Happy Monday! As usual for a Monday, today’s post is by Stephen. Thank you!!!
Recent events have bear greater scrutiny and understanding of a couple different but similar political organizations. As you are familiar a fair number of politically left cities have abandoned their citizens in favor of their leftist “activist” organizations behaving as riotous mobs under the pretext of “protests”.
There is some odd narrative spinning occurring where sometimes it is pointed out that the people instigating the violence are white Antifa supporters, yet other videos clearly show black BLM looters and rioters with each group claiming that other people are starting the violence, not them. They even tried to claim that the white Antifa members in those videos were really “right wing white supremacists” without any evidence to support such wild accusations. A lot of finger pointing where no one actually claims responsibility.
Before any honest and meaningful discussion of these groups can be attempted, it is necessary to delve into the history of those groups and understand the underlying philosophies and motivations of the groups themselves.
Antifa, which has recently and much belatedly been designated a terrorist group, consisting primarily of white college educated radicals who imagine themselves the reincarnation of the ‘60s hippie movement without the free love and LSD; and Black Lives Matter (or BLM) which strives for all outward appearances to be a rehashing of the ‘60s race riots surrounding segregation and the “civil rights” movement.
Let us start with the origins of Antifa, which date back much further than they are willing to admit, as they often try to pretend that they are a spontaneous Millennial movement spawned on college campuses, reacting to “Boomers” who they label as fascist control freaks.
After all, they keep telling everyone who will listen, Antifa is simply short for Anti-Fascists, so that they are really just opposing fascism and anyone who opposes them, by default, must be supporting fascism. Except, no one supports fascism. (Which to any intelligent mind would just make them look stupid, but a lot of young people buy this hype.)
When did Antifa actually begin? Actually, the first appearances of the recognizable name and symbols of Antifa go back to around 1932 in the Weimar Republic appearing on Communist Party headquarters, complete with the red and black flag symbols they still use to this day.
Yes, you heard that right, Antifa originates as part of the German Communist Party, many of the die-hard Antifa members freely admit that they are a communist organization, often paint graffiti of the Soviet communist hammer & sickle symbols.
As you may recall from previous articles, the Nazis, apparently the only fascists recognized by the modern Antifa youth ignoring fascists like Mussolini who actually coined the term or Franco who stayed in power decades after the war, copied their violent street thug tactics from the communists.
Nazi Brownshirts were a response to the forerunners of Antifa, the communist bullies who tried to intimidate people into supporting their party. The National Socialists, appealing more to veterans of WWI, were better organized and had an affinity to their paramilitary attire.
(Unfortunately in European political jargon those political parties aligned with the military are labeled as “right wing” creating the pretext for modern kids trying to rewrite history to prevaricate that the National Socialists were not “real socialists” because they were “right wing”, and “right wing” people in America are the conservatives and capitalists.)
Naturally, as psychological studies have shown people dressed alike and in uniforms behave more cohesively and effectively in confrontational situations, as amply demonstrated with paint-ball teams wearing team t-shirts, thus the communist rabble-rousers proved to be no match for the Nazi Brownshirt war veterans thus tried to become more organized as Antifa, but by that time had lost the momentum of the Munich streets.
The modern Antifa is thus a continuation or revival of the original communist organization which was for decades a marginal organization in Europe which found new strength and new members as our colleges and universities became increasingly the hotbeds of Marxist ideology from the ‘60s forward.
Not coincidentally brings us to the other organization involved in the disruptive and criminal riots which also had its origins in the ‘60s Marxism centered on America’s college campuses, collectively known as the “Black Power” movement.
The Black Power movement, complete with its own symbol of the raised black left-handed fist, was a militant segregationist movement in the mode of Malcolm X contrasting against Martin Luther King, Jr., almost the compete opposite of the “civil rights” movement.
Instead of seeking to overturn the Separate but Equal doctrine created by the courts and integrate blacks and whites, they sought to completely separate into their own society with their own control on the basis of race. Many went so far as to put forth the idea of creating their own country, or converging on cities or states to take over the government by voting power, still others advocated violence in tearing down society and fomenting a race war. It was a very fractured movement without uniform direction.
(Of interest, Michelle Obama’s senior thesis was a look back, or lamentation, at the Black Power movement at her Alma Mater and how contrary to their stated intentions of maintaining their segregated economic independence and had found jobs and homes integrating with the general society.)
One of the most notorious groups coming out of the Black Power movement was the Black Panthers, one of the most militant of the Black Power revolutionary minded segments inclined towards violence and control much like a forerunner of a number of black gangs but with a much more political focus. They were often though of as a black version of the KKK, often espousing not merely segregation but black supremacy and racial hatred.
It is out of this shadow of the Black Panthers that the Black Lives Matter movement arose as a political organization. Note that it is the entity of BLM and not the generic sentiment that black lives do indeed matter which is the important distinction.
Ever wonder why they so vociferously opposed and condemned sentiments that “all live matter” or “blue lives matter” condemning anyone who would utter such a statement as “closet racists and bigots” using “dog whistles” of racism? It had nothing to do with the speaker’s racism, but everything to do with building a brand, an organizational name.
Like Antifa, they deliberately chose a name which expressed a sentiment with which no one would really disagree to hide their Marxist philosophy behind. After all, who is going to say that black lives don’t matter any more than say that they are for fascism? The name is a mere shield to protect their ideology from criticism while attacking anyone who looks too closely at what they actually are and do.
Like other socialists groups, BLM advocates socialist policies, wealth redistribution, a controlled economy, public housing, public healthcare, and so forth. However, there are important distinctions and parallels in their form of Marxism to other socialist organizations.
The reason Antifa only holds up Germany as the fascist model and not Italy or Spain is because of its peculiar association with an ethnic supremacy which has understandably a lot of emotional baggage here in America. One needs only look at Italy and Spain to understand that ethnic supremacy was not a feature of fascism itself but endemic to Germany’s fascism.
For Germany at the time, it was a major political selling point to sell the nationalist part of national socialism, because the message of social unity, of being for the German people distinguished them from those Russian communist sympathizers who were working against the people.
BLM likewise holds up a racial supremacy for its followers, seeking to advance the interests of their group along racial lines, sowing racial hatred, and blaming another racial group for all of their problems. The parallels between the advocacy of NSDAP and BLM is staggering.
Of course, it must be understood that many, if not most, of the people inclined to support these organizations don’t ever look beyond the pleasant sounding platitudes that oppose fascism and claim that lives matter, thus are duped into supporting organizations with which they either do not ideologically agree or even understand.
Which brings us to look at the rather odd temporary alliances between these two groups in fomenting a chaos out of which they both hope to emerge victorious once the evil greedy corporations and conservatives have been dispatched.
Can one really believe that an organization which preaches such overt racism as BLM against white people would ever be satisfied to work hand in hand with the overwhelmingly white Antifa in a long term rebuilding of the society they now seek to destroy?
I have pointed out before that fascists did not come to power in Europe in a vacuum but largely as a reaction to the chaos sown by the communist riots being exported by the Soviets to their neighbors. “It was reading all of this that I began to realize that the real danger to America was not the Democrat party being leftist as much as the real danger of a reactionary movement.” – https://www.freedomreconnection.com/2016/02/29/politics-on-the-rebound/
If these groups, both of which are funded by the same people on the left, were ever to succeed in toppling civilization, it is almost a certainty that they would turn on each other.
There is much to be hopeful about on the other hand. The Nazis targeted a small minority to blame for their nation’s problems, there being only about 300,000 Jews in the German 1920 Census which more parallels the left’s previous rhetoric of the 1%ers, but pales when compared to BLM trying to blame the white 6/7 of the population for their problems. It is really hard to scapegoat the majority no matter how many genuflecting white-guilt self-flagellators bow before their would be oppressors.
On the other side of American Marxism, the lily-white, basement-dwelling soy-boys of Antifa face a worse situation than their Antifa forebearers who were hearty, if fool-hardy, working class stiffs who actually proved capable in a street brawl.
It is clear that these groups are destroying their own leftist enclaves, but when the dust settles do they turn on each other or join hand in hand to attack suburbia? Or, as is most likely, do they just get tired of acting stupid, slink off returning from whence they came, and twenty years from now write books about how they changed society for the better by looting and pillaging the local target store as they now teach classes as a tenured professor in the manner of terrorists like Bill Ayers?
