Progressive Politics

I’ve been following antifascist reporting for a while now, and it always bothers me when people will just stop supporting antifascists as soon as a nazi gets punched. It almost feels like they think the worst part of fascism is violence, not the mixture of everything else while using violence to enforce it. I’m personally all for punching nazis, preferably in self defense, though it’s not the best tactic (humiliation works better with fascists, bring back vegan milkshakes).

Some people are just so scared of violence and love to put themselves on a pedestal for being better than that, while almost always being fully isolated from the fascists while having no skin in the game.

I also fucking despise the online left. I’m an anarchist, and have been a socialist for pretty much my whole political life. But the online left will chew you up and spit you out for a single mistake. If you end up in some areas it’s pure dogma, and you will get angry replies for hours on end for not being the same politically.

I swear, the online left would rather do nothing and remain virtuous rather than go outside, fuck up, and learn from their mistakes while actually bringing their politics into the real world.

When you come across an actual fascist you need to cut that shit out like cancer. Back in the day, when I was young, fascists of multiple flavors, and other WP/ethno state, groups would attach themselves to music scenes I was interested in. So they would show up to venues for those scenes. They would initially just chill, and be cordial, and if they didn't get forced out, they would start coming more often, and bringing more of their fascist friends. This leads to the venue being a nazi hang-out. Everyone else sees that they are there, no one is forcing them out, and they stop showing up, because they don't want to hang in the same space as these shit people.

So when they did show up, they got forced out, often with violence. It works. After being beat up a few times, they move on. Eventually they end up in their own place, and everyone knows it is the nazi club, and avoids it. This isn't to say they didn't make pests of themselves beyond this, but they didn't come around as often, and when they did they made it clear they were there to start fights. Start fights... or gather in their trucks/vans, drive down into the city, and wait around outside of gay venues for a lone gay person, then drive up to them, jump out and attack them.

Their ideology requires violence in the end. So they should be treated as an inevitable source of violence. There is no place for paradoxical tolerance.

This reminds me of a tweet I saw recently. It basically boiled down to:

There are different battalions of progressive movements with different goals. Those groups being radical, progressive and moderate. You should recognize your place within these and do your part, while not criticizing what the others do.

I thought it was pretty eye opening. Helped me to contend with my feelings about moderates as a radical. lmao

It's more about whether you're authoritarian.

A lot of 'antifacists' i know are the first people to scream at others for 'being out of line' on a political issue. They claim to be anti-facist but practice politics like facists by trying to intimidate, harass, demean, and bully anyone who disagrees with them. Because they are the authority in their mind.

In my mind they act just like the fascist Trump people they claim to be against, they just use different sets of words when they are harassing/screaming/threatening people.

"...but there does seen to be an almost reflexive tendency of the left to shut down any criticism by assuming the worst in people whenever somebody says something even slightly critical or against the prevailing doctrine."

1. Not true
2. Do the above on the right and the response is that they build a gallows, call you a RINO to claim you never once actually truly supported the party (ever in your life) and threaten to impale you with the sharpened tip of a flag pole.

You see my enlightened, friend... You're kind of just exactly being OP's meme on this point. If you can hear me all the way up there, on the unprincipled higher ground?

The most interesting one here is equating fascists with antifascists because I feel like I kind of stray into that at times when antifascists get violent with fascists and punch a nazi protester or something. On the one hand, shouldn’t we take the high road and practice non-violence, but on the other hand, nazis would have no problem killing the other side if they had control. It gets into the whole paradox of tolerance and how the “high road” just may not be possible with some people. Maybe punching nazis is the correct response?

It's actually not, neither morally, nor pragmatically. This has been researched, and I literally have a copypasta about it, because it's something that just about everyone seems to either be ignorant of, or uncaring about (because they value the short-term 'cheap thrill' described below more highly).

Also, to be clear, it's perfectly possible to actively, and aggressively, oppose public expression of terrible points of view, without violence. I'm not, nor are the experts cited below, saying "ignore them". It's honestly not that hard to make them look like total fools--but taking a swing at them isn't going to do that:

It may feel cathartic and satisfy primal urges for retribution, but in the long run, 'punching Nazis' doesn't hurt the neo-nazi ideology, it helps it. Feeds the persecution complex, turns the guy you beat up who didn't physically attack you first into their martyr. Gives them more fuel to rally around and further radicalize them into wanting revenge.

Prioritizing a cheap, temporary thrill over real, lasting change for the better is ultimately self-serving, and not in service of your cause; ironically, it completely undermines it.

On a purely pragmatic/practical level, it's a bad idea, if your goal is to oppose Nazism.

Experts on extremism/terrorism etc. are all saying the exact same thing.

See for yourself: (emphasis added)

In the case of violent counterprotest tactics — e.g., punching Nazis — experts on extremism say it is likely only to aid the white supremacists’ cause.

The most commonly stated argument in favor of physically disrupting white-supremacist rallies is that society can’t give an iota of legitimacy to these groups. To allow them to spread their message of hate is to offer them a platform to recruit and to glorify their cause. What this logic leaves out is that it may well be the case that hate groups are better able to recruit and glorify their cause when they are able to engage in violence, regardless of how that violence starts, according to researchers in the field of countering violent extremism, or CVE.

“On the one hand, I don’t think these expressions should go unanswered,” David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University, said of the recent white-supremacist gatherings. “But you’re essentially giving them exactly what they want when you try to confront them directly.” That’s because these groups’ efforts to recruit and mobilize supporters rely on a very specific strategy that benefits greatly from violent conflict.

In the U.S., explicitly white-supremacist groups know they are vastly, vastly outnumbered by everyone who hates them — their paltry numbers being an easy thing to forget in the age of social media and especially so this week, in the wake of a real-life white-supremacist murder. So their only hope for relevance is to maximize every potential bit of media coverage. And the best way to do this is to create media moments: scary, evocative images like the torch photos from last weekend, but also as many violently photogenic confrontations with counterprotesters as possible. Producing violence is an underlying, often unstated, goal of many white-supremacist protests and gatherings.

When violence does break out, videos of it race through the internet’s white-supremacist underbelly, serving as incredibly valuable PR material. It doesn’t matter who gets the better of a given confrontation: When the Nazis get punched, it’s “proof” that anti-fascists or liberals or [insert minority group] or whoever else did the punching have it in for “innocent white Americans just trying to protest peacefully.” When the Nazis punch back, it’s proof that their enemies are, to borrow a word from alt-right parlance, “cucks” who are easily bested in the streets. Even when white supremacists lose street fights, they win the long game.

This sort of tactic, said Jeffrey Kaplan, an academic researcher and the author of a number of books on terrorist movements, “is a constant in terrorism or any form of asymmetric warfare,” whether the group in question is jihadist or white supremacist or whatever else. Kaplan, who is an incoming professor at King Fahd Security College in Riyadh, summed up the extremists’ logic like this: “Our numbers are paltry, we are despised by our countrymen and we couldn’t get a date for the life of us, but any action that has enough impact to strike at the heart of the enemy by getting media coverage is a major triumph.” Violent confrontations allow extremists to make a tantalizing offer to the angry, disillusioned young men — they are almost entirely men — whom they hope to groom to become tomorrow’s haters and killers: We are part of a movement to change the world, as you can see from this latest video that movement is working, and you can be a part of it.

Schanzer laid out a fairly straightforward alternative: Counterdemonstrators should respond assertively, vociferously, and in far superior numbers — but at a distance from the extremists themselves. This tactic both prevents the sort of violent conflict American hate groups want, and has the added benefit of drawing at least some media and social-media attention away from the smaller hateful gathering and toward the much larger counterprotest.

“Violence directed at white nationalists only fuels their narrative of victimhood — of a hounded, soon-to-be-minority who can’t exercise their rights to free speech without getting pummeled.” “I would want to punch a Nazi in the nose, too,” Maria Stephan, a program director at the United States Institute of Peace, told him. “But there’s a difference between a therapeutic and strategic response.”

Even former white supremacists admit punching Nazis plays right into their hands, gives them exactly what they want:

...when mouthpieces for white supremacist ideology are physically assaulted on camera, it becomes a powerful validation of their victimhood complex: in their minds, plain evidence that white people are indeed under attack, and motivation to spread a call to violent response with renewed zeal. This “punch felt round the world” was a great boost to the “alt-right” cause. If you aid and comfort neo-Nazis, which is exactly what punching them in the face does, you are no better than they are. Real life isn’t a fucking Quentin Tarantino movie.

When I was a neo-Nazi skinhead over 2 decades ago, I got beat up as often as I beat anyone else up. It never made me any less violent. In fact, we used to pile into vans and drive from Milwaukee to Chicago for the thrill of brawling fellow devotees of romantic violence like the guy throwing the punch in this video. We lived for violent opposition. We thrived on it. Violence of any sort, no matter how it may be rationalized, is the bread of hatred. We put mustard on that shit and gleefully gobbled it up and clamored for more.

Back in the 1930s, there were gangs of communists who routinely brawled the Nazi brownshirts in the streets of Germany. Their contemporaries would have us believe that if there were more communists who brawled harder than they did back then, that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened. As a former neo-Nazi, I can attest to how important it is to have violent opposition in order to maintain the hatred necessary to hurt people. The communist gangs helped Hitler’s National Socialist party come to power not only by galvanizing their own members, but more importantly by serving as a crucial ingredient in the overall atmosphere of fear and loathing that led the German general public to look to the Nazi party for order.