The deep misogyny of British culture really comes through in a new BBC retelling of Agent Zo’s work.

First, they misleadingly say she left Britain for Poland.

The woman who left Britain to parachute into Nazi-occupied Poland

Why not say the Polish woman who returned home to lead the liberation of her country? The headline is askew from the first sentence of the piece, which clearly says she was returning to Poland.

…a woman boarded a warplane ready to return to Poland to fight the Nazis…

Next, they try to emphasize she parachuted without wearing trousers, even though she actually was wearing a flight suit. As if Scotland doesn’t have male veterans wearing skirts? As if wearing a flight suit doesn’t mean she was in trousers?

…a woman boarded a warplane ready to return to Poland to fight the Nazis, a parachute strapped to her back and a blue dress beneath her flight suit. […] Branded “the captain in a skirt”… “I quite like the line she’s the only person to parachute back from Britain to Nazi-occupied Poland in a dress because she’s the only woman to do it,” [historian Clare] Mulley says.

She’s the only person to parachute into Poland wearing a blue dress under a flight suit? We should like this minor detail because… why?

Can we believe a blue dress matters at all, or that it’s even true? Did it have dark thread or light? Was it flat front or pleated? Cotton or wool blend? Seriously, this is the kind of tiny detail distraction that the historian’s bias invokes rather than anything important to the main thread of honoring Agent Zo (yes, pun intended).

My guess would be Zo knew she had to immediately appear normal, and was dressed ready to drop and walk. That’s a reflection of occupied Poland at the time, not her own fashion sense, which speaks directly to oppression.

Did Scottish men not wear skirts when they jumped for a similar, yet opposite reason of being distinct?

I suspect this historian spent exactly no time trying to find evidence of others wearing a dress underneath their trousers, as if such a getup would make any sense without a specific reason (e.g. trying to NOT standout or be noticed, on penalty of death).

In other words, it comes across as the historian saying she loves the fact that Polish women were expected to be wearing a dress always, no matter what, or be shot on sight. What kind of person likes that?

Also repeatedly there is an attempt to unfairly brand this fearless patriot in war as being too brave or too confident.

Branded … “a militant female dictator” as she confronted those in charge in London, her efforts would transform the status of women in the Polish Home Army, helping to save thousands of lives. …you look at some of the paperwork of her friends and they said: ‘Zo came and she terrified me. I couldn’t do anything else. I had to do it.’

Some of the paperwork says her friends were terrified by her into fighting against the Nazis? That sounds like war, where unfortunately people have to be motivated by fear early to fight against the Nazis to avoid being slaughtered later without any fight.

You think Zo is the scary one? Versus the Gestapo? Funny how you live to tell that story. I guess she terrified you in the right way. Because she was right, the other option wasn’t an option at all. For a historian to say fighting Nazism was not or is not a binary choice, is for that historian to be promoting Nazism.

…she sort of blithely assumes that everyone shares her very binary world vision – they’re bad, we’ve got to free Poland. “That’s it. That’s what’s driving her.”

It was a binary world because Nazism is the most binary system. Nazis kill anyone who doesn’t agree with Hitler, or his latest whim in a state of constant improvisation and chaos. I can’t believe I have to say this. This historian even admits as much when she says Nazis were illegally killing Polish women on sight in the most binary way.

“…Hitler has got this Commando Order… he said that anyone who is found fighting not in uniform will be shot without trial,” says Mulley.

Wear a dress and dare to disagree with Hitler? Get shot without trial.

Or publicly beheaded.

Zo didn’t assume that people shared this reality. She saw truths and knew a harsh toxic reality of Nazism. She knew her friends would be shot dead in a dress sooner rather than later, if they weren’t fighting along side her to end the binary world Hitler forced women into without any choice.

Let’s also not fixate on the voice of some offended man in London who branded Zo a militant dictator, when so many others did not. I’ve run into similar issues with Orde Wingate history, as well as the talented and beautiful “Night Witches”.

Take General Patton, as an opposite canonical example, regarding how tough men can be glorified over their terrifying methods of motivation. Was Zo’s methods as bad/good as Patton? And would she ever be judged in the same way?

Agent Zo is framed unfairly by the BBC, and by spurious voices, as though her confidence and competence as a resistance fighter was a terrifying dictatorship, instead of calm, calculated competency opposed to dictatorships…. Why not tell it always from a foundational story that Zo achieved mission objectives and an absolutely essential role for the success and safety of her troops in the liberation of Poland, despite overwhelming odds against her?

As reported by the BBC in February, former Prime Minister (PM) Liz Truss said it’s time for violence:

…conservatives are now operating in a hostile environment… we essentially need a bigger bazooka in order to be able to deliver…

Truss, the shortest-term PM in the United Kingdom’s (UK) history and the first ex-PM to completely lose any seat in government (due to extreme incompetence), was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Given her outlandish calls for domestic terrorism and civil war, as a literal nobody in America who can still seriously damage the political narrative, now she has been invited as an honored guest to the Republican National Convention (RNC).

‘I don’t know who that is’: What Americans think of Truss at Republican convention

Not knowing who she is makes her big stage speech calling for US violence even more dangerous, as it enters the dialogue with authority yet without real attribution.

Seven in ten UK voters have an unfavourable view of Trump – even more than have an unfavourable view of Truss.

Trump is shamelessly using Truss. And you would think Americans could bounce Trump out of office faster than Truss, given he’s worse. Alas.

Obvious game-playing by the RNC to use a disgraced UK PM to stoke violent hate without attribution recalls dangerous Trump rhetoric that called for assassination of his political opponents.

Trump: If Clinton picks judges, “nothing you can do, folks — although the 2nd Amendment people, maybe there is.” […] Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT, responded on Twitter: “Don’t treat this as a political misstep. It’s an assassination threat, seriously upping the possibility of a national tragedy & crisis.”

Trump responded to loud criticism of his obviously divisive call for assassination by invoking gaslighting propaganda tactics.

It’s called the power of unification…

By “it” he meant assassination. Trump openly called “it” his theory for unification, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, because he believes that killing his opponent… unifies power into him.

The GOP regular incitements to violence have now adopted this “unity” phrasing along with some of their more obvious incitements.

In Ohio campaign rally, Trump says there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses November election…

How could they so horribly misuse the word “unity” to campaign for violent disunity in America?

First, don’t discount how calls for unity towards preserving slavery were the defining feature of racist Confederacy secession. White men were tortured and lynched, their mutilated bodies strung up in public displays, if they dared to object to American prosperity being based almost entirely on mass human trafficking. Unity was demanded to prop up the systemic government-sanctioned rape of Black women for profit, with even anti-racist speech facing penalty of gruesome public death by mobs.

Second, the modern answer is the GOP have shifted their messaging hard towards a well-known reverse meaning used by current domestic terrorists, an encoded white supremacist signal related to extremist “replacement” racist conspiracies.

White Supremacist Propaganda Incidents Soar to Record High in 2023… common slogans include “White unity”…

Notably, at public rallies they leave the “white” part out like they leave their white hoods off.

Unity has been a theme of the Republican convention this week in Milwaukee…

Thus unification through hate, and especially violent hate, is a very old theme in American politics.

“[The organized terror movement after Civil War] stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.” And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.

What they mean is this:

…a former Ku Klux Klan leader and a current U.S. Senate candidate from Louisiana — encouraged listeners to cast their ballots for Trump, saying that “voting against Donald Trump at this point is really treason to your heritage.”

Treason. Meaning you will be put to death if you vote against white power, literally the same threats that were made after the Civil War to stop American Blacks from voting at all.

Colby: On the 29th of October 1869, [the KKK] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

The brand of bazooka-driven (assassination, bloodbath) “unity” the GOP is talking about is simply white supremacist violence, an 1800s-themed war to put white men into power and remove everyone else.

Some may remember 1988 was the obvious turning point and 1989 was when things got real for racist white nationalists.

The year 1989 will go down as a watershed year in the struggle for a non-racial democracy in South Africa.

Apartheid was ending fast, such that a certain emerald mine owning family was desperate to grab their hordes of ill-gotten wealth and change nationalities.

“All my movements there were by air in small twin-engine aircraft,” Errol said. “Airfields were a cleared grassy plain with two car’s headlights at the threshold and two car’s headlights at the far end. Landing was at night.” […] “Think of the early Wild West, except add jungle, wild animals (and wild humans), and many many things that can kill you,” he added.

So wealthy. The Musk family flew their private planes around and far above the “wild humans” they feared would kill them.

• Elon Musk’s private jets took 441 flights this year
• Musk asserted planes are less safe if pilots are Black

How did they come into such wealth? Elon Musk’s late grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman (1902 – 1974), was a rich chiropractor in Canada. But in 1950, he fled to South Africa. Why? Because he was under pressure following his 1940 arrest in Canada for being a part of an illegal political organization, Technocracy, founded in the 1920s by Howard Scott.

Canada outlawed the political party as it had been determined to be a national security risk (anti-semitic, racist, and Nazi-adjacent).

Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to possess his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming the national chairman of a minor [Social Credit] political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

Haldeman quit after his arrest to start his own extremist political party, before becoming the head of the antisemitic “Social Credit” (SoCred) party in 1946.

In 1947, Norman Jaques even read excerpts of the Protocols [of Elder’s of Zion] into Hansard. In Alberta’s Social Credit party, antisemitism was for many a central plank in their political platform, not to mention part of their Weltanschauung.

Having built a reputation in Canada as racist enemy to democracy and national security risk during WWII, Elon Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, then abruptly fled to Africa — a path similar to many Nazis after Hitler’s suicide. Notably he took very public credit for being so racist at the time that he wanted to be seen as a leader promoting the rise of an African white ethno-state.

[Haldeman relocated to South Africa due to] his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

After horrible inhumane oppression through technology used to rapidly amass wealth in the cruel Apartheid system, is it then any wonder why Elon Musk’s family high-tailed back into Canada… to hide their money and avoid accountability when Apartheid failed?

Clearly they believed nobody remembered the family’s legacy of open racism let alone fascist attempts at overthrowing government.

Haldeman was a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who blamed much of what bothered him about the world on Jewish financiers.

[…]

Haldeman railed against many dark forces that he believed to be propagating these ideas: Jewish bankers, Jewish intellectuals, philanthropic foundations run by Jews, communists, Black leaders, and anyone who supported the overthrow of colonial rule in Africa. “The facts of history show that the White man has always developed the country he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned,” he wrote, peddling stock apartheid propaganda, and “The Black people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization from the earliest times but, on their own, built nothing and discovered nothing, not even the wheel.”

So according to their proud Tweet in 2024 they simply jumped on a plane, left a teenager behind to sell everything they owned including the house in a hurry, because there was a “plan”.

Get the plan? GET IT?

Racists on the run, were in a panic to avoid reconciliation. It is the all too common white nationalist teenage girl carrying big bags of cash with few or no records… plan.

We then had to move immediately to Toronto.

The icing on this awful white supremacist illegal-immigration cake (Elon Musk and his brother lied their way into America) was when Elon joined Peter Thiel, the son of actual German Nazis who also had fled to South Africa to profit from racism, to form… PayPal.

Their business model mysteriously backed by angel investors was using the Internet as a giant money laundry scheme, like a digital Swiss bank account for white nationalist families like theirs fleeing the fall of Apartheid and needing to hide the wealth.

They sold PayPal, used the money to grab power away from others, and ever since have been getting attention for looking like white supremacists who tend to say… who me? Peter Thiel has even claimed lately he hangs around with Nazis because he’s trying to help uncover them.

Know your history, and you can see plainly how the Musk family today in America appears to be aiming for what grandpa Haldeman dreamed up in South Africa — technology used to create and run a white ethnostate dictatorship.

The [Technocracy] movement had a bizarre set of principles: They believed that the world should be run by a totalitarian regime of engineers and scientists based in North America; that these tech overlords would solve all of society’s problems[.]

The Technocracy party “referred to people as numbers (apparently, Musk’s grandfather was 10450-1) and sometimes added Xs to their names.”

Historians note Musk’s ideas that technology can solve most of society’s ills reflect some of the same technocratic beliefs his grandfather promoted. Musk previously said on Twitter, now called X, that Mars should have an established technocracy. He has also named his three children with Grimes — X Æ A-Xii Musk, or X, Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, and Techno Mechanicus

Why add an X to everything? Ask the KKK and Nazis. Their versions of an X and the Technocracy are inseparable.

A dating app marketing campaign in Germany has raised attention with provocative references to Nazi “ethnic purity” concepts.

…the ultimate ethnic-based dating app! …connect with people who share the same values, culture, and language as you! People from your German community who understand your past and want to create a future together with you!

People from your community who understand your past?

As opposed to… anyone else who understands your past?

The company doubles-down on a very dangerous “us versus them” curation of communities being “ethnically cleansed” to disconnect voices in a shared past.

There’s no complexity implied, or likely intended, meaning the app and data work towards an ethnically binary lifestyle that is less inclusive of others. The campaign even offers this odd slogan.

Find Your One.

I see no attempts to say find community, emphasizing being included by others. Instead it comes across as forming the most narrow an ethnic view possible to emphasize false “oneness” that discourages inclusion or tolerance.

Sexual racism… is closely associated with generic racist attitudes, which challenges the idea of racial attraction as solely a matter of personal preference.

Are you or aren’t you identifying as being ethnically German? That’s not an innocent question. And this app maybe will rat you out. After all, the Palantir police in Hesse and the AfD (Nazi party) really want to know, in case you hadn’t heard their news.

Unidentified police officers in Hesse [aided by Palantir] accessed the contact details of several politicians and prominent immigrants from official records and shared them with the neo-Nazi group, according to local reports.

Someone who plausibly crosses categories and reflects intermarriage, offering a more rich and diverse past, would be forced by such dua.com propaganda into an unnecessarily extremist form of ethnic purity in their digital identity.

This is a topic familiar to anyone who studies history, such as data collection used for genocide.

While it brings an awful angle to the story, it also maybe is not entirely unexpected. The company claims to be founded by Albanians who carry lingering beliefs about community unity as a political goal.

…determined to unite his community… won the first prize in Kosovo.

An Albanian ethnic exclusivism app of Kosovo, is… what generated this German ad about ethnic unity. It flies directly from political extremist-group anxiety with destabilizing effects of polarization, into a fire. Here’s the “about” page company image that dua.com has posted, where a certain “salute” stands out.

In other words there is important context because of German history of genocide… yet still maybe beyond that as well. Take the fall of Yugoslavia, for example.

Serbia triggered horrible political disintegration into war through ethnic-based unity propaganda campaigns, if you recall a conspiracy-laden rise of extremist President Slobodan Milošević.

This wealthy “business man” of Yugoslavia launched ad campaigns to drive people hard into choosing between an “us” (Serbian) or “them” (Kosovo Albanians, Croats, or anyone in Serbia opposing his binary approach to identity). He literally classified the “us” as being the one and only, a “heavenly” or a divine choice.

In order to make conspiracies and false choice seem more real, he stoked myths about community unity as reflection on identity as connection with their past. A “centuries-old hatred” was cooked up to unify a Serbian community in determination — violently obsess towards an ethnic state.

Understanding subtext of dua.com emerging from ethnic tensions of Kosovo, regardless of anyone being inside or outside a community’s past as an observer, seems fundamental to judging new ads in Germany that promote ethnicity as “unity” of “one” choice.

Consider, for example, how the “America First” movement started in nativist campaigns of the late 1800s to spread ethnic “unity” violence. People had to say they were America first, or they were lynched and murdered (e.g. how “African American” was created as an encoded slur to “other” non-whites). Today the America First racist hate campaign is spreading on hats and flags because somehow it remains less obvious than the swastika or burning cross.

Back to the topic of data on apps used to drive human relations with a propaganda campaign for binary “ethnic” choices, it invokes a sober assessment of past “resettlement” planning and worse, war crimes and genocide (e.g. tragic history of campaigns towards the mono-ethnic Velika Srbija — Great Serbia — let alone Apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany or America First).

Related:

Zheng, Robin (2016). Why Yellow Fever Isn’t Flattering: A Case Against Racial Fetishes. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (3):400-419.

Santana, E. (2020). Is White Always Right? Skin Color and Interdating Among Whites. Race Soc Probl 12: 313–322.