False flag operation?
A reporter from Wisconsin Public Radio reached out Wednesday (9-20-17) to the Blaska Policy Werkes for a statement on the vandalism done to the Voluntarios Internacionales monument in James Madison Park.
The reporter noted that just one month earlier, the Werkes had called for the removal of this monument to Communism, for that is what it is. (“Mayor Soglin, tear down this monument.”)
The stone memorializes the International Brigades that, in the acquiescent wording of every news story, “fought against fascism” in the Spanish Civil War in the run-up to World War 2. What you never read is that, while the International Brigade did fight against fascism, it fought FOR Stalinist Big-C Communism. For, the brigades were organized, funded, and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of Joe Stalin’s Kremlin.
The Madison connection was one Clarence Kailin, a lifelong, unrepentant Stalinist. “Madison’s last Communist.” (Story here.)
The Policy Werkes responded to WPR that we denounce all vandalism, including this. The only reason we called for the removal of the Communist stone was that the mayor of Madison was busying himself obliterating symbols of hate, starting with fairly anodyne plaque memorializing the Confederate solidiers buried as prisoners of war at Forest Hills Cemetery.
We then put the reporter on the defensive (a favorite tactic of your irascible scribe). If you are reporting this vandalism, we asked, why has public radio not seen fit to report the defacing of the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Officers Memorial on the Capitol grounds? On the Capitol Grounds!
Not surprised that the reporter ignored our words of wisdom.
The police memorial lists the names of 273 officers killed in the line of duty, with room for the inevitable more. Saturday morning (09-16-17) it was discovered red spray-painted with the words “Justice4AnthonySmith — an apparent reference to the protests in St. Louis that same day after a judge exonerated a white police officer for killing a black hoodlum.
Justice for Anthony Smith?
Anthony Smith had a rap sheet for drug distribution and unlawful possession of a firearm. He was out on probation for a theft charge at the time of the incident. Two St. Louis Police officers saw Smith making a fresh drug deal. Dashcam footage recorded Smith ramming his car twice into their squad car before attempting a high-speed getaway. Police managed to stop Smith. Instead of exiting the car as ordered, the Perp appeared to be reaching for a gun.
The police officer opened fire through the car window, killing Smith. A handgun was found in the vehicle between the driver’s seat and center console. Believe it or not, the district attorney filed charges against the police officer! (Call it the Ferguson effect.) The State of Missouri even alleged that the officer planted the weapon in the car, though dashcam footage showed no such deception.
The trial judge noted Smith’s DNA was found on the heroin in the car and on the gun but not the police officer’s. The judge also observed that during his 28 years on the bench “an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.” The police officer was exonerated. (Some might say Justice for Anthony Smith WAS served.)
Of course, the cop haters rioted, destroying property and throwing bricks and breaking windows at the mayor’s residence. (Why the mayor, we’ll never know.) At least 23 people had been arrested and 10 police officers had suffered injuries. (WaPo account here.)
Wisconsin Public Radio is not the only blinkered source.
False flag operation?
On the vandalism to the Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, the Wisconsin State Journal carried only a small, wire service story of 77 words, no photographs, and nowhere near Page One, much less any photos.
Compare that to the State Journal’s Page One treatment devoted to the Communist monument; 423 words reported by the excellent Rob Schultz plus two photographs in print and many more on-line.
That included a lengthy statement from Mayor Soglin (“Given the enabling rhetoric from Donald Trump, particularly since Charlottesville …”), comments from various outraged faith leaders, even a denunciation from Attorney General Brad Schimel. Nothing like of which was solicited for the Law Enforcement Memorial. A statement, perhaps, from Police Chief Koval? It was never solicited, he tells me.
Mayor Soglin, State Rep. Chris Taylor, Norm Stockwell (publisher of Progressive magazine), and Comrade John Nichols sponsored one of those feel-good community healing events last night at the Communist stone. None of them has condemned the defacement of the dead cops memorial.
Another is scheduled Sunday 4:30 – 6:30 p.m., sponsored by (among others):
Madison General Defense Committee of the IWW
International Marxist Tendency Madison
Worker’s World Party Wisconsin
Socialist Party Of Madison and Dane County
Madison Degenderettes (“a friendly international feminist & gender queer agitprop club”)
Madison Socialist Alternative
International Socialist Organization Madison
Great Lakes Antifa
Madison Democratic Socialists of America
Solidarity – A Socialist, Feminist, Anti-Racist Organization
We acknowledge that swastikas sprayed on the monument, located very near the historic Gates of Heaven synagogue on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, raised the ante. The graffiti made an anti-Antifa statement (wrap your heads around that one) and declared “Trump Rules.”
Then again, Madison plays its own race card when a white police officer shoots a black criminal. So the dead cops memorial should resonate, as well. Who will sponsor THAT rally?
We also note that the red paint seems suspiciously identical in both vandalisms. The Policy Werkes does not rule out that the Communist monument defacement may have been a false flag operation. That is how Antifa/Communists operate.
Blaska Policy Werkes 
39 responses to “Two monuments defaced in Madison: one gets big media play, the vandalism to the police memorial, not so much”
Every year in May, hundreds of police officers gather around Wisconsin at this Law Enforcement Memorial. The state doesn’t own it, it belongs to the foundation that supports fallen officers, the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Memorial.
Police join together in memory of the hundreds of officers who died while doing their jobs. They join to give support and condolences and remembrance to the families of their fallen friends and heroes of their communities. Officers that died unselfishly helping others,They sacrificed everything and their families must go on without them forever. No more a father, a husband, or wife,a mother, a brother, son or daughter. To deface this memorial to them shows a level of disrespect most undeserving. At the same time in May police attend the Memorial here in Wisconsin, another national Memorial in Washington, DC honors police nationwide. And all across America from east coast to west, heroes are remembered. This vandalism makes Madison look bad in the public eye nationwide more than anything. The only thing worse is the media silence on what happened and lack of any conscience.
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Clarence Kailin may have been an unrepentant socialist (and to those of us in Madison’s near east side, just a gentle elderly soul in the neighborhood), but that memorial to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (and Clarence) salutes their sacrifice in fighting fascism, not their support of Stalin. Don’t you right-wing nutballs see the difference? They were right to oppose Franco, a surrogate for Hitler, after all. Or does fascism not really matter to y’all? And a false flag operation? False flag by whom?
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It was a fight between fascism and communism. Clarence Kailin was not just a socialist, he was an unrepentant communist.
“In August 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Capital Times ran a somewhat derisive front-page article about Clarence Kailin under the headline, “Madison’s Last Communist?”
“A decade after the collapse of Soviet communism, at a time when socialism has been upstaged by environmentalism, feminism and other -isms, Clarence Kailin remains an unrepentant red.” — Isthmus, 10/26/09
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One more thing, A-Bob: do you really think Stalin fought in Spain for Denmark-style socialism? Or that Bill Clinton was president of the Second Republic?
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For years I’ve been trying to get you and your fans to acknowledge the difference between Western European democratic socialism and Stalinism. Guess it finally took. I’ll take that as a victory here in the black-and-white world of Blaska’s blog.
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By your pretzel logic there should be monuments in eastern Europe memorializing the Wehrmacht’s role in fighting Stalinist oppression. You may want to educate yourself on the Red Terror that those wonderful Fascist fighting Communists unleashed on Spain. It’s also instructive to read about the murderous internal purges amongst the Communists, including the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Make no mistake, for all it’s lionization by the left the Brigade was up to it’s waist in a cesspool of savagery and oppression that was a prologue to what the Stalinists would unleash in Russia and Europe. There’s a reason the Spanish Civil War turned Orwell on the communists.
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It was a brutal civil war, marked by atrocities by both sides. And it didn’t turn Orwell to fascism, either. Totalitarianism, left or right, is still totalitarianism.
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“Just a gentle, elderly soul in the neighborhood” Really? Just because you knew Kailin when the old goat had grown too decrepit to do Stalin’s bidding doesn’t excuse him or his pinko buddies in the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (talk about cultural misappropriation) from fighting for a totalitarian cause every bit as despicable as Nazism. If they’d won, Spain would have become another satellite of the USSR, every bit as brutal and repressive as Stalin’s puppet regimes in Eastern Europe. And the Communists would have been given free reign to do what they were already doing without the ALB’s help: burning churches, killing priests, raping nuns. NEWS FLASH: By fighting the Spanish fascists, Clarence and his buddies were supporting Stalin whether they intended to or not (and Clarence clearly intended to). Don’t try to make artificial and misleading distinctions.
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Ten hard Left organizations, many of whom could only exist in the university archipelago, probably accounts for forty? members. Except for the loonies who belong to two or three of these Orwellian nightmares. I manned a Peace Corps recruitment table at the Union in 1990. The push was to send Volunteers to the newly liberated eastern European nations to teach democracy, environmentalism and nascent free market distribution. Next to me was a rainbow haired recruiter for the Spartacist Youth League recruiting Commie wannabes. He got an earful as I described the needs of the people that had just given Commies the boot. Good times.
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I remember the Spartacists. Evil, ruthless throat cutters.
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ABob which flag would you consider more true in 1939? The Hammer and Sickle that invaded Poland from the east or the Swastika that invaded Poland from the west?
Show your work.
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The U.S. seemed to find the hammer and sickle to be just fine when it came to defeating fascism a few years later. Something to remember.
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All the same to you huh Bob?
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ABob… everyone who invaded Poland in 1939 was a Socialist. Some were National, some were international, but all were Socialists.
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Another irrelevant point from Splat. Nobody considers Nazis socialists in the leftist sense. Except you.
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Another great article David. It’s not surprising though – Madison has always had a shade of Red (that’s communist RED not media’s republican red which use to be blue – but that’s another story) to its political stance since the 1930’s when academia thought Stalinist communism was the new utopia. Comrade Paul (Fidel) Soglin, an unrepentant communist himself and other of his ilk want Madison to be the Berkeley of the East and adopt true communist/socialist ideas and values.
A look at the organizations who will rally at the “Voluntarios Internationals” monument on Sunday reads like a who’s who of the left uneducated in history. Stalin would send most of them to a gulag in Siberia for demonstrating. and not toeing the soviet communist line.
I find it interesting that the “Voluntarios Internacionales” monument is next to the Gates of Heaven Synagogue in James Madison park. Where else could you locate a monument in Madison to communism next to or in symbols of real freedom in America?
It’s even more interesting that the Wisconsin State Journal, which use to be a republican leaning newspaper and reported news from all sides has turned into the demoractic/socialist left Capital Times; which is no longer published in hard copy because nobody would buy it. Not reporting on the defacement of the law enforcement memorial in detail is part of that Capital Times view.
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It’s always puzzled me that the Commie salute (clenched fist, raised arm) like the one displayed on the recently defaced pinko shrine isn’t viewed with the same abhorrence as the stiff-armed Nazi salute. After all, they represent two sides of the same murderous, totalitarian nightmare. But Madison’s “progressives” are suffering a near-fatal fit of the vapors because THEIR shrine got a much-needed makeover. Where is the deafening silence from civic “leaders” that greeted the defacement of the Police Memorial? Soglin’s calling the vandals “cowardly” is rich; this from the guy who’s test of courage is desecrating the final resting place of long-dead POWs.
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You want clenched fists and raised arms? Subscribe to The Nation. Can’t run a photo of Bernie Sanders without it.
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A much-needed makeover? “Trump rules” and swastikas in front of a synagogue? Nice. You guys take the cake.
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Have you ever walked past Gates of Heaven and the commie shrine? They’re separated by a driveway to a parking lot and thematically have nothing to do with one another. GOH isn’t even a synagogue any more–it was deconsecrated long ago. Now it’s a venue Madison rents out primarily for wedding ceremonies and secular meetings of various kinds. If someone had painted swastikas on the GOH building, I’d be as indignant as you. But they didn’t. They targeted a pinko shrine dear to the hearts of Madison’s elite. (Didn’t you hear–Ed Asner, a real Hollywood celebrity contributed to funding it!!!!) So no wonder Madison’s “leaders” are in the throes of an epic hissyfit with members of the local media administering the smelling salts.
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Kriewald, what is with you and “pinko?” How old ARE you? It’s not the 1950’s anymore.
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From the 2009 Isthmus article, “Unrepentant Red: Clarence Kailin.”
Kailin remained loyal to the socialist cause and supportive of the Soviet Union even during the Stalin years, when, some say, more Soviet people were killed by the state than were by Hitler’s Germany. … But even with the benefit of hindsight, Kailin has “no regrets about defending the Soviet Union at the time. It was important to defend socialism, even if that wasn’t real socialism.”
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I’m waiting for Isthmus to run a gushing article some other ideologically blinded old goat entitled “Unrepentant Nazi.”
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ABob, the difference between western European socialism and Stalinism is that Stalin knew what he was doing.
Freedom, free speech, free markets are all anathema to all socialists.
That means you, Bob.
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Splat you’re a joke. You don’t seem to know much about Western Europe. More freedom, higher standard of living, way better healthcare (U!S!A! We’re #43!), happily and prosperously capitalist. Here we have more freedom to be poor, to be ill-educated, to be exploited by employers and monopolies, and to be afraid (yet insanely well armed). Before you or the other yahoos here tell me to go live there – I wish I could.
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I strongly suspect that your ranking of health care systems relies heavily on things such as life expectancy, which has much more to do with our lifestyles, and almost nothing to do with the quality of our healthcare system. (We have 1.1 guns per person and about .7 cars per citizen. We also have a growing addiction to heroine and cocaine. Do you think those things might have an impact on life expectancy?) Lefties keep these rankings stashed away so that they can spring them on us, when it’s completely irrelevant. Like now. So tell me Bob, what is it that keeps you chained to this horrible, ill-educated exploited, mess of a country, populated by yahoos? I sure wouldn’t live in a place like that.
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Why not disguise yourself as a Syrian refugee? They’d welcome you with open arms and give you more welfare benefits than you’d know what to do with.
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Let us now conveniently forget who was President and passed a health care law that somehow is not responsible for the USA being #43
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Been there a number of times. Name a freedom a European has that we don’t.
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Time to update my source (World Health Organization, for Mr. O’Loughlin). U!S!A! ranking has risen to 37th, thanks no doubt to millions more having insurance due to the ACA. Thanks, Obama! (H/t Kool Kevs.) Still a long way to go. Glad YOU’RE all so satisfied with things here. That’s the difference, Splat, between old conservatives who think we’re the best, and progressives who know we’re not, but that we can be better.
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I’m always happy to point out what differentiates you and me ABob.
To wit, I live where I’m happiest and am free to do so.
You’d only be happy elsewhere if you left yourself here.
Something tells me the problem is neither culture nor geography.
I see this kind of unhappiness in many Progressives.
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AnonyBob , since, by your own confession, you would like to go to some other nation……….but seemingly, cannot, we will take up a collection and pay for you to move to Cuba. Life expectancy there is 79.1, compared to our 79.3, here. In Cuba, you can enjoy the virtues of travel by donkey cart and you can live in a hot, humid home without AC. You’ll discover AC is not “needed” for a long productive life in the service to “the people.” And, as a bonus, you’ll receive these other benefits:
You can genuflect at photos/statutes of the commie of your choice. Freedom to worship Mao, Che, Gramsci, Adorno, Lin Biao, or even Nestor Makhno. You’ll be free from the temptations of the trappings of bourgeois Americakan Kulture.
In the unlikely event that you don’t like your new destination, we’ll happily pay for your move to a more fertile ground for revolutionary elan…….Zimbabwe. You can elevate your personal identity as you sacrifice and “organize” for even greater Social Justice under Mugabe.
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Enver Hoxha?
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T.P.: read for comprehension. Advanced nations, I’m talking, of which we are dead last when it comes to healthcare, amidst a rapidly fraying social contract.
You guys are priceless.
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ABob and his politics remind me of Comrade Fidel’s funeral. The honor guard had to push the Russian jeep carrying Comrade Fidel’s remains. At which time Fidel and Stalin were smoking turds in hell to annoy Hitler.
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ABob says ‘I said advanced nations, not Cuba. And I mean Socialism lite not the genocidal, imperialist, ethnic cleansing, Socialism like in the Union of Socialist Republics. Ya know, like Denmark and Venezuela. And hey, the National Socialist German Workers Party weren’t really Socialist even if the first national legislation was to pass Hitlercare.’
Thanks Bob.
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Like I said, priceless.
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Just noticed the list of organizations sponsoring the vigil (or whatever) at the commie boulder. At first I thought the scribes at the Policy Werkes were indulging in a little parody: “Marxist Tendency” (?!) Does that mean they identify as Marxists but haven’t undergone the lobotomy yet?) “Degenderettes” (??!!) The front band for Marxist Tendency? That’s what’s so frustrating about Madison liberals–when you try to parody them, you discover they’ve already beaten you to it.
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[…] of duty and after swastikas and pro-Trump sentiments were scrawled on the Monument to Communism (Detailed here) yet references them […]
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