More serious problem than the small number of Nazis who no one is supporting because media is justifying them and not calling out their true pernicious nature.
On Sunday, a relatively small group of white nationalists, under the banner of “Unite the Right,” chose to make an ostentatious celebration of the anniversary of their rally in Charlottesville — the one in which one of their number killed a counterprotester with his car. This time, they protested directly in front of the White House.
Naturally, this attracted a significantly larger counterprotest, filled mostly with goodwill opponents of their racist ideology. But the hooligan-like behavior of some in the crowd, who threw eggs and water bottles and shot fireworks at journalists and the police, served as a reminder that the Hitler Junior crowd, odious as they are, are a much smaller and less threatening gang than the so-called “antifa,” that mob of militant leftists known for their political street violence.
Fortunately, their uncivil antics were kept far milder than usual, in spite of their own best efforts to provoke a police confrontation. But bear in mind that both their numbers and their reach are far and away greater than anything the pathetic nationalists could ever muster. Their reach is also truly national.
Unlike the crowd that appeared last year in Charlottesville to universal condemnation, these rioters, with their cop-killer rhetoric and their skull-cracking, window-smashing tactics of political persuasion, now hold sway over many weak-minded politicians who sympathize with, collaborate with, or fear them too much to resist.
Even to call them “antifa” or “anti-fascist” is a mistake, an uncritical acceptance of their own euphemisms. Although they are a mix of Marxists and anarchists, they derive that term from Stalinist propaganda that started in the 1930s and picked up again in the 1940s after the Soviet Union abandoned its alliance with Nazi Germany. This word was used by the Soviet communists not only to help in the war effort, but also to reinforce their tyrannical domestic rule.
“Anti-fascism,” it turns out, is a great excuse for government to make people do anything you want them to do. Why, the Berlin Wall, from its construction in 1961, was always referred to behind the Iron Curtain as the “anti-fascist barrier,” implying that it was there to keep out harmful Western influences.