We’ve never found it harder to say “Happy New Year” than now. Given the heartbreak being felt across the country perhaps “Hopeful New Year” seems more appropriate.

We’re doing it tough. Thousands of others are doing it tougher. But readers of The AIMN share a common thread so succinctly summarised by Phil Pryor in his comment under 2019: The Top 5.

It’s been a hard year on the nerves and many are now frustrated, disappointed, depressed. We always need honesty, confidence, foresight, planning, positive and progressive attitudes, some hope. With a government from the top down consisting of dung, droppings, drainblocks and deviates, we feel stalled, dumped, betrayed.

That’s how the year ends, and as from today it is how the New Year begins.

We Australians are a resilient lot. It will get better because we will fight for what makes our country better. We can not control the elements but we can hold the powers that ignore them to account.

Over the last couple of weeks people have found their voice. In 2020 we will be shouting, and I suspect, taking to the streets even more. We want our country back and in 2020 we will make that known throughout the halls of Parliament. We will make Canberra rattle with our voices.

But all that’s in 2020.

Reflecting on The AIMN in 2019 … the year was a good one for us, easily surpassing the total number of hits we received in 2018.

In 2019 we had the 20 millionth visitor to the site since opening our doors on the 2nd of January, 2013. People are reading us! We also reached a Facebook membership of 20,000. And we look forward to a bigger 2020 thanks to our fabulous team of writers, our dedicated admin team, the loyal commenters and the growing number of readers.

You’ve all made The AIMN what it is today and we owe you our special thanks.

Oh, and we wish you a Happy New Year.

Michael and Carol.

Welcome to our annual Top 5. Being an election year we expected the Top 5 would have been filled with election talk, but it was not the case (as you will see below). It is safe to say that with Labor expected to win the May election in a canter, we were not as vociferous as normal at election time. Indeed, it wasn’t until December when Morrison’s profound incompetence as a leader was on full display that we really threw ourselves into full-time politics.

This year the Top 5 went down to the wire, with three articles published in late December making the Top 5. Even as late as the 30th of December there were positional changes.

Anyway, here are The AIMN’s five most popular posts in 2019:

(The Top 5 is based on the number of views only. It does not take into account the number of comments or the post’s popularity with other online media sites such as Facebook or Twitter).

Number One: The LNP Welfare Card: the true facts exposed. Corruption disguised as philanthropy!, by Michael Griffin.

This one surprised us. Why? It was also Number One for 2017!

Mid-year we noticed it being shared by widely Twitter – and it grew legs from there.

Excerpt:

The Liberal National Party (‘LNP’) Welfare Card programme resembles a LNP rort for the benefit of the Liberal and National Parties and their members, donors and supporters. Indue Pty Ltd, the corporation awarded the contract to manage the Welfare Card programme and to operate its underlying systems, is a corporation owned by Liberal and National Party members and that donates to various Liberal and National Party branches around Australia. The former chairman of Indue is none other than former LNP MP Larry Anthony who is the son of former Liberal Country Party Deputy Prime Minister Doug Anthony. Anthony now holds his shares in Indue in his corporate family trust managed by Illalangi Pty Ltd. Other companies now owned by Larry Anthony, or by the corporate trustee of his family trust, Illalangi Pty Ltd, work under ‘sub’ contracts for Indue itself and make their profits from dealings with Indue in the course of Indue performing its contracts with the LNP Government. These corporations are SAS Consulting Group Pty Ltd – a political lobbying group that counts Indue as a client – and Unidap Solutions Pty Ltd – a digital IT services corporation that provides Indue, as well as the current LNP Government directly, with various IT services. Larry Anthony is also current president of the National Party of Australia, that is, the ‘N’ in ‘LNP’.

Number Two: Bridget McKenzie revealed the Adani jobs lie and no-one noticed, by Kaye Lee.

This was another article that went crazy on Twitter, with even Zali Steggall, the Federal Member for Warringah retweeting it.

Excerpt:

Nationals deputy leader Bridget McKenzie made an amazing admission in an interview on Sky but nobody (except The Australia Institute) seemed to notice.

“[Adani will] be employing 1500 through the construction phase and around about 100 ongoing.”

Just to emphasise, that’s 100 ongoing jobs – not 10,000, not 1500 – ONE HUNDRED.

Considering Ms McKenzie is an avid Adani fan girl, the “around about” makes even the 100 jobs dubious. After all, Adani told investors the whole project would be automated from mine to port (meaning driverless trucks and trains to reduce on labour costs i.e. jobs).

Compare that to Queensland’s renewable energy projects committed since 2015: 5687 construction jobs & 273 ongoing. Projects proposed: 33975 construction jobs & 1,562 ongoing.

There are around 40,000 jobs in tourism in reef regions on the North Queensland coast — twice as many as in coal mining, according to ABS data. Other estimates put the number higher at 59,000.

Number Three: Scott Morrison should resign, by RosemaryJ36

With the outbreak of the terrifying bushfires across four states our ineffectual Prime Minister did little to endear himself to most Australians. Rosemary summed up our thoughts with her article.

Excerpt:

When our accidental-Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, took office, he swore an oath to ‘be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Her heirs and successors according to law.’

No mention of his duties to his wife and daughters. They are a private matter and, as long as he remains Prime Minister, his duties lie to the high office to which he has (sadly) been elected, and for which it appears he totally lacks competence!

Prime Minister – this is not all about you.

You really don’t have a clue, do you?

It is not about your promises to your daughters.

It is not about sharing the grief of people whom you have let down.

It is not about getting a few more photo ops, showing the caring Prime Minister comforting the distraught property owner who has lost everything.

Or the grieving widow with a young family whose partner died fighting the fires because he cared about his community.

That is all hypocritical flim-flam which highlights your failings.

Number Four: Dutton could be next, so God help us!, by Kathryn.

This colourful article – which was originally published as a comment – made an impression on both sides of the political divide. Those of the Left roared their support, whilst those of the Right … well … let’s just say that our moderators were kept busy deleting their less than thoughtful responses.

Excerpt:

This depraved, unspeakably callous monster, Dutton, is using inhumanity, hatred, fear, division and breathtaking sadistic mistreatment of desperate asylum seekers to cater to the decreasing number of his putrid rabble of xenophobic racist supporters in the red-neck haven of far northern Queensland and other areas of Bogan Australia!

What is really worrying, is that this demonic creature has been salivating after the PM job for years and now that MorriScum has chosen to abandon Australia, race over to Hawaii (in order to hand over $150K of taxpayer funds to his mentor, Brian Houston of Hillsong notoriety), it looks like SlowMo has committed professional suicide with Dutton waiting in the wings like some enormous, demonic Grim Reaper!

In the Lying Nazi Party, the psuedo-leaders, bible-thumping hypocrites and sociopathic sadists just seem to get worse and worse!

Number Five: Where is Scott Morrison and why is it a secret?, by Dr Jennifer Wilson.

The Prime Minister’s whereabouts during the early days of the bushfires were a mystery. Was he hiding somewhere?

Excerpt:

The secrecy surrounding the PM’s location is bizarre. Leaving the country in the midst of a national emergency with bushfires out of control and soaring temperatures threatening to elevate the danger to another level altogether is, in itself, an odd choice of timing. Shrouding his destination and the length of his absence in mystery only adds to the sense that we are in the hands of a very peculiar individual indeed. The man is already copping serious condemnation for clearing off, why conceal his destination as well?

I’m trying hard to think of any other world leader who has simply disappeared from his country at any time, let alone when that country is in the crisis we’re currently experiencing. We’ve never had a PM who buggered off when there was a national disaster. They’ve all had their flaws, some of them major, but nobody ever buggered off and left the country rudderless and burning.

Rumours have placed Morrison in Hawaii, enjoying a summer break with his family. More rumours suggest Hawaii was merely a stop over in a much longer journey to New York, where his Pentecostal mentor, Hillsong’s Brian Houston, has just opened a church in a multi-million dollar property recently acquired by Hillsong in Manhattan. I couldn’t possibly comment. Well, actually, I could.

Special mention must go to Dr Tristan Ewins, whose article Jordan Peterson gets it wrong again on inequality was firmly set in the Top 5 until Scott Morrison fired up our readers.

And a big special mention must also to every author who published articles on The AIMN in 2019. Anyone of those could have been, and deserved to be, in the Top 5.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 19

Moyers: I want to ask you about another side of him that is taken up in the book. It involves the much-discussed video that appeared during the campaign last year which had been made a decade or so ago when Trump was newly married. He sees this actress outside his bus and he says, “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,” and then we hear sounds of Tic Tacs before Trump continues. “You know,” he says, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet, just kiss, I don’t even wait.” And then you can hear him boasting off camera, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the… You can do anything.”

Lifton: In addition to being a strongman and a dictator, there’s a pervasive sense of entitlement. Whatever he wants, whatever he needs in his own mind, he can have. It’s a kind of American celebrity gone wild, but it’s also a vicious anti-female perspective and a caricature of male macho. That’s all present in Trump as well as the solipsism that I mentioned earlier, and that’s why when people speak of him as all-pervasive on many different levels of destructiveness, they’re absolutely right.

Moyers: And it seems to extend deeply into his relationship with his own family. There’s a chapter in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump with the heading, “Trump’s Daddy Issues.” There’s several of his quotes about his daughter, Ivanka. He said, “You know who’s one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody, and I helped create her? Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s 6 feet tall. She’s got the best body.”

Again: “I said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” Ivanka was 22 at the time. To a reporter he said: “Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married – and, you know, her father…”

When Howard Stern, the radio host, started to say, “By the way, your daughter – ” Trump interrupted him with “She’s beautiful.” Stern continued, “Can I say this? A piece of ass.” To which Trump replied, “Yeah.” What’s going on here?

Lifton: In addition to everything else and the extreme narcissism that it represents, it’s a kind of unbridled sense of saying anything on one’s mind as well as an impulse to break down all norms because he is the untouchable celebrity. So just as he is the one man who can fix things for the country, he can have every woman or anything else that he wants, or abuse them in any way he seeks to.

Moyers: You mentioned extreme narcissism. I’m sure you knew Erich Fromm –

Lifton: Yes, I did.

Moyers: – one of the founders of humanistic psychology. He was a Holocaust survivor who had a lifelong obsession with the psychology of evil. And he said that he thought “malignant narcissism” was the most severe pathology – “the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.” Do you think malignant narcissism goes a long way to explain Trump?

Lifton: I do think it goes a long way. In early psychoanalytic thought, narcissism was – and still, of course, is – self-love. The early psychoanalysts used to talk of libido directed at the self. That now feels a little quaint, that kind of language. But it does include the most fierce and self-displaying form of one’s individual self. And in this way, it can be dangerous. When you look at Trump, you can really see someone who’s destructive to any form of life enhancement in virtually every area. And if that’s what Fromm means by malignant narcissism, then it definitely applies.

Moyers: You said earlier that Trump and his administration have brought about a kind of malignant normalcy – that a dangerous president can become normalized. When the Democrats make a deal with him, as they did recently, are they edging him a little closer to being accepted despite this record of bizarre behavior?

Lifton: We are normalizing him when the Democrats make a deal with him. But there’s a profound ethical issue here and it’s not easily answered. If something is good for the country – perhaps the deal that the Democrats are making with Donald Trump is seen or could be understood by most as good for the country, dealing with the debt crisis – is that worth doing even though it normalizes him? If the Democrats do go ahead with this deal, they should take steps to make clear that they’re opposing other aspects of his presidency and of him.

Moyers: There’s a chapter in the book entitled, “He’s Got the World in His Hands and His Finger on the Trigger.” Do you ever imagine him sitting alone in his office, deciding on a potentially catastrophic course of action for the nation? Say, with five minutes to decide whether or not to unleash thermonuclear weapons?

Lifton: I do. And like many, I’m deeply frightened by that possibility. It’s said very often that, OK, there are people around him who can contain him and restrain him. I’m not so sure they always can or would. In any case, it’s not unlikely that he could seek to create some kind of crisis, if he found himself in a very bad light in relation to public opinion and close to removal from office. So yes, I share that fear and I think it’s a real danger. I think we have to constantly keep it in mind, be ready to anticipate it and take whatever action we can against it. The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He’s equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination. [Emphasis added]

Moyers: One of your colleagues writes in the book, “Sociopathic traits may be amplified as the leader discovers that he can violate the norms of civil society and even commit crimes with impunity. And the leader who rules through fear, lies and betrayal may become increasingly isolated and paranoid as the loyalty of even his closest confidants must forever be suspect.” Does that sound like Trump?

Lifton: It’s already happening. We see that it’s harder and harder to work for him. It’s hard enough even for his spokesperson to affirm his falsehoods. These efforts are not too convincing and they become less convincing from the radius outward, in which people removed from his immediate circle find it still more difficult to believe him and the American public finds it more difficult. He still can appeal to his base because in his base there is a narrative of grievance that centers on embracing Trump without caring too much about whether what he says is true or false. He somehow fits into their narrative. But that can’t go on forever, and he’s losing some of his formerly loyal supporters as well. So he is becoming more isolated. That has its own dangers, but it’s inevitable that it would happen with a man like this as his falsehoods are contested.

Moyers: You bring up his base. Those true believers aren’t the only ones who voted for him. As we are talking, I keep thinking: Here we have a man who kept asking what’s the point of having thermonuclear weapons if we cannot use them; who advocates using torture or worse against our prisoners of war; who urged that five innocent young people here in New York, black young people, be given the death penalty for a sexual assault, even after it was proven someone else had committed the crime; who boasted about his ability to get away with sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity and power; who urged his followers at political rallies to punch protesters in the face and beat them so badly that they have to be taken out on stretchers; who suggested that maybe some of his followers might want to assassinate his political rival, Hillary Clinton, if she were elected president, or at the very least, throw her in prison; who believes he would not lose voters if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone. And over 63 million people voted to elect that man president!

Lifton: Yes, that’s a deeply troubling truth. And I doubt the people who voted for him were thinking about any of these things. What they were really responding to was a call for change, a sense that he was connecting with them in ways that others never had, that he would express and represent their interests, and that he would indeed make this country one dominated again by white people, in some cases white supremacists. But as you say, these people who embraced that narrative unquestioningly are a lesser minority than the ones who voted for him. And of course, he still didn’t win the popular vote. But it’s true – something has gone wrong with our democratic system in electing a man with all these characteristics that make up Donald Trump. Now we have to struggle to sustain the functional institutions of our democracy against his assault on them. I don’t think he’ll succeed in breaking them down, but he’s doing a lot of harm and it’ll take a lot of effort on the part of a lot of people to sustain them and to keep the democracy going, even in its faltering way. [Emphasia added]

Moyers: He still has the support of 80 percent of Republican voters – 4 out of 5. And it seems the Republican Party will tolerate him as long as they’re afraid of the intensity of his followers.

Lifton: Yes, and that’s another very disturbing thought. Things there could change quickly too. What I sense is that the whole situation is chaotic and volatile, so that any time now there could be further pronouncements, further information about Russia and about obstruction of justice, or another attempt of Trump to start firing people, including Mueller, and that this would create a constitutional crisis which would create more pressure on Republicans and everybody else. So even though that is an awful truth about the Republicans’ hypocrisy in continuing to support him, that could change, I think, almost overnight if the new information were sufficiently damning to Trump and his administration.

Moyers: Let’s talk about the “Trump Effect” on the country. One aspect of it was the increase in bullying in schools caused by the rhetoric used by Trump during the campaign. But it goes beyond that.

Lifton: I think Trump has had a very strong and disturbing effect on the country already. He has given more legitimacy to white supremacy and even to neo-fascist groups, and he’s created a pervasive atmosphere that’s more vague but still significant. I don’t believe that he can in his own way destroy the country, just as he can’t eliminate climate awareness, but he can go a long way in bringing – well, in stimulating what has always been a potential.

You mentioned Erich Fromm. I met him through [the sociologist] David Riesman. David Riesman was a close friend, a great authority on American society. He emphasized how there’s always an underbelly in American society of extreme conservatism and reactionary response, and when there’s any kind of progressive movement, there’s likely to be a backlash of reaction to it. Trump is very much in that backlash to any kind of progressive achievement or even decent situation in society. He is stimulating feelings that are potential and latent in our society, but very real, and rendering them more active and more dangerous. And in that way, he’s having a very harmful effect that I think mounts every single day. [Emphasis added]

Moyers: Some people who have known Trump for years say he’s gotten dramatically worse since he was inaugurated. In the prologue to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Dr. Judith Lewis Herman writes this: “Fostered by the flattery of underlings and the chants of crowds, a political leader’s grandiosity may morph into grotesque delusions of grandeur.” Does that …

Lifton: That’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. And for anyone with these traits – of feeling himself victimized, of seeking to be the strongman who resolves everything, yet sees truth only through his own self and negates all other truth outside of it – is bound to become much more malignant when he has power. That’s what Judith Herman is saying, and she’s absolutely right. Power then breeds an intensification of all this because the power can never be absolute power – to some extent it’s stymied – but the isolation while in power becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more dangerous because of the power.

Moyers: But suppose that if Donald Trump is crazy, as some have said, he’s crazy like a fox, which is to say all this bizarre behavior is really clever strategy to mislead, distract and deceive others into responding in precisely the manner that he wants them to.

Lifton: I don’t think that’s quite true. I think that it’s partly true. As I said before, Trump both disbelieves and believes in falsehoods, so that when he did thrive on his longstanding and perhaps most egregious falsehood – the claim that Obama was not born in the United States – he’s crazy like a fox in manipulating it because it gave him his political entrée onto the national stage – and also, incidentally, was not rejected by many leading Republicans. So he was crazy like a fox in that case. But it’s more extreme even than that. In order to make your falsehoods powerful, you have to believe in them in some extent. And that’s why we simplify things if we say that Trump either believes nothing in his falsehoods and is just manipulating us like a fox or he completely believes them. Neither is true. The combination of both and his talent as a manipulator and falsifier are very much at issue.

Moyers: You may not remember it, but you and I talked 16 years ago this very week – a few days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. ll – and PBS had asked me to go on the air to talk to a variety of people about their response to those atrocities.

Lifton: I haven’t forgotten it, Bill.

Moyers: And in our discussion, we talked about your book, Destroying the World to Save It, about that extremist Japanese religious cult aum shinrikyo that released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo subways, you compared their ideology to Osama bin Laden: “He wanted to destroy a major part of the world to purify the world. There was in this idea, or his ideology, a sense of renewal.” We saw it in that Japanese cult. So the issue I am getting at is that such an aspiration can take hold of any true believer – the desire to purify the world no matter the cost.

Lifton: It is a very dangerous aspiration, and it’s not absent from the Trump presidency, although I don’t think it’s his central theme. I think it’s a central theme in Steve Bannon, for instance, who is an apocalyptic character and really wants to bring down most of advanced society as we know it, most of civilization as we know it, in order to recreate it in his image. I think Trump has some attraction to that, just as he had attraction to Bannon as a person and as a thinker, and that influence is by no means over. He’s still in touch with Bannon. So there is this apocalyptic influence in the Trumpean presidency: The world is destroyed in order to be purified and renewed in the ideal way that is projected by a Steve Bannon. And there is a sense of that when Trump says we’ll make America great again, because he says it’s been destroyed, he will remake it. So there is an apocalyptic suggestion, but I don’t think it’s at the very heart of his presidency.

Moyers: So our challenge is?

Lifton: I always feel we have to work both outside and inside of our existing institutions, so we have to really be careful about who we vote for and examine carefully our institutions and what they’re meant to do and how they’re being violated. I also think we need movements from below that oppose what this administration and administrations like it are doing to ordinary people. And for those of us who contributed to this book – well, as I said earlier, we have to be “witnessing professionals” and fulfill our duty to warn.” (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: Robert Jay Lifton and Bill Moyers on ‘A duty to warn’, billmoyers.com, 14 September 2017).

So, if one accept that no-one as mentally unstable as President Trump should be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency, could one be entitled to say that America has lost its grip on reality?

Or should that view be confined to Donald J. Trump?

Watching any part of the impeachment hearings, one would realise that there are at least two different versions of reality – not simply disagreements about facts and interpretation, but about reality itself.

Professor Lifton argues that one way to understand the America of Donald J. Trump is to consider the phenomenon of what he calls “ideological totalism.” He explains the similarities between the current ideological polarisation and efforts like Chinese communist thought reform in the early 1950s. The one element which makes today different – he says – is Trump’s lack of ideology. Instead, the President lives in a self-created “solipsistic reality” – the self is all which can be known to exist.

In Lipton’s view, Trump’s appeal, in part, to something he calls “psychological apocalypticism,” a pull toward “a new collective mindset which is pure, perfect, and eternal.” This combines a desire to be part of something bigger than oneself with a call to share in the effort of destroying reality in order to save the world.

Professor Lipton details the parallels between cult leaders and demagogic politicians, and makes reference to some of President Trump’s statements, going back to the inaugural address, when he spoke of “American carnage” and asserted that “I alone can fix it.”

Still, the public has been left to wonder whether Donald J. Trump is mad, bad, or both. The prestigious mental health experts who have contributed to the expanded and updated version of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (same publisher, 26 March 2019) argue that their moral and civic “duty to warn” supersedes professional neutrality. Whatever affects him, affects the nation: from the trauma people have experienced under the Trump Administration to the cult-like characteristics of his followers, he has created unprecedented mental health consequences across America and beyond. With eight new essays and about one hundred pages of new material, the updated edition covers the dangerous ramifications of Trump’s unnatural state during the first two years of his administration. Readers are assured that “it is not all in their heads.” It is in his.

Continued Thursday … (Part 21)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 18

Published on 3 October 2017, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump had been edited by professor Bandy Xenobia Lee, an American psychiatrist with Yale University School of Medicine, and contains essays from 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals on the “clear and present danger” that President Trump’s mental health poses to the “nation and individual well being.” The specialists argued that the President’s mental health is affecting the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk: possibly of involving it in a war and, always, of undermining democracy itself because of his pathological dangerousness. Consequently, they claimed, Trump’s presidency represents an emergency not only allowing, but perhaps also requiring, psychiatrists in the United States to raise alarms. The book contributors were able to overcome the ‘Goldwater rule’ by maintaining that pointing out danger and calling for an evaluation is different from diagnosis. Further, they have defended their decision on the ground that it is dangerous to turn reasonable ethical guidelines into a gag rule under political pressure.

The book has been very well received and highly praised, and suffice for all views that of professor Estelle B. Freedman, a historian who hold the Edgar E. Robinson Professorship in U.S. History at Stanford University. Her view is that “this insightful collection is grounded in historical consciousness of the ways professionals have responded to fascist leaders and unstable politicians in the past. It is a valuable primary source documenting the critical turning point when American psychiatry reassessed the ethics of restraining commentary on the mental health of public officials in light of the “duty to warn” of imminent danger. Medical and legal experts thoughtfully assess diagnoses of Trump’s behavior and astutely explore how to scrutinize political candidates, address client fears, and assess the ‘Trump Effect’ on our social fabric.”

One of America’s leading psycho-historians, Robert Jay Lifton, wrote the foreword to the book. Professor Lifton is renowned for his studies of people under stress – for books such as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans-Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalised their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the Hitler’s euthanasia project to extermination camps.

The issue of the ‘duty to warn’ is so compelling that, when Dr. John D. Gartner, who practices as a clinical psychologist in New York and Baltimore, decided to set up an organisation by that name intent on warning Americans that they are in dire trouble due to their president’s mental instability, more than 60,000 mental health professionals signed a petition prepared by Dr. Gartner, which states: “We, the undersigned mental health professionals, believe in our professional judgement that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ ” (Dr. John Gartner: “We Have a Duty to Warn the World About Donald Trump”, www.change.org, 22 March 2017).

At mid-September 2017 Bill Moyers, a very much respected journalist and commentator, was fortunate enough to interview professor Lifton. The long interview began with a consideration of the ethical dilemma faced by the book’s contributors: the Goldwater rule against the duty to warn.

This is how the dilemma was put to professor Lifton: “ … Aren’t you and the 26 other mental health experts who contribute to [the book] in effect violating the Goldwater Rule? … Are you putting your profession’s reputation at risk ?”

And this is how professor Lifton replied: “I don’t think so. I think the Goldwater Rule is a little ambiguous. We adhere to that portion of the Goldwater Rule that says we don’t see ourselves as making a definitive diagnosis in a formal way and we don’t believe that should be done, except by hands-on interviewing and studying of a person. But we take issue with the idea that therefore we can say nothing about Trump or any other public figure. We have a perfect right to offer our opinion, and that’s where “duty to warn” comes in.

Moyers: Duty to warn?

Lifton: We have a duty to warn on an individual basis if we are treating someone who may be dangerous to herself or to others – a duty to warn people who are in danger from that person. We feel it’s our duty to warn the country about the danger of this president. If we think we have learned something about Donald Trump and his psychology that is dangerous to the country, yes, we have an obligation to say so. (And that is why Judith Lewis Herman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School and Lifton had written a letter ‘Protect us from this dangerous president, 2 psychiatrists say’ to The New York Times, on 8 March 2017).

We argue that Trump’s difficult relationship to reality and his inability to respond in an evenhanded way to a crisis renders him unfit to be president, and we asked our elected representative to take steps to remove him from the presidency. [Emphasis added]

…

Moyers: You write in the foreword of the book: “Because Trump is president and operates within the broad contours and interactions of the presidency, there is a tendency to view what he does as simply part of our democratic process, that is, as politically and even ethically normal.”

Lifton: Yes. And that’s what I call malignant normality. What we put forward as self-evident and normal may be deeply dangerous and destructive. I came to that idea in my work on the psychology of Nazi doctors – and I’m not equating anybody with Nazi doctors, but it’s the principle that prevails – and also with American psychologists who became architects of CIA torture during the Iraq War era. These are forms of malignant normality. For example, Donald Trump lies, repeatedly. We may come to see a president as liar as normal. He also makes bombastic statements about nuclear weapons, for instance, which can then be seen as somehow normal. In other words, his behavior as president, with all those who defend his behavior in the administration, becomes a norm. We have to contest it, because it is malignant normality. For the contributors to this book, this means striving to be witnessing professionals, confronting the malignancy and making it known. [Emphasis added]

Moyers: Witnessing professionals? Where did this notion come from?

Lifton: I first came to it in terms of psychiatrists assigned to Vietnam, way back then. If a soldier became anxious and enraged about the immorality of the Vietnam War, he might be sent to a psychiatrist who would be expected to help him be strong enough to return to committing atrocities. So there was something wrong in what professionals were doing, and some of us had to try to expose this as the wrong and manipulative use of our profession. We had to see ourselves as witnessing professionals. And then of course, with the Nazi doctors I studied for another book – doctors assigned, say, to Auschwitz – they were expected to do selections of Jews for the gas chamber. That was what was expected of them and what for the most part they did – sometimes with some apprehension, but they did it. So that’s another malignant normality. Professionals were reduced to being automatic servants of the existing regime as opposed to people with special knowledge balanced by a moral baseline as well as the scientific information to make judgments.

Moyers: And that should apply to journalists, lawyers, doctors —

Lifton: Absolutely. One bears witness by taking in the situation – in this case, its malignant nature – and then telling one’s story about it, in this case with the help of professional knowledge, so that we add perspective on what’s wrong, rather than being servants of the powers responsible for the malignant normality. We must be people with a conscience in a very fundamental way. [Emphasis added]

Moyers: And this is what troubled you and many of your colleagues about the psychologists who helped implement the US policy of torture after 9/11.

Lifton: Absolutely. And I call that a scandal within a scandal, because yes, it was indeed professionals who became architects of torture, and their professional society, the American Psychological Association, which encouraged and protected them until finally protest from within that society by other members forced a change. So that was a dreadful moment in the history of psychology and in the history of professionals in this country.

Moyers: Some of the descriptions used to describe Trump — narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist – even some have suggested early forms of dementia – are difficult for lay people to grasp. Some experts say that it’s not one thing that’s wrong with him – there are a lot of things wrong with him and together they add up to what one of your colleagues calls “a scary witches brew, a toxic stew.”

Lifton: I think that’s very accurate. I agree that there’s an all-enveloping destructiveness in his character and in his psychological tendencies. But I’ve focused on what professionally I call solipsistic reality. Solipsistic reality means that the only reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more dangerous for the country and for the world. In that sense, he does what psychotics do. [Emphasis added]

Psychotics engage in, or frequently engage in a view of reality based only on the self. He’s not psychotic, but I think ultimately this solipsistic reality will be the source of his removal from the presidency. [Emphasis added]

Moyers: What’s your take on how he makes increasingly bizarre statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary, and yet he just keeps on making them? I know some people in your field call this a delusional disorder, a profound loss of contact with external reality.

Lifton: He doesn’t have clear contact with reality, though I’m not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren’t, and that’s one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama’s birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality. In my investigations, I’ve found that people can believe and not believe something at the same time, and in his case, he could be very manipulative and be quite gifted at his manipulations. So I think it’s a combination of those. [Emphasis added]

Moyers: How can someone believe and not believe at the same time?

Lifton: Well, in one part of himself, Trump can know there’s no evidence that Obama was born in any place but Hawaii in the United States. But in another part of himself, he has the need to reject Obama as a president of the United States by asserting that he was born outside of the country. He needs to delegitimate Obama. That’s been a strong need of Trump’s. This is a personal, isolated solipsistic need which can coexist with a recognition that there’s no evidence at all to back it up. I learned about this from some of the false confessions I came upon in my work.

Moyers: Where?

Lifton: For instance, when I was studying Chinese communist thought reform, one priest was falsely accused of being a spy, and was under physical duress – really tortured with chains and in other intolerable ways. As he was tortured and the interrogator kept insisting that he was a spy, he began to imagine himself in the role of a spy, with spy radios in all the houses of his order. In his conversations with other missionaries he began to think he was revealing military data to the enemy in some way. These thoughts became real to him because he had to, entered into them and convinced the interrogator that he believed them in order to remove the chains and the torture. He told me it seemed like someone creating a novel and the novelist building a story with characters which become real and believable. Something like that could happen to Trump, in which the false beliefs become part of a narrative, all of which is fantasy and very often bound up with conspiracy theory, so that he immerses himself in it and believing in it even as at the same time recognizing in another part of his mind that none of this exists. The human mind can do that.

Moyers: It’s as if he believes the truth is defined by his words.

Lifton: Yes, that’s right. Trump has a mind that in many ways is always under duress, because he’s always seeking to be accepted, loved. He sees himself as constantly victimized by others and by the society, from which he sees himself as fighting back. So there’s always an intensity to his destructive behavior that could contribute to his false beliefs.

Moyers: Do you remember when he tweeted that President Obama had him wiretapped, despite the fact that the intelligence community couldn’t find any evidence to support his claim? And when he spoke to a CIA gathering, with the television cameras running, he said he was “a thousand percent behind the CIA,” despite the fact that everyone watching had to know he had repeatedly denounced the “incompetence and dishonesty” of that same intelligence community.

Lifton: Yes, that’s an extraordinary situation. And one has to invoke here this notion of a self-determined truth, this inner need for the situation to take shape in the form that the falsehood claims. In a sense this takes precedence over any other criteria for what is true.

Moyers: What other hazardous patterns do you see in his behavior? For example, what do you make of the admiration that he has expressed for brutal dictators – Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq, even Kim Jong Un of North Korea – yes, him – and President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who turned vigilantes loose to kill thousands of drug users, and of course his admiration for Vladimir Putin. In the book Michael Tansey says, “There’s considerable evidence to suggest that absolute tyranny is Donald Trump’s wet dream.”

Lifton: Yes. Well, while Trump doesn’t have any systematic ideology, he does have a narrative, and in that narrative, America was once a great country, it’s been weakened by poor leadership, and only he can make it great again by taking over. And that’s an image of himself as a strongman, a dictator. It isn’t the clear ideology of being a fascist or some other clear-cut ideological figure. Rather, it’s a narrative of himself as being unique and all-powerful. He believes it, though I’m sure he’s got doubts about it. But his narrative in a sense calls forth other strongmen, other dictators who run their country in an absolute way and don’t have to bother with legislative division or legal issues.

Moyers: I suspect some elected officials sometimes dream of doing what an unopposed autocrat or strongman is able to do, and that’s demand adulation on the one hand, and on the other hand, eradicate all of your perceived enemies just by turning your thumb down to the crowd. No need to worry about “fake media” – you’ve had them done away with. No protesters. No confounding lawsuits against you. Nothing stands in your way.

Lifton: That’s exactly right. Trump gives the impression that he would like to govern by decree. And of course, who governs by decree but dictators or strongmen? He has that impulse in him and he wants to be a savior, so he says, in his famous phrase, “Only I can fix it!” That’s a strange and weird statement for anybody to make, but it’s central to Trump’s sense of self and self-presentation. And I think that has a lot to do with his identification with dictators. No matter how many they kill and no matter what else they do, they have this capacity to rule by decree without any interference by legislators or courts. [Emphasis added]

In the case of Putin, I think Trump does have involvements in Russia that are in some way determinative. I think they’ll be important in his removal from office. I think he’s aware of collusion on his part and his campaign’s, some of which has been brought out, a lot more of which will be brought out in the future. He appears to have had some kind of involvement with the Russians in which they’ve rescued him financially and maybe continue to do so, so that he’s beholden to them in ways for which there’s already lots of evidence. So I think his fierce impulse to cover up any kind of Russian connections, which is prone to obstruction of justice, will do him in.

Continued tomorrow … (Part 20)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 17

Reform, What Reform?

It would be quite difficult to match President Trump’s clumsy rhetoric on the occasion of events such as the El Paso massacre, followed by the Dayton killing.

In the wake of twin mass shootings over the weekend, on 5 August 2019 President Trump denounced ‘white supremacy’ and, citing the threat of ‘racist hate’, he summoned the nation to address what he called a link between the recent carnage and violent video games, mental illness and Internet bigotry. But he stopped well short of endorsing the kind of broad gun control measures that activists, Democrats and some Republicans have sought for years, such as tougher background checks for gun buyers and the banning of some weapons and accessories such as high-capacity magazines. And while he warned of “the perils of the internet and social media,” he offered no recognition of his own use of those platforms to promote his brand of divisive politics. Instead, he focused on a rising intolerance that he has been slow to condemn in the past. “In one voice our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” President Trump said at the White House. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated.”

It seemed unlikely that President Trump’s 10-minute speech, coming after one of the most violent weekends in recent American history, would reposition him as a unifier when many Americans hold him responsible for inflaming racial division. He took no responsibility for the atmosphere of division, nor did he recognise his own reluctance to warn of the rise of white nationalism until now.

Speaking at a lectern beneath a portrait of George Washington in the Diplomatic Reception Room, Mr. Trump read from a teleprompter as he denounced Crusius’ bilious anti-Hispanic manifesto as being “consumed by racist hate.” He also called it part of an “evil contagion” spreading online.

“These barbaric slaughters are an assault upon our communities, an attack upon our nation and a crime against all of humanity,” President Trump said of the massacres. Connor Betts, the Dayton gunman is not known to have had a political motive.

President Trump, who visited Dayton and El Paso on 7 August, took no questions. He also did not repeat his call on Twitter earlier in the morning for Republicans and Democrats to work together to strengthen background checks for prospective gun buyers. That outraged Democratic leaders in Congress, who quickly accused President Trump of retreating from more substantive action on gun control under political pressure. “It took less than three hours for the president to back off his call for stronger background check legislation,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, said in a statement. House Democrats passed such a measure in February 2019, but the Republican-controlled Senate has not acted on it.

On 5 August even some Republicans called for that blockade to end. Senators Susan Margaret Collins of Maine, Mike K. Braun of Indiana and Mike Braun of Indiana, all Republican, said that a bill to expand background checks for gun purchases should be brought to a vote. Senator Toomey and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, separately called President Trump to discuss the background checks bill that they had drafted after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, only to see it fall to a filibuster. “The president showed a willingness to work with us on the issue of strengthening background checks.” the senators said in a joint statement.

President Trump’s first comments, made in early-morning Twitter posts, set some gun control advocates up for disappointment.

From his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, President Trump tweeted several expressions of sympathy, along with more combative shots at the news media and his critics.

On 4 August President Trump’s aides recognised that he needed to do more. Some advisers suggested that background checks would be an easy, bipartisan measure to endorse, but President Trump was uncertain. When early drafts of his remarks began circulating, they did not mention background checks or immigration, according to two persons briefed on them. So aides were startled to discover that the President, sitting in the White House residence, had posted a tweet linking the two issues.

In a small meeting with President before the speech several aides argued that the linkage was a mistake, and the President dropped both the immigration idea and the call for background checks from his prepared remarks.

It was not immediately clear what other gun control proposals President Trump had been referring to on Twitter. The House of Representatives had passed back-to-back bills on firearms soon after Democrats took control, voting in February 2019 to require background checks for all gun buyers, including those at gun shows and on the internet, and to extend waiting periods for would-be gun buyers flagged by the existing instant-check system.

Instead of focusing on measures to limit the sale of firearms, President Trump’s later remarks at the White House ticked through a list of proposals that Republicans have long endorsed as alternatives. They included unspecified action to address “gruesome and grisly video games” and “a culture that celebrates violence.” Trying for a somber tone at the White House, President Trump repeated his past endorsement of so-called red-flag laws which would allow for the confiscation of firearms from people found to be mentally ill. He also said mental health laws should be changed to allow for the involuntary confinement of people at risk of committing violence. But he gave no indication of how he would pursue any of his goals. President Trump also warned that the Internet and social media provide “a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts.” But the President has himself amplified right-wing voices online with histories of racism and bigotry. President Trump also emphasised steps the better to identify and respond to signs of mental illness which could lead to violence, repeating a familiar conservative formulation that de-emphasises the significance of widely available firearms.

In Texas and Ohio, it is legal to buy military-style high-powered firearms, to use them with large-capacity magazines and to carry them in public, with a permit.

“Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,” President Trump said. Calling those who carry out mass shootings “mentally ill monsters”, he also said that he would be directing the Justice Department to propose legislation calling for the death penalty for “those who commit hate crimes and mass murders.” He added that he had “asked the F.B.I. to identify all further resources they need to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism – whatever they need.”

Gun control groups reacted sharply to Mr. Trump’s address. “Let’s be clear: This is not about mental health. It’s not about video games. It’s not about movies,” said Mr. John Feinblatt, the president of ‘Everytown for gun safety’, a gun control group. “Those are all N.R.A. talking points. This is about easy access to guns.”

President Trump has previously denounced racism with scripted remarks which sounded out of tune with his typical language. After the killing of a counter-protester at a white-power rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, he called ‘white supremacists’ “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

But those remarks followed earlier off-the-cuff comments by the President, who had been criticised for not more forcefully denouncing the ‘Unite the Right’ rally, which was organised by neo-Nazis. Instead he condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” President Trump later declared that the event had “some very fine people on both sides.” Aides said that he was referring to nonviolent protesters defending Southern heritage, and that he was angry that the news media had not paid more attention to left-wing Antifa activists who engaged in violence.

In March 2019, after a ‘white supremacist’ killed 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand, President Trump said he did not “really” see a rising threat from ‘white nationalism’. “It’s a small group of people,” he added. The President has also previously declared himself a supporter of stronger gun control, only to retreat from the issue. After a gunman killed 17 at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, President Trump startled Republican lawmakers that February when on live television, he appeared to embrace comprehensive gun control legislation which would expand background checks, keep guns from mentally ill people, and restrict gun sales for some young adults. But he made little effort to follow through.

Some of the Democrats campaigning for their party’s presidential nomination condemned President Trump for not calling the El Paso attack a ‘white supremacist’ act of domestic terrorism and blamed the White House for fuelling ‘white nationalist’ sentiment.

No federal agency is responsible for designating domestic terrorism organisations, as has been the case for international terrorism. Similarly, there is no criminal ‘rubric’ of domestic terrorism, and suspects who are by definition considered domestic terrorists are charged under other laws, such as hate crime, gun and conspiracy statutes. According to F.B.I. statistics, there have been eight mass shootings in the United States since 2017 in which the attackers espoused ‘white supremacist’ views. (M. Crowley and M. Haberman, ‘Trump condemns white supremacy but ‘stops short of major gun control,’ The New York Times, 5 August 2019).

As professor Lesley Russell, an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy at the University of Sydney, puts it: “Timing might means that [the El Paso and Dayton] shootings could have more impact than usual.”

During that first weekend in August 2019 Americans went to bed saddened by yet another gun massacre, this time in El Paso, Texas, only to wake the following day to news of a similar crime in Dayton, Ohio. While the communities mourned and the media endlessly debated the causes, the political responses were again highlighting the United States’ deep political divide, and Donald J. Trump again revealed himself as a president who is unable either to unite the nation or to focus on the root causes of gun violence. The rest of the world looks on in dismay.

On the face of it, that weekend’s carnage might seem unlikely dramatically to change the gun-control debate in America. That did not happen on 14 December 2012 when twenty-six people, including twenty children, were gunned down at Sandy Hook elementary school of Newtown, Connecticut, or on 15 February 2018 when seventeen students and staff were shot to death at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It did not happen when gunmen invaded religious sanctuaries and murdered Christians in Texas as it occurred on 5 November 2017 at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs; or when the target were Jews in Tree of Life Congregation on 27 October 2018 in Pennsylvania, or Sikhs at a Temple near Milwaukee, Wisconsin on 5 August 2012. And it did not happen when shootings occurred at military bases – at a rate of an one mass shooting per month since 2009, and in an Orlando, Florida gay night-club on 12 June 2016.

The President and Congress were away from Washington on August vacations, and it seemed that nothing would happen for at least several more weeks. The contrast to New Zealand’s response to the Christchurch massacre could not be starker. Americans seem increasingly resigned to living in communities in which no trip to a school, to a place of worship, to a shopping centre, or to a festival is safe. Indeed, a 7-8 August 2019 poll found that 78 per cent of Americans expected another mass shooting within three months, including 49 per cent who said one was ‘highly likely.’

While pleas ‘to do something’ were being heard in El Paso and Dayton, the once-active student voices of Parkland had become more muted and the parents of children who died at Sandy Hook struggle to keep the issue of gun control on the political agenda. The battle also comes at a cost: in 2019 two survivors of the Parkland shooting and the father of a child killed at Sandy Hook elementary school suicided. As was the case after the Parkland shooting, President Trump has shown no leadership and provided no comfort and consolation, seemingly veering between wanting to do more and worrying that doing so could prompt a revolt from his political base. (F. Hiatt, ‘There’s never been a president like Trump. Just look at his gun-control record’, The Washington Post, 11 August 2019).

One began to wonder: incompetence, indecision – simply, worst, true indifference?

President Trump has advanced – rather tentatively – a mishmash of ideas to reduce gun violence, many of them ill-defined and lacking either evidence or Republican support. Regardless of whatever he really thought or wanted to do, he was clearly constrained by White House aides and hamstrung by the N.R.A. and Senate leader Mitch McConnell.

Senator McConnell, whose obstruction on this issue even of bills with bipartisan support has been epic, intimated that he would not call the Senate back early to consider new gun legislation. In doing so, he rejected a plea from more than 200 mayors, including those from El Paso and Dayton. Nor would he bring any gun-control legislation to the floor without securing widespread Republican support – surely code for saying nothing will be done.

Yet there are a number of reasons why it is just possible that August 2019 could be a tipping point in this excruciatingly painful story.

Firstly, this is an issue that the Democrat presidential candidates have seized and will continue to push, keeping it front and centre in the debates. The biggest Democrat presidential field in history is also the most united ever in favour of gun control, and candidates are offering competing and aggressive gun safety plans.

Secondly, while the N.R.A. is still a major force, its power is waning. It has failed to get its top priorities signed into law even under President Trump; it is experiencing internecine power battles, allegations of financial misconduct and embarrassing headlines; and it is being outspent by a growing and emboldened gun-control lobby.

Thirdly, there is growing recognition of the role that extreme ‘white nationalism’ has played in radicalising the perpetrators of gun massacres. The overt racism which drove the shooting in El Paso, and the influence of President Trump’s demagoguery about Latino “invasion” in the shooter’s manifesto have frightened and galvanised many Americans, especially those in Hispanic communities who feel increasingly unsafe and unprotected. Many feel that radicalised ‘white nationalism’ has placed them in its crosshairs, and that this means, for them, “the death of the American dream.” America’s sixty million or so Latinos, who are more likely to vote for Democrats, account for 18 per cent of the national population. That is a powerful voting bloc.

Fourthly, that and other demographic features are changing the electoral map. In Texas, a growing Hispanic population and an influx of younger people attracted by new industries could see the state turn from Republican red to politically purple. In the 2018 mid-term elections a surge in Hispanic turnout in that state helped Democrats make significant gains. The likelihood of this happening again in 2020 is highlighted by the recent announcements by four members of the Texas congressional delegation that they will not contest their seats next year. The 2018 mid-terms also highlighted the continuing collapse of support for the Republican Party in the suburbs, especially among white women. An analysis shows that the majority of the forty-one seats gained by Democrats in 2018 were predominantly suburban. (D. Montgomery, ‘Suburban voters gave Democrats their House majority,’ CityLab, 7 November 2018).

Now, suburban areas of Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Philadelphia, in states that Donald J. Trump won in 2016 are seen as increasingly leaning Democrat. A growing economy is not overcoming residents’ dislike for President Trump’s violent rhetoric and behaviour, their fears for everyday safety and their dismay that schoolchildren need to learn lockdown procedures.

Fifthly, even in the absence of presidential and congressional action, many states are enacting their own gun-control laws. (B. Provenzano, ‘As the Republican Senate blocks reform, states pass their own gun-control laws,’ Pacific Standard, 21 June 2019).

This year, states hit by gun violence have acted to require background checks on all gun sales: Nevada and New Mexico, to mandate the responsible storage of firearms and prohibit the sale and possession of bump stocks: Nevada, and to keep firearms out of the hands of individuals who pose an imminent threat to themselves or others: Colorado, District of Columbia and New York. Increasing numbers of state legislatures are rejecting bills which would allow teachers to be armed, guns on college campuses, and ‘stand your ground’ responses which encourage the escalation of violence.

Finally, and sadly, while President Trump and the Republicans may think that diversion, delay and denial will mean that the anger and attention and push for action will pass, the chances are that these sentiments will be fired up by yet another massacre. On average, four or more people have been killed in a mass shooting every forty-seven days since 17 June 2015, when a young ‘white supremacist’ killed nine people at a Bible study class in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. (B. Berkowitz, A. Blanco, B. R. Mayes, K. Auerbach and D. Kindler, ‘More and deadlier: mass shooting trends in America,’ The Washington Post, 5 August 2019).

But there are other statistics which go unmentioned in the discussion, and are equally important.

The pressure these factors have brought to bear on President Trump and Senator McConnell have recently seen some changes in their public pronouncements, and it seems that they may be now more inclined to take steps towards some substantive action. Whether this results in new laws and regulations remains to be seen.

President Trump has faced major criticism for his harsh language, his lack of empathy and his rude demeanour during the visits to Dayton and El Paso, and in his Twitter bitter attacks on politicians from those cities. Speeches from presidential candidates, including former Vice-president Joe Biden and Senator Cory Booker, served as reminders of what a President should offer his country at such times.

Recently, at a forum in Iowa, sixteen of the Democrats running in the presidential primary spoke out against the obstruction practiced by President Trump, Sen. McConnell and the N.R.A. They also voiced support for a common set of gun-control proposals, including a requirement for universal background checks and a ban on military-style semiautomatic rifles.

President Trump is reportedly furious that his reputation has been damaged by charges of racism and that his language has been linked to the massacre at El Paso. Sen. McConnell is facing public outrage over his failure to act on gun control and accusations that his pandering to the N.R.A. has cost people’s lives. It is likely that polling is also influencing them. A majority of those surveyed in a recent poll, including 59 per cent of Republicans, said that the Senate should pass the two gun-control measures to tighten background checks on gun purchasers approved in February by the House of Representatives. (Poll: Who’s to blame for mass shootings? On that, some bipartisan agreement, USA Today, 7 August 2019).

Meanwhile President Trump was claiming “tremendous support for really common sense, sensible, important background checks” and arguing that Sen. McConnell and senators who are “hard line on the second amendment” are “totally onboard.” And Sen. McConnell confirmed that President Trump was “anxious to get an outcome and so am I.”

If President Trump supported such legislation and Sen. McConnell were willing to bring it up in the Senate, it would signal a fundamental change in the gun-control debate. It would also signal that Republicans were, finally, listening to the voters.

Even before the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Gallup reported the highest level of support for stricter gun laws in twenty-five years. Universal background checks were supported by more than 90 per cent of Americans, and only 23 per cent of all voters oppose an assault weapons ban. Surveys from a variety of sources all show a rise in the number of Americans who say they believe controlling gun violence is more important than protecting gun rights. (N. Cohn and M. Sanger-Katz, ‘On guns, public opinion and public policy often diverge’, The New York Times, 10 August 2019).

In a recent Greenberg Quinlan Rosner research of likely 2020 voters, more than one in four people said their views on guns have changed within the past five years, and of these, 78 per cent – and 70 per cent of Republicans – have moved towards supporting stronger gun laws.

In February 2018, just after the massacre at the high school in Parkland, Florida, President Trump met with members of Congress and chastised them for being “petrified” of the N.R.A. and for doing nothing on gun control. “It’s time that a president stepped up, and we haven’t had them,” he said. “And I’m talking Democrat and Republican presidents – they have not stepped up.” Now, more than twenty months and too many deaths later, it is time the President took his own advice. (L. Russell, ‘Could this be a tipping point for gun control?’, insidestory.org.au, 13 August 2019).

It is safe to say, at this point, that President Trump views on many subjects reveal, if not an instability of judgment, an ambivalence – a duplicity, perhaps? And that seems quite generous. He is being regarded as erratic, unpredictable, often unmovable – worst: temperamentally unfit for the position as president, unstable, unmoored, and by that one means ‘unhinged’. In the words of professor Kenneth Surin of Duke University, President Trump is an “unhinged Orange Creepoid”. (K. Surin, ‘Ukania: the land where the Queen’s son has his shoelaces ironed by his valet’, CounterPunch, 15 November 2018).

A question seems quite legitimate, certainly natural, even caring: “What is wrong with him?” The question seems to plague even the most distracted observer.

During the past 23 months the Trump Administration has proven as chaotic and destructive as its opponents feared, and the man at the centre of it all remains a cipher.

Having considered and overcome the ‘Goldwater rule’, by which all members of the American Psychiatric Association’ are constrained, 27 mental health professionals have collected their thoughts in a publication: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, Thomas Dunne Books, New York, N.Y. 2017).

The contributors were deeply conscious of the importance of observing the principle established by the ‘Goldwater rule’. It was set down at the time of the 1964 presidential campaign, when a magazine published a survey of psychiatrists’ views on Republican nominee Senator Barry Goldwater. That rule is contained in section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association ‘s Principles of Medical Ethics, which states that it is unethical for a psychiatrist to give a professional opinion about a public figure whom s/he has not examined in person, and from whom s/he has not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.

Continued tomorrow … (Part 19)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Dr George Venturini

Australians can be prosecuted at home for two offences committed offshore: child sex tourism and bribing foreign officials. The apparent reluctance to prosecute offshore bribery points to a deep-seated complacency in Australian law enforcement about these issues, says Ross Buckley, who is not only a law professor at the University of New South Wales, but as well Scientia Professor, KPMG Law and King & Wood Mallesons Professor of Disruptive Innovation and Law.

“This is probably due to the political power of the big companies,” he surmises. And one could be more assertive. Professor Buckley has been expressing long time ago the view that the government needs to provide guidance to Australian companies by reforming unwieldy provisions and publicly setting a maximum monetary amount for “facilitation payments” for each country overseas.

“Probably”? But, who is listening?

One has to go overseas, just across the Tasman, for a clear view of the problem and possible solutions. In November 2017 Transparency International published: As Good As We Are Perceived? A review of the approach to bribery and corruption by New Zealand business.

According to Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, New Zealand is perceived as the least corrupt nation in the world. In undertaking the study, Transparency International was interested to see if C.A.E.R.’s research data for New Zealand supports this perception. C.A.E.R. stands for Corporate Analysis Enhanced Responsibility.

“In Australia, bribery is a crime under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995. Australian nationals engaging in bribery of foreign government officials can receive fines of up to AUD 66,000 and ten year jail terms. Australian companies face fines of up to AUD 330,000 if convicted of bribing foreign officials. Australian companies and individuals may be convicted of bribery whether the act is committed from within Australia or from overseas.

There are two defences to the charge of bribery. The first is if the payments made are not illegal in the recipient’s country. [And that would have covered A.W.B. in Iraq] The other defence is that of facilitation payments.

There are discrepancies within Australian law as to what defines a facilitation payment and whether such payments are legal. The Criminal Code defines facilitation payments by stating that the payment must be: 1) of a nominal value; 2) paid to a foreign official for the sole or predominant purpose of expediting a minor routine action; and 3) documented as soon as possible.

The documentation must satisfy the reporting requirements also set out within the Criminal Code.

The Australian Income Tax Assessment Act (1936) (ITA) also sets out a definition of facilitation payments but does not include a reference to the minor nature of the payments. As the ITA Act does not refer to the size of a payment, and the Criminal Code does not define ‘minor’, it is unclear at what size a facilitation payment ceases being legal and becomes a bribe. (As good as we are perceived?, caer.com.au, PDF file, at 4).

Professor Buckley wondered: “It amazes me that company executives say [corruption] is the only way to get business – and almost everyone does it.” (Bribery and Corruption: How Good Guys Go Bad, businessthink.unsw.edu.au, 7 September 2010).

At the end of 2008 Mr. Rosario Fusca, the operational head of Australia’s biggest corruption investigation, the multi-agency taskforce, which comprised initially Australian Federal Police, Victoria Police, the Australian Taxation Office and A.S.I.C. officers, felt bound to write to his superior at the Australian Federal Police: “I refuse to be treated like a fool,” the email said. “This is a high priority AFP national investigation, the task is massive. If no proper effective support is given and maintained, I recommend closing this investigation.”

Mr. Fusca was quickly disciplined and demoted. Worse would come: stress leave, a humiliating return to work and, most recently, a Federal Court action which details an explosive claim that Fusca was offered a promotion in return for prematurely shutting down the police’s A.W.B. inquiry.

On 7 June 2012 he was on the A.B.C. 7.30 Report talking to Ms. Leigh Sales and spouting everything he knew about the failure properly to investigate A.W.B. His contention was that the Australian Federal Police had mishandled and prematurely shutdown the inquiry. And he documented his position. (Former investigator claims AWB kickbacks case mishandled, abc.net.au/7.30, 7 June 2012).

Mr. Fusca was indignant.

Overseas – he reasoned – many company executives who, like A.W.B. managers, engaged in sharp practices against the United Nations Oil-for-Food programme to pay ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s régime, had been gaoled and hit with huge fines. In Australia, not one of the many former A.W.B. managers whom the Cole Inquiry found to have acted corruptly had faced a criminal charge.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s five-year pursuit of civil law breaches against six former A.W.B. senior figures had, by the middle of 2012, produced only one minor victory.

Mr. Fusca believed that the Australian Federal Police-led multi-agency taskforce set-up to investigate those responsible for paying the ‘kickbacks’ failed to reach its full potential. He thought that Australians deserved to know why.

“This is one of those investigations where there has been a wilful blindness [in the handling of it] … people need to be held accountable. It is as simple as that.”

Performance reviews of his work were all favourable, with one noting Mr. Fusca’s “considerable experience in leadership roles [and his] diligence and tenacity.” His reputation was partly the reason why he was chosen to help lead the multi-agency A.W.B. taskforce, set up after the Cole Inquiry to investigate whether the A.W.B. managers had breached state and/or federal laws by setting up a covert kickbacks-for-wheat-contracts scheme.

There are few official public statements about the work of the multi-agency taskforce.

The first news release announced the Melbourne-based taskforce’s formation in late 2006, the second, that the federal police’s A.W.B. inquiry was closing down in August 2009 after advice given to the A.F.P. by senior barrister Peter Hastings, Q.C. A.S.I.C. would be left to finish the A.F.P.’ s job.

According to the A.F.P. media statement, Mr. Hastings had advised that “the prospects of a successful criminal prosecution were limited and not in the public interest.”

Mr. Fusca told the 7.30 Report viewers a story of a taskforce set up poorly and shut down months before it had finished its work.

“It took ages for it to get off the ground.” he said of the initial struggle simply to find the taskforce accommodation, computers and staff to begin inquiries.

When office space was found, there were not enough investigators to analyse the millions of documents produced to Cole’s Inquiry, let alone begin interviewing witnesses and liaising with overseas agencies.

In Mr. Fusca’s opinion A.S.I.C.’s relationship with the Federal Police was “a mess”, partly due to legal impediments to sharing information and the two agencies’ different agendas.

Mr. Fusca, who had joined the taskforce as a team leader before being promoted to acting co-ordinator, said that he struggled to keep his staff motivated.

Despite the difficulties, he said that the taskforce had become increasingly confident that it was building the backbone of a strong criminal case, a view he said which had been endorsed in 2008 by lawyers from the A.F.P. and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

If the taskforce had been able to prove that A.W.B. employees had committed a fraud on the Australian Government – or the United Nations – by not disclosing the ‘kickbacks’ hidden in wheat contracts, police could potentially lay charges.

Not long before the interview, the Cole Inquiry’s senior barrister, John Agius, Q.C., had told The (Melbourne) Age that police had plenty to work with. “In my belief, it was a very strong case that Commonwealth and perhaps the Victorian state laws had been breached,” he said. “In my view, there were cases to answer and I expected the matter would be in court and people would be prosecuted.”

Among the evidence that Mr. Fusca said his team had discovered were emails in which some A.W.B. managers discussed the need to keep the ‘kickbacks’ a secret.

A confidential legal opinion obtained by The (Melbourne) Age and written by Peter Hastings, Q.C., the barrister whose later advice would lead to the inquiry shutting down, confirms the inquiry had a sound legal basis from which to build a criminal case.

“I agree that there is a proper basis for pursuing a case of fraud to the effect that … [officials were] deceived into granting approval [to A.W.B.] for the export of wheat to Iraq,” said Hastings’ memorandum to the A.F.P. in April 2008, more than a year after the taskforce was formed.

Mr. Fusca said that his team was well aware of the intense political sensitivities around the case (the Labor Opposition had spent much of 2006 accusing the Howard Government of knowing about A.W.B.’s conduct), especially after it recruited a confidential, high-ranking political informant.

The informant, said Mr. Fusca, provided fresh intelligence that some Australian government officials had known of A.W.B.’s corruption, an allegation discounted previously by Mr. Cole.

Mr. Fusca said that the slow but sure progress of the taskforce in the second half of 2008 included a briefing with Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions Chris Craigie, Q.C. who encouraged the A.F.P. to continue building its criminal case. But inside the A.F.P. Mr. Fusca received a different message from some superiors. At an A.F.P. senior managers’ function at a bar in Canberra on 10 December 2008, Mr. Fusca said, he was approached by another senior officer. The incident that Fusca described was also detailed in his sworn Federal Court claim that the A.F.P. breached the Fair Work Act 2009 in its treatment of him.

“There was a general conversation about a variety of things and then he said if I could make the taskforce disappear, I’d be the next co-ordinator [in the A.F.P.’s special operations section].”

Mr. Fusca, who had recently sought a promotion from acting co-ordinator to co-ordinator, said that implied the message seemed clear. “If I could somehow close the inquiry, that the position of co-ordinator would be made available to me. I was completely floored by it … if I had my time again, I would have reported it there and then [rather than wait until taking court action]. I was just so taken aback by it.”

A day after the approach, Mr. Fusca said, another senior A.F.P. official in Canberra told him that the criminal brief against the A.W.B. suspects had to be finished by April 2009. Mr. Fusca claimed that he responded by saying this request was unachievable and that the earliest possible date for a criminal brief to be finished was by the end of 2009.

In a statement responding to detailed questions from The (Mebourne) Age, the A.F.P. said on 6 June that it was aware of the allegations made by Mr. Fusca in the Federal Court, but that it “is not appropriate for the A.F.P. to make any further comment on this matter as it is the subject of current judicial proceedings.”

The A.F.P. also said that by 2007 the taskforce had 27 staff and a multimillion-dollar budget.

Mr. Fusca returned to Melbourne and intensified his campaign for more investigators, wanting at least another dozen. On 18 December, a week after his trip to Canberra, he learnt he was getting just three, one of whom was about to resign.

“Here I was in charge of supposedly the A.F.P.’s No. 1 investigation. We had all these kickbacks being sent to a regime that was horrible and I was being sent an officer that was resigning,” he said.

Mr. Fusca responded by sending an email to three superiors detailing the taskforce’s “severe staffing problem” and the previous “factors that have impeded the taskforce from meeting critical deadlines.”

“It is difficult to digest and not become cynical when attempts are made to transfer members to a taskforce under these circumstances. This approach to staffing the taskforce is not the first … and I can say that our counterparts at A.S.I.C. and the Victoria Police have raised questions on how serious the A.F.P. is taking this taskforce.”

The email triggered his immediate demotion and led to a series of events which ultimately ended Mr. Fusca’s career.

He was removed from the taskforce and he took extended holiday and stress leave.

Mr. Fusca said that the A.F.P. gave him mostly menial tasks when he returned to work in March 2009. A confidential A.F.P. performance review of Fusca in August 2009 – eight months after he was demoted – urged his superiors to recognise “Ross’s previous experience and his obvious capabilities” and give him “more opportunities in a supervisory or command environment.” Those opportunities never came and Mr. Fusca resigned in late 2010.

Mr. Fusca’s lawyer, Nicole Spicer, described the A.F.P.’s treatment of his client as appalling.

“He has dedicated all his life to law enforcement and justice and he has been humiliated and embarrassed,” said Ms. Spicer.

But Fusca’s anger was extending beyond his own treatment. He said that the A.F.P.’s decision to shut down his taskforce was far too premature.

“If the evidence wasn’t there, I would say we’ve given it our best shot,” he said. “[but] we were months and months away from making that decision … There were thousands upon thousands of documents that hadn’t been examined correctly and weren’t being examined because members weren’t being replaced.”

An email to Mr. Fusca from a still serving federal agent, who was with the taskforce when it shut down, showed that Mr. Fusca’s views were shared by others within the federal police.

“Only over time, will the damage that has been done to this job be exposed,” the email said. “The A.F.P. has dropped the ball and failed to address the real issues that you as the boss faced.”

Two other members of the A.F.P. taskforce confirmed to The Age’s investigating journalists their belief that the inquiry could have been handled better.

In its statement, the A.F.P. said that the issues raised internally by Mr. Fusca were dealt with appropriately. It also pointed out that the taskforce faced several challenges beyond its control, including the need to re-collect evidence already gathered by the Cole Inquiry and the fact that legal challenges meant it was difficult to share information with A.S.I.C.

The A.F.P. refused to release the advice from Peter Hastings on which it relied to shut down its inquiry. But the A.F.P.’s statement highlighted its more recent successes in investigating white collar crime, including the bribery probe which has led to the charging of two Reserve Bank of Australia companies.

A.S.I.C.’s civil penalty cases lodged in the Supreme Court of Victoria against six former A.W.B. senior figures were stalled, as settlement negotiations between the ‘corporate regulator’ and the accused men continue.

A week before the interview a court heard that A.S.I.C. and former A.W.B. chief executive Andrew Lindberg had agreed to a settlement involving an admission that he had breached his director’s duties, the payment of a $100,000 penalty and, subject to court approval, a ban on directing a company until 2014.

Mr. Lindberg had admitted failing to tell the A.W.B. board that former employees of the company likely to have information “relevant to the allegations of impropriety” were not being interviewed for the company’s internal investigation, dubbed Project Rose.

The Court heard that Mr. Lindberg had also failed to tell the board that the U.N. Independent Inquiry Committee’s 2005 Volcker investigation into the Oil-for-Food programme had heard allegations that the A.W.B. was among companies which had paid ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s régime.

Sentencing, Victorian Supreme Court Justice Ross Robson said that while Mr. Lindberg’s negligence was not deliberate and he had otherwise maintained “honest and loyal conduct” throughout his career, his breaches were serious.

“None of the contraventions involve deliberate wrongful acts, dishonesty or any moral turpitude.” … “Nevertheless, Mr. Lindberg failed to perform his duties as a reasonable director or officer would in his situation. I find that the breaches of the act were serious.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Lindberg had not admitted to any malfeasance involving the actual payment of almost AU$300 million in ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s régime.

What he said, if correctly reported by the media, indicated that he had learned nothing from the ordeal. Speaking outside the Court, in a considerable display of victimism, he warned firms to be cautious when trading abroad.

“It’s been a long ordeal, six and a half years … I’ve never resiled from my responsibilities and I don’t do it now. And I just want to get on with my life and do what I can,” he told reporters outside the court.

“I think in any market, particularly overseas when you deal with third-world countries, I think you’ve got to be very careful, and it’s perhaps easier than you think to make mistakes. … “I just want to get on with my life now and thank everyone that’s supported me and thank the court for the consideration I’ve been given.”

On his part, the chairman of the ‘corporate regulator’ issued a statement to declare among some other fatuous reflections that Mr. Lindberg’s punishment should remind executives fully to grasp and obey their corporate responsibilities. “Good corporate governance requires executive directors to make adequate inquiries in relation to matters before them and properly inform the board.” (‘Former AWB boss fined over Iraqi bribes’, abc.net.au).

Mr. Fusca expressed his conviction that the public deserves a full explanation as to why Australian law enforcement agencies have so little to show for their efforts, six years after the Cole Inquiry exposed one of the nation’s biggest corruption scandals. (N. McKenzie and R. Baker, ‘Scandal? What scandal?’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 June 2012).

At the end of December 2013, while the A.S.I.C. was continuing legal proceeding against Trevor Flugge and Peter Geary over the ‘kickbacks’ to Saddam Hussein’s régime, legal proceedings against two staff involved in the scandal in the late 1990s were dropped.

After Andrew Lindberg and the former chief financial officer Paul Ingleby had been fined and disqualified from managing corporations, A.S.I.C. dropped the proceedings in the Supreme Court of Victoria against Charles Stott and Michael Long because it found no fault with their dealings and it was no longer in the public interest.

But A.S.I.C. confirmed that cases against the former A.W.B. chairman Trevor Flugge and the former general manager of trading Peter Geary were ongoing. (S. Locke, ‘ASIC drops case against former AWB staff, abc.net.au, 24 December 2013).

On 12 December 2015, almost two decades after Trevor Flugge had visited Saddam Hussein’s régime for the first time and the ‘kickbacks’ scandal exploded, Mr. Trevor Flugge, former chairman of A.W.B. faced his day in court.

Mr. Flugge was defending four allegations of breaching his director’s duties under the Corporations Act, while former general manager for trading Peter Geary was facing thirteen allegations of breaching his executive duties. Each breach carries a maximum fine of $ 200,000.

The 10-week civil trial began on that day in the Supreme Court of Victoria before Judge Ross Robson, having been initiated by the ‘corporate regulator’. “Flugge headed A.W.B. delegations to Iraq in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2001,” A.S.I.C. said in its third further amended statement of claim.

Despite the extraordinary passage of time, the trial promised to involve former ministers and senior public officials who were named in court documents and risked being called as witnesses to recall the decade-old events.

“On 2 April 1998, Flugge wrote to Tim Fischer, the then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Trade advising of a meeting scheduled with the Iraq Minister for Trade later that month.” one of the Court documents stated.

“In response to Australia’s decision to place troops in the Gulf region, Iraq intended to cut Australian wheat imports and … be replaced by imports from one of AWB’s major competitors, France. Flugge requested that the Deputy Prime Minister provide AWB with a message to pass on to the Iraq Minister for Trade indicating, among other things, the importance that is attached to the wheat trade between Australia and Iraq.” another document said.

Continued Wednesday – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 7)

Previous instalment – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 5)

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 16

In a nation where a mass shooting occurs on average about once a day, it is easy to be cynical about the prospect of change. But following the El Paso and Dayton attacks, there are glimmers of hope, however slight.

The crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates has jumped on the issue, ensuring that the national spotlight of the 2020 campaign will keep the debate over guns and domestic terrorism from fading away. In Congress, Democrats have rallied behind legislation which would require D.H.S., the F.B.I. and the Justice Department to address ‘white supremacism’ and right-wing extremism, including training and information sharing.

Among law enforcement there has been a new push for domestic terrorism to be codified as a federal crime. “Acts of violence intended to intimidate civilian populations or to influence or affect government policy should be prosecuted as domestic terrorism regardless of the ideology behind them,” Brian O’Hare, president of the F.B.I. Agents Association, wrote in a statement. Such a change would give prosecutors new tools to confront the threat of domestic radicalisation.

There has also been a noticeable shift in how law-enforcement and government officials talk about these attacks. F.B.I. agents, politicians and federal attorneys have become quicker to label extremist violence committed by Americans as “terrorism.” On 6 August 2019 the F.B.I. announced it was opening a domestic-terrorism investigation into the suspect in Gilroy, California noting that the gunman responsible for the massacre on 28 July 2019 at the Gilroy Garlic Festival had a ‘target list’ of religious institutions, political organisations and federal buildings. The day after the El Paso attack, the top federal prosecutor in western Texas declared that the incident would be treated as terrorism. “We’re going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is deliver swift and certain justice,” said U.S. Attorney John Bash.

This language matters, experts say. If we cannot call an evil by its name, how can we hope to defeat it? “You can’t really deal with the problem unless you acknowledge it exists,” said Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism. Mr. Pitcavage has studied far-right extremism since the mid-1990s. “We need a consensus that this is a problem, and we need to get together, irrespective of people’s partisan beliefs or anything else, to confront this problem for the good of everybody.” (V. Bergengruen and W.J. Hennigan, ‘We are being eaten from within.’ Why America is losing the battle against white nationalist terrorism, ‘We are being eaten from within.’ Why America is losing’, TIME, 8 August 2019).

The memoir of a physician may help further to understand the pervasive, threatening nature of ‘white supremacy’. In his book Dying of whiteness: How the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland (Basic Books, New York, N.Y. 2019, professor Jonathan M. Metzl, of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, wrote about one of his patients, ‘Trevor’. In early 2016 Dr. Metzl had met Trevor, a forty-one-year-old uninsured Tennessean who had driven a taxi for twenty years until worsening pain in the upper-right part of his abdomen forced him to see a physician. Trevor had learned that the pain resulted from an inflamed liver, the consequence of years of hard partying and the damaging effects of hepatitis C. When Dr. Metzl met him at a low-income housing facility outside Nashville, Trevor appeared yellow with jaundice and ambled with the help of an aluminium walker to alleviate the pain he felt in his stomach and legs.

Debates raged in Tennessee around the same time about the state’s participation in the Affordable Care Act, popularly named nicknamed Obamacare because it was signed into law by President Barack Obama, in 2010, and the related expansion of Medicaid coverage. Had Trevor lived some forty minutes away in neighbouring Kentucky, he might have topped the list of candidates for expensive medications called polymerase inhibitors, a lifesaving liver transplant, or other forms of treatment and support. Kentucky had adopted the Affordable Care Act and began the expansion in 2013, while Tennessee’s legislature repeatedly blocked Obama-era health care reforms.

One may barely conceive of a white body which refuses treatment rather than supporting a system which might benefit everyone. One should read that act as a metaphor for the decline of the nation as a whole.

Even on death’s doorstep, Trevor was not angry. In fact, he staunchly supported the stance promoted by his elected officials. “Ain’t no way I would ever support ‘Obamacare’ or sign up for it,” Trevor told Dr. Metzl. “I would rather die.” When Dr. Metzl asked him why he felt this way even as he faced severe illness, he explained: “We don’t need any more government in our lives. And in any case, no way I want my tax dollars paying for Mexicans or welfare queens.” [Emphasis added]

Trevor died of the toxic effects of liver damage caused by hepatitis C. In fact, Trevor’s deteriorating condition resulted also from the toxic effects of dogma. Dogma impressed on him that governmental assistance in any form was evil and not to be trusted, even when the assistance came in the form of federal contracts with private health insurance or pharmaceutical companies, or from expanded communal safety nets. Dogma, aligned with beliefs about a racial hierarchy, overtly and implicitly aimed to keep white Americans hovering above Mexicans, welfare queens, and non-white others. Dogma prescribed to Trevor that minority groups received lavish benefits from the state, even though he himself lived and died on a low-income budget with state assistance. Trevor voiced a literal willingness to die for his place in this hierarchy, rather than participate in a system which might have placed him on the same plane as immigrants or racial minorities – why, “Mexicans or welfare queens.”

Trevor also died because the dogmata and hierarchies he supported reflected the agendas of politicians who clamoured that health care reform and Medicaid expansion represented everything from government overreach to evil incarnate. Anti-A.C.A. invective found particular champions in Republican lawmakers in Tennessee, a once moderate, at the centre, state which had turned hard right. These politicians repeatedly made sure that Tennessee did not create its own Obamacare exchange, expand Medicaid, or embrace the health care law in any way.

Thus, routine screenings, filled prescriptions, visits to doctors’ rooms, and many other factors linked to better health outcomes rose steadily in Kentucky in the four years after that state expanded Medicaid. Such trends lifted the overall well-being of many Kentuckians and particularly helped people who suffered from what are oddly called preexisting conditions such as hepatitis C. Preventive care and proper treatment remained unattainable for many lower-income Tennessee citizens, in large part because of their state’s political choices.

Dr. Metzl had some sense of the complex medical and psychological explanations for Trevor’s symptoms. He had worked in an intensive care unit during his internship. He had witnessed the devastating effects of organ failure. He later trained in psychiatry, where he came to appreciate how people’s deep defence mechanisms and projected insecurities can lead them to act in ways which seem at odds with their own longevity.

Yet, the more Dr. Metzl spoke with Trevor, the more he realised how his experience of illness, and indeed his particular form of ‘white identity’, resulted not just from his own thoughts and actions but from his politics. Local and national politics claimed to make America great again – and, tacitly, white again – on the backs and organs of working-class people of all races and ethnicities, including ‘white’ supporters. It was politics which made vague mention of strategies for governance but ultimately shredded safety nets and provided massive tax cuts which benefited only the very wealthiest persons and corporations. Such politics, all too often, gained traction by playing to anxieties about white victimhood in relation to imagined threats posed by “Mexicans and welfare queens.”

Between 2013 and 2018 Dr. Metzl had travelled extensively in the South and Midwest – in Sarah Palin’s words, “the real America.” He had wanted to learn how people balanced anti-government and pro-gun attitudes while at the same time navigating lives impacted by poor health care, widening gun-related morbidity, and underfunded public infrastructures and institutions. During his travels he met many people who, like Trevor, were dying in various overt or invisible ways as a result of political beliefs or systems linked to the defence of white ‘ways of life’ or concerns about minorities or poor people hoarding resources. The stories these people told Dr. Metzl became the stimulus for a more sustained investigation of how particular American notions of ‘whiteness’ – notions shaped by politics and policies as well as by institutions, history, media, economics, and personal identities – threaten ‘white’ well-being.

Dr. Metzl found that Donald J. Trump supporters were often willing to put their own lives on the line in support of their political beliefs. As a result, when viewed more broadly, actions which may have seemed from the outside to be crazy, uninformed, or self-defeating served larger political aims. Had southerners, including Trevor, embraced the Affordable Care Act and come to depend on its many benefits, it would have been much harder for politicians such as Trump to block or overturn health care reform. By design, vulnerable immigrant and minority populations suffered the consequences in the most dire and urgent ways. Yet the trade-offs made by people like Trevor frequently and materially benefitted people and corporations far higher up the socioeconomic food chain – the agendas and capital gains of which depended on the invisible sacrifices of low-income ‘whites’. The white body which refuses treatment rather than supporting a system which might benefit everyone then becomes a metaphor for, and parable of, the threatened decline of the larger nation.

Dying of whiteness, which came out of Dr. Metzl’s research project, explores the effects on white population-level health of what became central Republican policy issues: loosening gun laws, repealing the Affordable Care Act, or enacting massive tax cuts which largely benefited the wealthy and corporations. Dr. Metzl also tracked the health effects of what various authors have called anti-government, anti-tax, pro-gun, and oft-Republican forms of ‘white backlash conservatism’ – a dynamic illustrated by Trevor’s rejection of the A.C.A. because of concerns about non-white minorities taking advantage of his resources.

Dr. Metzl’s research enabled him to assemble a narrative about how, in five steps, the embrace of ‘white identity’ politics by American voters produced catastrophic health outcomes for those same voters.

Rather than landing a man on the moon, curing polio, inventing the Internet, or promoting structures of world peace, a dominant strain of the electorate voted for politicians whose platforms of American greatness were built on embodied forms of demise.

Dr. Metzl concluded that:

Firstly, a host of conservative political movements emerged – or re-emerged – in southern and mid-western states over the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries which released into mainstream American politics once-fringe agendas, such as starving government of funding, dismantling social programmes, or allowing free flow of most types of firearms. These movements – ranging from the Tea Party to iterations of libertarianism funded by the Koch brothers, to the Freedom Caucus, to the so-called alt-right given voice through outlets such as Breitbart – arose from vastly different agendas and points of origin. However, their interests grew ever-more aligned as they came to power in southern and mid-western states in ways which shaped state agendas, national Republican platforms, and, ultimately, policies of the Trump Administration. As this played out, theories of backlash conservatism gave way to something even more powerful: practices of backlash governance.

Secondly, these increasingly unified forms of conservatism advanced politically through overt or implicit appeals to what has been called ‘white racial resentment.’ In other words, these agendas gained support by trumpeting connections to unspoken or overt claims that particular policies, issues, or decisions served also to defend or restore ‘white privilege’ or quell threats to idealised notions of ‘white authority’ represented by demographic or cultural shifts. This was both a top-down process – in which politicians used racial resentment as a tool for class exploitation – and a bottom-up one – the language of ‘white resentment’ became an increasingly accepted way of talking about ‘whiteness’ more broadly.

To be sure, groups such as the Tea Party rose to prominence for a wide array of cultural, economic, and religious reasons, many of which had relatively little to do with whiteness or race. Lower-income communities left behind by globalising economies, disenchantment with Democrats, and the growing influence of corporate lobbies and mega-rich donors on party politics unquestionably played major roles. A number of persons with whom Dr. Metzl spoke, when he explained his thesis, told him that positions which appeared to reflect racism instead reflected a larger, colour-blind ‘hatred of the poor.’

Yet a major part of these movements’ appeals lay in rallying cries which tapped into emotionally and historically charged notions that ‘white Americans’ should remain atop other racial or ethnic groups in the United States ‘social hierarchy’, or that white ‘status’ was at risk. This is not to say that any one specific person was expressly racist. Rather, frameworks of ‘white racial resentment’ shaped debates about, and attitudes toward, various public policies and pieces of legislation. Sometimes, the racial agendas of these calls to arms were overt and obvious. For instance, posters of then President Barack Obama photo-shopped with a feather headdress and a bone through his nose began to appear at anti-A.C.A. Tea Party rallies. In 2016 former Missouri Republican Party director Ed Martin told a cheering ‘Tea Party for Trump’ rally in Festus, Missouri: “Donald Trump is for Americans first. You’re not racist if you don’t like Mexicans.” That same year, the ‘Tea Party Patriots’ funded Asia-bashing advertisements featuring fictional Chinese executives in suits ostensibly speaking Mandarin and laughing about how they were able to buy thousands of acres of Missouri farmland. At other times, the racial underpinnings of the agendas appeared all but invisible to people on the ground, as with decisions to rally around issues such as guns, health insurance, or public schools – issues the racially charged histories of which had been obscured by the passage of time.

Thirdly, the policies which took shape when these once fringe forms of conservatism entered the mainstream Republican Party and assumed legislative power often negatively affected the health of middle- and lower-income populations. While some of these policies and actions directly affected health care, others not expressly linked to health, such as the proliferation of civilian-owned firearms, nonetheless carried profound medical implications. ‘White backlash politics’ gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When ‘white backlash policies’ became laws, as in cutting away health care programmes and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centres, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was increasing rates of death.

Fourthly, a wide array of middle- and lower-income people experienced negative health consequences from these policy decisions – again, largely because the policies involved elaborate strategies for tearing down community structures for middle – and lower-income Americans but hardly any blue-prints for building them back up. Minority and immigrant communities, often the targets of backlash’s ire, suffered greatly and needlessly. But the health and well-being of ‘white Americans’ suffered from the health effects of these policies as well. Such effects played out in public ways – such as when white concertgoers died in high-profile mass shootings linked to gun policies – or lack thereof – enacted by conservative white politicians. Other effects were far less obvious, such as the long-term implications of blocking health care reform or defunding schools and infrastructure.

Finally, as with Trevor, many lower- and middle-income ‘white Americans’ continued to support these policies and ideologies – with their inherent links to narratives of imagined victimhood and domination – even after their negative effects became apparent and promises made by politicians such as Trump unravelled. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, ‘white Americans’ in parts of the United States saw drops in life expectancy. But instead of scrapping these state-level policies as examples of historically bad governance, they became the foundations for legislation at the national level, in the form of Trump-era tax bills, gun policies, health care strategies, and other ill-fated initiatives. All the while, the issues themselves – such as guns, health care, or taxes – accrued larger symbolic or moral meanings in ways which rendered conversations about the effects of specific policies ever-more difficult.

The combination of these elements has led to a perilous state of affairs: a host of complex anxieties has prompted increasing numbers of ‘white Americans’ such as Trevor to support right-wing politicians and policies, even when these policies actually harm ‘white Americans’ at growing rates. As these policy agendas spread from southern and mid-western legislatures into the halls of Congress and the White House, ever-more ‘white Americans’ are then, literally, ‘dying of whiteness’. This is because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy – that is, an investment in a sense of ‘whiteness’ – ironically harms the aggregate well-being of United States whites as a demographic group, thereby making ‘whiteness’ itself a negative health indicator.

A wrong turn is made by addressing racism mainly as a disorder of people’s brains or attitudes. Instead, racism matters most to health when it shapes politics and policies which then affect public health.

Dr. Metzl’s focus on the health effects of American backlash politics for ‘white Americans’ is in no way intended to minimise the larger effects of racism in the United States. It should be taken as a matter of fact, but all too often is not, that systems in which ‘race’ correlates with ‘privilege’ have devastating consequences for minority and immigrant populations. Cuts to health delivery networks, communal safety nets, schools, and social services, alongside policies which enable the proliferation of guns, often impact minority populations first and most severely. Racism itself can also have profoundly negative health consequences. Rather than landing a man on the moon, curing polio, inventing the Internet, or promoting structures of world peace, a dominant strain of the electorate voted for politicians whose platforms of American greatness were built on embodied forms of demise.

Professor Yvette Cozier, an epidemiologist at Boston University, and her colleagues have uncovered associations between frequent experiences of racism – such as receiving poor service in restaurants and stores or feeling unfairly treated on the job or by the police – and higher risks of illness and obesity among African American women. Professor Michael A. Grandner, the Director of the Sleep and Health Research Programme at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, has found links between perceived racism and sleep disturbances. And Dr. Mario Sims, of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, found that lifetime discrimination was associated with greater rates of hypertension among adult African Americans.

Increasingly, one now hears that people with racist attitudes fare poorly as well. Racist views make people ‘sick’ and ‘unhealthy,’ neuroscientists claim, because the psychological effort of discrimination can raise blood pressure or cortisol levels and heighten risk for heart attacks or strokes. “Harboring prejudice may be bad for your health,” writes professor Elizabeth Page-Gould, of the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, because racially prejudiced people experience such “bodily reactions even during benign social interactions with people of different races.”

Dr. Metzl’s findings suggest that one makes a wrong turn when one tries to address racism mainly as a disorder of people’s brains or attitudes, or try ‘to fix’ the problem simply by attempting to sensitise people or change their minds. On an aggregate level, people’s individual racial attitudes have relatively little correlation to their health. In extreme cases like that of Trevor, racial animus can lead to medical disaster. Yet this correlation rarely holds true at the level of population health. Racial animosity rarely makes a person sick in and of itself – otherwise there would be many more sick people of all backgrounds in the world.

Instead, racism matters most to health when its underlying resentments and anxieties shape larger politics and policies and then affect public health. Dr. Metzl wold say this in part because many of the middle – and lower-income white Americans he met in his research were not expressly or even implicitly racist. Race did not even come up in many of their conversations. Yet racism remained an issue, not because of their attitudes but because they lived in states the elected officials of which enacted overly permissive gun policies, rejected health care reform, undercut social safety net programmes. In these and other instances, racism and ‘racial resentment’ functioned at structural levels and in ways which had far broader effects than the kinds of racism which functions in people’s minds.

Understanding why conservative white Americans vote in ways which negatively affect their own lives involves far more than pointing out ways in which these voters may have been deceived.

Addressing racism structurally allowed Dr. Metzl to raise what became the most troubling findings of his research. He found that, when tracked over time, racially driven policies functioned as mortal risk factors for all people living in states which had adopted them. This is because illness and death patterns which followed actions such as expanding gun proliferation or massive tax cuts mimicked those once seen in relation to other man-made pathogens, such as water pollution, second-hand smoke, or not wearing seat belts in cars, or during certain disease outbreaks. Society mobilised to reduce risk and improve health when toxins dumped into the water, cigarettes, or faulty automobiles led to declining health. But when the pathogens were policies and ideologies, they instead laid the foundations for politics furthered at the national level by the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association, and the Trump Administration. In these ways, stories such as Trevor’s come to embody larger problems of an electorate which, in its worst moments, votes to sink the whole ship – except for a few privileged passengers who get lifeboats – even when they are on it, rather than investing in communal systems which might lift all boats. ‘Anti-blackness’, in a biological sense, then produces its own ‘anti-whiteness’ – as an illness of the mind, weaponised onto the body of the nation. The particular issues about which Trump supporters appear to have been “duped” also tap into larger histories, myths, and ideologies. These histories, myths, and ideologies go a long way toward explaining the complex tension between promises of restored ‘greatness’ on one hand and practices of self-sabotage on the other. Better awareness of this paradoxical tension might allow the better to promote an alternative investment in collaboration and equality – in many instances, by addressing ideologies of ‘whiteness’ head-on rather than by proxy.

However, the electorate chose a regime the policies of which came cloaked in the promise of restored privilege, enacted through mechanisms of polarisation and divisiveness. As a result, Americans pursued a policy about eliminating financial safety nets and social support programmes, allowing ever-more guns, and defunding roads and bridges while at the same time enacting tariffs and building walls. Such talk, and the policies which flow from it, often signify protection, preservation, or continued supremacy. But in many instances, they ultimately serve to hemorrhage collective abilities to solve problems or help people in times of need. Ultimately, when ‘white’ voters are asked to defend ‘whiteness’, ‘whiteness’ often fails to defend, honour, or restore them. (J. M. Metzl, Dying of whitness: How the politics of racial resentment is killing America’s heartland, Basic Books, New York, N.Y. 2019).

Continued tomorrow … (Part 18)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 15

In the wake of the El Paso massacre, which was followed by a second mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, roughly 13 hours later, Trump promised to give federal authorities “whatever they need” to combat domestic terrorism. He said law enforcement “must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs” and said he was directing the Justice Department ‘to work in partnership with local, state and federal agencies, as well as social-media companies, to develop tools which can detect mass shooters before they strike.”

But White House officials did not specify which new authorities are needed. Nor does the Administration’s record offer much hope. In its early days the Trump Administration gutted the Department of Homeland Security office which focused on violent extremism in the United States and pulled funding for grants which were meant to go to organisations countering neo-Nazis, ‘white supremacists’, antigovernment militants and other like-minded groups.

The El Paso terrorist was born in 1998, three years after the worst homegrown terrorist attack in American history at Oklahoma City.

In 1998 ‘white supremacists’ assembled in Toronto to hear Ms. Ingrid Rimland, a doyenne of neo-Nazism. She had been reared as a Mennonite, a peaceful religion with a long history of celebrating white ethnic identity. By then in her early sixties, Rimland was highly regarded for having embraced the nascent world wide web as an organising tool for ‘white supremacy’. From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, Rimland’s site, Zundelsite.org, served as a clearinghouse for Holocaust denialism and fascist news, blasting daily ‘Z-Grams’ into the dark corners of the web. Celebrations of ‘white ethnicity’ are rarely if ever innocuous.

Even before setting up Zundelsite.org, Ms. Rimland had been a pioneer of ‘white identity’ politics, and when she took the podium in 1998 in Toronto she explained that she would be discussing her evolution as an ‘ethnic’ writer. In her lecture Rimland credited her embrace of ‘white supremacy’ to her upbringing as a Mennonite, a faith generally associated with pacifism and agrarianism.

With the far-right surging worldwide, historians have come the better to appreciate that the taproots of racism reach deep into local contexts. Rimland’s life and writings help demonstrate how an individual’s turn toward intolerance always reflects a personal journey – how ‘white supremacists’ mine biography for the stuff of bigotry. Factors such as economic recession, mass migration and democratic malaise may conjure favourable conditions for far-right populism, but the paths societies take on the road to illiberal rule are always specific. That means that one may never again see a country exactly like Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany. But, by the same token, no country or person or religion is immune from the pull of the ‘far right’.

Rimland’s biography cautions the reader that all celebrations of white ‘ethnicity’ must be received skeptically. When viewed in historical context, they are rarely if ever innocuous. For white Mennonites in the United States in particular – who often continue to think of themselves as an ‘ethnicity’ – Rimland’s example should sound warning bells about the dangers of continuing to embrace this identity.

The Mennonite denomination of Christianity – barely two million members worldwide – is best known for the principle of Christian pacifism. During the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe, early Mennonites, part of the larger Anabaptist movement, faced persecution from Catholics and Protestants alike. Thousands were beheaded, burned, or impaled for refusing to baptise their children into state churches or otherwise serve earthly rulers. Today a minority of Mennonites, like the Amish, avoid certain elements of modernity such as cars, telephones, and higher education and are ultraconservative, patriarchal, and homophobic. Most are not, however, and the church has a considerable liberal contingency.

Progressive Mennonites understand politics as the work of living together. They practice a faith which fosters debate and seeks to hear each person’s voice. Most congregations make their own rules and guidelines through democratic vote, and members are committed to inviting all participants to preach, teach, and hold leadership roles. This kind of political engagement usefully combats the apathy and individualism of the current neoliberal culture.

Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether the relationship between Rimland and Mennonitism was as surprising as it might appear on the surface. In recent years, Christianity has often seemed more a counterpart to far-right activism than a bulwark against it. Racist, anti-immigrant groups around the world justify their actions through various brands of Christian nationalism. In 2016, 81 per cent of white evangelical voters cast ballots for Donald J. Trump. Many Mennonites undoubtedly did the same.

Perhaps the most egregious of the denomination’s failings has been a propensity to excuse and even foster ‘white supremacy’. Ethnic parochialism would be familiar to Italian Catholics, German Lutherans, or Scottish Presbyterians. But white Mennonites’ chauvinism is in a class of its own. Despite – or possibly because – most Mennonites worldwide are now people of colour, white churchgoers often uncritically identify as ‘ethnic’ members, whose European ancestors allegedly survived centuries of persecution by marrying only within the faith.

‘Racial exclusivity’ is what Rimland most valued about her Mennonite heritage. “I never knew that anybody would want to be a mongrel.” she once told an interviewer. Rimland’s epic novel, Lebensraum! – a Germn word fairly difficult to translate; say, space required for life, Habitat – (Toronto, Samisdat Publishers 1998), portrays the denomination as an “ethnically savagely besieged community.” The main character, a blond and blue-eyed girl named Erika who is loosely based on Rimland, is less a person than an archetype. In Rimland’s telling, “her script was set more than four centuries ago. Her ethnic roots go deep into the soil of martyrdom.”

Most Mennonite families mat trace membership in Mennonite congregations to the Dutch Reformation. Their forebears are thought to have been German-speaking farmers who migrated in the late eighteenth century to that part of Imperial Russia which is now Ukraine. Catherine the Great had promised them religious freedom, exemption from military service, and financial benefits. In exchange, Mennonites pioneered the steppe for a hundred years. But in 1874 the Russian Empire instituted universal conscription, prompting a third of its pacifist Mennonite subjects to migrate to America.

Rimland first made her name in the late 1970s with a novel, The wanderers, (The saga of three women who survived, Concordia Publishing House, Saint Louis, Missouri 1977) which told of those German-speaking Mennonites who remained behind in Eastern Europe. The novel focuses on three generations of women who lived in the Soviet Union before and during the second world war, along with their subsequent migration to Paraguay. Rimland knew this history firsthand. Her earliest memories, from the late 1930s, were likely of Stalin’s ‘Great terror’ and its effects within her Mennonite colony, Molotschna. Soviet agents deported Rimland’s father in 1941, after which she lived with her mother and grandmother. During the second world war these women and their community cheered the arrival of Hitler’s forces. Rimland drew on her personal experiences when writing passages in The Wanderers about Mennonites leaving Ukraine in 1943 with the retreating Germany forces.

Reviewers of The wanderers assumed that, unlike her characters, Rimland did not personally hold the Nazis in high esteem. In an essay published in 1979, however, Rimland described how “the German Wehrmacht swept through our streets and into our hearts.” In a similar 1980 piece, she wrote about “the Eastern holocaust of 1945 when Berlin was put to the torch, when left and right of us the Wehrmacht was scythed from the earth.”

The modest success of The wanderers fell far short of Rimland’s hope for a meteoric rise, and afterward she flailed as a writer. Working as a school counselor in California, she contributed freelance columns to the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times. Her articles reveal a craving for fame and fortune. In a fawning review of Donald J. Trump’s – and Tony Schwartz’s – The art of the deal (Random House, N.Y. 1987), Rimland likened the real estate developer to the character John Galt of Ayn Rand’s anti-egalitarian novel, Atlas shrugged (Random House, N.Y. 1957). Both Trump and Galt exhibited “boundless inner strength and sharply focused talent – iconoclastic in ethics, hard-working, impatient with trivia, loving excellence for its own sake, hating controls on ambition and drive, having megadreams of what mind and money can buy.”

As Rimland reached late middle age with little to show for her toil, she began inventing scapegoats. She returned again and again in her mind to the one shining moment of her career: The wanderers. Rimland developed a conviction that, from the beginning, vindictive Jews had sabotaged her endeavours. She claimed that The wanderers was on its way to stratospheric success – but then someone at Bantam, “a Jewish publishing house”, noticed the novel’s positive portrayal of Nazi soldiers. It seems that all remaining copies were shredded. “Here was this great big groundswell,” she alleged, “and the next thing, it was done. It was wiped out.”

Reviewers of The wanderers wrongly assumed that, unlike her characters, Rimland did not personally hold the Nazis in high esteem.

Rimland’s fortunes were about to change. In early 1994 the Institute for Historical Review – a Fountain Valley, California clearinghouse for anti-Semitic works and best known for publishing articles and books promoting Holocaust denial – published a glowing review of The wanderers, that Rimland had recently expanded and reprinted at her own expense. The Institute, founded in 1978, was then at the peak of its influence. It favoured a pseudo-intellectual style and used the euphemistic term ‘revisionism’ to describe its mission of undermining mainstream consensus about the Holocaust. The Institute’s review highlighted with approval the ‘ten per cent’ of controversial new material Rimland had added to The wanderers.

In September 1994 the Institute for Historical Review hosted its twelfth International Revisionist Conference, with Rimland in attendance. It was there that she would have her fateful first meeting with Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel, a neo-Nazi German expatriate who ran a far-right press out of his fortified ‘bunker’ in downtown Toronto and who had already been gaoled several time for hate crimes.

Zündel impressed Rimland, and she was delighted to be interviewed for his television programme while he was in California. In the footage, Zündel’s flattering questions visibly thrill Rimland, who neatly slots her religious background and fiction into his line of ‘white supremacist’ inquiry. “Mennonites who created a community in Russia were totally, totally German,” she explained. Moreover, Hitler had been a liberator who “brought into our colonies the values that we had always held dear, namely the family cohesion, the pride in race, which was part of my upbringing.”

Rimland’s interview with Zündel inaugurated a business partnership. Financed by monthly $3,000 checks from Zündel in Canada, Rimland launched Zundelsite.org from her California home. Zündel and Rimland would marry in 2001, and move to Tennessee, where they lived in a romanticised chalet-style cottage. By 2003, however, Zündel had overstayed his United States visa, and after a protracted legal battle in Canada, he was deported to Germany, where he faced a lengthy imprisonment for inciting hatred. He died in 2007.

By 1998 Rimland was already an underground celebrity, drawing an eager crowd of ‘white supremacists’ for her Toronto lecture. Rimland had travelled there to promote Lebensraum!, her new trilogy. Like The wanderers, the novel was another saga of Mennonite history, but this time Rimland openly celebrated the Nazis and anti-Semitism. In a video of her speaking engagement, Rimland crafts her message around the trope of white racial persecution. “Who tells our children what we are all about?” she asks her audience.

This is when Rimland recounts her own ‘ethnic’ conversion. It had occurred in the late 1960s. She was living in Kansas with her first husband and their two sons, taking university classes despite her still minimal English. “I one day took myself to the library of the Mennonites.” – meaning the historical library and archives of Bethel College, a private Christian liberal arts university in Mishawaka, Indiana, “and started reading up on my own people.” Only through studying her heritage had Rimland learned to think of herself as part of a vibrant, superior culture. “That’s when I started writing The Wanderers,” she said.

Remarkably, Bethel College’s archive has record of Rimland’s research there. Cornelius Krahn, the library’s former director, an energetic archivist, editor, and historian, was a leading figure of twentieth-century Mennonitism. Like Rimland, Krahn had been born to a German-speaking Mennonite family in what is now Ukraine. He emigrated in the 1920s, achieving his doctorate in Nazi Germany in 1936. Krahn then migrated to the United States, where he eventually joined the faculty of Bethel College.

Rimland grew to consider Krahn a personal friend, and he later recommended her for a grant to research the book which became Lebensraum!

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Krahn helped craft a campaign which depicted Mennonites as a peaceful and persecuted ‘ethnic minority’. The purpose of this narrative was to allege that Mennonites in Europe could not have collaborated with Hitler’s racist regime. Krahn pushed his message among United Nations officials in order to aid his European friends and colleagues, from whom he simultaneously solicited articles for new ‘ethnic’ forums such as the magazine Mennonite life.

Tales of Mennonite suffering in the Soviet Union were central to Krahn’s ideology. He portrayed the once-flourishing colonies in Ukraine as a wellspring of historic peoplehood. Meanwhile, over 100,000 Mennonites, including members of Krahn’s own family, still lived in banishment in Siberia and Central Asia. Following a thaw in the ‘cold war’, he helped initiate a series of learning tours, in which North American Mennonites visited the Soviet Union. Rimland enthusiastically endorsed the idea: “I am so excited about the things I discover while reading about our past,” she confided to Krahn. “How much more meaningful would be a trip to the former Mennonite colonies in the Ukraine!”

More than 15,000 Mennonites who had collaborated with or accepted aid from Nazi Germany moved to the Americas. Most received United Nations refugee assistance by invoking the concept of ‘ethnic Mennonitism’.

Racists draw their power not from the margins but by engaging narratives which are recognisable, indeed core to large groups of people.

For Mennonites, moving forward will mean dismantling the language and logics of ‘ethnic peoplehood’. The concept is irredeemable. Krahn and other mid-twentieth-century church leaders promoted the idea precisely to help bury the denomination’s entanglement with National Socialism, and in so doing offered Rimland a robust language for launching her career as a prominent ‘white supremacist’. In turn, Rimland’s legacy persists among anti-Semites and other extremists. The hate she spread through her website, novels, lectures, and activism helped lay the groundwork for today’s global alt-right.

As a ‘white supremacist’, Rimland portrayed ‘ethnic’ Mennonite history as one of myriad tales of ‘Aryan’ persecution. This is the same logic which allows some white people to treat Confederate monuments as endangered heritage and which has prompted President Trump to tweet about ‘white genocide.’ Far-right movements spread because they harness narratives at the heart of what one thinks one’s own identity is, and then use those stories to push agendas of hate.

There is no single answer to far-right extremism, which is an ever-mutating, always-specific phenomenon. Each new guise requires a tailored response. (B. Goossen, The pacifist roots of an American Nazi, Boston Review, 2 May 2019).

By the end of George W. Bush’s presidency it had become apparent to U.S. officials monitoring ‘white supremacist’ threats that something serious was brewing at home. The prospect of the first black President sparked a sharp rise in far-right groups, from so-called ‘Patriot movement’ adherents to anti-government militias, according to analysts at D.H.S. The Secret Service took the unprecedented step of assigning Barack Obama a protective detail in May 2007, mere months into his campaign and long before candidates typically receive protection.

Mr. Daryl Johnson, who led a six-person group at D.H.S.’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, began working on a report about the rise of right-wing extremism. It warned that ‘white nationalists’, anti-government extremists and members of other far-right groups were seizing on the economic crisis and President Obama’s election to recruit new members. Johnson was preparing to release his report when a similar study by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, meant for law-enforcement officers, was leaked to the public in February 2009. The paper, titled “The Modern Militia Movement”, linked members of these militias to fundamentalist Christian, anti-abortion or anti-immigration movements.

The report was pilloried by Republican groups and politicians for singling out conservatives as possible criminals. Missouri officials warned Johnson about the blowback he could expect for publishing a similar analysis. But Johnson, who describes himself as a conservative Republican, said that he thought the D.H.S. lawyers and editors who worked on the report would provide a layer of protection from Republican criticism. “I didn’t think the whole Republican Party would basically throw a hissy fit,” he recalled.

But when the D.H.S. report was leaked to conservative bloggers in April 2009, it provoked an outcry from Republicans and conservative media, who painted it as a political hit job by the Obama Administration. D.H.S. Secretary Janet Napolitano, who originally issued a broad defence of the report, apologised to the American Legion for one of its most controversial components – a section which raised concerns about military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequently being susceptible targets for recruitment by right-wing groups. Johnson’s team was slowly disbanded; the number of analysts devoted to non-Islamic domestic terrorism dwindled from six to zero in 2010, he said.

The Missouri and D.H.S. reports were early examples of how the fight against right-wing terrorism would be hamstrung by politics. For years, “there’s been a visceral response from politicians that if these groups are being labeled as ‘right wing,’ then it’s Republicans who are responsible for those groups’ activities,” said Jason Blazakis, former director of the Counterterrorism Finance and Designations Office at the U.S. State Department, who is now a professor at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, California. “It’s unfortunate, but I think in many ways this has resulted and served this reluctance in the Republican side to take as strong of action as they could.”

In interviews, veterans of the F.B.I., D.H.S. and other national-security agencies recalled moments during the Obama Administration when they realised the domestic-terror threat was expanding unchecked. In January 2011, local police in Spokane, Washington, narrowly averted a tragedy when they redirected a Martin Luther King Day parade away from a roadside bomb planted on the route, loaded with shrapnel coated with a substance meant to keep blood from clotting in wounds. At the time, it was one of the most sophisticated improvised explosive devices to appear in the United States. Two months later, the F.B.I. arrested Kevin William Harpham, 36, a former U.S. Army member linked to the neo-Nazi National Alliance. “I remember being like, ‘Wow, we have a problem’, ” recalls former F.B.I. agent Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “The belief was always that this would be al-Qaeda, not a former soldier who is a white supremacist.”

In 2011 the Obama White House released a strategy “to empower local partners” to counter violent extremism. As part of that plan, D.H.S. official George Selim was placed in charge of leading these efforts as director of an interagency task force in 2016. Selim’s office of community partnerships, which had been set up a year earlier, grew to 16 full-time employees and 25 contractors, with a total budget of $21 million. As part of its work, it had $10 million in grants for local programmes to counter propaganda, recognise the signs of radicalisation in local communities and intervene to stop attacks before they happen.

But the Obama Administration was wary of the political blowback – according to a senior government official familiar with the efforts of the F.B.I. and D.H.S. – and mindful of the government’s lack of legal authority to monitor domestic hate speech, obtain search or surveillance warrants, or recruit sources. Meanwhile, the threat continued to grow, fuelled in online fora. In June 2015 Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old who posted on the neo-Nazi site Stormfront under the screen name “Lil Aryan” opened fire in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine parishioners.

Then Donald J. Trump won the White House. In the new Administration, efforts to confront domestic extremism “came to a grinding halt,” said Selim. The new Administration redirected federal resources on Islamist terrorism. Barely a week into his presidency, Reuters reported that President Trump had tried to change the name of the Countering Violent Extremism programme to Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.

The Administration’s reconstituted Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention saw its mission expand while its staffing and budget were slashed to a fraction of what they had been, according to a former D.H.S. official. “The infrastructure we had labored over for years started to get torn down,” said Selim, who also led counter-terrorism efforts under President George W. Bush. “It has been decimated in the past two years under this Administration.”

The Justice Department also reorganised its domestic-terrorism categories in a way which masks the scope of ‘white supremacist’ violence, according to former F.B.I. officials who said that the change made it harder to track or measure the scale of these attacks, which are often haphazardly classified as hate crimes or deferred to state and local authorities. The lack of clear data impacts the resources that the F.B.I. can devote to investigating them.

A second senior government official, on conditions of anonymity to discuss the Trump Administration’s efforts, said that while F.B.I. analysts continued to issue warnings about the alarming patterns of ‘white nationalist’ radicalisation online, mid-level officials and political appointees quickly recognised that assessments which ran counter to what President Trump was saying publicly would fall on deaf ears. “That could cost you a seat at the table,” – the official said – “although there have been fewer and fewer tables to sit at and discuss intelligence and policy.”

As President, Trump has repeatedly downplayed the threat posed by ‘white supremacists’. He famously blamed “both sides” for violence at a ‘white nationalist’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Asked if he saw ‘white nationalism’ as a rising threat in the wake of the 15 March 2019 attack on two New Zealand mosques by an avowed racist who killed 51 people, he countered: “I don’t really. It’s a small group of people.”

Image from slate.com

Continued tomorrow … (Part 17)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Dr George Venturini

The greatest international scam, the biggest corruption of its kind in Australia’s history resulted in international condemnation and litigation. The United States successfully pursued criminal charges against several citizens and others in its borders, but the Australian criminal investigation into A.W.B. was eventually dropped. Civil charges, however, were initially successful.

On 11 July 2006 North American farmers claimed US$1 billion in damages from A.W.B. before a court in Washington D.C., alleging that the Australian wheat exporter used bribery and other corrupt activities to corner grain markets. The growers claimed that A.W.B. used the same practices to secure grain sales in other markets in Asia and other countries in the Middle East. The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2007.

In August 2009 the Australian Federal Police dropped the investigation into any criminal actions undertaken by A.W.B. and others in this matter. The reason seemed to be that the chance of obtaining a conviction was limited and “not in the public interest.”

A civil case was brought by shareholders of A.W.B., and was settled out of court for AU$39.5 million in February 2010. Nobody really knows why.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission proceeded with several civil cases against six former directors and officers of A.W.B. Some of those cases were discontinued on condition that the parties would bear their own costs. A.S.I.C. decided to discontinue the proceedings after forming the view that it was “no longer in the public interest” to pursue its claims.

A.S.I.C.’s proceedings against Trevor Flugge, the former chairman of A.W.B., and Peter Geary, the former Group General Manager Trading of A.W.B., continued.

There were ‘lateral’ discoveries, such as the one involving big hearted (big Australian) B.H.P. has always liked to be seen as a business with a big heart as well as a hefty and healthy balance sheet. Most uninformed Australians went along with that story.

Yet, in 1996, B.H.P. had been warned by DFAT that its big-hearted plan to send wheat to Iraq as a ‘humanitarian gesture’ – and then recoup the money, with interest, through instalment payments – would breach United Nations sanctions against the Saddam Hussein’s régime. Still, it seemed, the big Australian was unperturbed, so it went ahead, bought 20,000 tonnes of wheat from A.W.B., and shipped it to Iraq. Then it did some unusual business with A.W.B. to build the repayments of US$5 million to a B.H.P. related company, using sham contracts with further inflated wheat prices. These contracts involved a B.H.P. related company called Tigris Petroleum.

The Cole Inquiry was given an opportunity to hear that B.H.P.’s Head of Energy, Philip S. Aiken, had brokered the deal between A.W.B. and Tigris Petroleum, the company collecting the US$5 million owed to B.H.P. Tigris had agreed to pay US$500,000 to A.W.B. for recovering the debt. Michael Long, A.W.B.’s head of marketing, said in evidence that Aiken had written a reference letter in September 2000 confirming Tigris had been assigned the debt to B.H.P. by the Iraq government. Asked if he was concerned the money paid to Tigris might go to the Iraqi government, Mr. Long told the Inquiry he was reassured by correspondence from B.H.P.

Four years later, six former A.W.B. top executives would be able to escape criminal charges over the ‘kickbacks’.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission would not have tried to revive civil cases against those accused of breaching U.N. sanctions against Saddam Hussein.

Key figures in the A.W.B. ‘kickbacks’ affair were set to avoid criminal charges after another retreat by the nation’s ‘corporate regulator’.

Five former A.W.B. officers, including the former chairman Trevor Flugge, were told in June 2010 that the ‘corporate regulator’ would not have prepared a criminal brief for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

But the end of the criminal investigation, revealed in the Victorian Supreme Court, had cleared the way for A.S.I.C. to revive civil penalty cases that it had initiated against the five in late 2007.

A.S.I.C. was the last ‘corporate regulator’ still examining possible criminal charges over A.W.B.’s systematic payment of more than US$225 million in illicit fees and commissions to Saddam Hussein’s régime between 1999 and 2004 in pursuit of contracts to sell Australian wheat.

The Australian Federal Police and Victoria Police had abandoned their criminal investigations in August 2009 after the federal Director of Public Prosecutions had decided that there would have been no chance of success.

Eventually the most serious of A.S.I.C.’s charges against Trevor Flugge, the former chairman of A.W.B., and Peter Geary, the former Group General Manager Trading of A.W.B., would be dismissed. (P. Durkin, ‘ASIC loses AWB case against Trevor Flugge a decade after Oil-for-Food’, The Australian Financial Review, 15 December 2016).

But A.S.I.C.’s decision to abandon its A.W.B. criminal investigation paved the way for the ‘corporate regulator’ to revive civil penalty cases it had initiated in late 2007 against five former senior officers of A.W.B.

The five were the former chairman Trevor Flugge, who was accused of seven instances of breaching his fiduciary duties; the former A.W.B. chief financial officer Paul Ingleby – 16 counts; the former head of trading Peter Geary – 10 counts; the former head of sales and marketing, Michael Long – 17 counts; and the former senior marketing executive Charles Stott – 12 counts.

Their cases were postponed in November 2008 while the Supreme Court of Victoria awaited confirmation from either A.S.I.C. or the Commonwealth D.P.P. about possible criminal action. A.S.I.C.’s lawyers told the court on 3 June 2010 that the regulator would soon file an application seeking court approval to restart the civil cases.

A sixth set of proceedings, against A.W.B.’s former managing director Andrew Lindberg, was under way.

However, in another development that day, A.S.I.C.’s lawyers informed Justice Ross Robson that they would have filed an application the following week to have him removed from Lindberg’s case because the judge had admitted to being a close friend of the former A.W.B. director Warwick McClelland.

A.W.B.’s counsel, Norman O’Bryan, S.C., told the court that all directors who were on A.W.B.’s board at relevant times, including McClelland, would be called to give evidence about what they knew and what they were told.

Mr. O’Bryan said that while A.S.I.C. at this stage did not expect to challenge McClelland’s credibility, it ultimately might, and A.S.I.C. believed it was “a moral certainty” that Lindberg would challenge directors’ credibility.

Justice Robson said that he would not hear the application to recuse himself until Lindberg had the opportunity to read a statement or outline of McClelland’s evidence. A.S.I.C. had not finalised its witness statements or outlines.

The case was not expected to return to court before 13 July 2010, at the earliest.

Justice Robson had presided over all the A.W.B. cases in the Victorian Supreme Court, including the 2008 application to postpone the five civil cases. He had allowed A.S.I.C.’s civil penalty case against Lindberg to proceed on the basis that he was highly unlikely to face any criminal proceedings, and he presided over several weeks of opening submissions from A.S.I.C when Lindberg’s stop-start trial had begun in 2009.

A.S.I.C.’s counsel first raised the recuse application in November. At the time Justice Robson said he did not feel “any embarrassment whatsoever about hearing the application for a stay unless you say why I should be embarrassed”, adding that McClelland was not a relative and “not some person I am responsible for looking after; he is a director of a major public company.”

Lindberg’s case, while it had hardly begun, had been tense and dramatic. A.S.I.C. initially alleged that he had breached his fiduciary duties by failing to stop the ‘kickbacks’ but, just as A.S.I.C. opened its case in October 2009 it launched a second, parallel action against the former chief executive.

Early in 2010 the Court of Appeal had allowed A.S.I.C. to run its second case, and the parties agreed to run the two cases as one. It was unclear when Lindberg’s trial would have resumed as there were now disputes about the formulation of A.S.I.C.’s statement of claim.

A.S.I.C.’s expanded case alleged that, as well as failing to halt the ‘kickbacks’, Lindberg did not tell fellow A.W.B. directors what he knew about either the payments or the gravity of allegations levelled at A.W.B. by the United States investigators, and that he allegedly misled directors about an internal A.W.B. investigation into the ‘kickbacks’.

A.S.I.C. would later confirm that its comments to the court regarding the end of criminal investigations related only to the six former officers facing court proceedings. (L. Wood, ‘Six former AWB chiefs escape criminal charges over kickbacks’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 June 2010).

During the Inquiry B.H.P. had promised to co-operate fully. For that reason Mr. Cole had been looking to have his terms broadened so it could consider charges against the world’s biggest miner. Mr. Cole said that it was “incongruous and inappropriate” that he had been unable to make findings about B.H.P.’s activities. The Inquiry heard that B.H.P. funded the 1996 ‘humanitarian gesture’ in a bid to win petroleum exploration rights in Iraq once the United Nations sanctions were lifted. B.H.P. had, of course, denied all along that the money was intended to help secure B.H.P. oil rights in Iraq, despite an assertion to that effect made by A.W.B.’s [then] C.E.O. Andrew Lindberg to the Australian Stock Exchange that it was the intention of B.H.P. to get the inside running on the oil exploration rights.

Appearing before the Inquiry, A.W.B. chairman Brendan Stewart would say that the company would accept responsibility. “The board deeply regrets the damage done to the company. The board accepts accountability for the actions of management, and the culture at A.W.B. during the Oil-for-Food program. At the end of the day, the board ultimately accepts responsibility for what happened, and is committed to making significant changes to ensure it never happens again.” (‘AWB chairman accepts responsibility’ – 7.30, abc.net.au, 29 November 2016).

More than a decade after the Cole Inquiry, former A.W.B. chairman Trevor Flugge and the former group general manager trading, Peter Anthony Geary, would be facing trial on charges of dereliction of duty in the ‘kickbacks’ scandal.

Mr. Flugge denied helping negotiate the sweeteners to the Saddam Hussein’s régime and welcomed the chance to clear his name.

The ‘corporate regulator’ had begun a civil case against Mr. Flugge in 2007, but froze the case while it pursued criminal charges. These were then discontinued in 2010, but now A.S.I.C. had returned to court, wanting to prove that Mr. Flugge was aware – or at least should have been aware – that A.W.B. was violating U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Meanwhile, A.S.I.C. was alleging that Mr. Geary had personally authorised six payments to Jordanian front company Alia totalling around AU$ 31 million between March 2002 and February 2003.

A.S.I.C. had won two civil cases in 2013 against Andrew Lindberg, who had paid a penalty of $100,000, and former chief financial officer Paul Ingleby, who had paid a penalty of $40,000.

The civil trial of Mr. Flugge and Mr. Geary was expected to last ten weeks.

* * * * *

The Volcker investigation had found no evidence to suggest that the monopoly wheat exporter had acted dishonestly, concluding on the evidence it had that A.W.B. did not knowingly pay ‘kickbacks’.

On its part, the Cole Inquiry was finding some evidence that in fact A.W.B. did act dishonestly, did knowingly pay the ‘kickbacks’ – and did more.

The Cole Inquiry concluded that from mid-1999 A.W.B. had knowingly entered into an arrangement that involved paying ‘kickbacks’ to the Iraqi régime, in order to retain its business. It cleared Government bureaucrats and ministers from wrongdoing, however, it recommended criminal prosecutions be begun against former A.W.B. executives.

The kickbacks also breached the O.E.C.D. Anti-Bribery Convention.

The Cole Inquiry recommended that 12 people be investigated for possible criminal and corporations offences over the scandal.

The scandal resulted in international condemnation and litigation. The United States successfully pursued criminal charges against several citizens and others in its borders, but the Australian criminal investigation into A.W.B. was eventually dropped. Civil charges were however modestly successful.

On 11 July 2006 North American farmers claimed $1 billion in damages from A.W.B. at Washington D.C., alleging the Australian wheat exporter used bribery and other corrupt activities to corner grain markets. The growers claimed that A.W.B. used the same techniques to secure grain sales in other markets in Asia and other countries in the Middle East. The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2007.

In August 2009 the Australian Federal Police dropped their investigation into any criminal actions undertaken by A.W.B. and others in this matter. This decision came after Paul Hastings, Q.C. declared that the prospect of convictions was limited and “not in the public interest.”

A civil case was brought by shareholders of A.W.B., and was settled out of court for $39.5 million in February 2010.

Mr. Flugge was later fined $50,000 and banned from managing a company for 5 years, for failing to inquire about A.W.B.’s payments to Saddam Hussein’s régime. A.W.B.’s managing director at the time, Andrew Lindberg, and chief financial officer Paul Ingleby were fined $100,000 and $40,000 and banned from manager roles for 2 years and 15 months, respectively.

​​​​Corruption scandals have, institutionally, engulfed a number of Australian companies operating overseas. The incidents raise questions about shortfalls in management supervision of staff, who act corruptly for the ‘good’ of their employer. Some of Australia’s largest companies, such as mining giant Rio Tinto, have been involved in widely reported examples. In 2005 the unruly behaviour of A.W.B. hit the headlines. Usually corrupt governments attempt to overcome the temporary embarrassment relying on the lack of attention of a hill-informed, uncaring, fatalistic, indifferent populace. There is little interest beyond the scandalous, often juicy, details. Some cases are not sexy enough to attract attention. Long time ago, bribes were reported to have been paid by Securency International, the company which invented and markets polymer banknotes and is half-held by the central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia. In the case, two companies – totally held by the Reserve Bank of Australia – Securency and Note Printing Australia, were fined a record $21.6 million in 2012 for their criminal conduct. However, the cases against four accused individuals collapsed after bungling by law enforcement agencies.

Transparency International, the global anti-corruption coalition, has been releasing several progress reports on the enforcement of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Anti-Bribery Convention. Already in 2009 Transparency’s report pointed to Australia’s weak record of enforcing the agreement. In fact, Australia had not prosecuted anyone. Generally enforcement was extremely uneven among the 36 out of 38 signatories to the Convention covered by the report. “There is active enforcement in only four countries (Germany, Norway, Switzerland and the United States) and little or no enforcement in 21 of the parties.” said the report. “Increased efforts are also needed in countries with moderate enforcement because their level of enforcement is not high enough to provide effective deterrence.”

In mid-2009, when Rio Tinto’s Australian head of iron ore marketing in China, Mr. Stern Hu, was charged with bribery, it was suggested that the Chinese Government was taking revenge for a rebuff of its earlier takeover bid for the company. Yet a later court judgement of the case detailed how Hu had demanded a 30 per cent commission – disguised as a ‘consultancy agreement’ – in return for giving a Chinese company a long-term contract for the supply of iron ore through an agent. He had also laundered a US$798,000 ‘cut’ through a friend’s bank account. Other bribes were handed over in a restaurant in the office tower where Rio Tinto has its Shanghai headquarters. Hu’s colleagues also rigged Rio Tinto’s spot market tendering processes in favour of those who bribed them.

Australian Federal Police continued to investigate a whistleblower’s allegations that Securency International offered AU$50 million in bribes and procured prostitutes to win contracts all around the world.

In the A.W.B. case, the grains marketeer admitted that the AU$ 290 million in fees it paid to a Jordanian transport company were loaded with payments which were passed onto Saddam Hussein’s régime. This contradicted its earlier responses to the Australian Securities Exchange and to Paul Volcker, who investigated corruption in the U.N. Oil-for-Food programme in 2005. The Cole Inquiry was told by too many of the cartel’s executives something like this: “ A.W.B. has consistently maintained its position that it did not know, and could not know, what Alia did with the money A.W.B. paid to it by way of transport fees.” The Prime Minister and the two ministers most closely connected with A.W.B.’s operation and supervision new absolutely nothing. “Nothing here to see” seemed to be the pass-word.

Corruption is pervasive, and contagious. The Australian Taxation Office ruled that the AU$290 million that A.W.B. paid was not illegal under Iraqi law. Consequently, they were not bribes under Australian law, and the Tax Office determined A.W.B. was well within its rights to claim the costs as a tax deduction. In 2009 the Australian Federal Police dropped its investigation, on the ground that it was not clear that breaching a United Nations sanction is a criminal offence and a conviction “was not in the public interest.” In 2010 A.W.B. was defending a AU$100 million shareholder class action by claiming that Australian and United Nations officials knew of the ‘kickbacks’ – and, anyway, they did not breach the U.N. Oil-for-Food programme.

​Of course, there is always the paramountcy argument of ‘the national interest’ and the ultimately venal consideration that the Australian Government has a conflict of interest as ‘kickbacks’ for contracts leads to profit for government coffers through more exports and more tax revenue. At this point, the healthy the doctrine of paramountcy, expressed in the legal principle which reconciles contradicting or conflicting laws. So the Securency and A.W.B. cases appeared to have the tacit support – almost justification – by the Australian Government.

Way to go!

Continued Saturday – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 6)

Previous instalment – Our mate: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (part 4)

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 14

Beginning in the 1970s, local networks brought together Klansmen and neo-Nazis of many stripes – ranging from adherents of racist end-times theologies and paramilitary fantasists to actual mercenaries – under the banner of ‘White Power’. They were linked by an ideology which married white nationalism, anti-communism, and genocidal fantasies, but they were not a centralized organization. Movement leaders developed the doctrine of “leaderless resistance”, providing ideological grounding and practical encouragement for acts of mass terror which would spark a revolutionary ‘race war’ but which could not easily be traced back to any particular organisation. ‘White Power’ activists did this work so successfully that the contours of their movement became hard to discern, and the ideology’s most violent adherents, such as Timothy McVeigh, were often dismissed as ‘lone wolves.’ But Belew shows that although the networks of ‘White Power’ organising may have been loose and decentralised, they were also intricate and extensive.

The ‘sacred text’ of this movement was The Turner diaries, white nationalism written by neo-Nazi leader William Pierce and first serialised in 1974. The Turner diaries – which depicts ‘white nationalists’ using genocide and nuclear war to take control of the United States and then the world – provided a blueprint for “leaderless resistance” undertaken by autonomous, ‘white supremacist’ guerrilla cells. It offered a gruesome vision of the genocidal reckoning their actions would finally produce. By the late 1970s one could order the book from an ad in Soldier of Fortune, The Journal of Professional Adventurers, a controversial magazine marketed to soldiers for hire and a wider audience which found those exploits entrancing or titillating. The novel became, in Belew’s words, “a touchstone, a point of connection” linking the movement’s hardcore advocates of armed struggle with a much wider array of men and women who fantasised about a ‘white ethno-state’ or simply about the bloodshed which was supposed to produce it. Timothy McVeigh kept the book in his soldier’s quarters, sold it at gun shows after his discharge, and followed its blueprint in the Oklahoma City bombing.

The Turner diaries may be ‘White Power’s Birth of a nation, but that film radiates ‘white-supremacist’ confidence; its brutish black pawns are easily vanquished by a confident and well-organised white cavalry. The Turner diaries promises no such happy ending. In its bleak view, white unity will only be restored at enormous cost and through a brutal, genocidal struggle. There is no room, in the end, for paternalism or a return to a golden age; the race war will be a war to the death, one that will bring the government down with it.

‘White Power’ activists pursued this war on several fronts. Louis Ray Beam Jr., an American ‘white nationalist’, Stephen Donald Black, another American ‘white supremacist’, and other leaders travelled throughout Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, plotted a coup in Dominica, an island country in the West Indies, to secure it against putative Soviet ambitions, sent mercenaries to fight for Somoza and later for the Nicaraguan Contras, and focused with increasing intensity on the United States-Mexican border as a paramilitary battleground. They also targeted domestic enemies, including Vietnamese refugees and American radicals. In Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979, a ‘United racist front’ of Klansmen and Nazis killed five protestors at a ‘Death to the Klan’ rally organised by the Communist Workers’ Party. As cell-style organising expanded in the 1980s, robberies and murders took place under many banners, including ‘The order’, the organisation and activities of which were closely inspired by The Turner diaries, the ‘White Aryan Resistance’, the ‘White Patriot Party’, and the ‘Posse Comitatus’. ‘White Power’ partisans bought or stole heavy weapons from military bases, preparing for wider and bloodier conflict with the state. They brought their propaganda to new media outlets – recorded phone lines and public-access television – while creating the Internet infrastructure which sustains the movement to this day. They did so, for the most part, with impunity: while some perpetrators were tried and convicted, sentences were short and many trials led – as in Greensboro – to outright acquittals.

‘White Power’ was an explicitly masculinist movement, but women nonetheless played crucial roles. Women built and maintained ‘White Power’ social networks, educated and indoctrinated young people, and learned survivalist strategies. They “brokered social relationships”, including in marriages which knit disparate factions of the movement together. They also performed a wide variety of insurgent tasks, up to and sometimes including bearing arms. But they were meant first and foremost to be mothers, not warriors. One of Belew’s most interesting sections concerns the 1988 trial of Beam, Butler, and a dozen other ‘White Power’ activists on more than a hundred counts of seditious activity. (Anti-Defamation League, Louis Beam, ‘The sedition trial’, 24 April 1987-7 April 1988, A.D.L. 2013). Belew attributes their acquittal on all counts to the defence’s familial performance of white male protection and white female vulnerability. Louis Beam’s wife, Sheila, became the face of the defence: a white woman who in the course of her flight from prosecution and arrest in Mexico claimed to have been mistreated, beaten, even sexually assaulted. Belew takes both journalists and previous scholars to task for naturalising Beam’s and others’ performances of embattled white femininity. She also notes that after the acquittals, two of the women on the all-white jury became romantically involved with defendants. In this theater of conflict, explicitly white supremacist ideas and expressions found common ground with broader cultural anxieties, and proved not only palatable but appealing to people outside the movement.

Belew depicts the militia movement of the 1990s as the descendant of ‘White Power’, “a move toward the mainstream” which represented the movement’s growing success. Individual militia members may not have considered themselves ‘White Power’ activists, or even racists. But she shows that the militia movement drew on the same “strategies and weapons from the Vietnam war, scenarios from The Turner diaries, and a rhetoric that drew strongly on the defense of white women.” Violent showdowns with federal power and militarised police at Ruby Ridge (location of an incident in August 1992 in which F.B.I. agents and U.S. marshals engaged in an 11-day standoff with self-proclaimed ‘white separatist’ Randy Weaver, his family, and friend named Kevin Harris in an isolated cabin in Boundary county, Idaho), and Waco (The Waco siege was the siege of a compound belonging to the religious sect Branch Davidians, carried out by American federal and Texas state law enforcement, as well as the U.S. military, between 28 February and 19 April 1993) demonstrated a threat which only a heavily armed citizenry could repel. The ‘New World Order’, with its black helicopters and domestic internment camps, was a new name for an old enemy. As at the 1988 sedition trial of Beam, Butler, et al., journalists missed the meaning of the movement they were covering, and depicted even longtime movement activists and leaders as ordinary white people who had been radicalised by recent events or victimised by federal power.

‘White Power’ is still quite strong. Indeed, it has broadened its reach online, where it continues to build an anti-liberal, anti-government, ‘white supremacist’ movement which radicalises individuals. Dylann Roof haunted ‘white supremacy’s online world before deploying its symbols and ideology in his rampage at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina on 17 June 2015.

Belew’s insurgents shocked many people when they turned up en masse in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, but they have never been far from the surface of ‘white supremacist’ politics and organisation. Its ‘respectable’ figures have needed their energy and numbers, and its hucksters have seen them as easy marks. Sometimes insurgent, office-holder, and huckster come wrapped together in a single package. But the relationship is often more complex. For many generations, the drumbeat of impending race war has structured this dance between leaders and followers, true believers and oafs. It has shaped conceptions and practices of white manhood and womanhood. It has guided social policy from schools and home loans to crime and punishment. It can be heard in Steve Bannon’s admiration for France’s The Turner diaries, Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The camp of the saints, and the description by Bannon’s student, Donald J. Trump, of immigrants as an “infestation.”

But that drumbeat is not a force of nature. It has been the work of men and women who amplified discontent, elevated it to a political principle, and provided it with outlets. The leaders of this social movement do not simply channel or release hostility; they create and intensify it. ‘White supremacy’ may be a language of fear and loss, but that makes it more dangerous, not less. (S. Kantrowitz, ‘White supremacy has always been mainstream,’ Boston Review, 23 July 2018).

President Trump visited Dayton, Ohio and El Paso on 7 August on a day intended as a show of compassion to cities scarred by a weekend of violence, but which quickly devolved into an occasion for anger-fuelled broadsides against Democrats and the news media.

President Trump’s schedule was meant to follow the traditional model of apolitical presidential visits with victims, law enforcement officials and hospital workers after calamities like the mass shootings which created a new sense of national crisis over assault weapons and the rise of ‘white supremacist’ ideology.

That plan went awry even before President Trump, who has acknowledged his discomfort with showing empathy in public, left Washington. On 6 August night, he tweeted that Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman from El Paso, should “be quiet.” As he prepared to leave the White House on 7 August morning, he attacked former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who said in a speech that day that President Trump had “fanned the flames of white supremacy.” Both Mr. O’Rourke and Mr. Biden were presenting as candidates for president and have been particularly harsh in their criticism of President Trump after the two shootings. President Trump rose to the bait. The result was the latest example of President Trump’s penchant for inflaming divisions at moments when other presidents have tried to soothe them, and further proof of his staff’s inability to persuade him to follow the norms of presidential behaviour. Yet shortly after, in response to questions about his Democratic critics, he again assailed them. “They shouldn’t be politicking today.” President. Trump said, referring to Mr. Biden and Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. And en route home to Washington, he tweeted still more attacks on Democrats, calling their charges that he is a racist “truly disgusting.”

The President was particularly upset by excerpts from a news conference in Ohio featuring Mr. Brown and Ms. Nan Whaley, the Democratic Mayor of Dayton, whom he had seen while flying from Dayton to El Paso. Both officials took a mostly respectful tone toward the President and said he had been received graciously. But Mr. Brown also said that some people at the hospital had privately said they do not support President Trump, and he charged that the President had used racist and divisive language. Mr. Trump reacted with fury.

President Trump was visiting the two cities after intense criticism that his fixation with illegal immigration has stoked ‘white nationalism’ and that he has failed to take meaningful action, including by backing substantial gun control measures, to combat mass shootings in the United States.

President Trump was greeted in both Dayton and El Paso by protests of unusual size for a presidential visit at a time of collective grief. In Dayton small groups of demonstrators waved signs which read “Dump Trump”. The reception was especially bitter in El Paso, a border city that President Trump has repeatedly criticised and where many people blame his anti-immigrant messaging and talk of a cross-border “invasion” for inspiring Crusius. Protesters staged a daylong demonstration in a park near the University Medical Center of El Paso, and when President Trump arrived at a nearby police emergency operations centre, a group greeted him with a large white bed-sheet which had the words “Racist, go home” written on it. Even as the President denied that he had “fanned the flames of white supremacy,” as Mr. Biden had asserted, President Trump repeated his past claim of equivalence between extremists on the left and right. “I am concerned about the rise of any group of hate,” the President told reporters before leaving the White House. “Any group of hate, I am – whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy, whether it’s antifa, whether it’s any group of hate, I am very concerned about it.”

The President held back from making any further public statements once he arrived in Dayton later in the morning, visiting privately with families and victims of the shooting over the weekend as well as emergency and medical personnel at Miami Valley Hospital. But, while his spokeswoman said the event was never meant as a photo op, the President’s social media director posted pictures on Twitter. “The President was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital, which was all caught on video,” he tweeted. “They all loved seeing their great President!”

The White House quickly followed up with campaign-style video featuring images of President Trump and the First Lady, Melania Trump, shaking hands with emergency medical workers and chatting with smiling hospital workers. Mr. Brown and Ms. Whaley joined President Trump on the visit to the hospital, where they said they each pressed the President to take more aggressive action to pass universal background checks for gun ownership. (M. Crowley, M. Haberman, M. Smith and M.D. Shear, ‘Trump uses a day of healing to deepen the nation’s divisions’, The New York Times, 7 August 2019).

When one thinks of a terrorist, what does one imagine? For more than a generation, the image lurking in Americans’ nightmares has resembled the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks – an Islamic jihadist – not Crusius, a 21-year-old ‘white supremacist’ from a prosperous Dallas suburb.

But long before the massacre at El Paso, it was clear that ‘white nationalists’ have become the face of terrorism in America. Since 9/11, ‘white supremacists’ and other far-right extremists have been responsible for almost three times as many attacks on American soil as Islamic terrorists, according to the government. From 2009 through 2018, the far right has been responsible for 73 per cent of domestic extremist-related fatalities, according to a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League. And the toll is growing. Forty nine additional persons were murdered by far-right extremists in the United States in 2018 as compared with any other year since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf war veteran who wanted to exact revenge against the federal government for the deadly sieges in Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The sprawling investigation which followed McVeigh’s attack, which killed 168 people, foreshadowed some of the challenges facing law enforcement at present.

The bombing helped to call attention to the threat of domestic terrorism. But that focus dissipated in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which drove the full force of the U.S. national-security system into fighting Islamic terrorism. From 2005 to 2009, according to a Justice Department audit, the number of FBI agents assigned to domestic-terrorism probes averaged less than 330 out of a total of almost 2,000 FBI agents assigned to counterterrorism cases.

F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray told Congress in July 2019 that a majority of the Bureau’s domestic-terrorism investigations since October 2018 were linked to ‘white supremacy’.

Yet the nation’s leaders have failed to meet this menace. In more than a dozen of recent interviews, current and former federal law-enforcement and national-security officials described a sense of bewilderment and frustration as they watched warnings go ignored and the ‘white supremacist’ terror threat grow. Over the past decade, multiple attempts to refocus federal resources on the issue have been thwarted. Entire offices meant to coordinate an inter-agency response to right-wing extremism were funded, staffed and then defunded in the face of legal, constitutional and political concerns.

At present, F.B.I. officials say that just 20 per cent of the Bureau’s counter-terrorism field agents are focused on domestic probes. In 2019 alone those agents’ caseload has included an investigation into an Ohio militia allegedly stockpiling explosives to build pipe bombs; a self-professed ‘white supremacist’ Coast Guard officer who amassed an arsenal in his apartment in the greater Washington, D.C., area; an attack on 27 April at a synagogue outside San Diego which killed one; and the 28 July assault at a garlic festival in Gilroy, California, which killed three persons. A 57-year-old man from Florida, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on 5 August after pleading guilty to mailing 16 pipe bombs to Democrats and critics of President Trump.

The F.B.I. has warned about the rising domestic threat for years, but has not had a receptive audience in the White House. As a result, agency leadership has not historically prioritised ‘white supremacist’ violence even among homegrown threats, for years listing ‘eco-terrorism’ as the top risk.

Law-enforcement officials say that the cancer of ‘white nationalism’ has metastasised across social media and the dark corners of the Internet, creating a copycat effect in which aspiring killers draw inspiration and seek to outdo one another. The shooter at El Paso was at least the third in 2019 to post a manifesto on the online message forum 8chan before logging off to commit mass murder.

“Even if there was a crackdown right now, it’s going to take years for the momentum of these groups to fade,” said Daryl Johnson, the already mentioned former senior analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, whose 2009 report on right-wing extremism was lambasted by conservatives even before its release. “I’m afraid we’ve reached a tipping point where we’re in for this kind of violence for a long time.”

Right-wing terrorism is a global problem, resulting in devastating attacks from Norway to New Zealand. But it is particularly dangerous in the United States, which has more guns per capita than anywhere else in the world, an epidemic of mass shootings, a bedrock tradition of free speech which protects the expression of hateful ideologies and laws which make it challenging to confront a disaggregated movement existing largely in the shadows of cyberspace.

Law enforcement lacks many of the weapons it uses abroad. To defend America from the danger posed by Islamist terror groups, the federal government built a globe-spanning surveillance and intelligence network capable of stopping attacks before they occurred. Federal agents were granted sweeping authorities by Congress to shadow foreign terrorist suspects. No comparable system exists in domestic-terror cases. Domestic terrorism is not even a federal crime, forcing prosecutors to charge suspects under hate-crime laws.

“White supremacy is a greater threat than international terrorism right now.” said David Hickton, a former U.S. Attorney who directs the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security. “We are being eaten from within,” he said. Yet, Hickton added, federal prosecutors are limited in how they try domestic cases. “I’d have to pursue a white supremacist with hate crimes, unless he interfaced with al-Qaeda. Does that make any sense?”

Then there is the problem of a President whose rhetoric appears to mirror, validate and potentially inspire that of far-right extremists. The screed posted by the suspected terrorist in El Paso said he was motivated by a perceived “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” President Trump’s campaign ran some 2,200 Facebook ads warning of an “invasion” at the border, according to a C.N.N. analysis. It is a term he regularly uses in tweets and interviews. “People hate the word invasion, but that’s what it is,” he said in the Oval Office in March 2019. “It’s an invasion of drugs and criminals and people.”

Continued Friday … (Part 16)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

The destruction we are witnessing is touching us all. The loss of life, property and wildlife is heartbreaking.

Families, broken.

Homes, destroyed.

Firefighters perishing. Perishing for fighting for someone they’ve never met. That they will never now meet.

Koalas – already facing extinction – are perishing in their thousands. And what of livestock?

In our burning country there is someone who needs our help. Whether it’s water or sandwiches for the firefighters, help for the families who have lost their homes or a loved one, or even a local vet trying to save the life of an injured animal.

Perhaps there is something we can do by way of a small donation.

We can all do our bit in that regards.

We here at The AIMN would like to help in some small way, therefore we have decided that all donations received on Christmas Day and Boxing Day will be forwarded on to the Australian Bushfire Appeal.

To donate, click on the Donate button below.

It will be appreciated.

Thanking you,

Michael and Carol.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 13

‘White supremacy’ is a language of unease. It does not describe racial domination so much as worry about it. ‘White supremacy’ connotes many grim and terrifying things, including inequality, exclusion, injustice, and state and vigilante violence. Like ‘whiteness’ itself, ‘white supremacy’ arose from the world of Atlantic slavery but survived its demise. Yet, while the structures are old, the term ‘white supremacy’ is not. It first appeared in British abolitionist critiques and U.S. proslavery defences in the first half of the nineteenth century, but it only became commonplace – and notably not as a pejorative – in U.S. whites’ post-emancipation calls for a racial order which would reinstitute slavery’s political and economic guarantees.

‘White supremacy’s opponents evoke it to condemn. Its proponents use it to summon up a vision of a racially ordered society, to rally political forces behind that vision, to establish laws and institutions which affirm it, and finally to render it natural and normal. But the very fact that the expression requires speaking means that something has gone awry. If the hierarchy of races were real, it would easily have survived slave emancipation. Instead, that hierarchy must be constantly asserted and enforced, lest the ‘white race’ be overwhelmed, overcome, and extinguished. ‘White supremacy’ is organised around a dread of its own demise, and with it the ‘white race’.

This inherent instability has produced a welter of fears, fantasies, and imperatives, from ‘racial purity’ to ‘race war’. It has also made ‘white supremacy’ a call to action. Indeed, the effort to transform the words from a slogan into a fact has been a massive social and political project, involving the witting and unwitting labour of many millions of people. ‘White supremacy’ has always been hard work.

But because it is work, it is possible to imagine that someday there will be no one willing to perform the labour. And sometime between the march from Selma to Montgomery and the election of Barack Obama, many Americans allowed themselves to believe something of the kind: that ‘white supremacy’s advocates, having lost their long war, were giving up.

The violent manifestations of ‘white supremacy’ over the past several years – from Dylann Roof’s murders in Charleston, through Donald J. Trump’s campaign and presidency – unwound that hope. No better illustration exists for ‘white supremacy’s return to the cultural centre than Charlottesville’s 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally, in which emblems of the Ku Klux Klan, the Third Reich, and the Confederacy jostled with more esoteric banners and names, together representing a century’s worth of ‘white supremacist’ politicking. By the time the sirens died out, it should have been clear that Dylann Roof was no ‘lone wolf,’ but the legitimate offspring of a re-emergent social movement.

Yet even as ‘white supremacy’ appeared suddenly to be everywhere in American life, many – and not just on the right – denied its existence. President Trump’s refusal to criticise even neo-Nazis was treated as a uniquely craven act of ‘norm-breaking,’ not as a predictable extension of decades of coded and not-so-coded racist appeals. In the rush to catch President Trump out, what has been omitted from media reporting is the long history of indulging ‘white supremacist’ ideology and expression. One might consider how long Pat ‘Blood and Soil – Blut und Boden’ Buchanan served as a respectable voice of the political and journalistic right, winning four states in the 1996 Republican primaries and later playing Rachel Maddow’s curmudgeonly uncle on M.S.N.B.C. – all in spite of his longstanding support for ‘white ethno-nationalism’. One might remember the P.B.S. NewsHour profile of President Trump supporter Grace Tilly which failed to note her neo-Nazi tattoos. The network’s post-backlash editor’s note treated Ms. Tilly’s claim that her tattoos were religious, not racist, as worthy of debate, as though an enormous ‘88’ – code for ‘Heil Hitler’ – paired with a bullseye cross, another ‘white supremacy’ symbol, left room for uncertainty. The myth that ‘white supremacy’ is a marginal political phenomenon has proved so durable that many people find it easier to deny its overt expression than confront a more troubling reality: “very fine people”, as President Trump would say – and not just fathers, husbands, and sons, but mothers, wives, and daughters as well – have always been central to the work of ‘white supremacy’.

Three fairly recent books explore the twentieth-century history of this political project. In Linda Gordon’s thoughtful reconsideration of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan (The second coming of the KKK: the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American political tradition, New York, N.Y., Boni & Liveright 2018) one sees shameless grifters deploy racial hierarchy and exclusion to forge the largest social movement of the early twentieth century. In Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s revelatory exploration of mid-century white women’s segregationist work (Mothers of massive resistance: White women and the politics of white supremacy, Oxford University Press 2018) one sees how the inheritors of that vision learned to speak in new languages, muted enough to pass in a society increasingly hostile to ‘white supremacy’ but unmistakable to partisans as a continuation of the long struggle against racial equality. In Kathleen Belew’s groundbreaking account of the ‘White Power’ movement from the mid-1970s to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (Bring the war home: the White Power Movement and paramilitary America, Harvard University Press, 2018), it becomes clear how a post–civil rights generation of ‘white supremacist’ organisers positioned themselves as victims of an overbearing state, even as they nurtured Timothy McVeigh, Dylann Roof, Patrick Crusius and the dream of ‘race war’.

These works do not claim to provide a comprehensive account of twentieth-century’ white supremacy’; such a project would also have to probe – as other scholars have – the forces of labour and capital, and the relationship of domestic ideologies and practices to their imperial histories. But, read together and through one another, these works provide a sobering crash course in the power, diversity, and persistence of ‘white supremacist’ ideas and politics.

Across the long twentieth century, ‘white supremacist’ activists nurtured an exclusionary racial nationalism. They envisioned an America safely in the hands of its ‘rightful’ owners, redeemed from misrule by ‘unfit’ peoples, and made great again. The latter would become the overarcvhing motto of Donald J. Trump. The work of such ‘white supremacists’ relied extensively on white women’s organisational and ideological labours, although they posited a world of white patriarchal families in which men spoke and fought while women sustained and reproduced. Responding to successive challenges, these activists developed new languages and new coalitions, but they remained consistently suspicious of political authority that they could not directly control. Partly for this reason, they usually saw electoral politics as a critical arena of struggle, and they rarely abandoned it. Across the century, this ideological and organisational landscape has been home to hustlers, activists, and insurgents playing distinct but often complementary roles. ‘White supremacy’ has always been at once a political movement, an armed struggle, and a long con.

Gordon’s Second coming of the KKK shows how a ‘white supremacist’ and nativist movement reset the boundaries of political discourse, clarified that the nation existed in the image and service of a particular kind of American, and took control of governments from school boards to Congress to give those imperatives life. Klansmen nurtured a politics of resentment against both ‘élites’ who looked down on them and the immigrants, blacks, and radicals who seemed to challenge their world.

The first Ku Klux Klan was founded in the 1860s by former Confederate soldiers and for a few years became the spear and symbol of the war against Reconstruction. This first Klan was actively suppressed by legal and military action in the early 1870s, and the campaigns of racial terror and political intimidation which finally overthrew Reconstruction were largely conducted under other names. The second Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons in response to that year’s blockbuster film, D. W. Griffith’s The birth of a nation, which reworked memories of the Reconstruction-era KKK into a myth of white male chivalry combatting black sexual barbarism. Beginning in 1919 the Klan exploded in size and power as organisers channelled the era’s powerful currents of nativism and violent ‘white supremacy’ through the heroic image and visual style of Klansmen. They coupled the anti-black rhetoric of the Reconstruction-era Klan with a pervasive hostility toward non-Protestant immigrants and what Simmons, the founder of the Second Ku Klux Klan in 1915, derided as their anti-American propensities for “Bolshevism, Socialism, Syndicalism, I.W.W.ism.” (The Industrial Workers of the World – the members of which are commonly termed ‘Wobblies’, is an international labour union which was founded in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois) Gordon encourages the reader to understand that, to many of its white American contemporaries, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was an ‘ordinary and respectable’ organisation which promised to restore white Protestants, mainly of the lower middle and skilled working classes, to their proper place of authority in American cultural and political life. Gordon reminds the reader that many of the Klan’s hobbyhorses – anti-black racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism; censoriousness about sex and alcohol; support for eugenics; and narrow-minded nationalism – reflected broad and sometimes hegemonic aspects of 1920s American culture.

Gordon also asks the reader to understand the movement as producing, not just reflecting, social concerns. The Klan channelled pre-existing hatred of racial inferiors and haughty elites, but it also ginned up those expressions and provided new outlets for them. Conspiracy thinking was central to Klan rhetoric and ideology. Everywhere lurked sinister forces which sought to take over the United States government and subvert the country’s way of life. Indeed, those forces might already have taken power. Jews, Catholics, Bolsheviks, and African Americans were always about to swamp ‘true Americans’ with rising birthrates; to take control of United States police forces and public schools; to undermine cherished values with sex, alcohol, or pornography; and to oppress real Americans from the safety of powerful, distant institutions.

Such conspiracy talk effectively transformed grievances and insecurities into well-defined targets against which local Klans could then organise. In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, the Klan took up the cause of fighting illegal liquor trafficking in a neighbourhood populated by Italians, blacks, and Jews. There and elsewhere, the Klan infiltrated or worked alongside police departments. Beatings, whippings, cross-burning, death threats, and fatal shootings marked the outer edge of the Klan’s activities, but in some places – Williamson County, Illinois; Dayton, Ohio; large swaths of Oklahoma—assaults were common and condoned.

Yet this Klan was not atavistic or residual but modern, a for-profit enterprise which combined state-of-the-art public relations, mass media, and franchising. It was – Gordon shows – a pyramid scheme, in which local Klans and their leaders effectively purchased the right to recruit more dues-paying, regalia-purchasing members. Little mattered but recruitment. The fine points of Klan ideology were left to local groups, based on their local circumstances. Thus Klans in one locale might focus on the threat posed by Catholic teachers, while those in another attacked bootleggers, and a third local unionists.

The Klan reached its apex as a political movement in 1924, when its forces made a serious effort to choose the Democratic nominee for president. Scandals both lurid – sex – and dreary – embezzlement – undercut the organisation during the remaining decade, just as the con was running out of marks. But even as the order crumbled, the Klan remained ideologically ascendant. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which went into effect at the end of the decade, dramatically curtailed ‘undesirable’ immigration. Eugenics remained a commonsense feature of reform movements and scholarly discourse. And the Klan’s commitment to a nation where self-confident white Protestant men and women managed the lives and labours of their ‘racial inferiors’, while guarding vigilantly against subversion and sedition, remained woven into the American political tradition.

Feminism is not a strictly ‘left’ phenomenon. There is not only conservative feminism but even bigoted feminism. Feminists played a central role in building the Klan. The fact that many women have played vital, sustaining roles in ‘white supremacist’ organising should not surprise anyone, and is not disconnected from the fact that a majority of white women voted for Trump. However, it can still be difficult to take this a step further and acknowledge that feminism is not a strictly ‘left’ phenomenon. Gordon’s chapter on ‘KKK Feminism’ asks readers to take seriously “a phenomenon that many progressive feminists found and still find anomalous – the existence not only of conservative feminism but even of bigoted feminism.” Early in its resuscitation, women demanded entry into the second K.K.K., and in 1923 national Klan leader Hiram Evans merged disparate groups into a kind of women’s auxiliary, the W.K.K.K. Women helped build and recruit the organisation. They even preached its gospel: Rev. Alma Bridwell White, for example, demanded women’s rights to property and legal protection against domestic violence, while also calling for the nomination of Klan-endorsed candidates who would uphold “prohibition, restricted immigration, [and] white supremacy.” In this, as in so many other respects, the Klan was “modern.”

Elizabeth Gillespie McRae runs with this theme in Mothers of massive resistance, which is populated by modern professional women who shared Rev. White’s skills, confidence, and ideology, and who played critical roles in the defence of ‘white supremacy’ from the 1920s to the 1970s. McRae follows these women’s confrontation with the mid-century transformation of Jim Crow from the law of the land to an embattled ideal, and of ‘white supremacy’ from the slogan of a hegemonic regional regime to something controversial or even unspeakable in polite company.

Among McRae’s many subjects, North Carolina’s Nell Battle Lewis is illustrative. A cosmopolitan and reform-minded graduate of Smith College, Lewis believed that forward-thinking élites could maintain a just and smoothly functioning segregationist order. She thought the greatest threat to that system resided in the willingness to tolerate manifest injustices, for example in the judicial and penal systems. She abhorred the modern Klan’s self-confident ignorance and vigilantism. But her outlook was proudly racist. In 1923, after watching The birth of a nation for the fifth time, she swooned with racial nationalist pride: the Reconstruction-era Klan, she wrote, was “a necessary tour de force effected by some of the leaders of a … civilization in danger of its very life.” In her columns for the Raleigh, North Carolina News and Observer, Lewis depicted a world of enlightened whites and deferential blacks. Inequality was real. It just needed to be properly managed.

Mothers of massive resistance shows how white women defined, refined, and defended a ‘white supremacist’ social order. In the 1920s, they worked as investigators who policed eugenicist ‘racial integrity’ laws. Later – McRae argues – they became ‘Jim Crow storytellers,’ affirming in columns, textbooks, and speeches “the oft-repeated fiction of a content black population in need of white oversight.” Here and elsewhere, their work orbited around the vision of white women as the guardians of domestic life, which encompassed homes, children, and schools. They may not have been the most visible public faces of the ‘Jim Crow order’, but they were “segregation’s constant gardeners.”

That garden encompassed political organising. Women served as regional partisans, keeping the Democratic Party in line or seeking alternatives to it. As the Roosevelt Administration responded to the labour struggles of the Great Depression, they warned against policies which placed black men in positions of responsibility properly belonging to white men. By the 1940s, they emerged as national organisers, searching out languages and alliances which would continue to legitimise ‘white supremacy’ in practice if not in name. As activists and justices chipped away at the constitutional foundations of segregation, they warned at ever-increasing volume that school desegregation constituted a “threat to the white race.” If black and white children sat together in classrooms, they would socialise, court, marry, reproduce, and destroy the segregationist order. They imagined desegregated schools as, in McRae’s words, “hothouses for consensual sex and breeding grounds for marriage” between whites and blacks.

Thinking globally, acting locally, McRae’s women fought to forestall that dreaded future. They forged coalitions with non-southerners who shared compatible values and outlooks. They learned to frame their opposition to desegregation in terms of ostensibly non-racial threats: federal power, Communism, the United Nations, and especially the subversion of traditional family structures. Southern segregationist women helped cross-pollinate their movement with those of conservatives beyond the South, people for whom racial segregation was equally desirable if sometimes less existential. Indeed, McRae wanted the reader to abandon the shopworn regional distinction between southern ‘segregationists’ and northern ‘conservatives.’ They learned to modulate their language to their audience and to build lasting bridges across regional lines.

In 1960 the Mississippi winner of a Citizens’ Council essay contest described segregation as a bulwark against “the threat of intermarriage”; she promised to “preserve [her] racial integrity and keep it pure.” Within a decade, both the contest’s judges and its winners would have to find different language with which to express their values if they were to remain respected participants in American politics. In her final pages, McRae shows how they succeeded. Segregation in Mississippi had been created and maintained by explicit and unapologetic state laws; segregation in Boston was a product of local racist practices sanctioned not by law but by custom and inaction, and of federal housing and lending policies which ratified and reinforced those exclusions, making the links between race, neighbourhood, and school seem natural rather than constructed. But everywhere, white women took the lead in 1970s’ protests against court-mandated programmes of school desegregation, defending a white domestic sphere of school and neighbourhood without directly asserting the legitimacy of racial segregation. By 1974, when Boston city councillor Louise Day Hicks declared that “the issue of forced busing is a women’s issue,” the explicit language of ‘white supremacy’ vanished, leaving only a Cheshire cat grin of fears and imperatives.

White women took the lead in protests against school desegregation, defending a white domestic sphere without directly asserting the legitimacy of racial segregation.

The defenders of segregation learned to speak their truths in code. Their demands for ‘local control’ defended racial hierarchies which previous generations of policy and practice had baked into institutions, neighbourhoods, and schools. Their language of ‘colour-blindness’ sought to neutralise historical accounting or reparation. Some, such as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush advisor Lee Atwater, claimed that in trading overtly racist language for “forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff,” they were establishing a new, non-racial basis for their coalition – though Atwater’s deployment of the worst scare tactics of ‘white supremacy’ in his 1988 ‘Willie Horton’ ads showed that one did not need to use racial epithets to communicate openly racist messages. (Horton, was an escaped convict from Massachusetts who had been serving time for murder when he skipped out on a temporary furlough from prison and committed robbery, rape and assault. During the 1988 presidential election, Horton became a central figure in Bush’s campaign and a way for the candidate to imply that his opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was soft on crime). But for most aspiring political or civic figures, a degree of deniability seemed to become essential.

In Bring the war home, Kathleen Belew traces the development of an openly ‘white supremacist’ counterculture between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. ‘White supremacist’ activists – many of them veterans – developed an analysis of the federal government which linked its putative abandonment of soldiers in Vietnam with its alleged elevation of immigrants and non-whites over white Americans at home. This corrupt state would soon snuff out the liberties of white men, leaving their families helpless before communists and racial inferiors. The solution was to “bring the war home”: to deploy the tools and methods of the wars in southeast Asia in a revolutionary struggle for a ‘white ethno-state’ in North America.

Continued tomorrow … (Part 15)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.

By Europaeus *

Continued from Part 12

When Dylann Roof, the white supremacist terrorist behind the 2015 Charleston massacre, issued his manifesto, he did so with a specific vision of America in mind.

To Roof’s mind, the United States was his country – a white man’s nation, worth reclaiming through horrid bloodshed, done in the name of racial supremacy. To Roof, ‘white supremacists’ could still conquer their country, even if they made up only a fraction of the population. Ideas that ‘white people’ in America should pack up and relocate elsewhere were ludicrous to Roof. Movements to cleave part of the country – say, the Pacific Northwest – into a ‘whites-only’ utopia were anathema to Roof’s endgame. “I think this idea is beyond stupid. Why should I for example, give up the beauty and history of [South Carolina?],” Roof claimed. “The whole idea is pathetic and just another way to run from the problem without facing it.” Fast forward four years, to El Paso, a ‘white supremacist’ picked up where Roof left off. In a reprise of the Charleston shooter’s slaughter, the El Paso shooter murdered some 22 individuals, all in the name of white nationalism. A manifesto written by the shooter outlined his extremism: how he was specifically targeting Hispanics, how his massacre would help prevent Texas from becoming a Democratic stronghold, how he aimed to end ‘racial mixing.’

The El Paso manifesto however, carries a different vision for an American future than that displayed by Roof – one overlooked in the days following the attack, and one which may portend a growing shift in the end-goals of ‘white supremacist’ extremists. To the El Paso shooter, America was, in a sense, beyond saving. Instead, the shooter wrote, the country must fracture entirely. “You’re going to have people who are unstable, who are going to say, ‘I’m tired of waiting. Now I want to make it happen. I want to kick off this race war.’ ” In Crusius’ vision, there would be no more United States. In its place, would be an America “divide[d]… into a confederacy of territories with at least 1 territory for each race.” Such a proposal would apparently allow “each race self-determination within their respective territory(s) [sic].”

Unlike Roof, Crusius wanted to be done with the United States. To him, there was no U.S. to reclaim.

“It sounds like they’re borrowing past ideas and putting renewed emphasis on it,” Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security official assigned to monitoring the far-right, told ThinkProgress, an American news website. “It’s getting new traction if these guys are quoting it in their manifestos.”

While the idea of breaking the United States into separate racial territories is, of course, ludicrous, it doesn’t come without support. And if anything, that support is growing, with flames fanned by actors both foreign and domestic. American state fracture – breaking up the country outright – has gained increasing credence among the far-right over the past few years. And with the El Paso terrorist attack, the domestic push to dissolve the United States outright entered a new phase – one the end of which remains unclear.

The record of attempts to break the country into racial regions has, of course, a lengthy history. President Andrew Jackson’s administration, for instance, put forward the notion of creating a ‘Western Territory’ peopled solely with Native Americans, many of whom would be ethnically cleansed from the American Southeast by both Jackson and his successor, President Martin Van Buren. To the Jackson administration, the territory would eventually gain statehood outright: a state populated by, and for, the indigenous nations conquered through America’s white supremacist expansionism.

Indeed, the root for such a race-based division largely took place in the American West. Oregon celebrated its ascension to statehood with a constitution barring any black settlement outright. Anti-Chinese pogroms in Idaho, Nevada and Wyoming aimed to drive competing non-white labourers from the territories, as did anti-South Asian riots in Washington State. Genocidal massacres of Indigenous nations in California in the mid-19th century – against Pomos, against Tolowas, against Wintus – achieved much the same, all in the name of forcing non-whites from newly American territory. And Texas was no different, with Texas Rangers responsible for much of the attempts at ‘ethnic cleansing’ along the Texas-Mexico border.

Of course, it is not as if the American West had a monopoly on these platforms of ‘ethnic cleansing’, or of ‘racial reorganisation’. Post-Civil War ‘white supremacist’ terrorism in the United States – lynchings, armed uprisings, political violence – aimed at driving formerly enslaved populations and their descendants from the American South. But for decades, the idea of breaking the U.S. into racial regions was a fantasy. ‘White supremacists’ – from the Ku Klux Klan to ‘white nationalist’ extremists in the militia movement – wanted a return to white racial hegemony across the entirety of the United States. Ideas of a ‘whites-only’ nation-state started resurfacing in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Johnson, and percolated especially in the Pacific Northwest. But only a small minority of extremists shared these views. Such was the idea Roof ridiculed in his 2015 manifesto.

Over the past few years, though, the notion of state fracture and racial re-organisation, may have gained credence among far-right voices – and supporters have been finding comfort from the highest ranks of the American government.

The recent interest in setting up a ‘whites-only’ state within the U.S. can be seen in a selection in terminology. Whereas ‘white supremacists’ claim precisely what their name signifies – the supremacy of the ‘white race’, however they define it – ‘white nationalists’ often fall back on petty claims that they are, in fact, not racist, but simply prefer people of the ‘white race’ to others. These claims are belied by the fact that the most prominent ‘white nationalists’ of the past few years – such as Richard Bertrand Spencer, an American neo-Nazi and ‘white supremacist’, president of the National Policy Institute and of Washington Summit Publishers, Matthew Warren Heimbach, an American neo-Nazi and ‘white nationalist’ who in September 2018 took the position of community outreach director for the National Socialist Movement, and the like – also happen to be inveterate anti-Semites who regularly spew racist diatribes, and clearly use the term ‘white nationalist’ as a linguistic defence against their own ‘white supremacy’.

But it is also true that there appears more interest over the past few years on the far-right in the interest of unwinding the United States entirely – an interest which culminated in the El Paso massacre. “You watch how the world trembles.”

Consider Heimbach.

He gained notoriety in 2016 as one of the faces of a generation of ‘white supremacists’. To Heimbach, the solution to America’s ails was simple: Balkanisation. “Every ethnic group should be able to opt out of multiculturalism if it wants to.” Heimbach said. “Multiculturalism leads to violence. Multiculturalism leads to disunity. Different cultures want to live differently.”

Spencer echoed Heimbach. Another prominent face of the fascists who rose to prominence in 2016, Spencer – accused of domestic abuse, to go along with his ‘white supremacy’ – has advocated the creation of a ‘white ethno-state’. While Spencer has not specified where such a state would exist, one of his allies, former K.K.K. lawyer Sam Dickson, fleshed out Spencer’s idea in late 2015. As the Southern Poverty Law Center related, “Dickson claimed African Americans could ‘be given Manhattan,’ describing his version of a Balkanization of America.”

Other semi-prominent extreme right voices have picked up the threads since. Patrick Little, another open anti-Semitic ‘white supremacist’ running as a Republican in California’s primary for U.S. Senate., announced in 2018 that he supported the “Balkanization” of the U.S. “I’m a fan of Balkanization.” Little claimed. The support of “Balkanization” fits into broader trends of American ‘white supremacists’ looking to the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the kind of ‘ethnic cleansing’ resultant, for inspiration.

Just in August 2019 the Southern Poverty Law Center outed a State Department official named Matthew Gebert as a ‘white supremacist’ – one who claimed ‘white Americans’ need a new country, one which could boast its own nuclear arsenal. “That’s all we need,” Gebert said. “We need a country founded for white people with a nuclear deterrent. And you watch how the world trembles.”

Having someone as outwardly racist and sympathetic to ‘white nationalist’ rhetoric in power as President Trump in some ways mitigates the push for outright state fracture. So long as President Trump remains ensconced in Washington, the ludicrous notion of territorial reordering in the United States remains at bay.

“I don’t think they’ve thought about [the structure of an all-white society],” Johnson told ThinkProgress, an American news website. “It’s this idealistic utopia, and they don’t sit there and say, ‘Well, how are we going to govern, how are we going to tax,’ things like that.”

The fact that these people are talking about doing this should disturb Americans of all stripes.” But that does not mean things cannot change – or that President Trump himself would not be sympathetic to the movement at some point in the future. After all, just early in August 2019 President Trump took to Twitter to boost a fired Google employee. The man President Trump publicly praised also happened to be a vocal supporter of Richard Spencer. Nor is this swelling ‘white supremacist’ push for the disintegration of the country, which spilled into bloodshed in El Paso, purely of domestic interest.

One should look at recent and much disputed Russian interference efforts. Not only have Kremlin-funded groups previously cultivated ties with neo-Confederates in the United States, but some of the most prominent fake social media accounts are accused specifically, and successfully, of having targeted secessionists with racist rhetoric through and after the 2016 election. Just a few months ago, one learned of an aborted plan to try to stoke racial discontent with the ultimate aim of cracking apart the nation into racial polities.

Neo-Confederates reach out to their alleged ‘Russian friends’ in new projects. “Regardless of whether or not these plans are an amateurish thought experiment, the fact that these people are talking about doing this should disturb Americans of all stripes.” a former assistant director of counterintelligence at the F.B.I. told N.B.C.

Elsewhere, rhetoric advocating the fracturing of America has begun to seep beyond just ‘white supremacist’ messaging. Far-right pundits like Kurt Schlichter and Jesse Kelly, who claim to be ‘patriots’, have floated the idea of destroying the United States. Kelly claimed he wants an “amicable divorce,” but it is unclear why he thinks any dissolution would be peaceful.

Very recently, Chris, a 35-year-old white man from rural Pennsylvania, supported the idea of dissolution during a progamme of a well known radio-televson station. As Chris revealed, he thinks American dissolution is effectively a fait accompli. “I feel like it’s going to happen one way or the other,” he said. “Maybe if we can control the process a little it won’t be quite as bad.” His support for dissolution rests largely on the racists surrounding him, pointing out that those in his community regularly refer to Martin Luther King Day with racial slurs. “It’s the N-word,” Chris said, noting how people describe the holiday. “N-Day is kinda what they say. Even the people who don’t say it chuckle at it.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the recent rhetoric advocating for the United States dissolution – whether from ‘white supremacists’ or otherwise – is predicated on the belief that American socio-political divides remain at the state level: that the supposed Red State/Blue State divide remains insoluble. But the notion that America’s divide remains on a state-by-state basis is years out of date. Instead, as recent elections indicate, the split is far more centered on rural-urban divides, precisely like in Texas.

Two decades ago, Austin was viewed as a ‘blue island’ in a ‘sea of red.’ Recently, Texas’s major urban areas – Dallas and Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio – have all tilted Democratic. Texas is no different from other Republican-leaning states, where major cities – Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Missoula, Montana – have voted Democratic in recent years. And there is little reason to think that trajectory will shift in the foreseeable future.

But then, that allegedly was one of the factors driving the shooter responsible for the El Paso massacre. It is also one of the reasons why domestic terrorists like him have begun turning toward trying to dissolve the nation, rather than returning to what they view as the halcyon days of ‘white supremacy’.

“I think the closer we get to the 2020 election, the more scary it’s going to get.” Christian Picciolini, a former ‘white supremacist’ who renounced the movement to run anti-extremist programmes, told ThinkProgress.

“If the Democrats win … I think you will see a lot of activity in states that are heavily Republican starting to talk about secession, starting to say, ‘Do we want to be part of this liberal, socialist, whatever-they’re-calling-it America?’ And I think you’ll have discussions about that,” Picciolini said. “But on other hand, you’re going to have people who are unstable, who are going to say, ‘I’m tired of waiting. Now I want to make it happen. I want to kick off this race war’.” (C. Michel, ‘White supremacists look to remake the map of America,’ ThinkProgress, 12 August 2019).

After the El Paso massacre there were calls to give the government more tools to address attacks motivated by ‘white supremacy’. But there are questions about how such legislation would work.

Since 2017, more than 230 incidents of hateful propaganda have been reported in communities across Texas – a phenomenon which has dramatically escalated in 2019, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organisation which tracks extremist activity. One group is responsible for more than two-thirds of the hype: ‘Patriot Front’, a Texas-based ‘white nationalist’ group formed after the deadly ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Members of the group insist that their European ancestors conquered America, and that people of colour, including Hispanic immigrants, are a threat to the ‘white race’. The same message appeared in Crusius’ manifesto. Crusius wrote that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and he criticised ‘race mixing.’

“We have seen an increase of reports of individuals who express a desire to commit violence – definitely,” said F.B.I. Special Agent Michelle Lee of San Antonio, referring to ‘white supremacists’. After the massacres, the F.B.I. saw a noticeable increase in the number of reported threats, Ms. Lee said. It’s unclear whether the public is simply more aware of the need to report threats, or if people with extremist ideologies are more active after they become inspired by acts of violence. In July 2019 F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that in the preceding nine months, the agency recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects, most of whom were associated with white supremacy. His comments came two months after a senior official in the F.B.I.’s counter terrorism division said that the agency was investigating 850 domestic terrorism cases, about 40 per cent of them involving racially motivated violent extremists.

But investigating hate groups can pose a challenge to federal officials because the government can’t monitor people – even if they espouse hatred against certain groups – unless there’s probable cause that they might commit an act of violence or other crimes, Ms. Lee said. The First Amendment protects free speech, no matter how repulsive, she said.

Instead, the F.B.I. largely relies on the public and private tech companies to report threats, most of which surface online. Critics argue that tech companies have allowed extremists to strengthen and proliferate online, and that the federal government has long overlooked the threat of ‘white supremacists’, instead focusing disproportionately on Islamic extremists. Organisations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have tracked the growing presence of ‘white supremacists’. According to the Anti-Defamation League, in 2018 right-wing extremists – the majority of them ‘white supremacists’ – were linked to more murders in the United States than in any other year since 1995, when the bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building left 168 people dead. The League tracks murders connected to all forms of extremism, including right-wing, left-wing and Islamist extremism.

“All of this is part of the surge in ‘white supremacist’ activity that we’ve seen since 2015,” said Ms. Carla Hill, a senior Anti-Defamation League researcher. “It’s also paired with the political rhetoric that has seemed to embolden this movement further to think, ‘Hey, this is our chance. If we don’t get ahead now, we’re losing our last chance to save the white race.’

“Online message boards such as 4chan and 8chan became breeding grounds for hate, Ms. Hill said. Racist or sexist memes, masquerading as jokes, were often used to indoctrinate young, white men into hateful ideologies. The bigotry kept escalating.

The online surge coincided with the 2015 launch of President Trump’s election campaign, when he said Mexico was sending “rapists” and “criminals” to the United States.

Ms. Hill said that she believes the political climate – and use of words such as “invasion” – have contributed to the rise in violence. “It’s just been the perfect storm,” she said.

‘White supremacists’ soon decided to take their movement offline and into the real world.

One of the hate groups which demonstrated in Charlottesville was the neo-Nazi organisation ‘Vanguard America’. At the rally, James Alex Fields, a ‘white supremacist’, plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Ms. Heather Heyer, 32.

After Ms. Heyer’s death, a Dallas-based member of ‘Vanguard America’, Thomas Rosseau, renamed the organisation to escape scrutiny. He called the splinter group ‘Patriot Front’. It is estimated that, presently, the group has at least 300 members, and Texas is home to its largest chapter, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Since 2018 ‘Patriot Front’ has been linked to more than 870 reports of racist propaganda across the country.

‘Patriot Front’ is the most visible ‘white supremacist’ group in Texas, followed by the ‘American Identity Movement’, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The social media accounts of both groups are flooded with images of propaganda.

One day after the El Paso massacre, the ‘American Identity Movement’ tweeted an image of its logo on a poster outside the municipal building in Allen, Texas – the hometown of Crusius.

Both groups aim to recruit new members with patriotic language. Sometimes, their flyers are not overtly racist. Instead, the groups are trying to insert themselves into mainstream conservative politics, said Ms. Hill of the Anti-Defamation League.

Many of their flyers are printed in red, white and blue, with slogans such as “Reclaim America” and “Not stolen conquered”. “I can only assume that it’s part of the optics to present themselves as American patriots, as opposed to white supremacists.” Ms. Hill said. (M. S. Richter and B. Chasnoff, ‘ ‘A perfect storm’ – online hate and political winds whip up white supremacy,’ Express News, 10 August 2019).

Continued tomorrow … (Part 14)

* Europaeus landed in Australia over fifty years ago. Except for the blue skies and starry nights between 02.12.1972 and 10.11.1975 the place has been constantly overwhelmed by what Hannah Arendt called the ‘sand storm’ – a metaphor for totalitarianism.