Self-righteous vandals
Do we have any moderate lefties here who clearly denounce this violence?
Do we have any moderate lefties here who clearly denounce this violence?
Violent left-wing activists have taken to styling themselves as antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists’, though their street-fighting tactics resemble nothing so much as the Brownshirt thuggery practiced by fascists themselves. This did not stop NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson from likening these hooligans to the heroes of World War Two. On the anniversary of D-Day, June 6, while America’s cities still smoldered after days of riots and looting, Liasson took to Twitter to call the Normandy invasion the ‘biggest antifa rally in history’.
Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter. They really do think that America is fascist, at least whenever a Republican is in the White House, and so petty vandalism is actually a heroic act of resistance. Knock the head off a statue of Columbus, smash the glass of every storefront on the street, and you’re defeating Adolf Hitler all over again. Such is the state of historical literacy and what passes for the moral imagination among many with comfortable perches in the national media. You would think that if they had a problem with the establishment, they should throw the first rock at a mirror. Spare the innocent shopkeepers who pay the price for antifa antics. Plenty of them are black or immigrants themselves, if that’s what matters to the worthies of NPR.
Activist academics, for their part, have played a larger role in inflaming the lawlessness. In other lands, archaeologists are people who strive to preserve the monuments of the past. Five years ago in Syria, Khaled al-Asaad, the 83-year-old chief of antiquities for the ancient ruined city of Palmyra, was kidnapped and tortured for a month by Islamic State militants, yet he refused to disclose the whereabouts of the artifacts they sought, and they killed him. In America on May 31 this year, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham named Sarah Parcak — a Guggenheim Fellow, to boot — tweeted out detailed instructions to protesters on how to tear down a 1905 Confederate military memorial obelisk in her own city. The soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy gave their lives for a state that upheld slavery, of course. But the Palmyrene empire had slaves, too. Would Prof Parcak encourage her followers to finish the job that Isis began?
.......
Dumb jokes are nothing new on Twitter. For many liberals today, however, it’s no laughing matter. They really do think that America is fascist, at least whenever a Republican is in the White House, and so petty vandalism is actually a heroic act of resistance. Knock the head off a statue of Columbus, smash the glass of every storefront on the street, and you’re defeating Adolf Hitler all over again. Such is the state of historical literacy and what passes for the moral imagination among many with comfortable perches in the national media. You would think that if they had a problem with the establishment, they should throw the first rock at a mirror. Spare the innocent shopkeepers who pay the price for antifa antics. Plenty of them are black or immigrants themselves, if that’s what matters to the worthies of NPR.
Activist academics, for their part, have played a larger role in inflaming the lawlessness. In other lands, archaeologists are people who strive to preserve the monuments of the past. Five years ago in Syria, Khaled al-Asaad, the 83-year-old chief of antiquities for the ancient ruined city of Palmyra, was kidnapped and tortured for a month by Islamic State militants, yet he refused to disclose the whereabouts of the artifacts they sought, and they killed him. In America on May 31 this year, an Egyptologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham named Sarah Parcak — a Guggenheim Fellow, to boot — tweeted out detailed instructions to protesters on how to tear down a 1905 Confederate military memorial obelisk in her own city. The soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy gave their lives for a state that upheld slavery, of course. But the Palmyrene empire had slaves, too. Would Prof Parcak encourage her followers to finish the job that Isis began?
.......
Comment