The Unite the Right trial is exposing the chasm between who plans White nationalism's battles and who does the fighting
A key federal defendant accused of conspiracy over the 2017 Unite the Right rally was forced this week to confront his own explicit calls for violence -- and who should do the actual fighting -- in the months before the deadly event unfolded in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Christopher Cantwell is among 25 defendants being sued for his role in the gathering that brought together far-right groups and racists for a weekend the main organizer had privately billed as "The Battle of Charlottesville."
Cantwell, who's known as the "crying Nazi," has tried to make the case that the threat that weekend from counterprotesters, including far-left antifa activists who track White nationalists online and try to disrupt their rallies, justified the White nationalists' acts of violence.
But on the stand, Cantwell had to listen to recordings of his own podcast, including one from January 2017 -- some eight months before the deadly Charlottesville rally -- in which he discussed Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine people at a Black church in South Carolina.
Roof "had no future" and so was "exactly the kind of person who should be committing acts of mass murder," said Cantwell's guest, a guy from the neo-Nazi gossip blog The Daily Stormer. Cantwell agreed: "Not everyone's going to be a professional propagandist, shall we say. Some of us got to be fucking cannon fodder for the race war."
Plaintiffs in the Charlottesville suit argue the chaos that erupted there was intentional and planned by the defendants in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence. They have presented thousands of pages of evidence -- private messages, podcasts, chat logs, even an ex-girlfriend's testimony -- detailing how the alt-right anticipated violence and how they approached the critical issue of who among them could be counted on to enact it.
What has become clear over three weeks of trial is that, for all their talk of brotherhood and unifying the White race, some in the White power movement expected others to carry out violence for the sake of their cause and considered those people disposable.
It is perhaps not surprising that a movement that dehumanizes large groups of people would treat its own members with casual cruelty. Still, it's one reason they're turning on each other with spectacular bitterness in court.
右翼团体审判暴露了谁计划白人民族主义的战斗与谁进行战斗之间的争论
在弗吉尼亚州夏洛茨维尔发生致命事件之前的几个月里，一名被指控在 2017 年联合右翼集会上共谋阴谋的主要联邦被告本周被迫面对他自己明确的暴力呼吁——以及谁应该进行实际战斗。
克里斯托弗·坎特维尔 (Christopher Cantwell) 是被起诉的 25 名被告之一，因为他在一个周末将极右翼团体和种族主义者聚集在一起，主要组织者私下将其称为“夏洛茨维尔之战”。
被称为“哭泣的纳粹”的坎特威尔试图证明，那个周末来自反抗议者的威胁，包括在网上追踪白人民族主义者并试图破坏他们的集会的极左反法活动分子，证明白人民族主义者的行为是正当的。暴力。
但在看台上，坎特威尔不得不听他自己播客的录音，包括 2017 年 1 月的录音——在致命的夏洛茨维尔集会前大约八个月——他讨论了迪伦屋顶，他于 2015 年在黑人教堂谋杀了 9 人在南卡罗来纳州。
来自新纳粹八卦博客 The Daily Stormer 的 Cantwell 的客人说，屋顶“没有未来”，因此“正是那种应该犯下大规模谋杀行为的人”。坎特维尔同意：“不是每个人都会成为专业的宣传员，我们应该说。我们中的一些人必须为种族战争做他妈的炮灰。”
夏洛茨维尔诉讼中的原告辩称，那里爆发的混乱是被告有意和计划的，阴谋实施出于种族动机的暴力。他们提供了数千页的证据——私人信息、播客、聊天记录，甚至前女友的证词——详细说明了另类右翼如何预期暴力，以及他们如何处理其中谁可以被指望的关键问题制定它。
在三周的审判中已经清楚的是，尽管他们谈论兄弟情谊和统一白人种族，但白人权力运动中的一些人希望其他人为了他们的事业而实施暴力，并认为这些人是可以丢弃的。
一场将大批人非人化的运动会随意残忍地对待自己的成员，这也许并不奇怪。尽管如此，这也是他们在法庭上以惊人的痛苦互相攻击的原因之一。
