As Trump faces Charlottesville reckoning, Joe Biden shows why America must call out extremists of all shades
Niall Ferguson says the Charlottesville backlash shows the worm has turned against Trump, but Joe Biden’s ‘there’s only one side’ tweet highlights how similar censure is rare when violence is perpetrated by anti-fascists or Islamists
The line Trump had crossed was rhetorical. He had failed to denounce with sufficient speed, conviction and clarity the white supremacists and neo-Nazis whose rally in Charlottesville led to the death of a young woman.
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Trump did belatedly say what needed to be said on Monday. “Racism is evil,” he declared, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.” However, before and after that statement, he also said that there had been violence “on many sides”. On Tuesday morning, Trump insisted there was “blame on both sides” (as well as “very fine people on both sides”) and that some “alt-left” groups had been “very, very violent” on the streets of Charlottesville. “They came charging with clubs,” he alleged.
“There is only one side,” tweeted the former vice-president, Joe Biden, in response.
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I yield to no one in my contempt for fascists and racists. I have spent much of my career as a historian trying to fathom why bogus theories of racial difference became so widely and fanatically believed that millions could be murdered in the name of racial “purity”. Those who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” and waving swastika flags are indeed beneath contempt.
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Nevertheless, I feel uneasy about Biden’s “there is only one side” – if it is intended to be a general statement about political violence. There is only one side when it comes to Nazism: you have to be against it. But there is more than one side engaged in political violence. This is not to defend Trump. This is to defend truth.
[Anti-fascist] groups made no secret of their interest in physical confrontation
First, the counterprotesters at Charlottesville included representatives of the anti-fascist (“Antifa”) movement. In social media in the days before the “Unite the Right” rally, Antifa groups made no secret of their interest in physical confrontation.
In Germany, where the movement traces its roots to the communist paramilitary groups of the 1920s, Antifa groups have long been under domestic surveillance as “extremist organisations”. Several individuals linked to Antifa were charged with assault after the riots outside July’s G20 meeting in Hamburg. Also last month, three Antifa members were arrested for fighting with Trump supporters at a rally in Philadelphia. Some American Antifa groups prefer to cast themselves as heirs to a domestic historical tradition, such as the radical abolitionists who instigated and aided slave rebellions in the 1850s. But this, too, implies political violence.
According to the Cato Institute, “nationalist and right-wing terrorists” have been responsible for 219 murders on American soil since 1992, while left-wing terrorists claimed “only” 23 lives. Then again, three-quarters of victims of the far right were killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, 22 years ago. More than half the leftist murders have taken place since the beginning of 2016.
Islamic extremists have killed more than 10 times as many people as the far right in the US since 1992
I do not remember Biden, much less his boss, tweeting, “There is only one side” after any Islamist atrocity. On the contrary, Barack Obama often used his considerable eloquence to make just the opposite point. In his speech after the 2012 Benghazi attacks, he even went so far as to say: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
Trump blew it last week, no question. But, as the worm turns against him, let us watch very carefully whom it turns to – or what it turns into. If Silicon Valley translates “There is only one side” into “Censor anything that the left brands ‘hate speech’,” then the worm will have turned into a snake.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford
