Choose Sides? You Bet. But Antifa and Fascism Are the Same Side.

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides, President Trump commented August 12 after bloody and lethal violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. "On many sides."

He got a public tongue-lashing for his words. That's because Trump has lost the moral authority to lay into thugs of all types. But the rest of us can do better.

The problem many Americans had with Trump's weasel words was that Heather Heyer was dead, and many other people injured, in Charlottesville, allegedly at the hands of James Alex Fields, Jr., a neo-Nazi who drove his car into a crowd in an act of political terrorism. And Fields was in Charlottesville to attend a rally featuring a dollar-store version of a Leni Riefenstahl torch-lit parade, chants of "Jews will not replace us," and racist speakers like Richard Spencer, who openly support Trump. A little specificity in placing blame would seem to be in order, but was prominent by its absence in Trump's comments.

"One has to take sides," Shuja Haider wrote at Jacobin, echoing other voices on the left. "There is a side that asserts our common humanity and fights fascism, racism, and hate. It was represented in Charlottesville by the leftist groups who took to the streets to confront the far right. The other side is the one that took innocent lives on those same streets."

Take a side? You bet. But Haider and company are trying to force a false choice. They'd have you believe that advocates of free speech, open society, tolerance, and peaceful political change have to pick between fascists with tiki torches and masked "anti-fascists" clashing with them in the streets. But advocates of a free, open, and liberal society are a side—the correct side—and the left-wing and right-wing thugs battling in the streets are nothing more than rival siblings from a dysfunctional illiberal family.

In June, James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican members of Congress gathered for a baseball practice. That the supporter of Occupy Wall Street and former Bernie Sanders volunteer sent six people, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), to the hospital instead of the morgue was a consequence not of better intentions than his soulmate, Fields, but rather a result of fortunately bad aim.

Before that, left-wing protesters violently shut down a Middlebury College speech by Charles Murray, injuring Professor Alison Stanger in the process, rioted over a speech by professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and forced the cancellation of a Republican parade in Portland, Oregon, with promises that "the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads." They boast of their contempt for free speech.

Right-wing and left-wing mobs seem to have a few preferred Thunderdome venues where they set up regular fight-club dates. "For reasons political and geographic, Berkeley has become a particularly common battleground," reports the Los Angeles Times. "They will glom themselves onto a tax day rally, a Trump rally, but there is a subgroup of extremists on both sides who are angling for a street battle," said criminal sociologist Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino.

Fight-club dates? Yes. This is an old and unoriginal kabuki theater of political violence, echoing another period when demoralized advocates of liberal democracy were urged to pick between competing brands of illiberalism as if their own set of principles didn't represent a side in itself.

"Antifa traces its roots to the 1920s and '30s, when militant leftists battled fascists in the streets of Germany, Italy, and Spain," notes Peter Beinart in The Atlantic.

Partisans of "pick a side" insist that every mention of violence by both right-wing and left-wing thugs is an exercise in "whataboutism." That is, an attempt to deflect from one's own sins by invoking the misdeeds of the opposition. In the case of Donald Trump's hemming and hawing over Charlottesville, that's likely true. Asked to comment on a terrorist act by a neo-Nazi at a rally of racists and neo-Nazis who have vocally lent the sitting president their support, an invocation of "many sides" sounds an awful lot like whataboutism intended to shift blame from his friends.

But for those of us already calling out the violent bigots flaunting Nazi imagery, it's not whataboutism to point out that an alleged alternative isn't actually an alternative at all—it's just another version of the same thing. As New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg tweeted from Charlottesville, "The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding 'antifa' beating white nationalists being led out of the park." She later, understandably, changed "hate-filled" to "violent," since actions are clearer and more important than motivations. And CNN's Jake Tapper commented that "At least two journalists in Charlottesville were assaulted by people protesting the Klan/Nazi/alt-right rally."

But is it fair to compare the violent far left in our streets to the violent far right opposing them? The left-wing antifa activists claim to be opposing the powers-that-be.

It's certainly true that the violent right generally supports President Trump. Given that support, his hesitancy about criticizing even the most extreme Nazi imagery and lethal violence (he did call out "racist violence" two days later, then walked it back) creates the impression that, if he isn't explicitly sympathetic to the marching morons at Charlottesville, he at least enjoys basking in the scented glow of tiki torches. If we're balancing dangers on the great scale of suckage, that connection to the White House would seem to make the fascist right the more immediate threat.

But that doesn't mean we have to pick a competing brand of ideological awfulness as a viable alternative to fascism. The thugs on the left have already proved themselves to be violent and intolerant. There's no reason to favor one illiberal force over another when our country has a long history based on much different, and much better, political principles.

"Sooner or later... one has to take sides—if one is to remain human," Haider writes, quoting a character from Graham Greene's The Quiet American. "The liberal center has to heed the same warning," Haider adds. "In order to reject Trump's equivocations about 'many sides,' we have to take one."

But the character Haider quotes is a member of Vietnam's Communist party—which killed "probably about 1,040,000" people in the post-Vietnam War period, after it came to power over the united country, as estimated by the late Prof. R. J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii. What about that? That's an unpalatable side to pick in any situation.

We do have to pick a side. But we already have one. Despite our many differences over specific policies, most Americans have traditionally supported the side of liberty, tolerance, free speech, and peaceful political change, within broad parameters. That side is in opposition to the violent, authoritarian thugs of the right and of the left. If we regain our faith in what we already have, there's no reason to choose between rival siblings competing to rule over the ruins of everything that's worthwhile on behalf of their illiberal family.

The President has been giving some reasonably good speeches in recent days but he should boldly go back to “on all sides” and tell it exactly as he meant it (because I’m pretty sure he got it right the first time).

If the media don’t like it, tough.

Here’s the essence of what I would suggest as a speech on this subject ...

“You may recall that shortly after the incident in Charlottesville, I said that we must oppose violence on many sides.

“This comment received instant criticism from the media who wanted me to distinguish between the violent extremists of the white nationalist movement and what they saw as ordinary Americans protesting my presidency.

“And yes, I agree that some of these protesters are non-violent and quite typical so-called progressive Americans who don’t like my policies and can’t get past the fact that they lost the 2016 election under the rules set out in our Constitution.

“But in the background, there are violent extremists of the left as well. There have been for many decades in America. You can remember, if you’re my age, that they were out in the streets from 1967 to 1970, often creating scenes of violence and anarchy, including destroying private property, attacking police officers who were trying to maintain law and order, and burning the flag of the country we love.

“This violent undercurrent of the far left used to be supported covertly by our former main adversary in the world, the Soviet Union, through their KGB agents. Their aim was to weaken the United States, make it less likely that we would oppose their expansionist foreign policy, and eventually lead to a socialist United States of America.

“And there are many shades of grey between peaceful protest and violent extremism. We need to respect the spirit of the First Amendment and be as tolerant as we can possibly be, of points of view that we find troubling or disturbing.

“If it were to become entirely criminal to belong to a far right extremist movement, then it should equally be a criminal act to join an extremist movement of the left, or of any religion for that matter.

“At this point in time, the law as it stands will only seek to arrest those who actively plot acts of violence against the government, the citizens, or private property. The level of alertness of law enforcement naturally goes up when such organizations move from talk to action.

“Yet it’s part of our cultural history, and a well-known fact, that violence of the left is tolerated in many circles in our country, including some parts of the media, and many parts of academia.

“I am not inventing a new fact by saying this, I am stating an uncomfortable truth, and one which previous leaders and the media have refused to make, either because they were too afraid, or because they have some sympathy for the radical left.

“It makes no sense to be critical of right wing violence from an office where a poster of Che Guevara has a place of honor.

“It makes no sense to be critical of white nationalists or the KKK if, in your heart, you believe that some other race is superior. If your criticism is honest, then you must equally believe that some race-based groups in our society are making, perhaps more subtly than neo-Nazis, racial arguments that usually place the white race in some inferior position to some other race. And while radical Islam does not form a race as such, there is a foundation of similar thinking there also, the idea that one particular religion creates superior people.

“In God we trust. This is the motto of our country. The founders of our country were tremendously aware, as I think we must be, that we are all servants of God, not the state, not any ideology or political party, and this is the best opportunity we have to create true consensus and friendly relations between people who will see issues from different perspectives.

“This is why I ran for office, not to advance the twisted ideology of the far right, but as to the equally twisted philosophy of the far left, ask yourself this — can the previous president honestly distance himself from the far left? Can Mrs Clinton distance herself? What about Bernie Sanders? At what point is this national debate basically an Orwellian farce of the guilty accusing the innocent?

“There is no shortage of intellect on the panel discussions of the media, so take up my challenge and let me know, how pure are the thoughts and intentions of the radical left in America today?

“But other than issuing a challenge, I have to tell you, my job makes me too busy to spend much time pondering these questions. I am here to serve the ordinary people of this country who are not extremists of any sort, who face challenges that ideologies created for them, and every day I notice more and more that a pragmatic, problem-solving approach is what we need.

“Political extremists try to solve problems by making everyone else just like them, or if that’s not possible, in a prison camp or dead. My approach is to cherish freedom, and true diversity, not a diversity that is approved by some committee of professors, but the real and historical diversity of our great nation. And I ask one favor. Give me a real chance. Stop pretending that some Russian plot lies behind my presidency. Give me the rest of this term of office to do what the voters elected me to do under our constitutional framework. And to my colleagues in the other branch of government, work with me, not against me. You will be pleasantly surprised at what follows. We can all make America great again. We owe it to the men and women who died fighting for our freedom to honor our constitution, because that is why they went to the battlefield. Even the divisive and horrendous Civil War was in many ways a test of our constitution from different perspectives.”

“And to those who want to perpetuate a race war and never move on, never accept that for many, America has been a multi-racial society for several generations now, please, give it up. You are trying to square a circle and get an apology from people who died years or decades ago. In God we trust, and God is the foundation of forgiveness. Let’s recognize the race baiters for what they are — opportunists who have no real message but want to have influence and stir up trouble. If you think your racial group is somehow disadvantaged, work through the system, but don’t expect some magic carpet ride to paradise where nobody has to work or hold any responsibility.

“Am I fit or unfit for office? The real question is this — are the American media and the democratic left fit for citizenship? Because if we have to, we’ll fix this country without you.”

(daddy voice, stern look, pick up your gonads at the door)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.