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by Jonah Goldberg September 1, 2017 4:46 PM A lot of what’s happened over the last 10,000 years can be attributed to hormonally charged young men pulling stupid crap. Dear Reader (and particularly those among you who will be experiencing kalsarikännit over the holiday weekend), Well, as Bob Menendez said when he walked through the door of a certain Hoboken “social club,” I’m home. And as the New Jersey senator said when the electronic cash-counting machine broke down, I’ve got a lot of work to do. So, as the former vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus said when the bed in his hotel suite was covered in various Las Vegas–area “hostesses,” I’m gonna jump right in. As everyone should, I was reading the new essay by my old friend, Matt “Two-Drink Minimum” Labash. He writes about Antifa and all that jazz. One passage stuck out for me. Matt “I Only Carry Stacks of Single Dollar Bills” Labash profiles a couple of anti-Antifa activists who get called fascists and white supremacists, despite the fact one is half-Japanese and the other is Samoan and neither is a fascist nor white supremacist (more on that in a bit). The Samoan guy goes by the name “Tiny” and serves as a kind of bodyguard to Joey at various protests and counter-protests. Matt “If Only You Could See My Tattoos” Labash writes: Powered by Tiny, 21, also came to politics through anger. Convinced all Trumpkins were racists, “I’d drive around and beat them up,” he says nonchalantly. When he couldn’t find any to sass him back in street encounters after he’d provoked them, he’d go home and watch other Trump supporters get pounded online. “It made me happy. F—in’ racists getting beaten up,” he said. While looking for more anti-Trumpkin-violence to enjoy, he clicked one day on video from one of Joey’s rallies. “He gave a speech” about love and unity, says Tiny. “Everything he said made me confused. I thought all these f—ers were violent and racist. So I kind of had a change of heart and reached out to Joey. If I had found out about antifa before finding out about him, I’d have been antifa, too.” This reminded me of a passage from Michael Burleigh’s wonderful book, The Third Reich: A New History (which you can also find in my book). He recounts a story of a young Patrick Leigh Fermor, a British guy traveling around Germany in the early 1930s. One night, he made some drinking buddies in a Rhineland workers’ pub. They were still all wearing their nightshift overalls. One of the guys he met offered to let Fermor crash at his pad. Fermor climbed a ladder to the attic where the guest bed was, and he found “a shrine to Hitleriana”: The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His SA uniforms hung neatly ironed on a hanger . . . When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on the bed, and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers, sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite! . . . Then, suddenly when Hitler came to power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!” He snapped his fingers in the air. “And here I am!” . . . Had a lot of people done the same, then? “Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!” ... A big swathe of the bad things that have happened over the last 10,000 years can be attributed to hormonally charged young men pulling stupid crap. Yes, yes, before the feminists get mad at me, plenty of young women have done stupid crap, too (indeed, there’s a weird school of thought that thinks it’s a great triumph when women live down to the lowest standards of men, but that’s a subject for another time). If you want to get all Darwinian about it, you could chalk it up the common behavior of male chimpanzees and humans alike of getting into fights to impress females. If you want to get all Moynihanny about it, you can blame the degradation of families and fatherhood. Or you can blame secularization, or the ennui that comes with late-stage capitalism, or the frick’n influence of Nietzsche or Mr. Rogers. The point is young people, particularly males, love to create drama, defy authority, and anoint themselves the heroic warriors of their tale. In that passage from Matt “Those Aren’t Pillows” Labash’s essay, Tiny admits he would have joined Antifa if he had stumbled on a different YouTube video. That pretty much tells you all you need to know. Some people just want an excuse to act on impulses that have remarkably little, if anything, to do with ideology. Radicalism is better understood as a psychological drive than a serious intellectual position. The best analogy is to criminal outfits. I’m sure if you talked to a Crip or a Blood, they’d be able to talk your ear off about how different Crips and Bloods are from each other. But I think all rational people understand the differences are smaller than those between Coke and Pepsi. ...Take this fairly representative Twitter thread from a writer trying to insist that there are deep and profound ideological differences between Antifa and the alt-right, particularly this bit: Before I get to my actual point, a few clarifications. First of all, Stalinism was genocidal (so were Leninism, Maoism, Jacobinism, Pol Potism, etc.). The only legitimate retort to this is immorally legalistic. The Soviets successfully lobbied the U.N. to exclude the kinds of mass murder the Soviets were guilty of from the official definition of genocide. Second, capitalism did not “give us chattel slavery.” I don’t know where it started, but people who peddle this line seem to think the word “chattel” only applies to American slavery. But all “chattel” means is “property,” and people kept slaves as property on every continent — save Antarctica — since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. The Ancient Greeks, Romans, Aztecs, Chinese, Native Americans, et al. all practiced “chattel slavery” for thousands of years. It even exists today in the Islamic State. You know who else had slaves? Stalin. If you want to call it “forced labor” that’s fine — though I doubt it would be a meaningful distinction to the millions sent into bondage by Stalin. ....Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451040/antifa-alt-right-idiot-boys-young-men-pulling-stupid-crap?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=G-File%20test&utm_term=GFile
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Topic: The Idiot Boys of Antifa and the Alt-Right (Read 375 times)
