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CreativeDominant -> RE: White Nationalists turn violent in VA -- state of emergency called (8/22/2017 3:23:29 AM)
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We also learned this:
Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not.(but is that not authoritarianism?)
That authority rests on no democratic foundation. Unlike the politicians they revile, the men and women of antifa cannot be voted out of office. Generally, they don’t even disclose their names.
Antifa’s perceived legitimacy is inversely correlated with the government’s. Which is why, in the Trump era, the movement is growing like never before. As the president derides and subverts liberal-democratic norms, progressives face a choice. They can recommit to the rules of fair play, and try to limit the president’s corrosive effect, though they will often fail. Or they can, in revulsion or fear or righteous rage, try to deny racists and Trump supporters their political rights. From Middlebury to Berkeley to Portland, the latter approach is on the rise, especially among young people.
Revulsion, fear, and rage are understandable. But one thing is clear. The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/534192/
Choose Sides? You Bet. But Antifa and Fascism Are the Same Side.
Advocates of liberal society are a side in themselves, and the left- and right-wing thugs battling in the streets are rival siblings from an 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 (James Fields, the white supremacist who killed a leftist protestors with his car in Charlottesville), 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.
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."
"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.
https://www.google.com/amp/reason.com/archives/2017/08/22/choose-sides-you-bet-but-antifa-and-fasc/amp
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