while i disagree with the conclusion, it is a valid argument and well-presented. i think this is one of those issues where you can actually agree to disagree – not whether nazis are a horrifying shitshow, but whether their existence constitutes sufficient incitement to justify physical violence, and whether you should take advantage of that legal opening if it does.
i’m a pacifist, not because i’m unfamiliar with violence, but because i’m too familiar with it. i beat up nazi skinheads with other punks in minneapolis in the late 80′s and early 90′s, and while one group moved back to denver, the rest just came back with more friends and more weapons, and it escalated until people ended up in the hospital. none of them stopped being nazis. all it achieved was relieving our anger feelings in the short term and giving us PTSD in the long term.
but you could argue that if we hadn’t done that, if we hadn’t kept coming at them as it escalated from throwing a drink on somebody to fists to boot parties to bats and knives, they’d have felt free to do as they pleased, and would have hurt people not equipped to fight back. that may be true. we have no data on that.
i guess what i’m trying to say is: i’m a quaker and a slytherin, i prefer nonviolent ideas both morally and for creative reasons. i feel pranking and confusing and undermining the bad guys is both more effective and more fun. but if y’all need to launch at the problem fist-first, i’m not going to condemn you. you do what you gotta do. what’s important is just that we don’t let their shit slide.
what punching nazis does is it raises the participation fee for nazis who want to do nazi shit. it makes it scarier and less fun for people to be nazis. it makes the weekend warriors actually start to calculate risk vs reward. for every nazi punk that had the strength of their convictions to keep going when they were facing down determined, violent antifa resistance, there were for sure plenty of cowards who thought ‘i hate jews, but i don’t want my nose broken in–maybe i’ll stay home tonight’.
we see over and over again that white supremacists talk a big game about being tough and brave, but they’re not actually inured to the threat of violence in the way that racial and sexual minorities are. they have no practice taking a boot to the face for what they believe in the way we do. they think getting their feelings hurt is violence! and so while some of them, when the fists start flying, are bloodthirsty enough to start swinging, a nonzero amount of them cut and fucking run. and a whole lot more never dared show their face at all. how many supremacist parades this year got cancelled because the cowards bolted the minute they saw some actual black people? cuz i remember there being several.
i admire nonviolence: i think ideally solving problems without violence is how it should go, nonviolence is often the most effective way to end horrible situations. and i really do want there to be more mercy and compassion in the world.
but i’m also personally a vengeful and spiteful bitch who’s mad as hell, and to me, ‘if you’re a nazi i will punch you’ sounds fair. the rest of us have been taking our lumps all this time just for being who we are! so i feel like it’s a minimum dispensation of justice that the shitheads who gleefully call for our eradication have to really, seriously consider whether or not they hate us more than they hate a fist to their faces.
so, yeah. if i see a nazi, i will punch him. will that solve the issue of that nazi being a nazi? no. will it get me in serious trouble? yes. but will it put any other nazis in the area on notice that being who they are risks getting them a tiny berserker jew to the snoot? YES.
If we learn nothing else from Jack Kirby, let it be that Nazis are vulnerable to fists.
It’s extremely noble to want to reform neo-Nazis, to help them find their way out.
I knew a skinhead in high school, name of Chris. He was a screwed up abused kid with untreated brain problems. He fell in with a shit crowd that gave him a target. I wish I could’ve helped him somehow.
And punching Chris in the face wouldn’t have convinced him to stop. But at that point, all the logic and all the kindness in the world wouldn’t have convinced him to stop either–at least, not before he did years of serious damage. What you have to understand is, by the point I met him, he was totally psychologically dependent on that hate. To him, it was the only thing holding his world together. At least in the moment I knew him, he was unreachable.
(And in a horrifying bit of deja vu, a close family friend’s teenage brother is now falling down the same hole, fueled by shitty parents and untreated problems and the chans. We’re afraid he’s past the point of pulling back now, at least for a long time. It’s heart wrenching.)
So yeah. We can’t fix the neo-Nazis with fists. But that wasn’t really on the table for us. So failing that, we have to stop the neo-Nazis.
And that’s a job fists can do.
Initiative Archival Network 