This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.
The Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice is inviting all those interested in supporting its mission of building racial unity and fighting white supremacy to its next regular meeting on Sunday, 10 September 2017 in the Thelma Terry Bldg in Virginia Avenue Park in Santa Monica. Linux Beach had earlier reported that the meeting would take place on 3 September. Because of the Labor Day holiday the meeting was moved back a week from the usual 1st Sunday of the month schedule. The meeting will begin at 6:30pm, preceded by a potluck at 6:00pm, but you are urged to arrive hours early prepared to spend time in the park even if the meeting room is filled to overflowing. The reason will become clear as you read on.
If you have been reading Linux Beachrecently, or some of the local publications such as the Santa Monica Mirror, Santa MonicaDaily Press, The Argonaut, Westside Today, or City Watch, that have covered this developing story, you already know about this local struggle against some of the same plainclothes Nazis and Klansmen that marched and murdered in Charlottesville. From their livestream chatter we have learned that they have decided to destroy the 6 year old Committee for Racial Justice because they see any fight against racism as "anti-white." They have declared it their new "Berkeley," but its not going to work out that way for them.
Join us! Sunday, 10 September 2017
Virginia Ave Park, 2200 Virginia Ave
Santa Monica, CA 90404
They sent a handful of hecklers hiding behind masks to the July meeting to disrupt it with racist and anti-Semitic taunts. They came back with maybe 25 white supremacists, and a handful of new recruits, to try to disrupt the August meeting, but we managed to keep them out of the meeting. They have vowed to come back and bring "hundreds" to the September meeting with the intention of "shutting it down." A racist president has emboldened them, that is why they brought their poison to Santa Monica in the first place. They hadn't done it before in 6 years of CRJ meetings.
Some of the leaders of the August 6th attack on CRJ spoke the following weekend to the collected fascists in Charlottesville. This is our local connection to that national struggle. After Trump's embrace of their deadly rally, and his pardon of Arpaio, they are on a sugar high,...and need to be brought down.
That is where you come in. We need you to help us deliver a resounding No! to these forces of hatred and bigotry. We need the progressive community of Greater Los Angeles to turn out in force and en masse to tell these neo-Nazis and plainclothes Klansmen "NOT IN MY TOWN! NOT ON MY WATCH!"
There was a closed meeting of about 50 CRJ activist this past Sunday for non-violent resistance training conducted by Abby Arnold and Vivian Rothstein from CLUE-LA. It was based on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s six principles of nonviolence, with practice in the specific skills needed for the challenge we’re facing now. It was decided at this meeting that the September meeting would be at the usual place and open to the public. You are invited to join us, as are Santa Monica City officials and all local politicians who reject this new wave a fascist violence, and we know the police will be there.
The West Coast Collective did a few podcasts about the ruckus based on my video:
And Louis Proyect found this video of our own Fake Alaskan praising Syrian President Bashar Assad, proving that the white supremacist world of Left-Right convergence is a very tiny one.
Getting out quickly before work. Please excuse error as such.
The number one white supremacist website Daily Stormer was forced off the Internet after the racist violence and murder in Charlottesville. As of this morning it has found a new home on the public Internet at https://punishedstormer.com/
I am posting this hurried blog so that others may use this info to pursue and hound them off of the web again. Free Speech is not a license to advocate genocide!
Daily Stormer has officially retreated to the dark web
The battle against the Daily Stormer has ended in retreat as the racist website has pulled back to the dark web where it is available only via Tor. Former gray hat hacker Andrew Aurenheimer announced the impetus for the decision on alt-right website Gab.
The website is now accessible via tools like the Onion browser and the address is available on Wikipedia. The server, now hidden from all registrars and hosting providers, could exist anywhere and there is no clear way to tell if any one company is or is not hosting the site.
In short, it’s far harder to access the Daily Stormer for the average user but now it is nearly impossible to shut it down without Silk Road-like intervention and tracking.
Admins at GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and Google dropped the site after the alt-right protests in Charlottesville. The hunt for Daily Stormer’s service providers began after the murder of Heather Hayer by an alt-right protester. More...
While this might have been true at 9AM PST when this article was posted. We now must report that DailyStormer is again available on the public Internet using the URL https://punishedstormer.com.
Daily Stormer is also still on the Darknet @ http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/ . You can access it by using TOR and Onion. I will try to write more about that later.
Talk about your celebrated Left-Right Convergence!
While I'm on the subject of Daily Stormer, here is their list of the 35 most important white supremacist websites. They should all be brought down!
This is why the so-called Atl-Right cancelled their planned rally in Venice. I wasn't the threat of violence that scared them, it was the threat of being overwhelmed!
In August, the white supremacists returned in greater numbers. They had about 25 people, but this time we were ready for them. They intended to stop the meeting but ultimately they failed because their attempts to force their way into the meeting were repelled by a guard hastily formed from meeting participants. Although the Santa Monica Police had more officers on the scene than I even knew they had, it was up to CRJ members to stop them from gaining entry and while only a few blows were exchanged, there was a lot of pushing and shoving.
Each time the plainclothes nazis made an attempts to get into the meeting, a battle ensured. Each time, the cops just watched until the struggle had been decided in our favor. Only then did they step forward to put themselves between between these nazis and the CRJ members. The first time they did this it ultimately worked to nazis advantage. Let me explain.
The main entrance to the meeting room consisted of two sets of doors separated by a lobby. The first of these assaults took place at the outer doors, and once that had been repelled, a half dozen or so of our people set up a strong defensive line in front of the outer doors. Only after they had done this did the police step forward and put themselves in their place while telling them to go inside. Apparently these cops then abandoned their post, because less than a half-hour had passed before we found that we were confronted by a lobby full of plainclothes nazis attempting to breach the inter-doors. Then a four minute struggle took place, it's shown in the film, to stop them from entering the meeting proper. Once we had prevailed in that struggle, the cops again interceded.
Except for one or two, the white supremacist never got into the meeting, so the most they could do in the way of disruption was to bang on the windows. The cops watched them do this for far too long before they made them stop. I think the cops became concerned about how it would look it they actually broke the glass while the cops looked on. Anyway, I am quite sure that if I started banging on a 3rd Street Promenade window in sight of the SMPD it would have been handled very differently.
In the meeting we listened to a number of very good presentations on the so-called Alt-Right, and its range of fascist and racist organizations, and most topically, on how to deal with their attacks.
After the second attack had been successfully rebuffed, the SMPD again interceded in a way that supported the white supremacist goal by asking the leadership of CRJ to end the meeting early in the name of "public safety." In other words, give the racists what they want, even after they failed to obtain it by force, so we can all go home. Their argument was that with so many units deployed at the park, they were leaving the rest of Santa Monica unprotected, but given how little they did to protect the meeting, they certainly didn't need all those units in the park.
The matter was put to a vote, and to the credit of the CRJ membership, it went down in a resounding defeat. We went ahead with the meeting and completed our agenda.
Making the Film
I had my own footage from inside of the meeting. Some of that was shot by a friend with a second camera. Some of it was shot with a camera in one hand while I fought to close a door with the other. In addition to this footage, I was able to gather up the livestreams, facebook posts, and YouTube videos of a number of the nazis. One livestream went on for more than 5 hours, and covered not only the white supremacist view of the meeting (outside footage☺) but their after meeting discussions in a Burger King and even the intimate discussion of two nazis going back to Burbank. All told, I was able to gather up more than 15 hrs. of footage, including two other livestreams that were more than 2 hours long. When I synchronize them on my timeline I had no less than 3 camera coverage at all times, and at times, as many as six. Their banging on the windows provided me with an unforeseen benefit. It allowed me to precisely synchronize the inside and outside footage, while the victorious closing of the doors during the struggles provided something like a diegetic clapper-board. The real trick was boiling it down to less than a half-hour.
I first learned about the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA from these livestreams. At least three of the nazis attacking Santa Monica were going to it and two were scheduled to speak at it, and they were heavily promoting it among their followers. Still, I didn't attach much importance to it until I woke up Saturday morning and found footage of the white supremacist tiki torch "blood and soil" march with one of the Santa Monica meeting disrupters livestreaming it. With the events on Saturday in Charlottesville in mind, I saw the broader context of our struggle in Santa Monica and threw myself into the work with new vigor. I needed to have this video posted before I went back to work on Tuesday.
I found the after meeting and side discussions of these plainclothes nazis most revealing. I call them plainclothes nazis because they no longer wear Klan robes or Nazi uniforms. They dress like ordinary people, and they chat slogans stolen from the peace movement like "No Justice, No Peace" and "Whose streets, our streets," but when you listen to their intimate conversation they are as much for burning Jews and killing African Americans as ever. They describe what they are trying to do in Santa Monica as a "race war." They still see Hitler as a hero, and they also like Trump a lot. As they will tell you in their own words, they feel inspired by Trump and have even been told that he is watching them.
In Santa Monica on Sunday, 6 August 2017
In Charlottesville on Friday 11, August 2017
As you can see from the pictures above, the forces we faced in Santa Monica are part of a larger movement. They now have a leader in the White House and they are growing fast. Knowing they have Trump in the White House and Session in the Justice Department has embolden them. That is why they first showed up in Santa Monica and then had a national "coming out party" in Charlottesville, complete with a presidential endorsement.
We have to do much more than just watch this movement, and so far we haven't even done a good job of that. I consume NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News, not to mention Democracy Now and dozens of progressive online publications, and on this "Unite the Right" gathering, I heard not a word. Had I not been making this film and listening to their conversations, I would have been completely surprised. Fortunately, some progressives were aware and did rally against the fascists. Mostly locals, I gather. The country should be thanking them, not criticizing them.
The real shame for the country would have been if the nazis rallied and no one protested!
We must vigorously fight this movement before it can link up with state power in the White House to destroy what democracy we do have and institute a fascist state.
The Southern California section of this movement can be expected to rally in Laguna Beach on Sunday. I hope there are protesters.
The Alt-Right was also planning a "March on Google" in Venice, CA, and other places, on Saturday for firing of James Damore, the employee who circulated what is said to be a misogynistic memo. They now have cancelled it due, they said, to "Alt Left Terrorist Threats." They also planned similar marches in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Mountain View, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington, D.C. They claim they are not white supremacist and "join the President in condemning the actions in Charlottesville on August 12th." This effort was announced by "Jack Posobiec, a vocal Trump supporter and right-wing activist who is known for pushing the false "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory."
The next meeting of the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice is scheduled for Sunday, 3 September in the Thelma Terry Building Virginia Avenue Park as usual. These neo-nazis have declared Santa Monica their new "Berkeley." They have vowed to return for this meeting with "hundreds" of supporters and shut the meeting down. They have vowed to destroy SRJ.
While the Santa Monica fight is a ground they have chosen, it may actually work to our advantage in the larger war for hearts and minds. In critiquing the anti-fascist struggle waged in Berkeley, Jack Gerson wrote:
The murders in Portland and at the U. of Maryland and the threats to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (and to LeBron James) are clear: these are virulent racist attacks by white supremacists, and the need to condemn and defend against them is clearly understood by the public. On the other hand, the series of confrontations in Berkeley and elsewhere between the alt-right and the black bloc appear barely relevant to most people. It has allowed the alt-right to pretend that all they want is to be able to hold a peaceful rally in a park to assert their right to free speech. To many, it has the appearance of two street gangs rumbling over turf. Furthermore, although the organizers of right wing rallies in Berkeley and elsewhere are hard-core racists, they don’t present themselves as such. Rather, they present themselves as standing up for their rights and as protectors of the public from authoritarian leftist thugs. (And there’s the black bloc, hooded and masked, looking every bit the popular image of terrorists!) Many of those who the alt-right brought to their Berkeley rallies were not themselves hardcore right-wingers, but believed they were there to defend free speech and liberty. So at this point tactically, our focus should be on protesting what our opponents do, not on their right to say it.
As you can see, from this perspective, Santa Monica is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. They may try to make it their new "Berkeley" but in this case they are coming to a destroy a peace group that has been operating in a fairly progressive community for more than six years. In defending the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice from fascist attacks and claims that it is anti-white because it is against racism!! (go figure?), progressive are standing on firm and popular ground.
Join us Sunday, 3 September 2017 Virginia Avenue Park, Santa Monica
In August, the white supremacists returned in greater numbers. They had about 25 people, but this time we were ready for them. They intended to stop the meeting but ultimately they failed because their attempts to force their way into the meeting were repelled by a guard hastily formed from meeting participants. Although the Santa Monica Police had more officers on the scene than I even knew they had, it was up to CRJ members to stop them from gaining entry and while only a few blows were exchanged, there was a lot of pushing and shoving.
Each time the plainclothes nazis made an attempts to get into the meeting, a battle ensured. Each time, the cops just watched until the struggle had been decided in our favor. Only then did they step forward to put themselves between between these nazis and the CRJ members. The first time they did this it ultimately worked to nazis advantage. Let me explain.
The main entrance to the meeting room consisted of two sets of doors separated by a lobby. The first of these assaults took place at the outer doors, and once that had been repelled, a half dozen or so of our people set up a strong defensive line in front of the outer doors. Only after they had done this did the police step forward and put themselves in their place while telling them to go inside. Apparently these cops then abandoned their post, because less than a half-hour had passed before we found that we were confronted by a lobby full of plainclothes nazis attempting to breach the inter-doors. Then a four minute struggle took place, it's shown in the film, to stop them from entering the meeting proper. Once we had prevailed in that struggle, the cops again interceded.
Except for one or two, the white supremacist never got into the meeting, so the most they could do in the way of disruption was to bang on the windows. The cops watched them do this for far too long before they made them stop. I think the cops became concerned about how it would look it they actually broke the glass while the cops looked on. Anyway, I am quite sure that if I started banging on a 3rd Street Promenade window in sight of the SMPD it would have been handled very differently.
In the meeting we listened to a number of very good presentations on the so-called Alt-Right, and its range of fascist and racist organizations, and most topically, on how to deal with their attacks.
After the second attack had been successfully rebuffed, the SMPD again interceded in a way that supported the white supremacist goal by asking the leadership of CRJ to end the meeting early in the name of "public safety." In other words, give the racists what they want, even after they failed to obtain it by force, so we can all go home. Their argument was that with so many units deployed at the park, they were leaving the rest of Santa Monica unprotected, but given how little they did to protect the meeting, they certainly didn't need all those units in the park.
The matter was put to a vote, and to the credit of the CRJ membership, it went down in a resounding defeat. We went ahead with the meeting and completed our agenda.
Making the Film
I had my own footage from inside of the meeting. Some of that was shot by a friend with a second camera. Some of it was shot with a camera in one hand while I fought to close a door with the other. In addition to this footage, I was able to gather up the livestreams, facebook posts, and YouTube videos of a number of the nazis. One livestream went on for more than 5 hours, and covered not only the white supremacist view of the meeting (outside footage☺) but their after meeting discussions in a Burger King and even the intimate discussion of two nazis going back to Burbank. All told, I was able to gather up more than 15 hrs. of footage, including two other livestreams that were more than 2 hours long. When I synchronize them on my timeline I had no less than 3 camera coverage at all times, and at times, as many as six. Their banging on the windows provided me with an unforeseen benefit. It allowed me to precisely synchronize the inside and outside footage, while the victorious closing of the doors during the struggles provided something like a diegetic clapper-board. The real trick was boiling it down to less than a half-hour.
I first learned about the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA from these livestreams. At least three of the nazis attacking Santa Monica were going to it and two were scheduled to speak at it, and they were heavily promoting it among their followers. Still, I didn't attach much importance to it until I woke up Saturday morning and found footage of the white supremacist tiki torch "blood and soil" march with one of the Santa Monica meeting disrupters livestreaming it. With the events on Saturday in Charlottesville in mind, I saw the broader context of our struggle in Santa Monica and threw myself into the work with new vigor. I needed to have this video posted before I went back to work on Tuesday.
I found the after meeting and side discussions of these plainclothes nazis most revealing. I call them plainclothes nazis because they no longer wear Klan robes or Nazi uniforms. They dress like ordinary people, and they chat slogans stolen from the peace movement like "No Justice, No Peace" and "Whose streets, our streets," but when you listen to their intimate conversation they are as much for burning Jews and killing African Americans as ever. They describe what they are trying to do in Santa Monica as a "race war." They still see Hitler as a hero, and they also like Trump a lot. As they will tell you in their own words, they feel inspired by Trump and have even been told that he is watching them.
In Santa Monica on Sunday, 6 August 2017
In Charlottesville on Friday 11, August 2017
As you can see from the pictures above, the forces we faced in Santa Monica are part of a larger movement. They now have a leader in the White House and they are growing fast. Knowing they have Trump in the White House and Session in the Justice Department has embolden them. That is why they first showed up in Santa Monica and then had a national "coming out party" in Charlottesville, complete with a presidential endorsement.
We have to do much more than just watch this movement, and so far we haven't even done a good job of that. I consume NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News, not to mention Democracy Now and dozens of progressive online publications, and on this "Unite the Right" gathering, I heard not a word. Had I not been making this film and listening to their conversations, I would have been completely surprised. Fortunately, some progressives were aware and did rally against the fascists. Mostly locals, I gather. The country should be thanking them, not criticizing them.
The real shame for the country would have been if the nazis rallied and no one protested!
We must vigorously fight this movement before it can link up with state power in the White House to destroy what democracy we do have and institute a fascist state.
The Southern California section of this movement can be expected to rally in Laguna Beach on Sunday. I hope there are protesters.
The Alt-Right was also planning a "March on Google" in Venice, CA, and other places, on Saturday for firing of James Damore, the employee who circulated what is said to be a misogynistic memo. They now have cancelled it due, they said, to "Alt Left Terrorist Threats." They also planned similar marches in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Mountain View, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington, D.C. They claim they are not white supremacist and "join the President in condemning the actions in Charlottesville on August 12th." This effort was announced by "Jack Posobiec, a vocal Trump supporter and right-wing activist who is known for pushing the false "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory."
The next meeting of the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice is scheduled for Sunday, 3 September in the Thelma Terry Building Virginia Avenue Park as usual. These neo-nazis have declared Santa Monica their new "Berkeley." They have vowed to return for this meeting with "hundreds" of supporters and shut the meeting down. They have vowed to destroy SRJ.
While the Santa Monica fight is a ground they have chosen, it may actually work to our advantage in the larger war for hearts and minds. In critiquing the anti-fascist struggle waged in Berkeley, Jack Gerson wrote:
The murders in Portland and at the U. of Maryland and the threats to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (and to LeBron James) are clear: these are virulent racist attacks by white supremacists, and the need to condemn and defend against them is clearly understood by the public. On the other hand, the series of confrontations in Berkeley and elsewhere between the alt-right and the black bloc appear barely relevant to most people. It has allowed the alt-right to pretend that all they want is to be able to hold a peaceful rally in a park to assert their right to free speech. To many, it has the appearance of two street gangs rumbling over turf. Furthermore, although the organizers of right wing rallies in Berkeley and elsewhere are hard-core racists, they don’t present themselves as such. Rather, they present themselves as standing up for their rights and as protectors of the public from authoritarian leftist thugs. (And there’s the black bloc, hooded and masked, looking every bit the popular image of terrorists!) Many of those who the alt-right brought to their Berkeley rallies were not themselves hardcore right-wingers, but believed they were there to defend free speech and liberty. So at this point tactically, our focus should be on protesting what our opponents do, not on their right to say it.
As you can see, from this perspective, Santa Monica is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. They may try to make it their new "Berkeley" but in this case they are coming to a destroy a peace group that has been operating in a fairly progressive community for more than six years. In defending the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice from fascist attacks and claims that it is anti-white because it is against racism!! (go figure?), progressive are standing on firm and popular ground.
Join us Sunday, 3 September 2017 Virginia Avenue Park, Santa Monica
In August, the white supremacists returned in greater numbers. They had about 25 people, but this time we were ready for them. They intended to stop the meeting but ultimately they failed because their attempts to force their way into the meeting were repelled by a guard hastily formed from meeting participants. Although the Santa Monica Police had more officers on the scene than I even knew they had, it was up to CRJ members to stop them from gaining entry and while only a few blows were exchanged, there was a lot of pushing and shoving.
Each time the plainclothes nazis made an attempts to get into the meeting, a battle ensured. Each time, the cops just watched until the struggle had been decided in our favor. Only then did they step forward to put themselves between between these nazis and the CRJ members. The first time they did this it ultimately worked to nazis advantage. Let me explain.
The main entrance to the meeting room consisted of two sets of doors separated by a lobby. The first of these assaults took place at the outer doors, and once that had been repelled, a half dozen or so of our people set up a strong defensive line in front of the outer doors. Only after they had done this did the police step forward and put themselves in their place while telling them to go inside. Apparently these cops then abandoned their post, because less than a half-hour had passed before we found that we were confronted by a lobby full of plainclothes nazis attempting to breach the inter-doors. Then a four minute struggle took place, it's shown in the film, to stop them from entering the meeting proper. Once we had prevailed in that struggle, the cops again interceded.
Except for one or two, the white supremacist never got into the meeting, so the most they could do in the way of disruption was to bang on the windows. The cops watched them do this for far too long before they made them stop. I think the cops became concerned about how it would look it they actually broke the glass while the cops looked on. Anyway, I am quite sure that if I started banging on a 3rd Street Promenade window in sight of the SMPD it would have been handled very differently.
In the meeting we listened to a number of very good presentations on the so-called Alt-Right, and its range of fascist and racist organizations, and most topically, on how to deal with their attacks.
After the second attack had been successfully rebuffed, the SMPD again interceded in a way that supported the white supremacist goal by asking the leadership of CRJ to end the meeting early in the name of "public safety." In other words, give the racists what they want, even after they failed to obtain it by force, so we can all go home. Their argument was that with so many units deployed at the park, they were leaving the rest of Santa Monica unprotected, but given how little they did to protect the meeting, they certainly didn't need all those units in the park.
The matter was put to a vote, and to the credit of the CRJ membership, it went down in a resounding defeat. We went ahead with the meeting and completed our agenda.
Making the Film
I had my own footage from inside of the meeting. Some of that was shot by a friend with a second camera. Some of it was shot with a camera in one hand while I fought to close a door with the other. In addition to this footage, I was able to gather up the livestreams, facebook posts, and YouTube videos of a number of the nazis. One livestream went on for more than 5 hours, and covered not only the white supremacist view of the meeting (outside footage☺) but their after meeting discussions in a Burger King and even the intimate discussion of two nazis going back to Burbank. All told, I was able to gather up more than 15 hrs. of footage, including two other livestreams that were more than 2 hours long. When I synchronize them on my timeline I had no less than 3 camera coverage at all times, and at times, as many as six. Their banging on the windows provided me with an unforeseen benefit. It allowed me to precisely synchronize the inside and outside footage, while the victorious closing of the doors during the struggles provided something like a diegetic clapper-board. The real trick was boiling it down to less than a half-hour.
I first learned about the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, VA from these livestreams. At least three of the nazis attacking Santa Monica were going to it and two were scheduled to speak at it, and they were heavily promoting it among their followers. Still, I didn't attach much importance to it until I woke up Saturday morning and found footage of the white supremacist tiki torch "blood and soil" march with one of the Santa Monica meeting disrupters livestreaming it. With the events on Saturday in Charlottesville in mind, I saw the broader context of our struggle in Santa Monica and threw myself into the work with new vigor. I needed to have this video posted before I went back to work on Tuesday.
I found the after meeting and side discussions of these plainclothes nazis most revealing. I call them plainclothes nazis because they no longer wear Klan robes or Nazi uniforms. They dress like ordinary people, and they chat slogans stolen from the peace movement like "No Justice, No Peace" and "Whose streets, our streets," but when you listen to their intimate conversation they are as much for burning Jews and killing African Americans as ever. They describe what they are trying to do in Santa Monica as a "race war." They still see Hitler as a hero, and they also like Trump a lot. As they will tell you in their own words, they feel inspired by Trump and have even been told that he is watching them.
In Santa Monica on Sunday, 6 August 2017
In Charlottesville on Friday 11, August 2017
As you can see from the pictures above, the forces we faced in Santa Monica are part of a larger movement. They now have a leader in the White House and they are growing fast. Knowing they have Trump in the White House and Session in the Justice Department has embolden them. That is why they first showed up in Santa Monica and then had a national "coming out party" in Charlottesville, complete with a presidential endorsement.
We have to do much more than just watch this movement, and so far we haven't even done a good job of that. I consume NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News, not to mention Democracy Now and dozens of progressive online publications, and on this "Unite the Right" gathering, I heard not a word. Had I not been making this film and listening to their conversations, I would have been completely surprised. Fortunately, some progressives were aware and did rally against the fascists. Mostly locals, I gather. The country should be thanking them, not criticizing them.
The real shame for the country would have been if the nazis rallied and no one protested!
We must vigorously fight this movement before it can link up with state power in the White House to destroy what democracy we do have and institute a fascist state.
The Southern California section of this movement can be expected to rally in Laguna Beach on Sunday. I hope there are protesters.
The Alt-Right was also planning a "March on Google" in Venice, CA, and other places, on Saturday for firing of James Damore, the employee who circulated what is said to be a misogynistic memo. They now have cancelled it due, they said, to "Alt Left Terrorist Threats." They also planned similar marches in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Mountain View, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington, D.C. They claim they are not white supremacist and "join the President in condemning the actions in Charlottesville on August 12th." This effort was announced by "Jack Posobiec, a vocal Trump supporter and right-wing activist who is known for pushing the false "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory."
The next meeting of the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice is scheduled for Sunday, 3 September in the Thelma Terry Building Virginia Avenue Park as usual. These neo-nazis have declared Santa Monica their new "Berkeley." They have vowed to return for this meeting with "hundreds" of supporters and shut the meeting down. They have vowed to destroy SRJ.
While the Santa Monica fight is a ground they have chosen, it may actually work to our advantage in the larger war for hearts and minds. In critiquing the anti-fascist struggle waged in Berkeley, Jack Gerson wrote:
The murders in Portland and at the U. of Maryland and the threats to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (and to LeBron James) are clear: these are virulent racist attacks by white supremacists, and the need to condemn and defend against them is clearly understood by the public. On the other hand, the series of confrontations in Berkeley and elsewhere between the alt-right and the black bloc appear barely relevant to most people. It has allowed the alt-right to pretend that all they want is to be able to hold a peaceful rally in a park to assert their right to free speech. To many, it has the appearance of two street gangs rumbling over turf. Furthermore, although the organizers of right wing rallies in Berkeley and elsewhere are hard-core racists, they don’t present themselves as such. Rather, they present themselves as standing up for their rights and as protectors of the public from authoritarian leftist thugs. (And there’s the black bloc, hooded and masked, looking every bit the popular image of terrorists!) Many of those who the alt-right brought to their Berkeley rallies were not themselves hardcore right-wingers, but believed they were there to defend free speech and liberty. So at this point tactically, our focus should be on protesting what our opponents do, not on their right to say it.
As you can see, from this perspective, Santa Monica is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. They may try to make it their new "Berkeley" but in this case they are coming to a destroy a peace group that has been operating in a fairly progressive community for more than six years. In defending the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice from fascist attacks and claims that it is anti-white because it is against racism!! (go figure?), progressive are standing on firm and popular ground.
Join us Sunday, 10 September 2017 Virginia Avenue Park, Santa Monica
Trump is not the first American to threaten Korea with a destruction the likes of which the world has never seen before. Commanding General Douglas MacArthur wanted to hit 25 targets in Korea and China with nuclear weapons. We now know this is real reason President Truman removed him is such haste.
If we want to understand why the government of North Korea is so bent on having the ability to nuke the United States, and why the North Korean people support this goal, we have come to grips with what should be called another American holocaust, the near complete destruction of Korea and the murder of more than 3 million civilians. Below we have reprinted a piece written by Bruce Cumings and published by Le Monde 13 years ago because it has never been more relevant.
This BBC documentary gives us a candid view of the terrible inhumanity and racism with which the IS conducted the Korean War. Years ago we retrieved it from obscurity and gave it a home on YouTube. It it the closest thing to Vietnam: American Holocaust, that we know of. A Korea: American Holocaust is a film needs to be made.
The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.
by Bruce Cumings
THE forgotten war - the Korean war of 1950-53 - might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States’ air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons (1), and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.
Korea is also assumed to have been a limited war, but its prosecution bore a strong resemblance to the air war against Imperial Japan in the second world war, and was often directed by the same US military leaders. The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been examined from many different perspectives, yet the incendiary air attacks against Japanese and Korean cities have received much less attention. The US post-Korean war air power and nuclear strategy in northeast Asia are even less well understood; yet these have dramatically shaped North Korean choices and remain a key factor in its national security strategy.
Napalm was invented at the end of the second world war. It became a major issue during the Vietnam war, brought to prominence by horrific photos of injured civilians. Yet far more napalm was dropped on Korea and with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than North Vietnam. In 2003 I participated in a conference with US veterans of the Korean war. During a discussion about napalm, a survivor who lost an eye in the Changjin (in Japanese, Chosin) Reservoir battle said it was indeed a nasty weapon - but “it fell on the right people”. (Ah yes, the “right people” - a friendly-fire drop on a dozen US soldiers.) He continued: “Men all around me were burned. They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them . . . It was terrible. Where the napalm had burned the skin to a crisp, it would be peeled back from the face, arms, legs . . . like fried potato chips” (2).
Soon after that incident, George Barrett of the New York Times had found “a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war” in a village near Anyang, in South Korea: “The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck - a man about to get on his bicycle, 50 boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No 3,811,294 for a $2.98 ‘bewitching bed jacket - coral’.” US Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of “sensationalised reporting”, so it could be stopped (3).
One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when US soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a US officer requested “to have the following towns obliterated” by the air force: Chongsong, Chinbo and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: “fired 11 villages” (4). Pilots were told to bomb targets that they could see to avoid hitting civilians, but they frequently bombed major population centres by radar, or dumped huge amounts of napalm on secondary targets when the primary one was unavailable.
In a major strike on the industrial city of Hungnam on 31 July 1950, 500 tons of ordnance was delivered through clouds by radar; the flames rose 200-300 feet into the air. The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North (5). Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.
Air force sources delighted in this relatively new weapon, joking about communist protests and misleading the press about their “precision bombing”. They also liked to point out that civilians were warned of the approaching bombers by leaflet, although all pilots knew that these were ineffective (6). This was a mere prelude to the obliteration of most North Korean towns and cities after China entered the war.
China joins the war
The Chinese entry caused an immediate escalation of the air campaign. From November 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered that a wasteland be created between the fighting front and the Chinese border, destroying from the air every “installation, factory, city, and village” over thousands of square miles of North Korean territory. As a well-informed British attaché to MacArthur’s headquarters observed, except for Najin near the Soviet border and the Yalu dams (both spared so as not to provoke Moscow or Beijing), MacArthur’s orders were “to destroy every means of communication and every installation, and factories and cities and villages. This destruction is to start at the Manchurian border and to progress south.” On 8 November 1950, 79 B-29s dropped 550 tons of incendiaries on Sinuiju, “removing [it] from off the map”. A week later Hoeryong was napalmed “to burn out the place”. By 25 November “a large part of [the] North West area between Yalu River and south to enemy lines is more or less burning”; soon the area would be a “wilderness of scorched earth” (7).
This happened before the major Sino-Korean offensive that cleared northern Korea of United Nations forces. When that began, the US air force hit Pyongyang with 700 500-pound bombs on 14-15 December; napalm dropped from Mustang fighters, with 175 tons of delayed-fuse demolition bombs, which landed with a thud and then blew up when people were trying to retrieve the dead from the napalm fires.
At the beginning of January General Matthew Ridgway again ordered the air force to hit the capital, Pyongyang, “with the goal of burning the city to the ground with incendiary bombs” (this happened in two strikes on 3 and 5 January). As the Americans retreated below the 38th parallel, the scorched-earth policy of torching continued, burning Uijongbu, Wonju and other small cities in the South as the enemy drew near (8).
The air force also tried to destroy the North Korean leadership. During the war on Iraq in 2003 the world learned about the MOAB, “Mother of All Bombs”, weighing 21,500 pounds with an explosive force of 18,000 pounds of TNT. Newsweek put this bomb on its cover, under the headline “Why America Scares the World” (9). In the desperate winter of 1950-51 Kim Il Sung and his closest allies were back where they started in the 1930s, holed up in deep bunkers in Kanggye, near the Manchurian border. After failing to find them for three months after the Inch’on landing (an intelligence failure that led to carpet-bombing the old Sino-Korean tributary route running north from Pyongyang to the border, on the assumption that they would flee to China), B-29s dropped Tarzan bombs on Kanggye. These were enormous 12,000-pound bombs never deployed before - but firecrackers compared to the ultimate weapons, atomic bombs.
A blocking blow
On 9 July 1950 - just two weeks into the war, it is worth remembering - MacArthur sent Ridgway a hot message that prompted the joint chiefs of staff (JCS) “to consider whether or not A-bombs should be made available to MacArthur”. The chief of operations, General Charles Bolte, was asked to talk to MacArthur about using atomic bombs “in direct support [of] ground combat”. Bolte thought 10-20 such bombs could be spared for Korea without unduly jeopardising US global war capabilities.
Boite received from MacArthur an early suggestion for the tactical use of atomic weapons and an indication of MacArthur’s extraordinary ambitions for the war, which included occupying the North and handling potential Chinese - or Soviet - intervention: “I would cut them off in North Korea . . . I visualise a cul-de-sac. The only passages leading from Manchuria and Vladivostok have many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb - to strike a blocking blow - which would require a six months’ repair job. Sweeten up my B-29 force.”
At this point, however, the JCS rejected use of the bomb because targets large enough to require atomic weapons were lacking; because of concerns about world opinion five years after Hiroshima; and because the JCS expected the tide of battle to be reversed by conventional military means. But that calculation changed when large numbers of Chinese troops entered the war in October and November 1950.
At a famous news conference on 30 November President Harry Truman threatened use of the atomic bomb, saying the US might use any weapon in its arsenal (10). The threat was not the faux pas many assumed it to be, but was based on contingency planning to use the bomb. On that same day, Air Force General George Stratemeyer sent an order to General Hoyt Vandenberg that the Strategic Air Command should be put on warning, “to be prepared to dispatch without delay medium bomb groups to the Far East . . . this augmentation should include atomic capabilities”.
General Curtis LeMay remembered correctly that the JCS had earlier concluded that atomic weapons would probably not be useful in Korea, except as part of “an overall atomic campaign against Red China”. But, if these orders were now being changed because of the entry of Chinese forces into the war, LeMay wanted the job; he told Stratemeyer that only his headquarters had the experience, technical training, and “intimate knowledge” of delivery methods. The man who had directed the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 was again ready to proceed to the Far East to direct the attacks (11). Washington was not worried that the Russians would respond with atomic weapons because the US possessed at least 450 bombs and the Soviets only 25.
On 9 December MacArthur said that he wanted commander’s discretion to use atomic weapons in the Korean theatre. On 24 December he submitted “a list of retardation targets” for which he required 26 atomic bombs. He also wanted four to drop on the “invasion forces” and four more for “critical concentrations of enemy air power”.
In interviews published posthumously, MacArthur said he had a plan that would have won the war in 10 days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria”. Then he would have introduced half a million Chinese Nationalist troops at the Yalu and then “spread behind us - from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea - a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” He was certain that the Russians would have done nothing about this extreme strategy: “My plan was a cinch” (12).
A second request
Cobalt 60 has 320 times the radioactivity of radium. One 400-ton cobalt H-bomb, historian Carroll Quigley has written, could wipe out all animal life on earth. MacArthur sounds like a warmongering lunatic, but he was not alone. Before the Sino-Korean offensive, a committee of the JCS had said that atomic bombs might be the decisive factor in cutting off a Chinese advance into Korea; initially they could be useful in “a cordon sanitaire [that] might be established by the UN in a strip in Manchuria immediately north of the Korean border”. A few months later Congressman Albert Gore (2000 Democratic candidate Al Gore’s father, subsequently a strong opponent of the Vietnam war) complained that “Korea has become a meat grinder of American manhood” and suggested “something cataclysmic” to end the war: a radiation belt dividing the Korean peninsula permanently into two.
Although Ridgway said nothing about a cobalt bomb, in May 1951, after replacing MacArthur as US commander in Korea, he renewed MacArthur’s request of 24 December, this time for 38 atomic bombs (13). The request was not approved.
The US came closest to using atomic weapons in April 1951, when Truman removed MacArthur. Although much related to this episode is still classified, it is now clear that Truman did not remove MacArthur simply because of his repeated insubordination, but because he wanted a reliable commander on the scene should Washington decide to use nuclear weapons; Truman traded MacArthur for his atomic policies. On 10 March 1951 MacArthur asked for a “D-Day atomic capability” to retain air superiority in the Korean theatre, after the Chinese massed huge new forces near the Korean border and after the Russians put 200 bombers into airbases in Manchuria (from which they could strike not just Korea but also US bases in Japan) (14). On 14 March General Vandenberg wrote: “Finletter and Lovett alerted on atomic discussions. Believe everything is set.”
At the end of March Stratemeyer reported that atomic bomb loading pits at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa were again operational; the bombs were carried there unassembled, and put together at the base, lacking only the essential nuclear cores. On 5 April the JCS ordered immediate atomic retaliation against Manchurian bases if large numbers of new troops came into the fighting, or, it appears, if bombers were launched from there against US assets. On that day the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Gordon Dean, began arrangements for transferring nine Mark IV nuclear capsules to the Air Force’s 9th Bomb Group, the designated carrier for atomic weapons.
The JCS again considered the use of nuclear weapons in June 1951, this time in tactical battlefield circumstances (15) and there were many more such suggestions as the war continued to 1953. Robert Oppenheimer, former director of the Manhattan Project, was involved in Project Vista, designed to gauge the feasibility of the tactical use of atomic weapons. In 1951 young Samuel Cohen, on a secret assignment for the US Defence Department, observed the battles for the second recapture of Seoul and thought there should be a way to destroy the enemy without destroying the city. He became the father of the neutron bomb (16).
The most terrifying nuclear project in Korea, however, was Operation Hudson Harbour. It appears to have been part of a larger project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defence and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons” - a euphemism for what are now called weapons of mass destruction.
The ‘limited war’
Without even using such “novel weapons” - although napalm was very new - the air war levelled North Korea and killed millions of civilians. North Koreans tell you that for three years they faced a daily threat of being burned with napalm: “You couldn’t escape it,” one told me in 1981. By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea had been completely levelled. What was left of the population survived in caves.
Over the course of the war, Conrad Crane wrote, the US air force “had wreaked terrible destruction all across North Korea. Bomb damage assessment at the armistice revealed that 18 of 22 major cities had been at least half obliterated.” A table he provided showed that the big industrial cities of Hamhung and Hungnam were 80-85% destroyed, Sariwon 95%, Sinanju 100%, the port of Chinnampo 80% and Pyongyang 75%. A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as “a low, wide mound of violet ashes”. General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just “rubble or snowy open spaces”. Just about every Korean he met, Dean wrote, had had a relative killed in a bombing raid (17). Even Winston Churchill, late in the war, was moved to tell Washington that when napalm was invented, no one contemplated that it would be “splashed” all over a civilian population (18).
This was Korea, “the limited war”. The views of its architect, Curtis LeMay, serve as its epitaph. After it started, he said: “We slipped a note kind of under the door into the Pentagon and said let us go up there . . . and burn down five of the biggest towns in North Korea - and they’re not very big - and that ought to stop it. Well, the answer to that was four or five screams - ‘You’ll kill a lot of non-combatants’ and ‘It’s too horrible’. Yet over a period of three years or so . . . we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too . . . Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening - a lot of people can’t stomach it” (19).
If you have been reading Linux Beach recently, or some of the local publications such as the Santa Monica Mirror, Santa Monica Daily Press, The Argonaut, Westside Today, or City Watch, that have covered this developing story, you already know about this local struggle against some of the same plainclothes Nazis and Klansmen that marched and murdered in Charlottesville. From their livestream chatter we have learned that they have decided to destroy the 6 year old Committee for Racial Justice because they see any fight against racism as "anti-white." They have declared it their new "Berkeley," but its not going to work out that way for them. 
