RE: Woodstock versus Charlottesville
Thanks for the post! I live in Charlottesville and have more knowledge about the events here than most.
First, the protests have been ongoing and back and forth for months. The latest protest is just the only one that made major news. Fascists, actual Nazi supporters who openly identified themselves as such, have been coming in from out of the area to protest the removal of Robert E. Lee's statue.
Actual, self-identifying KKK members have been here too. They have had plenty of marches that were allowed to go forward without incident. Each protest that was allowed escalated to a worse one.
At first they arrived in suits and well dressed. Now they come in full combat gear. At first only local police were present. Now the Virginia State Police come as well. Things have escalated greatly.
During that time, the opposition, the "antifa" as the propagandists like to call them, have been local people mostly. They are not all communists. They are not the paid protests of Soros either. They are my neighbors. Some are my friends.
Heck, the woman ran over worked at a company I interviewed at once, WillowTree. She's certainly not a communist, nor black masked "anarchist" paid for by Soros or some other group.
You can see in fact from the videos and pictures that the crowd the actual, self-proclaimed Nazi loving fascist, drove into was peaceful. They did not have weapons, and they were not in combat gear.
I take serious offense to the idea that the people there protesting are all communists or some other statists. They are not. Most of them are locals who are fed up with the pathetic racists coming and making a bad name for our city.
Some people have tried to suggest that the antifa are racists too. How is that possible? They are a mix of ethnic locals who all love this city. In a past protest even, the local police got in trouble because they were holding Black Lives Matter signs. I suppose all of the cops here are racists too? No, they are not.
To protest against, fight against, and be outraged by genuine fascist racists, is a good thing. This country went to war to fight such people. My grandfather Lowell Cornelison died fighting them in fact.
Today though, they ruin the city I love, burn torches and chant "blood and soil," and drive cars into peaceful people. What the hell happened to America?!
They are using race to divide us.
Ask yourself -- how is it possible that race relations seem worse today than they were 5 decades ago when there was segregation and rampant endemic racism? Something is wrong with this picture. Things should be getting better but they feel worse.
Part of the problem is misconstruing fascism as racism. Two very different things. Fascism has nothing to do with racism. Fascism is invited in by a society sick of chaos, and it is entirely possible that racism is being exploited as a source of chaos.
History rhymes. It does not repeat.
Uhm, the various groups that came to Charlottesville for the last protest were open Nazi, KKK, and other self-proclaimed racist groups. That's not a mystery. They came in the open and were proud of it.
Of course neo nazis are going to use race to divide people. They want to divide people by race after all. That's one of their objectives. I still don't understand why people are ignoring the fact that actual KKK and other affiliated groups were involved in this last protest.
Sure, there are some antifa groups that are racist too, and I do not support them either. My main point though is that people should guard against the suggestion that everyone who is anti-fascist is in those bad antifa groups.
They are not. As with the crowd that was driven into by the car, those people were locals. They were a diverse group of people who were not being violent and who got ran over by an open, self-proclaimed, neo nazi from Ohio.
Oh, not disagreeing with you about the open racism of some if not most of the permitted marchers.
They are nothing new. Those yahoos have been around for decades preying on the marginalized and malcontent.
Society treats them like the occasional foul smell that drifts in from the sewage treatment plant. A necessary evil in order to protect our freedom of speech.
Society is in no danger from them. You don't need to suppress the speech of an idiot. Just let him speak and he will quickly eliminate any doubt as far as society is concerned.
But if the quest to end racism drifts into a witch hunt, which it is, and racism accusations become a club used to gain advantage and bash other people over the head, then their ranks could grow.
So they are not the danger. Our reaction to them is where the danger could lie.