Hate Hits The Streets

Three lives lost and a country in shock – America counts the cost of its shameful far-right protests.

- Jane Vorster

THEY arrived in darkness, clutching flaming torches and chanting racist slogans. White supremacists on a mission to shock and intimidate – just like they’ve done at many other low points in American history. But the big difference this time was that instead of being just a few cowardly bigots hiding behind masks there were hundreds of them and they were proud to show their faces.

Waving Confederate flags and banners adorned with swastikas they shouted Nazi phrases like “blood and soil”. And it wasn’t just empty talk. The next day blood flowed in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

It’s being described as “America’s day of shame”. With several hundred taking part, it’s thought to have been the largest gathering of right-wingers in the US in decades. And at the end of it all three people lay dead and a couple of dozen others were injured.

The world was aghast. How could this be happening – in America of all places, which has one of the most liberal constitutions on earth? But happen it did.

The Unite the Right rally was ostensibly in protest of a decision by local officials to remove a statue of Robert E Lee, a top general who fought for the confederacy of southern states in the US Civil War in a bid to maintain white supremacy and stop the abolition of slavery. Yet commentators reckon it’s about so much more than just a historical figure atop a horse.