[Peace-discuss] [Peace] YES!!! Patrick Martin nails it.

Tue Aug 14 16:23:04 UTC 2018

So you can get all those people to counter-protest "fascists," but you
can't get them to protest Yemen or Gaza?

That's absolutely disheartening in my view, on a number of levels,
including the authenticity of their alleged political consciousness.

DG

On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 9:30 AM Karen Aram via Peace <
peace at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

>
>
>    - Print
>    <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/14/wash-a14.html?view=print>
>    - Leaflet
>    <http://intsse.com/wswspdf/en/articles/2018/08/14/wash-a14.pdf>
>    - Feedback
>    <http://www.wsws.org/en/special/contact.html?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsws.org%2Fen%2Farticles%2F2018%2F08%2F14%2Fwash-a14.html&t=What%20the%20neo-Nazi%20debacle%20in%20Washington%20showed>
>    - Share » <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/14/wash-a14.html#>
>
> What the neo-Nazi debacle in Washington showed By Patrick Martin
> 14 August 2018
>
> The turnout at the Washington neo-Nazi rally Sunday gave a glimpse of the
> real character of the fascist and white supremacist forces in the United
> States. Amid a blare of media publicity, grossly exaggerating the popular
> support for the ultra-right, less than two dozen people turned up for the
> “Unite the Right 2” rally in Lafayette Park, across from the White House.
>
> The entire affair should be described as a state-sponsored provocation
> rather than an actual rally. The handful of neo-Nazis were given their own
> private car on the Washington Metro, separated by police from other
> passengers. They rode through subway stations patrolled by more police,
> were escorted from the Foggy Bottom Metro station through a private exit,
> escorted by still more police on the walk to Lafayette Square, and
> protected there by hundreds of riot police, who kept away anti-fascist
> protesters who outnumbered the neo-Nazis at least a hundred to one. After
> the rally, the fascists boarded white vans, supplied either by the police
> or Metro, and were whisked away to safety.
>
> At every point, the neo-Nazis were outnumbered by the journalists covering
> the non-event. Dozens of reporters trailed Jason Kessler, the organizer of
> the rally, recording his every word. As for the scale of the media hype,
> the number of hours of cable television coverage proved to be greater than
> the number of neo-Nazis in attendance.
>
> And this was not primarily Fox News, which was somewhat embarrassed by the
> pro-Trump character of the white supremacist rally. CNN and MSNBC provided
> virtually unlimited airtime, and National Public Radio granted Kessler a
> seven-minute-long interview to spew his racist filth virtually
> uninterrupted to a nationwide audience. The effect was to build up the
> neo-Nazis as a potentially formidable force, out of all proportion to their
> actual support among the American people.
>
> Kessler called the rally to spit on the memory of Heather Heyer, the
> anti-fascist protester murdered by a white supremacist in Charlottesville,
> Virginia, exactly a year before, during the first “Unite the Right” rally
> in that university town. But it was clear that he miscalculated. While
> Charlottesville in 2017 was the scene of a full-scale fascist riot
> involving hundreds of torch-bearing racists, ostensibly defending
> Confederate statues from planned removal, Lafayette Park in 2018 was a
> debacle.
>
> Many of the racist groups that took part in Charlottesville decided not to
> come to Washington, at least in part because of the planned left-wing
> counterprotests. Also, much of the Virginia-based ultra-right is engaged in
> the campaign of Republican Senate candidate Corey Stewart, who is openly
> appealing to racism and anti-immigrant bigotry and is being shunned by the
> Republican Party establishment, although not by Trump, who has effusively
> endorsed him.
>
> It is worth pointing out that efforts to organize counterprotests to
> “Unite the Right 2” were censored by Facebook, on the thoroughly bogus
> grounds that they represented an artificial movement supposedly instigated
> by the Russian government to set Americans against each other. Facebook
> shut down one website promoting the counterprotest claiming that it showed
> signs of “inauthentic activity.”
>
> In reality, thousands of young people and working people turned out for
> the counterprotest, with some traveling from New York City or even further
> to show their hatred for the fascists as well as their hostility to the
> Trump administration, which they clearly regarded as the moral author of
> the neo-Nazi rally, if not the actual sponsor.
>
> It was “Unite the Right 2” which better deserved the label “inauthentic”
> since it was made possible only by state and media manipulation, attracted
> almost no one, and had no genuine popular support.
>
> The debacle in Lafayette Park does not mean that neo-Nazis and white
> supremacists can be dismissed or ignored. But it showed where the real
> danger lies: not as yet in any significant mass support for their
> ultra-reactionary politics, but in the systematic promotion of such forces
> by the capitalist state, both by the Trump administration and through
> police forces at every level, from ICE and the Border Patrol down to the
> local cops.
>
> Fascist elements are promoted to intimidate popular opposition to the
> Trump administration, and to create the impression that there is
> significant support for its right-wing rampage against immigrants and its
> all-out backing of police violence and brutality against the working class.
>
> A particularly foul role is played by the corporate media, backed by
> sections of the pseudo-left, who present the white supremacist groups as
> having widespread support, in keeping with their habitual slanders of white
> workers as being incorrigibly racist.
>
> For nearly two years, the Democratic Party and its media allies have
> peddled a racialist explanation for the election of Trump and the
> right-wing policies being pursued by his administration. According to this
> narrative, Trump won the presidency because of a white racist vote in the
> working class in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
>
> The claims that America is awash in racism, and that Trump’s election
> proves it, have been repeatedly disproven by serious analyses of the voting
> patterns in 2016 (see: “The myth of the reactionary white working class
> <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/11/12/pers-n12.html>”).
>
> It is especially absurd, given that the same states voted twice for Barack
> Obama, the first African-American president, and several were won by Bernie
> Sanders in the Democratic primaries over Hillary Clinton. It was only the
> right-wing campaign of Clinton, who made not the slightest appeal to the
> working class, that drove down turnout among both white and black workers
> and gave Trump the opening to win support on the basis of economic
> nationalism and populist demagogy.
>
> WSWS.ORG <http://wsws.org>
>
> *The author also recommends:*
>
> Facebook censors the left
> <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/03/pers-a02.html>[3 August 2018]
> _______________________________________________
> Peace mailing list
> Peace at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20180814/78508c9a/attachment-0001.html>