So why — beyond the traditional Trump bashing — are such liberal-lefties, or whatever you want to call them at CNN and elsewhere, so determined to make such an equivalency? Why do they want to magnify the existence and importance of neo-Nazis and Klan members in our society when their numbers are minuscule?
We could call this a kind of nostalgia for Nazism, the yearning for a simpler time when the source of all evil was so clearly evident and so directly confronted. Perhaps more importantly, it’s a nostalgia for when all evil was supposedly on the right, even though the Nazis, so many conveniently forget, were the National Socialist Party. At least the right could be blamed. And is.
It is also a yearning for a time when the source of evil was not so treacherous and complicated. No one knows how many Islamic radicals there are or where they are, although there are apparently a lot of them, probably vastly more than there ever were Nazis, possibly in the hundreds of millions if you add up the results of this Pew poll of eleven Muslim countries. (It may even be understated, given the reluctance to answer such incriminating questions.)
Not only that, a significant percentage of the left evinces sympathy for Islamic radicals, identifying with them and justifying their cause, despite the obvious misogyny and homophobia, through such latter-day crypto-fascist inventions as “intersectionality.” The Antifa movement, in the forefront of that nauseating sympathy for Islamism, is far more prevalent and dangerous in U.S. society than those few pathetic remaining losers in the KKK and similar neo-Nazi groups. The Antifa thugs are seemingly everywhere, smashing windows and making life Hell for weak-willed university administrators across the country.
I've been making this point all week. Stalin fought Nazis, too. Opposing Nazis is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to be good guys. https://t.co/tGaAZcRkxp
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) August 18, 2017
[Update a couple minutes later]
Let’s not talk about Islam:
They discussed the popularity of La Rambla as a tourist destination, and went into some detail about the nationalities of vacationers currently thronging the city. They noted that La Rambla is Barcelona’s chief tourist street, essentially its counterpart to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, the Kufürstendamm in Berlin, Fifth Avenue in New York – and, perhaps most significantly, La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, where, in July of last year, eighty-six people were killed in a similar jihadist atrocity.
They pondered the apparent lack of sophistication of this particular crime, the biographical background of the truck driver, the timeline of the atrocity, the apparent speed and weight of the truck itself, and so on. They talked about the wounded, about the degree to which they had been wounded, about how many had been sent to hospitals.
But they didn’t talk about Islam. They didn’t talk about jihad.
They used words like assassin, murderer, criminal. Even terrorist. But I didn’t hear the word jihadist. If they said it, I missed it. And except when they were forced to mention that, for example, the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack, I didn’t hear the word Islam.
They’d rather talk about Nazis.
[Noon update]
A point I’ve been making all week (e.g., the above tweet). Jonah Goldberg: No, Antifa, fighting Nazis doesn’t make you the good guys:
There’s a natural tendency to think that when people, or movements, hate each other, it must be because they’re opposites. This assumption overlooks the fact that many — indeed, most — of the great conflicts and hatreds in human history are derived from what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.”
Most tribal hatreds are between very similar groups. The European wars of religion were between peoples who often shared the same language and culture but differed on the correct way to practice the Christian faith. The Sunni-Shia split in the Muslim world is the source of great animosity between very similar peoples.
The young Communists and fascists fighting for power in the streets of 1920s Germany had far more in common with each other than they had with decent liberals or conservatives, as we understand those terms today.
Stalinists, and defenders of communism in general, like to play up the trivial differences with the Nazis, while ignoring the much greater similarities.
And then there’s this:
This history is relevant today because of the depressingly idiotic argument about whether it’s OK to equate “antifa” — left-wing radicals — with the neo-Nazi and white supremacist rabble that recently descended on Charlottesville, Va. The president claims there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest and that the “anti-fascist” radicals are equally blameworthy. He borrowed from Fox News’ Sean Hannity the bogus term “alt-left” to describe the antifa radicals.
The term is bogus because, unlike the alt-right, nobody calls themselves “the alt-left.” That’s too bad. One of the only nice things about the alt-right is that its leaders are honest about the fact that they want nothing to do with traditional American conservatism. Like the original Nazis, they seek to replace the traditional right with their racial hogwash.
Sean Hannity is an idiot, and so is Donald Trump for paying any attention to him.