How to destroy a right wing extremist
Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?
Abraham Lincoln
Like many here I go out of my way to participate in protest actions to show the strength of our beliefs. I attended a meeting last Tuesday just got back in town and will be going up to Phoenix if Trump keeps on schedule.
On MSNBC they just interviewed a former skin head who was asked why did he change? Kindness from a lesbian supervisor, an African American coworker.
It reminded me of some advice I got from one of my Thai partners 30 years ago. There was one person who was causing us lots of problems in our business and our workers. He was an American and he had a terrible temper and had alienated everyone I knew. He had gotten himself into some serious trouble and was having problems that were going to cost him his employment and probably impact his family.
I told my partner about it and had a couple of ideas how I could speed up his self destruction.
My partner told me not to do that but instead invite him out to lunch. I resisted. He said that you don't have to like the fellow, infact he was a terrible person and caused a lot of harm to different people however right now he had lost all the friends in the world and if I called him up and simply offered to take him to lunch it would have a dramatic impact on him, you would become his only friend. He might turn his life around, he might not but he would always remember that lunch.
I have a friend who stupidly sold some bad annuities and is now in prison. I never liked him and avoided him as much as I could but now all of his friends, his ex wife, his children and everyone but one sister refuse to talk to him. When he was making big money everyone wanted to be his friend and now I am the only one that talks to him and I get a monthly call. Now he will listen to me.
When I google former skin heads transformed by kindness this is what you find:
This one from Cracked of all places
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1446-5-things-i-learned-as-neo-nazi.html
Now, if you're expecting some corny story where I meet a member of a minority who shows me kindness and changes my life forever ... that's good, because that's what you're going to get.inding work is tough for any ex-con, but it doesn't get any easier when you have a swastika tattoo on your neck. The only guy who would hire me was, ironically, this incredibly Jewish guy named Keith -- if we made a sitcom about my life, he'd be played by Jerry Stiller. He hired me to move furniture for $100 a day, and after I worked for three days, I was ready for him to screw me over. I remember standing there, just thinking over everything I'd ever learned about how cheap and deceitful Jews were. Then he walked up, counted out the money, looked at me, and said, "You know what? You're a damn good worker, Frank. Have an extra $100."
I was even more pissed than if he'd tried to cheat me. But the worst insult was when he hired me full time. This all made me angry because, frankly, I didn't know how else to react. Kindness was new and scary. Here's an important secret: All us juvey kids grew up thinking we were dumb. I was told I was dumb my whole life, by my stepdad, by the cops, by myself, and it stuck. I believed it, so whenever I'd mess up working with Keith, my first reaction was to say how stupid I was. Until one day I broke this big expensive marble-top table, and I said to Keith, "I'm sorry, man, I'm so stupid, I'm sorry."
And he interrupted me: "Stop saying you're dumb, you fucking idiot."
Then he started talking about me. He said I worked hard. He said I was reliable. He said I was smart. And I was blown away, because all I could think about was how much I looked up to this guy, how much I wanted to be like him someday -- this old Jewish guy who was everything I'd ever taught myself to hate. I was blown away by this entire speech he gave about how much he respected me -- me -- and then he ended it with: "You know who you remind me of, Frank? You remind me of me."
That's when I knew I was done beating my head against the wall. What you have to understand is that every racist, or anyone who belongs to some kind of hate movement, makes exceptions. Because you make stereotypes about people, and then you meet one, and that one is always the exception: "All women are bitches, except Jessica, she's cool." Or "All black people are n*****s, except Ronny, because I work with Ronny and he is a good guy -- oh yeah, and Maurice, I went to school with him, and he was just like me, too." For a while Keith was my exception. And then he just ... wasn't.
The driving power behind these movements is fear: fear of inadequacy, fear of being forgotten, fear of not mattering. And as hard as we tried to scare people, no one was ever more scared than we were. Hate is just repackaged fear, and if you tear away the layers of a hateful person, you'll usually find a scared little kid in there.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4286678/Former-skinhead-Angela-King-converted-life-hate.html
After three years in prison with the help of some unexpected friendships, Angela turned her life around.
‘It literally changed my life,’ Angela told DailyMail.com. ‘Everything up until that point, I used aggression and anger and violence.
‘Those were my reactions to anything and everything in my life. So when I was treated with kindness and compassion, it was like being disarmed. I wasn’t prepared for that.’
. .
Life After Hate was started as a blog to help transitioning far right extremists, but today the group has several support groups, helps with research projects and education and continues to advocate for people transitioning out of extremist groups.
‘From working with the populations of other former extremists – I wouldn’t have believed it before, but I absolutely with all my heart and with everything that I am believe that even the smallest acts of kindness and compassion can change lives and change the entire course of a life,’ she said.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/ex-skinhead-recalls-violent-past
As a teenager, Brian Patterson was on a fast track to hell. The product of a ruptured home and a racist father, Patterson in the late 1980s fell in with neo-Nazi skinheads, including a period in Alabama with notorious Aryan Youth Front leader Bill Riccio. When he was homeless, alone, angry and abusing drugs and booze at age 18, a mysterious stranger stepped into Patterson’s life and rescued him: a self-avowed black Muslim named Alfred. Several months after their encounter, the older man and the teenager parted ways — but the crossing of their paths made an indelible impression on Patterson, who has fully rejected racism and hate.
Here is the story from the guy that was on MSNBC
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/08/reflections-white-supremacist-150828100415193.html
Thus all the information I took in on a daily basis as a white supremacist had to be either spun to fit the twisted lens I chose to view the world through or rejected entirely. Enjoying culture like the Green Bay Packers, Seinfeld and favourite movies like Bladerunner and This is Spinal Tap was soiled by my racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. Many moments were spent in painful awareness of my hypocrisy.
But the most powerful moments that fed the growing sense of exhaustion that led me away from hate were ones rooted in love. Time after time during my seven year stint in hate groups, I was graced with kindness and forgiveness by people I was openly hostile to because of who they were. Refusing to let my inhumanity diminish theirs, people like a Jewish boss, a lesbian supervisor, and black and Latino co-workers modelled what it means to be a human being, when I least deserved, but most needed such a lesson.
If you are like me you are likely to say yeah BUT Nazis and White Supremacists go over the line and you should meet force with force. I would like to introduce you to my friend Alex Keisch
One of the youngest Holocaust Survivors he doesn't want people to retaliate and he doesn't want people to by bystanders. He wants people to become "Upstanders"
"My goal has been to teach a lesson - how would you stop something like the holocaust from happening today. It takes courage to survive; it is the easy way out to go ahead and die and not stand up for what is right."
As part of Keisch's presentation, he speaks to the troubles of bullying and how small acts of unchecked aggression can lead to major problems that affect the lives of entire groups of people. He has come up with a catch phrase that he hopes will not only make people stop and think, but can be used as a mantra - "We don't allow that here."
"A lot of people see bullying as just part of being a kid. No, it is not," said Keisch. "At this point, bullying is an epidemic, not a rite of passage. Is genocide the next phase of bullying; I say yes. Generations of years, centuries of bullying result in genocides."
Finding systemic solutions and turning bystanders into "up-standers" has been at the heart of Keisch's message since he began giving lectures.
http://www.yesnobullies.org/
Maybe you know a group that would like to hear his formula for eliminating bullying, he lives in VA. I know that sometimes he feels like he is out there by himself so you can do something simply by sending him a note of encouragement.
I like his term "Upstanders" it sounds like something the President and Mrs. Obama would say.
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Good to see you again. Glad you are still around and hope things have been going well for you.
Several of my neighbors voted for Dolt45, I know this for a fact. But I have never stopped being nice to them. I've always been a firm believer in "kill 'em with kindness." 
Enlightening and informative.
I now have a new word for my vocabulary.
My one wish is that it can be sent to 45 and maybe he can expand his.
