Tara Isabella Burton · Saturday, August 12, 2017, 1:02 pm
The latest alt-right rally over a Confederate statue represents a terrifying resurgence of Nazi rhetoric.
The alt-right rally last night at the University of Virginia campus and today in the city of Charlottesville is technically about a statue of Robert E. Lee. But common to many participants in the rally is a willingness to use — and celebrate — Nazi symbols and ideology.
Last night’s protesters shouted anti-Semitic and Nazi-associated slogans, including "blood and soil”: a phrase that references the German ideology of Blut und Boden: the idea that a person is defined by his or her relationship to ethnic ancestry (blood) and the land they cultivate (soil).
Protesters also shouted “Jews will not replace us” (a more explicitly anti-Semitic take on “you will not replace us”, a white-supremacist alt-right slogan that arose in response to actor Shia LaBoeuf’s anti-Trump performance art piece “He Will Not Divide Us”).
Attendees at the rally also wore Nazi paraphernalia, carried flags with swastikas alongside Confederate flags, and wore shirts with quotations by Adolf Hitler.
To those demanding photographic evidence of Nazi regalia in #charlottesville, here's what's on display before breakfast. Be safe today pic.twitter.com/sbdkgv9eD1
— Andy Campbell (@AndyBCampbell) August 12, 2017
Protesters are doing something more terrifying than expressing hatred
The use of anti-Semitic slurs and Nazi imagery is ubiquitous among certain factions of the alt-right. But the rhetoric and imagery of Charlottesville, in which the tropes of the Ku Klux Klan -- including the burning torches of last night’s protest — and the trappings of Nazism collide, is particularly unsettling. In adopting the Nazified ideology of Blut und Boden, the Charlottesville demonstrators aren’t just expressing hatred against one group of people: something that would be sickening enough on its own.
Rather, they’re doing something even more terrifying: advocating for a radically reactionary understanding of societal relations: one predicated on the idea that one’s obligation is solely to fight for the future and the well-being of people who look just like them.
They’re also, implicitly, firing up their base by creating an even greater chasm between the “good old boys” — whom they portray as defending their own -- and their enemies: the implicit metropolitan (and coded-as-Jewish) elites: a strategy that may yet work to gather more disenfranchised, rural whites into the fold.
Read more
https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138352/this-weekends-charlottesville-rally-shows-how-close-good-old-boys-and-nazis-really-are
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
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