When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
An interesting think-piece from WaPo, which seems to be more closely aligned than usual to its (traditional) core political leanings... One possible interpretation of this article might be "Even though they may seem like lawless, violent thugs, they're actually a historical force for good."
Who are the antifa?
President Trump equated them with white supremacists. Here's why he’s wrong.
By Mark Bray August 16 at 6:00 AM
Antifascists may seem like a novelty, but they’ve been around for a very long time. Maybe we should start listening to them. (Getty Images)
On Monday, President Trump capitulated to the popular demand that he distance himself from his comment that “many sides” were to blame in Charlottesville by explicitly denouncing white nationalism. “Racism is evil,” he appeared to grudgingly concede, “including the KKK, neo-***** and white supremacists.”
A day later, however, Trump reversed course by clarifying that there were “very fine people” at the white power rally, while casting “blame on both sides” including the allegedly “alt-left” antifa.
First bursting into the headlines when they shut down far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in February at the University of California at Berkeley, antifascists again captivated the public imagination by battling the fascists assembled at the “Unite the Right” white power rally in Charlottesville.
But what is antifa? Where did it come from? Militant anti-fascist or “antifa” (pronounced ANtifa) is a radical pan-leftist politics of social revolution applied to fighting the far right. Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville.
There are antifa groups around the world, but antifa is not itself an interconnected organization, any more than an ideology like socialism or a tactic like the picket line is a specific group. Antifa are autonomous anti-racist groups that monitor and track the activities of local neo-*****. They expose them to their neighbors and employers, they conduct public education campaigns, they support migrants and refugees and they pressure venues to cancel white power events.
The vast majority of anti-fascist organizing is nonviolent. But their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly distinguishes them from liberal anti-racists.
Antifascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective. We should not, they argue, abstractly assess the ethical status of violence in the absence of the values and context behind it. Instead, they put forth an ethically consistent, historically informed argument for fighting ***** before it’s too late. As Cornel West explained after surviving neo-**** attacks in Charlottesville, “If it hadn’t been for the antifascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”
Though antifa are often treated as a new force in American politics since the rise of Trump, the anti-fascist tradition stretches back a century. The first antifascists fought Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in the Italian countryside, exchanged fire with Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts in the taverns and alleyways of Munich and defended Madrid from Francisco Franco’s insurgent nationalist army. Beyond Europe, anti-fascist became a model of resistance for the Chinese against Japanese imperialism during World War II and resistance to Latin American dictatorships.
Modern antifa politics can be traced to resistance to waves of xenophobia and the emergence of white power skinhead culture in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. It also has its roots in self-defense groups organized by revolutionaries and migrants in Germany, as the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed a violent neo-**** backlash.
In the United States and Canada, activists of the Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA) doggedly pursued Klansmen, neo-***** and other assorted white supremacists from the late 1980s into the 2000s. Their motto was simple but bold: “We go where they go.” If **** skinheads handed out leaflets at a punk show in Indiana about how “Hitler was right,” ARA was there to show them the door. If fascists plastered downtown Alberta’s Edmonton with racist posters, ARA tore them down and replaced them with anti-racist slogans.
Modern antifa politics can be traced to resistance to waves of xenophobia and the emergence of white power skinhead culture in Britain in the 1970s and ’80s. It also has its roots in self-defense groups organized by revolutionaries and migrants in Germany, as the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed a violent neo-**** backlash.
In the United States and Canada, activists of the Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA) doggedly pursued Klansmen, neo-***** and other assorted white supremacists from the late 1980s into the 2000s. Their motto was simple but bold: “We go where they go.” If **** skinheads handed out leaflets at a punk show in Indiana about how “Hitler was right,” ARA was there to show them the door. If fascists plastered downtown Alberta’s Edmonton with racist posters, ARA tore them down and replaced them with anti-racist slogans.
Responding to small fascist groups may seem trivial to some, but the rise of Hitler and Mussolini show that resistance is not a light switch that can simply be flipped on in a crisis. Once the **** and fascist parties gained control of government, it was too late to pull the emergency brake.
In retrospect, antifascists have concluded, it would have been much easier to stop Mussolini back in 1919 when his first fascist nucleus had 100 men. Or to stamp out the far-right German Workers’ Party, which had only 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting, before he transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the **** Party). Though the regimes that inspired their original protests are long dead, antifascists have devoted themselves to treating small fascist and **** groups as if they could be the nucleus of a murderous movement or regime of the future.
For years, antifascists have been maligned for treating groups of 40 or 60 Klansmen or fascists with the utmost seriousness. Members of the 10-year-old Rose City Antifa of Portland, Ore., the country’s oldest currently existing antifa group, confronted criticism even from the left for devoting themselves to unmasking and exposing the activities of small groups of local racists, Islamophobes and fascists rather than focusing on more large-scale, systemic injustices.
Years before the alt-right even had a name, antifascists were spending thankless hours scouring seedy message boards and researching clandestine neo-**** gatherings. They were tracking those who planted the seeds of the death that we all witnessed in Charlottesville. Agree or disagree with their methods, the antifa, who devote themselves to combating racism, are in no way equivalent to alt-right trolls who joke about gas chambers. Behind the masks, antifa are nurses, teachers, neighbors, and relatives of all races and genders who do not hesitate to put themselves on the line to shut down fascism by any means necessary.
It should not have taken the murder of Heather Heyer for so many of us, especially white people, to take seriously the threat of white power that has plagued communities of color for generations. The history of anti-fascist demands that we take seriously the violence of white supremacists. The days of “just ignoring them” are over.
Interestingly, the Washington Post is really making a hard turn back to the port-side, after weeks of what seemed like genuinely unbiased reporting. Their most recent opinion piece can be summarized as such: Trump is blaming both sides for the escalating political violence in the US, and that's not OK. It's only OK to blame the side that enjoys more privilege, despite employing less violence.
The Daily 202: False moral equivalency is not a bug of Trumpism. It’s a feature.
By James Hohmann August 16 at 8:20 AM
THE BIG IDEA: President Trump has a troubling tendency to blame “both sides.”
Showing that the remarks he delivered from a White House teleprompter Monday were hollow and insincere, Trump yesterday revived his initial claim that “both sides” are to blame for the horrific violence at a white supremacist rally over the weekend in Charlottesville.
Going rogue during an event at Trump Tower that was supposed to be about infrastructure, the president said there are “two sides to a story.” He then attacked counterprotesters for acting “very, very violently” as they came “with clubs in their hand” at the neo-***** and KKK members who were protesting the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that,” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? Do they have any problem? I think they do!”
The president then complained that not everyone who came to the “Unite the Right” rally was a neo-**** or white nationalist. “And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly,” a testy Trump said during a combative back-and-forth with reporters. (Read the full transcript here.)
These comments suggest very strongly that the president of the United States sees moral equivalence between ***** and those who oppose *****. Objectively, of course, there is NO moral equivalence between ***** and those who oppose *****.
But this is part of a pattern.
President Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Hamburg. (Evan Vucci/AP)
In a pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox, Bill O'Reilly pressed Trump on why he respected Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Putin's a killer,” O’Reilly said, noting that he murders his political enemies and leads a repressive authoritarian regime. Trump replied without hesitation, “We got a lot of killers. What? You think our country’s so innocent?”
“Take a look at what we’ve done, too,” the president continued. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes. ... So, lot of killers around, believe me.”
Trump made similarly bizarre statements about the moral equivalence between the democratic United States and autocratic Russia as a candidate.
As William F. Buckley, the founding editor of National Review, once put it: “To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”
Yet that’s essentially the logic Trump used yesterday.
Don’t forget: Trump compared the U.S. intelligence community to the **** regime earlier this year.
And the president’s first White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, used another variant of false moral equivalency when he made the insane claim that, unlike Bashar al-Assad, Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II. He apologized the next day. “Frankly, I mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison,” Spicer said.
President Trump reaches into his suit jacket to read a quote from his Saturday statement during his news conference yesterday. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Trump has often defended his own immoral behavior on the grounds that other men also behave badly, as if that somehow exonerates him. Recall how defiant he was last October after The Post published a video of him boasting in extremely lewd and predatory terms to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush about being able to get away with groping women and propositioning other men’s wives because he is a celebrity.
“Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close,” Trump said in his initial statement. “This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago.”
In a subsequent statement, he pivoted to argue that what he did was not as bad as what the Clintons had done in the past: “I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary (Clinton) has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims.”
The GOP nominee for president then brought women who had accused the former president of sexual misconduct as his guests to the debate in St. Louis that weekend. It was part of a broader effort to make the case, for all intents and purposes, that a lot of men are boorish pigs. Muddying the waters, as irrelevant as it might have been to questions about Trump’s personal character, allowed his campaign to survive.
That scorched-earth strategy is consistent with Trump’s response to Charlottesville.
President Ronald Reagan addresses the nation on television in 1983 to make the case for a proposed defense budget. At left is a picture of Soviet Migs in western Cuba. (Dennis Cook/AP)
One of the many ironies in all this is that conservatives have spent decades accusing liberals of believing in the kind of both-sides-ism that Trump now routinely espouses.
In one of his most famous speeches, Ronald Reagan told the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983: “I urge you to beware the temptation of … blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”
Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay on “The Myth of Moral Equivalence” is a classic of this genre. Reagan’s former ambassador to the United Nations pilloried those who argued that NATO was no better than the Warsaw Pact.
It has never gotten sufficient attention, but the year Kirkpatrick published her piece, Trump was paying to run full-page ads in The Washington Post attacking Reagan and his administration for lacking “backbone” in the realm of foreign policy. Talk about being on the wrong side of history …
The right’s disdain for both sides-ism continued through the Obama era. In 2011, Paul Ryan told the Weekly Standard: “If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics — I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.”
“The president’s rhetorical ricochet … seemed almost perfectly designed to highlight some basic truths about Donald Trump,” observes Marc Fisher, who co-authored The Post’s “Trump Revealed” biography last year. “He does not like to be told what to say. He will always find a way to pull the conversation back to himself. And he is preternaturally inclined to dance with the ones who brought him …Trump said Tuesday that Saturday’s confrontation ‘was a horrible day.’ And he made clear again that ‘the driver of the car’ that plowed into pedestrians in Charlottesville ‘is a disgrace to himself, his family and this country.’ But then the president turned to one of his favorite rhetorical tools, using casual language to strip away any definite blame, any clear moral stand, and instead send the message that nothing is certain, that everything is negotiable, that ethics are always situational. ‘You can call it terrorism,’ he said. ‘You can call it murder. You can call it whatever you want.’”
We’ve become sort of numb to Trump’s rhetoric since he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower 26 months ago and declared that Mexican immigrants are rapists, but we cannot lose perspective of just how shocking it is that an American president said what he did yesterday. This is one of the most surreal moments of Trump’s surreal presidency.
I disagree vehemently with the notion that white supremacy is on the rise in our country. What I see as being on a rise in our country is the frequency with which unfounded white supremacy accusations occur.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
Bunch of fucktards.
I'm waiting for the modern McCarthy to emerge from this.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that a news organization (even brain-dead WAPO) is openly supporting antifa.
I feel like I'm going a little crazy.
Actually I don't see the problem. White People no longer have to carry guilt, as slavery never happened. We can go back to blaming the jews for everything.
N. D. B. Connolly, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, urges liberal protesters to ‘start throwing rocks’ to drive out those with whom they disagree.
Segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House and many other American temples. Paper alone won’t drive them out. Start throwing rocks.
By vague analogy, any system of strong autocracy or oligarchy usually to the extent of bending and breaking the law, race-baiting and violence against largely unarmed populations.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that a news organization (even brain-dead WAPO) is openly supporting antifa.
I feel like I'm going a little crazy.
Me, too. And I'm starting to worry that crazy is becoming the new normal.
Originally Posted by sixshooter
I disagree vehemently with the notion that white supremacy is on the rise in our country. What I see as being on a rise in our country is the frequency with which unfounded white supremacy accusations occur.
Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?"
Bunch of fucktards.
I'm waiting for the modern McCarthy to emerge from this.
I agree with the first paragraph. The White Supremacy movement in the US has been on the decline for generations, and continues. What has changed is that, like every other marginal extremist group, they've found a new soapbox in the rise of social media and alarmist news coverage. And as a direct result of this, our perception of them has grown tremendously.
As to the latter, well.... The new McCarthy era is actually upon us already. The difference is that it's not the Congress holding the hearings, it's We The People, in the Court of Public Opinion. And by extension, the administrative branches of our public and private institutions, both commercial and educational.
"Do you now, or have you ever, opposed democratic socialism or the recognition of your privilege in the United States?"
Originally Posted by Monk
Both of those articles are stomach churningly disgusting.
"We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." -Edward R. Murrow
So that many of these statues in the South started going up during and after the Civil Rights movement doesn't seem the slightest bit inflammatory?
inflammatory to whom? someone not yet born -- because those are the bored white kids knocking them down. Sources of statues and dedication dates please.
inb4 whataboutism
the Robert E Lee statue in question was dedicated in 1922. It has nothing to do with the Civil Rights movement, dedicated in 1922 or 1962.
Antifa = Communist Anarchists, interestingly for hire
BLM = Black Socialists. Really. Read their manifesto
**** = National Socialist
Trump = Republican
Three of them cause violence, but only one of them gets in trouble.
As long as we're knocking down statues, I think there are a few in Rome that need to be removed. Caligula for one, and any other damn emperor who kept slaves or overthrew any indigenous peoples, etc.
08-16-2017, 10:55 AM
0
