I can appreciate you sincerity, even if I obviously dissagree with you conclusion. I certainly understand how you reached it but my concepts and pesrpectives come from my life experience and not from consuming yellow journalism or social media dribble. This forum and some social media pages about boat maintenance and tech where politics are not allowed are my only comsumption of “talking points” and we could hardly argue that BBS is a den of alt right brainwashing.
Didn’t you just make another topic closely related to this one using the daily mail as your source? That’s literally a sensationalist tabloid with a focus on providing politically slanted articles…
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And they made it on a “social media” platform too. 
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Maybe this is just because of where I live, but I’ve met MANY actual like totally sincere white supremacists. Hell some of them are pretty nice (to me) because they have a reason to be. These people are real and plentiful. I have literally never met anyone claiming to be part of antifa. Not once in my life. Not even while visiting Berlin. Though I did run into some one claiming to be a Nazi there… though they were obviously verrrry intoxicated mid-morning so there’s that.
So if we are going from life experience only. I would say both Nazis and other varieties of white supremacists as well as people who see themselves carrying on or recreating Southern Rebellion are real, probably plentiful, and at least in the US are having an actual impact. I’ve had face to face interactions with people like that. Antifa, to this
'leftist" by some metrics, is not their equivalent. Far as I know the existence of Antifa itself is fake news. It’s literally only the word of “sympathizers” that I have to go on in order to believe it exists at all. Based on MY experiences then this whole equivalence is ridiculous to the extreme. People I care about might actually face violence from racists. I may well live my whole life out without ever even spying the dreaded antifa outside of Daily Mail scare articles intended for a foreign audience with little to no experience or understanding of my day to day life. Equating the two based on my view of reality then, is just kind of overly… optimisitc.
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I saw a picture of the guy with the rifle on Ebaums and Duck Duck Go’d the story. Daily mail was the first article that came up. Found the story very interesting.
… and a history of defending fascists because socialists are supposedly “just as bad”. Even without the Daily Heil as a source, I see no point in engaging with another topic grounded in a false equivalency. This one is plenty.
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Say it. Say the Black Panthers are “thugs.”
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I’m sorry to dissapoint your justice fantasy but I believe and said the exact opposite.
Churchill and FDR didn’t think that antifascists and fascists were equally bad. They were happy to have the USSR fight on their side against the Third Reich and supported Stalin’s efforts to fight the Nazis.
Additionally, German centrists that thought that the Nazis were not as bad as the antifascists eventually realized that they were wrong. A number of the victims of the Night of the Long Knives were centrists that had cooperated with the Nazis.
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There were “respectable” Americans who were also sympathetic to the fascists, on the foolish base assumption that they were natural allies in the supposed struggle to protect capitalism against socialism*. They were the original America Firsters, and a direct through-line can be traced from them through the McCarthyites (who coined the ridiculous term “premature anti-fascist”), through the Birchers, through the Teabaggers, to today’s MAGAts. And standing behind them the entire time, from the Business Plot to today’s astroturf Covidiot demonstrations, have been deep-pocketed conservative billionaires and the simple-minded “free”-market fundies who spread their talking points.
[* as distinct from Communism and Stalinism]
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bunch of examples here :
… and not to forget how Texaco (illegally) funded and propped up Franco. (what some historians consider the first battlefront of WWII).
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This is hardly true since they only tolerated Stalin, and eachother at the beginning because of the scurge of the Axis and the fact that FDR was quite ignorant about who Stalin really was and what he had done. Furthermore, as the war was coming to an end, both the US and Brittain immediately pivoted against the USSR as they were just as bad or worse than the Nazis.
Roosevelt was a little blind because he got most of his information from the New York Times , as many Americans did in those days, including the U.S. State Department. The Times’ correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, was a real low-life. He was an alcoholic womanizer, and the Soviets supplied him with a fine apartment and women and booze. In exchange, he painted a rosy picture of the Soviet Union, despite the fact that millions of people were being murdered and starved to death. Almost the first thing Roosevelt did, when he got into office, was to recognize the Soviet government.
What would you have done if you had been in Churchill’s or FDR’s position in WW2? As FDR, would you have agreed with the America First movement and refused to help Churchill? Would you have refused to help Stalin? Do you really think that the world would be better today if Hitler had defeated Stalin and was able to then use all his forces against the Western Allies?
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I would have likely been on the side of joining the allies to stop Hitler even befor Pearl. Fighting the Nazis alongside the Soviets was absolutely the right strategic move just like working to weaken them after the war was over.
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A premature anti-fascist! Good!
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I am an anti Totallitarian, regardless of the philosophy behind it. Kind of like the Iron Front said they were.
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As we all are, including most antifa.
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I would imagine you are right. It is all the soviet paraphenalia and violence perpetrated by some of them that really turns me off. Even when some beat up people, I looked for signs online that they were condemmed by the rest if antifa and could not find anything but celebrating the acts.
FDR and Churchill knew exactly what kind of creature Stalin was. But they were also both critical thinkers who could prioritise threats and look beyond symbols and their own selfishness (both, after all, were essentially aristocrats) in the face of a crisis. They were adults who understood that thinking in black-and-white terms results in disaster when faced with a fascist threat.
That was the core difference between grownups like them and the isolationists like Lindbergh and enablers like Lord Rothermere, and it’s the core difference today between people who recognise the need for antifa and those who draw spurious equivalencies between antifa and white supremacists – more so in the latter case, because the vast majority of antifa counterprotestors are peaceful and don’t subscribe to Stalinism.
And yet here we are, in the 21st century, once again dealing with the same BS logical fallacies and unfounded conspiracy theories about who’s really behind anti-fascists (complete with a wealthy Jewish puppetmaster) being promulgated by actual plutocrats (no conspiracy there about the Kochs, Mercers, etc.) on an audience of dullards.
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