Not only their rights, but their lives. Another lesson from the Night of the Long Knives is that fascist thugs can’t help but start infighting when power and money are at stake (because the will to power and violent tactics are inherently built into fascism’s core ideology in a way that they aren’t in other modern ideologies, Marxism included).
The MoneyCons and Libertarians who support or make excuses for fascists, or who clumsily try to equate them with anti-fascists, often find themselves in a similar situation if they don’t pay proper tribute to the bigoted strongmen who “saved” them from actual socialism.
The trope of rhetorically connecting anti-fascist activism and various examples of popularly reviled right-wing violence has become a quite a stereotypical (and tired) alt-right talking point.
Whenever this topic arises I like to encourage anyone who hasn’t read Umberto Eco’s short essay on the characteristic aspects of fascism to check it out. I think it does a great job of articulating why fascism is importantly not synonymous with any authoritarian program, and needs to be opposed on multiple levels appropriate to it’s peculiar nature.
I am under no impression that fascism is synonymous with all other forms of authoritarian governments. They are all, however, still vile and to be opposed by all intelligent, and educated people.
Brownshirts are literally the German equivolent of the Facist party paramilitary group… I’m not sure how any of this applies to socialist (as in neither group was socialist, they were in fact the OG fascists) fighting on the street with the counterprotesters (i.e. the actual group like Antifa) who were vilified for being the same thugs as those they fought against in the centrist media. Brownshirts and blackshirts both called their beliefs “socialist” but split on racial and national lines and not any sort of normal use of the term.
Like, this rewriting of history would be unthinkable but given your stance on Ngo your analysis of history near and far seems to just say a thing you think and quote things you think back that up while refusing to take more than a casual glance at any of it.
I suggest you “take more than a casual glance” at the history of the brown shirts in order to understand better. I linked the wiki article and quoted specific passages to support my points but you might want to read the whole thing since you believe I am rewriting history. Unless you mean that you read the wiki article about how the brownshirts where mostly socialists and unionists and believe that I edited it to fit my narrative? Both groups where socialist with differing ideas of how to bring forth socialism. The black shirts where Soviet backed and as you say, often clashed with the brown socialists.
The browns where also commanded by a socialist:
Industrialists, who had provided the funds for the Nazi victory, were unhappy with Röhm’s socialistic views on the economy and his claims that the real revolution had still to take place. President Hindenburg informed Hitler in June 1934 that if a move to curb the SA was not forthcoming, he would dissolve the government and declare martial law.[30]
I don’t know how to simplify your misreading of history more. Fascism rose from getting white socialists to abandon class equality for racial superiority, and Nazi Germany rose along side Italian fascism. The Italians employed the blackshirts as their street thugs that claimed to be socialist (but were seeking benefits for white Italians) and the Nazis employed the brownshirts that claimed to be socialist (but were seeking benefits for white Germans), both of these groups were in no way actual socialists - they called themselves socialists and tried to court white socialists to join their side. This literally is what happens with white supremecists today that use the rhetoric that they will benefit working class whites and give them the life they are entitled to. The rhetoric has not changed in nearly a century now, and the only reason that it is muddled at all is that “fascist” is a term that originated in 1920s as the Italian Fascist party rose to power by courting capitalists for financial support (and so did the Nazis when they ousted their last actual socialists in 1926), but as teh actual socialism left the Nazi party Roehm stayed.
Why? Because he’s not a socialist, he’s a white supremacist whose primary interest was removing establishment politicians who betrayed their race and starting the holocaust to purify the German nation. That’s why even after Roehm’s death his #2 Viktor Lutze was leading the SA in Kristallnacht (i.e. brownshirt activity in support of Nazis after the SA supposedly lost all it’s power). The SA was always fascist, and so was Roehm - not socialist. Their claims to be socialist were always false and a ruse to recruit more fascist for the authoritarian leader who would be able to give their nationality and race the benefits it was entitled to.
That’s why I’m saying you are doing a poor job comprehending the history you are quoting.
I also find it surprising that someone who is such a big fan of Wikipedia-based history failed to notice, when they looked up and identified the Three Arrows logo of the Iron Front and identified it as a symbol often used by US antifa groups, that they didn’t read the whole page.
Which would have illuminated the fight the social democrats (“socialism-lite”) against both Nazis and Communists. In retrospect, the Iron Front and Communists should have joined forces to oppose the Nazis early, and we might have a very different history. But the link between US antifa and the social democratic Iron Front is more significant than the name implies.
I’d also point out that I personally choose the three-arrows logo for my own avatar not because of its association with Weimar-specific paramilitary tactics but because it generally represents opposition to fascism, Stalinism, and monarchism/neo-feudalism (which is the logical end-point of Objectivism and right-wing Libertarianism as well).
I’m not the only one who chooses the logo for that reason. For example, there’s Portugal’s Social Democratic Party and, of course, the mostly peaceful antifa counter-protestors to fascists and white supremacists. Often, though, the “failure to notice” the history of the symbol by is really a willful act of bad faith in service of creating a false equivalency between inherently violent fascists on the one hand and socialists (whose core ideology in no way requires violence to achieve their ends) on the other.
I have an T-Shirt with the logo on it, not because I’m in antifa, or any of the historic political groups that used it, but because a friend of mine thought “Iron Front” would be a great name for a band a couple decades ago (and thought the anti-nazi bit was a great touch, he was into making up band-names and logos, and for some reason had a silk-screen printer thing)
Sadly, I don’t feel comfortable wearing it anymore, because it doesn’t feel safe to espouse anti-nazi sentiment in public any more. I hate this timeline.
Rest assured that I am very familiar with the history and meaning of the iron front and it’s various permutations. Continually assuming my ignorance is a rather interesting debating tactic. Just because I dissagree with your view on Antifa does nit mean I don’t understand it.
That is interesting but you might be confused by the thread’s title which I did not write, to mean I was stating an across the board equivalency. I you were to read the post that got split off I was stating that they are equally looser justice LARPers, not completely equivalent.
Fascism is fascism. Beating up people has nothing to do with fascism, although it is a practice fascists indulge in with relish.
Are you really saying that people like the Iron Front were fascists, rather than, you know, desperately trying to save Germany and the world from fascism and often paying with their lives for it?
Not at all, but judging from the wording of the responces to my points I completely understand how you could think that. It is almost a certainty, in fact that I would have been an active member based on their stated goals to fight totalitarianism. My critique is for the violent, and cowardly tactics of current antifa mobs imbedded in otherwise peasful left protests, some of which I agree with their grievances.
If you use the US citizens here to get a taste of what America is thinking, you’ll be mistaken. The public schools here don’t generally teach things like critical thinking and logic, and our history books provide us with as slanted a view as you’d get in any other regime. Our mass media has fractured into a “populist” sector that panders to the far-right while pretending it’s centrist-conservative, the “mainstream” that is thought to be left and liberal but actually is generally conservative and centrist, and independent journalists and community sites that might have important messages but can’t be found by the typical American because it’s not on Facebook or Nextdoor.
I find a lot of news that doesn’t get picked up by the news aggregators here.
