Tag Archives: right-wing

The Extremists Who Founded America….

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Right Wing Extremists: Saving America Since 1776

With the 233rd Independence Day celebration on it’s way in America, we thought it would be a good idea to honor the radical extremists that founded this country.
Now, it might be true that calling Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin “right wing” is a bit historically questionable within the original context of the old Left-Right paradigm laid out in the French Assembly in the late 18th Century. We understand that technically the founders had more in common with what would historically be deemed the “left” than anything. ……”

Feds Blame Former Marine For Alleged Hutaree “Christian Militia” Conspiracy

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Michael Isikoff at Newsweek has posted on the non-story de jour, which apparently is that the federal government has filed a court document in the Hutaree case. The document is a brief in opposition to the defendant Michael Meeks’ motion to revoke the detention order against him.

We are looking forward to the day when a defendant’s every legal filing also becomes the subject of such prompt attention. I’ve italicized the federal government designation of the “crime” that Isikoff has adopted as established fact:

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“A former U.S. Marine rifle expert and veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War supplied the extremist Christian “Hutaree” militia with a “hit list” of federal judges and elected officials and served as the group’s “heavy gunner” who was responsible for providing a “significant volume of firepower” against designated law-enforcement targets, according to a court document released by federal prosecutors.

In a new court filing, federal prosecutors for the first time portray the former Marine, Michael David Meeks, 40, as a key figure in the Michigan-based Hutaree’s alleged conspiracy to trigger an “uprising” against the U.S. government by plotting to assassinate law-enforcement officers with improvised explosive devices.

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Meeks, the prosecutors allege, used his four years of U.S. military training to become a member of the Hutaree’s “inner circle” and participated in “military-style training exercises ” with the group on a dozen occasions between October 2008 and February of this year.”

As far as I can tell from this, the only thing the federal government has got on them so far is hearsay and some combat-style exercises.

Indian Business Students Drive Sales Of Mein Kampf

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“Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.
Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.

Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.

“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.

More at The Telegraph, UK”

My Comment

April 20 was Hitler’s birthday and I suppose the anniversary provides the justification for stories like these.  Mein Kampf is a book that I’ve never read myself and haven’t felt curious enough to read, either . It’s apparently selling briskly to Indian students, not for its anti-semitism but for the inspiration it provides management students.

More mischievously, the article goes on to insinuate a link between Gandhi and the Nazis.

There was one, but nothing that would please any Nazi-hunter. Gandhi was not unusual in seeing the European war as intra-imperial and seemed to think that satyagraha would work on the Germans as well as it had done on the British.

He went so far as to advise  Jews to let themselves fall before the Nazis as a kind of sacrificial gesture that would turn the consciences of their oppressors. Many scholars have – unsurprisingly – reacted to this with repugnance, but the advice was more a symptom of Gandhian quixotry than anti-Semitism – conscious or unconscious.