James Ridgeway

In 1965, James Ridgeway helped launch the modern muckraking era by revealing that General Motors had hired private eyes to spy on an obscure consumer advocate named Ralph Nader. He worked for many years at the Village Voice, has written 16 books, and has codirected Blood in the Face, a film about the far right. In 2012, he was named a Soros Justice Media Fellow.

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Anders Breivik, Stieg Larsson, and the Men with the Nazi Tattoos

—By James Ridgeway

| Tue Jul. 26, 2011 4:30 PM PDT

Stieg Larsson is the best-known novelist of the past decade, his Millennium Trilogy read by tens of millions of people worldwide. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two successors are beloved for their thrilling plots and compelling title character. But Larsson also embedded in his novels the abiding cause of his life: his crusade against the far-right movements that he saw as the scourge of Scandinavia and a threat to modern European society. Yet this part of his message never quite got through. Instead, the world stood in shock this weekend as Norway fell victim to precisely the kind of extremist violence Larsson had warned about.

The trilogy that has been met with such an enthusiastic but curiously apolitical response was written by a consummately political man: Raised by a grandfather who had been imprisoned during World War II for his anti-Nazi views, Larsson was in his youth a member of the Communist Workers Party and editor, for a time, of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjarde Internationalen. He later became the Scandinavian correspondent of Searchlight, the British anti-fascist and anti-racist magazine, and in 1995, amid an uptick in neo-Nazi violence in Sweden, he founded its Swedish equivalent, Expo—the model for the Millennium magazine featured in his trilogy. In the US, both Expo and Searchlight have maintained ties with another group that tracks the far right, the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. As an expert on the neo-Nazi movements, Larsson was once invited to lecture on the subject at Scotland Yard.

As Expo grew, the neo-Nazis in Sweden targeted it, threatening Larsson (who died in 2004) and his partner of 30 years, Eva Gabrielsson. According to Gabrielsson's book, "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me, both of them were placed on hit lists and were in enough danger to barricade their apartment doors and arrange for special police protection. "Stieg would receive bullets in the mail, and once someone was waiting for him outside the entrance of the TT building [where he worked]. Warned in time, Stieg slipped out a back door," Gabrielsson writes.

"Our answering machine was set permanently on 'record' to keep evidence of the threats we received," she continues, "and they were always in the same vein: 'Piece of shit, you Jew-fucker…Traitor, we'll tear you apart…and we know where you live.'" At the sign of the slightest provocation on their apartment block, police cars would descend on the street. The danger was undeniably real: Two journalists who once worked for Expo and were later employed by Aftonbladet, one of Sweden's largest newspapers, wrote an expose of the neo-Nazi black-metal music operations. One of them was seriously injured when his car was bombed. A labor union leader who revealed neo-Nazi names was shot dead.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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God's Own Warden

If you ever find yourself inside Louisiana's Angola prison, Burl Cain will make sure you find Jesus—or regret ever crossing his path.

—By James Ridgeway

| July/August 2011 Issue

It was a chilly December morning when I got to the gates of Angola prison, and I was nervous as I waited to be admitted. To begin with, nothing looked the way it ought to have looked. The entrance, with its little yellow gatehouse and red brick sign, could have marked the gates of one of the smaller national parks. There was a museum with a gift shop, where I perused miniature handcuffs, jars of inmate-made jelly, and mugs that read "Angola: A Gated Community" before moving on to the exhibits, which include Gruesome Gertie, the only electric chair in which a prisoner was executed twice. (It didn't take the first time, possibly because the executioners were visibly drunk.)

Besides being cold and disoriented, I had the well-founded sense of being someplace where I wasn't wanted. Angola welcomes a thousand or more visitors a month, including religious groups, schoolchildren, and tourists taking a side trip from their vacations in plantation country. Under ordinary circumstances, it's possible to drive up to the gate and tour the prison in a state vehicle, accompanied by a staff guide. But for me, it had taken close to two years and the threat of an ACLU lawsuit to get permission to visit the place.

I was studying an exhibit of sawed-off shotguns when I heard someone call my name. It was Cathy Fontenot, the assistant warden in charge of PR. Smartly dressed in a tailored shirt and jeans, a suede jacket, and boots with four-inch heels, she introduced me to a smiling corrections officer ("my bodyguard") and to Pam Laborde, the genial head spokeswoman for the Louisiana department of corrections who had come up from Baton Rouge to help escort me on my hard-won tour of Angola.

Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once known as the bloodiest prison in the South, into a model facility. Among born-again Christians, Cain is revered for delivering hundreds of incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the nation's largest maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, "with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus." To Cain's more secular admirers, Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the nation's booming prison population at a time when the notion of rehabilitation has effectively been abandoned.

[Read the full article]

Oslo Shooting: Read Anders Behring Breivik's Internet Comments Here

This English translation of the alleged Norway shooter's posts on a Norwegian website suggests he was obsessed with the impact of Islam on Norwegian society.

—By James Ridgeway

| Sat Jul. 23, 2011 10:56 AM PDT

Anders Behring Breivik, charged in connection with Friday’s horrific bombing and shootings in Norway, left clues to his motivation at an anti-Muslim website called Document.no. In the entries below—culled and translated by the British magazine Searchlight—Breivik is fixated on what he believes is the creeping evil of Islam in Europe. He argues for setting up a system of social networking "such that is linked to similar organizations in other countries (similar to a beginning of a cultural Euro-version of a Tea Party movement)." He complains that Europe lost the Cold War by 1950 and that the continent, especially Norway and Sweden, has been engulfed by Marxist attitudes, "while the old-established truths of patriotism and cultural conservatism today is branded as extremism." He notes, "The European cultural conservative movement is small at the moment but we are growing every day."

Breivik, in one post, argues that a "moderate" Muslim is like a "moderate" Nazi:

And then we have the relationship between conservative Muslims and so-called "moderate Muslims". There is moderate Nazis, too, that does not support fumigation of rooms and Jews. But they're still Nazis and will only sit and watch as the conservatives Nazis strike (if it ever happens). If we accept the moderate Nazis as long as they distance themselves from the fumigation of rooms and Jews?....For me it is very hypocritical to treat Muslims, Nazis and Marxists differ. They are all supporters of hate-ideologies. Not all Muslims, Nazis and Marxists are conservative, most are moderate. But does it matter? A moderate Nazi might, after having experienced fraud, choose to be conservative. A moderate Muslim can, after being refused to enter a club, be conservative, etc.

He denounces multiculturalism:

Tell me one country where Muslims have lived peacefully with non-Muslims without the Jihad

...How many thousands of new Europeans must die, how many one hundred thousand European women should be raped, millions robbed and tractor discarded before you understand that multiculturalism + Islam does not work?

He's has no tolerance for Marxists:

Had Western Europe and the U.S. decided to imprison all Marxists (Nazis and Marxists) after WW2 and swearing Marxist principles of hate ideology similar to Nazism, we had never been in the current situation.

He's a critic of the modern Protestant church:

Today's Protestant church is a joke. Priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like the minimalist shopping centers. I am a supporter of an indirect collective conversion of the Protestant church back to the Catholic. In the meantime, I vote for the most conservative candidates in church elections.

And this fellow accused of killing scores at a youth camp claims to be concerned for the youth of Norway:

I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years.

....Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.

The document below came to us via the US-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, a human rights group that tracks the far right in the US and abroad. The English translation is a bit rough in some portions, but the meaning is usually clear—too clear.

Did the FBI Bury Oklahoma City Bombing Evidence?

One lawyer's relentless quest for information reveals fresh hints of a coverup.

—By James Ridgeway

| Thu Jul. 21, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Timothy McVeigh is escorted from the courthouse in Perry, Oklahoma.

In 2007, Mother Jones was the first national media outlet to tell the full story of Jesse Trentadue and his quest for the truth, which began four months after the attack on Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people. It was then that Trentadue, a Salt Lake City lawyer, learned that his brother, a construction worker and one-time bank robber, had died in a federal prison in Oklahoma City.

Prison officials said the prisoner had hanged himself. But Kenney Trentadue, who had never revealed any suicidal inclination, was shipped home for burial with bruises all over his body and lacerations on his face and throat—suggesting something more sinister. Even Oklahoma City's chief medical examiner would later say, publicly, that it was "very likely he was murdered." But the most compelling evidence in the case was altered or turned up missing. Jesse Trentadue was never able to prove what had actually happened to his brother—though he did win a $1.1 million civil suit for "emotional distress" to his family, based on the way the government had handled the aftermath of Kenney's death.

[Read the full article]

Soylent Greenbacks: David Brooks Wants People to Die for Debt Reduction

—By James Ridgeway

| Fri Jul. 15, 2011 12:47 PM PDT

He looks delicious.

To help solve the debt crisis, the best thing I can do is die. Maybe not right now, but certainly before I put too much strain on the public purse—and since I'm 74, that means pretty soon. If I should be lucky enough to contract a fatal disease, I can do the right thing by eschewing expensive medical care that might extend my life. If that doesn’t happen, and I enter a slow and costly decline, then in the interests of the greater good I should take the Hemingway solution.

That's pretty much the message of David Brooks' column in today’s New York Times. "This fiscal crisis is about many things," he writes, "but one of them is our inability to face death—our willingness to spend our nation into bankruptcy to extend life for a few more sickly months."

Here's how Brooks comes by his position: To begin with, he says: "The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs." Never mind two futile wars and 10 years of tax relief for millionaires.

Furthermore, he argues, the reason for these soaring costs is that very old and very sick people insist on clinging on to their miserable lives, when they ought to be civic-minded enough to kick off. It's not the insurance companies, which reap huge profits by serving as useless, greed-driven middlemen. It's not the drug companies, which are making out like bandits with virtually no government regulation. It's not the whole corrupt, overpriced system of medicine for profit, which delivers the 37th best health care in the world, according to the WHO, at more than twice the cost of the best (France). No. It's all about us greedy geezers. We're the ones who are placing an untenable burden on the younger, heartier citizenry, with our selfish desire to live a little longer.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]