Call it what it is: racist bullying

New phrases shouldn’t hide the sickness of the hatred and intolerance on display in Charlottesville

One has to wonder why “alt-right” is used to describe what are really fascist, racist, and anti-semitic neonazis. In this age of new phrases for social media, Web 2.0 and other ways of describing innovations, we have stopped calling a spade a spade.

The Internet has enabled a vast network of usefulness and unprecedented communication and access to information. It has also given society’s bottom-feeders and fascist scum a platform to spew hate and intolerance.

Thankfully, Internet service providers and other online services are refusing to host such hatred.

The phrase “alt-right” was reportedly coined by US white nationalist Richard Spencer.

What we saw in Charlottesville is rooted in ignorance and fear, misguided antiimmigrant rage, and shameful anti-semitism. The far-right crowd chanted “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazi slogan “blood and soil”. Pretending it’s some kind of new online movement by calling it “altright” hides the ugly face of it. It’s a form of bullying, hidden behind indefensible justifications about culture.

When a white nationalist drove his muscle car into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, killing one and injuring a whole nation, it appears to be the final straw for many who looked the other way at the increasing racial intolerance, anti-immigrant propaganda and hate-mongering ushered in by the mad presidency of Donald Trump, who bizarrely blamed “both sides”.

At time like these people often quote German pastor Martin Niemöller, who wrote about the rise of Nazism in Germany:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out —

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

I had never experienced antisemitism until I went to boarding school in the Eastern Cape, where there were only five Jewish kids at Queens College High School for Boys. My nickname was simply — and disgustingly — “Jewish”. The teachers saw and heard it all. And not one did anything. My housemaster made antisemitic jokes about me in front of all the boys in my boarding house. Everybody knew. Nobody did anything. Just look at how many honourable people looked the other way during apartheid.

The worst of humanity was on display in Charlottesville, but it took a terrible tragedy to remind everyone how easily intolerance and hatred turns ugly and undermines the advances of democracy. We can’t allow these moral and ethical throwbacks to hide behind fancy phrases like alt-right. Let’s just call them what they are: fascists and racists.

What we saw in Charlottesville is rooted in ignorance and fear, and shameful anti-semitism