JimCorrigan
Well-Known Member
Nuance only matters if the crimes meriting punishment are different. The intent behind similar crimes is irrelevant.In your examples of rapists vs. killers, the nuance matters when it comes to punishment. One can apply similar logic as to how one deals with antifa vs. the alt-right, they're both bad sure but they deserve different responses.
And for people who stubbornly refuse to call antifa out for what they are, this bud's for you.
National Post said:'Antifa' are despicable fascists ? call them that, openly, now
Just because a group chooses to call itself anti-fascist, and say it?s against hate, there is no obligation on the press to accept the self-promotion of a violent masked mob
Rex Murphy
September 1, 2017
12:55 PM EDT
We are fortunate to live in an age where the fight against neo-Nazis and white supremacy is taken so seriously. Only last week, reading the editorial and news reports from down south it was evident, especially after Charlottesville, that the days of the American Republic were numbered. A breathless media warned it was Germany in the early 1930s all over again. Fortunately the Republic has survived.
Who saved us all from a toothbrush mustache future? Why, the black-masked ?antifa? militia and their Black Bloc twin, naturally.
Ready as always, clad in black from head to stormtrooper toe, with their full arsenal of smoke bombs, brass knuckles, pipes, sticks and baseball bats, pepper spray and even shields (to pummel, not protect) proved more than capable of putting emergent neo-Nazis under the knout, both in Berkeley and even up here at McGill.
How did they do it?
With mayhem and mobs, of course. They smashed cameras and sometimes the faces of reporters, chased down old people, executed beat downs on isolated protestors, mauled passersby, in one case threatened a man in a wheelchair, and in general stormed the streets like a wolf pack after a long hunger and a really bad hair day. Anti-fascism is hard thuggish work.
Dropping the irony, that was the ludicrous overview being tentatively offered and implicitly supported by many who really should have known much better. A neo-Nazi and/or white supremacist threat to American democracy exists only in the heads of those who read Marvel Comics for news and think Twitter is a medium for sentient beings.
The real question about the antifa nihilist deadheads is how long so many are going to (a) avoid making judgements on them and (b) put up with their blatant violence and duplicity. In a multitude of press reports after Charlottesville they enjoyed a real pass. The most witless or insolent of reporters/commentators likened them (Lord, spare us) to the Allied soldiers landing on the Normandy beaches, a classic example of the excusatory overtime put in to ?justify? a set of thugs who enact the defining brutalities of fascism while calling themselves anti-fascist. What we have seen from antifa and Black Bloc is Mussolini in the bud.
Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun was outstandingly on the mark from the beginning, seeing them for what they were. Most reporters HuffPuffed their disdain for the troglodytes of the right, but held mum or waxed pious on the antifa mobs. Following an attack on a reporter at the Berkeley melee, Goldstein offered this gem of rebuke: ?Hey, look, Mainstream Media! Your pets are off the leash.?
Bloomberg Media woke up a week late with ?Antifa has more in common with the Nazis than with American ideals.? No less than Nancy Pelosi, after Berkeley, found it expedient to declare ?The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.?
Would we could have heard some of the same here in Canada after the Montreal melee. The Toronto Star, in a backflip that left spider monkeys agape in awe of its agility, declared in a headline: ?Violence at Right Wing Protest.? Their overworked public editor should do a column: ?Fake News and Atkinson Principles, How Easily they Blend.? All the violence at that right-wing protest was antifa, Black Bloc and left wing.
Antifa and Black Bloc, in one or other of their various incarnations, have been around for two decades, and provided they were in sync with any ?progressive? agenda item, earned a media pass. They sprinkled every violent protest with the apologetic cant of ?but the majority of the protestors were peaceful.?
And for all the talk of ?right-wing violence? now, and of ?white supremacists? (they are a scorned and miserable sub-sub-minority of malcontents), actual violence by the black-clad mobs ? as long as it is simply called anti-fascist ? gets a free halo. It earns either no mention, no condemnation if mentioned, or if condemned done in a plaintive whisper of sadness and rue that antifa violence might give ammunition to the dread ?right wing.? The kind of reporting that gives sophism a bad name.
Just because a group chooses to call itself anti-fascist, and chooses to say it?s against hate, there is no obligation on the press to accept the self-promotion of a violent masked mob. A lazy and timid press, however, does just that.
There is a kernel of real fascism and real hate in North America. And it is the antifa movement, and its organizers, who are that kernel. They deserve no respect, and less tolerance. And trying to make them heroes of a non-existent, fatuous Resistance to a democratic vote only encourages street-violence that may grow to riot and mayhem, and ultimately stimulate the very breakdown of democratic order and respect for it the mob lying professes to be defending.
Antifa is not a friend of democracy. It despises democracy, and equally despises those who believe in democracy. There?s not a spit of difference between them and the neo-Nazis ? except, and it?s a big except ? they have supporters outside the coven.
http://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-antifa-are-despicable-fascists-call-them-that-openly-now
And for the nutty professor:
Washington Post said:Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis
Marc Thiessen
August 30
Last weekend in Berkeley, Calif., a group of neo-communist antifa ? ?anti-fascist? ? thugs attacked peaceful protesters at a ?No to Marxism in America? rally, wielding sticks and pepper spray, and beating people with homemade shields that read (I kid you not) ?No Hate.? The Post reports how one peaceful protester ?was attacked by five black-clad antifa members, each windmilling kicks and punches into a man desperately trying to protect himself.? Members of the Berkeley College Republicans were then stalked by antifa goons who followed them to a gas station and demanded they ?get the [expletive] out? of their car, warning, ?We are real hungry for supremacists and there is more of us.?
The organizer of the anti-Marxism protest is not a white supremacist. Amber Cummings is a self-described ?transsexual female who embraces diversity? and had announced on Facebook that ?any racist groups like the KKK [and] Neo Nazis .?.?. are not welcome.? The protest was needed, Cummings said, because ?Berkeley is a ground zero for the Marxist Movement.?
As if to prove Cummings?s point, the antifa movement responded with jackboots and clubs ? because their definition of ?fascist? includes not just neo-Nazis but also anyone who opposes their totalitarian worldview.
And let?s be clear: Totalitarian is precisely what they are. Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defended antifa?s violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, ?Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists? who believe that physical violence ?is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.? In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis. Neo-Nazis are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that killed 25 million people last century. Antifa members are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that, according to ?The Black Book of Communism,? killed between 85 million and 100 million people last century. Both practice violence and preach hate. They are morally indistinguishable. There is no difference between those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Hitler and Himmler and those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.
The United States defeated two murderous ideologies in the 20th century. So we should all be repulsed by the sight of our fellow Americans carrying the banners of either movement, whether they are waving the red flags of communism or black flags of Nazism. Yet we are not. Communism is not viewed as an evil comparable to Nazism today. As Alex Griswold recently pointed out, the New York Times has published no fewer than six opinion pieces this year defending communism, including essays praising Lenin as a conservationist, explaining why Stalinism inspired Americans, and arguing that the Bolsheviks were romantics at heart and that women had better sex under communism. Can one imagine the Times running similar pieces about the Nazis?
My mother and grandfather fought the Nazis in Poland during World War II, and her family then endured the Stalinist terror that followed, when Nazi occupation was replaced by Soviet domination. So forgive me if I see little moral distinction between the swastika and the hammer and sickle. Both are evil, and their modern adherents need to be condemned ? especially when they dare to commit acts of violence in our midst to advance their hateful visions.
Both the left and the right have a responsibility to police their own movements. In the 1960s, William F. Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, widely believed then to be anti-Semitic and a proponent of nutty conspiracy theories, from the respectable right, and today, conservatives have a responsibility to do the same with the white nationalists of the alt-right.
Those on the left have responsibilities as well ? responsibilities few are meeting. On Monday I asked the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for her statement of condemnation. To her credit, Pelosi issued a strong statement Tuesday, declaring, ?The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted. In California, as across all of our great nation, we have deep reverence for the Constitutional right to peaceful dissent and free speech. Non-violence is fundamental to that right.?
Good for her. So why haven?t more leading Democrats done the same? After Charlottesville, the media rightly demanded that President Trump and all Republicans condemn the neo-Nazis and the KKK. So where are the calls for Democrats to condemn antifa ? and the brutal public condemnation for those who fail to do so? If black-clad neo-Nazis had attacked peaceful protesters at a ?No to Racism in America? march in Berkeley, politicians in Washington would be falling over themselves to express their disgust ? and any who failed to do so would be vilified. But when neo-communists commit this kind of violence, they get a pass from the left.
That cannot be allowed to stand.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...b4e4bb76a3a_story.html?utm_term=.eac9b85f6421
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