By Sumantra Maitra
Monday, July 08, 2019
One of my colleagues, Andy Ngo, is recuperating in a
hospital with his skull bashed and earlobe torn by Portland Antifa. For those
not aware, Andy is a sub-editor for Quillette, where I am a contributing
writer, and he has been documenting the viral spread of the anarchist group
Antifa in the city of Portland.
In his last such reporting, he was targeted, assaulted,
and hospitalized with a brain bleed, with his camera and video instruments
stolen. From the outside, Portland appears to tolerate this kind of anarchy,
and Andy’s own work has highlighted that Portland is beset with a certain lawlessness.
The city’s progressive mayor has time for LGBT pride parades, but orders his
police forces to stand down when a gay Asian-American has his head caved in by
a privileged bunch of ultra-violent cosplayers.
Antifa is short for “anti-fascist,” which is what these
groups label themselves to excuse their crimes as a justified reaction to
Donald Trump’s presidency. Antifa and other far-left personalities and groups
openly organize every single day on Twitter and Facebook without any bans or
fear of law enforcement. Andy has been targeted often by such people, not just
Antifa but also by a section of liberal activists, lobbyists, policy people,
and even liberal
journalists who have tried to justify the assault on him.
In a blatant display of partisanship, the “fact-checker”
website Snopes
twisted itself like a pretzel trying to justify or at least minimize the
gravity of the assault, which the editor of Quillette Claire Lehmann instantly
called out. Quillette’s
editorial also called
this assault a wake-up call. CNN came up with a contorted tweet that almost
made it sound like Ngo was simply caught in a cross-fire and is now blaming
Antifa due to his personal biases.
Incidentally, Quillette has been on the forefront at
unmasking journalists with overt sympathy for Antifa, and published
a thorough paper to that effect.
“We were pilloried by left-leaning media last month for
publishing a piece which scrutinised the relationship between a handful of
journalists and Antifa,” Claire told me, “But considering how the violence at
Portland has been downplayed or at times even justified by those same
journalists, it is clear that more scrutiny is needed, not less.”
The assault finally caught the eyes of politicians as
well, with the U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grennell being exceptionally
vocal about it, as a prominent gay American leader: “Andy is a friend of mine
and he is one brave reporter. What has happened to him should never happen to
anyone,” Grennell told me.
Take a Lesson from
History
Ngo’s case is not unique, and it points to a dark
history. Of course, the Portland kids are not the German Antifa of the 1930s,
nor are the Proud Boys, the right-wing group that often brawls with them over
free speech, comparable to Nazis. And the USA isn’t facing an economic collapse
like 1930s Germany.
Both groups are mostly Live Action Role Players trying to
find meaning in their otherwise void, libertine, and undisciplined life, often
by bashing skulls and destroying properties. They have never faced a concerted
reaction, they have never had the state crack down with the full might of the
law, and they have never seen a man burning alive next to them in a Molotov cocktail
or riot police beating the hell out of rioters.
I sincerely doubt many of these face-masked punks would
be there on the streets the moment after they realize that punches, kicks,
shields, and batons are not always one directional. But that does not mean it
can never get worse. That also does not mean we can’t apply lessons from larger
epochs of history more locally.
There’s a theory in Marxism known as “heightening the
contradictions.” Karl Marx wrote a vague theory of economic history, with a
flawed prediction about how society would develop and shape in future. But he
didn’t say anything about day to day organization, so it was up to future
Marxists to design and interpret Marxism according to their cultural and
historical background.
It was Vladimir Lenin who realized that in order to bring
about a violent revolution, you need to move society to a point, often through
external effort, where there’s nothing but the enmity between two groups of
people. Only in that chaos can true revolutionary communists take power.
The major flaw in this idea was that Lenin seemed to be
certain that in chaos only the communists can win with power. Unfortunately for
his side, in reality, the monopoly on violence is never one-sided. In that
sense, violence is often Newtonian and follows natural laws: the reaction is
often just as powerful as the action.
In the Weimar Republic in the Germany of the 1920s, this
was displayed in full. Practically, there was no difference between the Nazis
and communists in Berlin, which was, at that point, the “reddest city in Europe
after Moscow.” Joseph Goebbels, for example, used the same rhetoric and
organizational tactics that the German communists used in his speeches.
“The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest
misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become
a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is
alienated from what he produces,” Goebbels wrote in 1932, “but a revolutionary
achievement following from the radical carrying out of the basic life needs of
the working class. A ruthless battle against corruption! A war against
exploitation, freedom for the workers! The elimination of all
economic-capitalist influences on national policy!”
The battle in the streets of Weimar Germany, with massive
inflation and poverty and national humiliation, was essentially, between two
sets of authoritarian thugs, the Nazis and the Antifaschistische Aktion,
the original German Antifa. Both the German imperial monarchist conservatives
and the Weimar liberals failed, and refused, respectively, to bring about
order.
If Police Won’t Enforce
the Law, Voters Will Respond
To quote W. H. Auden, those to whom evil is done do evil
in return. Violence almost always begets violence, and if liberals and
conservatives refuse, or fail, to establish order, like their forefathers from
80 years back, someone else will. The majority of the common people throughout
the Western world do not want a revolution or civil war or anything of that
sort. All they want is peace, civilization, and lawful streets. They will
support anyone who will provide them security amidst lawlessness.
Throughout history, people support the establishment of
peace and authority, often through force in extreme circumstances. It is a
natural human instinct to form a social contract and establish a secured
society amidst natural anarchy. If American liberals and conservatives both
fail to bring about order in generic lawlessness and anarchy, they will pave
the way for normal middle-class peaceful Americans to elect someone to bring
about order.
Anarchy is equal to, if not worse than, tyranny, and if
history is a guide, unless governments come to their senses and govern, a
Leviathan always rises. In between, a lot of people like Ngo will have their
heads caved in.
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