Antifa members should read historians of Nazi Germany, like Laurie Marhoefer of the University of Washington, who writes that anti-fascist street fighters who greeted a Nazi rally with violence thought that they had won by disrupting a rally and fighting its speakers back in 1927. They sent a message that “Fascism was not welcome.” But instead, “events like the rally in Wedding [a Berlin district] helped the Nazis build a dictatorship.” The Reds got media attention, but it led to escalating street violence, all of which helped the Nazis, who painted themselves “as the victims of a pugnacious, lawless left.”

Leftist violence in the 1930s in Germany led many to support the Nazis in the hope they would put an end to the continuing street brawls and violence. Today, the antifa left may even help to get Donald Trump reelected in 2020.

Ronald Radosh
September 11, 2017
‘Emergency Brake’ Antifa Says It’s Fighting Fascists. It Just Might Be Helping to Re-Elect Donald Trump.
[The political left is violent by nature.

This prediction is consistent with what I have said before.—Joe]

Bray and others have come to use the intellectual freedom of our universities to advance the most anti-intellectual movement in our history. They are destroying the very academic institutions that have protected their extreme views. Just as the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, said that “physicists have known sin,” the antifa movement is the sin of academia in abandoning our core values.

These protesters believe that history shows the dangers of free speech and the need to deny it to those who would misuse it. It is a familiar sentiment that “all the experience… accumulated through several decades teaches us… to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.” Those were the words of another early anti-fascist, China’s Communist Party leader Mao Zedong.

Jonathan Turley
August 29, 2017
The hypocrisy of antifa
[It’s not just the the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms that the political left want to destroy. One can pretty easily make the case that they want total control over a huge portion of your life. Speech, your money, your property, and even what you think. Orwell was correct when he wrote of “thoughtcrime.” I just wish the political left could be persuaded to view Nineteen Eighty-Four as a dystopian novel rather than a “how-to book”.—Joe]

ARTICLE 125. In conformity with the interests of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. are guaranteed by law:

a. freedom of speech;
b. freedom of the press;
c. freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings;
d. freedom of street processions and demonstrations.

These civil rights are ensured by placing at the disposal of the working people and their organizations printing presses, stocks of paper, public buildings, the streets, communications facilities and other material requisites for the exercise of these rights.

1936 CONSTITUTION OF THE USSR
CHAPTER X

FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CITIZENS
[H/T Richard.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn might have questioned the efficacy of this article and others. See, for example, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One).

People today would be well served to question the efficacy of our constitution as well. The people of the Soviet Union “believed in the system” even when the NKVD was arresting 25% of entire towns. And even when tens of thousands of people “disappeared” in the middle of the night to never be heard from again.

Read our constitution and Bill of Rights and then look at our Federal Government. Then think about it. Then figure what you can and need to do to fix that. Then, do it.—Joe]