The George Floyd video matches the transcript

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve previously analyzed the George Floyd transcripts here. Now the British paper Daily Mail has obtained the videos despite the efforts of prosecutor Keith Ellison to suppress them. Here’s a discussion by shipwreckedcrew of Red State about what the videos reveal, and it’s unsurprising that it’s in line with what I wrote based on the transcript – because after all, it’s a transcript of the video. At the link you can also find the videos themselves, if you wish to view them.

The only new information I can discern is that the visuals of what happened when the officers tried to place Floyd in the squad car tell the following tale:

At 4:40 Officer Lueng begins to open the back door on the driver’s side of his car, but it remains locked after a couple of efforts. While trying to resolve the issue, Floyd begins to protest about having to get in the car.

At about the 5:00 minute mark Floyd’s protests begin to take the form of some physical resistance — not really combative but just turning his body back and forth to keep the officer from holding on to him. Floyd is not a small man…

Lane is perfectly calm and measured at all times up to this point. Nothing about his actions or comments show him to be agitated or irritated by Floyd’s actions.

At 6:10 a second officer has joined Lane — he may have been there for a period of time and been off-camera and didn’t make a comment — to assist in getting Floyd to enter the vehicle. Floyd says at one point “I’m getting in” but he is at the same time resisting their ability to “move him” forward into the vehicle, and the officer responded “No you’re not.” He’s told repeatedly to “take a seat”, and he responds “I’m not that kind of guy”, something he said numerous times throughout the encounter. At this point, he has turned around to face the officers and is stiffening his body in resistance to their efforts to push him into the back of the car.

At 6:35 he says “I’m going to die in here”, and the officer responds “I’ll roll the windows down.” The officers succeed in getting him to sit on the backseat but with his legs still outside the car, and his upper body not inside the door frame as he continues to resist going inside the car. The efforts by the officers are still not violent — they are simply trying to “force” him enter the car by depriving him of other opportunities to move and pushing him backwards into the backseat.

There is no other way to describe Floyd at this point other than bordering on irrational.

There are more efforts to get Floyd into the squad car, described at the link. In the end, Floyd (who at one point asked to lie on the ground) ends up being restrained on the ground, as a bystander video which has been beamed around the world has already revealed.

Shipwreckedcrew wonders “where in the timeline the Officers made the decision to call for paramedics and an ambulance.” I don’t know the exact time, but from the transcript it appears to have been around the time they’re having so much difficulty getting Floyd into the squad car.

Shipwreckedcrew also seems to think that Floyd “quit breathing while he was on the ground, and the officers should have realized that and responded to his condition.” I say maybe yes, maybe no. He seems to have lost consciousness. But did he stop breathing? And did he go into cardiac arrest? I’ve never seen any official word on that. It’s important to know what the EMTs found when they arrived on the scene. At some point, we may finally learn.

Shipwreckedcrew also notes that there’s not a hint of any racial issue in the video. I would add there’s nothing in the transcript, either. But that won’t stop BLM and all the rest from asserting that the entire episode was a case of a race-motivated murder.

Cancel culture comes for MDs who support the use of hydroxychloroquine

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Simone Gold, a long-time and previously-respected emergency room physician, has been fired for expressing the non-approved view of the drug hydroxychloroquine:

Dr. Simone, 54, graduated from Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine Science, The Chicago Medical School in 1989. She has worked in Emergency Rooms across Los Angeles, treating Covid-19 patients since the pandemic outbreak. She is currently registered with Providence Hospital located at 501 South Buena Vista Street in Burbank.

Simon stated she was fired from her job because of media slander, after her employer found out about the viral video where she claimed her patients have received positive results from using the drug to treat COVID-19. She is the founder of the newly created group called “America’s Frontline Doctors…

The hydroxychloroquine video, a 45-minute livestream of the first day of a “White Coat” summit by the group, was posted to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by Breitbart and quickly went viral on July 28. It was viewed over 17 million times on Facebook. The video has been taken down by social media citing “misinformation.”

The video can be seen here.

Everything is now politicized, and so a seemingly sane and competent MD with lots of experience cannot state a case for a medication that is – as they say – “controversial,” without losing her job. This is something that should be battled out in the pages of scientific journals and not cause any bona fide doctor, pro or con, to lose his or her job.

I wonder if they’ll be coming next for noted Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, who has written a comprehensive article making the current case for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID (at that link there is another link to a PDF file that has the entire article).

.

Biden and the no-debates movement: the Democrats are testing the gullibility of the American public

The New Neo Posted on by

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Ah, but you don’t have to. You just have to fool enough of the people enough of the time.

The Democrats are in trouble with their presidential nominee, even though the MSM is heroically and energetically covering for them and for him. I don’t know what will ultimately happen to Biden in terms of whether he will remain the nominee, but I do know that, if he does, the Democrats are desperate to keep him as quiet as possible. That includes, of course, the elimination of challenges such as tough questions from the press – easy to eliminate when the press is fully on your side – and avoidance of traditional presidential debates.

The latter is a bit tricky, in the sense that debates have long been a required part of running for president. I’ve never been a big debate fan because I think they tend to be a superficial string of “gotcha” sound bites as well as being skewed by the media for the Democrat. However, what they are and always have been is a test of the ability to verbally express ideas at least somewhat spontaneously. Candidates practice answering all the questions that can reasonably be anticipated, but there is still a factor involving thinking quickly on one’s feet, under pressure.

That’s an important skill, too. And it’s one that in this case is even more important than usual, since one of the candidates gives every indication of being in the early-to-mid stages of senility. If that’s the case, then a debate would be a format that might be particularly likely to expose that fact. And if so, the Democrats are highly motivated to make sure that a debate will not occur.

But the dilemma is how to do that without arousing a great deal of suspicion that the reason for avoiding a debate is that Joe Biden’s advancing senility would be too nakedly revealed. That would be damaging, too. So the solution the Democrats and their handmaidens in the MSM seem to have arrived at is to pooh-pooh the necessity and value of debates themselves. Debates, who needs them?

What sort of fool would be convinced by arguments such as this?:

Longtime Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton senior adviser Zac Petkanas agreed with calls for Biden to back out of any and all debates with Trump in the coming months. As it stands currently, there are three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate scheduled between September 29 and October 22.

“Biden shouldn’t feel obligated to throw Trump a lifeline by granting him any debates at all. This is not a normal presidential election and Trump is not a legitimate candidate,” Petkanas tweeted last week, expressing his “opinion that no one asked for.”

Trump is president, but not a “legitimate candidate.” That’s been the Democrats’ mantra since Day 1.

Or how about this in the NY Times from Elizabeth Drew (whose articles I remember from years past in The New Yorker) [emphasis mine]?

The debates have never made sense as a test for presidential leadership. In fact, one could argue that they reward precisely the opposite of what we want in a president. When we were serious about the presidency, we wanted intelligence, thoughtfulness, knowledge, empathy and, to be sure, likability. It should also without saying, dignity….

This, by the way, isn’t written out of any concern that Donald Trump will prevail over Joe Biden in the debates; Mr. Biden has done just fine in a long string of such contests. The point is that “winning” a debate, however assessed, should be irrelevant, as are the debates themselves.

That effort by Drew would be funny if it weren’t so sad. I wonder who Drew thinks she’s fooling. Unfortunately, I think I know the answer: an awful lot of people who read the Times and the rest of the MSM and just follow the meme du jour, nodding sagely and not remembering all the years the MSM felt the debates were ultra-important, and when they skewed their coverage to favor the Democrat.

Who sometimes was Joe Biden. Well do I remember his awful debate performance against Sarah Palin in 2008, when he at least supposedly had all his marbles.

Columnists such as Drew know exactly why they are now trashing the debates, but they hope the public doesn’t notice the obvious. Perhaps it doesn’t even matter. Many of the people who will be voting for Biden don’t care that he might belong off the world stage. They know that other people, particularly from the Obama administration and to the left of it, will actually be in control and Biden will only be a ceremonial figurehead, something like a modern-day monarch. That state of affairs is worth it to get rid of the “illegitimate” candidate, Donald Trump.

[NOTE: While I was looking for that post on the Biden/Palin debate, I came across this one from December of 2008 with the curious title of “Biden’s Bin Hidin’.” I couldn’t recall what I was referring to, but here it is:

…Joe Biden has been unusually invisible, even for a Vice-President elect.

Usually, Vice Presidents are forgotten after their terms in office. Biden seems to be on track for being forgotten before he even takes office. His profile has been so low it’s underground…

A strange foreshadowing of the present. Could it be that Biden was already showing signs of mental deterioration? There’s also this:

…[Biden’s] been kept under wraps post-election in a manner that’s reminiscent of the McCain team’s early handling of the Alaska governor:

“Still, being number two in the Obama campaign and then the transition has made the public persona of Washington’s most loquacious, happy-go-lucky politician nearly unrecognizable.

“The lack of interviews alone is an about face. Biden was the most frequent guest on the Sunday news shows – in just 10 months, from August 2007 to this past June, he appeared on the shows at least 13 times. His interview with Stephanopoulos will be his first Sunday news show junket since joining the Democratic ticket – and he is only on for half of the hour-long show.”

Interesting.]

[ADDENDUM: Elizabeth Drew herself was a panelist and moderator for some presidential debates during the 70s and 80s.]

Let’s do another re-write of history, and let’s establish a quota system in the MSM

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s keep changing history until we get it right – I mean left – enough:

From Rep. Ford’s press release:

“Rep. Ford Today in Evanston to Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools

“Concerned that current school history teaching leads to white privilege and a racist society, state Rep. La Shawn K. Ford, D-Chicago, will join local leaders today at noon at the Robert Crown Center in Evanston to call on the state to stop its current history teaching practices until appropriate alternatives are developed.”

I thought that adopting the 1619 curriculum was a ready-made way to do that.

More:

Attendees at Sunday’s press conference will discuss how current history teaching practices overlook the contributions by Women and members of the Black, Jewish, LGBTQ communities and other groups.

Now “women” is capitalized? And how did the group ordinarily disfavored by the left, Jews, sneak in there? Now we’re going to have a celebration of famous gay people as gay people rather than because of whatever their actual accomplishments might have been, such as Alan Turing for example?

Hey, maybe they’ll teach how religious and racial quotas have traditionally hurt Jews and Asians. Yeah, I know better.

Speaking of which, there’s also this news:

On July 31, 2020 the NY Times Guild issued a set of demands to the Times, including an explicit hiring and staffing quota based on race, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: New York Times Employee Recommendation Memo:

“We come to this meeting with a mandate for sustained change and urgency to engage in a very necessary and long-overdue discussion about how to improve the working experience of Black, Indigenous and people of color at the Times, BIPOC@NYT.”

In addition to recommendations to form new committees, increase “diversity” initiatives, and so on, comes an explicit call for quotas, referencing census data for New York City:

“We recommend:

“A. Setting a goal of hiring, retention and promotion? for the New York Times workforce to reflect NYC demographics by 2025. ?https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/newyorkcitynewyork…”

And here’s a great response:

What did blue city mayors and governors think would happen if they allowed their cities to become boring and yet unsafe?

The New Neo Posted on by

I understand that the current mayors of cities such as New York and Minneapolis and Seattle, as well as some of the governors in their states, are far leftists trying to please a far left base. But they are also mayors of large cities and governors of states with large cities that need to continue to function in such a way as to not drive away city residents and their money, which is needed for taxes to fund city and state services.

Of course, if there are no city services left, there’s no need for the money. But do these mayors really want their own cities to become dysfunctional crime-ridden underpopulated burnt-out shells of their former selves?

Or didn’t they foresee any of this? Have they become so unmoored from reality that they think tax revenue is an unending fountain that can never dry up? Did they think they were in Oleanna?

Surprise! It doesn’t seem that way:

New York is faced with swelling budget holes as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, and the state’s governor is concerned the state’s financial situation may get worse if the city’s wealthiest taxpayers leave for good.

This week, the state’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo voiced concern that the longer work-from-home policies are in place, the less likely it is that people who have left the city will return….

Many wealthy individuals abandoned Manhattan for nearby suburbs, or other states entirely, to escape the densely-populated metro as it became an epicenter of the virus outbreak earlier this spring.

Moving executives told FOX Business that the exodus from New York City during the past few months has been “insane.”

Roadway Moving President Ross Sapir, for example, told FOX Business that people are moving out of Manhattan in numbers he has “never seen before,” as his company deals with its busiest season since its 2008 inception.

And many of the residents who have left belong to higher-income brackets.

Well, yes. They have the money to do it, and they don’t even necessarily have to sell their NYC places, because to them the price of a home in the boonies is chump change. It’s not just the virus, either, or the policies around it. Neither the article nor Cuomo mention the other glaring and obvious reason: riot-induced crime and the simultaneous reduction in policing.

Why do people live in New York City in the first place? Some are born and raised there and all their friends are there, and leaving would mean leaving all that. But many are there for the excitement and the culture. If you’ve got money, you can go out to a new play or concert or dance performance every night of the year and not repeat yourself. The same with restaurants, art exhibits, parties – all the offerings of a great (or once-great) city, as well as access to the levers of power. Now all the cultural offerings are meager, and the computer with its possibilities for remote working has made it possible to have some power while living elsewhere.

[NOTE: See also this.]

Three Biden questions

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Who will be Biden’s (or his handlers’) VP pick?

(2) Will Biden engage in a debate with Trump, and if so under what circumstances?

(3) Will Biden last till November as the candidate?

Of course, there’s also the question of whether Biden would win, if the answer to the third question is in the affirmative. But it’s those first three that interest me at the moment.

I think the answers will be Kamala Harris, no, and yes. But I admit I’m not confident that I’m correct. In this, the most bizarre presidential election of my lifetime, we’ve already had not just a black swan but a whole flock of them.

[ADDENDUM: See also this from Roger Kimball:

The narrative that catapulted Biden to his present subterranean eminence centered on his supposed political moderateness compared to some of the more outlandish bijoux on offer…

But what has made Joe Biden palatable to the actual power brokers in the Democratic party—far-left, woke commissars who combine a breathtaking arrogance with a deep hatred of America—was not his supposed “moderateness.” On the contrary, it was his empty vesselhood.

Biden, in short, is the toxic suppository, the smooth and unguent capsule, through which the enemies of democratic capitalism and traditional American values hope to insinuate their gospel of radical transformation into the tissues of American society…

As Joseph Simonson notes in his summary of the eighty-page document, “the party intends to circumvent Congress,” turning instead to unelected bureaucrats of the administrative state to push through its woke, politically correct goals. The fine print is disquieting to say the least.

“Racial equity” is a phrase that is repeated over and over again in this document. But what it means is the opposite of “equity” as traditionally understood, i.e., treating people the same regardless of their race…

On every contentious issue—immigration, defense spending, regulation, education, healthcare, taxes, housing policy, student debt—the Democratic platform calls for a huge increase in government intrusiveness and consequent loss of individual freedom.

Naturally, the truly radical nature of this platform is somewhat concealed by bureaucratese and a clever deployment of uplifting abstractions.

Please read the whole thing.

I believe that most people willing to vote for Biden and/or another Democrat don’t know what’s actually planned. Some of them would approve. But a very significant number would not, I believe – if they knew. They don’t.]

Donations, please! [BUMPED UP – scroll down for newest posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

(This post will be retired after the weekend. But of course, you can donate any old time.)

I would be deeply grateful if you decide to click on that Paypal button on the right sidebar (or towards the bottom of the blog if you’re on a phone) – the one that says “donate” – and contribute to the running of the blog. Every single bit adds up, and you’d be surprised at how much it helps. I thank you all in advance.

I don’t have ads because I don’t like them. I don’t have paid content. It’s just me, myself, and I, doing this for the last nearly-sixteen years. Yikes!

I will probably keep this notice at the top of the blog for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat.

And many many thanks to all who have contributed in the past. I’ve been very touched and gratified.

On humans, naked and clothed

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day a commenter wrote, in a thread about buying clothes:

As a hardcore nudist I probably find this more interesting/amusing than most. I’m also retired, so I no longer feel any need to try to impress anyone with my wardrobe. (In reality I don’t think I ever did.)

Why do we humans think that our garments make us look good? It seems pretty odd to cover something and claim to have improved its appearance. Maybe you shouldn’t go out in public. I know that most of us think there are fundamental flaws with our bodies, but it is not your clothes that make your butt look bigger than you like, and your clothes don’t really hide it either. Your body is what it is. Accept it, or work to change it. Don’t hide it, it’s beautiful.

Why do we find it necessary to cover our bodies with expensive fabric creations that require so much care? Imagine how much could be saved if we wore clothing only when required for warmth or protection. Think of the savings from reduced air conditioning. Think of how good it feels to remove even your most comfortable clothes.

People are different from each other, I guess. Very different. For example, I love wearing my most comfortable clothes, which are really comfortable as in: comforting. Soft, non-binding, soothing.

And we wear clothes because we are human, not just to keep warm. They serve so many purposes. Warm in winter, cool in summer (sun protection and sweat absorption, for example), and just plain pretty and even beautiful. It is part of human nature – for most people, although apparently not that particular commenter – to want to adorn oneself, to gild the bare forked lily. As King Lear says, in the extremity of his emotional suffering:

Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.—Is man no more than this? Consider him well.—Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on ’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.—
Off, off, you lendings! Come. Unbutton here. (tears at his clothes)

In some anthropology course or other I recall learning (can’t find a link now) that all human societies practice adornment, if only of a very perfunctory type. A string around the waist will do, or a necklace for the milady, without which she is considered shockingly naked.

Clothes – or some form of adornment, even if it only be this or this – are somehow a human near-universal. Ever wonder why? It’s not because of the clothing industry. And it’s not because of negative body image, either. Modesty? The urge to not let well enough alone?

If nudists don’t share that feeling, that’s fine. I have nothing against nudist camps; I just don’t want to go to one. But nudity among consenting nudists is 100% okay with me.

It is also of interest, however, that in the Bible the story of Adam and Eve has them eating from the Tree and then for the first time feeling the need to cover their nakedness. I have long interpreted that story as being a parable describing the dawn of human consciousness, which includes self-consciousness and the distinguishing of humans from animals, which are always naked (unless humans dress them in funny little outfits). In Genesis you find the story:

Genesis 2:22-25 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed…

[3:6-7]And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

There’s some question about the word “aprons,” but for our purposes let’s just accept that they were coverings serving the function of loincloths, at the very least. And if you want to take the word literally, you can purchase your very own Adam and Eve aprons.

Clothing is old, very very old – even older than some of my clothing:

Scientists are still debating when people started wearing clothes. Estimates by various experts have ranged from 40,000 to 3 million years ago. Some more recent studies involving the evolution of body lice have implied a more recent development with some indicating a development of around 170,000 years ago and others indicating as little as 40,000. No single estimate is widely accepted…

According to archaeologists and anthropologists, the earliest clothing likely consisted of fur, leather, leaves, or grass that were draped, wrapped, or tied around the body. Knowledge of such clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts. Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000 BC, found near Kostenki, Russia in 1988. Dyed flax fibers that could have been used in clothing have been found in a prehistoric cave in the Republic of Georgia that date back to 34,000 BC.

As I said, very very old.

Let’s hear it for the NBA’s Jonathan Isaac

The New Neo Posted on by

These days, this takes great courage:

Jonathan Isaac of the Orlando Magic stood, while everyone else took a knee. He also did not wear a Black Lives Matter shirt.

After the game, Isaac faced a hostile press populated by reporters who played gotcha games with him. Note the wording of the first question to Isaac.

Reporter to Isaac: “So you didn’t kneel during the anthem, but you also didn’t wear a Black Lives Matter shirt? Uh, do you believe that black lives matter?”

Isaac, who is black, handled the ridiculously biased question gracefully.

“Absolutely. I believe that black lives matter. A lot went into my decision,” Isaac responded…

“My life has been supported through the Gospel, Jesus Christ” Isaac said, “and that everyone is made in the image of God and that we all fall short of God’s glory and that each and every one of us, each and every day do things that we shouldn’t do…I felt like we all make mistakes but the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that there’s grace for us. That Jesus came and died for our sins and that if we all would come to an understanding of that and understand that God wants to have a relationship with us, that we can get past skin color, we can get past all the things in our world that are messed up, jacked up. I think we need to look around. Racism isn’t the only thing that plagues our society, that plagues our nation, that plagues our world.”

Even though I should know better, I still experience a sense of disbelief about what’s going on

The New Neo Posted on by

Some days I wake up and it takes a while for it to hit me that so many Americans seem to have lost their minds.

Oh, I’m not talking about the small number of people who are doing the burning and rioting. I’m not even talking about governors like Michigan’s Whitmer, who seem to be handling the COVID crisis in ways that combine Draconian edicts for the general population with looseness regarding the vulnerable nursing home population.

What I’m referring to is the fact that half the country seems to be willing to vote for the Democrats to perpetuate this sort of thing, Democrats who advocate (or fail to oppose) the most radical proposals ever to air in America. These voters are either unaware of what’s going on with the party or are okay with it all. They also are willing to vote for someone who is quite literally suffering from dementia, has a history of political corruption, has not answered off-the-cuff questions, may not agree to a debate, and will be a couple of weeks from his 78th birthday come Election Day.

This is almost literally unbelievable.

I’m also referring to the many governors and mayors of blue states and blue cities who are doing little to nothing to stop the destruction of their own cities – a destruction that is almost certain to cause the flight of part of their tax base and to grievously harm their economies in myriad ways. I’m talking about a populace that has become afraid of its shadow in terms of COVID, and willing to put up with almost any restriction on liberty in the name of supposed protection from the illness.

I’m also talking about a racist philosophy that calls itself “anti-racism” and that is doing far more for the revival of racism in this country than any small group of noxious neo-Nazis that remains. The anti-racism movement is also causing enmity among an unknown but probably significant number of relatives and friends who disagree on whether the anti-racism movement is a good development or a destructive one.

I could probably list more things that are hard to believe but are nevertheless the case, but I’ll stop there.

How did we get to this point? That’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer: Gramscian march (especially in the field of education), the proliferation of social media and cancel culture, the MSM becoming a pure propaganda machine – we’ve discussed it all before.

The speed with which it has happened puts in mind the famous Hemingway quote about bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Indeed.

Fun with words: Antifa and “The Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]

Leftist radicals are well aware of the importance of labels. There’s “Black Lives Matter” for a group run by Marxists, focusing only on those black lives ended by white police officers rather than on all black lives. And “Antifa” for a group that purports to be anti-facist but whose members act like brownshirts and have far left and/or anarchist goals.

And then there’s this interesting piece of Cold War history [my emphasis]:

The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. Construction of the wall was commenced by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) on 13 August 1961. The Wall cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany, including East Berlin. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, accompanied by a wide area (later known as the “death strip”) that contained anti-vehicle trenches, beds of nails, and other defenses. The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” from building a socialist state in East Germany.

GDR authorities officially referred to the Berlin Wall as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall). The West Berlin city government sometimes referred to it as the “Wall of Shame”, a term coined by mayor Willy Brandt in reference to the Wall’s restriction on freedom of movement. Along with the separate and much longer Inner German border (IGB), which demarcated the border between East and West Germany, it came to physically symbolize the “Iron Curtain” that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.

the wall was not an ordinary border wall designed to keep foreigners from coming in without permission. It was a very different thing – a wall designed to imprison the populace of East Germany, not to keep people out. As propaganda, the name “Anti-Fascist” didn’t work very well because for the most part the people of East Germany knew better:

The East German government claimed that the Wall was an “anti-fascist protective rampart” (German: “antifaschistischer Schutzwall”) intended to dissuade aggression from the West. Another official justification was the activities of Western agents in Eastern Europe. The Eastern German government also claimed that West Berliners were buying out state-subsidized goods in East Berlin. East Germans and others greeted such statements with skepticism, as most of the time, the border was only closed for citizens of East Germany traveling to the West, but not for residents of West Berlin travelling to the East. The construction of the Wall had caused considerable hardship to families divided by it. Most people believed that the Wall was mainly a means of preventing the citizens of East Germany from entering or fleeing to West Berlin.

Those of us old enough to remember the wall – and that’s most of us here – know full well what it was for, and know that pretty much the entire world knew it. Many of the young, however, probably haven’t a clue, and so analogies with our southern border wall may make sense to them.

But most of us who remember the Berlin Wall probably don’t remember its German name of “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” or “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall.” Note those first six letters.

And here’s the history of the original “Antifa,” which began in Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic:

Antifaschistische Aktion, commonly known under its abbreviation Antifa, was a militant anti-fascist organisation in the Weimar Republic started by members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) that existed from 1932 to 1933. It was primarily active as a KPD campaign during the 1932 German federal elections and was described by the KPD as a “red united front under the leadership of the only anti-fascist party, the KPD”. Under the leadership of the committed Stalinist Ernst Thälmann, the KPD viewed fascism primarily as the final stage of capitalism rather than as a specific movement or group and therefore applied the term to all other parties. The front focused largely on attacking the KPD’s main adversary, the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Germany, whom they referred to as social fascists and regarded as the “main pillar of the dictatorship of Capital”.

In the [post-WWII] era, the historical organisation inspired new groups and networks, known as the wider Antifa movement, many of which use the aesthetics of the historical Antifaschistische Aktion, especially its abbreviated name Antifa and a modified version of its logo. During the Cold War, the Antifaschistische Aktion had a dual legacy in East Germany and West Germany, respectively. In the east, it was considered part of the history and heritage of the KPD’s successor, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In the west, its aesthetics and name were embraced by West German Maoists and later autonomists from the 1970s.

And yet today in the US and Europe the term “Antifa” (or “anti-fascist”) is meant to be taken by those not in the know to mean simply anti-Fascist – as in, anti-Nazi. Of course, Nazis and Fascists are anyone Antifa defines as such.

AOC comes for Father Damien

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, Father Damien:

“Even when we select figures to tell the stories of colonized places, it is the colonizers and settlers whose stories are told – and virtually no one else. Check out Hawaii’s statues,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “It’s not Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii, the only Queen Regnant of Hawaii, who is immortalized and whose story is told. It is Father Damien.”

The New York socialist continued.

“This is what patriarchy and white supremacist culture looks like! It’s not radical or crazy to understand the influence white supremacist culture has historically had in our overall culture & how it impacts the present day.”

If Father Damien – a saint who gave his life caring for the sick and ostracized – is the face of white supremacist culture, then all hail.