Great video on anti-fascism. If you’ve ever tutted at antifa violence, if you’ve ever compared fascists with anti-fascists, if you’ve said that you will defend the free speech of fascists or opposed no-platforming of fascists – then you NEED to watch this video by Philosophy Tube – a philosophy masters graduate explaining how things work, in this case antifa and fascism. It explains why those positions might not be equivalent or the best. It might be over an hour, but it’s worth it.
I’ve explained before than antifa does not exist unlike fascists as a party, it’s purely reactive to fascists – if the fascists weren’t there, they’d go off and do something else separately. Also I love the fact he points out that liberals quite often enable fascists, and also how fascists run rings around liberals. Liberals aren’t that liberal usually, and have limits on their free speech and who can speak, but free speech over everything is a false dichotomy, it can’t exist – the proverbial Boy Who Cried Wolf, or shouting fire in a crowded theatre for example. There are consequences of that speech which aren’t and shouldn’t be protected, and it’s never in a value-free context.
This is why I am rather harsh with some enabling liberals, because they don’t realise the damage they are doing, placing themselves in some ivory tower as Protector Of Speech but actually allowing these idiots to spread their crap. They are a virus on democracy, like a retrovirus in fact – using the very white blood cells of their victims to poison discourse. That bad faith in the democratic discourse is why fascists should not be invited to the party…it makes them different from any other flavour of politics that they want to maximise their power and stop everyone else from having free speech – by wrapping free speech loving liberals around their fingers like a well-meaning knuckleduster.
And yes, all politics is violent in some way. Just some are seen by some as ‘acceptable’ as state violence, until, well it isn’t. (Peterloo, Amritsar, Poll Tax Riots, Chechnya, Myanmar etc.). I’ve also talked about scripts, ‘dogwhistling’, yellow press and talking to the gallery many times, it’s just explained better here (TODAY IS WEDNESDAY!).
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