In reality, and when one examines the issue closely, and especially what those who take a dissident position (in America and Europe and to a limited extent in the Southern Cone of South America) have written on the topic, there is a wide range of opinion.tillingborn wrote: ↑Fri Oct 07, 2022 4:04 pmI think the people waving Nazi flags might reasonably be called Nazis...
It runs the gamut from general disapproval/detestation up to open admiration. But in nearly all cases (that I have examined) there is an aspect of revisionism. Not a falsification of history but a re-interpretation of it. I have gathered that many of those who do think in these ways have come to believe that they have been lied to more or less from *day one*. That they see themselves as living under a régime which controls how history, and therefore the present, is interpreted. Something along the lines of Orwell's assertion in 1984:
This realization, or perhaps it should be called paranoia, leads them to look at those things which they were taught were 'absolutely evil' and utterly immoral from a different perspective. What I try to point out is that there is an extremely wide range of dissident opinion operating in the American body politic at this time. Most people, those who read only conventional sources, are simply not aware of the opposition. And they are not aware of the ideation that supports that opposition."Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past," repeated Winston obediently. "Who controls the present controls the past," said O'Brien, nodding his head with slow approval.
Bringing a Nazi flag to Charlottesville could be an indicator of someone having Nazi sympathy, that is true, but within the dissident circles themselves there was a certain amount of speculation that such a flag was brought in order to tarnish the image of the Unite the Right rally. So the point that I would make is, realistically, I am not convinced that there is, within the dissident circles, anything like a 'Nazi ideology'. But I would not deny that in America there have been openly sympathetic Nazi admirers. George Lincoln Rockwell being a good example 1961, This Time The World:
Tillingborn continues:In Mein Kampf I found abundant 'mental sunshine' which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like lightning bolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness; brilliantly illuminating the heretofore obscure reasons for the world's madness. I was transfixed, hypnotized. I could not lay the book down without agonies of impatience to get back to it. I read it walking to the squadron, I took it into the air and read it, propped up on the chartboard, while I automatically gave the instructions to the other planes circling over the desert. I read it on the Coronado Ferry. I read it into the night and resumed the next morning. When I had finished, I started again and reread every word, underlining and marking especially magnificent passages. I studied it, thought about it and wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it. How could the world not only ignore such a book, but damn it and curse it and hate it, and pretend that it was a plan for 'conquering' the world, when it was the most obvious and rational plan for saving the world which has ever been written? Had nobody read it, I wondered, that people went around saying it was the work of a mad "rug-chewer"? How could sensible people get away with such monstrous intellectual fraud? Why was it so hated and cursed? I could see why the Jews would hate and curse it, but why my own people? I reread and studied it some more. Slowly, bit by bit, I began to understand. I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic worldview of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific, racial idealism, actually, a new 'religion' for our times. I saw that I was living in the age of a new worldview. Two thousand years ago there had been a similar rise of a new approach or worldview, called a 'religion'; a worldview which shook and changed the world forever.
At the same time, actually preceding that riot, there were far more consequential rioting, terrorism and destruction brought on by those of an apparently different political persuasion. I know, that was a bit of whataboutism. However it is true.Some of the people involved in the assault on the Capitol would qualify as terrorists. People who bomb abortion clinics. There really are people prepared to use terror and violence to achieve their aims.
A better example of rightwing terrorism was the Christchurch massacre and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting qualifies as terrorism.
But the term 'terrorist' is defined as:
I think I would agree that the invasion and occupation of the Capital had 'insurrectionist elements' (in the sense that it was a riot and also in the sense that some intended to disrupt government business and process) but I do not think it qualifies as a terrorist act.Terrorism: the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective. Terrorism has been practiced by political organizations with both rightist and leftist objectives, by nationalistic and religious groups, by revolutionaries, and even by state institutions such as armies, intelligence services, and police.
On the other side of the coin I would at least make cite the use of Federal police (the FBI) to go after a wide range of private individuals and political organizers with somewhat dissident opinions in recent days, and their arrest in the course of spectacular raids, as a sort of political terror.
The bombing of an abortion clinic is certainly extreme violence. But (from one perspective) what is done in those clinics is perceived as and interpeted to be the initial or instigating violence. Still I take your point.