Salon.com > Nazism

Jews are now works of art

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:44:00 +0000

A few weeks ago, my sister was in the Passover aisle of her local supermarket when a woman came up to her and asked if she knew where the tahini was. She didn’t. The woman explained that it was always in this particular aisle but now wasn’t, which led my sister to explain that it had likely been moved because it isn’t kosher for Passover, which in turn led the woman to begin inquiring about Passover rules. That blossomed into a larger, nearly half-hour-long conversation about Judaism, with the woman asking lots of questions and my sister trying to answer them. “I did the best I could,” she told me. As anyone who’s ever been expected to represent their entire religion/race/ethnicity/gender/world view knows, it’s a pretty difficult task.

Inside the Aryan Brotherhood’s prison heroin empire

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:58:00 +0000

Prison is a place where racial hatred is routine, where gangs rule the roost and heroin is the most valuable commodity. “A white person in prison is in deep trouble if he doesn’t have people to stand with him,” one prisoner tells The Fix. “The guards can’t do nothing. All they can do is prosecute the winner.” And there are few bigger winners in the feds than the Aryan Brotherhood.

Despite some high-profile crackdowns against the gang in recent years, its grip on many facilities remains strong. “I just came from USP Lompoc [in Southern California] and the AB is running that yard,” the prisoner says. “The drugs are flowing. They got Atwater, Victorville, Canaan, Hazleton, Florence, Marion, Big Sandy and Coleman on lock. They are all over the system. The feds can’t stop anything.”

We let Charles Krafft fool us

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:25:00 +0000

CHARLES WING KRAFFT, the self-taught painter turned postmodern ceramicist, is famous for his ‘Disasterware’ collection, a term he coined for the melding of violent, often Fascist imagery with tawdry vessels. He’s fashioned everything from ceramic grenades with bio-weapons decaled in antiquated blue to perfume bottles appliquéd with swastikas. Krafft’s work has been featured in prominent news outlets such as Harper's and The New Yorker and is on permanent display at the Seattle Art Museum. He’s received endowments from the Soros Foundation and the NEA. Enthusiasts celebrate, or at least used to celebrate, what they believed to be Krafft’s insidious sense of irony that took a darkly comedic take on twentieth-century disasters, not to mention a vicious stand against political iconography in all forms. In 2009, art critic Jen Graves of The Stranger featured Krafft’s ceramic AK 47 on the magazine’s cover, admittedly duping herself concerning the artist’s perceived identity as an ‘iconoclast.’

Seattle artist inspires füror

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:07:00 +0000

For decades, iconoclastic Seattle artist Charles Krafft has made references to Nazis in his highly acclaimed, sometimes shocking pieces of art that most critics and art lovers brand as simple, ironic satire pushing the boundaries.

He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” – a gun and dagger.

Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth.

Kentucky neo-Nazis charged in gruesome murder, dismemberment

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000

The 25-point manifesto of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) makes several hyperbolic “demands,” such as “all non-Whites currently residing in America be required to leave the nation forthwith and return to their land of origin: peacefully or by force.’’

But it appears that two Kentucky members of the neo-Nazi group and an accomplice took at least one of the over-the-top mission statements deadly serious.

Point 17 says, “We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Murderers, rapists, pedophiles, drug dealers, usurers, profiteers, race traitors, etc. must be severely punished, whatever creed or race.”

On Jan. 9, according to the authorities, the men lured a white, 19-year-old alleged small-time drug dealer into the back seat of their car, choked him, beat him with fists and a metal pipe, dragged him out of the car, slit his throat, stabbed him in the chest, rolled his body down a hill and left him dead in the bushes, covered in brambles, in a field in Boone County, Ky., essentially a suburb of nearby Cincinnati.

Undercover with the neo-Nazis

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 16:18:00 +0000

BERLIN, Germany — This time around, he wore dark glasses, a bushy blond beard and a black beanie pulled down low. It was only his latest disguise, used to greet foreign press at a conference in Berlin.

The man who goes by "Thomas Kuban" must at all costs keep his identity a secret — after all, Europe's neo-Nazis would kill to get their hands on him.

For 15 years, Kuban, now in his mid thirties, risked his life secretly filming neo-Nazi rock concerts, events he says are the conspiratorial heart of Europe's diverse and burgeoning neo-Nazi scene.

His camera rolling, Kuban has witnessed hundreds of fanatics venerating the perpetrators of Auschwitz and calling for Jews and foreigners to be murdered. He has watched dumbfounded as crowds of thousands raise their hands in the Hitler salute shouting, “Sieg Heil,” or as Austrian police shook hands with neo-Nazis.

Austrian court finds 3 guilty of glorifying Nazism

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:33:00 +0000

VIENNA (AP) — An Austrian court has convicted a leading neo-Nazi and two accomplices of glorifying Nazism through a website and sentenced them to prison terms of up to nine years.

Gottfried Kuessel was given a nine-year prison sentence Friday for being the founder of the "Alpen-Donau" website. He already spent time in prison in the 1990s on conviction of trying to form a successor to the Nazi party.

The two others — Felix Binder and Wilhelm Anderle — were sentenced to seven and 4 ½ years respectively.

The website is no longer active, but defied years of Austrian efforts to shut it down because it was housed on a U.S. server.

Austrian officials said that left their hands tried because of U.S. free speech laws. Austria bans glorification of the Nazi era.

Alabama’s alleged teen terrorist made Nazi salutes

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:48:00 +0000

Weeks before Derek Mathew Shrout allegedly started building improvised hand grenades in his military family’s home, before the 17-year-old was arrested for plotting to use the devices against black and gay students and a teacher, he was committing racist acts in full view of everyone at an Alabama high school.

Two of his former friends say that Shrout – sometimes wearing his Junior ROTC U.S. Army-issued uniform – repeatedly performed stiff-arm sieg-heil salutes and shouted “white power” at Russell County High School in Seale, Ala., where he apparently intended to carry out the attacks. The community is some 20 miles from the U.S. Army’s sprawling Fort Benning, Ga., compound, where the suspect’s father is stationed.

Some of the suspect’s hateful antics apparently were captured on the school’s security cameras, and authorities may now be reviewing that video, if it still exists.

David Lee White, an 18-year-old senior at the high school, told Hatewatch last night that he repeatedly saw Shrout and a group of other white students – ranging in numbers from seven to 12, most of them boys – conduct impromptu Nazi-style salutes in the school’s hallways, at breakfast in the cafeteria and in a school bus parking lot. Many times, he said, this occurred in full view of teachers and other staff.

New Jersey neo-Nazis arrested in assaults on Middle Easterners

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:33:00 +0000

Federal authorities in New Jersey are ending 2012 with the arrests of two accused white supremacists who allegedly went on a hate-filled assault spree last New Year’s Eve.

Christopher Ising, 31, a reported member of the Atlantic City Skins from Waretown, N.J., was arrested today by FBI agents on an indictment charging him with conspiracy and commission of a hate crime assault. Those laws are contained in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2009.

Michal Gunar, 27, of East Windsor, N.J., also faces the same federal charges. He is an alleged member of another New Jersey-based white supremacist group known as the Aryan Terror Brigade, the FBI said in announcing the arrests.

The arrests grew out of a New Year’s Eve party last year in East Brunswick, N.J., where Ising hosted a “meet and greet” gathering for white supremacists, FBI officials said.

Alaska serial killer raised racist, anti-Semitic

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:56:00 +0000

A confessed serial killer and bank robber who took his own life in an Alaska jail cell on Sunday was exposed to the racist and anti-Semitic beliefs of Christian Identity theology during his childhood in a rural corner of Washington state, Hatewatch has learned.

Israel Keyes, 34, now linked to at least eight murders throughout the United States in the past 11 years, was a childhood friend and neighbor in Stevens County, Wash., of terrorists Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe — two racist brothers now serving lengthy prison sentences for murder and attempted murder.

White supremacist arrested in Oregon

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:22:00 +0000

A white supremacist with a 10-state criminal record dating back to the 1980s was arrested in Oregon over the weekend and charged with the brutal knife killing of a recently retired man he had apparently never met.

It was extensive media coverage and the use of electronic billboards displaying the image of Erik John Meiser that apparently led Clackamas County Sheriff’s deputies and federal marshals to arrest the suspect at gunpoint Saturday outside a motel in Corvallis, Ore.

Oregonian newspaper reported in weekend editions. A conviction could result in the death penalty.

Meiser, a 37-year-old drifter who has the word “NAZI” tattooed on the fingers of his left hand and “HATE” on his right calf, was arrested 66 miles away from the upscale Portland suburb where he’s accused of committing the murder.

Friends gathered Sunday for a memorial service for Hayes, a recently retired information-technology professional who was attacked, authorities said, after he and his wife returned to their home in Lake Oswego at 6 a.m. and apparently startled a burglar.