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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 03 2019, @11:09PM (4 children)
Problem is Nazis were socialists. They label all conservatives as Nazis nowadays while antifa is running around like the brown shirts hitting old men over the head with bike locks.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @03:51AM (2 children)
They were socialists in name only.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @09:57AM
The "It wasn't real socialism" argument eh?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 04 2019, @06:08PM
That may be true, but the US liberals are liberal in name only.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 04 2019, @04:07AM
Does not pass smell test of working class control of means of production.
In other news, the North Korean government is run by the Democratic Party of the USA, and the Chinese government is run by the Republican Party of the USA.
And other standard rebuttals. Not even obvious ones. They've been repeated ad nauseum. However, it is natural for fascists of all stripes to seek to eliminate socialism, so even guilt by way of occultist "true name" reasoning is to be expected. Fascism and socialism are two possible ways forward from terminal capitalism, and they both offer competing solutions to the objective social conditions inevitable in terminal capitalism.