Despite Trump: What is and What isn’t—Charlottesville to Boston

30 Aug 2017

Despite Trump: What is and What isn’t—Charlottesville to BostonPosted in Guest Commentaries By almariam On August 30, 2017
Guest Commentary: August Nimtz

Watching the images from Boston on August 19, and reading the reports I couldn’t help but think about how much has changed in the U.S. despite Trump. In April 1976, a major battle took place there when racist gangs sought to obstruct court-ordered school busing, groups that were far larger in number than any of the crowds who’ve been emboldened by the Trump election. Boston attracted national attention not unlike Charlottesville. But unlike almost all of the present crowds— except for one in Charlottesville whose main perpetrator is now being prosecuted —the ones in Boston, without any prompting from White Supremacists like the KKK, actually pursued bodily harm against Black people, especially the Black students on the buses.

Actor Mark Wahlberg, who grew up in Boston in the immediate aftermath of that period has long apologized for having been seduced by that ethos into actually committing vicious racist acts—evidence of how pervasive the climate was in the city and environs. The iconic image is a bunch of angry racists attacking a Black businessman in a three-piece suit, who had nothing to do with busing, with a long pole to which an American flag was attached.

It was the perfect propaganda image for those of us who mobilized nationally to defend the Black youth on the buses. We used that photo in all of our advertising for building one of the largest marches in the city’s history. Though not as large as Saturday’s August 19 action, which attracted somewhere between thirty and forty thousand and, thus, dwarfing the fifty to one hundred who stood behind police cordons exercising their right to “free speech,” it was a decisive moment in Boston’s racial politics. It, along with other advances for racial equality in subsequent decades, go a long way in explaining why so many in Boston and environs would come out in such numbers in opposition to what had once been unapologetically displayed on its own streets only a few decades earlier.

To make sure that we could attract the largest number of participants, we not only advertised our march as being a peaceful response to the violent racist gangs but we actually organized ourselves to make sure that our protest remained peaceful. Unbeknownst to me the high school aged daughter of a very influential senior colleague in my department wanted to attend the march. Her parents said she could if, first, she’d be one of the passengers in my car, and, second, that I assure them that she’d be safe. As a still untenured member in the department I had a personal stake in making sure the protest remained peaceful.

The march against the racist forces was organized by a coalition of organizations, one of which was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to which I belonged. Not every organization in the coalition was on board with the march being peaceful though the majority voted for that position. Based on prior experience, the SWP organized a contingent in the march to closely monitor any forces who might want to break discipline and physically engage the racists. I was assigned by the party to the contingent. Sure enough, a group of what we call in the movement the ultra-leftists tried to divert the march from the agreed upon course into a confrontation with the racists. Our task was to prevent that from occurring. To do so, we cut the cord of their bull horn once they began employing it, thus, preventing them from doing their confrontational thing. Had violence occurred, triggered by the ultra-leftists, it would have been not only disruptive but could have also endangered people who attended the march believing it would be a peaceful.

In 1980, another tragedy occurred in Greensboro, NC. Four members of the Communist Workers Party (CWP) were brutally murdered (one seriously wounded who I knew) by the KKK after appearing to want to confront the racists with guns. An all-white jury refused to convict the Klan members who committed the murders. Of course, we and other progressive forces denounced the blatant jury nullification though we vehemently disagreed with the CWP’s needless provocation. The idea that a small group of people, however courageous, can beat back entrenched racist and other reactionary forces flies in the face of what history teaches.

Another example of how much has changed in the U.S. is that of Heather Heyer who was run over by the 20 year-old white supremacist driver, James Alex Fields, in Charlottesville. Heather wasn’t a northern liberal but a young Caucasian woman from Charlottesville, and, without a college degree—as many liberals are so want to point out about Trump supporters. And listening to her mother’s pride about her daughter in her very Virginia working class accent brought home the power of Heather’s example and what it registers; which makes her death all the more tragic.

Unfortunately, Heather was a member of one of the organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which tend to look for confrontation with the racists and the police. I speak from personal experience when I say this. We had to put IWW members on a short leash when we had our Rodney King demonstration in Minneapolis in 1992 (one of whose key organizers, by the way, before he left the streets for the suites, was the young Keith Ellison, now congressman and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee). They hated the fact that we prevented them from trashing downtown stores as we were marching, 5000-plus strong, in one of the largest demonstrations ever seen in Minneapolis. It is true, we have to admit, that there are indeed individuals and grouplets on the left who do engage in violence and rely on confrontation as their mode of operation. Not only is such conduct dangerous for their own members and those who want to participate in peaceful protests but it also enables agent provocateurs, that is, those on the payroll of the police who seek to discredit progressive movements (such as what happened with the protests against the Republican National Convention when it met in St. Paul in 2008).

Lastly, the most obvious example of the depths of the changes in the U.S.: Who would have believed on November 9, 2016, that more Confederacy monuments would be torn down during a Donald Trump presidency than during any other presidency? I confess that I never expected to see in my lifetime the Robert E. Lee monument in New Orleans removed where I walked and rode by so many times.

As the renowned historian of Reconstruction Eric Foner puts it in his recent NYT essay: “Historical monuments are, among other things, an expression of power—an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.” David Duke and his ilk can’t prevent the removal of the monuments despite all their fawning before Trump. The massive largely proletarian-composed mobilizations of the sixties known as the Civil Rights Movement rendered them impotent. Steven Bannon is right in his characterization of them. “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more. These guys are a collection of clowns.” And they should never be confused with Trump’s hard core base. Bannon knows who that base is and would never have used such language about them.

The first protest action, by the way, I ever helped to organize, in spring 1964, against the sentencing of Nelson Mandela, took place in front of the White House. Within an hour—I can’t remember exactly—we were greeted with a counter protest by the American Nazi Party and its leader George Lincoln Rockwell. We never felt threatened in any way by their small picket line. As I think about it now, I wonder how they heard we were there. Did someone—I ask almost tongue in cheek—in the Lyndon Johnson White House let them know?

There will indeed be a real fascist movement one day in the U.S.; but only when the ruling class feels threatened by its working class which, we have to admit, is not the case today. It will have to be a situation not unlike what Germany’s ruling class faced in the 1930’s when it decided to ‘send in the clowns’—a totally virulent variety. Until then it’s a serious political mistake to think as some do that fascism is now knocking on the door since November 8, 2016. To do so is to concede unnecessarily to reaction and to ignore the opportunities to do mass work.

I emphasize the glass half full side of the story without in the least ignoring the fact the glass is also half empty. I do because it’s the profound changes I’m highlighting that will be the necessary ingredients in forging the kind of effort to address the half-empty side of the story. It’s not rocket science to recognize that as long as capitalism is in place, there can be no racial equality. Capitalism like all previous class societies is fundamentally incompatible with social equality. And the failure of the struggle for racial equality in its first and second Reconstruction editions is sobering testimony to capitalism’s continuing grip on social reality. I contend that this claim is not unlike what MLK was saying in the last year of his life exactly fifty years ago. I’m referring to his epiphany, in the aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that for there to be racial equality in the U.S. “there would have to be a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” For that to happen there will have to be a mass multi-racial, multi-national, multi-gendered working class movement.

My basic claim is that owing to the profound changes that have taken place in the U.S. over the last half-century, our side, progressive-minded forces, is in a better position today to realize such a goal than we’ve ever been in the entire history of the country. I’m not claiming, of course, that such a mass working class movement in all its skin colors, nationalities and genders is inevitable but only that we’re in a better position today than ever to construct one. The Boston demonstration, the example of Heather Heyer, and the removal of the monuments are simply the most recent evidence of the kinds of opportunities progressive forces have today that have never existed before. And it behooves us to not only recognize but to act on that reality and not merely be passive spectators.

August Nimtz is a professor of political science and African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

The Ugly Side of Antifa

by Leighton Woodhouse | Aug 28, 2017 | Uncategorized |
The Ugly Side of Antifa
Y esterday, at the anti-Alt-Right rally in Berkeley, I watched groups of masked Antifa members in Black Bloc formation swarm individuals who were apparently antagonizing them, and pummel them with their fists, feet, and flagpoles. When the victims tried to escape, they were run down, and in at least one case, cut off by the Antifa mob and beaten down some more. In the incidents I witnessed, about 5 or 6 Antifa members at a time participated in the attacks, while perhaps 100 others stood behind them, forming an impenetrable wall that blocked bystanders from intervening, or documenting the violence on camera. Those people would also help chase the victims when they fled.
In one case, as a crowd of non-Black Bloc protesters yelled at the assailants to let their victim go, an Antifa activist yelled, “He’s a Nazi!” over and over again, justifying the assault. Then, abruptly, maybe after realizing that the victim was not, in fact, a white nationalist, he changed his mantra. “He doesn’t have to be a Nazi!” he now shouted. The suggestion was that even if the victim wasn’t a fascist, he still deserved to be beaten. For what was unclear. Maybe because he supported Trump? Or he objected to Antifa’s tactics? Or refused to do something they ordered him to do? Who knew? The only thing those of us watching from a few yards away could tell was that a man, by himself, was on the ground, with a bloodied face, covering his head with his arms, being kicked and punched by a group of masked people, who were shielded by dozens of their comrades. My guess is that a lot of the Antifa people in the crowd who were passively assisting in the violence, including the guy yelling that he was a Nazi, didn’t know anything more than that, either.
Last week, Mark Bray, a historian of Antifa, said on Trumpcast, Slate’s podcast on all things Trump, that Antifa members are “some of the most caring and compassionate people I’ve met.” I just finished directing a short documentary about the online origins of the Alt Right, for which we interviewed several Antifa members, and I can affirm his depiction. To a person, our interviewees cared deeply about egalitarianism and anti-racism, and spent much of their day-to-day lives either working professionally or volunteering for organizations and in activist groups that fought for the social and economic rights of the disenfranchised. They gave eloquent and persuasive explanations for why fascism must be confronted head-on, with tactics up to and including violence.
But parsing out the nuances of moral justifications for violence in a quiet room somewhere is an entirely different thing than standing in a park with a mask on and a flag in your hand, with hundreds of your comrades, and making snap decisions about whose ass to beat and whose not to. Or whether to back up your comrades when they start beating someone up, when you have no idea how the altercation even began, or who the victim is. Or whether to go online afterwards and claim that everyone who got beat deserved it because they were all Nazis.
What happened in practice in Berkeley yesterday was that anybody who challenged the Black Bloc made themselves a target, whether they were a white supremacist looking to stir shit up (and there were maybe five or six of those in a crowd of thousands), or a liberal who yelled their disapproval at their tactics, or a reporter taking pictures after being commanded to stop. If you pissed someone in the Black Bloc off, and someone came after you, the rest of the bloc followed. Suddenly you were facing a hostile mob, the time for arguing your case expired, literally fearing for your life.
I was at the protest with a film crew, working on a documentary. We were in a public park. It was a big news event, where everybody knew there would be media. Activists in the Black Bloc were concealed by sunglasses and ski masks to protect their identity for exactly this reason. They carried flags and banners, to make themselves a spectacle. Yet for their personal security, many of them decided that it was their right to command photographers not to take their pictures, to physically block them from doing so, and if they persisted, to smash their equipment and assault them. That’s what apparently happened to the guy who the Antifa member kept calling a “Nazi,” until he changed his mind. One of my filmmaking partners and I got pushed around by Antifa, too. We were targets because we had cameras. The only reason we didn’t get administered a beat down is because when we were ordered (not asked) to point our cameras elsewhere, we only pushed our right to film them so far. Had we pushed it a bit farther, we probably would have ended up with some smashed equipment and black eyes.
There was a moment of triumph during the demonstration, before all the violence began, when just after facing what looked like the beginning of a confrontation with the Black Bloc, the police line that surrounded the park retreated, the checkpoints into the park, where police were searching bags for contraband, were taken down, and everybody outside of the perimeter flooded onto the field. Following upon the unambiguous victory over the Alt Right in San Francisco the prior day, it should have been the capstone of the weekend. The Alt Right had surrendered; the people had taken their public space back from both the “fascists” and the police. But it probably hadn’t been an hour before that feeling dissipated entirely. Soon, it was Antifa, instead of the police, who were occupying the park. The rest of the crowd, who many of the masked radicals probably disdained as wimpy, bourgeois liberals, shrank from the violence that had begun to overtake the scene, as well as the yelling and the physical domination and the general sense of schoolyard bullying emanating from the massive Black Bloc. At one point I turned around and all I could see was Antifa. They had spread throughout the park, and everybody else had gone home.
When you criticize Antifa members or their defenders for the tactic of mob violence, the reflexive response is usually something like, “There are literal Nazis marching in the streets, and you’re attacking us over your precious little non-violence principles?” But Antifa doesn’t have a monopoly over concern for what’s happening in this country. They’re no more woke than the squishy liberals who showed up to protest with their signs and their voices and not with their fists. The revulsion to violence on the part of most people on the left, from liberal to radical, is not born of naïveté over the scale of the right-wing threat. It’s the expression of basic moral principle, as well as a pragmatic political understanding that random mob violence by masked vigilates on the left isn’t going to defeat the Alt Right. In the Bay Area this weekend, the Alt Right was already defeated. All Antifa did was transform that message of people-powered victory into a cascade of headlines bolstering Trump’s “both sides” talking point.
The revulsion to Antifa’s violence is also an indication of the paucity of trust Antifa has established with much of the wider, non-activist world. People want the white nationalist movement smashed into dust; that’s why they’re showing up by the thousands and the tens of thousands to protests against the Alt Right. That doesn’t mean they want to hand leadership over to a subcultural vanguardist movement that barks at them from behind masks and shields and threatens to beat those who disagree with them into submission.
Most Antifa members are anarchists. It was an ironic thing to see these anti-authoritarian, anti-government activists essentially acting as a de facto state on that little quarter acre of lawn, ordering photographers around, deciding who could be in the park and who couldn’t, responding to dissent — even from liberals — with physical confrontation, and dishing out violence on whoever they decided deserved it, whether they were a “Nazi,” a non-compliant liberal protester, or a reporter with a camera. It was a bleak alternative to the far right dystopia we face under Trump. It was much more like the last days of the Occupy movement than like the first. It was dark, it was scary, and it was ugly.

How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’

Like the Aviva Chomsky post, Hedges hits the nail on the head. Its very good and very important. What's so impressive is that it is also very, very POLITICAL. The politically illiterate and holier than thou moralists who fixate on stopping the racist right's rallies are suckers responding to sucker-bait. I usually find Hedges a bit too moralistic, but this article is very hard headed and realistic. --RC



from Truthdig

Chris Hedges. Aug 27, 2017

Behind the rhetoric of the “alt-right” about white nativism and protecting American traditions, history and Christian values is the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric of antifa, the Black Blocand the so-called “alt-left” about capitalism, racism, state repression and corporate power is the same lust for violence.

The two opposing groups, largely made up of people who have been cast aside by the cruelty of corporate capitalism, have embraced holy war. Their lives, battered by economic misery and social marginalization, have suddenly been filled with meaning. They hold themselves up as the vanguard of the oppressed. They arrogate to themselves the right to use force to silence those they define as the enemy. They sanctify anger. They are infected with the dark, adrenaline-driven lust for confrontation that arises among the disenfranchised when a democracy ceases to function. They are separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those who engage in fratricide, by the “narcissism of minor differences.” They mirror each other, not only ideologically but also physically—armed and dressed in black, the color of fascism and the color of death.

It was inevitable that we would reach this point. The corporate state has seized and corrupted all democratic institutions, including the two main political parties, to serve the interests of corporate power and maximize global corporate profits. There is no justice in the courts. There is no possibility for reform in the legislative bodies. The executive branch is a dysfunctional mess headed by a narcissistic kleptocrat, con artist and pathological liar. Money has replaced the vote. The consent of the governed is a joke. Our most basic constitutional rights, including the right to privacy and due process, have been taken from us by judicial fiat. The economically marginalized, now a majority of the country, have been rendered invisible by a corporate media dominated by highly paid courtiers spewing out meaningless political and celebrity gossip and trivia as if it were news. The corporate state, unimpeded, is pillaging and looting the carcass of the country and government, along with the natural world, for the personal gain of the 1 percent. It daily locks away in cages the poor, especially poor people of color, discarding the vulnerable as human refuse.

A government that is paralyzed and unable and unwilling to address the rudimentary needs of its citizens, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia and as history has shown with the Weimar Republicor czarist Russia, eventually empowers violent extremists. Economic and social marginalization is the lifeblood of extremist groups. Without it they wither and die. Extremism, as the social critic Christopher Lasch wrote, is “a refuge from the terrors of inner life.”

Germany’s Nazi stormtroopershad their counterparts in that nation’s communist Alliance of Red Front Fighters. The far-right anti-communist death squad Alliance of Argentina had its counterpart in the armed guerrilla group the People’s Revolutionary Army during the “Dirty War.” The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels during the war I covered in El Salvador had their counterparts in the right-wing death squads, whose eventual demise seriously impeded the FMLN’s ability to recruit. The Serbian nationalists, or Chetniks, in Yugoslavia had their counterparts in the Croatian nationalists, or Ustaše. The killing by one side justifies the killing by the other. And the killing is always sanctified in the name of each side’s martyrs.

The violence by antifa—short for anti-fascist or anti-fascist action—in Charlottesville, Va., saw a surge in interest and support for the movement, especially after the murder of Heather Heyer. The Black Bloc was applauded by some of the counterprotesters in Boston during an alt-right rally there Aug. 19. In Charlottesville, antifa activists filled the vacuum left by a passive police force, holding off neo-Nazi thugs who threatened Cornel West and clergy who were protesting against the white nationalist event. This was a propaganda coup for antifa, which seeks to portray its use of violence as legitimate self-defense. Protecting West and the clergy members from physical assault was admirable. But this single act no more legitimizes antifa violence than the turkeys, Christmas gifts and Fourth of July fireworks that John Gotti gave to his neighbors legitimized the violence of the Gambino crime family. Antifa, like the alt-right, is the product of a diseased society.

The white racists and neo-Nazis may be unsavory, but they too are victims. They too lost jobs and often live in poverty in deindustrialized wastelands. They too often are plagued by debt, foreclosures, bank repossessions and inability to repay student loans. They too often suffer from evictions, opioid addictions, domestic violence and despair. They too face bankruptcy because of medical bills. They too have seen social services gutted, public education degraded and privatized and the infrastructure around them decay. They too often suffer from police abuse and mass incarceration. They too are often in despair and suffer from hopelessness. And they too have the right to free speech, however repugnant their views.

Street clashes do not distress the ruling elites. These clashes divide the underclass. They divert activists from threatening the actual structures of power. They give the corporate state the ammunition to impose harsher forms of control and expand the powers of internal security. When antifa assumes the right to curtail free speech it becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies to take that freedom away from everyone, especially the anti-capitalists.

The focus on street violence diverts activists from the far less glamorous building of relationships and alternative institutions and community organizing that alone will make effective resistance possible. We will defeat the corporate state only when we take back and empower our communities, as is happening with Cooperation Jackson, a grass-roots cooperative movement in Jackson, Miss. As long as acts of resistance are forms of personal catharsis, the corporate state is secure. Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.

“Politics isn’t made of individuals,” Sophia Burns writes in “Catharsis Is Counter-Revolutionary.” “It’s made of classes. Political change doesn’t come from feeling individually validated. It comes from collective action and organization within the working class. That means creating new institutions that meet our needs and defend against oppression.”

The protests by the radical left now sweeping America, as Aviva Chomsky points out, are too often little more than self-advertisements for moral purity. They are products of a social media culture in which we all are the stars of our own life movie. They are infected with the American belief in regeneration through violence and the cult of the gun. They represent a clash between the bankruptcy of identity politics, which produced, as Dr. West has said, a president who was “a black mascot for Wall Street,” and the bankruptcy of a white, Christianized fascism that produced Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.

“Rather than organizing for change, individuals seek to enact a statement about their own righteousness,” Chomsky writes in “How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence.” “They may boycott certain products, refuse to eat certain foods, or they may show up to marches or rallies whose only purpose is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the participants. White people may loudly claim that they recognize their privilege or declare themselves allies of people of color or other marginalized groups. People may declare their communities ‘no place for hate.’ Or they may show up at counter-marches to ‘stand up’ to white nationalists or neo-Nazis. All of these types of ‘activism’ emphasize self-improvement or self-expression rather than seeking concrete change in society or policy. They are deeply, and deliberately, apolitical in the sense that they do not seek to address issues of power, resources, decision making, or how to bring about change.”

The corporate state seeks to discredit and shut down the anti-capitalist left. Its natural allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled, after all, by the most retrograde forces in American capitalism. It has huge media platforms. It has placed its ideologues and sympathizers in positions of power, including in law enforcement and the military. And it has carried out acts of domestic terrorism that dwarf anything carried out by the left. White supremacists were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2006 to 2016, far more than any other extremist group, according to a report issued in May by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anti-capitalist uprising, to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all anti-capitalists.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center states categorically in its pamphlet “Ten Ways to Fight Hate,” “Do not attend a hate rally.”

“Find another outlet for anger and frustration and for people’s desire to do something,” it recommends. “Hold a unity rally or parade to draw media attention away from hate. Hate has a First Amendment right. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutional right of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups to hold rallies and say whatever they want. Communities can restrict group movements to avoid conflicts with other citizens, but hate rallies will continue. Your efforts should focus on channeling people away from hate rallies.”

The Nazis were as unsavory to the German political and economic elites as Donald Trump is to most Americans who hold power or influence. But the German elites chose to work with the fascists, whom they naively thought they could control, rather than risk a destruction of capitalism. Street brawls, actively sought out by the Nazis, always furthered the interests of the fascists, who promised to restore law and order and protect traditional values. The violence contributed to their mystique and the yearning among the public for a strongman who would impose stability.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer writes:

Violent confrontations with antifascists gave the Nazis a chance to paint themselves as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left. They seized it.

It worked. We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding [a Berlin neighborhood]. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.

One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence.

What took place in Charlottesville, like what took place in February when antifa and Black Bloc protesters thwarted UC Berkeley’s attempt to host the crypto-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos, was political theater. It was about giving self-styled radicals a stage. It was about elevating their self-image. It was about appearing heroic. It was about replacing personal alienation with comradeship and solidarity. Most important, it was about the ability to project fear. This newfound power is exciting and intoxicating. It is also very dangerous. Many of those in Charlottesville on the left and the right were carrying weapons. A neo-Nazi fired a round from a pistol in the direction of a counterprotester. The neo-Nazis were often carrying AR-15 rifles and wearing quasi-military uniforms and helmets that made them blend in with police and state security. There could easily have been a bloodbath. A march held in Sacramento, Calif., in June 2016 by the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to protest attacks at Trump rallies ended with a number of people stabbed. Police accused counterprotesters of initiating the violence. It is a short series of steps from bat and ax handles to knives to guns.

The conflict will not end until the followers of the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left are given a living wage and a voice in how we are governed. Take away a person’s dignity, agency and self-esteem and this is what you get. As political power devolves into a more naked form of corporate totalitarianism, as unemployment and underemployment expand, so will extremist groups. They will attract more sympathy and support as the wider population realizes, correctly, that Americans have been stripped of all ability to influence the decisions that affect their lives, lives that are getting steadily worse.

The ecocide by the fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries alone makes revolt a moral imperative. The question is how to make it succeed. Taking to the street to fight fascists ensures our defeat. Antifa violence, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, is a “major gift to the right, including the militant right.” It fuels the right wing’s paranoid rants about the white race being persecuted and under attack. And it strips anti-capitalists of their moral capital.

Many in the feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply complicit in the corporate assault on the country and embracing the dead end of identity politics, will seek to regain credibility by defending the violence by groups such as antifa. Natasha Lennard, for example, in The Nation calls the “video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She writes “if we recognize fascism in Trump’s ascendance, our response must be anti-fascist in nature. The history of anti-fascist action is not one of polite protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned debate with racists, but direct, aggressive confrontation.”

This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the core of these movements. It saturates the vocabulary of the right-wing corporate oligarchs, including Donald Trump. Talk like this poisons national discourse. It dehumanizes whole segments of the population. It shuts out those who speak with nuance and compassion, especially when they attempt to explain the motives and conditions of opponents. It thrusts the society into a binary and demented universe of them and us. It elevates violence to the highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism and self-reflection. It is the prelude to widespread suffering and death. And that, I fear, is where we are headed.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/antifa-mirrors-alt-right/

How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence

Instead of writing something myself, I'm posting this article which perfectly sums up the glaring political deficiencies of too many well intentioned protesters. They forget to think things through politically about how to win over people to our side. RC


Tuesday, August 22, 2017
How (Not) to Challenge Racist Violence

Published on
Monday, August 21, 2017
by Common Dreams

"Protesters are eager to expend extraordinary energy denouncing small-scale racist actors. But what about the large-scale racist actors?"

by Aviva Chomsky


"If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find," Chomsky writes.

As white nationalism and the so-called “alt-Right” have gained prominence in the Trump era, a bipartisan reaction has coalesced to challenge these ideologies. But much of this bipartisan coalition focuses on individual, extreme, and hate-filled mobilizations and rhetoric, rather than the deeper, politer, and apparently more politically acceptable violence that imbues United States foreign and domestic policy in the 21st century.

"If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find."
Everyone from mainstream Republicans to a spectrum of Democrats to corporate executives to “antifa” leftists seems eager and proud to loudly denounce or even physically confront neo-Nazis and white nationalists. But the extremists on the streets of Charlottesville, or making Nazi salutes at the Reichstag, are engaging in only symbolic and individual politics.

Even the murder of a counter-protester was an individual act—one of over 40 murders a day in the United States, the great majority by firearms. (Double that number are killed every day by automobiles in what we call “accidents”—but which obviously have a cause also.) Protesters are eager to expend extraordinary energy denouncing these small-scale racist actors, or celebrating vigilante-style responses. But what about the large-scale racist actors? There has been no comparable mobilization, in fact little mobilization at all, against what Martin Luther King called “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”—the United States government, which dropped 72 bombs per day in 2016, primarily in Iraq and Syria, but also in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, making every single day 9/11 in those countries.

Historically, people and organizations struggling to change U.S. society and policy have used direct action, boycotts, and street protests as strategies to pressure power holders to change their laws, institutions, policies, or actions. The United Farm Workers called on consumers to boycott grapes in order to pressure specific growers to negotiate with their union. Antiwar protesters marched on Washington or targeted their Congressional representatives. They also took direct action: registering voters, pouring blood on draft records or nuclear weapons, sitting in front of trains carrying weapons to Central America.

A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy

All of these kinds of tactics remain valid options today. But there has been a puzzling shift away from actual goals and towards using these tactics merely to express one’s moral righteousness or “allyship. I remember my first “take back the night” march in Berkeley, in the 1970s. As men and women marched through the campus holding candles, I wondered whether they thought that would-be rapists would undergo a change of heart when they saw that large sectors of the public disapproved of rape?

Over the years I have come to see more and more of what Adolph Reed calls “posing as politics.”Rather than organizing for change, individuals seek to enact a statement about their own righteousness. They may boycott certain products, refuse to eat certain foods, or they may show up to marches or rallies whose only purpose is to demonstrate the moral superiority of the participants. White people may loudly claim that they recognize their privilege or declare themselves allies of people of color or other marginalized groups. People may declare their communities “no place for hate.” Or they may show up at counter-marches to “stand up” to white nationalists or neo-Nazis. All of these types of “activism” emphasize self-improvement or self-expression rather than seeking concrete change in society or policy. They are deeply, and deliberately, apolitical in the sense that they do not seek to address issues of power, resources, decision making, or how to bring about change.

"Rather than organizing for change, individuals seek to enact a statement about their own righteousness."

Oddly, these activists who have claimed the mantle of racial justice seem committed to an individualized, apolitical view of race. The diversity industry has become big business, sought out by universities and companies seeking the cachet of inclusivity. Campus diversity offices channel student protest into alliance with the administration and encourage students to think small. While adept in the terminology of power, diversity, inclusion, marginalization, injustice, and equity, they studiously avoid topics like colonialism, capitalism, exploitation, liberation, revolution, invasion, or other actual analyses of domestic or global affairs. Lumping race together in an ever-growing list of marginalized identities allows the history and realities of race to be absorbed into a billiard ball theory of diversity, in which different dehistoricized identities roll around a flat surface, occasionally colliding.

Let us be very clear. The white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, hate-filled and repugnant as their goals may be, are not the ones responsible for the U.S. wars on Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. They are not responsible for turning our public school system over to private corporations. They are not responsible for our separate and unequal health care system that consigns people of color to ill health and early death. They are not the ones foreclosing and evicting people of color from their homes. They are not the authors of neoliberal capitalism with its devastating effects on the poor around the planet. They are not the ones militarizing the borders to enforce global apartheid. They are not behind the extraction and burning of fossil fuels that is destroying the planet, with the poor and people of color the first to lose their homes and livelihoods. If we truly want to challenge racism, oppression, and inequality, we should turn our attention away from the few hundred marchers in Charlottesville and towards the real sources and enforcers of our unjust global order. They are not hard to find.

Richard Spencer Might Be The Worst Person In America. But He Might Also Be Right About Israel

From the Forward

Naomi DannAugust 17, 2017


The images of Nazis and white supremacists marching in the streets of Charlottesville with torches chanting “blood and soil” shook me to my core. But so did something else that happened this week. In the aftermath of these acts of blatant racism and anti-Semitism, one of the march’s leaders, Richard Spencer, was invited onto Israeli TV. His words were chilling, but not for the reason I expected.

The Israeli TV host asked Spencer how he, a Jew, should feel about Spencer’s platform. What Spencer said was shocking:

“As an Israeli citizen, someone who understands your identity, who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood and history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me,” Spencer said. “I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves, just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.” He told the Israeli host that he sees himself as “a white Zionist.”

This isn’t the first time Spencer has compared his disturbing white nationalist vision to the Zionist project. A few months ago, Spencer stunned a rabbi at an event in Texas when he said: “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”

The rabbi didn’t have an answer and he’s not the only one. This is what’s so chilling about Spencer’s comparison of white supremacy to Israel – not its anti-Semitism but the kernel of truth at its core. Richard Spencer, whose racist views are rightfully abhorred by the majority of the Jewish community, is holding a mirror up to Zionism and the reflection isn’t pretty.


Now, of course, the comparison is not literally true. For starters, we Jews have a recent history in which we really could have used a country willing to stand up for us. That’s the historical rationale for establishing a Jewish state and that distinguishes us fundamentally from white nationalists. White nationalists in the U.S. are not facing any kind of discrimination whatsoever, despite their belief that they are.

But still, there are ways in which Spencer’s description of Israel hits a little too close to home.

Looking at Israel today, we can see a state premised on the privileging of one group, and all too often perpetuating the erasure and displacement of another. We also see an obsession with demographics and the maintenance of an ethnic majority.

Then you have the demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the state sanctioning of Jewish settlers who seize Palestinian homes in Hebron, and the policy of seizing the property of “present absentees” after Palestinians were displaced during the war to establish the state of Israel are just some examples.

Then there’s the discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel (who should ostensibly have the same rights as Jewish Israelis), Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, and African refugees seeking asylum.

Many of us see these policies as alarming violations of human and civil rights, indeed, of our Jewish values. And the proof is in the pudding: Richard Spencer sees this as inspiration for his white nationalist vision.


But we don’t have to rely on Richard Spencer to tell us that there are other disturbing places of intersection. There is a disturbing alliance between Zionists and white nationalists in the White House these days, and it doesn’t come from nowhere. There is a shared bedrock of anxiety about demographics and racist and Islamophobic fear of “Arabs” that goes hand in hand with both worldviews.

And just like there are fascists marching the streets of America, there are fascists marching the streets of Israel beating up leftists. The alt-right are not the only ones being vile online, either. My friends report that they regularly receive death threats as a consequence of their activism. During the Israeli assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014, leftist Israeli friends who opposed the war reported being chased by fascist mobs on the streets of Jerusalem.

Even ex-prime minister Ehud Barak said this week that the events in Charlottesville reminded him of fascism in Israel. He cited the example of Lehava, an anti-miscegenation gang that frequently attacks Palestinians.

Let’s not let Richard Spencer be our mirror. Let’s work instead to challenge ethnic supremacy and right-wing violence, both here and in Israel.

That means taking active steps to oppose Israel’s occupation, working for human and civil rights in Israel, and joining the movement for racial justice in the U.S. as full partners, and challenging the ways our own institutions uphold discrimination.

For too long, Jewish institutions have focused on branding advocates for Palestinian rights, and critics of the state of Israel and Zionism itself, as anti-Semitic – to the detriment of the fights against both antisemitism and racism. The reactionary response from Jewish institutions to the Movement for Black Lives platform is a prime example of how this misguided reaction to criticism of Israel has prevented American Jewish communities from working alongside Black organizers to challenge both anti-Jewish oppression and systematic anti-Black racism.

The most promising solution to anti-Semitism lies in building relationships and coalitions, recognizing how our freedoms are bound up together with those of people who have fewer rights than us, and having those difficult conversations when conflicts arise. It requires challenging the institutions that uphold supremacy, together.

That is the work, and that will, at times, require us to hold up that mirror to ourselves and to our communities. Let’s do it together.

Naomi Dann is media manager at Jewish Voice for Peace.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.
Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/380384/richard-spencer-israel/

The Zionist-white supremacist alliance in Trump’s White House

Ali Abunimah Lobby Watch 15 August 2017


Pro-Israel billionaire Sheldon Adelson, center, and his wife Miriam speak with Trump advisor Steve Bannon at the president’s inauguration on 20 January 2017. Brian Snyder Reuters
A much-discussed article in The New York Times about pressure on President Donald Trump to fire his advisor Steve Bannon contains this intriguing sentence:

Mr. Bannon’s ability to hang on as Mr. Trump’s in-house populist is in part because of his connections to a handful of ultrarich political patrons, including Sheldon G. Adelson, the pro-Israel casino magnate who is based in Las Vegas.

As executive chairman of Breitbart News before joining the Trump campaign, Bannon transformed the right-wing outlet into what he described as the “the platform for the alt-right” – the collection of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and racists who have been the renewed focus of outrage since their violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.

Israel’s silence
Bannon is widely viewed as the champion of the white supremacists – some of whom were openly parading with Nazi flags – and the reason why Trump did not explicitly condemn them immediately after one of their number, allegedly James Alex Fields, 20, rammed his car into counterdemonstrators killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others.

Hence the renewed pressure on Trump to fire Bannon. But if Bannon supports the white supremacist and clearly anti-Semitic far-right, why does he enjoy the backing of Adelson?

The Las Vegas billionaire, as is well known, is a major financier of the US Republican Party and one of the biggest donors to pro-Israel organizations in the United States. Adelson has said he regrets serving in the US army, instead of Israel’s.

He is also a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – and that’s where the answer can be found.

Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, have been conspicuously silent about Nazis rampaging in Charlottesville – all the more strange since Israel is usually quick to exploit international events to its advantage. (After three days of silence, Netanyahu finally, on Tuesday, tweeted a general condemnation of “anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and racism” without specifically mentioning Charlottesville.)

Why is the “Jewish state” apparently so reluctant to speak out against Nazis?

Israel’s anti-Semitic alliances
While Israel purports to be the protector of Jews all over the world, Zionists historically made alliances with the world’s most lethal anti-Semites. Zionists and anti-Semites, after all, shared the analysis that Jews do not belong in Europe, so why not cooperate to transport them somewhere else – Palestine.

This odious alliance continues in updated form, as journalist Max Blumenthal observed:


A cornerstone of Israel’s policy today is to cement ties with other ultra-nationalist, racist and Islamophobic forces around the world – even if they are also anti-Semitic.

A striking example is Netanyahu’s own embrace of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, despite the latter’s recent praise for Viktor Horthy, the wartime ally of Hitler who oversaw the murder of 500,000 Holocaust victims.

Israel’s interests took precedence over the safety concerns of Hungarian Jews, as Netanyahu ordered his foreign ministry to tamp down criticism of Orban’s anti-Semitic dog whistles.

Notably, Richard Spencer, the neo-Nazi ideologue who wants to create an Aryan homeland in North America, has called his mission a “sort of white Zionism.” Spencer has ties to another senior White House advisor, Stephen Miller.

A similar ideological alliance prevails inside the White House. And Israel has guarded it: Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador in Washington, publicly defended Bannon in the days following last November’s election, after American Jewish groups strongly criticized Bannon’s appointment to a top position.

Ideology and convenience
But the Adelson-Bannon partnership is also one of convenience. The Adelson-backed Zionist Organization of America is waging a campaign against Trump’s National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which aims to portray the army general as “hostile to Israel.”

McMaster also happens to be one of Bannon’s key opponents inside the White House.

Establishment Israel lobby figures, such as the Obama administration’s ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, have leapt to McMaster’s defense:


Choose your war
There are substantive issue at stake. Part of Bannon’s ultra-nationalist “America First” agenda is opposing some US military interventions, particularly a renewed “surge” in Afghanistan that is supported by McMaster and US defense secretary James Mattis.

That is not Adelson’s – or Netanyahu’s interest – however. Bannon and other ultra-right figures including White House advisor Sebastian Gorka – have been key opponents of the international deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program. Blocking or undermining the Iran deal has been Netanyahu’s preoccupation for years.

Bannon and Gorka furiously opposed the State Department’s recent certification that Iran is in compliance with the terms of the agreement.

The Zionist Organization of America’s key allegation against McMaster is that he is too sympathetic towards Iran.

Reporting by The Forward revealed that Gorka is a member of a Hungarian far-right group that was controlled by the Nazis during the war, and has given backing to an anti-Semitic militia.

For those who support justice and oppose war and racism, there is no “side” to choose in this battle. On one side, you have the Bannon-Adelson faction pushing extreme Zionism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy and possible war with Iran. On the other, you have have the McMaster faction, backed by the DC establishment, which wants to perpetuate America’s existing imperial wars, starting with escalation in Afghanistan.

Democratic socialists give joyous thumbs up to BDS

Ali Abunimah Activism and BDS Beat 7 August 2017

The Democratic Socialists of America overwhelmingly voted to endorse the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

This video shows delegates at the DSA conference in Chicago this weekend voting almost unanimously for the measure:


Demand what’s right
“Those who struggle against oppression and for equality will always have our support,” DSA deputy national director David Duhalde said in a press release.

“Just as we answered the call to boycott South Africa during apartheid, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”



“Democratic socialists aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo and demand what’s right,” Rawan Tayoon, a Palestinian activist with Young Democratic Socialists, said.

“We stand against imperialism, we stand against racism, and so we must stand against Israeli apartheid and occupation.”

Tayoon told The Electronic Intifada that the vote came after months of organizing by members.

She said she was moved by the celebratory spirit in the room when the moment came.

“I knew that it would pass because I had been working on it,” she said. “But people were not just voting for it, they were so happy to be voting for it and that was a surprise.”

DSA describes itself as the largest democratic socialist organization in the United States. With more than 25,000 members, it has seen its membership quadruple with the resurgence of left-wing politics in the US and Europe, particularly since the 2016 presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.


Old guard
The big vote for BDS is another mark of the ongoing generational change in views about Palestine.

The Democratic Socialists of America has traditionally been a bastion of left-wing Zionism and support for Israel.

One of the old guard expressed his dismay at the change. Eric Lee wrote in a blog post that he is resigning over the BDS vote after being involved with the group over 40 years, including a stint on DSA’s national board.

Echoing talking points from Israel and its lobby groups, Lee wrote that he considers the BDS movement to be “anti-Semitic and racist.”

Lee complained that in a video he saw of the conference some delegates were chanting “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.”

“I also saw at least one Palestinian flag being waved in celebration,” he wrote.

Born in the US, Lee previously lived in Israel. Now based in the UK, he helped organize American supporters of Bernie Sanders there during last year’s election. Lee has also worked to try to thwart support for BDS in the British trade union movement.

Other smears from Israel’s surrogates included a claim in The Jerusalem Post that the vote was held on Saturday as a deliberate “tactic” to exclude Jews who observe Shabbat.

The right-wing, pro-Israel blog Legal Insurrection claimed that young socialists support Palestinian liberation because they are motivated by anti-Semitism and by the “now-fashionable doctrine of intersectionality” in which “Israel is held out as the unique connecting force among capitalist and American-imperialist evils.”

Lobby groups have previously complained that intersectionality – a perspective that links struggles for liberation among oppressed peoples – is a threat to support for Israel.

Challenge to censorship
The DSA vote comes after recent decisions by several churches to endorse boycott and divestment and other measures in support of Palestinian rights.

The vote also sends a strong message to lawmakers that efforts at censorship, backed by the Israel lobby, are not slowing the growth of the movement.