The two movements are parallel but not necessarily the same, and i suppose it was just pointing that out. When anti-immigration politics becomes popular, out of the woodwork come the Nazis. That we’re finally far enough past WW2 for most of the anti-Nazi generation to have passed on to have Nazis popping up again probably isn’t coincidental. The thing is that once these movements become entangled there’s really no way to be anti-immigration and also not support these movements. I’m not sure, though, where that event horizon boundary is. We’re probably right on the line already.
Films like American History X, which i thought were on the nose, tended to actually have an impact in far-right communities. I think while there’s always going to be an ignorant core the broader base of support isn’t behind a sort of Nazi agenda.
That said there probably is a worry about punching Nazis. In some ways the worry is institutional. As long as we wring our hands about it and it’s the action of individual actors, and they are properly dealt with, there really isn’t a problem with “contagion”. Most of these types are pasty sorts anyway. It’s when you have broad segments of political society encouraging and validating Nazi punching that the rule of law seems subverted and would give ammunition and support to the Nazi side, being able to say, look, they don’t even believe in the laws they preach! Which, in that case, would be true enough. You can’t kill an idea, though punching it in the face is sure cathartic. OTOH, though this sounds a bit extreme, i’m not sure a bit of measured physical violence against people literally advocating genocide doesn’t test the courage of their convictions and keeps the virus down.
Malcom X was not av minor figure in the movement. Over fifty years after his assassination, academia is still trying to figure out where exactly to place his legacy. He had differences and similarities with Dr. King, but the differences make people uncomfortable and more willing to push his and his followers contributions aside. Black Power scared people, and Nelson Mandela was considered an terrorist. You can’t remove these things from history and still claim the same result. You just can’t.
I would hope if any of us found that Time Machine and went back to Nazis Germany, some Nazis would be punched. I don’t care of it was the law or not. Sometimes, you have to stop someone from killing millions of people by going against the law. After the gas chambers are built; it’s already too late.
The key is when to do the punching, though! By 1938 it was probably too late.
My favorite scene out of Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy is when an old woman falls on her feet before Kerensky and begs him to shoot Lenin. More recently, the attempted coup against Erdogan allowed him to safely land while hiding in the air. The only thing keeping the arrested generals alive (if they still are) is a EU law preventing Turkey from reinstating the death penalty. Sometimes there is a threshold when you have to do more than punch. The tragedy of being the good guys is that it’s almost impossible to know where that threshold is.
True. And right now it’s punching. Until Trump took office, some of these groups were going to be or were labeled with the domestic terrorism… do you suppose that’s because they are going beyond punching?
Nor was I advocating such. But Malcolm X wasn’t actually out there using violence. Nor was he advocating violence per se, really, but instead taking a much more assertive approach that would if necessary include violence in theory. I fully agree that the implicit threat of violence, in the sense that, if something wasn’t done Bad Things would happen, was important in getting stuff accomplished. But in the end, most of the de jure accomplishments of the movement came via the political process. No one went out and massacred whole state houses full of white supremacist legislators or torched entire segregated suburbs.
BLM and Ferguson, Women’s March, none of those are doing that today either. Burning cars also isn’t massacring entire state houses full of white people. You seem to equate violent protest to outright murder, but there is a entire field in between what might be considered violence to actual murder.
No, but there is also a wide spectrum of what we can call non-violent protest too. It doesn’t have to be hippies sitting in circles with flowers and singing kum-bye-yah, or whatever. There’s a real difference between violence that comes about because the authorities attack peaceful protesters, and rioting that’s spawned by inchoate anger. The former often can bring about change, the latter, not so much.
The point of all of this is that some folks seem to be advocating violence without any real sense of plan, purpose, goal, or expected outcome, other than venting justified anger and frustration. That sort of violence is not going to do much good. Even in the ur-example we keep coming back to, the Nazis in Germany, violence generally played into their hands. The only sort of effective violence in that case would have been if the state itself had eradicated the party, and even that would have had consequences we probably can’t reliably identify at this late date. Violence as a tool is always likely to hurt the wielder as much as the target. I tend to get very skeptical when people advocate violence per se.
If you want to do it right, figure out a way like the organizers of the Selma march did, where you calculate what sort of provocations will create what sort of responses and have a clear plan to exploit those consequences for the greater good. In that way, you let the other side initiate the violence, keep the moral high ground, and yet take advantage of the power of violence to break through to people’s consciousness. It still won’t satisfy a true pacifist, but it’s better than left-wing hit squads or whatever seems to be the vogue here.
I think this is pretty key. “Non-violent” did not mean “non-confrontational”. MLK marched in plenty of places (Chicago for one) where he knew that the mere presence of his marchers was going to cause significant problems for the administration and very probably leave riots and unrest in their wake.
Yeah, you have to confront. Gandhi confronted. King confronted. Sometimes confrontation can push things pretty far along. Sometimes, like in South Africa, it takes more, but each circumstance is pretty unique. Virtually going to war with our own right wing would merely validate their paranoia I’m afraid. Confronting them, though, is necessary.
Those particular situations though were confronting institutional, legalized racism and discrimination. In order to defeat them you have to confront a government apparatus that has the support of a significant part of the population and that requires a different sort of engagement with both the government and the population at large. Arguably what the Nazi on the corner represents is not that. Attacking them amounts to something akin to voter suppression, which, while of dubious morality in a democracy, does in fact work. Whether this is justifiable depends upon whether you think the fear of Nazism subverting Democracy is so great that the ends justify the means. Even in Europe though Nazi parties haven’t actually gained a majority of any government, though “far right” nationalist parties have seen double digit parliamentary representations.
Flipping out over figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, otoh, is the kind of slippery slope that Kasparov fears, because he is a fairly articulate, fairly logical sort of ideologue that challenges the left rhetorically, and the response to him seem to be blinding anger and rioting, when he’s exactly the sort of person that needs to be defeated on the battlefield of ideas. If the challenge he represents to the “intolerance of intolerance” is only answerable by violence, then the left will have a problem going forward proving their arguments, if their arguments amount to punching in the face those that disagree with them.
I don’t see actual Nazism going anywhere in the US, but the kind of anti-PC rhetoric espoused by Milo and latched onto recently gaining traction if the left can’t manage the arguments against it.
Seriously! All these people who condoned him are finally tuning into the fact that he’s a monster??
Fuck you! You are a monster, too! You just finally had a fucking shred of god damn empathy since he’s talking about children and it finally hit home. He never should have had a platform to begin with, aside from a soap box under a damn bridge.
