By Ian Tuttle
Monday, June 05, 2017
There is currently, on the streets, smashing storefronts
and setting things on fire, a group called “Antifa,” for “anti-fascist.” Antifa
are not a new phenomenon; they surfaced during the Occupy movement, and during
the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Antifa
movements began in early-20th-century Europe, when fascism was a concrete and
urgent concern, and they remain active on the Continent. Lately, Antifa have
emerged as the militant fringe of #TheResistance against Donald Trump — who,
they maintain, is a fascist, ushering into power a fascist regime. In
Washington, D.C., Antifa spent the morning of Inauguration Day lighting trash
cans on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, setting ablaze a
limousine, and tossing chunks of pavement through the windows of several
businesses. On February 1, Antifa set fires and stormed buildings at the
University of California–Berkeley to prevent an appearance by Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
(They succeeded.) In April, they threatened violence if Ann Coulter spoke on
the campus; when the university and local law enforcement refused to find a
secure location for her to speak, she withdrew, saying the situation was too
dangerous.
These and similar episodes call to mind Woody Allen’s
character’s observation in the 1979 film Manhattan:
“A satirical piece in the Times is
one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point of it.”
***
All politics is, at some level, a vocabulary contest, and
it happens that American politics is currently engaged in a fierce fight over,
and about, words. The central word at issue is “fascist,” but there are others:
“racist,” “sexist,” and the like. A great many people are currently involved in
a turf war, aiming to stake out conceptual territory for these charged words:
What is fascism? What isn’t it?
An illustration: In April, Heather Mac Donald was
physically blocked from an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College, in
Claremont, Calif., where she was scheduled to speak. Mac Donald is a scholar at
the Manhattan Institute, a prominent right-of-center think tank. She is a noted
expert on law enforcement, especially the complex relationship between law
enforcement and minority communities. She was among the first to theorize that
anti-police protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and elsewhere have
facilitated an increase in urban crime; the so-called Ferguson Effect is now a
matter of consensus among experts on both the left and the right. National Review readers will be well
acquainted with Mac Donald; she publishes in these pages regularly.
A group of students from Pomona College, part of the
consortium of Claremont schools, penned a letter to Pomona president David
Oxtoby, affirming the protest at their sister institution. Mac Donald, they
wrote, should not be permitted to speak; she is “a fascist, a white supremacist,
a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking
systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed
peoples are forced to live.” Mac Donald was not offering any material for
substantive intellectual discussion; she was, they claimed, challenging “the
right of Black people to exist.”
The last is, to those who are familiar with Mac Donald’s
work, an odd charge. Among her central claims is that the reluctance of law
enforcement to police minority communities has disproportionately affected
those same communities; more young black men are being killed by St. Louis PD’s
hands-off approach than were being killed by “proactive policing.” Mac Donald
does not oppose “the right of Black people to exist”; she maintains that it is
being threatened by militant anti-police sentiment.
But substantiating accusations that Mac Donald is a
“fascist, a white supremacist,” etc., is not the point. The point is finding
charged language to signify that Mac Donald ought to be persona non grata, without needing to prove the case. The outraged
undergraduates of Pomona College and Antifa are different in only one regard,
albeit an important one: Antifa are willing to employ muscle to achieve their
ends.
The purpose of words is, the philosopher Josef Pieper
suggested, “to convey reality.” But it is clear that, for Antifa, the purpose
is to cloak reality. Antifa’s reason for describing something or someone as
“fascist” is not that it is actually fascist (although perhaps on occasion they
do stumble onto the genuine item), but that describing it that way is
politically advantageous. Likewise with any number of other slurs. Antifa are
in effect claiming to oppose everything that is bad — and, of course, it is
Antifa who decide what is bad. Hence the organizers of the Inauguration Day
protests could write, as their mission statement, that “#DisruptJ20 rejects all
forms of domination and oppression.” That is a good monopoly if you can get it.
Roger Scruton, in A
Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006), examines how the
manipulation of language facilitated the Communist enterprise and its myriad
evils:
Who and what am I? Who and what are
you? Those are the questions that plagued the Russian romantics, and to which
they produced answers that mean nothing in themselves, but which dictated the
fate of those to whom they were applied: . . . bourgeoisie and proletariat;
capitalist and socialist; exploiter and producer: and all with the simple and
glorious meaning of them and us!
What George Orwell called “Newspeak” in his novel 1984 “occurs whenever the main purpose
of language — which is to describe reality — is replaced by the rival purpose
of asserting power over it.” The latter is the purpose of “anti-fascism.” Who
and what are you? A fascist. Who and what am I? An anti-fascist. Them and us,
tidily distinguished.
***
Reality shapes language, but language also shapes
reality. We think by means of words. Our perceptions change as the words
change, and our actions often follow. Back to the Communists: No one killed
affluent peasants. The Party “liquidated kulaks.”
Using words to cloak reality makes it easier to dispose
of that reality. Antifa are not satisfied with labeling people fascists; they
want them to bleed on that account. On Inauguration Day, in Washington, D.C.,
an Antifa rioter sucker-punched white nationalist Richard Spencer. Spencer is
as near to a prominent fascist as one will find in the United States today, and
a bona fide racist (an Antifa twofer). But the imperative of anti-fascism, to
reject “all forms of domination and oppression,” applies by anti-fascists’ own
inexorable logic no less to Heather Mac Donald — or to the Republicans of
Multnomah County, whom Antifa threatened to physically assault if they were
permitted to participate as usual in the annual Portland Rose Festival parade.
Why not punch them, too?
At The Nation
in January, Natasha Lennard showed how this logic works in practice. “Fascism
is imbued with violence and secures itself politically through the use or
threat of it,” writes Lennard, quoting from Militant
Anti-Fascism: A Hundred Years of Resistance, a 2015 book written by
anti-fascist blogger “Malatesta” (Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarchist
committed to revolutionary violence). As a result, there can be little question
of the necessity of “counter-violence” — “as in Ferguson, as in Baltimore, as
in Watts, as in counter-riots against the Ku Klux Klan, as in slave revolts.”
There are a great many questions ignored here — to take one obvious example,
whether the riots that consumed Baltimore in late April 2015 are in any
meaningful way comparable to nineteenth-century slave rebellions — but consider
for now just the use of “counter-violence.” It depends entirely on accepting
the premise that Donald Trump is a fascist. Since fascism is “imbued with
violence,” a violent response to the Trump administration is therefore
necessary.
This sort of reasoning, such as it is, gets a more
extensive workout in Emmett Rensin’s “From Mother Jones to Middlebury: The
Problem and Promise of Political Violence in Trump’s America,” published in Foreign Policy in March. Rensin purports
to assay recent left-wing political violence, but his clear if unstated purpose
is to defend it. According to him, questions of ethics — Is it right to commit violence? — or of tactics — Is it wise to commit violence? — are
unhelpful; what matters is why
political violence happens. The answer, he says, is “intolerable pressure” on
the lives of “the poor and oppressed”; “the intolerable pressure of a hateful
and fearful world is always waiting to explode.”
This romantic pabulum conceals a salient fact: The
victims and perpetrators of recent violence are hardly who Rensin makes them
out to be. “The poor and oppressed” are not students at Claremont McKenna
College (est. 2017–18 tuition: $52,825), and Muhammad Ashraf, the Muslim
immigrant who owned the limousine burnt out on Inauguration Day, is not “the
company” stamping its vulgar capitalist boot upon the downtrodden. Rensin
sidesteps this flaw in his analysis by offering a taxonomy of violence that,
conveniently, theorizes away both leftist responsibility and non-“oppressed”
victims: According to him, there is violence perpetrated by the state — e.g.,
drone strikes, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, and
the killing of Michael Brown (generally wicked); there is violence perpetrated
by right-wingers that is tacitly endorsed by the state — e.g., lynch mobs and
white-supremacist murderer Dylann Roof (always wicked); and there is violence
that “explodes” from among the “oppressed” (understandable, and who are we to
judge, really?).
What Lennard and Rensin are saying, underneath the layers
of refurbished revolutionary cant, is that Donald Trump is a grave threat that
justifies abrogating our laws against arson and assault — just like all of
those other grave threats, from chattel slavery to Ferguson. They are not so
bold as to come right out and say it, but they are, in the final analysis,
simply claiming that people who think like them should be exempt from the law’s
constraints, and that people who do not think like them should not receive the
law’s protections. In an article published shortly after Inauguration Day,
Lennard complained that prosecutors had brought up about 200 D.C. rioters on
felony rioting charges.
***
We have been through this before.
“During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the
FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly five a day.” So
notes Bryan Burrough in his 2015 book Days
of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of
Revolutionary Violence, which chronicles the 15-year reign of terror,
idealism, and ineptitude of radical left-wing groups such as the Weather
Underground, the Black and Symbionese Liberation Armies, and others that began
in July 1969 with a bomb in Manhattan and ended in April 1985 with the arrest
of the last members of the United Freedom Front in Norfolk, Va. Writes
Burrough: “Radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s
America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities,
accepted it as part of daily life.” When a bomb exploded at a Bronx movie
theater on May 1, 1970, police tried to clear the building, but patrons refused
to leave, demanding to see the rest of their film.
Sophisticated justifications for violence were part and parcel
of this fever. Leftist radicals were immersed in revolutionary literature —
Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, Malcolm X’s Autobiography
— and those texts were candid. In 1963, Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, the first
sentence of which read: “National liberation, national reawakening, restoration
of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever
the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event.” He continued,
inverting Christian teaching:
In its bare reality, decolonization reeks of
red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be the first only after
a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This
determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up
(too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only
succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.
The preface to the original edition of The Wretched of the Earth was written by
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who was even more bullish about violence:
“To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone,” Sartre
suggested. “There remain a dead man and a free man.”
Among the dead men was Frank Connor, a 33-year-old banker
from New Jersey, killed on January 24, 1975, when FALN, a radical group
dedicated to Puerto Rican independence, detonated a bomb in the historic
Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan. An interview with his son, Joseph, appears
toward the end of Days of Rage. About
his father’s murderers, Joseph concludes: “They appointed themselves my
father’s judge, jury, and executioner. He represented something they didn’t
like, so they decided they had the right to kill him.” Moreover, many like them
were excused — Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine
Dohrn, became celebrated academics — because their violence had served the
“correct” politics.
Today’s leftists are more gun-shy than their
predecessors, but the differences are a matter of degree. Under the aegis of
“anti-fascism,” leftist thugs have appointed themselves adjudicators of the
fates of Richard Spencer, Heather Mac Donald, the limo owner or Trump voter —
anyone they “don’t like” — and in this lawless realm, whatever crimes Antifa
commit are not crimes, and their victims are not victims.
One senses, too, that they enjoy the simple frisson of
violence. When Lennard writes in her post–Inauguration Day essay that Spencer’s
getting punched in the face was “pure kinetic beauty,” she is on a spectrum
with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who raped white women as an
“insurrectionary act,” and Dohrn, who gushed over the artistry of Charles
Manson’s murders. (“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner
in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate’s
stomach! Wild!”)
***
If the first 100 days of his administration are any
indication, Donald Trump may well be a fairly conventional president, except in
his personal conduct — which, even then, is likely to be more Berlusconi than
Mussolini. He is, though no one left of center would dare admit it, arguably
the leftmost Republican president ever elected, and his closest advisers — his
daughter and son-in-law — were until a few minutes ago lifelong Democrats. But
the sort of people who join Antifa are not the sort who interest themselves in
such details. No fanatics are.
The impulse toward destruction is deep-seated.
Kirkpatrick Sale, in his authoritative history SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society
(1973), writes:
Revolution: how had it come to
that? . . . There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the
morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses
available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of
America, inextricably a part of the total system. . . . Clearly something
drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system.
That describes far more than just the violent fringe of
1970s leftism. It is the stated position, today, of many Antifa and Occupiers
and Black Lives Matter supporters, and it is the unacknowledged assumption of
many progressive Democrats who would never throw a stone. It is the expressed
belief, too, of many who embrace the label “alt-right.” It is a weed that, for
50 years, has been taking root.
The natural and necessary institutions — chief among them
civil society and the law — that make it possible for people to live together
peacefully and prosperously require a degree of freedom. Inevitably, grifters
will swindle and demagogues will charm. But those determined to subvert these
institutions fail to see, or refuse to see, that the most likely alternative to
the principle of equality under law is a form of “domination and oppression”
worse than anything they currently oppose.
The remedy to outbursts of political turmoil is not to
wantonly tear down what fragile order exists, or to impose some new,
ill-conceived order by force. Power, at least in the long run, does not grow
out of the barrel of a gun; Mao was wrong. Legitimate and stable political
power is rooted in the healthful loyalties that temper destructive political
passions. Rightly ordered affections — toward God, country, and one another —
promote the civic friendship in which citizens work side by side to promote one
another’s best interests, and by which inevitable disputes can be resolved with
a minimum of conflict. When Lincoln urged that “we are not enemies, but
friends,” he was stating a necessary condition of the American republic.
The Antifa ideology can produce only enemies.
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