@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:I hope you aren't here endorsing Izzy's nonsensical assertion that such political thuggery is unique to the so called "far right". The fact is that it has been a tool of authoritarian extremists of both the left and the right for a very long time. In their early days the SA brown shirts battled with their equivalents in the then German Communist movement.
I'm not saying that it it is unique to the far/extreme right.
But it was here in Germany.
Political violence was the order of the day throughout the Weimar Republic. In the last years of the republic, however, it reached its peak. National Socialists and Communists fought bloody street battles almost daily.
The Red Front Fighters' Federation (RFB) was the paramilitary combat unit of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in the Weimar Republic. It played for the KPD the role that the SA had for the NSDAP. The left RFB, which at its best had some 150,000 members, never gained the importance of its right-wing counterpart.
The RFB was founded in 1924 and banned in 1929.
Before 1924, the right had already had numerous military units and battle groups, like the
Stahlhelm ("steel helmet"). And the SA.