White Nationalists March on University of Virginia

[broncofan]

I watched the video and I have no idea how you reached this conclusion. On the one side, we have a bunch of people spouting hateful bigotry and clearly setting out to intimidate and provoke. On the other, we have bunch of people trying to resist this, some of whom (understandably) lost their tempers and may have overreacted at times. Hating people because they do hateful things isn't morally equivalent to hating people simply because of their race or religion.

Also, the video is necessarily only a partial record and seems to have missed the violence instigated by the white nationalists, which has been widely reported elsewhere.

Yes I agree with you. I didn't express myself very well. I have no idea why I said the video puts his words into perspective when I meant showed them to be incorrect. A mystery except that I probably wasn't thinking while I was typing and just wanted to say something before I put the link up.

I meant the video shows how wrong Trump's comments are. Trump seemed to say that on each side there were both good and bad people. I think the video makes it very clear that one side is very bad and the other side was just there to express their opposition to extreme bigotry. In other words, there were not any innocent Nazis and there weren't any bigoted anti-Nazis.

[broncofan]

Hating people because they do hateful things isn't morally equivalent to hating people simply because of their race or religion.

This is especially true and has been lost on Trump. The white nationalists came with a message of hate while the counter-protesters were there to express their opposition to bigotry.

The video shows that no innocent person would have happened to find themselves among the white supremacist protesters. Nobody would have walked into that rally on Friday night to protest a statue and thought to themselves "I wonder why some people think this was about white supremacism?". The video did show some counter-protesters losing their temper as you said but the entire confrontation should be blamed on the people who came out to assert their ethnic superiority, not those who opposed them.

Edit: The premise that someone could be innocently protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue is debatable. I personally think the idea of such a protest is probably premised on racist nostalgia. But even if it were possible, the people were chanting like a bunch of unhinged racist idiots.

[filghy2]

Yes I agree with you. I didn't express myself very well. I have no idea why I said the video puts his words into perspective when I meant showed them to be incorrect. A mystery except that I probably wasn't thinking while I was typing and just wanted to say something before I put the link up.

Okay, I see what you meant now. I think I read the bit about putting Trump's words into perspective and subconsciously assumed there was a missing word in the next sentence.

[trish]

Just an aside: Before the advent of graphical interface web-browsers people navigated the internet using a language known as UNIX. Back in those days (pretty much before my time) people interacted with each other on the web in discussion groups which were known as use-groups and/or newsgroups. These appeared in a menu with names like alt.music, alt.astronomy, alt.transsexuals, etc. One group that was dominated by neo-nazis and white supremacists appeared in the listing as alt.right. I'm guessing the current 'movement' can trace it's origin directly to this use-group. What the alt means-I don't know (I suspect it has more to do with UNIX than anything else). Was there an alt.left? Probably, I don't know - but if so I doubt it was populated by militant commies. Alt.left is certainly not a thing in modern politics. I'm guessing there are some people here who are old enough to confirm or correct my fuzzy view of ancient internet history.

[fred41]

I don't think there is an official alt.left. I think it's pretty clear what the pouting imbecile refers to is the Antifa movement.Hard to believe he's that stupid, especially since we know damn well that folks like Bannon probably know all the proper terminology (because of his work with Breitbart...and because of his fevered mutterings to himself in the dead of night). It's far more likely that he calls it an alt.left movement to create a moral equivalence, which of course is ludicrous because, although they can sometimes be a massive thorn in law enforcement's side, the Antifa movement is mostly reactive. With the usual inclusion of anarchists there may be some violence (and certainly property damage) but it is not anywhere near the organizational level of the proactive alt.right hate groups.
You can't compare a loosely organized group of counter protestors, usually well intentioned, mostly non-violent...with this massive alliance of race hate groups.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/u...act-check.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...antifa/537048/

[trish]

Thanks fred.
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Just read the Vox piece on “Barack Obama is to Blame” (linked above in post #22)

I blame myself for the violence in Charlotte. I blame myself for being identifiably brown while performing well and holding down a well paying job in a competitive field. White-supremacists shouldn’t be forced to live in a world where so few people seem to notice how superior they are. Nor should they have to face the evidence that all people have pretty much the same natural potential to think, thrive, work and and love regardless of skin color, facial features or ethnic origins.

The violence was not Obama’s fault in particular: he just happened to be president eight months ago. Any black president could’ve and would have been sited as the spark the lit the tiki-torches in Charlotte last weekend. Of course, it doesn’t help that Obama is a Christian, goes to church and was born an American citizen in the state of Hawaii thereby collapsing the bizarre quantum-superposition of impossible realities in which alt-right groups attempt to build their castles of purist fantasy.
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I wanted to say earlier (partially in answer to filghy2‘s post#17) that I don’t particularly subscribe to the logic of memorializing and celebrating the confederacy in order to placate the ‘two-sides” to promote healing. I’m not even sure that is the actual logic behind the placing of statues and memorials. The “two-sides” reduction, as I said, leaves out a significant third party. But it is a logic that is out there. It’s taught in schools (or at least it was when I went to public school). And to some extent it does have that effect.

There are places (I think) where confederate statues and memorials are appropriate. I grew up very close to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The battlefields there are stuffed with both Union and Confederate memorials celebrating the troops who fought there. When I walk through the place and stand exactly where a Confederate sharpshooter had stationed himself more than a century before, I don’t admire him. I don’t despise him either. I’m filled with a kind of incredulity, a creeping sadness, a profound sense of deep causality and utter chaos. I weep inside for the ghosts that have not yet been laid to rest. It’s a worthwhile experience. Of course the place is always filled with tourists and many from the south (judging by their The South Shall Rise Again bumper stickers) take away an experience that’s entirely different.
______________________

What I don’t need is a statue to remind me of my proper place every time I walk down to my local coffee shop.

‘Should we tear down the statues of George Washington?’ our toddler in chief asks. No, but let’s not erect any more statues of anybody on town squares or in city parks. They’re fucking boring. And for Pete’s sake let’s especially not erect any statues in honor or 45, the fat man is just too disgusting. Who could possibly eat their lunch on a park bench next to that?

[broncofan]

You can't compare a loosely organized group of counter protestors, usually well intentioned, mostly non-violent...with this massive alliance of race hate groups.

Of the counter-protesters you see mostly students and well-intentioned people. But the two groups are not only separated by their objectives but also by the way they conduct themselves away from the protest. The white supremacists frequently talk about the violence of their enemies while they call them savages and use other terms meant to dehumanize them. They say this while they are wearing military clothing and talking about how they might have to use deadly force. To me it's clear that their end game is to bait people into a confrontation and use a disproportionate amount of force, more than is required for self-defense so that they can satisfy their blood-lust.

Before WWII the Nazis constantly discussed how they were more civilized than the Bolsheviks and would never resort to exterminating people. They frequently spoke of how their hand was being forced, and that they would reluctantly use violence if the other side continued to threaten them. They justified Kristallnacht by a single violent act on the other side and used it to commit violent acts against hundreds. You can hear echoes of it in Christopher Cantwell's statements about how he will "kill these people if he has to". What are the chances that his definition of necessity is not strict necessity?

So I guess what I must reluctantly acknowledge is something I consider noise, but which is worth saying. There are a few violent antifa people who come to rallies with their faces covered and try to get in fights with Nazis. If you look at the footage of the rallies, they are probably less than one or two percent of the people there. The other people are students of every ethnic background, religion, and sexual orientation trying to show they will stand against the menace of bigotry. On the side of the Nazis, every single individual was a bigot, used a language that contained inherent violence, used symbols meant to convey violence, and were looking for the opportunity to say violence was necessary.

[Stavros]

A) My recollection is that most rallies and marches have taken place in the US without incident, or with minor incidents. Louis Farrakhan is to many people an extremist, yet I don't recall much violence during his 'Million Man March' a few years ago. Many causes arrange rallies and marches to Washington DC that don't descend into violence, even the Westboro Baptists ridicule and abuse people in public but do not appear to provoke a violent response.

The KKK, and the various small groups associated with that kind of white supremacist politics relish violence, in the case of the KKK because that was their modus operandi in the past. They use violence to provoke but in the case of those seriously intending to take over the state, violence becomes part of a 'strategy of tension' as it was used by both the Red Brigades and the Fascist right in Italy in the 1970s-80s, the intention being to provoke so great a crisis that the Italian state would suspend parliament and rule as a dictatorship. A long term intention of the alt-right could be to make the USA ungovernable in some if not all areas, to provoke precisely the kind of breakdown in conventional politics that Bannon has hinted at, that would polarise Americans into an 'us and them' where the definition of who an American is, and who belongs in America would be at the core of the debate, the assumption being that White Christians made America for themselves, and nobody else.

Thank you, Black people, for the cotton, the music and the sports, but it is now time for you to go home to Africa.

B) The concept of 'left and right' emerged in the period just before and after the French Revolution when supporters of the Monarchy sat on the Right of the National Assembly and the Republicans on the left.
So there you are, George Washington was a lefty.

[Aticus100]

It's bizarre watching from the outside. I mean sure, we have some oddballs and some crackpots in the British political system too but Trump is literally a raving fucking lunatic.
I can't imagine any other political regime in the free world where the combined members of his own party would not have said "right, enoughs enough".
After Comrade Trump fucks off/gets impeached/resignes in a fit of indignation the members of the Republican Party are still going to be career politicians who will need to justify allowing this freak show to continue.
I don't know if the USA's standing on the world stage will ever be viewed the same again.

[trish]

This graph from the Southern Poverty Law Center (reprinted by Mother Jones) tells us something of the original and current intent behind all those confederate memorials.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...erate-statues/