Tuesday, August 08, 2017
By Spencer Sunshine,
Truthout | Report
The August 12 "Unite the
Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, looks like it will be the
largest organized racist demonstration in recent memory. But that's not the
only reason it is important. First, while there have been dozens of far-right
rallies since Trump's election, this will be the first major, national rally
run by the alt-right's openly white nationalist wing. Second, after months of
arguments, this is also an opportunity for a large swath of progressives to
come together in opposition to the far right.
Charlottesville has seen
multiple white nationalist rallies this year. The first, a May 2017 daytime
event, was followed by a nighttime torchlight photo-op. Led by alt-right poster
boy Richard Spencer, attendees chanted Nazi slogans like "blood and soil."
The second, in July, was a KKK rally. This time, counter-protesters were
out in force; one outlet put the numbers at 30 KKK supporters versus 1,000 protesters. But the
police arrested 23 counter-protesters, and some counter-protesters
were charged with a felony for merely wearing a mask.
The white nationalist rallies
are ostensibly being held to oppose the removal of a statue of former
Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. The city council agreed to the removal
in April, but it is being fought in the courts. Now white nationalists are
making a show of force at rallies based on this increasingly strained pretext.
Since Trump took power in
February, there have been numerous far right marches, which have congealed into
a street protest movement. I have dubbed it "Independent Trumpism" because, while it
fanatically supports Trump and his anti-immigrant and Islamophobic politics,
the organizing happens outside of the Republican Party apparatus itself.
These started as supposed
"free speech" rallies -- in reality, ultra-nationalist gatherings to
show they could hold the streets after antifascists forced
the cancellation of a Milo Yiannopoulos talk at the University of
California, Berkeley, in February 2017.
The marches then branched out
to both oppose the removal of Confederate statutes, and support Islamophobic
rallies like June's "March Against Sharia." Mostly they have
been organized by "alt-lite" activists, who stop just short of
embracing a homogenous white country, with everyone from Trumpist Republicans
to militias to open fascists in attendance. And while Richard Spencer did not
go to any of them, fascist groups like Identity Evropa and Vanguard America did
-- although they were not key organizers and tended to have a low-key presence.
This week's "Unite the
Right" event will be different. While attempting to pull from the same
broad pool of Trumpists, this time the rally will be led by a star-studded cast
of fascist and other white nationalist leaders and groups. Those supporting it
claim over a thousand people will come.
Richard Spencer will headline
the event; he attended college in Charlottesville and given the repeated
rallies, it looks like he hopes to turn the town into an organizing base.
Another famous alt-right figure, Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff, will also speak.
The organizer of "Unite
the Right," Jason Kessler, is a white nationalist who wrote for the Daily
Caller. Embracing the racist creed that white people are an oppressed
group, he's said that "the number one thing" he
wants from the rally is "to destigmatize Pro-White advocacy."
Kessler originally sought the attendance of a wider swath of Trumpist
activists, going so far as to denounce the earlier KKK rally. But as the event
approaches, it has become more clearly an open white nationalist -- and even
neo-Nazi -- event. Four groups in the Nationalist Front, a national umbrella
organization of racist groups, are attending. Matthew Heimbach of the fascist
Traditionalist Worker Party and Michael Hill of the neo-Confederate League of the
South will both speak. The National Socialist Movement, the largest US neo-Nazi
party, recently announced it will attend. (Their presence is
the welcome sign for hardened, open neo-Nazis -- who've generally shied away
from being visible at past alt-right events -- to come in force.) And last, the
fascist alt-right group Vanguard America, which recently joined the Nationalist
Front, will be there.
They will be joined by
alt-right figures who stop just short of claiming the mantle of racial purity
for themselves, but will happily collaborate with those who do. These
include Augustus Invictus, a Florida lawyer who has defended the
neo-Nazi skinhead gang American Front and ran as a Libertarian Party candidate
for Senate, and Baked Alaska, a former Buzzfeed editor who now promotes white
nationalism. Members of the alt-right fight gang the Proud Boys are also
expected.
While this is a mess of
fascists and their friends, some are still attempting to portray the
"Unite the Right" as a neutral event. The fascist Traditionalist
Worker Party says "the event's not about race" and that they welcome
"non-White allies."
The left is organizing in
response to the rally, although not nearly on the same national scale. This
will be a mistake, however, if a thousand Nazis take the streets and proceed to
make Charlottesville a new base. If there is one thing that I learned from
witnessing the Nazi and Klan boom in the 1980s and '90s, it was that Nazis hate
opposition. If you give a Nazi organizer an inch, they will be thrilled by the
lack of resistance and proceed to take a mile. Floyd Cochran, an Aryan Nations
organizer during this period, revealed that if his group encountered resistance in
towns they targeted for recruitment, they moved on.
Regional groups have been
organizing against "Unite the Right." These include chapters of
Showing Up for Racial Justice, Black Lives Matter and Redneck Revolt, as well
as socialist, anarchist and antifascist groups. A coalition of religious
progressives, Congregate Charlottesville, has called for "1,000
clergy and faith leaders to join" the counter-protest, and Cornel West
has said he will attend.
Following the demonstrations
in Berkeley at the beginning of the year, a number of progressives issued vocal
criticisms of the use of confrontational strategies against the far right.
These attacks by moderates on antifascist radicals helped lower attendance at
counter-demonstrations. Simultaneously, the far right was able to create an
unusual Trumpist Republican-Nazi-militia street coalition. This has helped
propel far right organizing to new heights.
While arguments on the Left
over how to deal with the Far Right go back many decades, the strategy of
sitting by and doing no more than documenting its rise because opposing it
"will give them attention" has never been a successful approach. Neither
has counting on law enforcement to arrest those who break the law.
In practice, since February,
few groups outside of antifascist circles have done national-level,
longer-term, nuts-and-bolts organizing on the ground against the organized
far-right groups. For example, there has been no new wave of regional anti-far-right groups like those which
existed in the 1980s and '90s. These groups did not engage in militant direct
action but did build grassroots opposition to Nazi and Klan
groups. But, outside of Redneck Revolt, there is not even a sustained effort to
create online counter-propaganda. (Although one of the few initiatives by
moderate groups has been to limit the far right's use of social media and
online fundraising platforms.) There have been localized demonstrations -- in
Portland in June after the murder of two men by an Islamophobic racist, and
later in the month against a national day of Islamophobic rallies -- but these
haven't gelled into any coherent organization or strategy.
The Charlottesville rally has
the potential to unite differing radical and progressive activists who oppose
white nationalist organizing, and this opportunity should not be squandered. A
broad-based, progressive coalition of groups with different analyses and
approaches is needed to counter this new, reinvigorated far right. If these
groups can't cooperate, they should at least be able to leave each other alone
to pursue their own strategies. But that should not mean staying home and
ignoring public far right activism. When far right organizers try to take over
our cities, the one thing that progressives can't do is to respond with
silence. In the face of an aggressive racist movement, silence is consent.
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