After the violence and hate of
Charlottesville, the International Socialist Organization appeals for mass
protest and solidarity to confront and defeat the rising far right.
August 15, 2017
THE MASK has been ripped off
the supposedly new "alt-right" movement to reveal the familiar and
horrifying face of fascism that most people thought was a relic of history.
Last
weekend's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia,
wasn't about some fake defense of "free speech," but championing a
Confederate statue. It welcomed open Nazis into its ranks, who roamed the
streets looking for people to assault--and ultimately committed a
vehicle-terror attack against a crowd of peaceful protesters, killing
32-year-old local activist Heather Heyer and injuring several dozen others,
many seriously.
The outraged response to Nazi
terror in Charlottesville was immediate and powerful, with protests and vigils
in hundreds of cities and denunciations of the violent racists coming from
everywhere. Everywhere but Donald Trump's White House, that is.
This is a decisive moment.
"Will the overt displays of racism return the extreme right-wing to the
margins of politics, or will they serve to normalize the movement, allowing it
to weave itself deeper into the national conversation?" asked
the New York Times.
The answer depends on what the
millions of people who despise Donald Trump and want to stand against him and
the right do in the coming weeks and months.
Now is the time to overcome
the fear that the fascists want us to feel and organize demonstrations with
overwhelming numbers--to stop this cancer now, before it can grow into something
far more threatening. That means organizing broad protests open to everyone
affected by this threat--which is just about everyone--to prove the far right
is a tiny minority.
After the sickening violence
of the storm troopers in Charlottesville, we know that the far right isn't
looking to gain power through winning votes, and they don't care about approval
ratings. We can't defeat them by following the liberal advice to "just
ignore them."
If we don't stop the far right
today, they will stop us from organizing tomorrow--it's that simple. This isn't
a battle that we chose, but it's one we have to win.
Let's also be clear that we
can't rely on the police to protect us from fascists or on the government to
deny them permits. It's up to all of us to defend our communities and our
movements from the right.
If we're successful,
Charlottesville could be remembered as a turning point, not only in our fight
against the right, but in our ability to organize for our own demands.
The International Socialist
Organization is wholly committed to this urgent struggle, and we join with the
call that has come from so many organizations and individuals since
Charlottesville: for a united fight to confront and defeat fascism.
There will be flash points in
the coming weeks, from Boston to Berkeley, but this fight needs to be taken
into every city and town, into every community, onto every campus, and into
every workplace. We appeal to all our supporters and the whole left to take
this stand: Now is the time to unite and fight.
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THE MOST horrifying incident
from Charlottesville last weekend was, of course, neo-Nazi James Fields' terror
attack, in which the Vanguard America member plowed his car into a contingent
of marchers that included members of the International Socialist Organization,
Democratic Socialists of America and Industrial Workers of the World, among
others.
But the project of fascism is
a lot larger than solitary terror strikes. They want to build an organization
of disciplined thugs to systematically brutalize and intimidate the
oppressed--a program that, as history shows, inevitably involves murder.
In this instance, it was James
Fields who was the killer. But the Nazis and far-right "peacekeepers"
who came heavily armed to Charlottesville were prepared to inflict violence on
people of color, Jews and the left. They are more than willing to kill
individuals in order to pave the way for their real aim--mass murder and
genocide.
The real face of fascism was
apparent throughout the weekend in Charlottesville: Hundreds
of torch-wielding men, chanting "Blood and soil!" and assaulting
counter-protesters; groups roaming the streets with weapons and shields,
looking out especially for people
of color like 20-year-old Deandre Harris to brutalize.
As
ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson wrote, the far right in Charlottesville:
exhibited unprecedented
organization and tactical savvy. Hundreds of racist activists converged on a
park on Friday night, striding through the darkness in groups of five to 20
people. A handful of leaders with headsets and handheld radios gave orders as a
pickup truck full of torches pulled up nearby. Within minutes, their numbers
had swelled well into the hundreds. They quickly and efficiently formed a
lengthy procession and begun marching, torches alight, through the campus of
the University of Virginia.
The fascists in
Charlottesville were confident. One
smug little Nazi named Sean Patrick Nielsen bragged to the Washington Post,
"I'm here because our republican values are, number one, standing up for
local white identity, our identity is under threat, number two, free market,
and number three, killing Jews."
All of which made Donald
Trump's initial statement condemning violence "on many sides" all the
more sickening to millions of people--and a
cause for celebration for the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website.
This is another warning sign
of the dangers of the current moment--with a Trump administration infested with
far-right racists, from alt-right promoter Steve Bannon to Euro-fascist ally
Sebastian Gorka to Confederacy enthusiast Jeff Sessions.
We shouldn't have any
illusions: The toxic combination of a far right that spans the range from open
Nazis to people with access to key White House personnel produced the biggest
show of force for American fascism in generations in Charlottesville.
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OUR SIDE has a powerful
potential weapon to use against this growing threat: overwhelming numbers. The
events of Charlottesville--not only the terror attack, but the Nazi flags, the
torch-wielding march and the thuggish violence--horrified the vast majority of
U.S. society.
From Saturday night through
Monday, solidarity
demonstrations were called in more than 400 cities across the country--an
explosion of protest that recalled the days after Trump's election last
November.
Jason Kessler, the
Charlottesville resident who initially called the Unite the Right rally, was chased
from his own press conference by furious local residents. Statements poured
in from across the country condemning white supremacy, domestic terrorism--and
Trump's weak response. The corporate media suddenly stopped referring to
Richard Spencer and his pals as "alt-right" and called them the more
accurate "white supremacists."
Dozens of Republicans in
Congress, who made their careers out of pandering to racism and reaction,
rushed to condemn the Nazis and distance themselves from Trump--who was finally
forced on Monday to explicitly condemn white supremacists.
Even then, though, it should
be noted that Trump's response to Charlottesville is to call for more "law
and order"--a racist buzzword that means giving police and immigration
authorities more unchecked power to detain and brutalize people of color.
The forces of "law and
order" were all over the streets of Charlottesville--and they stood
by as the orgy of right-wing violence took place.
Instead of appealing to the
government to defend us, we have to build mass protests to defend ourselves and
one another. The strategy of relying on small groups of anti-fascists to fight
on behalf of the oppressed was shown to be insufficient in Charlottesville by
the bigots' large mobilization.
This is the moment to build
united fronts with as many organizations as possible to confront the right--not
only left-wing groups, but unions and civil rights organizations, down to every
possible club on campuses.
In Portland, Oregon, this type
of coalition brought out more
than 1,000 people in June to confront hate groups that celebrated the
racist murders of Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche.
We need more of this kind of
organizing in the coming weeks when the far right descends on Boston on August
19, and throughout the school year as fascists like Richard Spencer attempt a
provocative tour of campuses. The Movement for Black Lives has called a
national day of action for August 19.
On August 27, the far right is
planning an all-out mobilization in Berkeley, California, for a "No to a
Marxist America" rally, where they will try to repeat their racist
rampages of last spring. But anti-fascists
have been preparing for weeks to send the message that we will not retreat
in the face of their violence and hate.
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AMID THE many condemnations of
the far right in Charlottesville, there has been one distinctly false note
coming from many political leaders: that these fascists are somehow
"un-American."
Violent racism has deep roots
in this country, and terrorism in defense of the right's twisted ideals is as
American as white sheets and a swinging rope.
But fighting back against
racist terror is also very much a part of U.S. history. Those who tell us to
ignore the racists and they'll go away are either ignorant of that--or they
don't want us to build movements against the far right because they
instinctively sense that our movements won't stop there.
This is the time to learn the
history of previous generations who fought the KKK and the courageous struggle
against fascism in Europe. And it's time to come together in action to give
ourselves the courage to confront the forces that want us to stay home.
Just as we've taken strength
from the bravery shown by the residents of Ferguson, Missouri, we can take
strength from the words of Heather Heyer's mother about her daughter: "She
would never back down from what she believed in. And that's what she died
doing, she died fighting for what she believed in."
The threat of the right is
growing, but it has to be faced and overcome in order to fight for any of our
demands. One organizer in Columbus, Ohio, gave voice to the instinct for
solidarity and struggle that has been felt around the country since
Charlottesville:
When we started planning the
Columbus airport protest [against Trump's Muslim travel ban] in January,
several right-wingers and Islamophobic scum started posting graphic photos of
animals and people being run over by cars.
Their aim was clear: to bully
and threaten, and make people scared to come out. For several hours late at
night, we just kept taking those photos down. Hundreds and hundreds of people
showed up anyway to fight the ban. We kept a look out for errant cars, but they
didn't show up. And so we became part of the historic airport actions that beat
back the first version of the Muslim ban.
These fascists will try to
silence us, they will try to intimidate us, they will try to make us feel
afraid. But we are many, they are few.
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