It should be pretty simple:

you can either punch literal nazis

or label everyone who disagrees with you a nazi

if you try to do both, don’t be surprised if everyone else is suddenly very interested in protecting even literal nazis from punchings, because you’ve shown an inability to distinguish the two

if you ask me, this is America

the country of Indiana Jones, Captain America, etc.

this is not the USSR

this is not the country where we label everyone we disagree with as fascists

if you want to do that, go back to Russia, comrade

There is actually a very consistent heuristic for punchings which would avoid the aforementioned issue. It should be perfectly possible to punch Spencer without justifying the punchings of people who aren’t like Spencer.

(This section used to contain information that seemed superficially true but has been corrected by insider knowledge; Spencer actually fired the guy who wrote the genocide posts in question but this information was not easily available on common sources. I apologize for the misinformation that happened. Spencer is a shithead who heils Trump but he did fire the guy who was even worse.)

So, if you do not entertain totalitarian notions of ethnic cleansing etc., you shouldn’t have to be worried that a heuristic that leads to Spencer being punched would be a threat to yourself. It is totally possible to have the rule that only people advocating ethnic cleansing (Spencer claims he wants “non-violent” ethnic cleansing which is a fucking joke; there is no non-violence in ethnic cleansing, the only question is how horrible the violence one will inflict in the process is), tyranny, democide etc. and actively politically working for it get punched.

So why the fuck are people afraid that punching Spencer means they too might get punched? I blame the tankies. No, really.

You see, if we had a consistent heuristic that (only) advocating tyranny and democide is what gets you the punchings, tankies would be on the wrong side of the fist as far as their preferences are concerned. Tankies don’t want this kind of consistency, so they will go to whatever lengths it takes to undermine the consistent attitude that democidal tyranny is the only thing that gets the punchings, and instead replace it with tribal bullshit.

And our broader culture and discourse are way more influenced by tankies than one would naively expect.

For example, Angela Davis, retired University of California professor and honorary co-chair of the Women’s March a couple of days ago, liked tankie-ism so much she got her doctorate in East Germany, and provided the guns people were killed with in the Marin County courthouse incident.

And here is Davis shaking hands with Erich Honecker, the leader of the tankie dictatorship of the GDR:

Apparently the principle of the progressive cultural elite no-platforming evil people only applies to right-wing evil people.

For comparison, let’s suppose some conservative professor were pals with B.J. Vorster, got his doctorate from the RSA because he liked apartheid so much, and was involved in supplying guns for a Klan shootout? What would it do to his career? The BDS people are adamant that anyone dealing with Israel is Bad, but how many people deal with Israel specifically because they like its treatment of Palestineans so much, and not just because it’s a first-world country with a lot of high-tech industry and good infrastructure etc.?

To say that I smell a bit of hypocrisy here would trivialize the traumas of those whose respiratory organs were devastated by chemical weapons.

And I don’t even mean to disparage prof. Davis’ work on the evils of the prison-industrial complex. Shocking as it might be, even people who have supported utterly evil things may be right sometimes. I’m not even trying to unfairly single her out because she’s only one example of the entrenched tankie corruption festering in the halls of left-wing power.

But it is clear that any sort of principled opposition to evil would require a massive purge in the progressive cultural elite, so naturally they will never support it. So instead the question of punching Richard Spencer gets turned into a tribal battle as the tankies try to justify punching anyone they don’t like and everyone else sees that and reacts in the only rational way.

On the other hand…

The super-structures that the marxist would typically speak entirely in terms of are ultimately simplistic macroscopic abstractions floating above a far more complicated and dynamic reality. The marxist loves to talk in terms of classes, the anarchist prioritizes talking in terms of interpersonal relationships and interactions.

Social justice has — on the whole — thus become in many regards a rather pragmatic attempt to hash out an etiquette or legal system (albeit a decentralized one largely enforced through reputation rather than state violence). This is an undertaking quite different from ethics. Indeed the biggest advantage and disadvantage of social justice is that it seeks to be as motivation-independent as it can be. It doesn’t attempt to establish why one should be for example opposed to misogyny. It either takes for granted that its audience already shares the same values (naturally causing some confusion from slight differences in these assumed values), or it seeks to arrange a sociocultural state of affairs independent of people’s underlying values. “Who cares what people actually believe, let’s find ways of browbeating them into at least acting decently.”

One can see why, as with marxism, most anarchists find the mainstream of social justice profoundly incomplete and insufficiently audacious. It often gives up before going deeper into challenging all power relations in and of themselves, settling instead for an incomplete intersectionality, and it shies away from the far more fractious problems of figuring out what we really value or should value, much less speaking explicitly of such values and their tensions. Of course the failure mode of some teens browbeating people over inane otherkin-style shit is a hell of a lot better than the marxist failure mode of The People’s Cops actually physically beating people.

Similarly there’s a temptation to see anarchist nuance and absolutism as frustratingly unpragmatic. There are big enemies doing a lot of damage that need to be knocked down and dithering trying to add complexities to our picture or speak in terms of distant and even more idealistic aspirations can understandably seem like a bunch of sabotague and backstabbing. When there’s a goal practically right in front of your nose you don’t want to hear some buzzkill well-actually anarchist telling you that’s not the ultimate goal and that the shortcut you want to take risks endangering their grander aspirations. Fuck their preposterously grand ambitions of a world without relations of control, you just want fucking bread. The picture you have, both of the world and your desires within it, are just common sense. Why dirty that up? Why undermine it?

Marxism and social justice largely look at the radicalism of anarchism with suspicion, seeing it as the kind of “reductionism” so accursed in the humanities. As something that either gets in the way of common sense or dissolves it entirely into useless and masturbatory intellectual rabbit holes. (“Oh so we’re supposed to care about individuals ultimately, I suppose that means ignoring systematic injustice and prioritizing every white dude with hurt feels cuz someone yelled at him.”) The proper notion of radicalism/reductionism — as something that compliments a realization of broad patterns and ultimately provides additional useful perspectives without undermining all capacity to prioritize — is alien to them.

Similarly the marxist (and the more vulgar social justice advocates) develop a kind of laser focus on some specific categories or forms of domination, often completely unequipped or unwilling to address more nuanced or complicated situations. Indeed just as marxist organizations have become particularly infamous among the activist left for tolerating and protecting abusers and rapists in their leadership, everyone is aware of circles of social justice where horrific interpersonal abuse is given a pass or becomes clouded and impossible to speak cleanly of because the perpetrators behavior isn’t easily definable along traditional dimensions of heteropatriarchal and white supremacist categories. The now quite old joke “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face while shouting ‘but this isn’t Formal Oppression!’ forever” reveals just how insufficient the “practical” lens can be. Aligning yourself against the currently most prominent expressions of power and domination does not equate preparing yourself to resist new or more local and particular instantiations of power, which can be all the more insidious or silencing for their relatively uniqueness or rarity.

While there’s no doubt often immense utility to the practical, the stakes in this world are too high to sit back and take things for granted. (…) [H]istory shows that oversimplifications into neat rhetorical frameworks have their own long-lasting momentum. People come to associate not with their original ethical motivations (if they even notice them) but merely in terms of the affiliations and strategies that once derived from such. The crude macroscopic patterns or tendencies that may well be correctly identified eventually get detached from their underlying roots. Those self-identified as underdogs remain stubbornly self-identified underdogs even when they come to rule regimes that slaughter millions, set up gulags, or occupy Palestine.

The radicalism of anarchism is what has left it fairly distinct among ideologies and mass movements, with no instances of mass murder in its name. It’s hard to stray too far, to ever let inertia and some “common sense” lead you down the road of slaughter and tyranny, when your philosophy grounds itself so directly in ethics, highlights it in every way and never lets you detach from your ultimate values. Many passingly claim to be champions of liberty, but anarchism demands of every action, every plan, does this liberate? Could this be more coherent with liberty? And if there are necessary tradeoffs how exactly do they work? Can they be improved? Are there better ways?

To reach a moment where we sit back, entirely satisfied, would be to abandon anarchism. To the radical there is no litmus for “due diligence”, no final finish line, no moment where we pat ourselves on the back. The vigilance of the radical is never satiated.

Anarchism has no allegiance to the tankies and is perfectly free to denounce all evil anywhere we see it. To reject this notion, the consistency of one’s opposition to evil, whatever forms it takes, is to reject the entire core principle of anarchism. Anarchism will always betray anything the instant it becomes oppressive, violent, and tyrannical. To not do so would be to betray anarchism itself.

Anyone who claims anarchists are or should be friends with tankies is lying and has a gulag to sell you.

The Status451 article on the book ‘Days of Rage’ is extremely interesting and important. Read it. If you wonder what the right-wingers got from UR, read this one instead because it contains the good parts of Moldbug without the bad parts of Moldbug. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, read the article so you’ll know.

TL;DR: tankies are way more influential than most people ever realize.

It’s also not an accident that within the article itself, marxism is named 2 times, communism 8 times, maoism 3 times, and even stalinism once, but anarchism exactly zero times.

Tankies and nazis want political violence where the nuances of reality get collapsed into a simplistic “us vs. them” frontline. Fuck that noise.

Bring back the Iron Front. Show people that one can be against nazis and tankies simultaneously. Show people that they have options beyond the bullshit quagmire. Queer the “with us or against us” binary.

This is America. We don’t punch someone who voted for Trump because they are afraid that a college professor promoting “white genocide” is actually serious (a fear which, when considering the stuff rich progressive cryptotankies have been all too happy to write endless apologetics for, is far less unreasonable than rich well-educated C-tribers might realize). We don’t punch nonviolent people who have shitty opinions if they aren’t involved in actively trying to impose their opinions into violent reality. We don’t even punch people who indent with tabs instead of spaces. And if we are to punch Richard Spencer, consistency demands that we shall recognize that with the same logic it’s perfectly okay to punch the tankie leaders too.

Fuck nazis

Fuck tankies

Fuck king George III too I guess

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