Charlottesville Requiem

Charlottesville Requiem

Who Did What To Whom?

By Philip Giraldi
The Unz Review
August 25, 2017

The hysteria unfolding regarding events in Charlottesville reminds
me of the anti-Russia madness that has made front page news ever
since Hillary Clinton discovered that she had lost the presidential
election to Vladimir Putin.

The media train is again rushing headlong into a terra incognita
with its only goal being to bring down President Donald Trump
by riding a wave of anti-right wing extremist revulsion.

The establishment press is essentially enforcing its own code
of ethics, insisting that just because what the mainstream
characterizes as morally repugnant, “Nazi-scum” and white
nationalists exist they are ultimately fully responsible for
any violence that is required to defeat them and disrupt their
activities.

For the ubiquitous talking heads like Wolf Blitzer and Rachel
Maddow to believe otherwise is to posit moral equivalency between
the good guys and bad guys, something that cannot be tolerated.

As far as I can determine, almost no one knows much about the
specific agendas of the various parties that were involved in last
week’s fracas in Charlottesville.

My own viewpoint extends only as far as a strong belief that the
deconstruction of this nation through the elimination of select
historical monuments is wrong, particularly when said monuments
commemorate people who fought and died for their country.

As I am a Vietnam-era army veteran I would concede
that my judgment in that regard is somewhat skewed.

That aside, there are several other issues that should be of general
interest that have been largely obscured by the violence that
erupted and the media interpretation of the event to fit in with its
own preferred narrative.

First and foremost is the free speech issue which is being
conveniently ignored by a media and political class intent on
punishing the white nationalist protesters no matter what rights
have to be trampled along the way.

As far as I can determine, the primary objective of the Unite-the-
Right gathering was to protest against removing a statue, so one
has to at least assume that some demonstrators were there in good
faith based on that issue.

And surely many of the counter-demonstrators were there to
protest peacefully against some of the admittedly extremist
groups marching under the Unite umbrella.

If President Donald Trump chooses to describe those individuals as
good people, that is up to him to make that assessment based on
what he was witnessing and hearing, but that is not what is really
important.

As far as I am concerned it matters not a whit whether some of the
Unite marchers call themselves neo-Nazis or alt-Right because they
had a permit to march and had a perfect right to gather, speak out
and demonstrate.

No one has a right to attack someone else or silence them because
you disapprove of them.

That is what the First Amendment is all about, the protection of
every individual’s right to speak his or her own mind, particularly
important if one is expressing unpopular or unorthodox views.

It matters not at all if the speaker is a Communist, Fascist,
a Green or a Libertarian, he or she has the same right.

If that speaking-out morphs into threats of violence or degenerates
into actual violence there are laws to deal with that, so free speech
is not and should not be construed as a license to run amok.

Likewise the so-called Antifa protesters had a right to demonstrate
and deliver their message though it is somewhat troubling that they
appear not to have had a permit to gather and the police allowed
them to effectively take control of the streets.

One might also note that it is the political left, so called
progressives, that have been in the forefront of using violence,
particularly on college campuses, to shut down debate on issues
they object to.

They have successfully denied access to speakers who are routinely
vilified as, “racists” or “Nazi-scum” including Ann Coulter, Milo
Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray and Ben Shapiro, and have, “shut
down” pro-Donald Trump rallies.

They push their agenda while simultaneously ignoring the racism
and domestic terror agenda of groups that they approve of like
Black Lives Matter.

This counter-demonstration in Charlottesville might easily be seen
as the latest manifestation of that particular form of left-wing self-
righteous bigotry, to shut down by violence a group that hard core
leftists are not willing to tolerate.

It is important to bear in mind that there is great danger
in selectively endorsing politically correct Free Speech.

If either the left or right is successful and we lose our First
Amendment rights through “hate speech” legislation or
other forms of state censorship such as have been introduced
in Europe it is safe to say that we will have lost our republic.

A second major issue is the role of local, state and federal
government in what both did and did not happen.

I have looked at a lot of footage of the rioting and have
also spoken to several people who were there as observers.

I wanted to know just how big the alleged Nazi and Klan
contingents were, – 100, 500, a 1,000? – which would
seem to me to be essential to understanding what took
place.

When I sought to discover more about the size of the groups
that demonstrated and counter-demonstrated I learned that
there was nothing definitive in the media on the issue.

I had been told by one of the witnesses that the so-called white
nationalists were greatly outnumbered and had not initiated the
violence, which would certainly alter the narrative.

So I picked up the phone and eventually got through to the
Charlottesville police department only to be told that there
had been no public declaration of the numbers involved or
sequence of events but someone would call me back.

No one has returned the call and I find it very odd that those
in authority have not even bothered to describe the event and
how it developed from an official point of view, if only for,
“lessons learned” to correct the procedures in place that led
to the violence.

There was in fact a considerable police presence in the area,
even accounting for bathroom breaks and donut runs, but it
was invisible where it needed to be, i.e. keeping the two
groups separated, which it had apparently agreed to do after
meeting with the organizers of Unite-the-Right.

Both right-wing and left-wing participants in the protests have
described how the police closed the park with the Lee statue
before standing around and only “looking on” when the fighting
started.

It is difficult to describe this failure to separate the groups and
clear the streets as an oversight, so it must have been deliberate.

Charlottesville has a liberal Democratic mayor named Mike Signer
who quickly climbed on the bandwagon to condemn the Unite-the-
Right protesters before, during and after the events of Friday night
and Saturday.

He appeared on national television in an interview with Jake
Tapper on the morning after the Saturday riot to lay the blame
for the unrest on Donald Trump.

One wonders what orders the Charlottesville police had received,
not to mention the numerous state troopers present who were
under the control of Governor Terry McAuliffe, another liberal
Democratic stalwart.

Who attacked whom?

Why did no one intervene until the fighting was well under way?

Was the official indifference just dumb or deliberate?

And finally, there is the possible role of the federal government
in what developed.

One media source has identified some of the allegedly radical
groups that came together to demonstrate on both sides.

Among the so-called supremacist groups one finds the Alt Knights,
Klu Klux Klan, Identity Evropa, Traditionalist Youth Network,
League of the South and the so-called “3% Risen.”

On the left, there was Antifa and Redneck Revolt.

Interestingly, though the media has made much of the fact that
some of the right-wing activists were armed, it has chosen to
overlook the fact the some of the left, most particularly Redneck
Revolt, also brought their guns along while many more counter-
protesters were prepared for action, carrying baseball bats and
wearing helmets and balaclavas to hide their faces.

In any event, neither side resorted to the use of firearms.

In reviewing the list of the various groups involved in the protests,
I was reminded of the old quip that the American Communist Party
only survived financially speaking in the post Second World War
environment because it had been heavily infiltrated by dues
paying members planted by the FBI.

Placing one’s informants in the middle of a radical group is a
time-honored practice that has exploded in the U.S. since 9/11.

Hardly any arrests in so-called terrorism cases are made
without an FBI informant being somewhere on the scene.

Of course, the informant is not supposed to encourage
or participate in any illegal action, but lacking a fly on
the wall when something goes down who is to know?

FBI officers get promoted on the basis of arrests made and both
domestic and international terrorism constitute high priority
targets.

I would assume that there FBI informants among the Klu Kluxers,
the neo-Nazis and also within Richard Spencer’s National Policy
Institute.

On the left, I would bet there were some inside sources
working the Redneck Revolt and Antifa.

The likelihood that there were paid FBI informants on both sides
of the conflict leads me to believe that the federal government
knows exactly what took place on August 12th in Charlottesville,
but perhaps no one has either the guts or requisite integrity to
be honest about it as it might be embarrassing all around.

What if it turns out that the politically more acceptable counter-
demonstrators deliberately provoked the violence and were
allowed to get away with it?

Even as I write this the tsunami, “orgy of self-righteousness”
as George Neumayr describes it, connected to Charlottesville
continues to grow.

Steven Sailer has asked how long it will be before an alleged neo-
Nazi is publicly lynched with the media blaming the victim for his
own demise?

And with all those apparent storm troopers marching around, it
hasn’t taken long for Jewish groups to raise the specter of a tide
of anti-Semitism in America all due to Trump, which inevitably
means that the accommodating media and pandering politicians
will get their talons into this story for a long time to come on
that basis alone.

Al Sharpton meanwhile wants to defund the Jefferson Memorial
and there are moves afoot to remove all the statues of former
slaveholders from the Capitol building.

Can James Madison, James Monroe and even George Washington
himself be next?

Will Washington the city be renamed Tubman?

Stay tuned.

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/charlottesville-requiem