VIDEO: Anti-fascists clash with lone counter-protester at LD50 Gallery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2I9B4UZEO4
These were the scenes on Tottenham Road in Dalston this morning as anti-fascist protesters clashed with a lone counter-protester.
The protest of the controversial gallery with links to the fascist-leaning ‘alt-right’ online movement started slowly this morning at 11am, but eventually numbered an estimated 300 people, who marched down Kingsland Road before returning to the gallery for closing speeches and demonstration. Organizers vowed to return again to the gallery in the coming weeks, with a view to precipitating its eventual closure.
A police van, several officers and an inspector were present throughout, however the scenes in the above video were about as heated as the protest got. A window above the gallery entrance was broken, however this is thought to have occurred prior to today’s demo. A planned, more numerous counter-protest did not transpire, and no-one representing the gallery was seen or heard from.
Speaking to the Citizen, the counter-protester (who gave his name as D.C. Miller) explained his stance: “[LD50 hosted] people speaking who hold very right-wing ideas. I think that’s a good thing, because I think that we have to be able to have discussion with people who hold these ideas. There are millions of people in the world who have these ideas now. Trying to repress them isn’t going to make them go away. We have to be able to have space where we can talk to each other, not just scream at each other, and I think that a gallery is such a space.”
Protesters congregate around LD50’s entrance. Photograph: Andrew Barnes
A protester, who declined to give his full name and, like many in the crowd, had his face covered, countered this viewpoint: “We don’t care about annoying liberal idiots or hard-right people that want to have free debate or whatever. We care about shutting down organizing spaces…there’s enough evidence to say that they’re organizing in this space. Any kind of fascist organizing causes a physical threat down the line.”
“If they invite people that praise Anders Breivik for killing a bunch of leftists, then why should we wait for their politics to kill a bunch of leftists before we stop them?”
LD50, owned by Lucia Diego, has been heavily tied to the neo-Nazi ‘alt-right’ movement since its “Neoreaction conference” last year. Speakers at that event included Brett Stevens, who has previously praised Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, saying “he chose to act where many of us write, think and dream.”
Online opposition to the gallery has come mainly from the Shutdown LD50! site, put together by Andrew Osbourne. American businessman Brian Caffyn, the benefactor of LD50, this week denied any interest or involvement in its activities when he spoke to a Hackney Citizen reporter.
The ‘lone protester’ was going around interviewing people in the crowd with a dictaphone asking for their opinion on whether they thought the gallery was being ironic, he said he was from Hope magazine
Irony? Dear god
All these left wing morons are good for is shouting people down. How about debating ideas?
and neo-nazi isn’t alt-right, how old are you people? 50?
Yea they debated with Hitler. That went well didn’t it?
And how old are you? Six? The Left has always monopolised violence while screaming hysterically about the ‘evil right-wing’. Anyone who remembers the contemptible Gerry Gable and his security-service linked Searchlight group knows this. If you’re white you are damned by a willingness to betray your own at every turn and call it virtue, eager to sacrifice an entire civilisation just to avoid social disapproval. This is why secretive cultural vandals make sure the useful idiots they recruit are also youthful idiots, those who prefer the company of children like themselves, all sound and fury, all unable to think, the white ones so emotionally needy and desperate to be liked they’ll see their own families dispossessed for the ‘greater good’ of white destruction. People like you label every opponent ‘fascist’ without the first idea what a fascist is or what fascism entails. I don’t know what you do know, but one thing you SHOULD know is that your children will spit on your grave if you win.
50? What’s age got to do with all this? Please don’t be ageist: it gets you nowhere and only puts people’s backs up against you. The matter is highly-charged enough already. I’m a left-leaning resident btw, not an alt-right idiot.
Holy Cow! People are really losing their shit. It’s astonishing to see it happen so quickly. I suppose the suppressed unhappiness, impotency and herd-idiocy is never too far from the surface, and all it takes is a few moves away from the socio/political norms, to reveal it, in all its hideous (and frankly embarrassing) glory.
Hey Guys! You want to shut down an art gallery! An ART GALLERY! (Think about it for a minute.)
An art gallery, that as far as I can tell, gets no public funding. It seems you want to shut it down because it’s an artifact of corrosive evil, tainting everything in a 10 mile radius. Because it organises secretive gatherings that seek to undermine everything ‘We’ have built here, in the beautiful borough of Hackney.
Or do you want to shut it because you don’t agree with its opinions?
Don’t like what it chooses to like or dislike?
Don’t get invited to its parties?
I genuinely fear for the left wing ( and now some of the London art community)
You seem incapable of making rational arguments or engaging in any debate.
What’s happened to you?
You ask (rhetorically) “Is it ok to punch a Nazi?”
Yes. Yes it WAS. From about 1939 – 1945 in fact. ( unless you were a committed Communist, of course)
I would say that if you are to punch a Nazi, now, in Dalston, chances are you’re not going to enjoy the ‘full Nazi-abuse’ experience, unless of course you keep telling yourself that in fact, your ‘victim’ really is a Nazi, because only a Nazi is capable of such vileness.
But I have to say, you look pretty good, angry and solid. I bet all your friends think the same. You’re going to look like you’re doing something. But what exactly are you really doing?
The Nazis are historical. They were once real, but no longer exist as a potent force. You can relax a bit.
Nasty people do exist. They’re everywhere. (seriously!) Some maintain half-educated fantasies about Eugenics and smart uniforms, but by Christ, you guys really take commitment to Nazism to the professional level.
The world is changing very quickly, and I think a good way of dealing with the uncertainty it produces, is to ask questions of it.
A bad way, is to call it something from the early stages of last century, throw bricks at it, and tape its mouth firmly shut, when it utters something that doesn’t sit well with you.
The terrible thing that this pathetic episode illustrates, is how childish and limited, the ‘thinking’ of the Progressive Left has become. This is scary, because if any one of you read a little bit more (or anything at all!) of the writers of NRX/Alt Right, you’d begin to see that some of their insights are extremely powerful. They are a broad church.
But while you’re all out there, hoodies up, throwing bricks, punching Nazis, and shutting down galleries, they’re thinking and talking.
I would imagine that most of them are laughing at you.
I’d laugh but its too tragic
alt left wing fascist cowards and bullies behaving like alt left wing cowards and fascist bullies.why dont you go and protest against isis you brain dead undemocratic thickos with yer backpacks and balaclavas,
Did it not occur to anyone that this whole thing might just be a performance art project, designed to evoke precisely the type of reaction displayed in this thread? The art collective called Decima did something very similar a number of years ago – using the mass media as their medium and making provocative claims simply for the sake of getting a rise out of people. Consider it. Lucia Diego could well just be winding you up for the sake of ‘art’.
Damn those artists. Fooled again!
Free speech in. Anti-free speech red scum out. Whatever they accuse Fascists of, they did worse when in power.
And? Even if that’s true, what difference does that make? And why you put apostrophes around lone protestor first of all it’s lone COUNTER protestor and it’s also accurate.
Everything about your comment is wrong, even if you aren’t lying.
What? First of all, no they didn’t… Second, even if they did he would have said one thing and done another rendering the debate useless and third what are you even trying to say? That debate is bad because world war two happened?
A lot of antifa members have actually gone overseas for the express purpose of fighting ISIS in battle, but don’t let me interrupt your narrative.