I started doing an anti-neo-Confederate daily series of posts during April, back in 2004, the first April after I started blogging. This year makes the 15th year I've been doing it. Neo-Confederate groups promote April as Confederate Heritage Month and it has often been officially proclaimed in some states as Confederate Heritage Month. In Texas, for instance, the state legislature in 1999 established it as a recurring designation. (Bryan Register, Texas perpetuates myths with Confederate Heritage MonthAustin-American Statesman 03/29-30/2018)
The neo-Confederate ideology and its public symbols, like the Confederate battle flag and statues honoring Confederate leaders who betrayed the United States by engaging in an armed revolt to defend and extend human slavery, have been actively contested in many places over the last year. Most notably and tragically in Charlottesville in August 2017, where neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in support of a statue of Robert E. Lee chanting, among other things, "Blood and Soil" (one of the most famous German Nazi slogans, "Blut und Boden) and "Jews Will Not Replace Us." That incident ended, of course, with the murder of Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 other counter-protesters by one of the pro-Confederate protesters showing his Honor and Courage by ramming his car into a crowd. (Joe Heim, Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and deathWashington Post 08/14/2017)
Speaking in the lobby of Trump Tower at what had been billed as a statement on infrastructure, a combative Trump defended his slowness to condemn white nationalists and neo-Nazis after the melee in central Virginia, which ended in the death of one woman and injuries to dozens of others, and compared the tearing down of Confederate monuments to the hypothetical removal of monuments to the Founding Fathers. He also said that counter-protesters deserve an equal amount of blame for the violence.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” he said.
“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
“You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he said.
Despite the weasel-words ("I’ve condemned neo-Nazis"), Trump was clearly defending the neo-Confederates and their ideology, and refraining from a straightforward condemnation of their violence and anti-Semitism or the Nazi slogans they were chanting.
This story shows in a vivid way the role that symbolism and the narratives attached to them can play in current politics. I've wondered to what extent Trump's identifying himself with Nazis, or at least refused to unequivocally condemn them and the murder associated with their demonstration, has contributed to his unpopularity among everyone but his hardcore 35%. Because Americans have seen an endless series of movies, TV programs, documentaries, articles, and pictures in which the German Nazis are depicted as Evil Incarnate. If any symbolism is identified in America as a symbol of Evil, it would be the swastika and other images particularly associated with the Nazis.
There's a bit of a perverse kind of internationalism in neo-Nazis choosing a Confederate symbol as a rallying point and even a motive for murder. In Germany and Austria and some other European countries, overt Nazi symbolism is illegal to display publicly. So at least by the early 1990s and probably earlier, the Confederate battle flag was used by rightwing extremists as substitutes for the swastika. I remember in the 1990s visiting in the German tourist area of the Spanish island of Mallorca and seeing a door of what appeared to be a shop that had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. I knew immediately it was a symbol of far-right politics.
Facts matter. And the neo-Confederate ideology is a significant kind of pseudohistory in the United States. It originated with post-Civil War efforts by Southern planters and white leaders to minimize the seriousness of the Confederate rebellion and specifically to dissociate it from the cause of slavery. Northern whites disliked slavery prior to the war, and many hated it. Some supported it. But white supremacy was pervasive in the North as well as the South, though clearly in a more intense, toxic, and treasonous form in the Confederate states. Even intense opposition to slavery could and did co-exist with white racism against blacks.
By the end of the Civil War, not only had the consequences of slavery proved to be excessively deadly and destructive to white people. But many soldiers from the North had seen slavery and slave plantations and fugitive slaves live and in person. So the prewar justifications of slavery as benevolent and necessary had been effectively completely discredited in the North. Anti-Reconstruction white Southerners recognized that they needed to distance themselves from the cause of slavery in order to have any effective credibility even among Northern conservatives.
The revisionist narrative of the history of slavery began immediately after the war and soon acquired the lable "Lost Cause." Historian Caroline Janney writes (The Lost CauseEncyclopedia Virginia 1999):
The term "Lost Cause" is not a product of today's historians; rather, it appears to have been coined by Edward A. Pollard, an influential wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner. In 1866 Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, a justification of the Confederate war effort, prompting the popular use of the term.
Today, "Lost Cause" and "neo-Confederate" can be used interchangeably to describe the same apologetic view of the Civil War and the white supremacist ideology and narrative that was always an integral part of it.
Janney summarizes the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of Civil War history as based on six claims:
The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.
Neo-Confederacy incorporates the Lost Cause view of history but is a broader ideology. The SPLC describes the Lost Cause narrative this way (Neo-Confederate n/d, accessed 03/31/2018):
The term “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” refers to a collection of political and historical myths that form the bedrock of many notable neo-Confederate slogans. “Heritage not hate” and “states’ rights” have shared roots in the post-Reconstruction effort to revise the indisputable fact of why the South seceded from the union in the 1860s: slavery.
They define neo-Confederacy this way:
“Neo-Confederacy” refers to a reactionary, revisionist predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession — in the specific context of the antebellum South — which rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile toward democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy.
An overall conservative ideology, neo-Confederacy has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.
In this regard, neo-Confederacy is best viewed as a spectrum, an umbrella term with roots dating back as early as the 1890s. It applies to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, neo-Confederacy is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early-1980s in publications like Southern Partisan, Chronicles and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South (LOS), the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The SPLC article goes on to note that the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of history is still influential well beyond the circle of those who would identify with it so closely as groups like the CCC or the SCV. When thinking about groups involved in promoting that worldview, it's important to remember that sectarianism is rampant on the far right and is fought out over slogans and issues that may seem indistinguishable to those not following them closely.
I've generally tried to focus on debunking the pseudohistory aspect of the neo-Confederate narrative in these posts. One recent book I'll be discussing this year is From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017) by Forrest Nabors, which looks at the ways in which the slavery system, known to opponents at the time as the Slave Power, was perceived by Americans as being in opposition to the basic republican form of government established by the American Revolution and the Constitution. The only Americans who enjoyed full citizenship included voting rights in 1860 were, of course, essentially white men, though free blacks, women, and even slaves were making their demands for citizenship and equality in very significant ways.
Nabors in his Introduction defines the project of his book:
The purpose of this book is to recover how the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress understood the prior national struggle that decisively shaped their understanding of their task. The premise of this book is that long ago, we, the American people, ceased to be fully aware of what the Republicans believed the cause of their party was and what they resisted when dark clouds gathered above the nation and then when the storm broke. We remember slavery, the principal theme of those days, but we no longer remember how they saw the political conflict at its deepest level and in its most general sense that shook the nation for decades. [my emphasis]
Slavery was at the center of the controversies that led to the Civil War. But in early America and antebellum times, that conflict manifested itself in particular ways and the understanding of it by slaveowners and their opponents evolved from existing understandings of the country and the American political community. Understanding that share a lot with the understandings of 1865 and even 2018. But our time is also separated from there's by radical transformations.
In the United States, the Nazis for decades have been the villains in countless numbers of movies, TV shows, radio dramas, comic books, documentaries, even musicals (The Sound of Music). If any group is generally identified among Americans as evil - even among people who know little about the actual history of Nazism in Germany - its Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.
So when the "alt-right" and other white supremacists staged their murderous presence in Charlottesville in August, it created a very negative impression, even among a lot of people who share many of their hatreds.
From Kirkland's report:
The racist far-right has been flailing since descending on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August for a rally that participants deemed a success for its huge turnout — until it turned deadly. Groups plan events and then cancel them in rapid succession, and people point fingers on Twitter at who they perceive to be leading the movement astray. An event intended to “Unite the Right” ended up doing the exact opposite.
“If this was initially seen as a victory for the movement, it’s actually been one of abject devastation,” Heidi Beirich, expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told TPM. “Look at the infighting that came in the wake of the event over whether it was the right tactics, if they should have been there in the first place, the groups that came, and the violence, obviously.”
“It was very painful to them and there’s a lot of reticence to go down that road again,” Beirich added. “They certainly don’t want to have a Charlottesville 2.0.”
The "alt-right" brand went from being an attempt to create a happy face for far-right white supremacist ideology to being widely identified with murdering Nazis:
Movement leaders of varying stripes all are saddled with the baggage of having attended an event where Ku Klux Klan leaders flew their banners, and where an ideological sympathizer rammed a car into a group of peaceful protesters, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring many more. The damage is particularly great for the so-called “alt-right,” a loosely defined group of white nationalists, anti-Semites and online trolls whose project has been putting a presentable, buttoned-up face on racism.
“The concept of the alt-right is to create a sort of mainstream version of an old hatred,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “When violence occurs at their events, it does undermine their effort to try to recruit and attract people to their cause as if it was somehow mainstream.” [my emphasis]
Kirkland also describes factional fighting in the alt-right spectrum. While factional fighting and jealousies petty and grand are part of all politics, they take particular forms for fringe groups. For one thing, people a fighting over a relatively small slice of political "territory" in such groups, and they generally lack the kind of incentives and resources large political parties have.
And white supremacist, Klan-style groups also tend to attract people not particularly distinguished for their "people skills."
The discussion on political violence in the US has been particularly cramped for a long time. Not that it was ever as clear as one might have wished.
Ordinary statecraft involves the application of violence, particularly through the police, the national security agencies and the prison system. This is considered legitimate violence when done in accordance with established law. This is the "state monopoly on violence" that is used to mark the difference between functioning national governments and "failed states." André Munro calls it "the concept that the state alone has the right to use or authorize the use of physical force. It is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of the modern state." (State monopoly on violenceBritannica Online; accessed 08/23/2017)
Use of the police power is a general attribute of modern states and is usually not seen as political violence. But since political decisions involving class and other group conflicts set the legal parameters of legitimacy, there is something political even about legitimate state violence. Black activists in the United States have often argued that many if not all black prisoners were in a real sense political prisoners because of the ways in which the political system has excluded them from substantive contribution to political decision-making and because of racially biased policing. But since not only Democrats or Republicans but presumably nearly all splinter parties in the US would be in favor of banning armed robbery, police coercion in arresting an armed robber is not commonly regarded as political violence.
Political violence in the usual sense of using violence of some kind to achieve partisan or policy goals has been some part of American life since the beginning. The American Revolution was certainly an act of political violence, as were the Whiskey Rebellion, slave revolts, the localized civil war in "Bleeding Kansas, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, the Confederate rebellion. The resistance to Reconstruction democracy in the South commonly involved violence as did the post-Reconstruction segregationist Jim Crow regimes. Sometimes the violence was superficially legitimate in that it enforced discriminatory laws aimed at African-American citizens. Sometimes it was law enforcement acting with de facto approval from their superiors in taking illegal action. Organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan were certainly part of the violence, as were mobs incited by public officials like the one in the Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) riot over integration in 1963.
There was also plenty of violence applied against labor organizers over the years, certainly not all of it "legitimate." (FYI, that's meant to be an obvious understatement!)
Political Violence After the Second World War
Unofficial political violence in the US - violence not undertaken by organs of the state - has been largely a monopoly of the Radical Right for decades. Not entirely, of course. Urban riots in the 1960s, political in at least a general sense, were widely perceived as acts by black people on the left. Unlike the largest urban riot in American history, the New York Draft Riot of 1863 which manifested overt pro-slavery, pro-Confederate and anti-black racist aims.
And some organized lelft groups undertook violent actions with political motivations in the 1960s and 1970s, of which the Weather Underground, the Black Guerrilla Army and the bizarre Symbionese Liberation Army are some of the best know. The Black Panthers advocated "armed struggle," though in theory and largely in practice they emphasized their right to exercise defensive violence against abusive authorities. The Black Panther Party's 10-point program of 1966 included, "We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense."
Given the success of the firearms lobby in loosening gun laws in recent years and in enacting "stand-your-ground" laws that make it easier for people to legally get away with murder, and the way in which gun proliferation advocates emphatically argue that people in the US in the present day need to keep firearms to defend themselves against tyrannical government, it may seem weird that during the 1940s and 1950s, people associated with the American Communist Party were arrested, prosecuted, deported and imprisoned for advocating the overthrow of the US government by "force and violence."
Actually, the US Communist Party of that period, like the German Social Democratic Party supported by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels during their lifetimes, advocated taking power via electoral means with the determination to use legitimate government police power to suppress any attempt at a violent revolution against any such duly elected left government. A series of Supreme Court decisions related to such cases drew clear distinctions between talking about the violent overthrow of the government in the abstract and advocating and preparing for immediate action toward that end, including Schneiderman v. United States (1943), Yates v. United States (1957), and Noto v. United States (1961).
Do I even need to mention that the evidence against the defendants in those cases was far less serious than what the Bundy Ranch crowd did in 2014? (Julie Turkenwitz, No Guilty Verdicts in Bundy Ranch Standoff TrialNew York Times 08/22/2017)
The question of political violence and "armed struggle" was heavily influenced in the 1960s by the dispute between the Soviet Union and China over the national liberation movements of the time. The Second World War was followed not only by the victory of Mao Zedong's Communists in China but massive decolonization in Asia and Africa. The independence movement in India and the successful violent revolt in Algeria against French control made a huge impression on European publics. The USSR and China had a major division in the late 1950s over various issues, not the least of them Mao's seeming indifference to the idea of a nuclear third world war. The two powers vied for influence among the emerging independent nations and among insurgent movements, with Vietnam being the most significant because of the US military intervention there.
One upshot of this was that Mao and his partisans insisted that "armed struggle" was always necessary to establish the goal of socialism, while the Soviets stressed that a "peaceful transition to socialism" was possible and desirable in many places. In Latin America, the example of Cuba and the advocacy by Che Guevara for "one, two, many Vietnams" had a great deal of influence. Juan Perón encouraged a broad-based political resistance in Argentina, which included but was by no means limited to sabotage and guerrilla resistance. On the radical left in Western countries, that larger world environment heavily influenced the way in which political conflict was discussed. So a lot of elaborate arguments over the role of violence in politics were elaborated on the left. And while Western conservatives tried to use law-and-order rhetoric and policies in response to domestic unrest and guerrilla violence in other countries, the center-left walked a line between supporting reform and decolonization, on the one hand, and opposing social violence, on the other. In the United States, the Democratic Party was particularly split over the American Cold War policy of active counterrevolution in Vietnam and elsewhere (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, etc.)
The violent Radical Right in the US in Recent Decades
The Patriot Militia movement of the 1990s was a significant development on the violent right. The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 dramatically demonstrated how deadly the Radical Right could be in the United States. Bill Clinton's speech commemorating the dead in that attack is widely considered one of his finest moments as President. He delivered a message that aimed at comforting the victims and their families but also sought to deligitimize the far right cause as destructive and godless and something that should be taken seriously (Remarks at a Memorial Service for the Bombing Victims in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 04/23/1995):
To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil. They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life. Let us teach our children that the God of comfort is also the God of righteousness: Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind. Justice will prevail.
Let us let our own children know that we will stand against the forces of fear. When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death, let us honor life. As St. Paul admonished us, Let us "not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
Yesterday, Hillary and I had the privilege of speaking with some children of other federal employees -- children like those who were lost here. And one little girl said something we will never forget. She said, "We should all plant a tree in memory of the children." So this morning before we got on the plane to come here, at the White House, we planted that tree in honor of the children of Oklahoma. It was a dogwood with its wonderful spring flower and its deep, enduring roots. It embodies the lesson of the Psalms -- that the life of a good person is like a tree whose leaf does not wither.
Deborah Lauter and Mark Pitcavage recall the federal response in the following years in a 2015 retrospective (Homegrown extremist threat remains 20 years after Oklahoma City bombing CNN 04/19/2015):
The attack's aftermath saw a storm of media coverage with themes such as "attack on the heartland" and America's "lost innocence." In fact, the bombing took the country by surprise. It wasn't simply the scale of the tragedy that drew attention, but the fact that the bombing exposed something new: American citizens targeting their own government with a deadliness hitherto unseen.
The public became aware of the true danger of the extreme right. Reports connected McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols to anti-government ideology movements, such as the militia movement, as well as to white supremacist causes.
Law enforcement also played catchup. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's 1994 annual report on terrorism had given short shrift to the extreme right. Its coverage of domestic terrorism focused on the activities of Puerto Rican radicals and animal rights and environmental extremists.
In contrast, the report spent only a paragraph describing the threat from right-wing extremists. It ignored the rapidly growing militia and sovereign citizen movements ...
When it comes to domestic terrorism, federal officials have too often been blind in the right eye.
After Oklahoma City, everything changed. The FBI shifted its priorities, hiring new agents and reassigning staff to work on domestic terrorism cases. It significantly expanded the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces and went to Congress with a lengthy "want" list.
The effort actually paid off. Increased scrutiny of right-wing extremists resulted in a flurry of arrests for everything from terrorist plots to hate crimes. Though it had paid a high price to do so, it seemed that the United States had recognized the dangers that right-wing extremists posed.
Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and with the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Muslim terrorism has become a bigger concern compared more secular ideological ones. But in the US, domestic far-right terrorists have been more responsible for more terror attacks than Muslim extremists since 2001. We should be careful about the distinctions we're making, though. Muslim extremist terrorist are generally hard right theocrats in their politics. And many American far-right groups are heavily influenced by radical right Christian ideas, often stemming in some way from the Christian Identity movement.
Daryl Johnson was with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) when Obama became President. He was warning then about the growing danger of far-right terrorism, as he describes in I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right.Washington Post 08/21/2017:
Eight years ago, I warned of a singular threat — the resurgence of right-wing extremist activity and associated violence in the United States as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the financial crisis and the stock market crash. My intelligence report, meant only for law enforcement, was leaked by conservative media.
A political backlash ensued because of an objection to the label “right-wing extremism.” The report also rightly pointed out that returning military veterans may be targeted for recruitment by extremists. Republican lawmakers demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind my report. The American Legion formally requested an apology to veterans. Some in Congress called for me to be fired. Amid the turmoil, my warning went unheeded by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats. [internal links from original not included]
Johnson also appeared in a Netroots Nation panel earlier this month which Dave Neiwert organized: The White Face of Domestic Terrorism: How Islamophobia Distorts the Reality of Terrorist Violence in America 08/12/2017 (scroll down to locate at the link). He expands on the subject and recent developments in that talk. As it happened, this panel started a few minutes after the news broke about the fatal attack that killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
Both Sides Do It?
With Trump and his loyal followers now holding up the "antifa" protesters as justification for far right violence, it was inevitable that we would start to see more media coverage of them. "Antifa" is a word taken from German, a short form of "anti-fascist." German and Austrian protesters against the far right have been known by that name for years. The name is used as a generic term. It's not a reference to any party or any particular political program or ideology other than activist opposition to the far right. Though Trump in his Phoenix campaign speech Tuesday used it in a way that may soon become another Republican cuss word for Mean Libruls. Cenk Uygur notes just after 3:20 that Trump used "An-TI-fa" as a carnival barker type call (Trumpamania Running Wild In Phoenix, Brotherrr!The Young Turks 08/23/2017):
Michael Shure and Nomiki Konst in that segment also note that Trump's supporters listening to the speech were probably not familiar with the term "antifa" yet. Which is why it could now morph into another Republican version of Mean Libruls.
Before we get into Republican and liberal-concern-troll versions, it's worth taking a look at Dahlia Lithwick's column in which she quotes participants in the pro-democracy counter-protests in Charlottesville describing how some protesters defended others from attacks by the white supremacist/KKK/Nazi goons, Yes, What About the “Alt-Left”?Slate 08/16/2017. One Charlottesville resident relates:
I stood with a group of interfaith clergy and other people of faith in a nonviolent direct action meant to keep the white nationalists from entering the park to their hate rally. We had far fewer people holding the line than we had hoped for, and frankly, it wasn’t enough. No police officers in sight (that I could see from where I stood), and we were prepared to be beaten to a bloody pulp to show that while the state permitted white nationalists to rally in hate, in the many names of God, we did not. But we didn’t have to because the anarchists and anti-fascists got to them before they could get to us. I’ve never felt more grateful and more ashamed at the same time. The antifa were like angels to me in that moment.
A minister gives this description:
Out of my faith calling, I feel led to pursue disciplined, nonviolent direct action and witness. I helped lead a group of clergy who were trained and committed to the same work: to hold space on the frontline of the park where the rally was to be held. And then some of us tried to take the steps to one of the entrances. God is not OK with white supremacy, and God is on the side of all those it tries to dehumanize. We feel a responsibility to visibly, bodily show our solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized.
A phalanx of neo-Nazis shoved right through our human wall with 3-foot-wide wooden shields, screaming and spitting homophobic slurs and obscenities at us. It was then that antifa stepped in to thwart them. They have their tools to achieve their purposes, and they are not ones I will personally use, but let me stress that our purposes were the same: block this violent tide and do not let it take the pedestal.
The white supremacists did not blink at violently plowing right through clergy, all of us dressed in full clerical garb. White supremacy is violence. I didn’t see any racial justice protesters with weapons; as for antifa, anything they brought I would only categorize as community defense tools and nothing more. Pretty much everyone I talk to agrees—including most clergy. My strong stance is that the weapon is and was white supremacy, and the white supremacists intentionally brought weapons to instigate violence.
It's helpful to look at accounts like these of the particulars in the protest events. They involve specific decisions about risks and assessments of danger in a given moment. Organizers have a responsibility to be clear with participants about known risks, especially in cases like those the minister describes in which violence against the participants is anticipated. The same is true of "antifa" groups who plan to defend other protesters against violence from armed militants. That risks includes the reality that police and prosecutors often are "blind in the right eye" in such situations and may accuse them of crimes for even purely defensive actions.
It's important to remember that there's nothing wrong with protecting someone against acts of violence. And there's nothing wrong with defending oneself from a violent attack. The kind of Ghandian militant pacifist resistance described by the minister is a particular kind of strategy in given situations. Taking such an approach may not involve a purely pacifist outlook. And even the few people who are genuine pacifists would generally not consider personal self-defense in the face of a violent attack to be wrong in all circumstances.
It's also a well-established tradition on the center-left to take any and all opportunities to distinguish themselves from the dirty hippies who actually organize and demonstrate for progressive causes and against reactionary ones. Good liberals are supposed to be polite and not ruffle too many feathers. It was such liberals that Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed in his Letter From Birmingham Jail.
Those responses sometimes spill blood. Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.
Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left. When the masked antifa activist was filmed assaulting Spencer on Inauguration Day, another piece in The Nation described his punch as an act of “kinetic beauty.” Slate ran an approving article about a humorous piano ballad that glorified the assault. Twitter was inundated with viral versions of the video set to different songs, prompting the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to tweet, “I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.”
The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the “righteous beatings.”
Yes, even-the-liberal Peter Beinart agrees with Trump that "antifa" is a danger to good Christian white folks!
Anarchists are know for being an unruly bunch, though stereotyping them as particularly inclined to violence would be unrealistic and unfair. And the press is known for carelessly labeling people "anarchists" who may not identify themselves that way at all. That said, I've never had a particularly high regard for the group (or groups) of anarchists who show up in the San Francisco Bay Area to protests wearing black masks and displaying a penchant for fighting, throwing rocks through windows and minor arson. As I recall, I first noticed them in Oakland during some protest during the oughts. They didn't seem to have any distinct or coherent message. And one of my first thoughts was, masked people who show up out of nowhere to commit vandalism during protests: a perfect vehicle for official and unofficial provocateurs. A group like that strikes me an extremely likely target for police or homeland security agents seeking to entrap people in "terrorist" plots.
But nothing is safer for pundits and liberal concern-trolls than "both sides do it!" And Beinart happily goes there:
A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. [my emphasis]
Yes, who can argue with that? On one side, we have white supremacist militants being actively encouraged and incited by the President of the United States. On the other, there are some masked anarchists with zero actual political influence. Both Sides Do It!
I won't try to fact-check all the claims in Beinart's piece. I'll just note here that he doesn't always make it clear just who is doing the violence in incidents for which he blames antifa.
I don't want to encourage people to break windows just for the heck of it. But it's probably time to recall the discussion in "the Sixties" in the US and Germany and presumably other places as well about the difference between "violence against things" and "violence against people." Yes, it's very rude, against the law and probably unnecessary in nearly all cases to toss a rock through the window of a Walgreens. But neither the law nor any sane system of values considers breaking a store window as morally or practically equivalent to deliberately ramming a group of people with a car. The latter, we should note, being a practice that Republicans in several state legislatures are attempting to decriminalize.
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal got into the act earlier in August with A Berkeley ‘Escape Hatch’ 08/09/2017 with a snotty editorial about UC-Berkeley not taking a more law-and-order approach toward protesters. That was one of St. Reagan's favorite themes in his successful first campaign for California Governor in 1966.
Michelle Goldberg takes a more sober approach to reporting on what the antifa movement is all about The Public Face of AntifaSlate 08/22/2017:
After the riot in Charlottesville ... antifa is suddenly making headlines. The term antifa refers to a loose network of militant left-wing activists who physically square off against the far right, and often try to prevent those they deem fascists from speaking publicly. Antifa is sometimes used as a synonym for black bloc anarchists — the scruffy kids in black bandanas or balaclavas known for smashing Starbucks windows — but while the movements overlap, they’re not identical. ... The movement appears to be growing rapidly under Trump, though it’s impossible to put hard numbers to it; there are no membership rolls.
Michelle's article is a good overview that tries to deal seriously with the practical situation presented by aggressive white supremacist demonstrations. I'm impressed that she avoids any kind of simplistic "both sides do it" false equivalence. She's not doing the kind of liberal concern-troll criticism that Peter Beinart presents.
I'm just winding up an interesting and enjoyable long weekend at the annual Netroots Nation convention in Atlanta. The pressure from the grassroots on the Democratic Party to be more forceful in standing up for its own claimed programs and principles was very evident and encouraging to see and experience. And the murderous white supremacist rally in Charlottesville added a extra sense of immediacy to resisting Trumpism and pressing the Democratic Party to become a more progressive presence in US politics. After Al Gore's closing plenary presentation, organizers had arranged for a march from the downtown conference hotel to the Statehouse in protest of white supremacy and in solidarity with the victims of the rightwing white terrorist attack there.
The local paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, gave particular attention to the ways in which Georgia state politics made its presence felt at the conference in a front-page article today by Greg Bluestein that doesn't seem to be online at this writing, "Liberal activists display divide among Democrats") 08/13/2017) but also highlighted the reform vibe of the event:
The nation's leading liberal activists came to Atlanta for the Netroots Nation conference spoiling to sharpen their fight with President Donald Trump. But they proved just as willing to poke, prod and pummel their fellow Democrats.
He obviously means that mainly metaphorically, though he does mention that "a minor scuffle broke out in the audience" when some attendees were loudly protesting Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Evans. The two main candidates in the Democratic gubernatorial contest are both named Stacey, the other being Stacey Abrams, who spoke at the opening plenary on Thursday. Evans is white, Abrams is black, which is some kind of factor in the contest. But part of the rap on Stacey Evans, in particular, is that she has supported some school privatization efforts.
This hour-long segment from TYT Network features three of the anti-Evans protesters, Jordan [Chariton] From Netroots Nation: Protests vs. Establishment 08/12/2017. I believe at least one of the three people interviewed here and maybe all three also spoke at the mini-rally at the Statehouse on Saturday:
More from Bluestein's print report:
Primary challenger to long-serving Democrats were treated like stars. Panels instructed the 3,000 or so activists how to wrest control of their local parties.
Others encouraged them to challenge establishment Democrats, whether they be on local school boards or in Congress, if they aren't liberal enough.
If anything was clear, the internal Democratic fissures sharpened by Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign have solidified, if not deepened, since Trump's election. In panels and in side conversations, organizers talked about forcing Democrats toward more liberal policies, such as single-payer health care and free college tuition.
I didn't attend the last two years' Netroots Nation conventions. But comparing my impressions this year to those from 2014 and earlier, my impression was similar.
Jordan Chariton in the video above gives a different perspective, arguing that Netroots Nation attendees are a more Establishment group than those at the People's Summit earlier this year. But he also explains that there are plenty of progressive people here, it's just they tend to be part of more organized groups that normally support the Democratic Party. And I think that's a fair assessment. Netroots Nation tends to attract people who are comfortable with working within the Democratic Party. But not the Blue Dog variety. Not a lot of Joe Manchin fans at NN gatherings. Whereas the People's Summit drew more people who were new to politics and/or attracted to left groups who keep their distance from the Democrats, and tended to attract younger participants on the average. (I haven't attended the People's Summit.)
I selected panels to attend that addressed foreign policy issues - there weren't many of those! - and panels that addressed Islamophobia, which is a key ideology for the radical right in the US and in Europe. Just after the news of the car attack in Charlottesville broke, I attended the panel organized by Dave Neiwert, who is himself an authority on the far right in the US, titled "The White Face of Domestic Terrorism: How Islamophobia Distorts the Reality of Terrorist Violence in America." It also featured anti-terrorism expert Daryl Johnson and Rabiah Ahmed of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
That was immediately followed by the closing plenary session, where Al Gore did a presentation in interview format, mostly dealing with the climate crisis. At the end, he addressed the Charlottesville disgrace, repeatedly referring to the white supremacists as alt-right, KKK and Nazis. Political junkies gravitate toward quibbles over labels. But as Dave Neiwert and his panel explained, actual Nazis, i.e., Hitler-worshipers and those who explicitly admire the Third Reich, are a distinctive segment of the far right which form part of the "alt-right" spectrum. But the latter also includes other currents, including the "Men's Rights Movement."
Trump condemned the protests that resulted in at least three deaths and prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency, but he didn’t criticize the white nationalist rally, which featured anti-Semitic chants and neo-Nazi slogans. Instead, he called for unity among “all races, creeds and colors.”
Gore said Trump should “give more thought to what it means to have a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi movement marching and creating this kind of hatred.”
“The country would be better served if the president would come back before the people,” he said, “and think of a more thoughtful and appropriate statement about how we can understand what’s going on in America – and how we can go forward.”
The quickly-organized march after the plenary session was impressive. Apparently there were about 500 people, pretty much all from the NN conference. Delores Huerta, the famous farmworkers' leader who worked closely with Cesar Chavez who had also spoken at the convention, led the procession to the Statehouse. Whoever the people were directly involved in organizing the march, they did an impressively good job of setting up the march, getting official permissions quickly, and keeping the marchers focused and walking in orderly groups. Huerta also spoke at the small rally at the Capitol. But that part of the event was not so well planned. The organizers never noticed, it seemed, that the loudspeaker connected to her mike wasn't working, so that most people couldn't hear what she said. That was followed by several other speakers, apparently from the same group that had organized the protest against Stacey Evans. There wasn't a clear theme to the presentations.
But that's a quibble. It was an impressive march. They used some chants familiar to me. But there were ones new to me, too, my own favorite being, "No Trump! No KKK! No fascist USA!" In a different context, I might have thought that was too sectarian sounding and maybe obscure for such an event. But unfortunately, on Friday it clearly addressing a white terrorist attack very much in the national news at that very moment.
