Lose the “anti” right off the top and go with “fa,” short for fascists, which is what the current rioters across the country really are. For those who may be confused, Edward Gibbon provides some helpful background in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Fasces or fascines were bundles of sticks the Romans would light on fire and roll down on their foes. Sometimes the Romans would use the fasces to fill up trenches and gain leverage for scaling walls and such. As a symbol of collectivism and militancy, the fasces proved an ideal symbol for the Italian fascist movement.
Benito Mussolini’s fascist blackshirts specialized in violence and constituted a Latino National Socialism that paralleled Teutonic and Slavonic versions from Hitler and Stalin. The Fascists and Communists purported to be at odds but they readily recruited from one another’s ranks. For reference, see Hans Massaquoi, son of an African father and German mother. In Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany, a remarkable account, Massaquoi encounters Nazis and Fascists but finds little if any difference between them.
“Fascism is a matter of taste,” said Vyacheslav Molotov after signing the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Pact. That deal launched World War II, with the Nazis and Communist powers both invading Poland and combining their forces until June 1941. The war finished off fascism as a movement, but as Evelyn Waugh noted, leftists still used the term for anything they didn’t like. Fox hunting, for example, was “fascist.”
That remains the trend on the Left, with the addition of “racist,” “sexist,” and so forth. Among those who claim to be “anti-fascist,” violence continues to be the rule, within limits. The masked, pasty-faced blackshirts would never show up at the training camp of the Minnesota Vikings, or a reunion of Vietnam or Gulf War veterans. As individuals, the fascists never look to throw down in bars frequented by bikers, longshoremen, or ironworkers.
The fascists operate in groups and prefer to target ordinary people emerging from Trump rallies, and when a conservative speaker shows up at UC Berkeley, they wreck the place. The modern fascists, which is what they are, pick venues ruled by Democrat invertebrates such as University of California boss Janet Napolitano, New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, and Jacob Frey of Minneapolis. Frey claimed the rioting in the wake of the George Floyd killing was the work of “white supremacists.” That is predictable nonsense, but it raises a point.
The fascists now form an axis with violent mobs such as Black Lives Matter, common criminals, and demented punks smashing windows with skateboards. Black Lives Matter has resurrected the Communist Party concept that blacks are not Americans and need their own nation. In the current conflagration, black-owned businesses have not been spared. Those who believe the United States is a completely racist, evil country do not want to see African Americans succeed. It’s all about destruction, and the pasty-faced fascists fit right in.
As Walter Sobchack observed in “The Big Lebowski,” National Socialism, at least, was an ethos. The blackshirted nihilists now burning up cities have no ethos, no ideas, and not the slightest clue. Effectively, they are sub-Nazis, deployed against innocents in the free, prosperous society they hate.
At this point, it’s got nothing to do with George Floyd.
As legitimate protesters might recall, in 2017 Minneapolis cop Mohamed Noor gunned down Australian-American Justine Damond, who had just called 911 to report a crime. Noor was charged with third-degree murder and in May 2019, drew a sentence of 12-and-a-half years in prison.
That should have alerted city bosses to dangerous cops like Derek Chauvin, now charged with murder and manslaughter for the death of Floyd, which his fellow cops did nothing to stop. If people think Chauvin deserves a lot more than 12 years, it is hard to blame them.