Eleanor Penny
Eleanor Penny is a writer, journalist, editor, poet, broadcaster and teacher. She's an editor at Novara Media, and an associate editor at openDemocracyUK.
Quotes
- Chomsky treats the battle against fascism as a battle for moral purity than can be won when the left remain respectful, polite, and deferent. But fascists have no interest in winning that battle. They don't care about respecting free speech or the right to a fair trial; they've openly declared their murderous intent towards people of colour (and other undesirables) and they'll pursue that goal by any means necessary. In this context, physical resistance is a duty, an act of self-defence, not an unsightly outpost of leftist moral decline. What's more - it works. From the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 to similar confrontations in Lewisham and Wood Green in London in 1977, physical resistance has time and again protected local populations from racist violence, and prevented a gathering caucus of fascists from making further inroads into mainstream politics.
- About Noam Chomsky after his comments on the 2017 Charlottesville car attack, as quoted in Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a 'major gift to the right' by Maya Oppenheim, 22 August 2017, The Independent