The foul odor of fascism has become inescapable in the American atmosphere. Republican officialsacross the country are working overtime toundermine the right to vote, leading right-wing pundits brazenly promulgate racist conspiracy theoriesand theAnti-Defamation League reportsthat 2020 saw a 45 percent increase in hate crimes throughout the Midwest.

There isperhapsno time more urgent to learn from one of fascism's former foot soldiers.Christian Picciolinibecame a neo-Nazi as a teenager in the working class Chicago suburb of Blue Islandin the late 1980s. As the leader of the Chicago Area Skinheads (CASH)and singer inthe white-power rock bandthe Final Solution, Picciolini was one of the most effective recruiters in the white supremacist movement.

His story transformed, however,from horrific to redemptive and inspiring. Picciolini is now one of the most effective anti-hate activists in the United States. The details of his transition from Nazi to progressive from hate leader to democratic healer are available in his fascinating and important memoir, "White American Youth: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement And How I Got Out."

Picciolini is the co-founder and director of theFree Radicals Project, an international multidisciplinary organization dedicated to the prevention of hate crimes, and working to stunt the growth of the movements that fuel them. He chronicles his current work in his insightful new book, "Breaking Hate: Countering the New Culture of Extremism."

He is also the host of a new podcast, "F Your Racist History,"which aims educates listeners on the often unknown or whitewashed influence of racism in American culture, politicsand economics.

In the past few years, Picciolini's warnings have become increasingly severe. As he and his colleagues at Free Radicals work to preserve the promise of multiracial democracy in the United States, Picciolini worries that the nation's complacency will soon meet a catastrophic end.

I recently spoke with Picciolini by phone about this work and analysis of the current crisis facing American politics.

You recently published an alarming assessment of American politics and culture on your Facebook page, writing, "Everything happening in America and the world right now and for the last decade (rise of neofascism, Qanon/conspiracists, Trumpism, 'America First,' white nationalism, polarization, etc.) is leading me to believe we will face a period of darkness like we've never seen before." Could you elaborate? What specifically has you so worried about thisperiod of history?

Well, what's happened since Barack Obama's election is that we've seen the resurgence of a different kind of white supremacy. Up until that point, professionals, expertsand those in law enforcement were touting the supposed fact that white supremacist organizations were either dead or dying. They were claiming that hate groups were going away, no one was joining groups like the Klan or becoming skinheads anymoreand we were making great progress in combating white extremism. When Obama was elected, we saw a different kind of white supremacy. It wasn't about joining the Klan or neo-Nazi organizations. It became about recruiting and radicalizing the mainstream.

That's been happening now for a little longer than 12years. We've seen the Libertarian Party infiltrated, and conservative spaces infiltrated by the same ideology I was involved with 30 years ago. Todaywe are seeing the effects of it. The fact that we are still in a place as a nation where we cannot agree that we have a problem with white supremacy there are people who downplay the problem, there are others who are adamant that it doesn't even exist we are setting ourselves up for a big failure. I think after this administration we are going to see things become more conservative politically, and then government will exercise a stranglehold over how we combat white extremism. It is already tough now. We can't find a consensus on it, which means we can't properly fight it. Imagine how tough it will become when the federal government is under control of less friendly policymakers.

I wish that I could tell you something different, but everything I've seen happen over the last 30 years, and everything I see happening now, leads me to believe that we are in for a period of darkness. That means that law enforcement won't feel that it has the support to do what they need to do to arrest white extremist criminals. White extremist criminals will blossom, and they will feel that they have the leeway to push the envelope. At the same time, we are seeing the institutions we depend on for safety law enforcement, the military becoming infiltrated with the same ideologies that affected me 30 years ago. It is becoming more and more part of the mainstream.

What I've seen happen, slowly but surely, over the past 30 years is that words I used to say as a neo-Nazi skinhead, the belief system that I had when I was an avowed white supremacist, are now part of the mainstream discussion. We are seeing people who are not neo-Nazis, or at least not claiming to be, spouting off the same beliefs politicians, law enforcement officers, police unions. Sowe're in for a very rude awakening.

It is terrifying that if you compare the rhetoric of contemporary right-wing figures, includingDonald Trump, and the rhetoric in your memoir as you look back on your involvement with neo-Nazis, or the rhetoric of Timothy McVeigh, it isdifficult to find any daylight between them. Canyou specify what language, issuesand ideas that are now prominent in right-wing discourse and Republican Party propaganda resemble what you and your associates were saying when you were a neo-Nazi?

First, there is the more blatant conspiracy-oriented language, regarding the "others" controlling the power structure. That is starting to exist in the language of QAnon, in terms of talking about "globalism." But also, more specifically, what's penetrated the right is "replacement theory" or the "Great Replacement." What I mean by that is white supremacists believe that the demographics of the country are changing rapidly, and that soon white people will lose agency and power, because they will be the minority. Whether that is happening statistically or not is a different story, because what white supremacists believe is that it is an intentional process being put forward by global cabals of, in most cases, Jewish people who are trying to upset the balance of white power. White supremacists claim that diversity is genocide for the white race. They believe that the promotion of multiculturalism is a tool of white genocide.

We've started to hear those ideas, and similar ideas, come out of Tucker Carlson, aFox News host with millions of viewers. It isn't just people like me when I was hanging out in dark alleys reading pamphlets from other conspiracy theorists. People are now getting this theory and hatred from Donald Trump, and various people in his orbit. They are getting it from Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona. These are people with suits and ties. They look like the mainstream, they sound like the mainstreamand, in certain cases, they've been elected to powerful positions by the mainstream. And yet they are saying the same dangerous and outlandish things that a 17-year-old Christian Picciolini said when he was sporting a swastika tattoo.

It is the whole notion that if white people don't wake up now, that they will be overrun. If you watch Tucker Carlson, people like David Duke and Tom Metzger, in the old days, said almost the exact same thing. They said, "White people, wake up! Immigration, the religions that they are forcing down our throats, multiculturalism it'sall a conspiracy to destroy our white power." Sometimes they use more palatable language, but they are using fear rhetoric to make white people afraid that they are being overrun by these other people and forces. Whether it is Islam, refugees, crime, immigrantsor even the way they talk about outsourcing of jobs, it is all rooted in that same idea that white people have to be afraid.

And there is a certain set of policies that emanate out of that paranoia:"Build the wall," family separation, the Muslim ban, voter suppression. Doesthisracist paranoia explainwhy so many Republicans have overtly turned against electoral democracy? They are making a brazen attempt, through voter suppression and partisan seizure of election offices, to undermine democracy. Is that where the paranoia has taken us?

I think so. Voter suppression has been around a long time. Every time there is a push for inclusion, for more people to vote, there is voter suppression. If you go back to poll taxes and literacy tests, that's exactly what the Voting Rights Act was correcting. Yes, it was technically legal for Black peopleand othersto vote, but white people in power made it almost impossible. There has always been a pushback by people who hold power against relinquishing that power. If you look at who is in power, it is mostly white men. Now, as they see it slipping away, or as other people become empowered, they are ramping up the dirty tactics.

As someone who has been on both sides of it, how do you suggest that a civil society with a Bill of Rights that protects speech and the press should effectively deal with hate speech, racist incitementand neofascism? How do we strike a balance between preserving our freedoms but also aggressively tackling this problem?

That's a tough one. We must do a better job of preventing future generations from finding what you describe as a viable option. All we can do right now is fight our way through itand hope that we survive.

Ultimately, what we have to do is hold people accountable. I'm talking about criminals, not people who are just saying things. We have a hard time holding criminals to account for the crimes they've committed. Just last week,Brandon Russell, one of the founders of a white supremacist terrorist group, Atomwaffen Division, was released from prison after four years, and this is after investigators found illegal guns and bombmaking material in his apartment. There are probably people in prison longer for marijuana, and this guy, for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government with a mass casualty event, is free.

It is hard to cut the head off the snake, because we are fighting this war against extremism the same way we fought the war on drugs. We are arresting and going after a lot of addicts, instead of going against the smugglers that are enabling the problem.

To round that out, we also learned this week that the FBI had been supportingJoshua Sutter, a confidential informant who was a white supremacist for 18 years. They paid him over $100,000. This is a person who still today is publishing white supremacist books and other materials, and those materials are used to radicalize people into joining Atomwaffen Division. Sohere is our own government actively funding someone who is working to radicalize people. That's a problem.

How do we expect to defeat white extremism if their coffers are being filled by the people who are supposed to protect us? When I say that we are in for darknessbecause we aren't taking the right approach to combat extremism, that is exactly what I am talking about. First, we have to take care of that problem. Then we can have the tougher debate on what we do about hate speech.

I am also more of the mind that we need to do a better job of raising our children. Give them all the information that they need to succeed, and when they become adults, provide them with serviceslike health care, like higher education all those services we make difficult for people to access. In some cases, the only way people feel they can find agency is by joining hate groups, because they are the only ones who seem to pay attention to them, to listen to their problems. It is, of course, a toxic environment, and what they are getting is not positive interaction, but they are gravitating to these groupsbecause they are getting something that they should be getting from society instead. Sowe should be thinking about how we lay a foundation under young people so that joining a hate group doesn't even seem like an option, and so that what they offer is never attractive.

That brings us to your story, and your organization, Free Radicals. There probably isn't a massive group of people who have a family member or friend who is in a hate group. But many people know someone in QAnon or someone who has taken an ideologically dark turn. For the sake of them, can you talk about what Free Radicals does, and also address the steps to de-radicalize people?

The Free Radicals Project is a nonprofit organization that I founded to help people disengage from hate groups. Yes, you are accurate when you say that there aren't many members of hate groups. Now, most people with the hateful mindset aren't card-carrying members of the Klan. That's part of how things have shifted in the last 20 to 30 years. It is less about the groupand more about the movement. There is a coalescence into the general movement. What we do is work with people directly who are in these movements, and we recognize that they don't know how to disengage. Even if they are feeling doubt, they can't discuss that with their comrades.

As someone who has been there myself, I have the ability to listen. We are guides, and we guide them out. It begins with understanding that ideology is likely not what brought them there. It was a search for identity, communityand purpose. What I do is I offer people substitutes for the identity, communityand purpose that they've found, and replace them with things that are more positive. We work for ways to replace the identity they found or the community in which they feel welcomed and rewarded.

That process begins with identifying the "potholes" in their lives. Potholes are those things we all encounter on our journey. Potholes are trauma. So, what is the pothole the trauma that put them on the road to their direction? Without debating about their ideology, we focus on those potholesand find pothole fixers therapists, job trainers, teachers, life coaches, hobby groups, anything that can work to build a better foundation under them.

Isn't it true that you received a federal grant, but the Trump administration eliminated it?

My old organization that I co-founded, Life After Hate, applied for and won a $400,000 grant in 2016. We never received the money, because the administration had changed. In December 2016, we were notified by the Obama administration that we won. In the early months of theTrump administration, we were notified that we would not receive the grant. They had reviewed our applicationand rescinded it. We were the only organization out of 36 that had the grant revoked. We were also the only one that was focusing on white supremacy. All of the others were focusing on Islamist extremism.

That speaks to the larger issue. Earlier, you used the word "terrorist." As you know, FBI statistics show that white supremacy organizationsand related hate groupsare responsible for more murders of Americans than any other extremists since 9/11. We all watched the gruesome and sad footage of Jan.6. But it still seems that most of white America remains blas about the terrorist threat of white hate.

Absolutely. That is one of the biggest reasons why we can't combat it. We can't even name it. We refuse to look in the mirrorand face that it is other Americans,not foreigners,who are the biggest threat to American democracy. We need to get over that hump, and recognize that these people are terrorists. They are criminals. We need to call them out and hold them accountable as such. My concern is that we don't have the will to call it out.

Is that part of what motivates your new podcast, "F Your Racist History"?

Yes, that was part of it. After 25 years, I've taken it upon myself to try to educate Americans about the world I was part of, because few others were stepping up to do that. I also learned a lot as I was going through my transition. We did an episode on Henry Ford, and I knew about him when I was a Nazi. I knew then that he was a supporter of Hitler. The rest of the world didn't know that. We had a museum about Henry Ford. Every town had a Ford dealership.

Sosome of the podcast is about things I already knewbut few others seemed to discuss, and some of it is what I've learned about American history. It is part of a recognition that if we don't know where we came from, how the hell are we going to measure our progress? And part of it is that if we can't admit that we've been part of this that we've all been complicit we aren't going to stop it.

Currently, there is all this hysteria over "critical race theory." Until a few months ago, it was a relatively obscure legal theory taught almost exclusively in law schools. Many polls confirm that most people claiming to have passionate objections to itdon't even know what it is. Soit is effectively an umbrella term, for those rallying against any instruction of systemic racism and, as you say, "complicity." Why is it important that Americans learn the true history of our country, and why is there so much backlash against that, wherethey aregoing so far as to try to ban it in colleges and high schools?

As Americans, as people who tout our democracy, we need to understand what we are preaching. We need to understand where we come from. We should be proud of how far we've come, but we also have to recognize that there are still many people oppressed and excluded due to institutional racism. Until we address those things, we are creating an ecosystem that is breeding racists. As long as there are people who benefit from racism, there will be people who are attracted to it. If we ever hope to make an equitable society, we have to understand the progressbut also the ugliness, and also identify all the things that are preventing us from becoming an equitable society today.

White supremacists and the right wing are using "critical race theory" to make white people afraid that their society is going to deprive them, and turn everyone else against them. The irony is that is exactly what they are covering up that white people, for centuries, have divided people and treated everyone else unequally. They are afraid of the mask being torn off. They are also bankingthat most people aren't going to do the intellectual work to understand what they are talking about. They will just emotionally buy into it.

I talked earlier about identity, communityand purpose and potholes as they relate to individuals, but I also thinkthe United Statesas a country right nowis struggling with its identity, communityand purpose. We have a whole history of potholes that we've not dealt with, and until we deal with themwe are going to keep finding ourselves going off onto the fringe. Right nowwe are dealing with so much uncertainty relating to the pandemic, politics, jobs, health care, so much else. Well, uncertainty is the one ingredient that allows extremism to thrive. Sowe are in a very dangerous position. We are on a tinderbox. We have to be really vigilant about dealing with it.

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Ex-neo-Nazi Christian Picciolini: "The words I used to say are now part of the mainstream" - Salon

A rusted vehicle in the wreck of the Karlsruhe.Photo: TOMASZ STACHURA / SANTI

Last year, a team of Polish divers discovered the wreck of the Nazi steamer Karlsruhe. The wreck was loaded with china, vehicles, and other wartime cargo, and the dive team is set to return in the coming days to further investigate. In particular, theyre interested in some unopened crates that went down with the ship. The team may even bring some items to the surface.

The shipwreck was found in September 2020 by a team from Baltictech, a diving company seeking several shipwrecks of vessels involved in Operation Hannibal, one of the largest sea evacuations in history that saw the Nazis flee Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. The Baltictech team took photographs of some of the Karlsruhe wreck when it was discovered. Somewhat confusingly, the Karlsruhe was one of two Nazi vessels of that name that sunk during World War II. The Karlsruhe that Baltictech is investigating is a steamer found some 40 miles off the coast of Poland; the other Karlsruhe was a Nazi warship that sunk off Norway in 1940. Both shipwrecks were found last fall.

The steamer was one of the last Nazi vessels to leave the Prussian city of Knigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) as Soviet forces retook the city in April 1945. Besides its 360 tons of cargo, the ship carried 150 soldiers from an elite Nazi regiment and about 900 civilians. Two days after the ship left Knigsberg, it was sunk by Soviet aircraft, leaving 113 survivors, according to the Associated Press. The Karlsruhe differed from the other ships involved in the operation in that it primarily carried cargo, the refugees boarded at the last minute, said Tomasz Zwara, a diver with the Baltictech team, in a press release emailed to Gizmodo.

Now nearly 300 feet underwater, the wreck is tough to dive on. Spending about half an hour at such depths requires two and a half hours of decompression. Because the ship was one of the last to leave the region, the Baltictech team thinks it may be laden with valuables the Nazis hoped to hold onto as they fled. Thats why theunopened crates aboard the wreck are of such interest to the team.

Some of the intriguing crate debris found on the shipwreck.Photo: TOMASZ STACHURA / SANTI

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We will dive and check whats in the crates without destroying them, said Tomasz Stachura, the president of the SANTI diving company and a technical diver who previously visited the wreck, in an email to Gizmodo. The dive team may bring objects to surface if they deem them worthy of further inspection and will have a representative from the National Maritime Museum in Gdansk, Poland aboard to advise.

The crates, unopened for three-quarters of a century, could easily carry mundane items of daily life in Knigsberg. But they also could contain valuables looted by the Nazis during the war. Stachura hopes that the wreck may hold the answer to what happened to the Amber Room, a luxurious paneled room in St. Petersburgs Catherine Palace that was looted by the Nazis and brought to Knigsberg, where it vanished during the war.

We do not have any hard evidence that the Amber Room is there [in the wreck], but nobody has any hard evidence that Amber Room is elsewhere, Stachura told Atlas Obscura last year. The truth is that the Germans wanting to send something valuable to the west could only do it by means of Karlsruhe, as this was their last chance [to get it out of Prussia].

While a treasure hunt may prove fruitless, the upcoming dive will give the team a better understanding of whats left of the Karlsruhe and what it carried on its final voyage to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

More: Heres What Protects Shipwrecks From Looters and Hacks

Read more:

Dive Team to Investigate Wreck of Sunken Nazi Steamer - Gizmodo

Victoria plans to be the first state to make public Nazi symbols illegal.

Victoria is set to be the first state or territory to outlaw the display of Nazi symbols, as part of a new Anti-Racism Strategy.

The state government says the legislation to ban the public display of Nazi symbols comes in recognition of the rise of neo-Nazi activity.

Neo-Nazi groups have been festering in Australia. A report earlier this month by the The Age and SMHexplains that the neo-Nazi group The Nationalist Socialist Network has been raising money to buy property to form the genesis of a new, racist state. The report is harrowing, and alleges the groups members range from ex-military men to government employees and even a childrens piano teacher.

ASIO General General Mike Burgess told 60 Minutes that 50 percent of its on-shore priority counter terrorism caseload is taken up by neo-Nazi cells, and that it was a reflection of the global trend here.

Victorias minister of multicultural affairs, Ros Spence, says the Nazi symbols glorify one of the most hateful ideologies in human history. We must confront hate, prevent it, and give it no space to grow.

The Victorian Government says it will carefully assess how to ban the display of Nazi symbols to ensure appropriate exceptions are in place, such as for educational or historical purposes, or for other uses of the symbol.

In a further move to strengthen Victorias anti-hate protections, the new laws will move beyond covering race and religion to also include sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, sexual orientation, disability and HIV/AIDs status. The changes will make it easier for people who want to take action through the courts to prove vilification.

Earlier this year, a report by the Victorian Parliaments Legal and Social Issues Committee found that vilification impacted Victorians across culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, faith groups, people with a disability and also people from the LGTBIQ community.

Attorney-general Jaclyn Symes says the Victorian Government will consult widely with the community and impacted groups to get the settings right before making legislative changes.

The legislation is expected to come in the first half of 2022.

Photo Credit: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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Daniel Andrews Moves To Ban Nazi Symbols And Strengthen Anti-Hate Protections - Junkee

We now know why we should read a Nazi memoir: because it shows the need to examine the discourses that haunt nations even today. Then, the documents of historic trials such as Nuremberg, offer insights, via the documentation, on how cults and political parties worked.

Documents and texts produced by such parties, cults and organisations, written by the foot soldiers and ordinary men and women who decided to go and work in the killing fields of Nazi Germany, Poland and other places are, however, more difficult to come across. Daniel Goldhagen set out to find answer to the question When Hitler decided on the annihilation of the Jews, why did the Germans actively participate in the plan? and his search resulted in Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996), a meticulous, if controversial, documentation of the ordinariness of Nazi executioners.

But, better than these looking-back texts is a volume published in 1938, on the cusp of the World War. Built on a collection of over 700 autobiographical essays of different lengths collected in 1934, a year after Adolf Hitler acquired power, the book set out to examine why middle-class youth, farmers, bank clerks, soldiers, in their millions, between 1928 and 1933, joined the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party and transformed it into a political movement.

Theodore Abels Why Hitler Came Into Power

Theodore Abel, a Columbia University sociologist, collected these first-person accounts in order to ask: what motivated the ordinary Germans to become Nazis? Why was National Socialism an attractive political movement? Abel proposed an essay contest for the best personal life history of an adherent of the Hitler movement, with cash prizes for the most detailed and trustworthy accounts.

The participants had to provide full details of their family life, education, economic conditions, memberships in associations, participation in the Hitler movement, and important experiences, thoughts and feelings about events and ideas in the post-war [i.e., World War I] world.

Abels aim was to understand from these autobiographies the reasons why people flocked to Hitler. The result of this massive project was Abels Why Hitler Came Into Power, a unique and frightening text from within the minds and consciousness of people who went on to become Nazis.

Here is why

In Auschwitz, in a Primo Levi episode that would provide the most horrific slogan (if that is what it is), the thirsty Levi breaks off an icicle to quench his thirst. A Nazi guard snatches away the icicle, and the bewildered Levi asks, Why? The guard responds: Here there is no why. That such an event came to a pass merits, however, a why question.

Midway through his book, Abel asks the why of the Hitler movement. He offers four responses:

We can see the answers to the why from the accounts in the volume. It is to be kept in mind that these accounts are about the why of joining the Nazis, well before the Second World War, but it requires only a small imaginative leap to ask the same people who join totalitarian parties, hate mobs and such organisations even today.

Abel demonstrates how discontent offered a common focus for many oppositions and made concerted action on a large scale possible. Discontent on the part of individuals had a direct effect upon their subsequent joining of the Hitler movement, writes Abel. Hitler projected national unity was based on a racial doctrine, the idea that common blood binds individuals into a Gemeinschaft [community] and that racial intermixture is the cause of disunity as well as the deterioration of native stock. A workers autobiographical account in Abels book states:

Faith was the one thing that always led us on, faith in Germany, faith in the purity of our nation and faith in our leaderSome day the world will recognize that the Reich we established with blood and sacrifice is destined to bring peace and blessing to the world.

An account by an anti-Semite records how he listened to speeches about the Jewish conspiracy, prosperity and threat. At a gathering, he records, everyone cried: Out with the Jew! The mass media contributed to the general feeling: Every honest German artisan was of the firm conviction that everything printed in a newspaper was true.. The man writes, In Germany everything in politics and economics at that time depended on Jews, and so, I occupied myself with the Jewish problem. He decides: Fight against the Jew by all means, as the embodiment of wickedness and evil. When he first read Mein Kampf, he was gripped by the greatness of thoughtsI was eternally bound to this man. Hitler, the man concludes, was given to the German nation as our savior, bringing light into darkness.

The account by a soldier describes the corruption in German Marxism, and how, when he embraced Nazism, he found his Gemeinschaft. The sacrifices, he writes, were borne for the sake of this Gemeinschaft. Hitlers call to duty was enough, he writes:

Honors and dignities do not matter. All that counts is that as soldiers of the front we keep out promise to Germany The Leader is calling, gun in hand! And everything else falls away.

The story of a middle-class youth is the autobiography of a young mans discovery of National Socialism (which was initially opposed in schools and in most families, as he notes). His conversion makes him realise: I made up my mind that I would have to choose between politics and family. Enrolled in the party, he describes how the Fuehrer had promised to bring freedom and food to the German people. In the countryside, the peasants clung to the Fuehrer with reverence and love, and even in the larger cities the working class raised its hand in respect to him. For the middle-class youth, we will find strength in our Fuehrer, who arouses in us the slumbering ideals of Germanic freedom and heroism.

Fhrerparade: Wehrmacht troops parading for Hitler in Warsaw, Poland, 1939. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

From these accounts we can see the answer to the why: why the middle-class youth, the worker, the soldier all took to National Socialism and then to Hitler. Given an enemy, a purpose, an ideology and a charismatic leader, the ordinary German found a route to glory and prosperity for the entire race. And nothing would hinder the march on that route.

It is on that march, unstoppable, brutal, often inexplicable that, when faced with the bewildered Jews question, why, the Nazi was able to respond without hesitation, here there is no why.

Also read: George Orwells Review of Mein Kampf Tells Us as Much About Our Own Time as Hitlers

Why we need to understand the Why

Abels collection provides astonishing first-hand accounts of the process and cultural psychological conditioning through which the ordinary Germans were able to explain, defend and even rationalise to themselves and to those who listened, the extermination of the Jews, and the need for war. Melita Maschmann, a propagandist in Nazi Germany, in Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self, writes:

On the Night of the Broken Glass our feelings had not yet hardened to the sight of human suffering as they were later during the war. Perhaps if I had met one of the persecuted and oppressed, an old man with the fear of death in his face, perhaps

This is another of the responses, alongside the many in Abels work, to the why. The depersonalisation and dehumanisation of the enemy, reducing them to an unimportant life form so that there was no guilt in the Nazi when executing or torturing them, is captured in Maschmanns memoir (Maschmann corresponded with Hannah Arendt after the war).

In his interviews, available in Gitta Serenyis Into that Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, the largest of the extermination camps, described how he began his career in the police, flushing out villains here and thereit was all good experience and I knew it wouldnt hurt my record. His interviewer Serenyi notes how however terrible the stories he was telling, Stangl was constantly to fall back into police jargon he was a villain. Later, when asked how he could take part in the extermination, Stangl says:

It was a matter of survivalThe only way I could live was by compartmentalizing my thinking.if the subject was the government, the object the Jews, and the action the gassings, then I could tell myself that for me the fourth element, intent was missing.

In a nations history, when discourses of dehumanisation, metaphors of animalisation and excess [the fear of minority numbers] are employed against communities, then we should recall how the ordinary men and women in Nazi Germany came to accept that the extermination of a race was integral to their nation. When we see cults and politics and they become interchangeable after a point offering answers to the why in the form of scapegoating or victim-blaming, we are on the cusp of disaster. The intent, as Stangl claims, is missing because he, like all Nazis, was trying to survive.

A general view of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland, January 19, 2015. Photo: Reuters/Pawel Ulatowski

However, Goldhagen in his book examining the why, again, of everymans participation in the genocide, argues that acts of initiative (Germans who on their own set out to torture and kill) and excesses are really both acts of initiative, not done as the mere carrying out of superior orders. He proposes that whatever the cognitive and value structures of individuals may be, changing the incentive structure in which they operate might, and in many cases will certainly induce them to alter their actions. In a debate at the Holocaust Museum with Christopher Browning (author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland), Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer and others, Goldhagen would put it pithily:

The German perpetrators, namely those who themselves killed Jews or helped to kill them, willingly did so because they shared a Hitlerian view of Jews, and therefore believed the extermination to be just and necessary.

Incentive structures and the vision offered by leaders that rewire the cognitive include: the law refusing to take its course, rewards by the party/organisation, even a career. Such structures embolden and produce the initiative to go after the Jews that Goldhagen saw in the ordinary Germans. This is an initiative that has been tragically replicated since then: heroes pointing guns at enemies in public spaces, hate speech targeting communities, law enforcement officials rewarded in their careers for being biased against communities, and others. If there is a reward in selling someone down the river, the cognitive dissonance that otherwise would prevent inhuman behaviour, is no longer in operation.

Also read: When Hitler Realised the End of the War Was Upon Him

There is no why in the minds of the perpetrators because the why has been provided for, by the party, the cult, the leader. This is not to say that they have signed away their minds. Rather, the minds have been rewired through regular dollops of incentives, immunity (from prosecution), and the whys provided top-down. Clearly, the ordinary Germans no longer needed to ask why since the incentive structures of pure Gemeinschaft, race or nation, the illusion of prosperity for the pure are adequate to alter cognitive and value systems.

What Abels documentation of the ordinary-as-excess, like Goldhagens, teaches us is this: if we do not ask why, the heinous actions we see around us will be explained as why not.

Pramod K. Nayarteaches at the University of Hyderabad.

Read more:

Why People Flocked to Hitler, and Why the Nazis Believed Here There Is No Why - The Wire

Camp Atterbury is set to host thousands of evacuees who assisted U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and now face retribution from the Taliban in the coming days.

CAMP ATTERBURY, Ind. When Afghan evacuees fleeing the Taliban arrive on the grounds of Camp Atterbury in the coming days, they will be living inside a facility that once prepared U.S. military personnel for battle, housed Nazi and Italian prisoners of war, and healed soldiers recovering from warfronts across the world.

Camp Atterbury has a long military history dating back to World War II.

Facilities there, located near Edinburgh in southern Indiana, rose up from what used to be farmland for 500 Hoosiers just nine months after the shock of Pearl Harbor.

By August 1942, thousands of soldiers were being trained in the particulars of warfare, learning specialties like artillery, tank battalions, and more.

It wasn't just troops bound for the European or Japanese theaters that checked in through Camp Atterbury's front gates, though.

The United States would see nearly half a million Axis fighters through it's gates to be kept as prisoners of war, in facilities across the country, between 1943 and 1946.

Camp Atterbury was just one of nine internment camps set up to hold enemy POWs across Indiana.

Thousands of soldiers, mostly Italian and German, made their way into the camp from 1943 to 1946.

Over the course of three years, Camp Atterbury would earn a reputation for hospitality towards those captured enemy fighters. The largely Roman Catholic contingent of Axis prisoners of war were even permitted to built a chapel there, which still stands today.

One of those Italian soldiers, Libbero Puccini, carved the camp's "Camp Atterbury" rock.

He fell in love with an American, and eventually became a citizen of the United States. His son, Lt. Colonel Marcus Puccini, would go on to serve the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a C-130 pilot with the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

The hospital there, Wakeman Army Hospital, became a place where soldiers fresh from fighting were treated and could try to recover before rejoining society.

As World War II drew to a close in 1946, Camp Atterbury was discontinued as a military base.

In 1968, it was again discontinued as a military base after providing support throughout the Korean War, though the Indiana National Guard was based there.

For the next thirty years, throughout the 1970s and 1990s, it largely functioned as a base for the Indiana National Guard and to provide support for conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East, including Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Following the September 11 attacks, Camp Atterbury once again became a site where reserve and regular troops prepared for overseas combat.

Throughout the duration of the Afghan War, Camp Atterbury often marked the last stop for thousands of U.S. soldiers who were headed to conflict in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. For family members of servicemen, it was sometimes the place of a final goodbye.

Today, it serves as the training ground for the Indiana National Guard and other branches of the U.S. military.

Now, for not the first time in it's history, Camp Atterbury is preparing for a new role.

The site will provide temporary housing for Afghan special immigration applicants, their families and other at-risk individuals.

Some 5,000 evacuees from Afghanistan will arrive in the United States on special immigrant visas, which they obtained by helping the United States during the decades-long war in Afghanistan.

Active duty and National Guard service members at Camp Atterbury will provide housing, medical, logistics, and transportation.

Representative Greg Pence said Camp Atterbury will start building support over the next week to house approximately 5,000 Afghan evacuees fleeing from the Taliban.

It is not yet clear when the first evacuees will arrive, but authorities expect that it could be as soon as the next few days.

Continued here:

Camp Atterbury, the place where thousands of Afghan evacuees seek refuge, once held Nazi POWs - WTHR

The Ministry of Equality that directs Irene Montero has included as a speaker for an official conference in Santander, in collaboration with the Menndez Pelayo International University, the controversial feminist activist, Pamela Palenciano, who has starred in monologues stating in relation to Vox that there should not be a party full of Nazis in the Congress of Deputies.

Specifically, this signing from the department of Montero will participate in the seminar which will take place this Monday and Tuesday at the Palacio de La Magdalena de Santander under the title Towards a feminist radicalization of democracy. It is organized by the Institute for Women, under the Ministry of Equality. In fact, Irene Montero will participate in the inauguration of these days with the seal of the Social Communist Government, together with the rector of the Menndez Pelayo International University, Mara Luz Morn.

In his case, Palenciano will intervene in the last presentation, called New violence against women in public space: digital violence and will share a table with the gathering Cristina Fallars. Among the objectives of this seminar, according to the Womens Institute, is to examine how feminism can become an authentic realization of the democratic ideal if it is capable of confronting the various axes of domination that are operating and that prevent the achievement of true social justice, says the Ministry of Equality.

The activist Pamela Palenciano. (Photo: EP)

However, the controversial monologues that Palenciano has produced clash squarely with this democratic ideal. For example, calling those dissenting from their gender ideology Nazis, on this occasion, Vox, the countrys third largest force. Furthermore, in those monologues, titled Not only do the blows hurt, also assured that Vox voters are rabble, that the conquest of America was a Authentic genocide and that the patriarchy began twenty-one centuries ago, in reference to Christianity.

Alleged crime

Recently, Palenciano has been in the news in the same way when it was known that the Court of Instruction No. 15 of Madrid has admitted to processing the complaint presented by the Association of Abused Men against her for an alleged crime of degrading treatment of men in such monologues. Thus, both Palenciano and its producer were summoned to testify on September 15.

The Association of Abused Men filed a complaint against Palenciano for attacking those actions against the male gender, even causing some students to leave the room in the middle of the session, as in a show offered in Linares (Jan), organized by the City Councils Department of Equality (PSOE).

The activist defines her show as a monologue that starts from the personal to the political as a way of transforming the macho romantic love models . Now, next Tuesday, he will exercise this activism again in a seminar paid for by the Ministry of Equality, with money from all taxpayers.

Link:

Montero signs the activist who called Vox Nazi to give lessons in feminist democracy&#... - Market Research Telecast

While some of the greatest artworks had been looted by the Nazis and were recovered after the war, thousands are missing to this day.

Rome, 1944. German soldiers stand outside of the Palazzo Venezia with Giovanni Paolo Paninis Carlo III di Borbone che visita il papa Benedetto XIV nella coffee-house del Quirinale a Roma. The 1746 oil on canvas painting was taken from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, but now safely rests in the citys Museo di Capodimonte

Starting in 1933 with the seizure of property belonging to German Jews and continuing until the curtains closed on the European theatre of the Second World War in 1945, the Nazis plundered roughly 650,000 pieces of art from across the continent. While many of these pieces were retrieved, in large part by the efforts of the famed Monuments Men, around 30,000 of the looted artworks remain missing to this day.

Adolf Hitler was no stranger to the world of art. He himself was an avid painter and in his youth planned to pursue the passion as a career but abandoned the idea after being rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna twice. As much as he was a lover of the brush and canvas, he reserved a special kind of dislike for modern art, referring to it as degenerate in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, and condemning such movements as Dadaism, Cubism, and Futurism as being a product of a decadent twentieth-century society.

In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and wasted no time incorporating his so strongly felt distaste for modern art into the political system. Drawings, sculptures and classical paintings, such as portraits and landscapes by Old Masters, could stay in Germanys state museums. All else was to be sold or destroyed. And hence, the great Nazi art heist began.

Missing, presumed destroyed. Jean Metzingers En Canot, 1913, oil on canvas, was exhibited at The Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937

But the removal of what Hitler deemed distasteful artworks from the nations galleries and museums for profit or destruction was not enough for the Nazis. Much like penitent public drunkards, 650 pieces of the confiscated art were first to be exhibited to the public for their mirthful derision. In July of 1937 Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst" (The Degenerate Art Exhibition) opened in Munich. The day before to the exhibitions opening, Hitler conducted a speech that declared merciless war on cultural disintegration and went so far as to say that the German art world was afflicted with a great and fatal illness.

Though, the Nazis struggled significantly in the sale of the seized artworks. Putting so much emphasis on the inferior quality of the pieces had backfired. On March 20, 1939, in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department, close to 5,000 paintings, sculptures, watercolors, drawings and prints were set alight in an act of propaganda similar to the Nazis infamous book burnings. As utterly tragic as the event was, the desired result was achieved. Suddenly there was no shortage of buyers for the so-called degenerate art. But it wasnt solely the eradication, or profit from such art that fueled the great Nazi art heist Hitler also had plans for a great art museum. The Fhrermuseum, which was to be located in the city of Linz, Austria, never reached realization, which is ironically unfortunate, because if most of the pieces that had been earmarked for the large museum had been housed there when Nazi Germany fell, it would have made a sizable part of the process of recovery and subsequent return much easier.

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver, and gold on canvas, Neue Galerie, New York

Over the Nazis twelve-year reign many famed paintings fell into their clutches, including Klimts Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The painting, also known as The Woman in Gold, was commissioned by Jewish banker and sugar producer Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the sitters husband. The piece was abandoned when Ferdinand was forced to flee the city of Vienna following the Anschluss of Austria the annexation of the country into Nazi Germany in 1938. It was subsequently stolen in 1941 from the large art collection left behind. After a lengthy legal battle, the painting was sold by Ferdinands niece Maria Altmann to Ronald Lauder, art collector and co-founder of New Yorks Neue Galerie.

Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, 1489-90, oil on walnut panel, Czartoryski Museum, Krakw

Leonardo da Vincis famed Lady with an Ermine suffered a similar fate. In an anticipatory move made as a result from the imminent German occupation of Poland, the painting was relocated from the city of Krakw to the much smaller town of Sieniawa, in hope that it would be safer there, as it had been during the November Uprising (the Russian-Polish war) of 1830-1. Unfortunately, the Nazis still discovered the painting, and it was sent to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Nazi Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank (also known as the Butcher of Poland), noticed the painting housed in the museum in 1940, and requested that it be returned to Krakw.

Consistent with the masterpieces history of transiency, it was relocated to Wawel Castle, where Franks suite of offices was housed, before being transferred to a warehouse deposit of plundered art in Breslau in 1941. It was then brought back to Wawel Castle and exhibited. But that wasnt the Ladys final wartime resting place; it was discovered by Allied troops at Franks countryside villa in the small town of Schliersee, Bavaria, near the conflicts end. It was returned to Poland in 1946.

Monuments Men and a Polish liaison officer pose with the Lady with an Ermine upon its return to Poland in 1946

The Nazis went on to plunder artwork from every country that they occupied, particularly targeting Jewish property, with many pieces ending up in the private collections of high-ranking Nazi officers. In order to help protect precious European art from the Nazis hands, the Allies created special commissions, such as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) organization, whose members would become known to the world as the Monuments Men. Over 1,050 repositories for looted artwork in Germany and Austria were discovered in such places as salt mines, tunnels, and secluded castles. Although many of stolen artworks have been returned to their rightful owners, a high number still remain missing, and every now and again come to light in an unexpected manner.

In 2012, a trove of over one thousand paintings, drawings, and prints were discovered in the Munich apartment of a reclusive octogenarian after he was investigated for suspected tax evasion. Of these pieces, around two to three hundred were believed to have originated from Nazi looting. The large stash, which likely contained pieces exhibited in 1937s Degenerate Art Exhibition, belonged to Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Hildebrand Gurlitt a Nazi-associate art dealer. The collection, which contained works from revered artists such as Renoir, Chagall, Czanne, and Matisse, was confiscated by the German government and subsequently investigated by a large team of international researchers. Fourteen pieces proven to have been looted under Nazi rule have now been returned to their original owners, although surprisingly Gurlitt named the Museum of Fine Arts Bern in Switzerland as the sole heir to the trove shortly before his death in 2014, leading to the remainder of the dubious collection being housed there today.

Even though countless paintings that the Nazis seized during their truly horrifying reign were completely destroyed, it is still quite possible that many that werent will someday resurface.

For more onauctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit ourMagazine Page

Continue reading here:

Great Art Heists of History: The Nazis' War Against Modern Art - MutualArt.com

Since the white supremacist rallies in the US city of Charlottesville in 2017, the financing of far-right movements and figures has increasingly come under the microscope.

Experts told The Feed that in the past five years, neo-Nazis and members of the far-right have become more evasive and sophisticated at hiding their finances.

In May, Australian neo-Nazi and leader of the National Socialist Network Thomas Sewell was arrested by counter-terrorism police following an alleged assault in a Victorian national park.

Police claim Sewell, along with a group of Caucasian men, swarmed a car after noticing a man had been filming them.

Its alleged Sewell, who was denied bail in June, punched the passenger side window.

Shortly after Sewell was arrested, one of his supporters took over his messaging channel on Telegram.

The Feed has seen Telegram messages, sent by an associate of Sewell, asking supporters to donate cryptocurrency to Sewells legal and prison fund.

The Feed has observed the removal of several fundraisers for Sewell on the crowdfunding site BuyMeACoffee. On Telegram, one of Sewells associates also regularly pleads for donations in the cryptocurrency Monero.

The commies took down my previous fundraiser, Ill just keep remaking them, a message in Sewells Telegram read.

The legal process is not cheap and every dollar donated towards it is a dollar saved from our movement funds.

They are better spent on gym equipment, tech equipment and expanding our operations.

Stacked cryptocurrency coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin)

iStock Editorial

Any leftover funds will be spent on increasing the racism capability of the Australian Klan, a message in Telegram read.

Sewell was charged with assaulting a black Channel 9 security guard in March. In video footage seen by The Feed, Sewell appeared to punch the security guard several times in the head, while an unknown associate filmed the assault.

In the video, the guard was knocked to the ground and racially abused, with the associate telling him: "dance monkey, dance"

A spokesperson from the Australian Federal Police confirmed they had observed individuals attempting to raise funds for Sewell for legal fees and other legitimate expenses.

Provided the solicitation and application of funds are clearly for the purpose of legal expenses or welfare issues, there is no illegality, the spokesperson said.

The AFP continues to examine whether groups and individuals breach Commonwealth laws, they added.

Our primary concern is when extremist views develop into planning or facilitation of violent activities, which constitutes a terrorist act.

The use of cryptocurrency among the far-right and neo-Nazis is pervasive, according to US extremism researcher Professor Megan Squire.

You cant really be on the far-right without using, and being familiar with, cryptocurrencies at this point, Professor Squire told The Feed.

Four or five years ago that wasnt true. But today, it certainly is.

Professor Squire said the switch to cryptocurrency was largely sparked by members of the far-right being cut off from traditional financing methods like online banking and PayPal.

A spokesperson at the AFP told The Feed, Ideologically motivated individuals and groups are more organised, sophisticated and security-conscious than in the past.

John Bambenek, an American cybersecurity expert who built a neo-Nazi bitcoin transactions tracker, said the use of cryptocurrency is also tied to ideology.

For neo-Nazi groups, if you truly believe this whole antisemitic nonsense, which includes the kind of Jewish world banking conspiracy, what else are you going to use?

The Australian Federal Police says financing of far-right groups is becoming more sophisticated.

http://www.afp.gov.au

In 2017, a Melbourne court convicted Cottrell of inciting hatred, contempt and ridicule of Muslims after making a video in 2015 in which he beheaded a dummy in protest of a Bendigo mosque. His attempt to appeal against this conviction was lost in 2019.

I had my bank account my personal bank account, I was using to try to raise funds to keep paying my barrister, they closed it, Cottrell said in the YouTube video seen by The Feed.

So I just had to end up accepting the conviction because I couldnt afford to keep paying the court fees.

In the video, Cottrell also complained that hed been censored from social media, lost jobs due to his political ideology, and had his PayPal account closed.

Sewells associate, who has been fundraising for his legal costs, also had his bank account shut down in July.

In messages seen by The Feed, the man shares a screenshot of a letter from his bank. He complains his bank advised him they will no longer provide me with any services and are shutting down all my business accounts.

From fundraising for legal costs to buying exercise equipment for community gyms, there is a range of ways the far-right spends its cryptocurrency.

Professor Squire said those on the far-right are often tight-lipped about their earnings and how they spend donations.

They don't tend to be very flashy with their wealth, she said.

Even the guys that have tons of Bitcoin or got really big donations and stuff, they don't tend to flash it around.

Crypto Cryptocurrency Bitcoin Processor Mining

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A lot of the guys that are involved in these movements are pretty working-class, hand to mouth kind of thing, but they're not wealthy people, she said.

I think they would be really turned off if their leaders were doing that.

Professor Squires research for the Southern Poverty Law Center showed a handful of leaders of the global white nationalist movement have raised significant sums of money through streaming platform DLive.

DLive was initially created as a video game streaming platform. It attracted many far-right supporters due to its loose enforcement of prohibited speech, which essentially allowed streamers who were using the site to say whatever they wanted.

In January, rioters used the site to broadcast themselves storming the US Capitol, with some earning significant donations for their live streams.

Streamers who use the site can make thousands of dollars thanks to donations from online viewers using a currency called lemons. The highest content creator using DLive netted USD $62,250.75 in donations from April to October 2020.

I think it was a shock to a lot of people how much money they were actually pulling in because it was just the numbers were so high, Professor Squire said.

For the first time, we were able to uncover the transaction logs and show how much money these guys were making, she said.

It wasnt really obvious to the outside world that they were absolutely just dripping in cash.

Supporters of former Preisdent Donald Trump climbing the west wall of the US Capitol in Washington during the 6 January riot.

AP

Bitcoin is much easier to track than some other cryptocurrencies, according to Mr Bambenek. He told The Feed while Bitcoin is anonymous, it is not private.

So you can enter in a wallet [address], see all the transactions in and out and whether it's balanced, he said.

Following the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Mr Bambenek developed a Twitter bot to track the Bitcoin transactions of the far-right.

What we noticed is because of the way I was providing transparency to what they were doing, their behaviour started changing, Mr Bambenek said.

Daily Stormer, for instance, very explicitly references an article I worked on CNN with as to why they switched to [cryptocurrency] Monero, which obscures the transactions.

White nationalist demonstrators walk into Lee park surrounded by counter demonstrators in Charlottesville, 2017.

AP

The data is still there, everybody kind of sees that there is a transaction. But you don't get any detail [about addresses] unless you have the encryption key, he said.

As the far-right become smarter at making its financing clandestine, there are tell-tale signs in their transactions of anti-semitic and white supremacist beliefs.

Professor Squire said Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, received two donations in the lead up to the Charlottesville rallies.

The unknown donor gave the amount 0.88USD once and then 14.88USD five days later.

88 and 1488 are both, you know, tweaks on 14 words, which is one of the little slogans that they use to represent what they believe in as far as racism, Professor Squire said.

The 88 is for H,H, the letters of the alphabet. It stands for Heil Hitler.

Professor Squire said she searched over 300 known wallets for Bitcoin and other coin addresses and found several 100 different transactions in those amounts.

People fly into the air as a vehicle is driven into a group of protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

AAP

It isnt feasible to ask cryptocurrencies like Monero to ban neo-Nazis from using digital currencies, Professor Squire said. She explained that often the people behind developing these currencies are unknown.

But it may be possible to put pressure on what Professor Squire calls the two ends of the pipeline.

Monero, Bitcoin, whatever the currency is, at some point, it has to come out, she said.

You got to buy groceries, you got to put food on the table, pay your rent and your landlord might not take Bitcoin

Professor Squire said eventually people will withdraw cryptocurrencies and transfer them into real money.

The places where that happens, those exchanges, are places where pressure can be applied, she said.

Mr Bambenek said laws should be strengthened to regulate Coinbase exchanges. He said governments can legislate to force customers to provide their identity.

That's the only real place of enforcement and some of those are willing to act and some try to stay under the radar.

But every time that we poke them and try to expose them and kick them off, they get a little bit better. And eventually, they're going to get good.

See the rest here:

Following the paper trail: How neo-Nazis make their money - SBS News

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Bengaluru: Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington, USA, have developed new forensic tracking techniques that could locate lost uranium from the Nazi Germany atomic weapons program. Over 600 cubes of Uranium, that were parts of plans for a nuclear reactor and an atomic bomb, went missing from a secret underground laboratory at the end of World War 2 and were taken to the US. Until today, only a handful have been located while the others were likely trafficked.

The new technique was developed when researchers received access to three of the purported uranium cubes. Their findings were presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society last week.

Also read: 5 ways 1945 nuclear attack on Hiroshima-Nagasaki continues to impact the world

The technique used to test the cubes origins is radiochronometry, or dating samples using natural radioactive isotopes (chemical elements with the same number of protons but different number of neutrons). Radiochronometry is regularly used by geologists to date ancient rocks and minerals, and the researchers hope that using the technique will reveal the age of the uranium. This in turn would potentially reveal where the original uranium was mined, giving more information about the origins of a cube.

The researchers also used other simpler techniques to track a cubes journey and origins.These cubes were called Heisenberg cubes after the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, one of the creators of the cubes. Heisenberg headed the Berlin group of German nuclear scientists, and as Allied forces made progress in 1944, moved his entire team and equipment to a secret underground cave below a castle in a small town in Germany.

Heisenbergs group built a nuclear reactor here, composed of 664 uranium cubes that were submerged in a tank of heavy water and covered with graphite to protect from radiation exposure.

The experiment was not successful as the amount of uranium within these cubes was not enough to trigger a nuclear reaction. Heisenberg set out to increase the size of the cubes, working in collaboration with the two other groups of the German nuclear program one at Leipzig and another at Gottow, the latter of which was headed by physicist Kurt Diebner.

In 1945, a mission associated with the Manhattan Project (the American mission to build an atomic weapon during WW2) tracked down the cave, leading Heisenberg to dismantle the reactor and bury the uranium, which was confiscated by the Americans. The cubes were never recorded to have entered the US, and went unaccounted.

German physicists during the Nazi regime are thought to have built over 1,200 cubes of uranium. Over 400 cubes from a different research site were smuggled into the Soviet Unions black market and disappeared.

Some of the cubes that entered America have been identified and have been preserved as artefacts, including the one at PNNL. The PNNL cube has been identified as a Heisenberg cube, but the researchers note that it has a styrene-coating which was originally found in cubes from Diebners lab. The researchers think that the cube was one of the few that Diebner sent to Heisenberg when he was trying to increase his uranium cube sizes.

Because each of the labs used different chemical coatings on their cubes to reduce oxidation, the team thinks the technique of analysing the coating for the source lab could also help potentially track down illegal uranium.

(Edited by Manasa Mohan)

Also read: Pokhran anniversary: How we built the nuclear bomb

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GoDaddy has informed Texas Right to Life that they're being evicted.

The domain host let the anti-abortion group know that their site, which allows citizens to report anyone who performs or assists an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, violated GoDaddy's terms of service and would therefore be removed within 24 hours. The site sprang up in an effort to enforce the Texas Heartbeat Law.

"We have informed prolifewhistleblower.com they have 24 hours to move to another provider for violating our terms of service," said GoDaddy spokesperson Dan C. Rice in an email to Gizmodo.

The terms that were violated probably included reporting personal information without the subject's consent, as the Texas Right to Life site's submission form allowed anyone to do.

When Mashable attempted to visit the site, a location-based WordPress security plugin prevented any access. It's unclear if this block was initiated by the site owners or as a result of GoDaddy's eviction, but it's likely the former given the nature of the plugin along with recent reports of attempts to overload the website with spam submissions.

What displays when you try to access the Right to Life website from the NYC area.Credit: Screenshot: google Chrome/Wordpress

A Texas Right to Life representative has said that this move doesn't deter them from their goals.

"Our IT team is already in process of transferring our assets to another provider and we'll have the site restored within 24-48 hours," said spokesperson Kimberly Schwartz to NPR.

Later on Friday, the Right To Life website went offline a second time after Digital Ocean, its next hosting provider which has terms of service similar to GoDaddy's, also dropped the account (h/t Ars Technica). It reappeared a few hours later with a new host, the rather infamous Epik, meaning the anti-abortion whistleblower website now joins a community that includes a neo-Nazi homepage, an imageboard that's been a favorite of mass shooters, and a social media platform that served as a gathering place for alleged perpetrators of the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C.

Before the site went down, internet "hacktivists" were working overtime to bomb the submission form with fictional reports, hoping to make the site useless. Sean Black, a TikTok user and coder, created a bot to submit a false report about every 10 seconds. His IP address was eventually blocked, but he went on to create an iOS shortcut that continued to fill out false reports. According to Vice, almost 5,000 people have accessed the shortcut.

Texas Right to Life claims that the attempts to sabotage the site have failed, and that they were prepared for such a situation. Still, its incredible to think about anti-abortion groups having to sift through thousands of submissions, trying to figure out if one of Marvel's Avengers really tried to have an abortion.

UPDATE: Sept. 4, 2021, 8:11 p.m. EDT Added info on the website's move from GoDaddy to Digital Ocean to Parler.

Read the original:

GoDaddy, Digital Ocean ban Texas Right to Life's abortion reporting site - Mashable

Josh Azouzs play walks a perilous line between dramatic humour and the outright offensive, occasionally stumbling too far across into the wrong territory.

Set in Tunisia in 1943 shortly after the Nazis have taken over from the ruling Vichy government, it is the story of two young couples one Jewish, one Muslim who have been friends for years until the arrival of the invaders alters their social geography.

It opens like Becketts Happy Days, with Victor, a Jew (Pierro Niel-Mee) buried up to his neck in the desert, guarded by his best friend Youssef (Ethan Kai) who has thrown in his lot with the Nazis.

As the play unfolds, revealing the domestic as well as the political tensions, it becomes clear that Azouz is using betrayal and infidelity as an echo chamber for the bigger issues of collaboration and the search for identity and homeland.

If the argument occasionally takes a turn for the arid, it is saved from total desiccation by the performance of Adrian Edmondson as the Nazi commandant, nicknamed Grandma by his men due to his fondness for knitting.

Tottering around with a walking stick owing to a knee injury, Edmondson is both absurd and sinister, a leering psychopath who has designs on Victors spirited wife Loys (Yasmin Paige) and gleefully exploits his fascistic power of life and death for his own lecherous ends.

The set is a kind of Cubist desert made of plywood boxes that open up to reveal beautifully tiled interiors while an electric sun beats down from above.

Skirmishing with Absurdist theatre, the play is not entirely successful there are awkward plot points that make little sense and some lacunae in the dialogue, and Azouz struggles to weld several disparate ideas together.But it's a bold attempt to address a universal problem within the framework of a little known aspect of history.

Flawed but fascinating.

Almeida Theatre until September 18, tickets: 020 7359 440

See the original post here:

Once Upon A Time In Nazi Occupied Tunisia REVIEW: A brave attempt to awaken history - Express

Historian Richard J. Evans is a preeminent scholar on Hitler and Nazi Germany, most pointedly through his trilogy on the history of the Third Reich. His most recent work, "The Hitler Conspiracies: The Stab in the Back - The Reichstag Fire - Rudolf Hess - The Escape from the Bunker," takes on the key conspiracy theories generated out of the Hitler era. Aaron J. Leonard recently conducted an interview with him via email to discuss his work, the current invoking of fascism in some quarters, and the contrast between solid historiography and work amplifying and propagating conspiracy theories.

________________

Why do you think Hitler and his murderous regime which ought to be repellent loom so large in the popular imagination?

They loom so large in the public imagination precisely because they are so repellent. Hitler has come to stand as a kind of substitute for Satan in an increasingly secular world: he is the epitome of evil. When we think of Hitler, we think of dictatorship, war and genocide, of cultural repression, racism and the looting of art on an unprecedented scale. The more the Holocaust has become part of mainstream public memory, the more it has brought Hitler into the center of public attention as its originator.

Your chapter detailing the "Stab in the Back" myth, which claims the German army was sabotaged from victory in World War I by various anti-patriotic left-wing forces, made me think of a Vietnam veteran I encountered a few years back who was adamant that in that war, the US was forced to fight with 'one hand tied behind its back.' It seems one of the features of many of these conspiracy theories or 'alternative histories' is to take a loss or weakness, and turn it into something less. Is that accurate, or is there something else going on?

The idea that a war or an election wasn't really lost, but betrayed by a backstairs conspiracy, is an easy and perennially attractive way (to some people at least) of explaining defeat: defeat, after all, is very difficult and painful to admit. It also disqualifies a whole section of society as not really part of it, whether that's the Jews or the socialists in Germany in 1918, or the Democrats in America in 2020.

In your book Lying About Hitler which recounts the libel suit brought by David Irving against historian Deborah Lipstadt, a trial in which you testified you literally had to chase down footnotes to show how he manipulated evidence to minimize and deny the Holocaust. Irving is arguably more insidious than some of those you challenge in your current work because he was seen as a scholar, rather than a crackpot and yet, his methodology is not far removed from the crassest of conspiracists. How would you contrast the two methods employed between conspiracy-based ones which are not wholly devoid of evidence versus those based on the method of honest historians?

Conspiracy theorists very frequently imitate the methods of honest historians: You will find their works weighed down with footnotes and crammed with elaborate, solid-looking detail. Only when you subject them to detailed scrutiny does it become clear that the detail isn't solid at all it's full of deliberate errors, falsifications, manipulations, misquotations, mistranslations, calculated omissions and manufactured connections, speculation, innuendo and supposition. Irving's Holocaust denial work was full of mistakes, as the judge in the libel action he brought against Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 noted, but they were not honest mistakes, since they all went to support his arguments. Honest mistakes are random in their effect; his were not. Honest historians know they have to abandon their arguments when the evidence turns out to disprove them; dishonest historians and conspiracy theorists bend the evidence to fit the argument.

Quite a few people, particularly on the left, have taken to invoking the word 'fascism' or otherwise draw parallels to the National Socialists of the 1930s & 40s, to describe various current phenomena. What do you see as the limits and benefits if any of such historical analogies?

Fascism is one of those concepts that can seem almost infinitely elastic; it's just too tempting for polemical purposes to accuse any authoritarian politician of being like Hitler, or any populist movement of being fascist. But we have to remember that fascism was a militaristic movement, aiming at war and conflict, territorial expansion and empire. Fascists put every citizen into uniform, drilled the people into uniformity and obedience in training camps, and subordinated private life, business companies, and institutions of all kinds to the state. Fascists were ultimately genocidal, whether it was the Nazis exterminating the Jews, or the Italian Fascists exterminating the Ethiopians (among other things, by using poison gas). Nazism and Fascism also put science at the center of their belief systems, in particular, racial and eugenic 'science', and regarded religion as a leftover from medieval times that would soon disappear. In all these respects it differed from 21st-century populism, which is hostile to the state, anti-scientific, and opposed to militarism both within the country and outside it. The classic fascist mass consisted of endless marching columns of identically uniformed men; today's populist mass, as in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, consist of thousands of informally and in some cases eccentrically attired individuals heaving about in a chaotic heap, violent and aggressive but not organized in any military way. The problem with calling today's right populism 'fascist' is that it's fighting today's battles with the weapons of the 1920s and 1930s. Time has moved on since then.

I am constantly astonished, and not a little frustrated, that so much taken for 'common knowledge' has already been countered by professional historians and yet it seems we live in a world where too often "alternative history" operates as actual history in the popular imagination. How can that ever change, or at least not command such power?

The Internet and social media are largely though not exclusively responsible for undermining belief in truth and objectivity. Society has become increasingly polarized through the rise of 'identity politics' my truth is not the same as your truth (though in fact there can never be two opposing truths; only one of them can ever be the real truth). The spread of hyper-relativism through the dominance in universities of postmodernist culture has also played its part. The mass media, above all television and the movie, have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction. Holding social media companies to account for the lies they allow to be spread is a beginning. But more needs to be done.

This article was originally published at History News Network

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A preeminent scholar on Nazism explains whether it makes sense to refer to Trump-loving populists as fascists - Raw Story