White Nationalists March on University of Virginia

[filghy2]

Unfortunately, I fear that the people quoted in the "Barack Obama is to blame" article might be fairly representative of the Republican base these days, which is why Trump thinks he can keep getting away with this stuff. This is why I don't feel confident that the party will recognise that it's gone down the wrong path and decisively reject Trumpism. If the Republicans don't spend a long time in the political wilderness as result of this debacle there is something very rotten in the state of the union.

[hippifried]

This isn't a southern problem. Back in the 50s, the Ku Klux Klan was able to muster up massive crowds for rallies and marches (in full regalia) across the northern and central tiers. Am I the only one old enough to remember how nasty things got over busing in 1970s Boston? It's been what? 10 or 15 years since Cincinnati was ripped apart by race riots? Let's not forget LA, & I'm amazed Oakland hasn't exploded. Coeur d' Alene, Idaho has a huge concentration of reactionary supremacists. Until recently (not sure if it's still true), upwards of 90% of printed Nazi literature was published in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This problem is all over the place. By concentrating on one region, you ignore the rest of the country, where things are just as fucked up, if not more so. Contemplate the fact that every city in the USA is segregated by race and/or ethnicity.

[Stavros]

This isn't a southern problem. Back in the 50s, the Ku Klux Klan was able to muster up massive crowds for rallies and marches (in full regalia) across the northern and central tiers. Am I the only one old enough to remember how nasty things got over busing in 1970s Boston? It's been what? 10 or 15 years since Cincinnati was ripped apart by race riots? Let's not forget LA, & I'm amazed Oakland hasn't exploded. Coeur d' Alene, Idaho has a huge concentration of reactionary supremacists. Until recently (not sure if it's still true), upwards of 90% of printed Nazi literature was published in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This problem is all over the place. By concentrating on one region, you ignore the rest of the country, where things are just as fucked up, if not more so. Contemplate the fact that every city in the USA is segregated by race and/or ethnicity.

I agree with most of what you say, but the present situation is generated by the tussle over monuments to the Confederacy, so as far as day to day news goes, it has become, if temporarily, a 'Southern' specific issue.
Next week, however the focus could shift to Phoenix Arizona where the President plans to hold a rally -organized by his re-election committee (!). Will you be going? For the Do-nuts, if nothing else?
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/16/po...ump/index.html

[Stavros]

Donald Trump on Thursday again lamented the removal of Confederate statues from US cities, saying these removals “ripped apart” the country’s history and culture.

He then compared statues of Confederate leaders like Stonewall Jackson to monuments of US founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

“The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!” Trump tweeted.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...harlottesville


If he has the balls, General Kelly should take his boss to one side and tell him that he is in a hole, and to stop digging it deeper, and deeper. But let's face it, this is a President who will tell it like he sees it, even if he is blind to history, and seeks to invent it, rather than to 'rip it apart'. I even wonder if he knows what the Civil War was and why it was fought, he hasn't shown much interest in the history of his country before.

[filghy2]

He can't stop digging because, aside from underlying sympathies for white nationalism, Trump seems to have a pathological aversion to being seen to have been pressured into backing down. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/0...r-chaos-241721
It's scary that a man so driven by these motives has his finger on the nuclear button.

[blackchubby38]

To be fair, I do think there is a segment of the left that has been violent. Destroying public property on the campus of Berkley because they don't want someone speaking, throwing eggs at Trump supporters, or what occurred during the riots in Charlotte last summer. Lets not forget the cops that have been assassinated over the past 2 years. While the murderers themselves didn't have any political affiliation, they targeted a specific group that they they felt was part of the establishment. The 1960s' was filled with leftist violence as some thought that was the only way to enact social change.

The difference between the groups that I have mentioned and white supremacists and Neo Nazis, is that we have seen what happens when the latter comes to power and they're able to achieve their final solution.

[Stavros]

To be fair, I do think there is a segment of the left that has been violent. Destroying public property on the campus of Berkley because they don't want someone speaking, throwing eggs at Trump supporters, or what occurred during the riots in Charlotte last summer. Lets not forget the cops that have been assassinated over the past 2 years. While the murderers themselves didn't have any political affiliation, they targeted a specific group that they they felt was part of the establishment. The 1960s' was filled with leftist violence as some thought that was the only way to enact social change.

The difference between the groups that I have mentioned and white supremacists and Neo Nazis, is that we have seen what happens when the latter comes to power and they're able to achieve their final solution.

You need to prove that the people responsible identify themselves as 'left' -and are 'left' by a more objective set of criteria- with the problem that it is not clear to me what it means in the USA. The kind of people who smash windows are mostly anarchists, who are not thought of as 'left-wing', so I am not sure who it is you are talking about. We have had plenty of demos in the UK which resulted in the smashing of windows, defaced monuments, violent acts against the police -though none intended to kill or even severely injure. The socialist movements of Europe have existed for a long time and are embedded in our politics in a way that did not take root in the US notwithstanding the wobblies and occasional examples of union militancy such as in the auto industry in the 1920s. A large grouping of anti-fascists again might lead people to assume they are all left-wing, but this also may not be true. The ACLU is often derided as a left-wing organization by its critics 'on the right' yet it supported the right of the rally to take place in Emancipation Park as a defence of the First Amendment.

It seems to me that a diverse group of people opposed to nationalism, white nationalism, white supremacy etc may not by definition be 'left' as the default position to 'the right', not in the US. In Europe the left bases its programme on a critique of the state and capitalism, it has an agenda in which control of the state apparatus is used to re-structure the economy so that the benefits of production are distributed more evenly, and believes that public services should be provided by the state rather than the market. The left is also opposed to nationalism replacing it with the belief that international co-operation is the only guarantee of world peace. There is a lot of laziness and obscurity in the use of labels, but few which can mistake what the groupings under 'alt-right' intend, and that is also because of the additional dimension in the USA of its deeply woven divisions between ethnic identity groupings which make it hard to place them on the left. The UK may have been deeply involved in the slave trade, but we never had slavery in the form it existed in the US, and that has created a profound cultural difference. Again, consider the Black Panther Party in the 1970s which attempted to fuse Marxism with Black Nationalism, even though the two are in contradiction. Is Black Lives Matter a left-wing organization? It is a complex problem but I don't know if a more nuanced definition of terms will make a difference when people become polarized by differences around which they gather for solidarity even when they don't actually agree on a lot of things. Another example would be feminism -are all feminist movements left-wing? I hope you see the problems of definition here.

[hippifried]

I agree with most of what you say, but the present situation is generated by the tussle over monuments to the Confederacy, so as far as day to day news goes, it has become, if temporarily, a 'Southern' specific issue.
Next week, however the focus could shift to Phoenix Arizona where the President plans to hold a rally -organized by his re-election committee (!). Will you be going? For the Do-nuts, if nothing else?
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/16/po...ump/index.html

Well... Not being part of the secret society, I don't know where the rally's being held. Has to be indoors because it's still over 100 degrees (37.7c) here. Without an invitation (aka $$$$$), I'd get stuck outside between the cops, antifa, Klan/Nazis, & Mexicans. Could be dangerously entertaining, butteye'm an old cripple with a flat screen in my air conditioned cave. I'll wait for the reruns. Riots are a young man's game. I did my part in the '60s & '70s. It's y'all's turn.

[Yvonne183]

This isn't a southern problem. Back in the 50s, the Ku Klux Klan was able to muster up massive crowds for rallies and marches (in full regalia) across the northern and central tiers. Am I the only one old enough to remember how nasty things got over busing in 1970s Boston? It's been what? 10 or 15 years since Cincinnati was ripped apart by race riots? Let's not forget LA, & I'm amazed Oakland hasn't exploded. Coeur d' Alene, Idaho has a huge concentration of reactionary supremacists. Until recently (not sure if it's still true), upwards of 90% of printed Nazi literature was published in Lincoln, Nebraska.

This problem is all over the place. By concentrating on one region, you ignore the rest of the country, where things are just as fucked up, if not more so. Contemplate the fact that every city in the USA is segregated by race and/or ethnicity.

In most cases the cities you mentioned that are segregated, it is white liberals who segregate themselves from blacks. Go to Baltimore and go to the white enclaves and you'll find mostly liberals.

From George Orwell:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped. Nothing exists except in an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

[Stavros]

In most cases the cities you mentioned that are segregated, it is white liberals who segregate themselves from blacks. Go to Baltimore and go to the white enclaves and you'll find mostly liberals.

Hi Yvonne, loved the Orwell quote!

Here is the curious thing about Baltimore, dominated by Democrats since the 1960s - consider this from Newt Gingrich:
All Americans should care enough about their fellow citizens trapped with bad leadership, bad government, selfish bureaucrats, and misleading news media. All of us should care about creating a much better future for poor Americans. That future has to start with a fact-based analysis of how we got here and who has been responsible.

In Baltimore City, the answer is Democrat officials, who for a half century have crippled and weakened what was once a great and vibrant city.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/05/18/...ores-collapse/

-then ask -so why don't citizens in this failing city vote Republican?
Gingrich could answer that in view of the industrial decline of the city and a significant loss of its population, leaving behind a largely Black and unemployed population, the Republicans offer nothing but more of the same, so they may as well vote Democrat. His own version of capitalism is in fact responsible for the economic decline that has had such a devastating impact on Baltimore, but he won't accept any responsibility for it, and blames it on Democrats instead.

Here, for example, is a snapshot of what happened in a city which was once the 6th largest in the USA and an important source of steel, shipbuilding and motor manufacture:

In 1971, when Sparrows Point was the largest steel mill in the country, a surge in steel imports led to massive layoffs among domestic producers. Three thousand workers at Sparrow Point lost their jobs that year, followed by another 7,000 in 1975.⁶ By the late 1980s, the workforce had dwindled to 8,000, accompanied by a decline in wages and benefits as the union conceded on many pay and benefits issues.⁷ Baltimore workers could no longer look to steel as a source of middle-class wages and job security.
The story of Bethlehem’s steel mill at Sparrows Point is a microcosm of economic changes that profoundly affected Baltimore and other “rust belt” cities across the US during this period. The manufacturing industries, having long been the economic base for employment and output for nearly a century, dwindled and disappeared.
Baltimore lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs between 1950 and 1995, 75% of its industrial employment — not to mention most of the jobs with union representation. Currently, only 6% of all jobs in the City are in manufacturing. The collapse of industry led to a number of changes in the demographic makeup of the City and the surrounding region, contributing to a crisis in urban poverty that lingers today.
http://www.nathanielturner.com/rober...1199union3.htm

-And note that this decline began in the early 1970s when Nixon was President. Somewhere in these stories of the US and the rage against a system that has not provided secure well-paid jobs is a simple fact about capitalism: it has no nationality, it has no colour, and it has no mercy. When it is more profitable to produce in Sector B than Sector A, then production will move from one to the other, and is unlikely to return.