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Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA |
Update: 11:00 a.m. PST – State of emergency as white nationalist rally in Charlottesville turns violent
Thanks to Trump, the alt-rights national recruitment program in America is thriving.
Today, Neo-Nazis and KKKer’s will take over the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. The event is being called “Unite the Right.” It’s a siren call to fascists, racists, Neo-Nazis, Klan members, and anarchists.
Organizers are expecting 1000 people to attend. Perhaps more, if their pre-rally recruiting did well. Some are calling it the biggest racist rally in recent memory.
While there have been dozens of far-right rallies since Trump’s election, this will be the first major, national rally run by the alt-right’s openly white nationalist wing.
Charlottesville has seen multiple white nationalist rallies this year. The first, a May 2017 daytime event, was followed by a nighttime torchlight photo-op.
Led by alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer, attendees chanted Nazi slogans like “blood and soil.” The second, in July, was a KKK rally.
The white nationalist rallies have been ostensibly held to oppose the removal of a statue of former Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. But don’t kid yourself; it’s not that the alt-right gives a tinker’s damn about history, but they do know how to exploit it for their agenda.
Some progressive groups will be there to counter-demonstrate. Hopefully, it won’t turn into a riot. Americans are not particularley happy right now with how things are going; the threat of a nuclear war with Korea, and Trump’s racist immigration policies have set the stage for a high level of tension right now.
The last thing this country needs is idealogical warfare turning into massive street fights across the country.
Counterprotests serve as an immediate denucication of a current event – like this hate rally – but they are not the answer to the problem. The answer lies in sharing the truth about these groups.
Exposing the hate in the alt-right movement is not hard to do. Countering it takes more than a one-off protest against a current event. Silence is not golden when it comes to opposing hate.
We all need to voice our oppostion to this wave of hate through whatever means are available to us. Nearly everyone has access to a computer and social media. We can all write our legislators and voice our opinion.
Finally, most importantly, we can all be examples of tolerance by the way we live, and how we interact with others.
As It Stands, call me old-fashioned…but I believe love trumps hate.
The Creative Chronicles of Dave Stancliff 