These are worrying times for our country, when armed Neo-Nazis and Klansmen march through the streets of an American city, inciting violence and taking an innocent life. Good people everywhere are horrified, while our president acts as an apologist for those who would exterminate or enslave other Americans.
What are we to do? There is no easy answer. This is America, and people have the right to hold and express even the most repugnant views. At the same time, we cannot go back to an era where the Klan terrorized and lynched people with impunity. We cannot allow Nazis to invade and occupy American cities and towns.
They weren't always like this. I remember protesting a Klan rally here in Fayetteville in 1994. They dressed up in their little outfits (not the pointy sheets, but the "respectable" button-down shirts), waved around flags and did some speechifying. The police kept a distance between them and the overwhelming number of us counterprotesters. At the end of the day, everyone went home, and democracy was preserved.
But when they started adding guns to the mix, it became a very different thing. Armed thugs marching through the streets under un-American flags feels a lot less like an exercise in free speech, and more like an invading force. It is, after all, what every invading force does. It's what the Nazis did in Germany and it's what Mussolini's blackshirts did in Italy. The point is not the "free expression of ideas." The point is intimidation and the implicit (or explicit) threat of violence. This is not protected speech. This is a threat to our civil society.
There is a reason our nation's armed forces will not allow these people to serve in their ranks. They are against the very bedrock, founding principles of our nation: "That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." And they have shown both by their words and deeds that they are willing to attack and kill innocent Americans. They are by literal definition un-American.
So, OK, let them rally around some racist statue -- unarmed, and contained by police. Let them speak -- until and unless they call for violence. Let them issue public statements -- and let our leaders and all good people disavow them. Turn them back into what they once were, and all they deserve to be: isolated crackpots.
DeLani R. Bartlette
Fayetteville
Commentary on 08/24/2017