I can appreciate many conservative and libertarian positions. I don't believe most of them are stupid or racist, just enough of them.
AntiFA, the newest terrorist organization.
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Wait what? Isn't that the opposite of racist? lol
*Edit*
Unless they are conservative under their Antifa mask...go ahead and bash their heads in and shoot them with all the pepper balls you want for the viewing pleasure of EH.
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Has anyone posted this yet?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...a-how-hardcore-punk-fuels-the-antifa-movement
Saturday 9 September 2017 02.00 EDTLast modified on Saturday 9 September 2017 03.01 EDT
“No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!”
When Green Day chanted the repurposed lyrics from Texan punk trailblazers MDC’s 1981 song Born to Die during the 2016 American Music Awards, it gave the burgeoning anti-Trump, anti-fascist movement the slogan it needed – and it would soon appear on placards, T-shirts and be chanted by protesters in their thousands in months to come.
It was a tiny piece of punk history writ large on American cultural life – but it only gave the merest hint of US hardcore punk’s influence on the current political landscape.
As political commentators struggle to nail down the exact nature of Antifa’s masked legions, they’ve overlooked one thing: Antifa has been critically influenced by hardcore punk for nearly four decades.
From on the collectivist principles of anarchist punk bands such as Crass and Conflict, the political outrage of groups such as the Dead Kennedys, MDC and Discharge, Antifa draws on decades of protest, self-protection and informal networks under the auspices of a musical movement.
Mark Bray, author of The Antifa Handbook, says that “in many cases, the North American modern Antifa movement grew up as a way to defend the punk scene from the neo-Nazi skinhead movement, and the founders of the original Anti-Racist Action network in North America were anti-racist skinheads. The fascist/anti-fascist struggle was essentially a fight for control of the punk scene [during the 1980s], and that was true across of much of north America and in parts of Europe in this era.”
“There’s a huge overlap between radical left politics and the punk scene, and there’s a stereotype about dirty anarchists and punks, which is an oversimplification but grounded in a certain amount of truth.”
Drawing influence from anti-fascist groups in 1930s Germany, the UK-based Anti-Fascist Action formed in the late 70s in reaction the growing popularity of rightwing political parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. They would shut down extreme-right meetings at every opportunity, whether it be a march or a gathering in a room above a pub. Inspired by this, anti-racist skinheads in Minneapolis formed Anti-Racist Action, which soon gained traction in punk scenes across the US. Meanwhile, in New York, a movement called Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice sprung up.
The term “Antifa” was adopted by German antifascists in the 80s, accompanied by the twin-flag logo, which then spread around Europe, and finally pitched up in the US after being adopted by an anarchist collective in Portland, Oregon.
For Thomas Barnett, singer with popular hardcore punk band Strike Anywhere, his punk ethics and the direct-action philosophy of Antifa go hand in hand, and, with Trump’s presidency emboldening the extreme right, the stakes couldn’t be higher: “This isn’t just a raft of right-wing ideas – this is actual hate and violence, and the destruction of entire sections of humanity. Of course, I don’t believe in the false equivalence [between Antifa and the alt-right]. I think anti-fascists’ pre-emptive street violence against Nazis is righteous and important.”
Strike Anywhere singer Barnett says: “It’s also about community self-defence. The punk experience is like the flow of water. You can put up dams, you can run it underground – it will still get through. It also carries on the folk tradition that was speaking truth to power before there was even electric power.”
If there was ever a person unafraid to speak truth to power, it would be Jello Biafra, former singer of the Dead Kennedys and the man responsible for their 1981 call-to-arms Nazi Punks Fuck Off. So it might come as a surprise that he is withering in his criticism of Antifa’s actions in recent months.
“I’m not down with confronting [the extreme right’s] provocations of violence with actual violence. I mean, self-defence is one thing, but going to a Trumpist rally with the express purpose of beating up fascists – what does that accomplish? Who’s the fascist now? It plays right into their hands,” he says.
“More than ever, we have to keep our heads right now. And I am all about freedom of speech, but I think protesting these people non-violently is the way to go, because it lets the targets of the fascist speakers know they’re not alone and lets the fascists who show up know that there’s an awful lot of people who are not down with them, and a chorus of raised middle fingers is better than showing up with some kind of a weapon. Escalating the violence is not the way to go.”
Advertisement
Many adopt direct-action tactics, whether it be the recent Antifa protests across the US, the black-block tactics employed during the WTO and G7 protests around the world, or even the decision made by Brace Belden to leave California to join the YPG, the far-left Kurdish guerrilla group battling Isis.
“Punk itself wasn’t a direct influence on my joining a guerrilla group, of course, but punk did help to cement my radical politics. Being in a community with a certain degree of consciousness and solidarity between people helped immensely in that regard,” says Belden.
Bands, record labels, zine writers and venues around the world have co-operated to create a network that exists entirely outside of the mainstream, providing an off-grid template for Antifa activists to draw from. In America, there is Appalachian Terror Unit, a young band with heavy Antifa leanings from the Trump heartland of West Virginia. In Oakland, Antifa-related punk/oi! band Hard Left have taken part in benefit shows for protesters involved in the events at Charlottesville. In Texas, Antifa are organizing community relief efforts for victims of the Houston floods.
“There’s definitely an overlap between the leaderless politics and the DIY ethos and the notion that ‘if there’s a problem in our punk scene, we’re not going to be able to count on the mainstream to necessarily give a shit,’” explains Bray.
With his current band, the Guantanamo School of Medicine, he has updated his 1981 song and called it Nazi Trumps Fuck Off, but it comes with a caveat: Trump is the target, not his supporters.
“I usually talk about the song on stage for a while before we play it, pointing out that almost everybody in the audience, especially if we’re playing in Texas or Southern California, know people in their family, close friends, at school or work, whatever, who think that Trump is really cool. And I point out that the last thing we should do is to dismiss these people as rednecks or stupid or ‘I’m not going being your friend anymore, fuck you’ – that’s not going to persuade anybody of anything and it helps Trump divide the country. My point is that you don’t do that, you sit down and talk to somebody, not blog in an echo chamber. It might be stomach-churning, but you might plant a seed, and if someone wakes up three weeks, three months, three years later and thinks, ‘Wow, that person that called me on my bigotry was right.’ All this racist, anti-immigrant fascism isn’t getting us anywhere. I don’t want any part of it anymore.”
Author and punk historian Jon Savage, a champion of the Dead Kennedys during his stint as a music journalist in the 70s, isn’t so sure: “It’s very idealistic and very laudable, but it’s like arguing with Brexiters over here (in the UK). You’re not going to get any change out of that. There is a proportion of people who can discuss things in a rational way, but here you’re talking about core beliefs and wishes and feelings, and these are irrational, and they are even less rational when they are tested against reality.”
For Savage, Antifa’s direct action tactics are as legitimate a tool as Biafra’s more measured approach: “If you don’t protest the way things are, then nothing is going to change. You’re reacting to fascism and entropy. You need a variety of approaches, and in politics I wouldn’t discount any approach. It’s probably useful to have sensible people because they can say, ‘Well, look what happens when you don’t listen to me and see what the nutters are going to do.’
For Barnett, even the current terminology is under debate. “Calling it ‘Antifa’ is like calling it this weird exotic cult, instead of calling it ‘everyday life’. Every aspect of media coverage of it is insidious, turning public opinion against us, making us a violent spectacle that’s both something terrible and un-American, when this is the fucking Boston Tea Party,” he says. “If people want to talk about how the heritage of American culture and our patriotic destiny fits in [to anti-fascism] – it’s basic math to me, and to many, many others.”
Biafra and Strike Anywhere’s Thomas Barnett at least find some accord on the rebranding of the right, however. “You know what they called the alt-right two years ago? Neo-fucking-Nazis!” says Biafra. “Now it’s alt-right, like alt-country or alternative pop music.”
Barnett concurs: “They don’t get to be alt-right. They just get to be digital-age Nazis, or white supremacists or terrorists. And that’s what [the media] are doing to anti-fascist action.”
Regardless, Barnett says the antifascist movement isn’t taking anything for granted. “These rallies, whatever the next one is, whatever form it takes, are Trojan-horse events to invite and welcome white terrorist groups, and are just platforms for them to go into communities to hurt and intimidate people. And that’s what anti-fascist action has always known, and that’s what the punks have always known.”
Or, in the bald terms of someone who put his teenage years in a punk band called Warkrime behind him to go and fight in an actual war, former YPG militia member Belden says: “When I was younger my friends and I used to beat the shit out Nazis that would roll out to punk shows [in California]. And guess what? They’d leave and never come back. Violence works.”
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2...a-how-hardcore-punk-fuels-the-antifa-movement
Saturday 9 September 2017 02.00 EDTLast modified on Saturday 9 September 2017 03.01 EDT
“No Trump! No KKK! No Fascist USA!”
When Green Day chanted the repurposed lyrics from Texan punk trailblazers MDC’s 1981 song Born to Die during the 2016 American Music Awards, it gave the burgeoning anti-Trump, anti-fascist movement the slogan it needed – and it would soon appear on placards, T-shirts and be chanted by protesters in their thousands in months to come.
It was a tiny piece of punk history writ large on American cultural life – but it only gave the merest hint of US hardcore punk’s influence on the current political landscape.
As political commentators struggle to nail down the exact nature of Antifa’s masked legions, they’ve overlooked one thing: Antifa has been critically influenced by hardcore punk for nearly four decades.
From on the collectivist principles of anarchist punk bands such as Crass and Conflict, the political outrage of groups such as the Dead Kennedys, MDC and Discharge, Antifa draws on decades of protest, self-protection and informal networks under the auspices of a musical movement.
Mark Bray, author of The Antifa Handbook, says that “in many cases, the North American modern Antifa movement grew up as a way to defend the punk scene from the neo-Nazi skinhead movement, and the founders of the original Anti-Racist Action network in North America were anti-racist skinheads. The fascist/anti-fascist struggle was essentially a fight for control of the punk scene [during the 1980s], and that was true across of much of north America and in parts of Europe in this era.”
“There’s a huge overlap between radical left politics and the punk scene, and there’s a stereotype about dirty anarchists and punks, which is an oversimplification but grounded in a certain amount of truth.”
Drawing influence from anti-fascist groups in 1930s Germany, the UK-based Anti-Fascist Action formed in the late 70s in reaction the growing popularity of rightwing political parties such as the National Front and the British Movement. They would shut down extreme-right meetings at every opportunity, whether it be a march or a gathering in a room above a pub. Inspired by this, anti-racist skinheads in Minneapolis formed Anti-Racist Action, which soon gained traction in punk scenes across the US. Meanwhile, in New York, a movement called Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice sprung up.
The term “Antifa” was adopted by German antifascists in the 80s, accompanied by the twin-flag logo, which then spread around Europe, and finally pitched up in the US after being adopted by an anarchist collective in Portland, Oregon.
For Thomas Barnett, singer with popular hardcore punk band Strike Anywhere, his punk ethics and the direct-action philosophy of Antifa go hand in hand, and, with Trump’s presidency emboldening the extreme right, the stakes couldn’t be higher: “This isn’t just a raft of right-wing ideas – this is actual hate and violence, and the destruction of entire sections of humanity. Of course, I don’t believe in the false equivalence [between Antifa and the alt-right]. I think anti-fascists’ pre-emptive street violence against Nazis is righteous and important.”
Strike Anywhere singer Barnett says: “It’s also about community self-defence. The punk experience is like the flow of water. You can put up dams, you can run it underground – it will still get through. It also carries on the folk tradition that was speaking truth to power before there was even electric power.”
If there was ever a person unafraid to speak truth to power, it would be Jello Biafra, former singer of the Dead Kennedys and the man responsible for their 1981 call-to-arms Nazi Punks Fuck Off. So it might come as a surprise that he is withering in his criticism of Antifa’s actions in recent months.
“I’m not down with confronting [the extreme right’s] provocations of violence with actual violence. I mean, self-defence is one thing, but going to a Trumpist rally with the express purpose of beating up fascists – what does that accomplish? Who’s the fascist now? It plays right into their hands,” he says.
“More than ever, we have to keep our heads right now. And I am all about freedom of speech, but I think protesting these people non-violently is the way to go, because it lets the targets of the fascist speakers know they’re not alone and lets the fascists who show up know that there’s an awful lot of people who are not down with them, and a chorus of raised middle fingers is better than showing up with some kind of a weapon. Escalating the violence is not the way to go.”
Advertisement
Many adopt direct-action tactics, whether it be the recent Antifa protests across the US, the black-block tactics employed during the WTO and G7 protests around the world, or even the decision made by Brace Belden to leave California to join the YPG, the far-left Kurdish guerrilla group battling Isis.
“Punk itself wasn’t a direct influence on my joining a guerrilla group, of course, but punk did help to cement my radical politics. Being in a community with a certain degree of consciousness and solidarity between people helped immensely in that regard,” says Belden.
Bands, record labels, zine writers and venues around the world have co-operated to create a network that exists entirely outside of the mainstream, providing an off-grid template for Antifa activists to draw from. In America, there is Appalachian Terror Unit, a young band with heavy Antifa leanings from the Trump heartland of West Virginia. In Oakland, Antifa-related punk/oi! band Hard Left have taken part in benefit shows for protesters involved in the events at Charlottesville. In Texas, Antifa are organizing community relief efforts for victims of the Houston floods.
“There’s definitely an overlap between the leaderless politics and the DIY ethos and the notion that ‘if there’s a problem in our punk scene, we’re not going to be able to count on the mainstream to necessarily give a shit,’” explains Bray.
With his current band, the Guantanamo School of Medicine, he has updated his 1981 song and called it Nazi Trumps Fuck Off, but it comes with a caveat: Trump is the target, not his supporters.
“I usually talk about the song on stage for a while before we play it, pointing out that almost everybody in the audience, especially if we’re playing in Texas or Southern California, know people in their family, close friends, at school or work, whatever, who think that Trump is really cool. And I point out that the last thing we should do is to dismiss these people as rednecks or stupid or ‘I’m not going being your friend anymore, fuck you’ – that’s not going to persuade anybody of anything and it helps Trump divide the country. My point is that you don’t do that, you sit down and talk to somebody, not blog in an echo chamber. It might be stomach-churning, but you might plant a seed, and if someone wakes up three weeks, three months, three years later and thinks, ‘Wow, that person that called me on my bigotry was right.’ All this racist, anti-immigrant fascism isn’t getting us anywhere. I don’t want any part of it anymore.”
Author and punk historian Jon Savage, a champion of the Dead Kennedys during his stint as a music journalist in the 70s, isn’t so sure: “It’s very idealistic and very laudable, but it’s like arguing with Brexiters over here (in the UK). You’re not going to get any change out of that. There is a proportion of people who can discuss things in a rational way, but here you’re talking about core beliefs and wishes and feelings, and these are irrational, and they are even less rational when they are tested against reality.”
For Savage, Antifa’s direct action tactics are as legitimate a tool as Biafra’s more measured approach: “If you don’t protest the way things are, then nothing is going to change. You’re reacting to fascism and entropy. You need a variety of approaches, and in politics I wouldn’t discount any approach. It’s probably useful to have sensible people because they can say, ‘Well, look what happens when you don’t listen to me and see what the nutters are going to do.’
For Barnett, even the current terminology is under debate. “Calling it ‘Antifa’ is like calling it this weird exotic cult, instead of calling it ‘everyday life’. Every aspect of media coverage of it is insidious, turning public opinion against us, making us a violent spectacle that’s both something terrible and un-American, when this is the fucking Boston Tea Party,” he says. “If people want to talk about how the heritage of American culture and our patriotic destiny fits in [to anti-fascism] – it’s basic math to me, and to many, many others.”
Biafra and Strike Anywhere’s Thomas Barnett at least find some accord on the rebranding of the right, however. “You know what they called the alt-right two years ago? Neo-fucking-Nazis!” says Biafra. “Now it’s alt-right, like alt-country or alternative pop music.”
Barnett concurs: “They don’t get to be alt-right. They just get to be digital-age Nazis, or white supremacists or terrorists. And that’s what [the media] are doing to anti-fascist action.”
Regardless, Barnett says the antifascist movement isn’t taking anything for granted. “These rallies, whatever the next one is, whatever form it takes, are Trojan-horse events to invite and welcome white terrorist groups, and are just platforms for them to go into communities to hurt and intimidate people. And that’s what anti-fascist action has always known, and that’s what the punks have always known.”
Or, in the bald terms of someone who put his teenage years in a punk band called Warkrime behind him to go and fight in an actual war, former YPG militia member Belden says: “When I was younger my friends and I used to beat the shit out Nazis that would roll out to punk shows [in California]. And guess what? They’d leave and never come back. Violence works.”
The only thing I would say is they're calling neo-nazis and skinheads alt-right plays right into their hands and simply couldn't be further from the truth. They want to associate their sickness with conservative and libertarian ideals and the two just don't mesh like oil and water. If anything they're closer to the far left and they way the do business through violence and murder. Still other than that a lot of good information.
There would be no anti-fascism if not for fascism/(white) nationalism. There would be no anti hate if not for the fear and hate that precedes it.
Is this a serious statement?
Just for starters.
Liberal Fascism
Rich Karlgaard, FORBES STAFF
May 16, 2008 2:35 PM 123
I resisted reading Jonah Goldberg’s book until the recent Forbes investor cruise, when, having exhausted the bag of books I’d brought along, I needed fresh fodder. The ship’s library obliged. Sometimes you get lucky.
Liberal Fascism is a must-read in this age of creeping statism–which one worries may advance with greater speed after November. Goldberg’s book is an alternative tour through the murderous 20th century, during which 100 million people were extinguished by their own governments and billions more had their liberties curtailed.
Goldberg debunks the widely held view that communism was the opposite of fascism. In fact, the only thing that separated the two main branches of 20th-century totalitarianism was that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born of an international movement while the National Socialist German Workers Party was explicitly nationalist.
Both cancers were inspired by Karl Marx. Both asserted the need for a “new man” torn from religion. In his youth, writes Goldberg, “Hitler often stayed up nights writing plays about pagan Bavarians bravely fighting off Christian priests trying to impose foreign beliefs on Teutonic civilization.” Hitler also hated capitalism as much as Lenin, though Hitler was better at bending it for his own purposes.
In the U.S., "fascism lite" was embraced by Teddy Roosevelt, and much more so by the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Wilson himself wrote, in a graduate school thesis called "Congressional Government," “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.” He wrote in another thesis, called "The State," “Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.”
Youthful hyperbole? Hardly. Campaigning for president in 1912, Wilson said, “While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it is Jefferson who said that the best government is which does as little governing as possible … But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.”
Such words, of course, cleared the ground for FDR’s expansive government policies in the 1930s and 1940s and later for Nixon’s wage and price controls.
Every good history tells you something you didn’t know. The surprise for me was the near complete embrace of fascism by the intellectual classes during the first 40 years of the 20th century. Fascism wasn’t just embraced by a few gullible idiots, like journalist Lincoln Steffens, who upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1921 said, “I have been over into the future, and it works.”
The fascist delusion came from higher intellectual quarters. Writes Goldberg:
I am not the first to use the term [liberal fascism]. That honor falls to H.G. Wells, one of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the 20th century. Nor did Wells coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis,” he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July, 1932.
Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism anticipating a Hillary Clinton administration. Clinton, like Woodrow Wilson, draws her core beliefs from the progressive social gospel wing of Christianity with a dollop of 1960s radicalism. But since Clinton won’t be our next president, does Liberal Fascism still have immediate relevance?
Well, listen to the campaign talk from Barack Obama and John McCain and decide. Neither candidate is a skeptic of liberal fascism’s great new crusade, global warming. Obama is a product of the lawyer-social worker-nanny axis, while McCain is pure straight-backed military. Between them, I hear little libertarian talk.
What do you think? If you’ve read Liberal Fascism, share your own review. Or, if you haven’t read it, comment on whether you think America is moving toward or away from statism.
What continues to amaze me is that liberals are exactly the very thing they SAY they hate. Their hyporcacy suffocating and all encompassing.
@Milktoast Bandit The problem you continually face is trying to box in definitions to mean what you want. But no matter how hard you try there's always that little bit of truth you can't completely cover over. Like leaving a quarter sized hole that truth like an octopus can easily get through.
@Milktoast Bandit The problem you continually face is trying to box in definitions to mean what you want. But no matter how hard you try there's always that little bit of truth you can't completely cover over. Like leaving a quarter sized hole that truth like an octopus can easily get through.
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Antifa: brazen attitudes create too much noise, thus the attention from the FBI, and, in my personal opinion, this makes them an absolute failure of an organization. If you really want to be an activist, you must infiltrate and adapt. You must be "one of them". Act like them, talk like them, pretend to be another Joe Shmoe. You don't go breaking windows and screaming for alt-right blood in the fucking streets. That behavior is fucking stupid. Now any activity on Antifa's behalf will likely be thwarted because of the now massive red X on their backs. That is not how you organize. Antifa is like a club for teenage "punx" to dress and act like thugs because mommy and daddy bought them their first cars, but somehow they're still upset.
I'm all about anti fascism, but they are not going about it the ideal way.
I'm all about anti fascism, but they are not going about it the ideal way.
Apparently, I gave you too much intellectual credit, as your posts clearly demonstrate a lack of intelligence, an abundance of ignorance, and a cerebral slob-iness that invalidates your opposition to the cold hard truth laid out before you...
Heed your words...
In other news... Have you ever been to New York? I hear it's always lovely this time of year.
Sorry to have proven you wrong with this One post. I really thought it would take more to convince you but I see now no matter convincing fact or truth will sway you. Your mind has been hijacked and set on it's path. It would be hard to say how long ago that happened. Perhaps as early as birth. Either way there's probably little if any hope for you at this point.
Never the less I will tolerate you much as I do the drooling idiot on the street corner. A prisoner of their own mind but no slave to truth.
Be you on your way merry soul.
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That's not what my post means. Proof of your rightness is not in the article about a book by a conservative journalist that uses revisionist history to hijack a phrase and give it new meaning. This op-ed devalues your position to the point of sad hilarity. This conversation is like trying to talk to a farting leprechaun, that's trapped inside an armadillo, that's fighting an angry kangaroo on top of a pile of butterfly turds... wtf.
By the way... I hear New York is fabulous for the intellectual type...
Hahaha...more videos of violence!
So fun!
@Milktoast Bandit
Opining is what EH does best.
Facts are not his forte.
So fun!
@Milktoast Bandit
Opining is what EH does best.
Facts are not his forte.
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ANTIFA: "Peace through Violence."
Wearing a mask during a protest needs to be illegal (by any group.) Only one reason they are hiding, and that is because they don't want to be held accountable for their actions. How quickly a protest can be diffused by that alone.
Who could forget this precious snowflake who needed her service animal.
Wearing a mask during a protest needs to be illegal (by any group.) Only one reason they are hiding, and that is because they don't want to be held accountable for their actions. How quickly a protest can be diffused by that alone.
Who could forget this precious snowflake who needed her service animal.
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