Minneapolis, MN – A new documentary film shines light on the history of the militarization of American police in an era defined by civil unrest, drawing sharp parallels to today.
Without mentioning recent events in the entire film, Sierra Pettengill’s new documentary “Riotsville, USA” still invokes striking parallels between the late 1960s and the George Floyd protest uprisings in 2020. The film was produced during 2015-2021, premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January 2022 and was widely released in September by Magnolia Films; it’s attracted more coverage in lists of top documentaries for the year. [See our editor’s note below for more Unicorn Riot original reporting on domestic military and police training programs.]
Crowd Control & Military Anti-Riot Training in the 1960s
In 1967, the U.S. Army built a makeshift town on a military base in Virginia (later replicated at Fort Gordon, Georgia). A mock urban center sporting fake liquor stores, pawn shops, and turned-over cars, it was made to simulate a real “ghetto” and the riots that raged in city streets that summer. Resembling a movie set with storefront facades, it was created to train officers in responding to civilian uprisings. They named it “Riotsville.” The filmmakers craft an intimate view of this training program, weaved through long-lost and now recovered archival footage.
The uprisings throughout 1967, like most of the unrest throughout that period, have their roots in police violence against African Americans. Uprisings in Detroit and Newark saw the most violence that year, which were both triggered by instances of police brutality against Black people.
Minneapolis experienced three consecutive nights of unrest in July 1967, the second year in a row where cases of police brutality against Black residents led to “rioting” along Plymouth Avenue in the historically Black Near North neighborhood.
Photo of a riot simulation at a military base. Riotsville, USA. Image Courtesy of Magnolia Films.
“Riotsville, USA” shows us how Vietnam-era law enforcement was obsessed with maintaining “law and order” at all costs.
One officer speaking on a televised forum on police/community relations parroted a line that every social justice activist from 1967 until today has heard: “And I say to you, it’s only one thin line between crime and society, and that’s us policemen.”
The broken-record repetition of the same script today, 55 years later, begs the question – just how much has America changed since the 1960s? And is change being prevented by design?
Back at Riotsville, as police attempt to replicate parts of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, a squad car blaring its sirens pulls over two men driving a 1960s model sedan. Four officers exit the police car and immediately throw the driver and his passenger up against their vehicle as they manhandle and search the two men. A large crowd of apparently outraged bystanders quickly forms, outnumbering the officers.
Soldiers in street clothes, costumed as hippies, played the rioters. Military actors demonstrated their version of the beginning of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in front of a live audience of generals and politicians, as if it were a government-produced Broadway play. The spectators seated in bleachers are shown smiling, clapping and laughing as servicemen carried out simulated violence against simulated dissidents.
“Cop City” & Modern Day ‘Riotsville’
Mock towns are still used today for riot simulations in law enforcement training. One official term for these installations are “tactical scenario villages.” (Two similar facilities are in northern California and Cuyahoga County, Ohio.)
Sarah Saarela, a former Minneapolis cop turned police abolitionist, told Unicorn Riot that the film reminded her of riot training at Minnesota’s Fort Snelling before becoming a cop, and another location in the east Twin Cities metro area after becoming a sworn officer.
Photo by Marjaan Sirdar.
“They had makeshift store fronts that we had to go into, and random targets would pop up that said either ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy,’ and we had to decide within like a millisecond whether to shoot or not. That’s how they train paranoia.”
Sarah Saarela, former Minneapolis cop
Over two decades ago, Saarela and fellow Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Bill Palmer were in an officer-involved shooting. Saarela and Palmer shot and killed Barbara Schneider after responding to a disturbance. Schneider was inside her Uptown apartment having a mental health crisis when officers claimed she ran towards them with a knife.
The Barbara Schneider Foundation, a nonprofit that was formed after her killing, has partnered with the police to develop and implement crisis intervention training (CIT) for cops, supposedly to prevent these types of killings. This partnership resulted in the creation of a police nonprofit called the Minnesota Crisis Intervention Team (CIT). Barbara Schneider’s killing and CIT were the catalysts that led to MPD carrying less-lethal taser weapons and the development of the Safety and Mental Health Alternative Response Training Center (SMART Center), where MN CIT is headquartered.
The SMART Center is a law enforcement training facility in Inver Grove Heights, MN, that recently opened up. Although the SMART Center was built for training law enforcement in responding to mental health crises, Saarela believes it will inevitably be the one-stop shop where cops undergo active shooter drills, riot and crowd control training, and more. She thinks the SMART Center is nothing but a police “grift” that trains cops how to legally get away with murder. “Take police out of the mental health community,” Saarela said in an interview shortly after Floyd was murdered.
The cities of Woodbury and Cottage Grove, in partnerships with Washington County and the State of Minnesota, recently built the HERO Center, a “state of the art immersive training center” for police and first responders which includes a “tactical scenario village.” This facility cost taxpayers more than $20.5 million and boasts of having over 700 “scenarios” to choose from.
A couple hours’ drive from Fort Gordon, where the second Riotsville was built five decades ago, lies the new proposed site just south of Atlanta, Georgia, where the Atlanta Police Foundation plans to destroy a massive forest to build a more than $90 million 85-acre law enforcement training center. Atlanta residents and activists have been organizing to shut down the proposed site, nicknamed “Cop City.”
Officially named The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, the widely opposed project is slated to include a mock village with a gas station, bank, bar, nightclub, school, residential homes, apartments, park, and splash pad. It would also feature a warehouse for training in crowd control tactics.
Recently, a SWAT team carried out a violent raid on activists occupying the Atlanta forest, who now face a range of severe charges including domestic terrorism. [Watch Unicorn Riot’s short documentary about the struggle in Atlanta to shut down the proposed “Cop City,”here.]
The idea of “tactical scenario villages” was a direct result of the uprisings that swept through cities across the U.S. in 1967.
Trailer for Riotsville, U.S.A.
Kerner Commission: Key Recommendations Ignored
President Lyndon Johnson formed the Kerner Commission which investigated the 1967 rebellions and submitted a report on March 1, 1968 identifying the reasons for the unrest and its recommended remedies. The commission was named for its head, then-Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, to investigate the root causes of fiery unrest that swept through cities like Newark and Detroit in ’67.
Screenshot from Riotsville, USA
Johnson blamed the riots on “outside agitators,” a theory ultimately dismissed in the report. The commission looked for a lot of things including nefarious agitator conspiracies behind the unrest. Instead, the committee frankly concluded that the unrest was a predictable, understandable response to systemic racism and inequality.
The film features the commission’s famous prognosis, in which it proclaimed: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white. Separate but unequal.”
An unidentified newscaster featured in the film summarized the committee’s findings as painting “an image that is more like the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ or the garrison states of Latin America than our image of the United States.”
The commission called for nothing short of a massive redistribution of wealth, including large increased federal investments in schools, public housing, jobs programs, and a guaranteed minimum income.
“The commission proposed a program of unprecedented vastness. A call to raise taxes, spread the wealth, lighten the burden on the burning ghettos.”
Riotsville, USA
However, the only recommendations from the Kerner Report Congress followed through with was massive federal funding to militarize police departments across the country.
“At the end of the Kerner Commission’s report, there was an addendum titled ‘Supplement on the Control of Disorder.’ Its recommendations were one of the only parts of the report that Congress would ever implement. It called for extensive new federal funding for police.”
Riotsville, USA
Similarly, after George Floyd’s murder and the 2020 uprising, the Minneapolis Police Department’s budget increased by $3 million, even though MPD failed to spend their entire budget the previous fiscal year.
“A door swung open in the late ‘60s. And someone, something, sprang up and slammed it shut,” the narrator said in the opening lines of the film, referring to the garrison state that was crystalized by lawmakers in the years and decades following the post-civil rights era uprisings.
Mo’ State Sanctioned Violence, Mo’ Unrest
When the Kerner report was released on March 1, 1968, sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee were on strike. The demonstrations, which faced violence from sanitation bosses and the police, demanded better working conditions and wages after two African American sanitation workers were crushed to death in a garbage compactor while seeking refuge from the rain.
Photo of a Riotsville simulation at a military base. Riotsville, USA. Image Courtesy of Magnolia Films.
Many still remember these as the famous marches where demonstrators carried “I am a man” protest signs. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” the night before he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel.
“Riotsville, USA” captures outrageous audio of late U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), a former Ku Klux Klansman, using inflammatory rhetoric against protestors and protest leaders on the U.S. Senate floor. Byrd claimed Dr. King started a riot in Memphis, rhetoric that likely set the stage for King’s killing.
Flier of a March for Justice and Jobs during the 1968 Sanitation Strike, featuring Dr. King, days before his murder. Photo Courtesy of the National Archives.
“…Massive rioting erupted during a march which was led by Martin Luther King. It was a shameful and totally uncalled for outburst of lawlessness. Undoubtedly encouraged by his words and actions and his presence. When the predictable rioting erupted Martin Luther King fled the scene leaving it to others to cope with the destructive forces he had helped to unleash. I hope that well meaning negro leaders will now take a new look at this man who gets other people into trouble and then takes off like a scared rabbit. If anybody is to be hurt or killed in the disorder which follows in the wake of his highly publicized marches and demonstrations, he apparently is going to be sure that it will be someone other than Martin Luther King.”
U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Pettengill played Byrd’s speech over vintage videos of actors performing acts of rioting, turning over cars and causing destruction in a residential area of a military base. Six days after that speech, Dr. King returned to Memphis where he was gunned down.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 Civil Rights March in Washington, D.C. Photo Courtesy of the National Archives.
King’s murder was a flashpoint and the major source of the civil disturbances in 1968. For two nights after Dr. King was killed, race rebellions ravaged several cities across America, less than one year after the so-called “race riots” analyzed by the Kerner Commission rocked the nation.
Although police responded in their predictable brutal fashion, the 1968 tumult seemed different, with more deliberate organized repression from the authorities. To this day, many people believe Dr. King was assassinated by the government because of his increasing opposition to the War in Vietnam and U.S. imperialism, and in 1999 a Memphis jury declared his murder was indeed the result of a government conspiracy.
A scenario where the predominantly white anti-war movement and Black struggle converge was an underlying concern that the Riotsville simulations were preparing for.
“Both Riotsvilles centered on a scenario of concern to law enforcement: that anti-war protesters would be incited by Black ‘agitators.’”
Riotsville, USA
A Chicago police chief is featured in the film visiting Riotsville as a reporter asks him about preparedness for the upcoming 1968 Democratic National Convention (DNC) and political demonstrations. He told the reporter that he’ll take what he learned from Riotsville and integrate it into his department.
The film also features archival footage of the Chicago law enforcement buildup and recruitment process in preparation for the DNC demonstrations. It’s reminiscent of how the 1969 film Medium Cool (Dir: Haskell Wexler) also focused on similar exercises before the fateful convention.
Pettengill noted that the massive anti-war street protests that overshadowed the Democrats’ convention inside Chicago’s International Amphitheatre was a test-run for law enforcement who had been training at Riotsville.
For many viewers who experienced the recent unrest in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by officer Derek Chauvin, the parallels are striking.
During Chauvin’s murder trial, less than a year after what some have said were the largest demonstrations in world history, an officer a few miles from where Floyd was murdered “mistakenly” used her gun instead of her taser and killed a fleeing suspect.
On April 11, 2021, Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter shot and killed unarmed Daunte Wright, once again inciting mayhem across the Twin Cities. Protests and looting broke out across the metro that night, resulting in two more murders under suspicious circumstances.
The Justice for Daunte Wright protests were the perfect opportunity for Minnesota law enforcement to roll out the unaccountable multi-agency Mobile Field Force (MFF) deployment branded as ‘Operation Safety Net.’ (OSN)
Gaslighting in Miami and Minneapolis
The 1968 Chicago anti-war protests were led by white student activists who wanted to expose police brutality to the world. But the film emphasized the unrest in Miami where just a few weeks earlier a more brutal Riotsville test-run happened during the Republican National Convention (RNC), which received little publicity at the time and has been largely forgotten.
Photo of a Riotsville simulation at a military base. Riotsville, USA. Image Courtesy of Magnolia Films.
The film showed video of Miami-Dade law enforcement dressed in riot gear, preparing for “the big one.” Up to that point, Miami had never experienced large-scale unrest in its history.
On the second day of the ’68 Republican convention, Black people demonstrated peacefully in Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood against police brutality and for community control. The city sent five police units to respond after a white reporter was ejected from a rally.
Filmmakers made it clear that it was the Miami police who initiated the violence and incited the riot after they murdered two Black people and wounded four others. However, reports by mainstream media during the RNC were chock full of lies.
Cops initially alleged that they were under sniper attack from community members and in turn killed two people, a lie which was repeated across national television.
This narrative relied on an already debunked lie that police across the country regularly repeated to justify violence. In its investigation, the Kerner Commission concluded that nearly every credible instance of sniper attacks on police during the 1967 rebellion were from fellow officers. And that it was actually law enforcement who had shot and killed three unarmed women through their apartment windows during the ‘67 upheaval, and blinded one child, presumably all Black.
Despite this, the film notes, “there was a sniper scenario in every Riotsville.”
“They still claim there’s going to be a bogeyman on the rooftop with a gun,” Saarela, the former Minneapolis cop, told Unicorn Riot. “One time [during training] a sniper shot me in the leg with a paintball,” she said, recalling how Minneapolis police (MPD) riot simulations would always have a cop who would hide on the rooftop and pretend to be a “rogue sniper.”
Saarela said the “rogue sniper” trope was crafted by cops so they can continue to kill with impunity.
“The boogeyman sniper on the rooftop has always been a cop. That’s who assassinated Tekle Sundberg,” she said, referring to the 20 year-old Minneapolis man who was shot and killed by MPD snipers on July 14, after experiencing a mental health crisis and having a long standoff with cops.
Saarela and Palmer killed Barbara Schneider 22 years before Sundberg was shot and killed by MPD snipers Aaron Pearson and Zachary Seraphine.
Following the dramatic archival footage of the 1968 uprising in Miami, the segment concluded with a white news reporter describing Liberty City as a war zone. With sinister music playing in the background, Pettengill noted that, “Police Leadership in Miami trained at Riotsville.”
Going Deeper Down the Rabbit Hole
A decade ago, a military training manual from the U.S. Army Military Police School at Fort McClellan, Alabama was leaked to the public describing an emergency declaration and the government’s coordinated response to massive civil disturbances in the event of a financial collapse and breakdown of society. The manual mentioned the word sniper 82 times. It was published in 2006, two years before the actual global financial crisis and recession.
Photo of a riot simulation at a military base. Screenshot from Riotsville, USA.
This became newsworthy within “alternative media” due to its emphasis on using the military against Americans to quell domestic disturbances, and an attention grabbing line under the section regarding “Use of Deadly Force” which reads “warning shot will not be fired.”
On page 27, the army manual lays out the military’s consideration for confiscating firearms from stores in case of an emergency declaration – a strategy also demonstrated in the film at the Riotsville simulation.
Today, when racist authoritarianism in the U.S. is comfortable enough to unmask itself and blend in with the mainstream, “Riotsville, USA” is like a trail of breadcrumbs taking viewers back towards the start. With this film, people today get to see the genuine intentions and thoughts behind policing and race relations in America, two generations ago.
Saarela, the former cop, said, “‘Riotsville, USA’ makes a ninety minute long argument for abolishing the police.”
The film’s pointed commentary was written by the essayist Tobi Haslett and read by Charlene Modeste. By the end of the film, the footage of the fake rioting is almost indistinguishable from the footage of the very real Miami rebellion. “Riotsville, USA” can easily leave viewers who lived through the recent unrest feeling gaslit.
During a recent Q & A at the Film at Lincoln Center, Pettengill said that audiences described the gaslighting, telling her that it’s really helpful to see this all compiled together. “‘This is what we suspected was happening and it’s really helpful to feel like we’re not crazy.’ ‘Cause this country can really make you feel like you’re crazy,” she added.
Haslett said it’s important that the film showed what law enforcement was up to behind the scenes. “It’s just as important to show… [that] the events preceding and succeeding a riot are all being planned for.”
In another interview, Pettengill pointed out how historically most riots in the U.S. have been caused by white vigilantes, not by Black people, but quite often against Black people. She said that the unrest of the 1960s provoked a very different response from law enforcement and she used the film to demonstrate that this was not by coincidence.
“To be able to show the military recreating and rehearsing something and then see it play out in real time shifts the narrative: instead of the police and military responding to an outbreak of violence, it’s presented as an attack on civilians by the police backed by a massive explosion of money and interest towards repressing Black rebellion.”
Sierra Pettengill, Riotsville, USA director
Pettengill’s film confirms what Black people have been saying for generations. The online review and ratings website Rotten Tomatoessummed it up well:
“…RIOTSVILLE, USA…offers a compelling case that if the history of race in America rhymes, it is by design.”
The U.S. military’s set of civil disturbance planning templates from the 1960s were called “GARDEN PLOT.” After 2002 the US Northern Command reorganized this into “NORTHCOM CONPLAN 3502”.
Cover of the October 1968 Military Police Journal, featuring an “Emergency Operations Center”
Cover image composition by Dan Feidt, based on media courtesy Magnolia Films & concept by Marjaan Sirdar. Dan Feidt contributed to this report for Unicorn Riot.
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Durban, South Africa – As the ongoing South African Energy Crisis enters its sixteenth straight year, continued substation breakdowns coupled by widespread sabotage and corruption at the nation’s virtual energy monopoly, ESKOM, has resulted in an unprecedented surge of rolling blackouts. As a result South Africa has experienced more power outages this year than all other year’s in the energy crises combined.
As ESKOM’s aging coal-dependent infrastructure decays, substation breakdowns at various coal plants have become the norm, forcing the company to increase the duration of pre-planned power outages in a process called “loadshedding.”
Corruption and political infighting at the public utility has also become normalized leading to the recent resignation of the company’s CEO André de Ruyter in December 2022. Soon after De Ruyter’s resignation, it was announced that the South African National Defense Force (SANDF) would be deployed indefinitely to guard at least four different unspecified ESKOM sites.
Substation Breakdowns and Sabotage
As explained in our previous report detailing the history of ESKOM, the South Africa’s Energy Crisis began back in 2007 and was predicted before then in a 1998 government white paper. However, due to political infighting, seeming lack of public funds and the resulting government inaction, ESKOM was unable to secure the necessary funding to upgrade its ailing infrastructure. As a result, the energy crisis occurred exactly as predicted forcing government scrambling to build more power plants.
Kusile Power Station 2019 (photo source: Wikimedia)
Medupi Power Station 2014 (photo source: Wikimedia)
“The reality is that the power stations are too old and the new power stations (Medupi and Kusile) are performing like old power stations.”
Two of the government’s biggest post-crisis construction projects were named the “Kusile” and “Medupi” power stations, both of which were initially planned to be completed by April 2011 whereby they would supply around 25% of South Africa’s total energy needs. However, serious design deficits led to consistent breakdowns, coupled with multiple labor disputes and several high-profile corruption scandals meant that both projects would fall well behind schedule and grossly over-budget. When a portion of Kusile’s generators were finally brought online back in Sept. 2021, less than a month later on Aug. 9, 2021, a massive accidental explosion wrecked the facility causing further damage and repair costs — no lives were lost in the explosion. Currently both projects are still incomplete and are roughly projected to be 300 billion rand ($17.6 billion) over budget and rising.
While the construction delays, ever expanding budget and poor performance of Kusile and Medupi continue to disappoint, the performance of ESKOM’s older coal-fired plants is getting worse by the year. Combine all of this with a steadily increasing global energy demand and it isn’t hard to see why South Africa has experienced record-breaking levels of power outages.
The economic and political pressures caused by the energy crisis has sent massive shockwaves throughout the country, forcing ESKOM into a nonstop cycle of reshuffling its leadership positions. The most recent reshuffling came on the heels of this year’s unprecedented rolling blackouts which extended deep into the holiday season, a crucial time for the South African economy. As a result, back in Sept. the government appointed a new ESKOM board of directors and in early Dec. it’s CEO André de Ruyter officially resigned from his post, making him the eleventh boss to have quit or been removed from the position since the energy crisis began.
At the time of De Ruyter’s appointment he was viewed by some as the perfect man for the job and perhaps ESKOM’s last hope for a quick and desperately needed turnaround. This was due to his enthusiasm and reputation for taking command of struggling business projects, particularly at South African based billion-dollar corporations, Sasol and Nampak.
At Sasol, he would succeed in taking the helm of one the company’s struggling subsidiaries in Germany and making it profitable again. He wasn’t able to achieve the same success at Nampak but he would at the very least reduce its overall debt and notably outperformed his peers during his tenure there. Additionally, he obtained a master’s degree in business administration from Nijenrode University in the Netherlands and is known to be a very amiable people person who is well traveled and can speak several languages. It was these traits which pushed De Ruyter to the top of a massive 143-person hiring pool, a decision which was not embraced by all but was enough to secure the endorsement of several key high-ranking ANC officials, including Gwede Mantashe.
Mantashe currently serves as the national chairperson of South Africa’s ruling-party African National Congress (ANC) and the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy. As such, he is one of the key people who gave De Ruyter the nod for the job back in 2019 and ironically one of the same people who would later push him out. As head of Mineral Resources and Energy, Mantashe’s department is responsible for managing the country’s energy policy, which ESKOM is obligated to follow. Mantashe’s previous record as a prolific leader for the nation’s single largest and most powerful labor union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) also made his endorsement a key one for De Ruyter as NUM commands the largest share of ESKOM’s unionized workforce.
NUM still opposed De Ruyter’s appointment on the grounds that it was a setback for other qualified black professionals who were arguably just as qualified if not more so for the job. The union was also decisively against government plans to restructure ESKOM by dividing it into three different parts: distribution, transmission, and generation. NUM opposes the restructuring plan because it believes it will lead to privatization and therefore further job losses and reduced benefits for workers.
National Union of Mine Workers members during the National Union Mine of Workers 14th Congress held at Emperor’s Palace in Kempton Park. South Africa. 05/23/2012 (photo source: GovernmentZA Flickr)
Despite its early criticism of De Ruyter’s appointment to CEO, NUM announced that it would be willing to work with him provided that he would halt the government’s restructuring plans. As time went on however, De Ruyter would only continue to agitate NUM by launching numerous internal investigations intended to root out corruption and chronic mismanagement within ESKOM. The results of these purges were suspensions and other disciplinary actions taken against several high-ranking NUM members and ESKOM employees. These disputes along with a host of others over worker’s wages and benefits led NUM and other unions to begin publicly calling for De Ruyter’s dismissal in 2021. De Ruyter ignored these calls until his former backer Mantashe publicly came out against him, perhaps providing the final nail in his coffin by criticizing De Ruyter for “acting like a policeman” and accusing him and ESKOM of “agitating to overthrow the state.”
SANDF Deployment
SANDF soliders on patrol (photo source: Ashraf Hendricks, Groundup Media)
Shortly after De Ruyter’s resignation, the SANDF announced that it would be deployed to at least four different unspecified ESKOM sites in order to combat the growing prevalence of coal theft and sabotage.
For years, ESKOM has been plagued by constant theft of coal and diesel fuel supplies, organized by criminal syndicates who pay ESKOM employees to swap higher grade supplies for lower-grade supplies, in transit. These stolen high-grade coal and fuel supplies are later sold in the black market for enormous profits while ESKOM’s power plants are duped into using lower-grade supplies, leading to more frequent generator breakdowns. Additionally crime syndicates have been accused of employing workers to intentionally sabotage essential equipment so that their various subcontracting front companies can then be paid to fix the very same technical problems they caused.
ESKOM’s labor unions have also been accused of employing sabotage as a tactic to disrupt business as usual and achieve various workplace demands. However, it was reportedly a more recent tip-off from the South African intelligence community warning of an escalated risk of sabotage to critical infrastructure that caused President Ramaphosa to deploy the SANDF.
The SANDF deployment has been greeted with mixed reactions, with some believing that it is an unfortunate but long overdue step needed to secure South Africa’s national key points – especially its power plants. Others are more skeptical of the SANDF ability to police such large and complex facilities, arguing that this task should be the job of South Africa’s various law enforcement agencies in coordination with the wider South African intelligence community.
Nevertheless, President Ramaphosa has authorized the SANDF to continue Operation PROSPER until a satisfactory drop in coal theft and sabotage is achieved. While it’s currently unknown exactly how many soldiers will be dedicated to this deployment, recent reports say around 200 soldiers will be made available, with a minimum of 10 soldiers available at each designated site. Critics say that this small number is well short of the number required to establish a proper security perimeter at any of ESKOM’s 19 coal-powered sites. Some analysts therefore believe that the recent army deployment is merely a show of force, intended to show criminal syndicates that “the government is getting serious now.” Just how long that seriousness will last is anyone’s guess.
When Will it End?
As affected Africans continue to languish in the dark, there are no definitive answers as to when it will end, and whether it will get worse before it gets better. But as older plants decay, newly constructed plants falter, and energy demand rises, it appears likely to get worse. Meanwhile, government officials continue reshuffling leadership and drafting more ambitious recovery plans in the hopes that a total energy collapse can be averted. But even if a collapse can be averted by building more coal fired stations it will likely increase the ever more pressing issue of global climate change.
Some counter that building new coal facilities is the only way to bring about the quickest end to the energy crisis since renewable energy sources currently produce much less electricity than coal. But as the government’s new state of the art coal facilities fail to meet expectations, many are beginning question the logic of this strategy in the current context. Though, if there is one thing that all sides seem to agree on it would be the lack of honesty and transparency from government officials. Indeed if there had been more bitter honesty about the reality of South Africa’s rapidly dwindling energy reserves starting in 1998, the country may have never been in this position to begin with.
Minneapolis, MN – With life-threatening cold this winter season, the City of Minneapolis continues to evict encampments, displacing unsheltered people and throwing away their personal belongings, including propane tanks they rely on for warmth. The longstanding Quarry encampment in Northeast Minneapolis is the latest under threat of eviction after being served a notice on Dec. 21 to leave by Dec. 28.
In response, Quarry residents and advocates held a press conference on Dec. 27 demanding the authorities not evict the encampment and announcing that community would come to defend the residents.
The next day, when the eviction was scheduled to occur, upwards of 100 to 150 encampment defenders showed up to the Quarry over the course of the morning. The city said the eviction was put on hold due to the large activist presence.
Encampment defenders thwarted a planned city eviction of the Quarry encampment on Dec. 28, 2022 – screenshots contributed by Aaron Johnson
Around 10-15 residents call the Quarry encampment home. Many of them have been displaced from past encampment evictions. Several residents, including one of the founders of the encampment, spoke during the press conference alongside community advocates, mutual aid workers, and volunteers devoted to helping the increasing numbers (upwards of 2,600) of unhoused people in Minneapolis. Watch the press conference held on Dec. 27 outside of the Quarry encampment below.
During the morning defense of the encampment on Dec. 28, legal observers and community members spotted what they say was a man in a United Operations Inc. truck drive into the parking lot of the Quarry shopping center, drop used needles on the ground, pick them up and tell the corporate news “This is why we’re evicting this camp.”
Can’t make this shit up. This man pulled up to the Home Depot parking lot, dumped out a bunch of needles on the ground, picked them up and said, “This is why we’re evicting this camp.” He is now talking to news reporters. This is also his car. pic.twitter.com/cfd7W8GJyD
Advocates have announced that they plan to defend the encampment through the week.
A press release in the lead-up to the presser goes as follows:
“On Monday, December 20, the city heartlessly evicted a small encampment on 31st Street under the I35W overpass, tossing people’s meager possessions across the street and confiscating the propane tanks people were using to run their heaters. The high temperature that day was 3 degrees. There were no shelter beds available that night.
Two days later, unhoused people residing at a Minneapolis encampment known as The Quarry received notice that they are being evicted. City employees posted a notice saying “No trespassing! Please vacate. All tents, structures, and personal belongings must be moved Dec 28, 2022.” The notice comes in the midst of Winter Storm Eliot, a severe weather event bringing temperatures well below zero along with dangerous wind chills. No shelter beds are available at the time of this press release.
Residents of the Quarry encampment, along with local organizers and advocates, will hold a press conference to speak out against the escalation of violence toward unhoused people and to demand an end to these life-threatening evictions.“
It’s no secret that the social media platform Telegram is home to a huge part of the global radical right. This happens due to the possibilities it offers to the user and the alleged protection of data it offers from government interventions. Much has been said about how the radical right uses the platform to initiate violence, spread propaganda and indoctrinate new members to their beliefs. But what about recruiting people to fight in the real world? One neo-nazi group, the Atomwaffen Division, has been doing just that, according to a Unicorn Riot investigation.
Atomwaffen Division (AWD) is a violent neo-Nazi terrorist group created in 2015 in the U.S. and responsible for at least five murders. Although the group consists of few members, it managed to include former and present members of the Armed Forces of the United States of America in its ranks. Members of the group have been arrested for murder, preparation of terror attacks and other crimes. Although the group was originally based in the U.S., they have established branches all over Europe.
In 2020, due to the pressure the group received because of the alleged decision of the U.S. State Department to declare the group as a foreign terrorist organization and numerous arrests of it’s members by the F.B.I, Atomwaffen Division announced its dissolution. A few months later it was re-created under the name of “National Socialist Order.” In 2021, this new group was declared as a terrorist organization in the United Kingdom and was banned in Australia and Canada.
AWD was known for trying to recruit mainly young individuals in university campuses, by posting propaganda flyers. Beyond that, the group tried to recruit and spread its hateful ideology online via social media, such as Telegram and YouTube, and the neo-nazi website called “Iron March,” which was active until 2017. Through this kind of online activism, the group was believed to organize military style training camps in the U.S. However, there haven’t been any other reports of AWD trying to openly recruit fighters online to get involved in an ongoing war, such as the one in Ukraine. The majority of AWD’s online presence, and more specifically on Telegram, was limited to ideological propaganda and cohesion, networking as well as glorifying violence and promoting hate speech against political opponents.
There has been an AWD cell in Russia since 2020 and it has close relations with the paramilitary, radical right group known as the Russian Imperial Movement. Many of the members of AWD have received military training from the latter.
Meanwhile in Ukraine, while there were some indications of an AWD affiliated branch in the country, named AWD Galizien. AWD started actively organizing its local group since the beginning of the official Russian invasion in Ukraine.
In 2020, the Ukrainian authorities and the secret services of the country managed to arrest neo-Nazi individuals who were related to AWD in Kiev and Odessa. And in October 2020, two U.S. citizens who were members of AWD were expelled from the country for trying to join the Azov Regiment and for the incitement of murders and terrorism. However, a 2020 investigation revealed AWD members were sent to train with neo-nazi militias in Ukraine.
We cannot be absolutely certain when a group of AWD members first started operating in Ukraine, but one thing is clear: they are now trying to recruit fighters to join them on the ground through Telegram. How do we know it? While investigating the terror group, we tried to join it via social media.
Attempting to Join AWD
Everything started within the Telegram channel entitled ‘Atomwaffen Division.’ In a post, the channel announced that a recruitment period for the AWD Ukraine group began and stated that “everyone can join.” It continued by giving specific instructions to every individual who was interested to send a message in a bot channel, writing “I want to join the team.”
While it’s an escalation in tactics, the overt call for participation fits in with the channel’s history of glorifying far-right ideas and actions. The channel is full of neo-Nazi propaganda, including Hitler-era flags, Nazi salutes and pictures of AWD members fighting alongside the Azov Regiment, a unit of Ukraine’s National Guard, in Mariupol. That being said, there has been reported another relationship between Azov and AWD, back in 2016, concerning Americans who were willing to join Azov in Ukraine. It is worth mentioning that until the announcement of the recruitment, this AWD Telegram channel was only used for propaganda reasons. It was the first time it publicly announced a recruitment call.
The channel’s posts leave no doubt about the Nazi ideology of the group, which called for the recruitment of new members for the Ukrainian branch in the same channel it uploaded the above neo-Nazi propaganda. However, it is not unheard of for the microcosm of the European far-right to promote the recruitment of fighters via Telegram since the beginning of the Russian invasion.
For the needs of this investigation, we detected at least one more channel called ‘Ultras not Reds’ promoting the new recruitment campaign of the far right Azov, back in August, commenting: “For White Europe.” Of course we should point out the qualitative difference between AWD and Azov, with the latter being an official branch of the Ukrainian military and thus having much more strict criteria for its recruitment, while on the other hand AWD is an informal, non-state affiliated and organized group and thus necessarily having way looser criteria concerning who is capable of joining, training and gaining combat experience.
Back in the AWD channel, when we sent the message to express our interest in joining the team, the answer came almost immediately. A few minutes later it was announced that the candidates for membership will have a personal interview with the AWD leader in a few days’ time. When we tried to obtain additional information and asked what we should do in the meantime, the answer was laconic. “Wait.”
So we waited. But the interview with the AWD leader did not occur and the chat was deleted a few days later.
Radical Right Recruitment Leads to Violence
While radical right and neo-nazi groups may exist and operate in most armed forces of European countries, there is no doubt that AWD Ukraine is marginal, and its members are a few dozen at best. But the fact that an open neo-nazi group is pushing a global recruitment campaign, as evidenced by its translating messages to multiple languages, to fight and gain real battle experience with real weaponry, is at least worrying.
Nobody can guarantee that the recruited individuals will not return to their countries, determined to use their newly acquired military training and experience, to train like-minded people or to commit violent attacks and hate crimes. AWD offers individuals the opportunity to gain real combat experience, by joining its openly neo-nazi ranks, and thus be much more physically, psychologically and ideologically ready to commit acts of violence afterwards in their home countries.
In fact, before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were dozens of cases of foreign fighters who fought in Ukraine, returned home and were criminally charged with intending to or committing acts of violence. This includes a double homicide in Florida in 2018 by a man who deserted the U.S. Army and fought for far-right extremists in Ukraine in the late 2010s.
It’s up to the Ukrainian authorities and the European community to intervene and stop the action and recruitment of such extreme groups. Otherwise, there is the danger of Ukraine becoming a laboratory for the global far-right, a place where extremists from all around the world travel in order to train and gain combat experience. Groups such as AWD and its recruitment attempts contribute to such a direction and pose security issues not only for Ukraine, but for the rest of the world.
Cover image contributed by Chryssa Mavrokefalidou.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s office told the federal government yesterday that he will remove the makeshift shipping container barrier he constructed along the US-Mexico border, both in the Coronado National Forest in Cochise County and near Yuma, Arizona. The agreement was filed as a stipulation in federal court.
The agreement came one week to the day after the federal government filed a lawsuit against Governor Ducey and the State of Arizona for encroaching on federal lands and dumping hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers into the wilderness along the US-Mexico border.
In a stipulation filed in federal court Wednesday, December 21, the State of Arizona agreed to remove shipping containers from the Coronado National Forest in Cochise, County Arizona.
Since the project began in late October, workers have feverishly placed hundreds of shipping containers along the Arizona/Sonora border in Southern Cochise County, forming a precarious barrier and a gash through an otherwise pristine stretch of oak grassland.
According to the Complaint filed by the federal government December 14, the shipping containers “damage federal lands, threaten public safety, and impede the ability of federal agencies and officials, including law enforcement personnel, to perform their official duties.”
Under the terms of the new stipulation, the shipping containers Ducey installed near Yuma, Arizona will be removed by January 4, 2023, however no clear timeline was established for removal of the barrier in Cochise County.
The stipulation set a clear timeline for removal of the shipping containers near Yuma, Arizona, yet no clear timeline for the removal of those in the Coronado National Forest in Cochise, County Arizona.
Governor Ducey’s term in office ends in early January when his successor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who has pledged to remove the shipping containers, takes office. It is unclear whether the responsibility for removal of the Cochise County shipping container barriers will fall on the incoming administration.
The combined projects in Yuma and Cochise County carry budgets of over $108 million, although it’s unclear how much of that money has already been spent given the interruption of the project in Cochise County. Both contracts were awarded to AshBritt, a private disaster management company with a history of illegally donating funds to a pro-Trump super PAC.
It is unclear if AshBritt will also be awarded the contract for removal of the containers, but since they are already under contract for work on the project, it’s likely they’ll be the company tasked with removal as well. If so, the removal operation could be a way to continue siphoning public funds to the company.
In late November, a group of activists and locals began blockading the project in Cochise County, placing their bodies between the heavy machinery and the wilderness area facing imminent destruction. By standing in the way, blockaders managed to impede further placement of shipping containers for weeks until the Governor’s office announced that it would end the project.
Following the successful blockade, workers began hauling hundreds of shipping containers from a staging area to the Arizona State Prison Complex in Southern Tucson. There, the containers were stacked along the outer perimeter of the prison’s concertina-topped fences.
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