Notice how less intense the outrage is about Trump's latest both-sides-bad comment re #Charlottesville? His conduct becomes normalized.I can't agree.
Although we have persuasive reports that Antifa members behaved admirably in Charlottesville, many Democrats are having second, third and fourth thoughts about the group. The Antifa movement is largely composed of anarchists who hate the Democratic party as much as (or more than) they hate the Trumpers. One simply cannot trust such people. One certainly does not want to hop into bed with them.
Antifa has earned a reputation for being violence-prone. I agree with this Vox writer:
But one reason Trump could draw up this false equivalence in the first place is because antifa protesters have been carrying out violence against right-wing groups for months now. As Peter Beinart reported in the Atlantic, antifa activists have violently protested right-wing speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and conservative political scientist Charles Murray. In the Yiannopoulos protests in particular, antifa activists even threw explosive Molotov cocktails and other objects at police.
When far-left protesters act violently, it gives Trump and other conservatives more ammunition to draw equivalencies between the far left and far right — even if it is a false equivalence, given that America has a long history of racist violence and very little, by comparison, of left-wing violence.
My biggest problem with Antifa is that the movement recruits among the young -- the arrogant, ineducable young. Never trust anyone under thirty.
For these people, history does not exist -- which means that they are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. The anti-war protests of the 1960s were heavily ratfucked by the FBI's COINTELPRO and by the CIA's Project CHAOS. (Operation MERRIMAC was the infiltration program under CHAOS.) I've seen no evidence that anyone connected with Antifa recognizes the need to protect against agents provocateurs. The movement will also become vulnerable to a crippling paranoia once members finally understand that agents provocateurs are in their midst. (That paranoia pretty much destroyed the SDS, or so I've been told by former members.)
Today, many who romanticize the Vietnam-era protests ignore the fact that many anti-war leaders were...well, assholes. They were young hotheads who arrogantly refused to admit the obvious when their actions proved self-defeating. They become infatuated with the idea of revolution despite the utter lack of public support for such a revolution. Their rhetorical and actual violence, coupled with boorish behavior and an uncompromising attitude, repulsed the majority of Americans.
Their "revolution" created a backlash. Result: Nixon. Another result: The "Jesus freak" movement, which, as the 70s progressed, became subsumed into a newly-empowered Fundamentalism.
I'm convinced that Hubert Humphrey -- an Establishment Dem detested by the "revolutionary" left (in much the same way Hillary is detested by the BernieBros) -- would have pulled out of Vietnam within two or three years. Nixon kept the war going until 1975. Thus, we may fairly argue that the antiwar protestors prolonged the war.
I'm old enough to recall those years. History, I fear, is being repeated.
Liberals have to proceed with a certain degree of caution when dealing with Antifa and their confreres. Obviously, we must denounce the Alt Rightists and the Richard Spencerians with all due vehemence. We must also denounce Trump's "both sides were to blame" narrative.
But we must do all this without making heroes of Antifa. Mark my words: Even though members of that movement behaved laudably in Charlottesville, they are likely to stab us in the back.
6 comments:
Not only does common sense state that Antifa has been infiltrated, I ask if Antifa was actually created by the alt-right. They fit every objective of the Trump administration. They are left wing radicals who resort to violence making them the ideal target to build up as representative of the left to "both sides" any deplorable thing Trump does. Just like Infowars fulfilled the right's goals a bit too neatly to be merely a coincidence, the same seems to be true with Antifa. RVAwonk (https://twitter.com/RVAwonk) has done good work showing how Russia has been promoting Antifa. I follow left wing politics pretty closely, but the only time I hear about Antifa is from the alt-right. The whole thing has screamed "ratfucking operation" from the start as opposed to an organic movement that has been infiltrated. And, seriously, how often have true anarchists been even a blip on the radar of American politics? Basically only around the turn of the 20th century? Certainly not since the rise of communism.
Either way it's
A Bigfootnote citing would include Mario Savio (no anarchist, he) and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, circa 1964-1965. A series of images I recall seeing on the nightly news: women and men students who were 'sitting in', obeying passive resistance inside some building, were being dragged down stairs, by policemen (campus or city, I forget) who were pulling them by their long hair (early Beatles-length, not hippie long). Yeah, nationally we got Nixon, but Reagan came first as backlash, in 1966, as California's fascist governor.
I have another image, from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago: Chicago Gauleiter Richard Daley standing and screaming when Senator Ribicoff at the podium described the brutality taking place outside (later deemed a police riot), and everyone could read Daley's lips saying "Get that globalist bastard off the podium!"
Either way it's ratfucked.
But things are probably somewhat complicated. Some of these folks give every appearance of being trained soldiers (IDF Intervention to check the far right? Just guessing, based on videos of West Coast protests, But suddenly organized groups that come from no previously known origin? Lots of opportunists out there. But very few opportunistic leftists. As usual.
The problem is that what the enemy has is money, astronomical amounts of money, That plus the hopelessly worthless and incompetent FBI, etc. Nearly everyone has a price, even if it is the avoidance of prison on unrelated charges.
It is therefore clear that infiltration is a given in current circumstances.
Caution is an important element of any approach we might take.
On this topic, there is one enormous advantage the left took away from the Sixties, and that is a commitment to anti violence.
Amelie: Gauleiter Daley, priceless!
Joseph, agree on HHH. Gore, too. A long list of possibilities denied by right wing machinations.
nemdam: "...the only time I hear about Antifa is from the alt-right." True for me, also! That screaming head, Alex Jones(?), recently punched a Trump effigy in the head (and then removed the head to show a skull) and declared himself an ipso-facto antifa affiliate. Except for that and the MSM, I never hear this group mentioned. Well, maybe only because I don't frequent Twitter.
Following that Antifa link Joseph provided (the Vox link appears broken) I was more interested in an Anonymous post down thread showing the "racism" of the anarchists. What it actually showed were two young men, one white one black, nose to nose each threatening to pummel the other. Without knowing what sparked the chest-thumping, and seeing that some in the group were POC, it's hard to conclude racism, or even violence. Looked like young testosterone to me.
I've been worried about Anonymous. That post did little to allay those fears.
Antifa aside, let's be clear about what was so heinous about Trump's remarks in the first place. He said that there were "many fine people" at the neo-Nazi rally, which was nothing /but/ a neo-Nazi rally. He even said he'd seen their nighttime torch rally and saw fine people in that mix.
I'm disappointed you're not reminding readers of that, and instead focussing on antifa.
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