Boston showed how mass action can defeat fascists

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12 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2017 In the days following the Aug. 11-12 white-supremacist “Unite the Right” conclave in Charlottesville, which ended with the murder of Heather Heyer, antiracist and anti-fascist protests erupted in hundreds of cities and towns across the United States. About 3000 marched in Philadelphia on Aug. 16, and 1000 rallied in Portland, Ore., two days later.

The largest counter-mobilization took place on Aug. 19, when tens of thousands of demonstrators filled Boston Common and marched through the streets to say, “No Nazis, no KKK, no fascists in the USA!” The huge outpouring of protesters dwarfed a simultaneous rally of right-wingers in Boston Common. The Boston Herald reported that upwards of 30,000 joined the counter-protest, and police officials said that 40,000 were there.

One counter-protester told Yahoo News: “I’m here because I stand against hate; I stand against bigotry; I stand against ignorance. A fire is being lit on that side [of the racists], and we need to squash it—we need to squash it soon. We need to show them how small a segment of our society they really are.”

The right-wing organizers had predicted that several hundred would attend their so-called “Free Speech” rally in Boston. And although the organizers avowed that their event had nothing to do with racism, they encouraged the participation of outspoken racists and other leading figures from the far right. Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, assured the media that KKK members from Massachusetts would be there. But in the end, the Klansmen never showed up.

Also scheduled to speak were Joe Biggs, a former writer on the Infowars conspiracy website, and Kyle Chapman, former director of the New Zealand National Front, a white-supremacist party. Chapman is facing charges of attacking anti-Trump demonstrators with a lead-filled stick in Berkeley, Calif., in March. However, it does not appear that either man attended the Boston event.

News reports said that few more than 20 people participated in the right-wing event. The participants were forced to pack up early, without any of the scheduled major speakers having addressed the rally. As police escorted the right-wingers into police vans to make their getaway, the counter-protesters sang, “Hey, hey, goodbye!” It was an important victory for the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement. Far right envigorated by Trump election Following the election of Trump to the presidency, white supremacists and fascist forces felt that they had a fresh wind in their sails. The KKK’s official newspaper, The Crusader, and David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Klan, had endorsed Trump’s candidacy and were outspoken in their support once he was in office.

The Trump campaign caps that read, “Make America Great Again” served as a kind of uniform for many of the rightist marchers in Charlottesville. No doubt the wearers were emboldened by Trump’s stance against Muslims and other immigrants, and more recent declarations such as his ban on transgender people in the armed forces, his call for police to “rough up” people that they apprehend, and his speech in Poland on increased militarization in order to uphold the values of “Western civilization.” Racist violence and other acts of bigotry, such as the desecration of mosques and synagogues, have increased since Trump’s election. Trump’s remarks following the terrorism in Charlottesville, in which he insisted on placing blame for the violence on “all sides,” further lifted the spirits of the racists, fascists, and the “alt-right.” But the huge outpouring of protesters around the country, and especially in Boston, showed that mass counter-mobilizations are the surest way to deflate and deflect these Michael Dwyer / AP (Above) Tens of thousands of protesters surrounded far-right meeting in the bandstand on Boston Common. reactionary forces. It gave evidence that tremendous numbers of people are determined to join the fight against racist intolerance and the ultra-right. Moreover, Boston showed that truly massive counter-protests are effective in helping to avoid the sort of violence that took place in Charlottesville. The huge demonstration of people who declared, “Hate has no home in Boston,” was able to scare away the Klan and other violence-prone thugs who had hoped to attend the rightist rally.

White supremacists planned at least nine rallies nationwide for the weekend of Aug. 19-20 alone. But in virtually every case, protesters came out in even greater numbers to counter the racist events. Some of the rightists’ rallies, as in Dallas, were called ostensibly to denounce plans to dismantle the statues celebrating the slave-holding Confederacy, which were set up throughout the South during the days of Jim Crow segregation. The Dallas anti-racist counter-mobilization drew over 2000 participants, who chanted, “This is not Charlottesville!”

Hundreds marched to Martin Luther King’s tomb in Atlanta on Aug. 19 in a protest against white supremacy organized by a new coalition of civil and human rights groups, Georgia Resists. Also on Aug. 19, at least 4000 protested a right-wing event in Vancouver, B.C. The right-wingers, some of whom carried Confederate flags, said that they were opposing Islam and the Canadian government’s immigration policies. Right-wingers planned events in San Francisco and Berkeley on the weekend of Aug. 26-27. But both events were called off after broad coalitions, with the backing of key sectors of the labor movement, were formed to organize large counter-mobilizations (see (continued on page 11, in “Bay Area mobilizations counter neo-fascists”)