Blackwater Nazis Aim Homeward: Kristallnacht in Virginia? by Anton Chaitkin
This article appears in the October 26, 2007 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Greg Ahlemann is running for sheriff of Loudoun County, Va., by trying to incite mob anger against illegal immigrants. The Washington Post's Oct. 12 profile of the Republican nominee focussed on the weird tattoo on his arm: the logo of crusaders for an Armageddon religious war, showing a colonial American flag and an Israeli flag, joined by a cross. Ahlemann hurriedly convened a press conference on Oct. 15 to warn of illegal Hispanic immigrants as a crime threat—and to show off his tattoo. [[Ahlemann aimed his vitriol at the incumbent sheriff, Steve Simpson, for his refusal to join the anti-immigrant hysteria.]]

Half a world away, mercenaries gone murderous-wild in Iraqi streets provoked the government there to demand that the firm Blackwater USA be expelled from Iraq. The Blackwater scandal ripped through Congress, as Washington was haunted by the specter of global warfare to be run by fascist private agencies.

This is the agenda of British System über-financiers Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, as implemented by Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's "Revolution in Military Affairs."

The Rohatyn Center for International Affairs (Middlebury College, Vt.) ran an October 2004 conference on "Privatization of National Security," where, in partnership with Bush Administration architect, George P. Shultz, Rohatyn advocated a future world of private wars modeled explicitly on the feudal dark ages and the conquests of the British East India Company.

That future is now, and here at home.

Besides deploying its own mercenaries, Blackwater also trains American law enforcement personnel at all government levels. The Blackwater gang is reaching for power in domestic law enforcement, and the privatized police functions would be amalgamated with anti-immigrant vigilante mobs.

EIR has established that the Greg Ahlemann incitement-candidacy is part of an international theocratic, fascist underground, connecting the Blackwater corporate leadership to armageddonist Protestant and Catholic operatives.

Some global centers of this movement are just outside Washington in Northern Virginia: Christendom College (Front Royal), a political offshoot of Francisco Franco's Spanish fascism; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's St. Catherine of Siena Catholic parish (Falls Church); and Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries (headquartered east of the Loudoun County seat of Leesburg).

"Spooks" from these precincts aim to steer behind them crowds of Americans demoralized by the gathering storm of economic collapse.

Vigilantes and Mercenaries

Through the night of Oct. 17, over 1,000 pro- and anti-immigrant activists clashed at the meeting of the Board of Supervisors of Prince William County, Va. At 2:30 the next morning, the Prince William Supervisors voted 8-0 to set up a Criminal Alien Unit of the county police, and to deny certain public services to illegal aliens. The illegals would be flushed out by police demanding proof of citizenship during routine traffic stops and other interactions.

These scenes evoke 1930s Germany; Kristallnacht, the night Hitler's stormtroopers broke windows of Jews scapegoated in the Great Depression disaster; and the Gestapo, demanding, "Where are your papers?"

The Prince William ordinance was co-drafted by a vigilante organization known as "Help Save Virginia," with sub-sets Help Save Manassas, Save Herndon, and Save Loudoun. This is the Virginia public face of the movement called the Minutemen, which deploys vigilantes to the Mexican border. The "Help Save" website runs appeals for contributions directly to the Minutemen.

Virginia Minutemen chairman George Taplin was manning the "Help Save" booth on Oct. 7 at the Sterling Fest in Sterling Park, Va. He ran the Help Save/Minutemen movement's anti-immigrant agitation in Herndon, Va., and led their incursion into Loudoun County in January 2007. The vigilantes are one deployment of the national anti-immigrant movement, whose leaders include Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) and fascist Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, of "Clash of Civilizations" infamy.

A bill was introduced in 2006 into the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 6015) for the government to hire 5,000 to 8,000 mercenaries to patrol the border with Mexico, and to have private contractors such as Blackwater USA take over the training of the U.S. Border Patrol. Cosponsors included Reps. Tancredo, Eric Cantor (R-Va.), and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). The bill's prime sponsor, Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), had previously brought Blackwater president Gary Jackson to Congress to speak on how Blackwater could privatize Border Patrol functions.

Blackwater was set up in 1996 by Michigan billionaire Erik Prince. Guided by his religious-political shepherd Charles Colson, Prince has bound himself and his company to impose a Dark Ages in social and political life, a return to Inquisition rule, crusaders, and mercenary wars. In 2001, Prince gave $500,000 to Colson's Prison Fellowship, through the Prince family's tax-exempt Freiheit Foundation.

Infamous as a convicted Watergate conspirator, Colson later forged an alliance of "evangelicals" with far-right Catholics. Colson and his cohorts published in November 1996 a diatribe entitled "The End of Democracy?," calling for theocratic Christians to overthrow the no-longer-legitimate U.S. constitutional "regime." A convert to Catholicism, Prince has also funded the pro-Franco Legion of Christ.

Blackwater's Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel is Joseph Schmitz, formerly Pentagon Inspector General under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and a leading operative of the underground theocracy. Schmitz's father, the late California far-right Congressman John G. Schmitz, converted his aide Warren Carroll to Catholicism, and set him on the path to his intrigues in Spain with pro-Franco circles. This led to Carroll and the William F. Buckley family founding Christendom College, an agitational center, since sponsored by the Schmitzes and funded by Blackwater's Erik Prince.

Blackwater has put into Iraq hundreds of mercenaries formerly in the security services of Chile's Augusto Pinochet, the dictator whose death squads were whitewashed by Pinochet public relations chief William F. Buckley and his friends at Christendom.

Target: Virginia

Charles Colson's headquarters is just up the street from the Christian Fellowship Church in Ashburn, a congregation grown gigantic under its pastor James (Jay) Ahlemann, the father of Greg Ahlemann. Rev. Ahlemann is the chief funder of his son's sheriff campaign.

The senior Ahlemann is a disciple of political-religion manager James Dobson, whose Family Research Council was financially organized by the father of Erik Prince, with the young Erik Prince as an intern. In 1998 Rev. Ahlemann led a mob-incitement against the building in Loudoun County of a Muslim academy. Anti-Muslim leaflets were passed through the Ahlemann church from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by apocalyptic race-warrior William Paddock. Ahlemann had a local action arm called Concerned About Loudoun's Future, run by Sandra Elam—a fanatic who bases herself in Scalia's St. Catherine of Siena parish, a center for Inquisition Catholics like the Legionnaires of Christ. The Ahlemann-Elam group threatened to purge county officials who voted to allow the Muslim school's construction.

Rev. Ahlemann was later asked to leave his church for reasons which are unclear. At Dobson's request, he went out for a time to run the Pasadena, Calif. church which Dobson had earlier led. Rev. Ahlemann now runs Nazi-like anti-immigrant organizing through a network of smaller congregations in Virginia's Fauquier, Prince William, and Loudoun counties, and television and radio stations he owns in the Winchester-Warrenton-Front Royal area.

It was in the vacuum of the dispirited local Republican Party, that a rightist clique recently staged a little coup to make Greg Ahlemann, a loose-cannon former patrol officer, the party's sheriff nominee.

At his Oct. 15 press conference, Ahlemann blustered about the "alien" crime threat, but could not produce even a guess about the numbers of illegal immigrants, or cite any instances of criminal activity. Asked if he works with the Minutemen, Ahlemann lied by indirection: no, he said, only with Save Loudoun—the Minutemen's local public face. He acknowledged that there is a deep crisis in the housing market collapse. To make up for tax revenues that will be lost, he promised to slash the budget for public services. But an economic crisis can be useful politically, to those whipping up the masses against the Hispanic scapegoats.

Crossing the Line

Harvard's Samuel Huntington is lead strategist for
ethe anti-immigrant crusade, the philosopher alike for Blackwater and the border vigilantes, made famous by his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations, promoting anti-Islamic world war as inevitable.

Huntington explained in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, what his movement would do in an economic crisis: "The large and continuing influx of Hispanics threatens the pre-eminence of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture and the place of English as the only national language. White nativist movements are a possible and plausible response to these trends, and in situations of serious economic downturn and hardship they could be highly probable...." He assured his readers that the "new breed of white racial advocate" is "cultured, intelligent, and often possessing impressive degrees from ... premier colleges"—perhaps not a precise depiction of the knuckle-dragger sheriff candidate.

Blackwater USA's preferred hell-world of limitless mercenary wars was prefigured in Huntington's 1957 The Soldier and the State, attacking the concept of the republic's military: "The professional army ... is far more reliable than the political army which fights well only while sustained by a higher purpose.... The supreme military virtue is obedience." He lauded the Korean War, where the American soldier "fought solely and simply because he was ordered to fight it and .... he developed a supreme indifference to the political goals of the war...."

Now, when a political clique employs both "indifferent" Blackwater troopers, who kill for effect in Baghdad, and religious fanatics promoting racial hatred in an emerging political-economic crisis, it is well to be warned that a fundamental danger line has been crossed.