Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 08, 2018 7:33 pm

“Alt-right” vs. YouTube: Hitting white supremacists where it hurts

Forget Facebook and Twitter. YouTube is the alt-right’s lifeblood, and now the video platform is fighting back


“This isn’t the usual, ‘We’re under an attack, thank you for the support, share links.’ No, no, no. This is — we’re done, we’re off the internet, they’re banning us,” complained conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich on a recent episode of Infowars, during which he and Jones vowed to organize a protest of Google at this year's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas.

Cernovich added, "They want us in gulags, Alex," and darkly warned that "death camps are coming."

Later in the same broadcast, Jones claimed he was being targeted because he had "busted over 30 pedophiles killing children who were being held as slaves." (He hasn't.)

Gavin McInnes of CRTV offered a more pedestrian xenophobic theory, suggesting that "everyone at these social media companies has an accent" and "H1-B visas with an axe to grind." (In other words, blame the immigrants.)

More mainstream groups, running interference for white nationalists as they typically do, blamed the "trusted flaggers program." The Daily Caller, the Heritage Foundation, and Tucker Carlson have all claimed the Southern Poverty Law Center was a trusted flagger and denounced YouTube for supposedly letting the venerable anti-racist organization target white supremacist content for removal.

In reality, YouTube isn't taking down conspiracy-theory videos and white supremacist rants efficiently enough, but this panicked reaction speaks volumes about why YouTube, far more than Facebook or Twitter, has become the go-to online platform for spreading the far-right message.

Much of the success of YouTube's "conspiracy community," said Rebecca Watson, a progressive YouTube personality, stems from the platform's character as "a great, unmoderated echo chamber." She often creates videos meant to counter the conspiracy theories that frequently go viral on YouTube.

"There’s not an easy way to know what is in a video without watching a video," explained Jared Holt, a researcher for Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way. "Alt-right" YouTubers understand that this makes it impossible for the service to devote adequate manpower to moderating content, given the enormous volume of video uploaded every day.

There's also "not a lot of pushback against these people" from progressives on the service, Holt added. In a sense, YouTube allows white nationalists to hide in plain sight. Few liberals have the stomach or time to actually watch and respond to right-wing videos that spread fabricated theories or outrageous falsehoods. Social media in text form, as on Twitter or Facebook, attracts far more criticism, but videos can transmit far-right ideas far more widely while encountering relatively little pushback.

Rebecca Watson also noted that despite recent attempts to crack down on "fake news," YouTube and similar services rely on "algorithms that are based on popularity and 'upvotes,' and are easily gamed." "Alt-right" users have become experts in exploiting such algorithms to get more eyes on their videos.

Last week, Kelly Weill of the Daily Beast exposed the ways "alt-right" trolls push their content on YouTube, often by creating "fake accounts in order to boost visibility of their preferred videos and bury videos they don’t like."

This matters, said Ryan of Media Matters, because the "alt-right" is focused primarily on recruiting young people and there's "a readymade audience of young people" who "think of YouTube the way [older generations] think of our cable programs on TV." If a young person watches a right-wing video out of curiosity, she noted, the autoplay feature on the site will immediately queue up a related video. Before you know it, that viewer has consumed "five or six videos with those same points being repeated over and over again," making the arguments seem more acceptable, or at least less outlandish, than they otherwise would.

Recruitment matters. So does money — perhaps even more. As Ryan put it, "many of these guys have built their profiles largely on video," and generating ad revenue on YouTube is a primary source of income.

“These people that make YouTube content full-time with a white nationalist or conspiracy-theory flavor to it," Holt explained, now face "a threat to the way of living they’ve created for themselves.”

Ad revenue on pre-recorded video clips isn't the only source of alt-right revenue on YouTube, as Holt explained.

"People sympathetic to the 'alt-right' or white nationalist identities have been using live-streaming on YouTube to subvert community guidelines, because it’s hard to moderate something in real time," he explained. "During live-streaming, content creators have access to a feature called superchats where live viewers can donate money to have questions or comments pinned to the top of the live chatroom next to the video. It’s a way for people who are hosting extremist content to turn a profit.”

Holt believes the biggest blow to the "alt-right" so far has been the suspension of live-streaming privileges for a number of prominent "alt-right" figures, including Baked Alaska, Andy Warski, and Jerome Corsi. That sparked this semi-literate but fully enraged Twitter response from Corsi.


https://www.salon.com/2018/03/08/alt-ri ... -it-hurts/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Thu Apr 05, 2018 9:01 am

https://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/wha ... ism-anyway

What is Fascism, Anyway?

We Spoke to Scholars to Define the Contentious Term

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Words, and their meanings, are important.

Language is the principle way that we interact with each other. It’s our main form of symbolic communication and the tool that we use to understand the world around us. So for social movements, language holds a particular importance—building a common understanding of words and the things they represent is foundational.

For the anti-fascist movement, defining terms can be tricky. This difficulty stems specifically from the word “fascism” itself. The dictionary definition focuses on fascism as a form of authoritarian right-wing government, but fails to describe what fascism is before it actually takes power.

“It’s notoriously difficult to define fascism,” explained Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, in an interview with The Link. The first wave of fascists in the 1920s and 30s, he said, “adopted and discarded ideas at will.” They stole symbols and language from the left-wing workers’ movement, but redirected it towards wildly different goals.

The confusion in defining fascism, Bray said is “especially true in the postwar period, where fascists and far-right groups have adopted from Maoist and Trotskyist and anarchist ideas in a bizarre confluence of perspectives.”

For Alexander Reid Ross, author of the sweeping history of post-World War II fascism Against the Fascist Creep, this difficulty in forming a definition is built into fascism itself. In an interview, he described fascism as “syncretic,” taking elements from both the political left and right, but always striving towards greater levels of social hierarchy and domination.

That, for Reid Ross, is one of the foundational aspects of what makes fascism a distinct political tendency. The cornerstone of fascism is a drive towards greater distinctions between groups—class, race, gender or otherwise. These hierarchies are viewed as “natural and organic,” based on an “irrational understanding of might makes right,” he said.

“Fascism emerged as a rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment,” Bray explained. “It was really founded on an emotional appeal towards power and domination.”

The ultimate goals for fascists, Reid Ross explained, is a “confederation of ethno-states,” where each so-called racial group would have a their own state. Another way to describe this, Reid Ross pointed out, is “apartheid states where cultural minorities do not exist.”

By framing their goals as racial separation, fascists turn the language of diversity upside down. Using this logic, the desired apartheid states are framed as being anti-racist—because they guard against the supposedly homogenizing force of multiculturalism, which is framed as the real racism. This is the logic behind the white supremacist slogan that “diversity is white genocide.” Using this trick of language, the fascist movement hides its own intentions of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The entirety of the far-right cannot be accurately called fascist, though. In his book, Reid Ross differentiated between fascists and a broader category which he referred to as the radical right. The two groups share many of the same views, but the radical right tends to be more open to working within democratic parliamentary systems.

Reid Ross was quick to point out that, in practice, the lines separating fascists and the radical right are very blurred. “The divisions are there, but they’re frequently flouted by the participants,” he said. “You have people serving as conduits or bridges between movements.”

Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, “described himself as a classical liberal but actively and with intent worked to bring messaging from white nationalists to mainstream conservatives,” Reid Ross continued. “The issue with the radical right in general is that this is often their function.”

Explicitly fascist organizations may be small, but they pose an outsized threat beyond what their numbers alone would reveal. Unnoticed fascism tends to fester and become dangerous in three main ways, Bray explained.

“The most obvious is that they’re violent and murderous,” he said, referencing the growing number of murders and terror tied to far right groups in the United States. That same danger presented itself in Quebec City on January 29, 2017, when a racist murdered six people in a mosque. The alleged shooter had previously described how he only wanted white immigration in Quebec, a mirror of common white nationalist talking points.

“Secondly,” Bray explained, “they influence public discourses around issues like immigration, affirmative action, questions of race and national identity, to a degree that’s beyond the proportion of their numbers.” Here in Quebec, the past year has seen mainstream political parties pandering to far-right sensibilities by passing legislation such as Bill 62, which would restrict niqab-wearing Muslim women from accessing public services.

Lastly, Bray says, “Mussolini started out with 100 people, and Hitler started out with 54. You never know where a small white supremacist or fascist group can go. So when anti-fascists argue for stopping them before they take the first step forward, that’s an argument about the potential for these groups to grow.”

“It’s unlikely, but it’s possible, and I think that needs to be taken into account as well.”
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Sun Apr 22, 2018 11:09 am

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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Thu May 03, 2018 6:46 am

This is good:

Beyond History: Stretching Our Understanding of Fascism

Shane Burley

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For decades, the idea that fascism was on the horizon was the result of partisan hyperbole, the labeling of things labeled a totalitarian evil as “fascist.” The tide has shifted and a mass right populist upsurge has made fascism a realistic possibility, both in the political sphere and at the street level, where essentialized identity, fear, and “othering” has increased levels of acceptance. The traditional Marxist understandings of fascism have given an unrealistic picture of what to expect from insurrectionary white supremacist movements since the interwar period and has left many organizers without the schematic for how the fascist right actually functions. It takes defining the terms and understanding its shape to figure what comes next, and how a radical vision can eradicate its seeds before they fully sprout.

It’s Cultural, Not Just Economic

The idea that fascism comes as a totalizing result of the ruling class’s assault on the workers movement is not only incorrect, it refuses the extent of fascism’s actual terror. Georgi Dimitrov’s address at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in July–August 1935 has often been cited by contemporary organizations trying to come to terms with fascism’s appeal, calling it “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” Leon Trotsky’s assertion that fascism is the “most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital” has also been revived in force, a definition that lack’s even the most basic connection to anything we would call fascism in a post-war world.

What both definitions try to accomplish is to see the how and where fascism comes from, not what it ideologically is. This is the function of scholars like Robert Paxon, who looks as the “stages” that fascism came to pass in interwar countries. His analysis is more useful and accurate, but again misses what we need in a modern context. Fascism is a cultural force and not simply the results of economic contradictions, and because of its inherent economic limitations does not represent a clear move towards self-interest for the propertied classes. Fascism itself is a mass movement, only available in the era of mass politics, and through that populism it is able to appeal to a large swath of the working class. This is done by sublimating class identity for racial or national ones, and doing so through a reframing of the issues of worker alienation in terms of culture rather than the means of production. While ruling class entities certainly got behind European fascist movements, they did not uniformly, and that is certainly not the case in the majority of neo-fascist minority movements.

This could, instead, be seen as the inability of capital to reconcile uniform interests, a splitting of their perspectives. The “three-way fight” analysis works well to explain this dynamic, where by many struggles can be divided up into the ruling class, the left or workers movement, and a reactionary or authoritarian movement that pulls from the populations that could go to the previous two. In anti-imperialist struggle for national liberation this analysis was seen most clearly, where by many movement include the people’s liberatory struggle as well as a far-right clerical or nationalist movements that, while decisively fighting the imperialist capitalist class, were repressive and frightening in their own right. Fascism can be seen in this way, as an element in society that can be as much a mass politic as the left, but turning workers against their own interests even if it is not directly controlled by a united ruling class.

Fascism Is Not Systemic Oppression or Authoritarianism

The loose application of the term fascism has often been synonymous with some type of authoritarianism, the state or corporations interfering into an individual’s life in Orwellian ways, or simply the extention of systemic white supremacy and colonialism. I am defining fascism as a form of essentialized identity and inquality, made revolutionary. This means that it believes human being are unequal, in nature and spirit, and that identities like race and gender are real and significant as social dividers. This concept is and of itself oppressive and authoritarian, but it is fundamentally different than those found in the liberal democracies in which fascism is rising. Instead, the authoritarianism of the bourgeois state is justifiable in its own terms: it is in the interests of capital and against the popular classes. White supremacy is systemic within that, yet sublimated publicly and denied as reality.

What a fascist movement does is make that oppression explicit instead of implicit, a significant change since it attempts to reshape the public opinion to consciously favor the suppression of marginalized groups. The violence of white nationalism is insurrectionary in this way, it explodes past the violence of the state in its view of the current system as insufficient in its attacks on people of color. Many fascist movement also see themselves as anti-authoritarian, even anti-state in that they see a profoundly different social order and want to see certain privileged people or groups as free from state repression. While this is rhetorical rather than reality, it does present itself as a fundmanetally different view of authority than the U.S. government in many cases.

The refocus on fascism should not distract from the ongoing legacy of institutional white supremacy and patriarchy or the “Big Brother” elements of the existing state, but the two are not one in the same.

Metapolitics

The approach from much of the radical left centered in shopfloor militancy has been to analyze fascism on a purely political stage. The analysis of historian Robert Paxton centers this view, breaking down fascism into “5 stages” that go through the ideologues entering into a coalition, that coalition taking state power and breaking off allegiances, and moving to a period of increased authoritarianism and eventual collapse. This continues to see fascism in its functionary stages, how it works in statecraft. The problem here is that we are discussing the way that those movements played out in the largely primitive states of interwar Europe, all with their own unique baggage a century past.

If we want to look at neo-fascism, the fascism that is still a minority movement and vying for power, it has to be looked at in its essential qualities and not its political maneuvering. In the post-war world, fascist movements took their ideas of identity and inequality and focused on metapolitics, the cultural space that is pre-political and helps inform the values that determine politics down the line. This means entry into music and the arts, the use of philosophy and esoteric spirituality, and the reframing of values rather than just politics. If they can make the idea of human inequality normalized, to re-emphasize race as a valid dividing line, and to reinterpret the brutal crimes of colonialism as just the normal “struggle between races and civilisations for the future of the planet,” then they have the potential to enact their vision since they have reshaped the people who manifest the mass politics.

This struggle can be counterintuitive for organizers who have centered their ideas in the economic and political, where the battle is measured in material wins and losses. What can be learned from this, primarily, is where to find fascism, and it will often be in venues where conventional wisdom would tell us least to look.

Labor is Not Immune

The Traditionalist Workers Party was the brain child of Millenial white nationalist Matthew Heimbach, who wanted to combine the blue collar racist movements found in Patriot circles with the new-found “intellectual” approach of the Alt Right. He has founded his analysis in national socialism: the privileging of certain groups into a hierarchical vision that remains anti-capitalist. His socialism would solidify class collaboration, but would still attempt to maintain a reasonable material standard of living for white workers so they could perpetuate their caste through institutions of reproductive labor. His prerogative has set his sites on union members, especially in the skilled trades, since they have a stake in opposing “globalized” international capitalism and he could combine his own right-wing version of anti-capitalism with an intense nationalism. Against free trade, immigration, and billionaire tax breaks, he supports organized labor as an institution of the white worker, fighting finance capital that he sees as uniquely globalized, impersonal, and Jewish.

The labor movement is often assumed to be left in its character, just as anti-capitalism is. This is because its roots are in the anti-oppression class politics of the left, not the hierarchical vision of the right. Fascism turns this, like it does most left politics, on its head by using many of the political programs associated with the left to see through right-wing goals. They oppose capitalism because it destroys national and racial distinctiveness, pushes women into the workforce, and is a chaotic system that does not represent “natural hierarchies.” Their anti-capitalism instead wants to reinstitute natural hierarchies, a systematized form of class collaboration that keeps people in their classes. Their vision of the labor movement has a different endgame from the left’s, but it still is vying for a voice. It will do this by playing on labor’s darkest moments, of using civic nationalist rhetoric, of privileging skilled trades, and of collaborating with business leaders like Trump.

Acknowledging this means that a deeper rhetoric has to be used inside of the labor movement so that not only immediate gains are considered, instead keeping the long-term revolutionary syndicalist vision in mind as piecemeal gains are made.

The struggle to confront fascism is, itself, drawn from the exact avenues fascism takes towards power, through mass movements. The ability to draw people in the workers’ movement towards an antifascist praxis derives from the extent to which the work has been done to center anti-racist politics into a radical vision of class struggle. Syndicalists are historically centered in this struggle as the ability to build a new society out of a mass union politic is the same strategy necessary to confront a fascist movement that creeps into every area of social life. The power of workers in the workplace comes from the strength, and size, of the solidarity acquired, and that same principle plays out in the streets as the Alt Right attempts to co-opt the language of social strife. While drawing from the union movement gives us a tactical strength, it also displays limitations since this fight is one distinctly different from the history of class antagonisms that gave rise to the labor movement.


https://medium.com/@burlesshanae/beyond ... b6db04a76/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Tue May 08, 2018 9:17 am

Shane Burley is an important anti-fascist thinker:


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Against the Alt-Right: An Interview with Shane Burley



May 7, 2018
Interviewer: Josh Robinson

JR: Much of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It focuses in on the Alt-Right manifesting as a sort of dominant appearance of fascism in the US over the past four years. How did the Alt-Right come to dominate the fascist political scene in the States over the past few years, and how does it fit within how fascist ideas have developed in the US since the Second World War?

SB: It came to dominate the fascist movement in the US largely through the historic failure of the far-right to create a revolutionary white ethnostate. There really has not been a dominant intellectual fascist movement in the US for decades. By and large, white nationalism, which as a term did not really dominate until the 1990s, has always been hindered by its inability to create a philosophical underpinning to justify its racial animus. This has a few distinct causes.

First, American white nationalism’s largely blue-collar organizations during the second half of the twentieth century has always primed action over conversation, with little focus on intellectual coherence or effective organizing. Second, its guttural race hatred has made white sovereignty the key issue, which, on its own, is not a fully realized ideology that is able to interpret a variety of aspects of society. Instead, it doesn’t actually make an argument about ideas as much as simply casting blame on people of color and Jews for whatever ills they seem to identify at the time, from crime to liberalism to economic injustice. Third, the heavy Americana that US organizations tend to inflect has also kept them out of the continuity of European fascist philosophers and movements, creating a reasonably petty version of fascist politics. Fourth, and maybe most importantly, white nationalist violence over the past fifty years has always made them outcasts; they are the dominant threat of terrorist bloodshed in the US.

What the Alt-Right wanted to do was to build an intellectually coherent fascist movement, at least in the beginning. Building from the European New Right, the conservative revolution in Germany, German idealist philosophy, romanticist art movements, perennial traditionalist writing, and other trends, they wanted to make arguments against equality and in favor of essentialist concepts of identity. The only real intellectual core of most of the US white nationalist movement focused on what is called “race realism,” which essentially boils down to neo-eugenicists’ arguments about race and IQ, criminality, sexual restraint, and other personality features. While this is obviously ideologically motivated and completely discredited pseudoscience, it does not necessarily present itself as ideological. Instead, the Alt-Right wanted to make ideological arguments, of which “race realism” was only one component.

So, when Richard Spencer started the now-defunct AlternativeRight.com in 2010, he was pulling from a “big tent” of far-right theorists and ideologues who were going to inject nationalism with the appearance of depth. He invited a variety of people to write for the site, including paleoconserative writers he had been mingling with at Taki’s Magazine and Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative, European New Right authors he had begun conversing with, open racialists who used heavy pseudoscience like American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, “folkish” pagans who used ancestral European religions as an identitarian vessel, and others who were challenging the basic assumptions of liberal society.

As the years went on, and Spencer took over the National Policy Institute and Washington Summit Publishers and founded the Radix Journal, he further crystalized his fascist ideas, added some authors to the Alt-Right canon while deleting others, and he created a full-spectrum ideological catalogue. While it certainly centered on race and the belief in inequality between races, his fascism was intersectional. It touched on gender, sexuality, social hierarchy, religious traditions, philosophy, aesthetics, and economics. It was this full spectrum character that brought Spencer more in line with the European fascist movements he idolized, and really helped the Alt-Right become the best example of a generic or categorical fascist movement we have today.

This thought creation linked up with the growing internet troll culture, expanded through blogs and podcasts, allowing it to grow to the capacity we see today. Spencer brought the philosophy, 4Chan brought the personality, and podcasts like The Daily Shoah synthesized the two. The new face of the Alt-Right also hit American culture at just the right time, when a “whitelash” was happening against growing multiculturalism in America and the right populism that had been sweeping Europe made its way to the US. In that way, the “coherent fascism” that Spencer built was boiled down to its essence, turned into snarky blog posts and memes, and served up to an audience that had become more racially angry through the stoking of nativist populist institutions like Breitbart and candidates like Donald Trump.



JR: Now that we are seeing a lot of the consequences for the Alt-Right, such as the elimination of their web platforms and the shutdown of their public organizations, can you predict what the next couple of years will look like for them?

I would be remiss to make a prediction of exactly what will happen with the Alt-Right. I have done this in the past and been proven incorrect. It is sort of my hubris to look at signs and determine how they will play out. Instead, what I can speak to are the challenges faced and what seems like the likely direction for both the Alt-Right and its opposition.

It is important to analyze one key component of the Alt-Right’s success. All fascist movements need a crossover point to make it into the larger culture. Even in an intensely racist and unequal society like the contemporary US, open racialism and fascist politics are vastly unpopular when they are presented openly and honestly. Americans like their racism implicit, not explicit. So, what they need is a slightly more moderate and mainstream institution to help them repackage their ideas to a mass audience. All fascist movements have had some version of this operation, from the America First model, which hid open fascists, to the White Citizen’s Council’s connection to the Third Era Ku Klux Klan. In the 1980s and 1990s, this was largely done through paleoconservatism, with figures like Pat Buchanan and publications like Chronicles (which actually did publish fascist European New Right philosophers like Alain de Benoist).

Today, this has happened with what is called the Alt-Light or New Right, which is comprised of punchy, populist, nativist figures that exist largely online and who make up a cultural, rather than electoral, base. Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones, Lauren Southern, Milo Yiannoupoulos, Ann Coulter, Gavin McInnis, Breitbart, InfoWars, and Rebel Media all have a role in this, as do some “patriot”-type militia organizations. Since the beginning of 2015, the actual Alt-Right, which is openly fascist and defined by its white nationalism, has cozied up to these institutions, who do not commit to openly fascist ideas, to help get ideas about Islamophobia, nativism, immigration, and patriarchy out to the public. This has helped along their massive growth, since they have a much larger recruitment base to pull from.

The problem with this partnership is that it was always tenuous and never fit perfectly. The Alt-Light is better described as civic nationalist rather than ethnic nationalist: their nationalism isn’t necessarily rooted in genetics, but culture. Now, we can easily look at this and see it for the coded racism that it is, but the Alt-Right isn’t coded racism, it is explicit racism. So, while people like Lauren Southern or the Proud Boys have created massive organizing spaces for the white nationalists of the Alt-Right, figures like Richard Spencer or Jared Taylor have always had a certain discomfort with the Alt-Light. In the Alt-Light’s denial of racism, they sort of reaffirm that racism is, as a concept, important, and Spencer and the Alt-Right would like to destigmatize open white supremacy.

So, after Trump was elected, the allegiances between the Alt-Light and Alt-Right began to fracture heavily, and after the murder of Heather Heyer and the disaster at Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, they were severed permanently. Today, the Alt-Light wants nothing to do with the actual Alt-Right, and the Alt-Right feels betrayed by the Alt-Light. This is also a common feature of these tacit alliances: the more moderate figures always abandon the radicals. So, with August 12, the white nationalists of the Alt-Right wanted to have a “coming out” party for the open racialist wing, and they were not only going to include the middle-class Alt-Right intellectuals, but also the KKK and neo-Nazi organizations that they share most of their ideas with.

Post-Charlottesville, the largest recruitment strategy of the Alt-Right has been severed. Starting during the year prior to Charlottesville, and intensifying after the tragedy, they began to see mass platform denial. One of the things that allowed the Alt-Right to flourish was that they were essentially on the same platforms as major media and political figures. Social media and easy web hosting was a major boost to them and allowed them to create a massive propaganda infrastructure, which is all but gone today. After Charlottesville, most Alt-Right institutions lost web hosting, payment services, web cataloguing services, social media accounts, podcast hosting, email services, and even dating apps. They have had to start from scratch to create their own infrastructure, but the bottom line is, now that they have been kicked off all the platforms used by most of the country, they simply don’t have the same reach for recruitment and influence they once did. More than this, the financial severing has destroyed their monetary base, and their choice to use “pay walls” for subscriptions to most of their websites is further limiting their outreach beyond their racist echo chamber.

Their growth has also been limited by the mass opposition they have faced. It took a while, but a mass antifascist movement has formed to confront the Alt-Right. They cannot have a public event without overwhelming opposition. Shortly after Charlottesville, a group of Proud Boys and other Alt-Right hangers-on tried to have a public event in Boston. Their 150 participants were met by an opposition of 40,000. Spencer, trying to exploit the rules that govern public universities, has targeted colleges as a location he can coerce into hosting him. Students and community members are creating strategies for mass resistance to either force the speech to be canceled entirely or derail it so effectively that it cannot be used for recruitment.

On top of that, the doxing of major Alt-Right figures, the revelation of their personal information, has created a web of personal and professional consequences. This is dissuading a large portion of potential recruits from wanting to join for fear of giving up their entire life. It is also limiting the stability and finances of those involved, since they become unemployable and their families disown them.

All of this is a long way of saying that they have become heavily limited and it is difficult to see a pathway for them to regain the momentum they had in 2016 over the next couple of years. They will likely further radicalize, since they will become more insular, which is evidenced by their descent into more traditional colonialist and genocidal public arguments. Even their key institutions are in conflict, debating over whether they should continue into “real world activism” or continue building meta-politics through philosophy and art. And with that pattern of peaks and decline you have demagoguery, strong personalities with a lot to lose who are battling for hegemony within their insular subculture.

It is from this cauldron of failure that seemingly random acts of violence often emerge, out of desperation and rage fueled by increasingly radical rhetoric. As we are seeing a flurry of Alt-Right motivated attacks and murders, this trend seems as though it is on its way in. And that may be the most frightening part of where we are now, and why organizers are thinking of ways to defend their communities from racist violence.



JR: What kind of antifascist strategies have been uniquely successful when dealing with the Alt-Right? Have new strategies emerged over the last couple of years?

SB: The first thing to remember is that the Alt-Right is in continuity with fascist movements of the past. Many of the major figures and institutions that helped prop up the Alt-Right were also prominent in the 1990s white nationalism scene. Some of the antifascist groups that were fighting earlier forms of white nationalism are still here fighting the Alt-Right, so the skills and tools they developed in earlier struggles are relevant and applicable when it comes to the new breed of racist.

That said, the intensely online nature of the Alt-Right has meant that going online and ensuring an information exchange is critical. The online nature has created a layer of anonymity for Alt-Right participants that antifascists have had to penetrate. This has been done by working effectively on doxing, making sure that no figure in the Alt-Right could permanently maintain their anonymity. This has two effects, as mentioned before. It severs major figures from the broader community and often robs them of their income source, but it also serves as a warning to less committed members who do not want to sacrifice their livelihood and social standing to participate in a white supremacist movement.

The next thing that has been very effective is the focus on pressure campaigns on web platforms to drop Alt-Right publications and people. Since the Alt-Right relies almost exclusively on web outreach and propaganda, having them removed from common platforms has been incredibly effective. Antifascists have found that this is especially effective when communities focus on pressuring the companies with potential backlash, rather than simply trying to have them strengthen regulations, which could also be used against leftist activists.

Traditional militant antifascism has also been incredibly effective as the Alt-Right moves out into the streets. They are unable to have regular events at this point, whether it be public rallies or private conferences. In this new world, any appearance of the Alt-Right brings such a massive wave of opposition that it is next to impossible for them to exist.

A focus on campus organizing has also been critical since the Alt-Right has focused heavily on building a base on campus. As Richard Spencer continues to try to appear on college campuses, like the University of Michigan, antifascist campus projects like the Campus Antifascist Network are holding him back. As Identity Europa and Turning Point USA continue recruitment of dissident campus conservatives, a mass antifascist student movement is proving a critical juncture to stop their progression through the universities.

One of the most important components is to look at the composition of the antifascist struggle right now and to integrate ongoing anti-racist and anti-oppression projects.



JR: What role do intersecting movements have in antifascism? Is there a place for tenant organizing, labor unions, feminist collectives, and other projects?

SB: They are critically important. As mentioned above, we need to see that antifascism is not just a singular struggle uninformed by the various ways that oppression hits people’s lives. This is especially true of anti-racist, post-colonial, anti-queerphobia, anti-transphobia, and feminist organizing, all of which are specifically targeted by reactionary nationalist movements. Antifascists acknowledge the necessity of intersecting with those struggles, and not allowing singular white male perspectives to inform antifascist analysis and priorities. Part of this is to see community self-defense as a component of antifascism, confronting police violence, and the all-out assault on women and gender non-conforming people.

Fascism is, in and of itself, the process of making implicit inequality explicit. Within that, the process of confronting class institutions that perpetuate this inequality is necessary, not only for building the power needed to take on fascist insurgencies, but to confront the hierarchical class society that birthed them in the first place. Labor, as the largest social movement, has built a base in worker organizing, and has the institutional and financial weight to really give antifascist movements a shot in the arm. Tenant struggles are hit by the intersectional oppression of class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other factors, and so part of creating safe and vibrant neighborhoods means linking up with antifascist movements that see racial scapegoating as a key component of the rental crisis. There is no social movement today that is not touched by reactionary violence, and if there is to be some degree of consciousness and unity in the working class, which is necessary for larger institutional overhaul, then we have to confront street-level bigotry, oppression, and violence.



Author Bios:

Josh Robinson is an organizer and writer based in New England. His work has been featured in Anti-Fascist News and It’s Going Down.

Shane Burley is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It. His work has appeared in Jacobin, Al Jazeera, In These Times, Waging Nonviolence, Alternet, ThinkProgress, Upping the Anti, and Roar Magazine. He can be found on Twitter at @Shane_Burley1.


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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Thu May 31, 2018 2:50 pm

"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 01, 2018 6:27 am

Faith Goldy: Innocent “Journalist” or Pro-Nazi Propagandist?

By Montreal Anti-Fascists - May 31, 2018

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Since 2015, Goldy became well-known as the host of “On the Hunt With Faith Goldy,” a video report on Ezra Levant’s far-Right Zionist Rebel Media website. Typical shows had themes like, “While migrants rape their way across the continent, where are Europe’s men?” (January 29, 2016), or “Trudeau teams with Soros on refugee scheme” (December 15, 2016). It was Goldy who promoted various conspiracy theories about the massacre at the Quebec City mosque in January 2017, continuing to spread misinformation long after it had been debunked by mainstream media outlets.

Later that year, she accompanied Proud Boys founder (and at the time her colleague at Rebel Media) Gavin McInnes to the West Bank, where she called for a “crusade” to “reclaim” (i.e. ethnically cleanse) Bethlehem, also tweeting selfies of herself posing in a “deus vult” hoodie emblazoned with the crusaders’ cross, with the caption “in hoc signo vinces” (“in this sign you shall conquer”).

A complete catalogue of Goldy’s racist, Islamophobic, and sexist bullshit, would require a stronger stomach to compile than we have (though you can see some more examples here). As time went on, Goldy only became more outspoken, championing views that were noxious even to a fellow-racist like her boss Ezra Levant. While Rebel Media was ok with her devoting a show to “white genocide” in June 2017, things came to a head in August as Goldy traveled to Charlottesville, VA, to report on the racist protests and antifascist counterprotests as a “journalist” embedded within the far-Right.

As the Winnipeg Free Press reported in the wake of the clashes, “In the course of her dispatches, Goldy argued the events in Charlottesville were evidence of a ‘rising white racial consciousness’ that was going to change the political landscape in America. She also went to great lengths to laud the 20-point ‘meta-political manifesto’ composed by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, a document that included calls to organize states along ethnic and racial divides and celebrates the superiority of ‘White America.’ Goldy described Spencer’s manifesto as ‘robust’ and ‘well thought-out.’”

It was the backlash against her sympathetic interview with Robert “Azzmador” Ray of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer – during which the two can be heard basically agreeing with each other about everything, in what can only be regarded as an exercise in mutual admiration – while in Charlottesville that led to her termination at Rebel Media.


https://itsgoingdown.org/faith-goldy-in ... pagandist/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 09, 2018 10:35 am

The Fascist Creep Within the Church of Satan

By Trident Antifa - June 8, 2018

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Newcomers Trident Antifa offer up a critique of the fascist creep happening within the decades old Church of Satan.

Although the Church of Satan isn’t an organizing political entity, it should still be on the antifascist radar. Even though the organization is over 50 years old, there is still a lot of confusion, ignorance, and downright lies about what it represents.

It should be made clear what the Church of Satan and Satanism are and they should be critiqued for the actual positions they hold instead of straw-manned. The Church of Satan is not a front for fascism or white supremacy and [the Chruch’s brand of] Satanism is not devil worship. Instead, they espouse an ideology of “vital existence.” The concern here is with the organization’s lazy permittance of and complicity in some members’ fascist and far-Right leanings. Any organization or institution that allows these ideas in their ranks and also gives them a platform should be subjected to vitriolic criticism and ultimately be annihilated.

What are the Church of Satan and Satanism?

The Church of Satan was founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey. After his death, it was taken over by Peter Gilmore and Peggy Nadramia. It exists to represent and defend Satanism as defined in The Satanic Bible and The Satanic Scriptures. The organization consists of a hierarchical structure with its Active Members being of various degrees: 1st-degree Satanist, 2nd-degree witch/warlock, 3rd-degree priest/priestess (also referred to as reverend), 4th-degree magister/magistra, 5th-degree magus/maga.

Satanism is an atheistic ideology using Satan as a symbol for rebellion, iconoclasm, and liberation from “spiritual” religions and herd constraints that would stifle man’s carnal existence in this life. Satanism is a life philosophy that champions “vital existence” and indulgence (not compulsion) and does not recognize or concern itself with notions of the supernatural or an afterlife. It is squarely about living in the here and now and getting the most out of this life. It is a religion of the flesh and natural instincts and is at odds with religions and ideologies that aim to subjugate people under their rule and conformity to an arbitrary and restrictive morality, such as in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Satanism espouses life-affirmation, while these religions and ideologies espouse life-denial.

The Problem With the Church of Satan

The Church of Satan depicts itself as an apolitical entity whose members choose their politics freely in accordance with their needs. This includes members who identify and sympathize with the Alt-Right and fascism. The organization puts forth the argument that it is apolitical because it doesn’t in any official manner endorse any political party or candidate and that its membership spans the political spectrum, from far-Left communists to far-Right fascists, and liberals and centrists in between. But in practice, the organization breaches any claim to being apolitical.

The organization runs a news feed on its social media accounts and on its website. It can be seen by a quick search that in numerous cases it has endorsed and promoted, effectively platforming, posts that include podcasts with fascists, and one, in particular, featuring fascist political candidate Augustus Sol Invictus in a Heathen Harvest episode (the post on the Church of Satan’s news feed seems to have recently been taken down, but the post dates back to 2015 and it remained up no problem for 3 years). The host of the show is a Church of Satan Reverend named Raul Antony. But the Church of Satan claims to be apolitical; but the problem is that you can in no real way be apolitical while in an official capacity post links to sites and podcasts in which the hosts or guests embrace fascism. That is by definition a political endorsement.

The Church of Satan draws the ire of this article in a twofold manner: 1. because of its clear, hypocritical, and dishonest ways of platforming fascist ideas, and 2. because of its lazy and repugnant tolerance of its membership being far-right, alt-right, and fascist. The organization has not made any statement or policy barring people who are fascists or fascist sympathizers, and when questioned on its complicity in allowing literal nazis in their ranks it either remains silent or wholeheartedly deflects the question and the church’s responsibility, which is hypocritical and ironic because the Church of Satan prides itself on championing responsibility to the responsible. Moreover, fascism itself is not in-congruent with Satanism. In fact, there is canonical evidence via The Satanic Scriptures in the essay The Fascism Question that supports this claim. We will be taking a look at this essay in the coming days.

Additionally, the Church of Satan regularly (again, in an official capacity) promotes posts for The Accusation Party, a podcast that focuses on an anti-SJW, anti-feminist, anti-antifa, pro-free speech, Alt-Right narrative. The Accusation Party frequently makes strawman arguments against its flawed and dishonest notions of social justice, safe spaces, and antifascism. It puts forth toxic ideas of intolerance and is dead-set against inclusion and equality. Although The Accusation Party may not necessarily be fascist per se, it consistently perpetuates the talking points of the Alt-Right. It is in practice an Alt-Right podcast whether it wants to admit it or not. It is entirely bigoted, ignorant, and dishonest while being absolutely wrong about absolutely everything. What is striking about this is that the Church of Satan prides itself on being as accurate and researched as possible, putting forth an air of credibility; but it actively links to pages that outright spew disinformation, having no concern at all for truth. This reveals a repugnant character. If the Church of Satan really is apolitical and it does not condone fascism or disinformation, why can the moderators just not be bothered to research and investigate the content they are promoting?

Since it has been demonstrated that the Church of Satan has no problem with literal nazis in their ranks, that they platform fascist ideas and outright disinformation, and that they have taken no initiative to distance themselves from fascism or bar fascists from their organization, it is now shown to be the morally bankrupt institution that it is.


https://itsgoingdown.org/fascist-creep- ... -of-satan/
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 10, 2018 9:00 am

Trump’s Loudest Anti-Muslim Twitter Troll Is A Shady Vegan Married To An (Ousted) WWE Exec

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Mekelburg had also been trying to make inroads into what Ibrahim Hooper calls “the cottage-industry of Islam haters,” which is run by bigots such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Brigitte Gabriel and Frank Gaffney — several of whom have close ties to the Republican establishment and the Trump administration. Their efforts can be remunerative, thanks to generous funding from conservative and libertarian foundations such as the Donors Capital Fund.

Mekelburg’s best connection to this world was through Anni Cyrus, who produces The Glazov Gang, an Islamophobic talk show that can be found on YouTube. Host Jamie Glazov is the editor of one of Horowitz’s anti-Muslim publications. Mekelburg asked for Cyrus’ help in launching her own anti-Muslim organization. Cyrus, who did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment, greeted Mekelburg’s overture with enthusiasm.

“It’s such a privilege to hear from you as I follow your amazing work daily,” Cyrus emailed. “Thank you so much for considering me for this project. It will be an honor to be able to work with you on this.”

Mekelburg named her organization Resistance Against Islamic Radicals (RAIR). She created a website, set up a Facebook page and a Twitter handle, and recruited Cortez to design artwork from behind bars, according to Galasso. RAIR’s mission would be “to stop the Jihadi infiltration in our American communities.” Mekelburg didn’t mention herself anywhere on the organization’s website. Under an “accomplices” section, however, she posted the names, photos and contact information for people and groups she believed were collaborating with jihadi terrorists. That could mean anyone with a connection to Islam.

“If the local garbage man was seen going into a mosque, you could submit that information to the site and she would post it,” said Galasso.

Soliciting denunciations from members of the public had a Gestapo-Stasi stink to it, and RAIR’s roster of “accomplices” included city council members, rabbis, police chiefs, mosques, newspapers and other businesses. It looked like a target list. (During the reporting of this story, the contact information for the “accomplices” was removed from the RAIR website.)

Janet Lyness, the county attorney in Johnson County, Iowa, made the list because she donated to the campaign of Mazahir Salih, a Muslim woman who became the first Sudanese-American elected to public office in the United States when she won a city council seat in Iowa City last year.

Lyness, who is the chief law enforcement officer for Johnson County, didn’t realize Mekelburg had targeted her until she was contacted by HuffPost.

“It concerned me seeing this, accusing me and all these other people of being jihadists,” Lyness said. “While it’s ridiculous, and everything she’s saying is false and ludicrous, I do wonder who might be reading this and might follow up and want to contact or threaten anyone on this list.”

Mekelburg had plenty of warning signs that her hate-slinging might have consequences. “My dads bugging out,” she texted last year, around the time she was working on RAIR. “He calls me every day bugging out. … His business is in a Muslim hotbed and my brothers restaurant has the same name. World Trade Center muslim terrorists mosque is down the street.”

Mekelburg’s Islamophobia also put Siino in an awkward position. In February 2017, after his startup went out of business following a trademark dispute, Siino found a new job with the WWE, the Connecticut-based pro wrestling entertainment company co-founded by Linda McMahon, who now works in the Trump administration. Siino, who did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment, became a senior vice president responsible for global content distribution and business development. Mekelburg told Galasso that the WWE knew about @AmyMek and had asked Siino to keep his connection to his wife quiet.

When asked by HuffPost about the veracity of this claim, the WWE at first offered a cryptic answer. “This is the first time we’re hearing about Amy Mekelburg,” said a corporate spokesperson last Thursday, requesting not to be identified by name.

The company had reason to worry about Mekelburg’s Islamophobia. In the early part of 2018, the WWE and Saudi Arabia finalized a controversial 10-year deal to bring pro wrestling there. Siino was negotiating TV deals in the United Arab Emirates, according to the WWE. Back in Fishkill, his wife was casting Muslims as subhuman filth.

Twitter’s policy against hateful conduct prohibits “behavior that incites fear about a protected group” and “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone.” One digital sleuth who tracks @AmyMek told HuffPost that he has reported the account to Twitter more than 50 times to no avail. Although the company has “withheld” Mekelburg’s account in Germany and France, Twitter has done little to cramp her style in the U.S.

Mekelburg appeared to operate without fear of fallout anywhere. As this story neared publication, she kept tweeting hate, even when her husband’s job was in jeopardy. Last Friday, after HuffPost asked the WWE a second time if anyone there had known about @AmyMek before hiring Siino, the company responded definitively.

“No,” said the WWE spokesperson. “Now that it has come to our attention, Sal Siino is no longer an employee.”

Siino showed up at the Fishkill apartment complex over Memorial Day weekend, dry-cleaned shirts hanging in the back of his Audi A5. On Tuesday, he was still there. And Mekelburg was still tweeting. She raved about “jihadi rape gangs” and threw her support behind Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-Muslim, violent British criminal who was arrested last week for contempt of court after livestreaming about “Muslim paedophiles” outside a gang rape trial in Leeds, England. She defended Roseanne Barr after Barr tweeted racist and Islamophobic comments and anti-Semitic lies.

Clearly, Mekelburg wasn’t going to stop.

On Wednesday, she emailed this HuffPost reporter ― not to answer questions or address or clarify any of the information I’d gathered about her. She wanted to muscle me. “My attorney, Martin Garbus (cc’ed on this email), will contact you tomorrow morning,” she wrote.

Martin Garbus is a high-profile attorney who has represented Daniel Ellsberg, Nelson Mandela and Don Imus, among many others. Two of his current clients, Paul and Chris Gaubatz, are major Islamophobes. When Garbus did not call me at the designated time Thursday morning, I called him.

“I don’t represent that woman,” he told me and then hung up the phone.

But that wasn’t the end for Mekelburg. She posted a long thread on Twitter blaming me for the WWE’s decision to fire Siino over her bigotry. Within minutes, her followers began calling me with threats.

“You better be careful because people are out there targeting you now,” one said.

“You’re going to get it now,” said another.

White nationalists, misogynists and neo-Nazis all amplified Mekelburg’s comments about me. So did prominent far-right propagandists such as Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich, both of whom had been instrumental in driving the near-deadly “PizzaGate” disinformation campaign.

Unfortunately, hate that festers online against any group of people doesn’t always stay online. Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in 2011 after radicalizing himself with the same anti-Muslim propaganda that Mekelburg spreads. In the U.S., assaults and hate crimes against Muslims have risen alarmingly since MAGA xenophobes mustered on social media.

And hate isn’t always so explosive. It often manifests as a quiet cruelty. Last year, according to Mekelburg’s other former friend, the Twitter troll stopped at a Sunoco in Fishkill to buy bananas at the gas station’s convenience store. Inside, she found an older man ― a Muslim immigrant ― working behind the counter. Mekelburg paid for her bananas but refused to speak to the man. She wouldn’t look at him. She just threw a few bills on the counter. When the man tried to place some change in her hand, she made it clear to him that he was not to touch her.

Then she went home to tweet.


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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:39 pm

In a 2016 BuzzFeed article, alt-right guru Richard Spencer told journalist Rosie Gray that he found mainstream-press coverage a bit jarring because “I’m so used to being an avant-garde bohemian intellectual.” Or consider these quotes from a recent interview with a guy named Paul Waggener: “I mostly listen to the really classic, incredibly depressing country music. And I listen to a lot of black metal. . . . Everything is moving rapidly more and more towards a corporate monoculture. . . . It mediates all activity through television, through the internet. Everything has become mediated like pornography.” Waggener is a founder of the Wolves of Vinland, a “folkish pagan” group, and of Operation Werewolf, a sort of far-right bohemian men’s movement that counts plenty of Mishima fans in its ranks. A white supremacist who complains about corporate monoculture, whose musical taste would win the approval of all the rock snobs I went to college with, and whose views on porn are more progressive than theirs? It seems odd, though I guess it’s just an update of punk/skinhead hybridity. The docudrama series NSU German History X (2016) does a brilliant job of depicting the moment, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when East German adolescents were choosing subcultural affiliations in an atmosphere of cultural ferment. Neo-Nazis and Marxist anarchists are living in the same abandoned buildings, wearing the same clothes (with different slogans), and listening to bands that are musically indistinguishable. For some kids, the choice of which group to join seems almost arbitrary. Counterrevolution can be as much fun as revolution, because it’s the same thing, only in reverse.

Relatedly, the mythology of the mighty nihilist exerts its appeal across the political spectrum, informing archetypes of subversion and rebellion that can be repurposed for any ideological program. The term avant-garde is borrowed from the military lexicon; the modernist avant-gardes conceptualized the artist as, essentially, a guerilla fighting an asymmetrical war against bourgeois culture and norms as such. That’s who Mishima was when he was writing his night thoughts and committing every possible heresy. Morally, the segue from metaphorical combat to actual violence is momentous, but perhaps psychologically it’s less of a leap than we might assume, when the ground has been prepared by deeply ingrained ideas about heroism, extreme risk, and the kinds of experience worth having.

Waggener professes to identify with the language and social structures of “motorcycle gangs.” The ’60s counterculture, too, had a thing for motorcycle gangs, romanticizing them all the way up until Altamont, the Dionysian death rite of the 1960s, when a bunch of Hell’s Angels who were doing security for the Rolling Stones—just as bikers have been doing for white-supremacist demonstrators in the past couple of years—killed Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old black man. Fascists aren’t the only people who go looking for the essence of reality in their own grandiose and potentially lethal fantasies. If the counterculture’s search for the ultimate sensation usually entailed a peaceful hippie pilgrimage, it might also take the form of the kind of hypermasculine death trip that Mishima renders so vividly, and that he lived out. He fits right in among the easy riders and raging bulls in New Hollywood’s pantheon of heroes. If he had never existed, the alt-right wouldn’t have needed to invent him, because Paul Schrader already would have.


In the Fascist Weight Room, 1968’s dangerous and grandiose fantasies by ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN
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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 19, 2018 5:13 pm

Because of Their Violence

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When the Alt Right first made itself known in 2015 (it had been lingering around for years before that), people immediately signaled, rightly, that they were ideologically the same as their North Carolina comrades, only with well pressed suits, books of pseudo-philosophy, and an upper-middle-class arrogance. This method was, however, not new by any means. When David Duke took over the largest KKK contingent in the 1970s, he largely dropped the buffoonish robes and argued wedge issues like immigration and affirmative action. He later left the Klan to form the National Association for the Advancement of White People and, throughout the 1980s, built up a base of support and talking points that would lead to his catastrophic political runs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. About the time David Duke was making waves, Jared Taylor, a former PC Magazine editor with a Yale degree, started American Renaissance, a “race realist” publication and series of conferences dedicated to reinvigorating academic-sounding arguments for the racial inferiority of non-whites and the perennial need for “a self-consciously European, Majority-white nation.”[3] He brought together figures like Forbes-editor-turned-anti-immigrant-extremist Peter Brimelow[4] and Kevin MacDonald, whose work has defined 21st Century anti-Semitism by suggesting Judaism was a “group evolutionary strategy” to outcompete non-Jews for resources.[5]

This was, again, not new. Figures like Francis Parker Yockey had taken German Idealist and Conservative Revolutionary philosophy and melded it with elements of the left to attempt at a smart, and sober appearing, take on white nationalism. Organizations like the Pioneer Fund, a fascist and eugenic foundation that funded “race science” research used in books like the Bell Curve, had existed since the 1930s, using establishment money to push the academy to validate their most atrocious ideas. The Council of Conservative Citizens, a neo-Confederate group founded in the 1980s as a way of engaging the original membership lists from the pro-Segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1960s, began holding conferences with scores of public officials, including Mike Huckabee and Trent Lott.[6] At the same time, they were arguing that miscegenation was “against God’s chosen order” and publicly venerated slavery and the antebellum South.

All of these organizations had come with a suit and tie, and the Alt Right was merely the latest incarnation of these, built for a Northern audience of meme-lovers and those steeped in paleoconservative, Third Positionist, and European New Right tracts. The argument that the Alt Right will try to make is that their presence is about ideas, not violence, and so the left’s response is hyperbolic at best: it is preparing to respond to violence when all they have are unpopular opinions. The same was said for its organizational ancestors, all clamoring just to have their voices heard in this unjust system of political correctness.

The problem, however, is that their violence is implicit for only so long before it breaks away. The Council of Conservative Citizens, long known for its ties to explicit white nationalist street groups with KKK and neo-Nazi affiliations, was cited as the inspiration for Dylan Roof’s massacre at the Charlton church in 2016. David Duke’s era KKK has been accused of dozens of acts of violence, and its membership went on to form projects like White Aryan Resistance, which was sued into oblivion after its associates murdered an Ethiopian immigrant in Portland, Oregon in the late 1980s.[7] American Renaissance, as a central hub for the white nationalist movement in the U.S., has seen scores of the most violent edges of the racialist movement come through its doors, including members of Aryan Nations who were looking for a home after they lost their compound when several members attacked a black family passing by. It takes little to see the violence that is underneath the surface with their public facing organizations, all it requires is to look at its members, what they do, and what they want.

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Re: Drawing Lines Against Racism and Fascism

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2018 7:11 am

Fighting the Fash since 1932: a history of Antifa in Germany

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Communist Party of Germany (KPD) headquarters with the historic Antifa symbol, 1932


Traditional Antifa strategies have been successful in fighting Nazis, combining researching their organisations, publicly outing Nazi cadres, attacking them and blockading their demonstrations. However, as I have shown above, they have always had to adapt new developments. In the US, Antifa tactics have been lately adopted successfully and led to fascist Richard Spencer claiming that “Antifa is winning”. However, many of the strategies working well in the US at the moment have stopped functioning in Germany. For example, police are nowadays sufficiently prepared that actual blockades of Nazi demonstrations are becoming very rare. In addition, an exclusive focus on anti-fascism is not enough to build a revolutionary movement. While traditional Antifa strategies are totally necessary to fight Nazis, they often demand secrecy and cannot involve large numbers of people. While the left needs to be determined to fight Nazis, it also needs to build a broad base for the struggles of the working class and all exploited and oppressed groups.


https://fightback.org.nz/2018/06/13/fig ... n-germany/
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