Below, is the article to which the authors of the Truthout Op Ed were
referring. As I mentioned the other day, it's now very difficult for me to
get material from Truthdig to post because they've changed the way their
website is constructed, so I managed to lose the title of this article. But
as I thought, his concern is the group of violent Black Bloc anarchists who
confront racists at demonstrations.
Miriam
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times best
selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and
ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,.
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.
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."
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.
