I hate to break this to you. You are correct in that they are fascists and IF they ever got into power they would tread on the rights of their political opponents to do things like mail out campign literature. Just like YOU seem to want to do.

Fascism isn't JUST a phenomenon of the right. Movements of the left can obviously be fascist too. Not all that much better than the right wing sort.

Yawn, usual right-wing trolling from MDN.

Don't bother feeding the troll, see them for what they are and ignore.

You can't fight fascism with fascism. Facism coming from the left isn't greatly preferable to fascism of the right. Just because our enemies want to take away our rights doesn't mean that we can fight back by trying to take away theirs.

In fighting the fascists we have to be careful not to become fascists ourselves. Fascism isn't NECESSARILY a creature of the right. Not NECESSARILY correlated to economic politics but concerned with the authoritarian vs libertarian spectrum.

I don't think MDN is a right-wing troll, I think it just comes from a different set of cultural values over in the US. Freedom of speech there is elevated to the highest importance, above things like privacy and inciting racial hatred. These things are a standard part of the US libertarian left, whereas in Europe the priorities are slightly different.

Personally I think it's OK to beat fascists because that is what they would ultimately do to you if they got power, but I can see MDN's point of view.

But I'm not that sure the difference is cultural values per se.

From time to time you've had elements of a libertarian left over your side too. Perhaps the real difference is that over here the authoritarian left never got into power to stand us left anarchists up against a wall.

I wouldn't quite put it as saying that I placed "free speech" and "the right to vote" above things like "discrimination" and "racism". But making progress on one front by major sacrifices on another might not be much progress. And yes, a "right to vote" does imply that the a*holes get to organize parties and vote too.

Is it really that hard to see? Being willing to mix it up with them on the streets isn't the same thing as trying to interfere with their right to vote. Might be able to defeat RIGHT WING fascism that way but the price would be insitituting LEFT WING fascism. From an anarchist perpective not that great an improvement.

Over here we tend to "populist" rather than strictly speaking "fascist" movements. But that's equally susceptible to flipping left to right as fascism is. Look more closely at history. Not all the right wing fascist movements of the past century started out on the right.

I'm not really sure you can say that encouraging postal workers to exercise their right to refuse to deliver fascist and racist propaganda is itself "fascism". Surely that's just the right to NOT help promote free speech you disagree with? Are you saying that if you were a postie you would deliver fascist leaflets when you weren't even legally obliged to?!?

Also, fascism implies centralisation, so I don't think anarchist individuals physically attacking fascists can be described as "left fascism" either. If a left-wing government organisation did it, then sure, but that isn't the case.

There's a danger that fetishising free speech becomes wooly-minded liberalism.

There was a load of interesting comments on here yesterday - where have they all gone to?

You can see the hidden ones here:
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/04/449330.html?c=all#comments

I don't think they were trolls or that controversial - I think the Indymedia admins are being a bit heavy-handed here.