There are other rights that cover not getting punched in the face. Since you are not casting the puncher as the criminal element, I am confused about where you stand. You seem close to advocating violence
Excellent example. Equally reactive, equally dangerous, combine explosively. Yet, you cannot tell them apart from distance.
So, is Milo doing any trolling these days? Did he ship himself back to England?
It's one thing to defend, with a heavy heart, the abstract principle of free speech. It's another to argue that neo-Nazis are actually good people, law-abiding victims, with handsome jawlines and thick manly biceps, do they work out, I bet they work out.
I understand the underlying argument.... but I reject the premise. Let me give some of my favourite illustrations...
You live in a country in which the government is quite content to let people die of preventable diseases because mustering the collective will to save them is hard. It seems strange to talk of the "inalienable rights" of people who you have no collective intention of seeing through to the next sunrise.
This is all very fair. As I've said before, I take a frankly pretty dim view of the masks-and-bats school of anti-fascism, which I think tends to reflect more than anything the naivety, or less charitably the sheer dumb privilege, of its predominantly white, predominantly male adherents. There are times and places where it has its virtues, places were fascism represents an imminent physical threat to a great many people, and when anti-fascism is a broad and deep enough movement to provide a genuine social basis for such action. I don't think that either of these conditions have been met in the United States, or in much of Western Europe. In Greece or in Russia, I can absolutely see the necessity in resurrecting the traditions of your grandfathers and taking some Nazi scalps. But it's harder to make that argument in countries were the fascists are still, on the whole, a diffuse and cowardly fringe-movement. And most anti-fascists know this, most of them do not turn up to counter-protests dressed in black and swinging bats, but simply as citizens, with the intention not of starting a fight but of providing a direct confrontation. A physical presence, and necessarily so, but fundamentally a physical expression of moral force, rather than an expression of physical force. The fascists will of course immediately turn to expressions of physical force, that's the linchpin of their whole mutant worldview, but we shouldn't hope that it becomes necessary to respond in kind, and without meaning to be too cynical, it's hard not to find just that note of hope in the self-romanticisation of the more "hands-on" anti-fascists.
They have the right to say whatever they want and accept the
If these people, these fine people, are prepared to commune with neo-Nazis, to make common cause with neo-Nazis, to hold torchlight marches with neo-Nazis and chant menacingly about Jews with neo-Nazis, then they have already made the conflation, have volunteered to identify themselves with fascism. Like Columbus, their fore-father in genocidal delusion, I have merely discovered that which was already there.
Defend the free speech of whomever you like.
In the United States and Western Europe, physical force anti-fascists are predominantly white. To some extent this simply reflects local demographics. It can also reflect the fact that physical force anti-fascism stems from a much longer tradition of street fighting among working class youths; in Germany, they're almost the direct heirs of the Edelweiss Pirates, anarchist-leaning youth gangs who skipped school beat up Hitler Youth dweebs. But I think, to some extent, it reflects the fact that masking up and punching a Nazi carries less risk for a white male than for a black or brown male. It's not without risk, especially from people of working class background, which in my experience is genuinely a majority of physical force anti-fascists, but they're less likely to see the end of the really nasty end of the American security state- or, at least, less likely to expect it.
Most?
No, it's where the media stop pretending that the black bloc is reacting to fascists, and start actually calling them out for being violent thugs who don't differentiate between fascists and right-leaning, but peaceful protesters.
