What tag would you propose instead?
Fascists don’t get any traction unless street thuggery and gangsterism becomes the norm. The Nazis thrived on that kind of chaos, to the degree that romanticised tales of street brawls were part of their iconic party song, which itself was about one of their own murdered street thugs. Right-wing populist demagogues understand the power of this kind of chaos, which is why (for example) they might promote violence against protesters at their rallies or hire bikers as event security.
That’s not an argument for not defending oneself when assaulted, of course. Nor does it do us any good to deny the visceral pleasure of watching a fascist scumbag like Richard Spencer taking one in his smug mug. But we cannot let the kind of violence this judge was asking for become a common feature of American political discourse, since it ultimately only empowers the fascist gangsters.
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This topic seems like a good place to bring up a couple of items I’ve posted in the past.
One is a quote from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
Clive! If you let yourself be defeated by them, just because you are too fair to hit back the same way they hit at you, there won’t be any methods but Nazi methods! If you preach the Rules of the Game while they use every foul and filthy trick against you, they will laugh at you! They’ll think you’re weak, decadent!
And the ither is this clip from Skokie.
Food for thought.
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While this is all true, it’s also true that the predators of the world aren’t going away anytime soon.
They will take advantage of any opening to colonize the body of society. This is compounded by the fact that the worst predators are still partly human, and operating from a position of human morality, however alien a version of it.
So where is the line? People believed that it could be written into the dna of a country and that would hold fast. But…laws are just words until given life by belief and enforcement.
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Indeed. This is why I avoid military history. It’s a snooze fest. However, you’d never know that from films on war…
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I don’t approve of violent gangsters but if they’re gonna beat up anybody I suppose it might as well be Nazis.
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That’s where we have to hold the line. There is a concerted effort underway, and not just in the U.S., to undermine liberal-democratic institutions. The law, and a general interest in ensuring its legitimacy and even-handed enforcement against predators, is one of those institutions. Bannon and his ilk would be happy to replace that (or, as in Putin’s Russia, supplement it) with gangster “justice” and private and unaccountable police forces comprised of predators.
The time to hold that line in the U.S. is now. We have many problems but we are not yet the Weimar Republic.
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You’re absolutely right. Kristallnacht was, in fact, orchestrated by the Nazi government then already in power, the Weimar government having been obliterated 5 years before. The Weimar government was incapable of stopping the eventual domination of either of the 2 extremist parties. Weimar Germany was rightly called “a democracy without democrats”.
Historical lessons for what can occur when power only accrues to extremists, and moderates are forced to accede to one end or the other; what Americans call ‘tribalism’ when it happens in other countries.
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With Nazis, history shows us that their words ultimately led to suffering and death. Better to stem that rising tide with a punch to the face.
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In the cosmic calendar of resistance, 2017 may well be the Year of the Punched Nazi.
This fact has caused some consternation and hand-wringing among those who see Nazis as perfect foils for their ideological posturing rather than very real genocidal extremists with a long and bloody track record. For the mainline liberals and conservatives who lament the punching of Richard Spencer, the young white supremacist activist who coined the term “alt-right,” Nazism remains a theoretical construct, an “idea” that can be debated and defeated without a shot being fired in anger. For the rest of us — for many Jews, for ethnic and religious minorities, for queer people — Nazism is an empirical fact with the solidity of iron roads leading to walled death camps.
The camps are Nazism’s endpoint; it is what Nazism is for. Nazism serves as a refuge for whites dislocated by mass society and modernity, who seek someone to blame for their anomic dread. With that in mind, we must be very explicit about what Nazism’s relationship to democracy must be, and refuse dangerous, whitewashing euphemisms when discussing it (e.g. “you support punching someone who disagrees with you”).
Such generalizing language is intellectually lazy at the best of times; here it is outright deadly. Yes, it could be said that I “disagree” with Spencer that a genocide of Black Americans is desirable, but I believe he should be punched because of the very real risk that he could galvanize such an event into actually happening. This is a fear supported by the tremendous weight of our history, and by the fact that we had to fight the bloodiest war of our species’ existence the last time Nazism came into conflict with modern democracy. To call this a “disagreement” is an unspeakable slight against millions of dead.
To be blunt: Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter. There is nothing about the ideology or its practice that is anything but corrosive to democratic institutions.
Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death. There is no reasoning with it. It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else. Simply allowing Nazis onto a stage, as the BBC did when it let British National Party leader Nick Griffin sit and debate with political luminaries on its Question Time program, is to give them an invaluable moral victory. Like creationists who debate evolutionary biologists, the former benefit mightily from the prestige of the latter.
In using this tactic, Nazis abuse the democratic forum to illegitimately lend credence to something that is otherwise indefensible, the equality of the stage giving the unforgivable appearance of “two sides” to a position that is anathema to public decency. This is not because Nazis love democracy or free speech, but because they know how to use this strategy to unravel them.
But is it enough to say that we must meet Nazism with force because it is so terrible? It should be, morally. I would, however, add that there’s room to consider why force, specifically, is a necessary tool in these extreme times. There is a reason that it works against Nazis, adding weight to the argument that they are a special case where a normal ethic of nonviolence should be suspended.
The goals of Nazism have not changed, but some of its window dressing has. As he was being punched, Richard Spencer was showing off a lapel pin of Pepe, a cartoon character appropriated by extreme right and Nazi 4channers in their reactionary campaigns, which ultimately featured in many pro-Trump memes, some of which were retweeted by the man himself. The new exponents of modern Nazism are eager to exploit what they see as a constituency of young, tech-savvy white people whose online culture is a neat fit for them.
4chan’s “driving trollies” culture is built on a perverse ideal that prizes the use of offensive speech and borderline criminal behavior as a means of becoming a stronger, superior person. If you are ever offended by something, hurt by it, or made to fear for yourself, you’re weak, a “special snowflake” who’s been “triggered” and a “lolcow” (someone you should keep hurting because their reactions will be funny). In this ethic, all emotion (except rage, lust, or mirth) is weakness, something the trolley can exploit to get big laughs for him and his fellows.
This notion has been exploited to great effect by people like Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who believes “America needs more trollies.” Yiannopoulos, who himself has a history of sympathy for Nazi ideas, and who has tried to lend respectability to Richard Spencer—calling him a “bright” “intellectual” figure on the “alt-right”—has since taken 4chan on the road, so to speak, using his university speaking engagements to gin up mob harassment of transgender students. Unable to resist a photogenic Nazi, the press has treated Yiannopoulos to numerous interviews. In one with the New York Times he literally said: “I don’t have feelings.” While this is an obvious lie, it fits with the trolley culture ethos he seeks to promote.
The ideal man — the Trollermensch, if you like — is one who does not feel, who sociopathically wounds without empathy, who finds humor in even the most grotesque of suffering. In exchange, you feel no pain, no vulnerability; you cannot be hurt the way you are ruthlessly hurting others.
This is the alluring promise that 4chan’s culture has made to a generation of disaffected young men who feel powerless, adrift, and vulnerable in a rapidly changing world where being a white man is no longer a guarantee of success and prestige. Be mighty, hurt others, never get hurt again. But humanity, in all its little frailties, always catches up with us in the end.
After he was punched, Richard Spencer told the Times, “I am more worried about going to dinner on an average Tuesday because these kinds of people are roaming around,” adding on a Periscope video that “I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes, that I’m going to hate watching this.” Spencer, who was proudly touting and retweeting 4chan Pepe memes and cheering right along with Yiannopoulos about the world needing more driving trollies, was expressing fear and vulnerability. The facade had cracked; he was no Trollermensch, just human, equal to everyone he thought himself superior to, equal to everyone he’d see dead.
Nazis have long depended on something like driving trollies culture to work their dark magic. The concept of the “Big Lie” is right at home in an age of ideologically-driven 4chan hoaxes targeting women and minorities, and Nazism always relied on a certain chicanery to keep people guessing about their true intentions until it was too late — an eerie lesson for the present. Nazism’s fakery, and its ability to distort reality until ordinary people could not trust their own senses, bears more than a passing resemblance to 4chan’s culture of harassment and thuggish hoaxes. But the weak point was always the mythology of superiority and strength.
Deploying force against Nazis always revealed the lie that they belonged to a “Master Race.” And this was not just military force, mind you, but the rolled-up sleeves and bared fists of ordinary citizens who were determined to prevent the spread of fascism’s cancer. To look at British fascist leader Oswald Mosley disheveled after his rally was shut down by angry East End workers in July 1962 is to look not on the leader of a Master Race, but something considerably more ordinary and pathetic.
As I noted earlier, Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter; coming into contact with it is often destructive for our institutions because it is the personification of bad faith with malice aforethought. The only nonviolent solution is to marginalize Nazism from public life in our society — one may be free to hold these views, but not to try and spread them at the highest echelons of our public fora. When, however, someone like Spencer does come along and is being feted in the mainstream, there are no other options available to us.
The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate — many thinkers who lived through the Second World War, from Karl Popper, to Hannah Arendt, to Jean Paul Sartre, have been quite clear about why dispassionate discourse with men like Richard Spencer is not only pointless, but actively dangerous.
The use of force, by contrast, does reveal the shared humanity that Nazis deny. Our vulnerability is one of the things that links us all, seven billion strong, in a humane fragility. These are essential aspects of our humanity that both Nazi mythology and channer trolley culture deny. Punching a Nazi, by contrast, reveals it. It reveals they are no masters, but quite eminently capable of fear, of pain, of vulnerability. And that takes the shine off; it eliminates their mystique, and it puts the lie to the idea that their ideology is an armor against the pains of modernity.
That alone justifies Richard Spencer being punched in the face on camera.
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They were already saying to kill Jews and feminists, so them saying to just punch those groups is practically deescalation.
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The question of whether we should beat on individual Nazis seems to miss the point when it’s our institutions, not roving gangs, that are committing the most widespread acts of casual violence; breaking up families in immigration raids or at the border; marginalizing the transgendered; dismantling the state agency tasked with keeping our air and water clean. As much fun as it is to menace the Richard Spencers of the world, it’s the Scott Pruitts that we really need to disrupt.
Of course I understand that there is a relationship between the two, and that we do need to worry about violent hate groups, but it’s not a street brawl that’s called for—it’s a revolution.
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Our Constitutional rights are not absolute. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater, you can’t publicly advocate for the assassination of the President, then there rules for libel/slander, etc. Plus felons lose their 2nd Amendment rights and voting rights. There are ways you can lose your rights even in a free society, and we don’t think twice about them.
Nazis are all about restricting other people’s free speech, if they were in total control of our government or any government that’s what they would begin doing. They are also all about racism (a particularly dark and dehumanizing strain of it), and though they might say they are non-violent we all know what their history is.
The idea that giving Nazis a legitimate place in the debate will lead to their downfall is a nice idea, but I’m not sure it’s proven. I am opposed to violence too, but I also recognize that when it comes to Nazis there is a line that has to be drawn in the sand, the only question is where we draw that line, because we all know Nazis will cross the line eventually.
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ActionAbe:
I’ve often used war as a metaphor for this kind of things, and I always tell people: War is boring, and wars fought skillfully are even more boring.
Mindysan33Regular17m
Indeed. This is why I avoid military history. It’s a snooze fest. However, you’d never know that from films on war…
Sorry to hear that. I find written MH sometimes to be insightful and often to be an aid in ‘perspective-keeping’; in the same way that a friend once confided to me. In his early 20’s he was beset with career and personal issues and was venting to his dad. His father, a crewman on a B-17 in WWII, quietly responded: “Yeah, at your age all I had to deal with was bailing out of a flaming aircraft.”
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I guess I’m talking the more traditional MH, which is all about tactics and manuevers - it’s not all about that now, I suppose. It goes with my dislike “big man” history more generally - I realize this is a personal view, of course. Not all war time histories are like that now. Given that my interests generally lie in understanding people’s relationships to one another, subcultures, and how people actually live their daily lives, a history that delves into the lives of soldiers, especially during war time - how they cope with the violence and downtime, how that impacts their mindsets and their lives after - would be far more interesting. Life during war time that lets people know that it’s not exciting and fun to shoot at other human beings for a living, that it has real world consequences for people often are not positive (even if the outcome of a war might be, like ending the Nazi’s control over Europe). Does that make more sense?
Incidentally, if you want to alert a person if you have a comment directed at them, just hit the @ symbol and start typing their name, and you’ll get an alert.
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I missed the spelling issue. I thought you were concerned with identifying Judaism with the Jewish Mafia.
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“The Nazi scumbags were meeting one night on the second floor.
That’s a line destined for one of my songs, Awesomeness…
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There’s a lot of space between holding a dispassionate discourse with Nazis and actual face-punching. That fascists use the mechanisms of liberal democracies to undermine them does not give us immediate license to go straight to violence, even if violence is their ultimate goal and end-point.
The failure I see in connection with the article you excerpt is mainly one of the conservative establishment and the corporate mainstream media, who have not sufficiently and clearly and promptly labelled Spencer’s and Yiannopolous’ statements as unacceptable, repugnant, and unworthy of engagement and those individuals themselves as pathetic and opportunistic fame-mongers whenever they encounter them.
While we should never pretend that fascists and racists don’t exist or that they’re harmless clowns, there is also no obligation on anyone’s part to pretend that their crackpot ideas are worthy of serious consideration.
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I’m generally a pacifist, but we should realize that Gandhi would not have succeeded against Nazi Germany.
He would have been in Dachau by '35, and would now just be a footnote of history.
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I’m completely anti Nazi-punching. 100%. Why?
Well, either the Nazi[1] in question is merely someone with unpopular politics who is otherwise harmless, in which case they should not be punched at all, or they are actively working to harm people in which case you shouldn’t just punch them.
Basically, my Nazi-dealing toolset only includes a pen and a rifle.
[1] Fun fact! ‘Nachos’ and ‘Nazi’ are cognates.
I guess I’m talking the more traditional MH, which is all about tactics and manuevers - it’s not all about that now, I suppose. It goes with my dislike “big man” history more generally - I realize this is a personal view, of course. Not all war time histories are like that now. Given that my interests generally lie in understanding people’s relationships to one another, subcultures, and how people actually live their daily lives, a history that delves into the lives of soldiers, especially during war time - how they cope with the violence and downtime, how that impacts their mindsets and their lives after - would be far more interesting. Life during war time that lets people know that it’s not exciting and fun to shoot at other human beings for a living, that it has real world consequences for people often are not positive (even if the outcome of a war might be, like ending the Nazi’s control over Europe). Does that make more sense?
I find military history fascinating because that’s what the ancients wrote about most of all and if you want to know how things worked in, say, Ancient Rome your best bet is to go from the army outward, especially since the only non-rich people that tended to get written about in antiquity were in fact the working class stiffs in making up a maniple or a phalanx.
(Another great way to work out the common everyday history of ancient times is the history of food and cookery. Everyone has to eat, and people do write down recipes, it turns out.)
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