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posted by martyb on Thursday January 03 2019, @04:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-see-it-now-you-don't dept.

Wired Magazine has an article that some might find interesting.

I was at what should have been a farmers’ market in Berkeley, California, last year when a throng of black-clad antifascists tried to scrap it out with far-right ralliers in the middle of a park named after Martin Luther King Jr. I watched scrawny college students get pummeled by hulking, be-swastika-ed ex-soldiers and ex-law enforcement officers in motorcycle gear. The antifascists’ one reprisal was setting off a homemade smoke bomb, which promptly blew back into their own faces, drawing raucous jeering from the white supremacists. It was as close to a war zone as I ever hope to be, and it was unequivocally a win for the racists.

But then,

It was easy to imagine the Bay Area becoming an extremist battleground—each weekend an opportunity for the next rally turned riot.

That vision has not come to pass. In the long arc of American racism, 2017 saw a sudden spike in visibility, but it was not the beginning of a new era in which people routinely walk the streets advertising their white supremacy. This year has brought the opposite trend: 2018 has been a year of pushing the alt-right and other white nationalist groups back underground, and punishing them for misdeeds committed during their brief moment in the sun. That’s a testament to the strength of the backlash against 2017’s naked racism, and evidence of how costly being openly racist has become—especially on the internet, where it has doomed entire social media platforms to obscurity. This must be counted as a good thing.

Goebbels said, allegedly, "Even if we lose we will win, because our enemies have adopted our methods." Looks like the alt-right is losing.

Regardless of what scaremonger reporters might espouse, the alt-right, as we have come to know it over the last two years, has failed—as extremism researchers always knew it would. But in its place has come something shadowier and far older: an underground white supremacist movement operating on society’s fringes, and a culture that disavows the racists while quietly mainstreaming their ideas.

So here's the point:

The issue, though, is that while there’s satisfaction and schadenfreude in watching these public flounderings, the alt-right doesn’t have to be visible to succeed. In fact, going underground is a return to the status quo for American white supremacy.


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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 03 2019, @07:40PM (10 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 03 2019, @07:40PM (#781643) Journal

    No, see, it doesn't need to be filtered if we kill all the nazis. You're not thinking hard enough.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @10:06PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @10:06PM (#781724)

    After we're done killing the nazis can we start on the communists too?

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @10:39PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @10:39PM (#781735)

      You never get done killing the nazis. There's always more nazis. Always.

      You say there are no more nazis? That's the kind of thing a nazi would say. Come to think of it, you kind of look like a nazi....

      There are always more nazis.

    • (Score: 3, Disagree) by ikanreed on Thursday January 03 2019, @10:46PM (3 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 03 2019, @10:46PM (#781738) Journal

      You can't just kill people cause you disagree with them.

      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @12:41AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @12:41AM (#781804)

        You can't just kill people cause you disagree with them.

        Yes you can. Happens every day, just not on a large scale. People have killed over disagreeing who will get to split the wishbone at Thanksgiving.

        It's not right to do so. It probably won't achieve whatever you think your actual goal is. But to say people can't kill people over a disagreement is silly.

        Perhaps you meant they shouldn't?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @05:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @05:56PM (#782138)

        Funniest comment + moderation this year.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 04 2019, @06:19PM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 04 2019, @06:19PM (#782153) Journal

        As AC has already pointed out, you can actually kill people for any reason, or even for no reason. There may, or may not, be consequences, but you can kill all you like.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVZtf1oJLK8 [youtube.com]

        Dance hall girls were the evenin' treat
        Empty cartridges and blood lined the gutters of the street
        Men were shot down for the sake of fun
        Or just to hear the noise of their forty-four guns
        And there's fire on the mountain, lightnin' in the air
        Gold in them hills and it's waitin' for me there

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:53PM (2 children)

    by crafoo (6639) on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:53PM (#781778)

    Always one murder away from Utopia, eh?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @02:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @02:36AM (#781861)

      https://soylentnews.org/politics/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=29442&page=1&cid=781542#commentwrap [soylentnews.org] was a slightly trolling mostly serious comment from what I could see, the response was a trolling bunch of crap and ikanreed then rolled with the troll game.

      So I guess this is the pinnacle of alt-right debate? Troll people into saying something stupid then pretend it was something they meant seriously?

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Sulla on Friday January 04 2019, @06:14PM

      by Sulla (5173) on Friday January 04 2019, @06:14PM (#782149) Journal

      https://www.theonion.com/report-suggests-stalin-was-just-one-great-purge-away-fr-1825691925 [theonion.com]

      BALTIMORE—Challenging decades of mainstream academic thought, a group of Johns Hopkins University researchers released a report Tuesday indicating that the late Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin was only one great purge away from creating a communist utopia. “Our research demonstrates that if Stalin had shipped a mere 100,000 more people to Siberia, the whole communist experiment would have worked out perfectly,” said historian and report co-author Franklin Morrison, adding that all of the USSR’s corruption, hunger, and disease would have disappeared overnight if Stalin had simply been able to let a few million more Ukrainians starve to death. “It’s a shame, because in 1953 the Soviet Union was really on the precipice of becoming a perpetual workers’ paradise devoid of all poverty and want. Unfortunately, Stalin passed away before he could round up just one last group of intellectuals and make them dig their own mass graves.” Morrison also noted that Stalin likely came closer to creating a communist utopia than any other leader in world history besides China’s Mao Tse-tung, who actually achieved it.

      --
      Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @01:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @01:28PM (#782017)

    Exactly something a leftist extremist communist jew would say.

    You are a jew. Amirite?