I was accused of moral relativism on Facebook when I stated that both sides were to blame in Charlottesville. This was supposedly because, by blaming both sides equally, I was entirely absolving one side from blame in the death of the young woman who was struck by the jerk in the car.
I can’t parse that, and you probably can’t either. To me, that young woman would still be alive today if both sides had stayed the hell home. There is indeed blame on both sides. Both sides are full of hate and both sides espouse hate. That one side in this particular contretemps espouses hate against non-whites, and the other side espouses hate against those who hate non-whites, seems immaterial to me. Either side is as bad as the other.
After all, the SS blackshirts were just as bad as the SA brownshirts whom they destroyed. But that’s history, after all, and not many people actually learn history anymore. But the analogy holds.
I was so assaulted because I dared (in this person’s opinion, anyway) to diminish the culpability of the white supremacists who, after all, started it all by having their protest in the first place. However, I suspect the real reason for this assault on my integrity is merely because the person who did so is a rabid neverTrumper who will never back down from his now-untenable position; I mean, come on, the guy was elected and he’s president, and he’s not a Nazi. And by insisting that I’m letting the Nazis off by including antifa in the mix, this person is implicitly stating that antifa bears no blame whatsoever. Does he support antifa? I’m going to guess he’d be horrified if someone told him that. But that’s what he’s doing by claiming it’s moral relativism to blame antifa equally with the Nazi group for the death of that young woman.
As I told him repeatedly, if antifa hadn’t shown up, that young woman would still be alive. But it would have been even better if neither side had shown up at all.
However, the main point this person misses in the process of being all het up about spreading the blame around is that any culpability for the young woman’s death is not placed on the group — it’s placed on the person who actually ran that car down the street and killed her with it. And that’s an important point.
In our system, the group to which that young fool belonged won’t be on trial anywhere except in the court of public opinion. The court of law that will try said young fool for vehicular homicide isn’t going to be interested in his political views, or what hate group he happens to belong to — they will be concerned only with his disregard for the law and the consequences of that disregard. And that is because our courts are courts of law, not courts of political justice.
Make no mistake — antifa would like nothing better than for our courts to become courts of political justice, wherein they could, in Stalinesque show trials, condemn the 1% to death and then start in on the bourgeois middle class. Which is why I oppose antifa as much as I oppose asshole white supremacists who dress up in swastika-festooned clothing, wave the swastika flag, and play at being National Socialists just like the bunch of pin-headed, slack-jawed wanna-be Hitler Youth they are.
These two groups are two sides of the same adulterated coin. National Socialists vs. International Socialists. All left-wing, no matter how hard the left tries to push them off on the right (the soi-disant “alt-right” being little more than a fabrication of feverish brains on the left side of the spectrum). All of the repugnant ideologies on parade last weekend, nay, since it became clear that Donald Trump was a serious threat to Hillary Clinton’s coronation, originated on the left. The KKK? A left-wing Democrat institution for many, many years. Fascists and Nazis were both leftists, and made no bones about being leftists, despite generations of Gramscian historians who have tried to frame them as being phenomena of the far-right. Black Lives Matter? Left-wing anarchists with a desire to destroy the police as a force for civil order. Name a disruptive domestic terrorist group that has been in the ascendant in the past two or three years, and every one of them is a tool of the left. Hell, even the Southern Poverty Law Center has become a leftist tool of destruction, by tarring innocent and well-meaning right-wing organizations with the “hate group” moniker.
And they are all to blame for what happened last weekend. Because they have weakened the social structure of this country to the point where such things not only can happen, they are happening — with great regularity.
What is most alarming about this is that the number of people actually involved in these actions is tiny in comparison to the rest of the country. In other words, we could easily scrum ’em if we chose to.
I fear we’re coming to that. And sooner than we think. It’s going to be messy.
And there won’t be a damn thing that’s morally relative about it.
Recent Comments