Okay okay… I guess maybe I need to explain myself. I’ve been throwing barbs at people whining about a Nazi getting punched in the face all morning.
To be honest, I am really, truly livid at everyone doing this. I honestly thought that this post would be cathartic, but it somehow only made me angrier.
I know it’s going to be hard to believe, but I am, actually, a pacifist. War scares me like you wouldn’t believe, I abhor guns with a passion (I really think they should all be banned, bar none; they had fucking muskets when the 2nd amendment was written; so you know what?… I’ll bend on allowing 18th-century muskets), and I actually do think that, in theory, violence should be a last resort.
But this is not theory.
We are not in a place where we can hold Vulcan-academic discussions about it all. This shit is not just some ivory tower discussion about something that might happen.
This shit is actually happening, in real life, right now.
Let me remind you, if I may, of who the Nazis are.
The party emerged from the German nationalist, racist and populistFreikorps paramilitary culture, which fought against the communist uprisings in post-World War I Germany.[7] The party was created as a means to draw workers away from communism and into völkisch nationalism.[8] Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti-big business, anti-bourgeois, and anti-capitalist rhetoric, although such aspects were later downplayed in order to gain the support of industrial entities, and in the 1930s the party’s focus shifted to anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist themes.[9]
They are the party of Adolf Hitler, and with him in charge, they implemented one of the single worst instances of mass human genocide in history.
10,504,500 to 12,172,000 people were murdered in this atrocity. That is, 5.93 million Jews, 2-3 million Soviet POWs, 1.8-2 million ethnic Poles, 300K-500K Serbs, 270K disabled people, 90K-220K Romani, 80K-200K Freemasons, 20K-25K Slovenes, 5K-15K members of the LGBTQ community, 2.5K-5K Jehovah’s Witnesses, and 7K Spanish Republicans. And if you expand the list to include victims of the Nazi party outside of the Holocaust itself, an estimated 17 million to 26.3 million people were murdered.
And you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with punching a modern-day Nazi in the face…
So let’s talk about Richard Spencer, shall we?
Richard Spencer is a noted White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi. Some of the things you need to know about him are that he was radicalized by reading Friedrich Nietzsche and Jared Taylor, he wants America to become a white ethno-centric nation, and he refuses to denounce the KKK and Adolf Hitler
You may also not know that he may be the originator of the term “alt-right”, an attempt to sugar-coat white supremacy.
The following video is the infamous video where Spencer and his fans basically treat Trump as if he is Hitler… in a good way:
In today’s day and age, Nazis aren’t building concentration camps and committing actual genocide (though let’s not pretend like it can’t happen again, please; I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the ultimate goal of Cheeto Hitler and his administration with Muslims, people of color, etc… maybe even Jews… even if they’ll have a harder time of it here). But they are still spouting the same disgusting, backwards, bigoted shit that they’ve always been. Richard Spencer has even called for a “peaceful” *snort* ethnic cleansing.
So why am I fine with punching Richard Spencer?
Two reasons:
1. It’s the least we can do. Because of the first amendment (which I do support and so no, I don’t have a problem with this), we can’t throw him in jail, as what he has said is, indeed, protected speech; even if it is beyond hateful. I’m also against outright killing Spencer, and I’m against putting him in the hospital.
But I’m not against him feeling a sting. Since the punch didn’t harm him too bad (honestly, he might not even have a bruise), I not only don’t see the problem with it, I outright refuse to.
2. I want White Supremacists and Nazis to feel unsafe speaking their actively dangerous, violent language in public. And if you’re about to go all “slippery slope” on me, don’t bother. I’m talking about fucking Nazis. If your devotion to free speech is so strong that you have no problem with fucking Nazis having platforms and terrorizing people, then as far as I’m concerned, you are their accomplice. You may as well just join them.
White Supremacy should be socially unacceptable. Social (NOT LEGAL!) consequences for espousing White Supremacy should include extreme ostracization and some light, mild bruising, preferably in the face.
The state we’re in right now is the literal opposite, since we have a White Supremacist administration in the White House and in Congress.
So this is my final word on Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. I will not discuss or debate it anymore. I’m good with him, and all Nazis, getting punched in the face.
Period.
End of discussion.
+1
Richard Spencer’s tweet on the day of the Quebec mosque terror attack:
Direct link to the tweet of the triggered beta cuck Nazi manlet in search of a space space
Nathan, careful with your rhetoric there. White liberals and progressives will deem you “no friend of theirs”, which is, as usual, what this is all about. The desperate and urgent need of minorities to fight white supremacy or face mass murder is actually about getting the nod of approval from white asshole atheist liberals.
Saad…
So… I have an extension in Chrome that replaces the word “cuck” with the phrase “scary ghost”. So this is what your comment at #2 looks like to me…
I genuinely hate the word, but I don’t begrudge it being turned on those assholes who tried to make it a “popular” slur against people who fight for social justice. Which is why I have the extension… 😀
(And just to make it funnier, that line I wrote up there looks like this for me:
Oh god that makes me laugh so much…)
Also…
Oh. Well… sucks to be them, then… I don’t want their nod of approval…
Haha!
I hate most of the words there too, but couldn’t resist using them for this piece of shit. I don’t use them normally.
And of course that was supposed to be “safe space” =/
It’s so plain and simple that I just don’t get that people just don’t get that this isn’t about punching Nazi’s… This is about making the world safer, not less safe, for virtually anybody.
There is a thoughtful article at the Grauniad on The ‘punch a Nazi’ meme: what are the ethics of punching Nazis? (“An assault on ‘alt-right’ figure Richard Spencer sparked the ‘punch a Nazi’ meme. Violence is bad, but so is racism — so where do we stand ethically?”). It explores the issues (plural) from several different perspectives (plural).
I will not excerpt the article for two inter-related reasons: It is long, exploring multiple concepts, making excerpts prone to be misleading; and, in the past, people have only read the excerpts and consider them a full summation of the excerpted article.
Having said that, there is a quote in the article I quite like. Dr King, commenting on people who call for civility in the face of injustice: These people “[prefer] a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
(This comment has been cross-posted elsewhere, so apologies if it seems familiar…)
Bah, you Americans and your free speech fetish. Spencer is using falsehoods and emotions to whip other people into violence. Trying to counter that through reason will have a low chance of success, because these beliefs were never reasoned into in the first place. It even creates a false legitimacy, by implying the removal of other people’s rights is up for debate.
Instead, you need to send a strong message that the majority of the public abhors the ideas he’s pushing, and hope that people who agree with him will consider why from their hiding places. A bop on the nose isn’t a perfect message, as there’s a nontrivial chance of permanent damage from it, but in small doses it’s effective.
In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to punch Nazis, because there would be no Nazis.
In a slightly-less ideal world, just like the first but with added Nazis, we wouldn’t need to punch Nazis, because they’d either be too ashamed to admit being Nazis, or everybody would ostracize them for being Nazis and ridicule them out of the public eye.
But neither of those are the world we live in.
In the real world, where Nazi views are treated by the press as ‘just another viewpoint’, and where they have the ear of Orange Julius Caesar, I’m okay with people having to ask themselves “Will advocating white supremacy/genocide/Nazism get me punched in the face, and is it worth it?”
As for slippery-slope arguments on face-punching Nazis, I’m with you on that. I can understand wanting to have discussions about where to draw the line. But to say “You shouldn’t punch Nazis in the face, because what will that lead to?” isn’t having that discussion -- it’s arguing, in the negative, that there shouldn’t be a line at all. Well, fuck that noise.
Many of your claims are not really supported and are not supported by the links that you provided. I submit to you that you are claiming things that are not actually known to be true and are, yet, again, examples of people hearing certain words and jumping to conclusions.
FWIW. The TV Comedy & News show The Last leg raised this issue in one of their recent programs including with a good discussion and a twitter poll :
https://twitter.com/TheLastLeg/status/825116743077085184
You can view it on iView here :
http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/adam-hills-the-last-leg/ZW1017A001S00#playing
The Nazi punching question, discussion and poll starts at about the 26 minutes mark. Not sure if this can be viewed outside Australia so hope it works and maybe someone with better computer-fu than me can suggest ways to get around it. (Hate the whole “not available in your country” etc.. crap with our supposedly world wide web; a-n-y-w-a-y.)
If it helps that this was TLL series 10 Episode 1 with David Tennant as the guest and the details incl.
Oh & I know there are a few clips of Spencer getting punched on youtube with apt music like this one :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yshClIiz-cw
With Tchaikovsky 1812 overture. There’s also similar ones with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, “The Eye of the Tiger” etc.. Incl. one where he’s smashed in the face for every syllable of the song Nazi Punks Fuck Off which was shared by someone on FTB -- might’ve been on here or Pharyngula &forgotten who, sorry. Anyhow. from that last one :
Agreed.