Fair points, but the press is going out of their way to demonise all militant left wing activists. They tend to do the same to
all anti-establishment demonstrations.
I mean, look at some of the ridiculous lengths the tabloids (and conservative broadsheets alike) go to in demonising totally peaceful anti-war activists or protest groups like Black Lives Matter.
I don't deny that some antifascists get carried away, but it's not something that should reflect on all of us, or the tactic of resisting fascism through disrupting and picketing fascist demonstrations.
The point i keep coming back to though, is that fascism/nazism is implicitly violent.
If people are organising to advocate genocide/"ethnic cleansing"/creating "white ethnostates" then they're not peacefully sharing their views - they're engaging in very dangerous rhetoric and inciting violence and murder.
I cannot accept incitement of violence as "peaceful protest".
As for bad publicity, there are a few different ways of looking at it.
The "goal" of most militant antifascists is to increase the cost of entry to fascist and neo-nazi politics.
You are absolutely correct - we will never be able to rid the world of racism or other forms of malignant prejudice.
The thing we can do is prevent these people from organising and forming gangs who enable one another to engage in violence and intimidation of people in the community who fit the usual list of targets of nazis - black folk, muslims, gay people, drug users, leftists etc etc.
If racists see that
they will become targets if they go marching through jewish areas chanting "yids out" or whatever, the idea is that they'll think twice about doing so.
Unlike the people that nazis target, nazis themselves absolutely have the choice to reform and change their behaviour.
Gay folks, black folks etc don't have that ability - they're born that way.
So yeah - i hate violence, and think it is pretty depressing to see people turn up to demos to fight one another, but i also think it is important to have some people that are brave and passionate enough to engage with nazis on the street so the rest of us don't have to. Guys with swastika tatts, steelcap boots and clubs don't show up to these things to debate politics, and i strongly believe that if they are uncontested, their movements will grow - especially when they are fed by decades (or centuries) of racist newspapers and racist politicians fanning the flames of distrust and division.
I've been to heaps of "antifa" rallies over the years, and i've never committed an act of violence.
It's totally overhyped. The one thing i've seen at demonstrations more times than i care to remember though, is
police attacking peaceful demonstrators.
I've been attacked by riot cops, and seen friends and comrades get brutally assaulted. It happens all the time and nobody outside of activist circles gives a damn.
So all the concern i've read lately about nazis copping it from counter demonstrators strikes me as quite ironic.
When police club people who have linked arms to picket something
absolutely peacefully - or the mounted police do a horse-charge through a crowd of students protesting the iraq war (which happened at one of the first really crazy rallies i went to in ~2003) where are the irate pundits then?
They're silent. They don't care - most people don't. But they have been manipulated recently into passionately defending nazi's "right" to assemble and act out their little games of intimidation and other race-hatey shenanigans.
Selectively reporting violence is an easy way to do this, because it's very easy to edit the context out of these sorts of confrontation.
When a neo-nazi skinhead breaks police lines and attacks counter-demonstrators, it's not hard to make it look like an unprovoked attack, and you see that kind of thing a lot in this coverage.
The fascists are so often painted as victims.
"freedom of expression" is not equally valued or defended in public discourse (by the media, politicians, or law enforcement) so i don't take a lot of notice of what those people think of us. Ugly scenes don't do anyone any favours, politically, but honestly - if all anti-fascists practiced total non-violence all the time, the fash would kill and injure even more of us than they already do.
It does, and that's why the response to nazi provocation isn't polite or forgiving.
We do, however, support reformed nazis. We're not
totally unreasonable
