bekanntesten Straße in Downtown San Francisco, in der sich unter anderem die Twitter-Zentrale befindet.

Das Technologie-Unternehmen Uber hat die Market Street bereits verlassen. Twitter könnte dem Vorbild bald folgen. Mit Ausnahme eines lichtdurchfluteten Großraumbüros von „Urban Alchemy“ stehen die Räumlichkeiten nahezu aller großen Geschäfte, Hotels, Banken und Fast-Food-Ketten heute leer und Nachmieter sind nur schwer zu finden.

Eine Tourismus-Region

Trotzdem treibt es weiterhin Touristen hierher, vor allem wegen der Endstation der historischen Cable Cars. Auch wenn gegen Mittag einige Besucher der Stadt auf der Market Street unterwegs sind, dominieren auch jetzt Obdachlose und Suchtkranke das Straßenbild. Bei ihrem Anblick stelle ich mir die Frage, was Touristen antreibt, sich durch von obdachlosen und suchtkranken Menschen bevölkerte Straßen kutschieren zu lassen? Eine Antwort will mir nicht einfallen.

Meine Frau, die in den Neunzigern selbst einige Jahre in San Francisco gelebt hatte, verglich ihren aktuellen Eindruck mit dem Gefühl, das sie Anfang der Neunziger als 17-Jährige bei ihrer Reise in die Sowjetunion Gorbatschows hatte: ein gebrochenes Reich, das bald darauf unterging. Vielleicht so gebrochen wie viele Menschen in San Francisco heute?

Auch ich war schon mehrfach hier gewesen. Das San Francisco von heute hat mit der Stadt, wie ich sie kenne, nichts mehr zu tun. Ob sie auch untergehen wird? Wer weiß.

Pünktlich um 15 Uhr waren wir zurück in der Passbehörde. 16.30 Uhr, die Behörde schließt offiziell um 16 Uhr, hielt meine Frau ihren neuen Pass freudestrahlend in den Händen.

Um der Rush Hour aus dem Weg zu gehen, fuhren wir nicht sogleich aus der Stadt, was um diese Uhrzeit viele tun, sondern „nur“ zur Golden Gate Bridge. Hier gab es ausschließlich Touristen, dazu einen fantastischen Blick auf die imposante Hängebrücke, dem vielleicht bekanntesten Wahrzeichen San Franciscos, die ehemalige Gefängnisinsel Alcatraz und rüber zur Stadt.

Obdachlose und Drogenabhängige waren dort nicht auszumachen. Fast war es so wie in dem Song von John Phillips: „If you come to San Francisco – Summertime will be a love-in there“.

#USA #impérialisme #sans_abris #San_Francisco #pauvreté

Forget the song, get the girl !
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyScKtmgHJk

Who cares if you don’t show me Paris or Rome?
As long as you are here, I’m happy at home

▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionne_Warwick

Bacharach asked Warwick if she would be interested in recording demonstration recordings of his compositions to pitch the tunes to record labels, paying her $12.50 per demo recording session (equivalent to $120 in 2022). One such demo, “It’s Love That Really Counts” – destined to be recorded by Scepter-signed act the Shirelles – caught the attention of the President of Scepter Records, Florence Greenberg, who, according to Current Biography (1969 Yearbook), told Bacharach, “Forget the song, get thegirl!”

Il avait raison, quelle chanson de m... , mais alors quelle force de voix et de caractère de part de la jeune Dionne.

Puis, quel système d’exploitation machiste et capitaliste connu sous la devise « the american way of life ». Heureuaement que c’est fini depuis #meetoo et l’introduction de la right-to-work law , pas vrai ?

▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

#USA #musique #machisme #capitalisme

Chassez le naturel ...
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EO87D4AM9k&pp=ygUZV2hlbiBXZSBBbGwgR2V0IHRvIEhlYXZlbg%3D%3D

... il revient au galop
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ClwsynwVrI

When We All Get to Heaven
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_All_Get_to_Heaven

“When We All Get to Heaven” is a popular Christian hymn. The lyrics were written in 1898 by Eliza Hewitt and the melody by Mrs. J. G. (Emily) Wilson. The two became acquainted at Methodist camp meetings in New Jersey. Hewitt was cousin to Edgar Page Stites, another well-known hymnist who wrote the lyrics to “Beulah Land.”

... sauf si tu es black et t’appelles Dionne Warwick

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgJDkvXcWtM&t=202

Un pays, deux nations.
This is not a love song. (PIL)

#USA #religion #musique #jim_crow

Le refus du gratte-ciel
▻https://topophile.net/savoir/le-refus-du-gratte-ciel

https://topophile.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/extrait_Le-refus-du-gratte-ciel_Lewis-Mumford_topophile-copie.jpg

1925. Lewis Mumford, critique d’architecture, historien des villes et des techniques, avocat des cités-jardins et membre de la Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), rédige un dialogue fictif, chargé d’ironie mordante, entre un architecte et un critique au sujet du gratte-ciel, le skyscraper, cette expression architecturale des Etats-Unis et son idéal masculin, le self-made-man. Si... Voir l’article

The US Is Facing a Growing Air Safety Crisis. We Have Ronald Reagan to Thank for It.
▻https://jacobin.com/2023/09/reagan-patco-strike-faa-air-traffic-controllers-short-staffing-safety-crisi

Comment l’abandon de la gestion d’infrastructures essentielles par l’état mène au dysfonctionnement et aux accidents mortels.

8.9.2023 by Joseph A. McCartin - On March 15, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a “safety summit” in McLean, Virginia, gathering more than two hundred “safety leaders” from across American aviation to discuss “ways to enhance flight safety.” What prompted the unusual summit was, by the FAA’s own admission, a “string of recent safety incidents, several of which involved airplanes coming too close together during takeoff or landing.”

As the New York Times recently reported, such events have continued since the McLean summit, including one on August 11 in which a private plane nearly landed on top of a Southwest Airlines flight in Phoenix. Analyzing a database maintained by NASA that records confidential reports filed by pilots and air traffic controllers, the Times found roughly three hundred near misses in the most recent twelve-month period and evidence that the number of such reports filed have doubled over the past ten years.

One contributing factor to the growing concerns about safety is a shortage of air traffic controllers. A recent internal study by the inspector general of the US Department of Transportation found that twenty of twenty-six critical facilities (77 percent of them) are staffed below the FAA’s 85-percent threshold. That includes the vital New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility, which manages one of the most complex airspaces in the world and is currently at 54 percent of its staffing target (which is jointly determined by the FAA and the controllers’ union, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association). Less than 1 percent of FAA facilities are currently meeting 100 percent of their staffing targets.

According to the inspector general, the FAA “lacks a plan” to address the staffing crisis. To meet its needs while short-staffed, the agency has been requiring controllers to work overtime. The Times reports that some have already logged more than four hundred hours of extra time in 2023.

In many ways, this brewing crisis recalls the situation that existed in the FAA more than a half century ago, when overstretched air traffic controllers struggled to deal with burgeoning air traffic at the dawn of jet travel. Then, as in recent months, worries about the possibilities of catastrophic accidents were on the rise. The roots of this current crisis, however, can be traced back to the Reagan administration.
Today’s Controller Staffing Crisis and the Early Days of Air Traffic Control

Many of the incidents that provoked the FAA’s “safety summit” have been widely reported:

On January 13, an American Airlines plane crossed a runway in front of an oncoming Delta Air Lines plane when its pilot misunderstood an air traffic controllers’ direction, forcing the Delta flight to suddenly abort its takeoff.
On January 23, a Kamaka Air cargo flight came within 1,173 feet of a United Airlines flight arriving from Denver when both arrived almost simultaneously at Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Hawaii.
Less than two weeks later, on February 4, a FedEx cargo plane was forced to abort its landing at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas after a departing Southwest Airlines flight was mistakenly cleared for takeoff on the same runway.
On February 16, an Air Canada Rouge flight and an American Airlines flight were mistakenly cleared to land almost simultaneously on the same runway in Sarasota, Florida.
On February 27, a Learjet took off without clearance on a runway at Boston’s Logan Airport on which a JetBlue flight was about to touch down, forcing the JetBlue pilot to abort the landing and put the jet into a steep climb to avoid a collision.
On March 7, a Republic Airways/American Eagle flight mistakenly taxied across a runway that a United Airlines Airbus bound for Chicago had just been cleared to take off from.

More than forty-five thousand flights occur daily in the United States — by far the busiest national airspace in the world. By any measure, until recently the FAA has long supervised the world’s safest airspace, especially when one considers how rare accidents are given the volume of flights. The last commercial airline accident causing fatalities happened in 2009. But as the incidents above suggest, this system that has functioned so well over the years might be starting to fray. Any one of the recent incidents could have resulted in a collision with the potential for staggering loss of life.

The FAA itself was created in response to an accident — a midair collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956 that killed 128. Launched in 1958, the agency’s first priority was to bring order to the nation’s haphazard system of air traffic control.

It struggled to do so. The FAA’s air traffic control workforce, recruited almost exclusively from the ranks of military veterans who had learned to use radar in the service, was overworked and under-resourced from the outset. The agency’s problems became clear on December 16, 1960, when another midair collision occurred, this one over New York City, killing 134.

The New York catastrophe triggered a reaction among a group of young air traffic controllers who had been complaining about their equipment and short staffing. They began to organize. Led by two controllers, Mike Rock and Jack Maher, who had been working on the morning of the accident, the workers began to demand improved radar and an end to forced overtime. By 1962, they could draw on President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10988, which introduced a limited form of union recognition and collective bargaining to the federal government. Under the umbrella of that executive order, Rock, Maher, and their coworkers worked to build a union.

Their efforts were spurred on by a string of other accidents that highlighted the problems with the system. Indeed, the FAA witnessed an average of twelve fatal air accidents annually between 1962 and 1966. Then in July 1967, a Piedmont Airlines Boeing 727 and a twin-engine Cessna collided over Hendersonville, North Carolina, killing eighty-two people.

Controllers had seen enough. By January 1968, they had formed a national union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Its creation marked a turning point. With PATCO’s formation, controllers got a collective voice, and they used that voice effectively in subsequent years, lobbying Congress and FAA management to improve a system in crisis, pushing for innovations such as the NASA-administered program for reporting near accidents. Over the next decade. PATCO’s influence helped improve safety substantially.
Ronald Reagan and the PATCO Strike

But controllers’ morale still suffered. While their agitation helped make the system safer, their pay began to lag behind the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, and the stress of their jobs took a toll on the controllers in the busiest facilities. Like other federal employees, they were not allowed by law to negotiate over their compensation, benefits, or the length of their workweek. During the Carter administration — which deregulated the airlines, cut taxes, and cut back funding for some social welfare programs — their frustration grew to the point that PATCO decided to endorse Jimmy Carter’s challenger in the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan. Reagan had promised that, if elected, he would work to address controllers’ concerns.

The Reagan-PATCO alliance was infamously short lived. When Reagan, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild, refused to meet demands that PATCO members considered essential during their negotiations in the early months of his presidency, the union struck on August 3, 1981.

PATCO’s action was illegal under federal law. It grew from years of frustrating relations with FAA management, and disappointed expectations regarding what controllers’ believed they had been promised by Reagan. They decided to strike, engaging in a form of mass civil disobedience that the union’s leaders had concluded was their only option.

What happened next planted one of the seeds of today’s air safety crisis. Reagan gave the striking controllers a forty-eight-hour ultimatum: return to work or be fired and permanently replaced. When more than eleven thousand (approximately 70 percent of the controller workforce) defied his warning, Reagan fired them on August 5, and the FAA began efforts to permanently replace them.

Never before had the government faced the prospect of training a new, highly technical workforce from scratch in such a short time. Some moderate Republicans, like Representative Guy Molinari of New York, urged Reagan to hire back controllers who had not been leaders of the walkout, warning of the long-term cost and lingering consequences of replacing all the strikers. But once he issued his ultimatum, Reagan and his hard-line advisers believed that sticking to the mass firing would send a message to domestic and foreign observers alike that he was not a president to be trifled with. So even though public opinion favored rehiring most of the strikers, Reagan never relented.

Reagan’s decision to ban all strikers meant that it took years for the system to come back to its prestrike staffing levels. Seven years later, the vital New York TRACON was still operating at only 80 percent of its target staffing. Even more important for the long run: the huge group of replacements hired in the first five years after the strike would itself become problematic. That massive bubble of new hires meant that these replacement workers would one day near retirement within a few years of each other, and when new hires were made to replace them, the pattern would be repeated again. Ever since, the Times recently noted, “there have been waves of departures as controllers become eligible for retirement,” and the FAA has struggled to keep pace.

The FAA requires air traffic controllers to retire at age fifty-six. It does not hire new recruits over the age of thirty-one in order to ensure that controllers can have careers of at least twenty-five years, recognizing that the first few years of a controller’s development will involve closely supervised on-the-job training. Developmental controllers train for between two and four years, with certification for specific air space positions at certain high-density facilities taking up to two years of specialized training.

These constraints, which exist to ensure safety, make filling the slots of air traffic controllers a recurrent challenge for the FAA. The loss of a senior controller to retirement doesn’t just create a new slot to fill; it also deprives a facility of a seasoned veteran who can mentor the training of a developmental controller.
The Corrosive Influence of Reagan’s “Nine Most Terrifying Words”

The long-term impact of Reagan’s firing of the PATCO strikers isn’t the only troubling legacy he left to our system of air traffic travel. Although the era of austerity began under Carter, it was Reagan who helped popularize and establish a contemptuous attitude toward government as policy orthodoxy.

At a press conference in 1986, Reagan famously quipped, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” In a nutshell, that pithy line summed up the ideology of the neoliberal revolution that Reagan helped to lead. Perhaps the greatest measure of his success is that this view also found a home in the Democratic Party (as Bill Clinton made clear when he declared in his 1996 State of the Union that “the era of Big Government is over.”) Almost forty years later, the United States still struggles with the anti-government animus behind that comment, a potent political influence Reagan and his neoliberal followers did so much to develop.

Today’s GOP has taken that anti-government sentiment to new extremes that make Reagan look moderate by comparison — like Florida governor Ron DeSantis promising that he would “start slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy on his first day in office if elected president. But it should not be forgotten that Reagan himself helped lay the groundwork for the likes of DeSantis when he declared in his 1981 inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

This same anti-government spirit is currently animating the GOP-led House of Representatives as it threatens to trigger the fourth federal government shutdown in the span of a decade when the federal budget deadline arrives on September 30. It is a spirit that has been inexorably eroding the morale of federal workers for years now. The last government shutdown, which came during Donald Trump’s presidency, lasted thirty-five days. It furloughed 380,000 federal workers, and forced other, “excepted workers,” whose work was considered indispensable — including air traffic controllers — to continue working without pay. One survey later showed that 90 percent of federal employees believed that the shutdown had worsened morale in their already-beleaguered agencies.

Air traffic controllers were among those whose morale suffered most during the Trump shutdown, during which they missed two paychecks. It was therefore no coincidence that they played a crucial role in bringing that shutdown to a screeching halt. When a group of New York controllers called in sick on the morning of the shutdown’s thirty-fifth day, they forced the FAA to issue a ground stop, freezing air traffic around the nation’s busiest and most complex airspace. Within hours the Trump administration caved, and the shutdown was over.

Unfortunately, it won’t be so easy to break the death grip of Reagan-spawned anti-government ideology that has a hold on today’s Republican party. Representative Bob Good, a Virginia Republican, recently remarked that “we should not fear a government shutdown” and asserted that if one occurs, “most Americans won’t even miss [the government].” Even if we manage to avoid another damaging shutdown perpetrated by Good and his allies in the far-right House Freedom Caucus, the likeliest solution to the looming crisis will be a continuing resolution (CR), a device that provides temporary funding for agencies in a new fiscal year until appropriations bills can be approved.

Since the Reagan years, government shutdowns have become more common than on-time budgets, and in order to avoid shutdowns Congress has had to resort to CRs of varying coverage and length in all but three years (1989, 1995, and 1997). Yet the problem of government by CR is that it undermines the ability of agencies to plan efficiently. In the specific case of the FAA, the prospect of another shutdown or a string of patchwork CRs will further inhibit its ability to address the personnel shortage that now afflicts many of our most vital air traffic control facilities and impede the agency’s response to the problems it acknowledged in its March 15 air safety summit.

There are real dangers far more terrifying than the bogeyman Ronald Reagan cynically conjured with his “nine most terrifying words,” as the overworked, under-equipped air traffic controllers who directed air traffic on the morning of December 16, 1960, when two planes collided in the sky over New York, could testify. Let’s hope that we don’t require the kind of wake-up call that the nation received that cold December day before we address the growing crisis in our system of air travel and finally free ourselves from Reagan’s poisonous neoliberal legacy.

#USA #aviation #grève

Le mug shot de Trump ou le défi à l’Amérique

La pose choisie par l’ancien président, Donald Trump, pour sa première photo d’identité judiciaire (mug shot) est celle de la colère et de la menace. Le ressentiment comme projet politique.

Le premier mug shot (photo d’identité judiciaire) de Donald Trump, à Atlanta, restera dans les annales et l’ancien président le sait pertinemment. C’est la raison pour laquelle il a très certainement travaillé la pose. Il apparaît comme étant en colère et déterminé, voire menaçant. C’est un regard de défi. À qui s’adresse-t-il ? Autant à son électorat (« Je n’ai peur de rien ») qu’à la justice (« Je ne me laisserai pas faire »). Cette photo va être déclinée en goodies : T shirts, casquettes, tasses à café, etc. Elle deviendra également un mème. Bad buzz, still buzz ? Autant en faire un good buzz.

▻https://entreleslignesentrelesmots.wordpress.com/2023/09/05/le-mug-shot-de-trump-ou-le-defi-a-lamerique

#international #usa

L’élite oligarchique américaine et son impact sur le monde - Chris Hedges

Elucid (Les crises) : L’élite oligarchique américaine et son impact sur le monde Chris Hedges - Olivier Berruyer

Chris Hedges est un journaliste américain, lauréat d’un prix Pulitzer. Il a été correspondant de guerre pour le New York Times pendant quinze ans. Reconnu pour ses articles d’analyse sociale et politique de la situation américaine, il a également enseigné aux universités Columbia et Princeton. Dans cette interview par Olivier Berruyer pour Elucid, il propose une critique de ce qu’il appelle « l’élite progressiste » américaine, l’hypocrisie de ses valeurs et son accointance avec les puissances d’argent ("les entreprises"). Il décortique le rôle de cette oligarchie, comment elle a pris le pouvoir et comment elle impacte dorénavant le monde entier.

La vidéo =>  : ▻https://elucid.media/politique/lelite-oligarchique-americaine-et-son-impact-sur-le-monde-chris-hedges/?mc_ts=crises

#usa #néolibéralisme #capitalisme #médias #journalisme #universités #censure #chris_hedges #inégalités #guerre #oligarchie

Why I will NEVER use the Metric System
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRnuY1Vao0o

#histoire #système_métrique #science #USA #France

EU and USA plough ahead with secret discussions on biometric data exchange scheme

The EU and USA are discussing a proposed “#Enhanced_Border_Security_Partnership” which would involve “continuous and systematic” transfers of biometric data in both directions, but the Commission has refused to release documents that would provide further information to the public.

Statewatch revealed last year that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was touting Enhanced Border Security Partnerships to EU institutions and member states, requiring direct connections between the biometric databases of participating states and the USA’s #IDENT/#HART system.

IDENT/HART is “the largest U.S. Government biometric database and the second largest biometric database in the world, containing over 270 million identities from over 40 U.S. agencies,” according to a DHS document.

Further documents obtained by Statewatch indicated that the Commission and the USA had set up a “dedicated working group” to discuss the scheme and a “proof of concept,” which would involve the transmission of data.

The Commission’s response to an access to documents request filed by Statewatch suggests that the working group has been busy – but the Commission refused to release any of the documents it identified, citing the need to protect “public security” and “international relations”.

The request filed with the Commission sought the following documents:

“1. All agendas and minutes of the working group between the European Commission and the US authorities regarding the proposed Enhanced Border Security Partnership (#EBSP).

2. Presentations, notes, reports or other documents presented, discussed, or used as background information for the meetings of that working group.

3. Documents regarding the “proof of concept” on the potential sharing of data under an EBSP, in particular setting out the authorities involved, the data to be transferred, the source of that data, and the legal basis for sharing data as part of a “proof of concept”.”

The response from the Commission (pdf) said that five documents had been identified:

“1- Flash report: Meeting with DHS on new EBSP Working, Commission document for internal use, dated 13/07/2022, ref. ARES (2023)4144843,

2- Flash report: Kick-Off meeting COM/DHS Working Group on new US EBSP requirements (06/09/22), Commission document for internal use, dated 06/09/2022, ref. ARES (2023)4119093,

3- EU-US Working Group on EBSP, Commission document for internal use, dated 22/09/2022, ref. ARES (2023)4144961,

4- WORKING DOCUMENT & ANSWERS: COM-US Working Group on the U.S. Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP) requirements as part of the U.S. Visa Waiver Program (VWP), Commission document for internal use, dated 04/10/2022, ref. ARES (2023)4118328,

5- DHS Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP) Requirement, Powerpoint presentation by US Department of Homeland Security, dated September 2022, ref. ARES (2023)4118099.”

The letter, signed by Monique Pariat, the Director-General for Migration and Home Affairs, said that the documents could not be released as they contain “sensitive information of ongoing discussions between the Commission and the US on the Enhanced Border Security Partnership (EBSP).”

Some of that information concerns “law enforcement investigative procedures that, in the hands of criminals and terrorists, could be misused against public security, for example by facilitating the bypassing of effective cross-border checks and obstructing the attempts of US authorities to prevent illegal activities.”

Furthermore, wrote Pariat, “given the public security concerns outlined above, the public disclosure of the documents, which were intended to be used for official internal purposes only, would be tantamount to a breach of trust of the US authorities and could therefore undermine international relations with the US.”

Releasing parts of the documents whilst censoring others would be impossible, the letter argued, but they are either “entirely covered by the exceptions or the remaining parts after expunging the confidential information might be meaningless or illegible.”

The Council has also discussed the EBSP plan recently, with the Council’s Working Party on Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Information Exchange (IXIM) holding an “exchange of views” in mid-July (pdf).

A comment made in April this year by Chris Jones, Statewatch Director, remains relevant:

“The EU’s own top court has ruled on multiple occasions that the USA does not offer adequate privacy protections for non-citizens, yet the Commission and the member states are planning to open up their biometric databases to the Department of Homeland Security and, by extension, who knows how many other US agencies? The fact that discussions on the plan are taking place in secret makes it all the more galling, albeit entirely unsurprising.”

▻https://www.statewatch.org/news/2023/august/eu-and-usa-plough-ahead-with-secret-discussions-on-biometric-data-exchan

#échange_de_données #données #USA #Etats-Unis #Europe #UE #données_biométriques #frontières #Union_européenne #EU #coopération #partenariat #sécurité_frontalière

The revolt against civilization ; the menace of the under man
▻https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/1022671-the-revolt-against-civilization-the-menace-of-the-under-man
Enfin trouvé : voici le véritable inventeur du Untermensch . Le roi des cons n’est pas Allemand, ce n’est pas un Français non plus, sa majesté est citoyen des #USA et un grand copain de nos nazis nationaux comme beaucoup de ses compatriotes .

La page Goodreads (haha !) dans l’entête contient une liste de 36 éditions de l’oeuvre qui aurait inspiré Hitler (à vérifier). La dernière année de publication est 2019. J’en tire la conclusion qu’actuellement vraiment tous les nazillons capables de déchiffrer un texte sont en possession du torchon mega-raciste. Le marché est saturé.

▻https://archive.org/details/cu31924016895975/page/n7/mode/2up

Lothrop Stoddard
▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothrop_Stoddard

The Nazi Party’s chief racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg appropriated the racial term Untermensch from the German version of Stoddard’s 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. The German title was Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).

J’ai lu Rosenberg et je vous dis que c’est décevant. Ce type était incapable de formuler une seule phrase avec un argument réfléchi. Le nazisme était le règne des incultes. Stoppard était sans doute plus intelligent. D’après notre encyclopédie en ligne préférée il aurait même inspiré le créateur de Tarzan from the Apes .

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Tarzan_of_the_Apes.jpg

Voici quelques charmants titres de l’homme qui a formulé la raison d’être de tout nazi de pédigrée.

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921 [1st Pub. 1920]. ISBN 4-87187-849-X

The New World of Islam, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922 [1st Pub. 1921].

The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922.
Racial Realities in Europe, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924.

Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1940.

Hybris

Stoddard wrote a memoir, Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today (1940), about his experiences in Germany. Among other events, the book describes interviews with such figures as Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley and Fritz Sauckel, as well as a brief meeting with Adolf Hitler.[22] Stoddard visited the Hereditary Health Court in Charlottenburg, an appeals court that decided whether Germans would be sterilized. After having observed several dysgenics trials at the court, Stoddard asserted that the eugenics legislation was “being administered with strict regard for its provisions and that, if anything, judgments were almost too conservative” and that the law was “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

Fin

After World War II, Stoddard’s theories were deemed too closely aligned with those of the Nazis and therefore he suffered a large drop in popularity. His death from cancer in 1950 went almost entirely unreported despite his previously broad readership and influence.

L’empire n’avait plus besoin des l’idéologies racistes développées au dix neuvième siècle. La lutte des classes changea de visage. Le racisme d’antan céda sa place à l’anticommunisme impérialiste et génocidaire.

#racisme #nazis

The Worst 2024 Election Interference Won’t Come From Russia Or China
▻https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/12/the-worst-2024-election-interference-wont-come-from-russia-or-chin

12.7.2023 by Caitlin Johnstone - The New York Times has been churning out an amazing number of hit pieces on Robert F Kennedy Jr lately.

On Tuesday the Times published an audio essay titled “Why I Regret Debating Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” by opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo debated Kennedy in 2006 about the legitimacy of George W Bush’s 2004 win against John Kerry, believing that Kennedy’s skepticism of the election results was dangerous.

“Disputing elections is just not good for democracy,” Manjoo says, joining the rest of the American liberal political/media class in rewriting history to pretend they didn’t just spend the entire Trump administration doing exactly that.

Manjoo cites his experience debating Kennedy (whom he repeatedly refers to as a “conspiracy theorist”) to argue that nobody should debate the presidential candidate on the topic of Covid vaccines, adding yet another entry to the countless articles and news segments which were published in the mass media last month saying that vaccine scientist Peter Hotez should reject Joe Rogan’s offer of $100,000 to a charity of his choice if he’d debate Kennedy on the subject.

Last week The New York Times published an article titled “5 Noteworthy Falsehoods Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has Promoted,” along with a Paul Krugman article which opens with the line “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank” and an opinion piece titled “Pro-Vaccine Views Are Winning. Don’t Fear the Skeptics.” which opens with a stab at Kennedy. The week before that there was a standard hit piece by Gail Collins. The week before that there was another piece by Farhad Manjoo about how nobody should debate Kennedy about vaccines.

Sometimes they’re presented as opinion pieces, sometimes they’re presented as hard news stories despite brazenly biased language and overt editorializing, and all are slanted against Kennedy in some way. The New York Times plainly dislikes RFK Jr, and makes no secret of working to make sure its audience dislikes him too.

And this is pretty much what we can expect from American mass media until Kennedy has either lost his presidential race or had his reputation so thoroughly destroyed among the electorate that he can be safely ignored. The message will be hammered and hammered and hammered home until the illusory truth effect causes readers to mistake rote repetition for truth, and Kennedy’s campaign will fizzle.

And Silicon Valley is playing, too. Last month YouTube took down multiple videos featuring two different interviews with Kennedy on the grounds that they violated the platform’s policies against “vaccine misinformation”. Youtube is owned by Google, which has had ties to the CIA and NSA since its inception and is now a full-fledged Pentagon contractor.

Kennedy tweeted some interesting comments about YouTube’s removal of his interviews.

“People made a big deal about Russia supposedly manipulating internet information to influence a Presidential election. Shouldn’t we be worried when giant tech corporations do the same?” asked Kennedy, adding, “When industry and government are so closely linked, there is little difference between ‘private’ and ‘government’ censorship. Suppression of free speech is not suddenly OK when it is contracted out to the private corporations that control the public square.”

This is a point I’ve been emphasizing for years: in a corporatist system of government, where there’s no real separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

And it really is interesting how almost everyone seems to be pretty much okay with corporations in the media and Silicon Valley interfering in a US election like this. Everyone shrieked their lungs out about the (now wholly discredited) narrative that Russian bots had influenced the US election with tweets and Facebook memes, but immensely wealthy corporations with universes more influence manipulating the way people think and vote is perfectly fine?

That does seem to be the way of it, though. This past April the Obama administration’s acting CIA director Mike Morell admitted to using his intelligence connections to circulate a false story in the press during the 2020 presidential race that the Hunter Biden laptop leak was a Russian disinfo op, because he wanted to ensure that Joe Biden would win the election. And absolutely nothing happened to him; Morell just went on with his day.

It’s just taken as a given that it’s fine for US oligarchs and empire managers to interfere in an election with brazen psyops and mass media propaganda, even as more and more internet censorship gets put in place on the grounds of protecting election security. If an ordinary American circulated disinformation to manipulate the election, imperial spinmeisters would cite that as evidence that online communication needs to be more aggressively controlled. But when Obama’s acting CIA director does it, it’s cool. Election interference for me but not for thee.

This is where the most election interference will come from in this presidential race: not from Russia, not from China, but from the rich and powerful drivers of the US-centralized empire. The operation of a globe-spanning power structure is simply too important to be left in the hands of the electorate.

I don’t have any strong opinions about RFK Jr and won’t be supporting any presidential candidate in America’s pretend election. But these presidential races do often provide opportunities to highlight the ways our rulers have got everything locked down.

#USA #élections #hégémonie_idéologique

X : Was Elon Musk auf dem Weg zur Alles-App übersehen hat
▻https://www.heise.de/meinung/X-Was-Elon-Musk-auf-dem-Weg-zur-Alles-App-uebersehen-hat-9279416.html

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91IiboSY8mL._SL1500_.jpg

Elon Musk est désormais le patron de XITTER !

Malheureusement la blague ne fonctionne qu’en Allemand où « zittern » signifie trembler . Voilà le service de messagerie qui fait trembler de peur chaque personne dont la carrière politique ou réputation dépend de la fiabilité du service qui transmet ses messages au « monde ».

J’aime bien ce néologisme, alors vous risquez de le rencontrer dans mes observations et commentaires jusqu’à ce qu’on ne parle plus du Le Roi des concombres à la couronne en forme de grand X.

23.8.2023 von Gregor Honsel - Elon Musk will Twitter – sorry, X – ja bekanntermaßen zu einer Alles-App nach dem Vorbild des chinesischen WeChat umbauen. Also zum digitalen Universalwerkzeug einschließlich Social Media, Bezahlfunktion, News, Gaming, Shopping, Dating, etcetera. Die Umbenennung in X (als offene Variable für alles Mögliche) ist da nur konsequent. Es dürfte jetzt sehr unterhaltsam werden mit anzusehen, wie Musk mit der ihm eigenen Krummlinigkeit Feature für Feature an das abgerockte „Xitter“ andengeln (oder auch abbauen) will.

Bei der Einschätzung von Musks Plänen mache ich mir immer zwei Sorgen: dass ich ihn über- und dass ich ihn unterschätzen könnte. Als Twitter-Chef kam er mir bisher vor wie ein Kapitän, der in der Bordbar neue Cocktails entwirft, während sein Schiff geradewegs aufs nächste Riff zuläuft. Andererseits hat Musk mit Starlink auch innerhalb kürzester Zeit eine ganze Branche praktisch neu geschaffen. Mehr als die Hälfte aller aktiven Satelliten gehören zu Musks erst ab 2019 aufgebautem Netzwerk. Das muss man erstmal sacken lassen. Vielleicht kann sich der Visionär Musk ja auch künftig hin und wieder gegen das gleichnamige Kleinkind durchsetzen. Dagegenwetten würde ich jedenfalls nicht.

Zurück zu Xitter: Wie mir scheint, hat Musk etwas Entscheidendes übersehen: Viele Features sind zwar eine notwendige, aber keine hinreichende Bedingung für eine Alles-App. Daneben braucht sie auch viele Nutzer beziehungsweise einen dominanten Marktanteil. WeChat erreichte schon vor fünf Jahren die Milliarden-Marke. Bei Twitter aber gehen die Nutzerzahlen seit 2022 auf Tiefe.

Ist Musk weiterhin so erfolgreich dabei, seine Kundinnen und Kunden zu vergraulen, wird es ihm wenig nutzen, den verbliebenen Rest mit ständig neuen Funktionen zuzukübeln. Zumal es für die meisten Features schon etablierte Alternativen gibt und die wenigsten Menschen tatsächlich blöd genug sein dürften, ihr ganzes digitales Leben einem Typen wie Musk anzuvertrauen.

En ce qui concerne le Le Roi des concombres :
Wir pfeifen auf den Gurkenkönig
▻https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wir_pfeifen_auf_den_Gurkenk%C3%B6nig
Le mot « Gurke » et les mots composés avec sont couramment utilisés pour ridiculiser quoi que ce soit. Une vielle voiture est simplement un « Gurke », « rumgurken » signifie une errance sans but ni issue et « vergurken » décrit une action à travers de laquelle on rendu inutilisable quelque chose. A mon avis Musk a « vergurkt » Twitter.

https://i.weltbild.de/p/wir-pfeifen-auf-den-gurkenkoenig-072480699.jpg?v=23&wp=_ads-default-v4

Christine Nöstlinger
▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_N%C3%B6stlinger

#Xitter #Twitter #Wechat #messagerie #USA #imérialisme #Gurkenkönig

The New Man of 4chan
▻https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle

A propos d’une source de violence au centre de l’empire

March 2016 by Angela Nagle - “The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,” announced one commenter last year on the giddily offensive /r9k/ board of the notorious, anarchic site 4chan. “This is only the beginning. The Beta Rebellion has begun. Soon, more of our brothers will take up arms to become martyrs to this revolution.” The post, dated October 1, was referring to the news that twenty-six-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer had killed nine classmates and injured nine others before shooting himself at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

The night before the shooting, an earlier post on /r9k/ had, in veiled but ominous terms, warned fellow commenters from the Northwestern United States that it would be a good idea to steer clear of school that day. The implication was not lost on the /r9k/ community. The first responder in the thread asked, “Is the beta uprising finally going down?” while others encouraged the anonymous poster and gave him tips on how to conduct a mass shooting. The apparent link between the post and the killer remains under FBI investigation, but in the immediate wake of Harper-Mercer’s rampage, a number of the board’s users hailed it as a victory for the beta rebellion.

The details that emerged about Harper-Mercer’s online life made it difficult not to resort to stereotyping. On a dating site, he had listed pop-culture obsessions typical of “beta” shut-ins, including “internet, killing zombies, movies, music, reading,” and added that he lived “with parents.” His profile specified that he was looking for a companion with a shared set of personality traits: “introvert, loner, lover, geek, nerd.” The term “beta,” in the circles Harper-Mercer frequented, is an ironic inversion of the fabled swagger of the alpha male. Whereas alphas tend to be macho, sporty, and mainstream in their tastes, betas see themselves as less dominant males, withdrawn, obsessional, and curatorial in their cultural habits.

Withdrawn does not necessarily imply peaceable, however, which is where the “uprising” and “rebellion” parts of the beta identity come in. This particular brand of computer-enabled detachment easily seeps into a mindset of entitled violence and is accompanied by a mixture of influences from the far right to the countercultural left. The email on Harper-Mercer’s dating profile was ironcross45@gmail.com, but he was also a member of a group named “Doesn’t Like Organized Religion,” and blogged that “The material world is a lie . . . Most people will spend hours standing in front of stores just to buy a new iphone.” Harper-Mercer left behind a manifesto in which he described his feelings of social and sexual rejection and showed he had studied mass killers. It was reminiscent of the video—circulated widely among exponents of the beta rebellion—recorded by “virgin killer” Elliot Rodger, who murdered six victims and injured fourteen more in Isla Vista, California, explaining how his own shooting spree was rooted in sexual frustration.
Going Beta

On men’s rights sites and in some geeky subcultures, “beta male” is a common term of identification, one of both belonging and self-mockery. It has become a popular meme on 4chan’s recreationally obnoxious /b/ board, a precursor to /r9k/ that produced hacker collectives such as Anonymous while also incubating scores of anti-feminist online attacks in recent years. Know Your Meme records the earliest use of the term “beta uprising” in 2011, on the men’s rights movement blog Fight for Justice. From around 2013, the beta-male uprising was a regular topic among 4chan users; it encompassed elaborate fantasies of revenge against attractive women, macho jocks, and other “normies” with majority tastes and attitudes.

Can “traditional ideas about gender” really be bursting forth from an Internet culture that also features a male My Little Pony fandom?

The post alleged to be Harper-Mercer’s school shooting alert came with an image of Pepe the Frog, a character lifted from the Matt Furie comic strip Boy’s Club, angrily brandishing a gun. This, too, was a trope of the beta rebellion: in his original cartoon form, Pepe was a sad sack, prone to bouts of humiliation. But as his froggy visage got meme-fied on 4chan, he took on a distinctly more menacing aspect. Pepe became a favorite icon of last-straw ranters spewing extreme misogyny, racism, and vengefulness. Much to the irritation of geeks, Pepe also became popular among normies, which is why you can find videos on YouTube of angry Pepe in a red rage accompanied by variations of the male scream, “Normies! Get the fuck off my board!”

Overwrought digital threats and confrontational online rhetoric are nearly as old as the Internet itself. Posters on 4chan/b/’s more transgressive threads regularly claim that they are about to do terrible things to themselves and others.

But some posters are also acting out those fantasies. Among the stale memes, repeat posts, true-life confessions, pre-rampage tip-offs, and cock-and-bull stories that make beta forums so impenetrable, sometimes even insiders can’t tell which are which. In November 2014, an anonymous 4chan user submitted several photos of what appeared to be a woman’s naked and strangled corpse, along with a confession: “Turns out it’s way harder to strangle someone to death than it looks on the movies . . . Her son will be home from school soon. He’ll find her then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me. I bought a bb gun that looks realistic enough. When they come, I’ll pull it and it will be suicide by cop. I understand the doubts. Just check the fucking news. I have to lose my phone now.”

Later that same day, police in Port Orchard, Washington, announced that they were investigating a suspected homicide, after the thirteen-year-old son of a woman in her early thirties found her dead in their home. The victim, Amber Lynn Coplin, was indeed the woman in the 4chan/b/ photo. Her thirty-three-year-old live-in boyfriend, David Michael Kalac, was arrested after a brief police chase and charged with murder. Every dead body on 4chan is a joke, unless it isn’t.

Elliot Rodger’s rampage, too, was real. On a spring day in 2014, Rodger stabbed his roommates, drove to a University of California–Santa Barbara sorority house, and hammered on the door. When he was denied entry, Rodger shot at people outside, in the end killing mostly men. The rampage ended when he crashed into a parked vehicle; police found him dead in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his head.

Midway through his massacre, Rodger uploaded a final video to YouTube, titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” outlining his purpose. He announced his desire to punish women for rejecting him and railed against sexually active, macho, dominant men, whom he called “brutes” and “animals”:

Well, this is my last video, it all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution, the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you . . . I’ve been through college for two and a half years, more than that actually, and I’m still a virgin. It has been very torturous . . . I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it . . . I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman.

The 4Chan War on Women

Rodger also left behind a lengthy autobiographical manuscript, titled My Twisted World. In it, he describes his frustration at not being able to find a girlfriend, his hatred of women, and his contempt for ethnic minorities and interracial couples (in spite of his own mixed-race background). The manifesto specifically mentions a “War on Women,” which will unfold in two stages: “The Second Phase will take place on the Day of Retribution itself, just before the climactic massacre . . . My War on Women . . . I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: The hottest sorority of UCSB.”

On 4chan/b/, the day the story broke, Rodger was the subject of much fevered attention. One contributor posted a selfie of Rodger from his Facebook profile and wrote, “Elliot Rodger, the supreme gentleman, was part of /b/. Discuss.” “That dude was fairly good looking,” one commenter remarked. “He must’ve just been the beta to end all betas if he never got laid.” Another commenter wrote, “Manifesto had ‘I do not forget, I do not forgive’ and ‘kissless virgin,’ etc., he was a /b/tard.” Rodger’s “I do not forget, I do not forgive” was likely a reference to a sign-off used by Anonymous, which emerged from 4chan/b/. Anonymous has gone on to do some activist work that intersects with feminist concerns, including the exposure of the names of those allegedly involved in the ugly Steubenville, Ohio, rape case. But the Anonymous doxer who exposed the high school footballers went on to be accused of sexual assault himself. Whoever the target, the group’s vengeful sensibility survives, not only in the Guy Fawkes iconography that has been adopted by various protest movements, but also in the beta rebellion’s reformist rhetoric.

Rodger identified as an “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. He would troll Bodybuilding.com’s “miscellaneous” section posting comments like “Men shouldn’t have to look and act like big, animalistic beasts to get women. The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just shows that their minds haven’t fully evolved.” After the Harper-Mercer shootings, one 4chan commenter wrote, “/r9k/ needs a new martyr alongside our hallowed Elliot.”

Rodger’s online identity is traceable to several other forums, too, including the now-defunct PUAhate, where men laid into pick-up artists for putting women on a pedestal and occasionally espoused hardcore separatism in the vein of the Men Going Their Own Way movement. Rodger wrote in his long manifesto that on PUAhate he had discovered “a forum full of men who are starved of sex, just like me.” He also frequented a subreddit for incels called ForeverAlone (referencing a meme made popular by 4chan) and one called TheRedPill (alluding to The Matrix movie), which hosts anti-feminist men and men who take a dim view of what is involved in the game of sexual conquest. After the Rodger massacre, a thread appeared on TheRedPill called “Omega man kills 6 and commits suicide.” One commenter on the thread wrote:

If you read his manifesto, you also learn that he pedestaled pussy to an extreme degree basically his entire life since puberty. It turned into hating of women and sex in the very end, but it was twenty years of making vagina the Holy Grail of his existence that really fucked up his head.

To which another commenter responded:

Feminists and religious zealots strive to take all sexual outlets away from men, be it prostitution, sex travel, or mere pornography for masturbation. Thus these politicians bear partial responsibility for increasing sex crimes against women and children, and probably for the mayhem created by Elliot Rodger.

And another, sympathetically:

He was incel. Lonliness [sic] and extreme sexual deprivation can have extremely serious psychological effects on some people . . . this kind of shit breaks a young man’s spirit.

Like Uber, but for Violent Misogyny

It’s easy to mistake the beta rebellion for a youthful, but otherwise undifferentiated, variation on the bad old tradition of patriarchy. Yet the phenomenon bears the unmistakable signs of a new, net-bred brand of misogyny. It exists squarely within the libertarian ethos that infused computer cultures spanning from the early, back-to-the-land, frontier hacker culture of the sixties and seventies to the Californian rebel capitalism of the dotcom neoliberalism of the nineties.

As the same frontier sensibility that characterized early Internet culture also runs through American gun culture, it’s no great surprise that the rites of gun worship and principled geek isolation should overlap—or that they should find expression in the targeting of women whom beta men believe are dedicated to a matriarchal thwarting of male freedom and desire. But this seamless convergence of women-demonizing forces is, indeed, something new under the sun, an innovative incarnation of the free-floating male grievance that, as we’ve seen, metastasizes through culture. It’s striking, then, to note just how thoroughly both the press and the social media–centric feminist commentariat have consigned the beta rebellion to the dustbin of outmoded patriarchy—treating it as an obsolescing bug, as opposed to a distressing feature, of today’s Internet discourse.

In her 2013 book Cybersexism, feminist journalist Laurie Penny admits that the culture of digital woman-hating does indeed have a surface affinity with geek culture, but then goes on to suggest that online misogyny is a conservative remnant of the pre-Internet past. “We have a brave new world which looks far too much like the cruel old world” and “recreates offline prejudices,” she writes.

Academics have echoed this view, characterizing online misogyny as the politics of conservatism and patriarchy reproducing itself anachronistically in new media, or as just another emanation of hegemonic masculinity. For example, in a study of gender and age bias in online communities, Jonathan Warren, Sharon Stoerger, and Ken Kelley wrote that “many age-old forms of discrimination appear to have been preserved.” Pamela Turton-Turner analyzed “recent online hate campaigns mobilized against females,” which, she argues, are “symptomatic of a broader normalization of old-style sexism.” Adrienne Shaw agreed in an article titled “The Internet Is Full of Jerks Because the World Is Full of Jerks,” stating that “misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. were not invented by the internet.”

In response to Harper-Mercer’s massacre, Salon ran the headline, “Toxic Masculinity Is Tearing Us Apart.” The Huffington Post and Ms. magazine ran articles declaring the problem was “masculinity, masculinity, masculinity.” Writer Soraya Chemaly asserted, “What we really need . . . is a public conversation about hegemonic masculinity in the United States. . . . Schools, parents, coaches and religious communities all need to be thinking deeply about how traditional ideas about gender and gender stereotypes work to create a national culture.”
All the Young Dudes

But how, exactly, does “hegemonic masculinity” accurately sum up a scene explicitly identifying as beta male? And can “traditional ideas about gender” really be bursting forth from an Internet culture that also features gender-bending pornography, discussions about bisexual curiosity, and a male My Little Pony fandom? What’s more, can a retreat from the traditional authority of the nuclear family into an extended adolescence of videogames, porn, and pranks really be described as patriarchal?

PepeWebPage151001.4_72

Those seeking to defend their ideological turf will say that the killers are measuring themselves against a damaging masculine ideal, but at what point is this stretching the hegemonic masculinity theory so far that it becomes tautological—and a rote explanation for all bad male behavior?

In fact, a great deal about the beta-male rebellion runs counter to theories of masculinity advanced by scholars like R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel. In her 2005 book Masculinities, Connell lists the words “nerd” and “geek” among the terms that stigmatize marginal masculinities. The beta style draws from a countercultural genealogy and identifies itself against feminism but also against social conservatism, political correctness, mainstream consumer culture, and most important, against hegemonic masculinity itself.

The self-organized corps of women-hating men, by the lights of conventional academic-feminist theory, should be united in the repression of any and all gay male tendencies expressed online. But 4chan/b/ traffics openly in gay and trans pornography and hosts discussions of bisexual attraction. During one such discussion, a /b/ user wrote, “Why can’t you just tell yourself you’re bi and be happy with that? When I first came here /b/ made me question my sexuality real fucking fast. Just admit you’re half faggot half straight and be done with it, no shame in that.”

Similarly, the beta view of gender is complicated by an anti-mass-culture outlook. As copycat threats multiplied on /r9k/ after the Harper-Mercer shootings, one commenter advised, “Make sure you got molotovs. it is really easy and painfully [sic] way to kill many normies.” Another wrote that “Chads and Staceys” should be targeted, referencing a 4chan meme devoted to a parodic figure known as Chad Thundercock. As his name none too subtly suggests, Chad is a stand-in for the young, attractive, muscular football player claiming dominance over the beta-world in the contest for sexual success with women. Chad and his female equivalent Stacey are embodiments of the “normies” meme—and are typically depicted as sports playing, small-town ciphers of mass culture with generic tastes. One famous post, accompanied by an image of a football player and cheerleader kissing, describes with relish a fantasy of the couple going home together in his Ford, him crashing, and Stacey’s “last moments spent in utter agony” as she tries to tear her “bronze arm” free.
Remedial Class

As one patiently surveys the varieties of online expression favored by beta males, it becomes apparent that, in addition to their all too palpable sense of self-loathing, they’re further actuated by a pronounced sort of class contempt. One key source of their rage—against both the sexual pecking order and society at large—is that their own sense of superiority over the masses, the unspecial “normies,” is not reflected back to them by others in real life.

Beta-male defenders like Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos have argued that feminism has created cruel conditions for men who are different and geeky, while some feminists criticize the beta rebellion even as they regard the marginalized masculinities at its heart as a progressive force—a kind of counter-hegemonic corrective to an older notion of masculinity based on physical strength and machismo. But surely the idea that geeks are a victim group is out of date today. The American high school movie cliché has for several decades been the story of the geeks and the jocks. Invariably in such popcult fables, we see how the bullied members of the former group go on to prosper and thrive in adulthood with their superior intellect, while the discredited high school impresarios of physical prowess languish in small-town backwaters, mired in dead-end blue-collar jobs and unhappy marriages. The hard-to-miss moral is that the geeks shall inherit the earth—and that the athletic, macho, blue-collar male, once admired for his physical strength, now deserves his own decline.

Women have long figured in the countercultural imagination as avatars of a vain, mindless consumerism. This is the tradition that 4chan is really carrying on.

The beta insurgents likewise heap scorn on the conservative cultural mores of the small-town and blue-collar populace. Indeed, the beta-sphere is almost as fiercely opposed to conservative family values as it is to feminism. For a pretty typical example from 4chan, a gruesome image was once posted on /b/ of an aborted fetus, lying on a doctor’s table beside instruments and blood. The poster who uploaded the photo wrote, “I am undecided about abortion. On the one hand I support it because it is killing children. On the other, it gives women a choice.” Commenting on another image of a severely handicapped newborn child accompanied by a discussion of whether the mother should have had an abortion, another 4chan/b/ commenter wrote, “This is literally a sack of cells with a heart beat, it is not a human being. This is just Christfags being Christfags.” Outsiders to the subculture will no doubt be confused by this term, which seems to be mocking pro-life conservatives as gay, but “fags” as a suffix is ubiquitous on 4chan and exists alongside discussions of gay sexual fantasies and a general knowing awareness of the failed masculinity and outsider identity of those using the term. Like much of beta culture, this practice tries to carve out a cultural politics that rejects both the strict moral values of conservatism and the constraining political correctness that beta adherents associate with feminism and liberalism.

In this way, the betas don’t easily map onto either end of the Kulturkampf, and are therefore liable to confuse ideologues. A notorious hacker and troll known as weev was the primary orchestrator of attacks against female technology blogger, programmer, and game developer Kathy Sierra in 2007. The weev offensive, joined by many others in the hacker-troll milieu, involved “doxing,” posting personal details about Sierra’s family and home address among highly sexualized and threatening messages, like photoshopped images of her with a noose beside her head, with a shooting target pointed at her face, and being gagged with a thong.

In response to the attacks, Sierra closed down her blog and withdrew from speaking engagements and public life. In the time since the attack, weev has since become famous for hacking a phone company—a maneuver that triggered a Twitter-based #freeweev campaign, which gained support from prominent progressive endorsers such as Laurie Penny and Gabriella Coleman. Embarrassingly for those who expressed the view, fashionable in the heyday of the Occupy movement, that 4chan/b/ is a “counter-hegemonic space” and that trolls in the 4chan/b/ vein are, as Coleman argued, inheritors of the Dadaist and Situationist traditions, weev is a fascist sympathizer with a swastika tattoo on his chest. Penny claimed to be unaware of his far-right views, while Coleman not only continues to defend his rights as a hacker, but also presents him as an endearingly impish figure in her latest book.
Fascism, for the Lulz

The casual racism embedded in this geeky beta world comes wrapped in several layers of self-protective irony, with black masculinity treated as both the object of jealousy and of hatred. Commentators like Coleman have lent a certain credibility to the beta uprising’s contention that its motives are misinterpreted by a public that fails to grasp its unique brand of postmodern wit. Some people, they say, simply “don’t get” that the betas are in it strictly “for the lulz.” But while forum chatter certainly doesn’t inevitably escalate to violence and even the worst speech does not amount to violence, some of 4chan’s self-described geeks have taken their faux-ironic bigotry offline. After the November 2015 shooting of five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, a video emerged of two of the men involved, clad in balaclavas and driving to the BLM protest, saying, “We just wanted to give everyone a heads up on /pol/”—referring to the politics board on 4chan, a group that partially overlaps with the /b/ community. The speaker then points at the camera and says, “Stay white.”

Significantly, weev’s sensibility fuses elements of the anti-establishment far right, like the militia movement (which styles its anti-government activities a form of “leaderless resistance”), with the left-leaning vision of the old anti-establishment counterculture. In a recent magazine interview, a journalist spoke to some of the hackers and trolls of Anonymous, LulzSec, and 4chan/b/, including weev (a.k.a. Andrew Auernheimer):

I’m at a restaurant with Auernheimer and his friend Jaime Cochrane, who is a softly spoken transgender troll from the group Rustle League, so-called because “that’s what trolling is, it’s rustling people’s jimmies.” They’re explaining to me their version of what trolls do. “It’s not bullying,” says Cochrane. “It’s satirical performance art.” Cyberbullies who drive teenagers to suicide have crossed the line. However, trolling is the more high-minded business of what Cochrane calls “aggressive rhetoric,” a tradition that goes back to Socrates, Jesus and the trickster god Loki, from Norse mythology. Auernheimer likens himself to Shakespeare’s Puck. Cochrane aspires to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman. They talk of culture jamming, the art of disrupting the status quo to make people think. They talk of Abbie Hoffman.

Along with the presupposition that misogyny must spring from conservatism often comes the notion that transgression and countercultural gestures are somehow incompatible with it. But women have long figured in the countercultural imagination as agents of conformity and avatars of a vain, mindless consumerism. It seems to me that this is the tradition that 4chan and the wider beta-sphere, perhaps unknowingly, are really carrying on. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press’s brilliant 1996 study The Sex Revolts charts how the attribution of blame to women for the bland conformism of post-war America influenced the counterculture. In 1942’s Generation of Vipers, the pulp novelist and social critic Philip Wylie described an America in a state of national decline and shallow materialism due to the feminizing influence of the “destroying mother.” Wylie described feminized mass culture—a.k.a. “momism”—as “matriarchal sentimentality, goo slop, hidden cruelty.” Norman Mailer presented the psychopath as a noble and transgressive figure, who used his charismatic force to oppose feminized mass culture and emasculating consumer capitalism. “We are victims of a matriarchy here my friends,” says Harding, a psychiatric inmate in Ken Kesey’s classic counterculture novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And in Fight Club—the 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel famously adapted to the screen in 1999 by David Fincher and invoked as a quasi-biblical authority on 4chan—Tyler Durden’s pink soap, made from the reconstituted fat of women who have undergone liposuction and had it contemptuously “[sold] back to them,” acts as a potent symbol.

Here the counterculturalists of the beta world are tapping into a misogynic tradition—only it’s aligned with the bohemian left, not the buttoned-down right. Long before the postwar counterculture emerged, Emma Bovary symbolized the dreary and banal feminine massification of culture for nineteenth-century culture rebels. Channeling this same tradition, the beta world inveighs continually against the advanced feminization and massification of Internet-age culture. This is why their misogyny sits so comfortably alongside their mix of geeky and countercultural styles and why the pat “hegemonic masculinity” answer is so inadequate.
The Tangled Net

Today, we see the weirdly parallel ascent of an Internet-centric feminism that, like the beta revolution, glories in geeky countercultural elitism, and whose most enthusiastic partisans spend a great deal of time attacking other women for being insufficiently radical. Many of these feminists are active on the microblogging site Tumblr, and they are less apt to write about material issues that have concerned left-wing feminists for decades, like parental leave or unequal pay, than about the online obsession du jour: from feminist video games to coloring books, cosplay, knitting, cupcakes, microaggressions, trigger warnings, no-platforming, bi-erasure, and the fastidious avoidance of anything remotely resembling cultural appropriation. The recent popular left candidates Bernie Sanders (in the United States) and Jeremy Corbyn (in the United Kingdom) have come in for heavy rhetorical fire from this new wave of wired feminists, who deride them both as retrograde prophets of “brocialism.”

In response to the Oregon attacks, Milo Yiannopoulos wrote, “Today’s man-punishing, feminized culture is creating killers. . . . Why not harness that [masculine] power and set men back to work? To make America great again, we need to rescue our lost generation of young males.” According to a wealth of scholarship cited by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the feminization of culture is a feature of the decline of violence, not a cause, and there are many countries with better work and childcare conditions for women than America that are not producing mass shooters. Yiannopoulos conflates two enemy forces: Young geeks may be the losers in the cruel and chaotic modern free market of sexual choice, but they are the relative winners in the dominant economic ideology of the day. It is the geeks—those who merged the counterculture with information technology in the 1990s—who have already inherited the earth.

In the information age, the tastes and values of geeks are elevated above the masculine virtues of physical strength and material productivity that preceded them. Today, the market ideology of the information society is ascendant—particularly with its main Anglophone challengers tarred as brocialists—and it is immensely comfortable with its cultural power, which means that it happily accommodates transgression, gender fluidity, self-expression, and an abundant choice of niche online subcultural identities. It’s been a depressing spectacle to see two post-political, economically illiterate forms of subcultural identity politics—Tumblr feminist and beta/hacker anti-feminist—doing battle online. This feminism certainly has things to answer for; in addition to its penchant for sabotaging its own allies, it must be challenged on the damage it has done to university life with its militant opposition to free speech. But only one side of this new Internet gender rivalry is producing killers, and despite what polemicists such as Yiannopoulos are saying, it isn’t the feminists.

#USA #internet #masculinisme #mass_shooting

John Oliver - Bail Reform
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQLqIWbc9VM

#USA #justice #droit

Nächster Balkankrieg in Sicht ?
▻https://www.telepolis.de/features/Naechster-Balkankrieg-in-Sicht-9278957.html
Une fois n’est pas coutume, alors pourquoi pas lancer une deuxième guerre chaude en Europe. Avec les soldats étrangers (7000 au Camp Bondsteel) c’est comme avec les autoroutes neuves, il faut leur donner une raison d’être. Une petite guerre du Kosovo ferait du mal à personne, pas vrai ?

▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Bondsteel

27.8.2023 von Christoph Jehle - Seit dem Ukraine-Krieg hat die militärische Lösung neues Gewicht bekommen. Jetzt gibt es Kräfte, die im Kosovo Schluss mit einer Appeasement-Politik machen wollen. Kommentar.

Solange man im Westen glaubt, von der Vorstellung ausgehen zu dürfen, dass Russland den westlichen Waffenlieferungen nicht standhalten kann und schließlich dem endgültigen Untergang geweiht sein dürfte, scheint man auch andernorts die Entscheidung suchen zu wollen.

Da greift man gerne das Erbe der Jugoslawienkriege wieder auf, bei welchen es den westlichen Staaten nicht gelungen ist, die Serben auf Linie zu bringen, obwohl man mit Camp Bondsteel nahe Ferizaj im Kosovo einen um die 7.000 Mann starken militärischen Stützpunkt errichtet hat.

Dieser weckt nicht nur vom Namen und der Infrastruktur her Erinnerungen an die Aktivitäten der US-Armee in Südostasien, sondern stand zudem nach dem Jahr 2000 im Ruf, ein „Guantanamo-ähnliches Gefangenenlager“ zu beherbergen.
Kyiv Post veröffentlicht Brief an die Balkan-Beauftragten

Es verwundert nicht wirklich, dass dieser Brief in der Ukraine veröffentlicht wurde, mag er doch aufzeigen, dass auch die Verbündeten Russlands sich nicht mehr der Hoffnung auf Diplomatie hingeben sollen, weil ihnen bei Unbotmäßigkeit gegenüber den westlichen Vorstellungen nur der militärische Weg übrig bleiben könne.

55 Außenpolitikexperten, darunter auffallend viele von den Britischen Inseln und aus dem Baltikum, warnen vor einer Bedrohung des Friedens auf dem Balkan und fordern ein Ende der Appeasement-Politik gegenüber dem serbischen Präsidenten Aleksandar Vučić.

„Die jüngsten Entdeckungen von Waffenlagern im Norden des Kosovo und Berichte über anhaltenden Waffenschmuggel über die Grenze zwischen Serbien und dem Kosovo verdeutlichen die Gefahr einer weiteren Eskalation“, heißt es in dem in Kiew veröffentlichten Brief.

Der Kosovo sei ein souveränes Land und eine funktionierende Demokratie. Serbien müsse dafür zur Rechenschaft gezogen werden, dass es versuche, die demokratischen Wahlen im Kosovo zu stören.

Die Autoren sind für Abschreckungsdiplomatie, was auch immer das sein soll, um die im Westen erkannte aktuelle Krise zu lösen. Man fordert die Wiederherstellung von Ausgewogenheit und Verhältnismäßigkeit im Umgang mit Kosovo und Serbien, ohne dass man diese näher erläutert.

Die Verfasser des Briefes glauben in der derzeitigen Politik des Westens einen Mangel an Druck auf Serbien zu erkennen sowie einen Mangel an Unparteilichkeit. Man solle sicherstellen, „dass wir keine auf Belgrad ausgerichtete Politik für den Balkan verfolgen“, hält der Brief ebenso fest.
Wie nimmt man dem Westen die Scheu vor einer Neuauflage der Balkankriege?

„Seit Monaten wird bereits das Regime von Vučić vor allem von den US-Diplomaten Christopher Hill, Gabriel Escobar, Dereck Chollet und James O’Brien auf verschiedene Art und Weise unterstützt. Und dies, obwohl die serbische Regierung ein wichtiger Verbündeter des Kreml ist“, stellt der österreichische Standard fest.

Offensichtlich sei auch, dass die USA nicht mehr an eine Demokratisierung der Region glaubten, weil sie nicht in demokratische Kräfte investierten, die seit Monaten in Serbien auf die Straße gehen, sondern in autoritäre Nationalisten.

Durch die aktuelle US-Politik werde die Region immer instabiler, weil die völkischen Nationalisten, die ein Großserbien, Großalbanien und Großkroatien schaffen wollen, sich durch die US-Politik bestärkt fühlten.

Diese Entwicklung laufe auf Kosten der kleineren Länder wie Kosovo, Montenegro, Nordmazedonien und Bosnien-Herzegowina. Dies gehe aktuell sogar so weit, dass Gabriel Escobar, der US-Gesandte für den Balkan, die gleichen Sätze sage wie der russische Botschafter in Bosnien-Herzegowina.

Als kürzlich die neuen kosovarischen Bürgermeister im von Serben bewohnten Nordkosovo ihre Ämter beziehen wollten, griffen militante serbische Extremisten die Nato-geführten KFOR-Truppen an. Die westliche Seite zog dafür nicht Belgrad zur Verantwortung. Westliche Diplomaten beschuldigten die kosovarische Regierung unter Albin Kurti, daran schuld zu sein, weil sie die Bürgermeister in ihre Ämter geschickt habe.

Konsequenterweise wurde die kosovarische Regierung auch vom Westen abgestraft. Die Teilnahme des Kosovo an der Nato-Übung Defender Europe 23 wurde abgesagt. Und die EU-Staaten vereinbarten am 14. Juni einstimmig „umkehrbare und vorübergehende Maßnahmen“ gegen die kosovarische Regierung.

Die Verfasser des in Kiew veröffentlichten Briefes lehnen die aktuelle Entwicklung auf dem Balkan grundsätzlich ab und forcieren militärische Mittel anstelle eines diplomatischen Ausgleichs.

Immerhin stünde bei einem Zerfall des Kosovo möglicherweise auch die Existenz von Camp Bondsteel auf dem Spiel und damit der mit Abstand größten US-Truppenpräsenz auf dem Balkan.

#USA #Europe #impérialisme #Balkan #Kosivo #guerre

American Holocaust: The Destruction of America’s Native Peoples
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qra6pcn4AOE

American Holocaust: The Destruction of America’s Native Peoples, a lecture by David Stannard, professor and chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Hawaii. Stannard, author of American Holocaust, asserts that the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most substantial act of genocide in world history. A combination of atrocities and imported plagues resulted in the death of roughly 95 percent of the native population in the Americas. Stannard argues that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust operated from the same ideological source as the architects of the Nazi Holocaust. That ideology remains alive today in American foreign policy, Stannard avers.

Le livre
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Holocaust_(book)

#American_Holocaust #pouvoir #impérialisme #USA #génocide

Wounded Knee Occupation 1973
▻https://libguides.snhu.edu/c.php?g=1184812&p=8902710

According to the Salem Press Encyclopedia ...:

The tiny hamlet of Wounded Knee, the site at which more than two hundred Sioux and others were massacred in 1890, became a symbolic site again as members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the site during 1973. They quickly were confronted by armored troops and police.

The seventy-one-day occupation of Wounded Knee began on February 28, 1973. On March 11, 1973, AIM members declared their independence as the Oglala Sioux Nation, defining its boundaries according to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868. At one point, federal officials considered an armed attack on the camp, but the plan ultimately was discarded. Dennis Banks and Russell Means, AIM’s best-known leaders, stated that they would hold out until the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee had reviewed all broken treaties and the corruption of the BIA had been exposed to the world. After much gunfire and negotiation, AIM’s occupation of Wounded Knee ended on May 7, 1973.

Wounded knee occupation This link opens in a new window

Johansen, B. E. (2022). Wounded Knee occupation. Salem Press Encyclopedia.

Primary Sources
...
This primary source provides a firsthand account of Owen Luck, a photojournalist who was present at the occupation of Wounded Knee. He details the event in a visceral and impactful way, describing his engagement with the Lakota people and his experience throughout the event. Click on the link above to access the document.

A Witness at Wounded Knee, 1973 This link opens in a new window

Luck, O. (2006). A Witness at Wounded Knee, 1973. The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 67(2), 330-358. ▻https://doi.org/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.67.2.0330

The following article is an interview with Delbert Eastman, the Bureau of Indian Affairs police chief at the time of the occupation. It provides a detailed account of the various players in the event and gives a local take on the seige.

A Tribal Policeman’s Observations of Pine Ridge Reservation (1973) This link opens in a new window

Reinhardt, A. D. (Ed.). (2015). A Tribal Policeman’s Observations of Pine Ridge Reservation (1973). In Welcome to the Oglala Nation: A Documentary Reader in Oglala Lakota Political History (pp. 178–179). University of Nebraska Press. ▻https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1d9nhjk.56

Below is the image of a flyer used to rally protesters to the cause of taking back Wounded Knee.

Prevent a 2nd massacre at Wounded Knee : show your solidarity with the Indian nations This link opens in a n

American Indian Movement. (1973). Prevent a 2nd massacre at Wounded Knee: Show your solidarity with the Indian nations [Digital Image]

#USA #histoire #insigènes #american_indians #génocide #accaparement_des_terres

Joshua Landis sur X :
▻https://twitter.com/joshua_landis/status/1694084399170507249

The $56 million of oil U.S. seized from Iran this week is chump change

In 1953, US gifted itself 40% of the entire Anglo-Persian Oil Company (renamed BP) after overthrowing #Iran's democratically elected government.

US is losing its mojo

What is more, the US pushed #SaudiArabia to sell more oil to China to encourage #China to acquiesce to #Iran sanctions & make up for lost Iran oil.

Now Saudi is moving into China orbit.

And, Iran has expanded its oil exports to over 2 mbd.

Lose, lose. Foolish #USA

#états-unis

GRAIN | Les avocats de la colère
▻https://grain.org/fr/article/6986-les-avocats-de-la-colere

Les entreprises californiennes ont créé des filiales au Mexique et ont commencé à s’approvisionner directement auprès des producteurs, allant jusqu’à installer leurs propres usines de conditionnement dans le Michoacán[31]. Une étude estime qu’en 2005, Mission Produce, Calavo Growers, West Pak, Del Monte, Fresh Directions, et Chiquita concentraient 80 % des importations étasuniennes d’avocats du Mexique[32].

Actuellement, l’état fédéral du Michoacán représente 75 % de la production nationale, suivi du Jalisco avec 10 % et de l’Edomex, avec 5%[33]. En 2019, on pouvait déjà voir comment l’agrobusiness d’exportation était l’acteur central du champ autour duquel se sont articulées les politiques publiques. S’ils ont réussi à rentabiliser cette entreprise, c’est en obéissant aux stratégies de domination de l’agro-industrie de l’avocat et à ses impacts sur le territoire, en particulier sur les modes de vie paysans et communautaires[34]. Le boom de l’avocat au Mexique dépend aujourd’hui de l’abattage de forêts entières et a souvent recours à des incendies ou à des coupes sauvages pour faire de la place à d’autres vergers d’avocats, engloutissant les ressources en eau de localités et de régions entières. Les coûts sociaux aussi sont extrêmement élevés.

https://grain.org/system/attachments/sources/000/007/087/large/AF-Aguacate_Infografia-FR_1.jpg

#agroalimentaire #mexique #usa #néolibéralisme #consommation #agriculture

Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans
▻https://web.archive.org/web/20210208220916/http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Woundedknee1891.jpg

cf. ▻https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Indigenous_Peoples%27_History_of_the_United_States

Beginning in 1887, the federal government attempted to “Americanize” Native Americans, largely through the education of Native youth. By 1900 thousands of Native Americans were studying at almost 150 boarding schools around the United States. The U.S. Training and Industrial School founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, was the model for most of these schools. Boarding schools like Carlisle provided vocational and manual training and sought to systematically strip away tribal culture. They insisted that students drop their Indian names, forbade the speaking of native languages, and cut off their long hair. Not surprisingly, such schools often met fierce resistance from Native American parents and youth. But the schools also fostered a sense of shared Indian identity that transcended tribal boundaries. The following excerpt (from a paper read by Carlisle founder Capt. Richard H. Pratt at an 1892 convention) spotlights Pratt’s pragmatic and frequently brutal methods for “civilizing” the “savages,” including his analogies to the education and “civilizing” of African Americans.

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

We are just now making a great pretence of anxiety to civilize the Indians. I use the word “pretence” purposely, and mean it to have all the significance it can possibly carry. Washington believed that commerce freely entered into between us and the Indians would bring about their civilization, and Washington was right. He was followed by Jefferson, who inaugurated the reservation plan. Jefferson’s reservation was to be the country west of the Mississippi; and he issued instructions to those controlling Indian matters to get the Indians there, and let the Great River be the line between them and the whites. Any method of securing removal - persuasion, purchase, or force - was authorized.

Jefferson’s plan became the permanent policy. The removals have generally been accomplished by purchase, and the evils of this are greater than those of all the others combined. . . .

It is a sad day for the Indians when they fall under the assaults of our troops, as in the Piegan massacre, the massacre of Old Black Kettle and his Cheyennes at what is termed “the battle of the Washita,” and hundreds of other like places in the history of our dealings with them; but a far sadder day is it for them when they fall under the baneful influences of a treaty agreement with the United States whereby they are to receive large annuities, and to be protected on reservations, and held apart from all association with the best of our civilization. The destruction is not so speedy, but it is far more general. The history of the Miamis and Osages is only the true picture of all other tribes.

“Put yourself in his place” is as good a guide to a proper conception of the Indian and his cause as it is to help us to right conclusions in our relations with other men. For many years we greatly oppressed the black man, but the germ of human liberty remained among us and grew, until, in spite of our irregularities, there came from the lowest savagery into intelligent manhood and freedom among us more than seven millions of our population, who are to-day an element of industrial value with which we could not well dispense. However great this victory has been for us, we have not yet fully learned our lesson nor completed our work; nor will we have done so until there is throughout all of our communities the most unequivocal and complete acceptance of our own doctrines, both national and religious. Not until there shall be in every locality throughout the nation a supremacy of the Bible principle of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and full obedience to the doctrine of our Declaration that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights,” and of the clause in our Constitution which forbids that there shall be “any abridgment of the rights of citizens on account of race, color, or previous condition.” I leave off the last two words “of servitude,” because I want to be entirely and consistently American.

Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible—probable—citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.

There is a great lesson in this. The schools did not make them citizens, the schools did not teach them the language, nor make them industrious and self-supporting. Denied the right of schools, they became English-speaking and industrious through the influences of association. Scattered here and there, under the care and authority of individuals of the higher race, they learned self-support and something of citizenship, and so reached their present place. No other influence or force would have so speedily accomplished such a result. Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven millions of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people; became healthy and multiplied, because they were property; and industrious, because industry, which brings contentment and health, was a necessary quality to increase their value.

The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them. . . .

We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them. Although some of the policies now prominent are advertised to carry them into citizenship and consequent association and competition with other masses of the nation, they are not, in reality, calculated to do this.

We are after the facts. Let us take the Land in Severalty Bill. Land in severalty, as administered, is in the way of the individualizing and civilization of the Indians, and is a means of holding the tribes together. Land in severalty is given to individuals adjoining each other on their present reservations. And experience shows that in some cases, after the allotments have been made, the Indians have entered into a compact among themselves to continue to hold their lands in common as a reservation. The inducement of the bill is in this direction. The Indians are not only invited to remain separate tribes and communities, but are practically compelled to remain so. The Indian must either cling to his tribe and its locality, or take great chances of losing his rights and property.

The day on which the Land in Severalty Bill was signed was announced to be the emancipation day for the Indians. The fallacy of that idea is so entirely demonstrated that the emancipation assumption is now withdrawn.

We shall have to go elsewhere, and seek for other means besides land in severalty to release these people from their tribal relations and to bring them individually into the capacity and freedom of citizens.

Just now that land in severalty is being retired as the one all-powerful leverage that is going to emancipate and bring about Indian civilization and citizenship, we have another plan thrust upon us which has received great encomium from its authors, and has secured the favor of Congress to the extent of vastly increasing appropriations. This plan is calculated to arrest public attention, and to temporarily gain concurrence from everybody that it is really the panacea for securing citizenship and equality in the nation for the Indians. In its execution this means purely tribal schools among the Indians; that is, Indian youth must continue to grow up under the pressure of home surroundings. Individuals are not to be encouraged to get out and see and learn and join the nation. They are not to measure their strength with the other inhabitants of the land, and find out what they do not know, and thus be led to aspire to gain in education, experience, and skill,—those things that they must know in order to become equal to the rest of us. A public school system especially for the Indians is a tribal system; and this very fact says to them that we believe them to be incompetent, that they must not attempt to cope with us. Such schools build up tribal pride, tribal purposes, and tribal demands upon the government. They formulate the notion that the government owes them a living and vast sums of money; and by improving their education on these lines, but giving no other experience and leading to no aspirations beyond the tribe, leaves them in their chronic condition of helplessness, so far as reaching the ability to compete with the white race is concerned. It is like attempting to make a man well by always telling him he is sick. We have only to look at the tribes who have been subject to this influence to establish this fact, and it makes no difference where they are located. All the tribes in the State of New York have been trained in tribal schools; and they are still tribes and Indians, with no desire among the masses to be anything else but separate tribes.

The five civilized tribes of the Indian Territory—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—have had tribal schools until it is asserted that they are civilized; yet they have no notion of joining us and becoming a part of the United States. Their whole disposition is to prey upon and hatch up claims against the government, and have the same lands purchased and repurchased and purchased again, to meet the recurring wants growing out of their neglect and inability to make use of their large and rich estate. . . .

Indian schools are just as well calculated to keep the Indians intact as Indians as Catholic schools are to keep the Catholics intact. Under our principles we have established the public school system, where people of all races may become unified in every way, and loyal to the government; but we do not gather the people of one nation into schools by themselves, and the people of another nation into schools by themselves, but we invite the youth of all peoples into all schools. We shall not succeed in Americanizing the Indian unless we take him in in exactly the same way. I do not care if abundant schools on the plan of Carlisle are established. If the principle we have always had at Carlisle—of sending them out into families and into the public schools—were left out, the result would be the same, even though such schools were established, as Carlisle is, in the centre of an intelligent and industrious population, and though such schools were, as Carlisle always has been, filled with students from many tribes. Purely Indian schools say to the Indians: “You are Indians, and must remain Indians. You are not of the nation, and cannot become of the nation. We do not want you to become of the nation.”

Before I leave this part of my subject I feel impelled to lay before you the facts, as I have come to look at them, of another influence that has claimed credit, and always has been and is now very dictatorial, in Indian matters; and that is the missionary as a citizenizing influence upon the Indians. The missionary goes to the Indian; he learns the language; he associates with him; he makes the Indian feel he is friendly, and has great desire to help him; he even teaches the Indian English. But the fruits of his labor, by all the examples that I know, have been to strengthen and encourage him to remain separate and apart from the rest of us. Of course, the more advanced, those who have a desire to become civilized, and to live like white men, who would with little encouragement go out into our communities, are the first to join the missionary’s forces. They become his lieutenants to gather in others. The missionary must necessarily hold on to every help he can get to push forward his schemes and plans, so that he may make a good report to his Church; and, in order to enlarge his work and make it a success, he must keep his community together. Consequently, any who care to get out into the nation, and learn from actual experience what it is to be civilized, what is the full length and breadth and height and depth of our civilization, must stay and help the missionary. The operation of this has been disastrous to any individual escape from the tribe, has vastly and unnecessarily prolonged the solution of the question, and has needlessly cost the charitable people of this country large sums of money, to say nothing of the added cost to the government, the delay in accomplishing their civilization, and their destruction caused by such delay.

If, as sometimes happens, the missionary kindly consents to let or helps one go out and get these experiences, it is only for the purpose of making him a preacher or a teacher or help of some kind; and such a one must, as soon as he is fitted, and much sooner in most cases, return to the tribe and help the missionary to save his people. The Indian who goes out has public charitable aid through his school course, forfeits his liberty, and is owned by the missionary. In all my experience of twenty-five years I have known scarcely a single missionary to heartily aid or advocate the disintegration of the tribes and the giving of individual Indians rights and opportunities among civilized people. There is this in addition: that the missionaries have largely assumed to dictate to the government its policy with tribes, and their dictations have always been along the lines of their colonies and church interests, and the government must gauge its actions to suit the purposes of the missionary, or else the missionary influences are at once exerted to defeat the purposes of the government. The government, by paying large sums of money to churches to carry on schools among Indians, only builds for itself opposition to its own interests. . . .

We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization. America has different customs and civilizations from Germany. What would be the result of an attempt to plant American customs and civilization among the Germans in Germany, demanding that they shall become thoroughly American before we admit them to the country? Now, what we have all along attempted to do for and with the Indians is just exactly that, and nothing else. We invite the Germans to come into our country and communities, and share our customs, our civilization, to be of it; and the result is immediate success. Why not try it on the Indians? Why not invite them into experiences in our communities? Why always invite and compel them to remain a people unto themselves?

It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond all question; and it is also well established that those advanced in life, even to maturity, of either class, lose already acquired qualities belonging to the side of their birth, and gradually take on those of the side to which they have been transferred.

As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.

The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them. It has demanded for them the same multiplicity of chances which all others in the country enjoy. Carlisle fills young Indians with the spirit of loyalty to the stars and stripes, and then moves them out into our communities to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored, that he has the inalienable right to liberty and opportunity that the white and the negro have. Carlisle does not dictate to him what line of life he should fill, so it is an honest one. It says to him that, if he gets his living by the sweat of his brow, and demonstrates to the nation that he is a man, he does more good for his race than hundreds of his fellows who cling to their tribal communistic surroundings. . . .

No evidence is wanting to show that, in our industries, the Indian can become a capable and willing factor if he has the chance. What we need is an Administration which will give him the chance. The Land in Severalty Bill can be made far more useful than it is, but it can be made so only by assigning the land so as to intersperse good, civilized people among them. If, in the distribution, it is so arranged that two or three white families come between two Indian families, then there would necessarily grow up a community of fellowship along all the lines of our American civilization that would help the Indian at once to his feet. Indian schools must, of necessity, be for a time, because the Indian cannot speak the language, and he knows nothing of the habits and forces he has to contend with; but the highest purpose of all Indian schools ought to be only to prepare the young Indian to enter the public and other schools of the country. And immediately he is so prepared, for his own good and the good of the country, he should be forwarded into these other schools, there to temper, test, and stimulate his brain and muscle into the capacity he needs for his struggle for life, in competition with us. The missionary can, if he will, do far greater service in helping the Indians than he has done; but it will only be by practising the doctrine he preaches. As his work is to lift into higher life the people whom he serves, he must not, under any pretence whatsoever, give the lie to what he preaches by discountenancing the right of any individual Indian to go into higher and better surroundings, but, on the contrary, he should help the Indian to do that. If he fails in thus helping and encouraging the Indian, he is false to his own teaching. An examination shows that no Indians within the limits of the United States have acquired any sort of capacity to meet and cope with the whites in civilized pursuits who did not gain that ability by going among the whites and out from the reservations, and that many have gained this ability by so going out.

Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation. What a farce it would be to attempt teaching American citizenship to the negroes in Africa. They could not understand it; and, if they did, in the midst of such contrary influences, they could never use it. Neither can the Indians understand or use American citizenship theoretically taught to them on Indian reservations. They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it.

When we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences; when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact—then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian.

Source:
Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210126004256im_/http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/styles/display_collections/public/image-teaching/scis_0002_0.jpg?itok=9PYf-mWM

#USA #génocide #racisme #éducation #american_indians #native_americans

HITLER’S SHADOW, Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War
►https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf
Dans cette publication on apprend que la CIA était plutôt sceptique en ce qui concernait la collaboration avec Stepan Bandera. Les parachutages d’agents anticommunistes étaient l’affaire des Britanniques. Plus tard c’étaient surtout les ex-nazis allemands proches d’Eichmann, particulièrement Gerhard von Mende, un participant à l’organisation de l’holocauste, qui le soutenaient jusqu’à sa mort. La CIA avait son propre homme de main, Mykola Lebed.

Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Published by the National Archives

In 1998 Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act [P.L. 105-246]
as part of a series of efforts to identify, declassify, and release federal records on the perpetration of Nazi war crimes and on Allied efforts to locate and punish war criminals. Under the direction of the National Archives the Interagency Working Group [IWG] opened to research over 8 million of pages of records - including recent 21st century documentation. Of particular importance to this volume are many declassified intelligence records from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Army Intelligence Command, which were not fully processed and available at the time that the IWG issued its Final Report in 2007.
As a consequence, Congress [in HR 110-920] charged the National Archives
in 2009 to prepare an additional historical volume as a companion piece to
its 2005 volume U. S. Intelligence and the Nazis. Professors Richard Breitman
and Norman J. W. Goda note in Hitler’s Shadow that these CIA & Army records produced new “evidence of war crimes and about wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of war criminals; and documents about the postwar activities of war criminals”.
This volume of essays points to the significant impact that flowed from
Congress and the Executive Branch agencies in adopting a broader and fuller
release of previously security classified war crimes documentation. Details about records processed by the IWG and released by the National Archives are more fully described on our website iwg@nara.gov.

William Cunliffe, Office of Records Services,
National Archives and Records Administration

CHAPTER FIVE, Collaborators: Allied Intelligence and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
...
The CIA never considered entering into an alliance with Bandera to procure intelligence from Ukraine. “By nature,” read a CIA report, “[Bandera] is a political intransigent of great personal ambition, who [has] since April 1948, opposed all political organizations in the emigration which favor a representative
form of government in the Ukraine as opposed to a mono-party, OUN/Bandera regime.”

Worse, his intelligence operatives in Germany were dishonest and not secure. Debriefings of couriers from western Ukraine in 1948 confirmed that, “the thinking of Stephan Bandera and his immediate émigré supporters [has] become radically outmoded in the Ukraine.” Bandera was also a convicted assassin. By now, word had reached the CIA of Bandera’s fratricidal struggles with other Ukrainian groups during the war and in the emigration.
By 1951 Bandera turned vocally anti-American as well, since the US did not advocate an independent Ukraine.” The CIA had an agent within the Bandera group in 1951 mostly to keep an eye on Bandera.

British Intelligence (MI6), however, was interested in Bandera. MI6 first contacted Bandera through Gerhard von Mende in April 1948. An ethnic German from Riga, von Mende served in Alfred Rosenberg’s Ostministerium
during the war as head of the section for the Caucasus and Turkestan section, recruiting Soviet Muslims from central Asia for use against the USSR. In this capacity he was kept personally informed of UPA actions and capabilities.

Nothing came of initial British contacts with Bandera because, as the CIA learned later, “the political, financial, and tech requirements of the [Ukrainians] were higher than the British cared to meet.” But by 1949 MI6 began helping Bandera send his own agents into western Ukraine via airdrop. In 1950 MI6 began training these agents on the expectation that they could provide intelligence from western Ukraine.

CIA and State Department officials flatly opposed the use of Bandera. By 1950 the CIA was working with the Hrinioch-Lebed group, and had begun to run its own agents into western Ukraine to make contact with the UHVR. Bandera no longer had the UHVR’s support or even that of the OUN party leadership in Ukraine. Bandera’s agents also deliberately worked against Ukrainian agents used by the CIA. In April 1951 CIA officials tried to convince MI6 to pull support from Bandera. MI6 refused. They thought that Bandera could run his agents without British support, and MI6 were “seeking progressively to assume control of Bandera’s lines.” The British also thought that the CIA underestimated Bandera’s importance. “Bandera’s name,” they said, “still carried considerable weight in the Ukraine and … the UPA would look to him first and foremost.”

On trouve des informations sur les relations de la CIA avec les anticommunistes ukrainiens dans le chapître The United States and Mykola Lebed

Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group
▻https://www.archives.gov/iwg

#histoire #USA #anticommunisme #Ukraine #Bandera

The American Soul Is a Murderous Soul
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/10/the-american-soul-is-a-murderous-soul-guns-violence-second-amendment-trump/#cookie_message_anchor

By Patrick Blanchfield - In 1923, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans: “All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

Lawrence’s observations of the American character did not draw upon deep wells of direct personal experience. When he wrote those lines, he had only been living in the United States for a bit more than a year and had spent much of that time among artists and the literati. But he was neither the first nor the last to make such an observation. Nearly 50 years ago, surveying both the wreckage of the 1960s and centuries of archives, the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that “Americans certainly have reason to inquire whether, when compared with other advanced industrial nations, they are not a people of exceptional violence.”

The allegation that the American character is essentially murderous — or at least more murderous than that of other nations — still strikes a chord today. It’s not just the periodic invitations to violence that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has issued over the course of his campaign, most recently against his Democratic competitor Hillary Clinton. This summer’s headlines have also enumerated trauma after trauma. Eight members of a single family murdered in Ohio. Forty-nine dead in a mass shooting in Florida. Shootings by police claiming the lives of black Americans in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Maryland. Fatal shootings of police in Texas, Louisiana, and California. Breaking reports of horror follow one another fast enough to induce a kind of whiplash.

Or consider the strenuousness with which each political party now routinely denies that Americans are inherently violent, a refrain that can begin to feel like protesting too much. In his final speech at the Republican National Convention last month, Trump bemoaned the “violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities” but, true to form, laid the blame on hordes of “illegal immigrants … roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens”; “brutal Islamic terrorism”; and the enabling of a Democratic president whom Trump has previously and unsubtly intimated isn’t really American himself.

Democrats likewise tend to suggest that, for Americans, acts of violence are an aberration. Announcing a gun safety program in the wake of last December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not inherently more prone to violence. But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency.” From this perspective, violence in America does not indicate anything “inherent” in the American character: It is about the presence of guns, the availability of which is a contingent and remediable matter of policy.

But what if there’s good reason to believe that being American has always involved a relationship of some kind to violence — whether as its victim, as its perpetrator, as a complicit party, or even as all of these at once. Rather than assuming, in Obama’s words, that Americans are “not inherently more prone to violence,” the country owes it to itself to finally try to consider the question directly.

How is violence quantified, and what are the benchmarks used to assess whether a given society’s level of violence is high or low, normal or exceptional? The general practice among researchers across numerous disciplines is to present yearly “intentional homicide” rates per 100,000 of a given nation’s population; crucially, these figures do not include deaths directly related to full-blown wars.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) compiles national figures for its reports, the most recent of which reflects data from 2012 and 2013. Per the UNODC, some 437,000 people were murdered worldwide in 2012, putting the average murder rate at 6.2 victims per 100,000 persons. But beyond that average figure, as you might expect, there is wide variation in terms of both individual nations and continents. Regionally, Central America and southern Africa both clock in at over four times the global average (more than 25 per 100,000), while Western Europe and East Asia are some five times lower than it. Within continents and regions, the variations can be stark. Thus, to take Africa as an example, the rate in Senegal is 2.8; Egypt, 3.4; Sudan, 11.2; and Lesotho, the highest, at 38. In Europe, Switzerland’s rate is 0.6; the U.K., 1; Finland, 1.6; Lithuania, 6.7; and Russia, the highest, at 9.2. The Americas show the widest variation: Canada’s rate is 1.6; Argentina, 5.5; Costa Rica, 8.5; Panama, 17.2; Mexico, 21.5; and Honduras, the highest in the world — at 90.4 per 100,000.

Against this backdrop, for the period of 2007-2012, the United States has averaged 4.9 homicides per 100,000 persons. America thus stands more or less shoulder to shoulder with Iran (4.1), Cuba (4.2), Latvia (4.7), and Albania (5). So much for the data on homicides tout court. The question then is whether or not to consider America’s standing among countries like these to be an aberration. Such states certainly aren’t in the same class as the United States in terms of development metrics like per capita GDP, and this fact tends to get cited by American politicians and political observers as prima facie evidence that something else (whether “terrorists” or guns) is skewing their country’s violence data, pushing it out of its allegedly more “natural” peer group — places like the Scandinavian states, the U.K., or Japan.

But while such comparisons may sound rigorous at first blush, they are often naively aspirational (at best) or deliberately deceptive and chauvinistic (at worst). Nowhere is this more blatant than in the context of the debate over guns. For example, many gun control advocates and supposedly objective analysts will condemn violence in the United States as abnormal by invoking comparisons to “developed” nations as defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Yet these comparisons will regularly exclude Mexico, which is not only an OECD member but also America’s third-largest trading partner and its unfortunate next-door neighbor. The reason given for this exclusion, as though self-explanatory, is “the drug war.” The annual U.S. market for illegal drugs may be well over $109 billion, and an estimated quarter-million guns may be trafficked to Mexican cartels from the United States in any given year, but inviting the contemplation of such queasy moral entanglements is apparently less politically expedient, and more offensive to patriotic amour-propre, than demanding why America can’t just clean up its act and be more like the places we feel it “should” resemble.

It’s not just our use of empirical metrics for evaluating violence in America that can be dubious. Opining on the supposedly inherent tendencies of vast groups of people toward violence — Americans, Muslims, the left-handed, anyone — should rightly raise flags. It’s the kind of thing you might expect from a 19th-century phrenologist, someone who would measure skulls for indicators of “destructiveness.” But although the vintage pseudo-scientific quackery underwriting such speculation may have fallen out of fashion, the sentiments themselves haven’t disappeared. Consider Iowa Rep. Steve King, for example, pontificating on the civilizational contributions of whites versus other “subgroups,” or research indicating widespread biases whereby black Americans are perceived to be both “prone to violence” and less susceptible to pain. Passing judgment on “a people” as an abstraction rarely leads anywhere good and frequently reveals more about the observer than the observed.

But making claims about the inherent relationship “Americans” have with violence is especially dicey. The United States is an extremely heterogeneous country, with vast regional differences, considerable ethnic diversity, marked de facto segregation, and wide income inequality — which Americans would we be talking about?

This is where considerations of the allegedly violent American national character run aground, though in a telling way. Because like most goods and ills in America — from job opportunities to education to healthy drinking water — violence is not equally distributed among Americans. Indeed, drilling down into the demographics of violence in America reads like an indictment of society’s broader treatment of the poor and marginalized. As analysts have pointedly observed, black Americans are some eight times more likely to be murdered than their white compatriots and, in any given year, will be killed at rates anywhere from 10 to 20 times the benchmark OECD rates. When the homicide rates for individual states rather than the national average are compared, the results are damning: The murder rates in Louisiana (11.93 per 100,000) and Washington, D.C., (13.92) are on par with figures from countries like Nicaragua (11), the Central African Republic (11.8), and Côte d’Ivoire (13.6).

Those who cast these figures as artifacts of so-called “black-on-black crime” not only often traffic in thinly veiled racism, but don’t even attempt to understand the problem at hand. Most crimes of any sort in any place — not just murders — involve members of the same group targeting one another in close geographic proximity. And in a nation as segregated as the United States remains to this day, the concentration of violence in crowded ghettos and benighted postindustrial areas should be unsurprising. Americans have a history of citing violence as the cause of their racial prejudices. But the reality is that anti-black racism is itself the defining feature of the institutions and social pressures that generate everyday violence in the United States.

What Americans should reflect on is how deftly their society has contained and distilled the phenomenon into marginalized communities — and how that distribution of violence is something the majority of Americans of either political persuasion tend to deem irrelevant to their periodic national debates about the country’s safety or lack thereof. The Washington-based politician or journalist who sees a headline-grabbing rampage of shootings as a sign that America is descending into barbarity, and as threatening its status as an “advanced” country, exists in a kind of cognitive bubble: Literally only blocks away, bodies regularly drop at rates otherwise only seen in violence-prone corners of the developing world. Taking an even broader view, it is arguable that, but for modern advances in antibiotics and trauma care, murder rates in such parts of the United States would surpass those historically associated with medieval Europe. American “progress,” such as it is, has apparently consisted in merely blunting some deadly outcomes and enabling others.

Guns are undeniably a central part of this landscape. In environments in which violence is already present, and in which more violence is probable, the presence of guns appears to quicken lethal outcomes. This is true on both the level of households and the level of communities. Research indicates that, over the course of their lifetimes, one-quarter of American women will experience physical or sexual violence from a domestic partner; this rate puts the United States alongside Jordan, Serbia, Nepal, and Guatemala. But when a gun is present in an American home where there is a history of domestic violence, the likelihood that a woman living there will be killed has been credibly estimated to increase some twentyfold. On the community level, homicide rates in cities like Chicago and New York are roughly equivalent — but only for murders that don’t involve guns; gun homicides in the former are easily an order of magnitude higher than the latter.

But these considerations do not easily translate to the national level. Although in the past year many cities have experienced a sharp and disturbing increase in homicides, with no clear explanation as to why, overall violent crime rates have been dropping for decades, even as Americans have consistently expressed a conviction that crime has been steadily getting “worse” and even as they have accordingly purchased more guns than ever before. From a certain perspective, when considering America’s unprecedented saturation with firearms, observers may be forced to admit that the surprising thing is how much more violent America could be than it currently is.

If there is any singular feature that characterizes how many Americans understand our national relation to violence, it is our ingenuity at looking the other way, at siloing problems away from one another, and at disavowing, sublimating, or repackaging our complicity in the most easily observable patterns.

Signs of supposed progress in expressions of American violence often disguise profound continuities. For example: The era of highly visible public lynchings, which is estimated to have claimed some 5,000 lives, has passed. Yet since then we have moved on to an institutionalized death penalty regime, wherein states that previously had the highest numbers of lynchings now have the greatest numbers of black people on death row. Both per capita and in raw numbers, America’s prisons warehouse more human beings than any other country on the planet, and its police demonstrate a clear pattern of racial bias in killing their fellow citizens at a rate stratospherically higher than that of any of its supposed peer nations. U.S. soldiers are deployed in some 135 countries, and the number of troops actually engaged in combat is almost certainly much higher than authorities are willing to admit. Meanwhile, America is far and away the world’s largest exporter of weapons, with the global arms industry’s largest and most profitable players based in the United States and reaping booming markets in conflict zones while being heavily subsidized by federal and state tax dollars.

Everyday Americans may not be “inherently more prone to violence,” but our way of life is certainly structured around violence and around selectively empowering, quarantining, directing, and monetizing it at home and abroad. The majority of Americans apparently find no cognitive dissonance in this arrangement, if we even perceive it at all. Instead, we express bafflement and outrage that we are not something other than what we are and what we have always been. Plumbing what lurks within the “essential American soul,” a cynic might suggest, is a self-indulgent exercise, a red herring. The better question might be whether we even have one in the first place.

#USA #violence #racisme #histoire #crime #impérialisme #armes

Contre-histoire des États-Unis, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – Éditions Wildproject
▻https://wildproject.org/livres/contre-histoire-des-etats-unis

https://wildproject.org/media/pages/livres/contre-histoire-des-etats-unis/f71e332bcc-1657800622/roxannedunbarortiz-contrehistoiredeseu-1200x630-crop-50-50.jpg

Le monde qui vient
novembre 2021
9-782-381140-278
336 pages
22 €
13 × 20 cm
Préface et traduction par Pascal Menoret
Première édition française 2018

Ce livre répond à une question simple : pourquoi les Indiens dʼAmérique ont-ils été décimés ? Nʼétait-il pas pensable de créer une civilisation créole prospère qui permette aux populations amérindienne, africaine, européenne, asiatique et océanienne de partager lʼespace et les ressources naturelles des États-Unis ? Le génocide des Amérindiens était-il inéluctable ?

La thèse dominante aux États-Unis est quʼils ont souvent été tués par les virus apportés par les Européens avant même dʼentrer en contact avec les Européens eux-mêmes : la variole voyageait plus vite que les soldats espagnols et anglais. Les survivants auraient soit disparu au cours des guerres de la frontière, soit été intégrés, eux aussi, à la nouvelle société dʼimmigrés.

Contre cette vision irénique dʼune histoire impersonnelle, où les virus et lʼacier tiennent une place prépondérante et où les intentions humaines sont secondaires, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz montre que les États-Unis sont une scène de crime. Il y a eu génocide parce quʼil y a eu intention dʼexterminer : les Amérindiens ont été méthodiquement éliminés, dʼabord physiquement, puis économiquement, et enfin symboliquement.

L’autrice

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz est une historienne et militante née en 1938. Docteur en histoire (UCLA, 1974), elle est également diplômée en droit international et droits de lʼHomme de lʼIDH de Strasbourg (1983). Militante de la cause amérindienne depuis 1967, cofondatrice du Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) aux États-Unis en 1968, elle a aussi vécu en Europe, au Mexique et à Cuba. Elle est lʼautrice dʼune quinzaine dʼouvrages.

On en parle

Avec ce compte-rendu de la conquête des États-Unis du point de vue de ses victimes, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz nous rend un service immense. Renseigné en profondeur, éloquent et lucide, ce puissant récit dʼun crime terrible prend aujourdʼhui un sens nouveau : les survivants rejoignent en effet les peuples indigènes du monde pour lutter – en idées et en actions – contre la destruction écologique du monde causée par la civilisation industrielle.
Noam Chomsky, linguiste

Voici sans doute la plus importante histoire des États-Unis jamais écrite. Voici, restituée de façon honnête et souvent poétique, lʼhistoire de ces traces et dʼun peuple qui a survécu, meurtri mais insoumis. Spoiler alert : la période coloniale nʼest pas close – et tous les Indiens ne sont pas morts.
Robin Kelley, historien

Lʼoubli de lʼhistoire est la maladie fondamentale de la plupart des Américains blancs. Dunbar-Ortiz demande à ses lecteurs de retourner à ce point de départ : de sʼenraciner dans la poussière rouge et les débris de la mémoire.
Mike Davis, sociologue

Issue dʼun milieu ouvrier, ayant grandi en Oklahoma, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz a participé à tous les grands mouvements féministes ou révolutionnaires des années 1960 et 1970. Elle éclaire ces expériences avec une implacable précision, et fait preuve dʼune fière et admirable indépendance.
Howard Zinn, historien

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz a écrit le livre fondamental, celui qui remet à l’endroit l’histoire nationale américaine, structurée par un génocide originel et une violente colonisation de peuplement.
Raoul Peck, cinéaste

Sommaire

Préface du traducteur
Note de lʼauteure

Introduction. Cette terre

Suivez le maïs
La culture de la conquête
Le culte de lʼalliance
Des empreintes de sang
Naissance dʼune nation
Le Dernier des Mohicans et la république blanche dʼAndrew Jackson
Dʼun océan à lʼautre, étincelant
Pays indien
Triomphalisme et colonialisme en temps de paix
La prophétie de la danse des esprits : une nation arrive
La Doctrine de la Découverte

Conclusion. Lʼavenir des États-Unis

Bekannt durch Filmhit »The Blind Side« : Michael Oher sagt, er sei nie adoptiert worden
▻https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/michael-oher-bekannt-durch-den-film-the-blind-side-sagt-er-sei-nie-adoptiert

Dans le film The Blind Side c’est une belle histoire pleine d’empathie sur une riche famille charitable blanche qui adopte un jeune noir d’une famille précaire et l’encourage à devenir une star de foioball américain. En réalité le jeune homme n"a jamais été adopté et ses beau parents ont signé des contrat lucratifs en son nom et ont gardé des sommes importantes de ses revenus pour leurs propres enfants. Ils l’ont fait travailler comme s’il était leur esclave surdoué. Bien entendu ils ne veulent rien savoir. "On l’aimera toujours" disent-ils.

25.8.2023 - Weiße Familie nimmt schwarzes Ghetto-Kind auf – und macht es zum Footballprofi: Der Film über diese wahre Geschichte brachte Sandra Bullock einen Oscar ein. Nun geht der Junge von damals gegen die Pflegeeltern vor.

Die Mutter drogenabhängig, der Vater im Knast: Michael Oher wächst in schwierigen Verhältnissen auf. Gefördert von einer Pflegemutter reift der Jugendliche zum Football-Spieler. Dass dies der Stoff für feinstes Wohlfühlkino sein kann, erkannte auch Hollywood. »Blind Side – Die große Chance« (im Original »The Blind Side«) wurde 2009 zum Hit, Sandra Bullock in der Rolle der Pflegemutter Leigh Anne Tuohy gewann für ihre Darstellung einen Oscar – und Oher wenige Jahre später den Super Bowl.

Eine Geschichte mit Happy End also? Womöglich nicht. Der heute 37 Jahre alte Oher hatte den Film und die Darstellung seiner Person darin schon früh kritisiert. Nun legt er nach: Am Montag hat Oher vor einem Gericht in Tennessee eine Petition eingereicht, in der es übereinstimmenden Medienberichten zufolge heißt: Oher sei nie rechtmäßig von den Tuohys adoptiert worden. Man habe ihn vielmehr angelogen und ihn so dazu gebracht, Papier zu unterschreiben, welche die Tuohys nicht zu seinen Adoptiveltern, sondern lediglich zu seinen Vormündern machen würde – damit diese Millionen mit seiner Lebensgeschichte verdienen konnten.

»Die Lüge von Michaels Adoption ist eine Lüge, anhand derer sich Leigh Anne Tuohy und Sean Tuohy auf Kosten ihres Mündels bereichert haben«, heißt es demnach in der Akte. So hätten die Tuohys nach Ohers Unterschrift zahlreiche Geschäfte abgeschlossen, bei denen Geld auf die Konten des Paares und ihrer beiden inzwischen erwachsenen leiblichen Kinder geflossen sei. Oher, der der Akte zufolge erst nach seinem 18. Geburtstag das Dokument über die Vormundschaft unterzeichnet habe, habe nichts davon gesehen.

»Total daneben«

Ein Anwalt der Tuohys teilte der Nachrichtenagentur AP mit, man werde eine Antwort auf die Anschuldigungen vor Gericht einreichen. Sean Tuohy sagte »The Daily Memphian«: »Wir sind am Boden zerstört. Der Gedanke, dass wir mit einem unserer Kinder Geld verdienen würden, ist erschütternd. Aber wir werden Michael mit 37 genauso lieben, wie wir ihn mit 16 geliebt haben.«

Oher war nie glücklich mit dem Film über sein Leben. Niemand habe sich mit ihm unterhalten, sagte er damals, kein Regisseur, kein Schauspieler, keine PR-Abteilung. Verarmter Junge aus verwahrlostem Elternhaus, adoptiert von reichen Weißen, schafft es in die NFL – das habe den Machern offenbar als Basis genügt. Vor allem der Football-Teil habe ihm nicht gefallen, so Oher damals. Die Darstellung seiner Person sei »total daneben« gewesen. »Ich habe das Spiel von klein auf gelernt. Niemand musste mir beibringen, wie man blockt.« Oher spielt dabei auf eine der Schlüsselszenen des Films an, in dem Bullock als Football-Fan Tuohy dem Jungen zeigt, wie man sich einem Gegner erfolgreich in den Weg stellt.
Schadensersatz und Gewinnanteil

Nun also die Klage. Warum erst jetzt? Oher habe die sogenannte Lüge erst im Februar 2023 entdeckt. Bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt sei er davon ausgegangen, »dass die Vormundschaft ihn zu einem Mitglied der Tuohy-Familie machen würde, während sie ihm in Wirklichkeit keine familiäre Beziehung zu den Tuohys verschaffte«, heißt es in der Akte. »Zu keinem Zeitpunkt haben die Tuohys Michael darüber informiert, dass sie die letztendliche Kontrolle über alle seine Verträge haben würden, und infolgedessen hat Michael nicht verstanden, dass er, wenn die Vormundschaft bewilligt wurde, sein Recht, für sich selbst Verträge abzuschließen, mit seiner Unterschrift aufgab«, heißt es in der Petition.

#racisme #exploitation #adoption #USA

Un mur flottant équipé de « scies circulaires » à la frontière américano-mexicaine
►https://observers.france24.com/fr/am%C3%A9riques/20230811-un-mur-flottant-%C3%A9quip%C3%A9-de-scies-circulaires-%

https://s.observers.france24.com/media/display/8a2d18e2-3843-11ee-9f9f-005056a90321/w:1280/p:16x9/Circular_saws_texas_US%281%29.png

Des vidéos diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux le 8 août 2023 permettent d’observer de plus près la barrière frontalière flottante installée par le gouverneur du Texas, Greg Abbott, et destinée à empêcher les migrants clandestins d’entrer aux États-Unis. Ces installations controversées, près desquelles un corps a récemment été retrouvé, sont équipées de disques métalliques pointus fabriqués par Cochrane Global.