I wrote this piece about a year ago.
Over the past several months, but especially over the past few days, I’ve been viewing the level of discourse in this forum with increasing dismay…and frankly, contempt. Safely insulated behind their keyboards, decent, civil, rational people have become increasingly shrill, self-righteous and smug. They call for unrest, vandalism and violence. They’re the “Punch A Nazi” crowd (it should be noted that they lack the courage to bloody their own knuckles). They claim that any action taken is justified, because, Nazis. What they don’t get is, opposing Nazis doesn’t automatically put you on the side of the angels. Stalin fought the REAL Nazis (as opposed to wannabe losers, like that lot in Charlottesville), but that didn’t mean he wasn’t one of biggest mass murderers and thoroughly evil people in history.
Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about the “Alt-Right”, who are neither alternative, nor right (or Right-Wing). Their platform is just a recycling of the vile rhetoric used by the Democrats, when they formed the KKK a hundred-and-fifty years ago, after losing the Civil War. Ironically, they have a great deal in common with Antifa and their supporters. It’s been said that the only difference between Nazis and Communists is that no one ever says “Well, REAL Nazism has never been tried.” There’s a lot of truth to this statement.
Nazis and Antifa are conceptual peas-in-a-pod. Both use brownshirt/stormtrooper tactics, both demand lickspittle ideological conformity, both divide people into tribes, fostering an “Us versus Them” mentality, and both favor the use of big government coercion to achieve their ends. The only difference is, Nazism oppresses in the name of The Race, Antifa oppresses in the name of The Proletariat.
It doesn’t matter if you fly the Swastika and call yourself a National Socialist, or fly the Hammer and Sickle and call yourself a Democratic Socialist, or whether you call it a Concentration Camp or a Gulag. It ends in the same place; the mass grave. Collectivism, whatever its stripe, is antithetical to human freedom.
As I’ve said before, we’re approaching the flashpoint of history. Now is the time to decide who we want to be. Do we want to be the generation that oversaw the end of the American experiment in self-government, or the generation that reignited the flame of Liberty and Justice. It’s up to us, my friends. All of us. Now, decide the future.