Showing posts from: August 2020
The Palme Assassination, Sweden’s JFK Complex: A Coda?
THE modern history of Sweden has been one of continuous, peaceful state existence. Non-participation in any war since 1814, no political assassinations in the country for nearly two centuries (following the murder of King Gustav III in an aristocratic coup attempt in 1792). This remarkable run, free of political violence, was shattered on the night of 28th February 1986 with the seemingly unfathomable murder of Sweden’s incumbent democratic socialist prime minister, Olof Palme＊.
Sveavägen murder scene 🔻
(Photo: Anders Holmström/Svenskt Pressfoto)
‘Clouseauesque’ policing
The Swedish PM’s shooting in Sveavägen, one of Stockholm’s busiest streets, by a single assassin, was followed by an amateurish investigation that was a complete shambles from the start. An initial mix-up over phone calls meant the police were slow to respond to the crime, losing precious minutes while the murderer made good his escape. On arrival, they failed to cordon off the murder scene properly, allowing onlookers to contaminate potential forensic evidence; key witnesses were allowed to leave the scene without being questioned. Established crime protocol—a street-by-street search of the area (a dragnet)—was not implemented [“Olof Palme: Sweden believes it knows who killed PM in 1986’, BBC News, 100-Jun-2020, www.bbc.com/].
🔺Head of investigation, H Holmér
(Image: www.news.sky.com)
The police investigation was headed by Hans Holmér who assumed more or less from day one that the crime was politically motivated, eventually becoming fixated on the Kurdish militant group the PKK as the likely perpetrators, to the neglect of other leads (injudiciously, witnesses with key information were ignored). After a haul of locally-based Kurdish immigrants were arrested and then released for lack of solid evidence, the prosecutors and media turned against Holmér’s handling of the case, forcing him to resign [‘“Murder Most Foul” – the Death of Olof Palme’, (Jan Lundius), Inter Press Service, 30-Jun-2020, www.ipsnews.net; BBC News]⦿.
The suspects and the conspiracy theories◘
In the 34 years since the Palme shooting the police have conducted 10,000+ interviews and 134 people have confessed to the murder. Aside from the PKK, another international suspect was the white South African regime. Palme was a charismatic figure in world politics but also a controversial and polarising one, as a foreign policy-minded social democrat he elicited criticism from both left and right, including from both the superpowers. In addition, his high-profile anti-apartheid stance was a thorn in the side of the Pretoria government. One theory suggests a conspiracy between South Africa’s security and intelligence forces and right-wing extremist mercenaries within Sweden to execute Palme. The view gained some traction but Swedish investigators have never satisfactorily connected the dots between these elements.
🔺 Stockholm: Intersection of Sveavägen and Tunnelgatan
Palme’s economic reforms, especially those geared towards promoting worker control, did not endear him to the capitalist class in Sweden. More specifically there was Palme’s strong stance against the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors who was illegally selling weapons to several proscribed nations. When Iran was blocked from receiving a shipment one scenario advanced is that an Iranian hitman liquidated the Swedish PM [‘Sweden’s Bofors Arms Scandal’, Directorate of Intelligence, 04-Mar-1988, www.cia.gov/].
Political pressure for “a result”
Refocusing domestically on individuals, the spotlight turned to Christer Pettersson who had a criminal record including manslaughter. Pettersson was dubiously convicted of Palme’s murder in 1989, in part because Palme’s widow, prompted by police officers, picked him out in a police lineup. The seriously compromised verdict was easily overturned on appeal (lack of a murder weapon or motive) [‘Who killed Sweden’s prime minister? 1986 assassination of Olof Palme is finally solved – maybe’, (Andrew Nestingen), The Conversation, 11-Jun-2020, www.theconversation.com]. The investigation team’s eagerness to ‘fit’ Pettersson for the crime despite being bereft of hard evidence, reflects the pressure exerted by the ruling Social Democratic Party on the police to secure a quick resolution of the crime “acceptable to the public” [‘Who killed the prime minister? The unsolved murder that still haunts Sweden’, (Imogen West-Knights), The Guardian, 16-May-2019, www.theguardian.com].
Another, more ‘political’ suspect to attract the police’s interest early on was Victor Gunnarsson. Gunnarsson was an activist with connexions to various right-wing groups, especially the European Workers Party which held grudges against Palme. Gunnarsson was briefly detained by Holmér but the case against him however dissolved when witnesses failed to locate him at the murder scene at the time of the crime. Gunnarsson later emigrated to the US where he himself ironically became a homicide victim [‘Victor Gunnarsson’, People Pill, www.peoplepill.com].
‘Skandiamannen’✪
Another name on the person of interest list of police was Stig Engström. Engström willingly offered himself up to police as a ‘witness’ at the time of the assassination and though questioned, the police eventually discounted him as a serious suspect. But some 20 years after the murder, a new theory, originating in a book by Lars Larsson and developed by journalist Thomas Pettersson, gained traction. The case put by Pettersson that Engström was the killer rested on a conjunction of factors—the “right timing, the right clothing, (he had) unique information, he had close access to guns of the right type, he was right wing and Palme unfriendly” [‘After 34 Years, Sweden Says It Knows the Killer of Olof Palme’, (Thomas Erdbrink & Christina Anderson), New York Times, 10-Jun-2020, www.nytimes.com]. Petersson handed over his findings to the police in 2016, leading to a reopening of the investigation.
Palme, then Swedish communications minister, (with actress Lena Nyman), appeared in the controversial 1960s “erotic-drama” ‘I am Curious – Yellow’ 🔻
‘Resolved’ but left up in the air?
Earlier this year the state prosecutor announced that he had come to the conclusion that Engström was probably Palme’s killer, but, given that Engström himself died in 2000, he promptly closed the case. Not everyone in Sweden is satisfied by the conclusion to the Palme case, many questions remain unanswered about the inconclusiveness of the evidence…eg, no DNA match, where is the missing murder weapon and what was the motive? (BBC). To paraphrase one antagonistic perspective on the case resolution: “it settles none of the unanswered questions”, instead it “underlines the determination of powerful political forces to continue the cover-up surrounding Palme’s murder” [‘Decades-long cover-up continues of assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’, (Jordan Shilton), World Socialist Web Site, 13-Jun-2000, www.wsws.org/].
(Source: www.latimes.com)Endnote: Palmology and parallels with the JFK conspiracy saga
The collective trauma felt by Swedes with Olof Palme’s 1986 assassination—many expressing a sense of lost national innocence, no longer immune from political violence◘—recalls the devastating effect the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 had on the American psyche (Lundius). Both leaders’ violent deaths triggered a runaway train of conspiracy theories, some plausible and some highly implausible◕. In the years since 1986 Sweden’s national obsession with the unsolved murder, labelled Palmessjukdom (“Palme sickness”) has inspired a raft of plays, films, television and musical works on the topic. It has even been cited as a contributing “factor in the worldwide explosion of Scandinavian (noirish) crime fiction”. ‘Palmology’ has spawned a veritable Swedish industry of privatspanarna – a legion of private investigators (such as Thomas Pettersson) conducting independent inquiries into the baffling crime…some have been serious researchers, others espousing “crackpot theories” (West-Knights).
(Source: www.cnbc.com/)
𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪——𝄪
＊ not however the country’s last political murder, in 2003 Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was assassinated by another “lone wolf” assassin
⦿ marginalising SÄPO (Säkerhetspolisen – the state secret police) from the investigation didn’t make the task any easier
✪ Engström was dubbed “Skandia Man” by Lars Larsson because he worked in the Skandia Insurance Co tower building which fronts on to Sveavägen-Tunnelgatan
◘ and perhaps in some measure jolting Swedes out of a lingering outlier complacency
◕ among the multitude ‘fingered’ for the hit on the Swedish PM, was the Swedish police, the Yugoslav secret service, even Palme’s own wife, Lisbet
Nancy Bird Trumps Badgery & Co: Sydney’s Long and Tortuous Journey to a Second Airport and the Contest for Naming Rights
Sydney’s long-debated second international airport is slated to be completed—in so far as anything can be asserted with any confidence in the post-coronavirus age—by 31st December 2025❋. The site selected and given final approval by the Commonwealth government in 2014, Badgerys Creek, is on 1,780 hectares of land in greater western Sydney in indigenous Darug country.
(Source: SMH)
The saga begins in 1946. Towra Point (in Sydney’s south) is mooted by the NSW state government as a likely site for the second airport◲…over the next 40 years at least 20 sites are put forward as prospective locations for another airport to ease congestion at the existing Kingsford Smith Airport. Successive federal governments of differing political hues cast the net far and wide—to the north, south and west of Sydney—in the hope of finding a site that best meets the needs. When the government flags that it favours Somersby (Central Coast) and Galston (northwest) in the early 1970s, outbreaks of NIMBY-ism (vocal grass-roots protests from the locals) leads Canberra to back down. Another candidate, Holsworthy (southwest), is rejected because of an unknown number of unexploded military projectiles littering the site from a nearby army base and its proximity to a nuclear facility, only to be unfathomably resurrected as a prospect in the mid-1990s by the Howard government and then quickly dropped again on grounds of “environmental unsuitability”. Goulburn, 200km southwest of Sydney, too gets shelved – because of the high capital costs involved [‘Second Sydney Airport – A Chronology’, Parliament of Australia, www.aph.gov.au/].
(Source: www.aph.gov.au/)
Frustrated at the ongoing failure to resolve a viable site for the second airport, the Commonwealth toys with the idea of ditching the whole project and looks at an alternative plan sans second airport – the construction of a third runway at Kingsford Smith Airport and complimenting it with a VFT (very fast train) connecting Sydney and Canberra (the VFT never materialises). By the mid-1980s only two sites remain in the running – Wilton and Badgerys Creek⊞. By 1986 Badgerys Creek is ”last man standing” and the Crown purchases land there.
Even after settling on the location, progress on the second airport mimics the more inane capers of TV’s Yes Minister – a stop-start pattern of self-limiting actions, deferment of decisions, vacillations. Feasibility and EIS studies come and go, budgetary problems always loom, the Commonwealth and the state government bickers over what form the airport should take, engaging in political points-scoring, etc. The achievement of anything tangible, actual progress, is grotesquely underwhelming. One example will suffice: 1988, the incumbent government proposes to fast track the construction of Badgerys Creek, but no action follows the words. In 1991 another study contradicts this, finding there’s “no pressing need” to rush the second airport. Three more years on and fast tracking is back on the agenda, the new urgency is the 2000 Olympics. But in 1995 it is reported there “has been little or no development at Badgerys Creek” (“token construction works to date”) and later that year the Commonwealth announces that “the airport won’t be ready for the Sydney Olympics”… and so it goes (‘Second Sydney Airport’).
⌂ Blue Mountains anti-airport bumper sticker
Consistent with the past fraught nature of the second airport issue, the choice of Badgerys Creek is far from consensual. Opposition from Blue Mountains Council and its residents’ groups is particularly vocal – the litany of objections include its likely impact on the national park’s ecology, the threat to its UNESCO World Heritage site status, health hazards, air and noise pollution, [‘Council study finds airport noise on natural areas overlooked’, WSROC, 08-Dec-2017, www.wsroc.com.au]. Some have again raised the question of whether a second airport is really necessary, arguing that existing airport capacity at Bankstown and Richmond airports could be expanded to lighten the domestic passenger and cargo transport burden on Kingsford Smith [‘Is a new airport at Badgerys Creek really needed?’, (Peter Martin), Sydney Morning Herald, 15-Apr-2014, www.smh.com.au].
⌂ Future aerotropolis?
✑ ✑ ✑ ✑ ✑ ✑
Sorting out the nomenclature Once the Commonwealth red-inks the Badgerys Creek site in 2014, a media debate ensues over whose name the new airport should bear. The early favourite is Sydney Harbour Bridge engineer John JC Bradfield, strongly lobbied for by politicians from both sides (LNP prime minister and premier, Labor state opposition leader, etc) [‘Bradfield Airport has universal approval’, (Danile Meers), Daily Telegraph, 06-Nov-2014, www.dailytelegraph.com.au]. Others including Wollongong councillors and the Royal Aeronautical Society plump for Lawrence Hargrave, a seminal figure associated with advances in the field of aeronautical pioneering (unlike Bradfield). From a western Sydney viewpoint, a Penrith City councillor makes a pitch for William ‘Billy’ Hart, who flew a box-kite plane (based on Hargrave’s earlier breakthrough invention) from Penrith to Parramatta in 1911 [‘Penrith Council defer naming of Western Sydney Airport site’, (Krystyna Pollard), Liverpool City Champion, 02-Mar-2017, www.liverpoolcitychampion.com.au].
Badgery of Badgerys Creek The most intriguing candidate, is one with both pioneering credentials like Hargrave and Hart, and real geographical “skin in the game”…(Andrew) Delfosse Badgery, whose family gives its name to the suburb encompassing the airport site—great-grandfather James Badgery settled the area in 1799—was the first person to fly a plane of his own construction in Australia. Badgery flew from Sutton Forest to Goulburn, a distance of less than 50 miles, in 1914)❂. The case for “Delfosse Badgery Airport” is supported by the aviator’s family and the St Marys Historical Society [‘Pilot’s claims has wings: Aviation pioneer Andrew Delfosse Badgery built the first plane in Australia at Badgery’s Creek…and Flew It!’, (Ian Walker), Daily Telegraph, 12-Nov-2014, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
⌂ Del Badgery & his 1914 bi-plane
(Picture: Liverpool City Council)
And the winner is? With one eye on gender-inclusiveness and PC “brownie points”, and a nod perhaps to North American precedents◗, the Morrison government in 2019 opts to name Sydney’s second international airport after Nancy Bird-Walton, a pioneer aviatrix icon of Australia – for a brief summary of Bird-Walton’s achievements in flight see my blog dated 27-May-2017, ‘Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I’.
__________________________________________
❋ no bets on the chances of this being a lay down misère, given the vicissitudes of the second airport story
◲ after opposition from the Sutherland Shire local government over concern about noise levels, the Gorton government kills off the scheme in 1969, citing “environmental difficulties”
⊞ indicative of government indecisiveness, Badgerys Creek is on and off the short list of candidates several times over a span of 45 years before the final take-up by the Abbott government
❂ it is a matter of uncertainty whether Badgery built the plane (a Cauldron bi-plane) on the family farm at Badgerys Creek or at Sutton Forest in the Southern Highlands (Pollard)
◗ airports in Niagara-Ontario and Kansas named (respectively) after pioneering aviatrixesDorothy Rungeling and Amelia Earhart
The Moral Guardians’ War on ‘Pernicious’ Comic Books
As all of us are only too aware, COVID-19 has cut a swathe through public gatherings, large aggregations of people are a “no-no” in 2020. Across the globe all manner of events have been on the receiving end of a different sort of cancel culture treatment. The superhero-studded world of comic book conventions has not been immune to this contagion. Comic-cons everywhere, including the San Diego Comic-Con International, America’s oldest comic book convention, have been red pencilled in this year of the plague. But if we turn the clock back some 70 years we might observe a time when the existential threat was directed at the product itself, the actual comic books.
(Photo source: www.theverge.com/)
There were no organised comic-cons in the more cautious and conformist 1940s and 50s, but this in no way equated with a lack of popularity of comic books. In fact the Forties had been a Golden Age, especially for American comic books, Comic strip creators were riding high with a slew of superhero characters—including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Captain America, the Avengers and Captain Marvel—proving lucrative for companies like Detective Comics (DC Comics), Entertaining Comics (EC Comics) and Timely Comics (Marvel Comics). By mid-decade comic books were the most popular form of entertainment in the US (with 80 to 100 million copies being sold per week!) By the late 1940s comic books were well and truly being marketed towards adults as well…”fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, titles (began to tell) lurid stories of crime, vice, lust and horror” [David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, (2008)].
♦️ Wonder Woman (Sensation Comics, 1942)
‘Seduction of the Innocent’
Dark clouds appeared over the comics industry’s blue skies in 1954 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by a Bavarian-born neurobiologist Fredric Wertham. The book was “a full-throttled attack on the lurid contents of various crime, horror, and even super-hero titles, (with an emphasis on) graphic illustrations of wife-beatings, sado-masochism, and gruesome murders”⁕ Sean Howe, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, (2012)]. Wertham’s inditement of the American comics of the day was that they corrupted impressionable youth, inveigling them into fanaticising about evil, leading them on a ruinous path to criminal behaviour, etc.[‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 1’, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Crime SuspenStories, 1950
1940s, North and bonfires
Wertham was not the first critic to take aim at the US comic book industry. In the view of CBLDF✥, since the 1930s “the comics medium has been stigmatized as low-value speech”. In 1940 conservative commentator Sterling North urged parents and educators to guard against the influx of “mayhem, murder, torture and abduction—often with a child as the victim” in contemporary comic strips. North also decried the incidence of “voluptuous females in scanty attire, machine gun (-wielding hoodlums) and “cheap political propaganda” in the comics. The effect on children, he went on to say, of these “badly drawn, badly written and badly printed” strips was “a strain on young eyes and young nervous systems” as well as constituting “a violent stimulant” to them [North, Sterling. “A National Disgrace”. Childhood Education. 17.1, 1940: 56. Print.]. During WWII religious and patriotic organisations conducted public burnings of ‘disapproved’ comic books in American neighbourhoods – in ironic juxtaposition of the war being fought overseas concurrently against Nazi Germany (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
♦️ Dr Wertham, researching
“Pop culture McCarthyite”
But it was Seduction of the Innocent that struck the strongest chord in a 1950s America “looking over its shoulder” for real or imagined enemies of society in the grip of a hysteria heightened by McCarthyism. It triggered a public outcry, prompting an investigation into the industry by a Senate sub-committee. Publicity from the hearing was damning and the fallout was devastating. Comic books were denounced by Wertham and other moral crusaders as contributing to juvenile delinquency⚉. At the height of the moral panic, comic book publishers were sometimes treated as though they were mobsters, and the cartoonists, as if they were pornographers [‘The Caped Crusader’ (Jeet Heer), Slate, 04-Apr-2008, www.slate.com; ’Comic Censorship, Part 1’].
The emasculated comic book
Threatened with both public and government censure, the comics industry choose to self-regulate, introducing the Comic Code Authority, “a censorship code that thoroughly sanitized the content of comics for years to come”. The new code (something analogous to the film world’s draconian Hays Code) was taken to ridiculous lengths, it forbade comics from showing zombies, vampires, ghouls and werewolves; words like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ couldn’t be mentioned in the story lines; nor could criminals be portrayed sympathetically and the institution of marriage could not be seen to be disrespected (Howe).
♦️ The imprimatur of the self-censor
Comic book publishers were forced to produce ‘purified’ comics suitable for a younger market—more infantile and tamer stories, squeaky-clean but ‘dopey’ heroes replacing the previous super-overachievers—in short, “safe fantasies” for the youngest readers (’Comic Censorship, Part 1’).
The economic and human toll
The new reality of the world of comic books decimated the industry’s hitherto prosperity…between 1954 and 1956 the number of titles produced was cut by more than half – from 650 in 250 over that two-year period!✧. By summer 1954 15 comics publishers in the US went belly-up. EC Comics, up to then one of the market leaders, discontinued all its comics lines…its much-vilified publisher William Gaines switching production solely to the satirical Mad magazine. Over 800 jobs in the industry vanished more or less immediately (Howe; Hajdu). Many talented inkers and pencillers left the industry for good, many for economic reasons but others due at least in part to the stifling of their creative artistic output.
Endnote: Demise of adult comics
Both Wertham and North in their hatchet jobs on the comics genre made the error of completely disregarding the significant adult readership of comic books. The recovery of the industry, the winning back of that readership, took many years…it didn’t really happen until the emergence of ‘Underground’ comics in the 1960s with publications like Zap Comics and comic artists like R Crumb§ [‘History of Comics Censorship, Part 2, CBLDF, www.cbldf.org/].
♦️ Detective Comics, 1945
PostScript: The Wertham thesis unpacked
After it became accessible in 2010 Wertham’s research on comics books was investigated and his conclusions found largely baseless…Wertham was said to have manipulated data, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence. A further weakness of his work was that he used non-representative samples as the basis for his conclusions. Scorn was also poured on Wertham’s contentions that the comic character Superman harboured Nazi SS tendencies, that the Batman/Robin relationship had homoerotic overtones, and that Wonder Woman was a lesbian role model (Wertham saw this as wholly undesirable)[‘Fredric Wertham’,Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Heer].
________________________________________________
⁕ that serious comics of the period were laden with violence, misogyny and racism, could not be disputed (Heer)
✥ Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
⚉ a sense of elitism also coloured Wertham et al’s dislike of popular comics. Wertham considered their consumption blocked children from an appreciation of literature and fine arts (Hajdu; Heer)
✧ over 100 pieces of anti-comic book legislation came into effect in the Fifties (Hajdu)
§ the fashionability of adult readership was further advanced by the advent of graphic novels
Posse Power: The Alternate America of Constitutional Sheriffs and Posse Comitatus
Before the Sovereign Citizen Movement came along (see preceding blog), there was an earlier fringe organisation in the US, Posse Comitatus, which mined the same ideological/conspiracy terrain and employed similar disruptive tactics against federal authority. Emerging in the late 1960s, Posse Comitātūs (Latin for “force of the county”), sprouting anti-Semitic hate speech and uncompromising anti-government dogma and railing against federal taxes, appealed to a range of conservative and reactionary fringe groups — including the Tax Protest Movement, 2nd Amendment Absolutists, Christian Identity adherents and other ”white WASPs”, and ’preppers’ or survivalists. The driving impetus for Posse Comitatus anti-came largely from one William Potter Gale who took over the movement from its founder Henry Lamont Beach⁕. Gale, a self-styled minister, preached retributive violence against US public officials who violate the law and the Constitution (Gale’s “sound bite”: they should be hung by the neck at noon at the nearest intersection of town) [‘Too Weird for The Wire’, (Kevin Carey), Washington Post, May/June/July 2008].
⟰ WP Gale, Posse Comitatus ideologue and leader
The trans-Atlantic sheriff Posse Comitatus drew on an earlier institution in American history, the office of the sheriff. This office deriving from 9th century Anglo-Saxon England—the word ‘sheriff, meaning literally the “shire guardian”—was exported to England’s American colonies where the sheriff of a county came to be directly elected as a constitutional officer holding great autonomy and independence in his position [‘Sheriffs and the posse comitatus’, (David Kopel), The Washington Post, 15-May-2014, www.washingtonpost.com].
⟱ Office of the sheriff had its genesis during the rule of Alfred the Great in Wessex
(Source: www.historytoday.com)
After America became a republic, the institution of sheriff retained its status as the grass-roots hub of local law enforcement, although over time regional variations emerged. In the more densely populated North-East of the country the creation of urban police forces eroded the office’s power, but not so in the South and the West, where the preponderance of larger rural counties meant the sheriff remained a key force in tying together isolated communities. Here the overriding perception commonly is that ”the sheriff in his county is more powerful than the president”§ [‘The Renegade Sheriffs‘, (Ashley Powers), The New Yorker, 23-Apr-2018, www.newyorker.com].
An alternate history of US law: Common law trumps statutory law Posse Comitatus doctrine affirms the office of sheriff as the truly ‘legitimate’ arm of law enforcement in the land. In the minds of its adherents, it authorises the office-holder to determine local laws based on judicial decisions of county courts. Thus it holds that common law always takes precedence over statute or written law [‘Posse Comitatus’ (organization), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
“Constitutional sheriffdom”
Influenced by Posse Comitatus and other extremist anti-federal government groups a body of sheriffs in the US have gone further to enunciate their local authority over the law. These hardliners in 2011 formed themselves into an association of ‘constitutional’ sheriffs (Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association or CSPOA)✪. CSPOA’s position echoes that of Posse Comitatus – the sheriff represents the highest authority in the county (Powers). In the early 2010s CSPOA mobilised sheriffs to take a very strong stand against President Obama’s attempts to establish gun control legislation [‘Line in the Sand’, (Mark Potok & Ryan Lenz), Southern Poverty Law Center, (Summer Issue, 13-Jun-2016), www.splcenter.org].
Posse Comitatus stoking the Midwest farm crisis A farm recession in the American Midwest in the early 1980s, resulting in economic ruin, bank foreclosures, etc., “created the conditions necessary for the (Posse Comitatus) doctrine to attract significant support” among desperate and disenchanted farmers⊞. Gale’s acolytes “crisscrossed the region explaining to farmers and ranchers (that they) were under no obligation to repay overdue loans or peacefully accept the foreclosure of their property” [‘Posse Comitatus’, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, www.plainshumanities.unl.edu]. Some unscrupulous peddlers of Posse Comitatus ideology even sold the hard-hit farmers bogus prepackaged legal defences to circumvent their financial obligations (Carey).
(Source: Iowa PBS)
Followers of the Posse Comitatus manifesto often refused to pay taxes, obtain driver’ licences or pay vehicle insurance counterfeiting (steming from a denial of US fiat money) and other acts of federal disobedience. Posse Comitatus groups set up “common-law courts and juries”✦ to try public officials who had earned their enmity. Some members of Posse Comitatus groups, like today’s Sovereign Citizens, also engaged in more lethal actions. In 1983 one Posse member killed federal marshals and a local sheriff.
Continuing ideological after-effects By the late 1980s with William Gale’s death, Posse Comitatus activism ebbed away. The movement’s decline has been attributed to a lack of effective leadership. Nonetheless the attraction of its ideology to disaffected fringe elements lies in the durability of its receptive message to many [‘The Anti-Government Movement Guidebook’, (1999, National Center for State Courts), www.famguardia.org]. Gale’s inflammatory ideas “gave people on the paranoid edge of society a collective identity” (Carey). The Posse Comitatus ideology held the appeal it did, according to Daniel Levitas, because Gale forged an American-sounding ideology which married together appeals to anti-Semitism, anti-communism, White Supremacy and the sovereignty of the people [‘The Terrorist Next Door’ (Daniel Levitas), New York Times, 17-Nov-2002, www.nytimes.com].
Endnote: The archetype of the posse in the old west In countless Hollywood western movies the standard trope shows sheriffs raising posses to apprehend fugitives or to marshal back-ups to defend a community or town under threat. This was not merely Hollywood mythology but did occur. On the western frontier during the 19th century the sheriff had the authority to command a posse. Posse service was a right and a duty of responsible citizens of the day (Kopel). The reality behind the Hollywood depiction of posses is that they “routinely overstepped their quasi-legal function and were themselves responsible for mob violence” [‘Hate Normalized: Posse Comitatus’, Siouxland Observer, 30-Apr-2018, www.siouxlandobserver.blogspot.com].
⟰ Former Arizona sheriff, Richard Mack, a co-founder of CSPOA (Source: www.azcenter.com)
Postscript: ”An increasingly central role in partisan battles” The Marshall Project has identified at least 60 sheriffs across the US that are currently using the wide discretionary powers they have to oppose state government-imposed restrictions due to COVID-19. This has meant not enforcing pandemic safety measures such as stay-at-home orders, the wearing of masks, business closures, etc. [‘The Rise of the Anti-Lockdown Sheriffs’, (Maurice Chammas), The Marshall Project, 15-Aug-2020, www.themarshallproject.org].
↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼↼ ⁕ a far-right activist who had been a member of the “Silver Shirts” (American neo-Nazis) in the 1930s
§ the familiar image again courtesy of Hollywood is of the racist, tyrannical southern sheriff who rides roughshod over everyone, personified in the film In the Heat of the Night
✪ the idea of constitutional sheriffs was Gale’s, first proposed in the 1970s
⊞ by the late Seventies there was 80 or more distinct Posse Comitatus groups in the plains states, with Wisconsin in particular a ‘hotbed’ (‘Anti-Government Movement’)
✦ the common law courts, together with Sovereign Citizens, have been described as ”the direct ideological descendants of Posse Comitatus” (‘Anti-Government Movement’)
“We’re All Individuals!”: “Living Persons” in the Bubble of their Own “Sovereign Nation“ Speak Out
Who’d have thought that it’d take a pandemic to bring to light just how many cynics and crazies are out there? Before COVID-19 we only had the climate change deniers and the occasion conspiracy peddler to cope with. Since the virus first descended, coronavirus deniers have been coming out of the woodwork, a contagion not confined to the USA.
Human rights or human life? Recently, a new phenomena has popped up on social media and TV screens – from the “Republic of Covididiocy”. Provocateurs have taken to filming themselves confronting police and retail shop personnel during lockdown – provocatively refusing to wear masks, not giving their personal details and declaring loudly that their human rights were being transgressed. The extreme position adopted by these protesters connects them to conspiratorial views held by fringe extremists in the US✱.
Conspiracy heaven ⍌
A universal scofflaw mindset These individuals are part of a loosely-organised movement of people who call themselves “Sovereign Citizens” (or “Sov-Cits” or just ‘Sovereigns’, for short), whose purpose is to assert some set of existing natural rights which, they purport, places them outside of the jurisdiction of the government and the law. In a climate of pandemic-induced restrictions many of these people may just be (over)reacting to the state’s clampdown on their freedom of movement and activity, a knee-jerk libertarian impulse. However the concept of Sovereign Citizenry long pre-dates the current pandemic as a conspiracy-driven stratagem, with its origins, unsurprisingly, found in America.
The world according to Sovereign Citizens “The Sovereign Citizens Movement promotes the tantalising fantasy that anyone can declare himself or herself above and beyond the jurisdiction of the government by invoking arcane legal terminology”. ~ Southern Poverty Law Center
(Source: www.radicalisationresearch.org)
In the 1990s the SCM picked up the earlier Posse Comitatus movement’s baton of unrelenting enmity towards the federal government, portraying themselves as the “true defenders of the Constitution”. Sov-Cit beliefs rest on the same premise as that established by Posse Comitatus. They believe that the US government is illegitimate…it is, they say, a corporation that has duped ‘natural’ citizens (read “Sovereign Citizens”) into an unlawful contract. Sovereign theorists cite the 14th Amendment in 1868 and FD Roosevelt’s 1933 abandonment of the gold standard as a back-up to the paper currency as historical ‘proof’ of federal deception.
Gurus and methods The SCM is a loosely organised group of litigants, commentators, tax protesters/deniers and financial scheme promoters…leadership comes from “redemption gurus” who advise Sovereigns to use ‘legal’ phrases to remove themselves from the jurisdiction of government (BBC).
Prison recruitment, outreach and education Gurus and other Sovereign ‘mentors’ incarcerated for fraud or for not paying taxes have found prison an ideal environment to indoctrinate and recruit new adherents. Imprisoned drug dealers and embezzlers were particularly willing recruits to the cause, jumping at the chance to put Sov-Cit theories into place in the hope of getting out of jail, or to retaliate against the public officials and law enforcement officers who put them there! The pseudo-legal strategy employed by Sov-Cits (again following Posse Comitatus) is based on the ludicrous “Theory of Redemption”—a secret (and mythical) fund of money created for everyone at birth by the US government—which Sov-Cits can supposedly redeem or claim to pay debts [‘Sovereign Citizens Movement Resurging’, Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring Issue 2009, 26-Feb-2009, www.splcenter.org].
“American National”, the preferred nomenclature for Sovereigns ⍌
Before the advent of the internet training of Sov-Cits took place at seminars held at remote extremist compounds. Now recruits learn via online videos and forums (like You Tube and MySpace) which disseminate SCM doctrine and tactics. Some Sovereign groups sell booklets like “The Prison Packet” which purports to guide inmates towards the realisation of their freedoms. Religious outreach, through the agencies of numerous Christian fundamentalist fringe organisations in the US, is another avenue for recruiting Sov-Cits into the fringe fold (Southern Poverty Law Center).
Paper terrorism Sovereigns employ what are saturation methods, submitting countless bogus court filings containing hundreds of pages which are virtually indecipherable. The purpose? “To punish, to harass and mislead public officials”. The paper terrorism may take the form of elaborate scams, the generation of fake letters of credit or tax forms, frivolous law suits or other faux legal documents [‘Understanding the sovereign citizen movement: a guide for corrections professionals’, The Free Library, www.thefreelibrary.com/].
Law-enforcement officers in the Sovereigns’ cross-hairs Some Sov-Cits are out and out “con artists”, transparently pure 100% charlatan, but as Michael Barkun warns, others are politically-motivated anti-government extremists⧆…and dangerous! In 2010 a Sov-Cit duo, father and son, killed local police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas. A New Hampshire shootout in 1997 resulted in the death of five people including the Sovereign provocateur acting as a “lone wolf”❂. Cop killing by Sovereigns is not confined to America – in 2016 a Reichsbürger, the German version of the Sov-Cit, shot dead a policeman in that country. The FBI has declared some Sovereign Citizens to be domestic terrorists. Often inmates utilise the Sov-Cit strategies from within the prison system to carry out protracted vendettas against judges, IRS officials, prosecutors and local sheriffs (Southern Poverty Law Center).
(Source: www.bbc.com/)
The lengths a Sov-Cit will go to
Your dedicated Sovereign is not adverse to creating fake car licence plates or printing his or her own currency and then trying to pass it off as real money. One SCM provocateur in Florida, in acrimonious conflict with his local Bank of America branch, sent it a bogus foreclosure notice and even barricaded the branch during opening hours (SPLC).
Francis: “It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression” Reg: “Its symbolic of his struggle against reality” ~ Monty Python’s Life of Brian
Sovereigns don’t believe they need to hold a licence in order to drive (or to fish for that matter). When stopped by police patrols they have been known to deny that they are driving and affirm rather that they are in fact merely travelling⚅ (Dr Kaz Ross, interview, ABC Radio). And travelling, Sovereigns insist, is “a God-given right”. Some Sovereigns go even further than just mouthing the mantra that they are outside of federal jurisdiction, proclaiming to be citizens of other entities, eg, the Montana Freemen, the “Republic of Texas” (The Free Library)✫.
Anti-government protest in Oregon ⍓
(Source: http://m.dk.com)
Endnote: Sovereign Citizens are one of a panoply of Alt-Right, conspiracy-obsessed fringe hate groups in the US which might loosely be subsumed under the umbrella term “patriot movement”. There is a lot of blurring of the lines between SCM, QAon, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Bois, the Proud Boys, the Anti-Vaxxer groups and various others of a similarly contrarian ilk. In particular, the Sov-Cits’ emphasis on the duality of US citizenship echoes the philosophy of another group – the Freemen-on-the-Land movement. The latter proclaim that “with special knowledge and careful language, we can circumvent these laws and regulations and live freely as an alternative vision of ourselves under our own ‘natural‘ laws” (a virtual identikit image of the SCM’s credo and tactics) [’What is the ‘sov cit movement?’, BBC News, 05-Aug-2020, www.bbc.com; ’The seriously weird belief of Freeman on the Land”, (Shelley Stocken), News, 09-Jul-2016, www.news.com.au].
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PostScript: Black separatism On the surface you might think Sov-Cits would be an exclusively Caucasian phenomena, given its links to White Supremacist outfits like Christian Identity. But there is an African-American separatist subset that adheres to the Sovereign Citizens credo. Given their disproportionate representation in US prisons, Black inmates not surprisingly have been attracted to the SCM ideology. A clique of African-American drug-dealers on trial for murder in the 2000s in Baltimore employed its obstructionist ploys to delay proceedings for years [‘Too Weird for The Wire’, (Kevin Carey), Washington Post, May/June/July 2008].
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✱ the great danger here “is when fringe beliefs and proponents begin to slip into the mainstream”, eg, President Trump’s spruiking of alleged coronavirus cures which are not scientifically proven and possibly harmful, ‘The threads that don’t connect: Covid gives Australian conspiracy theorists a home’, (Michael McGowan), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com.au] ⊞ a right to hold possession of property owned by another until they discharge the debt (www.lexico.com/) ⧆ Barkun describes them as “a stubbornly resilient sub-culture, a community of the alienated” ❂ many Sovereign groups are thought to be aligned with militia groups ⚅ ‘driving’, they assert, is what a truck driver or a taxi driver does for a living ✫ it’d be stating the obvious to say that Sovereigns have a cockeyed notion of the rule of law, one based on the false premise that an individual can choose which law they consent to, and which they don’t (SPLC)
United Fruit, CIA, Do Business in Guatemala, Cold War Style: 3) Precursor to Civil War and an Export Model for Anti-Communists a
A fortnight after Jacobo Árbenz Guzman fell on his sword, resigning the presidency of Guatemala, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who had led the so-called “Army of Liberation”—the US-financed and trained rebel force which had invaded the country—was made president of Guatemala’s ruling military junta. Despite Washington’s professed intention to rebuild Guatemala through comprehensive reforms into a “showcase for democracy”, the US’s ongoing preoccupation with the drive to eliminate communism in the region took precedence [Brockett, Charles D. “An Illusion of Omnipotence: U.S. Policy toward Guatemala, 1954-1960.” Latin American Politics and Society, vol. 44, no. 1, 2002, pp. 91–126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177112. Accessed 4 Aug. 2020].
Árbenz’s resignation speech ⍗
Doubling down on communism America’s ‘Liberator’ for Guatemala however took a blanket approach to the communist witch hunt, his repressive crackdown targeted anyone suspected of opposing his increasingly dictatorial regime. Political opponents, labour leaders, remnants of the Árbenzista peasantry, were all rounded up (over 3,000 were arrested by Castillo Armas and an unknown number liquidated). Non-communists were routinely caught up in the purge, including ordinary farm workers from local agrarian committees. Árbenz’s agrarian land reform system was dismantled, the land appropriated from United Fruit Company (UFCo) was returned to it. Resistance to Castillo Armas’s removal of peasants from their lands acquired during the revolution was met with repression by the regime. Castillo Armas also had to deal with insurrections by disaffected left-wing Ladino officers (remnants of the military remaining loyal to Árbenz and Areválo), fighting a guerrilla insurgency from the highlands (Brockett).
Árbenz and his supporters spent 73 days in asylum in the Mexican Embassy before an inglorious exile ⍗
Armas’ presidency, which ended in 1957 when he was assassinated by an Árbenz sympathiser, was a disaster for a recovering Guatemala. The fallout from the Armas regime’s soaring debts and entrenched corruption was that it became almost completely dependent on US aid. The deteriorating situation under Ydígoras (the new president) led him to declare a “state of seize” in 1960, suspending civil liberties and establishing military rule. An attempt by a group of dissident military officers to overturn Ydígoras’ increasingly oppressive government triggered a civil war in Guatemala which lasted 34 years and claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 civilians, including a genocidal “scorched earth” policy conducted against the indigenous Q’eqchi Maya community [‘Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, American Republics, Volume V’, Office of the Historian, www.history.state.gov/]
⍐ the Guatemalan junta post-democracy
“Guatemala as domino” – a blueprint for coups in Latin America and the Caribbean Post-1954 the US continued to provide Guatemalan security forces with “a steady supply of equipment, training and finance, even as political repression grew ferocious”. The type of practices rehearsed in Guatemala—covert destabilisation operations, death squad killings by professional intelligence agencies—were lessons learnt for dealing with future ‘maverick’ regimes trying to chart a different political and economic path to that acceptable to Washington [Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, (2011)].
The most tragic and wide-reaching legacy of the 1954 Guatemala coup is that it provided a model for future coups and instability in the region set off by a heightened Cold War. The US followed the Guatemala playbook in orchestrating the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by reactionary exiles in 1961 – albeit with a very different outcome. The US’ toppling, with British complicity, of the democratically elected Jagan government in British Guiana in 1964 had familiar reverberations to 1954: Washington’s fear of confronting a communist government in the hemisphere after the Cuban Revolution resulted in “an inflexible and irrational policy of covert subversion towards a moderate PPP government” in British Guiana [Stephen Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story, (2005)]. The CIA and right-wing dissidents within the Brazilian military colluded in a coup which overthrew the liberal government of João Goulart in 1964 (golpe de 64), replacing it with an uncompromising military junta. Washington’s involvement was prompted by Goulart’s plans to nationalise the Brazilian oil industry and other large private businesses. The same techniques and rhetoric were employed in the Dominican Republic coup/counter-coup in 1965. Most notoriously the Guatemalan putsch was to have echoes in the 1973 coup d’état in Chile which violently removed Marxist president, Salvador Allende. This was in response to Allende’s move to nationalise foreign businesses including US-owned copper mines and telecommunications giant I.T.T. US president, Richard Nixon, in fact had already tried to prevent Allende from taking office after the socialist won the Chilean elections fair and square in 1970❅ [‘Chilean president Salvador Allende dies in coup’, History, www.history.com/].
⍐ CIA headquarters in Virginia, USA
CIA hit-list for Guatemala CIA documents declassified in the 1990s reveals lists were compiled as early as 1952 of individuals in the Árbenz government “to (be) eliminated immediately in event of (a) successful anti-Communist coup”. Because the names were deleted during the agency declassification it can’t be verified if any of the assassinations were actually carried through [‘CIA and Assassination: The Guatemala 1954 Documents’, (Edited by Kate Doyle & Peter Kornbluh), The National Security Archive, www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu].
Footnote: the removal of Árbenz from Guatemala didn’t mean the CIA and Washington were done with the deposed president. The CIA continued its campaign to trash the reputation of Árbenz in exile, even though, personally, he was a politically impotent figure by this time. The CIA found it useful to continue to smear Árbenz as a “Soviet agent”, tying him to the ongoing US crusade against communism in the hemisphere✪ [Ferreira, Roberto Garcia. “THE CIA AND JACOBO ARBENZ: HISTORY OF A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN.” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 59–81. JSTOR, www.jstor.og/stable/45194479. Accessed 6 Aug. 2020].
Nixon and Armas ⍗
PostScript: A mea culpa of sorts Decades later the US government through President Clinton issued an apology, not for the 1954 coup, but for the US’ role in the human rights abuses of the civil war in Guatemala, which slaughtered thousands of civilians. It wasn’t until 2011 that the Guatemalan government (under President Colom) apologised for the “historic crime” against Árbenz and his family [‘Apology reignites conversation about ousted Guatemalan leader’, (Mariano Castillo), CNN, 24-Oct-2011, www.edition.cnn.com; ‘Clinton apology to Guatemala’, (Martin Kettle & Jeremy Lennard), The Guardian, 11-Mar-1999, www.theguardian.com].
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❅ US I.T.T. (International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) entreated the Nixon administration to wage “economic warfare” and take other covert measures against the Allende regime to ensure its ouster from power, ‘Papers Show I.T.T. Urged U.S. to Help Oust Allende’, New York Times, 03-Jul-1972, www.nytimes.com
✪ back in Guatemala, President Armas and the latifundios (rich conservative landowners opposed to the Árbenz agrarian policy) provided a in-synch chorus, echoing the US charges of communist collusion by Árbenz