Yet, how many nazis have been put in the hospital or killed?
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I don’t know if they’ve gotten better or worse since the 1990s, the fringe right is much more prominent now than during the 90’s, but a lot of main stream culture from the 90s is considered completely unacceptable now. Culture as a whole has become more tolerant and a lot of people who were mainstream in the 90s are now considered fringe so it’s hard to compare.
But since the 60’s its undeniably better. In 1964 a 21 person conspiracy, led by local law enforcement, murdered 3 civil rights workers, the state government refused to prosecute, and the first federal judge threw out indictments.
That’s not a racist fringe, that’s a community being so racist that they elected a local government that would go around murdering people, a state being so racist that it refused to punish the murders, and a federal judge doing the same. I’m sorry but that’s a completely different world than the one we’re operating in now. Dylann Roof is on death row because of his murders. If he’d done the same crime in the same state in 1968 he probably wouldn’t have been arrested, and if he was arrested and somehow prosecuted I doubt he’d have gotten life. More than anything he’d likely have had a whole lynch mob to keep him company.
Yet you want to compare the 60s to now. So we either can compare or we can’t.
Plus, you’re ignoring the fact that many of those people from the 1960s are still with us today, are still part of power structures, daily life, etc.
Yes, but it’s slipping backwards. Yes, Dylann Roof is on death row, but the many police officers who shot unarmed black people are not. They still get protection and absolution from their crimes.
The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner happened out of site, unlike the public lynchings of the 1920s and 1930s, where they often happened in plain site of everyone. They hid it and the FBI intervened because local law enforcement would do nothing. There was finally a conviction in 2005 under the Obama era justice department. I doubt that the justice department today would go after a lynching like this one, which is my point about it going backwards.
[ETA]
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I cannot express how important this is. The 60s are not even a lifetime ago, let alone so far behind us to say culture has homogenously shifted to the reverse stance. The racism is over crap is literally a white supremecist propaganda spin, and is the foundation of white supremacy recruitment (such as one of the pillars of being a proud boy being not feeling guilty about being white).
Almost every rising star politician of the era is still in office - such as AS BEING THE HEAD OF THE ENTIRE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT. And imagine that, he has been working to declare protesters against Nazis terrorists, end the anti-terror enforcement of white supremacist groups, and stopped the investigations of police abuse.
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This is a long standing pattern in American politics as well. Active push to end racial inequality, such as the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil war and then radical republicans in reconstruction, and then a backlash against equality by the mainstream political establishment. The rise of the Democratic redeemers from the 1870s until the 1950s and 60s was based entirely on reinforcing the hierarchy of race that arose out of slavery and the class system it created. The 1920s and 1930s was the height of the anti-racist backlash, the nadir of race relations in America. The civil rights movement (which has been one long continuous movement from the day that Africans were first brought to the New World chains) during that time was pushing back against the 1920s and 1930s. We are experiencing the backlash against the classical civil rights movement right now. You can see that in the 90s as well, with the rise of current prison system tied to the “get tough on crime” mentality that both parties championed.
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The nazis loudly celebrated the murder of Heather Heyer.
And they have been shooting at people from the beginning.
You already have those. They were the people who attacked Charlottesville.
The Klan is no longer the USA’s “shadow” government. It’s squatting in the White House.
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I don’t usually bother calling out apparent typos but:
Maybe “backlash against equality” and “height of the racist backlash” ?
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Thanks for pointing that out.
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You realize I wasn’t being serious, right?
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There’s a lot of people here who would have written that comment in complete seriousness, I suspect they were a source of a lot of the likes. They seem to be arguing that punching Nazis in public will push Nazis back underground and stop incidents like this one.
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Wouldn’t fighting against multiculturalism just mean fighting for single culture supremacy?
I’m not sure there’s a more un-American idea…
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Has someone notified ICE? This illegal immigrant should be immediately deported.
I’d quibble on that. From my perspective, it’s been about imposing the culture of the white ruling class from day one.
Cultural genocide directed at enslaved Africans and Native Americans, displacement and erasure of Latinx North America, the “Yellow Peril”, “Americanism”, the Klan, Jim Crow, America First, the Red Scares, the Religious Right, etc. etc.
It’s a major theme (possibly the major theme) of American history.
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I’m referring to the whole American meltingpot narrative, but I suppose that’s only ever been a thing in coastal cities.
I guess the right has a cultural ideal of homogeneity and uniform values, while a lot of left leaning people are more into the idea of taking the good parts of everyone’s cultures to make our big American stew.
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That’s the thing: the melting pot narrative is itself an example of American monoculturalism in action.
In multicultural societies, the idea is that immigrants retain most of their native culture, and that’s fine. In the melting pot concept, immigrants are expected to lose their native culture and blend into a generic “Americanism”.
You don’t need to melt down the incoming culture if it isn’t seen as a threat.
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@aluchko, you never addressed this point. As others have pointed out, the violence is here, now. The more you believe that the situation can only get worse (absent underlying, systemic change that is very difficult to arrange, to say the least), the more this point of unity should be your overriding concern. I suspect it is what you haven’t accepted yet, because this is a painful realization (ie, that there is a rather high probability that the US will have a 2nd civil war, in some form). If you doubt that the status quo will only lead to more and worse white supremacy given current conditions, the argument can be restated for you. My question is do you accept that that would be sufficient to conclude that it is ethical to punch a (clearly identified) nazi?
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Is it ethical for a clearly-identified Nazi to punch you?
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