Putin, Hezbollah on the Brit right, Pokémon Go at the Yasukuni
[ by Charles Cameron — a couple of discordant notes on goings on ]
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This tweet from Casey Michel showing contemporary American fans of Sir Oswald Mosley —
My look at growing ties between US hard-right extremists and Kremlin-linked organizations: https://t.co/OtslMcDLMT pic.twitter.com/SOoPeMxvHf
— Casey Michel (@cjcmichel) July 17, 2016
— looked interesting, so I went to the linked Eurasia.net article, US Hate Group Forging Ties with the “Third Rome”, where I found these images:
— with a caption that reads:
In two photos posted to his personal social media networks, Matthew Heimbach stands with other white nationalists underneath the “Novorossiya” flag in a photo he published in May 2016 to his personal Twitter account (top) and he stands next to a flag used to represent the president of Russia in a photo he published to his personal page on the Russian social media web site VKontakte in August 2015. Heimbach, an American citizen, claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the best European leader of the 21st century. (Photos: Matthew Heimbach/VKontakte;Twitter)
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The double-headed eagle flag in the second image, according to the Appleton Studios heraldry blog, is in fact the “achievement of arms of the Russian Federation: The red shield with St. George on horseback slaying the dragon, the shield on the breast of a double-headed eagle wearing crowns (with a third crown in chief) and holding in its talons the orb and scepter.”
That’s interesting, next to the Oswald Mosley guy — but what’s just as intriguing is ther symbolism of the t-shirt he’s wearing. That’s a Hezbollah t-shirt — and it’s no coincidence, as this next image from his twitter-stream shows:
May God protect the brave fighters of the S.A.A and Hezbollah in the struggle for Aleppo. #NationalistSolidarity pic.twitter.com/Duv4Ij92yG
— Matthew Heimbach (@MatthewHeimbach) February 9, 2016
**
Okay, that’s my first note. Here’s the lead-in to my second:
First China invents global warming now uses Pokemon against Japan, which doesn't us enough for me to care! Very bad! https://t.co/nfEB5N1ZBE
— J.M. Berger (@intelwire) July 23, 2016
**
Pokémon Go Is At The Center Of An International Incident
Wha??
What’s worth noting here is that the Pokemon GO “gym” (augmented reality contest location) that’s at the center of this kerfuffle is geolocated at the Yasukuni Shrine — which can be seen as the Japanese approximate equivalent of the Arlington National Cemetery in the US — the nation’s most sacred shrine to its war fallen — always bearing in mind this major difference, that the Yasukuni Shrine includes numerous convicted war criminals among those venerated:
Why is the Yasukuni Shrine so controversial?
The Shrine is a national religious institution in Japan. Since 1869 it has honored the souls of those who have died in the service of Japan. So it mostly contains military men, but also some classes of civilians who’ve died in war-time. These include merchant seamen, and workers in bombed munitions factories, but not people in the general population killed, say, by allied bombing in World War II.
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