Nazi murders in Charlottesville, USA, many protests

This video from Arizona, USA says about itself:

Phoenix hold prayer vigil after Charlottesville violence

13 August 2017

Black Lives Matter Phoenix arranged the event on Sunday in downtown Phoenix.

By Isaac Finn in the USA:

Protests against Nazi violence, in support of Charlottesville victims held across US

14 August 2017

One day after the Nazi rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia—which left one dead and 19 injured—thousands of people participated in protests and vigils throughout the US to oppose fascist violence. Similar demonstrations are planned this week.

In Seattle, Washington, protests were held in opposition to a far-right demonstration that was scheduled to take place in Westlake Park. Joey Gibson—who is associated with the Oregon-based group Patriot Prayer—organized the so-called “Freedom Rally.” In the past, Gibson, a Trump supporter, has compared Islam with the Ku Klux Klan. He also organized two protests in Seattle earlier this year that resulted in fighting between anti-fascist groups and Patriot Prayer members.

While the counter-protest yesterday was predominantly peaceful, Seattle police took advantage of minor skirmishes to retaliate against left-wing protesters. This included police in full SWAT body army using tear gas against protesters that used silly string.

Police also tweeted pictures of alleged weapons used by left-wing protesters and carried several arrests. As of Sunday night, however, police have not disclosed how many people were arrested.

The counter-protest in Seattle, at about 1,000 people, was roughly five times that of the right-wing demonstration.

The protests elsewhere in the US were mostly called by Democratic Party-affiliated organizations, but attracted a broader layer. Those attending expressed their solidarity with the victims in Charlottesville and voiced their opposition to the Trump administration.

Many expressed hostility to the entire political establishment.

Rick, who attended a vigil in Ferndale, Michigan, said, “They have to have an enemy, and rather than having an enemy that’s wealthy and powerful, they pit us against each other.

“In the ‘70s they had social unrest and so there was democratization. The youth went out and said we need voting rights and want to oppose the war. Events since have eroded those gains, and we haven’t had a mass movement to claw things back from the rich and powerful. Maybe Trump’s actions will create that movement.”

Andrew attended the protest in New York. “The events in Charlottesville are a really sad thing to see,” he said. “I was also surprised to see this in Virginia. That is where many of the Founding Fathers were from, and you would hope that it would uphold that democracy is for everyone.

“The rhetoric in the last election clearly empowered these people to say what they would not normally let them say. The president has made them feel like they can do this now.”

Eliza, a production assistant in New York, said, “I felt the need to have my voice heard, and so I came out here. I’m really terrified at how separated the country has become. I really believe that there should be equality and freedom for everyone, and anything against freedom is the antithesis of America.

“In this the two sides just don’t have equal weight for their arguments. I was glad to see a lot of Republican Congressman speaking out against the attack, but I wasn’t surprised by Trump’s response.”

Following some discussion about the mass dissatisfaction with the entire political system, she added, “I’ve always been a politically active person, but I see that a lot of people aren’t. There is a lot of corruption in politics and many areas of this country have been abandoned. We need politicians that are acknowledging the problems.”

Abei, who attended the rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan, said, “I am firm believer in equality. I have only been in the US for a week but I’m interested in this because similar things are happening everywhere. I come from India and have lived in Australia, and you see attacks on immigrants and racism there as well. Far-right parties too.”

After some discussion with a WSWS reporter, he added, “I suppose I support the Democrats, but only because there is no other choice really. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, other places, and even under the Obama regime. It just seems like even with all that, there is no way out of this, between those two war crime parties.”

This video from the USA says about itself:

Vigils held across NH in solidarity with Charlottesville

13 August 2017

Granite Staters are showing support for victims of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, with vigils across New Hampshire.

And according to CNN commentator Van Jones, the U.S. needs to pay attention to the fact that “an American citizen was assassinated in broad daylight by a Nazi.” [HuffPost]

#FIREBANNON TRENDS In light of the White House advisor’s ties to the white nationalist movement. [HuffPost]

Airbnb is reportedly kicking white supremacists off its platform while GoDaddy is no longer hosting a Neo-Nazi website.

This 1943 government film on fascism went viral over the weekend.

By Eric London in the USA:

The White House and the fascist rampage in Charlottesville

14 August 2017

After months of deliberate planning and coordination with the police, the Nazi “Unite the Right” rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia reached its deadly apogee Saturday afternoon when a 20-year-old Hitler admirer from Ohio drove his car through a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing 32-year-old Bernie Sanders supporter Heather Heyer and wounding 14 more people.

The corporate press has focused on Trump’s failure to verbally condemn the violence of the far right. But the American media’s handwringing over Trump’s statements evades the fact that there is a political method to Trump’s madness.

As the Financial Times noted:

Donald Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville from his golf resort in Bedminster consisted of reassurances about law and order and a general rejection of hatred. Here is the crucial phrase: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence that’s on many sides, on many sides.” Those three final words, repeated for emphasis, unmistakably draw a moral equivalence between the counter-protesters and the armed white supremacists who had spent the previous night carrying torches and chanting the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”

Those words, along with the president’s decision not to cast the bigotry in racial terms, joins a long list of signalling by conservative American politicians that stretches back decades. But to describe Mr. Trump’s comments as a “dog whistle,” audible only to a target audience, is to give the president and his team more credit than they deserve. In the context in which it was offered, the statement had the subtlety of a billy club.

But how could Trump condemn the fascist operation when his own White House was deeply involved in encouraging and giving support to its organizers?

This Nazi riot is not an aberrational event in American politics. It is the product of Donald Trump’s strategy to build an extra-constitutional fascist movement outside the framework of the two parties, itself an expression of the putrefaction and collapse of American democracy under the weight of staggering levels of social inequality.

In the past three weeks, Trump and his advisors—Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka—have escalated the administration’s efforts to whip up support among fascist elements who form the core of his political base.

Trump has attacked Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, challenging one of the most powerful legislative figures in his own party. He has made bellicose threats that the US is “locked and loaded” for war against North Korea and appealed to his billionaire constituents as well as the police, immigration and border officials, and the military to support his “tough on crime” and anti-immigrant policies.

In the process, he has emboldened the forces that took over the 22,000-student University of Virginia campus on Friday. The Nazis carried out a torchlight parade across the campus, founded and designed by the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, while chanting “blood and soil,” “Sieg Heil,” and “one people, one nation, stop immigration.”

At dawn Saturday morning, dozens of uniformed fascist militiamen armed with assault rifles and shotguns deployed downtown, establishing military control over the heart of the 50,000-person city. After the militia had secured the area, without police interference, vans filled with people from across the country poured into the city center, unloading hundreds of Nazis armed with guns, knives, chains, metal poles, baseball bats and pepper spray.

What happened next can be described only as a fascist riot. Police withdrew from the scene and Nazis began attacking counter-demonstrators in the streets, shouting racial and homophobic slurs while chanting “Heil Trump.” Straggler counter-demonstrators were pulled into the Nazi melee and beaten mercilessly, while the police looked on.

Brian McLaren, a pastor who had traveled to Charlottesville as a counter-demonstrator, told the press that “the police hung back quite a distance” as the Nazis launched their attack. Then, in the early afternoon, James Fields Jr. of Maumee, Ohio sped through the crowd in his car, flipping bodies over the hood like bowling pins.

Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, responded to criticism by stating on Sunday that the police did “great work” over the weekend. McAuliffe, former head of the Democratic National Committee and prominent fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, said the murder of counter-protestor Heather Heyer could not have been prevented. “You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon,” he declared.

The purpose of this weekend’s violence was to send a message to Trump’s detractors in the Republican and Democratic parties that he has an alternative base to which he can appeal. Accordingly, the Nazis held their rally just two hours from Washington DC.

A timeline of the three weeks preceding this weekend’s rampage makes clear the systematic and calculated campaign of the Trump White House to mobilize the most backward and reactionary social forces in the country.

• On July 22, Trump made a bellicose speech to an audience of sailors to mark the commission of a $13 billion aircraft carrier.
• On July 25, he delivered a speech in Youngstown, Ohio glorifying Christian religious extremism.
• On July 26, the Department of Justice filed a “friend of the court brief” stating that private corporations are not barred from firing employees based on their sexual orientation. That same day, Trump tweeted that his administration would bar transgender people from military service and nominated antigay Kansas Governor Sam Brownback to be the State Department’s ambassador at large for international religious freedom.
• On July 28, Trump told police and immigration agents in Long Island, New York that he loved watching criminal suspects “get thrown into the back of a paddy wagon.” He urged them to rough up people being detained, saying, “Please don’t be too nice.”
• On August 2, Trump and Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue announced legislation, the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment [RAISE] Act, which would slash legal immigration in half. At a press conference announcing the plan, Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller echoed the anti-Semitic language of the German Nazi Party when he denounced CNN’s Jim Acosta as having a “cosmopolitan bias.” On the same day, the media reported that the Justice Department was planning to sue colleges for “discrimination against whites.”
• On August 6, Trump launched a “Real News” program on his Facebook page in an attempt to build a personalist following outside the framework of the mainstream media.
• On August 8, White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who is a member of the Hungarian fascist Order of the Vitez, said the fascist bombing of a mosque near Minneapolis, Minnesota might be a “fake hate crime” that was “propagated by the left.” The following day, Gorka told Breitbart News that “white supremacists” are not “the problem,” and that terrorism is the product of Islam.

In the days that followed, Trump launched his war threats against North Korea and Venezuela and made new attacks on the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell.

This weekend’s Nazi violence is stamped with the political trademark of Bannon, Miller and Gorka. Nazi demonstration leader Jason Kessler acknowledged after the event that organizers had “networked with law enforcement” for months in advance of the “Unite the Right” provocation.

Kessler also met with several Republican officials in preparation for the Nazi mobilization. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Kessler held a press conference with Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart to denounce Charlottesville’s plans to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

In March, Kessler traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with Virginia Congressman Tom Garrett, who represents the Charlottesville area. Kessler posted on Facebook that he had “a very productive meeting today with Congressman Tom Garrett,” and acknowledged that he was in discussion with Garrett over how Kessler’s Nazi groups could support Trump’s anti-immigration measures: “We talked RAISE Act and Stop Arming Terrorists: 2 great bills we support,” Kessler’s post read.

The events in Charlottesville and Trump’s drive to develop an extra-constitutional fascist movement are a warning to the working class in the US and internationally. The program of the fascists in the White House and on the streets of Charlottesville is for genocidal war abroad and the mass internment and murder of immigrants, LGBT people, Jewish people and socialists at home.

Fascism is the excrescence of the decaying social order of American and world capitalism, which, in the figure of Donald Trump, has vomited up a fitting expression. It will not be stopped through moralistic appeals to the political establishment, but only through the mobilization of the working class united across racial, national and ethnic lines and politically armed with a revolutionary program for the socialist reorganization of the US and world economy.

African American CEO Quits White House Council Over Trump’s Charlottesville Response — And Trump Attacks Him. Instead of denouncing neo-Nazis, Trump denounces a CEO criticizing him for not personally denouncing neo-Nazis: here.