Paul2
Philosopher
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2004
- Messages
- 8,553
This is another example of the power of labels compared to what the label is supposed to stand for. Who cares if you label yourself fascist or anti-fascist? What counts is your behavior towards fascism. The labels can obviously be mis-used.I can speak to the point of view on both of these--
The point of view from the right that you describe is not that the "snowflakes" and "antifa terrorist" are the same people--the "antifa" are the scary communist thugs, the "snowflakes" are their enablers.
On the question of "when did anti-fascist become a bad thing" -- I do have to call fallacy there. The lion's share of people on the right who don't like Antifa aren't "yay, fascists!". They don't believe that antifa are actually against fascism--they think Antifa are just using the label as PR and want to establish an authoritarian state themselves.
They may be mistaken, but that is not logically inconsistent, nor historically really--consider the "DPRK" not being actually democratic.
I don't think it's helpful to defend that hill: "But being against fascism is good!"-- it misses the target. What matters is if their actual behavior is justifiable. Sometimes it is, and I think sometimes it isn't. We're not going to pretend that CHOP was a model to emulate, are we?
A similar point is made by atheist Matt Dilahaunty, who says that it doesn't matter whether you call yourself an atheist or not (at least as far as epistemology goes), what matters is what you believe and on what basis.