The Nazi groups waved swastikas, DeSantis flags, and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” a slogan popularized at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina. A notable attendee was Kent “Boneface” McLellan, a neo-Nazi who has reportedly traveled to Ukraine to serve with the Azov Battalion, showing how U.S. aid to Ukraine is being used to train and fuel the far-right movement of our own country. “The chickens coming home to roost,” as Malcolm X said.

While both mobilizations combined numbered less than 100 participants, and many traveled from out of state, neo-Nazis across the country are becoming more emboldened to hold public demonstrations and this must be analyzed. This increase in activity should be understood as the Republican Party openly embracing far-right political stances to mobilize their base, combined with the mainstreaming of racist and chauvinist politics by the media.

Organizations of all stripes are coming together against the rise of white supremacist terrorism, as seen following the murder of three Black people in Jacksonville. The people taking away reproductive rights and banning Black education are the same ones cozying up to white supremacists and neo-Nazi organizations.

We join with other organizations demanding that Governor DeSantis condemn these white supremacist mobilizations stoked by his policies and rhetoric. Governor DeSantis attacks teaching Black history in the legislature while white supremacists commit targeted attacks on Black people. This is national oppression in action.

The increasing activity of the far right extends beyond the DeSantis administration. The mainstreaming of far-right organizations and policies should be seen as a symptom of the decline of U.S. imperialism and power. The U.S. empire is in decline and our internal contradictions are sharpening. The time to join the fight is now! frso.org/join

#OrlandoFL #FRSO #FRSOOrlando #AntiFascism #Nazis #DeSantis

This week an FSU undergraduate student has been exposed through copious emails and message logs as being a member of the Neo-Nazi group Patriot Front. The student is Calvin Stow-Ortiz from Tampa, where his father unsurprisingly works for the Tampa Police Department. In leaked messages Stow-Ortiz references spreading the groups propaganda posters and stickers in the Tampa area and made plans with another Patriot Front member to vandalize FAMU’s campus with white supremacist stickers. On the messaging app Telegram, Stow-Ortiz uses a picture of an SS Nazi soldier as his profile picture. In another leaked message Stow-Ortiz shared a video of a torchlit Nazi march and said Patriot Front should emulate it. There can be no doubt that Stow-Ortiz is a white supremacist, anti-semite, and fascist.

Despite overwhelming calls from the community to remove this white supremacist from our campus, Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students Angela Chong made it clear in an email obtained by Our Tallahassee that FSU would once again allow fascists to remain on campus. The email to a concerned citizen says FSU is unaware of any “actionable activity or offenses” and that “FSU prides itself on protecting freedom of expression and speech.” The email falsely claims that the safety of students, faculty, and staff is FSU’s foremost priority. The FSU and Tallahassee community have made it very clear: Calvin Stow-Ortiz presents a threat to the safety of all marginalized groups in Tallahassee.

In October 2021 Patriot Front held a retreat in Tallahassee at Williams Landing Park. In attendance were members from out of state and all around Florida. At this retreat they practiced marching like Nazis and pathetically attempted to train in hand to hand combat. SDS condemns FSU’s inaction in the face of racism and hate in our community and on our campus. SDS demands the immediate expulsion of Calvin-Stow Ortiz from FSU. SDS calls on all progressive student organizations to join us in opposition to Nazis on campus. FSU claims to care about diversity and inclusion, yet have shown time and time again that this is a lie. FSU honored the legacy of slave owner Frances Eppes for decades, so it comes as no surprise that racists like Stow-Ortiz feel that they can spread hate in our community. No white supremacists on our campus!

#TallahasseeFL #StudentMovement #StudentsForADemocraticSociety #Nazis #Antifascism

On May 8, 1945, at 11:01 pm Central European Time – already May 9 in the USSR – the German surrender took effect, ending World War II in Europe. The war with Germany and her fellow members of what we now call fascist allies in Europe – Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Slovakia and Finland – had already claimed the lives of perhaps 50 million people. In the ensuing years, oceans of ink have been spilled by right-wing historians and polemicists in an attempt to distort or even minimize the significance of this date. The purpose of this rewriting of history is in some cases to defend fascism, but in many more it is simply to diminish the prestige of the Soviet Union, the first socialist state. We think it is appropriate to call to mind a few facts.

First, the Nazi empire was guilty of the most astounding crimes, some without any real parallel in history. Over the summer of 1944, some 400,000 Hungarian Jews – almost the whole Jewish population of Hungary – were transported by rail to Auschwitz, a death camp the Nazis had built in occupied Poland, and murdered, down to the last child. Most were gassed, but history records that many of the children were thrown alive into crematory fires – sometimes more than a thousand children were killed this way in a single day. In all, 6 million Jewish people were murdered in the most efficient genocide campaign the world has had the misfortune to witness. Many millions more were murdered among the Romani, Slavic and other peoples the Nazis considered racial inferiors and among Soviet prisoners of war. Still hundreds of thousands more were murdered among people with disabilities, sexual minorities and other targeted groups.

Second, the capitalist world was for a long time complacent about the rise of Nazism. The governments of France, England and Poland stood idly by while Hitler annexed first Austria and then Czechia. The cost of this was enormous. Almost half the tanks used by the Nazis in the conquest of France were built at the Skoda works in occupied Czechia. And this was not an isolated case. Even with Hitler's racism on full display, the democratic governments of Europe were far more concerned with his value as a bulwark against socialism.

Third, it was the Soviet Union which, from the beginning, was the main enemy of Nazi Germany. What we now know as the Axis originally called itself the Anti-Comintern Pact. Long before what is widely considered the start date of World War II, Soviet soldiers had already fought bloody battles against German and Italian fascists in Spain, and against Japanese militarism in Manchuria. Throughout the period of appeasement by the capitalist powers, the Soviet government urged the strongest possible resistance to Nazi aggression, even going as far as to offer one million Soviet soldiers for the defense of Czechoslovakia – an offer which Czechoslovakia would probably have accepted, but the Polish government refused to allow transit or supply of this army through their country. The period of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR was an emergency measure, agreed by the Soviets only when it was clear they would otherwise be standing alone against Germany and might have to fight a second front against Japan. Throughout the period of this pact, the Soviet government and people frantically built weapons, constructed defenses, and organized and prepared for the decisive confrontation they knew very well was only a matter of time.

Fourth, the decisive sacrifices and the decisive victories in the war against Nazi Germany occurred on the Eastern Front. Casualty figures compiled by the German military showed that between the start of the war and January 31, 1945, 3.5 million of the 4.4 million German casualties had occurred on the Eastern Front. The single Battle of Stalingrad cost the Germans as many casualties as the entire fighting in France, including both 1940 and 1944. When the German invasion of the USSR began in the summer of 1940, the Soviets faced 3.8 million soldiers and 7000 armored vehicles. When the Western Allies made their greatly delayed landing in Normandy, they faced only 600,000 men and 2000 armored vehicles. Worse for the Germans, the crack Nazi units which had conquered France in six weeks in 1940 had been destroyed in the battles on the Eastern Front and rebuilt with raw recruits. In sacrifice, the USSR lost 27 million of her citizens in the war – by far the most of any country in the European conflict. Many of them were killed in combat, but millions more were murdered in prisoner of war camps and concentration camps or were among the civilians massacred or starved by the invaders.

Fifth, the Soviet victory in World War II was possible only due to socialist construction. In World War I, the Russian empire fielded by far the weakest army of any of the major powers. Though it had an almost unlimited supply of soldiers, its level of training, organization, and equipment was disastrously bad. During World War II, in every single year, the newly industrialized USSR outproduced Germany – at the time, Europe's premier industrial power – in every major category of war material – planes, tanks, cannons, rifles, machine guns. This tremendous advantage in war material was key to the Soviet ability to resist and ultimately defeat an invasion force which had completely conquered Belgium and France – at the time, a major military power in her own right – in just six weeks.

The reality is that the Soviet Union was the most consistent and dangerous enemy of fascism, the worst evil that Europe has ever suffered, and Soviet efforts and the strength of the USSR were key to fascism's defeat. This fact was not lost on many people in 1945, and certainly not on the handful of survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp liberated by the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division on January 31 of 1945.

No objective evaluation of socialism is possible without an objective evaluation of the real world history of socialism. In the long list of accomplishments of real world socialism to date, we must prominently include playing the key role in the defeat of Nazism.

#UnitedStates #International #Asia #Europe #Nazis #WorldWarII #Socialism #Antifascism #Russia #SovietUnion

Milwaukee, WI – Activists rallied outside the Milwaukee County courthouse on the afternoon of July 11 to stand in solidarity with a student who was arrested and charged for taking a vulgar, racist sign away from a Nazi.

Grae Hosmanek is a freshman student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In May, she and others witnessed a racist student protesting a Jewish event on campus and gathered around to deter him from spreading hate speech and threats. The lone fascist, who called himself “Chris,” was holding a sign that read “(((GAS)))” a reference to the Nazi holocaust, and another sign bearing a Nazi swastika. The sign also advocated for “civil war.” Chris told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he wanted to “spark the conversation” about “Marxism ideology.”

Hosmanek stepped in to take a sign away from the Nazi student, to the supportive cheers of the crowd that had gathered. She ripped the sign in half and ran off with it. The campus police caught her and arrested her a few minutes later. While police allowed the Nazi student to continue his threats toward Jewish and other students, Hosmanek was charged with theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct and obstructing an officer.

After supporters gathered at her first court hearing, three of the charges were dropped. Hosmanek is still facing a charge of “vandalism,” and chose to fight her case at trial and plead not guilty to the bogus charge. “I want people to see me, what I did, and why I did it,” Hosmanek told Fight Back!, “You need to not only stand up for what is ri