Oh, look what I accidentally dropped as I stumbled through the room…
Clumsy me.
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Everyone wants to feel safe. You are not safe.
I disagree with speaking for “everyone”, but if you want to feel safe, then go ahead and do it. As an indigenous queer communist person who is all kinds of marginal, I don’t expect to obtain feelings of safety from without. My “realist” view of culture is that it is usually based upon conflicts, and like being in any war, the only safety is in death when your mission is complete. Death is perfectly safe, and everybody does it. In fact, if one doesn’t feel compelled to neurotically cling to one’s life, ideals, the lives of others, etc then one is in a much calmer, somewhat more objective position to act from. Knowing that you are already for all practical purposes dead, it is impossible to be intimidated. Meanwhile, whenever people are fixated on possibilities which are unthinkable, they tend to be paralyzed with tension and fear, to lash out without strategy, act ineffectively, and make bad decisions.
As usual, the key is to not worry about how long you may live into some hypothetical future (of which there are no guarantees), but rather put forth the effort and attention to live as well as you can now. And living better now usually does mean going further in the long run anyway. Stress kills more people even then nazis, and it’s harder to fight both. Business and governments use the same tactic, roping people into selling out their long-term well-being for short-term survival, because they know that most people’s fear will win over their principles. Until it’s too late.
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Agreed. Soldiers and other occupiers had to deal with the fact these are not an enemy or a combatant that you can sorta argue ‘ok they did a thing now we get to hand out beatings.’ With Skinheads and white suprimests they ALREADY see you as subhuman and not worth existing, at least the ones that are committed to that cause. You’ll have people like my family that have racist tendencies, but that tact would work on since for them it’s more ‘I’ve seen enough people who actually are horrible lazy people’ and then take that thinking a little too far… but you can’t go to protest a nazi rally thinking you’ll catch someone realizing ‘wait what the fuck am I doing running this guy over with a car?’
I don’t like violence, because every time I’ve wanted to hurt people has been when I was angry and me angry means I’m not thinking clearly, meaning I generally won’t be in a good mental place to know when or how to stop.
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Did you watch ANY reports on Charlottesville. THEY PHYSICALLY ATTACKED PROTESTERS. It’s not conjecture on our part, they actually DID that.Someone LITERALLY RAN A WOMAN DOWN IN A CAR BECAUSE SHE WAS THERE. Dylann Roof ACTUALLY SHOT 9 PEOPLE AT PRAYER.
We know they are violent, because THEY ARE VIOLENT.
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I used to be on the Gandhi train, but the more I thought about WWII in particular, the more I realized that non-violent opposition is only appropriate in certain situations. In others, it’s terribly naive. Old-school Nazis, for example, dgaf.
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Passive resistance works if the people you are opposed to have no desire to kill you.
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I would change “works” to “can work,” but otherwise you didn’t contradict my comment. If you think you were rebutting it, you should re-read it.
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Just backing it up. I had planned to say more but I’m not doing well today (a mysterious knee injury is distracting me with pain)
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Gotcha. Good luck with that knee!
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Since our laws are ostensibly designed to guarantee equal access and protection under the law, and since these Nazi’s are actively fighting to end that equality, their violence amounts to treason or at the very least, sedition. We can give them a voice in public without allowing their violent acts.
With that said, I’ll just repeat a little reminder. Hitler was not stopped by pacifism.
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If antifa had not been there, and the Nazis beat the clergy bloody, and it was all over the news, I would like to think the raving self-serving lunatics of the right would not be blaming “both sides”, let alone posting diatribes all over the internet that “antifa started it.” News footage of Bull Connor using dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protesters had an effect on the rest of America if not in the deep south.
But of course, these are different times. Within hours a full blown conspiracy theory will be spreading across the internet: these were all paid actors, “false flag” etc. Plus a horde of conservative pundits will be making up their own belabored excuses.
I don’t have an answer here. American society has crossed some weird Rubicon I don’t think we can return from. The cravenness of American conservatism, so hungry for power that they refused to denounce racism and secretly courted it for decades, they’ve been traveling this road for so long they can’t turn back, it would mean the death of their party.
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“Nah. Boy, dying is easy. There is nothing heroic about dying. But if you can take a stand for something you’d be willing to kill for, that is something, something special”
- Bill Paxton in The Last Supper
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…Right before he got killed in self defense.
Context matters.
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I agree with both of you. It was surely the bankrupting of the UK by WW2 that led to Indian independence - we could not afford to enforce British rule. As Kipling had observed 45 years before
Far called, our navies melt away / on dune and headland sink the fire…lo, all our pomp of yesterday / is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Exactly what happened. And Partition was a nasty civil war.
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One reason why I think Gandhi’s approach worked with British occupation, but does not work against contemporary ethnic nationalists is that the rhetoric of white supremacy in the 19th century went to great lengths to justify itself as being a civilizing influence in non-European cultures. If their treatment seemed harsh, it had to be kept in mind that it was tough love, and these people were being saved from the primitivism of their own culture. Satyagraha gave the British enough rope to hang themselves, in that when oppression becomes severe enough, it can’t be explained away as a supposedly civilizing force. It gets called out as it is, rape, theft, slavery, genocide, imperialism.
Those who advocate “ethnic cleansing” for its own sake aren’t rationalizing their position with that kind of hypocrisy, making those tactics less effective. Gandhi’s way works with some people, but not against nazi ideology nor those who are strict adherents of it.
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Oh for sure context matters. I just remember watching that scene and hearing that line. Never saw the end of the movie. They killed a bunch of people with different political view points and were disappointed when they got one person to change their world view. Sadly after I saw that movie on TV, Bill Paxton died like a few weeks later.
The pacifist minister was there. From your post, it appears that you weren’t there.
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Why wouldn’t we think that? We’re talking about an armed group that attacked people while screaming about their desire to kill people. I find it is a reasonable rule of thumb to believe the armed person screaming about their desire to see you dead.
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You do understand that we’re talking about open and proud fascists here, right? The ability to feel shame about being involved in an incident like this isn’t one of their well-known characteristics. Resorting to violence to push their agenda, on the other hand, is one of them. This is clear to anyone who’s studied history.
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