A new documentary has been released called “Bisbee ’17” about American life under President Wilson after his successful 1916 “America First” campaign. NPR gives us the synopsis of the Bisbee Deportation story:

The event itself has become known as the Bisbee Deportation. On July 12, 1917, roughly 1,200 copper miners, who’d been striking for better wages and safer working conditions, were rounded up at gunpoint, some by their own relatives, and sent via cattle car to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to die.

[…]

People to this day in the town believe that the deportation was correct and right. And they sympathize with the people who carried it out, particularly people who are descendants of people who had a hand in it.

[…]

When you go through that list of deputies, you see that there is one Slavic name. Everybody else is an Anglo-Saxon. So my conclusion – after all of this research, the deportation was not a response to a labor action. It was that to a limited extent, but it was also in the nature of an ethnic cleansing.

What the documentary, and NPR for that matter, do not reveal is why ethnic cleansing would be so topical in 1916. In short, Woodrow Wilson effectively restarted the KKK in 1915 after it had all but disappeared, and Bisbee is a reflection of that sentiment.

What caused the KKK decline and why did Wilson bring it back?

I will try to briefly explain. It starts with President Grant signing into law the creation of a Department of Justice (DoJ) in order to aid in the prosecution of white supremacists, since they were refusing after the Civil War to accept blacks as citizens. Grant wanted to use non-military measures to protect 13, 14 and 15 Amendments to the Constitution from domestic terror threats.

The DoJ itself buries these civil rights foundations of its origin in this rather bland retelling on their official website:

By 1870, after the end of the Civil War, the increase in the amount of litigation involving the United States had required the very expensive retention of a large number of private attorneys to handle the workload. A concerned Congress passed the Act to Establish the Department of Justice (ch. 150, 16 Stat. 162), creating “an executive department of the government of the United States” with the Attorney General as its head.

That “increase in the amount of litigation involving the United States” means white supremacists.

In other words, Grant greatly expanded the Attorney General role from Judiciary Act origins of 1789, basically a one-man advisory concept, to a systematic government arm to protect the Union against domestic threats. This new much broader departmental remit with branches was resourced to fight white supremacists nationally. President Grant basically pushed out a peace-time organization specifically to fight pro-slavery militants who continued to refuse to lay down their arms after he had forced their official surrender in war. This is what caused the KKK to decline.

Why was General Grant, now President Grant, faced with this problem?

Sadly in 1866 just a year after Lincoln’s assassination, President “this is a country for white men” Johnson was repeatedly trying to block blacks getting rights. Despite Johnson’s efforts the Thirteenth Amendment was passed in 1866 abolishing slavery, which pro-slavery militants considered an assault on their “economic freedom” to be a white supremacist:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction

The failure of Johnson to block civil rights legislation angered violent white supremacist militants and they rebelled again to prevent peace. Despite decisively losing the Civil War to General Grant, pro-slavery militants after the assassination of President Lincoln created the KKK under President Johnson to use veil of night and disguise to continue terror campaigns against Americans abolishing slavery. Within two years by 1868 the KKK was running numerous violent terror campaigns to prevent reconciliation, murder blacks and sabotage Thirteenth Amendment labor rights.

This is why President “Let Us Have Peace” Grant’s election in 1868, and his creation of the first real DoJ in America in July of 1870, were seminal moments in the fight against white supremacists. The candidate Grant ran against had a campaign slogan, like President Johnson’s reputation, of “This is a White Man’s Country. Let White Men Rule.”

Grant had won the war, now he won the Presidency and was about to take down the same people for the same reasons, this time with non-violent means. A month after DoJ was created, August of 1870, a Federal Grand Jury declared the KKK a terrorist organisation. President Grant then further established remedies for these domestic terrorists in 1871 by signing an Enforcement Act, which made it illegal for private conspiracies (e.g. KKK) to deny civil rights of others. He pursued in peace the same anti-American forces he already had decisively beaten in war, and again he brilliantly led the country away from its violently racist detractors.

Here’s testimony from an emancipated slave, who explains how the KKK immediately after Civil War ended began their domestic terror tactics like placing hidden traps on roads and killing American soldiers.

While it is tempting to frame the sad white supremacist chapters of American history entirely in terms of Civil War and enslavement of blacks, we can not overlook the broader picture of the late 1800s and how the KKK was a symptom of racism and wrongs more broadly found in American history:

• 1871 hundreds of armed whites entered “Negro Alley” to murder Los Angeles’ Chinese residents
• 1885 white supremacist “Knights of Labor” group fomented a Rock Springs massacre that left dozens of Chinese miners dead
• 1887 white “schoolboys” tortured and murdered thirty-four Chinese miners in Oregon
• 1897 Lattimer massacre saw Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German miners shot in the back and killed; the sheriff decided to end labor protests by murdering protesters

Grant’s focus on enforcing civil rights was meant as an end to slave labor that the white supremacists fought so hard to preserve. The story of white supremacists in American using terror tactics really has a broader topic of wage disputes and labor rights with non-whites. But the reason the KKK in particular is significant to the Bisbee story is Grant’s strong leadership meant the KKK made less of a name for itself over the subsequent decades until things changed in 1915.

That is when “the 20th Century KKK” was initiated, infamously associated with President Wilson’s screening of a white supremacist propaganda and isolationist views of the world/immigration. It is the timing of a second KKK that should be noted as backdrop to this movie.

While the original KKK formation under President Johnson had used domestic terror to undermine the Thirteenth Amendment and deny freed slaves their civil rights, this recast formation was a “labor-oriented” terror organization targeting immigrants and their religions, which is how the “America First” campaign of President Wilson brought back the KKK that President Grant had ended.

The Bisbee story thus is a clear reflection of the KKK second rise, a “reaction” to civil rights being granted to non-whites such as Irish, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, Catholics…. All of these groups were targeted under the guise of “labor-oriented” action by the KKK during President Wilson’s administration, just as blacks had been murdered by the KKK under President Johnson’s administration.

My presentation on machine learning security at the 2018 6th Annual Global Big Data Conference:

When: Wednesday, August 29, 15:30 – 16:15
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center
Event Link: Hidden Hot Battle Lessons Of Cold War: All Learning Models Have Flaws, Some Have Casualties

In a pursuit of realistic expectations for learning models can we better prepare for adversarial environments by examining failures in the field?

All models have flaws, given any usual menu of problems with learning; it is the rapidly increasing risk of a catastrophic-level failure that is making data /robustness/ a far more immediate concern.

This talk pulls forward surprising and obscured learning errors during the Cold War to give context to modern machine learning successes and how things quickly may fall apart in evolving domains with cyber conflict.

Copy of Presentation Slides: 2018-GBDC.daviottenheimer.pdf (4.4 MB)

The Guardian gives a contemporary political analysis of how Nazis today use propaganda centers to push their talking points into the US regime’s mouthpiece

The conspiracy theory of “white genocide” has been a staple of the racist far right for decades. It has taken many forms, but all of them imagine that there is a plot to either replace, remove or simply liquidate white populations.

South Africa and Zimbabwe in particular have exerted a fascination on the racist far right because in the mind of white nationalists, they show what happens to a white minority after they lose control of countries they once ruled.

The “Genocide” of White Farmers is a lie. It is a cruelly calculated lie designed to help white supremacists murder blacks. What seems to be missing from the political science of this story is the history of white farmers killing blacks under false claims of keeping stability.

That “lose control of countries” phrase is the big clue that should take readers directly to my recent Secret SAS Missions in Africa post, where I explain how South Africa and Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) had racist far-right governments committing acts of mass terror and calling it “protection” for whites. These countries dehumanized blacks and characterized anyone with dark skin as perpetual threats to the safety of white women and rural folk (farmers, or “Boer” in Dutch).

Psychological Operations used phrases like “See the woman crying. She has just learned that the communist terrorists have infected her with V.D.” to dehumanize blacks and stoke fear of neighboring countries:

At the time Rhodesia went to war against its own people, British recently had won similar wars of oppression in Kenya and Malaya. Rhodesian white supremacists were under the impression they could achieve the same results using similar tactics. They failed. British tactics and military aid used by the Rhodesian forces failed to maintain white power.

People reading the news today need a dose of reality on what the white supremacists in southern Africa really were doing to any blacks who dared attempt to enter government service and speak of self-determination.

The whites, to this day, believe the government propaganda, that the people were given brick houses with running water, schools and clinics. In reality, the government provided nothing except the fence and transport. People were dropped on the dirt inside the fence in the coldest time of year (August, 1974) without so much as a stick or a piece of string with which to build a shelter. For the first month, there was continuous wailing as funerals took place, mainly of the elderly, disabled and newborn, who died of exposure.

I’m talking about acts of genocide by whites while claiming themselves both the saviors and victims, often using “we hired blacks to fight along side us, and some of them became our friends” as their proof they did not wage a racist campaign:

Over the next twelve years, Graham’s role in acting out the genocidal destabilization policies of the Rhodesian white supremacist regime in neighboring Mozambique resulted in shocking crimes against civilians: one million people killed (60% children), 200,000 children orphaned, 250,000 children separated from their families, 1.7 million people (over 10% of total population) fleeing to neighboring countries and 4.3 million people displaced.

When whites abruptly lost their obviously racist and wrong wars to prolong colonial (white supremacist) rule, they immediately set about destabilizing African countries with pseudo-operations and false flags to kill as many blacks as possible and blame it on the blacks themselves.

The key here is to recognize how white supremacists push these upside-down conspiracy stories as just one of their many unethical methods to cover their own crimes as they deny blacks any representation in government. And also please recognize that giving any legitimacy to their conspiracy stories emboldens the white supremacists to commit further crimes.

I find it appalling when I hear SAS veterans to this day lie about their role and falsely claim blacks preferred white-only rule so much that blacks volunteered to violently oppose blacks entering government. This is akin to white-supremacists in America trying to claim blacks preferred slavery and willingly volunteered to fight for the perpetuation of slavery.

Fourth graders until the 1970s learned how living on a plantation was “one of the happiest ways of life.” […] And this is what Alabama taught its children about the Ku Klux Klan: “Many of the Negroes in the South remained loyal to the white Southerners. Even though they had lately been freed from slavery, even though they had no education, they knew who their friends were.”

The truth is Rhodesian national conscription actively excluded non-whites because a white supremacist government wanted to avoid any arguments for civil rights that spring naturally from putting “citizen” requirements upon the non-white population. A South African WITS seminar by Louise White sheds some light:

At the time of [Unilateral Declaration of Independence] (UDI) national service for whites, Indians and Coloureds was four and a half months. Coloureds and Indians served in two units, the Reinforcement Holding Unit and its supplementary Protection Companies, which primarily provided transport and supply. In 1978 these units were combined into the Rhodesia Defence Regiment. Once the guerrilla war began, and certainly by 1972, conscription of white Rhodesian youths intensified. The basic outlines are that by 1972, all white males 18-25 were required to undertake nine months “service training” in the army or the police.

[…]

So who was willing to fight, or even register to fight, for the Rhodesian Front, for the idea of white privilege maintained against majority rule? Many Rhodesians believed that it was the new arrivals – recent immigrants who had benefited from the assistance packages of the first years of UDI — who would risk life and limb for the privileges Rhodesia offered. Rhodesian born Angus Shaw was scathing: the men who had exchanged council housing in the East End of London for a house in the sun with servants were willing to pay the price, even if it meant “burning down the odd village” when they were called up.

[…]

Outside the country, the issue of new immigrants was eclipsed by that of foreign soldiers. These men were, according to most writings on the war, professional soldiers from Great Britain and large numbers of Vietnam veterans from the US, Australia and New Zealand and few ex-legionnaires from continental Europe who came to fight for Rhodesia. Some came because they wanted adventure; others found it the best career option available to them.

And if anyone ever asks you about the significance of airplanes being shot down around Rhodesia, immediately ask them who has been held accountable for the 1961 incident when “in an effort to secure a cease-fire, [UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld] left by air for a personal conference with President Tshombe of Katanga. Sometime in the night of September 17-18, he and fifteen others aboard perished when their plane crashed near the border between Katanga and North Rhodesia”.

Many believe the plane had been shot down and to this day the US and UK government refuse to release signals intelligence on the subject. Hammarskjöld was despised by white supremacists for his support of human rights and self-determination:

From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father’s side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country – or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions. From scholars and clergymen on my mother’s side, I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God.

600,000 CHILDREN KILLED IN MOZAMBIQUE was a direct function of recent white immigrants to Africa and their secret foreign mercenaries trying to stop blacks from having any say in present or future government. Another 500,000 people killed in Angola were subjected to the same white-supremacist doctrine to prevent blacks having any control of government, as I explain in my “Hidden Hot Battle Lessons of the Cold War” presentation.

The “genocide” of white farmers reference simply is a dog-whistle for white supremacists. They are signaling to each other intent to assassinate leaders supporting black rule and stoke civil wars among minority populations as “proof” of the supremacy of whites; these Nazis still believe whites should be allowed to move into a territory and forcibly take everything away from non-whites and then violently deny non-whites any say in the matter.