I just encountered a tweet with a gif that showed a woman in a “Make Bitcoin Great Again” hat being blindsided and pepper-sprayed by some guy, with a reply saying “you dont often see female nazis getting what they deserve”
Originally, a “Nazi” meant someone who wanted to create a fascist state and commit genocide. Any decent person would hate these guys, so we all understood that Nazi=Evil.
Then “Nazi” meant someone who endorsed racist beliefs, regardless of policies. This was transparently diluting the meaning from its original form, but we didn’t really mind, because racists suck and we were going to be pissed at them anyway.
Then “Nazi” meant someone who supported Donald Trump for any reason. ie: Over a third of the USA.
Now “Nazi” means someone who wears ~edgy~ hats supporting bitcoin.
And, regardless of your opinion on genocide - or literally anything else, for that matter - in a month, “Nazi” is going to mean you.
It literally does not matter what you believe. Not a single bit. You could be the most fervent anti-racist in the world. You could hate Hitler with all your heart. You could have been completely certain that no one in their right mind would call you a Nazi.
And then someone wearing a dumb hat got pepper-sprayed.
So, the next time you see the punching discourse, remember this: All of those arguments in favour of punching Nazis are encouraging people to punch anyone in a silly hat. Even if the person making the argument doesn’t endorse punching people in stupid hats, this is where it leads. And saying “But I thought they’d only punch the real Nazis!” is no excuse.
Saying “You can punch Nazis” means “You can punch people you call Nazis”. Simple as that. There is no ledger in the sky listing the True Nazis and distinguishing them from the Fake Nazis. If there was, people in stupid hats wouldn’t be pepper-sprayed. Any and all endorsement of punching Nazis on sight is an endorsement of “Use your judgement to decide who to punch, because no one’s judgement is ever flawed”.
And then people wearing the wrong hat will be punched. And people wearing the wrong shoes will be punched. And people eating the wrong food will be punched. And people listening to the wrong music will be punched. And you will be punched. You will always be someone’s Nazi, and this is the political climate in which they will feel justified in assaulting you.
So, if being a fucking decent person who doesn’t attack strangers based on their hat doesn’t compel you, at least let a little self-interest do it. Do you want a jacked up whiteboy with a saviour complex to beat your ass for walking down the street the wrong way? No? Then don’t contribute to the culture that wants to make that happen.
Because when you ride with the disintegration of the social order, you ride with Hitler. ///
Ayup.
Why do we not like Nazis? Because they want to use violence on the people they don’t like. What normalizes Nazis? Using violence on the people we don’t like.
“You will always be someone’s Nazi, and this is the political climate in which they will feel justified in assaulting you.”
This is exactly the sort of thing that’s a counterpoint to everyone I’ve seen whining about how slippery slopes don’t apply to nazis.
I disagree. I don’t have to worry about being someone’s nazi. There are actual emboldened or recently converted nazis out there who worry me more. But stepping away from the element of personal preservation, let me argue more objectively.
You don’t like the argument that punching fascists, assaulting nazis, is categorically different from other violence. OK. Then let’s perceive the phenomenon dimensionally. Everyone can be placed on a scale of 0-100 in terms of nazi quintessence. Public outcry for and against violence done to a fairly high level nazi is a known value: lots of approval, some guilty appreciation, lots of moderate condemnation, and some nazi response. Someone is lower on the nazi scale? Radicals still cheer, but the guilty appreciation and moderate condemnation factions grow. Nazi response is a constant, because they’re nazis. This pattern continues until the majority of society sort of agrees that no, this particular act of violence is not meme-worthy. The market speaks, and our collective decision tree reaches a conclusion - level 69 nazis are not nazi enough to punch, or whatever the needle lands on. People won’t keep slapping level 12 nazis, because the blowback will be huge. It will get no likes.
I trust this system. It will never bite me in the ass. Under no circumstances will I ever be anywhere near the margins of maybe-punchable. Which is as it should be, because nazis are inherently the worst sort of extremists. Avoiding this ideology should be political easy mode. If this social wayfinding violence convinces a few people to maybe shift a little down on that scale, away from the 60-70 splash zone, forgive me for not stepping up to protect their collective right to be dill holes.
So, I have three problems with this:
The first is that the Nazi scale is not consistent or predictable. Lots of people think the scale is in a completely different place from other people. I’m not saying some people want to punch level 50 Nazis, while others only punch 80 and up, and the former is willing to defer to the latter to avoid backlash.
I mean people who actually don’t realise that other people might see the person they’re calling a 90 as being a 20. I have encountered people who are honestly confused that someone on the left might think they’re an asshole if they punch anyone registered to the Republican party, regardless of how or whether they voted. There are people who don’t understand that there might be backlash from all quarters - not just the administration - if Trump’s grandchildren were kidnapped.
There are people whose scales look nothing like anyone else’s, and I don’t even want them to hear “punching level 90 Nazis is OK” because then they’ll punch people no reasonable person would count. I want a blanket injunction because it’s the only thing that’ll stop the paranoiacs who twist everything into Nazis under the bed.
But even beyond that - even if we granted the idea that the perception of the Nazi scale was consistent across everyone - I still don’t want violence to slide further down it. Do we want to to go from punching 80s to punching 60s to punching 40s to the breakdown of civil discourse (to the extent that we still have any)? This is why I want people to stop calling for violent escalation. I want to at least arrest the decline of civil society.
Furthermore, even with a consistent scale, there are outliers. Even if, by some miracle, we could get most people to agree on 60, there would still be people who’ll punch at 30 and damn the consequences because they’re ~saving the world~. Like, if there are already people at the “pepper spray silly hats” level of nonsensical extremism, do we really want the situation to deteriorate? Do we want to lower the average and let the outliers get worse?
Seriously though, I’m not someone’s nazi, I’m someone’s oven joke, I’m literally not allowed to be someone’s nazi, They wouldn’t let me if I tried,
I’m in the same position, mate. I’m Black and Jewish and gay. Any true Nazi would triple-oven me in a heartbeat, so I am fully motivated to track and shame and discredit them.
But some people just don’t fucking get that. I have been called a Nazi on several occasions by obvious idiots. These are the “someones” I mean when I say “someone’s Nazi”. Luckily, none of the people who’ve called me that would have been willing to punch me for it. But that’s the thing: I don’t want that to change. This safety margin is important.
I want the people stupid enough to believe in gay black Jewish Nazis to keep their hands in their fucking pockets. I do not want them to be in an environment where they feel like this is at all justifiable, because those people cannot be trusted to know who to punch. And I have enough on my plate without having to watch my back from so-called allies.
Just to pile on top of this, right wing actions do not occur in a vacuum. Right-wingers are often oversensitive to threats. As the punching spreads, because some people are out there enough to combine “we should punch white supremacists” with “all white people have internalized white supremacy”. Right-wingers are going to respond to that sort of thing by either punching equally unrelated people or going after Leftists. …and they have about as much justification to go after tankies as Leftists have to go after Nazis.