From the history of a Japanese soldier, comes insight into Americans today

In the Spring of 1974, 2nd Lt. Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army made world headlines when he emerged from the Philippine jungle after a thirty-year ordeal. Hunted in turn by American troops, the Philippine army and police, hostile islanders, and eventually successive Japanese search parties, Onoda had skillfully outmaneuvered all his pursuers, convinced that World War II was still being fought and waiting for the day when his fellow soldiers would return victorious.

Related: two countries in Europe took a very long time to rid themselves of fascism.

In other words, some Americans may still believe that… their country is meant only to be ruled by a small group of elite white men as the 1868 presidential candidate ticket still proclaimed after Civil War.

You can see here the campaign language used did not try to tone anything down or hide meaning:

Again I have to reiterate this campaign in 1868 was IMMEDIATELY AFTER CIVIL WAR ENDED.

And if that isn’t bad enough, thirty years later in 1898 (i.e. sons/daughters of the Civil War traitors) again ran that same “this is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it” campaign in a violent coup in North Carolina.

Vox explodes the 1898 coup with great detail in a brief 2019 documentary called “When white supremacists overthrew a government: The hidden history of an American coup”.

I hate pie charts, so have a good look at these numbers and see why some Americans seem to be acting like an Onoda:

• 38-40% of Congress are millionaires
• 77% of Congress are white (reported in 2019 as the most diverse ever)
• 76% of Congress are men (House 76%, Senate 75%)
• 80% of Congress are over 50

Speaking in round numbers you’re looking at a country run with almost 80% white men over 50, and almost half millionaires.

Some Americans are very concerned about these rich white men not being in control of the country (feelings of fear about loss and guilt when anti-racists run for office).

In 1868 the KKK even issued threats of violent lynching as intimidation to any white men caught voting for an anti-racist presidential candidate (women couldn’t vote and blacks would be lynched no matter who they voted for…).

Although the “let only white men rule” insurrectionists lost that election in 1868 (after losing their war in 1865) did they really surrender?

In 1916 the KKK won the presidential election using an “America First” campaign (marked by “wholesale murder” of black Americans, as well as a pandemic) and they did it again in 2016.

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Update January 21: “The White Caps are the true American patriots and begged Trump to be President”

Just so we’re clear on what this video tells us, like it’s the 1800s again, I have taken a still from “The White Caps” KKK film of 1905, predating the 1915 film adaptation of The Clansman (Birth of a Nation):

There’s an interesting side-note to use of the “white caps” in 1905. It perhaps was an appropriation of a 1889-1891 “Las Gorras Blancas” (the white caps) name used by a group in New Mexico.

The leader of Las Gorras Blancas (Herrera) is believed to have taken his costume inspiration from the mid 1800s hooded Ku Klux Klan, yet they operated mainly as fence cutters and barn burners — organized Latino resistance to injustices from illegal Anglo American land-grabber encroachments (“with barbed wire came hunger”)

It would be very ironic for a MAGA woman to claim that Latino vigilantes seeking removal of whites begged Trump to occupy the White House… so we have to assume she means the KKK.

People keep saying Washington DC violence from militias is a new thing to prepare for, yet who remembers 1960s and early 1970s saw repeated attacks on US capitol by violent domestic groups?

The FBI records have details of the groups involved, including one that used bombs on Capitol Hill, and how they were defeated (presumably then fading from memory).

…credit for 25 bombings—including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the California Attorney General’s office, and a New York City police station.

Hearings by United States Congress, House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service in 1971 give a pretty succinct description:

Update 2023: Twitter has been rebranded to a swastika.

I’ve been asked, perhaps in jest by those reading my SS blog post, whether the Columbia pinwheel logo is a swastika because it has four quadrants (it’s not).

…founded in 1938 [a year after largest shirt factory owners Paul and Marie Lamfrom were forced to escape Nazi Germany], used a simple wordmark until the introduction of the geometric emblem in 1978 [by Gertrude Boyle, daughter of Lamfrom and wife of Columbia President who died suddenly]. It was a rhombus, composed of eight equal rectangles, which aimed to represent the woven textile.

It should be noted here that 1978 was a year after a company named Pinwheel was founded to create children’s television.

Two years later this Pinwheel company was renamed to Nickelodeon (as you probably would recognize it today). Columbia however kept the pinwheel logo of the same origin year.

I mean what if Gertrude, like a lot of people in the late 1970s including that children’s TV network, thought that pinwheels meant freedom, fun and pretty things? And what if she wanted to convey woven threads, so she gave her pinwheel a textile look? Seems kind of common sense.

Here are some other similar examples:

What we see may be little more than accidental framing. And that reminds me of the many examples of unfortunate errors, such as this infamous one by Target.

Unfortunate. Kind of like ASSlaw.

Arguments against my common sense claim go something like this: from certain angles and in exceptional cases the Columbia pinwheel could in fact resemble a swastika, such as when poorly knitted.

Here’s someone clearly shocked to realize just how bad Columbia manufacturing (or doctored images) can get — and hopefully nobody really wants to argue here low quality and sloppy knits are carefully planned by a textile company:

It’s a terrible outcome, yet I maintain this is far too apocryphal for people who fled Nazi Germany to restart their lives and rebuild the same business in America… their daughter to then use the symbol of her parents’ persecutors as their logo, which shows when product quality declines.

She may have been unintentionally influenced by her parents’ pain of survival under swastikas, or intentionally influenced through the pleasure of pinwheels; in either case or even both I see nothing yet to justify the case she wanted to spread Nazism through inexpensive low-quality white socks.

Dare I say… it’s a stretch.

I mean that’s a bit like asking me if every inexpensively made (unpredictable outcome) single pinwheel or rotational quadrant we see (common design in history) is a swastika. For example, here’s the Stanford-born Sun Microsystems logo in 1982. Hard not to assume he designed this while staring at the Columbia logo on his socks.

And here’s another Stanford-born technology company logo (Google).

I’ve roundly criticized Stanford, yet I do not see in any way how these pinwheel logos of theirs symbolize that school’s genocidal heritage.

In that context, some symbols are just so obviously obvious (and meant as such) we shouldn’t even have to discuss them.

Clint Watts today tweeted a report to Telegram worth mentioning:

.@telegram – there’s an issue on your platform, a channel posing as the President (presumably a fake or hacked account) is inciting violence and advocating that Biden should be killed. The channel has >350K members. Might want to take a look. (trump_33)

33 means the KKK, as documented in federal trial for 33 year old Alexander DeFelice.

“The eleventh letter of the alphabet is K,” Nill told the jury explaining that “three times 11 is 33.”

It’s not a swastika, it’s as bad or worse because of context.

That 33 alone should have been the red flag loooooong before inciting violence and advocating death started to flow, and even before it had followers.

This isn’t rocket science.

In a similar vein, hate groups in America are waving flags and using symbols that very clearly show intent to do harm.

It’s illegal. So why aren’t they being arrested?

Armed ‘militias’ are illegal. Will authorities finally crack down…? 29 states have criminal statutes outlawing private militias…. These laws have been tested in the Supreme Court dating back to 1886…

It’s not that hard to see where this line is drawn and when speech is not protected in America. Don’t believe anyone who says speech is unrestricted. That is false and the courts have said so many times in conviction of criminals trying to hide behind speech laws.

We’re way past the time to reject the platitudes of seemingly incompetent big tech security officers who’ve argued that telling them to block imminent harms makes their product Orwellian.

Not having power sure can suck. We should aim to keep power flowing unless we’re talking about being killed by power. Then shut it down BEFORE the killings.

…his company had been able to limit ISIS’ use of their network, technical and legal reasons meant they couldn’t apply the very same measures to far-right extremists. But after several more social media-linked mass killings — Christchurch, El Paso, etc. — what he’d said was “impossible” suddenly became possible.

It’s why we have ground fault circuit interrupts (GFCI), amiright?

…trip quickly enough to prevent an electrical incident.

When a trump_33 comes down that pipe… interrupt. Again, this stuff is not rocket science.