For what it’s worth, I’ve been interacting with Dr F for damn near two decades, and I believe I’m correct in saying that he would willingly and gladly accept the legal ramifications for punching a Nazi. He’s not suggesting that he should be above or exempt from the law.
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Professor Bike Lock is / was one.
Just another example of false equivalency.
Oh goodness yes. I will proudly accept being arrested for assaulting a Nazi.
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I knew you would have to retract your argument that I was arguing against an imaginary person, but sometimes it’s okay to say, “Oops, I wasn’t following the thread closely!” instead of “Oh yah? Double dumb ass on you!”
I end your quote early not because I won’t address the rest, but because it is long and my response would make it only longer. I follow your lead in incorporating what I am talking about into the post itself.
There are, of course, some people who really do believe that violence is never the answer. But my point is that these people are extremely rare and are almost never the ones who actually argue against violence in protesting or with Antifa specifically. My point with bringing up the military is not to get drawn into what exactly makes their violence justifiable, but to point out that accepting them inherently means one believes that some violence is allowable, and thus the “violence is always wrong” argument cannot be sustained. This is important to break down before the rest of the argument, since “violence is wrong” is a thought-terminating cliche.
What you describe of the Black Panthers sounds no different than what I described of the justifiable acts by Antifa. Antifa was there to intimidate, and (for those who fought) to fight if they were attacked. They used intimidation and planned to back that up with violence if necessary. They support violence in the same way the Black Panthers supported violence.
You do seem to be slipping into thinking I am saying what I am not saying–though this may be due to my own lack of clarity on the subject. I am not saying that violence is inherently justified because Nazism is such a bad thing. I am arguing that there exist situations where violence is the appropriate response. And, in fact, we seem to agree on this particular instance.
And I did not argue that violence alone was what stopped Unite the Right. The idea that violence and argument and protest are all somehow opposed to each other is another thing I hate. They all work in together. Violence ideally is not necessary, but it can be in some situations. MLK and Malcolm X worked together: neither’s message or actions alone would work. In UtR’s case, the threat of exposure was also used and also cited as reasons to stay away. So was the bad publicity.
Finally, while stopping the people is not the only goal in the war against extreme bigotry, it is a goal. It is both a primary goal–in that making people scared to be Nazis in public limits the harm they can cause–and a secondary goal: Because stopping the people actually does help fight the idea. It’s not as if this is some rational position. That part of the war is already won. So some of the reason to hold these ideas is that they are acceptable in some places, or that they give you power. That you can “take back the country.” There’s a perverted sort of prestige, and this feeling of safety in numbers and belonging involved.
I’ve actually read some stuff from people who are former neo-Nazis, and it wasn’t the ideology that led to them becoming part of the group. The ideology is about conforming to the group of people who would accept them. And while teaching these people that there is another place to be accepted is also a really good idea, that’s not really something you can do at a protest. What you can do is make being part of the group unappealing, because of the backlash one will receive.
I would prefer violence to not be necessary in this, of course. But the Nazis were violent, and Antifa was right to fight back.
And that is another argument. The law has a particular set of punishments for violence. The punishment for punching people isn’t death, so there’s an acknowledgement that there will sometimes be a point where violence is justifiable–where the actor will think that the violence is “worth it.”
Now I don’t put that line at simply “someone is a Nazi.” I put it at “this guy is actively and significantly harming this other person in a way that is technically legal.” For example, say a trans friend is being harassed and bullied. Fighting back against said bully with violence may not be legal, but I could determine that it was worth it.
That said, if someone I knew punched a open and blatant Nazi without later remorse, I’m not going to stand up on principle and no longer be friends with them the same way I would if they punched a completely innocent person. I’m going to say “I don’t agree with what you did, but I understand why you did it.”
The situation just is not that black and white. I’m comfortable with the ambiguity–the gray.
So are you for preemptively attacking people over ideology or not?
I have met exactly as many Antifa members as I have met cannibals. Zero. I bet you haven’t met any, either.
Cannibalism and Antifa violence should both be condemned in measure equal to their relevance, and should be inserted into the public discourse to the same degree. Which is none.
ElvisL1ves wasn’t talking about being arrested. Do you realize there are significantly worse possible outcomes for punching people who say things you don’t like?
There is no peaceful white nationalism. I’ll repeat: There is no peaceful white nationalism.
Fascism and the alt-right is fundamentally based on ideals that determine that black people, jewish people and other POC are diluting the white race and trying to or inevitably will “replace” them (nevermind that “white” is a carefully constructed race and the one drop rule is relatively recent). It’s based on a hatred of people who “weaken” or “betray” the race or ideals by being disabled, by being gay, by being trans. The only thing that will make them happy is if, at best, these people flee the country (and in the case of queer people, new queer people will always be born), or at worst and more likely, these people die.
If you’re a political opponent of antifa, you can avoid antifascist violence by ceasing to be a fascist, or at least by choosing to not go to fascist rallies, by not providing resources to fascists, by not advocating fascist policies. If you’re a political opponent of fascists, the only way to get them to stop is to die.
This does not mean all antifascist violence is okay, or right, but it has to be noted that the context it occurs in is not as simple as beating your neighbor with a billy club because he supports slightly different taxation policies than you.
Should we apply this to everything? Is it inappropriate to talk about unjustified police shootings because their frequency is so vanishingly small? What would be left to talk about if we applied this rule broadly? Heart disease and cancer?
And let me follow up with some of the immediate responses here.
- Antifascist action contains a lot of non-violent, and even non-confrontational activity. Note that “antifa” is not an organization. There are no uniforms, no leadership. It’s horizontally structured and made up of small, local cells that respond to specific problems in their own community in ways they see fit. They may, of course, coordinate with each other. Some may also be better or worse or more or less prone to violence. But a lot of good antifascist action contains things like talking to the alt-right to try and convert members away from it, or infiltrating it to gain intel.
In fact, gaining intel is a big part of Antifascist action, and there’s usually a large degree of intel gathered and debate that occurs before violent action is taken. Most antifascist cells are going to consider the optics of their choices, and only use something as visible and radical as physical violence if they deem it necessary. Again, different cells may draw this line in different places, or may even just catastrophically misjudge it, but no, I don’t think we should just “go Nazi hunting”. Antifa just doesn’t take the option off the table entirely because of what I posted above.
This is the reason why someone who does antifascist action isn’t going to say “I condemn the violence antifa uses”. Both because they know it’s not an organization, and because they generally don’t take violence off the table. They need to know which specific instance. For instance, bike lock guy is one I condemn, and he seems like kind of an idiot for doing what he did. Unite the right I don’t, but that’s a complex situation and the violence at that rally is due as much to a huge police fuckup as anything else.
So my argument does not justify just hunting down and beating or murdering everyone with remotely fashy viewpoints.
Secondly, I’d like to address the “who is a fascist?” argument. And I’d like to say, I’m sorry, I can’t give a checklist where if you meet all the criteria, yup! Someone’s a Nazi and thus violence can be justified! I view any attempt to ask for an objective set of criteria to “identify a Nazi” to be a deliberate deflection. Especially since Nazis are really good at looking at any list of criteria and fudging what they do just a little bit to make themselves appear like they’re not fascists. “Oh, but I disavowed Hitler during an interview once” type of stuff. That said in The Philosophy of Antifa, the author makes much the same arguments as me, but he does go into detail and provide a set of approximate signifiers for contemporary western fascism, with the recognition that the alt-right deliberately tries to dodge the line.
I do not agree with this, I do not believe that violence is ever the appropriate response.
But I do recognize that most of society agrees with you. And that makes me sad.
mc
I, on the other hand, am sad that you feel so strongly about the difference between state and non-state violence, to the point of using different words for them. Keep in mind that everything Nazi Germany did was perfectly legal, and very often didn’t involve any more force than our prison system up until the end when all the gassing and such came into effect. I’m not arguing we’re Nazi Germany, but I feel like your rhetoric is too easily exploitable by an authoritarian regime, especially any regime sliding into authoritarianism. Everything becomes “just a little more” force.
Anybody who chants “Jews will not replace us” should check the birth rates. They’re barely replacing themselves.
If they deem it necessary based on what authority? Based on what mandate? If you claim “self-defense”, be very clear about what the law allows, and if you disregard the law, society has a right to defend itself against you.
We established law-abiding societies to prevent tribalism from overwhelming minority groups. Anitfa pretends to care about minorities, but if it counts illegal violence as one of its tactics, it is placing itself in a position where it can only prevail if it’s going after people who are a minority of the population it’s acting within. Gang-on-gang violence, in other words, and we expect the police to go after the Crips even if they only ever kill Bloods, because a Crip versus Blood gang war is still horrible.
So you reserve the right to use violence against someone who kinda-sorta looks like a Fascist to you, ignoring the political science definition of the term and instead latching onto one which lets you beat more heads.
Yeah. That’s truly the epitome of having a moral high ground. Good fucking job.
Cannibals aren’t bashing heads at conservative rallies or assemblies.
What about beating communists? Is that ok as well?
Personally I think communism is more of a danger than fascism only because communism at least has a superficially appealing message. And in power communists do a fair amount of carnage.
If the rule is “social phenomenon should only be inserted into the public discourse to the degree in which it actually affects people” then yeah, it should be applied broadly. Antifa and MS-13 and Islamic terrorist refugees are such scandalous news stories the conservatives loooooooooove to talk about, not because they’re actually afraid of these things, but because it helps their narrative.
Gay conversation therapy (as a random example) is a bigger social problem than a thousand Antifas would ever be. Want to talk about that in an average of three Fox News articles a day, every day for 2 straight years? No? Why not?
How did you reach this conclusion?