March 24, 2011
Antifa activists do not debate their enemies; after all, their enemies are fascists and thus have no legitimacy. Their goal is to confront and silence them. From the Anti-Racist Action website:
“If you can get away it [sic], carry weapons, or if there’s a chance you might get searched by cops, carry items that can be used as weapons in a pinch (hefty flagpoles, thick placard sticks, batteries, maglights, bike locks)….And don’t forget your masks”nothing makes the fascists tremble like a group of black-clad, balaclava-wearing Antifa bearing down on them.”
The “Greatest Generation” fought and won World War II, while the Boomers marched in Civil Rights protests. What’s left for the present generation to do? Plenty, as the antifa see it. In their minds, they have taken up both unfinished struggles, which have resumed with the emergence of nationalist and anti-immigration parties in Europe and America. The Civil Rights movement and World War II have not only merged; they”ve globalized. And the battleground is the streets.
A few days after Taylor’s press conference, Daryle Lamont Jenkins of One People’s Project (OPP) congratulated a small group of antifa in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr. statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, where he shook hands with Michael Behrle. “We just used our free speech,” Jenkins told supporters. “We just used our First Amendment rights before they had the chance to take them away.”
I contacted Jenkins and asked how Taylor’s group threatened his First Amendment rights. He replied that American Renaissance’s efforts to separate themselves from blacks constituted an attempt to effectively silence them. Jenkins further assured me his organization rejected violence. When I asked about Michael Behrle’s threat to forcibly disrupt Jared Taylor’s meeting, he responded, “I just chalk it up to bravado.” However, his website links to Behrle’s Anti-Racist Action Network, which clearly endorses the use of force. Jenkins also told me, “I don’t care what happens to white supremacists.”
Many antifa identify themselves as anarchists and communists. Both earlier movements secularized Christianity’s message that a chosen few will guide the world away from evil and toward the good, which today’s antifa warriors envision as a raceless, classless, unified world. But to get there, the old constraints must be broken. Anarchist and communist intellectuals preached that violence in a holy cause was an act of purification and renewal. Prince Kropotkin, who never harmed a fly or a single detested royal in his life, once wrote, “A single deed is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets.”
Or as Daryle Lamont Jenkins put it, “If someone wants to be involved with OPP, they have to remember that it isn’t about putting out propaganda.”
