In this case, reactive would work well.
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I guess I will have to do some research. I mean, it sounds plausible, but it also sounds like the 1001 other plausible urban myths which don’t actually pan out.
Thanks for the info!
ETA
OK, thanks.
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Well, yeah, that is a pretty easy concept, so long as you’re going to pretty heroic lengths to avoid the larger, more important point.
You get that this isn’t really about being “classified” as criminal but about actual fascists being defined as merely being anti-anti-fascist, right?
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It has happened in the past, but usually the people who get injured don’t trust the police so they don’t report it. It’s different when it is someone working for the Labour Party though.
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Goes to show you what terrible communicators these guys are? WTF is an “antifa”? Why not call yourselves “The Churchill Society”, or “Churchillians”. Explain “he fought fascists, so do we”.
Done. Nobody names anything the “anti-Churchill” group, at least, no right-winger.
The cops might find “The terrorist Churchill Society” a little harder to utter, too.
Because they have been using AntiFA for the last 85 years? Besides, Winston Churchill was a shitty person too, back when AntiFA started he was still talking about the evils he thought Gandhi would do. The only Churchill worth naming yourself after would be Mad Jack Churchill
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Naa, you got that wrong, it’s now: Act like a criminal, if you want to become POTUS.
Or in the case of the cops: Just say someone acted like a criminal, after you treated them like a criminal (without any trial of course, who needs that…)
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Only if you are rich, male and White.
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If they’d been calling themselves “Conquistador Instant Leprosy” for 85 years, would that make it a good name?
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e49bffae-7dea-491a-8487-cc70b74cb8b1
It’s a dumb name. And the list of people who think Churchill was a bad person (I’m one, the poison gas comment is hard to get around) is the same as the list of people who won’t be against antifa, whatever they are called.
But in the modern context, where every demonstration is a TV show and violence is the clip that represents the whole demonstration, it’s a dumb group, all around. The ONLY clips you can find of Seattle, 1999, these days is the Starbucks window being kicked in. These battles are battles of public perception, not broken heads. They’re about as helpful as renaming the Democratic Socialists into, well, “Conquistador Instant Leprosy”…
I remember being told by an anarcho-communist that it doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, we will still be hated and vilified by those who oppose us. If AntiFA changed their name to “Cute Fluffy Kittehs”, within a week that name would be just as hated as “Conquistador Instant Leprosy”.
As opposed to the groups they are opposing, who are connected with actual terrorist attacks in the US?
I side with AntiFA partly because I know what will happen if the far right wins. Murder, death camps, genocide. The fascists will kill me (they have already tried before), and the centrists have shown themselves to be completely useless at stopping them.
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I agree about how anarchists mishandled things and were naive about how the MSM and the cops worked during the anti-globalisation demonstrations. However, while a lot of anarkiddies are entryists into antifa groups and there’s a similarity of black bloc fashion sense, as a whole antifa has struck me as being a lot smarter in imposing movement discipline on the members who prefer to initiate violence and pointless vandalism.
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I guess this disproves two negatives making a positive.
As opposed to the clips of DC from the following April, or the many clips of the long series of mass demonstrations all through 2000 and most of 2001, not a single one of which you can recall or describe?
The only reason you remember 1999 is because there were windows broken for you to complain about. Your own example proves the opposite of your point.
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I was only saying the utterly obvious, which is that if it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t lead.
Nonetheless, I’m getting insulted at this point; clearly time to leave.
Which is how most people feel about any demonstration where fighting breaks out.
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No, your argument is simply a really bad one.
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Well, @the_borderer has done a great job of explaining Antifa, but really, the whole reason why is because the name has a history of being the ones willing to stand up to Nazis in Germany before it was cool. These were the very first ones to punch Nazis. Back when Churchill was still an archconservative politician himself, even.
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Despite your misconceptions AntiFA are there to oppose fascists who have consistently shown themselves to attack POC and QUILTBAG people without provocation. Counter-protests where AntiFA are there but fascists aren’t tend to have a party atmosphere.
I can’t say the same about demonstrations where fascists turn up but AntiFA don’t. Fash just feel like they can target people with impunity in those circumstances.
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That sounds like a fantastic mechanism for having things one probably isn’t allowed to do done on your behalf, at arm’s length; and where the pesky FOIA nerds can’t get you.
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My argument is basically that answering violence with violence in the middle of demonstrations calling for civil rights is neither desired by most of the people demonstrating, nor helpful to the moral position from which the calls for civil rights are being made. Since this argument has a lot of material from MLK and Ghandi supporting it, no more defense from me is needed here. I’ll let it go. And I’ve really got to quit commenting at boingboing, I usually regret doing so.
