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Anytime fascists in USA have a PR/optics problem, like for example a parade of them marching and spouting fascist slogans or when one of their fans commits a mass murder, this counter messaging inevitably emerges to explain no it’s Actually Leftists who are violent terrorists.
It’s an old tactic. In Condor propaganda from the 70’s in Argentina, the strategy was the same. Leftists were labeled as violent terrorists and targeted for extermination and right wing death squads were called “counter terrorist forces” or “hardliners” (see: a few bad apples).
It was coordinated psychological warfare against leftists by the military dictatorships who controlled the Southern Cone, there are receipts in CIA docs & NSA archives. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/MEETING%20OF%20CONDOR%20MEMBER%20%5B15503008%5D.pdf it's too bad this document is still redacted decades later but there's enough info...
It's really eerie to read these old cables and see the same patterns emerging today against the left. See: any cable that mentions "Triple A" from Argentina (there are many) https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976BUENOS04852_b.html
And here's a fun fact I learned recently, I was shocked I never heard about it before. British journalist Robert Cox was arrested in 1977 and taken to the central police station in Buenos Aires. There was a 10 ft x 10 ft swastika painted on the wall there. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1977STATE191385_c.html
Any prisoner that was brought to this police station had to walk past the giant swastika. The word "Nazinacionalismo" was painted underneath. And the US State Dept knew, and the Argentine police knew, and the generals knew. Everyone knew it was there. #SomeOfThoseThatWorkForces
Anyway I'm off on a tangent that I could tweet about literally all day. But the point is, anyone calling the left "antifa terrorists" or using the pejorative term "antifa" is participating in deliberate counter-messaging to shift the narrative away from right wing extremism.
And I've got receipts for that too. This was the user-to-user graph for 30,717 #AntifaTerrorists tweets from August 2019.
PS: if you want to read more about the Argentine dictatorship and how a large swath of Argentine society was silent while atrocities were happening right in front of their faces, I highly recommend reading this: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/20/silence-is-health-how-totalitarianism-arrives/
I wrote this thread while researching this article for CJR about a US PR firm that worked for the Argentine dictatorship. Exaggerating crimes committed by the left and downplaying human rights abuses by the right was part of a professional PR strategy: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/william-f-buckley-and-argentinas-dirty-war.php
