Mediaboss Marketing

To facilitate new interdisciplinary research, the Graduate School of Education and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will host an event designed to explore and accelerate collaborative research projects.

Exploring Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Funding Opportunities, open to GSE and SEAS faculty, will take place at 12:30 p.m. March 4 in Salvadore Lounge, the second-floor atrium space in Davis Hall, North Campus.It is slated to be the first of several collaborative cross-decanal research events.

X. Christine Wang, GSE professor and interim associate dean for interdisciplinary research, and Shambhu Upadhyaya, SEAS professor and associate dean for research and graduate education, organized the event after recognizing that both schools desired additional opportunities and infrastructures to support meaningful collaboration.

Were living in this globalized, connected world. The problems were trying to resolve have become complex and demand complex, interdisciplinary collaboration, Wang says. Oftentimes, we are siloed in our areas, and this event is trying to facilitate that cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Upadhyaya shares a similar perspective. While the faculty in different schools at UB have been doing excellent research in their own disciplines, the current trend is to not work in silos but engage in interdisciplinary initiatives, he says.

Rather than hosting research talks or planning formal introductory meetings, this fast-paced event will allow faculty to obtain more information about each others research in less time a kind of speed networking.

Faculty will socialize with the intention of finding shared scholarly interests and possible funding sources.

You mingle, you congregate, you discuss and generate ideas for the future to develop relationships and trust, Wang says.

Upadhyaya and Wang, along with additional GSE and SEAS faculty, worked to identify common themes linked to contemporary research in both decanal units.

The events research themes will include:

Participants will bring business cards and one-page handouts detailing their research interests and the funding opportunities they wish to pursue. When interests align, faculty will sit at a round table focused on a specific theme to brainstorm plans for long-term projects.

For the SEAS faculty who work in artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced technologies, human-computer interaction and other engineering problems, looking at research on human development, education, ethics and social contexts will bring a new perspective to their research with meaningful outcomes, Upadhyaya says. The same is true for the GSE faculty if they collaborate with faculty with expertise in engineering and technology.

Upadhyaya and Wang hope this gathering launches future informal meetings focused on cross-collaboration at UB. Wang envisions partnerships with the College of Arts and Sciences, School of Public Health and Health Professions, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and the School of Management.

You know each other, you have each others contact information and then you can continue to build on the conversation, she says. This is not viewed as a one-time thing; this is the beginning of a long-term collaboration.

See the original post:
UB 'speed-networking' event to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration - UB Now: News and views for UB faculty and staff - University at Buffalo

Discussed in this essay: Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, by Anne Sebba. St. Martins Press, 2021. 320 pages.

For more than 40 years, it was axiomatic on the left that Julius and Ethel Rosenbergthe Jewish couple famously executed on June 19th, 1953, as spies who turned the designs for the atom bomb over to the Sovietswere innocent victims, scapegoats of the McCarthy era. In the decades after their execution, one could be certain that each June, an article would appear in the pages of this magazine that picked apart the governments case by pointing to apparent absurdities in the charges leveled against the Rosenbergs ring: What kind of spies showed up at each others doors using their real names? Could something as silly as a jaggedly cut Jell-O box really have been a sign by which Soviet spies recognized each other? Could a drawing by Ethels brother David Greenglass, who had no postsecondary education, actually have enabled the Soviets to manufacture their own bomb? The lefts consensusclinched by book-length treatments of the case like Walter and Miriam Schneirs 1966 study Invitation to an Inquestwas that the Rosenbergs were framed, killed not for espionage but because they were Jews and, despite their unwavering denial, committed Communists.

This theory came crashing down in 1995 when newly released Soviet files, known as the Venona transcripts, demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Julius was not only a spy, but the head of a ring of mainly Jewish comrades, including David. But if the transcripts confirmed Juliuss guilt, they showed that Ethels role was limited to knowledge of the espionage ring and recommending her sister-in-law Ruth for the role of typistthus undermining the narrative advanced by the state in Ethels conviction. A few years later, Juliuss Soviet handler, Aleksander Feklisov, affirmed that Ethel knew about Juliuss work but was not a spy herself. She had nothing to do with thisshe was completely innocent, he said. David eventually admitted that his testimony that Ethel had typed up the notes he provided on the Manhattan Projectwhich led to her convictionwas made only to protect himself and his wife.

At the time of the case, those who believed Ethel wasnt guilty of the charges brought against her wondered: Why would the devoted mother of two young children, knowing she was innocent, remain silent on penalty of death, leaving her children orphans? The question persists today, and Anne Sebbas recent biography, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, attempts to answer it. Sebbas book rounds out the portrait of the martyr, revealing her to be both a product of her times and a rebel against them: a devoted housewife who had left her artistic hopes and work life behind to devote her days to motherhood, a political militant, the scorned daughter of a family that preferred her brotherand, in the end, a victim of mass hysteria induced by the ambient anti-communism of her era, and heightened by her violation of social norms surrounding the appearance and conduct of women. Sebbas carefully considered accountone of the few treatments of the case to focus on Ethelis fair and sympathetic without falling into the trap of hagiography. By detailing the contours of Ethels life, the book helps us understand the flesh-and-blood woman who would be transformed into a political symbol. But in failing to deeply read Ethels own politics, it falls short of providing a compelling explanation of her infamous silence.

Ethel Rosenberg, born Ethel Greenglass in 1915, was a product of Manhattans largely Jewish Lower East Side. From a young age, she sang, acted, and dreamed of a life in the arts. (Her high school classmates elected her class actress.) But while she was talented enough to sing in a professional choir, the reality of life as a poor Jew forced her to find office work as a way to support herself and her family. It was there that she discovered the left-wing politics that would become her dominant interest. Sebba describes how she led a strike at her workplace that resulted in her firing from her position, a job restored to her by the newly established National Labor Relations Board, which allowed workers to organize in unions without fear of retribution. She soon became one of what Sebba estimates were 3,000 Communists on the Lower East Side, probably the largest concentration of Party members in the US. In 1939, she signed a petition to put the Communist candidate for City Council, Peter V. Cacchione, on the ballota fact that would later be used against her at trial. (Hard as it is to believe now, Cacchione, leader of the Communist Party in Brooklyn, was eventually elected in 1941 and then re-elected twice.)

Ethel met Julius, a City College student, in December 1936, and by all accounts theirs was a story of shared love and activism. Ethel gave birth to the couples first child, Michael, in 1943, and the second, Robby, in 1947; in Sebbas portrayal, her dedication to her sons was as whole-hearted as her devotion to her husband and her politics. Michael was a difficult child, and Ethel studied all the available sources in an attempt to find the best way to help him. (Sebba notes that she continued her subscription to Parents magazine even while imprisoned and awaiting trial, when she had little chance of ever spending time alone with her boys again.) The Rosenbergs struggled financially, as Julius ran a series of failed businesses, yet Ethel remained a stay-at-home mother, abandoning her lingering dreams of making it on the stage. At the same time, she deepened her political organizing, which became inseparable from her marriage; for example, the couple together campaigned for Communist Party candidates and supported the Spanish Republicans. As Sebba writes, [A]lthough communism theoretically championed the equality of the sexes, it was not theory that interested Ethel. From now on she . . . turned instead, in her single-minded way, to political activism and Julius.

This all came to a crashing end on July 17th, 1950, when Julius was arrested. In the weeks after her husband was taken into custody, Ethel was called to testify before a grand jury, but refused to answer their questions. In August, after a particularly bruising day of questioning, she was met at the courthouse by two FBI agents who arrested her for violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Government officials involved in the case would later admit in private that Ethel was arrested, and then tried and sentenced, primarily as a means of pressuring Julius to talk.

Though both Rosenbergs were vilified in the press, Ethel was cast in an especially negative lightoften for reasons irrelevant to the issues of the case. Her unprepossessing appearance was, as Sebba shows, often held against her, with journalists describing her as wearing the tired uniform of the clerk or stenographera dark wool skirt, a whitewash blouse and a white wool sweater, as having a dish-face complexion, and as slightly dumpy. Even her hair was critiqued; one journalist wrote that she failed to make the best of her naturally curly dark hair. Her bob is neither long nor short and it needs shaping. Her calm demeanor at the couples trial was taken by some as proof that it was Ethel who was the real brains behind the spy ring.

Though the judge and the prosecuting attorneyswho included Roy Cohnwere also Jews, there was an undercurrent of Jew=communist in the trial and the reaction to it. As Sebba points out, it was no coincidence that, at a time when 25% of New Yorks population was Jewish, the jury contained not a single Jew. The Rosenbergs were poorly defended by their attorneys, who had no experience with criminal trials nearly as grave as this one, and who, in an effort to soften the court towards the defendants, did little to push back against testimony to which they could have objected. Pressed on their politics, both Julius and Ethel took the Fifth Amendment, which was their right. But at that time, the height of the Cold War, their silence was viewed as at best an obfuscation, and at worst an admission that they had chosen the side of the enemy. It took the jury an afternoon and morning of deliberations to find them guilty, and Judge Irving Saypol, in sentencing them to death, blamed them for the deaths of Americans in Korea and the looming threat of a Soviet bomb.

Legal and personal appeals followed, as well as an international campaign in the Rosenbergs defense. (Sebba tells us that the American Communist Party shied away from the case so as not to be tainted with the charge of espionage.) Despite all thisand despite evidence that Ethel was never the governments real targetPresident Eisenhower refused to grant clemency, fearing that granting Ethel a reprieve would encourage other housewives to turn to espionage. A last-ditch effort by the couples lawyers to delay the execution, which had been scheduled on the Sabbath, only resulted in the hour being moved up. Julius was executed first, then Ethel. The Rosenbergs had entered history.

In the end, there is no way to understand Ethels conductor Juliussexcept through the lens of their political stance: their fidelity to Communism and the Soviet Union. While Sebba recognizes this dimension, she doesnt get to what was at the heart of their actions. Appreciating this commitment, and taking account of the specific period during which the spy ring was active and the trial occurred, is essential to comprehending how these two peopledevoted spouses, dedicated and loving parentsgave their lives so stoically for their cause.

Juliuss political allegianceswhich Ethel clearly sharedwere formed by the fact that he was a spy during World War II, when the US and the USSR were allies in the battle against fascism. (This fact has often been held up as evidence that the trial and sentence were iniquitous, since whatever was turned over to the Soviets was technically turned over to allies.) Long before D-Day in June 1944, Communists (and many others) around the world had called for the establishment of a second front. In Europe, only the Red Army and the various resistance movements were actively fighting the Nazis. Anything that could be done to assist Stalins army was a blow against fascism, and that meant there was no higher calling for a Communist than to be a comrade in arms with the Soviet soldiers who fought at Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Kursk, or with the Communist-led partisans fighting and dying in France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Feklisov wrote in his memoirs of Juliuss almost obsessive love for the Soviet Union, describing how he cherished being considered as brave as the partisans who fought behind Nazi lines. Julius further demonstrated his ideological motivations by never asking for payment, and only ever grudgingly accepting small sums from the Soviets, despite his familys dire financial straits. As his espionage unfolded in the final years of the war, he understood himself to be at one with the fighters in Europe, risking his freedom and his life much as Titos Communist guerillas did by fighting the Nazis in Yugoslavia and Zhukovs armies did as they fought their way across Europe.

Ethel was equally committed to the Soviet Union as a beacon of both workers rights and antifascism. While it seems certain that had she broken under pressure she would have survived, as her brother did, cooperating with the prosecution would have meant denying everything she and Julius had fought for and believed in. Even more, it would have been a betrayal of the fight against fascism. Julius himself made this manichean choice clear, writing about the trial in a 1952 letter from prison to Ethel: If we are able to contribute something in the the great fight for peace and against fascism and I believe that we have already made an important contribution to aid in this fight, then we have turned the tables on the prosecution and have advanced the cause of justice and freedom.

The Rosenbergs have long been cast as either nefarious villains or superhuman heroes. Both views obscure the truth: They were passionate ideologues, inspired and constrained by the politics of their particular moment. We honor them best by understanding who they were in all their humanity. Even as it fails to fully plumb the depths of the Rosenbergs devotion to their politics, by illuminating the couples choices and the historical backdrop against which they made them, Sebbas Ethel Rosenberg takes us a long way along the road to that comprehension.

Originally posted here:
The Overlooked Loyalties of Ethel Rosenberg - Jewish Currents

On a cool, tropical morning in the tumultuous year of 1931, the American poet Langston Hughes woke up snugly and confusedly on the inside of a large clay drainage pipe. The pipe, his home for the previous night, was one of a series of large pipes that sat estranged on the side of a mountainous road somewhere in rural Haiti, perhaps to later be placed under roads to drain the overflowing streams that flood under the weight of violent storms with their heavy rains. But at this moment they remained underutilized in the applied field of water redistribution and instead became a source of warmth for the poet whose bus had run out of gas the night before.

At this moment in time, the 29-year-old poet faced an uncertain future he was relatively well-known in literary circles but was in no way famous; he was consistently winning literary prizes but was in no way rich; well-endowed with inspiration, yet destitute of financial stability. That he made it this far was impressive enough, considering the overwhelming odds against him as a working-class Black man in America, but despite it all, he went on to establish himself as one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century.

In his childhood, Langston Hughes lived a volatile life, his father left behind the family and the unbearable racism of America for Mexico; his mother traveled incessantly to find work, he lived in and out of poverty often with his grandmother as he moved from Missouri to Kansas, from Kansas to Illinois, from Illinois to Ohio, all before graduating high school. But it was his time in Cleveland, while attending Central High School between 1916 and 1920, when his passion for poetry developed most rapidly and thoroughly. Ethel Weimers second-year English course taught him the works of Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and, most impactfully to the young Mr. Hughes, Carl Sandburg. Although I had read of Carl Sandburg before . . . I didnt really know him until Miss Weimer. . . . Then I began to try to write like Carl Sandburg (Hughes 1993). The young poet was also fervently engaged in extracurricular activities and often wore a sweater that proved this; it was covered in club pins. He was on the track team, served as a lieutenant in the schools military training corps, edited the yearbook, served as class president, occasionally made the monthly honor roll, and wrote many of his early poems for the schools magazine, the Belfry Owl.

Moving between overpriced kitchenette apartments, Hughes witnessed the harsh realities of the segregated geography and racist economy. But he also encountered the fleeting cultural beauty that blossomed. Clevelands Central High School, a Victorian Gothic building on Central Avenue (since destroyed), hosted a diverse community of European immigrants from Poland, Russia, Italy, and also served a growing Black community. This made for a hotbed of radical ideas. His classmates lent him The Gadfly, introduced him to the Liberator, and took him to hear Eugene Debs speak. They knew that it was wrong that Debs was locked up, they knew that Lenin sent a shockwave from Russia to the slums of Woodlawn Avenue, and when the Russian Revolution broke out, our school almost held a celebration (Hughes 2002, 49).

The years after graduation, like much of his life, involved a seamless continuation of movement, never finding a firm residence for more than a year, floating from one place or job to the next, but always with his sights set on his true passion: writing. From 1925 to 1930 his career picked up: he won poetry contests; published his first two books, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew; graduated from Lincoln University; was taken up by a wealthy patron of the arts, Mrs. Mason; and published his first novel, Not without Laughter. During the economically depressed year of 1931, Hughes traveled to Cuba and Haiti and began writing for the radical press.

I went to Haiti to get away from my troubles, he wrote honestly about his trip. Hed just spent Christmas with his mother in Cleveland and intended to take a bus to Key West. Fortunately for Hughes he met a fellow poet named Zell Ingram, a disenchanted student at the Cleveland School of Art who, conveniently for Hughes, was desperate to quit his classes and travel. They took Ingrams mothers car, both with $300 in their pocket, down to the coast. After the turbulent break with his patron, Mrs. Mason, he thought it necessary to sit in the sun awhile and think. . . . So in Haiti I began to puzzle out how I, a Negro, could make a living in America from writing (Hughes 1993).

In the sun, he began writing for the communist magazine New Masses, a bastion for what lead editor Mike Gold called proletarian literature. In its pages, Hughes warned poetically of an insurmountable foe in Havana, a pirate called THE NATIONAL CITY BANK. He wrote of Haiti as a world of black people without shoes who catch hell, a country with a deteriorating Citadel, rusting while the planes of the United States Marines hum daily overhead. By the middle of their trip, Hughes and Ingram grew tired. At this point Zell, who had never traveled before outside the confines of the U.S.A., said he wished he had stayed home in Cleveland.

Hughes returned wearily to New York where he had little time to decompress before going on a tour of the South. In 1931 thered been twelve known lynchings in the South, of which Hughes was painfully aware during his voyage. He wrote two poems about one of the most pressing conflicts of 1931, the Scottsboro case. BLACK BOYS IN A SOUTHERN JAIL. / WORLD, TURN PALE! Hughes wrote. Nine young Black men were accused of raping two white women on a freight train traveling through Alabama, and their arrest almost led to a lynching. The prosecution played out through years of court cases and appeals led by the Communist Party and the NAACP, which eventually resulted in most of the nine defendants being released. The next year he wrote a short play and four poems on the case called Scottsboro, Limited.

In keeping with his momentum of ceaseless travel, in the summer of 1932 the inquisitive Hughes sailed to the land of John Reeds Ten Days That Shook the World, the land where race prejudice was reported taboo, the land of the Soviets. He was accompanied by twenty-two young Black Americans to make a Soviet-led film on race relations in the U.S. A third of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander ([1956] 1993), focuses on his impactful time spent in the socialist country. However, the reflections stay relatively indifferent, devoid of any strong opinions due to Americas censorship and blacklists of the 1950s.

Noticeably absent from his autobiography, for example, are his poems that speak highly of Lenin and revolution. Some of his most politically charged works have been censored from collections of his poetry; works like One More S in the U.S.A. [to make it Soviet] and Ballads of Lenin might be conveniently omitted from an innocent collection of his wide assemblage of poems.

But he nonetheless spoke honestly of the hospitable treatment of himself and his crewmates in the USSR, who were always introduced as representatives of the great Negro people. On the streets queuing up for newspapers, for cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in the line would say, Let the Negro comrade go forward. If you demurred, they would insist, Please! Visitor to the front. Even as the movie fell apart, he noted that hed never been paid such a high rate or lived in such comfort: All of us were being paid regularly, wined and dined overmuch. . . . I had never stayed in such hotels in my own country since, as a rule, Negroes were not then permitted to do so. Besides, I had never had enough money for such fine living in America (Hughes 1993).

His adventures eventually landed him humbly back in Ohio, residing with his distant cousins in Oberlin to care for his sick mother. Hed never been to the small town located not far west of Cleveland. He knew few things about the town other than that his distant cousins lived there, and that his grandmother, Mary Patterson Langston who was married to Sheridan Leary who died fighting with John Brown was the first Black woman to attend Oberlin College.

On his return to Ohio, Hughes engaged with the local theater scene. In the Fairfax neighborhood of Clevelands east side is the still standing Karamu House, the oldest African American theater in the United States, opened in 1915. Most of Hughes plays were developed and performed at the theater, which premiered many of his works throughout the 1930s. In 1936 and 1937 alone, Karamu House put on a stream of plays almost as quickly as Hughes could write them. This included his farce, Little Ham, a comedy titled Joy to My Soul, and a historical drama about Haiti called Troubled Island.

Perhaps itching to travel again, Hughes ventured in summer 1937 back to Europe, first to Paris for the International Writers Congress where he enjoyed a venturesome excursion that included a memorable gala and the attendance of a motorcycle race with the famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom hed briefly lived with in Mexico then to Spain where he finished the year reporting on the brutal civil war for the Baltimore Afro-American. Some of the men in the International Brigades had told me they came to Spain to help keep war and fascism from spreading. War and fascisma great many people at home in America seemed to think those words were just a left-wing slogan. But of course it wasnt just a slogan to Hughes or those who fought unremittingly against fascism in Spain. Endless years of moving and traveling, Hughes wondered what the future held for him, Europe, and the world:

Would the world really end?

Not my world, I said to myself. My world will not end.

But worldsentire nations and civilizationsdo end. In the snowy night in the shadows of the old houses of Montmartre, I repeated to myself, My world wont end.

But how could I be so sure? I dont know.

For a moment I wondered. (Hughes 1993)

In the paranoia and anti-communism of the 1950s, Hughes was interrogated in March 1953 by Roy Cohn at an executive session of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He refused to name names, but, under the threat of being blacklisted and seeing his career ruined, renounced his radical views but not before educating the committee members on what it meant to be an African American in America. The results of which led to a decade of relative political neutrality in his work, earning him criticisms from all sides, but keeping his career and passport intact something many other communists had been deprived of.

Nonetheless, Langston Hughes lived a zealous life as a traveler and a poet, an activist and an artist. His communist politics developed from his early years in Cleveland to the USSR to Spain and everywhere in between. His work was torn violently by the hostilities of historical revisionism during the Cold War, the ruptures visible and unsustainable. One side of him was canonized, the other suppressed by anti-communism and cynicism. His work was effectively censored, stripped of its revolutionary foundations, and muffled of its political radicalism. But the two can be rejoined. Like the moments separating a brief strike of lightning and its booming roll of thunder, we wait patiently to hear its roll and remember that the two are intertwined. His revolutionary works sit waiting to be compounded, to strike with a lively force a new generation of proletarian artists who can revive the totality of Langston Hughes and bring about the O mighty roll of the Revolution.

SourcesLangston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, Hill and Wang, (1956) 1993. epub.Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, vol. 13 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2002.

Images: Top, photo by Gordon Parks, Wikipedia (Public Domain); Hughes in 1928, Wikipedia (public domain); Scottsboro defendants, Wikipedia (fair use); Republican forces in Spanish Civil War, Wikipedia (CCO).

Read the original:
Langston Hughes: Progressive poet and wanderer Communist Party USA - Communist Party USA

DRESDEN, Germany First vaccine opponents attacked the police. Then a group of them chatted online about killing the governor. And one day an angry crowd beating drums and carrying torches showed up outside the house of the health minister of the eastern state of Saxony.

The minister, Petra Kpping, had just gotten home when her phone rang. It was a neighbor and he sounded afraid. When Ms. Kpping peered out of her window into the dark, she saw several dozen faces across the street, flickering in the torchlight.

They came to intimidate and threaten me, she recalled in an interview. I had just come home and was alone. Ive been in politics for 30 years, but I have never seen anything like this. There is a new quality to this.

The crowd was swiftly dispersed by the police, but the incident in December represented a turning point in a country where the SA, Hitlers paramilitary organization, was notorious not just for showing up at the homes of political rivals with torches and drums, but for attacking and even murdering them.

It was the clearest indication yet that a protest movement against Covid measures that has mobilized tens of thousands in cities and villages across the country was increasingly merging with the far right, each finding new purpose and energy and further radicalizing the other.

The dynamic is much the same whether in Germany or Canada, and the protests in various countries have echoes of one another. On the streets of Dresden one recent Monday, the signs and slogans were nearly identical to those on the streets of Ottawa: Freedom, Democracy and The Great Resist.

In Germany, at least, the merging of the movements has taken an increasingly sinister turn, with a specter of violence that is alarming security agencies. Since December, the threats have only intensified.

Last month the far-right Alternative for Germany party called for another protest outside of Ms. Kppings home. (The police stopped it.) Hospital staff in Dresden, the Saxon capital, have been attacked. A second governor has received death threats. And when the police raided the homes of nine people who had debated ways to kill Michael Kretschmer, the governor of Saxony, on the messenger service Telegram, they discovered weapons and bomb-making ingredients like gunpowder and sulfur.

As the pandemic enters its third year, Germany is emerging from another long winter of high case numbers that are now slowly receding. While the government is preparing to lift restrictions, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is determined to turn a general vaccine mandate into law ahead of the next fall.

The debate about Covid restrictions has energized a far-right scene that thrives on a sense of crisis and apocalypse.

Germanys far right, which in recent years used anger over an influx of refugees and Europes debt crisis to recruit, has seized on the virus as its latest cause.

If the issue is different, the messaging of those organizing the protests is eerily familiar: The state is failing, democracy is subverted by shady globalists and the people are urged to resist.

Now as then, what began with demonstrations against government policy has become personal. The number of verbal and physical attacks on politicians tripled last year to 4,458, according to federal police statistics. It is no longer just regional and local politicians who are targeted. The federal health minister and the chancellors chief crisis manager on the pandemic are among a growing group of officials requiring police protection.

Two and a half years after a regional politician who defended Germanys refugee policy was shot dead on his front porch by a neo-Nazi, security agencies worry that far-right militants want to use the pandemic to unleash another wave of political violence.

Violent resistance to democratic rules is now a frequent demand in the anti-corona protests, Dirk-Martin Christian, domestic intelligence chief of the state of Saxony, said in an email interview. The routine assertion that we live in a dictatorship and under an emergency regime that must be eliminated, and against which public resistance is legitimate, is evidence of the progressive radicalization of this movement.

There is an increasing willingness to use violence in the context of the protests, Mr. Christian added, noting the fantasies of murder targeting Mr. Kretschmer, the Saxon governor, and the SA-style procession outside Ms. Kppings house.

The radicalization of protesters against Covid measures is most visible in the former Communist East, where far-right extremists now dominate the organization of the protests and control the information and disinformation on popular Telegram channels associated with the movement.

Saxony, the most populous eastern state, has a long history of far-right protests, starting with the annual neo-Nazi marches on the anniversary of the Dresden bombing in 1945.

March 4, 2022, 6:06 a.m. ET

In 2014, the anti-Muslim Pegida movement short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West was founded there, then spread to other cities. For years its supporters marched on Monday nights, like the protesters who brought down Communism a quarter century earlier.

We are the people, the slogan associated with Pegida marches, is now popular at the coronavirus protests on Monday nights too.

The parallels are worrying, officials say, because prolonged street protests have proven to be powerful incubators of far-right violence.

Regular protests have the effect of giving extremists the feeling that public opinion is with them and that the time to act is now, said Michael Nattke, a former neo-Nazi who left the scene and has been doing anti-extremism work for the last two decades. It creates its own dynamic.

For intelligence officials, too, its no longer a question of if, but when.

We are very concerned about the possible radicalization of individual perpetrators, said Mr. Christian of the Saxon intelligence service.

One concern is that far-right extremists are tapping into the frustrations and fears of ordinary citizens who march alongside them every week. That regular proximity erodes boundaries.

Something is becoming normalized that mustnt be normalized, said Ms. Kpping, the health minister. Its worrying that you cant distinguish anymore who is on the streets because of vaccines and Covid restrictions and who is already radicalized.

On a recent Monday night in Dresden, eleven different protest walks, which had been advertised on Telegram, snaked their way through different parts of the city before coalescing into one march with some 3,000 people. Some carried candles, like the peaceful protesters who marched against the Berlin Wall in 1989. Others waved the flag of the Free Saxons, a new party that is so far right it considers the Alternative for Germany party establishment.

New Zealands Covid reckoning. For much of the past two years, the coronavirus was a phantom presence in New Zealand. Now, the island nation is being hit by a major outbreak of the Omicron variant, with the virus spreading at an extremely fast rate.

N.F.L. drops protocols. The league and the players union agreed to suspend all Covid-19 protocols, effective immediately. The N.F.L., which is not in season, is the first of the major professional sports leagues in the United States to halt its coronavirus-related policies

In the crowd was Betina Schmidt, a 57-year-old accountant in a red woolly hat. Ms. Schmidt said she was not just protesting government plans for a general vaccine mandate but also a broader conspiracy by powerful globalists to destroy the German nation.

Until a few years ago she voted for the Greens. Now I know they are not green, they are totalitarian, Ms. Schmidt said. What they want has nothing to do with the environment. They want the destruction of Germany.

She stopped watching news on the public broadcaster last summer and is now getting most of her information on Telegram. Like many others here, Ms. Schmidt cited The Great Reset, a book by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which Ms. Schmidt says reads like a script for how a group of powerful globalists plan to destroy the German nation and create a mishmash of people that can be led easily.

I didnt believe it either six months ago, she added.

Matthias Phlmann, the author of Right-Wing Esotericism, a book about the fusion of far-right conspiracy theories with alternative views, said such theories were spreading fast and well beyond the milieu of people traditionally open to far-right ideas.

These conspiracy theories are powerful accelerators of radicalization, he said. If you believe someone wants to erase you, that you live in a dictatorship, violence is justified.

Germanys federal intelligence service, which is known as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, recently created a new category for dangerous conspiracy theorists dubbed delegitimization of the state. It has also set up a special organization tasked with monitoring some 600 channels on Telegram associated with the protest movement.

Security agencies have been caught off guard before. Asked in September in Parliament whether there was a concrete danger coming from the pandemic protest movement, the government denied this, saying only that some protesters showed signs of radicalization and a greater readiness to commit violence.

Ten days later an employee of a gas station was shot dead by a customer after the employee asked him to put on a mask. The attacker had been a regular at the protest marches.

They have been very slow to understand the risk, said Mr. Nattke, who regularly meets with officials about the far-right threat and says he has been warning them for months. It wasnt really until the torchlight procession outside Petra Kppings house that they took it seriously.

In Dresden, the group that fantasized about killing the Saxon governor, and is now under investigation for plotting terrorism, was first discovered by journalists. Now Mr. Christians office has its own team of half a dozen Telegram watchers, who scroll through hatred and disinformation to identify serious threats.

Its frightening how many people are following these calls for mobilization, Mr. Christian said. The erosion of the political center has already begun.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

Read the original post:
In Germany, Threats Grow as Far Right and Pandemic Protestors Merge - The New York Times

Two GOP candidates for governor, Gary Rabine and Darren Bailey, address the Quincy Tea Party Tuesday night. Moderator Mecki Kosin is also pictured.

QUINCY Two Illinois gubernatorial candidates, a congresswoman and an assortment of other politicians made their way to Quincys industrial section of the Riverfront Tuesday evening.

The Quincy Tea Party has been holding its meetings in the lower level of Tower Pizza and Mexican, but with a larger than usual crowd expected to gather, the organization sought a larger venue and held the event at The Well, 711 Front Street.

The forum gave candidates an opportunity to present their platforms and circulate petitions. The Tea Party is planning to host more formal debates at future meetings this year, with the June 28 primary and November 8 general election looming.

The first day of filing for the 2022 election is Monday, March 7.

Two of the GOP candidates for governor, Gary Rabine and State. Sen Darren Bailey (R-Xenia) met privately on Baileys campaign bus before the event was under way. Both have made previous stops in Quincy.

The appearance was timely in that the states chief medical advisor, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, had just announced her resignation as director of the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Bailey said her stepping down was a relief for Illinois. His full interview is below.

The Bailey campaign also used the opportunity to take Twitter and link Ezike and Governor JB Pritzker to one of his rivals running for governor, Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin.

Republican Congresswoman Mary Miller, who is running in the newly-configured 15th District against another incumbent member of Congress, Rodney Davis, said she wanted to be with salt of the earth people in Illinois Tuesday night as opposed to being in the U.S. Capitol to watch President Joe Biden give the State of the Union address.

Davis did attend the State of the Union and released a statement:

The state of our Union is in crisis because of President Joe Biden and one-party, Democrat rule in Washington. The President will try and rewrite history, but on every major issue, his Administration and his Democrat allies in Congress are failing the American people. We have a border crisis, an economic and inflation crisis, an energy crisis, a crime crisis, a national security crisis, and more. Every single crisis has been created or made worse by the policies and rhetoric of President Biden and Democrats in Congress.My Republican colleagues and I will continue to hold President Biden and Speaker Pelosi accountable for pursuing an out-of-touch, far-left agenda and press for real solutions to the issues the American people face and care about.

Congressman Sam Graves, who represents Missouris 6th District also responded:

The difference between what were feeling in North Missouri and what the President says were feeling is stark. The supply chain crisis, coupled with out-of-control inflation, is driving prices through the roof and making it more difficult for families, farmers, and small business owners to succeed. This crisis isnt going to end until President Biden stops passing the buck and starts living up to his promises.

Go here to read the rest:
Quincy Tea Party hosts candidates as filing time is around the corner Muddy River News - Muddy River News