Charlottesville Post-Mortem: The Tragic Demise of White Identity
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It was May of 1970 and my wife and I, both graduate students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, had joined hundreds of other people, most of whom were students, in an enormous march around Chapel Hill in protest of the shooting of demonstrators at Kent State University and incursion into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. As we were marching toward Franklin Street, the main drag in the town, someone near the front began the chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win.”*
As deep as my anger was toward the government that I had finished serving on active duty in the Army a scant two years before, the chant made me very uncomfortable. It struck me as pro-Communist, which its originators probably intended it to be, but virtually the entire crowd—very few of which I would think really had any Communist sympathies—joined in the chant. It had a nice cadence, like the ones I had shouted with my platoon at Fort Bragg, but at the same time it managed to taint the march, giving opponents something easy to seize upon and denounce.
Flash forward to September of 2005. Once again I’m in a march against a major American war. This time it’s the war in Iraq and I’m part of a truly massive demonstration in Washington, DC. It was probably the high water mark in the United States of resistance to the criminal Middle East wars so far in the 21st century. But even more than the earlier march in Chapel Hill, people who I am certain were ringers and plants tainted the demonstration. The largest and noisiest such group flew socialist banners, dressed similarly, and all seemed to be no older than thirty. “Where on earth did they come from?” I wondered. A friend accompanying me spotted one obvious ringer sporting a sign directing obscenities toward President Bush, positioning himself between the television cameras and the speakers’ platform on the Ellipse near the White House. I have no guilt feeling over joining my friend in forcibly taking down the man’s sign after he refused to do so voluntarily, and tearing it up.
From this little bit of experience I can say that political demonstrations give a great opportunity for the practice of what in the Nixon era was called “dirty tricks” for propagandistic purposes. I can also recognize the grain of truth in the “controversial” observation of President Trump that there were “very fine people on both sides” in the recent violent event in Charlottesville, Virginia.
But in contrast to the two demonstrations that I experienced, which were filled with genuine people with the best of intentions from all walks of life and of all ages, the percentage of such people in the melee at Charlottesville had to have been very low. To be sure there are lots of people of good will who still revere the great Confederate General Robert E. Lee and are dismayed at the plans of the city of Charlottesville to remove a statue honoring him, but only the most deluded among them would participate in a rally led by a self-proclaimed “white nationalist” and peopled by assorted “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists.” Even without the violence, such support from such a quarter is clearly harmful to the cause of honoring General Lee, perpetuating, as it can’t help but do, the very simplistic notion that the War between the States was all about ending the racist oppression of black people by white people.
On the other side there might have been some well-meaning but weak-minded people among them who have succumbed to the steady diet of propaganda that has come almost monolithically from the national opinion-molding community, from the universities, the press, and from Hollywood on the subject of racism in the United States in general and the South in particular, and would be moved to go out and protest against it. Perhaps there are more folks than I would like to believe who responded honestly to the clarion call of the Marxist Socialist Worker web site with its reasoning like the following:**
Here's another obvious point about people who organize protests in defense of the Confederacy: They are hate-fueled racists whose actions quickly reveal that the only freedom they're interested in protecting is their own freedom to oppress and intimidate others. ....
To halt this growing menace will require people coming together in large numbers to directly confront the hate-mongers before they can grow into a truly threatening force.
Antifa - Portland
Still, if they are motivated enough to go out and protest—some of them traveling a long distance to do so—one would think that they would also have heard about a group called Antifa, a very violence-prone outfit that claims to be on a mission against “fascism.” Since white nationalism from their perspective is fascism incarnate, one could well expect that theirs would be a heavy presence among the “protestors” of the white nationalists’ rally in Charlottesville, and so it was. Would well-meaning “fine people” really want to be associated with mobs that throw containers of urine and feces on people and club them, set fires to cars, and bash out the windows of buildings as a form of expression? I suppose it is possible that the counter-protest crowd had some few among it who could claim ignorance by dint of the fact that they got all their news from, say, MSNBC or CNN and had never heard of Antifa, but it is difficult to believe that there were very many such people.
President Trump also said in his initial statement, rightly though imprecisely and inarticulately, that there were “bad people” on both sides—both sides—who were responsible for the violence. To be more accurate, what he should have said was that there were ringers and plants on both sides who were most likely primarily responsible for the violence. In fact, if truth be told, what happened at Charlottesville might best be described as one big propagandistic dirty trick, from a beginning that stretches a few years back to a very bad end that we are only beginning to see…
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