We have seen things in our country that most of us never expected to see. Violent people carrying guns and torches shouting hateful fascist, racist, anti-Semitic slogans. How to respond without being drawn into the same mode of behavior?
Violence, say the anti-fascist (antifa) strategists, is a bad strategy. It can only escalate already tense and dangerous situations.
So anyone considering setting up to oppose alt-right and neo-Nazi demonstrations might consider getting some white makeup and a red fright wig. This is what one small city in Germany has been doing. Instead of copying the violent actions of the local far-right thugs, they are showing them up as silly. Even Steve Bannon, late of the White House, has said that these people are a bunch of clowns. So why not mock them?
As an article in The New York Times on Aug. 17 commented: โBy undercutting the gravitas white supremacists are trying to accrue, humorous counterprotests may blunt the eventsโ usefulness for recruitment. Brawling with bandanna-clad antifas may seem romantic to some disaffected young men, but being mocked by clowns? Probably not so much.โ
In an essay by Phillip Roth about the Czech dissident writer Ivan Klima, Roth describes a scene in Prague during the end of the Communist era where he sees a crowd on the street standing in front of a TV. People are laughing loudly. Roth wonders if it is a stand-up comic performing, but no, it is a politician and the crowd is mocking him. The Czechs had learned during their terrible years of oppression that satire worked better than guns. Nothing would make our own dear leader more frustrated, I believe, than to be laughed at.
Meanwhile, there are the Confederate leadersโ statues. Take them down? Leave them up? Leave them up but with educational labels to explain their significance?
Again, hereโs an example from the former Eastern Bloc, Hungary, which remained behind the Iron Curtain until 1989. What to do with all those overblown, bombastic Communist statues? In 1993, when I traveled to Hungary with another friend with Hungarian roots, we visited the park where those monuments to a dead system were being moved. It was quite a scene โ all these huge sculptures and bas reliefs assembled on a muddy spot that would eventually become a manicured park. The architect of the project, รkos Eleลd wrote eloquently, in words I think might apply to our current situation:
โThese statues are a part of the history of Hungary. Dictatorships chip away at and plaster over their past in order to get rid of all memories of previous ages. Democracy is the only regime that is prepared to accept that our past with all the dead ends is still ours; we should get to know it, analyze it and think about it!โ
Besides, the business of the physical statues is just a distraction from the real questions that our terrible current regime has raised and the hornetsโ nests it has stirred up. So, please, send in the clowns.
Marietta Pritchard
Amherst