How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’
By
Chris Hedges
Editor’s note: A Berkeley, Calif.,
rally organized by a right-wing
group
turned violent Sunday
after arrival of a group that
carried an anarchist banner.
August 29, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Behind
the rhetoric of the “alt-right”
about white nativism and protecting American
traditions, history and Christian values is
the lust for violence. Behind the rhetoric
of
antifa, the
Black Bloc
and the so-called “alt-left”
about capitalism, racism, state repression
and corporate power is the same lust for
violence.
The two
opposing groups, largely made up of people
who have been cast aside by the cruelty of
corporate capitalism, have embraced holy
war. Their lives, battered by economic
misery and social marginalization, have
suddenly been filled with meaning. They hold
themselves up as the vanguard of the
oppressed. They arrogate to themselves the
right to use force to silence those they
define as the enemy. They sanctify anger.
They are infected with the dark,
adrenaline-driven urge for confrontation
that arises among the disenfranchised when a
democracy ceases to function. They are
separated, as Sigmund Freud wrote of those
who engage in fratricide, by the “narcissism
of minor differences.”
They mirror each other, not only
ideologically but also physically—armed and
dressed in black, the color of fascism and
the color of death.
It
was inevitable that we would reach this
point. The corporate state has seized and
corrupted all democratic institutions,
including the two main political parties, to
serve the interests of corporate power and
maximize global corporate profits. There is
no justice in the courts. There is no
possibility for reform in the legislative
bodies. The executive branch is a
dysfunctional mess headed by a narcissistic
kleptocrat, con artist and pathological
liar. Money has replaced the vote. The
consent of the governed is a joke. Our most
basic constitutional rights, including the
rights to privacy and due process, have been
taken from us by judicial fiat. The
economically marginalized, now a majority of
the country, have been rendered invisible by
a corporate media dominated by highly paid
courtiers spewing out meaningless political
and celebrity gossip and trivia as if it
were news. The corporate state, unimpeded,
is pillaging and looting the carcass of the
country and government, along with the
natural world, for the personal gain of the
1 percent. It daily locks away in cages the
poor, especially poor people of color,
discarding the vulnerable as human refuse.
A government
that is paralyzed and unable and unwilling
to address the rudimentary needs of its
citizens, as I saw in the former Yugoslavia
and as history has shown with the
Weimar Republic
and czarist Russia, eventually empowers
violent extremists. Economic and social
marginalization is the lifeblood of
extremist groups. Without it they wither and
die. Extremism, as the social critic
Christopher Lasch wrote, is “a refuge from
the terrors of inner life.”
Germany’s
Nazi stormtroopers
had their counterparts in that nation’s
communist
Alliance of Red Front Fighters.
The far-right anti-communist death squad
Alliance of Argentina had its counterpart in
the guerrilla group the People’s
Revolutionary Army during the “Dirty War.”
The Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Front (FMLN) rebels during the war I covered
in El Salvador had their counterparts in the
right-wing death squads, whose eventual
demise seriously impeded the FMLN’s ability
to recruit. The Serbian nationalists, or
Chetniks, in Yugoslavia had their
counterparts in the Croatian nationalists,
or Ustaše. The killing by one side justifies
the killing by the other. And the killing is
always sanctified in the name of each side’s
martyrs.
The violence by
antifa—short for anti-fascist or
anti-fascist action—in
Charlottesville, Va.,
saw a surge in interest and support for the
movement, especially after the
murder of Heather Heyer.
The Black Bloc was applauded by some of the
counterprotesters in Boston during
an alt-right rally there
Aug. 19. In Charlottesville, antifa
activists filled the vacuum left by a
passive police force, holding off neo-Nazi
thugs who
threatened Cornel West
and clergy who were protesting against the
white nationalist event. This was a
propaganda coup for antifa, which seeks to
portray its use of violence as legitimate
self-defense. Protecting West and the clergy
members from physical assault was admirable.
But this single act no more legitimizes
antifa violence than the turkeys, Christmas
gifts and Fourth of July fireworks that John
Gotti gave to his neighbors legitimized the
violence of the Gambino crime family.
Antifa, like the alt-right, is the product
of a diseased society.
The white
racists and neo-Nazis may be unsavory, but
they too are victims. They too lost jobs and
often live in poverty in
deindustrialized
wastelands. They too often are plagued by
debt, foreclosures, bank repossessions and
inability to repay student loans. They too
often suffer from evictions, opioid
addictions, domestic violence and despair.
They too sometimes face bankruptcy because
of medical bills. They too have seen social
services gutted, public education degraded
and privatized and the infrastructure around
them decay. They too often suffer from
police abuse and mass incarceration. They
too are often in despair and suffer from
hopelessness. And they too have the right to
free speech, however repugnant their views.
Street clashes do not distress the ruling
elites. These clashes divide the underclass.
They divert activists from threatening the
actual structures of power. They give the
corporate state the ammunition to impose
harsher forms of control and expand the
powers of internal security. When antifa
assumes the right to curtail free speech it
becomes a weapon in the hands of its enemies
to take that freedom away from everyone,
especially the anti-capitalists.
The focus on
street violence diverts activists from the
far less glamorous building of relationships
and alternative institutions and community
organizing that alone will make effective
resistance possible. We will defeat the
corporate state only when we take back and
empower our communities, as is happening
with
Cooperation Jackson,
a grass-roots cooperative movement in
Jackson, Miss. As long as acts of resistance
are forms of personal catharsis, the
corporate state is secure. Indeed, the
corporate state welcomes this violence
because violence is a language it can speak
with a proficiency and ruthlessness that
none of these groups can match.
“Politics isn’t
made of individuals,” Sophia Burns writes in
“Catharsis
Is Counter-Revolutionary.”
“It’s made of classes. Political change
doesn’t come from feeling individually
validated. It comes from collective action
and organization within the working class.
That means creating new institutions that
meet our needs and defend against
oppression.”
The protests by
the radical left now sweeping America, as
Aviva Chomsky
points out, are too often little more than
self-advertisements for moral purity. They
are products of a social media culture in
which each of us is the star of his or her
own life movie. They are infected with the
American belief in regeneration through
violence and the cult of the gun. They
represent a clash between the bankruptcy of
identity politics, which produced, as Dr.
West has said, a president who was “a black
mascot for Wall Street,” and the bankruptcy
of a white, Christianized fascism that
produced Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions.
“Rather than
organizing for change, individuals seek to
enact a statement about their own
righteousness,” Chomsky writes in “How
(Not) to Challenge Racist Violence.”
“They may boycott certain products, refuse
to eat certain foods, or they may show up to
marches or rallies whose only purpose is to
demonstrate the moral superiority of the
participants. White people may loudly claim
that they recognize their privilege or
declare themselves allies of people of color
or other marginalized groups. People may
declare their communities ‘no place for
hate.’ Or they may show up at
counter-marches to ‘stand up’ to white
nationalists or neo-Nazis. All of these
types of ‘activism’ emphasize
self-improvement or self-expression rather
than seeking concrete change in society or
policy. They are deeply, and deliberately,
apolitical in the sense that they do not
seek to address issues of power, resources,
decision making, or how to bring about
change.”
The
corporate state seeks to discredit and shut
down the anti-capitalist left. Its natural
allies are the neo-Nazis and the Christian
fascists. The alt-right is bankrolled, after
all, by the most retrograde forces in
American capitalism. It has huge media
platforms. It has placed its ideologues and
sympathizers in positions of power,
including in law enforcement and the
military. And it has carried out acts of
domestic terrorism that dwarf anything
carried out by the left. White supremacists
were responsible for 49 homicides in 26
attacks in the United States from 2006 to
2016, far more than those committed by
members of any other extremist group,
according to a report issued in May by the
FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.
There is no moral equivalency between antifa
and the alt-right. But by brawling in the
streets antifa allows the corporate state,
which is terrified of a popular
anti-capitalist uprising, to use the false
argument of moral equivalency to criminalize
the work of all anti-capitalists.
As the Southern
Poverty Law Center states categorically in
its pamphlet “Ten
Ways to Fight Hate,”
“Do not attend a hate rally.”
“Find another outlet for anger and
frustration and for people’s desire to do
something,” it recommends. “Hold a unity
rally or parade to draw media attention away
from hate. Hate has a First Amendment right.
Courts have routinely upheld the
constitutional right of the Ku Klux Klan and
other hate groups to hold rallies and say
whatever they want. Communities can restrict
group movements to avoid conflicts with
other citizens, but hate rallies will
continue. Your efforts should focus on
channeling people away from hate rallies.”
No
Advertising
- No
Government
Grants
-
This
Is
Independent
Media
|
The
Nazis were as unsavory to the German
political and economic elites as Donald
Trump is to most Americans who hold power or
influence. But the German elites chose to
work with the fascists, whom they naively
thought they could control, rather than risk
a destruction of capitalism. Street brawls,
actively sought out by the Nazis, always
furthered the interests of the fascists, who
promised to restore law and order and
protect traditional values. The violence
contributed to their mystique and the
yearning among the public for a strongman
who would impose stability.
Historian
Laurie Marhoefer writes:
Violent confrontations with antifascists
gave the Nazis a chance to paint
themselves as the victims of a
pugnacious, lawless left. They seized
it.
It
worked. We know now that many Germans
supported the fascists because they were
terrified of leftist violence in the
streets. Germans opened their morning
newspapers and saw reports of clashes
like the one in Wedding [a Berlin
neighborhood]. It looked like a bloody
tide of civil war was rising in their
cities. Voters and opposition
politicians alike came to believe the
government needed special police powers
to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship
grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis
themselves were fomenting the violence
didn’t seem to matter.
One of Hitler’s biggest steps to
dictatorial power was to gain emergency
police powers, which he claimed he
needed to suppress leftist violence.
What took place
in Charlottesville, like what took place in
February when antifa and Black Bloc
protesters
thwarted UC Berkeley’s attempt
to host the crypto-fascist Milo
Yiannopoulos, was political theater. It was
about giving self-styled radicals a stage.
It was about elevating their self-image. It
was about appearing heroic. It was about
replacing personal alienation with
comradeship and solidarity. Most important,
it was about the ability to project fear.
This newfound power is exciting and
intoxicating. It is also very dangerous.
Many of those in Charlottesville on the left
and the right were carrying weapons. A
neo-Nazi
fired a round
from a pistol in the direction of a
counterprotester. The neo-Nazis often
carried AR-15 rifles and wore quasi-military
uniforms and helmets that made them blend in
with police and state security. There could
easily have been a bloodbath. A march held
in Sacramento, Calif., in June 2016 by the
neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party to
protest attacks at Trump rallies ended with
a number of people stabbed. Police accused
counterprotesters of initiating the
violence. It is a short series of steps from
bats and ax handles to knives to guns.
The
conflict will not end until the followers of
the alt-right and the anti-capitalist left
are given a living wage and a voice in how
we are governed. Take away a person’s
dignity, agency and self-esteem and this is
what you get. As political power devolves
into a more naked form of corporate
totalitarianism, as unemployment and
underemployment expand, so will extremist
groups. They will attract more sympathy and
support as the wider population realizes,
correctly, that Americans have been stripped
of all ability to influence the decisions
that affect their lives, lives that are
getting steadily worse.
The ecocide by
the fossil fuel and animal agriculture
industries alone makes revolt a moral
imperative. The question is how to make it
succeed. Taking to the street to fight
fascists ensures our defeat. Antifa
violence, as
Noam Chomsky has pointed out,
is a “major gift to the right, including the
militant right.” It fuels the right wing’s
paranoid rants about the white race being
persecuted and under attack. And it strips
anti-capitalists of their moral capital.
Many in the
feckless and bankrupt liberal class, deeply
complicit in the corporate assault on the
country and embracing the dead end of
identity politics, will seek to regain
credibility by defending the violence by
groups such as antifa.
Natasha Lennard,
for example, in The Nation calls the “video
of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched
in the face” an act of “kinetic beauty.” She
writes “if we recognize fascism in Trump’s
ascendance, our response must be
anti-fascist in nature. The history of
anti-fascist action is not one of polite
protest, nor failed appeals to reasoned
debate with racists, but direct, aggressive
confrontation.”
This violence-as-beauty rhetoric is at the
core of these movements. It saturates the
vocabulary of the right-wing corporate
oligarchs, including Donald Trump. Talk like
this poisons national discourse. It
dehumanizes whole segments of the
population. It shuts out those who speak
with nuance and compassion, especially when
they attempt to explain the motives and
conditions of opponents. It thrusts the
society into a binary and demented universe
of them and us. It elevates violence to the
highest aesthetic. It eschews self-criticism
and self-reflection. It is the prelude to
widespread suffering and death. And that, I
fear, is where we are headed.