I’d like your thoughts opinions, please, as I’m a bit baffled and conflicted by it all. In no particular order, I’d again wondered about the equivalent of “what if they gave a war…and nobody came…” As in: did the neo-Nazis and Klanspeople even deserve a response by various antifa groups…or might have been preferable to not give any energy to such racist barbarians? In the past, various Klan marches were simply given wide birth, which took the air plum out of their sails. Wish I could remember where those events occurred in that fashion, but…I cannot. Skokie may have been one, as there are loads of David Duke acolytes there, or were. Poking about some hashtags, including #CharltottesvilleKKK, I found this (albeit ‘decent’ whites was a strange word choice and she’s white, never heard of her.):
Is it my white privilege talking, and did the ‘thousands of white nationalists’ (according to some accounts) need to be confronted so directly? Had I been black, and nearby in a state steeped in racism, would I have been there?
By the by, the NY Daily News has a photo gallery up with captions, including one in which the Nazi prick (whatever his ‘legion’ call themselves: Vanguard?) drove through the crowd, and left bodies hurling through the air…with his white supremacist allies with their shields.
And left one young paralegal dead. I’m sure the woman has her own dreaded hashtag now, and the antifa movement has its first martyr, tragically, but goddammit, she’s become a political football already, of course. One said that Heather Heyer was a Bernista! Jeebus. May she rest in peace and power.
Aside from Herr Drumpf having condemned the ‘egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides’, the stoopidest Tweet I’d seen from the political class was this:
But likely there were others… Most on both sides of the aisle called the murder and injuries of 19 others by car ‘domestic terrorism’.
Mr. wd and I’d been discussing some of the ramifications of the event, including the advisability of ‘showing up for the war’, and I’d reckoned the antifas considered themselves heroes. Just as I was shutting down my laptop for the night, he said he was quite sure that he’d spotted my favorite black prophetic gospel preacher in a photo at the Guardian. And he was right; I went to his Twitter account and found he’d re-Tweeted this:
It’s been announced that Chicago will hold a solidarity event tonight, and goddess knows there must be a lot of white supremacists/anti-semites there.
Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer blames President Trump for running the sort of campaign he ran, and reports had it that many of the ‘United Front’ fascists held signs with his mottoes on them. There are also many who are claiming that the police didn’t even try to stop the violence until Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared the city in ‘a state of emergency.
As for the statue of Robert E. Lee in the park that these fuquewads were allegedly defending, how will it be removed now, or will it? Could it have been taken down in the dark of night earlier on? I did see a headline t the effect that the governor of Kentucky said he’ll hurry and take down their offensive Confederate statues right away. [Update]: as it turns out, a judge ruled that it couldn’t be taken down for six months after the April vote by the Charlotte City Council vote to remove it.
But I’d sure appreciate knowing what you’ve been thinking/musing about all of this. Including: would you have gone had it been possible, or to the one in Chi-town?
John Mellencamp painted this; his artistic version of ‘Strange Fruit’; what a soulful creative genius he is.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
christ in a canary cage.
morning edit: from pro publica: ‘Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville’; State police and National Guardsmen watched passively for hours as self-proclaimed Nazis engaged in street battles with counter-protesters. ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson was on the scene and reports that the authorities turned the streets of the city over to groups of militiamen armed with assault rifles.; ProPublica, Aug. 12, 2017
last evening the twittersphere began to reflect on how, for so many libruls, anti-fascism seems to stop at the waters edge.
these two tweets note that theme:
Let’s be clear what white nationalism is in the United States; it is primarily an anti-black movement seeking to restore slavery in order remove competition from “free labor”. Yes, kinda backwards to the “free labor” argument against slavery 150 years ago. It is rooted in the 50-year-long reaction against desegregation of the schools and housing (a resistance that has been more tolerated outside the South than within the South) and a 150-year-long resistance against the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that were forced on the 11 rebel states as their price for rejoining the Union and ending occupation by the US Army. All of the Third Reich nostalgia and KKK regalia are overlaid on that mid-20th century reversal, which was rubbed in with the popular Presidency of Barack Obama. (Popular enough to win two terms.)
Let’s be clear that in 1968 the Republican Party saw that it could win against Hubert Humphrey by mobilizing white nationalist jingoism as part of its coalition behind Richard Nixon. And that a decade later the “religious right” that Ralph Reed brokered to back Ronald Reagan was built first around defending segregation academies (“Christian schools”) against IRS taxation as non-religious and uniting conservative evangelicals (and their Christian schools) and conservative Catholics (and their parochial schools) behind the notion of school choice, which took a back seat to an loud anti-abortion movement. White nationalism has been incubated for 40 years in the evangelical churches of the networks Rev. Criswell (First Baptist, Dallas TX), Rev. Jerry Falwell (Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lynchburg VA), and the Southern Baptist Convention that was left after the 1978 coup that politiicized it and returned it to a Jim Crow position on racial issues. That faction of the Republican Party nationalized the pro-segregation reaction that had been what most Americans hated most about the South. Thus, you have post-coup Southern Baptist congregations in the Pacific Northwest (certainly around Yakima WA) and Southern California and some of the Ohio Valley Midwest. And those have carried neo-Confederate attitudes about race.
Let’s be clear that World War II was not embraced patriotically by all Americans. Pre-war, there was a significant American Nazi movement, drawing from German immigrant areas (which had been pro-German prior to 1917 as well), anti-communist Catholic and Protestant bunch of fascist movements, and the America First movement, whose poster children were Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Those people did not disappear although many might have changed their views about Nazism and right-wing politics after the extent of the Holocaust was reported, something that did not register in full until the early 1960s. Count one or two generations from 1939 and you have the ages of a lot of the people who are attracted to the Alt-Right movement.
Let’s be clear that “Nazis” have be typed as “the worst of the bad” in American culture for fifty years, and that for some folks, that is an attractive identification manifested in “Nazi” motorcycle helmets, collection of Nazi memorabilia, and continuing in print of Mein Kampf. And that under the proper social conditions the spores become the meme again.
Those social conditions recurred in the neoliberal Presidencies following Richard Nixon’s election. Austerity (conservatism) led to greater inequality, which allowed more money to be pumped to politicians, which broadened the support for austerity and so on until the Trump electoral college win short-circuited the process. Welcome to the 1930s all over again.
By the time this movement is done (and it will be) likely a lot of the statuary propaganda of the continued life of the Confederacy will be gone and most of the symbols of the Confederacy discredited. What goes down with European fascist and Nazi symbolism will depend on how soon European countries abandon neoliberalism.
That statuary propaganda was erected between 1880 and 1910, the literary propaganda was unleashed with The Birth of a Nation. Those who seek the perpetuation of discrimination are pulling out the same media stops again. Those who suffered from Jim Crow and lynching and 100 years of post-slavery discrimination are opposing them and have more of the money power to do it. The culture war is coming to a head, pushed from the desperation of those who feel they lost 50 years ago. There is a growing consensus among the whites and blacks who do work together in Southern cities that we must face the reality of our history and not the “resurrection of the Confederacy” mythology that has been propagated in jest and then in seriousness for the past 50 years. The years from 1875 until 1965 were a PTB-sponsored terrorist war in the South and have seen outbreaks during “conservative” presidents again. Just a reminder: 53 years ago, three men were murdered for registering people to vote.
Of course, the white PTB have inflamed the situaton with the spin they have put on affirmative action (“Sorry, fella, we got to hire a black female because of affirmative action” when the employer was just too cowardly to tell a aggressive white guy that he didn’t like his attitude.) Or the PTB who wanted to keep the issue hot politically. And the way that they have constructed the public-school-to-prison pipeline to disqualify minorities from voting.
Poor Po-po’s were outgunned by a small number of Alt-Right Neo-Nazi and KKK guys in costumes. Thus the strategic retreat, according to the local PTB. No machine guns on trucks, not an armored personnel vehicle in sight. No riot gear and no pre-emptive arrests of Alt-Right “terrorists”. And the demonstrators with permits were allowed the privilege of pushing back the police line, a privilege of “neatly dressed short-haired white boys.”
People who counter-demonstrate against KKK groups tend to try to turn out enough people to overwhelm the demonstration and draw the news media into to seeing that the groups don’t represent local sentiment, which generally they don’t. because they are targeting liberal college towns.
People who counter-demonstrate against neo-Nazi groups tend to expect and prepare to deliver more aggresssive tactics. Those two diverse tactics can collide when the town is too small (as Charlottesville is) to separate tactics in time and space. Or when discipline of one of the several groups degenerates into seeking blood. People who decide to show up in counter-protest need to understand that some of the groups see the confrontation as a battle of will and not as a competition in the market of ideas.
Shaun King of the NY Daily News has been asking for identification of those Alt-Right activists who committed crimes during the march. When he gets identification, he notifies employers if they can be identified or colleges and universities where these folks attend. It is up to those institutions as to whether they want to be associated with the before manifested at the march. This is reversing a tactic often used against liberal and left-wing groups.
So far there are some interesting “halfway” groups like Oathkeepers who have been spotted at Charlottesville. Also a guy with an 82nd Airborne hat.
I think there is for now some determination among those who have worked to end the Jim Crow mindset in the South that now is the time to take down the institutions and symbols that preserve the legitimacy of discrimination. Many of the flags have already gone. The redundant statuary and the celebration of the leaders of the terrorism — Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman, Nathan Bedford-Forrest, PTG Beauregard, — will also go. Some remembrances of the leaders of the brief period of freedom during Reconstruction (1865-1875) will go up in their place and be greeted with the accusation of “carpetbaggers, negroes, and scalawags”. Some in fact were very fine and underrated leaders in a very tough time. Some of the officers assigned to the Freedmen’s bureau will likely be commemorated as well. The period of Reconstruction has been suppressed from national view for quite some time. I believe that even Ken Burns will be doing a retrospective that has already drawn animosity (some Southerners hated his Civil War for telling them that they were fools to go to war and fools to pretend that they did not lose the war.
This culture war has to do with rooting out the lies that have been told about slavery and the Civil War in the South and in an accommodating nation. To deal with institutional racism, the big lie of the Southern Cause has to be faced. And the reality of of all war that they are “rich men’s wars and poor men’s fights” has to come to the surface.
This is likely the central issue of political life here and releases so many other issues. I could write much more, but won’t right now. Except this. I lost three ancestors who were drafted by the Confederacy in late 1863. All from disease. Most did not last a year. One died in the Elmira NY prisoner of war camp after transportation from Spotsylvania Court House. I know none of their opinions about the war. None of those owned a slave at all; often they were the poorer siblings. But for those who came back, the Civil War was the major event in their life and the PTB could use that celebration of veterans to bind them closer to conservative Democratic politics. That strain of politics is what switched to the Republican Party between 1964 and 1968, a historical fact that Republicans are now forgetting. Enough marchers in Charlottesville were Young Republican and College Republican leaders of one stripe or another to make the point that it is the Republicans who benefit from a permanent political majority of people like the Alt-Right; thus Steve Bannon as a White House adviser. And the quick and easy way to get that voting majority is close off naturalization and disqualify minorities from voting. Interesting that focus for a situation in which voting for lefties means so little (it actually doesn’t make anything “more left”). Like it or not, elections are central in one strategy for our future, if only to legitimize seizure of power.
thanks for all the historical narrative and reminders, and one of the things i hadn’t known was your history on “…World War II was not embraced patriotically by all Americans.”, and what followed. and with this: “People who counter-demonstrate against KKK groups tend to try to turn out enough people to overwhelm the demonstration and draw the news media into to seeing that the groups don’t represent local sentiment, which generally they don’t. because they are targeting liberal college towns.”…are you indicting that ‘showing up for the war’ was warranted?
i’d have to agree that some of the photos i’ve seen, not all counter-demonstrators were unarmed and peaceful. but i do emphatically believe that obama’s neolberalism and wars were directly related to all this, as well as how his DoJ didn’t stop the war by police on the citizenry, esp. unarmed blacks, browns, and mentally ill among the underclass.
now i’d just started reading eric london’s piece at wsws, and he named bannon an a couple others in T’s administration as directly complicit. let me finish, and i might feature a bit of it. he, like you and many others who come here, know far more of who the players are, and what they contribute. but scanning, i believe he’d said that ‘anti-immigration’ was a biggie among the klansmen, et. al., and quoted mcAuliffe’s hideous claims about the po-po.
more later for me, too; chores are callin’ my name. oh, and you might want to look at pat lang’s take on charlottesville, as in: wtf?
again, for now: eric london at wsws.org, some snippets:
“In the past three weeks, Trump and his advisors—Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka—have escalated the administration’s efforts to whip up support among fascist elements who form the core of his political base.
Trump has attacked Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, challenging one of the most powerful legislative figures in his own party. He has made bellicose threats that the US is “locked and loaded” for war against North Korea and appealed to his billionaire constituents as well as the police, immigration and border officials, and the military to support his “tough on crime” and anti-immigrant policies.”
“Virginia’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, responded to criticism by stating on Sunday that the police did “great work” over the weekend. McAuliffe, former head of the Democratic National Committee and prominent fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, said the murder of counter-protestor Heather Heyer could not have been prevented. “You can’t stop some crazy guy who came here from Ohio and used his car as a weapon,” he declared.
one item on his ‘past 3 week timeline’ bullet points unknown to me:
“On August 8, White House aide Sebastian Gorka, who is a member of the Hungarian fascist Order of the Vitez, said the fascist bombing of a mosque near Minneapolis, Minnesota might be a “fake hate crime” that was “propagated by the left.” The following day, Gorka told Breitbart News that “white supremacists” are not “the problem,” and that terrorism is the product of Islam.”
later: “This weekend’s Nazi violence is stamped with the political trademark of Bannon, Miller and Gorka. Nazi demonstration leader Jason Kessler acknowledged after the event that organizers had “networked with law enforcement” for months in advance of the “Unite the Right” provocation.
Kessler also met with several Republican officials in preparation for the Nazi mobilization. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Kessler held a press conference with Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Corey Stewart to denounce Charlottesville’s plans to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.”
i’d been looking for a definition of ‘alt right’ and found: van newkirk at the atlantic objecting to the white-washing terms of the political class and media, taking richard spencer’s self-labeling ‘white nationalists’ as gospel’, rather than calling it ‘white supremacy’ in avoidance.
“But the protesters, which now boast the endorsement of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the participation of Klansmen and Neo-Nazis—some armed and chanting “Jews will not replace us”—appear to be exactly the kind of mob that the term “white supremacist” evokes in its most commonly used connotation.
The disconnect in terms is understandable. It’s one thing to see the Red Shirts and Klansmen as bogeymen of the past and imagine their pogroms and mob clashes in the abstract. It’s another to see them manifest suddenly in violent strength, even if one subscribes to the idea that white supremacy runs deeper than caricatures of hooded rogues, and that its long tendrils have always animated politics and political violence in America.”
but the splc says the term was coined by spencer as well, so…i dunno. some use it to describe all trump voters, apologists, etc. kinda fuzzy term by now, i reckon, as he walks wider, but ‘abjuring political correctness’ rang a bell’, lol.
and yep, i’d seen shaun king’s ‘identify this man’ tweets. i’d even looked at his account for the killings by police diary, an was pretty bored that he and so many others…only rail about trump, never, ever Ds.
addressing your drafted relations who died in the war, and the need for twigging to the fact that all wars are…rich man’s wars…the late, brilliant john trudell’s ‘rich man’s war’:
and yes, a movement to end the ruthless subjugation of the cheap labor classes and people of color needs to be global. including prison labor, of course.
Hello Tarheel Dem,
I’d like to hear more about your take on the Oathkeepers. I remember first hearing about them, I think, during the Bush Administration and they sounded pretty good to me at that time, what with the Patriot Act and “free speech” zones and indefinite detention. As I understood they were a group of police and mitary who. pledged to refuse to carry out unconstitutional orders. But I’ve also heard them denounced on the left as an authoritarian paramilitary group.
I realize now that I should have posted my earlier comment here than on the Ta-Nehisi Coates thread. Namely my uncertainty in how to address the latest surge of white supremacy. (Not racism or fascism itself, which unambiguously horrifies me). But I’ve seen persuasive arguments from quite a few perspectives on the appropriate response. Wendye sums it up nicely when she asks, “do we show up for the war or not?” I can see both sides. On one hand, I don’t want to be one of the “Good Germans” who did nothing in what appears to be a growing tide of noxious evil. On the other hand, is opposing them so fiercely just feeding into the madness and would starving them of the attention they so desperately crave be a more effective strategy in this place and time?
I think I mentioned John Spritzler as a writer I recently discovered and how much his seemingly fresh and original perspectives on an old topic were making me think he’s a much better antiracist advocate than Tim Wise, especially in light of the latter’s descent into naked anti-Russian chauvinism. He echoed something you or wd said about affirmative action and took it a bit further: he said that Nixon deliberately created affirmative action as a divide-and-rule tactic as part of his Southern Strategy. I don’t know if he has any evidence or whether this is pure speculation, but it seems to square with some Nixon tapes when he’s telling his speechwriter to “put something in there for the j*gs”.
Mr. Spritzler also wrote an article called, “Is it a Privilege to Not be Discriminated Against?” in which he basically agrees with the concept we call “white privilege” while arguing that this is a terrible, divisive term that is bpund to cause resentment and misunderstanding by poor whites who certainly don’t feel privileged, making them more receptive to right wing propaganda that the entire country is a place where blacks and latina/os are magically given all the good jobs while they suffer. Similar to Ta-nehisi taking John Calhoun’s words equating poor and rich whites with aristocracy at face value. Given Wise’s descent into despicable partisan chauvinism, could there be lurking behind the “establishment” antiracist narrative an element of a Gladio-Soros-color revolutionesque (ouch, that unwieldy phrase is an earsore) strategy of tension and could spectacles like Charlottesville be designed to distract from class issues and “humanitarian” warmongering?
Warning: this is about to degenerate into rambling, but I have so many thoughts on this subject that relate to other thoughts and other issues, so I better conclude for now. My parents were very conservative Kennedy Democrats who later became Reaganites and (ugh) in their declining years Rush Limbaugh fans. They supported the civil rights movement but thought affirmative action was wrong. At face value their views seemed to make sense, but teenage me sensed something was wrong with that argument. Growing up in an all-white suburb and not meeting a black person till I was 13 or so, I knew nothing of the daily discrimination black people faced everywhere. I, like many others, was propagandized into thinking it was a Southern thing that magically disappeared with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Still, I have supported affirmative action all my life and still do, but after Spritzler’s article I’m starting to question this. Tim Wise was the first writer I read who went into the actual statistics of the massive amounts of wealth transferred to create the white middle class, with New Deal programs like FHA and the GI bill that wete available only to whites. Redlining. To say nothing of massive intergenerational wealth created through slavery, the Homestead Act, etc. In other words, 400 years of affirmative action for white people. But though I admired Tim Wise and his views resonated with me, there was an unctuousness that seemed to permeate the very cadence of his sentence structure I began to find unsettling and annoying.
When I started reading black authors and bloggers, mostly bloggers, everyone from Julian Abagond to Brothawolf to Diary of a Negress to Frances Cress Welsing, I discovered to my surprise that many of these people disdain him. They say he views his work as a nine-to-five job rather than a calling, lives in an expensive mansion, only superficially criticizes mainstream librul democrats because that’s where the money comes from, and refuses to share his wealth, saying it “wouldn’t be fair to his daughters” (I’m a little ambivalent on this last one, but the rest seem to me valid criticisms).
Then there’s Paul Craig Roberts. I have a lot of respect for him and agree with him on many things, but I’ve been more than a little troubled with his views on race. I agree that identity politics is used as a smokescreen by establishment liberals to distract from the real racist injustices like mass incarceration, school-to-prison pipeline, and environmental racism, to say nothing of endless brutal terrorist war waged against black and brown people the world over (and some whites, see Ukraine and Yugoslavia). But today he veered closer to defending white supremacy than I’ve ever seen him, coming very close to defending the Klan and giving a complete opposite version of reconstruction which I find much less plausible than your view, Tarheel Dem, though I know little on the subject. He relies on Thomas DiLorenzo, who I’ve read a little.
My sense is that PCR is not a bigot, but he may be an unconscious racist, especially given that he grew up in the South at a certain time and place, and must have been steeped in the narrative Southerners were given about Reconstruction. I wonder if you’ve ever read Ferrol Sams. He’s a southern writer, much like Flannery O’Connor, though he came from a class of landowners and became a doctor. His family seemed to be decent folk who believed in segregation but seemed to minimally exploit their black farmhands, paid them well, paid for their medical care when they got hurt, disdained overt bigots and Klansmen, etc. It’s pretty clear to me Sams iz neither a bigot nor a racist, and he certainly had a complex relationship with his kind and respectable, yet alcoholic and philandering father.
And then Roberts goes on to condemn in harsh terms the Native American genocide that was happening aeound the same time, seemingly giving credence to the Soros/ color revolution/Gladio narrative of the Union troops of the period. He says there were entire towns in the South where the white women hid in the woods because of Federal officials encouraging the worst elements to rape the women, looting carpetbaggers, etc. As a lifelong antiracist, I instinctively disbelieve this, but obviously you know much more about this than me, and I appreciate your eloquent post. I intend to educate myself on the subject.
I wonder if, given what paradigms Roberts’ upbringing may or may not have inculcated in him, he needs to believe DiLorenzo’s narrative in the same way that I “need” to disbelieve conspiracy theories about the Beatles being social engineering projects of the infamous Tavistock without looking at the evidence?
This brings me to my recent meditations on the relationship between the personal, the political, and the spiritual, which I will not address here, as I’ve already rambled all over the prairie here, enough to kill all the prairie dogs in about 37 states. I hope some of this made sense to someone. I have no answers at this point. But I have lots of questions.
It occurred to me that a better analogy is maybe Roberts “needs” to believe DiLorenzo’s view of Lincoln and Reconstruction similar to my unwillingness to see Lincoln as a totally bad guy, given that I grew up in Illinois where “Land of Lincoln” is the state motto and every eighth grader had to make the class pilgrimage to Springfield and the tiny log cabin in New Salem where he was born (I learned many years later it was a replica). I mean, some of those Confederate apologists have a point that every other Western country managed to abolish slavery without killing so many women and children, and the Emancipation proclamation didn’t free any slaves because it only applied to the South which wasn’t under his control, but I sense disingenuousness in much of their narrative, though I know little on the subject except the (presumed) half-truths we all learned in school.
(Sorry if this is in the wrong place. My phone does funny things when I post replies sometimes)
RE: Patrick Lang
Cvillereader likely is pretty centrist of Charlottesville opinion.
Lang is an old Cold Warrior; not gonna be gentle on the left.
But on this Lang is on target:
“Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate for governor is not running well in the polls. I suspect that McCauliffe is looking to firm up their base and make himself look good to the left. pl”
Having gotten another Blue Dog through the governor’s primary, Dems are fretting about their chances. Election is 3 months away.
McAuliffe is in a real bind. And if Virginia and New Jersey don’t give them some good news this November, the Donkey Funk is going to drag into 2018.
I said last year was an existential election for one party or the other. I was wrong. It was an existential election for both parties, and both parties lost. What Trump is trying to do is put a happy face on that loss and make sure that they can continue to hold power. What Clinton did was to deligitimize Trump’s win (with an asterisk) to prevent a juggernaut effect like the one that followed Reagan and W. With whatever abuse of the truth, the Resistance TM seems to have ground the juggernaut into the ground. Watch out for war or national emergency and law’n order as the Republican counteroffensive.
Neither party has legitimacy at the moment, and neither has the power to govern. Dangerous times.
that’s not what i’d read. some bits include:
“The intention of the antifa left and its Democratic Party and media wings seems clear. It is to silence through shaming, ostracism, loss of income and perhaps eventually legally anyone who does not submit to be assimilated into a new collective consciousness in an America that believes itself to be a sinner country. pl
A note on comments: Criticism of US policy is acceptable on SST. Condemnation of the US as a sinner nation is not and will not be published.”
and of course the US is ‘a sinner nation’ built on the backs of slave labor and genocide.
but again, imo, dems are not ‘the left’. centrist might be accurate, but they keep on ratcheting right. see their: ‘a better deal’. better than…their old deal? oh, no, just more faux-populist. but i agree that what all this might led to is emergency rule, even by the military. but again, i’m just not sure what resistance™ definition is to the citizenry at large. are you thinking linda sarsour’s women’s marches?
on edit: or are you referring to the raft of solidarity w/ charlottesville across the nation? sanctuary cities?
Was actually referring to that one Charlottesville reader of Sic Semper Tyrannis (the motto of Virginia, btw).
Lang is not going to be happy with “the left” or Democrats shaming his Virginia buddies. And, he is going to take a Cold War frame to any “left”.
Dems are not the left — never have been. But often have been in coalitions with a part of the left. For the past 30 years, they have proved unreliable coalition members.
Never totally reliable, even FDR. Read the history of the Southern Textile Workers strikes of 1934-1938. And of course the Dixiecrat governors were quick to let loose the Home Guard on biracial unions.
the “left”, the public left, aka liberal, aka donkeys, court right-wing, authoritarian, fascistic, racist crap all the time. how did trump, in part, get to be where he is now? cuz of Bubba. cuz of CNN & MSNBC. the dems & their media stenographers are happy to promote the awful scarefulitude of the trump’s neo-nazis, which trump seems happy to provide. I am not per se saying all this is coordinated b/n the two parties, though it might be. but as the dems are eager to go all Jackson Pollack all over Trump w/the Putin brush & bucket, they will do the same w/ Nazis et al in order to scare sheep back into the donkey’s animal farm abattoir. Terry “Jimmy Buffett” Macauliffe? I mean fuck. how many mentally ill/retarded or just innocent people does a guy to have execute to get some fascist street cred around here? the wsws article asserts that Charlotte’s congresscretin was cavorting w/neo-N Kessler.
it’s b/c the donkeys don’t care about inflating or not a threat but only about the party brand, they invite more neo-N public activity. they will continue to do so. Or are the dems against war w/Russia, Korea, Syria and VZ? did they put neo-N’s in power in Ukraine? did the US support the fascist BJP party in India under Obama? will the dems’ fake anti-neo-N rhetoric change one damn about the deportation, incarceration, police, austerity, etc., etc. policies of Trump? nope. hell, we’ll put the next Hitler in office in the name of fighting off Hitler. who better to fight Adolph than his twin?
anyway, I had this guy tell me something: he’d lost his hand at the wrist in a chicken gutter or whatever, it was on the job, but he was refused disability (ok, I don’t know if all this story is true or not. but if that lost hand was fake, that was a hella magic trick.) he was told he could get on disability (SS, natch) if he filed for mental incompetence. he refused cuz he said those people on disability for reasons of mental health will be the first to be dumped into the FEMA camps, for their own good. and it’ll be all legal. cuz they already committed themselves. (i’m not sure, even if he’s right, he still shouldn’t have signed off on mental incompetence in order to get some cash out of uncle. they’ll screw this guy over in either case, so why not? but hey: principles, or food?)
paranoid? crazy? he also said one possible course of action for the federales w/their program of inducing popular mass addiction to meth, etc., is to suddenly remove the supply and watch people go nuts. in that state, they are easily programmable & will do anything. more paranoia? (is that why we get movies like The Purge & the Purge: Ex-Lax Rampage? zombie flicks?)
maybe there’s some overstatement here or assumption of a super duper grand conspiracy w/uncle in control of every piece on the board of 11th dimensional interspatial chess w/5 or 40 other key players…maybe. but, you know, it’s not less stupid than the milquetoast lazy ass complacent, self-justifying self-blinding ignorance of a middle class soccer dad or suburban suzie 6 pack. at least he knows something is deeply wrong. you can’t even get the soccer family to notice this guy is missing a hand.
got it just right on esp. obama’s support for nazis and racists, ghost of tom joad, and yes: modi. is bibi’s likkud party racist? but oh, yes, obomba tweeted some of mandala’s quotes like ‘no child is born hating’ and some of those. but his doj? riiiight, how many back and brown people were killed and not even federal prosecuted under civil rights violations. of course, dems will remember the boes he threw walking out the door on ‘federal prison reform’ and such. did he pardon leonard peltier? dah! okay, at least chelsea manning…finally.
and the Ds love the wahabbists, hate the shiia still, as does the trumpeter. and on VZ, syria, ukraine, just marching the playbook along the same road, up a few notches. ‘providing deadly weapons to ukraine’ now, as if the other weapons of war were simply defensive. partners in peace and torture w/ the uae, yada, yada.
on edit: https://twitter.com/cordeliers/status/897446652633423873
but your missing hand friend might be right, but it seems if he could see a doc, if he could be diagnosed w/ any other of myriad conditions, he could just maybe score some SSI bucks.
our daughter emailed me coverage of another ‘officer involved killing in c springs a bit ago. oh, yes, killed for shoplifting…another one. sure, they’ll throw down a weapon. ‘under investigation, name not released, deputy’s name not released’ boilerplate. but at least the EPCS is busy fightin’ real crime!
telesur is reporting that mike pense shot his mouth off from colombia about military actin to restore democracy™ in VZ, and that herr cheeto is thinking about pardoning AZ pink underwear racist, fascist joe arpaio, ‘america’s favorite sheriff’. they pointed out the thousands of missing students in mexico pena nieto hasn’t ‘found’ yet.
on edit: two more things. one is on ‘giving a war, but nobody came’, would that have been a better response?’, and the other is that with the unrelenting immiseration of the lower what, 85% globally now, including your one-handed friend and fellow streetbillies, i keep hearing this in my head. the man who posted it deleted 2 minutes of patti’s having forgotten the lyrics, and she delivers it with such low-key, understated passion that she fair’ blew me away. fancy, it came out in 1962 on ‘freewheelin’. the audience’s faces: so many statues, a few blinked-back tears. fancy the high pathos and poignancy the pedal steel brings to …oh, my stars.
ha ha. direct action. but that c’ville robert. e lee one wasn’t gonna just fold over like a cheap pup tent, was it? still….with enuff people power…(i was about to say ‘they pyramids were built, but: slave power, that was.) ;-)
for posterity on a most sincerely…dead thread: ‘America’s pro-Nazi president defends Charlottesville rampage’, wsws.org
“In response to shouted questions from reporters about his initial response to the fascist rampage, Trump repeatedly accused both sides of violence. “You had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” he said. “No one wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now: You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.” As the exchanges continued, Trump’s bias in favor of the fascists became more explicit. He twice cited Friday night’s KKK-like torch parade through the campus as proof that many if not most of the “Unite the Right” demonstrators were simply seeking to peacefully protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. In fact, they were shouting slogans such as “Jews will not replace us!” By the end of the press conference, Trump was suggesting that the counter-protesters, whom he called the “alt-left,” were the aggressors, because, unlike the fascists, they did not have a permit. “But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest,” he said. “Because I don’t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”
so…i looked for info on the permits, and i dunno that the wiki’s correct, but it says:
“Kessler, the organizer of the “Unite the Right” rally, applied for a permit from the City of Charlottesville to hold the event at Emancipation Park. The week before the event, the Charlottesville government—including Mayor Michael Signer, city council, City Manager Maurice Jones, and Police Chief Al Thomas—said they would approve the permit only if the event was moved to the larger McIntire Park. The city’s leaders cited safety concerns and logistical issues associated with holding the event at Emancipation Park, adjacent to the densely populated Downtown Mall. Kessler refused to agree to relocate the rally, but the City relocated the rally anyway, a decision praised by the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville. Kessler, supported by the Rutherford Institute and the ACLU, sued the City of Charlottesville and Jones on First Amendment grounds in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. On the evening of August 11, the night before the rally, Judge Glen E. Conrad granted an emergency injunction declaring that the Unite the Right rally could go forward. Conrad granted the injunction for the rally citing several factors: that Emancipation Park was the location for the statue of Robert E. Lee that was planned to be taken down and that the rally was partially for, that resources would be needed at both parks for both the rally and the counterprotestors, and that the move to McIntire Park was due to the viewpoints of the organizer and not the safety of the public.
The court’s decision was praised by the ACLU. Mayor Signer issued a statement saying: “While the City is disappointed by tonight’s ruling, we will abide by the judge’s decision. … Chief Thomas, his team and the hundreds of law enforcement officials in our City will now turn their full attention to protecting the Downtown area during tomorrow’s events.” Prior to the rally, counterprotesters obtained permit(s) to gather at McGuffey Park and Justice Park.”
okay: antifas/blm not permitted to protest at emancipation park, but good grief; is the judge an idiot? after the earlier unite the right and counter-protestors (ahem) experiences, might he not have anticipated more mayhem and violence? and sorry, mayor signer, your police were worse than useless, and mcAuliffe is the boss of the state police who stood back and watched the nazis smash people.
now this fellah, Phil Wilayto, of the virginia defenders, provides his long narrative of the events, but seems to believe that *this is the time* to smash the burgeoning white supremacist movement in the states once and for all. he said that among the various affinity groups: ‘The Democratic Socialists of America had a large turnout’, which was what had prompted many to condemn them for their socialism stopping at the water’s edge.
“Progressive forces need to take this threat very seriously and take practical steps to prepare for the increasingly difficult struggles ahead. The only other option will be retreat.”
Lots of ripples. Baltimore’s mayor pre-emptively took down Confederate statues without announcement in the middle of the night.
Yes, on Durham’s minor Confederate statue being toppled like the US does in regime change coups. Democratic sheriff was minimal in his charges–one self-confessed participant with two felony charges. Police and sheriff’s department were minimally involved. Was one of the two statues in front of the “old” Court House (early 1900s).
The “Alt-Right” action in Charlottesville on the statue in “Emancipation Park’ might be a rear-guard action after all. Lexington is accelerating its actions. There might be other spontaneous take-downs. There is a huge amount of frustration with the continuation of the institutions of discrimination and segregation in this little corner of the progressive universe.
Watch for other action re: Nathan Bedford-Forrest, PTG Beauregard, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman, other leaders of the post-Civil War terrorist war to preserve white supremacy. And a reduction in the number of statues to Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Also watch more shaming and job-killing. Those who have tried to organize desegregation and union causes have gotten properly fed up with lefties being impoverished and righties getting six-figure contracts. Pat Lang might not think it properly American, but advocacy for discrimination is not theoretical freedom of speech. Businesses are associating their reputation with their employees.
Fifty years ago was the time to smash the white supremacy movement once and for all, but Nixon needed them to strip Democrats of Southerners and urban ethnic Catholic union members. Yes, now is the time to bust white supremacy once and for all in the US. It has been one of the pillars of much of the powers that be when economic push comes to shove–a three-hundred-fifty year-long flim-flam.
Hello wd and all…
Video:
good on their solidarity, marym. thanks. ;-)
hold those thoughts! i’ll be back in a bit. mr. wd’s father blessedly crossed over…transitioned…died…last night, and family communications are flying over things to do next. he lived for 99 years; fancy that. (wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, arrggh.)
The young ‘uns around here are OK. Some powerful jail support after toppling the monument to the “boys in gray”.
i only have time for a few raw links, sorry.
b at moa thinks the confederate statues should stay up, because: they’re reminders of our history. an internal link goes to a few other statues that have been defaced; seems as though i’ve misplaced it. absolutism will be pretty large issue soon. oh, and i did have this ending of b’s copied down: “That may be the intend (sic) of some people behind the current quarrel. The radicalization on opposing sides may have a purpose. The Trump camp can use it to cover up its plans to further disenfranchise they (sic) people. The fake Clintonian “resistance” needs these cultural disputes to cover for its lack of political resistance to Trump’s plans.”
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/08/smashing-statues-seeding-strife.html
the aclu is receiving some heavy criticism for appealing to the judge to allow their rally; that’s a good thing, considering. but free speech as absolute will become quite an issue as their rallies and counter-protest happen, as many are calling for. i still think that not counter-protesting at the same locale would save a hella lot of potential violence…especially for those who don’t want to have it foist upon them. some do, obviously, leaving me to muse about whether this might act as a subconscious wish to be war heroes for a number of them. guess we’ll see, but none of you have answered my question: would you have gone to charlottesville?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/aclu-free-speech-white-supremacy/index.html
maybe later; i’m pretty burned out.
another good voice for antifa shouldn’t stop at the water’s edge: ‘The Story of Charlottesville was Written in Blood in the Ukraine’ by BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka, a few snippets.
“While I recognize the danger of the violent right-wing movement, I am more concerned with the right-wing policies that are being enacted into law and policy by both Democrats and Republicans.”
Looking at white supremacy from this wider-angle lens, it is clear that support for the Israeli state, war on North Korea, mass black and brown incarceration, a grotesque military budget, urban gentrification, the subversion of Venezuela, the state war on black and brown people of all genders, and the war on reproductive rights are among the many manifestations of an entrenched right-wing ideology that cannot be conveniently and opportunistically reduced to Trump and the Republicans.
What about the recent unanimous resolution by both Houses of Congress in support of Israel and criticism of the United Nations for its alleged anti-Israeli bias? Would that qualify as racist and right-wing, since it appears that the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians is of no concern? And what about the vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to go even beyond the obscene proposal of the Trump administration to increase the military budget by $54 billion dollars and instead add a whopping $74 billion to the Pentagon budget?
And when we understand that white supremacy is not just what is in someone’s head but is also a global structure with ongoing, devastating impacts on the people of the world, we will understand better why some of us have said that in order for the world to live, the 525-year-old white supremacist Pan-European, colonial/capitalist patriarchy must die.”
as far as the aclu quotes on the cnn link, suing for a permit really isn’t about ‘discussion’ and the marketplace of ideas, is it? milo at berkeley may have qualified for that, as he was to just talk, wasn’t he? what would the ghost of mario savio advised? ;-)
but hey, aclu and judge, Brandenburg v. Ohio might have offered some clues: ‘The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
now there will be more, for instance ‘Virginia Flaggers plan rally in front of Richmond’s Lee statue on September 16’ not yet permitted, but will antifas show up in droves and do battle, or create their own rallies and protests? the Phil Wilayto fellah i’d linked to seemed more than willing to fight in the streets.
Locally, dozens of antifa and sympathizers showed up at the Sheriff’s Department saying “Arrest me too”. The black DA is cautioning patience while the white Democratic sheriff is in one heck of a political pickle.
No one’s arguing for restoring the statue.
I’m not sure that b understands the way that the Confederacy has been talked about for 150 years, the American contrast with the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II, or the implications of parroting the Russian line on this issue. Too much overemphasis on how the Democrats have been playing the politics of this (hamhandedly) and too little understanding of who these folks actually are.
The ACLU finally realized that people begging for freedom of speech show up with firearms to deny that freedom from other people. Chalk one up for antifa’s “punch a Nazi” (as opposed to “shoot a Nazi”) stance. That stance is based on the notion that bloodying a bully causes them to reconsider bullying.
Antifa also helped themselves by acting as defenders of third party (clergy in this case) counter-protesters who were about to be physically run down by the Alt-Right unity forces. The Democratic establlishment equivalence by talking down the Alt-Left just fell on some hard times.
hmmmm. then only the one man’s been arrested so far, others…pending till it blows over, perhaps?
oh, please don’t think i was endorsing b’s point of view. it’s much like herr trump’s of course, and he did get plenty of pushback in comments. also, if you’re referring to the cnn-aclu piece, *some* aclu affiliates and members realize that their lawsuit was wrong as rain. but if i get your drift, you kinda liked the violence from the antifas as it was ‘defensive’? i will say that whoever shows up from this point onward will be choosing to engage, though, so at least that’s clear.
as i was waking up from a brief siesta, i clicked into rt, saw that john kelly has fired steve bannon, then clicked into ian welsh’s site to find this. given the first 17 comments, i guess i should be able to figure out who the collective ‘we’ is, yes? antifa is alt-left, then? oh, these labels do vex me so…
oh, and i’ve finally discovered the reason for my body’s antipathy for pure coconut oil: i’m allergic. put some on my face and it blew up like a red apple, hives, i reckon. lasted for days. ;-)
This is one thing I can agree on 100%. I read similar sentiments on Tarzie’s site. These people are hell bent on violent suppression of others’ speech. This is something far beyond a desire fir rational debate, they were out for blood. And the heavily militarized police were “outgunned?” What a contrast to Ferguson!
(though I have to admit I cringed at Tarzie’s citation of “free speech zones” as precedent. I would have hoped that the abomination of caging people up like animals miles from the object of the protest would have been declared unconstitutional by now. Shielding the powerful from the discomfort of being the subject of mass protest defeats the whole purpose of protest. Though in all fairness to Tarzie, he may have a different vision of what “free speech zones” might look like.
And say what you will about antifa, Cornel West is not the first person to say that antifa saved their lives in the face of Nazi aggression. As long as it’s purely defensive and they remain vigilant towards provocateurs who may be in their midst.
On the ground in Boston today
@caulkthewagon https://twitter.com/caulkthewagon
@JackSmithIV https://twitter.com/JackSmithIV
@Fara1 https://twitter.com/Fara1
tl;dr (1)
tl;dr (2)
“…out of our paaahrk!” loved that, and this one, too:
“Following the announcement of the conclusion of the ‘Free Speech Rally,’ light skirmishes broke out between police and counter protesters. Riot police had to step in and push the counter protestors back.”, RT
“Following the announcement of the conclusion of the ‘Free Speech Rally,’ light skirmishes broke out between police and counter protesters. Riot police had to step in and push the counter protestors back.”, RT “The Houston chapter of Black Lives Matter is staging a rally called ‘Destroy the Confederacy’ at Sam Houston Park, urging the city to remove the ‘Spirit of the Confederacy’ statue from the park.”
at ian’s: Peter August 19, 2017
“The free speech gathering in Boston ended quickly in the face of ugly Soros goons ready for conflict. The demonstrators were clear about distancing themselves from even the white nationalists but that didn’t matter to the antifas.
As I predicted earlier when there were no Deplorables to attack the antifa immediately began throwing urine and stones at the cops who were there to protect them. The cops begged for calm but arrests are mounting.”
at ian’s: Peter August 19, 2017
“The free speech gathering in Boston ended quickly in the face of ugly Soros goons ready for conflict. The demonstrators were clear about distancing themselves from even the white nationalists but that didn’t matter to the antifas.
As I predicted earlier when there were no Deplorables to attack the antifa immediately began throwing urine and stones at the cops who were there to protect them. The cops begged for calm but arrests are mounting.”
blink,blink. my comment there has been in moderation for at least a couple hours. :-( (finally couldn’t help myself.)
The ripples from the spontaneous toppling of the Confederate statue at the Old Durham Courthouse continue. Approaching a hundred jail support people asked to be arrested for toppling the statue.
And… the President of Duke University, fearing similar spontaneous action on campus had maintenance pre-emptively remove (Saint) Robert E. Lee from the “saints” at the entrance of the Gothic revival Duke Chapel.
‘Tens of thousands march for unity, overwhelming ‘free speech’ rally‘, boston globe
Police estimate: 50 people at the white supremacist rally, 30-40K counter-protesters, 27 arrests.
“But Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said that “99.9% of the people here were [here] for the right reason, and that’s to fight bigotry and hate.””
1 arrest was for a guy in a mega hat with a gun
good on them. peter and some of them over yonder just make shit up and call it ‘reality’. hope it goes well in houston.
Charges of throwing urine usually appear in demonstrations when police want to shut them down for reasons of “health and safety”. Has anyone actually seen this sort of thing happen? The logistics of the tactic make it a suspect allegation in most cases.
i dunno if they saw it or not, but they’re adamant about it over yonder, but how would one be able to identify ‘urine’ in any event? but yes, at occupy camps, claiming health and safety er…lies…closed down a hella lot of them.
thanks for taking the boston globe and other links over to peter, marym. and of course for patiently trying to counter his, RC’s and others’ ridiculous assertions. at least those half a dozen nazi/white supremacist sympathizers are receiving plenty of righteous pushback by now. quite a place ian runs there.
two good ‘uns from telesur:
here’s one of the least biased reports that i’d found via general search queries. some had extra photos, videos, that seemed suspect, or at least not as claimed. here’s one of those.
The photo of the antifa “sticks” in your second link was from 2015 in UK.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/wd7p75/dover-nazi-march-against-refugees-753
nice catch, marym! it sure didn’t seem legit, did it? (she hoped.) how did you come across the link? actually, the first time i saw it, there was a yellow circle w/ and arrow pointing out the nail.
Just random twitter surfing. I’d seen something a few days ago with examples of photos being sent around from right wing sites as if they were current, but were also old pictures of other places. I didn’t save that link, but it’s something to watch for in the future.
well, good sleuthing, marym. you’re a force of nature fer certain. sleep well, dream your bliss if you can.
I remember the same charges being made by the media against the protestors at the ’68 Democratic Convention. I was 11 years old living in Chicago at the time. The Chicago American published photos of bats and balls with spikes in them and bags of purported urine and feces. I later (many years later) learned that this was a common COINTELPRO tactic used by agent provocateurs. But as a young impressionable kid, this was the first time hippies or protestors came on my radar. (Second time was Charles Manson a year later). Very effective propaganda. I thought these people were animals and I became a little war-supporting right winger until I eventually learned what’s up. I can (and have) written pages on this. The personal and the political.