#and natural rights like this is literally a nazi account it’s not trying to hide that fact at all

[communistkenobi]

can you guys like pay attention to the op of popular meme posts. i know sometimes meme aggregator accounts are subtle but this has a slur in the url

[theculturedmarxist]

By Gary Brecher.Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd co-hosted with Mark Ames for podcasts, newsletters and more!. Posted with THE EXILED.

There’s a gigantic, well-organized, extremely violent fascist group with tens of thousands of active members in Germany right now.

And nobody notices.

You’d think all the fascist-hunters would have sniffed it out by now, but it goes right by them as if these guys were invisible.

Which is odd, because this group is not trying to hide, or pretending to be harmless. They’re not shy about it, and it’s not just talk. They have quite a record. They’ve been rampaging for decades, and if anything they’re stronger now than they used to be. They’re closely linked to CIA and Nazi groups; they’re very busy beating, burning, and murdering minorities of all kinds, and boast quite openly about hating literally everyone who’s not a member of their own ethnic group and sect, even suggesting that members go on “hunting expeditions” against minorities which they’d already almost wiped out back in the 20th century.

This group recently held massive, open rallies in the cities of Germany, and it’s only in the last few years that the government has even attempted to ban the public symbols and salutes of this massive fascist group.

There’s something grotesquely comic about this. We have a swarm of fascist-spotters who’ve spent the last few decades waiting for fascism to emerge in Germany when it was marching around, shouting at the top of its lungs, beating minorities, celebrating genocide, and supporting ethnic cleansing right in front of their damn faces.

I’m talking about the Gray Wolves. And I defy anyone to find a more successful, out-front, no-kidding, massive, effective, ruthless fascist organization anywhere in the world. They’re adapting quickly, and even have their own fierce Wiki defenders.

Here are a few highlights from their long, successful career:

In 1978, Gray Wolves started pogroms against Alevi Kurds in Maras (also known as Kahramanmaras) in South-Central Anatolia.

Location is important here. Maras is due north of Aleppo across the Syrian border, NW of Kobane, and above all just up the road from Gazantiep. Gazantiep is a key city for right-wing Turkish nationalists, a city dominated not just by people who are ethnically Turkish but who identify as rightwing Turks of the most intensely nationalist kind. This kind of population lives in a state of siege, glories in that feeling, and is almost always willing to lash out against the sea of minorities they imagine surrounding them. That’s why Gazantiep keeps making the news as a nice convenient safe house for IS and their Turkish allies, some of whom killed 57 Kurds at a wedding in 2016.

It’s important to emphasize that people who are ethnically Turkish are not a bloc. Some of the bravest people on earth, languishing in the Turkish state’s prisons or buried in unmarked graves, are proudly Turkish by ancestry.

And then there are the young men who join the Gray Wolves. Those men are murderous fascists, and it’s cowardice to pretend not to see that.

Violence by these men against minorities has never stopped, but it hit its peak — more like the highest peak in a mountain-range of a graph — in 1978, before the Anglosphere had any handle on sectarian violence in the Middle East.

The target of the Gray Wolves in Maras was a double minority: Alevi Kurds. Alevi Muslims are often considered heretics by Salafists and other Sunni fundamentalists. They were massacred with impunity in Ottoman pogroms. Erdogan’s AK Party, which very much wants to revive Ottoman practice and Ottoman borders, openly considers the Alevi heretics fair game for the Gray Wolves’s death squads.

Those who were killed in 1978 were not only Alevi, but Kurds — and the Turkish state, which embraced Wilsonian ethnic nationality with a vengeance, a terrible vengeance, hates Kurds simply for being Kurds. So the Kurdish Alevi of Maras were a natural target twice-over.

The campaign against them built up for weeks, as pogroms usually do, with the unpredictable pace partly a result of working with unstable, violent mobs but also part of a strategy to terrorize the victims, who never know when things will go from bad (very bad) to even-worse.

The details of the massacre are very typical, sickening but not unusual:

Witnesses to the massacre.

Seyho Demir: “The Maras Police Chief at the time was Abdülkadir Aksu, Minister of the Interior in the last AKP government. The massacre was organised by MIT (the Turkish secret service), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Islamists together… As soon as I heard about the massacre, I went to Maras. In the morning I went to Maras State Hospital. There I met a nurse I knew…When she saw me, she was surprised: ‘Seyho, where have you come from? They are killing everyone here. They have taken at least ten lightly-wounded people from the hospital downstairs and killed them.’ This was done under the control of the head physician of the Maras State Hospital. Everyone knows that such a big massacre cannot be carried out without state involvement. In the Yörükselim neighbourhood they cut a pregnant woman open with a bayonet. They took out the eight-month foetus, shouting “Allah Allah” and hung it from an electricity pole with a hook. The pictures of that savagery were published in the newspapers that day. The lawyer Halil Güllüoglu followed the Maras massacre case. The files he had were never made public. He was killed for pursuing the case anyway. Let them make those files public, then the role of the state will become clear.”

Meryem Polat: “They started in the morning, burning all the houses, and continued into the afternoon. A child was burned in a boiler. They sacked everything. We were in the water in the cellar, above us were wooden boards. The boards were burning and falling on top of us. My house was reduced to ashes. We were eight people in the cellar; they did not see us and left.”(EZÖ/TK/AG)

All accounts agree that the massacre not only happened with state collusion but state encouragement. No one was punished. Many were, in fact, promoted, and hold high positions in Erdogan’s government today.

That’s the pattern here: the Gray Wolves as the street-fighting wing of the state. The parallel is closer to Indonesian Islamists in 1965 than the SA in 1930s Germany, but so many people have trouble taking any fascism clearly unless it can be soldered to 1930s Germany that I may as well make the analogy for, as they say in the academic biz, heuristic purposes.

The Gray Wolves ideology is very widespread and acceptable in many (not all) communities in Turkey. This leads to a lot of more or less lone-wolf killings (as it were), as when a soldier who was a member of the Gray Wolves killed a fellow soldier for being an Armenian a few years ago.

Older readers might remember the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II back in 1979.

The assassin was one Mehmet Ali Agca, a longtime member of the Gray Wolves.

He had a track record of killing leftists and other enemies on behalf of the “Idealists” (seriously, that’s what the Wolves call themselves):

“The weapon used in the Feb. 1, 1979, murder of a Turkish newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci, for which Mr. Agca was convicted, was supplied by a member of the Idealist Clubs, according to the Turkish authorities. Other members helped Mr. Agca escape from prison. Still others prepared a false passport for him. And on the day of the killing, he went to the National Action Party offices.”

Note the familiar pattern: Ali Agca kills a leftist editor who’s annoying the Turkish state, gets caught, and manages to escape with a lot of help from Turkish intelligence.

They hardly bothered to hide their collusion in the escape. The Turkish state was killing a lot of leftists, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of minorities — the usual suspects for classic fascists like Ali Agca.

But as you older readers might recall, nobody in the media talked about Ali Agca as a Turkish fascist. He was, for Cold-War purposes, smeared as a Bulgarian agent.

The “Bulgarian connection” never made much sense, but it served the US/UK/Israel/Saudi intelligence agencies’ PR purposes. Remember, Turkey is NATO — very, very NATO.

NATO might survive the loss of many other small European states, but it could not survive losing Turkey. So the US/UK state will always side with the Turkish state and help them cover up fascist atrocities, blaming them on the Soviets until those useful patsies took their final dive.

Blaming Bulgaria rather than the obvious suspects, the Gray Wolves to which this thug Ali Agca had been murderously loyal all his life, was especially bizarre since there was an obvious sectarian motive: the Gray Wolves hate Christians, as they hate all other minorities, ethnic or religious, and make a point of staging provocations at all occasions when the remnants of what was once a huge Christian minority dare to show themselves in public.

Orthodox Christians are the Wolves’ preferred prey. They prefer not to do anything too bloody to high-profile Western targets like a pope, but when you squirt sectarian hate into weak minds and itchy trigger fingers for generations, some of the lads are going to pick the wrong victim.

Perhaps that’s what happened when Ali Agca went from NATO-approved murderer of leftists and Kurds, to shooting the Pope. We’ll never know, because it was quickly twisted into the ridiculous “Bulgaria did it” farce by the guys who enjoy a few cocktails with their opposite numbers from Ankara at all those NATO conferences.

And we’ll never know how much daily violence this massive fascist gang inflicts. Occasionally the Turkish state gets irritated enough to send a suicide bomber or two to kill Kurdish peace demonstrators, as it did in Ankara in 2015, killing 86 demonstrators and maiming a hundred more. But that state, our NATO ally, supports a whole madhouse of Arab and Turkmen jihadis as well as its own stable of disposable Gray Wolves assassins, so it may never be clear whether it was the Wolves, precisely, who pressed the detonators.

But it’s a statistical certainty that somewhere along the long line from greenlighting an attack like this and sending red-hot ball bearings splattering into the bodies of teenagers with peace banners, many of the men involved were members in good standing of the good ol’ Wolves.

Violence by the Gray Wolves is a constant in Turkey, usually unreported — especially now that Erdogan’s party has imprisoned thousands of journalists and intellectuals, and terrorized the rest into quietism or collusion. We may never know how many Kurds are murdered daily in the southeast of Anatolia, because no one who matters, in the Turkish state or its many powerful allies in the West (e.g. the Michael Flynn story) want you to know about it. It’s rare for those stories to make the news at all, but God knows you can’t forget them once you’ve read them.

In fact the Gray Wolves are going mainstream, and winning a lot of votes.

Fascism is mainstream in Turkey, getting more mainstream all the time — and has been since the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Gray Wolves have quite a pedigree, a classic fascist genealogy.

Fascism is often strongest in the ruins of a defeated empire, and that was the situation in the former Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The Empire had once ruled from Central Europe to Iraq, flowing and ebbing over the centuries (with a peak in the 16th century). At its peak, it was a fearsome conquering force.

There’s a great novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare detailing the unstoppable waves of special forces that the Empire could unleash on strongpoints that held out against conquest.

The Ottomans took a long time to fall from that 16th c. peak. They were still around, partly because Britain and France always supported them against the bogeyman of the late Victorian Era, the Russian Threat.

Propped up by the two big powers of Europe, the Empire managed to survive a coup in 1908 by young officers who would go on to a career in defeat and genocide, because they guessed wrong on which side would win the oncoming Great War.

The Young Turks, as these officers were called, sided with the up-and-coming, efficient military of the neighboring empire: Germany. They guessed wrong, but not before they managed to exterminate the harmless Armenians who had recently been patronized as Turkey’s “model minority” for their docility. And this genocide went so well, so quietly, that Hitler, contemplating the genocide of the European Jews, allegedly demanded of any squeamish nay-sayers “Who remembers the Armenians?”

You get a lot of horrible echoes like that in this story. At any rate, no one cared to remember or notice the extermination of the Armenians, but the winners at Versailles were typically vengeful against the former Ottoman Empire — not by any means for wiping out the Armenians, but for being German allies, and losing.

Britain and France, now joined by the US, were as vengeful toward the former Empire as they had been lenient during its bloody final years. Ottoman rule over non-Turkish territory was erased. For a few years there was some doubt whether even Anatolia would remain a Turkish state.

Then, as most of you know, came Mustafa Kemal, soon to become Kemal Ataturk, a hero of Gallipoli (a Turkish/Ottoman victory that stood out proudly in the great defeat).

Ataturk was a typical elite young officer of the early 20th c. Those were very dangerous people, those young officers. Often impressive individuals, but completely ruthless and immensely fond of violence. That goes for all of them, right across the Continent — Hell, right across the world.

Ataturk formed a nucleus of former officers from the Great War. (Again, the international echoes are clear enough; suffice to say that these guys were the most dangerous, formidable demographic in a few generations, perhaps since the emergence of the Napoleonic elite.) They fought well, and then they went about making Turkey a monoethnic state, without mercy.

For a while, that state was professedly secular, but since it had already killed or driven out most religious minorities, the monoethnic state became, under the AK party, avowedly mono-sectarian as well.

The current chant of the Wolves many, many supporters is “My heart is Turkish and my soul is Muslim!” You must be both: ethnically Turkish and orthodox, Sunni Muslim as well. No mercy for anyone who fails either test, which means that a lot of Kurds, a lot of Alevis, a lot of secular Leftists, end up dead or in prison.

The evolution of the Gray Wolves is a classic fascist Genesis story, and the behavior of its hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of supporters is classic fascist violence. Why don’t more people notice that?

I hate to speculate, because the range of possible answers all boils down to cowardice, conformity, and the odd Euro-centrism one finds in the strangest places. They don’t get noticed because they’re not European, maybe? Fascism of the 1930s was European, and that’s the only kind amateurs notice? Odd, because Turkey is European enough to be the cornerstone of NATO.

This would not be the first time that the interests of what you could call the NATO Deep State aligned all too perfectly with the more gullible pockets of the Left. In fact, it’s very closely related to the phenomenon of not noticing, or trying very hard not to notice, the sectarian ultra-violence of the Syrian “rebels.” But this time, since Turkey is a NATO ally, it’s the violence of the state and its fascist proxies that is ignored. I struggle to come up with any other reason that the Gray Wolves get so little attention.

All I know is that we have a massive, ultra-violent, highly effective, classically fascist movement killing minorities every single day, and there’s an odd silence about it.

I would love to ask one of the innumerable online fascist hunters why they hunt stray curs and slink silently past the cold stare of the Gray Wolves. Perhaps it’s not so much any of the excuses I suggested above; perhaps some hunters just prefer smaller, easy prey to the real thing.

Gary Brecher is the nom de guerre-nerd of John Dolan. Buy his book The War Nerd Iliad. Hear him read his comic memoir Pleasant Hell in audiobook format.

Subscribe to the Radio War Nerd podcast & newsletter!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

* * * *

Joohn Choe

Did you know that half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level?

It's a constraint on victory outcomes in counter-disinformation work; it's a problem when you declare war on things like QAnon or the Republican industrial lie complex.

It arises when you use a technique from military planners called "thinking backwards".

This doesn't mean "be old-school and nostalgic" (I mean, you'd think), it means "start from the outcome and work backwards".

Illiteracy turns out to be a problem when you consider the basic problem of active measures defense as an exercise in thinking backwards. You get new solutions and new problems; illiteracy, and being literate but not reading, or alliteracy (irritatingly not a word in spell-check), are some of those problems.

First, let's talk about the outcome.

The fundamental problem with disinformation studies is that you can't define what disinformation is unless you take a stance on what information is, and how it's used in society.

It's meaningless to point your finger and say "liar!" as we are wont to do in this field if you're not even clear on what role that should play in society, or how things are supposed to work normally. You can't diagnose a dysfunction in how society produces and consumes information if you don't even have a view on how it functions.

You need to have a defensible, testable theory of how America's information economy operates normally if you are going to put yourself forward as some authority on how it's functioning abnormally. You cannot be a counter-disinformation operator without being a philosopher, and to some extent, a systems theorist and, increasingly, I'd argue, an aestheticist (as in "studies aesthetics", not "aesthetician who does your nails").

This is incredibly basic. I still find it odd that even very professional people and companies in this field don't grapple with this issue. Even the data is meaningless, no matter how impressively objective it is, if you're lacking that kind of context; you end up having anomalies with no baseline, like an endless stream of singleton events.

That's no way to run a railroad, like the old saying goes.

So, back when I had a startup, with advisors, I talked to one of them who actually taught a class at Berkeley on startups about this crazy recording of a Federal crime I'd gotten in Alabama, and I asked for advice for what to do about it in terms of the fight against disinformation.

The answer he gave ended up being a lead-in to thinking about this in a systems-oriented, long-terms sustainable kind of way. I still come back to it as a recurrent point in shaping outcome scenarios.

He suggested, first off, in this sort of infuriatingly wise way that he has (he's an old Asian dude, so) that you have to ask, first: is zero percent really possible?

What kind of victory state are you after, if this is actually a lie that involves disinformation on the scale that you observe it?

He argued that you have to fit disinformation into a place with other aspects of how we talk to each other. On his account, there was potentially value in giving people the ability to create and pass on value in determining what was disinformation and what wasn't, and it verged into a discussion of a crypto-currency based anti-disinformation app that I ended up not really wanting to do.

Credit where credit is due, though: his argument about the achievability of zero percent disinformation made a lot of sense.

The outcome state we're after can't be "zero active measures" and "zero disinformation". Not only is that unrealistic, if you even did manage to achieve that, you'd have North Korea. They have no problem with differing versions of state truth and reality, because everything is state truth that excludes reality.

Diversity in viewpoints is one of our strengths as a country, too; reducing everything down to one version of truth, even as generous as the boundaries might be on that, would inevitably end up flattening society. Like, no one wants "information socialism", that just... sounds bad.

You could argue that disinformation is a flipside of a coin, actually. Disinformation is in a state of mutual entailment with socially accepted official truth; there can't be one without the other, in one way of looking at it. And that's what I think my advisor was getting at.

It's like that old cliché about "tHe sIgN fOr cRiSiS aNd ChAngE ArE tEh sAmE iN cHiNeSe" which is like, you understand, up there with Sun Tzu quotes and "your people are so hard-working!" as far as Things I Ain't 'Bout As An Asian Person, You Feel Me Though (the game show!).

And don't even get me started on people ripping off strategy ideas from theorists of Chinese stick-poking and rock-throwing warfare.

In a normal time, you could say that there's a balance between disinformation and truth, and truth is usually the winning side on that, because normally, the President and the ruling party aren't active sources of disinformation with the veneer of authority on it.

We're getting out of a period of time in which that balance was badly, badly disrupted on the side of disinformation. The kind of abnormalities we see as a society - from the Capitol insurrection to how weird people around us are, compared to what they were like in 2015 - those can all be seen as stemming from that state of imbalance.

The outcome, the advisor argued, was fundamentally about balance. Not about destroying disinformation, or striking it until it wasn't a problem; the paradigm was rebalancing, he argued.

Winning isn't reducing disinformation to zero. It's achieving a new balance between disinformation and truth where the boundary favors truth more.

Almost every victory state for "The War On Disinformation" boils down to that, actually.

If you see it as rebalancing, then new ways of achieving achieving victory by restoring balance open up.

For starters, you could add to the flow of information coming out; you could even make oppositional truth part of it. That's really what "fact-checking" is on social media - Politifact and LeadStories aren't "fact-checkers", because fact-checkers are people at media institutions who run quality control on news, and they are not that. They pick and choose what stories to oppose, at times seemingly arbitrarily, at times politically, and calling them "fact-checkers" hides the essentially subjective nature of that practice.

You could create personal truth, give people new ways to be, new role models to emulate and new social roles to fulfill - "offensive fact-checker", "Nazi-hunter", "deplatformer", and the like. And you could even amplify it and try to drown out the misleadingly framed truth, and the outright mistruths, coming out of the disinformation industry.

You could mobilize the truth to create political crises, and work to reset the boundary on allowable lies. This is the core methodology of an activist, it's creating strategic dilemmas for institutions based on public perception and the pressure to do the right thing.

Outcome-focused political activism, where you're trying to get a specific candidate elected or voted out of office, is one way of specifically mobilizing the truth, instead of just sitting on ass and feeling good about having it (this is common, I'd argue). We can not only reduce disinformation better - interdict it better, ban it better, find it better, track it better - we can also get better at producing alternative presentations and modes of appeal for truth.

The problem with all these solution scenarios, though, and the area that I see where we could really stand to improve, and maybe even something that I'd work on for a minute, is our culture.

I'd argue we just don't have the kind of intellectual culture that supports a lot of these solutions. We can't, not with fundamental adult literacy the way it is; not with the state of the public intellectual the way it is.

There was a point around 2015 when people were declaring a crisis of the French public intellectual tradition; since Henri-Levy, basically, Pierre Bourdieu if you count him, there just haven't been globally notable, famous French philosophers like there used to be. That traces to any number of factors with them, but a lot of them are factors we share, like the ever-wider spread of spectacular culture and its increasing efficacy at exploiting us, drawing us into addiction loops, even, with social media and "binge-watching" TV shows.

I'd argue that the best counter-disinformational solutions we have right now come down to art and aesthetics, actually, because we are so bad as a culture at reading.

Militarized truth, and grassroots truth, and offensive truth, are forms of rebalancing between disinformation and truth, yes, but it's a reactionary, almost frantic kind of truth. The jobs that it gives people, the roles that it puts people into - content moderator, offensive fact-checker - eat people up in the long run because they're in a race against disinformation, and disinformation keeps winning.

And it ends up repeating the basic problem of piling truth upon truth without mobilizing it, positioning it in a way to get through to people.

If it takes a pretty image and a witty notion to introject a critical idea into someone's head; if it takes a song and a dance, even, to get someone to have a bullshit filter... I say, do it.

Call it less "Art of War', more "War of Art".

---

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

https://www.politico.eu/.../decline-of-french.../

https://www.wyliecomm.com/.../whats-the-latest-u-s.../

[ssnakey-b]

My grandpa’s experiences in a Russian POW camp have been turned into a book.

Hi everyone. Today, I’d like to talk about something very personal, yet something that I think is very important to people in general. And to do that, we need to start with a bit of a history lesson.

Most of the people reading this I probably aware that I am French. Well, I was born and still live in Alsace, the easternmost region of the country, whose Eastern border is also the border between France and Germany.

Needless to say, this means that we’ve seen our fair share of conflict, as the two nations have been fighting over us, as well as another region called Lorraine, since... pretty much these two nations have existed. So unsurprisingly, one of the conditions of France’s surrender to Germany during World War 2 was that these two regions would be annexed, meaning they were officially part of Germany, meaning that all able-bodied men in these regions could potentially be drafted in the Wehrmacht, despite not being German. I’ll let you guess what happened to those who tried to refuse, and/or their families.

This happened across multiple countries and in France, we call them the “Malgré-Nous”, which translates to “Against Our Will”, and my grandfather was one of them. And because the Germans of course would rather not risk their superior homeboys, these people forced into the army were sent to fight off the Russians.

At some point, my grandpa’s squad ended up surrounded by Russian forces. They tried to flee, but were eventually caught and taken prisoners. They were sen’t to various prisoner camps, and ended up spending most of their time in the infamous Camp 188 in Tambov.

Now, this was a POW camp, the soldiers there were a bargaining chip for Russia, so they weren’t going out of their way to make people suffer or starve them, but this was a POW camp in soviet Russia, in the middle of the most brutal conflict in human history, so as you can probably guess, the living conditions barley allowed for survival.

I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps just to fight off depression and hunger, but my grandfather decided to keep a journal of it. He even describes the almost slapsticky way in which he had to move his arms around a guard searching him so he wouldn’t see it, and he explains that he eventually sewed hidden pockets inside his coat’s sleeves so he could hide it. It contains not only descriptions of the camp, daily life inside it and the land and wildlife of the area, but he also drew many sketches of what he saw, some of which you can see in these pictures. As an artist myself, I am very proud to see that not only does it run in the family, but he made such an important use of his talent.

Obviously, the journal of a surviving soldier’s experiences in a Russian POW camp is an incredibly rare and valuable document (even my family didn’t find out about it until a few years ago), especially considering the little-known aspect of WW2 of non-German people being forced into their army. Russian people are especially fascinated by this sort of stories because of course, for most of the XXth century, they could only know what their government would allow them to know about their own history.

This is how a French-speaking Russian woman who frequently visits France ended up hearing about the journal in local publications. She had this project of writing a book about the camp, and was looking for first-hand accounts of what it was like. Naturally, as soon as she heard about this, she contacted my parents and asked if she could write about the journal and include pictures of it. It goes without saying that they accepted. In fact, my father had the entire journal scanned in high resolution for just such an occasion (we also intend to have the entire thing printed, with a copy of the letter he received to inform him he was drafted).

Well, as the title of this post says, the book is now complete and its author sent us a copy. Of course, none of us can read Russian, but the author’s daughter is working on a French translation, so I’m very anxiously looking forward to it. There are other people’s accounts as well, my grandpa’s taking up about a third of the book.

Here is the letter announcing he’s been drafted, written on October 24th, 1944. It includes a list of items to get before reporting, such as work shoes, a shovel, a mess kit, etc... notice the “Heil Hitler!” at the end. Also note that although his name was “Geoffrey Rieb”, they of course spelt his name as Gottfried. Similarly, they spelled the name of the street where they wrote this “Rue du travail” (Labour Street) in German, turning it into “Strasse der Arbeit”.

Here’s a map he drew while trying to work out where they were and how much he’d travelled (the guards only spoke a bit of German outside of Russian so they couldn’t provide much information). Oh and one thing that’s not included in the book is that he actually built a makeshift sextant to help in his calculations (note: I believe this specific sketch is from a copy of his journal which he remade more cleanly once he got back home as he clearly realized that all of this needed to be preserved).

On the left page, he specifies the many nationalities the people he met during his “stay” (as he put it) in the camps of Lobsch, Pulawy, Segesa and Tambow hailed from: France, Belgium, Luxembourg, ¨Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yougoslavia, Estonia, Lettonia, Hungary, Italy, Romania and Austria. He explains that all prisoners except for the Germans wore caps with their national colours on.

He also adds that in each camp, you had an easier time depending on your nationality: if you were Austrian in Lobsch, German in Pulawy, Polish in Segesa, and in Tambow... you had to be a teacher. It’s a bit of a joke since the camp almost exclusively included French prisoners, to the point it ended up being nicknamed “The French camp”.

On the right page is a sketch titled “Those who aren’t coming back.....” and depicts the Alsacian graveyard of Tambow. Yeah, let us not forget that around 8000 people died there. My grandpa was one of the lucky ones.

To the right is a sketch of another camp he went through, Rada. To the left is one of my favourite sketches, of which you can see a variation on the cover, of “Soup time at the Segesa train station”. These lines of people eating what little they could get is really striking. But what really stuck in my mind is an anecdote my grandpa relates. I’m not sure it was exactly at that moment, but on his way back, he mentions stopping at a train station and being so hungry he decided to trade his sweater for a sausage.

I wish nobody to ever be so desperately hungry that they are willing to literally trade the clothes on their backs for a sausage, in the middle of Northern Russia. And I wish for nobody to be desperately cold that they’re willing to trade what little food they have for a sweater.

It’s not all cold, hunger and sadness though. There are sketches of the beautiful nature, some amusing stories like the prisoners organising a football tournament, even being able to form national teams, some heartwarming moments like my grandpa making plans for renovations in their countryside home (which he eventually did make!).

And then there are also some truly incredible moments, like when the prisoners decided to take turns giving each-other lectures on their job. This is what the sketch on the left in the top picture is for, as it describes one of the machines my grandpa used for his job.

But that’s not what makes this story incredible. See, one of the people giving a lecture was a German engineer. And the sketch on right page and on the bottom pic are blueprints my grandpa was able to make based on descriptions by that engineer. You may have noticed it looks like a rocket. And if you look carefully at the top right sketch, you may have noticed the name V1.

That’s right, this guy was a military engineer, giving the prisoners a lecture on Germany’s signature weapon. now I’m going to go ahead an assume this sort of information was top secret, with major consequences should any info about it leak, and yet here it is in my grandpa’s journal. This blew my mind when I first saw it and I wondered if I was seeing this right.

This to me can only mean one of two things: either this guy expected to die in this camp, so he wasn’t scared for himself should the Russia get a hold of it and he was branded a spy and/or a traitor back in Germany, but even then you’d think he wouldn’t want to endanger his nation, or at least he’d fear for his family, or he knew that even if the Russians did find the blueprints, the Nazis would have fallen out of power by the time word got back to Germany. Either way, I’m still having a hard time comprehending that this is real and my grandfather got to hear it straight from one of the engineers.

But this also speaks volume about the situation these men were in. They were all trained, indoctrinated to hate and want to kill one-another. Propaganda was everywhere on all sides of the conflict. Just look at how hateful some of the European or American war posters were. And in Germany, we’re talking about a Nazi dictatorship, a regime raising an entire generation to believe that genocide was the right thing to do, so the incitement to blind hatred was especially strong.

And yet, here they all were, talking to each-other, educating one-another, exchanging ideas, trading as equals, ignoring nationalities, ethnicities and culture. Because when you’ve hit rockbottom, when you’re all neck-deep in the same shithole, tired, starving, and unsure if you’ll still be alive by the end of the week... who can still give a crap about such petty issues? I get the feeling that for them, the war was over long before any treaty was signed.

I hope you found this as interesting as I did and that it’s giving you a new perspective on World War 2, that conflicts are always so, so much more complicated than “good guys vs bad guys” and how the people most directly involved by it wanted nothing more than to live in peace and let their neighbours do the same.

For me, it’s also a very personal document, as my grandpa died when I was still very young and I don’t have many memories of him, so finding this helps me connect with him a little bit more. I’ll keep you posted when the French version is completed and who knows? Maybe we’ll make more. I just know I want as many people as possible to know about this. Remembering these events is our duty to the World and to future generations.

Oh and if you have any questions regarding this, feel free to ask, I’ll answer them to the best of my avbilities.

[republicstandard]

Hillary Clinton's ShareBlue is Crippling US Democracy

Strange, isn't it? The same corporate media outlets, journalists and pundits that were all in for Hillary, are now trying to convince the country that a poorly run, hardly seen Russian troll campaign is grounds for reversing the election, and launching a war with a nuclear power. This is insanely irresponsible.

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Campaign finance watchdogs say "Correct The Record is “creating new ways to undermine campaign regulation.”' The FEC, split between Democrats and Republicans, was deadlocked on taking action against David Brock and his multimillion dollar troll farm. In those FEC filings, Hillary Clinton's Correct the Record trolls were listed, including their salaries.

As you may remember, Bernie Sanders' supporters were the first victims of Hillary Clinton's likely illegal astroturfing efforts with CTR and it's "Breaking Barriers" online spam and troll campaign, and they were not happy.

Libby Watson of The Sunlight Foundation observed that the astroturf effort goes far beyond merely defending Clinton, to targeting and intimidating those who criticize her. She told The Daily Beast,

“This seems to be going after essentially random individuals online. (Clinton's troll network) Is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical.”

Daily Kos forum posters also noticed Correct The Record interference:

“[T]here have been a number of diaries claiming to ‘have switched from Bernie to Hillary’ lately, and some of them have been from recently created accounts with no record of pro-Sanders remarks or diaries.”

During the election, there were allegations of CTR bribing Reddit mods to silence, censor anti-Clinton posters, and coordinate "downvotes" and "upvotes" to promote Hillary and hide pro-Trump views.

CTR's new incarnation, ShareBlue was eventually

"removed from the [Reddit] whitelist for violation of our media disclosure policies." ~ r/politics • r/Against_Astroturfing

Meanwhile, according to FEC filings Clinton's CTR PAC disbursed $9,617,828.28 in 2016. Most interesting is that CTR PAC listed $0 for expenditures, other than $4k in filing and administrative costs.

David Brock spent $10 million dollars and claimed it wasn't part of any normally listed campaign expenditure. He spent $10M on sock accounts, trolls and paying off mods on social media. That’s nearly a factor of ten times more than what has been claimed the 13 indicted Russians spent.

Obama's OfA PAC uses similar astroturf, troll-farm tactics as Hillary/Brock's CTR/ShareBlue. We know that the "Russian bots" accounted for 0.43% of total election-year political tweets. I'd love to see the totals for bots linked to the Democrats, given the funding differential.

Democrat-supporting trolls swarm when contentious subjects like gun control, DACA, Obamacare, or corruption by Democrats are in the news and trending topics column on Twitter. They attacked during the #PPSellsBodyParts scandal. They've been all over during the aftermath of the Florida school shooting, pushing "gun sense" and signal-jamming opponents to David Hogg and his Rescue Rangers. None of this should come as a particular surprise at this point.

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Back in October 2016-January 2017, these Democrat operated sock accounts took on "Ex-GOP, #NeverTrump, "Reagan Conservative!" appearances, to push anti-Trump propaganda, and directly attack conservatives who expressed support for Trump. Pretending to be "real conservatives" and shaming people to control the opposition to damage the President is a low tactic, even for Correct The Record.

While we don't know the full extent of this problem, it is clear that the CTR/OfA Democrat trolls participated in spreading "cuck-Nazi" attacks on Republicans. They helped flood social media with dank memes, and virulent messages, aimed at Blue Check moderates, who reacted so poorly. CTR/OfA socks also promoted the more fringe characters on the alt-right, pushed down the less extreme, and helped smear alt-lite figures, to paint the narrative that all conservatives were literally Nazis, and sow division in the ranks. It worked.

The election PAC CTR became ShareBlue in Jan 2017. Several prominent #NeverTrumpconservatives have been linked to Brock's propaganda farm, including Cheri Jacobs, Ana Navarro and people associated with Evan McMullin. An investigation into the corporate paper trail behind Shareblue reveals that it appears to be supported and sponsored by a raft of foreign interests from China, Britain, Israel and various Middle Eastern entities [SA, Qatar, Iran] to interfere in American politics.

According to a report in ZeroHedge:

“An investigation into a shadowy world of shell companies and chains of influence stretching all over the globe has revealed that Democratic propaganda figure David Brock's organization Shareblue appears to be an apparent front group being used by a number of Chinese, Middle Eastern, British, Israeli, Mexican and American special interests to spread anti-Trump and anti-democratic rhetoric both during the presidential election as well as in its aftermath.”

ShareBlue is basically Google or Apple in terms of scale, compared to the poorly run and ineffective, mom and pop operation of Russian trolls busted by Mueller.

It has made pushing propaganda on Twitter and other social media for foreign interests into big business. From the same ZeroHedge piece:

Peter Daou is the CEO of Shareblue's holding company, True Blue Media LLC. An adviser to Hillary Clinton, in addition to the  Clinton Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, the U.S. Department of Energy, the UN Foundation, Microsoft, Intel, AARP, PR Newswire and Bloomberg Philanthropies and the UK's UBMplc. Daou played an advisory role for OneVoice International, an "international grassroots movement that amplifies the voice of mainstream Israelis and Palestinians, empowering them to propel their elected representatives toward the two-state solution."

This infographic shows the web of foreign ties that ShareBlue and it's parent company True Blue Media have.

"Brock, Daou, and others in the propaganda group could be in violation of Foreign Agent Registration Act.Shareblue exists as an outlet for political interests to subvert democratic institutions in America and to promote [foreign] interests..to take advantage of American citizens" – The New York Times, Sept 2016 - Inside Hillary Clinton’s Outrage Machine, Allies Push the Buttons.

(ShareBlue/CTR) "has instructed its surrogates to blame news coverage for negative press. 'Are they going to hold Hillary to a different standard again?' read one recent “talking points” memo..."

Tad Devine, a senior strategist to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, described ShareBlue, Dauo, and Brock as “The pond scum of American politics,” which is damning indeed from the camp of a hard-left candidate.

To go into much more detail on the tactics deployed would take a book in itself, so forgive us for covering in light strokes. Here is a link to the full David Brock confidential "playbook" for ShareBlue trolls. I do encourage that you read it for yourself, it is highly informative. Here is an excerpt which illustrates the agenda and the massive resources available to David Brock’s organization.

Staggering. Further evidence of just how far Shareblue is willing to go to push their narrative was dug up by Ethan Pepper of Newsnuke last year.

“In all, CTR tricked people into thinking that Hillary Clinton had more organic support online than she actually did. Countless bots and low wage employees would smear Hillary’s opponents and scramble sensible discussions about her flaws.”

Naturally, because the Left cannot meme, detailed instructions had to be given to enable paid shills to spread disinformation effectively. Check out these instructions- particularly the emotive targeting and the hilarious admission that pro-Hillary memes sucked.

The Hillary SuperPAC Correct the Record operated by David Brock morphed into ShareBlue, and continues their troll campaign on Twitter today using sock accounts to sow disinformation and push narratives. They've spent millions on this process already.

Brock's Correct the Record PAC openly coordinated with the Hillary campaign, despite campaign finance laws that explicitly prohibit this. They determined that since Twitter, Reddit and Facebook are free, spending money to employ socks wasn't an expenditure. pic.twitter.com/5o53mDmXLG

— Notorious Augusto P (@GenAugustoP) February 19, 2018

In a leaked transcript of a Slack private message board, Brock claims that they have been given an NSA sniffing program called "Fox Acid" which was used to dox and threaten 'anonymous' users on Reddit and the Chans. At the time, hundreds of users were outed, suspended or dropped off the boards.

There you have it folks- no big whoop, just a pro-Clinton PAC, illegally coordinating with the campaign and using NSA sniffing tools to out social media users and drive them off platforms, while mobilizing a bot-net troll army to steer the narratives, and bribing mods on boards to help.

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When taken into consideration with what we know of  Fusion GPS, MM4A, ShareBlue, CTR, George Soros’ Open Society, Tides Foundation, OfA,  American Bridge,  Hamilton 66 and JournoList to name but a few of the leftist organizations playing for keeps in the war for your mind it appears pretty clear that the “Vast Left-wing Conspiracy” is very real, foreign-funded and pushing propaganda on both the American people and those overseas.

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[demonofthelight]

Life stories: Simon Clarke

Joanne (presenter): What keeps you awake at night, like what do you regret the most?

Simon: I don't know if I regret anything because everything teaches you something. Everything we go through is a lesson in life.

Joanne: That's the diplomatic response. What's the real response? If you could change something what would be?

Simon: There's this girl, anyone that listens to this podcast regularly probably knows all about her. Well, I can't regret us ending, because she's getting married in, what's the date? She's getting married in less than a month and she's meant to be happy so I don't regret us ending. I regret being so unimportant in her eyes that we don't still speak. I regret that, more than anything. I don't know if she was the 'one' but she was a friend. A friend I will forever adore.

Joanne: Does that keep you awake at night.

Simon: I wouldn't go that far but there are days I wonder about her.

Joanne: If she was watching this show, what would you say to her?

Simon: I'm sorry I never made her happy and I'm sorry she felt pressured by me. There's this story where a mutual friend once told me, this girl who I don't want to name Joanne, I really don't. You've shown pictures there but she doesn't look the same anymore not even the same coloured hair. Anyway this mutual friend told me she 'hates me for bringing her up'. Honestly, I'm sick of talking about it but I was always taught there's no taboo subject.

Joanne: Do you wish you two stayed in touch?

Simon: Mixed. (looking uncomfortable and shifting) I wish we never drifted so apart into two different circles but the circle she mixes in aren't compatible with the circle I drift in. I don't want to sound like an arrogant asshole. I mean it's nothing to do with superiority or a god complex. The circles I drift in are quite intellectual. Political debates, university alumina, professional jobs, e-sports. The circles she drifts in are more materialistic or hobby orientated. Motorbikes, sports etc. I mean some of those people think I'm literally the worst thing to happen to her, while some of the people in my circle find those who can't debate infuriating. The reality is the person she is now and the person I am now are completely different.

Joanne: Moving on to the death of your mom. Can you remember the day you found out?

Simon: Like it was yesterday. I got woke up in the morning while the paramedics were in my kitchen. I got told that my mom had died in her sleep and as you can imagine my father was in bits. I didn't know how to process it initially so I stayed in my room for about an hour. As time passed, I just wanted to be hugged and told I wasn't as alone as I felt.

Joanne: I'm sure your sisters and brother were by your side.

Simon: Of course, but they were trying to come to grips with it too. To be entirely honest, I reached out to a friend the following day or within the next few days. It became a blur that week but I remember distinctly that the one female who I loved and depended on to that level other than my mother was my ex. I spent the time up until the funeral genuinely believing she would pop over and check up on me even after we broke up on bad terms.

Joanne: How did your friend react , how did they support you?

Simon: As we've touched on, I was a loner in school. Until near the end of high school, I was a bullied shy kid. I didn't have any true friends. But this moment, this terrible event, Matthew made me realise I would never have to go through a travesty alone. He took time out to go for a drink with me during that week and he took the day off work to go to my mom's funeral. He's a complete atheist. He think's my philosophy on the afterlife is closer to Stephen King than history textbooks but he literally walked probably a few miles to and from the funeral just to show his support. I've never told him how much that meant to me. But I'd like to think he just knows.

Joanne: I'm sure he wasn't the only friend over that time?

Simon: No, I have another fantastic friend called Andrew. I had a very bitter falling out over him trying to get me support and honestly anyone else would have knocked me out for the abuse I gave him over it. He just laughed it off. One of two friends that I can depend on, hopefully and as far as I'm concerned the rest of my life.

Joanne: You mentioned the girl again (picture of 2011 as a couple goes on screen), her family is your neighbour right so they knew about what happened with your mom but didn't she text you or call in?

Simon: Her parents lived opposite the street, but she never asked or showed concern on my wellbeing. I have no entitlement of that care. It's her right to feel or act in any legal way she wishes. I'll respect her freedom to do that for as long as I can.

Joanne: How does that make you feel?

Simon: It made me realise our perspectives on the 18 months we were in a relationship were different. For me, it was a fantastic period and I imagine for her it's best to forget it.

Joanne: Does that bother you?

Simon: Should it? People change, circumstances change. Can we move on?

Joanne: OK. We'll go to a break... Welcome back. I'd like to talk about university and is it true that you were warned before you enrolled?

Simon: As a 18 year old child. I made a stupid comment about a friend publicly on Facebook. My friend found it hilarious and it's the sort of dark humour we say to each other over voice chat and in person but someone twisted what I said to imply someone who died in my local area. Well implied the post was about them. I never met and couldn't care less about them. I apologised and thought that was the end of it but a formal police report was filed and the individuals informed my university who at this point had just provided me with an offer to enrol that I accepted. I mean top business college diploma in the county, they ripped the hands off for me. So that was interesting. The university was great about it. The police were as incompetent as you can imagine but it did teach me that don't say anything on social media that can't be literally taken. Like this will go up on YouTube and Tumblr. So anything I say can be proved.

Joanne: How did you emotionally react to this event, where what you said was taken out of context?

Simon: Betrayed by others but I was stupid and naiive. You can't be those things especially as a successful businessman. At this time a lot of falsehoods and rumours came around ranging from me being a drug addict to committing sexual assault. It was obvious at this point those who had ever had a conversation with me knew that I had traditional moral values so the accusations were as ridiculous as they sound. Childish rumours spread to squash what I had to say. My friends just ignored them, and the people the bullshit influenced were better off not in my life anyway.

Joanne: I've only met you twice and you're quite outspoken about some controversial subjects but its obvious to me morally your the other way. Severely punish criminals, probably too far in my opinion.

Simon: I agree, my opinions can be quite controversial but I'm as against illegal drugs as I love a cup of tea. Even my critics would tell you that.

Joanne: You've gone from a social media account with 50000 followers overall to less than a tenth of the size. Why do you think this is and does it bother you?

Simon: I used to be a depressing blogger with poems, and writing that was soul crushing but honest about my thoughts or feelings about myself. I then started to feel less lost so naturally started writing about facts not emotions. Politics was always a topic I found fascinating. I've always been debating since I can remember. I get off on a debate, which is why it's hilarious to mock those that call you names because they can't debate the facts of the topic. I started looking at things like the wage gap and white privilege economically and they don't hold up to the scrutiny expected in academic work. They just don't. Those that believe either of those things are either stupid or lied too.

Joanne: I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of politics because it's become who you are but if I can, I want to touch on 'getting off' of those that call you names in other words 'Trolls' can you elaborate on that?

Simon: I'll give you an example. I'm quite camp just look at what I'm wearing so I got an anon message on Tumblr once that read 'you are a gay homophobic sexist Nazi that should just kill yourself'. How hilarious is the stupidity of that statement. If I was gay, I couldn't be homophobic and gay people aren't allowed to be a Nazi. It shows the idiocy of these people that are probably children.

Joanne: Does these kind of hate messages matter to you?

Simon: Of course it matters, everybody wants to be liked. Those that claim otherwise are lying. But the opinions of people I've never met who are so ashamed of themselves they hide through anonymous, do not matter to me. The opinions of friends and parents of friends matter to me.

Joanne: You once said you were 'bad with women'.

Simon: Oh God, yea. I really wish I hadn't had said that. It was on an emotional post at 3am. It was a spur of the moment thought. I don't think I'm naturally bad with women but I am a marmite figure. I'm not universally liked. Most people I meet are probably intimidated by me. I think the women that I find attractive clearly don't normally find me attractive.

Joanne: Why is that? What type of women do you find attractive?

Simon: I'm probably a 6 out of ten, if I could lose the acne probably a good 7. I tend to fall for either the tall slim blonde or the short petite unique person. I'm quite simple like that. Then if they are able to debate or disagree with me brilliantly, I just adore them.

Joanne: (laughs) So you see yourself as just above average?

Simon: In looks, I do. In style, I'm quite unique and some people hate that I stand out. In personality, I am extremely demanding but I also expect that from myself.

Joanne: Do you ever think about children?

Simon: I did. I thought about marriage and kids but I've only ever found three people in 21 years that I could see having a life with. I do think about children's names though, I have top three for both genders. For a boy: Constantine, Excalibur or Arthur. For a girl: Katherine, Kate or Kathleen.

Joanne: Do you think it's fair when some people refer to you as egotistical, arrogant or psychotic?

Simon: It's no business of mine what other's perceive me to be. I can only concentrate on who I am and I'm none of those things.

Joanne: Do you like being the centre of attention with someone claiming you 'have to be seen to be the most overdressed person because you need the attention?

Simon: I don't mind it, but I don't actively pursue it. I don't really mind whether someone outshines me. I love a challenge and I think demanding the best from myself constantly while can be quite exhausting to see, is who I am whether that's monopoly, gaming or dressing.