I feel tempted to say, ‘They’re violent leftists, so not very much’. But, no. There is a serious side to this question. I really do think it matters that we at least try to work out how a group whose stated aim is violent confrontation with White Supremacists have ended up attacking vanilla conservatives and centrists in the street. Also, I see a lot of conservatives suggesting that violent payback is the way to go here. Enough. Why we shouldn’t just try to crush Antifa is because what we’re dealing with is a huge, global movement — There are thousands of these people, so it’s safe to say the option of throwing the lot of them in prison, let alone into graves, is impractical at best. What we’re going to have to do is what we always have to do with violent mass-movements: Persuade them to stand down.
To achieve that, we have to understand the nature of the problem Antifa poses; understand just what’s going on inside their heads.
Although it’s not a comparison that Antifa would appreciate, we have been here before. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, the West had to confront large (and genuine) numbers of organised White Supremacists. The US probably had the worst of this, what with the KKK and those Democrats (more tellingly) who didn’t actually burn any black churches, but still supported segregation. The worst of these people, the murderers and violence-promoters, were prosecuted. That left a sizeable portion of the white, southern population to be reasoned with.
Understanding this version of White Supremacism wasn’t necessarily as easy as you’d think. Sure, they hated the people with different colour skins … But they also had a strange obsession with how the South had been mistreated after the Civil War, and an even stranger obsession with black men lusting uncontrollably after white women.
To get rid of this BS for good involved understanding it. Sure, you might feel the need to take a shower afterwards. But. Still. If the plan is to deal with industrial scale moral evil, then walking carefully through the mindsets that create them is a sad necessity.
Let’s get started, shall we?
First up, we need to engage in an ideological palette-cleanser. I do not think that all leftists are violent or completely awful. Plenty of them are well worth reading/listening to. If you doubt me, then check out the sterling work done by: Caitlin Johnstone, Suzie Dawson, or, if you’re looking for something less Free Assangey, Jimmy Dore. It’s fair to say that, politically, I have about as much in common with these three as alligators do with broccoli. What matters here aren’t our differences of opinion. Rather, it’s the fact that if I were to meet Caitlin, Suzie or Jimmy on opposite sides of a protest march, my fear that they’d try to smash my skull in with a bike-lock would be exactly zero.
This matters, and it matters because a lot of people on our side of the political fence often seem tempted to use Antifa as a way of attacking the whole of the left. This isn’t just unfair, it’s counterproductive. Look. Half of the population disagree with us. A vanishingly-small number of that 50% are masking up and beating people in the street. It is, therefore, safe to assume that although Antifa are a mass-movement, they’re not a mass-movement that represents anything like the majority of even the hard left.
So. What drives Antifa? Well, they seem to like the idea of getting out in the street and bashing fascists. Okay. So far, so … Odd. Because there aren’t all that many actual fascists wandering the streets of Western cities these days. Sure, if you turn over enough slimy rocks, you may unearth the occasional Richard Spencer. If you’re a really lucky fascist-hunter, you might even hit the motherload and locate a couple of hundred half-wits marching around chanting, ‘The Jews will not replace us’. But. Still. If this kind of crap is the best White Supremacism has to offer the modern world, I think it’s safe to say the good guys have already won. Go home Antifa: You don’t need to Bash what the 21st Century Fash has to offer — The sniggers and/or general indifference of the general public have got this covered for you.
Ands, at some level, Antifa must know that Andy Ngo, Dave Rubin and Tim Pool aren’t Nazis … So why don’t these people see how misguided they are? Why don’t they see how history is actually going to judge them? Too big an ask? Okay, then, let’s narrow our focus for Antifa’s benefit — How can they not see that a gay, Asian journalist is about as far from a fascist as it’s humanly possible for a person to be?
One answer I often hear bandied about is that they just like a good rumble, and having run out of actual Nazis to rumble with, they’ve simply moved on to the rest of us. Sure, Antifa are a loathsome bunch, but for this to be true, they’d also have to be a mass-movement whose members were all lying about their core beliefs. That just isn’t credible. Yes, their beliefs are immoral, but that doesn’t mean they don’t really hold them. Look, the Nazis were nuts. The Klan were nuts. Just because a huge number of people turn violent in defence of a belief-system that strikes the rest of us as completely crazy, it doesn’t have to be the case that those holding those beliefs are lying about their motives.
So what is going on here? If I had to place a bet on the cause of Antifa’s crazy, I’d pay special attention to what this BBC cretin has to say:
Politicians are using coded language to “manipulate people” nto making decisions they wouldn’t normally be “morally comfortable with,” a political language expert has told the BBC.
This kind of political message — which only a particular target audience is meant to understand — is known as a “dog whistle,” Professor Jennifer says.
Some have claimed these tactics were used to make people think Barack Obama was a foreigner. Others said UKIP’s “Breaking Point” poster was a racist dog whistle.
The idea at work here, and almost ubiquitous on the modern left, is that the conservative movement is simply seething with all kinds of hate. Only, like homosexuality a century ago, racism has become the vice that dare not speak its name. Instead of being able to loudly and clearly proclaim our race-hate, those of us on the centre-right are forced to resort to the use of coded language that only we pick up on. Thus, when noted racists like Ali Alexander point out Kamala Harris isn’t actually an African American (she’s half-Jamaican, half-Indian), this is seen as less a truth, more a kind of secret signal designed to mobilise the Nazis hidden among us.
Consider, though, that we share a world with actual White Supremacists. Also, consider that these charmers seem to have no problems at all with loudly proclaiming their beliefs. Why, then, are Antifa, along with much of the left in general, convinced that vanilla conservatives are hiding their Nazism under bushels of not doing anything overtly racist at all? Is it really credible that half the population of the West are engaged in a kind of covert plot? Why, with those numbers, haven’t we just thrown away our dog-whistles and re-opened Auschwitz?
Whatever. I think it’s this line of thinking, on the left in general, that gives rise to Antifa’s violence. If you convince, say, 10% of the population that the 50% they disagree with are all secret Nazis, don’t be surprised if a tiny sliver of them decide to mask-up and start Bashing the Fash.
If we want to cut the ground out from under Antifa, then, our target has to be this nonsense about ‘dog whistles’; that is, the absurd idea that there are vast, vast numbers of White Supremacists hiding among us. Erase this gibberish from public discourse, and, like desegregation destroyed the Klan, so, too, will the likes of Antifa shrivel and disappear.
Also, as always, #FreeAssange
