‘Antifa’ despicable fascists, just say it

We are fortunate to live in an age where the fight against neo-Nazis and white supremacy is taken so seriously. Only last week, reading the editorial and news reports from down south it was evident, especially after Charlottesville, that the days of the American Republic were numbered. A breathless media warned it was Germany in the early 1930s all over again. Fortunately the Republic has survived.

Who saved us all from a toothbrush moustache future? Why, the black-masked “antifa” militia and their Black Bloc twin, naturally.

Ready as always, clad in black from head to storm trooper toe, with their full arsenal of smoke bombs, brass knuckles, pipes, sticks and baseball bats, pepper spray and even shields (to pummel, not protect) proved more than capable of putting emergent neoNazis under the knout, both in Berkeley and even up here at McGill. How did they do it? With mayhem and mobs, of course. They smashed cameras and sometimes the faces of reporters, chased down old people, executed beat downs on isolated protesters, mauled passersby, in one case threatened a man in a wheelchair, and in general stormed the streets like a wolf pack after a long hunger and a really bad hair day. Anti-fascism is hard thuggish work.

Dropping the irony, that was the ludicrous overview being tentatively offered and implicitly supported by many who really should have known much better. A neoNazi and/or white supremacist threat to American democracy exists only in the heads of those who read Marvel Comics for news and think Twitter is a medium for sentient beings.

The real question about the antifa nihilist deadheads is how long so many are going to (a) avoid making judgments on them and (b) put up with their blatant violence and duplicity. In a multitude of press reports after Charlottesville they enjoyed a real pass. The most witless or insolent of reporters/commentators likened them (Lord, spare us) to the Allied soldiers landing on the Normandy beaches, a classic example of the excusatory overtime put in to “justify” a set of thugs who enact the defining brutalities of fascism while calling themselves anti-fascist. What we have seen from antifa and Black Bloc is Mussolini in the bud.

Lorrie Goldstein of the Toronto Sun was outstandingly on the mark from the beginning, seeing them for what they were. Most reporters HuffPuffed their disdain for the troglodytes of the right, but held mum or waxed pious on the antifa mobs. Following an attack on a reporter at the Berkeley melee, Goldstein offered this gem of rebuke: “Hey, look, Mainstream Media! Your pets are off the leash.”

Bloomberg Media woke up a week late with “Antifa has more in common with the Nazis than with American ideals.” No less than Nancy Pelosi, after Berkeley, found it expedient to declare “The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.”

Would we could have heard some of the same here in Canada after the Montreal melee. The Toronto Star, in a backflip that left spider monkeys agape in awe of its agility, declared in a headline: “Violence at Right Wing Protest.” Their overworked public editor should do a column: “Fake News and Atkinson Principles, How Easily they Blend.” All the violence at that right-wing protest was antifa, Black Bloc and left wing.

Antifa and Black Bloc, in one or other of their various incarnations, have been around for two decades, and provided they were in sync with any “progressive” agenda item, earned a media pass. They sprinkled every violent protest with the apologetic cant of “but the majority of the protesters were peaceful.”

And for all the talk of “right-wing violence” now, and of “white supremacists” (they are a scorned and miserable sub-sub-minority of malcontents), actual violence by the black-clad mobs — as long as it is simply called anti-fascist — gets a free halo. It earns either no mention, no condemnation if mentioned, or if condemned done in a plaintive whisper of sadness and rue that antifa violence might give ammunition to the dread “right wing.” The kind of reporting that gives sophism a bad name.

Just because a group chooses to call itself antifascist, and chooses to say it’s against hate, there is no obligation on the press to accept the self-promotion of a violent masked mob. A lazy and timid press, however, does just that.

There is a kernel of real fascism and real hate in North America. And it is the antifa movement, and its organizers, who are that kernel. They deserve no respect, and less tolerance. And trying to make them heroes of a non-existent, fatuous Resistance to a democratic vote only encourages streetviolence that may grow to riot and mayhem, and ultimately stimulate the very breakdown of democratic order and respect for it the mob lying professes to be defending.

Antifa is not a friend of democracy. It despises democracy, and equally despises those who believe in democracy. There’s not a spit of difference between them and the neo-Nazis — except, and it’s a big except — they have supporters outside the coven.