Fascists Burn Down Civil Rights Center in TN | Squat the Planet

Fascists Burn Down Civil Rights Center in TN

Zaphod

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Zaphod

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why use this as an opportunity/excuse to criticize those who criticize the radical left?
I dont have a problem with criticism of the far left. As a radical leftist I have plenty myself. My problem is the false equivalency between people who do shit like this and people like my comrades and I. The time to be on the fence is gone. The time to propagate that psuedo intellectual bullshit is over. There's a fucking war on.
 

Dmac

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Nazi is short for National socalist party . Funny how socialists like to ignore that.
 

Honey Crust

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BardoBard

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I dont have a problem with criticism of the far left. As a radical leftist I have plenty myself. My problem is the false equivalency between people who do shit like this and people like my comrades and I. The time to be on the fence is gone. The time to propagate that psuedo intellectual bullshit is over. There's a fucking war on.

If there is a false equivalency, it's comparing destroying property to physically assaulting people.

Using violence to stifle your political rivals is literally terrorism and fascist behavior.
That includes assaulting someone at a rally without provocation (ie Antifa), burning down a building, or threatening someone with violence.

As someone who grew up with a lot of gangs and experienced a lot of violence, I lament seeing this kind of escalation, most of these morons on both sides don't know what they're pushing, and the ones that do are the kind of people best avoided.
 
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Honey Crust

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That includes assaulting someone at a rally without provocation (ie Antifa), burning down a building, or threatening someone with violence.
“Threatening someone with violence” is literally the nature of white supremacist and nazi rallies. The call for the extermination of people of color is a call for violence, and the rallies are a physical manifestation of that. If that isn’t provocation I don’t know what is.

Street violence against people who want us dead and kill people like us will always be self defense, pre-emptive or otherwise
 

BardoBard

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“Threatening someone with violence” is literally the nature of white supremacist and nazi rallies. The call for the extermination of people of color is a call for violence, and the rallies are a physical manifestation of that. If that isn’t provocation I don’t know what is.

Street violence against people who want us dead and kill people like us will always be self defense, pre-emptive or otherwise

I've never exempted hate groups from being terrorists, same boat.

As far as your stance of being retaliatory, that is a lie, assuming you're old enough to remember the 90s and early 00s, there was no widespread hate movement in the US.

They were fading into history before groups like Antifa gave them a "legitimate" platform to recruit and spread their propaganda, now they can present themselves as defending right wing activists / speakers etc.

Congratulations on participating in the resurgence of that brand of insanity.
 
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Honey Crust

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Ah yes it was the queers and the communities of people of color and the immigrants and all the folks that fight against the far right that brought them back

And not like

Internet message boards like 4chan or forums like Stormfront or propaganda spread through YouTube or Facebook or Reddit or other social media platforms that allowed them to reach wider audiences than they previously could in the 90’s and early 00’s. That’s definitely not the reason for the growth in far-right activity.

Antifascist Action has existed since the thirties. It wasn’t us. Say what you will but we’re still the ones actually doing anything about this.

Richard Spencer doesn’t show his face in public anymore because getting punched in the face “took the fun out of rallies.”
What do you propose we do instead of defending our communities from the people that would harm us?
 
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BardoBard

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No one has been trying to do anything to you to fight back against, Stormfront has been around for 24 years and made no traction, we had a black president for 2 consecutive terms and violent crime rates on a whole have been plummeting for years.

Playing the victim while you bash beehives, that's all this is.

Organizations like Antifa do not represent anyone but themselves, I'm an immigrant and those jits sure as fuck don't represent me.
 
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BardoBard

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Word, hiding behind a lack of internal accountability does not negate external accountability, no one cares how you label yourself.

Thats why decentralized organizations like Antifa are blamed for the actions of it's worst members, because there's no one to say "that guys not one of us" with authority

Anyways I have better things to concern myself with than this conversation

 
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dumpster harpy

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No one has been trying to do anything to you to fight back against, Stormfront has been around for 24 years and made no traction,

Really?
 

salxtina

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Holy shit this is the Highlander Center how am I just hearing about this? This place is legendary.

From OP's link:
"When a building is engulfed in leaping flames before the fire department even arrives the situation often termed suspicious. When symbols are found spay painted nearby it term applies doubly. When that building contains the executive offices and 90 year of archives of a civil rights organization truthful people use words like racism and arson. On the night of March 29th this is what happened to the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market Tennessee, located about 25 miles outside of Knoxville.
...
The current leadership of the Highlander Research and Education Center has not gone public with what it knows, probably at orders of the very same FBI that worked to destroy them in the past. No authority has called this arson, although that is expected to be announced later this week by the Jefferson County Fire Marshall. They are waiting until the trail is cold and their cousins or the perpetrators (if those are two different things) have left town after sobering up from all the free beer they got from the FBI when they were done with their long night of playing with matches.
All messenging from the Highlander Research and Education Center avoids mentioning the cause of the fire or the graffiti. As if somebody left a smoke in the wastebasket. As if this was a natural event. In a sense it is a natural event. A hate crime that is an infrastructure attack on the civil rights movement is a perfectly natural event, like a drone firing a missle into a school bus in Yemen while the pilot sits at the Springfield Air National Guard Base here in Ohio. That natural event is followed by the natural denial and coverup. Without a cause a fire can not be arson, without arson there is no crime, without crime there is no criminal and without a criminal there no fascist menace to confront, just the sad natural day to day events of life in America."

The Mockingbird Paper is good stuff, but I want to point out that the struck-through text is NO LONGER TECHNICALLY TRUE, as per the Highlander Center's April 2 2019 facebook status:
facebook.com/highlandercenter/posts/2399172926781803

Highlander Center said:
It’s time for our people to hear more from us.
What we know:
As most of you know, a devastating fire burned down our main office early Friday morning. Thankfully no one was inside the building and no one was injured.
We also found a symbol connected to the white power movement spray-painted on the parking lot connected to the main office.
While we do not know the names of the culprits, we know that the white power movement has been increasing and consolidating power across the South, across this nation, and globally.

Since 2016, the white power movement has become more visible, and we’ve seen that manifest in various ways, both subtle and overt. They’ve targeted and exploited working class and cash-poor white communities searching to find a sense of belonging, dividing them from people who support efforts to improve the material conditions of all people. Their attempts to increase in size and scale impact the realities of our daily lives here because the majority of Black people in this country reside in southern states.
As islamophobic attacks become more prevalent, we’re hyper-aware that the majority of Muslims in this nation are Black people. We know that anti-Semitic attacks have rocked the Jewish community. We know that anti-immigrant forces are consolidating, attacks on reproductive freedoms abound and the politics of the federal government’s executive branch are speaking to the privilege-based fears of the white power movement, emboldening them in ways the 21st century hasn’t seen.

Even in the face of these realities, the southern freedom movement is alive and well. Our folks are winning campaigns. They’re organizing and base building. People are fighting for progressive policies and using direct action to hold people in power accountable.
Highlander is a sacred place built by communities of the most affected people and it has become a home to those who believe in freedom and collective liberation here in the south, across the U.S and around the world. Because of our history we are not surprised that this space, one where marginalized people working across sectors, geographies and identities show up consistently, has been repeatedly targeted over our 87 years of existence.

What’s next:
The safety of our people is and has always been our first concern. The investigation is nowhere near over. We are continuing to survive and monitor the process that takes more time in a rural geography with limited public resources. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office will continue their investigation. The Tennessee Bomb and Arson people will continue to do theirs. We are not confused about how rarely people are ever charged with arson; however, we are surviving and monitoring these investigations.
This is a time for building our power. Now is the time to be vigilant. To love each other and support each other and to keep each other safe in turbulent times. Now is not the time to dismiss how scary things are, which makes it even more important to have concrete assessments of concrete conditions, and sophisticated strategies to build a new world.
What’s next for Highlander is that we will continue to be that sacred place, that movement home, that place where strategy is developed, that place where principled struggle happens, that place that accompanies movement, that place that incubates radical work, and that place that demands transformative justice.
We love you all, we appreciate your patience and questions, and please continue to be vigilant.


For those who take the opportunity to call terrorism and ARSON "criticism," their own rides and homes would do well to face similar critique soon.
 
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blank

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Word, hiding behind a lack of internal accountability does not negate external accountability, no one cares how you label yourself.

Thats why decentralized organizations like Antifa are blamed for the actions of it's worst members, because there's no one to say "that guys not one of us" with authority
Well if there's no structure, hierarchy, process for joining or anything. You can just say "I am part of Antifa" then bitch slap someone. There's no organization. It's just like a really tiny old protest movement that crappy basic cable pundits and Youtube personalities use to scare old people.

Do people remember sharps? The BAD NAZI thing? It's basically that.
 

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