Post by maxinquaye on Sept 22, 2017 14:23:24 GMT -5
Twenty-five year old Partik Hermansson is a Swedish anti-fascist activist. No, not Antifa. He's part of the mainstream of antifascist activism; employed by the magazine Expo.se to journalistically document the far right's doings and dealings within the Swedish political duck-pond.
One year ago he dropped out of his normal boring life of press-briefings, research, database mangling to go undercover with the alt-right. It brought him to England, and then to the United States. He documented everything he saw, and what he saw was weird, creepy, and dangerous. At one time he talks about how he went out into the boondocks of the US of A with some militia types who all sat around in khakis fingering their AR-15s. It was scary for a Swedish kid who's probably never seen a gun before.
You can read about his work on this here in this New York Times article, but that's not what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is this article in The Atlantic that asks the silly question, is it "Ethical to record Nazis?"
And I ask myself, why do we always land in this situation?
Why don't people ask the difficult questions of the people who are, you know, actual self-confessed Nazis. This kid did a really brave thing. He should get a slap on the back, a grunt, and someone should buy him a well-deserved beer. That's what should happen. He does, after all, walk in the footsteps of giants in journalism who has used the undercover-tool to expose great stories, great events, and grievous wrongdoing. Such as with actual self-confessed Nazis.
One year ago he dropped out of his normal boring life of press-briefings, research, database mangling to go undercover with the alt-right. It brought him to England, and then to the United States. He documented everything he saw, and what he saw was weird, creepy, and dangerous. At one time he talks about how he went out into the boondocks of the US of A with some militia types who all sat around in khakis fingering their AR-15s. It was scary for a Swedish kid who's probably never seen a gun before.
You can read about his work on this here in this New York Times article, but that's not what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about is this article in The Atlantic that asks the silly question, is it "Ethical to record Nazis?"
And I ask myself, why do we always land in this situation?
Why don't people ask the difficult questions of the people who are, you know, actual self-confessed Nazis. This kid did a really brave thing. He should get a slap on the back, a grunt, and someone should buy him a well-deserved beer. That's what should happen. He does, after all, walk in the footsteps of giants in journalism who has used the undercover-tool to expose great stories, great events, and grievous wrongdoing. Such as with actual self-confessed Nazis.
