A couple weeks ago a friend posted a video on Facebook – Ben
Shapiro’s “Undercover in Antifa: Their Tactics and Media Support Exposed!”,
available on YouTube – which was full of enlightening information. I’d already guessed, from studying the
Charlottesville caper, that Antifa (like BLM) was an unofficial goon-squad for
a very-well-funded branch of the anti-Trump crowd, but I hadn’t known so many
of the details.
I noticed in the video that the Antifa crowd are uniformly
young, at least a little on the pudgy side, soft-handed, physically unskilled, and nonchalant about
their own money – as if they’ve never imagined being without enough of it. They’re eager to use assorted hand-weapons,
or even guns, but don’t seem to have much experience with or knowledge of them. Above all, they’re supremely self-righteous –
as if assuming that all the proper people in the world – including the
government -- automatically must think
as they do, and anyone who doesn’t simply must be a lunatic or a Nazi. In
brief, they look like middle-to-upper-class college students, with none of the
practical skills, knowledge or attitudes that working-class or poor kids would
pick up just by surviving.
The video confirms that they’re most often found around
liberal university campuses, actively supported, encouraged, and even protected
by liberal university professors. In
short, Antifa is the extreme action-faction of the Special Snowflake/Social
Justice Warrior/Limousine Liberal crowd that infests most of the more expensive
liberal-arts and state universities these days.
They’re particularly dangerous young Parlor Pinks. And yes, they’ve been declared a “domestic
terrorist” organization by the FBI. Yet
they’re still lionized by the Liberal media, who give much coverage to their
abundant anti-Nazi – and anti-Trump – picket-signs, particularly over their
“counter-protest” role in the carefully-sculpted Charlottesville incident.
Besides my general dislike for Parlor Pinks, I’m especially
incensed by reporters and editors who describe Antifa enthusiasts as
“anarchists”. As a lifelong ideological
Anarchist myself, I can tell you that they’re anything but. Real Anarchists, whether they come to it from
the non-Marxist Left or the Libertarian Right, are people who have done a lot of serious research,
self-examination, and studying – of everything from history to psychology –
pondering the question of how to maintain a decent and free society without
even the possibility of tyranny: in other words, how to have order without “law”.
This means, clearly, that they themselves must live outside
the protections of law and government;
they must provide such for themselves, and they’re on their own. The Anarchist and the outlaw have much in
common, and must learn the same lessons to survive. Chief among these is Bob Dylan’s famous line:
“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
Because humans are social animals, nobody survives alone; we all need our social support networks. To keep a network, one has to make bargains
and adjustments with other people – and stick to them reliably. The Anarchist and the outlaw have to manage
this without a government’s law and enforcement to fall back on – quite the
contrary, if anything – and that takes considerable thought, and work.
Even as youngsters, these are not the kind of students who
plot how to use accusations of racism/sexism to blackmail a professor into
giving them a better grade. They’re not
the sort to evade facts, manipulate statistics, sneer at logic, and elevate
their own precious passions – particularly their cherished Outrage – to the
position of moral standards. They’re not
such flaming hypocrites as to demand absolute freedom of expression for
themselves while noisily – and violently – denying it to anybody else. These are not the type to believe that “the
only thing that matters is what other people think of you.”
Above all, real Anarchists must be realists – or they don’t last very long. Whether they come from the working class –
like Nestor Makhno and Murray Bookchin – or the aristocracy – like Prince Peter
Kropotkin and Count Leo Tolstoy – they know full well that they are a minority
even among rebels, are feared and hated by tyrants from both ends of the
political scale, and don’t have (or really want) enough power to enforce their will on “the masses”, or
actually much of anyone. They approach
political situations with the watchful caution of a soldier in a war-zone, not
with the thoughtless arrogance of elitism.
(Isn’t it ironic that the Antifas accuse everyone they don’t like of
“privilege”, while unconsciously assuming it for themselves? There are many other such ironies, not to
mention hypocrisies, in the wonderful world of Antifa – including their name.)
The working weapon of real Anarchists is persuasion – with verifiable facts and
logic, with thought-provoking art, or with a tactic called “reality tripping”:
luring people into experiencing a situation for themselves. This tactic is attributed to no less than
Will Rogers, for his famous quote: “There are three kinds of people: the few
that can learn from reading or being told, the few more that can learn from
seeing someone else do it, and all the rest of us who have to learn by p!ssing
on the electric fence for ourselves.”
Using this tactic takes extensive forethought, study, and planning –
activities for which Antifa is not at all famous.
Real Anarchists will consider using violence -- with extreme
caution, not from moral objections but from tactical ones. The 19th-century stereotype of the
bomb-throwing (usually at some Czar’s or Emperor’s relatives) Anarchist is long
obsolete, if only because surviving Anarchists observed the effects of all
those bomb-throwings, and concluded that it was a tactic of extremely limited
usefulness.
Anarchism has survived as a political movement for well over
a century, despite heavy “evolutionary pressure”, precisely because of its
intelligence – in both senses of the word.
Thoughtless, excitable, morally arrogant, mentally lazy, emotionally
childish, unconsciously “privileged” Anarchists do not exist – at least, not
for long. Antifa is not an Anarchist
organization in any sense of the word.
“By their works ye shall know them”, and by their actions
the Antifa crowd have shown themselves to be the very Fascists they claim to
oppose. This seems to be par for the
course in modern American politics, where loyal Democrats sneer at “populism”,
self-styled “Conservatives” welcome Black, Jewish, gay and female supporters
and even leaders, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are notorious
for trying to exterminate whole species of domestic animals. Welcome to the age of hypocrisy.
--Leslie <;)))>< (To be continued)
