The scenes from Charlottesville over the weekend were truly horrifying and should give all Americans pause. We can rightly assign responsibility for the violence to the neo-fascist, white supremacists, who marched onto the University of Virginia campus looking for a fight. That this melee ended in the apparent murder of a thirty-two year-old civil rights activist, Heather Heyer, as well as a raft of injuries to counter-demonstrators standing in the path of James Fields’ vehicle, is an indelible stain on our country and its current political culture. Given what has been learned about Fields, it is entirely appropriate to label his attack as an act of domestic terrorism.
Much has been made of President Donald Trump’s tepid response to these events and, in particular, his statement that the violence and bigotry unleashed in the streets of Charlottesville were fueled by “many sides.” The president’s comments not only misrepresent what happened in Charlottesville, they also embolden the provocateurs, who understand their hate-filled agenda as one premised on self-defense and protection of endangered cultural heritage.
At the same time, though, serious consideration must be given to the way that this wave of neo-fascist violence is being met and, to a certain degree, mirrored by counter-demonstrators who wish to act in defense of liberal democratic values and norms. The question faced by liberals and anti-fascists right now is not whether to resist the alt-right and its claims of white supremacy, but how?
Trump is able to condemn violence “on many sides,” in part, because the bullying and brawling perpetrated by white nationalists has induced the resistance to embrace or, at any rate, participate in, a more general climate of violent political confrontation. Covering Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally for The New York Times, Spencer Hawes described an escalating series of verbal altercations, punctuated by a sudden outburst of reciprocal violence:
“Protesters began to mace one another, throwing water bottles and urine-filled balloons — some of which hit reporters — and beating each other with flagpoles, clubs and makeshift weapons. Before long, the downtown area was a melee. People were ducking and covering with a constant stream of projectiles whizzing by our faces, and the air was filled with the sounds of fists and sticks against flesh.”
A similar scene unfolded in Berkeley, California this spring, when pro-Trump supporters clashed with counter-demonstrators in and around the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park. Eleven people were injured in that fracas, with six sent to the hospital, including one who received treatment for a stabbing wound. Counter-demonstrators claimed then, as many do now, that someone must stand up to the neo-Nazis, who threaten to subvert and hijack our democracy. This is true, in a sense. Illiberal movements cannot be allowed to control our civic spaces and culture. But I want to propose this, too: punching and pepper-spraying Nazis, even in self-defense, will not end well. History should alert us to the dangers of meeting violence with violence.
The rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the 1920s and early 1930s, prior to Adolf Hitler becoming chancellor, took place against the backdrop of political street fighting not unlike the riots in Berkeley and Charlottesville. Nazi paramilitaries (so-called “brownshirts”) fought with labor unionists and members of various left-wing parties in the streets of Berlin, Hamburg, and elsewhere. Each episode of violence convinced participants that theirs was a movement and cause under attack by pernicious “others,” whose interests represented a critical threat to the body politic and to the nation itself. As the sides continued to fight, the Nazis built a seductive mythology around the “martyrs,” who had fallen in the streets while serving their cause, and party propagandists used the growing atmosphere of conflict as a plank in their platform, promising to restore order and manage the “state of emergency” by any and all means.
At the Nuremberg trial following World War Two, British and American prosecutors presented a vast swath of materials that showed how the Nazis deliberately leveraged this violence to build their party’s base and prepare for a revolutionary overthrow of the democratic order. This is one of the ways that a fringe outfit, polling at less than three percent, managed to become Germany’s single largest political party in a handful of years. As one Nazi pamphlet explained,
“Possession of the streets is the key to power in the state – for this reason the [brownshirts] marched and fought. The public would have never received knowledge from the agitative speeches of the little Reichstag faction and its propaganda or from the desires and aims of the Party, if the martial tread and battle song of the [paramilitaries] had not beat the measure for the truth of a relentless criticism of the state of affairs in the governmental system.”
Street politics as they have recently played out, in Charlottesville and elsewhere, play directly into the hands of the white nationalists who see the bloodshed as legitimating and necessitating their particular brand of violence. Resistance to these tactics must take forms other than direct physical confrontation to be effective. While there is no equivalence between the white nationalists and the activists who came out to protest and resist their agenda, those who allow themselves to be drawn into the violence will facilitate the illiberal program which the alt-right seeks to instill.
Author info:
Alexander Karn, Associate Professor of History, Colgate University