We remember the murder of Heather Heyer in a white supremacist terror attack in Charlottesville this day in 2017 during the Unite the Right march of Klu Klux Klan, Nazi revivalists, and other feral lunatics of racist ideologies and psychopathic rage.
Trump’s authorization of violence against nonwhite people in the infamous line “There are good people on both sides” will remain a badge of the cruelty and criminality of his regime for all history.
The legacy of Charlottesville must be our vigilance against fascism., for in Heather Heyer we can see us all.
Charlottesville, and the Trump regime’s institutionalization of its white supremacist terror and criminality as ICE and its campaign of ethnic cleansing for which many of the perpetrators of this and other hate crimes were hired specifically because of their membership in Nazi Revivalist and other hate groups like the KKK, Oathkeepers, and Proud Boys, and including insurrectionists who stormed our capital to murder members of Congress, proves that the purpose and mission of America as a guarantor state of our universal human rights and of the equality of all human beings remains a paramount and ongoing ground of struggle for antifascist patriots both here at home and where ever men hunger to be free.
On August 11 of 2025 Trump commemorated the Unite the Right march and authorized its fascist and racist ideology by placing Washington DC under Occupation by federal terror forces. This he has tried before in a general campaign of repression of dissent and the criminalization of our rights of protest and free speech in numerous failed attempts to steal our citizenship and reduce us to subjects during the Black Lives Matter protests, and our capitol city is but the first of many of his list of majority nonwhite cities to terrorize; but there is no question or ambiguity of the meaning and intention of such crimes of tyranny and terror.
The Confederacy many of the Deplorables dreamed of refounding under the Trump regime was nothing more grand than a human trafficking syndicate that had declared itself a nation.
And we know Trump’s history as a human trafficking crime lord and key partner of his friend Epstein.
This is the world Trump would condemn us all to; wherein human beings are things that can be owned and used.
And above all else, the America of the Republican Party is a white ethnostate whose economy is based on the re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor, with migrants and other nonwhites gathered into concentration camps and the bond of their labor sold on the open market to white elites exactly like the Bantustan system of South Africa and those of the Nazis whom Trump idolizes.
To make an idea about a kind of people is an act of violence.
And no matter where you begin with divisions of belonging and otherness, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
As written by Blake Montgomery in Buzzfeed, in an article entitled Here’s What Really Happened In Charlottesville: Who came ready for violence? Was it on “many sides”? The answers are clearer on the ground; “Yes, you can blame the Nazis.
The race-fueled chaos that wracked Charlottesville, Virginia, finally came to rest on Sunday night. And the hundreds of people who spent the weekend fighting in streets — and the millions who watched them — began what has become a new American ritual: arguing about what really happened, and what a spasm of localized political violence means.
Was this an assault by racist extremists on innocent, rightly outraged Americans? Was it a clash between “many sides,” as President Trump notoriously said? Was the scale of the white supremacist threat blown out of proportion? Was the violence of the black-hooded “antifa” understated?
The answers are clearer on the ground than they are in the filter bubbles driven by fierce partisan argument on social media and cable news. They are complicated but not ambiguous. Here are a few:
The right-wing protesters were relatively homogenous — in ideology and appearance — and largely ready for violence. They ranged from old-line racists like the Ku Klux Klan to the ones who wear polo shirts instead of hoods who try to brand themselves “alt-right.” There was no ambiguity about their cause — they demand the nation become whiter, and they are emboldened by a White House administration they believe makes that promise when the president yells “America first.”
The counterprotesters, in contrast, represented a far broader spectrum of the American center and left. There were self-identified “anti-fascists”; Black Lives Matter activists from around the country; religious leaders, including around 100 Christian ministers wearing their clerical collars; furious Charlottesville residents; and garden-variety liberals from as far away as Seattle. A handful of the “anti-fascists” wore Black Bloc garb — black shirt, black pants, black balaclava — to conceal their identities from police, though most did not.
The right-wingers were more prepared for violence. Most white supremacist and Nazi groups arrived armed like a paramilitary force — carrying shields, protective gear, rods, and yes, lots of guns, utilizing Virginia’s loose firearm laws. They used militarized defensive maneuvers, shouting commands at one another to “move forward” or “retreat,” and would form a line of shields or a phalanx — it’s like they watched 300 a few times — to gain ground or shepherd someone through projectiles. It seemed that they had practiced for this. Virginia’s governor said that the right’s weaponry was better than that of the state police. The opposition was largely winging it, preferring to establish bases in other parks with water, coffee, food, first aid, and comfort. Conflict would start much the same as it has at other alt-right rallies: two people, one from each side, screaming, goading each other into throwing the first punch.
By Sunday, even among the most radical voices on the left, there was incredulity at attempts — from various swaths of the mainstream to pro-Trump media, and of course, the president himself — to compare them to their enemies. This is Trump’s “many sides.”
“No one on our side is calling for vast swaths of the public to be put to death,” said Lacy McAuley, an anarchist activist based in DC who led counterdemonstrators in a march through the streets.
That is all to say that the neo-Nazis came to fight. And then their car attack escalated their rolling American streetfight with antifa to a far deadlier level than previously seen.
White nationalist organizer Jason Kessler set the stage for the bloody day when he announced months ago that he would “Unite the Right” against the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation Park in downtown Charlottesville.
On Friday night, white supremacists gathered for an eerie torchlit march through the University of Virginia. They fought with counterdemonstrators and menacingly encircled student activists who held the line at the statue of Thomas Jefferson — the image of the darker circle of students surrounded by the light from burning tiki torches becoming an image that traveled widely on social media. The torch-bearers were chanting the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and the KKK mantra “You will not replace us.” Richard Spencer led a similar march in Lee Park on May 15 to protest the removal of the statue of Lee.
Kessler scheduled the Saturday rally to start at noon. By the time BuzzFeed News arrived at 10:30 a.m., violent conflict was already in full swing.
Through the day, the right-wing extremists brawled with the leftists who had really come to fight, all in a park formerly named for a Confederate general. The day got bloodier and more dangerous until 1:45 p.m., when a young man identified by police as James Alex Fields, 20, drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of anti-racist counterdemonstrators, and peeled away in reverse. He allegedly injured 19 people and killed one, Heather Heyer, in the act of terrorism.
Hard to see from afar, but intensely visible on the ground, were the different shades of right-wing extremist. They included new racist and personalities like social media personality Baked Alaska, Spencer, and Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group that argues for pure European heritage, alongside more old-school hate groups like the Traditionalist Workers’ Party, affiliated with the KKK, and the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization that held its ornate banner, which clearly evokes a Swastika, aloft throughout the day. Fields was marching with Vanguard America, a small white nationalist organization, wearing the group’s uniform and carrying its shield.
A few of the counterprotesters — namely members of a group called Redneck Revolt — were armed with shotguns, assault rifles, and pistols.
But there were many more guns on the right, many carried by a group called the Three Percenters, a heavily armed “patriot” militia group that’s acted as security at other alt-right rallies in Portland and elsewhere. The group’s views align more with libertarianism — fundamentalist interpretations of the Constitution and an emphasis on personal liberty — than with the alt-right.
Those groups, evidently aware of the real danger, appeared to keep members of each side separate from the other in certain areas. Three Percenters stood on one side of Emancipation Park, Redneck Revolters a few blocks away at a different park.
Three Percenters said in an official statement after the rally that they disowned the racist groups at Unite the Right and issued a stand-down order during the rally. But they also served as a kind of armed guard for their leaders: After police forced the white nationalists out of Emancipation Park, Three Percenters formed a protective barrier around alt-right blogger Mike Enoch and Spencer. Enoch appeared to have been pepper-sprayed.
The area of most intense conflict was on the steps into Emancipation Park. Each side squared off against the other in a schoolyard turf war. At around 11:00, counterdemonstrators deployed a large sign made from plywood spray painted with “alt-right scum your time has come” and a decapitated Pepe the Frog. It doubled as a barrier and quickly became a prize, with each side fighting to gain control of it. Eventually it fell, right-wingers stomped on it, and people continued fighting.
Each side also threw dozens of water bottles at the other. It was the preferred projectile of the day, along with rocks, tomatoes, broken flagpoles, and balloons filled with paint, one of which splattered a police car.
Right-wing extremists carried a variety of different flags — the libertarian “Don’t Tread on Me” with the familiar sliced-up snake, flags with symbols of the racist neo-pagan cause Odinism, Confederate flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, Kekistan flags, and others. Counterdemonstrators made a game of stealing the banners, though right-wingers would beat them with the shorn flagpoles.
The weapon of choice — for the police, right-wing fighters, and antifa alike — was pepper spray. Police used the most, blasting it from large canisters at protesters. None of the fights that broke out lasted very long because one side or the other would use pepper spray to rescue their combatants.
Around noon, both state and local police declared Unite the Right and the demonstrations in the surrounding streets an unlawful assembly. They evicted everyone from Emancipation Park by a police line. Right-wing extremists and white nationalists fought the police, which is highly unusual. (At previous rallies in Berkeley and Portland, the alt-right has complied with police direction and sought permits for their gatherings, which has helped them maintain the stance that they are acting in self-defense when things get violent. The permits, in particular, ensure that their left-wing antagonists, often antifa in Black Bloc formation, end up on the wrong side of a police riot shield.)
In Charlottesville, though, white nationalists, including Spencer, leaned against police’s riot shields in a desperate attempt to keep their place. Police pushed them along the entire length of the park and down the stone steps into a waiting, screaming crowd.
While police were removing people from the park, counterdemonstrators had a chance to storm one side of it as right-wingers retreated. There were mixed messages among right-wingers, some of whom said to fall back and some of whom wanted to hold their ground despite police warnings.
One young white man carrying the black and white flag of Odinism started brawling with counterprotesters even as his own comrades retreated.
“Let’s get this race war started! Shoot me!” he yelled.
Instead, a counterdemonstrator stole his flag and tried to escape over a police fence. The man with the Odinist flag followed the protester, grabbed his backpack, and smashed his head into the metal barricade.
After police vacated the park by force, both sets of protesters splintered. BuzzFeed News followed a group of white nationalists and Black Lives Matter activists who engaged in a brutal brawl involving metal poles in a parking garage adjacent to the Charlottesville police station. One of the victims, De’Andre Harris, said he was yelling curses at white nationalists and was wearing a white scarf with curses about the Klan scrawled on it. They chased him, caught him, and beat him with wooden poles and punches.
When Fields allegedly drove his car into a crowd after the crowds were forced from the park, people at the intersection of 4th and Market were hysterical, calling out for friends and asking people they knew if others in their circles were safe, though each person seemed to have less information than the last. Emergency responders had difficulty making their way to the site of the attack because of the crowd’s sheer size. After, there were isolated reports that white nationalists were driving around town taunting people, but things remained largely quiet.
The day after the rally, Kessler attempted to hold a press conference but was run off by protesters. Later, on Periscope, he disputed the characterization of the rally as affiliated with the KKK or neo-Nazis, saying it was “only about the statue” and blaming the day’s carnage on police inaction. Many right-wingers at the rally have charged police and Charlottesville city government with the crimes of the day.
He did not reject the description of it as a white nationalist rally, and he did say that the KKK and neo-Nazi groups who were slated to speak had “good points to make.” He exaggerated the extent of the antagonism right-wingers faced by saying that antifa were armed with rifles and that right-wingers had been pinned in the park by thrown bricks. Police in fact evicted right-wingers from Emancipation Park, and the only left-wingers armed with guns appeared to be blocks away.
At the heart of the arguments since Saturday has been the question: Was this a symmetrical battle between two parallel sides?
Sheryl Gay Stolberg @SherylNYT posted on social media “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park” 2/2 03:34 AM – 13 Aug 2017.
Each side did engage in intense violence and attempted to seriously injure the other. But when the battle lines were formed, the right came better equipped and ready to use force to defend their belief that white people are better than nonwhite people. And on the white supremacist side is Fields, whose alleged act was named terrorism by people from the far left to members of the Trump cabinet (but not the president himself). He is charged with one count of second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of hit and run.
After posting the tweets above, Sheryl Gay Stolberg later apologized and modified her statement, clarifying that she was talking about physical violence rather than hate.
On the ground, leftists were incredulous at the parallel between the Nazis and their range of enemies.
“One side wants to eject all black people from America, the other wants fair hiring,” said Emily Gorcenski, a Charlottesville activist. “It makes me sick to hear people say both sides are equally bad, especially when we tried so hard to make it nonviolent.”
Despite the deep enmity on the ground in Charlottesville, the violence came after some backchannel efforts a week ago to prevent it failed. Gorcenski met with C.J. Ross and Daniel Highberger, members of the Virginia Three Percenters, in Fishburn Park in Roanoke, Virginia, last Saturday, Gorcenski and Ross both confirmed.
Ross had been in conflict with right-wingers online; he did not want the event to have white nationalist overtones and did not want the Three Percenters to participate if it did. Kessler personally disinvited him. He went in plainclothes.
Ross was looking for Gorcenski at the time of the car attack. She said she was mere feet from the Dodge Challenger. He said he was around the corner. In the mayhem following the attack, Ross said he tried to make way for emergency responders. As paramedics went to work, he said he got into conversation with Black Lives Matter activists and found he liked and agreed with them.
“I had a great conversation with them. I’d never met anyone in a BLM group before. These particular people said they were all about freedom and liberty as well,” he said. “Something awful happened, and, for me at least, it turned into a small positive thing, which, I think, is what we all want.”
As written by Eliott C. McLaughlin in CNN, in an article entitled Charlottesville rally violence: How we got here; “Despite the outrage and uproar, everyone had to know the protests were coming to Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend – and that they would get out of hand.
This is how we got here.
It began in February when the City Council voted to rechristen two parks named for Confederate generals and to remove a bronze statue of one of those generals, Robert E. Lee, from an eponymous downtown park.
This came on the heels of several Southern cities removing dozens of Confederate monuments from public property after a self-described white supremacist massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The Charlottesville move met with resistance, as some residents sued, and a judge blocked the statue’s removal for six months as the matter was litigated.
The City Council voted again in April, this time agreeing to sell the statue and let the buyer remove it, CNN affiliate WVIR reported.
Violence began in May
Prominent white nationalist RIchard Spencer led a demonstration in mid-May that served as prelude to Saturday’s violence. Angered by the city’s decision, torch-wielding demonstrators marched on the city, drawing condemnation from its leaders who regarded the protest as intimidation.
They were met by counterprotesters carrying banners that read “Black Lives Matter” and “F**k White Supremacy.”
Police made three arrests. One police officer was injured when a flying object struck him in the head.
Fast-forward to July, and about 50 Ku Klux Klan members, some in Klan robes, arrived in the city, where they were outnumbered 20-to-1 by counterprotesters.
Shouts of “Racists go home” clashed with chants of “white power.”
Police had to employ pepper spray and tear gas to disperse crowds. They arrested 22 people.
The most recent violence began Friday night, ahead of a planned Saturday rally that the Southern Poverty Law Center described as the “largest hate-gathering of its kind in decades.”
Charlottesville had tried to move the demonstration, citing safety concerns, but a federal judge issued an injunction allowing the rally to take place at Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park and the site of the contentious statue.
Jason Kessler, who organized the “Unite the Right” rally, said the rally was aimed at “standing up for our history.”
“The statue itself is symbolic of a lot of larger issues,” including preserving history against “revisionism,” combating political correctness, advocating for white interests and free speech, Kessler said.
Scuffles erupted near a statue of President Thomas Jefferson on the nearby University of Virginia campus. Police declared the demonstration illegal and ran off the white nationalists and counterprotesters.
The Saturday event lived up to its SPLC billing, as fistfights and screaming matches broke out in this blue town of 47,000 that is home to Monticello, Jefferson’s onetime estate.
Protesters fired pepper spray at each other. Police scrambled to disperse the crowd ahead of the rally’s noon kickoff and declared an “unlawful assembly” just before the rally was slated to begin.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe quickly declared an emergency.
“Go home,” the Democrat told right-wing groups in the city. “You are not wanted in this great commonwealth. Shame on you.”
By 1 p.m. police had cleared Emancipation Park, and by early afternoon, police in riot gear stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind their shields, at times advancing toward protesters.
Fights continued to break out, with people kicking and swinging at each other, while other protesters tried to de-escalate tensions without police intervention. One side chanted, “Blood and soil!,” an old Nazi slogan, while counterprotesters cried, “Nazi scum off our streets!”
Police reported 15 injuries associated with the rally, but that toll jumped around 1:30 p.m. when a man drove a silver Dodge Charger into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old local paralegal whose father said she was always fighting for others.
Nineteen more people were injured. Video shows the Charger barreling down a narrow side street packed with protesters. It slams into a silver convertible, throwing one protester onto the convertible’s roof.
The driver then backs down the street, its bumper dragging, and several protesters give chase.
The suspect being held in a Virginia jail in connection with a deadly crash near a scheduled rally of white nationalists has been identified as James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Maumee, Ohio.
Authorities later arrested James Alex Fields, 20, of Maumee, Ohio, jailing him on suspicion of second-degree murder, malicious wounding and failure to stop in an accident that resulted in death. The Justice Department is also looking into the case.
A social studies teacher at Fields’ Union, Kentucky, high school later told CNN the young man had “outlandish, very radical beliefs.”
“He really bought into this white supremacist thing. He was very big into Nazism. He really had a fondness for Adolf Hitler,” said Derek Weimer, who taught Fields as a junior and senior.
The day got deadlier just before 5 p.m., when two Virginia State Police troopers died after their helicopter crashed while they were on patrol near the clashes. They were identified as Lt. H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Trooper-Pilot Berke M.M. Bates, 40.
While President Donald Trump issued his condolences to the families of Heyer and the troopers, he issued a controversial statement on the violence, admonishing “hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides,” rather than singling out the white nationalists who staged the rally.
As written by Chris Cillizza in CNN, in an article entitled Donald Trump’s incredibly unpresidential statement on Charlottesville; “A group of white supremacists – screaming racial, ethnic and misogynistic epithets – rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday. One person was killed and 19 others were injured when a car sped into a group of counter-protesters.
This is what the President of the United States said about it:
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”
It’s hard to imagine a less presidential statement in a time in which the country looks to its elected leader to stand up against intolerance and hatred.
Picking a “worst” from Donald Trump’s statement – delivered from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club – isn’t easy. But, the emphasis of “on many sides” – Trump repeated that phrase twice – is, I think, the low ebb.
Both sides don’t scream racist and anti-Semitic things at people with whom they disagree. They don’t base a belief system on the superiority of one race over others. They don’t get into fistfights with people who don’t see things their way. They don’t create chaos and leave a trail of injured behind them.
Arguing that “both sides do it” deeply misunderstands the hate and intolerance at the core of this “Unite the Right” rally. These people are bigots. They are hate-filled. This is not just a protest where things, unfortunately, got violent. Violence sits at the heart of their warped belief system.
Trying to fit these hate-mongers into the political/ideological spectrum – which appears to be what Trump is doing – speaks to his failure to grasp what’s at play here. This is not a “conservatives say this, liberals say that” sort of situation. We all should stand against this sort of violent intolerance and work to eradicate it from our society – whether Democrat, Republican, Independent or not political in the least.
What Trump failed to do is what he has always promised to do: Speak blunt truths. The people gathered in Charlottesville this weekend are white supremacists, driven by hate and intolerance. Period. There is no “other side” doing similar things here.
“Mr. President – we must call evil by its name,” tweeted Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colorado. “These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism.” Tweeted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, another fellow Republican: “Very important for the nation to hear @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists.”
What Trump is doing – wittingly or unwittingly – is giving cover to the sort of beliefs (and I use that word lightly) on display in Charlottesville today.
Chalking it all up to a violent political rhetoric that occurs on both sides and has been around for a very long time contextualizes and normalizes the behavior of people who should not be normalized. It is not everyday political rhetoric to scream epithets at people who don’t look like you or worship like you. Trump’s right that this sort of behavior has existed on American society’s fringes for a long time – but what we as a nation, led by our presidents, have always done is call it out for what it is: radical racism that has no place in our world.
So, that’s the big one. But there are other things in Trump’s statement that are also worth calling out – most notably “not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.”
What Trump is doing here is pre-emptively absolving himself of blame for creating a political climate in the country in which people like these “Unite the Right” demonstrators feel emboldened enough to rally in public. Not my fault, Trump is saying. There were hate groups and hate speech under Obama too!
With someone dead and more than two dozen people injured, this is, of course, not the time for assigning blame. Or for making political calculations. This is a time to say: We stand together against what we saw in Charlottesville today. Trump didn’t do that. Not even close.
Then, last but not least, is what Trump said a few paragraphs after his “on many sides” comment. Here it is:
“Our country is doing very well in so many ways. We have record – just absolute record employment. We have unemployment, the lowest it’s been in almost 17 years. We have companies pouring into our country. Foxconn and car companies, and so many others, they’re coming back to our country. We’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country and great for the American worker. We have so many incredible things happening in our country. So when I watch Charlottesville, to me it’s very, very sad.”
White nationalist Richard Spencer and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Lee Park after the “Unite the Right” rally was declared an unlawful gathering August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the “alt-right” clashed with anti-facist protesters and police as they attempted to hold a rally in Lee Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is slated to be removed.
Really? A pivot to an I-am-not-getting-enough-credit-for-all-the-good-I-am-doing-in-the-country line? With scenes of hatred splashed across TV screens? With someone dead?
This speech is not the time to tout your accomplishments. I mean “we’re renegotiating trade deals to make them great for our country”? Who thought that was a good thing to say in the same speech in which Trump, theoretically, was trying to reassure people that what we all saw in Charlottesville is not, fundamentally, who we are?
That no one – starting and ending with the President – raised a red flag about tacking on a laundry list of accomplishments to a speech that should have simply condemned the behavior in Charlottesville and called to our better angels, is staggering, even for this White House.
There are moments where we as a country look to our president to exemplify the best in us. They don’t happen every day. Sometimes they don’t happen every year. But, when they do happen, we need the person we elected to lead us to, you know, lead us.
Trump did the opposite today.”
As I wrote in my post of January 16 2021, Silence Is Complicity: No One Gets to Sit This One Out; A post in which I quote Adam Parkhomenko elicited an interesting reaction from someone, one which makes me question how the rhetoric of fascist and racist privilege creates complicity; the quote is in reference to the massive responsibility avoidance and denial on the part of the Republican lawmakers who refuse to join the call impeach our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, and his rabble of murderous barbarians.
Here is the quotation; “I have a very simple message for Republicans calling for unity without accountability: the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.”
This was the reaction; first, repetition of the very call for unity without accountability, which I would characterize as granting permission through failure to consequent behaviors, which the quote calls out; “These words are just creating more divisions!”
Second, an attempt at silencing dissent; “Please Stop!”
Third, an attempt at blame shifting; “Whenever one person thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong you are the problem!”
And Fourth, the very worst of the apologetics of historical fascism, a claim of moral equivalence; “Everyone just needs to stop all of these posts because there are good people on both sides!”
And this last I cannot let pass, for on the last occasion of its general use this propagandistic lie and rhetorical device led directly to the Holocaust and the global devastation of total war.
I am unclear which good people she could be referring to; the ones who were going to capture and hang or guillotine members of Congress, the ones who murdered a police officer and attempted to bomb both the Democratic and Republican offices, the white supremacist terrorists who have rallied to the cause of treason and armed sedition, or the mad tyrant who commanded them?
To this I replied; You are wrong. Treason, terror, and the murder of police officers has no excuse. You are either with us as American patriots or against us; no one gets to sit this one out and be counted among the honorable, the moral, and the loyal.
Silence is complicity.
Such is the Talmudic principle, “Shtika Kehoda”, famously paraphrased by Einstein in his 1954 speech to the Chicago Decalogue Society as “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity”, and referenced by Eli Weisel as “the opposite of love is not only hate, it is also indifference.”
Martin Luther King said it this way in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story; “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
John Stuart Mill expressed a related idea in his 1867 Inaugural Address to the University of St. Andrews; “Let not anyone pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci formulated it as resistance to tyranny, with which he was very familiar in the wars of dominion between the princes of Renaissance Italy; “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
Silence is complicity.
Should this concept require further clarification, please refer to the following recording and transcript of Elie Wiesel’s Millennium Lecture at the White House, on April 12 1999, hosted by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; “Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends: Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again.
Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people.
Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary — or Mrs. Clinton — for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations — Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin — bloodbaths in Cambodia and Nigeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence, so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.
What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting — more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were, strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.
Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps — and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.
If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945, so he is very much present to me and to us.
No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — maybe 1,000 Jews — was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already on the shores of the United States, was sent back.
I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, a great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we called the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war?
Why did some of America’s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity. But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine. Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Elie Wiesel – April 12, 1999”
Charlottesville, Revisited—2017 to 2024
What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times?
Charlottesville: An American Story, Deborah Baker
24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy, Nora Neus
‘Enabling It to Happen Again’: How Charlottesville Led to the Capitol Attack/ PBS Frontline
Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy, Timothy J. Heaphy
‘Hyperbolic and false’: Trump’s portrayal of crime in Washington DC has little to do with facts, Sam Levin
Just as with Los Angeles in June, Trump’s claims about DC are rooted in false and misleading claims about crime and homelessness, experts say
D.C., Here’s What We’re Gonna Do, by the Women’s March
‘Wake up!’ Fear as Trump DC move seen as ‘giant red trial balloon’ for rest of nation
Trump seizes control of Washington DC police and deploys national guard
President claims US capital ‘overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals … and homeless people’
Donald Trump’s incredibly unpresidential statement on Charlottesville/ CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/politics/trump-charlottesville-statement
Here’s What Really Happened In Charlottesville
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/heres-what-really-happened-in-charlottesville
Charlottesville rally violence: How we got here
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-rally-timeline-tick-tock
https://id3563.securedata.net/thpmediasources/audio/speeches/thp-wiesel-perils.mp3
