Racists in the military
You know what I hate more than the media slicing up veterans? I hate veterans doing that to each other;
“Outside every major military installation, you will have at least two or three active neo-Nazi organizations actively trying to recruit on-duty personnel,” said T.J. Leyden, a former white power skinhead in the U.S. Marines who now conducts anti-extremism training.
That’s from a link that Art sent us from a Hampton Roads local TV station. With all of the years I spent in the Army, almost all of it on military installations, I never witnessed anyone being recruited by a neo-Nazi group. And then this quote;
To J.M. Berger, a counterterrorism analyst and editor for IntelWire.Com, the military attracts extremists because of the weapons training it provides.
“One thing that we really have to keep in mind is that extremists are often explicitly interested in joining the military because they get training that they can use later,” Berger told CNN, adding that “there have been some explicit discussions among leaders of some of these groups that their followers should join the Army to get trained.”
And what, exactly, are they going to do with that training? Seriously. This miniscule portion of the population is going to raise up and use their military training to take over country? Or will they just use it to make pin-prick insurgencies that will make them more hated than are already?
I’m pretty sure that most gun owning Americans would say they’ll protect their homes and families from neo-Nazis just as quickly as they’d defend against anyone from the other end of the political spectrum.
Leyden, the former white supremacist who wrote the book “Skinhead Confessions: From Hate to Hope,” said he openly displayed his extremist leanings while serving in the Marine Corps in the late 1980s.
“I used to hang a swastika flag on my wall locker and everybody in my unit all the way up to my commander knew it,” he said. “The only time they ever asked me to take it down was when the commanding general would come through, just so they wouldn’t get in trouble. And afterwards, I would put it right back up and they were perfectly fine with it.”
He noted that his brother’s unit had less tolerance for such displays.
Yeah, I don’t see that happening. A Nazi flag would last about three seconds in any of my units and more than likely, it’d be one my privates who would have removed it before I saw it.
According to the Department of Defense website, the task force visited 28 installations and interviewed more than 7,500 soldiers. It found that less than 1% said they had seen soldiers or civilian employees involved with extremist groups.
A decade later, the Southern Law Poverty Center reported in 2006 that some high-profile members of extremist groups were serving in the U.S. military.
Yeah, we talked about the SPLC report a few years ago. The assclowns went on what the Neo-Nazis told them about their military service but never bothered to check on them. We could find no record of them ever serving. So if you suspend common sense, it’s easy to believe SPLC.
Category: Military issues, Veterans Issues
Yeah I bet that would have flown for about two seconds after I saw it. Fricken idiot…
Are you fucking kidding me? That shit wouldn’t fly for 2 seconds….”everybody was fine with it”….my big hairy white ass. Not in my Army and I was in during the late eighties. I’m no Marine but I can’t imagine that shit would last any longer in the Marines either…..fuck that…I KNOW it would fly in the Marines….
…sorry Marines, big fat typo…I meant it WOULDN’T fly in the Marines….sheesh, I let that downrange a little early! Sorry again to the Marines here…
Leyden’s got a nice gig for himself conducting “anti-extremist training”. As long as the SPLC keeps defining down extremism he has a job for life.
Still, I wonder if he is by chance from Illinois, cause, you know, I hate Illinois Nazis.
#4 wins with the Blues Brothers reference!!!
I remember going to the TJ Leyden training while I was an AIT XO Ft Bliss. That would put it in the 1998-2000 timeframe. It was very informative at a time when most of this white supremacist stuff wasn’t common knowledge. It was also about that time when the army started being on the lookout for racist tattoos. We never actively found one, but one Private secretly came forward to his Drill Sergeant and sheepishly told him that he had a swastica tattoo he got when he was young and stupid and wanted it removed before anyone else found out about it. The army took care of the removal.
Uuummm… 24 years and have never seen it once. Assuming this ass wipe survived until his chain of command found out, there are specific regs. governing exactly these displays to include the Stars and Bars. He is full of shit.
And the whole mole/undercover training meme sounds like the same urban myth perpetrated about infiltration of gang members in the late nineties. Except I don’t remember the media ever picking up on that story. Of course this is totally different since this asshole is white.
Back in ’85, at Misawa AB, a Russian linguist hung a Soviet Merchant Marine flag on his wall. First inspection and it was ordered removed.
Yeah right. What a crock of shit.
I’m betting the proponent of this training is DEOMI.
Back when I was there, this took up an entire day of instruction. They had an E-8 who was one of the experts in it, and he had several tables of books and material they had reportedly found in Army rooms- from The Turner Diaries to The Anarchists Cookbook and much more; white supremacist literature, pamphlets, etc.
They said Bragg, Knox, Riley, Jackson and a couple other posts were where it was found the most. Benning wasn’t mentioned, surprisingly.
It was interesting stuff, but I’ve never been approached, even as a private way back. And of course, we ALL looked like skinheads back then….
The latest report I saw said that Page converted to National SOCIALISM (Nazism) and racism, AFTER his discharge from the military. Supposedly, he converted because of policies he experienced IN the Army.
Did you know as many Army Sergeants have won Gold Medals in the London Olympics, as have dishonorably discharged Clinton era Veterans that committed mass murder in the last 6 months?
Did you know that as many wives of Army Sergeants have won Gold Medals in the London Olympics, as have movie theaters been shot up in the last 12 months?
http://waronterrornews.typepad.com/home/olympics-2012/
And remember how Kerry said if you don’t work hard and get into college, you could end up in Iraq, and all those people that only joined for the college money? Well, Joshua Taylor decided that reading about history wasn’t gonna cut it, so he joined the Marines, so he could make History instead. He feels sorry for his buddy that got stuck in Hawaii instead of getting Afghanistan like himself. Oh yeah, he had a full scholarship.
http://?waronterrornews.typepad.com/?home/2012/08/?cpl-taylor-chose-making-history?-over-reading-about-it.html
How does it relate? Well, sometimes, it’s nice to remember what “Normal” looks like. And the “Normal” for Troops is doing the right thing, even when “normal” people say it can’t (or shouldn’t) be done.
Of course there are racists in the military.
It is called the “Mason” club. Gotta love the irony, too.
Look to the IN, especially TRADOC (the ring for those of you that are unfamiliar with it). It gets old.
Apparently, James Burmeister, the 82nd Airborne soldier convicted of killing two black civilians back in the mid 90
s, displayed nazi flags in his barracks. Not saying it was a common occurrence Army wide, as an investigation revealed only a small percentage of skinheads in their ranks, but it did happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/28/us/ex-gi-at-fort-bragg-is-convicted-in-killing-of-2-blacks.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Over 20 years, I can safely say I met a few racists in the Air Force, but nothing organized. Funny thing though, the most racist person I knew was a black guy from Detroit (I grew up near there). Everything he was asked to do (maintaining jets) was a plot to keep a brother down, even when his direct supervisors were black.
Had one guy try and start up a skinhead group when I was in Germany,asked me to a “Meeting he had with 3 other guys while in Hof during our Border Rotation. Started out as he was starting a Motorcycle Club and then he started spouting the core Nazi beliefs as the basis for the club. Three things- he was a friggin’ POL Clerk who was shitty at his job, married a stripper who was back in the States spending his $$. 2 I told him my Grandfather was killed by Brownshirts outside of Frankfurt in 1935 for making a public statement against Hitler that got published in the Local Newspaper. 3 The asshat didn’t even OWN a Motorcycle. He started sporting a Hitler mustache and gave the Nazi salute while off duty- we all avoided him like the friggin’ plague.
He was was later chaptered out for poor job performance but we all knew it was his beliefs that was the major factor. DICKWEED!
This same story went around 20 years ago.
Only that time it was the crack-dealing gangs that were sending their members into the military for the training so they could better defend their turf.
blah blah blah yada yada
The news media is getting their story ideas from Hollywood now. If you don’t have anything new to say, just rehash a 20 year old movie with something interesting in it, like a woman with three boobs, and sell it to the public all over again.
Tman: I’d take that NYT article with a grain of salt. Frankly, it sounds to me like Burmeister was “blowing smoke” to his girlfriend about displaying a Nazi flag in his barracks room, and she fell for it. I’d love to know if she claimed to have seen it in person or if that was based on Burmeister telling her he’d done that. I’d guess the latter.
Burmeister may well have put up Nazi items temporarily behind locked doors and taken pictures. But I’d also guess he took them down and hid them every time he left – if for no other reason than to prevent it from being confiscated if the room were inspected. I’d have to hear firsthand testimony from others in that unit before I’d believe the unit’s chain-of-command tolerated that crap.
But Hondo…. No one would ever lie about something like that to make people believe they’re a badass would they???? Why….. That would be dishonest!
Next thing you know someone will claim military honors they didn’t earn.
Nahhhh… That could never happen.
When I was in “Division” from ’93-’95, I remember approaching some idiots in Rick’s. They were wearing ‘bomber’ short waisted jackets with all kinds of World War II SS insignia and patches sewn on them, skinny red suspenders and their blue jeans ‘bloused’ into white laced jump boots.
“Who the f*** let you out of the barracks dressed like that?” I said. Then I started quizzing the idiots about what they had sewn on their jackets. Needless to say, they had NO clue what what it was they were wearing. It was just “Nazi stuff” to them. I told them they were wearing something the Germans gave to mothers for having babies and walked away laughing at them but deep down embarassed by them.
I spent between the early 1990s and last year in the Army and the Guard, as an Orthodox Jew with the funny little hat.
The only overt racism I ever encountered was from black CS or CSS MOS soldiers, often with their NCOs running cover, including the only times in my life I’ve ever been called a kike or a “hymie.” If there where white supremacists out there, maybe they’re not focused on Jews anymore, I dunno. But that doesn’t fit the narrative. Black people can’t be racist.
@20.
I have seen what you are talking about and you are correct.
They hide behind “Daddy”.(CSM)
It is all about the ring. Usually E-6 and above.
OK let me sum this one up in my little way:
I spent 32 years in the Navy and served with every branch at one time or another. I now serve my country in a civilian capacity.
The notion that the armed forces is a bastion, recruiting ground, and/or training opportunity for white supremists and hate monger in BULLS*IT. It is against our doctrine, policy, ethos, and a pure departure from what WE are all about.
The day I am wrong flaming purple monkeys will fly out of my butt!
True Hondo, who knows what the truth is.
The reality is that there probably were isolated incidents of openly racist soldiers and actions, but hardly representative of the military. One can’t expect to filter out 100% the bad apple recruits.
I have done no studies to confirm this except for my short stint ( 5 1/2 years) in the army. I would postulate that the the small amount of “soldiers/marines/sailers” that say they are open racists are E-1 to E-3’s possibly a couple E-4’s. Loners and probabaly not great soldiers who will tell some civilian journalist they are an open extremist and take phone pictures of their room with all their Nazi crap hung up, only to immediatley take it down. I`m not going that no leve of leaderships thinks like this, but I think i can safely say that people with these ideals dont last in the military. Plus, everyone who has been in the service knows that shitbags come in all races and are all equaly worthless.
This is the most hypocritical thing I have ever read, Lilyea a known racist who will gladly slice up another veteran just for disagreeing with his politics has the gall to post this.. What a disgrace!!
Looks like someone forgot to go screw himself today and became all crankified.