I realize I am preaching to the crowd with this, but I wanted to try to make the point in a new way and also share a related story from my experience.
Fascism is about the exultation of power. A key tenet is the strong deserve the power they seize. Street fighting is not just a means to an ends, it is the ends. As opposed to the effete world of peaceful democratic power.
So, punching Nazis is a victory for Nazis. It proves their point. It accepts their system of power. It juices them up and eggs them on.
A peaceful response that expresses our values is more powerful. Pretty much, that’s what happened here yesterday. Humor and ridicule are also useful tools.
I do not agree with people who say that when the Klan rides into town we should all just stay away and ignore them. (Although 10,000 people turning their backs all at once would make a powerful statement.) Rather we need to draw the playing field around the Nazis to place them within that world of our democratic power. That’s where they lose.
I’m also not drawing any kind of moral equivalence between Nazis and people who punch Nazis. Rather, I’m trying to make a point about strategy.
Years ago I volunteered as an escort at a women’s health center that performed abortions. On procedure days the clinic would be besieged by a fanatical church group from Maine. They were never physically violent but could become loud and threatening. Our job was to de-escalate, also to come between the women and the crazies.
The escorts often became targets of church group. But to engage them directly would have ratcheted things up, the opposite of our role. So we came to understand that although we were there because of them, we were not there for them. We were there for the women.
It could be pretty frustrating sometimes! But discipline paid off.
Confronting Nazis is a similar gig, I think. It’s not a symmetrical conflict, but a struggle over whose values and whose system of power is true. Theirs or ours.
Mark L. Bail says
There are times and places where it might be to physically fight, but punching Nazis for the fact that they are Nazis is inherently selfish. It makes some anti-Nazis feel better, but feelings are temporary and violence rarely makes our community better.
Saturday in Boston was beautiful for the sheer numbers of people who attended and were peaceful. The actual demonstrators amounted to a fraction of 1 percent of the counter protestors.
I have a feeling we’re going to see more violence from certain types who are marching in the same general direction, literally on Saturday, and figuratively the rest of the time. as peace-loving protesters. There will always be arrests. From what I watched on NECN, the police were restrained. The one guy I saw could have been arrested a few times before they finally took him into custody.
The crazies have always been with us. They were never part of the Democratic Party, which the Far Left has always disliked, but they have been a mainstay of the the Republican Party for years. And violence was there in the 1960s and 1970s with hundreds of bombings a year. Weather Underground was nihilistic in its enthusiasm for violence. Remember Bernadine Dorhn praising Charles Manson? We will have to endure the Antifa and Black Bloc at peaceful protests, but we need to disown their violence.
Trickle up says
I think one of the things I want to respond to is the idea that we are called, morally, to organize counter protests in order to engage directly with the haters. The counter protest is aimed at our society and at each other and at ourselves.
SomervilleTom says
Agreed, and … the presence of violent extremists provides, I think, a necessary counterpoint to a message of non-violent pacifism.
Slavery would not have been abolished in the south without violence. The non-violent messages of MLK would not have been nearly as effective without the threat of massive violence if nothing was done.
In my view, a meaningful threat of uncontrolled violence plays a part in persuading people to listen to non-violent voices delivering a message they don’t want to hear.
I am not advocating violence. I’m instead observing that the blissful crowds of people who obediently walk in circles carrying candles in carefully cordoned-off “free speech zones” have essentially ZERO impact on anybody.
As Admiral Nimitz was fond of saying — “if you’re not making waves, you’re not underway.”
Christopher says
Yeah, but there are plenty of instances where the only threat needs to be that they will take their candles to the polling place and vote accordingly. I don’t like even the subtle hint that violence might have to be resorted to.
AmberPaw says
Discipline is always better then an impulsive, thoughtless response. Good planning and thorough communications are always better then chaos. Standing for values and protecting the vulnerable are necessary at times. I do agree that crazies have always been with us – and violence and destruction appeal to some of those crazies with a political cause being no more than an excuse to do the stuff they like such as breaking things, burning things, and hurting people. Back in the 60s I called those folks the Friday night window smashers. Sociopaths may well be attracted to the NeoNazi groups and creeds as well because they fit in so well; for that subgroup being punched merely legitimizes their future violent acts and plans.
terrymcginty says
I’m not proud to admit that I was initially amused by, and enjoyed watching the now-famous video of the Nazi being hit to a disco beat in Washington DC.
I was set straight by a friend of the founders of this blog. But this wonderful piece calls attention to a profoundly important way to think more deeply about what lies behind such a punch to the face. Thank you.
Mark L. Bail says
I think that initial reaction is understandable. I watched the video (w/o the remix) and felt a similar reaction.
What makes us progressives isn’t necessarily our immediate reaction, it’s our rational rejection of the action and reactions.
petr says
I like your post very much and I appreciate your point. When I see an 18 year old kid with no other political experience besides growing up in America carrying Nazi signs and espousing what he believes is Nazi ideology I mainly see someone who, essentially, is inviting you to punch them so they can punch back. They cannot possibly have any real or meaningful understanding of Nazi-ism or fascism. Nazi-ism is merely their preferred method of provocation. And, as we saw on Saturday, and previously in Charlottesville, it’s very provocative.
But it’s not really punching a Nazi. At best it’s punching a deluded angry person who thinks they want to be a Nazi. Even calling them a ‘Nazi” may be giving them a stature they desire but don’t deserve.
It is interesting, at least to me, that the strength of our democracy, at present, can be seen in an almost wholesale elision of it… The debate, such as it is, rages between rabid anti-socialists on the right who see commies that aren’t there and fervent anti-fascists on the left who do see toy Nazis and fascist cosplay… and it is load-bearing elements like free speech and the courts that enable the very structure of this. oft ridiculous, debate.
SomervilleTom says
I don’t agree with your final paragraph — this in particular:
I saw a crowd of Nazis carrying torches and Nazi flags that Saturday night in Charlottesville. That crowd was not there to oppose “commies”, real or imagined. The “gathering of deplorables” in Charlottesville was organized in response to the city’s decision to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee and rename the park where the statue was located. That had everything to do with RACISM, and nothing to do with commies.
In my view, your final paragraph makes the same error as Mr. Trump’s attempt to argue that the “alt-left” (whatever that is) and alt-right are two sides of the same coin. They are not.
The upwelling of hate we see is NOT coming from “fervent anti-fascists on the left”. It is coming from deplorables promoting bigotry, prejudice, and hate. Bigotry, prejudice and hate directed at blacks. These are white supremacists.
I agree that we face a horrific challenge. I categorically reject your attempt to conflate those advocate this hate with the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose it.
petr says
Yeah, I hear you. You’re not wrong. My point was to underline both the sheer ridiculousness of the debate (and by debate I’m not talking about the marching Nazi wannabe’s but about the real powers in Congress and their long history of dog-whistle approvals to the marchers alongside their strident anti-socialism) and the incredible fact that democracy makes it possible to have a debate without reference to democracy… which is also ridiculous, if you think about it.
I believe the racism and the hate of the marchers in Charlottesville is real but their inability to directly say that leads them to make gestures and reference at other, ridiculous, themes like Nazism, which they can’t possibly understand, and Klan puffery, which is an essentially a costume party inversion of medievalist chivalry mythos with an unhealthy dollop of cowardice thrown in. I certainly don’t mean to imply that, wholly ridiculous as it is, it’s not, also, very dangerous. It is. Donald Trump is a thoroughly ridiculous person who, nevertheless, has his finger on the trigger.
Pointing out our our willingness to call them Nazi, that is to say to engage in a rather lazy anti-fascism shorthand elides the ridiculousness of it and might not be the best strategy… which ideas about strategy is why, I dare say, Trickle up started this conversation. I’m reminded of JFKs inaugural address in which he stated “those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” and I think that’s exactly what the right is doing and I’m pretty certain that’s how they’ll end up. The left is too busy saying ‘my, what a terrible tiger it is!” to begin with the realization how foolish the attempt to ride it is. The tiger is always going to be terrible and attempting to ride the tiger is always going to be foolish.
SomervilleTom says
Well, perhaps.
I suggest that the KKK might seem less like a “costume party inversion of medievalist chivalry mythos with an unhealthy dollop of cowardice thrown in” if you had spent more time living a region where blacks, Jews, and — yes — Catholics lived in realistic and mortal fear of those “costume party” cowards.
Similarly, I suggest that if you spent more time living with Germans, you might not so readily dismiss mobs carrying torches and Swastikas.
I certainly hope that the demons summoned by the Nazis and KKK will be exorcised by the rest of us as we deal with all this.
I think it is a mistake to underestimate the reality of those demons. I think it is crucially important to avoid a false conflation of those in the thrall of those demons and those who, even imperfectly, strive to repudiate them.