AntiFa ate my baby: Today in Tweets

For whatever it’s worth, I dashed off a short note to Nancy Pelosi telling her how disappointed I was with her statement about antifa.

I’m dealing with more health issues with Catbeast atm plus, I now have a ‘long distance’ kitten who will live with my friend (from whom I got Catbeast) until the old man goes to kitty heaven. I have to get to where she lives so we can get him vaccinated and neutered (she can’t afford to do it herself) next week, so I’ll be driving down for that (Yay SoCal freeways.)

I hope it’s ok to jump in. I’ve not read upthread, so apologies if this is wildly irrelevant.

I’ve spent the last year dog walking. Some of the dogs have been puppies not in control of their nonsense, and I’ve had bruises as a result. The puppies haven’t meant it, and I haven’t taken it amiss.

As I read about Antifa (which is an abbreviation I really resent, because surely we all are), my view starts to change. About three years ago, I was on an anti-austerity march where fellow marchers were chanting at the police keeping us safe/contained “you’ll be next and you know it, you’ll be next”, which I felt was true but not helpful. Five minutes later the black bloc invaded and I stopped feeling safe, and was hugely grateful for the police.

But now I’ve been savaged by puppies (whole bits of my arm is green, and I’m not actually a Martian), maybe I feel differently about standing up to Nazis. If I can be covered with bruises by a well-meaning puppy, maybe it’s time for me to get in a Nazi’s face. And, as a white middle class woman in her 40’s, maybe I should be using my privilege (ie coppers don’t like to see my bruises) and ability to be bruised. I don’t know, but it’s a thought.

Ok, having read a little (certainly not all) upthread, it’s important to understand the difference between non-violence and pacificism. Non-violence is a mass movement tactic. If a bunch of guys come on to your farm at 3am and start setting fire to your property and harming your family, you do whatever you can to waste their time so your family can get away. You don’t invoke pacifism. You slow them down, by any means.

When there’s 50 of you and you would otherwise be accused of being a riot, this is where non-violence is powerful.

I feel really crappy that, as a politics graduate, it took me until watching the film Selma to understand how politically and strategically savvy Dr King was. That’s what non-violence is. It’s using your opponents’ violence against them, to the point of putting yourself in the line. It isn’t anti-violence, because violence is part of the conversation, sadly. It’s using violence against those that perpetuate it. It really pisses them off.

OK this rant over.

Here’s hoping this extends into next year and every year after

QFT.
I don’t have kids, but I would be happy to pay a bit more in taxes to have 3 free meals for all school kids in my area too. Even better if instead of more taxes, the funds were redirected from our obscenely bloated military budget.

@John Halaway
Ah we can dance if we want to,
we can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance
Well they’re are no friends of mine

@Weatherwax
As a tactic though – especially if you’re a group who might be painted as a mob or riot, double especially if you’re concerned about “optics” – non-violence needs to be absolute. You cannot raise a hand in self defense. The second you do, it’s more of the both sides crap. And you can’t just say “I don’t believe in violence so I’m going to stay home.”

Effective non-violent resistance to violent groups is basically showing up prepared to literally get your head kicked in. For those who can do that, more power to you.

Imaginary Petal
September 1, 2017 at 10:35 am

@SpukiKitty

One friendly suggestion. It’s not very nice to describe the quite serious disagreements between members of the community as bickering or fussing, and suggest that they should just stop doing it. The people who argue here tend to have strong feelings about what they’re arguing. You are implying that they could just drop their ideas and move on, as if they’re only arguing because they like to argue. This is more than a little condescending.

What you’re doing is explaining to others that they shouldn’t take their own feelings seriously, because you don’t find their feelings interesting.

It’s also a leap to assume that just because we’re all commenting on the same blog, we’re all on the “same side”. This is not a safe assumption. We can, and do, often disagree on very serious matters. Some/many of us appreciate an environment in which we can have heated and frank discussions about contentious issues.

If you don’t like the current discussion, you don’t have to participate in it. Personally, I’m staying out of this particular one. This doesn’t mean you have to abandon the blog forever. You can just stick to commenting on other posts. You can even stay on this post and comment about something different.

When people argue about things that are very important to them, it’s to be expected that the tone won’t always be perfectly friendly. (In my view, a much bigger problem occurs if people adopt a pissy tone when not engaged in contentious discussion. That’s just bad form and creates a toxic environment.)

Okay. You have a point. We all have to speak our piece and get stuff off our chest.

If a thread’s too tense for me, I won’t take part.

I learn so much here! Thank you all. @Still Fiqah especially. I’ve always felt leery and bad whenever some white person invokes the name of Dr King to make a point, as if using him like a tool to do a thing. Always felt painfully disrespectful to a man who worked so hard for justice. You make it more clear, thank you.

@John Halaway, from how you write, it seems pretty clear that you had decided that we’re wrong about everything before you even got here, so I’m not sure why you’re commenting. What would you like from us?

EDIT> Oh, and thank you for showing me The Cut! Looks good.

@ChimericMind
Honestly, you’re talking like a damn fool here, and I haven’t got much patience to unpack this shit, but here goes.

And pairing that attitude of required rage with one where everyone not taking part in it is automatically an enemy

Nobody’s saying everyone needs to punch nazis; we can’t and shouldn’t all be street fighters. However when you tut tut about keeping the moral high ground, violence is bad, antifa are evil violent thugs just like Proud Boys, you’re taking the side of nazis and Klansmen. That’s all there is to it. You don’t have to mask up and roll out, but the literal least you can do is vocally support the folks who do instead of condemning them.

And for those wondering what I’m talking about, I’ll set up the logical set that I’m seeing:

You need a remedial logic course, old bean.

@Rugbyyogi

Errrr… wow – instead of asking me where my line is, please tell me instead where MY violent action – or perhaps yours, might make a positive difference in any of these cases?

Because when nazis get the shit beat out of them, they go home instead of roaming the streets looking for victims. As someone who’s a member of one of their speficially targeted groups, I call that a fucking win.

When society descends into constant violence, then it’s the poor, the powerless, the weak and the meek who suffer the most. That’s not a vision I care to endorse.

Yeah, we’re suffering plenty already, thank you. We’d like to not have suffering turn to dying faster than it is, though, which is why we don’t like nazis organizing to kill us.

@nparker

I’m getting the impression that some people here, if they had been around at the time, would have been giving white feathers to conscientious objectors in the war. It isn’t a nice vibe.

Fuck you. Shaming people for not supporting fighting literal fascists in their own country is not even the same sport as shaming people for not participating in a pointless imperial war, let alone the same ballpark.

@BlackBloc, Still Fiqah
Seconding everything you said.

@FrickleFrackle

Is it possible for me to be a good person as a cis white male that doesn’t want to use violence?

Sure. Just keep in mind what side you’re on, like.

@Scildfreja

Don’t feel guilty about it either. Do what you can. War’s won as much by the farmer as the fighter.

Far more so. Logistical support is basically the difference between forces that win regularly and ones that lose a whole lot.

@Bobbie LobBomb
I can recommend you some reading if you’re interested. (Read the fucking bread book!*) There’s a ton of Leftbook groups around, but unfortunately the non-condescending part can be hard to find. I got into this stuff in the ancient pre-social media days, so I dunno offhand about intro stuff. Ask around at Purple and Black Anarchists, they’ve a pretty good community. Or Red and Black or Pink and Black, they’re all allied.

*The Conquest of Bread by Pyotr Kropotkin; I strongly recommend it.
@Weatherwax

, because surely we all are

We, the mammotheers, perhaps, but we, white America is a different matter. Which is exactly the problem.

When there’s 50 of you and you would otherwise be accused of being a riot, this is where non-violence is powerful.

When there’s 50 of you and you’re not white, it’s gonna be called a riot no matter what you do. For us white folks, the cutoff is about 150 for lefties, unlimited for anyone else.

@Zephkiel

As a tactic though – especially if you’re a group who might be painted as a mob or riot, double especially if you’re concerned about “optics”

Thing is though, the purpose of beating nazis isn’t to convince the public that nazis are bad, it’s to convince nazis that naziing around in public is bad for their health and they should crawl back under the rocks they came from.

Some unfortunate ableist language aside, this is an excellent summary of the situation. Also CN for mentions of bigoted violence.
Pullouts:

Even during the war, even during the death camps, it’s hard to say how many Germans actually knew how bad things were, what was going on…For a myriad of reasons, most people just don’t jump headfirst into oceans of blood, even the really bad ones. They generally need to dip their toes, a bit. Almost no one, in the grand scheme, joined the Nazi party thinking “I want to gas Jews.”

Since the war, Western culture has in part dealt with the world historic trauma it suffered culturally by a constant, therapeutic, necessary stream of art and documentation of the Reich’s crimes against humankind…The flooding of the culture with the history of what is likely the worst tragedy in world history has been comprehensive and impossible to ignore.

And that’s what attracted today’s Nazis. Understand that…Every single contemporary Nazi was attracted to Nazism cognizant of of its worst crimes. Not in spite of those crimes, and generally because of them. They saw the video, they read the history, and they thought “That’s sounds great, sign me up.” Even the ones who deny the holocaust like it. They revel in the imagery of the Holocaust. That’s what they’re in it for. The Holocaust isn’t a bug for them, it’s a feature.

They don’t divorce themselves from the history of the name. It wouldn’t be hard. It’s certainly possible to advocate racist positions without appropriating Nazi or fascist specific iconography or ideas. Some on the alt-right even try. But, eventually, they slip up and out pops a seig heil or a “blood and soil”. They want the history. They celebrate that history.

There are no cool Nazis. Even the occasional well appointed, moderately thoughtful front man like Spencer, or the poor, dumb teenager who’s going to realize what a big mistake he’s made six months from now, is going to be toting a bunch of shithead losers behind him, every fucking time. No one who isn’t a Nazi, who has experienced a group of Nazis, wants to hang out with Nazis again. They are nasty, ambulatory garbage with stupid haircuts. I’m not talking about politics. I’m talking about the real world that people actually live in. They destroy business for bars they begin frequenting. People start avoiding any place they show up because there’s always some fucking horrible shit going on. Someone getting picked on, someone getting beat up, someone almost getting beat up, racial slurs, women being sexually abused, bartenders threatened, everyone threatened, I shouldn’t need to go through this list. I don’t know why I’m going through it.

They will make an entire working class neighborhood a fucking pain in the ass for as long as they’re tolerated. They’ll harass businesses, mess with neighbors, and just make everyone’s fucking life shitty as long and as much as they can until they wind up doing something so dumb and shitty they wind up going to prison. A good deal of the time, that’s murdering someone. I haven’t even mentioned the special attention people of color get, of course. Or gay people. Or trans-people. Or, God forbid, they decide anyone even looks Jewish. Do I really have to? They will do whatever they can to make any member of a vulnerable group feel constantly threatened, at the very least. At the most, well, you read the papers.

I’m sure a lot of this may be hard for wealthy Hollywood stars to relate to, or some of my less vulnerable, whiter, straighter, more insulated friends. If you haven’t been forced to be around these people in a real world environment, it’s probably hard to wrap your head around just how fucking odious these pricks are in person, but it’s not a fucking joke. It’s not a game. And it’s NOT FUCKING POLITICS. They are, wherever they appear openly, a clear, present threat to anyone in their vicinity, anyone they can get in a vulnerable position. Anyone they can get their hands on.

The point is that, past the immediate function of antifa actually defending other, more peaceful, protestors (which is almost all they generally wind up doing. Just ask Cornell West and the line of clergy that were attacked during the battle of Charlottesville), probably the most important function the antifa strategy serves is to signal to the worst of the protestors on the right, the true fascists, that their presence will SIMPLY NOT BE TOLERATED IN THE COMMUNITY.

That there is an active, hostile presence in the the area, willing to put their bodies and liberty on the line, in order to protect themselves and the community, particularly the most vulnerable. To STOP them before they get a foothold, to fucking hurt them badly enough that they won’t come back the next weekend to fuck up a show, or bust up a bar, or beat up a fucking trans kid, or knife someone, or shoot someone. Or shoot a bunch of people. Or drag some poor old black janitor behind a car till he dies.

Thanks for the info and links, esp @BlackBloc. I have some reading to do!

@BritterSweet – Thanks, that looks interesting (re misogyny in Big Bang Theory). I marked it to finish watching later. …I remember how one episode of the show had Sheldon being misogynist for no reason. He kept saying to his new assistant Alex (a woman) that women are bad workers because they’re always distracted by their sex drives. Thing is, his character should know enough basic biology not to say such a stupid thing! And why have him bully his employee? He’s supposed to be annoying but sympathetic.

-Tangentially, a bit surprised at the narrator saying the male cast aren’t “conventionally attractive”… aren’t they? …I might be of the opinion that Kunal Nayyar is dazzlingly beautiful, so I’m biased. 🙂

Grr, why am I talking about the non-important stuff? Oh right, because women are distracted by their sex drives. Explains everything! /s

@ChimericMind

I think you either need to take back that comment about your foster brother, or provide a heck of a lot more detail regarding how Dali’s ideas could/did get him killed.

There are other things I wanted to say, too, but I can’t think of how to say them right now.