Category Archives: Security

Poetry, Security

Dobrindt Left the Antisemitism Post Empty to Do the Job Himself

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I have been up to my eyeballs in German political speeches this autumn, shocked by the antisemitism. The work is slow and mostly dull. We pull the Bundestag protocols, we read what people said, we note what makes a claim about Jews and what does not.

The AfD gives plenty to note. That was expected. Every other party combined doesn’t come anywhere close to the AfD. They crank it out as if it’s been enabled. But by whom, and how, and why?

What was not expected was a man who fell out of the tree when we shook it, because his record is clean on the exact terms we had been checking.

Alexander Dobrindt is Germany’s interior minister. CSU, in the Bundestag since 2002. We read everything he said in parliament over those twenty-four years. He has never said anything coded as antisemitic there. None of the dogwhistles or trigger words, no winks. When he mentions Jews, he condemns Judenhass. He says Jews belong to Germany. By any fair reading of his words, he shouldn’t be in this fruit bowl.

So why did he keep landing there? Because of what he consistently does around and with the subject. A small set of examples shows the method.

One day apart

On 20 May 2025 he presented crime statistics on politically motivated offences. The government published his line: “Egal, wo der Antisemitismus herkommt – er ist unter keinen Umständen zu akzeptieren.”

So the man says wherever it comes from.

Wherever. Hold that word.

The next day, 21 May, he took questions in the Bundestag. Protocol 21/6, page 405: antisemitism exists “sowohl im rechtsradikalen Bereich als auch in Bereichen des importierten Antisemitismus.”

Imported. Not wherever.

Same minister, same week, two audiences, two messages.

He has used “importiert” since October 2023. It is a word that points away from the AfD, away from the homegrown far right, and at migrants. Once it points there it becomes an argument for deportation. Researchers who study online antisemitism have described this move for years: concede that antisemitism exists, then hand it to a target group, usually Muslims. Shahak Shapira said it more plainly this September. Germany has plenty of antisemitism already. Nobody needs to import any.

A memorial hour

On 9 November 2023, the day Germany remembers the pogrom of 1938, the Bundestag held its memorial debate. Dobrindt spoke, as captured in Protocol 20/134, page 16792:

Die Jüdinnen und Juden gehören unverbrüchlich zu unserem Land, ihr aber nicht.

The protocol notes Saskia Esken calling out from the SPD benches: “Nicht mal in so einer Gedenkstunde können Sie das lassen!” Not even in a memorial hour.

He went on anyway. In that hour he asked for a six-month minimum sentence for hatred of Israel, automatic expulsion of foreign offenders and loss of citizenship for dual nationals. Then the sentence the demands were built for:

Wer nicht mit Israel leben will, wer nicht friedlich mit Juden leben will, der kann auch nicht in Deutschland leben.

The protocol notes applause from CDU/CSU, FDP and the AfD. The AfD does not usually clap for a CSU minister in a memorial hour. Apparently a whistle was heard.

The bills his party then tabled were voted down in April 2024. He has been interior minister since May 2025. He has not brought them back.

Two days after an election

On 20 September 2026 Die Linke won the Berlin election. On 22 September Dobrindt said the Berlin Linke tolerates antisemites and extremists in its circles, “ganz offensichtlich.”

Two days. No inquiry, no finding, a federal minister telling the parties negotiating a state government whom not to work with.

On 24 September, on the ZDF talk show maybrit illner, the host corrected her own slip about the Linke’s lead candidate, Elif Eralp:

Sie ist keine Antisemitin.

She is no antisemite. The president of the Central Council of Jews has said he finds her personal position credible.

Dobrindt answered, “Na doch.” She is. On what basis, he did not say.

Eralp is not Jewish. She filed a criminal complaint for defamation and insult. The ministry’s full response was:

Die Worte stehen für sich.

The words stand on their own, as if nobody has to answer for them.

On 7 October, at the memorial on the Bebelplatz for the Hamas massacre, Dobrindt said it again without naming the party: be alarmed when a party in Berlin talks about joining a government while tolerating antisemites in its circles.

If that is his standard he should be talking about the AfD non-stop. Its figurehead Björn Höcke has two convictions for using an SA slogan. Its rallies chant the same slogan with one word swapped, “Alice für Deutschland.” Its internal mail, verified by Correctiv, reads the way you would expect. The record is public.

Around 150 Jewish Berliners, Deborah Feldman and Susan Neiman among them, signed a letter calling the campaign against the Linke a cynical political instrumentalisation. The Central Council of Jews said the Berlin Linke has a real problem, which in Berlin is like saying the weather is bad, and did not endorse “Na doch.” That seems about right. There are antisemites around Berlin politics, the Linke included. The minister is not working against them. He is wielding them.

The word he saves

The AfD has existed since 2013. The domestic intelligence service calls it confirmed right-wing extremist, and German courts have read its “Remigration” plan as ethnic cleansing. Dobrindt calls it “rechtsextremistisch” too, and opposes a ban. In thirteen years, in nothing we could find, has he ever called the AfD antisemitic.

Only the Linke got that word, two days after winning an election. The party that applauded his memorial speech has not gotten it once.

And during the weeks of warnings about Berlin, the federal government’s own post for fighting antisemitism was empty. Felix Klein left at the end of August. The successor was approved on 14 October. In July Dobrindt had promised one “in Kürze.”

So the minister alarmed about antisemitism in one party let the office meant to speak for Jews sit vacant through the alarm. If you want to know how “never again” coexists with all of this, the pattern is not hard to see.

The pattern

His other famous phrases fit. “Konservative Revolution” in 2018, the name of the Weimar far right, kept after historians objected. “Anti-Abschiebe-Industrie” the same year, for the lawyers of asylum seekers, a term that won Unwort des Jahres and was followed by thousands of hate mails to one lawyer in Ellwangen with the phrase in the subject line. “Migrantische Chaoten” this month, after which his own ministry admitted it had no numbers.

The targets change. Jews are never the target. Jews are forever the reason given for one.

It is not the first time this blog has watched him point left while the right does the work. In June, after the Reutlingen substation fire, the interior minister talked about left-wing extremists before anyone had evidence of who struck the match.

This is the move Esra Özyürek describes in Subcontractors of Guilt: the Holocaust’s weight gets passed down to the people with the least power to refuse it, and Muslims in Germany end up holding the bill. “Importierter Antisemitismus” is that transfer in two words. It is the same reflex that had the Chancellor filing antisemitism under hostility to foreigners at a Berlin rally in September. Dobrindt’s version goes a step further into operations: the Jews belong to us, as a reason we hold, so that “ihr aber nicht” can follow.

What we will publish

Dobrindt will appear in the antisemitism tracker with zero antisemitic statements. That is the honest number and a count that cheats is worthless. Next to the zero will be a second column: statements that use antisemitism against somebody else. He is at eight so far. The memorial speech, memorable for who applauded it, is the first.

We also looked for anything he has said about his own family’s place in Nazi Germany, as we do for everyone. Nothing is published, and he has never spoken of it. That blank will be on the page too.

The lesson from a season of reading is simple. The words are not the only thing. A German right-wing politician can go twenty-four years without one bad word about Jews and still use them whenever it “pays”.

Turkish- and Arab-background Germans are made to perform remembrance as a condition of belonging while ethnic Germans get to treat their own antisemitism as historically closed. The guilt gets subcontracted downward to the people with the least power to refuse the transfer of blame.
History, Poetry, Security

No Quarter: High Time We Hold Hegseth to Hegseth

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In the matter of Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War. Brief for the prosecution.

I. The charge

Ordering the killing of shipwrecked survivors on September 2, 2025. The charge is the unlawful killing of persons hors de combat. Treason is set aside for the moment because it needs an army in the field or adherence to an enemy. The charge the record supports so far is enough.

II. Statement of facts

  1. On September 2, 2025, United States forces struck a boat in the Caribbean. Reporting places a verbal order from Hegseth before the operation: “kill everybody.”
  2. Two survivors were seen clinging to wreckage. Roughly two hours later a second strike killed them. The White House confirms the second strike and attributes the order to Admiral Bradley, acting under Hegseth’s authorization.
  3. Hegseth first said he watched the operation live, then said he left before the second strike and saw no survivors in the “fog of war.” Both statements are his.
  4. The campaign continued. Just Security’s running timeline put the count at 72 strikes and 243 dead by late October 2026.
  5. On September 15, 2026, Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, read eight articles of impeachment on the House floor, charging that Hegseth directed the unlawful use of deadly force in the boat strikes. The Speaker sent the House home a day early to avoid a vote.

III. The rule

The Department of War’s own Law of War Manual forbids attacking the shipwrecked. Legal experts reviewing the September 2 orders found them self-evidently unlawful, because they ordered no quarter, and found the second strike an attack on persons hors de combat. Representative Mike Turner, a Republican, put the civilian version plainly: had the survivors been captured and convicted, they would have gone to jail, not been executed.

IV. The defendant’s own standard

The tribunal is asked to apply the standard the defendant has applied to others.

  • Exhibit A, 2019. Hegseth privately lobbied the President to pardon Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two civilians, Mathew Golsteyn, charged with murdering a detainee, and Edward Gallagher, charged with stabbing a prisoner. He told his audience “these are the good guys.” Three trials, erased.
  • Exhibit B, 2025. “Kill everybody.” Two men in the water, no capture, no trial.
  • Exhibit C, 2026. Hegseth announced the Pentagon would livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, a man who received a court-martial, a conviction and thirteen years of appeals. Hegseth took a lawful sentence and tried to make it a broadcast. The President withdrew it.

The pattern across all three exhibits is the removal of the trial. The pardons removed trials already held. The order removed a trial that should have followed capture. The livestream removed the dignity a trial had already secured.

V. Precedent

On October 19, 1864, Robert E. Lee wrote to Grant that captured Black soldiers belonging to Confederate citizens would be returned to their owners rather than exchanged as prisoners of war. Grant refused every exchange on those terms. Lee put in writing that captured men were property, and he commanded on that basis to the end.

In June 1865 a federal grand jury indicted Lee for treason. Grant stopped the trial. Lee died obscured, at home in 1870, with barely a thousand mourners. Within two years the men who lost the war began fabricating him into a myth that now sits on a Georgia mountain protected by statute. The absence of the trial is the only thing that ever saved Lee, and the cost of that absence ran a century.

VI. Relief sought

A trial. Charge, evidence, witnesses, verdict. The September 2 video and the Justice Department memo entered into the record. Admiral Bradley under oath. The sentence belongs to the court and to no one else.

That is the one thing the defendant has denied to every person he has judged. It is the one thing the record now demands for him.

History, Security

From the Monstrosity of Lee to the Magnificent Eight: After a Century of Oppression Black Women Sweep Georgia

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Georgia elected eight Black women to statewide office on Tuesday. It matters not least of all because of the disinformation in America that it overcomes; the century of Robert E. Lee propaganda and myths that it shatters. Every statewide race on the ballot went to a Democrat, and every Black woman who ran statewide won. Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the first Black woman to serve as governor of any American state.

The first Black woman ever elected to a partisan statewide office in Georgia took her seat eleven months ago. Alicia Johnson joined the Public Service Commission in December 2025, a body over a century old. She said it was a shame to be the first anything on it.

Some have commented that Trump targeted Blacks for removal from their federal government seats, as Wilson did starting in 1913 under the “America First” banner he ran on in 1916, and thus they are winning all the races at the state level now. Notably, when the GOP ran Trump against a Black woman for President on an “America First” platform, Trump had already called Lee “the greatest strategist of them all” as the 1890 Richmond statue came down, and said Lee would have won Afghanistan. The name at the root of “America First” is specific.

Robert E. Lee.

Wilson, before he was President, delivered the Lee birthday address at Chapel Hill on January 19, 1909, presenting a traitorous “monster” who ran a school of rapists as a model for the whole nation. Four years later Carr stood on the same campus to unveil a Confederate statue, as Wilson used his election mandate to purge Black federal workers.

Lee had died in 1870 in almost total obscurity. He should have been hanged in 1865, but Grant intervened to stop the trial. After that Lee wanted to be unknown, by design, so that he could die of natural causes instead of being hanged for treason let alone killed for his many crimes against humanity (including his own men). Barely a thousand people attended his funeral, most of them students and cadets from the two schools in Lexington. His own students had to be called in to carry his body, perhaps for school credit. Fifteen years later 1.5 million people turned out for his sworn enemy President Grant, who had the Confederate generals he had defeated as his pallbearers. By any honest measure of the two men they could not be farther apart.

Grant was a military genius, a General who captured three whole armies and pioneered modern combined army and navy operations. Lee took three decades to make colonel, known for blunders and brutality including denying aid to the wounded and murdering prisoners. Grant won the presidency twice, created the DoJ and the first National Park, and initiated Civil Rights enforcement. Lee ran a college whose students were known for raping Black schoolchildren in the area and other racist violence including attempts at lynching.

Then the myth about the two men was built by racist propagandists who lost the Slaveholder Rebellion, and Georgia moved that mythology into actual law.

1889. Georgia makes Lee’s birthday a paid state holiday by statute.

1906. Hoke Smith runs for governor on Black disfranchisement. On September 22 the Atlanta papers print four alleged assaults on white women by Black men, none ever substantiated. The massacre follows that night. The 1908 amendment delivers the literacy test and grandfather clause. The invented Black rapist is the license for the real white one.

1913. Julian Carr dedicates a Confederate monument at Chapel Hill and tells the crowd he horse-whipped a Black woman until her skirts hung in shreds, one hundred yards from the statue. The crowd approves.

1915. Helen Plane of the United Daughters of the Confederacy hires Borglum to carve Lee into Stone Mountain and writes asking for Klan figures on the carving. The Klan refounds itself on the summit that November.

1919. Georgia is the first state to reject the Nineteenth Amendment, then uses a six-month registration rule to keep women out of the 1920 election. White women vote in 1922. Black women stay out under the 1908 rules. Georgia ratifies in 1970.

1924. Lee’s head is unveiled on Stone Mountain on Lee’s birthday before 5,000 people.

1954. Fifty-seven days after Brown v. Board, Marvin Griffin points at the mountain and promises to finish the carving. He adds the battle flag to the state flag in 1956 and buys the mountain in 1958. The carving finishes in 1972.

1965. Grace Towns Hamilton becomes the first Black woman in the Georgia legislature. One century after Appomattox.

2001. The price of removing the battle flag from the state flag is Georgia Code 50-3-1(c), which protects the Lee carving by statute.

2015. Governor Deal renames Lee’s birthday “State Holiday.” The day stays on the calendar.

2022. Secretary of State Raffensperger cites that holiday to block Saturday early voting in the Warnock runoff. Keisha Lance Bottoms posts that Lee’s birthday is blocking the vote. The Georgia Supreme Court overrules him.

2025. Alicia Johnson. The first.

2026. Eight. The woman who posted about the Lee holiday in 2022 is now governor.

Research published in PNAS in 2021 found Confederate monuments concentrated in the counties with the most lynchings. The SPLC data shows the monuments went up in two waves, one with the Jim Crow constitutions after 1900 and one with the backlash to Brown after 1954. Georgia hit both waves with the same mountain, and the mountain is protected by the same Republican majority that just lost the state House.

Lee’s name was a holiday, a mountain, a flag, a statute, and a voting calendar. Each one was a mythological fixation turned into a legal instrument specifically deployed for denying Black women any power.

Tuesday’s result is what Georgia looks like once the Lee disinformation bubble is popped.

Energy, History, Security

Nuclear Bombs All Wrong in “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”

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I was invited to a group viewing of the Focus Features film called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. It was released March 2026, as a documentary by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell built on interviews with the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

For someone formally trained as a historian who has been on the forefront of AI security research for over 15 years, I found it difficult to watch. For example, partway through, a famous voice in the film reaches for a particular standard analogy. He says Germans were working on the bomb in the 1940s and…

so it’s not so easy to tell Robert Oppenheimer then, “slow down.”

Record scratch. I almost walked out of the film at that moment.

The line sounds like history. It is NOT. That is propaganda. Mythology at best.

On every point I can refute it. The German threat was a belief, the belief was exposed as such and thus failed before the bomb existed. People told Oppenheimer to slow down, in writing, and he was the one who refused to listen.

It’s a FACT that Oppenheimer was told to slow down. And this AI “documentary” tries to push total propaganda that Oppenheimer had no choice but to speed up?

The failure of the film is simple to explain. It takes people who are purported experts in one area, and then pushes them into a discussion outside their expertise.

At one point a man presented as some kind of AI theorist in ethics is allowed to go on-and-on about military tactics where he clearly has zero clue and should be shut down. Imagine an artist inviting an accountant to sit in a hot-seat under intense lights to explain how brain surgery works.

Let’s dig in deeper to this Oppenheimer mistake, because it’s so easily disproved. It shows the kind of fact checking devoid from the film. There is a notable lack of integrity and quality that should have gated its release. Unless you call it an art film. Then, ok, fine it’s just one guy’s anxiety project. But a documentary?

Nope.

Albert Einstein signed the famous letter to Roosevelt of 2 August 1939 because he believed Germany was ahead. His belief was mistaken. The letter warns that Berlin had stopped uranium sales from the Czech mines it had seized and that German physicists were repeating the American experiments. That belief is the entire basis of the letter, meaning we now know conclusively it wasn’t based in fact. Fifteen years later Linus Pauling visited Einstein at Princeton and wrote down what he heard. Einstein called the letter the “one great mistake in my life“, with the single excuse that the Germans theoretically could have built a weapon first. It was anxiety that drove him to press a fear and he regretted it once the fear disproved.

Oppenheimer himself rated that fear low. In a 1965 interview he said that when he went to New Mexico he worried more about the campaigns in Africa and Russia than about a German bomb, and that belief in the German threat varied from person to person. Wigner kept it until there were no Germans left.

Today there’s no doubt about the Germans falling out of any bomb race by the summer of 1942. Albert Speer met the physicists at the Harnack House in Berlin on 4 June 1942 and Heisenberg told him a bomb was beyond reach within the war. To be fair, the Nazis had lost the war by 1943, meaning the later years are best described as German genocide and suicide while refusing to surrender a lost war. The project in this context was reduced to reactor research. Heisenberg put it plainly to Der Spiegel in 1967:

There never was a race for the atomic bomb.

Three years before Trinity, the race didn’t exist. Put THAT in your AI “documentary”.

The Allies found this out while the bomb was still eight months from completion. Samuel Goudsmit, scientific head of the Alsos intelligence mission, wrote that at the fall of Strasbourg in November 1944 his team found “irrefutable documentary evidence that Germany did not have atomic weapons” and was far behind on reactors. The same month James Chadwick told Joseph Rotblat at Los Alamos that intelligence showed the Germans were off the bomb. Rotblat asked to leave at once and was home before Christmas. He had already heard General Groves say at a dinner in March 1944 that “the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets”.

One scientist did what the AI “documentary” calls unthinkable. He told the bomb project to stop, and he stopped.

The others told it to slow down. Do you see yet how far from documenting actual technology this “documentary” is?

The Interim Committee met on 31 May 1945, three weeks after the German surrender, and settled on use against a Japanese city without warning. The scientists at the Chicago laboratory replied within days. The Franck Report of 11 June 1945 asked for a demonstration before any use on a city and warned that a surprise attack would start an arms race. Gee, that seems an important detail for an AI film. Leo Szilard’s petition of 17 July 1945 carried 70 signatures and asked the President to withhold the bomb until Japan had been given terms and refused them.

Oppenheimer is the guy who blocked the petition at Los Alamos. He refused to be told to stop or slow down.

Szilard sent it to Edward Teller to circulate there. Teller recalled that Oppenheimer talked him out of it on the grounds that scientists had no business applying political pressure, and the petition collected no signatures at the laboratory. Oppenheimer had already signed, for the Scientific Panel, the recommendation of 16 June 1945 that disposed of the demonstration idea:

we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

Then it was used, twice, by the military on a country that had nothing to do with the bomb development. The order of 25 July 1945 authorised the first bomb after 3 August and added that “additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready”. The second strike needed no further decision. Hiroshima was 6 August. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August. Nagasaki was 9 August.

The steps are important, especially since Americans never learn this correctly. The Japanese Supreme War Council was called on the morning of 9 August in response to the Soviet attack, before the second bomb fell. The Soviet entry weighed at least as heavily as the bombs on the surrender decision, and the bombs added little to what conventional raids had already done: Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama were each more than half burned out by August 1945. The atomic bomb was a demonstration aimed at the Soviets, not so much at the Japanese.

After the Soviet test of August 1949 the question became the hydrogen bomb, and Oppenheimer, chairing the General Advisory Committee, finally gave the advice he had refused in 1945. The committee’s report of 30 October 1949 recommended against a crash programme, and the majority annex he signed called the weapon one of genocide. Bit late, no?

Truman overruled him on 31 January 1950. Four years later the Atomic Energy Commission stripped his clearance. In December 2022 the Department of Energy vacated that decision and found the 1954 process had been driven by a wish to discredit him in the public debate over nuclear weapons policy.

When Oppenheimer finally said slow down in a way that counted, the time he waded into politics as he had told others not to, the state ended his career for it. Think about that political reason for not saying slow down, versus the actual risks from technology.

So the AI “documentary” has its technology history exactly backwards.

Telling Oppenheimer to slow down was easy and it was done, repeatedly. Done by Franck, by Szilard and 69 colleagues, by Rotblat with his feet, and in the end by Oppenheimer himself. The German justification was a belief dated to 1939, which had to be abandoned in Berlin in 1942, and was disproved in Strasbourg by 1944. The project ran straight through all three dates to a different objective entirely. That is the Oppenheimer story told properly.

When an AI executive says the big scary adversary makes slowing down big scary technology impossible, the historical question is what the project did on the day the fear of a big scary bear turned out to just be a little chihuahua (reactor experiment in a cave).