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The white-Left Part 1: The two meanings of white

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Green Party Jill Stein's campaign in context

The worldwide white nationalist movement had another important election victory Sunday in Germany. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), or "Alternative for Germany," beat Angel Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) in regional voting in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. When the final vote is tallied the Social Democrats are still expected to have the strongest showing with 30% of the vote, and Merkel's CDU is expected to have 19% which, for the first time ever, was beaten by the white nationalist AfD which is expected to get 21%. This is a very big upset in Europe's most powerful country. T.J. Raphael writing for PIR says "Like Donald Trump here in the United States, Petry’s right-wing stance is attracting a lot of disenfranchised voters."


The AfD was found only four years ago in opposition to the euro. Initially it was for the reintroduction of traditional gender roles in the family, reintroducing the conscription of 18 year old males, and stopping the "uncontrolled expansion of wind energy," before the influx of Syrian refugees that resulted from Assad's barrel bombing and Angela Merkel's "open-door" policy made immigration a hot topic. Although its been "very loosely and thinly organized," its been able to develop quickly using strategies "copy-pasted from the more experienced and professional extreme-right wing parties of Austria and France," said an EU electoral strategist.

This German version of the US Alt-Right movement behind the Trump campaign was getting about 5.5%-6.1% of the vote before it came out with a strong anti-immigrant stand in May. It adopted a new manifesto calling for a ban on minarets, veils for women and the Muslim call to prayer. “Islam is not part of Germany,” the party manifesto declares.

If you're only now hearing about this party, you may be wondering just how far right it is:
This party is so far right AfD leader Dr. Frauke Petry advocated having border police shoot migrants, including refugees, attempting to illegally cross into Germany and AfD board member Beatrix von Storch added that, if necessary, even women and children should be fired at. Prominent party member, Björn Höcke, speaks about supposed genetic differences between Europeans and Africans that make the latter reproduce more. Members described Islam as “sharia, suicide bombings and forced marriages.” The left-wing ANTIFA calls them Nazis. The leading national news outlet, Spiegel, called it "a dangerous party," saying "the party's existence, and growing popularity, is raising questions as to whether Germany has truly learned the lessons of World War II and the Nazi dictatorship."
With the encouragement of racist forces like the AfD, the attitude towards Syrian refugees has turned ugly. Last month, a bus full of refugees in the Saxon town of Clausnitz was met by angry protesters shouting "Go home!" Days later a hotel being converted into a shelter for refugees was destroyed by arson as onlookers cheered and celebrated. Arson attacks on asylum hostels are on the rise.

Arsonists in Weissach im Tal in the western state of Baden-Württemberg burned down a building that was to be used to accommodate asylum-seekers. 24/8/15

White Internationalism


Jill Stein and the Green Party are in denial about what is going on in the world all around them with their fantasy that this is just another Dems vs Repubs POSTUS election like all the others. They refuse to see this election in the context of this worldwide resurgence of white nationalism, even as France's National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen endorses Donald Trump and Brexit leader Nigel Farage comes to the US to campaign with him.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is also an authoritarian and sees himself as the international leader of this white nationalist movement [ which BTW included Muammar Gaddafi and still includes Bashar al-Assad ] so it isn't surprising that Putin's mouthpiece RT likes and defends AfD, claiming it isn't "xenophobic." RT German, in particular appears to cover AfD favorably and often. RT plays an important role in binding the various national nationalist movements together as for example this piece in which Dr. Hugh Bronson, deputy speaker of AfD Landesverband Berlin, talks about how they are using the successful Brexit vote in their organizing.

It also isn't exactly breaking news that the Kremlin wants to see Trump in the White House. Michael Crowley has written about it in Politico. Newsmax has noted RT's biased coverage. Quora posted these telling results from their Google searches in April:
Google: "Bernie Sanders" RT (Russia Today) = all positive press
Google: "Hillary Clinton" RT (Russia Today) = all negative press
Google: "Donald Trump" RT (Russia Today) = 95% very positive press (plus an actual Putin endorsement)
Google: "Marco Rubio" RT (Russia Today) = mostly negative press
It would appear they were only considering candidates that still had a viable path to the White House in April. Had they included Jill Stein, it would have looked like this:
Google: "Jill Stein" RT (Russia Today) = all positive press
Louis Proyect says RT has run 105 articles "in praise of" Jill Stein. A Google search turns up 302 references. RT isn't giving this frequent and positive coverage to the Green Party ticket because they actually think she can win. Putin is a hard-nosed political realist, and, sorry Jill, its not because he has fallen in love with your feel-good ideas.  Apart from buying goodwill, RT is promoting Jill Stein in the hopes that she will be the flanking attack that allows Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton. That is the real reason that Jill Stein was invited to RT's 10th anniversary expo and and had dinner with Putin.
Just as the AfD looks favorably upon the British extreme-right's success with the Brexit, they are looking forward to seeing Donald Trump elected president of the United States.


What follows is what appears to be a Twitter discussion between anti-AfD activists about the upcoming US election. All the way from Germany, John sees what Jill doesn't. Her only major impact in this election may be to allow Donald Trump to win. Translation follows each tweet:
#Trump- candidate is @GOP. So have @TheDemocrats #election2016 in fact already won? Only @JohnKasich would have been dangerous.

@Nein_zur_AFD @GOP @TheDemocrats @JohnKasich I even wonder whether Hillary remains strong enough to win against Trump.

@Johnny379847 Very likely. Trump has serious problem among women and ethnic minorities. @GOP @TheDemocrats @JohnKasich

@Nein_zur_AFD Especially since you don't know exactly how many Democrats will ultimately change their vote to Jill Stein if Hillary is the candidate.

So even in Germany, they see that, as a practical matter, the role of the Jill Stein campaign will be to help Trump win. You can bet that the AfD in Germany, along with Putin, Breitbart, and Trump are desperately hoping that Jill Stein can pull enough progressive votes away from Hillary Clinton to really make a difference.

How Jill Stein was for Brexit before her Orwellian attempt to say otherwise


When the Brexit passed in June, Jill Stein called it a victory against neoliberalism on her website:
The vote in Britain to exit the European Union (EU) is a victory for those who believe in the right of self-determination and who reject the pro-corporate, austerity policies of the political elites in EU. … The Brexit vote is one more sign that voters are in revolt against the rigged economy and the rigged political system that created it… Britain has spoken for much of humanity as it rejects the failed vision of a world that prioritizes profit for the few amidst hardship for the many. Now we must build on this momentum.
She was able to accept the obvious right-wing leadership of the Brexit, and ignore the anti-immigrant and Islamaphobic motivation behind the break with the EU so that she could embrace it as a people's victory. This changed quickly after she was called on her position, as by Duncan Hosie in the Huffington Post:
Her belief that Brexit was a “victory” should sound familiar. It mirrors the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who asserted that Brexit as “great” and “beautiful” victory of ordinary people over the corrupt political elites.

After Brexit, Stein said Brexit re-affirmed the “right of self-determination.” After Brexit, Trump said, “self-determination is the sacred right of all free people’s and the people of the UK have exercised that right for all the world to see.”

To Stein and Trump, Brexit symbolized “self-determination,” not the corrosion of democracy by bigotry and fear-mongering.

“[Brexit supporters] took their country back, just like we will take America back,” Trump said. Perhaps Stein could add that line to her stump speech.
Upon hearing such criticisms, Jill Stein revised her statement so that she spoke less favorably about it. This was a very good thing. This new version was certainly much better. It didn't call Brexit a "victory" and it did call out the "deplorable and dangerous anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee anger that neoliberalism generates."  Problems arose because she tried to pretend that she hadn't revised the statement at all, and things very quickly moved into Orwellian territory.

For example, you might click on the link in a Rolling Stone article that quoted from the original and be taken to a page on www.jill2016.com with very different wording. Allen Clifton wrote in Forward Progressives:
Not only did she completely change her official statement on her website, but she removed the original and didn’t indicate anywhere that she had made these changes. In other words, Stein changed her official statement on Brexit hoping nobody would notice, while also ridding any trace of her original comments where she called the vote a “victory” and encouraged people to “build on the momentum.”
In one particularly bizarre exchange on facebook, Steve Ambrusko, looking at the original statement, writes "Sorry Jill, you now just lost my vote." Jill Stein doesn't explain that she has changed her statement. She plays it off, telling him to try clearing his cache and refreshing the page to see the "actual text" - as opposed to the text on his screen already.

The pandering to white supremacy is one thing. Obviously, I have to hold that against her. But this, a willingness to create and promote historical lies is something else entirely.

If you follow this blog regularly, you know I love computers. For one thing, that's the way I make my living, besides, without computers and the Internet, bringing you all this useful information in a timely manner would be impossible. Believe me I know because when I started doing political agitation, the mimeograph and MultiLith were our main distribution platforms, and searches began at the local library. All that is so much easier now. That's why I love computers.

But there is one thing I really hate about computers and that is the power they give to someone who misuses them. Take this present question. In the old days, once you took a position on this or that, committed it to hardcopy and distributed it, there was no pretending you never wrote that. Words on hardcopy may fade with time, but they don't change.

This is not the case with characters in RAM that are then displayed on the screen. They can be changed, as you like, and leave no trace of their former selves. This now allows the "Photoshopping" of history to a degree that totalitarian regimes of the 20th century could only dream about. That is why I always recommend readers take screenshots, print out, or otherwise commit to hardcopy anything important they see on the web where they don't entirely trust the "stability" of the source.

It is dishonest to change content without acknowledging that the content has been changed. It creates a scar through reality that can not be repaired until the deception is acknowledged. The one major news outlet that seems to regularly practise such "creative" rewriting is Putin's propaganda outlet RT, so it would appear that she shares more than Putin's outlook on world affairs. It would also appear that she shares his attitude towards truth.

The Green Party needs to distinguish itself from the two major capitalist parties on questions of integrity and in this case it probably has because neither the DNC or the RNC have been caught so blatantly revising their website without acknowledgement. Its as though Hillary Clinton, instead of deleting emails, offered forged ones in their place, or Donald Trump, instead of refusing to release his tax returns, released doctored ones. So, leaving aside all these other questions and considering just the different candidate's Orwellian approaches to hiding the truth in this post-1984 world, Jill Stein isn't even the least of three evils.

For all of the above reasons, she should quit her campaign.

My other recent posts relating to this unique election cycle:
What should the Green Party do?
Greens could give White House to Trump as poll numbers even
Why Green Party's Jill Stein should drop her presidential bid
Amy Goodman should address this extremely important statement by her guest
How Jill Stein Tweets for Trump
HuffPost item shows how @JillStein campaign whitewashes @realDonaldTrump
Trump tells his '2nd Amendment people election will be stolen to prepare for insurrection
Trump didn't threaten Hillary, he threatened violent insurrection
Meet Green Party's Jill Stein, Putin sock-puppet & Assad apologist


Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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