Blaming the boogy man of White Nationalists, Russia, or outside outside agitators is a way to shift blame by politicians and an easy scapegoat.
Amusingly the governor of Minnesota, and a big city MN mayor blamed vandalism & lootingrioters as being the work of people who were all from out of state, thereby parroting Trump's same line (or he theirs).
They (not Trump of course) had to walk it back when it turned out not to be true.
Is there some outside groups posing as others, possibly, but to blame a majority of problems on them is just BS.
The problem is antifa has become the new boogy man for the GOP, and they've been pushing this narrative extremely hard. It's apparent they've identified their enemy, but this approach has me worried that "First they came for the antifa..." might not be far off.
I see a lot of mischaracterization of what is a category, not a group. From what I can tell antifa is anti-fascism, and somewhat characterized by people willing to take direct action.
Some of their direct action includes running up behind people and striking them with a bike lock across the back of their head for the crime of voting the "wrong" way.
I believe the parent comment is referencing the 2017 Berkeley incident where a professor ambushed multiple conservative and libertarian protesters from behind, hitting them in the back of the head with a bike lock.
You're just doing the same thing again, using a vague "they" to extrapolate from cherry picked examples onto an amorphous mass, without even bothering to dress up the dissonance between that and "bike lock", singular.
No mass is 100% identical though, so "you can't use some individual actions to project on the group they chose to be part of and that chooses to accept them" really just makes the concept of groups useless.
"No, that specific action wasn't covered by our shared intent, so obviously we will accept responsibility for it" is something I believe pretty much everybody will agree on after the action has happened and has resulted in negative feedback. Had it produced applause and achieved the goal of the group, they would have celebrated it.
> "you can't use some individual actions to project on the group they chose to be part of and that chooses to accept them"
You certainly can't cherry pick them (one instance of violence versus billions of instances of peacefulness, for example), apart from "group that chooses to accept them" not applying here.
> Had it produced applause and achieved the goal of the group, they would have celebrated it.
Had there been anye instances of violence by people calling themselves antifa, those seeking to defend the ongoing, systematic violence would have invented instances of violence of people they call antifa. See how that works, or rather, how it doesn't?
True, if it was billions to one, I'd probably agree with you. It's not though, not being peaceful is pretty much one of the core defining features of the black bloc. And let's not go down the road with claims of "all the other instances are Nazis or undercover cops trying to hurt the movement". I have serious doubts regarding the Nazis (I knew a few people in Antifa circles back in the day and you don't go unnoticed with your shit just because you wear a black sweat shirt, like every sub-culture they have lots of Shibboleths), and the undercover cops are mostly observers, not instigators (though I'm sure they will take part in riots if it helps their cover or their case).
> See how that works, or rather, how it doesn't?
My point is that disowning a member's actions when they aren't considered favorably post factum is what pretty much every group does. If Antifa/black bloc were actively promoting non-violence, that would be a different issue, but this rather sounds like the Daily Stormer saying "we don't condone violence wink wink" when another one of their goons snaps and shoots up a mosque.
> It's not though, not being peaceful is pretty much one of the core defining features of the black bloc.
If the black bloc was all of antifa, it would just be called antifa. Outside the black bloc, direct action covers a lot of things, from just organizing all sorts of things (not just protests), art and being loud, to vandalism and even violence.
Just take all the sorts of things that were done in human history while claiming it was for freedom, both bad and good. Does that make any person doing thing X in the name of freedom responsible for what a person doing Y in the name of freedom? You can call those people a "group" all day long, but that doesn't mean they're actually a group in the sense of voting on their values and actions.
It's literally not an organization. There are lots of people that have anti-fascist stickers or flags or whatever in europe that explicitly exist to stand up for people when nazis/neo-nazis show up to protests, or to their squats, or to their homes... they exist to save peoples lives from right-wing violence.
It's pitiful that this is the best boogeyman the right can come up with in 2020 and it's extra pitiful that - like everything else they project - it's just them telling on themselves.
I don't think you're allowed to point it out here, but there is a large audience here that is a massive part of the problem. rich, influential people with power (whether they use it or not) riding this generation's wave of prosperity with no knowledge of or interest in the people that are affected by their jobs and lifestyles.
smart enough to learn to code or to polish a pitch to a vc, but lacking any critical thinking skills or morality that would cause them to reflect on their position in society.
flocking to the right at the first hint of something that does reflect these truths.
supporting fascists because you're scared or uncomfortable is even worse than supporting fascists because you're a bigot imo
Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics, which is one of the hallmarks of fascism.
Naming yourself "the good guys" doesn't mean anyone who opposes you is bad. It's like if someone said disliking 'Make America Great Again' means you don't want America to be great. Or opposing the Patriot Act makes you not a patriot.
You know this, everyone else reading this knows this, stop pretending we don't.
no, they don't! what are you talking about? I have been to places where people have to defend themselves from neo nazis coming to beat them up for being gay. it is a label that indicates reactive protection from fascist violence, period
Equivocation between literal facicts and people who want to fight literal facists doesn't make a lot of sense.
So no, I really, truly have no clue what you're getting at. Like as far as I can tell you're saying "being willing to punch a Nazi makes you a Nazi". Which, like, no.
Demonising your enemies as racists or fascists, ie nazis and employing mob tactics to "no platform" them or otherwise shut them up as in "no free speech for racists", strike me as exactly the sort of tactics the real fascists employed in the 1930s. So in that sense, yes, Antifa groups/coalitions/collectives/networks frequently behave like fascists. Which is no surprise really if you subscribe to the horseshoe model of the political spectrum.
>> Naming yourself "the good guys" doesn't mean anyone who opposes you is bad. It's like if someone said disliking 'Make America Great Again' means you don't want America to be great. Or opposing the Patriot Act makes you not a patriot.
Your reply:
> Like as far as I can tell you're saying "being willing to punch a Nazi makes you a Nazi".
Yes, I'm still confused by the equivocation between facists and antifacsists, and your dodging that question doesn't help.
Please elaborate. Please don't just re-quote yourself. You know, follow the guidelines and engage in good faith. I did, it why I asked a genuine clarifying question which you seemed to ignore.
No, you did not address GP in good faith. And GP did address your question by quoting himself: the problem is not "fighting against the bad guys", the problem is whom you consider the bad guys. Anti-fascists calling themselves such in no way means that everyone they oppose is actually a fascist.
> Anti-fascists calling themselves such in no way means that everyone they oppose is actually a fascist.
This doesn't address my comment, nor is it what GP said. Id suggest you reread their comment. And mine.
I'll break it down:
> Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics
This is overbroad. Many people don't share antifa politics. I don't. They don't threaten me with violence. Something is missing here.
> which is one of the hallmarks of fascism
So this is only sensical in an overbroad generalization of antifa to mean "violent left wing people who are violent towards anyone not suitably left wing", which isn't antifa under any reasonable definition, and is an entirely circular argument.
I wonder if you also think that the allies forces in ww2 were also fascists for going to war with nazi germany. They were after all, using violence of people who didn't share their politics (politics of genocide).
Equivocating someone who wants to commit genocide and someone who wants to stop them from doing so can certainly be done with saying that they both "want to commit violence to people who don't agree with them" but its a very good example where ignoring the political content of an action in favor of the content can lead you to really bizarre statements.
> using violence of people who didn't share their politics (politics of genocide).
The genocide became widely known after the war had already started. The allies did not join the war out of their goodwill but rather due to their own geopolitical and economic interests - they never intended to stop any genocide (the US engaged in eugenics and mandatory sterilisation and only stopped because hitler did it too - they even put the Japanese living in the US in concentration camps), it was just a side-effect.
Regardless (and this is a bit offtopic), I wonder, would you support WWII if only to save people from genocide? In the same spirit would you support war against China in order to save the Uyghurs and other suppressed groups? I personally would reply yes to the first one but I am debating about the second.
> In the same spirit would you support war against China in order to save the Uyghurs and other suppressed groups?
No, for two reasons: I don't actually have any concrete information on what is happening in China, and 2 the USA does a lot worse to suppressed groups both inside and outside the country than China has ever done, so I'd support a dismantling of the US State (today, maybe during ww2 I would say first go to war with germany and then dismantle the USA) before I support any kind of intervention in any other place in the world.
Using violence to achieve political goals is not in itself a "hallmark of fascism". From the Gordon Riots, to union riots, to militant suffragettes, history is littered with examples of political change that was expedited by violence.
In the UK, the British Union of Fascists organised a march in London in 1936 and were countered by ten times as many people organised by anarchist, communist, socialist and Jewish groups. The ensuing violence sent an extremely clear message that fascism is not welcome in the country.
>> Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics
Your reply:
> Using violence to achieve political goals is not in itself a "hallmark of fascism".
Agreed. But I didn't write that it was.
You live in the UK. How would you compare the IRA of the 1920s with the provos in the 1980s? Would you say they're the same group? They have the same name.
I'm a bit confused about your argument, then. Antifa aren't violent against just anyone that doesn't share their politics. It's not a single organisation with a uniform political ideology, so that wouldn't make sense. It's more like the practise of aggressive confrontation specifically against authoritarian, right-wing movements, especially those which have some level of support from the state and/or police.
> Antifa aren't violent against just anyone that doesn't share their politics.
In my experience (as a mainsteam left person) Antifa consider anyone not on the hard left to be either 'fascists' or 'bootlickers'. Everyone else I know who has had any contact with Antifa has had the same experience. Many Antifa people would say this is an accurate view of anyone who does not share hard left political views.
They don't tend to protest engage in violence against soft-left events like democrat rallies, unless I'm mistaken? The vast majority of the time it's against alt-right or white supremacist events.
Honestly, I'm not even sure that Antifa exists. I'd never heard anything about such a group being worthy of concern in America until the current president started trying to make white supremacists sound like regular folks. I view rhetoric about Antifa as propaganda from apologists for right-wing extremism. It's their way of saying "he started it!" Any time their culture war comes to blows.
>smart enough to learn to code or to polish a pitch to a vc, but lacking any critical thinking skills or morality that would cause them to reflect on their position in society.
Sure, people that disagree with your viewpoints lack critical thinking and morality. Painting people who disagree with you as immoral idiots just sounds like you're not able to defend your beliefs.
People start with moral intuitions first and work backwards to find reasons. Fallacies, ignorance, and sloppy thinking is quasi-deliberate, to satisfy a priori values of what is sacred and what is profane, who are the good people and who are the bad people.
This story is natural clickbait because you have literal fascists claiming to be anti-fascist, which is an obvious contradiction.
But if Antifa is just anybody who is against fascism then violent anti-fascists are Antifa. You can't say they're not when they actually are against fascism. And without any official leadership to disavow the advocation of violence, now your label is tainted by violent evildoers and you get to enter the grab-bag of boogymen for whenever somebody needs one.
Using violence to coerce people is fascism. How a violent activist group can claim to be anti-fascist is beyond me. They have become the thing they claim to hate.
No it's not. Fascism uses violence to coerce people. Pretty much every ideological system that is in power uses violence to coerce people. Liberals uses the police to coerce the majority of the population to not take their stuff. Conservatives do the same thing. The great western democracies used violence to coerce the nazis to not occupy their states.
Fine, whatever. You want your civil war so much, you better be willing to be on front lines getting shot at; no whining about brutality, either.
Maybe this isn't you, but I'm just sick to death of keyboard warriors and tweety radicals who've never experienced violence (let alone meted it out) posturing online.
Yeah I don't see much of Antifa capital A but more people rallying around the idea of anti-fascism. Those that oppose this seem to have not read about the paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Not to be snarky, but I can tell that you're active on Reddit, because every third person in discussions like this proffers Popper's paradox.
This is, at a high level, an idea that we can all get behind. What rational and decent person can condone intolerance? But, just like hate speech, 'intolerance' can become very subjective very quickly.
Thought experiment: imagine politician X tweeted "[i]n order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance" in response to a supposed war on Christmas or war on white people.
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EDIT: Instead of just downvotes, would appreciate substantive comments on where my line of thinking is wrong. Thanks.
> Thought experiment: imagine politician X tweeted "[i]n order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance" in response to a supposed war on Christmas or war on white people.
I mean, if those things were actually happening, they'd be right. Otherwise it's just sealioning.
Yeah reverse racism isn't a thing, and I've heard Merry Christmas about 100x more than before that made up war, but now it just makes me nervous because it has become "a thing" and seems a loaded phrase now which is a real shame ... But yeah, none of that really related to you know, like, actual genocide.
Thomas, you're missing my point. My point isn't that those things are real: they obviously are not.
My point is that a such a philosophical principle is only valid iff you are comfortable with that same principle being used by your political enemies against you.
Sorry for the late reply will probably be buried, but I don't know how someone in opposition to tolerance has any kind of moral high ground to be any kind of meaningful political enemy. It is like a core aspect of a society to have be some kind of accepting. It's like an open world or closed world problem, and none of us really live in a closed world ultimately.
Yes, 'reverse racism' isn't a thing, it's just racism. You don't get to change the meaning of words because you studied critical race theory at university.
Does nobody remember the riots in 2015? BLM burning cities down? Stealing the mic from Bernie Sanders (of all people! The man literally marched with MLK) might ring a bell, if you remember that. BLM is very much a violent, radical organization.
Who do you attribute the assassinations of police officers to? I guess you could argue that they weren't "organized", but it seems about as organized as right-wing terrorism like the shooting in Charleston (a.k.a. the fascism the anti-fascism is counteracting).
I don't consider Christianity a violent organization despite the crusades and the inquisition, nor do I consider Islam a violent organization, or most other religions.
I consider an organization on their tenets, under which Black Lives Matter is completely fine.
KKK for example isn't.
Right-wing terrorism has no redeeming kernel of decency, nor does it have a productive movement behind the (few?) bad actors.
No, you don't, or you would consider a religion that endorses literally infinite amounts of torture for anyone who disagrees with them to be violent. There's also its attitudes toward homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22), slavery (Exodus 21:7), murdering people for working on saturdays (or maybe sundays?) (Exodus 35:2), and touching pig remains (Leviticus 11:7), among others.
I wholeheartedly condemn a large portion of the evangelical movement, and any religious fanatic, but I also believe that there's a case to be made for more charitable translations and interpretations, and I know several Christians who believe not in the things you listed, but follow the less brimstoney new testament.
But to some extent I do agree with you, otherwise I would still be a Christian which I'm not, for the fact that any belief that subjugates moral philosophy and reasoning to interpreting holy text will always have blind spots.
Either way, I apologize if it distracted from the point I was trying to make, that all organizations, good or bad will have bad actors, but what's important is identifying which organization can be fruitful and which is inherently bad.
"Slaves, obey your earthly masters" (Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22) (the easiest one to grep for, since I remember the exact phrasing). Doesn't sound very superseded to me, and Christians continued supporting that right up until the South lost the Civil War (and a fair bit past that in other places) and slavery became politically impractical to defend. So it wasn't a case of a misquotation (by two different sources? really?) being corrected; it was a case of explicitly heretical values being forced on the church at (rather close to literal) gunpoint.
As someone more eloquent than me put it: Christianity had it's chance to rule the world; we call it the Dark Ages for good reason.
Er, just to clairify, Islam is also horrible, but I have less in the way of citations for them because I don't interact with them as much and I don't speak Arabic. If you want to look up said citations yourself, I think the search keywords your want would be "sharia law", although "muhammed pedophile" would probably also help.
Well, technically the Bureau of Land Management does use threats of violence to enforce it's decisions, but it's a bit unfair to single them out next to much worse offenders like the ATF or CIA.
The experience with -ism words like socialism, communism, capitalism, libertarianism, etc, is that it is very hard to rally a group together that agrees on an actual definition of what they mean.
So when you say 'From what I can tell antifa is anti-fascism' - what does that mean? America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist and the first alternative philosophy seems to be light/moderate socialism. Second is maybe libertarianism.
So who/what do you think the anti-fascists are opposing, and what would they espouse if they ever decide there are no fascists for them to define themselves against?
> America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist and the first alternative philosophy seems to be light/moderate socialism.
Corporatism was inseparable from fascism in Italy and Germany. The exploitation of the profit motive is one of the primary reasons that so many people overlooked the atrocities.
Fascism is the reason so many companies like IBM, Hugo Boss, L'Oreal, Koch Industries, Audi, Porsche, Adidas, BMW, and countless other extant corporations have dark histories from supporting the German extermination camps to utilizing their slave labor to build their products.
Fair enough; but am I going to get disagreement when I say the brand of corporatism that currently holds power is pretty obviously not fascism?
Quoting a few key sentences from Wikipedia:
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency) through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. [0]
America doesn't have a serious lobby that believes in those things. There isn't a lobby that is serious about autarchy, there isn't a lobby calling for complete mobilisation and there isn't a lobby calling for a one party state. Apart from maybe the anti-facists I don't know of a lobby promoting political violence. The war and imperialism stuff is possibly true, but that isn't a new thing in American politics - America has been at war my entire lifetime and mostly in the same set of middle eastern countries.
The only link between fascism and American politics is that Trump is popular in the Republican party and is happy to stand up and say that the globalism pendulum has swung too far. That is a tenuous link to fascist ideology.
The NRA is a serious lobby group that is being used to promote a single party. And it's moves toward schools being more heavily policed/militarized organization in the name of safety seem like a stepping stone towards fascism to me.
Their original goal, of a rights advocacy group has turned into a partisan dividing tactic.
Do you expect Planned Parenthood to promote the GOP, and do you consider them fascist for not doing so?
Supporting one party over another is not an act of fascism. They promote the GOP because the GOP supports their goals. Do you think it's reasonable to expect them to promote the other party while that party actively works against them?
They promote a stronger police presence in schools, but they also support the right of teachers to be armed and able to defend against attackers. In other words, they support teachers being able to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. Whether you agree with that or not, the 2nd Amendment is a decidedly libertarian idea. Fascism is authoritarian by nature. Promoting one of these is mutually exclusive with promoting the other.
Regarding police in schools, I don't see how that fits with Wikipedia's definition of fascism: a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy. Perhaps we're operating on different definitions.
Planned parenthood isn't an organization created to defend a constitutional amendment. It relies an a particular Amendment to provide some of it's services, but it's not a fair comparison.
I also wouldn't think poorly of the NRA for just it's change in how it donates to candidates if they weren't performing illegal coordination and also promoting Republicans candidates even if their opponent was aligned with their 2nd Amendment stance.
Police presence in schools is just a step into a strong regimentation of society IMO. And the 2nd Amendment is far too vague to be considered libertarian. We could debate all day over what the intent was, or how it can be interpreted.
> Planned parenthood isn't an organization created to defend a constitutional amendment. It relies an a particular Amendment to provide some of it's services, but it's not a fair comparison.
Frankly I don't see why that's relevant. My point is that the amendment itself has become a partisan issue. The GOP and the NRA agree on their interpretation of the amendment, while the other party opposes them. Why would you expect two allies to support their mutual opposition instead of each other, and how does not doing so equate to fascism?
> performing illegal coordination
Political corruption != fascism, and it is certainly not unique to it.
> the 2nd Amendment is far too vague to be considered libertarian
I disagree, but I can see how some interpretations of it (that it's meant to arm militias which are agents of the state) could even be considered authoritarian. However, the NRA advocates for the interpretation that says people should have the means to overthrow their government if necessary. I'm having a hard time seeing how that aligns with fascism.
This is what it means. It is a reply to "America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist" after all.
I remember back in 2015-2016 seeing Trump supporters get their heads get bashed in by antifa, often women and the elderly. I’ve hated antifa ever since. It’s not a new thing.
you are half correct, but welcome to the downvote brigade of people going against the hive mind.
both antifa (term from the 30s and reused in Europe when neonazis showed up in the 90s) and BLM were term widely abused (and maybe even introduced) by the Russian troll army in the wake of US social movements after Occupy.
Antifa as a bogyman fits with the golden quote from Umberto Eco.
"However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."
"Antifa" is not just "anti-fascism". It is short for "Antifaschistische Aktion" and is an umbrella term for loosely related groups of extremist Anarchists/Communists who share the same symbolism, rethoric and tactics.
This is the definition of the word, no matter how much lefists try to whitewash the term and shift the overton window.
Those are some quick downvotes although I literally wrote the definition of "Antifa" that you can find on Wikipedia. Some people really don't like the truth.
And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.
Today, "Antifa" is synonymous with "Antifaschistische Aktion".
> The only definition from that page that is not related to some extremist marxist/anarchist movement is this article
Why is it important for you to filter some definitions out?
> And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.
There are historical reasons that explain why Antifa caught up as a name, what logo activists use, etc.
The abbreviation did not change, it still stands for "anti-fascim actions" today, or "Antifaschistische Aktion" in German.
But you are saying Antifa is synonymous, ie. equal to "Antifaschistische Aktion", not for what the words mean, but in a literal way, to restrict the definition.
No matter how the name came to life, the spirit behind it is broader that the name; nowadays it is a perfectly fine shortcut for anti-fascism.
The dictionary !=== truth. At best it's truthy. Wikipedia probably even less so when it comes to political stuff.
I know a number of people in various countries who participate in Antifa action and who, while definitely left of center, are by no means anarchists or communists, and not even close to Marxists-Leninists or whatever other hard-left groups there are.
If you’ve watched the ubiquitous video footage of protests where the left and right confront each other over the past 4 years, antifa is a clear group and aggressor. I have a friend in the “chapter” here, what loose categories have chapters? They treat it as a group/organization. They seem to be more organized than the Proud Boys, which plenty of people on the left deem a white supremacy organization.
It’s funny to me that now they are a target, people are trying to play down their involvement in the political landscape the past few years.
I’ve watched them shut down speech, aggressively block events from happening, attack people in MAGA hats, there is so much hate pouring out of them that they are more fascist than anti-fascist.
And yet, viewing that same myriad of videos, I see the exact opposite: That more hatred, threats of violence, and actual violence comes from the alt-right / white nationalists / MAGA provocateurs (depending on the video), and antifa simply returns that antagonism. Of course there are examples both ways, but speaking in terms of averages here, it doesn't even seem like a close call. Antifa's reaction's aren't always right, but neither is belting a guy who spits on you in a bar, yet I can't blame the puncher, and the bias is obvious if somebody gets up on a pulpit and claims moral superiority over the despicable violent puncher who viciously attacked the poor innocent spitter. I wish everybody could be Ghandi in the face of the ever-growing tidal wave of hatred, mockery, and gleeful threats of violence, but it's unrealistic to lay the blame primarily at the target's feet when they fail to rise to that level.
I totally agree. I think the far right and far left groups that act in this manner are both despicable. These groups are each possessed by an ideology and their primitive nature makes them try to force their will on one another. I personally wish we can someday go back to diversity of thought without worrying about getting your head bashed in.
Maybe. Why don't you point out exactly what it is in that video that makes you confident enough to label them as "Antifa." I don't see anything that leads me to believe they're anything more than dumb teenagers in the middle of a riot.
Exactly. 200 million people don't vote. Many kids that age could care less what an 'antifa' or #MAGA is... they just want to destroy something or act out, and this is their chance to 'maybe' get away with it.
The anarchist symbol has been used by tons of groups, both left and right, throughout history. You can find it almost anywhere that has a substantial amount of graffiti and I'd bet more often than not it's just done by kids/teens that have no significant group or political affiliation. The video doesn't even show who sprayed it and basically everyone looks like your average teen. Labelling this as "Antifa" because someone spray painted an anarchist symbol and someone has green hair is a bit of a stretch.
In addition to what sdkjfhskjfh says, Antifa is not exclusively (or even primarily) anarchists. I've met quite a number of people who participate in Antifa counter-protests who are not anarchists at all.
It's like "libertarian" or "feminist". It's a label you can use to describe a stance or general association with an idea, but not much more.
Being "anti-fascist" can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but using the "antifa" label makes it sound scary or organized. It reminds me of media outlets talking about message board trolls and disruptors as "the shadowy group known as Anonymous".
> green/long hair and a female voice acting like a leader, white and hoodies means you'd go with Antifa
IDK, your description could just as well be feminists, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, etc., infact it seems to go as far as to just be saying "any white person protesting with BLM is an Antifa".
There are in fact a disproportionate number of white supremacists in Portland; Oregon itself was founded as a whites-only state, and it was illegal for black people to live there until 1926. The state's constitution on admission to the Union carried a black-exclusion clause.
Portland itself outlawed black residents in the 1840s and that law stood for many decades. It's only very recently that Portland has developed the reputation for having a liberal populace; as recently as the 1990s it was essentially the white supremacy capital of the west coast.
Something else I think you're indirectly hinting at is that revelations like the one in the original post - White Nationalists posing as Antifa - can be bent by bad actors as an excuse to claim that all anti-fascists are white nationalists, instead of being correctly observed as fascists trying to undermine anti-fascism. In effect, even after being exposed Evropa was successful.
If you're a spineless liberal governor/mayor who ultimately supports the cops, but you need to save face, then the outside agitators/white anarchists/Russia narrative is a godsend.
It's also a popular way to claim that your locality has no issues - nobody would be protesting or rioting if not for Those Agitators, nobody is actually upset, etc. "A riot is the language of the unheard".
So true. It's just an attempt to control the storyline. PR 101. And when their political opposition has a peaceful protest or gathering with a few rogue individuals (or actual fraudulent hired "actors" in some cases) then they label the entire group bad.
Now, I don't think the bulk of the looters are bad people. But to change the narrative to be anything other than a REALLY TERRIBLE PR move by young people being opportunistic is absurd. For the truck driver who was beaten, the MSM were calling the violent protestors brave.
It comes down to this - are you helping the cause or hurting the cause? Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause and they're making every excuse under the sun. To think that humans, by and large, will look past it (for right or wrong) is out of touch with reality.
And if you criticize the means in any way, you get attacked even if you support the same change. In my opinion, to suggest that young black people are so pliable and incapable of thinking that some posts by a rogue group would turn them into robotic looters is racist in itself.
Young people semi organized and did some dumb stuff and justified it because of rightful injustice. Are they bad? No. Was it wise? Of course not. That's what happened.
Outside of that - I've been involved in a coroner's inquest before as my jury duty and it was very interesting. You basically are tasked with deciding whether a death was homicide, suicide or natural causes. I've heard about these civilian oversight boards as the answer but they have challenges with "local political manipulation" and require "steep budgets for investigators" [1]
So from my coroner's inquest experience, I was thinking - you already have civilians. It's efficient. If an officer is involved and the coroner's inquest participants rule it to be a homicide - boom, you could mandate an automatic trial!
This seems like it would be easier to roll out, more efficient, and provide pure accountability to any officer involved shooting. They'd know they would be legally required to go to trial if the coroner's inquest ruled a homicide.
Certainly, some evidence could still be tampered with by the powers that be, but that would elude the civilian oversight boards too in those cases. And with body cams, social media and business and civilian cameras, it's gotten much harder for them to hide evidence. So if you have an easy path to a trial originating from jury peers after coroner input, then you have a ton more accountability.
On the other hand, Seattle has seen many, many citizens arriving after the riots with brooms and dustpans, cleaner and rags. They're cleaning up the damage and the graffiti. They're good people. I wish they'd get a lot more media coverage. Makes me proud of Seattle.
"Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause"
The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.
I grabbed this quote from your reply specifically because it seems to make the claim that people who belive in social justice are delusional, heavily-biased, and are entirely or at least largely in support of looting. I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.
"Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)
In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places. This tweet has one, but there are many in the responses to that tweet as well: https://twitter.com/gryking/status/1267101707596632066
> but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops
I am pretty sure that they do, at least in my mind as well as in the minds of my friends. Especially due to the amount of incidents. You can criticize one side without supporting the other.
> there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places
And there are a quite few where they haven't. This movement consists of different people with different beliefs after all.
> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.
For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed.*
If you haven't noticed, the recent cases in the news involve suspected check forgery, jogging down a street, and sitting in one's own home, not arrests for violent crime. Save your talking points for when they're actually relevant.
This guy had, according to the coroner's report, recently used meth, had fentanyl in his system and the police stated he resisted arrest. He also has a police report from 2007 where he pointed a gun at a pregnant lady's belly to restrain her while his partner ransacked her apartment for jewelry and drugs. Sounds peaceful to you?
(and BTW it was a forged $20 bill, not check forgery)
> jogging down a street
You use this as an example of police brutality in which the police weren't even involved. And then you immediately follow with "Save your talking points for when they're actually relevant"? Will you?
> sitting in one's own home
Breonna Taylor, a black woman, who's boyfriend shot first at the police when the executed a no-knock warrant. Does this sound racially motivated to you? If they were white, would the officers not shoot back?
--
Maybe you should stop skimming headlines of MSM and start actually trying to uncover the whole story before you help perpetuate a race war with lazy, anecdotal and misleading examples masquerading as actual talking points.
> I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause
I've also never seen anyone make the argument that excessive use of force by US police officers is helpful.
That gives us two extremes that we can eliminate from the discussions. There are no people who think illegal force used by the police is good, nor is there people who think looting is helping the cause of stopping the police from using illegal amount of force. Two strawmen done and dusted.
> "Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops."
101 in in-group and out-group human behavior research. The in-group is always made out of individuals and a few bad apples can never represent the group that a persons self belong to. The out-group however is in contrast a homogenic group. The purpose of having a clearly defined group to define as "them" is to avoid having to spend the energy to individualizing every member. It is a type of lazy thinking. Both the police and the protesters has bad people in them and good people, you only need to look at the individual level.
> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost
If we expect every post on social media to include boiler plate signaling then it kind of losses meaning. Everyone already agree that illegal use of force by the police is bad and should be prosecuted. We have democratic created laws that says so and no movement to remove them. The problem lies at the pseudo kinship relations that a band-of-brothers style police force has when it is tasked to enforce those laws against the in-group.
> Both the police and the protesters has bad people in them and good people, you only need to look at the individual level.
A crucial difference is that the police is an actual entity/organization, and one that is entirely responsible for its members. The whole problem is that this organization is not properly keeping their 'bad apples' in check, and even actively shielding them from consequence.
On top of that, this organization is immensely powerful, has ridiculous weaponry (and some degree of training), and is legally allowed to do a lot of violent things that most other 'groups' or individuals are not.
I think it's absolutely fair to consider the police as a group (while acknowledging that it has 'good' members), and make more individual distinction concerning the protesters.
I also think it's not a coincidence that Trump and various others are pitching the "it's Antifa destroying our cities" or for that matter even the whole idea that Antifa is a properly organized entity. So much easier to justify the use of force against the whole lot of protesters!
It perfectly possible to address the issue of an organization without treating its members as homogenic group. There is however a greater risk here that by treating them as non-individuals, the only group they are allowed to be part of is the pseudo family that the police force develops. If we want to deescalate violence and hostility, treating people as individuals is a crucial step.
Telling organizations to keeping their 'bad apples' in check is an up hill battle, as within a in-group you don't see bad apples as representing the group. They are seen as individuals that did a bad choice, took a wrong turn, and as any individual they are given chances to change and do better. With pseudo kinship this get amplified, as its a fundamental aspect of most cultures that you treat kinship different than "others". Issues get handled and address within the family.
In order to break such patter you need to get cops more integrated into the society that they serve, increase pay in order to increase the status of the job within the rest of the community, decrease the inherent risks so that individuals has to rely less on a "family" to protect then, and increase the training period.
Nothing of that will help of course when governments start to use the military against protestors. Here in Sweden we have had several different parliaments trying to make clever hacks in order to prevent future parliaments from making such decision. At a time they even gave the power as an exclusive right under the king with the general idea beying that since the king does not participate politics and no future parliament would dare to take something from the king once given. Others have written laws forbidding parliament for taking such decisions. Currently it has been 89 years, and the event that caused such heavy opposition against military use against protestors, Ådalshändelserna, is still referenced in modern day politics. No matter what you don't send military against protestors.
> I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.
What puzzles me is that some people supporting this argument are highly paid software engineers. How do they reconcile this with the fact that it is precisely the concept of private property (and yes, violent enforcement of it) that allows them to sit in front of the computer all day building some cool stuff and not worry that some violent thug will break into their house and take away their laptop?
You can be the beneficiary of a system and still understand that there are specific positive externalities of that system's partial failure.
For example, a corrupt politician can understand why an anti-bribery campaign is beneficial for his country.
I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."
(That justice may come in the form of charges against specific police officers, or perhaps as a campaign of institutional reforms within the police apparatus.)
>But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."
Consider for a moment what the optimal strategy would be to handle this vandalism and looting from the perspective of "Rich people."
A) Capitulate to the demands of people using terror / destruction of property as leverage
B) Utilize the vast resources available to you to end the source of the problem
I think your heart is in the right place in a very Robin Hood-esque kind of way but you're not grappling with reality if you think "give us justice and the looting will end" is going to play out favorably for the looters
I'm not Robin Hood, but I appreciate that you are looking for a friendly and non-pejorative way to engage someone with whom you disagree.
Those vast resources that you mention (police and military) are at the very core of the conflict. Their use of force has only exacerbated the problem, because people spread videos of unjustifiable abuses (three cops brutalizing one prostrate individual in LA, a cop hitting protestors with his vehicle in NYC, a brigade of cops shooting law-abiding people on their own porch in Minneapolis, etc) that in turn draw more protestors to the fore.
Your A/B scenario is precisely the problem -- you equate the soothing of public anger with "capitulation" rather than "justice," and you make violence an imperative by arguing that the only strong approach is the brutal one.
Not to mention that you express a view that police brutality can "end the source of the problem." What is the source of the problem, if not police brutality itself? Were Americans violating curfews to demonstrate in the streets of major cities immediately prior to the murder of George Floyd?
> You can be the beneficiary of a system and still understand that there are specific positive externalities of that system's partial failure. For example, a corrupt politician can understand why an anti-bribery campaign is beneficial for his country.
True, but presumably these software engineers that I was talking about think about the ability to do their work as something worthy and morally good, not simply as a benefit that they get from a corrupt system. On the other hand, corrupt politicians don't think of bribes as something desirable to have in a system: they either cynically exploit their position for strictly personal gain or think of themselves as victims of the system who are forced to take bribes.
> I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."
This can be a valid strategy. I am reminded of someone who successfully executed this strategy: ANC and Nelson Mandela. But they were very clear in their demands and always stressed that they were reluctantly engaging in violence only because they had exhausted all peaceful methods. In contrast it seems that many who support recent riots are not very interested in actual solutions to the problem and only want to stick it to the Man in some way.
It's also important to distinguish between the protests vs elements using the protests (and pandemic) as a cover for crime. In NYC it least, it seems that the protests & those looting are two separate groups.
When you loot a store in your area, you aren't hurting "rich people", because they aren't a unified blob. You're just hurting a few people, like this guy and his wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uqOM94RJVc Eventually they will bounce back and restart somewhere else, where they are more welcome. But your area will have fewer businesses and jobs for a long time, because you've showed everyone the return on investment.
Why should the looters care? How do the looters benefit from having stores in their area that they are too poor to buy from? The taxes from these stores are less and less helping them with social programs etc and go more towards funding police departments that brutalize them.
> The taxes from these stores are less and less helping them with social programs etc and go more towards funding police departments that brutalize them.
That sounds like an assumption whose truth is heavily dependent on being in a specific locality.
> How do the looters benefit from having stores in their area that they are too poor to buy from?
Again, an assumption that is highly dependent on geography and specific looting. You're also assuming that the looters are necessarily poor -- forgetting about, for example, organized crime.
To your point about a few bad cops, the "bad apples" theory is just a way for institutional leaders to throw blame away from their own leadership, by isolating the blame to a few low-level individuals. We have to get away from the "bad apples" theory and start thinking about "bad barrels" that spoil the apples within.
We know how a riot can be a bad barrel that leads the people involved to do bad things. But a riot is not a day-to-day occurrence with its own persistent culture.
On the other hand, a police department does have a persistent culture, and we don't exactly understand how or why some police departments engender more brutality than others.
"The Lucifer Effect" is a very interesting book on the institutional dynamics that lead otherwise normal people to do horrific things. It is written by Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame. He is a proponent of the "bad barrel" theory.
> We have to get away from the "bad apples" theory and start thinking about "bad barrels" that spoil the apples within.
The phrase that "bad apples" is taken from is "A few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's one of many phrases that has entered the common consciousness in partial form with the exact opposite meaning of its original intention.
I'm borrowing Dr. Zimbardo's terminology, and I believe it is accurate in that he says we cannot attribute spoilage of the bunch to a few bad apples.
His counterpoint is that a bad barrel can spoil a bunch of perfect apples. Good people can commit evil actions when they are put into bad social structures.
The spoilage in the "bad barrel" model comes from the containing structure, not from within its contents.
If you have a good barrel, you can keep bad apples more or less fresh. And if you have a bad barrel, even the best apples will spoil.
More literally: our focus should be on the command structures, accountability practices, disciplinary bodies, legal liability, and training programs within police departments -- rather than blaming systemic problems on a handful of white supremacists, careless brutes, or sociopaths.
Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)
I have literally, a few months ago, responded to comments on this site where people claimed all police were bad because of the bad actions of some.
Tribalism is a real thing, and it results in dehumanization of the other "side", and opportunistic labelling.
In 2019, 259 black people were killed by police. In the same year, 189 Hispanic people were killed by police. 406 white people were killed as well. 17 Asians. Obviously, blacks are overrepresented.
When was the last time you saw a national news media report on a non-black person being unjustly killed by police? It happens, and the cops get let off, routinely. Daniel Shaver is a particularly egregious example, and the lack of national media coverage helps ensure that the cops aren't held accountable. The cop who murdered him was acquitted, and temporarily rehired to let him collect a 2400 a month pension.
The national media wants this framed as PURELY a racial issue, when the reality is that it's a mix of race, police militarization, and lack of police accountability due to cozy relationship with prosecutors.
This racial framing is unnecessarily tribal, and undermines the effectiveness of achieving a meaningful goal that helps reduce this behavior by police.
The racial framing is also relevant to the black lived reality, which is why black people get more involved in protests. It isn’t a far off, hypothetical issue. It disproportionately affects them still to this day, despite all their protests and efforts. That has to take a toll.
> In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places.
Watching livestreams from demonstrations in my city I saw a lot of this. Local people, mostly guys, were marching and sticking around until the later evening hours to stream live. They were basically patrolling and keeping an eye out for anyone who threw stuff, got out fireworks, or started a fight.
I saw them grab one kid who threw a bottle into a line of cops and chase him down as he ran away. Then when some others began yelling to "kick his ass!" the same guys held anyone back from starting a fight. It was community de-escalation and struck a stark contrast with the gassing and rubber bullets I've seen.
Any time you get a whole bunch of people crammed in together with emotions running high, there's a chance someone will decide to break stuff or punch someone. Seeing the crowd self-policing like this gave me the tiniest bit of hope.
> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers
This is precisely my point. The looting and destruction creates a major secondary storyline that has taken over. And that you're delusional if you think it isn't hurting the cause.
Sorry, I call it like I see it and if you think looting is helping the cause (the part you omitted) then I stand by it. I was talking about young people who would say their actions are helping and I was also talking about their supporters who rationalize it as ok and helping.
Using adjectives to describe the headspace of people who are committing crimes or supporting those that do that aren't even related to the injustices at hand, destroying businesses and other people's places of work, etc, is not name-calling.
Unfortunately, you seem to be right. The Governor of Minnesota admitted precisely that, stating simply that he didn’t want to believe that his own people could act that way.
Scapegoating allows politicians to avoid angering their own constituents, and it also makes it rhetorically easier for politicians to avoid taking the demands seriously.
And a significant fraction (1/6 to 1/3) of arrests have been from out of state. So, the original claims had an element of truth.
But I disagree with you that it’s just “BS”, which would imply a level of cynicism which may exists, but for which you provided no evidence.
Whatever means of mass communication is at hand? Facebook? Twitter? Whatsapp?
I remember during the 2010 London riots it was alleged that the organisation was happening over Blackberry Messenger, and the government was outraged that RIM refused to turn over decrypted messages to them.
Riots are a classic coordination problem [1]. Peaceful protests, of course, can use official means of communication. The hard part is how to coordinate violence and looting, which would otherwise preempted by law enforcement. The linked essay is a fascinating read on the topic.
So you’re posting a pic of 4chan trolls from the He Will Not Divide US stint in 2016 to refute a statement that the looters this past week comprising of African Americans are not white supremacists?
I think you are misunderstanding. I am saying white supremacists can be other than white so judging based on the skin complexion of the person seems a bit silly like op did.
Would you also say that rioters can be blamed for some of the damage, or only politicians? I'm pretty sure I've seen videos of people looting stores and beating up others.
I hated that tactic in my own country, where some of my fellow rioters last year blamed covert police agents for the damage and provoking violence, and I hope you hate that tactic from your own side as well.
By calling it a tactic, you make it sound like it's a lie. But these things are in fact happening. There certainly is a lot of noise - false positives, false negatives - but false flagging is occurring.
It is a lie, to be involved and advocate violence on demonstrations - but later to claim any actual violence was done by provocateurs. And it also is a tactic, even though mostly not a conscious one.
At least, this is my experience with large parts of the german (radical) left movement.
It is allmost surreal, when you follow the left wing online news ticker about the demonstration and everything that happens. Police and fascist violence there and there and again there!
And when you also follow neutral mediums or the other side, or are even there to see for yourself. Because then you can see quite some leftist/antifa violence or threats of violence, as well.
The agressors are allwas the others, the police and fascists, never they themself. And sure, police and fascists do use aggressive violence. And in numbers probably a lot more. But not only them.
So it is a tactic. It is propaganda.
I have seen all three sides (antifa, police and fascist) use it. And was quite some of that violence in fact done by covert police? Possible. But usually with the applause of the crowd.
(And the german right-wing movement is of course even worse at being hypocrites, because no one there is officially a rassist or a nazi and they get angry, if you point out rassist or nazi-ideologie arguments they made)
As an observer of the chaotic US experiment with a brazenly mendacious, profoundly corrupt and childishly inept president, and the far-too-intimate relationship between government and profiteers, I contemplate a few things:
=] democratic society needs education and honest public discourse (maybe a cultural sense of shame would help)
=] social memia is incapable of serving the public interest;
in the end, USians have only themselves to blame if their democracy achieves total collapse
The DJT experiment didn't bring this woe onto the country. He is a little vermin feasting on much deeper rot.
I live in Minneapolis less than a mile from the fifth precinct. There are in fact metric F-Tons of out of state cars in the neighborhood since late last week. Tons of violence tourists driving around gawking, and several cars with NO plates trawling around to boot. The thugaroos we've seen "patrolling", and who neighbors have had "friendly" chats with have been rural white guys feigning concern (White-knighting, one might even say) that we dont have enough guns to protect ourselves. The burning has been targeted at certain businesses that nobody local has beef with (Ie the post office- that racist institution, the gas station that everyone buys their gas from- even if you hate gas companies and hate standing in line, you recognize when you're hurting your neighbors).
Sure, the police haven't arrested many of these out of staters, non-community members, but they are most certainly here. They had to walk back their comments because they can't just say "but we're there in the community and we see it".
This particular case becomes very interesting since it made its viral round in conservative circles on social networks. People waking up their kids in the middle of the night to get them ready, while loading guns because of the manipulation of this Twitter account. That then ended up posing a real threat since a lot of conservative people was up in arms with loaded guns, and any sort of innocent scenario could have had a deadly outcome
Antifa is not a single organized group, it's anyone who is anti-fascist. So there is no 'real' antifa groups. The police don't have a very good track record releasing truthful information regarding these events, so why not chill out before drawing your own outrageous conclusions.
It would be fair to say that there are anti-fascist groups - many of them. It's just utterly non-factual to claim that "antifa" is an organized group, let alone some sort of terrorist organization. At best it's lots of small organizations with some common goals and iconography, and many of them have differing opinions and practices
Who claimed "antifa" is a singular organized group?
The KKK has multiple independent sects and semi-decentralized governance, but that doesn't mean "KKK" doesn't exist -- it refers to all of them collectively.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to be specific. Saying "antifa" does not imply a singular group. The same way "KKK" does not imply a singular group.
Trump tweeted: "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization". This implies a singular group, a singular group which the consensus seems to be does not exist.
It does not imply a singular group. For example, Al-Qaeda is classified as a terrorist organization despite being made up of several structures and groups.
If you'd checked the example you rely upon further down you'd have seen that in fact the individual Al-Qaeda groups are listed specifically in the State Department's listed of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Now obviously I don't have the authority to say why that is, but it seems reasonable to presume that they are listed as separate organizations because they are, in fact, separate organizations.
Not necessarily. You don't want vague language in official documents, so you have to be specific, because you'd just shift the problem if you said "Al-Qaeda", since you now need an official list of Al-Qaeda-Subgroups.
If it would allow nesting, I'm pretty sure somebody would've already accidentally put Al-Qaeda under Ansar al-Sunna and cause a recursion error, blowing up DC.
Antifa is not anti-fascist. In fact they are themselves fascists. A fascist is one who uses violence for political means. That is exactly what they do, as can be seen on TV for the last 7 nights. They are more properly anti-capitalists.
And they are a highly organized, though decentralized, group, again as can be seen by the multi-night multi-city violent display they have organized and perpetrated.
Isn't all war "the continuation of politics by other means"?
I presume what was meant here was that 20th C fascist movements got big by the strategic use of street violence, in a way that the relatively liberal societies they worked within weren't equipped to counter.
Obviously not the first movement to use street violence, but (in my understanding) the scale and discipline with which it was deployed was a new and distinctive feature.
Interestingly many black protesters have attacked Antifa members for perpetuating violence, including one group who dragged a man dressed in Black Bloc attire to police.
There are people who are using the current events as an excuse to sow division and chaos, and Antifa groups are absolutely included.
There are numerous quasi-organized Antifa groups. [1] They organize via Telegram and other (usually encrypted) modes of communication. In these groups, they regularly plan and encourage violent attacks on police and property.
Or to put it differently, how much do we know about the interconnections of such groups? I'm sure that some are just kids who like the look & dress up with their buddies (no connections). Some seem pretty organised. How do we tell the extent from outside?
I would hope there is effort put into infiltrating and studying such things. But presumably any serious FBI or whatever effort isn't going to be keen to spell out how they know what they know. (IIRC this was part of what broke up the KKK, that and anti-mask laws. Which at its height was also a mix of fairly organised & not at all, although I don't claim the same mix.)
Like who? In North America, I haven't seen any evidence of this. The example that's always posted, including in this thread, is a lone actor that hit a few people with a bike lock years ago.
According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right-wing extremist groups. That's not even including what they label as Islamist extremists and "incel" extremists which both could also easily be classified as right-wing extremism. In North America, violent left-wing extremism is barely a blip on the radar and yet we keep hearing "conservative" talking heads go on about Antifa. It seems like little more than a politically motivated distraction much like Obamagate.
We don't which is why it's weird the current administration is trying to declare 'antifa' a terrorist group without presenting any real evidence. If they know something we don't this would probably be a good time to tell us.
Antifa is, in practice, a collection of people whose most notable and consistent actions are preventing people that they perceive to be right-wing-radicals, i.e. non-left-wing-radicals, from speaking at universities and other events. Warren Farrell, Ben Shapiro, Janice Fiamengo and Jordan Peterson are not exactly radicals.
> The Antifa movement in Germany is a political movement, composed of multiple far-left, autonomous, militant groups and individuals who describe themselves as anti-fascist. The use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the understanding of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.
> The English word antifa (or ANTIFA) is a loanword from German, taken as a shortened form of the word antifaschistisch ("anti-fascist") and the name of Antifaschistische Aktion which inspired the wider Antifa movement in Germany.
Did you even read your own link? Not only does it mention that it's a specific movement that is "militant, predominantly left-wing", it outright states that
>Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist views and subscribe to a range of left-wing ideologies such as anarchism, communism, Marxism, social democracy and socialism
I've got a lot of chat logs of people organizing who know they're Antifa. The handbooks and wisdom obviously tell members to obscure the organizational structure, to enable exactly what you're doing here with the definition, and it works when nobody cares, but not now.
Just because your criminal organization has chapters, doesn't mean people don't see the organization.
Why are they targeting regular people, and the services that they rely on? At best, this is friendly fire, and at worst it's a mob that has lost its mind. I'm having difficulty getting the medication that I rely on to avoid going blind, because all of the drug stores are closed after getting looted and vandalized.
Did you ever attempt to engage in discussion people that self-identify as antifa online? Trust me, it is not a pleasant experience. My experiences so far were that they are full of mccarthyism accusing pretty much everyone of being a nazi, and that they want to silence (whether violently or via "cancelling") pretty much everyone who disagrees with them or defends someone who they do not like - even about the most mundane topic (as long as it is political/social). In addition if you check out antifa communities you will see that a lot of them engage in things like doxing and support arson of public property and buisnesses. Antifa is far from being just anti-fascist, even the original organisation, Antifaschistische Aktion was a Stalinist puppet.
This seems to be mostly a US-ian thing. From europe, it is perfectly acceptable to label yourself as "antifascist", with no ill intent understood by anybody (except fringe right wing extremists). I abhor "cancel culture" and the political correctness bullshit, but I still say proudly that I am antifa.
No, one is an opinion, the other is a label you willingly have to apply to yourself, in which you also associate yourself with several groups across the world of varying moral fabric.
In the same way as being a National and Socialists is the same as being a Nazi, killing millions of Jews?
Some times things become a thing of their own. Then differentiating makes sense.
Being anti-fascist is a good thing. Being an anti-democratic organisation which violently attacks civilians for having made the “wrong” vote in a democratic election is not.
ANTIFA has nothing to do with anti-fascism. Differentiation is not only useful, it’s absolutely required.
> Being an anti-democratic organisation which violently attacks civilians for having made the “wrong” vote in a democratic election is not.
this is a lie though. where's your evidence of this? where is it organized? If "attacks on civilians for having made the wrong vote" actually happened at all, let alone on the scale you're talking about, don't you think trump would be parading arrested people around like bin laden? don't you think they'd have a list of wanted members?
it's a nonexistent boogeyman. so far in this thread someone has mentioned "they beat people in the head with bike locks". OK, how many times has that happened? Less than 20? Less than 10? Can't you see how ridiculous (and bad faith) it is to pretend that that is a vast anti-democratic organization?? Can't you see that this boogeyman is gonna be used to vilify anyone who opposes the fascism they're pushing for?
Or do you not care? Better to have journalists shot in the eyes, protesters murdered, beat in the streets so that you don't have to question your ghost story about thousands of angry ninjas with bike locks beating up everyone who voted for trump? I beg you to look through your sources and realize what absolute nonsense you're being pushed by people with no crediblity
> this is a lie though. where's your evidence of this?
Yeah I’m obviously just making shit like this[1] up.
This was happening withspread throughout the US, repeatedly, week after week after the last election. No need to filter the news to disreputable sources to find full evidence for ANTIFA being a violent, anti-democratic organisation.
> where is it organized?
No idea. I’m not an insider, but when you see it happen again and again, with the same masks, same kind of people, same and same name at different places, it’s obviously not happening at random.
> Better to have journalists shot in the eyes, protesters murdered, beat in the streets
Now you are lying. Nobody is in support of this. Condemning ANTIFA as the anti-democratic, violent organisation it is, does not mean endorsing other forms of violence, like police brutality. If anything, this is your boogeyman.
your link doesn't even suggest what you're suggesting.
"The notice asked activists to “bring your friends, bring your crew and come prepared to disrupt the nightmare that is Trump,” while the site predicted “thousands” would show up “in opposition to Trump and his world.”"
Yes, that's called protesting. There's a twitter account encouraging protesting. What are you talking about?
It is more like an anglosphere thing I would say. In my experience so far it seems that at least some Europeans have pushed the American meaning of "antifa" into the term "anarchist".
Regardless, the www does not discriminate based on where you live[note]. You get both Europeans and US residents seeing the same content, so I expect that to change soon (if it hasn't already - similar to the term "liberal" shifting from economic liberalism/capitalism to mean left wing).
[note] excluding things like "this video is not available for your country"
> some Europeans have pushed the American meaning of "antifa" into the term "anarchist".
Let me cite the German Wikipedia:
> Antifa (Akronym für Antifaschistische Aktion) ist der Oberbegriff für verschiedene, im Regelfall eher locker strukturierte, kurzfristige autonome Strömungen der linken bis linksextremen Szene.
Here, Wikipedia describes Antifa as an umbrella Term for "autonomous groups" in the far-left extremist scene.
"autonomous groups" being:
> Als Autonome (altgriechisch: αὐτονομία, autonomía, „Unabhängigkeit, Selbstständigkeit“) oder autonome Gruppen werden heute Mitglieder bestimmter linksradikaler[1] unorthodox-marxistischer beziehungsweise anarchistischer Bewegungen bezeichnet.
It might not be problematic to call yourself an anti-fascist in Europe, but specifically Antifa? I don't know in what kind of bubble you live, but to me and most people that I know, this would be outing yourself as a militant Anarchist.
There is a big shitstorm on Twitter and an edit war on Wikipedia right now, because the left wing of the German Social Democrats have appealed to Antifa.
Yes, I have friends who are involved in this sort of thing and it's nothing like you describe. It's almost like you want to paint the whole thing with a broadbrush to try and make their criticisms irrelevent.
> Yes, I have friends who are involved in this sort of thing and it's nothing like you describe
There are always out-liners. In the same spirit I am sure that you can find people self-identifying as non-racist fascists.
> to try and make their criticisms irrelevent
Their criticisms of what? Of the material realm? I do not think that trash-cans harmed me yet so I see no reason to destroy them. Or do you mean their criticism of capitalism/the current system/fascism/racism/etc? If so I agree with them.
Nicely demonstrating ops point; if someone points out the behaviour of accusing all who disagree with you of being nazis it's unwise to immediately accuse said person of sharing views with Nazi like groups .
I feel like I told him he had a "Chaplin-like moustache" and then your comment paraphrased my comment as "Hitler-like moustache." They may be similar moustaches, but the latter would neither be what I actually wrote, nor meant.
I do not think that I have far-right views, I do not follow their "party" line however, for example I am pro-free speech for everyone.
I was accused twice by antifa people of being fascist myself. Once because I expressed my pro-archiving/anti-copyright views and another time when someone accused my friend (who is an actual anti-fascist that organises non-violent anti-fascist events in real life) of being a fascist because he does not agree with their violent policies and I went to defend him - in neither case they explained why they think that I am a fascist and I had no prior interaction with these people.
Regarding antagonism, in general people reply only when they have something to add or when they disagree with a post. If they have nothing to add but agree then they just upvote instead. I can't guarantee that this is the case here however.
One of the most anti-fascist people in history ended up being Stalin. I mean his forces were directly responsible for Hitler committing suicide.
But he was a horrible, genocidal maniac.
Just because you are “anti-fascist” does it mean that you can’t be evil, especially when you use violence to intimidate your political opponents and cause injury and loss to innocent civilians.
Inevitable I guess, given how this violence is likely to boost support for Trump and the right.
It raises the possibility that some of the people supporting, defending or excusing looting and violence on HN are secretly right-wingers. Nah, probably not, but still...
fascists do not call themselves that since the 40s.
calling the normal of not being fascists antifa is only enabling easier critic amd blaming of something that could not be criticized or blamed.
the term antifa only benefit fascists. who can now easily direct blame and critic to their critics, as shown in the article (which is not the first and hardly the last)
Gonna be hard to make the "white nationalist false flag" narrative stick when so many obvious antifa types have not only been arrested, but proudly post videos and selfies of their crimes to social media.
Meanwhile, I'm trapped in NYC with elderly parents, who now can't go outside because of rioters (after having been stuck inside for months because COVID), and I'm afraid of not being able to get food if the grocery stores shut down, or medicine if the looters target more pharmacies.
And I'm supposed to support reform to tie the hands of the NYPD, when they're the only thing standing between us and these terrorists now?
I'm afraid to - there aren't that many any more, and I don't know how we're going to communicate after we lose those, too. Words that still have actual meaning have to be protected carefully in the 21st century.
You assholes downvoting me are probably like those Molotov-throwing, rich sisters from upstate who don't have to worry about their elderly parents' safety (for now, anyway), and have enough money to buy their way out of whatever problems their actions cause.
You rich, privileged people are waging (or at least supporting) what amounts to a literal class warfare against lower income people who can't get away from this. The Bronx, the poorest borough, was the worst hit last night.
> And I'm supposed to support reform to tie the hands of the NYPD, when they're the only thing standing between us and these terrorists now?
hm you can do both actually, these things aren't mutually exclusive.
You can be against systemic racism, police having access to military equipment, the killing unarmed people AND be against rioters who're just here to destroy and steal. Last time I checked this isn't a 200 IQ thought, I'd even label that as "common sense"
> I'm afraid of ...
Then you know what some of these people feel and why the majority of them are protesting, you're fighting the same fight, stop shitting on each other like elementary school kids. The US is turning into a third world country and the enemy isn't your fellow citizens.
Who would have guessed that people was going to get pissed off at the police chocking to death some black guy in broad day light? Mean, that happens every day...
All news sources are unreliable, but, yes, The Daily Mail is something apart. That said, it's the UK's 3rd biggest newspaper, has an average reading age of ~58, and is majority female readers. The 'meta' on The Daily Mail is interesting and it should not be dismissed out of hand.
> And I'm supposed to support reform to tie the hands of the NYPD, when they're the only thing standing between us and these terrorists now?
What reform, specifically, are you against? This is a department with a long history of corruption, including serious recent cases, so it's not like no oversight is an option.
It is utterly ridiculous to try to blame either, far right or far left wing organizations for what is happening in the US right now. None of these groups have the power to cause that much damage. I’d be surprised if the number of antifa/black bloc people in these protest is more than a tiny fraction of people, like in any protest. Yet the discussion is shifted to these groups as an explanation for violence and this entire thread is full of people arguing about whether the Antifa is an organization. The antifa doesn’t even matter. What is happening to this discourse?
If there are 1000 people at a protest and 50 start brawling with the police, that changes the entire character of the day, no matter whether 50/1000 is a small number or not.
This is the point. There are many people at these protests. This is a heated, complex situation and at any large protest the people there are not homogeneous. The majority wants to peacefully protest, some loot, some want violence, the police is aggressive. Given that it is understood that every protest is a complicated social phenomenon, the narrative pushed by major news outlets in the US, and echoed in parts here, that somehow this is led and organised by Antifa, or the far right, is delusional. There are protests all over the US. In suburbs. How do you imagine this is working? The Antifa/Right has some chapters in every suburb of the US, just waiting to be unleashed upon the masses and this is the reason why protests turn violent? It's a gross oversimplification of the actual dynamics, it's a child's story that is easy to tell and easy to digest.
looking at the videos over the past few days its pretty safe to safe it was for the most part not white supremists. the last day was questionable like those bricks in dallas but other than that. there were a lot of young black people doing stuff on their own.
In Denver it seems that the day time protestors are older and more diverse (latino-american, african-american, etc) and the night time protestors are younger and more white-american looking to start trouble, though things are changing rapidly. [0]
There are confirmed reports of agitators that have been stopped before violence occurred, thank God. [0]
Last evening, Denver's PD chief marched with protestors and mostly allowed them to walk and shout well past curfew. I've not yet seen looting reports (though that may change), and the injuries to protestors and PD seem to have been much less as of now. Compared to other nights, it was successful.
Each city is different. Lumping people together nationally is not helping anyone discover what is happening locally.
[0] https://twitter.com/KyleClark I suck at twitter, so I can't figure out how to link specific tweets here. But Kyle Clark is the head anchor for Denver's 9pm news broadcast. The tweets in his feed specify the facts much better than I can.
Also, if NBC calls something misinformation with "little evidence", then it would be unsatirical to reference some primary sources itself.
"according to a Twitter spokesperson". Which spokesperson and where was this said? I don't see anything on https://blog.twitter.com. Nor could I find any primary recent references to Twitter and white nationalists or Identity Evropa except the editorials themselves.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadThey (not Trump of course) had to walk it back when it turned out not to be true.
Is there some outside groups posing as others, possibly, but to blame a majority of problems on them is just BS.
I see a lot of mischaracterization of what is a category, not a group. From what I can tell antifa is anti-fascism, and somewhat characterized by people willing to take direct action.
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3...
How he didn't get 7 counts of attempted murder is beyond me.
No mass is 100% identical though, so "you can't use some individual actions to project on the group they chose to be part of and that chooses to accept them" really just makes the concept of groups useless.
"No, that specific action wasn't covered by our shared intent, so obviously we will accept responsibility for it" is something I believe pretty much everybody will agree on after the action has happened and has resulted in negative feedback. Had it produced applause and achieved the goal of the group, they would have celebrated it.
You certainly can't cherry pick them (one instance of violence versus billions of instances of peacefulness, for example), apart from "group that chooses to accept them" not applying here.
> Had it produced applause and achieved the goal of the group, they would have celebrated it.
Had there been anye instances of violence by people calling themselves antifa, those seeking to defend the ongoing, systematic violence would have invented instances of violence of people they call antifa. See how that works, or rather, how it doesn't?
> See how that works, or rather, how it doesn't?
My point is that disowning a member's actions when they aren't considered favorably post factum is what pretty much every group does. If Antifa/black bloc were actively promoting non-violence, that would be a different issue, but this rather sounds like the Daily Stormer saying "we don't condone violence wink wink" when another one of their goons snaps and shoots up a mosque.
If the black bloc was all of antifa, it would just be called antifa. Outside the black bloc, direct action covers a lot of things, from just organizing all sorts of things (not just protests), art and being loud, to vandalism and even violence.
Just take all the sorts of things that were done in human history while claiming it was for freedom, both bad and good. Does that make any person doing thing X in the name of freedom responsible for what a person doing Y in the name of freedom? You can call those people a "group" all day long, but that doesn't mean they're actually a group in the sense of voting on their values and actions.
It's pitiful that this is the best boogeyman the right can come up with in 2020 and it's extra pitiful that - like everything else they project - it's just them telling on themselves.
smart enough to learn to code or to polish a pitch to a vc, but lacking any critical thinking skills or morality that would cause them to reflect on their position in society.
flocking to the right at the first hint of something that does reflect these truths.
supporting fascists because you're scared or uncomfortable is even worse than supporting fascists because you're a bigot imo
Naming yourself "the good guys" doesn't mean anyone who opposes you is bad. It's like if someone said disliking 'Make America Great Again' means you don't want America to be great. Or opposing the Patriot Act makes you not a patriot.
You know this, everyone else reading this knows this, stop pretending we don't.
The fact that nazis exist doesn't invalidate it. Again you probably know this so I'm not going to bother replying further.
So no, I really, truly have no clue what you're getting at. Like as far as I can tell you're saying "being willing to punch a Nazi makes you a Nazi". Which, like, no.
However, they are not facists.
>> Naming yourself "the good guys" doesn't mean anyone who opposes you is bad. It's like if someone said disliking 'Make America Great Again' means you don't want America to be great. Or opposing the Patriot Act makes you not a patriot.
Your reply:
> Like as far as I can tell you're saying "being willing to punch a Nazi makes you a Nazi".
ok
Please elaborate. Please don't just re-quote yourself. You know, follow the guidelines and engage in good faith. I did, it why I asked a genuine clarifying question which you seemed to ignore.
No, you did not address GP in good faith. And GP did address your question by quoting himself: the problem is not "fighting against the bad guys", the problem is whom you consider the bad guys. Anti-fascists calling themselves such in no way means that everyone they oppose is actually a fascist.
I did. Please don't presume to know my thoughts.
> Anti-fascists calling themselves such in no way means that everyone they oppose is actually a fascist.
This doesn't address my comment, nor is it what GP said. Id suggest you reread their comment. And mine.
I'll break it down:
> Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics
This is overbroad. Many people don't share antifa politics. I don't. They don't threaten me with violence. Something is missing here.
> which is one of the hallmarks of fascism
So this is only sensical in an overbroad generalization of antifa to mean "violent left wing people who are violent towards anyone not suitably left wing", which isn't antifa under any reasonable definition, and is an entirely circular argument.
So yes, please: explain.
Equivocating someone who wants to commit genocide and someone who wants to stop them from doing so can certainly be done with saying that they both "want to commit violence to people who don't agree with them" but its a very good example where ignoring the political content of an action in favor of the content can lead you to really bizarre statements.
Antifa use violence on unarmed opponents. Their enemies are anyone who does not share far left politics.
I find it very difficult to believe you are not already aware of this.
I mean, no, it happened, so obviously you cannot prove it didn't happen.
> It’s possible this has occurred
Ah, but "they were not real anti-fascists".
Have we still not gotten over this line of argument?
The genocide became widely known after the war had already started. The allies did not join the war out of their goodwill but rather due to their own geopolitical and economic interests - they never intended to stop any genocide (the US engaged in eugenics and mandatory sterilisation and only stopped because hitler did it too - they even put the Japanese living in the US in concentration camps), it was just a side-effect.
Regardless (and this is a bit offtopic), I wonder, would you support WWII if only to save people from genocide? In the same spirit would you support war against China in order to save the Uyghurs and other suppressed groups? I personally would reply yes to the first one but I am debating about the second.
No, for two reasons: I don't actually have any concrete information on what is happening in China, and 2 the USA does a lot worse to suppressed groups both inside and outside the country than China has ever done, so I'd support a dismantling of the US State (today, maybe during ww2 I would say first go to war with germany and then dismantle the USA) before I support any kind of intervention in any other place in the world.
In the UK, the British Union of Fascists organised a march in London in 1936 and were countered by ten times as many people organised by anarchist, communist, socialist and Jewish groups. The ensuing violence sent an extremely clear message that fascism is not welcome in the country.
>> Antifa literally exist to use violence upon people who don't share their politics
Your reply:
> Using violence to achieve political goals is not in itself a "hallmark of fascism".
Agreed. But I didn't write that it was.
You live in the UK. How would you compare the IRA of the 1920s with the provos in the 1980s? Would you say they're the same group? They have the same name.
In my experience (as a mainsteam left person) Antifa consider anyone not on the hard left to be either 'fascists' or 'bootlickers'. Everyone else I know who has had any contact with Antifa has had the same experience. Many Antifa people would say this is an accurate view of anyone who does not share hard left political views.
Sure, people that disagree with your viewpoints lack critical thinking and morality. Painting people who disagree with you as immoral idiots just sounds like you're not able to defend your beliefs.
People start with moral intuitions first and work backwards to find reasons. Fallacies, ignorance, and sloppy thinking is quasi-deliberate, to satisfy a priori values of what is sacred and what is profane, who are the good people and who are the bad people.
You're being far too generous here.
And that's the problem.
This story is natural clickbait because you have literal fascists claiming to be anti-fascist, which is an obvious contradiction.
But if Antifa is just anybody who is against fascism then violent anti-fascists are Antifa. You can't say they're not when they actually are against fascism. And without any official leadership to disavow the advocation of violence, now your label is tainted by violent evildoers and you get to enter the grab-bag of boogymen for whenever somebody needs one.
Your definition is meaningless and imprecise.
Maybe this isn't you, but I'm just sick to death of keyboard warriors and tweety radicals who've never experienced violence (let alone meted it out) posturing online.
This is, at a high level, an idea that we can all get behind. What rational and decent person can condone intolerance? But, just like hate speech, 'intolerance' can become very subjective very quickly.
Thought experiment: imagine politician X tweeted "[i]n order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance" in response to a supposed war on Christmas or war on white people.
---
EDIT: Instead of just downvotes, would appreciate substantive comments on where my line of thinking is wrong. Thanks.
I mean, if those things were actually happening, they'd be right. Otherwise it's just sealioning.
My point is that a such a philosophical principle is only valid iff you are comfortable with that same principle being used by your political enemies against you.
I consider an organization on their tenets, under which Black Lives Matter is completely fine.
KKK for example isn't.
Right-wing terrorism has no redeeming kernel of decency, nor does it have a productive movement behind the (few?) bad actors.
No, you don't, or you would consider a religion that endorses literally infinite amounts of torture for anyone who disagrees with them to be violent. There's also its attitudes toward homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22), slavery (Exodus 21:7), murdering people for working on saturdays (or maybe sundays?) (Exodus 35:2), and touching pig remains (Leviticus 11:7), among others.
But to some extent I do agree with you, otherwise I would still be a Christian which I'm not, for the fact that any belief that subjugates moral philosophy and reasoning to interpreting holy text will always have blind spots.
Either way, I apologize if it distracted from the point I was trying to make, that all organizations, good or bad will have bad actors, but what's important is identifying which organization can be fruitful and which is inherently bad.
Maybe we will disagree on a few there.
As someone more eloquent than me put it: Christianity had it's chance to rule the world; we call it the Dark Ages for good reason.
So when you say 'From what I can tell antifa is anti-fascism' - what does that mean? America doesn't have any serious fascist groups - from what I can tell the ruling powers are decidedly corporatist and the first alternative philosophy seems to be light/moderate socialism. Second is maybe libertarianism.
So who/what do you think the anti-fascists are opposing, and what would they espouse if they ever decide there are no fascists for them to define themselves against?
Corporatism was inseparable from fascism in Italy and Germany. The exploitation of the profit motive is one of the primary reasons that so many people overlooked the atrocities.
Fascism is the reason so many companies like IBM, Hugo Boss, L'Oreal, Koch Industries, Audi, Porsche, Adidas, BMW, and countless other extant corporations have dark histories from supporting the German extermination camps to utilizing their slave labor to build their products.
Quoting a few key sentences from Wikipedia:
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky (national economic self-sufficiency) through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. [0]
America doesn't have a serious lobby that believes in those things. There isn't a lobby that is serious about autarchy, there isn't a lobby calling for complete mobilisation and there isn't a lobby calling for a one party state. Apart from maybe the anti-facists I don't know of a lobby promoting political violence. The war and imperialism stuff is possibly true, but that isn't a new thing in American politics - America has been at war my entire lifetime and mostly in the same set of middle eastern countries.
The only link between fascism and American politics is that Trump is popular in the Republican party and is happy to stand up and say that the globalism pendulum has swung too far. That is a tenuous link to fascist ideology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
I've gotta say, the NRA has been getting closer to fitting this.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals?cycle=2012&id=d00000...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/us/nra-details-plan-for-a...
Their original goal, of a rights advocacy group has turned into a partisan dividing tactic.
Supporting one party over another is not an act of fascism. They promote the GOP because the GOP supports their goals. Do you think it's reasonable to expect them to promote the other party while that party actively works against them?
They promote a stronger police presence in schools, but they also support the right of teachers to be armed and able to defend against attackers. In other words, they support teachers being able to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. Whether you agree with that or not, the 2nd Amendment is a decidedly libertarian idea. Fascism is authoritarian by nature. Promoting one of these is mutually exclusive with promoting the other.
Regarding police in schools, I don't see how that fits with Wikipedia's definition of fascism: a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy. Perhaps we're operating on different definitions.
I also wouldn't think poorly of the NRA for just it's change in how it donates to candidates if they weren't performing illegal coordination and also promoting Republicans candidates even if their opponent was aligned with their 2nd Amendment stance.
Police presence in schools is just a step into a strong regimentation of society IMO. And the 2nd Amendment is far too vague to be considered libertarian. We could debate all day over what the intent was, or how it can be interpreted.
Frankly I don't see why that's relevant. My point is that the amendment itself has become a partisan issue. The GOP and the NRA agree on their interpretation of the amendment, while the other party opposes them. Why would you expect two allies to support their mutual opposition instead of each other, and how does not doing so equate to fascism?
> performing illegal coordination
Political corruption != fascism, and it is certainly not unique to it.
> the 2nd Amendment is far too vague to be considered libertarian
I disagree, but I can see how some interpretations of it (that it's meant to arm militias which are agents of the state) could even be considered authoritarian. However, the NRA advocates for the interpretation that says people should have the means to overthrow their government if necessary. I'm having a hard time seeing how that aligns with fascism.
Corporatism was also inseparable from the political systems in the UK and the US though, wasn't it?
Antifa is definitely not a new thing, having been around in Europe since the rise of fascism in the first half of the 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antifa&type=revis...
both antifa (term from the 30s and reused in Europe when neonazis showed up in the 90s) and BLM were term widely abused (and maybe even introduced) by the Russian troll army in the wake of US social movements after Occupy.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/02/activi...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
"However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."
This is the definition of the word, no matter how much lefists try to whitewash the term and shift the overton window.
Wikipedia points to many resources about Antifa movements, starting from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa
And you only care to pick one narrow definition.
You got it backwards.
The only definition from that page that is not related to some extremist marxist/anarchist movement is this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism
And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.
Today, "Antifa" is synonymous with "Antifaschistische Aktion".
Why is it important for you to filter some definitions out?
> And even that one uses the logo of the Antifaschistische Aktion. None of the other historic Antifascist movements described in that article are in any way relevant today.
There are historical reasons that explain why Antifa caught up as a name, what logo activists use, etc. The abbreviation did not change, it still stands for "anti-fascim actions" today, or "Antifaschistische Aktion" in German.
But you are saying Antifa is synonymous, ie. equal to "Antifaschistische Aktion", not for what the words mean, but in a literal way, to restrict the definition. No matter how the name came to life, the spirit behind it is broader that the name; nowadays it is a perfectly fine shortcut for anti-fascism.
I mean, dictionaries tend to agree on this one:
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/antifa
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Antifa
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antifa
I know a number of people in various countries who participate in Antifa action and who, while definitely left of center, are by no means anarchists or communists, and not even close to Marxists-Leninists or whatever other hard-left groups there are.
It’s funny to me that now they are a target, people are trying to play down their involvement in the political landscape the past few years.
I’ve watched them shut down speech, aggressively block events from happening, attack people in MAGA hats, there is so much hate pouring out of them that they are more fascist than anti-fascist.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=anarchist+symbol&iax=images...
It probably was sprayed by teenagers, but by spraying it, they're indicating their political affiliation.
Being "anti-fascist" can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but using the "antifa" label makes it sound scary or organized. It reminds me of media outlets talking about message board trolls and disruptors as "the shadowy group known as Anonymous".
If not for C19 the masks would be strong evidence.
But green/long hair and a female voice acting like a leader, white and hoodies means you'd go with Antifa.
I'd cross reference it with other protests. I think you get a hit if you really cared, they look like they are active.
(Antifa are dumb teenagers, a bit like 4Chan, Anonymous, or even ISIS, the word is lose in it's meaning when it's a distributed organisation)
Why? National Action, NS113, and Scottish Dawn, (UK far right terrorist organisations) all had female membership and leadership.
But to your specific point were the females also foot soldiers? Not, do you know of an example, but was it somewhat common?
This seems to be a more left wing thing.
What a weird thing to say. Yes, some of them had long hair; some of them had dyed hair.
> But to your specific point were the females also foot soldiers? Not, do you know of an example, but was it somewhat common?
It was a known tactic of National Action to recruit as many women as they could, because those women would then go on to recruit a lot of men.
They had enough women members to run a "Miss Hitler" beauty pageant.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/scottish-woman-named-m...
One of the winners went on to become part of the National Action leadership: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/national-action-...
IDK, your description could just as well be feminists, mermaids, gorgons, sirens, etc., infact it seems to go as far as to just be saying "any white person protesting with BLM is an Antifa".
Portland itself outlawed black residents in the 1840s and that law stood for many decades. It's only very recently that Portland has developed the reputation for having a liberal populace; as recently as the 1990s it was essentially the white supremacy capital of the west coast.
Now, I don't think the bulk of the looters are bad people. But to change the narrative to be anything other than a REALLY TERRIBLE PR move by young people being opportunistic is absurd. For the truck driver who was beaten, the MSM were calling the violent protestors brave.
It comes down to this - are you helping the cause or hurting the cause? Only delusional, heavily-biased people / social justice warriors think looting is helping the cause and they're making every excuse under the sun. To think that humans, by and large, will look past it (for right or wrong) is out of touch with reality.
And if you criticize the means in any way, you get attacked even if you support the same change. In my opinion, to suggest that young black people are so pliable and incapable of thinking that some posts by a rogue group would turn them into robotic looters is racist in itself.
Young people semi organized and did some dumb stuff and justified it because of rightful injustice. Are they bad? No. Was it wise? Of course not. That's what happened.
Outside of that - I've been involved in a coroner's inquest before as my jury duty and it was very interesting. You basically are tasked with deciding whether a death was homicide, suicide or natural causes. I've heard about these civilian oversight boards as the answer but they have challenges with "local political manipulation" and require "steep budgets for investigators" [1]
So from my coroner's inquest experience, I was thinking - you already have civilians. It's efficient. If an officer is involved and the coroner's inquest participants rule it to be a homicide - boom, you could mandate an automatic trial!
This seems like it would be easier to roll out, more efficient, and provide pure accountability to any officer involved shooting. They'd know they would be legally required to go to trial if the coroner's inquest ruled a homicide.
Certainly, some evidence could still be tampered with by the powers that be, but that would elude the civilian oversight boards too in those cases. And with body cams, social media and business and civilian cameras, it's gotten much harder for them to hide evidence. So if you have an easy path to a trial originating from jury peers after coroner input, then you have a ton more accountability.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/is-civilian-overs...
The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost, be the excessive use of force by US police officers, and the lack of accountability that officers face, in particular when black lives are lost as a result. Sure, destroying things this is bad, but black lives matter.
I grabbed this quote from your reply specifically because it seems to make the claim that people who belive in social justice are delusional, heavily-biased, and are entirely or at least largely in support of looting. I've never seen anyone make the argument that looting is helping the cause. What I have seen is arguments that acknowledge the 'badness' of the looting, and point out that the same arguments are not being applied to the police.
"Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops." -@aStatesman (Twitter)
In fact, there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places. This tweet has one, but there are many in the responses to that tweet as well: https://twitter.com/gryking/status/1267101707596632066
I am pretty sure that they do, at least in my mind as well as in the minds of my friends. Especially due to the amount of incidents. You can criticize one side without supporting the other.
> there are plenty of videos people have posted of protesters stopping looters in various places
And there are a quite few where they haven't. This movement consists of different people with different beliefs after all.
For every 10,000 black people arrested for violent crime, 3 are killed.*
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
* For every 10,000 white people arrested for violent crime, 4 are killed. (ducks ... and runs away)
This guy had, according to the coroner's report, recently used meth, had fentanyl in his system and the police stated he resisted arrest. He also has a police report from 2007 where he pointed a gun at a pregnant lady's belly to restrain her while his partner ransacked her apartment for jewelry and drugs. Sounds peaceful to you?
https://www.theblaze.com/news/george-floyd-fentanyl-methamph... https://files.catbox.moe/f4ylk1.jpeg
(and BTW it was a forged $20 bill, not check forgery)
> jogging down a street
You use this as an example of police brutality in which the police weren't even involved. And then you immediately follow with "Save your talking points for when they're actually relevant"? Will you?
> sitting in one's own home
Breonna Taylor, a black woman, who's boyfriend shot first at the police when the executed a no-knock warrant. Does this sound racially motivated to you? If they were white, would the officers not shoot back?
--
Maybe you should stop skimming headlines of MSM and start actually trying to uncover the whole story before you help perpetuate a race war with lazy, anecdotal and misleading examples masquerading as actual talking points.
I did not, however, say any of the other things you are attributing to me.
It's incredibly sad a comment that adds actual data to a conversation is being downmodded.
I've also never seen anyone make the argument that excessive use of force by US police officers is helpful.
That gives us two extremes that we can eliminate from the discussions. There are no people who think illegal force used by the police is good, nor is there people who think looting is helping the cause of stopping the police from using illegal amount of force. Two strawmen done and dusted.
> "Funny how one bad protester labels the whole movement, but a few bad cops are never supposed to represent all cops."
101 in in-group and out-group human behavior research. The in-group is always made out of individuals and a few bad apples can never represent the group that a persons self belong to. The out-group however is in contrast a homogenic group. The purpose of having a clearly defined group to define as "them" is to avoid having to spend the energy to individualizing every member. It is a type of lazy thinking. Both the police and the protesters has bad people in them and good people, you only need to look at the individual level.
> The problem, which shows up in plenty of posts on social media, is that people's concern should, first and foremost
If we expect every post on social media to include boiler plate signaling then it kind of losses meaning. Everyone already agree that illegal use of force by the police is bad and should be prosecuted. We have democratic created laws that says so and no movement to remove them. The problem lies at the pseudo kinship relations that a band-of-brothers style police force has when it is tasked to enforce those laws against the in-group.
A crucial difference is that the police is an actual entity/organization, and one that is entirely responsible for its members. The whole problem is that this organization is not properly keeping their 'bad apples' in check, and even actively shielding them from consequence.
On top of that, this organization is immensely powerful, has ridiculous weaponry (and some degree of training), and is legally allowed to do a lot of violent things that most other 'groups' or individuals are not.
I think it's absolutely fair to consider the police as a group (while acknowledging that it has 'good' members), and make more individual distinction concerning the protesters.
I also think it's not a coincidence that Trump and various others are pitching the "it's Antifa destroying our cities" or for that matter even the whole idea that Antifa is a properly organized entity. So much easier to justify the use of force against the whole lot of protesters!
Telling organizations to keeping their 'bad apples' in check is an up hill battle, as within a in-group you don't see bad apples as representing the group. They are seen as individuals that did a bad choice, took a wrong turn, and as any individual they are given chances to change and do better. With pseudo kinship this get amplified, as its a fundamental aspect of most cultures that you treat kinship different than "others". Issues get handled and address within the family.
In order to break such patter you need to get cops more integrated into the society that they serve, increase pay in order to increase the status of the job within the rest of the community, decrease the inherent risks so that individuals has to rely less on a "family" to protect then, and increase the training period.
Nothing of that will help of course when governments start to use the military against protestors. Here in Sweden we have had several different parliaments trying to make clever hacks in order to prevent future parliaments from making such decision. At a time they even gave the power as an exclusive right under the king with the general idea beying that since the king does not participate politics and no future parliament would dare to take something from the king once given. Others have written laws forbidding parliament for taking such decisions. Currently it has been 89 years, and the event that caused such heavy opposition against military use against protestors, Ådalshändelserna, is still referenced in modern day politics. No matter what you don't send military against protestors.
There definitely are people making such arguments. The assertion is that property is the root cause of injustice so presumably destroying it is just. See for example https://twitter.com/ImReadinHere/status/1267402206220869632
What puzzles me is that some people supporting this argument are highly paid software engineers. How do they reconcile this with the fact that it is precisely the concept of private property (and yes, violent enforcement of it) that allows them to sit in front of the computer all day building some cool stuff and not worry that some violent thug will break into their house and take away their laptop?
For example, a corrupt politician can understand why an anti-bribery campaign is beneficial for his country.
I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."
(That justice may come in the form of charges against specific police officers, or perhaps as a campaign of institutional reforms within the police apparatus.)
Consider for a moment what the optimal strategy would be to handle this vandalism and looting from the perspective of "Rich people." A) Capitulate to the demands of people using terror / destruction of property as leverage B) Utilize the vast resources available to you to end the source of the problem
I think your heart is in the right place in a very Robin Hood-esque kind of way but you're not grappling with reality if you think "give us justice and the looting will end" is going to play out favorably for the looters
Those vast resources that you mention (police and military) are at the very core of the conflict. Their use of force has only exacerbated the problem, because people spread videos of unjustifiable abuses (three cops brutalizing one prostrate individual in LA, a cop hitting protestors with his vehicle in NYC, a brigade of cops shooting law-abiding people on their own porch in Minneapolis, etc) that in turn draw more protestors to the fore.
Your A/B scenario is precisely the problem -- you equate the soothing of public anger with "capitulation" rather than "justice," and you make violence an imperative by arguing that the only strong approach is the brutal one.
Not to mention that you express a view that police brutality can "end the source of the problem." What is the source of the problem, if not police brutality itself? Were Americans violating curfews to demonstrate in the streets of major cities immediately prior to the murder of George Floyd?
True, but presumably these software engineers that I was talking about think about the ability to do their work as something worthy and morally good, not simply as a benefit that they get from a corrupt system. On the other hand, corrupt politicians don't think of bribes as something desirable to have in a system: they either cynically exploit their position for strictly personal gain or think of themselves as victims of the system who are forced to take bribes.
> I think it's fair to say that destruction of private property turns the situation into an economic problem, which in turn is a political pressure point. Rich people have more influence over police departments and attorneys general than do poor people. But for such pressure to do any useful work, the message must be, "give us justice and the looting will end."
This can be a valid strategy. I am reminded of someone who successfully executed this strategy: ANC and Nelson Mandela. But they were very clear in their demands and always stressed that they were reluctantly engaging in violence only because they had exhausted all peaceful methods. In contrast it seems that many who support recent riots are not very interested in actual solutions to the problem and only want to stick it to the Man in some way.
Edit: it seems exactly this happened after the Ferguson riots https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ferguson-anniversary-fina...
That sounds like an assumption whose truth is heavily dependent on being in a specific locality.
> How do the looters benefit from having stores in their area that they are too poor to buy from?
Again, an assumption that is highly dependent on geography and specific looting. You're also assuming that the looters are necessarily poor -- forgetting about, for example, organized crime.
We know how a riot can be a bad barrel that leads the people involved to do bad things. But a riot is not a day-to-day occurrence with its own persistent culture.
On the other hand, a police department does have a persistent culture, and we don't exactly understand how or why some police departments engender more brutality than others.
"The Lucifer Effect" is a very interesting book on the institutional dynamics that lead otherwise normal people to do horrific things. It is written by Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame. He is a proponent of the "bad barrel" theory.
The phrase that "bad apples" is taken from is "A few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's one of many phrases that has entered the common consciousness in partial form with the exact opposite meaning of its original intention.
His counterpoint is that a bad barrel can spoil a bunch of perfect apples. Good people can commit evil actions when they are put into bad social structures.
The spoilage in the "bad barrel" model comes from the containing structure, not from within its contents.
If you have a good barrel, you can keep bad apples more or less fresh. And if you have a bad barrel, even the best apples will spoil.
More literally: our focus should be on the command structures, accountability practices, disciplinary bodies, legal liability, and training programs within police departments -- rather than blaming systemic problems on a handful of white supremacists, careless brutes, or sociopaths.
I have literally, a few months ago, responded to comments on this site where people claimed all police were bad because of the bad actions of some.
Tribalism is a real thing, and it results in dehumanization of the other "side", and opportunistic labelling.
In 2019, 259 black people were killed by police. In the same year, 189 Hispanic people were killed by police. 406 white people were killed as well. 17 Asians. Obviously, blacks are overrepresented.
Data here: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends
When was the last time you saw a national news media report on a non-black person being unjustly killed by police? It happens, and the cops get let off, routinely. Daniel Shaver is a particularly egregious example, and the lack of national media coverage helps ensure that the cops aren't held accountable. The cop who murdered him was acquitted, and temporarily rehired to let him collect a 2400 a month pension.
The national media wants this framed as PURELY a racial issue, when the reality is that it's a mix of race, police militarization, and lack of police accountability due to cozy relationship with prosecutors.
This racial framing is unnecessarily tribal, and undermines the effectiveness of achieving a meaningful goal that helps reduce this behavior by police.
Watching livestreams from demonstrations in my city I saw a lot of this. Local people, mostly guys, were marching and sticking around until the later evening hours to stream live. They were basically patrolling and keeping an eye out for anyone who threw stuff, got out fireworks, or started a fight.
I saw them grab one kid who threw a bottle into a line of cops and chase him down as he ran away. Then when some others began yelling to "kick his ass!" the same guys held anyone back from starting a fight. It was community de-escalation and struck a stark contrast with the gassing and rubber bullets I've seen.
Any time you get a whole bunch of people crammed in together with emotions running high, there's a chance someone will decide to break stuff or punch someone. Seeing the crowd self-policing like this gave me the tiniest bit of hope.
This is precisely my point. The looting and destruction creates a major secondary storyline that has taken over. And that you're delusional if you think it isn't hurting the cause.
This is deeply hypocritical name-calling, and undermines your writing by implying that you, yourself, might be heavily biased.
Using adjectives to describe the headspace of people who are committing crimes or supporting those that do that aren't even related to the injustices at hand, destroying businesses and other people's places of work, etc, is not name-calling.
Scapegoating allows politicians to avoid angering their own constituents, and it also makes it rhetorically easier for politicians to avoid taking the demands seriously.
And a significant fraction (1/6 to 1/3) of arrests have been from out of state. So, the original claims had an element of truth.
But I disagree with you that it’s just “BS”, which would imply a level of cynicism which may exists, but for which you provided no evidence.
I remember during the 2010 London riots it was alleged that the organisation was happening over Blackberry Messenger, and the government was outraged that RIM refused to turn over decrypted messages to them.
[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSpx9rb...
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ7DOx5...
I hated that tactic in my own country, where some of my fellow rioters last year blamed covert police agents for the damage and provoking violence, and I hope you hate that tactic from your own side as well.
At least, this is my experience with large parts of the german (radical) left movement. It is allmost surreal, when you follow the left wing online news ticker about the demonstration and everything that happens. Police and fascist violence there and there and again there! And when you also follow neutral mediums or the other side, or are even there to see for yourself. Because then you can see quite some leftist/antifa violence or threats of violence, as well.
The agressors are allwas the others, the police and fascists, never they themself. And sure, police and fascists do use aggressive violence. And in numbers probably a lot more. But not only them. So it is a tactic. It is propaganda. I have seen all three sides (antifa, police and fascist) use it. And was quite some of that violence in fact done by covert police? Possible. But usually with the applause of the crowd.
(And the german right-wing movement is of course even worse at being hypocrites, because no one there is officially a rassist or a nazi and they get angry, if you point out rassist or nazi-ideologie arguments they made)
=] democratic society needs education and honest public discourse (maybe a cultural sense of shame would help)
=] social memia is incapable of serving the public interest; in the end, USians have only themselves to blame if their democracy achieves total collapse
The DJT experiment didn't bring this woe onto the country. He is a little vermin feasting on much deeper rot.
Sure, the police haven't arrested many of these out of staters, non-community members, but they are most certainly here. They had to walk back their comments because they can't just say "but we're there in the community and we see it".
Disinformation campaigns don't mean all such activity is by political shills.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/law-enfo...
The KKK has multiple independent sects and semi-decentralized governance, but that doesn't mean "KKK" doesn't exist -- it refers to all of them collectively.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/12671296442282475...
It implies a collective.
If it would allow nesting, I'm pretty sure somebody would've already accidentally put Al-Qaeda under Ansar al-Sunna and cause a recursion error, blowing up DC.
And they are a highly organized, though decentralized, group, again as can be seen by the multi-night multi-city violent display they have organized and perpetrated.
Interesting definition. Could it be said Abraham Lincoln used violence (in war) for political means?
I presume what was meant here was that 20th C fascist movements got big by the strategic use of street violence, in a way that the relatively liberal societies they worked within weren't equipped to counter.
Obviously not the first movement to use street violence, but (in my understanding) the scale and discipline with which it was deployed was a new and distinctive feature.
There are people who are using the current events as an excuse to sow division and chaos, and Antifa groups are absolutely included.
What? No, that's the definition of terrorism.
Fascism is an extreme nationalistic ideology pioneered in Italy by Mussolini and adopted by Nazi Germany.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/05/31/us/politics/ap-u...
How do we actually know this?
Or to put it differently, how much do we know about the interconnections of such groups? I'm sure that some are just kids who like the look & dress up with their buddies (no connections). Some seem pretty organised. How do we tell the extent from outside?
I would hope there is effort put into infiltrating and studying such things. But presumably any serious FBI or whatever effort isn't going to be keen to spell out how they know what they know. (IIRC this was part of what broke up the KKK, that and anti-mask laws. Which at its height was also a mix of fairly organised & not at all, although I don't claim the same mix.)
Like who? In North America, I haven't seen any evidence of this. The example that's always posted, including in this thread, is a lone actor that hit a few people with a bike lock years ago.
According to the Government Accountability Office of the United States, 73% of violent extremist incidents that resulted in deaths since September 12, 2001 were caused by right-wing extremist groups. That's not even including what they label as Islamist extremists and "incel" extremists which both could also easily be classified as right-wing extremism. In North America, violent left-wing extremism is barely a blip on the radar and yet we keep hearing "conservative" talking heads go on about Antifa. It seems like little more than a politically motivated distraction much like Obamagate.
We don't which is why it's weird the current administration is trying to declare 'antifa' a terrorist group without presenting any real evidence. If they know something we don't this would probably be a good time to tell us.
Wrong.
> The Antifa movement in Germany is a political movement, composed of multiple far-left, autonomous, militant groups and individuals who describe themselves as anti-fascist. The use of the epithet fascist against opponents and the understanding of capitalism as a form of fascism are central to the movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(Germany)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)
>Individuals involved in the movement tend to hold anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist views and subscribe to a range of left-wing ideologies such as anarchism, communism, Marxism, social democracy and socialism
Just because your criminal organization has chapters, doesn't mean people don't see the organization.
It’s as daft as saying you’re against democracy because you dislike the democratic people’s Republic of Korea.
Some times things become a thing of their own. Then differentiating makes sense.
Being anti-fascist is a good thing. Being an anti-democratic organisation which violently attacks civilians for having made the “wrong” vote in a democratic election is not.
ANTIFA has nothing to do with anti-fascism. Differentiation is not only useful, it’s absolutely required.
this is a lie though. where's your evidence of this? where is it organized? If "attacks on civilians for having made the wrong vote" actually happened at all, let alone on the scale you're talking about, don't you think trump would be parading arrested people around like bin laden? don't you think they'd have a list of wanted members?
it's a nonexistent boogeyman. so far in this thread someone has mentioned "they beat people in the head with bike locks". OK, how many times has that happened? Less than 20? Less than 10? Can't you see how ridiculous (and bad faith) it is to pretend that that is a vast anti-democratic organization?? Can't you see that this boogeyman is gonna be used to vilify anyone who opposes the fascism they're pushing for?
Or do you not care? Better to have journalists shot in the eyes, protesters murdered, beat in the streets so that you don't have to question your ghost story about thousands of angry ninjas with bike locks beating up everyone who voted for trump? I beg you to look through your sources and realize what absolute nonsense you're being pushed by people with no crediblity
Yeah I’m obviously just making shit like this[1] up.
This was happening withspread throughout the US, repeatedly, week after week after the last election. No need to filter the news to disreputable sources to find full evidence for ANTIFA being a violent, anti-democratic organisation.
> where is it organized?
No idea. I’m not an insider, but when you see it happen again and again, with the same masks, same kind of people, same and same name at different places, it’s obviously not happening at random.
> Better to have journalists shot in the eyes, protesters murdered, beat in the streets
Now you are lying. Nobody is in support of this. Condemning ANTIFA as the anti-democratic, violent organisation it is, does not mean endorsing other forms of violence, like police brutality. If anything, this is your boogeyman.
[1] https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/4/antifa-america...
"The notice asked activists to “bring your friends, bring your crew and come prepared to disrupt the nightmare that is Trump,” while the site predicted “thousands” would show up “in opposition to Trump and his world.”"
Yes, that's called protesting. There's a twitter account encouraging protesting. What are you talking about?
"FBI WFO has no intelligence indicating antifa involvement/presence"
Regardless, the www does not discriminate based on where you live[note]. You get both Europeans and US residents seeing the same content, so I expect that to change soon (if it hasn't already - similar to the term "liberal" shifting from economic liberalism/capitalism to mean left wing).
[note] excluding things like "this video is not available for your country"
Let me cite the German Wikipedia:
> Antifa (Akronym für Antifaschistische Aktion) ist der Oberbegriff für verschiedene, im Regelfall eher locker strukturierte, kurzfristige autonome Strömungen der linken bis linksextremen Szene.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa
Here, Wikipedia describes Antifa as an umbrella Term for "autonomous groups" in the far-left extremist scene.
"autonomous groups" being:
> Als Autonome (altgriechisch: αὐτονομία, autonomía, „Unabhängigkeit, Selbstständigkeit“) oder autonome Gruppen werden heute Mitglieder bestimmter linksradikaler[1] unorthodox-marxistischer beziehungsweise anarchistischer Bewegungen bezeichnet.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonome
Describing them as members of "unorthodox marxist/anarchist" movements.
For all I can remember, this was the definition of "Antifa" here in Germany. Despite constant whitewashing and overton-window shifting attempts.
google searches are strongly ip-geolocalized
> You get both Europeans and US residents seeing the same content
I disagree. Most europeans do not read english content at all.
There is a big shitstorm on Twitter and an edit war on Wikipedia right now, because the left wing of the German Social Democrats have appealed to Antifa.
https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antifa&diff=20053...
There are always out-liners. In the same spirit I am sure that you can find people self-identifying as non-racist fascists.
> to try and make their criticisms irrelevent
Their criticisms of what? Of the material realm? I do not think that trash-cans harmed me yet so I see no reason to destroy them. Or do you mean their criticism of capitalism/the current system/fascism/racism/etc? If so I agree with them.
I was accused twice by antifa people of being fascist myself. Once because I expressed my pro-archiving/anti-copyright views and another time when someone accused my friend (who is an actual anti-fascist that organises non-violent anti-fascist events in real life) of being a fascist because he does not agree with their violent policies and I went to defend him - in neither case they explained why they think that I am a fascist and I had no prior interaction with these people.
Regarding antagonism, in general people reply only when they have something to add or when they disagree with a post. If they have nothing to add but agree then they just upvote instead. I can't guarantee that this is the case here however.
But he was a horrible, genocidal maniac.
Just because you are “anti-fascist” does it mean that you can’t be evil, especially when you use violence to intimidate your political opponents and cause injury and loss to innocent civilians.
A profoundly anti-White government in all forms of propaganda and law, being set upon by the Africans and brainwashed Whites they radicalised.
And we get to sit back with popcorn watching them pound each other into the turf (while still somehow managing to both blame White people).
Mainstream media is now 50% fake news.
fascists do not call themselves that since the 40s.
calling the normal of not being fascists antifa is only enabling easier critic amd blaming of something that could not be criticized or blamed.
the term antifa only benefit fascists. who can now easily direct blame and critic to their critics, as shown in the article (which is not the first and hardly the last)
You aren't a White Supremacist, are you??????
Gonna be hard to make the "white nationalist false flag" narrative stick when so many obvious antifa types have not only been arrested, but proudly post videos and selfies of their crimes to social media.
Meanwhile, I'm trapped in NYC with elderly parents, who now can't go outside because of rioters (after having been stuck inside for months because COVID), and I'm afraid of not being able to get food if the grocery stores shut down, or medicine if the looters target more pharmacies.
And I'm supposed to support reform to tie the hands of the NYPD, when they're the only thing standing between us and these terrorists now?
I'm afraid to - there aren't that many any more, and I don't know how we're going to communicate after we lose those, too. Words that still have actual meaning have to be protected carefully in the 21st century.
You rich, privileged people are waging (or at least supporting) what amounts to a literal class warfare against lower income people who can't get away from this. The Bronx, the poorest borough, was the worst hit last night.
hm you can do both actually, these things aren't mutually exclusive.
You can be against systemic racism, police having access to military equipment, the killing unarmed people AND be against rioters who're just here to destroy and steal. Last time I checked this isn't a 200 IQ thought, I'd even label that as "common sense"
> I'm afraid of ...
Then you know what some of these people feel and why the majority of them are protesting, you're fighting the same fight, stop shitting on each other like elementary school kids. The US is turning into a third world country and the enemy isn't your fellow citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail
What reform, specifically, are you against? This is a department with a long history of corruption, including serious recent cases, so it's not like no oversight is an option.
Meanwhile, actual antifa groups call for violence on twitter.
There are confirmed reports of agitators that have been stopped before violence occurred, thank God. [0]
Last evening, Denver's PD chief marched with protestors and mostly allowed them to walk and shout well past curfew. I've not yet seen looting reports (though that may change), and the injuries to protestors and PD seem to have been much less as of now. Compared to other nights, it was successful.
Each city is different. Lumping people together nationally is not helping anyone discover what is happening locally.
[0] https://twitter.com/KyleClark I suck at twitter, so I can't figure out how to link specific tweets here. But Kyle Clark is the head anchor for Denver's 9pm news broadcast. The tweets in his feed specify the facts much better than I can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization
"according to a Twitter spokesperson". Which spokesperson and where was this said? I don't see anything on https://blog.twitter.com. Nor could I find any primary recent references to Twitter and white nationalists or Identity Evropa except the editorials themselves.