@AaronMk
That’s uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
not the best response to that, to say the least.
But I’d say that again: Antifa is very loose definition covering many organizations around the globe, with the level of degradation depending on location. Here for example they didn’t really participate in any infamous “riot” like protests when they were active and were content with picking gights with neo-nazi gangs and protesting nationalist demonstration, with is bretty fine by me.
Another repetition by me: modern antifa tactics outside of confronting neo-nazi gangs and disrupting their activity is pretty ineffective at best, and yes, that’s even if you disregard “”“private property””“
Well if you want a serious response, removed from the single isolated narratives put forward by TSP:
Accidents happen.
AntiFa isn’t a singular organization and is often organized informally at the local level. There’s no nation wide or international call for hits against cops or people who just happen to look like “Fascists”. Neither is resistance the only thing the group does, though it’s the end goal. But that can be achieved in several different ways.
In the case of counter-protest, it can be pretty clear who is who and what is what. And if property gets damaged: so what honestly. Business owners are insured. IF they get a window broken it’ll be paid for. It’s never the end of the world. Hell, I remember being told all my life that if I was in a situation like with a car that can’t stop to go ahead and crash through someone’s store-front: the person who runs the store is insured and won’t lose anything and I’m not going to be using how ever many cars ahead of me to cushion my momentum and stop me, and likely killing or severely injuring people who do not have the opportunity to dive out the way like they would if they were window shopping and hear someone laying on the horn.
So to shed a tear for them is really misplaced emotion. Starbucks or that local coffeehouse isn’t going to be going out of business nor is the local owner going to be out of a house because some yokel tossed a brick through a window. They have someone who has their back and will pay out for the damaged property because they’ve been paying monthly fees for that purpose, like with theft. And if not: oh well, should have thought about that when they set up their shop.
This also calls to point out the general chaos that is a large scale riot and whether or not the parties that start the violence or get involved in it are actually from the area. In cases like the Ferguson riots or even Baltimore, most individuals who carried out some smashy were from outside and taking advantage of the tension and chaos, with the police and emergency services already preoccupied keeping protesters and counter protesters apart.
You could continue out of the material and into something of political community. The general political approach to community in liberal politics and much of everything to the right is the Community of Strength; meaning anyone with some physical or talent value belongs to the community, the nation. Or that everyone of some particular groups - whites in this instance to use - are better as one and throwing out anyone not-them will only strengthen the community. The other is the Community of Vulnerability, where everyone is recognized as being vulnerable to something, has specefic needs, and being members of the community are invited into the political community because we can all address what we individually need; safety, political freedom, to not be impoverished, etc.
In the case of counter-protesting Nazis, the most emasculating thing to do is really: punch them in the face, turn them off the street, and jeer and sneer at them and turn them into pussies by rallying everyone else, also advertising in the process the existence of the alternative community and thus reduce the capacity for the Nazis to recruit from people and actually become a physical threat. Asking nicely for them to stop, and to appease their demands doesn’t work. We tried that in the thirties. We lost Central and Western Europe to a fascist powerhouse that cleaned out everything to try and make their community reign supreme, it took a brutal war to toss them out and grind them back under so at least the democratic status-quo could be restored.
Defeating Jim Crow took the uniting power of solidarity and action against the racist system to bring down the racially charged laws of the South.
Accidents do happen and this isn’t because AntiFa is necessarily a vigilante mob. There’s a great deal of intelligence gathering to avoid beating up the wrong person. But in the heat of moments that go far beyond levels to be effectively controlled you can brick a bystander. It’s just what happens when you take fascists, who have historically proven to be non-comprising, and anti-fascist demonstrators who have a full war’s worth of evidence to say, “Laying down and letting them go does not mean we win”.
Things can get additionally confusing when so often the fascist look can be ubiquitous with normal every-day dress. And that the Fascist organizers are falling back to the classic tactic of modifying their rhetoric to appeal at a much more centrist level. Like the Republican Party learned by the eighties in the United States, you can still discuss race without discussing race at all which can make the situation even more confusing. A relatively centrist person may be talking about protecting jobs (even though they may not ever work the job they’re defending) or lawful borders; but the fascist today can use the same language to disguise their own program of supremacy. And when overt fascist symbols are tossed out and replaced with much more covert ones that get replaced with considerable frequency in the modern era they can make themselves far more ghostly than they did in the 1940’s.
For example: before the 1930’s the swastika was a fairly benign symbol in the dharmic faiths (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) and was even in western art work (the celts, Armenian, etc.). But then the Nazi Party took it up and entirely skewed its meaning.
In much the same way - trolling or not - the OK hand sign has also become, or was before it got changed - if it has - to be a sign meaning “White Power” and not just “OK”. Similarly the formerly innocuous Pepe has gone through similar changes and is something of a double, triple, or quadruple etendre.
This is fairly common Fascist practice which dates back to the early rise of the Nazi Party. And it catches unaware liberals and centrists by surprise and can make intelligence gathering to identify who may be who at an event hard, or if someone who needs to be told to stop being a cunt difficult to do. And its designed that way. So its understandable at least to me that some poor guy wearing just the wrong color of clothes got identified as a fascist, and not knowing he was probably just an innocent centrist, liberal, or normal conservative.
tl;dr - reality is as complicated as expecting a clean and actually efficient US airstrike
