Antifa: socialists or fascists?

Argument has continued over which side of the political fence lie the blackshirted thugs beating up passersby and opponents in Charlottesville and Berkeley.

“They’re socialists,” says one side, “because they’re waving red flags and quoting Karl Marx.”

“No!” says the other side, “they’re fascists, you see, because they’re thugs in black shirts.”

“No,” respond the other side, ”they’re anti-fascist – it’s right their in their name, Antifa – and only socialists can be antifascist.“

“You mean,” says the other side, “like the DPRK, i.e.,North Korea, must be democratic because it says so in their name?”

The funny thing is, both these sides are right in their analysis, just as both the sides in combat are wrong – as George Reisman so sagely points out. The key here, he explains, is that:

Socialism comes in two leading variants: the German or Nazi variant and the Russian or Bolshevik variant.
    In the Nazi variant, the appearance of private ownership exists but all the actual powers of ownership are exercised by the government.
    In Charlottesville, both the protestors and the anti-protestors included numerous socialists, German or Russian style respectively.
    To that extent, the two sides were equivalent in their human-life-hating immorality.
    Among the protestors in Charlottesville, were many who sympathised with the Confederacy either in spite of or because of its slavery.
    But even sympathy for Confederate slavery pales in comparison with advocating slavery for today, for everyone, as does socialism.*

NOTE:

*  Reisman: “Socialism is an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production; … a system of slavery, established by armed robbery and maintained by totalitarian dictatorship and mass murder.
    Mass murders under socialism, including government caused famines (in millions): Mainland China: 76; Soviet Union: 62; Nazi Germany: 21 …. [Source: R. J. Rummel, Death By Government. New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1994. For proof of the nature of socialism, see pp 282-94 of my book CAPITALISM, available on Amazon.]

Quote of the Day: On #Charlottesville conditioning people to accept totalitarianism

"The ominous implication of [last] weekend's riots is that we are letting our politics descend into a brutal, unprincipled, physical brawl between two illiberal caricatures--which serves to drown out real debates over opposing ideas and marginalise any unifying principles that we might draw on as reasons not to just kill each other...
"The two sides are mirror images of each other, and both have an interest in making our politics devolve into street fighting. Both sides have also been priming their people to be ready to kill for the cause, and it appears that Spencer's gang got there first, with one of his followers ramming his car into a crowd and killing a young woman…
"We are in a state of emergency, and it's because we're letting our political debate be defined on illiberal terms. We're supposed to either back the guys who try to re-enact Nuremberg, or we back the guys who whip themselves up into a frenzy to 'punch Nazis'--and define ‘Nazi' as anyone who disagrees with them. We either want technology companies to conduct ideological inquisitions, or we've got guys chanting 'Blood and Soil. We take a vicious murder by a racist and turn it into another opportunity to score partisan political points on social media--as if we want racism to be a partisan issue rather than a common cause that transcends party.

"I wrote recently about the steps required to condition people to accept totalitarianism. One of those steps--one of the last ones--is that we get used to political differences being settled by a contest of force in the streets. We've been closer to that point before, during the 1960s, when the violent protests and race riots were far bigger. But that was the brink of a very deep precipice, and we should be doing everything we can, on both sides of the political debate, to pull back from it.”

~ Robert Tracinski, from his post 'Notes from Our State of Emergency'

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Monuments

Despite the ridiculously overblown claims of assorted idiots either quoting or  thoroughly misunderstanding George Orwell’s warning against the practice of historical airbrushing, there is nothing in the least “Orwellian” about removing monuments celebrating murderers or worse.

Germany boasts no public monuments to Hitler, Goering or Goebbels, and nor should it. It boasts no public monuments to Hitler, Goering or Goebbels, not because their memory has been Orwellianly erased, but because after the war fought to end Nazism the country was de-Nazified – as it should have been – rooting out the poisonous ideology to the most thorough extent possible.

Likewise in Japan, after a world  war fought to end its militant aggression, the country’s politics was thoroughly de-Shinto-ised and deodorised – Shinto being abolished as a state religion and its militant and ultra-nationalistic teachings, rites and monuments expunged.

So it was, or would have been, after the American Civil War too – a war fought, (as every rebel state’s declaration of their causes of secession made crystal clear at the time) to make the South safe for slavery just as long as their slave-owners desired. But too soon after that war against this inhumanity was won, the cause itself was lost and Jim Crow laws soon dragged in by the back door much that a war that killed 700,000 had thrown out the front.

So if it has taken one-hundred and fifty years to rouse the opprobrium necessary to remove statues erected to lionise peope who elected to go to war for the “right” to put other human beings in chains, then let’s raise a Halleh-fricking-lujah to that opprobrium, huh.

And stop mis-using Orwell to complain about it. Simply insist it be done within the law, instead of without.

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Bonus Quote of the Day: On monuments, and their purpose

“Monuments are not historical lessons. They portray something that is to be admired and appreciated—that is the purpose of art."
-~ Keith O'Neil

[Hat tip Stuart Hayashi]

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Quote of the Day: On Charlottesville and beyond

”The events in Charlottsville are the logical consequence of the politics of identity… The predictable, poisonous end result [of which] has been the return of racial thinking, the rebirth of racial imagination…”

Why Leftists Hate Speech

Why Leftists Hate Speech
Advocates of Statism Cannot Tolerate Political Opposition
Guest Post by Robert Tracinski


When the left talks about "hate speech"—which they perpetually attribute to the right, and which they have dredged up again as their latest line of attack against the tea party movement—I've always thought the phrase carries an unintended but revealing double meaning.

Many people are not good at introspection or at identifying the real meaning of their emotions; it's an acquired skill that requires a lot of work, practice, and honesty. So people will often correctly identify which emotions and objects are involved—but not the correct relationships between them.

For example, when a leftist hears someone on the right speak, he is able to correctly identify the emotion, hatred, and the fact that it involves someone's speech. But he gets the relationship backward. The real relationship is: he hates our speech. It is the left that is convulsed with rage whenever anyone speaks up in defense of liberty.

As my friend Jack Wakeland sums it up: "hate speech" isn't a noun; it's a sentence fragment. It stands for "I hate your speech."

That's why the left has responded to the tea party movement—which has engaged in such violent activities as holding up signs, giving speeches, asking questions of congressmen at town hall meetings, sponsoring forums on the health care bill, and organizing congressional debates—by threatening to infiltrate the movement in order to fabricate incidents of racism and advocacy of violence that they will then use to discredit us.
As one tea party organizer responds to that threat, "They can't actually debate our message, and that's their problem."

Confirming that judgment, the left is busy working itself up into a campaign to suppress our speech by depicting us as a violent threat that has to be put down.