Several celebrities collaborated on a letter defending Gish's post-mortem judgment, in the hope of making Bowling Green reverse its decision. Predictably, the university was less concerned with whether or not (some of) their students were offended rather than any considerations of fairness to actors. As the celebrity letter correctly observes, the attack-ivists were resorting to an elementary form of scapegoating, particularly by attacking a long deceased actor who could not defend herself. Indeed, back in February of this year Twitter became inflamed over forty-year old comments by another deceased actor, John Wayne.
On THE CLASSIC HORROR FILM BOARD, I participated in a discussion of the Bowling Green incident, and one poster asserted that one problem was that there wasn't a coherent argument to mount against the people who were claiming that society must purge itself of all theoretical suggestions of approval of racism. The poster said:
The problem is that no one has yet come up with a suitable 'yes, but...' argument to counter efforts to remove Gish and such examples. When an energized activist group pushes for removal, absent a 'yes, but...' argument. the easiest thing to do is comply and move on.
I agree in a broad sense that the only thing that can counter such scapegoating arguments are concise refutations of their position. To some extent the Right adopted the term "politically incorrect" as a means of combating Leftism in all forms, be those forms just or unjust. However, this phrase has become so over-used that it no longer has any power to make the extremists seem ridiculous.
Mostly for my own pleasure, I'll toss out the contemptuous phrase "corpse-fighters," to make clear that these are not fearless warriors confronting real threats in the real world, but only a bunch of cowards who can only battle people who can't fight back, counting on the fact that equally craven administrators care nothing about defending said people.
As much as I despise bullies like the Antifa criminals, even they look a little better than people who can only score points against dead people. At least Antifa goons take the risk that someone may strike back at them during their assaults.
3 comments:
Statistically Alt righters attack far more. I said it before and I'll say it again. Antifa don't really attack as much. Certainly compared to the absolute monsters that are the alt right. There have also been cases where alt righters were actively plotting to provoke anti fa into attacking
Saying the anti fa are violent thugs is as accurate as saying the KKK were freedom fighters
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/X56rQkDgd0qqB7R68t6t7C/seven-things-you-need-to-know-about-antifa
Compared to the Alt right nazis (who killed FAR more people and inflicted more pain) Anti fa are the good guys
There's nothing in your citation that proves your claim that "alt right Nazis" have killed more people than Antifa. As it happens, Antifa have not yet been accused of many murders at all, so you might win that comparison anyway-- except that the term "alt right Nazis" doesn't mean much of anything. If you wanted to claim a higher body count for white supremacists as a whole, you could probably make that case. But even most of those slayings were just by ordinary dorks who didn't ally themselves to either Nazism or the "alt right."
The only thing your linked essay says is that it speculates that the German Antifa had come down hard on the emerging German Nazi party, maybe German Nazism wouldn't have existed. OK, but why should anyone assume that a Communist Germany would be any better? The early Antifa was extremely Stalinist, and Stalin has just as much innocent blood on his hands as Hitler, if not more.
I stand by my comment that the Antifa who incite violence are indeed violent thugs and nothing more. They're certainly not courageously invading alt-right encampments. they're just messing with ordinary people on the street. So maybe they don't even have the tiny bit of courage I ascribed to them after all.
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