COLUMN: In the zone: CHAZ, Antifa and fascists – Colorado Springs Gazette

When the Seattle police were finally allowed to do their job, the delusional criminals that called themselves the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, for all their bluster, folded like a tent. Under U.S. law, no group may establish an autonomous zone, declare itself a separate country or secede from the Union. (We fought the Civil War over that.) The Chazians had no right to trespass on or appropriate private or public property. Jenny Durkan, Seattles flower-child mayor, who called this dangerous, illegal farce a summer of love, ordered the police to stand down in dereliction of her duty for almost a month. Only after shootings that took the life of a 19-year-old Black man over the weekend and a 16-year-old Black boy on Monday, did Durkan wake up to reality and unleash the cops.

Raz Simone, a radical left-wing rapper and would-be Idi Amin, declared himself the Warlord-in-Chief of CHAZtopia, and issued a long list of unconditional demands: The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, he declared, We demand abolitionThat means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle police. That was just for starters.

He also demanded a ban on the use of force by police to dislodge CHAZ, the destruction of the prison system, socialized health care and medicine for Seattle, citizenship for illegal immigrants and free college and public housing. (Sounds like he was channeling Bernie Sanders and AOC.) But Simone had no standing to demand anything.

Of course, Seattle was expected to pay for all this since CHAZtopia had no money. And what would Simone have done if his demands werent met? Declare war on Seattle? Burn his 6-square-block domain to the ground along with its inhabitants?

Domestic terrorists such as Simone and Antifa arent receptive to negotiation or reason. Theyre delusional revolutionaries who seek power and social upheaval with no practical replacement. Give them an inch and theyll take a mile. Appeasement of domestic terrorists, vandals and looters only encourages more of that, as weve seen in Seattle.

Regarding Antifa, shorthand for anti-fascist, its very name is a fraud. These are self-declared anarchists with no interest in pluralistic democracy. Antifas alignment with socialists directly contradicts its commitment to anarchy, which is the absence of government, whereas socialism is the embodiment of all-powerful government dominating peoples lives. For Antifa, this is a temporary marriage of convenience. The burgeoning socialist revolution in this country is where the action is, and thats what Antifa wants to exploit. It has no interest in the welfare state; it just revels in violent turmoil. While its credo of brutality is reminiscent of Hitlers Brownshirts and Mussolinis Blackshirts, thats a matter of tactics, not ideology.

Fascism, Nazism and communism are variations of the politics of the left. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin were cut from the same cloth. In Nazi Germany, Hitler followed Mussolinis fascist model in Italy after World War I. Hitler was a national socialist (hence, the abbreviation Nazi) as compared to Marx and Lenin who were international socialists dedicated to the spread of this ideology worldwide. In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that ideology predictably evolved into a totalitarian dictatorship.

Safires Political Dictionary traces the root of the term fascism, to fascio, the Italian word for bundle or group. The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Modern Economics defines it as A totalitarian, collective system of government in which central control is exercised over all economic, political and social activitiesentirely eliminating individualism and regarding the state as the highest expression of the will of the group...Private ownership of production is maintained, but extreme restrictions are imposed on private economic freedoms. Decisions on production, investment, prices and wages are all subject to arbitrary government control. This is what conservatives want less of in this country and its precisely what the left wants more of.

The intrusiveness and intolerance of fascist governments are essential parts of the vision of progressive Democrats and outright socialists such as Bernie Sanders and his ideological spawn AOC. The ruthless suppression of free speech subjectively deemed politically incorrect by radical left-wing students on college campuses, enforced by feckless college administrators who deny due process to those accused is fascism in action.

Its laughable when callow left-wing students, with scant understanding of the term fascism and its pedigree, hurl it at conservatives, when its their side thats better defined by that label. They wield the term as a meaningless slur, with the intellectual depth of a 4-year old calling another kid a doo-doo head.

Mike Rosen is an American radio personality and political commentator.

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COLUMN: In the zone: CHAZ, Antifa and fascists - Colorado Springs Gazette