Is it Pithy Macro time? It is, isn’t it?
18 Likes
9 Likes
13 Likes
Translated: poor and/or PoC people should just stand there and let fascists kill them until rich white people start to feel bad about it.
It’s not a PR battle.
12 Likes
If you said this to my face, we could also discuss the reality of why people get punched in the face for saying provocative things.
I do know how to interpret your clear response, and I don’t believe you.
1 Like
Do me a favour and don’t point your finger at the people who could probably need some consolation and help to get rid of a severe danger to their democracy. It’s very much ok to punch Nazis, and the NRA is a disgrace to humanity (especially the US of A part of humanity), but sneering at them is not helpful. Especially so after the last election, which, as you are well aware, made it possible for actual neo-Nazis to become MPs for the first time since the war.
That said, pointing the finger at a “German” import of Nazism is as lazy as it gets:
My grandfather was a German Nazi. It’s in my heritage to oppose Nazis by and with all means.
10 Likes
I’m sorry, but when a commenter asks gleefully why didn’t you people shot
back - what kind of American spirit is that - quoting the actual shooters
words doesn’t seem out of place.
4 Likes
Fabian’s also lazy trolling attempt re:NRA called for an answer. However, the words of a certified arsehole and Nazi do not prove the point you seemed to be trying to make.
If I blame Germany or Germans for this Nazi and Nazism based on the “hereditary” self-identification of the arseholes, I wasn’t paying attention and was falling in their trap. That’s certainly something I don’t want to do, and not something I like to see in any discussion. Hence my intervention.
5 Likes
Them not shooting anyone referred to the accepted level of protests. The Charleston church shooting, like the murder of Heather Heyer, was a case where I believe white supremacists overstepped what their base thought acceptable and hurt their own cause. That’s why white supremacist leaders generally disavowed Roof, just like they did James Fields (or they tried to make excuses). They were telling their followers that those attacks were not acceptable and shouldn’t be reproduced. This is something that’s different from ISIS and Al Queda, they’ll gladly accept credit and grant sanction to terror attacks while the major white supremacists organizations in the US aren’t there yet.
My worry is that in starting to use violence against Nazis (ie punching) they’ll be become more accepting of terror tactics until a white supremacist organization dedicated to domestic terrorism pops up.
As much as the KKK was a terrorist organization they were restrained by the fact they operated in the open as a sort of shadow government. The next iteration won’t be so restrained and Dylan Roofs might become a regular occurrence.
Dylan Roofs are a regular occurance. See also: Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, et al.
5 Likes
Do you know any hard core white supremacists? They celebrated the Charleston shootings and the death of Heather Heyer!
15 Likes
Thanks, Mike. This thread got me thinking about him. I have a shoebox with his personal items and came across this Western Union telegram that was hand delivered to my grandmother. (I removed his name for privacy). I can’t imagine how horrible it would feel to get notification like this.
3 Likes
Hard core white supremacists are already soldiers, the base I was referring to was their recruiting base. Brietbart readers, people who identifiy with the Altright, the people sympathetic to white supremacists but not quite ready to call themselves a Nazi.
Those were the real target of the Nazi marches, the people they were trying to convert from disagreeable assholes into full-blown white supremacists, and those people were turned off by the killings. That’s why the leaders of those organizations tried to distance themselves from the attacks even as the membership celebrated it.
People who already voted against the rights of their fellow human beings. Do you honestly think that there is anything you or I can say to many of them, other than agreeing with them and accepting the world that they want where many of our fellow human beings have no real rights, that the nazis are wrong? They already think “Hitler had a few good ideas” and even if literally every. single. person. involved in protests against nazis were perfectly behaved and allowed themselves to be physically attacked, shot, and brutalized, they’d STILL be sympathetic. We know this, because we saw this in the 1960s. Any sort of actions by civil rights activists were met by acts of violences and threats of such by those lovely people on the fence. This screeching white woman, yelling at Elizabeth Eckford (a CHILD) is the mainstream of American views on race:
They may not embrace murders, but they squarely pin the blame on the “agitators” instead of on the murders. Because they don’t care about racial, gender, sexual orientation, or identity equality. They care about not having to think about these issues and not having it brought up that they live in a world where the oppression of others makes their lives easier.
13 Likes
Who are the “people” you’re talking about? 1960’s white supremacists? They’re still a political force but not nearly as strong or extreme as they were 50 years ago.
Are the “people” Trump voters? There’s a lot of bad people there, but there’s also a lot of Republicans and independents whom we may strenuously disagree with, but they’re not particularly racist and voted Trump because they got fooled by the Clinton smears or they always voted Republican.
Are the “people” the Altright? They gave Trump a strong enough base to win the primary against a weak GOP field, but many if not most could have their minds changed if we were able to reach them.
Are the “people” the Nazis who were marching? They’re pretty unreachable, and they can potentially kill a lot of people, but they can’t win elections.
This isn’t some nitpick, it’s an absolutely critical piece of information if you want to respond with the proper tactics, and the population you seemed to describe (supportive of Hitler’s ideas, as racist as the south in the 1960s, and big enough to win elections) is a population that I don’t believe exists anymore.
And yet their president is in the white house, yeah? So powerful enough to sway an election. And it’s not like their ideology of white victimization at the hands of black militants has gone away.
They still voted for a person trading on racism to get votes.
They feel they did, which is why they are out in force now and are given a platform to speak at our state funded college campuses, despite their association with actually violence that actually has resulted in deaths.
This has been a point of debate for well over a century now - how to response to fascists. We known what’s worked in the past. We know the history. We know that they are active advocates for violence and will response with violence to both violence AND nonviolence. It’s not a question, it’s a fact of life.
But you don’t seem to agree, history be damned. So give us a strategy that doesn’t include using force to protect one’s self from violence for having the wrong skin color, wrong sexual orientation, wrong gender identity, wrong gender, wrong faith, wrong ideology? Maybe the stakes don’t seem as high to you, because you’re not part of a group that’s being targeted. There are people here, in this thread, who have told us about their experiences as targets of groups like this, well before this new age of fascism. They’ve explained to you how they were targeted and why. They’ve explained to you that they often did not engage in any sort of provocative actions, outside of existing.
No one here is advocating for rounding up and putting nazis and their allies in concentration camps (which is something that Spencer and his ilk regularly advocate for). We are talking about self-defense and being a forceful advocate for one’s basic humanity.
13 Likes
You should definitely call Fabian out then.
And the shooter, if that’s your pleasure.
Trump is bad and his base is worse (at least on race), but if you think either are 1960’s style deep south racists then you’re massively underestimating how bad 1960’s mainstream racism was.
I don’t deny anyone’s right to self defence. But punching a Nazi who is giving a television interview, or going to a Nazi march with the intention of breaking it up by using violence, are not instances of self defence.
No, I’m not. I think you’re underestimating how bad things are right now. They have gotten worse since the 1990s, thanks in part to the southern strategy deployed by the Nixon campaign in 1968, that intensified under Reagan in the 1980s. Given that the police have carte blanche to once again brutalize minoritiy communities with impunity illustrates the point, I think.
Others disagree with you here. Nazis openly marching in the street, with the backing of the President and the justice department, with the backing of local law enforcement, is a clear message to those of us who don’t want to live in a fascist state.
15 Likes
No, we just have people justifying and advocating assault, brutaility, and murder while simultaneously denying they’re engaging in the behavior they claim they condemn.
1 Like
