on battling hatred

Tragedy marked this past weekend, with one person killed and many more badly injured in an act of apparent domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, VA. Concurrent with that violent act, in a public display of wild-eyed and misguided extremism, hundreds of middle-class European-Americans marched through said city holding torches and shouting slogans straight out of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’. People who are now suddenly worried about the current rise of alt-right and neo-Nazi mentalities here in America must remember that Donald J. Trump ascended to the presidency on ideas nationalist, protectionist, and us-versus-them in their scope and design. In some sense, the alt-right stands today victorious, having helped vote its champion into this nation’s highest office. Hence, statements by leaders of the white-nationalist movement praising the president for his recent stance on their right to rally and organize with intent to subjugate and destroy.

The city of Boston this year decided to display a poster aimed at teaching people who use its public transportation services how to diffuse Islamophobia. It is this author’s personal experience that the most effective method for fighting violent extremism is to ignore the perpetrator and show love to the victims. In Charlottesville, VA, last weekend, citizens protesting the alt-right sometimes did the opposite, fighting violence with violence and hatred with hatred.

Although he disagrees with them on nearly every point (but for their right to keep breathing), this author thinks it’s important to let the alt-right, neo-Nazi, and white nationalist movements not only voice their ugly opinions but also march in public. If they’re banned from letting their true colors fly, open-minded and cosmopolitan lovers of freedom will never know whom to avoid socially, whose businesses to boycott or divest from, whose places of worship to picket, and whom to deny service as well as the time of day. (Since its financial support of organizations perpetuating homophobic bigotry came to light, this author hasn’t set foot inside of a Chick-fil-A, for example.) One slow, methodical way to crush America’s Nazi problem is to do so economically, a dollar at a time. Another way, is to crush it with clubs and sticks and knives and guns, like many of our grandparents did in Europe and beyond during the 1940s.

To destroy the creeping roots of incessant hatred it is often necessary to resort to violence. So long as one does so with positive intentions and for the benefit of all humanity, resting well at night should come easy. Just remember, though, that America’s white nationalists think that what they’re doing is for the benefit of all humanity, or at least the light-skinned portion of humanity whose ancestors come from Europe. Whichever path you choose in your resistance to bigotry and intolerance in America, stay grounded and don’t panic.

americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan

prayer and guns

No matter their flavor or doctrine or creed, religious extremists clearly feel the need to tell other people how to lead their lives, how to raise their children, how to dress their wives. This happens not only in the Fertile Crescent but also among American Protestants who claim that their nation is a Christian one then try to enforce it with prayer and guns. To us who've kept thinking it is hard to see the forces of ISIS, of Christianity, parading and boasting and spreading by might the teachings and habits that they see as Right. To live life in freedom by my chosen rules to me is worth more than a mountain of jewels; to live life in constant, perpetual fear that there maybe could be an extremist near just takes the wind out of my billowing sails and makes me weep buckets and flagons and pails. So stand up and fight for your right to choose to wear pretty dresses or to drink some booze, to worship in this house or nowhere at all, to stay down or get up right after a fall. This here call to action may not be too loud, it may not much rile up the masses and crowds, it is though a call for more pure anarchy and for less of religious insanity.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥