Left and Right

Red Guards on Tofu

My most recent column at Alternative Right. I analyze the stormtroopers on granola.
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The ultimate outcome of totalitarian humanism taken to its logical conclusion would be a totalitarian state organized as a kind of caste system whereby individual rights are assigned on the basis of group identity and group rights are assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed or on the victimological family tree.

Given these considerations, it might be apt to compare our present day lefto-fascist, stormtroopers-on-granola with the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were, of course, bands of youthful vigilantes who scurried about China during the 1960s smashing up cultural artifacts deemed “old” (e.g. conservative, traditional) and engaging in vigilante violence against persons deemed “reactionary” (mostly dissident intellectuals and those labeled “bourgeois” or originating from politically incorrect cultural or class backgrounds.) We see a similar though milder version of this today in the West today with attacks on expressions of traditional culture (like Christmas celebrations), historical artifacts considered to be reactionary (like Confederate Civil War monuments or streets named after Confederate generals), and vigilante actions against people given labels like “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” or “classist.”

I suspect that these “antifa” types, these Red Guards-on-tofu, would be every bit as murderous and destructive if the authorities would sanction it, as Chairman Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. We’ve seen hints at this already with the nonchalant attitude of the authorities towards threats of murder and arson against innocent people made by the Antifa in response to American Renaissance’s planned gathering in 2010. Plenty of other incidents have occurred where destructive or violent behavior by those claiming to act in the name of noble causes like “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism” have been overlooked or dealt with leniently by authorities convinced of the purity of their motives or restrained by political pressure.

The great irony presented by the Antifa is that despite all of their posturing as radicals and revolutionaries, they’re essentially doing the establishment’s bidding. The attitudes they subscribe to are not fundamentally different from those of the liberal elite overlords of the wider society. The Red Guards-on-tofu are simply a smellier, more ill-mannered, undisciplined, more in-a-hurry version of the liberal establishment itself. Wouldn’t it be an even greater irony if indeed the growing counterculture of the alternative right were to grow into a large influential movement as the leftist counterculture and antiwar movements did in the 1960s, with the Antifa and their ilk assuming the role of the “hardhats”?

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