As Far-Right Violence Surges, Ted Cruz Seeks To Brand Antifa A Terrorist Organization

Except for when islamic-extremism is dishonestly counted as right wing extremism, thus demonstrating a deliberate effort at intellectual dishonesty to sell a political narrative above all else.

 

Another made up claim. If you're going to continue to adopt dishonest tactic you can do one.

 

It's stretching the proper use of the word "terrorist" to brand Anti-Fa a "terrorist" organization. They have not yet resorted to bombing or shooting to advance their agenda.

They may get there. The Weathermen started out as something similar to Anti-Fa -- the "Days of Rage" were supposed to create disorder, and were preceded by bombing a statue to murdered policemen, but they did not try to kill anyone in cold blood at them. Their move to bombs came afterwards, and even then, at first their bombs were aimed at property, not people. When they then decided to start killing people -- GIs and their dates at a dance at Fort Dix -- their technical incompetence led to the Weatherman bomb team blowing themselves up. After that the Weatherman leadership switched tactics.

Also, Anti-Fa are not an organization in the same sense that, say, the IRA is, or even Al Queda. They are a loosley 'organized' group of people who believe that they have the right to determine who will be allowed to speak or demonstrate. They don't really have a central political philosophy. They're an extreme product of the me-me-me generation. Some of the more serious of them have begun to arm themselves -- the crazy who was shot in Washington State recently was a member of the 'John Brown' gun club -- but probably a lot of them are anti-gun, and in any case don't come from gun-friendly homes.

Although they don't have any centrally-planned strategy, you can see a kind of logic -- perhaps not conscious -- in their tactics. The Right in America believe in self-defense. Many of them believe that if someone throws a Coke can filled with cement at you, you have the right to reply with a quarter-ounce of copper-jacketed lead. If this happens, Anti-Fa will have won an enormous victory, because they will have convinced the broad middle group of Americans that they are victims and the real violence originates from the Right. And the Mainstream Media will do all in its power to reinforce that narrative.

So long as anti-Fa are not shooting or stabbing, the people trying to do terrible fascist things like fly the American flag must exercise extreme fire discipline.

 

And condemn right wing terrorism. Its the decent thing to do after all.

 

I should hope so. Including terrorism against abortion-providers. I think there are people on the Right who may be soft on the latter -- I haven't read anything in a serious conservative publication which is, but it wouldn't absolutely surprise me to see it -- but I don't know of anyone on the Right who doesn't condemn neo-Nazis and the Klan. This opposition may be stiffened by the fact that Zionism is a very strong current on the Right, and Nazis and fascists hate Jews.

There is a steaming swamp called the 'alt-Right' who, in their tactics, are roughly the equivalent of anti-Fa: young men with a confused, but definitely anti-democratic, ideology, if their thoughts can be called that. They're an incubator for the occasional mentally-unstable genuine terrorist of the sort anti-Fa has yet to produce, with the exception of that fellow in Washington State.

I think most conservatives have the attitude to these two groups, alt-Right and anti-Fa, that my friends and I had when we were kids in Texas towards scorpions and tarantulas: put 'em both in a bottle and shake it vigorously.

 

The difference here is the "far right" violence is a myth while Antifa grows increasingly violent.

 

Jolly comments in your posts, but why even refer to Antifa? The paradox of tolerance makes them stand out in their approach. If left wing terrorism does increase, mind you, we would have a concern. We know that its currently only right wing terrorism on an upward trend. However, it is perceivable that it could create something akin to an arms race (at least in terms of the interaction), where the left and right feed off each other to justify even greater violence.

 

Except for the individual who attacked an ICE facility and made use of both improvised explosive devices and firearms in the course of their actions.

That matter aside, acts of terrorism do not need to result in death to be considered and classified as acts of terrorism. Merely the use of force or implied threats of force in order to promote political changes is sufficient enough.

 

I think anti-Fa are far more dangerous, actually, as warped as that must sound. The fascists just kill people. Anti-fa is killing free speech.

They are the spearhead of a very significant movement among a lot of young Americans, namely, ideas that we don't like will not be tolerated: no platform for fascists, and we'll decide who the fascists are. And at the moment they include, for example, Charles Murray. They would certainly include me, if I were to speak at a campus where this sort of thinking has taken root.

The alt-Right and associated fascists can kill people, but they can't stop people having meetings, rallies, demonstrations, marches. They don't even try to. There's not even a logic to their terror. There was a logic, at one point, when a neo-Nazi assassinated the liberal Jewish host of a radio show, about 25 years ago. The real fascists and other extreme nationalists in pre-Hitler Germany did this.

If the American fascists had had the ability to do this systematically, that would have been one thing. But once any group in the US starts murdering people, it will quickly be the focus of police attention and be shut down. That's what happened to the Klan in the South -- J Edgar Hoover was extremely unsympathetic to the Civil Rights movement, but ... he had his orders, because the Klan's murders were hurting the US in its Cold War competition in the Third World. So the FBI went after the Klan, using methods of which the ACLU definitely would not approve, and broke them.

The same thing would happen to anti-FA, and the alt-Right, if they every tried a campaign of organized lethal violence. Rather, what happens, is that their less-stable members get whipped up by the rhetoric of those around them, and then flip out. (The same with anti-abortion groups -- they don't direct their members to go out and shoot doctors, they just say, "Those doctors are murdering innocent little babies" and occasionally one of their members draws the logical conclusion.)

Trying to be absolutely fair, although it pains me to say it, at the highest level there is not even an equality between anti-Fa, and the Fascists. In a horribly distorted way, anti-Fa believe they are defending decency and democratic society. Not so the fascists. The motives, at least the official motives, on both sides are not equal. (Who knows what the personal motives of every member are -- some young males just like to smash things up. There were members of the real anti-Fa, in Germany, who made a smooth transition to the SA. They were called 'roastbeef Nazis' -- brown on the outside, still red on the inside.)

But the fascists, at the moment, cannot destroy free speech and anti-Fa, and its various pale campus analogues, like the Campus Anti-Fascist Network, are doing just that.

 

The problem is, we are forced to make use of a finite vocabulary to describe an infinite reality. When I was young (and a Leftist) I attended a meeting which featured several speakers, one of them a member of the Communist Party. The John Birch Society turned up, clandestinely, and when he began to speak, they unfurled a banner "Communists Kill Americans in Vietnam", marched to the front of the room, and effectively ended the meeting.

At the same time -- that is, during that period, someone fired several .38 rounds into the home of the head of the group that organized that meeting (the Houston Socialist Forum). And someone else actually bombed the transmitter of a liberal FM station in the city.

To put the former event, as unpleasant as it was, into the same category as the latter two, seems to me to be an abuse of language.

 

Back to Popperian philosophy. You would have to categorical reject the paradox of tolerance. Can you do that?

 

So you don't want to support your own case, or you don't understand per capita or how it relates? Just trying to figure out where we are having the breakdown here.

 

My case has been proved. Right wing terrorism is on an upward trend and, since 9/11, it has been the cause of the most deaths. Please keep up.

 

I'm terrible at philosophy! It always seems to ask questions that have no definitive answer.

As for Popper, I cherish his criterion for rational thought, "What evidence would make you change your mind?" I only vaguely remember the Paradox of Tolerance and had to go look it up to be sure I remembered it properly. I found this Popper quote on a Libertarian website:

Which pretty much sums up my attitude. In a stable bourgeois democracy, as the Marxists call it, I am for tolerating the speech of unpleasant people. When that democracy is under physical threat, things are different. For instance, in wartime, I have no trouble with suppressing newspapers that support our enemies, as Lincoln and FDR did. Or, if society begins to unravel and we approach a civil war situation, then the weapon of criticism must be replaced by the criticism of weapons. Then it becomes purely a tactical question -- how best to destroy the enemies of democracy before they can destroy us. At the moment we're nowhere near that point, so I am in favor of letting neo-Nazis, ISIS supporters, and Mr Farrakhan, spout all they want, so long as they're not inciting direct violence. (However, in the case of the first two, I want to see the secret police earning their living by getting a good set of informers into place within their ranks.)

 

That doesn't dismiss the relevance of the Popperian argument. Without that dismissal you don't have a means to reject Antifa.

How are you measuring this 'point of destruction'? I'd suggest the paradox indicates that it isn't so predictable; making the standard liberal reaction destructive in itself. There's no 'cute fascists thinking they're important, but they're always going to be minor" rhetoric. The point surely is that, once there is growth, it can snowball to a 'Reichstag' burning.

 

Sure. That's 'just' a problem of political judgement, an art, not a science. A study of history is probably helpful -- the Nazis went from less than 3% of the popular vote in 1928, to 37% in the Spring of 1932. The anti-Nazi parties -- the KPD and SPD -- each in their own way, fumbled their response. But had they done the right thing, they would probably have had to wait until Hitler was made Chancellor before launching a civil war. I don't think they could have crushed the Nazis in the egg earlier than that, given the rightwing prejudice of German civil society -- judges who dealt very lightly with Nazi murderers and very harshly with Communist ones. But that's a moot point because the two parties had a self-defeating approach in the first place, especially the Communists.

So there is a kind of formal paradox: when the Nazis are small and presumably vulnerable to physical attack, they're not worth dealing with, and when they are large, they are immune from it. But it's more formal than real. It's like free will vs determinism ...fun to play with but of no serious consequence whatever you decide.

The real danger of fascism in America, in my opinion, doesn't come from spotty youths who can't get a girl friend and think that dressing up in a Nazi costume is cool. It comes from the possibility that the continued drift to the identitarian Left, with its implicit and explicit race-shaming of whites, will push the white working class towards some sort of quasi-fascist movement.

I don't see that happening now, but ... what if the US at some point in the future faces a big military humiliation by a newly-empowered China, combined with a big depression? Take someone with the intelligence of Steve Bannon, but who knows enough to conceal his real aims so that he never writes or says anything that gives him away. I could imagine such a person building a movement that would be fascist in all but name, ready to have its fascism 'crystallize' at a critical saturation point. I think the objective basis for an essentially fascist movement exists in the US, if the country begins to fracture along racial lines, as the Hard Left would like to see. And I don't see street scuffles by radical college students and scraggly-bearded dope-heads doing anything at all to stop it.

There are all kinds of complexities here -- for one thing, fascists need a scapegoat to blame for the economic crisis, and the wretched lumpenproletariat of the Black ghettoes just won't fill that role. But we know who will. However, there is a powerful pro-Zionist tendency in the Right which cuts across that. And there are other complications as well -- American patriotism is in tension with explicit racism, as I've tried to argue elsewhere. That video I've posted links to, with beer-bellied white motorcyclists with American flags on their Harleys and Southern drawls, escorting the ashes of a fallen Black Marine across America to his mother in Georgia, is the strongest anti-fascist action you can imagine. Anti-Fa would want to burn those flags.

 

Sounds a little like stuffing cheese in your ears and ignoring the paradox. The history is supportive of it after all.

Fascism is reliant on the theory of the elites. That won't come from the left (e.g. The stalinist types, found to be the closest in the psychology of the right wing authoritarian, also experience 'antifa').

Bannon knows to continue to build and to take advantage of liberalism. Indeed, his ilk gets more airplay than bigger movements such as the Greens. The likes of the BBC, for example, recently has had full blown excitement over the dress sense of the new fascists.

I don't see the need to mix up political economy. They only need economic crisis. That's always on the cards because of neoliberalism (i.e. the negative consequences of market fundamentalism)

Pro-Zionism isn't going to be cheery on the anti-fascist front. Its an interesting one mind you, given antisemitism is found to be the highest among the far right. And patriotism? It generates negative outcome (such as servicemen who shouldn't be dead at all), but its nationalism which is an ultimate source of irrationality.

 

I don't quite understand all of your points here. But I'll address just one: is patriotism/nationalism an ultimate source of irrationality? ( I think that's what you're saying but if I'm wrong, correct me.)

We must not confuse behavior we don't like, with behavior that is irrational.

Patriotism is an extention of tribalism. "My tribe above all others." Tribalism in turn is an extension of what we might call "Clanism", which is an extension of "My-family-ism" which is an extension of "ME-ME-ME-ism". It may be ugly, but in itself it is not irrational. Far from it, it's just the Selfish Gene at work.

And more than that: your family, your clan, your tribe, your nation are not just carriers of some of your genes ... they also protect you. You don't have to depende on the kindness of strangers, if those strangers are linked to you in some way. Not irrational at all.

People like me (and you?) would like to see the next step taken: from My-country-above-all-others to Our-species-above-all-others. Or you can leave out the 'above-all-others' because at our current stage of development, we're more a threat to the fiercest animal than it is to us.

But for that next step to happen, there must be a material base for it. The human race as a whole has got to undergo a lot more development. At the moment, the national arena is necessarily the only one we can work in.

And note that once one takes the step away from ME-ME-ME, the potential for selfless behavior arises: you sacrifice for your children, for example. (Of course, not everyone does this.) And going up that chain, patriotism is almost like the spirit of socialism -- the individual subordinates his own interests, for that of the collective. It's not in the interest of the soldier to crawl towards that machine gun nest, but sometimes he does it anyway.

Now American patriotism, because America is not a nation in the way many other nations are, based on a single genetically-related tribe -- the Serbs, the Sinhalese, the Hans -- but rather is a melding of many tribes .. ... American patriotism is a bit different.

Yes, it can be manifested as something unpleasant: USA ALL THE WAY, BOMB 'EM, etc. But it also is a way to unite the various tribes that make up America. I mentioned those white motorcycle guys with their tatoos and American flags escorting the ashes of that dead Black Marine. I wonder what would happen if some neo-Nazis or Klansmen turned up to protest paying respect to a Black man? Might be very interesting to watch.

 

"Fear is part of our tactics".

Ye, sure. Worry only about Right-wing extremists while ANTIFA are running around like mobs and destroying property for hundreds of thousands of Dollars. Congrats.

Both are garbage and need to be thrown in jail. I don't even see why this is an issue.

 

For nationalism, read up on Orwell (I know right wingers love him)

Afraid you've used your post to hide from the real debate with patriotism. I'm not interested in that jingoism.

 

Again, I literally do not understand the points you are making. (If someone else does, help me out here!) To have a useful debate, you need to make some straightforward assertions. Then we can argue about them.

As for Orwell, one of my heroes, the distinction between patriotism and nationalism is not wrong, and not new, although I think he uses the word 'nationalism' in a rather strange way if we're thinking about the same essay. Many others have made the distinction, but 'nationalism' in particular is one of those words that is used in many different ways -- I recall the leftist Michael Lind writing a book on 'The New Nationalism', something of which he approved.

 

I don't think the point is difficult. I'm rejecting any sense in the patriotism angle. Nationalism itself is always a negative, as good ole socialists like Orwell have demonstrated.

Take something like liberal versus social democracy. The distinction is largely the institutions adopted to control inequalities and poverty. Now that's an expensive business. There's also the threat of empowering the working classes. So what's the alternative? First, divide and conquer. Get the nearly nothings blaming the barely nothings (e.g. right wing reactions to immigration). Second, employ nationalism. Encourage acceptance of the status quo, often delegitimisng any progressive influences.

 

I went back and re-read the Orwell essay I think you're referring to, The Lion and the Unicorn. (By the way, I hope you're right that right-wingers like Orwell, because everyone should like Orwell. He was a very good man, not a deep thinker, but someone of generous spirit, and honest to the core -- no humbug at all about him. No one can be sure about all the things that influenced their political development, but I know that reading his Homage to Catalonia as a teenager, especially his description of revolutionary Barcelona -- "There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for" -- , was one of the things that made me a revolutionary socialist. Okay, I should have held fire until I had read a lot more and experienced some real life, but his description of ordinary working people in the process of revolution is moving even now, and is in such utter contrast to the privileged spoiled brats on our university campuses today.) But back to Orwell.

I can see why we on the Right would like him ... at first. From the very first page of that extended essay, we find this observation (emboldened words are my emphasis):

Uh-oh! That would sure get him shouted down on many of today's campuses.

Actually, I had forgotten how really excellent this essay is. A bit of re-writing, and the following could apply to America today:

Whoa! Just substitute 'American' for 'English' and you could make this a description of the US today.

However, Orwell was no conservative, far from it! A large part of this essay is a powerful argument for socialism -- genuine socialism, state ownership of the economy, flattening of income differences. There is also an interesting discussion of the difference between socialism and fascism, and the aspects of fascism that are socialist, which could be written with no change at all today.

And how about this:

Yikes!!! Is Orwell talking about the Religion of Peace??? Is he an Islamophobe??? No, it's Germans he has in mind, white people he's insulting, so that's okay.

Although Orwell was wrong in his belief that Britain had to become socialist in order to defeat Hitler, it's a really splendid piece of writing. Everyone should read it, and it's available for free, here.

There is another Orwell essay, in which he writes about the difference between patriotism and nationalism -- discussed here. I don't recall ever reading that essay, but the distinction he makes is a commonplace. The uber-conservative Joe Sobran used to make it, and it's often referred to on the 'Old Right' -- in a phrase, patriotism is loving your country, nationalism is hating others. In that essay, Orwell uses the word 'nationalism' in a strange way, I think, to simply mean a power-centered ideology. He includes as 'nationalists' "Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism [!]" I think that's stretching the word well beyond breaking point.

My point is that American patriotism is inherently anti-racist, because it honors America's warriors, who have always included non-whites. Or, to put it more precisely, American patriotism contains within itself the very strong potential for anti-racism, and any sincere anti-racist should recognize that.

 

They like him through political economic naivety. Communism=Socialism=Fascism to many of them. Thus, via some pigs, they think they see a kindred spirit. They don't realise his socialism, nor recognise his innate dislike of right wing authoritarianism.

Where's the evidence of that then? Just a sweet piece of tabloidism? We know that nationalism and bigotry have been found to go hand in hand. Its easy to find psychology research questioning your logic. Here's one chosen randomly:

Yesilernis Peña & Jim Sidanius (2002) U.S. Patriotism and Ideologies of Group Dominance: A Tale of Asymmetry, The Journal of Social Psychology, 142:6, 782-790, DOI: 10.1080/00224540209603936
Using a random sample (N = 405) of White and Latino Americans from Los Angeles County, the authors explored whether there is an asymmetrical relationship between U.S. patriotism and two different dimensions of social dominance orientation: group antiegalitarianism and group dominance. Although there was no evidence of asymmetry in the relationship between U.S. patriotism and group antiegalitarianism, there was evidence of consistent asymmetry in the relationship between U.S. patriotism and group dominance. Among Whites (the dominant North American ethnic group) and depending on demographic variables such as age, education, income, and gender, the greater the respondents' tendency to subordinate “inferior groups,” the greater their level of U.S. patriotism. In contrast, among Latino Americans (the major subordinate group in Southern California), the opposite trend was found. Here, higher levels of group dominance orientation were associated with lower levels of U.S. patriotism. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

 

No violence isn't surging. Not from the far left or right. Just loads of attention being paid to them... Good ratings.