#the destruction of democracy by passing a law to protect queer people that is not needed

[the-fifteen]

Seeing one of the blogs i follow for japanese art getting into LGBT discourse was something i was absolutely not expecting lmao

[silver-and-ivory]

I think the antifa perspective on liberals is something like this:

Liberals think that they’re defending freedom of speech, but really they’re turning a completely blind eye to the way that mob violence has been perpetuated by white suprematicists and Nazis. Instead, they react without context or thought to antifas, who they see as having “started it”.

Nazis want to attack liberal democracy- why aren’t liberals upset about that? If they really cared about liberal democracy, they’re be more concerned about Nazis.

I wonder if a lot of this is simply a factual dispute.

For one, a lot of antifa rhetoric and theory seems to be talking from a perspective of belief in Nazi/fascist/etc. prominence. The fascists have already attacked e.g. queer bloggers. The fascists have already destroyed the sanctity of institutions. The fascists have already eroded the liberal order of nonviolence. And so on.

This, then, provides the foundations of response: which is that, instead of futilely upholding that which has already been destroyed, antifa seeks to respond in kind. Antifa is not a cause of the destruction of the liberal order, but instead a result.

As for the other side, a lot of liberal rhetoric assumes that Nazis/fascists/etc. aren’t very powerful at all, and instead antifa is Really Powerful. The fascists are basically weird Internet dudes who are almost all ironic who you’ll never ever meet, and the government will step in and protect you if you’re ever attacked violently, which you rarely are.

I don’t really like “privilege” as a memeplex. But I do see why the liberal perspective would come off as galling and perhaps as coming from a place of relative ease.

To be more charitable to the liberal position, I guess that I’d say that they (we) think that antifa often creates its own enemies- that for example Trump was accused of being a fascist, but that he actually isn’t; or accusations of libertarians being fascists; or so on and so forth, and that antifa feels more scared than it has to be.

Then again, Type I errors trade off for Type II errors. And in a world filled with threats it makes sense to model most things as threats.

And if liberals are so concerned about antifa, why don’t I try to stop the destruction of the liberal order at its source- with fascists? It seems not only wrong, but also counterproductive and directly harmful to minorities to try to stop antifa, when really fascists are the source of the issue.

My thought-out position here is that people live in really different circumstances, and they shouldn’t apply things they know about their life to other people’s lives. Maybe “fuck all fascists and I’m nailing their heads to the wall” is a reasonable and incredibly liberating thing to say for some people. And simultaneously for other people it erodes the safety they need.

I think there’s a compromise position here, where antifa recognizes that not all fascists are violent, and says “fuck all violent fascists and I’m nailing their heads to the wall”. That’s still somewhat worrying for me, but at least it nominally agrees that violence is the thing that gets violence in return, rather than subscribing to an ideology of fascism.

Antifa refutations of the liberal position would ideally include things like “lmao fascists actually are??? already??? destroying our liberal democracy? and like antifas are literally just responding in kind to a taboo on violence that’s already been broken????? fuckng liberals”

Because that recognizes that, at least in principle, it would be nice to have a taboo on violence, which fascists are not only advocating against in ideology but which fascists are actively breaking. That’s a good, solid argument, and it’s not one I necessarily disagree with.

Note what I’ve specified here: I don’t think that ideology which hates liberal democracy is sufficient for retaliatory violence. Only the acting-out of that ideology is sufficient- actual, literal fascist violence.

Antifas should consider that Communism also has been formulated as inherently opposed to liberal democracy, as well as all of anarchism. Ideological threats to liberal democracy must not be met with bullets unless individual adherents or groups of adherents have already broken the violence taboo; and then the retaliation should be against those specific groups of adherents.

What I am still concerned about is that the weirdness of online spaces means that people who live in situations where there aren’t many fascists will end up feeling really scared of fascists. Or that sensationalistic claims - like “fascists took the White House” - will make people think they’re surrounded by violent fascists, whereas really America elected a (horrible, racist, xenophobic, murderous) president who is not a fascist.

Moreover, I’m really worried that the cure will be worse than the disease- that antifa doesn’t seem to recognize the force it’s unleashed.

What I see as the culmination of antifa is the establishment of masked vigilantes who are Defending Liberty and that kind of thing.

And that’s not necessarily bad! I’m onboard in principle with people stepping up to form their own policing organizations when the government abdicates or proves untrustworthy in its duty to serve and protect them.

But let’s be clear: this establishes a quasi-governmental police force. This means that they must be accountable to the people and they must have protections against violating people’s rights.

Like, the American criminal justice system is shit, because it’s racist. It would be even more shit if we didn’t have 1) the right to an attorney 2) jury trials of our peers 3) a code of laws that’s well-known with consistent penalties 4) (at least nominal) protections against unreasonable search and seizure 5) presumption of innocence, 6) the Miranda rights, 7) protections against self-incrimination, and 8) protections against cruel and unusual punishment. That’s clearly not enough because there are still abuses by the government; and these of course aren’t applied equally to everyone.

But the point here is that when you’re taking control of policing, it’s really important that you have structures in place that guarantee fair trials, good attorney representation, non-arbitrary penalties, and accountability to citizens.

Masked vigilante violence of the sort that Internet antifa seems to want doesn’t, as far as I can tell, have any of these restrictions.

Instead, some Internet antifas are very trigger happy with the fascist accusations. As I’ve explained before, these accusations spread not only from the accused person, but also to the accused person’s defenders. Do you see why this would worry me, in light of the right to attorney?

The obvious comparison here is McCarthyism. I want to be absolutely clear that I don’t think Communists are comparable to fascists, or that antifas are comparable to anti-Communists. That’s not the point. The point is the patterns.

McCarthy saw Communists everywhere, and all Communists were seen as equally bad. The presumption of innocence was ignored. People’s political and personal histories were investigated, and if they didn’t submit to investigation they were fired.

Spurious evidence led to more and more convictions. Anyone who tried to defend Communists was branded as a Communist as well. All measures, including illegal ones, were deemed acceptable to root out the Communist threat.

This is bad because not all Communists are violent, and because Communism ought to be a viable political ideology. Communists should be able to say what they want even if it is treasonous and even if it involves things like guillotining the bourgeois. (There are somewhat complicated laws surrounding that, but suffice it to say that you are allowed to advocate for people’s deaths as long as it isn’t direct incitement to violence.)

It is also bad because it means that even non-Communists could be accused of being Communists, and that would make them Indefensible. In fact, this structure makes Communists Indefensible, which is bad.

This obviously impedes fair trials and the right to attorney.

It is also bad because all actions, no matter how evil or illegal, were justified against suspected Communists. This is how America ended up with the My Lai massacre and committing evil acts towards Martin Luther King Jr. and the other civil rights activists. This is how the PATRIOT Act was passed.

— Because this is what happened with terrorists as well. The threat terrorism posed against America was severely overestimated, nations that were accused of terrorism or terrorist collaboration were attacked; and anyone who was accused of terrorism could be detained and therefore tortured.

The police and surveillance state became larger and anyone who disagreed with Bush was labelled a terrorist sympathizer. All terrorists were seen as violent; they were preemptively attacked to Protect America.

Again, terrorists =/= fascists and Bush =/= antifa. Look at the patterns. The same dynamics apply to antifa. The same dynamics apply to any government.

Despite what you might think of rationalists, Eliezer Yudkowsky has written against the Bush administration’s views on and treatment of accused terrorists here:

Nonetheless, I did realize immediately that everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response.  Initially, on 9/11, it was thought that six thousand people had died.  Any politician who'd said "6000 deaths is 1/8 the annual US casualties from automobile accidents," would have been asked to resign the same hour.

No, 9/11 wasn't a good day.  But if everyone gets brownie points for emphasizing how much it hurts, and no one dares urge restraint in how hard to hit back, then the reaction will be greater than the appropriate level, whatever the appropriate level may be.

This is the even darker mirror of the happy death spiral—the spiral of hate.  Anyone who attacks the Enemy is a patriot; and whoever tries to dissect even a single negative claim about the Enemy is a traitor.  But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.

When the defense force contains thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, one ought to consider that the immune system itself is capable of wreaking more damage than 19 guys and four nonmilitary airplanes.  The US spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers' lives shooting off its own foot more effectively than any terrorist group could dream.

If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history.  But that wasn't a political option.  Even if anyone privately guessed that the immune response would be more damaging than the disease, American politicians had no career-preserving choice but to walk straight into al Qaeda's trap.  Whoever argues for a greater response is a patriot.  Whoever dissects a patriotic claim is a traitor.

This is why I make a point of trying to defend accused fascists: because I know that no one else will, and because if there’s no devil’s advocate how will we check our own power?

Right now might be a good time to note that McCarthyism also targeted fascists:

3. The Loyalty Review Board shall currently be furnished by the Department of Justice the name of each foreign or domestic organization, association, movement, group or combination of persons which the Attorney General, after appropriate investigation and determination, designates as totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.

You might say that antifa isn’t nearly so powerful as the American government. And you’re right.

But if you don’t have checks on your power before you come into it- and that is the goal, right? Becoming powerful? - then when will you ever have them? If your movement doesn’t encode the idea “I might hurt someone innocent” -

or “I might go overboard fighting fascism and I don’t want to violate the civil liberties of fascists”

or “Not all fascists are inherently violent, and certainly not all accused fascists” 

or “People who defend accused fascists and doubt accusations of fascism aren’t necessarily my enemies”

— if you don’t have a movement that recognizes the damages it might be able to do, then all of a sudden you’ll find that it’s become powerful. And now you have a lot of people willing to accuse anyone of being a fascist, to slander the accused with all kinds of evil deeds, and then accusing anyone who defends the accused of being a fascist too.

I don’t want Internet antifa to be powerful, because I’m worried that it doesn’t recognize the very real harms that it could do. If Internet antifas seemed to recognize that their actions and ideology can hurt others, and they had plans for establishing limitations on their own power, then God, I would support antifa.

But I can’t in good conscience. Not right now.