Comment by Aqueous
9 years ago
"They've been marching for years without violence."
And then, when they felt they had a government sympathetic to their aims, they stopped being non-violent, and stopped covering their faces to hide their identities. And someone died being run over with a car, many people were brutally beaten (this has been captured on videotape), and two cops died responding to the chaos they caused.
I don't know about the history of "Antifa" violence but I do know what I can see with my own eyes, which is that Nazis are violent. Their expressed philosophy of government is of white nationalism, of removing all non-whites from the nation (whether through deportation or genocide). It is a proposal of mass violence. It is a movement of violence.
Yes, I'm sure that the radical right marchers shot down the police helicopter with their readily available Strela-3 rocket launchers that they keep on hand, just in case the opportunity to do so arises.
You're trying very hard to make a connection there.
Antifa has been instigating full on riots since the election. We're talking beating people unconscious (captured on video), torching buildings (captured on video), looting businesses (captured on video), destroying property (captured on video), and blocking traffic (captured on video), all without significant media coverage (despite the video footage). This can mostly be attributed to the general populace not being familiar with Antifa or its downright violent tactics/rioting.
It's a miracle Antifa hasn't managed to kill anybody yet. It is the only reason they haven't received significant media coverage; had the nut in the car not driven through a crowd, this whole mess would have flown under the radar, just like every political riot before this.
I'd also like to add that Trump is "sympathetic" to neo-Nazis in the same way Bernie Sanders is; isolationism is popular among white nationalists and supremacists. Adolf Hitler supported gun control, strict conservation efforts, and discouraged smoking; is everybody who supports these ideas a Nazi?
Yep - some lefty engaged in violence at some point and therefore the moral differences between these movements are completely erased. Sounds good to me - what about, what about.
Here are the concrete facts: The President failed to condemn open, white supremacists with designs on ethnic cleansing as the chief instigators of this violence. Nazis feel like they have an ally (Not wrongly) in the White House, and are emboldened. They have actually acted violently. Nazism is a violent ideology. These are the prevailing winds. I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole of false equivalency with you.
You're ignoring a prominent and consistent streak of politically motivated violence because in this case you dislike the other group more. You're diminishing the reality that Antifa is a worldwide movement/ideology with consistent violent tendencies.
The president did condemn open white supremacy, and did associate them with the violence, albeit not as strongly as it seems you would prefer, and not as the sole instigators (which they weren't).
Modern Antifa is also a (generally) violent group rooted in extreme socialist/communist politics, with the general overreaching idea of the violent overthrow of anybody they consider to be a "fascist." They have "actually acted violently," and have done so with much greater frequency and magnitude than any far-right group has in the last twelve months.
This isn't a false equivalency as much as it is an inconvenient one for leftist/progressive politics.
Where do you get that idea of the moral superiority of the modern left (is that not what you meant?) from? Isn't it quite strongly related with cultural Marxism, which is related to Marxism which (I hope) we can agree has been been the most genocidal ideology of human history, birthing Bolshevism, Stalinism and Maoism?
This is both a segue and something tightly related; do you think the genocide of white males is hypothetically possible, and do you have an opinion on the relation between the Armenian genocide and the modern-day "alt-right" notion of "diversity = white genocide" in relation to (re/dis)placement migration as promoted by the European Union, Sweden, Canada, Germany and France?
(I just noticed the combination of overwhelmingly (Islamic?) male illegal migrants and "diversity" as in the promotion of ethnic minorities and non-males, I think that might result in some interesting conflicts re: normal non-Western attitudes regarding women, but perhaps there is no conflict because of some dynamic I'm underestimating or overlooking?)
> I don't know about the history of "Antifa" violence
I think a lot of people aren't aware; the media hasn't been reporting it much. Someone who wants the full picture of what happened in Charlottesville should learn more about their history of violence, everywhere from Berkeley to Hamburg.
They've been violent against people ranging from neo-Nazis to college speakers to Trump supporters to police officers to the G20.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-ris...