Posted on 08/29/2017 12:58:08 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Even Chomsky Agrees. It may feel good, and they may well deserve it, but violence against neo-Nazis only helps sustain a dynamic at which the Nazis will prevail.
To many on the right—especially Donald Trump loyalists and devotees of white nationalist YouTube personalities—the black-clad anarchists known as Antifa represent the coming of a Stalinist dictatorship. To a sizable portion of the political left and center, the sight of tiki torch-wielding white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month portends a future of Nuremberg rallies and the death of liberal democracy.
The state of many Americans’ heightened anxiety is understandable. The presidency of Donald Trump has been a chaotic fiasco by any reasonable metric, and the instability of the commander-in-chief has made us all a bit edgier than usual.
Following up a week of possible accidental nuclear apocalypse with images of brazen neo-Nazis chanting phrases such as “Jews will not replace us” and the English translation of the German Nazi slogan “blood and soil,” topped off with a cowardly terrorist attack by one of the alt-right losers in attendance, Americans looked to their president for reassurance. Instead, they were met with equivocation.
Members of the president’s party—including Rep. Steve Scalise, who was nearly assassinated in June by an unhinged Bernie Sanders supporter—unreservedly condemned the violence initiated by the alt-rightist who intentionally drove his car into an assembly of peaceful protesters. Such full-throated condemnation wasn’t a particularly brave act. Slagging Nazis is about the easiest political layup available to any politician anywhere. Yet, it was too much for Trump, because the alt-right sympathizers in his inner circle have him fixated on antifa—who, while present in Charlottesville, represented only a portion of the counter-protest.
To be very clear, antifa and neo-Nazis do not reside on the same moral plane; white supremacists are demonstrably worse in both word and deed. Still, antifa wears its violence as a badge of courage, a necessary response to fascism that (in their view) liberals who believe in the necessity of civil liberties lack the courage to effectively confront. Antifa’s incoherent ideology was aptly summarized by one 20-year-old participant, recently quoted in The New York Times: “You need violence in order to protect nonviolence.” They want to make the world safe from Nazis by making them feel unsafe. Given the increasing willingness of neo-Nazis to march—unmasked and in public—it’s safe to say antifa’s tactics haven’t worked.
But that hasn’t prevented a healthy amount of antifa self-mythologizing, particularly in a number of pieces for The Nation by journalist and part-time masked vigilante Natasha Lennard, who has extolled the “pure kinetic beauty” of one of her cohort decking the unsuspecting (and odious) alt-right leader Richard Spencer. A more recent piece features Lennard engaging in delusions of tragic revolutionary grandeur by comparing today’s antifa with the anti-fascists who fought (and lost) in street battles against government-supported gangs in Nazi Germany and fascist Spain and Italy.
I enjoy seeing Nazis punched as much as the next decent human being, but I still maintain that violence is wrong and is a failure of political thought, not a righteous tool of it. In the aftermath of Inauguration Day’s viral Spencer-punching, it was more than a little disconcerting to see so many people who heretofore were proponents of the rule of law cheering on antifa as the self-deputized arbiters of acceptable political violence. While social media flooded with images of Indiana Jones and Superman and Captain America punching Nazis, I wondered if the terms “Nazi” or “fascist” might come to lose their meaning when deployed by antifa in search of the thrill of a fight.
A more sober analysis of how to deal with the new Nazi threat was penned by the leftist writer Amber A'Lee Frost in Current Affairs, where she argued that it’s “hazardous (and intellectually dishonest)” to treat “Nazis as some massive unstoppable movement on the precipice of seizing power (which they are not). Exaggerating the power and influence of the Alt-Right not only contributes to unnecessary panic, it plays into their promotion campaigns.”
It bears repeating that unlike neo-Nazis, neo-antifa haven’t killed anyone, and according to a study by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, the levels of deadly violence committed by the far-right dwarfs their left-wing counterparts by a factor of 10 over the past 25 years.
However, the notion that antifa participants have kept their violence strictly “anti-fascist” is plainly untrue, as most recently evidenced in the assaults on two journalists (including a woman, Taylor Lorenz of The Hill) in Charlottesville. In the aftermath of the violence, a defiant post on Antifa Seven Hills’ Facebook page blamed the reporters for the attacks they endured at the hands of the masked “anti-fascists.”
The post read in part:
Media you do not have the right to treat us this way. We are not your spectacle to profit off of. You are very often disrespectful and aggressive and we you [sic] will be met with the same behavior. If you don’t want to get hit don’t act like vultures. Ask for consent.
...because frankly everyone they punch ISN’T a NAZI.
Question authority, including theirs.
You forgot to include a HURL ALERT.
The issue isn’t the very few Nazis, KKK, or ultra-right nationalists in the U.S. The core issue is that all of WHITE America, with all of its incredible achievements, has been under constant assault for at least one generation and NOBODY speaks up to defend what white people have accomplished. White people are now so cowed that they won’t even defend themselves against these horrible onslaughts (similar to how the US won’t defend itself against the moslem horde assaulting us today).
After 8 years of Obama racism and division, plus the coming years of this ginned up communist-led “antifa” horse crap, people are finally waking up to the fact that whites have a lot of enemies that want them dead. It’s long past time for white people to speak up proudly about their centuries of accomplishments (such as Western Civilization) and put these destroyers in their place. Do NOT let our enemies make the preposterous and farcical claim that all whites are virulent racists and that only only black and brown people are deserving of life in the US.
Bump ...
Because it helps illustrate that Nazi’s are leftist/socialists too, and have NOTHING to do with the “right”.
Don’t be silly. Lefties are the greatest set of mass murders in recorded history. Even excluding the Nazis. Commies murdered upwards of 100 million people and enslaved many more tens of millions. Leftists need to he stamped out wherever they are found.
Again, the false claim that Nazis are/were on the right.
They were definitely leftists. They described themselves as leftists, and often converted communists to Nazis.
Calling Nazis “far right” is a ruse to give the false choice of National Socialists vs. International Socialists.
Limited government is not spoken of.
Any article that refuses to investigate the funding and background of both groups of protestors is totally useless.
Much more to the Antifa story. The thugs are being paid, the police are being ordered to stand down, and there are people on the ground directing the violence. It is a conspiracy to violate and intimidate the peaceful protesters who are definitely not nazis. The FBI should arrest the thugs who assault protesters since they are violating their civil rights, arrest the on site police commander who prevents his officers from making arrests even when felonies are being committed in their presence, and eventually arrest those who pay the thugs and gave the orders to the police to stand down.If Sessions simply enforces civil rights laws, Antifa and their sponsors will go to jail.
This has little if anything to do with a relative handful of neo-Nazi and KKK jerks, and 99.99% to do with a communist revolution.
For all you’d want to know about today’s revolutionary communist/anarchist protest groups and then-some, check out my FR Home page, at:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl/
Even if the Antifa people read this they wouldn’t pay attention. They are deranged.
Sessions
cricket
what is going on??
Its so hard to tell!!
The presidency of Donald Trump has been a chaotic fiasco by any reasonable metric, and the instability of the commander-in-chief has made us all a bit edgier than usual.
DING! DING! DING!
Here we have a winning solution to our current public stupidity!!
The Nazis--the original variety--were all for a monolithic new order; all for enforced uniformity of thought; the absolute opposite of Jeffersonian values; the opposite of the Jeffersonian freedom to think for oneself, so important in the founding of the University of Virginia; the freedom of each to pursue happiness according to his or her own lights.
Antifa--as George Soros--represents a Compulsion For Uniformity; an in that compulsion driven pursuit, adopts the thuggery that won the streets of German cities, before the Nazis behind that thuggery came to power.
But, of course, the reality is that the Brownshirt "want-to-bes" in Antifa, are the nearest thing to the originals that we have seen on this scale in America in generations.
a bunch of Soroz-funded Nazis pretending to be against Nazism
zero credibility, anyone can see through these hooligans
The number of “Nazis” in the world is vanishingly small. (No, leftists, pro-Confederates are not Nazis. Neither are Trump supporters. Phooey, anyway!)
Meanwhile, on the alt-left, AntiFa side:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJZtefjT0gU
These miscreants have revealed their ugly, anti-American face, for the whole world to see!!!!
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