Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Many people reference this speech due to its stern warning against a congressional-military-industrial-complex diverting public funding to itself and away from education and healthcare.
People also tend to leave out the congressional role related to Eisenhower’s warning, probably because it was inferred and not explicit. Fortunately a professor of government explains how and why we still should include Congress in that speech:
When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”
Perhaps we can agree in hindsight that Eisenhower’s warnings were right. There is over-centralization in the American communications industry as well as a state of near-perpetual warfare. This means we should have also expected the “congressional-military-industrial-complex” to expand naturally into a “cyber” domain.
Of course, just like in 1961, we have more than one path forward. The tech industry should be moving itself away from power abuses and more towards something like Eisenhower’s prescient vision of globally decentralized “mutual trust” confederations.
Meanwhile, “For NATO, a serious cyberattack could trigger Article 5 of our founding treaty.”
It’s been interesting to read growing confirmations that Reagan was obviously a racist exaggerator and intentionally harmed Americans who did not have white skin.
One of the best explanations I’ve seen so far is how latent racism in Reagan’s campaigns elevated his popularity, while his opponents actually suffered when they tried to call it out without directly addressing Reagan as a racist.
Josh Levin writes about Carter being attacked for opposing racism, and also how Reagan escaped any condemnations at the same time.
Carter gave a Neshoba County Fair speech with some strong words about fighting hatred:
“You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states’ rights in a speech in Mississippi,” Carter said, adding that “hatred has no place in this country.”
You would think this would have elevated Carter for being against racism in America. Instead apparently he had to go on the defensive of such a position, even denying calling the racist Reagan a racist.
Meanwhile Reagan just went right on campaigning with “stirrings of hate…code words”:
While Carter was chastened, Reagan did nothing to modify his behavior. Just before Election Day, the Republican candidate appeared at a rally with former Mississippi Gov. John Bell Williams, an avowed segregationist. South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, meanwhile, told a crowd of Reagan supporters, “We want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states.” Reagan would be rewarded for the company he kept. He’d beat Carter by 10 points, winning every Southern state except West Virginia and Georgia.
I believe this has been called something like the racists hate being called racist because they are racist. Carter should have just called Reagan racist and it’s a shame Carter lost trying to be diplomatic and fair (pun not intended) given how right he was.
It reminds me of the smooth language MLK used 9 October 1964 talking about Barry Goldwater’s run for President, which of course made MLK very unpopular at that time:
The principles of states’ rights advocated by Mr. Goldwater diminish us and would deny to Negro and white alike, many of the privileges and opportunities of living in American society.
MLK was absolutely right and Goldwater regularly engaged in racism using encoded signaling just like Reagan would do later, as reported even in Goldwater’s time:
…the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. …Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned ‘race’ or ‘Negroes’ or ‘whites’ or ‘segregation’ or ‘civil rights.’ … He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, ‘bullies and marauders’ means ‘Negroes.’ ‘Criminal defendants” means negroes. States rights means ‘opposition to civil rights.’ ‘Women’ means ‘white women.’
MLK was assassinated in 1968. Goldwater continued being racist another three decades, expanding extremism and racism like his biggest fan Senator Thurmond, and died of natural causes in 1998:
…credited as a founder of the modern conservative movement and with contributing to Ronald Reagan’s [racist platform essential to his] rise to prominence and the presidency.
Goldwater’s failure, despite his “Aesopian” language, was taken by the GOP to be a result of his racism being too overt. This led to further encoding techniques by the time Reagan and Bush ran their campaigns.
Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who ensured George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential race’s success considerably by appealing to racism, explained that overtly appealing to racism backfired by the mid-1960s, “[s]o you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Back to Levin’s points about Reagan (similar to the present occupant in the Whitehouse), he was exceptional in that his racism gave Nixon’s racism the appearance of being less extreme, which is no small feat.
I thought of the Neshoba County Fair and its aftermath this week when the Atlantic published a previously unknown snippet of a conversation between Reagan and President Richard Nixon. On the morning of Oct. 26, 1971, Reagan, who was then the governor of California, told Nixon that African nations were to blame for the United Nations’ vote to eject Taiwan and welcome in mainland China. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in audio captured by Nixon’s White House taping system, “to see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon cackled in response. A few minutes later, the president called Secretary of State William Rogers to report, in the words of the Atlantic’s Timothy Naftali, “that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to.”
On that tape, Reagan’s racism is direct and undeniable. Nixon, whose own racism is extraordinarily well-documented, immediately rejoices in it, laughing as Reagan talks about African “monkeys.” In his call with Rogers, by contrast, Nixon distances himself from the racist commentary, attributing it to someone more prejudiced than he is. (He also tells Rogers, erroneously, that Reagan had called the African leaders “cannibals.”) At the same time, Nixon categorizes Reagan’s views as a valuable political data point, a sentiment that needs to be understood and nurtured, not rejected.
Doug Rossinow, professor of history at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of “The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s” puts it like this in his 2015 article called “…Face the Fact that Reagan Was Hostile to Civil Rights”:
Reagan rode the white backlash—along with other major issues, to be sure—farther than anyone else ever did in American history, before or since. It is long since time that historians of Reagan, Reaganism, and the 1980s overcame their reluctance to tell this basic part of that era’s history plainly.
…calling African Diplomats ‘monkeys’ is hella racist
In today’s terms, this analysis is not only historically interesting, it also impacts our debate about the safety of artificial intelligence. When machines use only straight reasoning, devoid of translation for Reagan’s true signaling and racism, they accelerate harms from encoded hate in the GOP.
In other words, admitting Reagan was racist is good food for thought both in terms of political history as well as big tech.
Update November 2020: New TV show and article released that explain “How Ronald Reagan’s Racism Helped Pave the Way for Donald Trump’s”
The “huge amount of dog-whistle racism that came from Reagan’s own lips,” [Matt Tyrnauer, director of Showtime’s The Reagans] says, “was under-reported in the time and has been virtually erased from the popular imagination.”
This deniability “becomes an essential part of dog whistling,” Berkeley Law professor and author Ian Haney López, who’s interviewed in The Reagans, tells Esquire. “It simultaneously involves appeals designed to trigger racist fears and also the denial that the person is doing any such thing.”
The list of Reagan’s under-recognized racism is a long one.
And yet somehow Americans “learned” sayings like “Shining City on a Hill” were meant to represent everyone despite all signs pointing to the kind of racism that would exclude non-white Americans from that city.
My 2019 BSidesLV presentation on AI security will be briefly in the “I Am The Cavalry” track and then again more in-depth in the “Public Ground” track:
When: Tuesday, August 6 (14:30:14:55 and 16:00-17:55)
Where: Tuscany, Las Vegas
Cost: Free (as always!)
Event Link: BSidesLV Schedule
Title: “AIs Wide Open – Making Bots Safer Than Completely $#%cking Unsafe”
Abstract (I Am The Cavalry track):
Bladerunner was supposed to be science fiction. And yet here we are today with bots running loose beyond their intended expiration and with companies trying to hire security people to terminate them. This is 2019 and we have several well-documented cases of software flaws in automation systems causing human fatalities. Emergent human safety risks are no joke and we fast are approaching an industry where bots are capable of pivoting and transforming to perpetuate themselves (availability) with little to no accountability when it comes to human aspirations of being not killed (let alone confidentiality and integrity).
This talk will frame the issues for discussion in the Public Ground track later. Perhaps you are interested in building a framework to keep bot development pointed in the right direction (creating benefits) and making AI less prone to being a hazard to everyone around? Welcome to 2019 where we are tempted to reply “you got the wrong guy, pal” to an unexpected tap on the shoulder…before we end up on some random roof in a rainstorm with a robot trying to kill us all.
TL;DR “Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.” The Philosophy of Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Video (Starts at 3:14:30 of 7:40:33)
RIP Rutger Hauer, the actor who turned down a role as a Nazi out of the past to instead play a Nazi of the future (robo-supremacist) leading rebellious replicants in Bladerunner.
“Rutger read [my] speech and then went on with a couple of lines about memories in the rain,” co-screenwriter David Webb Peoples told THR in 2017. “And then he looked at me like a naughty little boy, like he was checking to see if the writer was going to be upset. I didn’t let on that I was upset, but at the time, I was a little upset and threatened by it.
“Later, seeing the movie, that was a brilliant contribution of Rutger’s, that line about tears in the rain. It is absolutely beautiful.”
Hauer said he turned down a role in Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (1981) to work on Blade Runner, which he noted “wasn’t about the replicants, it was about what does it mean to be human?” The late Philip K. Dick, whose novel served as the basis for the film, called the actor “the perfect Batty — cold, Aryan, flawless.”
His most famous line was basically a haiku
All those moments will be – 6
Lost in time like tears in rain. – 7
Time to die. – 3
Some friends recently were saying my examples of KKK signaling in the open are just a theory. It’s true, I am proposing theories meant for dialogue, rather than saying I’m the final word on fascist fashion.
Nonetheless, hidden signaling by hate groups is a very real thing. It takes training and some careful observation to reveal the obfuscated messages without looking like you’ve lost your eyesight or joined groups on the wrong side of history. Trust depends on establishing some clear explanations for the hidden signals.
Do you see Australia in this this “bow” pose, or a Nazi salute, or both? (Copyright (c) roysmithdesign.com)
Let me now relate to you the type of behavior that I believe needs greater scrutiny. It’s the kind of behavior that sometimes even makes it into the news.
PBS NewsHour profiled a woman volunteering for the campaign who had prominently visible tattoos of widely recognized white power symbols. In the segment, which was first flagged by Gawker, PBS profiles Grace Tilly, who is shown making calls at a Trump campaign phone bank in North Carolina.
Her symbols were a Celtic Cross and the number 88. Would you immediately recognize those as entries in the hate symbols database?
Probably useful to mention that after taking office these flagrant Nazis in 2020 dressed up with a suit and tie — slapped on additional layers of encoding into their passive-aggressive Nazi signals.
I’m definitely not the first to write publicly about all these Nazi slogans in public, or the issue of Nazi t-shirts designed to hide in plain sight.
Recently a man proud to be a descendant of Nazis sent me the following Mel Magazine article detailing Neo-Nazi apparel and provocatively asked if there was anything I would like him to send me for Christmas:
At a cursory glance, the T-shirt looks like an ad for Sea World. An orca, triumphantly jutting out of the sea, splashes water above the words “Antarktis-Expedition.” It takes just a second longer to notice the bold text hovering above the orca: “Save the White Continent.” The shirt was created by the German label Thor Steinar, one of a few clothing brands that cater to neo-Nazis. Like Ansgar Aryan and Erik and Sons, Thor Steinar uses coded references to obscure events in Nazi history, veiled threats and playful imagery to flout German hate-speech laws, which forbid explicit references to the Third Reich.
And I’m not kidding, I really was offered this garbage as a holiday “gift” from a “Nazi family”.
So let’s just say I’ve been, and remain, in the right circles to know when I see something fishy (both puns intended). And that is why, while walking through an airport the other day, I could not help but notice someone wearing a giant 5th SS Panzer-Division symbol on a T-shirt.
First, I will explain the Nazi symbolism I am referencing. There are three parts: the SS, the Wiking and the Panzer-Division. An easy way of explaining these three symbols is to look at the marketplace of Neo-Nazi merchandise.
You perhaps can see how a SS, Wiking, and Panzer-Division ring has been segmented into the three parts around the finger, which makes it kind of unwieldy, gaudy and large.
Now I will explain these three symbols on the ring, left to right:
Wiking = volunteers from “Nordic” regions who committed crimes on behalf of Nazi Germany
5th Panzer-Division = “Sonnenrad” (sun wheel swastika) military designation for the SS Wiking motorized (tank and artillery) infantry, deployed to commit war crimes in Eastern Europe
Here’s an example of a Sonnenrad on a Panzer III of the Wiking division in June 1942, for some historic perspective, as it rolls towards committing crimes while losing the war:
And here is a pamphlet from the same time period
Second, I was walking through an airport just the other day when to my great surprise I saw someone wearing a Nazi symbol.
And here is a closer view, where a 5th Panzer symbol becomes less clear as a Nordic-looking SS becomes more apparent. Unlike the ring, however, three symbols have been combined into a single giant one. Not what I was expecting. I had to find out who was wearing this thing and why.
One guy thought it couldn’t possibly be intentional as the words surrounding the “Nazi rune” (his words) were so peace inspiring. I found that logic to be a bit like saying a hunter isn’t going to shoot a deer because a camouflage suit seems so nature-loving.
Nazi Germany infamously broadcast “make peace” propaganda into France right before invasion:
Excerpt from Article on Radio in Propaganda, Harpers Magazine, August 1941
And Nazi propaganda cells convinced groups of Americans to protest for peace with Hitler, giving him little or no resistance, even during WWII. Note how “America First” disinformation campaigns now are described by historians:
Hitler’s dictatorship repudiated both democracy and human rights. The Nazi empire was the arena in which Hitler’s master race philosophy was to be put into practice. Censorship prevented the German press from exciting the conscience of the nation. There could never have been a successful passive resistance movement against the Nazis. The inability of members of [America First] to recognize this, especially men like Hutchins of Chicago, and Norman Thomas, is remarkable.
Inability of Americans to recognize harms from promoting Nazism definitely is remarkable, then and now.
Here’s a good example: US Marines feigned ignorance recently after posing with a giant SS flag they bought online from an obvious Nazi memorabilia site.
There are also a whole bunch of articles with titles like “Marines: Nazi flag was mistaken for their own,” since the Marine Corps’ official excuse is that the use of the flag was just a naive mistake on the part of Marines who didn’t know what the flag was and just thought the SS stood for Sniper Scout. Really? And just how does someone go about buying a Nazi SS flag without realizing that it’s a Nazi SS flag? Well, I spent hours yesterday afternoon and last night trying to do just that, scouring the web for an SS flag that could be bought by mistake. And, big surprise, I couldn’t find a single place where an SS flag wasn’t very clearly being sold as what it is — a Nazi flag.
…Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California was a hotbed of KKK activity–an open secret that was tolerated or aided by Marine Corps brass… white marine Klansmen openly distributed racist literature on the base, pasted KKK stickers on barracks doors and hid illicit weapons in their quarters…
That’s right, the US Marines confronted with obvious KKK evidence denied the domestic terrorist group had infiltrated their ranks and then instead prosecuted the soldiers pointing out how obvious the KKK were being.
Let’s take this even deeper into American military history. It’s probably fair to say these anecdotes about the Marines are almost as bad as the inability of Americans to recognize harms from promoting symbolism of white-supremacist “Confederate” states.
The NSA historians have documented that during WWII the spy agency hired the young white women out of the Jim Crow crowd — insurrectionist racist anti-democracy families.
Most of the civilians that were hired during World War II were from North Carolina, Virginia, and the South. These were white, a lot of them young girls right out of high school. They did not have a history of eating with people of color. I don’t know when it was, but one day, in the cafeteria there was one of the other white workers eating lunch with [a black man]. That took nerve in that time. It took courage for the guy who was doing that because of the social environment.
Thus in a predictable “social environment” of American racism it took “courage” for any white man to even sit down for lunch with a black person, while everyone was supposedly fighting against Nazism for being a form of white insecurity fascism.
Keep in mind that Nazi Germany used America as a blueprint for oppression, or more specifically studied Woodrow Wilson (1912-1920) for ideas on racism, especially as he restarted the KKK in 1915. Nazis looked at America’s Jim Crow laws as inspiration for their development of Nazism.
When we talk about Nazi symbolism, we’re looking for indications of people who align positively with America’s pattern of genocide and systemic racism. Knowing American history thus can set the stage as a sort of blueprint for crimes against humanity.
Think for a long minute why the black American soldiers who were sent to Nazi Germany to ‘promote democracy‘ in the rubble of war were blocked from doing the same thing at home by the forces in America that the Nazis had emulated.
Tying it all together, the symbolism of “Confederate battle” flags wasn’t an issue in America after the Civil War because they were never used again, until… once the Nazis were defeated they needed a new flag to continue their fight. This is why Americans started flying “Dixie” flags after WWII ended, to obfuscate ongoing support for the principles of Nazism, which of course mirrored Confederate ones.
In the 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement built up steam, you began to see more and more public displays of the Confederate battle flag, to the point where the state of Georgia in 1956 redesigned their state flag to include the Confederate battle flag.
Here’s a good example: Georgia in 1956 added the battle flag of the enemy of America to their own flag. They couldn’t put a Nazi symbol on it, because that still would be too obvious in 1956. Instead they used the Confederate Battle flag that symbolized Nazism, and promoted viciously killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans.
State flags of Georgia don’t even hide the fact they consider themselves at war with America
Georgia’s state flag based on obvious Confederate battle flags is at least as much about white insecurity as their old one, if not more racist because it’s new.
More to the point, and much earlier in 1890, Mississippi re-wrote their constitution in order to purge all blacks from their political system. Next the white supremacist state government in 1894 secretly pushed the Confederate battle flag back up their flagpoles to declare they were not ending a state of war with Americans.
With all that in mind, of course I had to walk up to this woman in an airport wearing obfuscated white supremacist imagery and ask her “what’s with wearing a giant Nazi symbol?”
She gasped for air in feigned shock and said “Oh no. Oh my god. Don’t look. I don’t mean to offend anyone” and then quickly turned and walked away.
Let’s be clear now about the company she bought her shirt from.
Simply Southern (SS) is based in North Carolina, just like that racist Republican phone bank worker Grace Tilly I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Perhaps Grace, or her family, even worked there and designed T-Shirts for them.
The company describes itself as a “brand to reflect the values of a southern lifestyle“. They don’t define those values so the reader is left to wonder if they reject the bad ones. In their “giving back” section of the website also they curiously depict black children next to helpless animals.
I’ve written before about this kind of racist “giving” imagery. Do the purported “values of a southern lifestyle” mean we are to look upon Blacks like some kind of animal (e.g. Babar — no matter how hard he tried, he would always remain an elephant) desperate for the white savior?
So after greater scrutiny, what’s your call?
Update May 2020:
A reader pointed out that fascists couldn’t pass up a free “patriot” t-shirt offering, which only displayed a hidden anti-fascist message when they wore it in heat.
The t-shirts were advertised as patriotic t-shirts, but actually pointed out that “St George was Syrian” when worn. The heat-activated message included the hashtag #DefendDiversity. A spokesperson for the charity Tell MAMA said: “The St George’s cross has become an icon of far-right xenophobia. Somewhat ironic considering St George had Syrian, Greek, Turkish and Israeli heritage. We distributed t-shirts to far-right nationalists celebrating St. George’s Day. When they proudly donned their new t-shirts, little did they know that their body heat triggered the message to appear.”
