What is your nonviolent solution that moves the needle on the problem equally as fast or faster than the violence you are opposing? Because if you don’t have a solution that is comparable in speed and efficacy, then you are choosing to protect odious people against petty violence in favor of the active violence these people are advocating. I also find it funny that war is classed in the acceptable violence category.
4 Likes
I’d agree that these might be effective tactics (although I’d still claim the cost outweighs the benefit)… if Farage, Rees-Mogg, and Boris Johnson were fascists accumulating private armies of disenchanted youth and derived their power from such.
Instead, they project their followers fear of change, and wield frightening electoral muscle. Instead, these petty acts of violence feed right into the persecution fantasies of would-be voters.
Indeed. But anticipatory violence has had few successes and a whole history of tragedy. Perhaps this is an example where it will work, and somehow not get hijacked, but I’ll bet on pretty much the rest of history.
And quite frankly, democracy itself is anathema to pre-emptive violence. After all, it explicitly encompasses the possibility that people who you strongly disagree with and find odious will be in power (which given where I am on the spectrum, is almost always…) and enjoins those who accept democratic principles to accept that.
Not an easy concept, especially nowadays.
If they are advocating active violence, then arrest them.
Farage and Rees-Mogg’s policies are odious and welfare-reducing. And no doubt they provide encouragement for violence in fringe elements.
But inventing narratives to justify violence is always dangerous. Don’t fall into the trap.
And the whole “how dare you protect odious people” is a line well used. Mostly by people you probably don’t want to be associated with 
They don’t need to build private armies, when white men are being radicalized and committing acts of violence as “lone wolves” (which was/is a far right strategy to build up something like a private army, but with plenty of plausible deniability - see white power figures like David Lane and William Pierce):
This is happening, right now…
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/31/politics/inspector-general-warns-overcrowded-conditions/index.html
No one is inventing that narrative, it’s factual. This is the world that people like Farage and Rees-Mogg and Trump WANT to build. Safe for christian cisgendered whites of means, and unsafe for those of us who don’t fit that.
6 Likes
Good points.
However, I’d say that the damage that Trump and the right causes due to their electoral success is vastly higher than the damage done by the lone wolves encouraged by his words. In fact, I’d say the lone wolves and white supremacists are most encouraged by his electoral success.
We’re still a democracy, and the power of the voting box is vastly higher than individual idiots.
Which means if we’re interested in helping people, by far the best way to do it is to win elections. Which means the people we need to reach are the large group in the middle who aren’t utterly convinced of the rightness of our cause.
And I don’t think petty violence attracts more people to vote in our preferred direction than it repels, no matter how good it personally feels to see odious people get what they deserve.
You just don’t get it. They and their followers have those persecution fantasies whether true or not. Facts don’t matter. You could run the same damn lead story in The Times with Farange on the page: “Farage Claims Left is Picking On Him” with a picture of him hunched over, with or without milkshake.
The violent or near-violent followers of these wanna-be fascists affect the vote by intimidating and threatening people at polling places. In the UK, they’ve murdered politicians. In the US, they’ve shown up at minority-heavy polling places armed, and tried to check people’s ID, you know, to “protect the integrity of the vote” specifically because Trump talked about voter fraud. That is pre-emptive political violence. A milkshake is not.
ETA: Is this a big enough private militia for you? If not, how about the entirety of ICE?
4 Likes
As everyone knows: if you leave fascists alone, they’ll eventually get bored an go home. All historical evidence shows this.
5 Likes
They help make electoral success of the Trumps and Farages of the world possible. These are interconnected and mutually constitutive phenomenon. Fascists never really went away after world war 2. They merely hid, regrouped, and took on new tactics based in new technologies. The work that the lone wolves did in spreading the messages of their ideologies (helped along by the over reaction in the 90s by the Clinton administration to Ruby Ridge and Waco, which wasn’t even a white supremacist group) and the election of our first black president played into their white genocide narrative, and drew new, more vocal recruits. Back in the 90s, it was not nearly as wide spread and well organized as it is now, and their tendrils into the mainstream through Breitbart, right wing radio, and fox news, plus their effective use of the internet for organizing, HELPED GET TRUMP ELECTED. They showed themselves right after the election, in some very mainstream places, because they have indeed been slowly colonizing the GOP with their people, reaching out to white middle and working class people who are feeling aggrieved by years of neo-libreal policies. They now have someone who they can blame it on, thanks to these groups.
You do realize how gerrymandered many districts are? And that there has been an active voter suppression campaign by some elements in the GOP, right? Voter roles purged, people dropped who are active voters, road blocks put up to ensure that the “wrong” people don’t vote… We really do have to question how much of a democracy we actually are with things like that happening. And, if we ever WERE actually a democracy, where it was one person, one vote, it was for a very short time in our history and is showing signs of serious erosion. The SC not too long ago gutted one of the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act (that states with a history of discrimination need to get any new voting laws vetted by the justice department), meaning that the very same voters who were supposed to have protections are in very real danger of having their right to vote violated once again.
if people are willing to vote for a racist, sexist, islamophobic, bigoted asshole because they got hit with a milkshake, I seriously doubt they would have voted for progressive policies in the first place. If that’s the line for people between voting for a bigot and not, then I’d guess they were likely going to vote for a bigot, because they don’t care about other’s human rights.
I really think you’re down playing the very real danger these people represent. This is a real, global threat to democracy, freedom, and human dignity, not some black bloc kiddie throwing a milkshake…
4 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
