shiny happy people

How can some people completely transform their identity? In a rather peculiar case, former tween neo-nazi pop divas transformed themselves into liberal advocates for cultural diversity and marijuana smoking. They had previously been controversial with their rock band called Prussian Blue.

Now 19, the Gaede girls’ new perspective on life is a jarring contrast to the one they held only six years ago. Back then, Lynx told ABC News, “We’re proud of being White, we want to keep being White. We want our people to stay White [….] we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”…

Noam Chomsky:Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said. And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there. “In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.” He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.” When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said. No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said. “These are lessons to keep in mind.” Read More:http://www.progressive.org/wx041210.html image:http://www.uproxx.com/music/2011/07/teenaged-nazi-music-duo-prussian-blue-discover-marijuana-have-a-change-of-heart/

…The twins’ move towards liberalism started to take shape during a 2006 European tour, where they were billed with Swedish White Nationalist singer Saga. During their set, the girls did a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” which was received with boos and jeers from the mostly-skinhead audience.Read More:http://www.thcfinder.com/marijuana-blog/culture/2011/07/nazi-twins-now-potsmoking-liberals#axzz1UJSlOcxa

But the Gaede twins are not alone. Alberta’s perhaps future premier and arch-conservative Ted Morton:

Once an eager Young Republican and athlete, college rebellion took hold of young Ted. “I was a stereotypical sixties student. Had long hair, beads, smoked pot, anti-war – all that stuff,” Mr. Morton says. He sought an identity where many conservatives wouldn’t – a commune. “And the communes in North America were held together either by drugs or by religious fanaticism, so that didn’t appeal to me too much. So we went off to Israel where the kibbutzes are,” he said of a move made with his then-girlfriend, now wife, Bambi. “So we tried that for 10 months, and that cured me of socialism. Read More:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ted-morton-albertas-charisma-challenged-firebrand-takes-his-shot/article2121650/page1/a


---Speaking of a–holes, the girls’ mother, April, says she thinks the girls will eventually be more racist, stating, “When they have children of their own, they’ll come to the same conclusions I have.” You call those conclusions? Nice euphemism for just making sh*t up about millions of people. Meanwhile, Lynx says she doesn’t think they should have been pushed towards “being front-men for a belief system that we didn’t even completely understand at that time. We were little kids.” You might be wondering when I was going to get to the part about marijuana. You may have even been skimming everything up to this point to get to the sticky icky talk. Fair enough. Lynx says, “Marijuana saved my life.” She was diagnosed with cancer during her freshman year of high school. After having a large tumor removed from her shoulder, she developed CVS (cyclic vomiting syndrome). Marijuana alleviated her symptoms better than anything else she had tried, and she became one of the first minors in Montana to get a medical marijuana card. Lamb also got a card for scoliosis, back pain, lack of appetite, and stress. Now they want to work to make medical marijuana legal nationwide. ---Read More:http://www.uproxx.com/music/2011/07/teenaged-nazi-music-duo-prussian-blue-discover-marijuana-have-a-change-of-heart/

Even Israel has a neo-nazi movement, showing that the attraction to the doctrine can cut across nominal divisons. From a 2007 case:

Cell-leader Eli Buanitov, a 19-year-old known as ‘Nazi Eli,’ is also charged with a separate count of battery.
According to the indictment, ICQ records show Buanitov intended to conduct a ceremony for his fellow neo-Nazis in which they would “swear their allegiance to Hitler and vow to preserve the white race with the last drop of their blood.” …”The problem is that here there isn’t anything to fight against because it’s a country of fucking kikes, we just can’t. Not me, not you and not even Adolf – may he rest in peace,” wrote Buanitov in an online conversation with a friend….

---The other gang members were arrested by the police, which found in their possession different neo-Nazi paraphernalia. Some of the suspects even had tattoos of slogans and symbols associated with the Third Reich. Advertisement According to the prosecution, the gang members would document their assaults and maintained contact with other neo-Nazi cells operating across the world. Aside from Bogitch, who was considered the gang leader, all eight members were convicted and are currently serving their prison sentences. ---Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4014233,00.html

…In one of the documented incidents a defendant walked up to a Chinese foreign laborer using a payphone and punched him in the head while other cell members looked on. In another incident several cell members approached two foreign laborers and pushed them. When the laborers tried to walk away Buanitov moved towards them and smashed a glass bottle on the head of one of the men….Another video shows cell members walking through a public park in Tel Aviv and asking a homeless man if he was Russian and whether he was addicted to drugs. The man replied yes to both questions and was then forced to kne


own before the neo-Nazis and “apologize” to the Russian people for his being a drug addict and a Jew….According to the indictment police searched the home of one of the defendants and confiscated 720 grams of explosives, four kg of propellants, a smoke grenade and equipment designed for assembling bombs. Read More:http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3448557,00.html

Chomsky:There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said. And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained. “The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’ People see that and are not happy about it.” He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.” Read More:http://www.progressive.org/wx041210.html image:http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/dan-roberts-on-business-blog/2010/jan/13/congress-bank-hearings

Does recall Stanford Prison Experiment.Strip searched, sprayed for lice and locked up with chains around their ankles, these so called paid and voluntary “prisoners” were part of an experiment to test people’s reactions to power dynamics in social situations, which surpassed the margins that Zimbardo had calculated to be probable. Other college student volunteers who were the “guards” , had free reign in their authority to dictate 24-hour-a-day rules.Given that liberty, they responded much like MIlgra’m questioners:  In short order they were  humiliating the “prisoners” in an effort to break their will.

Professor Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment of August 1971 soon became a classic.And a confounding one at that in seeing loosey-goosey counterculture types have their behavior transformed in assuming the roles of prison guards.  Using realistic methods, Zimbardo and others were able to create a prison atmosphere that transformed its participants. It went back to the old question of nature or nurture and the role of context and structure. The young men who played prisoners and guards revealed how much circumstances distorted then fractured their individual personalities. It also revealed how almost anyone,  given complete control over others, can behave like a monster.”In a few days, the role dominated the person,” Zimbardo — now president-elect of the American Psychological Association — recalled. “They became guards and prisoners.” So disquieting and shocking  were  the personality changes  that Zimbardo abruptly halted the proceedings before perhaps permanent or chronic damage could arise.

---At parole hearings, staff make a judgement about whether a prisoner is sincerely sorry for their crime and has changed from being a lawbreaker into someone who intends to “go straight”. This viewpoint was challenged by Philip Zimbardo, who argued that the behaviour of prisoners is shaped almost entirely by the SITUATION they are in. If this is true, then although people may enter prison as sensitive and non-aggressive individuals, the intensely oppressive environment will transform them into hostile people. Haney, Banks & Zimbardo published the STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT (SPE) in 1973.---Read More:http://sgspsychology2.webs.com/imprisonment.htm

Ultimately, the far fight and neo-nazi leanings in its soft format of the Gaele twins or the Breivik murders can only be seen within the larger phenomenon of totalitarianism that presently seeks a form of legitimacy within a global economic transformation that is fraught with displacement and is poorly communicated to the electorate.Here we see that the choice of victims can change over time and contexts, but the nature of the crimes and the essential features of the movement remain the same. If history, and the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments have taught, though controversial, is that tragic conformity of ordinary individuals can be manipulated to unleash violence as a instrument of state policy. The result is a culture of complicity where the task of organizing large numbers of people willing to participate becomes incrementally easier.

image: http://www.ww2incolor.com/dramatic/nuremberg-trials.jpg.html Read More: http://www.kafka-franz.com/kafka-and-judaism.htm Nuremberg Trail. 1945-46. ---On the other hand, as shown in the Blue Octavo Notebooks, he was quite interested by metaphysical questions of sin, Truth, and ultimate reality, writing intriguingly, "There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution." Elaborating further, he went on, "The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty." Many commentators, most notably his best friend and biographer Max Brod, who was himself quite devout, see Kafka as a religious writer, holding, for example, that the object of K.'s quest, the Castle, is in fact God or divine love or eternal life. Whether this interpretation is justified or not has been fiercely debated, but it says a lot about Kafka's sensibility that his works can be read in this way, even though they frequently seem completely bereft of hope of any kind, much less hope in a transcendent, religious sense.--- Read More:

…In stressing that wickedness is not a necessary condition for doing evil, Hannah  Arendt can at least be thought to have a counter-argument to subjective evil. Arendt emphasized that our faculty of thought is connected to telling good from evil and right from wrong, in which case the “activity of thinking” could sublate innate wickedness, thus providing a condition against evil-doing.But when that thinking activity is challenged and overturned by a mass complicity going in the opposite direction?…

ADDENDUM:

We will let Susan Sontag have the final word since she seems to encapsulate identity and the control and power component of the Zimbardo experiment:

Fascist aesthetics… flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death….

Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/world/africa/04seif.html?_r=1 ---TRIPOLI, Libya — After six months battling a rebellion that his family portrayed as an Islamist conspiracy, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son and one-time heir apparent said Wednesday that he was reversing course to forge a behind-the-scenes alliance with radical Islamist elements among the Libyan rebels to drive out their more liberal-minded confederates. “The liberals will escape or be killed,” the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, vowed in an hourlong interview that stretched past midnight. “We will do it together,” he added, wearing a newly grown beard and fingering Islamic prayer beads as he reclined on a love seat in a spare office tucked in a nearly deserted downtown hotel. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?”

(…)
… A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a ‘spiritual’ force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse… Fascist aesthetics is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in.
(…)

…There is a general fantasy about uniforms. They suggest community, order, identity (through ranks, badges, medals, things which declare who the wearer is and what he has done: his worth is recognized), competence, legitimate authority, the legitimate exercise of violence. But… why the SS? Because the SS was the ideal incarnation of fascism’s overt assertion of the righteousness of violence, the right to have total power over others and to treat them as absolutely inferior. It was in the SS that this assertion seemed most complete, because they acted it out in a singularly brutal and efficient manner; and because they dramatized it by linking themselves to certain aesthetic standards. The SS was designed as an elite military community that would be not only supremely violent but also supremely beautiful (… The SA, whom the SS replaced, were not known for being any less brutal than their successors, but they have gone down in history as beefy, squat, beerhall types; mere brownshirts.)
(…)
Why has Nazi Germany, which was a sexually repressive society, become erotic? How could a regime which persecuted homosexuals become a gay turn-on?

A clue lies in the predilections of the fascist leaders themselves for sexual metaphors. Like Nietzsche and Wagner, Hitler regarded leadership as sexual mastery of the ‘feminine’ masses, as rape. (The expression of the crowds in Triumph of the Will is one of ecstasy; the leader makes the crowd come.)…Read More:http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2010/09/susan-sontag-on-fascist-aesthetics.html

 

 

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