Portland antifa attack fellow counter-protestor carrying American flag
107 replies, posted
Weren't these guys pushing the whole "punching a Nazi is as American as apple pie" thing really hard a while back?
Hard to know if these are the same guys considering, you know, they're anonymous people who cover their face.
Are you guys being purposefully obtuse?
There is no ‘antifa’ to join. There is no group. If you turn up to counter protest fascism you are antifa. Antifa is a strategy.
A strategy that seems to be a magnet for violent authoritarian assholes.
If thats the point you think we're making. Its not.
except for the part where it plays into their strategy for playing the victim
Is it a magnet though or does the media like the play out assholery and fearmonger with stories like this? Is this the norm? A lot more anti fascist action occurs than the media will report on.
i also made no comments either way about the idiot in the article so you don’t need to tell me about that.
even though its enticing as hell to knock a nazi on their ass.
it does play into their victim narrative like what @Griff said.
Though, if a group of nazis or neo-nazis are actively hurting people or attacking people. Have at it.
it's also true
Remember how, not even five years ago, when this statement wasn't considered controversial? I miss those days.
They tried that in the 60s and 70s, the FBI spent most of its energy radicalizing them as part of anticommunist work.
Hello, antifa apologist here throwing in my 2 cents.
Whenever stories like this shows up, my first instinct is suspicion, as these incidents often gets blown out of proportion through manipulation of facts by alt-right propagandists.
However, taking a step back, I recognize that these things can and do happen. While I have no problems with actual nazis getting knocked the fuck out, you can't always be sure of your targets.
So that said, knocking out a naive liberal waving a flag is certainly bad praxis. While liberalism might be diametrically opposed to radical leftism, they should not be treated the same way as fascists and racists. And also, approaching a person, univocally calling a national flag a fascist symbol while demanding to take the flag off their hands is also not the right way to go about things.
But again, national flags do not belong in an anti-fascist black bloc. Usually in these manifestations, the fascists are the ones flying the flags, and generally, anarchists and national flags don't mix. If one were to handle this situation differently, one would try to explain in polite terms how national flags aren't welcome in the bloc, and a more sensible course of action would be to let this person keep their flag, but not fly it within the bloc. If liberals want to fly national flags in opposition to fascists, they should do it in their own bloc.
Props to the street medics for taking care of this guy so quickly.
This sort of thing seems to happen pretty regularly. Weren't they attacking reporters and people with cameras some time back as well?
Reminder that this argument is pointless as this is only relevant in how difficult it is to gauge member counts, not to mention it could easily be turned the other way around if an Antifa group does something positive. Lastly, even minor Antifa groups are permissive of violent protest as not even one has ever disavowed another for being "too violent".
If you create a movement without any leadership or structure which people can choose to become part of without any sort of approval, then anyone who chooses to self-represent as part of that group IS necessarily representative of that group. This is a ridiculous argument and is essentially the no true Scotsman of the internet age.
To play devil's advocate, is the guy who ran over that woman at Charlottesville not a nazi because he wasn't a registered member of any nazi political party? Nobody there said that he could represent them after all. Therefore, it wasn't a nazi who did this horrible thing, it was a random unbalanced psycho! Leave us cuddly good natured nazis out of this.
Honestly the amount of bullshit I see bubbling up from otherwise reasonable people when the topic of antifa comes up is baffling.
He is a Nazi. But Nazis aren't bad because this one dude who claims to be one ran over people with his car. They're bad because they're, well, Nazis.
If you want to criticize antifa as a whole, then criticize the ideology or methods that most of them share. Don't generalise a few individuals' actions to condemn the whole of the group.
If antifa were an organisation with a leadership, then you could criticize said leadership for not condemning individual acts. But it's not, so that's a moot point.
What do you propose the more reasonable majority of antifa should do, exactly? Distance themselves from the movement? But then what should they do once some individuals in their new movement start being violent? Rinse and repeat?
People here are criticizing their methods though, not even the intent. And they commit violence and vandalism as a group, their leadership os obscure but their positions and methods are consistent worldwide. What even is this argument, honestly, what reasonable majority? Wheeeeere is it?
Nope. Firsthand reports from dozens of reporters there all said that the worst they got was a bump out of the way.
literally the unite the right 2 protest. the worst that happened was some reporters being pushed away and being told to fuck off. Painting a boogeyman over the entire movement that involves millions because of a handful of dickheads is idiotic. Its as bad as the BLM movement being discredited because of a few idiots being up people or smashing windows..
Whenever people get offended over statements about punching and murdering nazis (which helps nazis by the way) I can't help but think of this old ZP quote from 2012.
Especially when you get to watch a well-placed bullet zoom along in slow motion and tunnel through Fritzl's brainpan, tearing up all his treasured memories of eating schnitzel as a boy. NO GUILT; HE'S A NAZI!! You could pull his fucking toenails out with pliers and it'd still be about as morally complex as Duck Hunt.
I miss when jokes like this were noncontroversial because it was near universally recognized that Nazis were the closest the world has to pure evil, and the only people who would say otherwise were insane assholes anyway.
The ideology and methods championed by antifa inevitably lead to situations like this. You have dozens of individuals in a heated situation without any oversight or organization who are working under the axiom that vigilante violence is correct so long as it's against a given group. Add to that the fact that many members of antifa are political extremists in their own right and you have the perfect fuel for fuck storms like this where a relatively milquetoast political symbol sparks an attack.
It's not my job to solve the problems with their fucking political movement but it pisses me off when I see pro-antifa people whining that the police are fascist sympathizers because they don't let them do whatever the fuck they want, and then whistle and twiddle their thumbs and try to pretend that everything is hunky-dory when shit like this happens. Fuck that.
Even though out of the hundreds of antifa events around the world, there's only ever a few people like this. Also, no one identifying as antifa has every killed anyone. Compare that to the kkk who Adobe have killed many many people
So long as you are okay with your opponent using the same cop-out strategy, then you are right. Otherwise perhaps we need to have a conversation about amorphous political groups using violence.
Just to draw out the point:
"There is no 'alt-right' to join. There is no group. If you turn up to protest the destruction of america via direct action you are alt-right. The alt-right is a strategy. That's the end of it."
"You can't blame the alt-right for the actions of one person! He doesn't represent them and couldn't represent them because they aren't a group."
See, I think we should hold political movements to a little more criticism than that. Otherwise you're going to have a hell of a time picking through individuals to know which of the group you don't like are 'the bad ones'.
I will wholly criticize antifa/black-bloc people as a whole when these types of incidents happen because they exert approximately 0 effort in self-policing when they're out and about. Throwing cups of water on people in wheelchairs and bashing people with bike locks is bad, but it's even worse when they close ranks around these kinds of scumfucks instead of throwing them away.
In other words, they become culpable (in my eyes) because they don't try to fix/prevent it.
The main thing to comprehend in comparing antifa to neo nazis/white supremacists is the dynamics of where their goals lay. White supremacists hold interest in keeping and pushing various forms of systemic oppression. Antifa seeks degradation and repealing of various forms of systemic oppression. The difference is within the dynamics of power such actions are done.
Note this is not to justify anyone's violence, but to explain the underlying motivations.
So to talk about antifa we need to... willingly misunderstand the facts? Saying antifa are not a group is literally the fact of the matter. It’s not a cop out, it’s literally how it is. Antifa refers to a set of actions and techniques that can be used by people who subscribe to any number of ideologies.
There is is no comparison between the alt right and antifa, because the alt right is a philosophy you subscribe to, whereas anti fascist action are a set of actions you undertake.
if you want to complain about antifa you need to understand what it is. This false equivalence bullshit is just wrong.
This whole thing just reminds me of "anti-gamergate is not a group"
It wasn't controversial until leaderless, unaccountable, ideologically extreme groups started using it as justification to exert vigilante violence against people they subjectively decided are Nazis.
Is it surprising that normal people don't want to sanction anonymous activists to carry out ideological violence when they can't trust that they won't be targeted too?
You realize those actions themselves also have an underlying philosophy? I mean, you can scream false equivalence all you want but the truth of it is that you don't know whether the alt-right has intellectual diversity within it any more than you know that antifa has diversity within it. What you judge people by is their actions when you have nothing better to go on. I can agree with you that fascists are bad untill the cows come home, but you seemingly wish to make no such concession when it comes to anarchist black-block thugs.
Why is it such a terrible thing to ask that people don't show up in masks swinging weapons like they are god's chosen warriors? By all means, show up, but reign in your wrath until you at least know who it is you are giving a concussion to.
But you're right, this is totally comparable to sit-ins. /s
When did radical leftists suddenly get a monopoly on the black bloc tactic? There is a low-key irony in the prospect of an anarchist group policing uniform and symbols among people momentarily associating with them.
Is it not more logical that instead of disassociating with people they find problematic to their ideology but still equally allied in opposition to their current enemies, that they would disassociate just as well with people using violence against potential bystanders - a thing that very clearly aids no one and leaves them worse off in the war of public opinion and memes, for after all it is the message that counts in these kind of events? Groundless solidarity is a thing that enables any idiot to do as he wishes as long as he can excuse it to his political/ideological allies.
These individuals may be anonymous (as is the whole point of the black bloc) but certainly other equally anonymous individuals in the vicinity can stop them from fucking up? Whether through apathy or complicity, these people should not be getting a free pass from their so-called comrades when making mistakes, for it is an ever present temptation to defend people in your group in the belief that to do otherwise is to fall to "divide and conquer" strategies by the enemy.
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