I’m working on it. Maybe. Well, one day. Like when other Left of centre, anti trump, anti corpo type folks oppose the things I oppose in correct manner and degree, duh.
I’m working on it. Maybe. Well, one day. Like when other Left of centre, anti trump, anti corpo type folks oppose the things I oppose in correct manner and degree, duh.
It’s based on what you wrote.
No one who has read anything serious about fascism suggests punching people is anything but helpful to the regime.
You might read Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny”. It’s very short and quite well written.
I’ve read it. I’ve also read Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and other scholars of fascism.
But if you’re just going to assume my criticism of fascism is based on a fiction series made by Disney of all fucking companies, then I’m not going to waste my time discussing these things with you.
When I got banned from reddit for saying we should normalize punching nazis, it was from before this regime took hold, when it was still a foreboding storm cloud on the horizon. It was maybe 2023 or 2024, when an innocent black man was beaten to death by cops, and a photograph circulated of a dude who wore a nazi armband to the man’s funeral.
I’m sorry, but if you think the appropriate response to that is anything other than to use physical force to chase him away and teach him never to pull that shit again out of fear for what will happen to him, then I just can’t agree with you.
The Allies in WWII didn’t defeat the nazis by being nice. I recognize the situation isn’t comparable, because there’s no coalition of global superpowers capable and willing to depose the current regime in the US, and no ragtag band of rebels has the resources or backing, let alone the organization or the experience, that it would take to stand against the government, and any escalation would spell disaster for the last remnants of hope there are for an electoral offramp from this madness. But that’s simply not the context that I was posting in.
Feel free keep handling fascists with kiddie gloves, but that treatment is what enabled them to seize power in the first place. Not because people were treating them too harshly. Neville Chamberlain would like a word…
And you’re still comparing where we are now with WWII… And missing the entirety of how these movements get from where we are now to full on authoritarianism. Violence in the streets has been an essential part of fascist regimes. Both the Brownshirts and Blackshirts revelled in the street fights and their political masters used them to point out disorder etc. There’s a reason Eco’s essay is fourteen ways to look at a Blackshirt.
I dunno, to have seriously read about fascism and advocating throwing punches nowadays is a mind boggling contradiction unless you want more fascism, which I presume is not your goal.
Again, it’s why trump has almost exclusively sent ICE to Democratic cities and why DHS was super ready to claim Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists. The trump administration is itching for people to follow your advice so that they can point to violent disorder in the streets and give themselves more powers etc. It’s textbook shit.
It’s as if someone was talking about how they’d just seen Sound of Music but thought it was weird to make a movie about singing nazis. The pieces are sort of there I guess for that but it takes a wild interpretation to get there. At that point, my first 8 guesses would not be that you’ve seen the movie. Similarly, if you’re advocating things that fascists crave, well, I’m not sure how much of that reading has sunk in?
“Apes don’t read philosophy!”
“They do Otto, they just don’t understand it.”
Edit: a format
You’re contradicting yourself in your first two sentences. We don’t have to be in full swing WWII/Holocaust conditions to point out when fascism is making a resurgence. It didn’t all happen in a day. It took years to build up the the worst of it.
People writing it off now because “It’s not as bad as the holocaust” need to realize that even Nazi Germany “wasn’t as bad” as the worst of the Holocaust, until it reached the point when it was.
Burying our heads in the sand now and opting for appeasement is not a solution. I’m not saying we should all go out and get in brawls with ICE because that would obviously be pointless suicide, and it would give them the PR that they want.
You’re ignoring that this whole conversation started from the part where I referenced something that happened years ago, before the fascists were in power but when they were just starting to feel more comfortable coming out into the open. We should have never let them get that comfortable.
Anyone wearing a fucking nazi armband to the funeral of someone who had just been bludgeoned to death by cops, should have been run out of town at the very least. Better if they had been made a public example out of.
Fascists crave war, but if the Allies didn’t give it to them, then we’d all be speaking German! Appeasement is not the answer. Do you suggest that a tolerant society should tolerate intolerance?
That’s literally the point.
You deal with nascent/rising fascism through different means than when it is full blown. Public opinion still matters at this stage, unlike when fascism has taken hold.
You even seem to understand that the violence is exactly what they want.
Doxxed, fired, jeered etc. Yes, nazi clad fucks shouldn’t be comfortable. But once you throw that punch, you’ve lost. And the ones wearing the nazi regalia want you to throw that punch. It’s the same thing as brawling with ICE, in both cases you are acting exactly how the fascist wants, and arguably requires, you to act.
By throwing those punches, or encouraging others to, you are helping the fascists win.