Arrests, Violence at Stone Mountain as Counter-Protesters Clash With White Supremacists
I am always conflicted when I post news regarding white supremacist hate rallies like this one. The conflict arises from the tension between giving the racists what they want versus giving them what they really need. The counter protesters almost always outnumber the hate propagators, and you have to wonder if you are just giving team hate unwarranted notoriety by reporting the event.
What supremacists want is for people to pay attention to their theater of white victim hood, as well as their unsubtle retconning of history; however what what they really need is for people to see them for what they really are. They are in a subtle but very real way victims - not victims of other races, but rather victims of a primitive worldview where tribes and ethnicity matter more than character, deeds, or individual accomplishment and worth.
These sick and twisted individuals are victims of the white privilege traditionalists from the South, those soft spoken pols and tribalists who propagate the myths of Southern White Nobility and victim hood that existed well prior to the Civil War.
The followers who heed the politco’s dog whistles are usually uneducated white Southerners who find it easy to externalize their problems by blaming other races and large scale conspiracies. They are the ones who view their sad state of being through the facile lenses of hate. So even as we revile the leaders, we should allow a small pinch of pity for their evil followers who through fear or intellectual laziness have succumbed to the racist message.
It’s the ugliness of tribal supremacist philosophy and the cynical chess move of using rural white poor to counter urban ethnic poor that must always be revealed; because at the end of those games it’s always the pawns on both sides that lose.
Only about two dozen white power demonstrators showed up at the “Rock Stone Mountain” rally and, by early afternoon, they were packing up to leave after one man arrived with a large red flag advertising the Ku Klux Klan. Organizers had said they didn’t want such symbols at the event.
But despite the low turnout - they had predicted up to 2,000 attendees - and the wave of counter-protests that left them isolated inside a barricade, organizers declared the event a success.
“They didn’t win. They didn’t shut us down. We had a successful, peaceful rally,” said Joseph Andrews, 37, of Kennesaw.
But counter-protesters said they had carried the day. As they peeled off to return home, Dawn O’Neal and Shweta Malhotra hugged, claiming victory over the Klan.
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