To really understand all the connections and similarities between Washington and Lee, one should read Douglass Southall Freeman’s Pulitzer Prize winning, multi-volume biographies of both men. This book is a shortcut, with a more liberal approach:
I guess I will be voting for the Democrat in the Senatorial election. I cannot bring myself to vote for either of these two. One has the stink of our former Luv Gov all over him and the other has been removed from office twice already. Good Job Alabama. Now I am going to have to research Doug Jones. Everything I have heard so far has been good (of course I am getting my information from lawyers)
Ricky – Last night you wrote, “If Heritage Preservationists mix with white supremacists or white nationalists, they are going to all be called white nationalists or Neo-Nazis.”
I understand how unfair that seems. But a friend (a Texan, although not by birth) addressed this on Facebook, saying that it bothered him that the folks with the Confederate battle flags did not move away from those with the swastika flags, or tell them to leave. They protested along with them, mingling with them, so that it certainly looked as if they accepted them as part of their own.
Kizzie, The horizontal version of the ANV battle flag has been used by some very bad people for over 50 years now. Heritage groups have been saying “Heritage not hate” for many years. Friday and Saturday were real setbacks, and that is not the fault of Donald Trump and has nothing to do with him.
Thank you for that, Ricky. I have long admired him. My dad was quite a history buff and had many books on the civil war. We have some family stories, having to do with the civil war. My father, the youngest of 4 boys, remembers the conversations of the older men, at family gatherings, an out the war between the states. We come from a long lived family, so there was a lot of history to hear.
*Somebody* *somewhere* (on Facebook? on this blog?) mentioned that “they” (meaning the Nazis & KKK) had planned & publicized this protest for months, & so we shouldn’t be surprised they showed up. (It also pointed out that with all that, only about 200 of them showed up.)
But wasn’t the protest actually organized by the southerners opposing the destruction of the confederate statues? Were they the ones with the permits, or were the Nazis & KKK the ones with the permits? Or did they all have permits?
“You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that,” Trump said. “You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”
I don’t think you can say it much more clearly than that. Both sides were in the wrong. One side may or may not have been more wrong than the other. Thinking bad things is not actually supposed to be illegal in this country. Following up on those thoughts is. In God’s rules, it is different. Our thoughts do matter.
I see the establishment RINOs have their knives out for some backstabbing. And note that they’re refusing to make the distinction between the Southern Heritage folks and the Klan, as Trump did. They’re calling them all racists and thugs. And not a one called out Antifa and their thug tactics. Not one.
“Several Republicans turned on President Donald Trump after he said Tuesday that neo-Nazis and ‘alt-left’ liberal extremists shared responsibility for violence that turned deadly over the weekend in Virginia when a white nationalist ran over a woman with his car.
Kasich, who reminded the audience that he never endorsed Trump during last year’s campaign, said he worried Trump’s false equivalency would lead to the bullying of Jewish and African-Americans kids in the schools.
‘And to not condemn these people who went there to carry out violence and to somehow draw some kind of equivalency to somebody else reduces the ability to totally condemn these hate groups,’ Kasich warned.
‘It’s terrible, it’s just terrible,’ he continued. ‘The president of the United States needs to condemn these kinds of hate groups,’ he said, adding that it’s ‘not about winning an argument.’
‘You see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and the baseball bats,’ Trump said in New York, describing hooded counter-protesters who came to Charlottesville to disrupt a white nationalist march.
‘What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?’ he challenged reporters on Tuesday. ‘Do they have any semblance of guilt?’
The president also said ‘I do think there’s blame on both sides’ and that there were ‘very fine people’ in the crowd that had ‘a permit’ to protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E Lee.”
“Sheriff’s deputies have begun arresting protesters who tore down a monument to Confederate veterans in front of the old Durham County courthouse Monday night.
Taqiyah Thompson, who climbed a ladder and put a rope around the statue before a crowd tugged it off its base, was arrested by deputies around 4:45 p.m., immediately following a press conference at North Carolina Central University, in which she had defended her actions and others demanded amnesty for all involved. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office confirmed that deputies had begun executing warrants, but she did not immediately know how many.”
Both sides wrong: mumsee anecdote:
If one of my children steals from another child, and the other child beats up first child. I may say, well, that’s justice. But I would more likely say, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Of course it is wrong to lynch people and beat people and all that. It is also wrong to attack people who have been given a permit to air their views. It seems to me both sides have some seriously ugly ideas. And when they put feet to their ideas, they ought to be locked up permanently.
Yes, that is good news. She had the right to voice her opinion, she did not have the right to destroy property. You could say she was doing exactly what the alt left was doing at the rally, only theirs included harming fellow human beings.
It doesn’t matter if he didn’t say it. They and their counterparts are too busy spreading the lie to actually make sure they have the facts straight. They have an anti-Trump agenda to push, facts be damned. They are intentionally distorting the facts.
“During a press conference Tuesday President Trump once again commented on the violence in Charlottesville. Naturally, his remarks were instantly mischaracterized to portray Trump as condoning the very neo-Nazis and white supremacists he condemned in a brief speech Monday.
In no time, the political media set began virtue signalling based on inaccurate summations of what Trump said. Heaven forbid media actually listen to or watch the words on which they comment.
This rush to blame without proper knowledge has become a common occurance thanks to summaries like this one. Apparently, taking two minutes to watch the included video is too arduous a task:”
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We need to stop taking the idea of equivalency to ridiculous positions. Nazis and people who oppose nazis are not equally guility. The veterans in the old age home who we wheel out to the memorial every Remembrance day are not as guilty as the men they violently opposed.
An easy way to differentiate; Nazis opppise people on the basis of race and religion. Anti-Nazis or antifa oppose Nazis. These are not equivilant groups.
And if you are a proud southerner protesting the tearing down of a statute and people are chanting “The Jews will not replace us”, its time to take your flag and go home.
And if you have a president who doesnt see the difference between a general who founded the country and a general who wanted to break the country up, you might want a new president who knows American history.
Moderate Republicans need to root out the radicals in their party. They can start by unequivocally condemning right wing terrorism. Who knew it would be so hard to condemn Nazis.
We see the difference, just saying that vigilante justice is not really the American way. Both sides can be wrong without them being equally wrong, in world justice. In God justice, any taint is enough. That is why He died for us.
I haven’t followed any of this closely as I still reside in the State of Denial on most days. I’ve grown weary of the endless melodrama. I’m still of the opinion that the “pro nazi” contingent is small and fringe (and ignorant of what their position even is or was, historically speaking — most appear to be very young, sad people really).
Not saying it’s not to be watched and taken seriously, but I doubt there’s a swelling, grassroots movement in that direction.
“An easy way to differentiate; Nazis opppise people on the basis of race and religion. Anti-Nazis or antifa oppose Nazis.”
That’s crap, and you know it. When they protest, riot, and burn every year at the G8, are they protesting Nazi’s? No
When they attack people at a Trump rally, are they opposing Nazis? No
When they attacked people they disagreed with in Berkeley, were they protesting Nazis? Again, no.
Either way, they have no authority to oppose, attack, and assault anyone. They’re criminals. Stop providing justification for criminal acts because you agree with them
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“Moderate Republicans need to root out the radicals in their party. They can start by unequivocally condemning right wing terrorism. Who knew it would be so hard to condemn Nazis.”
It’s not, and they have been unanimously condemned. And the left has far more radicals as the recent shooting of a Congressman, 5 Dallas cops, and numerous other examples demonstrate. Only difference is the right condemns the radicals, while the left embraces them and make heroes of them. The left needs to work on the log in their own eye before worrying about what the right is doing with there’s.
“Since 1907, portland, oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.
In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”
Next, the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.” When Portland police said they lacked the resources to provide adequate security, the organizers canceled the parade. It was a sign of things to come.”
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“In Washington, D.C., the response to that question centers on how members of Congress can oppose Trump’s agenda, on how Democrats can retake the House of Representatives, and on how and when to push for impeachment. But in the country at large, some militant leftists are offering a very different answer. On Inauguration Day, a masked activist punched the white-supremacist leader Richard Spencer. In February, protesters violently disrupted UC Berkeley’s plans to host a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart.com editor. In March, protesters pushed and shoved the controversial conservative political scientist Charles Murray when he spoke at Middlebury College, in Vermont.
As far-flung as these incidents were, they have something crucial in common. Like the organizations that opposed the Multnomah County Republican Party’s participation in the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, these activists appear to be linked to a movement called “antifa,” which is short for antifascist or Anti-Fascist Action. The movement’s secrecy makes definitively cataloging its activities difficult, but this much is certain: Antifa’s power is growing. And how the rest of the activist left responds will help define its moral character in the Trump age.”
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“Those responses sometimes spill blood. Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.
Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left. When the masked antifa activist was filmed assaulting Spencer on Inauguration Day, another piece in The Nation described his punch as an act of “kinetic beauty.” Slate ran an approving article about a humorous piano ballad that glorified the assault. Twitter was inundated with viral versions of the video set to different songs, prompting the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to tweet, “I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.”
The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the “righteous beatings.”
Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.
A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos.”
Kizzie, You may not want to ruin your friend’s day, but the only way to be a Texan is by birth. This rule is particularly painful to my sister, who through an act of gross negligence or child abuse on the part of our parents, was born in Oklahoma City.
The Hollywood Forever Cemetery removed a monument commemorating Confederate veterans early Wednesday after hundreds of activists requested its removal and some threatened vandalism.
The move comes days after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the city’s ordered removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The events triggered a national debate about similar monuments across the country.
Since 1925, the 6-foot monument has stood in the Confederate section of the cemetery, where more than 30 Confederate veterans, along with their families, are buried. The monument will be taken to a storage site within the next 24 hours, cemetery officials said, but the grave markers will remain.
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We also have some Confederate soldiers buried in our community in a historic cemetery, but I don’t think there are actual monuments out there — we’re apparently doing a story as well, so editor was asking …
Better dig them up and toss them to the dogs….those evil people….fighting for what they believed…we will straighten this country out soon as we get the schools to teach them how to believe what we want them to believe. History is so overrated.
In the battle between Nazis and anti-Nazis, its not the time to play Switzerland. Being a Nazi is a rather large log, punching a Nazi is a such a small speck it really matters not.
Currently, the US has a president who sees no difference between Nazis and those who oppose Nazis, who brags about committing sexual assault, etc. Thus, I have no problem with any group who refuses to normalize his behaviour and his supporters. Nazism and sexual assault are not behaviours that should be tolerated or normalized.
History is important — at the very least the president of the US should know the difference between Jefferson and Lee.
I’m extremely befuddled that the right and the Republican party have such difficulty condemning a Nazi who drives a car into a crowd of people killing one and injuring up to 20 without resorting to an equivalency argument. A Nazi killed an anti-Nazi — how hard is it to say that is wrong period. And even as we discuss this, Republican legislators are attempting to lower liability to drivers who run over protestors. https://thinkprogress.org/republican-lawmakers-in-6-states-are-trying-to-protect-drivers-who-hit-protesters-4da6e6ebaa59/
As for political violence — its far more prevalent on the right than on the left — the log resides there. “Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told NPR that “when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74 percent of those murders.” https://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-the-far-right-hold-a-near-monopoly-on-political-violence/
It is wrong. Of course it is wrong. Everybody knows it is wrong. That does not mean the others are not wrong also. What is so hard about saying both sides were wrong? It does not make either side to be less evil just because they are both wrong.
I think you underestimate the deadly force that the white supremacists and neo-Nazis carry. This is footage and interviews without commentary. There is a language and disturbing images warning:
“punching a Nazi is a such a small speck it really matters not.” Hwesseli at 3:12. You should be ashamed. Just change the word “Nazi” to “Jew” or some other group, and that is exactly the kind of rationale a Nazi would use to justify their behavior. You have become the thing you hate.
By the way, Idaho was known at one time for its huge population of neoNazi’s. There were about twenty of them living up at Hayden. They were driven out by the neighbors as I recall. Most folk don’t put up with that stuff.
We have become a really dumb society. One example: We now need an organization to tell us when an organization is a hate group. Apparently, we cannot research or hear what these people are saying and determine ourselves if they are, indeed, a hate group. Of course, we have to trust the organization that they really understand what each group teaches and that they really are teaching and promoting hate. The supposed group that says they do this has many groups listed as hate groups that are certainly not.
Of course, this organization would probably agree that the mom who bore a son is a hater of her son, because she will not call him a her. She will not say she gave birth to a daughter. She will not change her own history or that of her son. Therefore, she is a hater, no matter what she does for her son’s good.
More and more people are afraid to speak out on any of this, because your words are twisted, turned and selected to make you look like a racist or monster. That, of course, is the whole point. So the spiral of silence continues, until it is too late.
I’m the anonymous poster. I didn’t bother to sign in when I put up the link.
I don’t see any use in repeating what I’ve said for the past four days. The conversation about the humanity and dignity of people as individuals, rather than members of groups started before I heard the news from Charlottesville. I know individuals who are racist, and I treat them as I would any human being, but I do not justify their sin. Comparison with others is one way of justifying sin.
Chas, the neo-Nazis identify themselves with the Third Reich and glorify Hitler. They know who the Nazis were.
Mumsee, the Nazis were right wing. They were deadly enemies of the Communists in Germany in the street fighting that would erupt in the years between the wars, before the Nazis were successful in gaining power.
In 1919, Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart formed the German Worker’s Party (GPW) in Munich. The German Army was worried that it was a left-wing revolutionary group and sent Adolf Hitler, one of its education officers, to spy on the organization. Hitler discovered that the party’s political ideas were similar to his own – he approved of Drexler’s German nationalism and anti-Semitism but was unimpressed with the way the party was organized. Although there as a spy, Hitler could not restrain himself when a member made a point he disagreed with, and he stood up and made a passionate speech on the subject.
Anton Drexler was impressed with Hitler’s abilities as an orator and invited him to join the party. At first Hitler was reluctant, but urged on by his commanding officer, Captain Karl Mayr, he eventually agreed. He was only the fifty-fourth person to join the German Worker’s Party. Hitler was immediately asked to join the executive committee and was later appointed the party’s propaganda manager.
In the next few weeks Hitler brought several members of his army into the party, including one of his commanding officers, Captain Ernst Röhm. The arrival of Röhm was an important development as he had access to the army political fund and was able to transfer some of the money into the GWP.
The German Worker’s Party used some of this money to advertise their meetings. Adolf Hitler was often the main speaker and it was during this period that he developed the techniques that made him into such a persuasive orator.
Hitler’s reputation as an orator grew and it soon became clear that he was the main reason why people were joining the party. This gave Hitler tremendous power within the organization as they knew they could not afford to lose him.
The Party Gets a New Name
In April, 1920, Hitler advocated that the party should change its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Hitler had always been hostile to socialist ideas, especially those that involved racial or sexual equality. However, socialism was a popular political philosophy in Germany after the First World War. This was reflected in the growth in the German Social Democrat Party (SDP), the largest political party in Germany.
Hitler, therefore redefined socialism by placing the word ‘National’ before it. He claimed he was only in favour of equality for those who had “German blood.” Jews and other “aliens” would lose their rights of citizenship, and immigration of non-Germans should be brought to an end.
In February 1920, the NSDAP published its first programme which became known as the “Twenty-Five Points.” In the programme the party refused to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty and called for the reunification of all German people. To reinforce their ideas on nationalism, equal rights were only to be given to German citizens. “Foreigners” and “aliens” would be denied these rights.
Didymus — are you equating Jews with Nazis? There’s a difference between hitting Nazis and Jews. Our fathers and grandfathers understood the difference — they were not ashamed to hit Nazis.
Mumsee — the Nazis were/are extreme right wing populists.
You can see from that, how some people might find the party appealing. They would be wrong.
When a white person goes into a store and misbehaves, it is wrong.
When a black person goes into a store and misbehaves, it is wrong.
Is one more wrong than the other? No.
If the white person then goes and beats up the black person for misbehaving in the store, is he wrong? Yes.
If the white person kills the black person, is he wrong? Yes.
Does that mean the black person was not wrong to go in and misbehave in the store? No.
How about if the black person beats up the white one for misbehaving? Still wrong.
Or kills the white person? You got it, still wrong.
How about if they both go into the store and treat others, including the store owner, with respect? They are both fine and we all get along.
Nazi means National Socialism. Hitler and Mussolini were originally socialists until the socialists gave them trouble. However, they did not move to the extreme right, but only slightly to the right – they were just a different flavor of socialists.
The political spectrum has two axes, not one, which is why so many people get confused. One axis is collectivism vs individualism. The other is centralized vs decentralized authority. Communism, Fascism, Socialism and the American Leftists are all Collectivist. Most want centralized authority, but a few like anarchists want decentralized authority. The American Right are all on the side of individualism, and most favor decentralization of power. Libertarians want the least government, but that doesn’t make them extremists.
Socialists and Fascists are both authoritarian and collectivist – they cannot be right wing. Right wing means individualistic.
Tychicus, according to Mumsee’s link on the origins of Nazis, Hitler never liked socialism.
People here have always expressed concern about the rewriting of history, and now, because neo-Nazis defended a statue of Robert E. Lee, we are re-examing whether the Nazis were wrong?
With is wrong with Nazis? I would like to think the answer is one of those truths we hold to be self-evident.
Right wing is not individualistic. In the early stages of the Fr. Rev., the parliament sat with all parties included and were grouped from right to left — hence our modern political spectrum. The absolutist royalist sat at the far right along with the church hierarchy, then slightly right of centre sat those Frenchmen who wished to copy the English constitutional monarch example, then in the centre sat those who wish to emulate the American revolution and then to the left were followers of Thomas Paine and further along the left were socialists. The right were cultural collectivist whereas the left were universal collectivist and classical liberal individualism was the centre. Absolutist royalism has been adapted to the modern reality into fascism. In response to capitalism and classical liberalism, conservative theorists developed fascism which rejected capitalism but retained ethnic and religious culture differences. In southern Europe it was seen as a alternative to socialism by the conservative cultural elite including the Catholic church. In northern Europe, it appealed to the 19th century romantics, Prussian aristocracy, etc.
In modern US politics the spectrum is rather small; Clinton, Bush, Reagan etc all fit in the centre — with a little dip to the right. In Europe you have a far larger political spectrum and the Nazis are on the far right along with other nationalists and cultural conservatives, the CDU and SD type parties in the middle and the communist on the left.
“Nazis and people who oppose nazis are not equally guility.”
Nobody anywhere has said anything like this, and this kind of equivocation explains the reluctance of some to condemn Nazis without, at the same time, referring to the *violence and rhetoric* of some self-professed anti-Nazi groups. It’s a give an inch, take a mile proposition. It’s in evidence in posts throughout this thread. It’s the kind of slothful syllogism that says, “A prominent racist, violent group is “right wing” (scare quotes); historically, violent groups have, supposedly, more commonly been right wing; conservative ideas are considered to be on the “right” of the political spectrum; THEREFORE, isn’t it obvious: Conservatives are sympathetic to violent racist groups, and racism and Nazism are inextricably tied to conservatism.” It’s nothing but a lazy smear.
hwesseli at 4:50. No, I am not equating Jews and Nazis. I am saying that when you try to justify violence against an individual solely because of a label you have placed on them, then you have become like the Nazis. If you would like to replace the word “Jews” with “Communists” or some other label, that would be fine.
I just saw on NBC Nightly News that California has the most hate groups of any State. Yeah, I was surprised too.
I hate no one, but I do not want to see history erased. We are judging men and women who lived over 100 years ago by our 21st Century sensibilities. This is fair to no one.
I have a similar problem with the whole notion of “hate crimes”. A crime is a crime, and the punishment should fit the crime. Instead we say that a gay-hater’s murder of a gay person is worse and deserves greater punishment than a psychopath’s murder of a stranger because the former is motivated by hate. We say that a white supremacist’s murder of a black person is worse than a rapist’s murder of his victim because the former is motivated by hate. That’s the thought police in action.
Punish the crime, whoever did it. Punish the more heinous crime with the more severe punishment. Regardless of who committed it
Punish the white supremacist who murdered a protester with his car as a murderer. Punish everyone else there who was violent and incited violence for their crimes. On all sides.
Amen, Kevin, that’s long been a pet peeve of mine (the “hate crimes” category). It can become way too subjective. Ideally, justice and the law are objective (or as objective as is humanly possible to be).
Yes, haters in California, we were doing stories on that today — so nice to be away from it all, cleaning out my kitchen cupboards. 🙂
Equating Nazi and Nazi opposing violence? I don’t see it as the same. There’s still a few veterans who show up at war memorials on Remembrance Day. They engaged in Nazi opposing violence. I don’t equate them with Nazis.
Kevin, I’m not a big fan of hate crime legislation and terrorism charges. It leads to the politicization of what is essentially a criminal act. I said this in 2001. The US should’ve used criminal charges to arrest anyone who had something to do with 9/11 and other acts of terror. Depoliticalize the act and treat them like common criminals.
hwesseli, if I remember correctly, part of the reason not to prosecute it as a common crime is that one’s evidence has to be shared with the other side’s attorneys, and when the other guys have committed what is in effect an act of war, you can’t really give state secrets to their attorneys. The argument made sense to me at the time, though it may have been more complicated or nuanced than that.
That was a very interesting piece, Ricky. I know that Bannon can be a wild card, but I’m actually encouraged to hear that someone at the WH is still able to maintain focus on trade issues. It’s good news to hear that he is reaching out to allied interests across the aisle. Hopefully there can be an influx of productive ideas to move us in a more promising direction long term. As the author states, it will be interesting to see if Bannon is still there after Labor Day. :–)
Debra, I also found this piece on John Kelly interesting. He has a rough few days, but I think he has made some big improvements in the White House organization and morale.
President Trump’s lack of discipline leaves new chief of staff John Kelly frustrated and dismayed https://t.co/KM7jrP0jAi
“Equating Nazi and Nazi opposing violence? I don’t see it as the same. There’s still a few veterans who show up at war memorials on Remembrance Day. They engaged in Nazi opposing violence. I don’t equate them with Nazis.”
This is a silly argument. You’re comparing pineapples to hand grenades.
When men fought the Nazi’s in WW2 they did so with the full weight and authority of their respective govts. They were soldiers fighting a declared war against declared enemies. Antifa is thugs and punks, with no authority to do anything about anything. They have no right to assault anyone, regardless of their assaulted victim’s heinous views. They don’t get to be judge, jury, and executioners just because they believe someone is a Nazi sympathizer. Nor do they have the right to stomp on their 1st Amend. rights, no matter how offensive their message. That’s not how it works in America.
Not all those who resisted Nazis did so with the approval of their govt. Some were even German. Some like Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did so violently. Others like my family hid or ran away from Nazis.
I’m a big fan of free speech. It helps identify the idiots. However I’m also a big fan of protesting said idiots. Antifa does engage in counter protests and likes to intimidate but its MO is to record, identify and out Nazis. Don’t let Nazi behaviour be acceptable or normalized.
As my previous link indicates the right in America Is responsible for about 70% of political violence whereas the left is cited for 10%. In Charlottesville, the right came prepared for violence and carried out violence, killing one and injuring countless others.
In previous years I have commented that left has noted how the police treat the left and right wing protestors (compare North Dakota to Oregon) and this would not continue. The rise of antifa is in part a reaction to police complacency in the face of neo nazi activity and violence.
For example, a young black teen was beaten up by club wielding neo Nazis in a Charlottesville prkg garage. The police promised to investigate but nothing was done. The antifa took the available video and identify two men. The police have still not acted. Until the police and the govt take right wing violence seriously, others will feel compelled to step in.
When govts and police didnt stop Nazis, the Jews, the underground, etc all fought back violently or non-violently. Today when the police fail, others step in. Its not a positive development (the police should do their job) but its not necessarily negative (at least Nazi ideology isnt normalized)
ACLU takes heat for its free-speech defense of white supremacist group
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(CNN) Last weekend’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, has put the American Civil Liberties Union on the defensive for representing the white supremacists and generated furious debate over First Amendment speech rights.
The ACLU has been here before.
In a statement posted Tuesday night, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero insisted hateful, bigoted speech must be aired.
“Racism and bigotry will not be eradicated if we merely force them underground,” Romero wrote. “Equality and justice will only be achieved if society looks such bigotry squarely in the eyes and renounces it.” …
In his statement, Romero referred to the ACLU’s history of representing Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other detestable groups through the years and tacitly acknowledged the current dissent within ACLU ranks over its litigation ensuring that demonstrators could gather last Saturday in a downtown Charlottesville park. …
… Some people, including Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, leveled blame at the ACLU for the resulting violence.
“The city of Charlottesville asked for that to be moved out of downtown Charlottesville to a park about a mile and a half away — a lot of open fields,” McAuliffe said on NPR Monday. “That was the place that it should’ve been. We were, unfortunately, sued by the ACLU. And the judge ruled against us.”
McAuliffe contended the result in the middle of downtown was “a powder keg.” …
Silicon Valley escalates its war on white supremacy despite free speech concerns
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Silicon Valley significantly escalated its war on white supremacy this week, choking off the ability of hate groups to raise money online, removing them from Internet search engines, and preventing some sites from registering at all.
The new moves go beyond censoring individual stories or posts. Tech companies such as Google, GoDaddy and PayPal are now reversing their hands-off approach about content supported by their services and making it much more difficult for “alt-right” organizations to reach mass audiences.
But the actions are also heightening concerns over how tech companies are becoming the arbiters of free speech in America. And in response, right-wing technologists are building parallel digital services that cater to their own movement. …
… Still, tech companies are forging ahead. On Wednesday, Facebook said it canceled the page of white nationalist Christopher Cantwell, who was connected to the Charlottesville rally. The company has shut down eight other pages in recent days, citing violations of the company’s hate speech policies. Twitter has suspended several extremist accounts, including @Millennial_Matt, a Nazi-obsessed social media personality. …
… Lee Rowland, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, cautioned consumers against being so quick to condemn companies that host even the “most vile white supremacist speech we have seen on display this week.”
“We rely on the Internet to hear each other,” Rowland said. “We should all be very thoughtful before we demand that platforms for hateful speech disappear because it does impoverish our conversation and harm our ability to point to evidence for white supremacy and to counter it.”
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The Politics of Pointlessness
Charlottesville may be a prototype of a politics drifting away from normalcy.
By Daniel Henninger
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Charlottesville was a warning. The warning is that America’s politics is steadily disconnecting from reality. Our politics is starting to seem psychotic.
Generally people get into politics to accomplish something concrete or achievable—the passage of a piece of legislation or of identifiable public policies whose purpose is to make things better. In a word, progress.
The right and the left have disagreed for centuries on what works, but they at least shared a belief that the point of their political activity was to accomplish something real.
Charlottesville was a political riot. Is Charlottesville the future?
Some may say the Charlottesville riot was the lunatic fringe of the right and left, with no particular relevance to what falls in between. But I think Charlottesville may be a prototype of a politics that is drifting away from traditional norms of behavior and purpose. …
… The phenomenon that enables politics without purpose (played out in endless street protests) is the internet. It is the group-organizing tool for psychologically disassociated young people on the left and on the right, like James Alex Fields Jr. , who allegedly drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer. She won’t be the last casualty.
… Amid this torrent, an odd paradox emerges: People are consuming more content and detail about politics than ever, and more people than ever are saying, “I have no idea what is going on.” Someone is at fault here, and it is not the confused absorbers of information.
Charlottesville is being pounded into the national psyche this week as a paroxysm of white nationalism. On current course, the flight from politics is going to look like rational behavior.
_______________________________
Wandering Views 
QoD
What civil rights do civil rights groups want?
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Ingraham vs. Krauthammer on Fox yesterday.
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Douthat’s column today is on the possibility of a new Civil War. He doesn’t see the spark that could set things off.
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To really understand all the connections and similarities between Washington and Lee, one should read Douglass Southall Freeman’s Pulitzer Prize winning, multi-volume biographies of both men. This book is a shortcut, with a more liberal approach:
http://www.writersreps.com/The-Man-Who-Would-Not-Be-Washington
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On second thought, reading the abridged versions of Freeman’s works is a much better idea.
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I guess I will be voting for the Democrat in the Senatorial election. I cannot bring myself to vote for either of these two. One has the stink of our former Luv Gov all over him and the other has been removed from office twice already. Good Job Alabama. Now I am going to have to research Doug Jones. Everything I have heard so far has been good (of course I am getting my information from lawyers)
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R Kessler, This is for you. I can not think of Freeman’s biography of Lee without remembering the final chapter.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/People/Robert_E_Lee/FREREL/4/11*.html
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http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/doug-jones-wins-democratic-primary-alabama-senate-race
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Kim, Is it possible that Jones could defeat the Republican nominee?
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Ricky – Last night you wrote, “If Heritage Preservationists mix with white supremacists or white nationalists, they are going to all be called white nationalists or Neo-Nazis.”
I understand how unfair that seems. But a friend (a Texan, although not by birth) addressed this on Facebook, saying that it bothered him that the folks with the Confederate battle flags did not move away from those with the swastika flags, or tell them to leave. They protested along with them, mingling with them, so that it certainly looked as if they accepted them as part of their own.
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Kizzie, Your friend was right even though he or she was not a Texan by birth. Psalms 1 addresses a somewhat related issue.
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Kizzie, The horizontal version of the ANV battle flag has been used by some very bad people for over 50 years now. Heritage groups have been saying “Heritage not hate” for many years. Friday and Saturday were real setbacks, and that is not the fault of Donald Trump and has nothing to do with him.
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Thank you for that, Ricky. I have long admired him. My dad was quite a history buff and had many books on the civil war. We have some family stories, having to do with the civil war. My father, the youngest of 4 boys, remembers the conversations of the older men, at family gatherings, an out the war between the states. We come from a long lived family, so there was a lot of history to hear.
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Why does this phone change the words in my sentences? Grrrr.
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*Somebody* *somewhere* (on Facebook? on this blog?) mentioned that “they” (meaning the Nazis & KKK) had planned & publicized this protest for months, & so we shouldn’t be surprised they showed up. (It also pointed out that with all that, only about 200 of them showed up.)
But wasn’t the protest actually organized by the southerners opposing the destruction of the confederate statues? Were they the ones with the permits, or were the Nazis & KKK the ones with the permits? Or did they all have permits?
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Published August 16, 2017
Fox News
“You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that,” Trump said. “You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”
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I don’t think you can say it much more clearly than that. Both sides were in the wrong. One side may or may not have been more wrong than the other. Thinking bad things is not actually supposed to be illegal in this country. Following up on those thoughts is. In God’s rules, it is different. Our thoughts do matter.
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I see the establishment RINOs have their knives out for some backstabbing. And note that they’re refusing to make the distinction between the Southern Heritage folks and the Klan, as Trump did. They’re calling them all racists and thugs. And not a one called out Antifa and their thug tactics. Not one.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4795610/GOP-continues-hammer-Trump-Charlottesville.html
“Several Republicans turned on President Donald Trump after he said Tuesday that neo-Nazis and ‘alt-left’ liberal extremists shared responsibility for violence that turned deadly over the weekend in Virginia when a white nationalist ran over a woman with his car.
Kasich, who reminded the audience that he never endorsed Trump during last year’s campaign, said he worried Trump’s false equivalency would lead to the bullying of Jewish and African-Americans kids in the schools.
‘And to not condemn these people who went there to carry out violence and to somehow draw some kind of equivalency to somebody else reduces the ability to totally condemn these hate groups,’ Kasich warned.
‘It’s terrible, it’s just terrible,’ he continued. ‘The president of the United States needs to condemn these kinds of hate groups,’ he said, adding that it’s ‘not about winning an argument.’
‘You see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and the baseball bats,’ Trump said in New York, describing hooded counter-protesters who came to Charlottesville to disrupt a white nationalist march.
‘What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?’ he challenged reporters on Tuesday. ‘Do they have any semblance of guilt?’
The president also said ‘I do think there’s blame on both sides’ and that there were ‘very fine people’ in the crowd that had ‘a permit’ to protest against the removal of a statue of Robert E Lee.”
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Some good news.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/durham-arrests/537015/
“Sheriff’s deputies have begun arresting protesters who tore down a monument to Confederate veterans in front of the old Durham County courthouse Monday night.
Taqiyah Thompson, who climbed a ladder and put a rope around the statue before a crowd tugged it off its base, was arrested by deputies around 4:45 p.m., immediately following a press conference at North Carolina Central University, in which she had defended her actions and others demanded amnesty for all involved. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office confirmed that deputies had begun executing warrants, but she did not immediately know how many.”
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Both sides wrong: mumsee anecdote:
If one of my children steals from another child, and the other child beats up first child. I may say, well, that’s justice. But I would more likely say, two wrongs don’t make a right.
Of course it is wrong to lynch people and beat people and all that. It is also wrong to attack people who have been given a permit to air their views. It seems to me both sides have some seriously ugly ideas. And when they put feet to their ideas, they ought to be locked up permanently.
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QoD @ 7:07 was a serious question.
Does anyone know?
If there’s a problem, we can solve it.
If there’s no problem, everybody go home and watch the game.
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Yes, that is good news. She had the right to voice her opinion, she did not have the right to destroy property. You could say she was doing exactly what the alt left was doing at the rally, only theirs included harming fellow human beings.
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I did not know that was a real question, thought it rhetorical.
I believe what civil rights people would like is to erase the past few thousand years and start over in the garden.
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It doesn’t matter if he didn’t say it. They and their counterparts are too busy spreading the lie to actually make sure they have the facts straight. They have an anti-Trump agenda to push, facts be damned. They are intentionally distorting the facts.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2017/08/no-trump-did-not-call-nazis-and-white-nationalists-very-fine-people/
“During a press conference Tuesday President Trump once again commented on the violence in Charlottesville. Naturally, his remarks were instantly mischaracterized to portray Trump as condoning the very neo-Nazis and white supremacists he condemned in a brief speech Monday.
In no time, the political media set began virtue signalling based on inaccurate summations of what Trump said. Heaven forbid media actually listen to or watch the words on which they comment.
This rush to blame without proper knowledge has become a common occurance thanks to summaries like this one. Apparently, taking two minutes to watch the included video is too arduous a task:”
——————-
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My opinion seems to coincide with Colbert — the most relevant statements are after 3:30.
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We need to stop taking the idea of equivalency to ridiculous positions. Nazis and people who oppose nazis are not equally guility. The veterans in the old age home who we wheel out to the memorial every Remembrance day are not as guilty as the men they violently opposed.
An easy way to differentiate; Nazis opppise people on the basis of race and religion. Anti-Nazis or antifa oppose Nazis. These are not equivilant groups.
And if you are a proud southerner protesting the tearing down of a statute and people are chanting “The Jews will not replace us”, its time to take your flag and go home.
And if you have a president who doesnt see the difference between a general who founded the country and a general who wanted to break the country up, you might want a new president who knows American history.
Moderate Republicans need to root out the radicals in their party. They can start by unequivocally condemning right wing terrorism. Who knew it would be so hard to condemn Nazis.
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We see the difference, just saying that vigilante justice is not really the American way. Both sides can be wrong without them being equally wrong, in world justice. In God justice, any taint is enough. That is why He died for us.
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Thanks mumsee.
I haven’t followed any of this closely as I still reside in the State of Denial on most days. I’ve grown weary of the endless melodrama. I’m still of the opinion that the “pro nazi” contingent is small and fringe (and ignorant of what their position even is or was, historically speaking — most appear to be very young, sad people really).
Not saying it’s not to be watched and taken seriously, but I doubt there’s a swelling, grassroots movement in that direction.
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“An easy way to differentiate; Nazis opppise people on the basis of race and religion. Anti-Nazis or antifa oppose Nazis.”
That’s crap, and you know it. When they protest, riot, and burn every year at the G8, are they protesting Nazi’s? No
When they attack people at a Trump rally, are they opposing Nazis? No
When they attacked people they disagreed with in Berkeley, were they protesting Nazis? Again, no.
Either way, they have no authority to oppose, attack, and assault anyone. They’re criminals. Stop providing justification for criminal acts because you agree with them
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“Moderate Republicans need to root out the radicals in their party. They can start by unequivocally condemning right wing terrorism. Who knew it would be so hard to condemn Nazis.”
It’s not, and they have been unanimously condemned. And the left has far more radicals as the recent shooting of a Congressman, 5 Dallas cops, and numerous other examples demonstrate. Only difference is the right condemns the radicals, while the left embraces them and make heroes of them. The left needs to work on the log in their own eye before worrying about what the right is doing with there’s.
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Since you seem to be ignorant of who they are, or are at least pretending you are…..
They’re criminals and thugs who hide their faces to avoid prosecution for criminal acts. They have no moral justification for what they do
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/
“Since 1907, portland, oregon, has hosted an annual Rose Festival. Since 2007, the festival had included a parade down 82nd Avenue. Since 2013, the Republican Party of Multnomah County, which includes Portland, had taken part. This April, all of that changed.
In the days leading up to the planned parade, a group called the Direct Action Alliance declared, “Fascists plan to march through the streets,” and warned, “Nazis will not march through Portland unopposed.” The alliance said it didn’t object to the Multnomah GOP itself, but to “fascists” who planned to infiltrate its ranks. Yet it also denounced marchers with “Trump flags” and “red maga hats” who could “normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice.” A second group, Oregon Students Empowered, created a Facebook page called “Shut down fascism! No nazis in Portland!”
Next, the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.” When Portland police said they lacked the resources to provide adequate security, the organizers canceled the parade. It was a sign of things to come.”
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“In Washington, D.C., the response to that question centers on how members of Congress can oppose Trump’s agenda, on how Democrats can retake the House of Representatives, and on how and when to push for impeachment. But in the country at large, some militant leftists are offering a very different answer. On Inauguration Day, a masked activist punched the white-supremacist leader Richard Spencer. In February, protesters violently disrupted UC Berkeley’s plans to host a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart.com editor. In March, protesters pushed and shoved the controversial conservative political scientist Charles Murray when he spoke at Middlebury College, in Vermont.
As far-flung as these incidents were, they have something crucial in common. Like the organizations that opposed the Multnomah County Republican Party’s participation in the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade, these activists appear to be linked to a movement called “antifa,” which is short for antifascist or Anti-Fascist Action. The movement’s secrecy makes definitively cataloging its activities difficult, but this much is certain: Antifa’s power is growing. And how the rest of the activist left responds will help define its moral character in the Trump age.”
———————
“Those responses sometimes spill blood. Since antifa is heavily composed of anarchists, its activists place little faith in the state, which they consider complicit in fascism and racism. They prefer direct action: They pressure venues to deny white supremacists space to meet. They pressure employers to fire them and landlords to evict them. And when people they deem racists and fascists manage to assemble, antifa’s partisans try to break up their gatherings, including by force.
Such tactics have elicited substantial support from the mainstream left. When the masked antifa activist was filmed assaulting Spencer on Inauguration Day, another piece in The Nation described his punch as an act of “kinetic beauty.” Slate ran an approving article about a humorous piano ballad that glorified the assault. Twitter was inundated with viral versions of the video set to different songs, prompting the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau to tweet, “I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.”
The violence is not directed only at avowed racists like Spencer: In June of last year, demonstrators—at least some of whom were associated with antifa—punched and threw eggs at people exiting a Trump rally in San Jose, California. An article in It’s Going Down celebrated the “righteous beatings.”
Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.
A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos.”
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Kizzie, You may not want to ruin your friend’s day, but the only way to be a Texan is by birth. This rule is particularly painful to my sister, who through an act of gross negligence or child abuse on the part of our parents, was born in Oklahoma City.
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http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-hollywood-forever-monument-20170815-story.html
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The Hollywood Forever Cemetery removed a monument commemorating Confederate veterans early Wednesday after hundreds of activists requested its removal and some threatened vandalism.
The move comes days after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the city’s ordered removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The events triggered a national debate about similar monuments across the country.
Since 1925, the 6-foot monument has stood in the Confederate section of the cemetery, where more than 30 Confederate veterans, along with their families, are buried. The monument will be taken to a storage site within the next 24 hours, cemetery officials said, but the grave markers will remain.
________________________________
We also have some Confederate soldiers buried in our community in a historic cemetery, but I don’t think there are actual monuments out there — we’re apparently doing a story as well, so editor was asking …
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Better dig them up and toss them to the dogs….those evil people….fighting for what they believed…we will straighten this country out soon as we get the schools to teach them how to believe what we want them to believe. History is so overrated.
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If we erase the last three hundred years of history, my father died as a German soldier in WWII and all the black people are in Africa.
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In the battle between Nazis and anti-Nazis, its not the time to play Switzerland. Being a Nazi is a rather large log, punching a Nazi is a such a small speck it really matters not.
Currently, the US has a president who sees no difference between Nazis and those who oppose Nazis, who brags about committing sexual assault, etc. Thus, I have no problem with any group who refuses to normalize his behaviour and his supporters. Nazism and sexual assault are not behaviours that should be tolerated or normalized.
History is important — at the very least the president of the US should know the difference between Jefferson and Lee.
I’m extremely befuddled that the right and the Republican party have such difficulty condemning a Nazi who drives a car into a crowd of people killing one and injuring up to 20 without resorting to an equivalency argument. A Nazi killed an anti-Nazi — how hard is it to say that is wrong period. And even as we discuss this, Republican legislators are attempting to lower liability to drivers who run over protestors.
https://thinkprogress.org/republican-lawmakers-in-6-states-are-trying-to-protect-drivers-who-hit-protesters-4da6e6ebaa59/
As for political violence — its far more prevalent on the right than on the left — the log resides there. “Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told NPR that “when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74 percent of those murders.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-the-far-right-hold-a-near-monopoly-on-political-violence/
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It is wrong. Of course it is wrong. Everybody knows it is wrong. That does not mean the others are not wrong also. What is so hard about saying both sides were wrong? It does not make either side to be less evil just because they are both wrong.
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I think you underestimate the deadly force that the white supremacists and neo-Nazis carry. This is footage and interviews without commentary. There is a language and disturbing images warning:
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Because sometimes both sides are not wrong. Being a Nazi is wrong, opposing Nazis is not wrong.
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Btw im not the anonymous poster
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Why is being a Nazi wrong?
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“punching a Nazi is a such a small speck it really matters not.” Hwesseli at 3:12. You should be ashamed. Just change the word “Nazi” to “Jew” or some other group, and that is exactly the kind of rationale a Nazi would use to justify their behavior. You have become the thing you hate.
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Mumsee, “Nazi” is an epithet. That’s all it is. It has no other meaning and those who use it don’t know who the Nazis were.
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Weren’t the original Nazi’s the social Democrats of the day?
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Hating a group of people for hating a group of people seems a bit odd to me.
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By the way, Idaho was known at one time for its huge population of neoNazi’s. There were about twenty of them living up at Hayden. They were driven out by the neighbors as I recall. Most folk don’t put up with that stuff.
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We have become a really dumb society. One example: We now need an organization to tell us when an organization is a hate group. Apparently, we cannot research or hear what these people are saying and determine ourselves if they are, indeed, a hate group. Of course, we have to trust the organization that they really understand what each group teaches and that they really are teaching and promoting hate. The supposed group that says they do this has many groups listed as hate groups that are certainly not.
Of course, this organization would probably agree that the mom who bore a son is a hater of her son, because she will not call him a her. She will not say she gave birth to a daughter. She will not change her own history or that of her son. Therefore, she is a hater, no matter what she does for her son’s good.
More and more people are afraid to speak out on any of this, because your words are twisted, turned and selected to make you look like a racist or monster. That, of course, is the whole point. So the spiral of silence continues, until it is too late.
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I’m the anonymous poster. I didn’t bother to sign in when I put up the link.
I don’t see any use in repeating what I’ve said for the past four days. The conversation about the humanity and dignity of people as individuals, rather than members of groups started before I heard the news from Charlottesville. I know individuals who are racist, and I treat them as I would any human being, but I do not justify their sin. Comparison with others is one way of justifying sin.
Chas, the neo-Nazis identify themselves with the Third Reich and glorify Hitler. They know who the Nazis were.
Mumsee, the Nazis were right wing. They were deadly enemies of the Communists in Germany in the street fighting that would erupt in the years between the wars, before the Nazis were successful in gaining power.
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This snippet comes from the Jewish Virtual Library:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-the-nazi-party-nsdap
Origins in the German Worker’s Party
In 1919, Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart formed the German Worker’s Party (GPW) in Munich. The German Army was worried that it was a left-wing revolutionary group and sent Adolf Hitler, one of its education officers, to spy on the organization. Hitler discovered that the party’s political ideas were similar to his own – he approved of Drexler’s German nationalism and anti-Semitism but was unimpressed with the way the party was organized. Although there as a spy, Hitler could not restrain himself when a member made a point he disagreed with, and he stood up and made a passionate speech on the subject.
Anton Drexler was impressed with Hitler’s abilities as an orator and invited him to join the party. At first Hitler was reluctant, but urged on by his commanding officer, Captain Karl Mayr, he eventually agreed. He was only the fifty-fourth person to join the German Worker’s Party. Hitler was immediately asked to join the executive committee and was later appointed the party’s propaganda manager.
In the next few weeks Hitler brought several members of his army into the party, including one of his commanding officers, Captain Ernst Röhm. The arrival of Röhm was an important development as he had access to the army political fund and was able to transfer some of the money into the GWP.
The German Worker’s Party used some of this money to advertise their meetings. Adolf Hitler was often the main speaker and it was during this period that he developed the techniques that made him into such a persuasive orator.
Hitler’s reputation as an orator grew and it soon became clear that he was the main reason why people were joining the party. This gave Hitler tremendous power within the organization as they knew they could not afford to lose him.
The Party Gets a New Name
In April, 1920, Hitler advocated that the party should change its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Hitler had always been hostile to socialist ideas, especially those that involved racial or sexual equality. However, socialism was a popular political philosophy in Germany after the First World War. This was reflected in the growth in the German Social Democrat Party (SDP), the largest political party in Germany.
Hitler, therefore redefined socialism by placing the word ‘National’ before it. He claimed he was only in favour of equality for those who had “German blood.” Jews and other “aliens” would lose their rights of citizenship, and immigration of non-Germans should be brought to an end.
In February 1920, the NSDAP published its first programme which became known as the “Twenty-Five Points.” In the programme the party refused to accept the terms of the Versailles Treaty and called for the reunification of all German people. To reinforce their ideas on nationalism, equal rights were only to be given to German citizens. “Foreigners” and “aliens” would be denied these rights.
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Didymus — are you equating Jews with Nazis? There’s a difference between hitting Nazis and Jews. Our fathers and grandfathers understood the difference — they were not ashamed to hit Nazis.
Mumsee — the Nazis were/are extreme right wing populists.
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You can see from that, how some people might find the party appealing. They would be wrong.
When a white person goes into a store and misbehaves, it is wrong.
When a black person goes into a store and misbehaves, it is wrong.
Is one more wrong than the other? No.
If the white person then goes and beats up the black person for misbehaving in the store, is he wrong? Yes.
If the white person kills the black person, is he wrong? Yes.
Does that mean the black person was not wrong to go in and misbehave in the store? No.
How about if the black person beats up the white one for misbehaving? Still wrong.
Or kills the white person? You got it, still wrong.
How about if they both go into the store and treat others, including the store owner, with respect? They are both fine and we all get along.
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So, I ask again, why is being a Nazi wrong?
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Nazi means National Socialism. Hitler and Mussolini were originally socialists until the socialists gave them trouble. However, they did not move to the extreme right, but only slightly to the right – they were just a different flavor of socialists.
The political spectrum has two axes, not one, which is why so many people get confused. One axis is collectivism vs individualism. The other is centralized vs decentralized authority. Communism, Fascism, Socialism and the American Leftists are all Collectivist. Most want centralized authority, but a few like anarchists want decentralized authority. The American Right are all on the side of individualism, and most favor decentralization of power. Libertarians want the least government, but that doesn’t make them extremists.
Socialists and Fascists are both authoritarian and collectivist – they cannot be right wing. Right wing means individualistic.
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Tychicus, according to Mumsee’s link on the origins of Nazis, Hitler never liked socialism.
People here have always expressed concern about the rewriting of history, and now, because neo-Nazis defended a statue of Robert E. Lee, we are re-examing whether the Nazis were wrong?
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No, I was asking HRW what his rationale for thinking the Nazi’s wrong might be wrong, Who gets to decide right from wrong.
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Didn’t like it so redefined it.
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How the rush to judgment can destroy an innocent person’s life:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/16/arkansas-professor-wrongly-id-d-as-torch-bearing-protester-in-charlottesville.html
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Now I see what I have been missing. I am impressed…or maybe depressed.
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Come with me to the State of Denial, Janice.
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With is wrong with Nazis? I would like to think the answer is one of those truths we hold to be self-evident.
Right wing is not individualistic. In the early stages of the Fr. Rev., the parliament sat with all parties included and were grouped from right to left — hence our modern political spectrum. The absolutist royalist sat at the far right along with the church hierarchy, then slightly right of centre sat those Frenchmen who wished to copy the English constitutional monarch example, then in the centre sat those who wish to emulate the American revolution and then to the left were followers of Thomas Paine and further along the left were socialists. The right were cultural collectivist whereas the left were universal collectivist and classical liberal individualism was the centre. Absolutist royalism has been adapted to the modern reality into fascism. In response to capitalism and classical liberalism, conservative theorists developed fascism which rejected capitalism but retained ethnic and religious culture differences. In southern Europe it was seen as a alternative to socialism by the conservative cultural elite including the Catholic church. In northern Europe, it appealed to the 19th century romantics, Prussian aristocracy, etc.
In modern US politics the spectrum is rather small; Clinton, Bush, Reagan etc all fit in the centre — with a little dip to the right. In Europe you have a far larger political spectrum and the Nazis are on the far right along with other nationalists and cultural conservatives, the CDU and SD type parties in the middle and the communist on the left.
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“Nazis and people who oppose nazis are not equally guility.”
Nobody anywhere has said anything like this, and this kind of equivocation explains the reluctance of some to condemn Nazis without, at the same time, referring to the *violence and rhetoric* of some self-professed anti-Nazi groups. It’s a give an inch, take a mile proposition. It’s in evidence in posts throughout this thread. It’s the kind of slothful syllogism that says, “A prominent racist, violent group is “right wing” (scare quotes); historically, violent groups have, supposedly, more commonly been right wing; conservative ideas are considered to be on the “right” of the political spectrum; THEREFORE, isn’t it obvious: Conservatives are sympathetic to violent racist groups, and racism and Nazism are inextricably tied to conservatism.” It’s nothing but a lazy smear.
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Why everybody buys in to the explanatory value of the “modern political spectrum” is beyond me. It’s a hopelessly clunky, artificial construct.
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hwesseli at 4:50. No, I am not equating Jews and Nazis. I am saying that when you try to justify violence against an individual solely because of a label you have placed on them, then you have become like the Nazis. If you would like to replace the word “Jews” with “Communists” or some other label, that would be fine.
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I just saw on NBC Nightly News that California has the most hate groups of any State. Yeah, I was surprised too.
I hate no one, but I do not want to see history erased. We are judging men and women who lived over 100 years ago by our 21st Century sensibilities. This is fair to no one.
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It’s been said before but let me say it succinctly.
Nobody here has equated Nazis and Nazi-opposers.
Most have equated Nazi violence and Nazi-opposing violence.
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I have a similar problem with the whole notion of “hate crimes”. A crime is a crime, and the punishment should fit the crime. Instead we say that a gay-hater’s murder of a gay person is worse and deserves greater punishment than a psychopath’s murder of a stranger because the former is motivated by hate. We say that a white supremacist’s murder of a black person is worse than a rapist’s murder of his victim because the former is motivated by hate. That’s the thought police in action.
Punish the crime, whoever did it. Punish the more heinous crime with the more severe punishment. Regardless of who committed it
Punish the white supremacist who murdered a protester with his car as a murderer. Punish everyone else there who was violent and incited violence for their crimes. On all sides.
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Amen, Kevin, that’s long been a pet peeve of mine (the “hate crimes” category). It can become way too subjective. Ideally, justice and the law are objective (or as objective as is humanly possible to be).
Yes, haters in California, we were doing stories on that today — so nice to be away from it all, cleaning out my kitchen cupboards. 🙂
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Equating Nazi and Nazi opposing violence? I don’t see it as the same. There’s still a few veterans who show up at war memorials on Remembrance Day. They engaged in Nazi opposing violence. I don’t equate them with Nazis.
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Kevin, I’m not a big fan of hate crime legislation and terrorism charges. It leads to the politicization of what is essentially a criminal act. I said this in 2001. The US should’ve used criminal charges to arrest anyone who had something to do with 9/11 and other acts of terror. Depoliticalize the act and treat them like common criminals.
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A revealing interview with Bannon:
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hwesseli, if I remember correctly, part of the reason not to prosecute it as a common crime is that one’s evidence has to be shared with the other side’s attorneys, and when the other guys have committed what is in effect an act of war, you can’t really give state secrets to their attorneys. The argument made sense to me at the time, though it may have been more complicated or nuanced than that.
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Kevin D. Williamson was kind of tough on our old hometown.
https://twitter.com/kevinnr/status/897912614583500800
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That was a very interesting piece, Ricky. I know that Bannon can be a wild card, but I’m actually encouraged to hear that someone at the WH is still able to maintain focus on trade issues. It’s good news to hear that he is reaching out to allied interests across the aisle. Hopefully there can be an influx of productive ideas to move us in a more promising direction long term. As the author states, it will be interesting to see if Bannon is still there after Labor Day. :–)
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This ball at Fenway Park was slippery.
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Debra, I also found this piece on John Kelly interesting. He has a rough few days, but I think he has made some big improvements in the White House organization and morale.
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HRW,
“Equating Nazi and Nazi opposing violence? I don’t see it as the same. There’s still a few veterans who show up at war memorials on Remembrance Day. They engaged in Nazi opposing violence. I don’t equate them with Nazis.”
This is a silly argument. You’re comparing pineapples to hand grenades.
When men fought the Nazi’s in WW2 they did so with the full weight and authority of their respective govts. They were soldiers fighting a declared war against declared enemies. Antifa is thugs and punks, with no authority to do anything about anything. They have no right to assault anyone, regardless of their assaulted victim’s heinous views. They don’t get to be judge, jury, and executioners just because they believe someone is a Nazi sympathizer. Nor do they have the right to stomp on their 1st Amend. rights, no matter how offensive their message. That’s not how it works in America.
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Not all those who resisted Nazis did so with the approval of their govt. Some were even German. Some like Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did so violently. Others like my family hid or ran away from Nazis.
I’m a big fan of free speech. It helps identify the idiots. However I’m also a big fan of protesting said idiots. Antifa does engage in counter protests and likes to intimidate but its MO is to record, identify and out Nazis. Don’t let Nazi behaviour be acceptable or normalized.
As my previous link indicates the right in America Is responsible for about 70% of political violence whereas the left is cited for 10%. In Charlottesville, the right came prepared for violence and carried out violence, killing one and injuring countless others.
In previous years I have commented that left has noted how the police treat the left and right wing protestors (compare North Dakota to Oregon) and this would not continue. The rise of antifa is in part a reaction to police complacency in the face of neo nazi activity and violence.
For example, a young black teen was beaten up by club wielding neo Nazis in a Charlottesville prkg garage. The police promised to investigate but nothing was done. The antifa took the available video and identify two men. The police have still not acted. Until the police and the govt take right wing violence seriously, others will feel compelled to step in.
When govts and police didnt stop Nazis, the Jews, the underground, etc all fought back violently or non-violently. Today when the police fail, others step in. Its not a positive development (the police should do their job) but its not necessarily negative (at least Nazi ideology isnt normalized)
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http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/aclu-free-speech-white-supremacy/index.html
ACLU takes heat for its free-speech defense of white supremacist group
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(CNN) Last weekend’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, has put the American Civil Liberties Union on the defensive for representing the white supremacists and generated furious debate over First Amendment speech rights.
The ACLU has been here before.
In a statement posted Tuesday night, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero insisted hateful, bigoted speech must be aired.
“Racism and bigotry will not be eradicated if we merely force them underground,” Romero wrote. “Equality and justice will only be achieved if society looks such bigotry squarely in the eyes and renounces it.” …
In his statement, Romero referred to the ACLU’s history of representing Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other detestable groups through the years and tacitly acknowledged the current dissent within ACLU ranks over its litigation ensuring that demonstrators could gather last Saturday in a downtown Charlottesville park. …
… Some people, including Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, leveled blame at the ACLU for the resulting violence.
“The city of Charlottesville asked for that to be moved out of downtown Charlottesville to a park about a mile and a half away — a lot of open fields,” McAuliffe said on NPR Monday. “That was the place that it should’ve been. We were, unfortunately, sued by the ACLU. And the judge ruled against us.”
McAuliffe contended the result in the middle of downtown was “a powder keg.” …
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/silicon-valley-escalates-its-war-on-white-supremacy-despite-free-speech-concerns/2017/08/16/842771b8-829b-11e7-902a-2a9f2d808496_story.html
Silicon Valley escalates its war on white supremacy despite free speech concerns
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Silicon Valley significantly escalated its war on white supremacy this week, choking off the ability of hate groups to raise money online, removing them from Internet search engines, and preventing some sites from registering at all.
The new moves go beyond censoring individual stories or posts. Tech companies such as Google, GoDaddy and PayPal are now reversing their hands-off approach about content supported by their services and making it much more difficult for “alt-right” organizations to reach mass audiences.
But the actions are also heightening concerns over how tech companies are becoming the arbiters of free speech in America. And in response, right-wing technologists are building parallel digital services that cater to their own movement. …
… Still, tech companies are forging ahead. On Wednesday, Facebook said it canceled the page of white nationalist Christopher Cantwell, who was connected to the Charlottesville rally. The company has shut down eight other pages in recent days, citing violations of the company’s hate speech policies. Twitter has suspended several extremist accounts, including @Millennial_Matt, a Nazi-obsessed social media personality. …
… Lee Rowland, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberty Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, cautioned consumers against being so quick to condemn companies that host even the “most vile white supremacist speech we have seen on display this week.”
“We rely on the Internet to hear each other,” Rowland said. “We should all be very thoughtful before we demand that platforms for hateful speech disappear because it does impoverish our conversation and harm our ability to point to evidence for white supremacy and to counter it.”
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And this from the WSJ’s Opinion pages today:
The Politics of Pointlessness
Charlottesville may be a prototype of a politics drifting away from normalcy.
By Daniel Henninger
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Charlottesville was a warning. The warning is that America’s politics is steadily disconnecting from reality. Our politics is starting to seem psychotic.
Generally people get into politics to accomplish something concrete or achievable—the passage of a piece of legislation or of identifiable public policies whose purpose is to make things better. In a word, progress.
The right and the left have disagreed for centuries on what works, but they at least shared a belief that the point of their political activity was to accomplish something real.
Charlottesville was a political riot. Is Charlottesville the future?
Some may say the Charlottesville riot was the lunatic fringe of the right and left, with no particular relevance to what falls in between. But I think Charlottesville may be a prototype of a politics that is drifting away from traditional norms of behavior and purpose. …
… The phenomenon that enables politics without purpose (played out in endless street protests) is the internet. It is the group-organizing tool for psychologically disassociated young people on the left and on the right, like James Alex Fields Jr. , who allegedly drove his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer. She won’t be the last casualty.
… Amid this torrent, an odd paradox emerges: People are consuming more content and detail about politics than ever, and more people than ever are saying, “I have no idea what is going on.” Someone is at fault here, and it is not the confused absorbers of information.
Charlottesville is being pounded into the national psyche this week as a paroxysm of white nationalism. On current course, the flight from politics is going to look like rational behavior.
_______________________________
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Hmmm.
https://twitter.com/Scott_Gilmore/status/897582269308653568
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