August 14, 1945 – the day Japan surrendered unconditionally – will always be etched in my mind. It was the day my father returned home from overseas. He had fought with the 10th Mountain Division in Italy. My mother, brother, two sisters and I ran to him and hugged him, as he de-trained in Nashua, New Hampshire.
The world, this August, is a different place. While it may seem hard to believe, with the month’s mayhem so fresh in our minds, we are better off than seventy-two years ago. We were more unified then, because of the War and, perhaps, more respectful of one another’s political leanings. Economic inequality was not as stretched as it is today. But social equality is greater; there is less bigotry, and standards of living are higher; there is less poverty and less hunger. History is a work in progress, and the elusive Grail of peace and understanding, which moves deliberately, remains out of reach.
Charlottesville, Virginia, its ramifications and repercussions, dominated a month that began with a war of words between North Korea and the U.S. – words that threatened a maelstrom – and ended with devastating floods in Texas. Kim Jong-un backed off firing a missile into the sea off Guam, but he did, provocatively, fire one over Japan. The situation remains tenuous. Accommodating bad guys rarely works. An op-ed by Susan Rice in The Wall Street Journal, was a reminder that policy makers would be wise to re-read Aesop’s Fables’ tale of “The Scorpion and The Frog.”
Charlottesville reflected the dissonance between extremists, and the desire of politicians to seek crises to exploit. A march in Charlottesville, to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, was the excuse. A group of right-wing extremists – white supremacists, members of the KKK and Neo-Nazis – received city permission for a march. They were met by protestors, mostly members of Antifa (antifascist action), who wear masks to shield their identity. Both sides came armed, with fists, pepper spray, bricks, clubs, shields, tear gas and, in the case of at least one Antifa protestor, a flame thrower. Blows were exchanged. The police, apparently, had been asked to stand back, as though they wanted both sides to destroy one another, or perhaps it was the “Ferguson effect”? The demonstration ended with the death of an Antifa demonstrator, as a deranged white supremacist, James Alex Fields, Jr., allegedly drove his car into a crowd of protestors. Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer was killed and nineteen were injured.
What gave this demonstration media-legs was when President Trump, in comments that same day, did not specifically, and solely, condemn neo-Nazis or white supremacists by name. He implied that blame belonged on both sides. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides.” It was his words “on many sides” that drove the Left nuts. It was, after all, an Antifa demonstrator who was killed, not a Neo-Nazi. Yet, violence was not one-sided. The New York Daily News reported that Taylor Lorenz of The Hill was punched in the face by an Antifa for recording a fight between the two groups: she was told not to “snitch, media bitch.” Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times tweeted at the time – something she surely now regrets – “The hard-left seemed as hate-filled as [the] alt-right. I saw club wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.” Hatred and violence are pretty evenly dispersed among extremists on both sides – something that will have to be recognized, acknowledged and condemned before reconciliation can begin.
We can all agree that the KKK and neo-Nazis are evil, and Mr. Trump, in this era of hypersensitivity, should have singled them out for blame, (which he did two days later). But, there is no question that his depiction of hate-filled extremists being on both sides was accurate.[1] Who can forget Missouri state senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal saying on social media: “I hope Trump is assassinated”? Antifa has not received the media attention it deserves. While they have their origins as opponents (including Communists) to Germany’s Nazis of the 1920s and early 1930s, in the U.S. they rose to prominence and militancy during the punk rock-scene of the 1980s. They claim to stand for equality and freedom. But that is specious. Their tactics are as fascist as those they oppose. They disapprove of “bourgeois” behavior: raising children within marriage, civility, hard work, thrift, self-discipline, respect for authority and tolerance of those whose ideas are different. They believe speech they deem racist to be violence, so must be countered physically. They were behind the groups forcibly disrupting conservative speakers on college campuses, from Berkley to Middlebury, and interrupting right-wing rallies, from Portland, Oregon to Charlottesville. Peter Beinart questions, in the September 2017 issue of left-leaning The Atlantic: “The antifa activists say they are battling burgeoning authoritarianism on the American right. Are they fueling it instead?” He concludes: “…they are its unlikeliest allies.”
